ponderthescriptures.com just reporting american democracy and culture (legislation, budget priorities, voting laws & Suppression, corruption) r. scott burton

“This is the Republicans’ back-up plan in case they can’t suppress enough votes,” Fred Hiatt, washingtonpost “‘The commitment of many state legislatures to attacking the foundations of our democracy appears to have deepened,’ says the report from Protect Democracy, States United Democracy Center and Law Forward. ‘The trend toward threatening election administrators with criminal penalties is more pronounced and aggressive, and attempts by legislatures to perform core elections functions has grown more brazen’...

“Potentially most dangerous, legislatures are giving themselves the right to interfere in vote-counting and election disputes while tying the hands of secretaries of state to rule impartially or even in some cases to seek legal advice...

“But bills giving legislators more oversight of elections, allowing them to interfere in the running of elections and otherwise injecting partisanship into the process, already have passed in , Arkansas, Florida, , Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee and , according to the report. These could dramatically alter the outcome when a fraudster such as Trump comes calling...

“It’s bad enough that most Republicans continue to defend Trump’s slander on American democracy and use it as a pretext to suppress the vote, instead of looking for ways to appeal to more voters.

“It’s even scarier that they are trying to write themselves an insurance policy so that, if their vote suppression strategy fails in 2024, they can nonetheless reclaim power.

“That should be unacceptable to every patriotic American.”

“I Can’t Just Forgive Trump Supporters,” Jonathan Rigsby, medium “Every time I stop in traffic and see a Trump sticker on the car in front of me, I’m not struck by a sense that we have a disagreement over the details of policies. This isn’t a question of whether the top tax rate should be 38.4% or 41.2%. Instead, I’m consumed by a feeling that this person would be indifferent to my violent death.

“Right now, there is a large-scale effort to obscure responsibility for all of this, what author A. R. Moxon calls ‘the Great American Forgetting Project.’ As the pandemic recedes, we will all be told that it is time to get back to normal, to shrug our shoulders and move on from all that craziness.

“I am not willing to do that. I am not willing to offer forgiveness without contrition and repentance. The people who spent years cheering for cruelty must take the first steps, because I will not move a single inch towards them in compromise until they can show me that they are worthy of respect.”

“American democracy is at risk from Trump and the Republicans. What can be done?” Pippa Norris, theguardian

Page 1 of 91

“Challenges to democracy are increasing worldwide. The long spread of ‘third-wave’ democracies across the globe from the mid-1970s stalled around 2005 – since when scholars have noted accumulating indicators of democratic backsliding and rising authoritarianism in many countries….

“The US electoral system has also long been problematic, notably extreme partisan gerrymandering, the composition of the electoral college, rural over-representation in the Senate, lack of electoral standards as the supreme court rolled back federal oversight of state elections established by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, low turnout and the expansion of misinformation in the media. Since Bush v Gore in 2000, serious challenges to electoral legitimacy, and growing party polarization over the rules of the game, have gradually deepened. The Election Integrity Project has used expert surveys to evaluate the quality of national elections around the world since 2012 and found that US elections have persistently been graded poorly by EIP experts, scoring next to last among the world’s liberal democracies, and ranking about 45th out of 166 nations worldwide.”

“‘A new inauguration date is set’: Inside the latest QAnon conspiracy theory to ‘reinstate’ Trump,” Jon Skolnik, salon “According to a Tuesday tweet from the Times' Maggie Haberman, the former President has been telling a number of people he's in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August. Trump's reported thinking echoes that of his former lawyer's, . On Saturday, Powell told attendees to the QAnon conference that Trump ‘can simply be reinstated.’

“‘A new inauguration date is set, and Biden is told to move out of the White House, and President Trump should be moved back in,’ she explained…

“Powell was not the only speaker at this past weekend's event who spoke directly about the possibility Trump could reclaim his throne soon.

“, apparently looking to encourage another election coup, asking the crowd why ‘what happened in Myanmar’ can't happen in the U.S?

“‘No reason,’ Flynn answered. ‘I mean, it should happen here.’”

“New Texas Bill Reduces Polling Locations in Blue and Nonwhite Districts,” Montinique Monroe, truthout “A voter suppression bill currently being considered by the Texas legislature would decrease the number of polling locations in districts that are traditionally Democratic and nonwhite while increasing the locations in Republican and predominantly white districts.

“The state experienced high turnout for the 2020 election, especially in more heavily populated areas like Houston. Now, Republicans are targeting those very places in an elections bill, SB 7, applying a formula to redistribute polling locations in the state’s five most populous counties that the Texas Tribune has found would disproportionately affect voters in Democratic communities.

“In Harris county, which houses Houston, all but two of the area’s 15 Democratic districts would see a decrease in polling locations thanks to the new formula. District 141, which is also home to the largest portion of nonwhite people of voting age of any other district in the county — white people make up only 10.6 percent of the population of voting age there — would be hit the hardest, losing 11 polling places…

“Meanwhile, every district represented by a Republican would either not see a change or would gain polling locations. All of those districts have white voting age populations of 45 percent or more, according to census data.”

Page 2 of 91

“The new mask guidance relies on an honor system. Do we trust each other enough to make it work?” Marisa Lati, Washington Post “In an intensely polarized nation, many people have little faith that their maskless fellow Americans have actually been vaccinated. That lack of trust, fueled by the ongoing politicization of the pandemic, tears at the fabric of a public-health strategy built on the assumption that other people will do the right thing.

“Just more than 1 in 3 people in the United States are fully inoculated, leaving most of the population among those instructed to keep their face coverings securely over their noses when indoors. But with federal officials repeatedly rejecting the possibility of vaccine passports, enforcement relies on an honor system.

“Asked Thursday how people will know if others had been vaccinated, Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, said they wouldn’t.

“‘You’re gonna be depending on people being honest enough to say whether they are vaccinated or not,’ he told CNN.

“As a result, the public’s lack of confidence in each other foments ‘a sort of existential crisis,’ said Richard Carpiano.... He said trust functions as a social glue to hold together society.”

“The Death of Democracy Looks Nearer Than Ever,” Elayne Clift, truthout.org “The fact is, the real and growing possibility of living through the destruction of American democracy is not going away. It is growing. is now viewed as the head of the Republican Party as he holds the feet of elected officials to the fire with his fierce, alarming grip on their futures. A significant number of regular Republicans continue to embrace the lies, mantras and inconceivable theories spewed out daily by Fox News. Insurrectionists crawl out from under their rocks in droves. The Supreme Court is now a quasi-political body with a 6-3 conservative majority.

“All this is terrifying in its implications. Like many others, I grow more and more anxious by the day...I know that what happened in countries like Turkey, Egypt, Poland, Hungary and others can happen here.

“We are not immune from autocrats and dictatorship and we are not protected by our Constitution if it no longer holds meaning for those in power. Our future is riding on the midterm elections next year, and the 2024 presidential election.

“If you think I am needlessly hyperventilating, consider this: In 1923 Hitler mounted a failed coup. When he failed, his effort was treated leniently. A decade later he was Germany’s dictator. In 2021 Donald Trump inspired a failed coup. It too has been treated leniently by those who say we “need to move on.” Will he, or his appointed alter ego, be our dictator in less than a decade?”

“We must end the post-truth society,” Jennifer Rubin, washingtonpost “The storming of the Capitol building on Jan. 6 was the culmination of a series of actions and events taken or instigated by Trump so he could retain the presidency that together amount to an attempt at a self-coup.

“It does not matter that the seditious attack failed. Nor does it matter that Trump failed in his attempts to cajole — and even threaten — Vice President Pence, Congress and state election officials into overthrowing the election results. The coup took place in an environment that must change. As Hill argues:

Page 3 of 91

“Unless the Big Lie is thoroughly refuted, we can expect more attempts to subvert the constitutional order from Trump’s supporters—and we still have to get through the January 20 Inauguration. The president’s actions and his falsehoods have shattered America’s democratic norms, exacerbated its political divisions, and put people’s lives at risk. …

“If we are to restore democratic norms and make sure this does not happen again, these congressional Republicans will have to take personal responsibility for their actions in support of Trump’s coup attempt. They must tell the truth to their constituents about the election and what the president tried to do in January 2021. They owe it to the people they represent as well as the country they serve.

“The ‘Big Lie’ to which Hill refers — that the 2020 election was stolen through rampant voter fraud — is one of many in the post-truth world that right-wingers have propagated to gin up their base and promote a sense of panic and grievance. In this world, masks don’t work and Ukrain has the DNC server. White evangelicals tell their flocks there is a war on Christians. Radio talk-show hosts tell us there are terrorists among refugees fleeing violence in Central America. There is a whole industry — extending to issue-oriented advocacy groups and think tanks — designed to con the mob and infuriate them.”

“The Trump presidency was marked by battles over truth itself. Those aren’t over,” Jose A. Del Real, washingtonpost “President Trump stands as a singular figure in American history for his willingness to entertain conspiracy theories from the Oval Office, and none has been more damaging or far reaching than his unsubstantiated claim that the 2020 election was rigged against him. One out of every three Americans believes that there was widespread fraud in the last presidential election, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, despite no evidence to support that view. Two in three Republicans believe so.

“The social conditions that brought so many people to believe the falsehoods Trump has told about the election and a litany of other issues took root decades before he became a political figure and will extend far beyond the four years of his administration…

“…all of the social science shows that if someone really believes a conspiracy theory, it is just about impossible to change their ”

“‘Our goal needs to be to prevent any more people from falling into conspiracy world views. If people are in that world, they are largely unpersuadable’

“There is a New Class in America: The Irresponsibles,” Martin Edic, medium “I am still floored when I see the crowds partying in some warm place, acting as though there is no pandemic and no reason to be careful. They include the Karens, female and male, who claim their rights are violated by a piece of cloth over their faces, or that they somehow have privilege because of their race.

“This wave of unbridled selfishness, which leads to the sickness and death of others, including their friends and family members, is simply incomprehensible, yet it is rampant in our country. This persecution mentality has no basis in reality, other than a childish belief that they are beyond any common sense rules.

“A substantial part of this country is veering into chaos, driven by a culture of narcissism that exploded when we elected a maniac President, who is the ultimate representative of a spoiled childishness

Page 4 of 91

“MAGA’s contempt for democracy stems from the myth of the ‘self-made man’ who believes he owes nothing of his success to language, culture, education, ecological services, social contracts, public institutions, or national prosperity.”

“‘Putin-style democracy’: how Republicans gerrymander the map,” Tom McCarthy, theguardian “‘Public sentiment in 2020 favored Democrats, and Democrats retained control of the House of Representatives,’ said Samuel Wang, a professor of neuroscience and director of the Princeton gerrymandering project. ‘[But] because of reapportionment and redistricting, those factors would be enough to cause a change in control of the House even if public opinion were not to change at all’...

“‘The threat of extreme gerrymandering is more acute today than it has ever been because of the combination of an abandonment of oversight by the courts and the Department of Justice, combined with new supercomputing powers,’ said Josh Silver, director of Represent.us. The non-partisan group issued a report this month warning that dozens of states ‘have an extreme or high threat of having their election districts rigged for the next decade’.

“‘Frankly,’ Silver said, ‘what we’re seeing around gerrymandering by the authoritarian wing of the Republican party is part of the Putin-style managed democracy they are promoting – that combination of voter suppression and gerrymandering’...

“The new Republican gerrymandering efforts are expected to focus on urban areas in southern states that are home to a disproportionate number of voters of color – meaning those voters are more likely to be disenfranchised.

“In Texas, mapmakers could try to add districts to the growing population centers of Houston and -Fort Worth without increasing representation of the minority and Democratic voters who account for that growth. In Florida they might add Republican voters to a growing Democratic district north of Orlando. In , where the Democratic governor is shut out of the process, Republican mapmakers might seek to add a district in the Democratic-leaning Research Triangle, in a way that elects more Republicans.”

“McConnell says companies should stay out of politics — unless they’re donating money,” Teo Armus, Washington Post “After the Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that companies could finance election spending, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) celebrated the prospect that corporate America would enter — and influence — the political fray.

“‘For too long, some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process,’ he said in a statement at the time. He hailed the decision, Citizens United, as ‘an important step’ in ‘restoring the First Amendment rights of these groups.’

“But just over a decade later, McConnell has a different message for companies: Unless it involves money, they had better stay quiet.

“‘My warning to corporate America is to stay out of politics,’ McConnell said at a news conference in Kentucky on Tuesday, before adding: ‘I’m not talking about political contributions.’”

“Georgia’s New Voting Law Is Rife With Hidden Horrors,” Greg Palast, truthout “When we first reported that handing a slice of pizza to a voter waiting three hours in a line is now a felony in Georgia, other media quickly picked up the story, highlighting the cruelty of Georgia Republicans making predominantly Black voters suffer from hunger and thirst in lines the GOP deliberately made long by closing polling stations in majority-Black precincts.

Page 5 of 91

“But the food-in-line prohibition is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to horrific provisions hidden in the 95 pages of Georgia’s new anti-voting law.”

“Three Fundamentalisms Are Driving the Resurgence of Fascist Politics in the US,” Henry A Giroux, truthout “Free-market fundamentalism separates economic, political and educational activity from any viable notion of social and ethical responsibility while destroying all notions of the common good.

“Religious fundamentalism collapses the line separating the church and state while waging a war against economic equality, social justice and democracy itself. This is a fundamentalism rooted in the notion of the theocratic state designed for white Christians that justifies the regressive notion of a holy war against anyone who is not white and a Christian fundamentalist. Coupled with a market fundamentalism that places profits above human needs, religious fundamentalism provides some of the oxygen for justifying violence as a solution to all social problems.

“The final fundamentalism — manufactured ignorance — is an educational fundamentalism that wages a war against reason, critical consciousness and any notion of agency that is both critical and willing to hold power accountable. Market and religious fundamentalism now merge with a massive assault on the public imagination in the form of another fundamentalism — the drive to produce a collective consciousness rooted in manufactured ignorance.”

“Georgia's governor signed 'Jim Crow' voting bill under painting of a slave plantation,” Kreel Wicker, theguardian “The Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch created a thread about a painting of a Georgia plantation that is hanging behind Kemp in the photograph. Writing about the history of the Callaway plantation in Wilkes county, Georgia, Bunch said the place depicted ‘thrived because of the back-breaking labor of more than 100 slaves who were held in cruel human bondage’.

“The columnist, who later published an op-ed about the discovery, said the symbolism of Kemp signing a bill that has referred to as ‘Jim Crow in the 21st century’ is no coincidence.

“The 98-page Election Integrity Act of 2021 has garnered criticism for the additional ID requirements it has added to absentee voting, and making it a crime for many volunteers to hand out water or food within 150 feet of polling precincts.

“The practice of handing out food and water became popular as a method of keeping exhausted voters in line at precincts where wait times can span hours…

“‘Brian Kemp and his white henchmen have created an image for our times, in working to continue a tradition of inhumanity and that now spans centuries, from the human bondage that took place behind the placid scenery of Brickhouse Road in Wilkes county, to the suppression now hidden behind a phony facade of ‘voter integrity’. This legacy is a crime against humanity, and it cannot stand,’ Bunch tweeted.”

“Conspiracy Theories Are Killing Us — and Trump’s Departure Hasn’t Ended Them,” Shane Burley, truthout.org “… ordinary people posting conspiracy theories on Facebook… are drawn in because it feels empowering. There have been psychological studies on this, and these are folks who have very little belief in their own self-agency. They believe themselves to be non-players in the world and this gives them the chance to sort of stay ahead of everybody else…

“Initially, conspiracy communities are very welcoming, particularly to newbies. The two real initially empowering aspects of conspiracy theories are they have people encouraging them and they feel like they have secret knowledge. And they are in a community where they are actually listened to. The narrative arc of conspiracism feels empowering at first, but it is ultimately very disempowering because the overall narrative is that you are actually up against these nefarious forces that are so dark

Page 6 of 91

and deeply entrenched that no one really stands a chance against them. And so, they begin withdrawing from the world. It continues to have a disempowering effect of destroying your interpersonal relationships in the real world, both from friends and family and their larger community.”

“Liberty’s Discontents,” Tyler Stovall, thenation “It was another great day for liberty—and yet a horrible one for tens of thousands of Americans who now may die needlessly because so many cling to a warped idea of freedom that apparently means not caring whether others in your community get sick. The reality is that those devil-worshipping elected officials and their mad scientists are trying to mandate masks in public for the same reasons they don’t let 12-year-olds drive and they close bars at 2 a.m.: They actually want to keep their constituents alive.

“Give me liberty or give me death, indeed…

“Freedom empowers our individual desires, but at the same time it structures how we live with other individuals in large, complex societies. As the saying goes, my freedom to swing my fist ends just where someone else’s nose begins…”

“US democracy on the brink: Republicans wage 'coordinated onslaught' on voting rights,” Sam Levine, theguardian “Despite a lethal pandemic, a staggering 159m votes were cast, 67% of eligible voters, the highest turnout in a presidential election since 1900. Such turnout is even more remarkable considering that millions of Americans adopted an entirely new way of voting, casting their ballots not on election day but ahead of time, either in person or by mail.

“There wasn’t a meltdown in the election process that many feared early on in the pandemic. The United States Postal Service, under attack from Trump and his allies, delivered ballots on time. Officials found no evidence of widespread fraud or malfeasance during the election. By the time they declared the 2020 election ‘the most secure in American history’, a larger truth was apparent: democracy had prevailed.

“But 2021 has been far from a celebration of democracy. It’s been the opposite – American democracy is under attack...

“Republicans have launched a brazen attack on voting, part of an effort to entrench control over a rapidly changing electorate by changing the rules of democracy. As of mid-February, 253 bills were pending to restrict voting in 43 states. Many of those restrictions take direct aim at mail-in and early voting, the very policies that led to November’s record turnout…

“Trump dismissed proposals to make it easier to vote last year by saying: ‘You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.’ And this month, Michael Carvin, a lawyer representing the Arizona Republican party, said something similar when Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked him what interest the party had in defending two Arizona voting restrictions. Lifting those restrictions, Carvin said, ‘puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats. Politics is a zero-sum game.’

“Conspiracy Theories Are Killing Us — and Trump’s Departure Hasn’t Ended Them,” Shane Burley, truthout.org “…if we look at what’s happened with the coronavirus as a sort of the model for how rural communities are embracing right-wing authoritarianism as they have under Trump, rural communities are fundamentally really killing themselves in the name of a culture war. Look at what’s happening in South Dakota and Oklahoma, where all these hospitals are being overwhelmed and people are dying while they are saying that the coronavirus is a hoax. And in their obituaries, they say they love Trump, like it’s their last words as they die.”

Page 7 of 91

“Voters are leaving Republicans behind,” Helaine Olen, Washington Post “‘People by and large, across partisan and most demographic lines, strongly support at least an essential role for the federal government in making sure people have access to basic housing, education, health care and food,’ John Halpin, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress…

“This is not a sudden movement. A report by the center unearthed similar findings in 2019. I wrote about it at the time, noting that Americans were more unified than it seemed on supporting government aid. But in many cases, the support has increased since then. In 2021, for instance, a majority of Republicans — 54 percent — said they believed many people lived in poverty because jobs do not pay enough or housing is too expensive. That’s a significant increase from 2019, when only 43 percent of them agreed with a similar statement.

“When Halpin conducts focus groups, he says he finds over and over again that people say either they or people they know benefited from government aid, even as they say they still believe others do take advantage of the programs. ‘What we see is the challenges of the American economy are hitting a lot more people,’ he said. ‘Consequently, they’re willing to support pretty strong measures by the government to help low-income people.’

“Halpin attributes this change, in part, to the impact of the pandemic. ‘It’s probably not lost on people that there were two-mile-long backups at food banks in the pandemic,’ he told me…

“These findings call out Republican opposition to spending on people in need of help for what it is: mean-spirited. In fact, it is so unpopular that Republicans holding elected office are thwarting the wishes of a majority of their own voters by coming out against it.

“That’s something President Biden and Democrats need to hammer home over and over again.”

“Stacey Abrams Knew Another Round of Attacks on Voting Was Coming,” Joan Walsh, thenation “Since those hard-won Senate victories, Georgia Republicans have been working overtime—not to figure out how they might appeal to the state’s rising majority of African American, Latino, and Asian-American voters, along with fed-up suburban women and college-educated white people, including the young. No, there’s been no postmortem, autopsy, no ‘what went wrong’ exploration by the state party. They know what went wrong: Too many Democrats voted. So the focus is on keeping them from voting, by any means necessary…

“‘Here in Georgia, Republicans have already told us that they want to eviscerate laws they created!’ she told me. ‘They were the ones who allowed for no-excuses absentee balloting, who allowed for the use of ballot drop boxes. For years they were the ones using the system, and they were perfectly sanguine about it’...

“‘The audit is proving the process we have works,’ Abrams told me. ‘That’s the problem for them— the process works’...

“Abrams has called the barrage of new legislation, which disproportionately affects Black voters, ‘Jim Crow in a suit and tie.’”

“Conspiracy Theories Are Killing Us — and Trump’s Departure Hasn’t Ended Them,” Shane Burley, truthout.org “… actual conspiracy, by nature, necessarily must have a very limited number of actual participants, because the larger the number of people involved in the conspiracy, the greater the likelihood of exposure. And then it ceases to be a conspiracy, right? It’s no longer a secret plot. Whereas in conspiracy theories, you can have vast populations involved in this conspiracy, entire ethnic groups or entire religions. The most popular of these is the “globalists,” and this has just become a nameless mass of people that anybody that can include, basically anyone who questions the right wing…”

Page 8 of 91

“Conspiracy Theories Are Killing Us — and Trump’s Departure Hasn’t Ended Them,” Shane Burley, truthout.org “After Trump spoke at CPAC it became clear that his hold on the GOP, his conspiratorial view of world affairs and ‘stolen elections,’ continues to be a central piece of America’s conservative movement. These beliefs are threatening to radically reshape policy, such as further eroding voting rights over the false belief in voter fraud. Now the GOP seems beset on ‘election integrity’ as its primary issue for the coming years, entirely constructed out of conspiratorial falsehoods that will have the ability to attack free and fair elections…

“While rural America is far from a monolithic white demographic, those rural areas that continue to be overwhelmingly white have seen a mass orientation to conspiracy theories. Motivated by as well as misplaced blame for economic and cultural disaffection, conspiracy thinking has taken over in towns around the country.”

“Biden's no LBJ but he must protect voting rights. What else is the presidency for?” Ribert Reich, theguardian “Although Democrats possess a razor-thin majority, the bill doesn’t stand a chance unless Democrats can overcome two big obstacles.

“The first is the filibuster, requiring 60 votes to pass regular legislation. Notably, the filibuster is not in the constitution and not even in law. It’s a rule that has historically been used against civil rights and voting rights bills, as it was in the 1960s when LBJ narrowly overcame it…

“If Democrats fail to enact the For the People Act, Republicans will send voting rights into retreat for decades…

“We are once again at a crucial juncture for civil rights and voting rights that could shape America for a half-century or more. Joe Biden is not LBJ, and the times are different from the mid-1960s. But the stakes are as high.

“Biden must wield the power of the presidency to make senators fall in line with the larger goals of the nation. Otherwise, as LBJ asked, ‘what the hell’s the presidency for?’”

“Conservatives on the Supreme Court Are Trying to Quietly Toss Aside Federalism,” David Laurie, medium “… the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority is now poised to dictate to state judges and governors how to enforce their own election laws, so as to tip the scales in favor of Republican candidates. Working in tandem with Republican legislators seeking to further suppress and dilute Democratic votes, the Court could usher in decades of minority control of both state and federal governments, unless Congress acts.

“The political logic is as simple as it is repugnant: The Republican Party is shrinking, particularly as suburban voters — long a key part of the GOP base — recoil from an increasingly nativistic and racist GOP. The party’s prospects for future electoral success thus depend on evermore effectively suppressing and diluting the votes of those citizens who favor Democratic candidates.

“The GOP’s self-perpetuating control of the majority of state legislatures has long been key to implementing the party’s strategy of undermining democracy. The Republican Party pioneered the demographic science of partisan gerrymandering both state legislative and congressional districts to maximize Republican victories. GOP mapmakers pack Democratic voters into small numbers of congressional districts, thereby diluting, and indeed nullifying, voters’ actual impact on electoral outcomes. In heavily gerrymandered states like Wisconsin, election results are often so lopsided as to make a mockery of democracy…

Page 9 of 91

“The likelihood that the Supreme Court will step in to hamstring efforts by state officials and courts even to apply their own laws to facilitate free and fair voting makes it all the more essential that Congress act soon to enact the John Lewis Voting Rights Enhancement Act, which is intended to undo the damage the Supreme Court has done to the Voting Rights Act, as well as the For the People Act, which would limit partisan gerrymandering of House Districts. The future of the nation’s democracy could depend on it.”

“The Truth About Our Political Divide That’s Too Terrifying To Admit,” Bernie Bleske, medium.com “I have relatives and friends who still support Trump. They think the Democrats literally stole the election. They believe the Capitol riots were the work of and the Left. They’re convinced America is ‘close enough’ to some government agency secretly microchipping us all, that anyone who isn’t a Republican is a communist, and that Republicans who oppose Trump are nearly as bad or worse, especially if they don’t believe the election was stolen.

“I know this is what they believe because they’ve said it. Because I’ve read what is said on FOX News, because every so often I tune in to ‘conservative’ radio, because I’ve seen the clips of prominent Republican politicians making such claims. I know this because they voted for Donald Trump again...

“Early in the Trump presidency, some troubling surfaces began to see exposure. Trump would tweet something outrageous — he really won the popular vote because California added millions of fraudulent ballots, Obama was wire- tapping him before the election, Obama is a Muslim — and conservatives wouldn’t deny it. At first they’d just kind of look away, but soon enough there were murmers of agreement, little ‘well, what if it’s true?’ comments, and ‘how do we know for sure?’

“It was like the tweets scratched away at a thin layer of paint, a paint that seemed almost designed to hide the real shape beneath…

“It began to seem not so much that Trump was outrageous, or singular, but that he spoke for millions we’d never suspected.”

“Biden's no LBJ but he must protect voting rights. What else is the presidency for?” Ribert Reich, theguardian “In 1963, when the newly sworn in Lyndon Baines Johnson was advised against using his limited political capital on the controversial issue of civil and voting rights for Black Americans, he responded: ‘Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?’

“The US is again approaching a crucial decision point on the most fundamental right of all in a democracy: the right to vote. The result will either be the biggest advance since LBJ’s landmark civil rights and voting rights acts of 1964 and 1965, or the biggest setback since the end of Reconstruction and start of Jim Crow in the 1870s….

“On one side are Republicans, who control most state legislatures and are using false claims of election fraud to enact an avalanche of voting restrictions on everything from early voting and voting by mail to voter IDs. They also plan to gerrymander their way back to a US House of Representatives majority.

“On the other side are congressional Democrats, advancing the most significant democracy reform legislation since LBJ – a sprawling 791-page For the People Act, establishing national standards for federal elections.”

“On the anniversary of Selma we are sadly reminded: voting rights are still imperiled, Elliott Smith, theguardian “According to the Brennan Center for Justice, there have been 253 bills introduced in 43 states since the start of 2021 to restrict expanded voting opportunities. As the Brennan Center explains: ‘These

Page 10 of 91

proposals primarily seek to: 1) limit mail voting access; 2) impose stricter voter ID requirements; 3) slash voter registration opportunities; and 4) enable more aggressive voter roll purges.’ These bills are being introduced in state legislatures throughout the country by Republican legislators.

“Since Shelby County v Holder, a 2013 US supreme court case which gutted key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, at least 25 states have passed racist voter suppression laws, including to reduce early voting days and create barriers to language access. This is in addition to partisan gerrymandering and redistricting measures that create obstacles across race and class lines. These measures disproportionately target Black, brown, indigenous and poor white people joining together to demand progressive change. The real threat to our democracy is not the man who recently held the highest office, but rather those throughout our state legislatures who continue to push false narratives about voter fraud.”

“Will Senate Republicans allow their louts to rule the party?” George Will, washingtonpost “Although not nearly as tragic as 9/11 in lives lost and radiating policy consequences, 1/6 should become, as its implications percolate into the national consciousness, even more unsettling. Long before 9/11, Americans knew that foreign fanaticisms were perennial dangers. After 1/6, Americans know what their Constitution’s Framers knew: In any democracy, domestic fanaticisms always are, potentially, rank weeds that flourish when fertilized by persons who are as unscrupulous as they are prominent.

“The Framers are, to the 45th president, mere rumors. They, however, knew him, as a type — a practitioner of what Alexander Hamilton (in Federalist 68) disdainfully called ‘talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity.’ Post-1/6 America has a quickened appreciation of how those ‘little arts,’ when magnified by modern modes of mass communication as wielded by occupants of the swollen modern presidency, make civilization’s brittle crust crumble.”

“Republicans Have Already Introduced Over 100 Voter Suppression Bills This Year,” Kenny Stancil, truthout.org “Ari Berman on Thursday reported on the GOP’s ongoing nationwide push to make voting more difficult — particularly for communities of color and other Democratic-leaning constituencies — and in some cases to empower state legislatures to overturn election results…

“Republicans across the country, Berman said, are ‘weaponizing Trump’s lies’ about fraud in an attempt to roll back voting rights after last year’s historic turnout and expansion of mail-in ballots…

“According to an analysis conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice in late January, Republicans at the state level have introduced three times as many bills to chip away at voting rights compared to the same point last year.

“Already this year, 106 bills have been introduced in 28 states — including 17 under complete GOP control, where passage is more likely — to undermine access to the franchise. According to the Brennan Center’s report, ‘These proposals primarily seek to: (1) limit mail voting access; (2) impose stricter voter ID requirements; (3) limit successful pro-voter registration policies; and (4) enable more aggressive voter roll purges.’”

“How the Covidiots Won,” Umair Haque, medium “Do you know what they do to you in Jakarta if you don’t wear a mask? They make you dig Covid graves. Jakarta’s in Indonesia, by the way. It’s hardly a country as rich as mine is. I think that’s an entirely appropriate punishment. It’s grounded in a moral and social logic that seems entirely absent from the West: you’re helping cause a wave of death, and we are going to make you face the consequences of your irresponsibility in a way that you can’t ignore them any longer….

Page 11 of 91

“The bitter, sad, stupid truth is this: we’ve normalised Covidiocy in the West. It’s seen as a matter of ‘personal choice’ in much of the West whether or not to shoulder the basic human responsibilities of fighting a deadly pandemic. We sane and reasonable ones are the ones who are seen as extremists if we ask for behavioural changes…

“We’ve allowed a culture of Covidiocy to flourish, here in the West. It’s made of stunning indifference, total irresponsibility, vapid individualism, people allowed to act as if their actions have no consequences whatsoever. Hey, who killed all those people? Not me! No sir! I didn’t wear a mask, but I’m not a killer! Wait, how many people do you think you might have infected? This chain of basic scientific logic not only doesn’t work with the average Westerner — it’s considered rude and impolite to say such things. But they are basic truths…

“The social dynamic between us sane people and Covidiots in the West goes something like this. We don’t want to hurt their feelings. We don’t want to be rude, don’t want to step on their toes, don’t want to offend them. Never mind the inconvenient fact that they’re by now causing a wave of mass death without parallel in modern history — and don’t feel any remorse about it either, which appears to make them psychopaths. Should we be afraid of offending people that ignorant, stupid, malicious, and reckless…

“It’s as if asking people to change their behaviour in tiny, tiny ways — wear a mask, don’t go out for a beer every night, maybe stay home — is too much to ask, despite the fact that it could prevent a rising tide of mass death. On the one hand, mass death, on the other hand, tiny, tiny changes in individual behaviour. The culture of Covidiocy we’ve allowed to flourish makes it seem as if the small changes in behaviour the pandemic demands aren’t worth preventing all that death and sickness. All that counts is the hurt feelings of Covidiots.”

“They rioted at the Capitol for Trump. Now, many of those arrested say it’s his fault,” Axman and Salman, usatoday “They broke through barricades, shattered windows and seized control of the U.S. Capitol building, some making death threats against members of Congress hiding inside, others brutalizing the police officers who stood in their way.

“As the cases against nearly 200 of the Capitol rioters begin to wind through federal court, many of the defendants are blaming the commander-in-chief they blindly followed for the violence that left five dead during the Jan. 6 insurrection.

“In court documents, media interviews and through official attorney statements, staunch supporters of former President Donald Trump who carried out the attempted coup argue they were merely doing what they thought the nation’s leader had asked, some citing a cult-like loyalty…

"‘You have to understand the cult mentality,’ Broden said. ‘They prey on vulnerable victims and give them a sense of purpose. In this case, Trump convinced his cult followers that they were working to preserve democracy’...

“In charging documents and court records, the FBI cites social media feeds, media statements and its own agents’ interviews with at least 29 people arrested for taking part in the riot who said they came to Washington to support Trump or were doing what he told them to do that day.

“The GOP’s 2022 Strategy: Voter Suppression or Bust,” Ellie Mystal, thenation “At the beating heart of the Big Lie—the deranged fantasy that the 2020 election was stolen from its loser, Donald Trump—is the Republican belief that the votes of Black people shouldn’t count. In lawsuit after lawsuit after the election, Republicans asked the courts to throw away votes that had been cast in predominantly Black communities. In , they literally singled out Detroit and threatened to refuse to certify its votes. The GOP’s entire postelection strategy was to reinstitute race-

Page 12 of 91

based voter disenfranchisement all the way up to January 6, when 147 Republican lawmakers voted to straight-up overturn the results because Black people had overcome the white supremacy baked into the Electoral College…

“… state legislatures have already prepared three times as many voter restriction bills this year as were proposed during the same period of time last year. The numbers are staggering: ‘Twenty-eight states have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 106 restrictive bills this year (as compared to 35 such bills in fifteen states on February 3, 2020)’...

“The new laws cover everything Republicans could think of to make it harder for people to cast a vote. Many of the proposals are laser-focused on absentee ballots: Republicans want to make those harder to get, easier to reject, and impossible to fix. Other laws make it harder for people to register to vote. Still others want to make it easier to purge registered voters from the rolls….

“The Republican candidate for president has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections. What’s wild is that the GOP has no plans to address this problem, no strategy to broaden its appeal beyond the insular white racists and wealthy white business interests that represent a stagnant and aging minority of the country…. For them, it’s voter suppression or bust.”

“‘This Crap Means More to Him Than My Life’: When QAnon Invades American Homes,” Anastasia Carrier, politico “… QAnon continues to spread—about 30 percent of Republicans have favorable views about the conspiracy theory, according to a January poll by YouGov...

“As American politics scrambles to deal with this fringe ideology and its followers—a set of people seemingly impervious to facts, some committed enough to assault the U.S. Capitol—the country might learn a few things from the people who have to grapple with QAnon in their very homes, and who live with it every day. And what their stories tell us is unsettling. In post after post on r/QAnonCasualties, fathers and daughters, wives and husbands, best friends and colleagues describe their inability to get through to the people they are closest to. There are stories of marriages and friendships torn asunder, estranged siblings, parents and children severing ties. There are occasional accounts of success. But more often the stories end with people giving up trying to reach their radicalized loved ones. Sometimes, they walk away entirely.”

“McConnell shows that legacies don’t matter when facts no longer do,” Ronin Grisham, Washington Post “Republicans… have been unconcerned with their legacy. Reverence for one’s legacy was supposed to be the safety valve, the narcissistic self-defense mechanism that also has the effect of offering salvation to others. The guardrails are gone.

“The country has been at war with the truth for some time….

“But Americans tend to be creatures of both optimism and habit, and so when their public officials are faced with difficult decisions, they tend to reflexively believe — hope, pray — that their leaders’ choices will be driven by concern for their personal legacy. They rely on the notion that people care about the way in which future generations will remember them and so, rather than allow their name to be inscribed on the pages of time as a coward or an autocrat or a racist, they will respond with integrity, enlightenment and kindness.

“But like so many parts of the culture that have been beaten down and left for dead during the Trump era, the reverence many people once had for personal legacies has passed away. There it lies, alongside the culture’s respect for facts and truth….

Page 13 of 91

“The fate of one’s legacy used to be a reason to pause and reconsider some intemperate act, some plundering of institutions. No more….

“But along with a bit of this country’s innocence and self-confidence, the importance of legacy has seemingly died — or at least been significantly diminished. Grand historical assessments by academics and intellectuals are as unimportant among some citizens as science.

“Caring about one’s legacy is no longer seen as the considered act of a statesman, but rather the snobbery of the elite.”

“Is America’s Soul Beyond Redemption?” Andrew J Bacevich, thenation “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism”...

“I long ago concluded that Dr. King was then offering the essential interpretive key to understanding our contemporary American dilemma. The predicament in which we find ourselves today stems from our reluctance to admit to the crippling interaction among the components of the giant triplets he described in that speech. True, racism, extreme materialism, and militarism each deserve—and separately sometimes receive—condemnation. But it’s the way that the three of them sustain one another that accounts for our nation’s present parlous condition…

“Martin Luther King is enshrined in American memory as a great civil rights leader and rightly so. Yet as his Riverside Church Address made plain, his life’s mission went far beyond fighting racial discrimination. His real purpose was to save America’s soul, a self-assigned mission that was either wildly presumptuous or deeply prophetic.”

“ is American fascism,” Michael Gordon, washingtonpost.com “One of the most important strands of our founding ideology is civic republicanism. In this tradition, the common good is not automatically produced by a clash of competing interests. A just society must be consciously constructed by citizens possessing certain virtues. A democracy in particular depends on people who take responsibility for their communities, show an active concern for the welfare of their neighbors, demand integrity from public officials, defend the rule of law, and respect the rights and dignity of others. Without these moral commitments, a majority is merely a mob.

“What type of citizen has Trump — and his supportive partisan media — produced? Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) still holds her job in Congress because she is representative of ascendant MAGA radicalism. Those who reflect her overt racism, her unhinged conspiracy thinking and her endorsement of violence against public figures are now treated as a serious political constituency within the Republican Party…

“Call this civic barbarism. Instead of promoting the values of responsible citizenship, Trump and his media enablers are elevating and blessing the very worst among us. They are making many Americans less suited for self-government and more dangerous to their neighbors. And they are doing so for the reason some of the Founders most feared: To lead the mob against true democracy…

“This is a reality that I have resisted naming. The 45th president and a significant portion of his supporters have embraced American fascism. And Trump’s buffoonery does not disprove the point. Though he probably cannot name the political theory he has embraced, his own recklessness, vanity and authoritarian instincts have led him down fascist grooves.”

“The Most Terrifying Threat to America Is Middle-Class White Guys Cosplaying a Fascist Uprising,” Jude Ellison Sady Doyle, medium.com “For QAnon believers, like Chansley, ‘conspiracy’ provides a once-in-a-lifetime chance to feel special: The believer perceives himself as the hero of a vast, mythic drama, battling villains who

Page 14 of 91

happen to be the most famous celebrities and powerful politicians of his age. He stages an all-star movie and casts himself in the lead role…

“Pop culture didn’t cause this. White people — white men especially — are susceptible to fantasies of power because those fantasies are the basis of whiteness and masculinity. We raise boys on stories of soldiers and superheroes, telling them that conflict and battle are what makes someone a hero. We tell young men that dominance and violence are key to masculinity. White people of every gender are raised with massive, swollen senses of entitlement; we teach white children that they deserve the world, and if their success is not automatic and spectacular, that must mean someone, somewhere, is taking away what is rightfully theirs.

“It was inevitable that some people would take these stories literally. It was just as inevitable that they would take them too far. Fascists were able to gain a foothold in America because they understood the stories America tells about itself — the white rage and violence that we have always honored and glorified, the way every man is taught to long for war. They were able to convince white people threatened by progress that the discomfort and unhappiness they felt were not simply entitlement or ignorance, but the righteous rage felt by an action hero just before he takes his bloody revenge…

“Some of those people will die in service to the smarter fascists who are using them to advance their cause. Few of them will take this into account before they open fire. Greg from Accounting is our enemy now — but then, for many Americans, he always was. Now we can see him for what he is, horns and face paint and all.”

“Why is it so hard to deprogram Trumpian conspiracy theorists?” Brian Klass, washingtonpost.com “For the past four years, the United States was governed by a conspiracy theorist in chief. Whether by retweeting QAnon accounts from the Oval Office or painting himself as the victim of shadowy ‘deep state’ plots at rallies, President Donald Trump injected the toxin of baseless conspiratorial thinking straight into America’s political bloodstream. On Jan. 6, America saw how far that venom had spread, as a ragtag group of militias, racist extremists and flag-waving disciples of Trumpism stormed the Capitol.

“The insurrectionists were unified by their support for Trump. But many of them shared another crucial trait: They were conspiracy theorists. And while hundreds of people stormed the Capitol, there are millions of Americans who share their views. There is no doubt: The United States has a serious problem with pathological political delusions.

“So, do we have any hope of deprogramming the millions of Americans who are devoted to dangerous lunacy? Don’t hold your breath.

“Psychologists and political scientists have been interested in conspiracy theories for decades, but their research has taken on new urgency. And what is clear from their findings is this: Once people have gone far enough down the rabbit hole of conspiratorial thinking, it can be nearly impossible to get them back out.

“There are a few reasons conspiracy theories are so ‘sticky’ once they’re in someone’s head. First, conspiracy theorists are far more likely to have a Manichaean worldview, meaning they interpret everything as a battle between good and evil.

“Second, those who seek to debunk conspiracy theories are precisely the people that true believers distrust. If someone believes the media is controlled by sinister but unseen puppet masters, fact checks from CNN will never convince them they’re wrong.”

“The Democrats' priority in power must be to stop minority rule,” Andrew Gawthorpe, theguardian.com

Page 15 of 91

“The Democrats’ victory in the Georgia Senate races cements their control over America’s most important governing institutions. In deciding what to do with their newfound power, they should learn from those who won this victory – the tireless organizers, many of them Black women, who made sure that Georgians were registered, motivated and able to vote. They know how to turn this country’s true Silent Majority – the one which rejects Republicans in election after election, including in 2016 – into a governing majority. What they did for Georgia, national Democratic leaders must now do for America.

“The case for the Democratic Party to commit itself to a radical pro-democracy agenda is simple. The last four years have shown the horrors of minority rule. Political institutions like the Electoral College, the Senate and gerrymandered House districts reward Republicans for appealing to a narrow minority of the population. They take this easily-won power and use it not for the good of the country as a whole but to push through extremist policies and fight culture wars.

“As inheritors of this situation, it is the duty of Democrats to do what they can to alter it. This is no time for incrementalism. Only a radical program aimed at strengthening American democracy and preventing the return of rightwing minority rule in the future will rise to the moment….

“When he struck down the For the People Act, Mitch McConnell derided it as ‘a bill designed to make it more likely that Democrats win more often.’ In a sense, he is right. If America’s political institutions more accurately represented the American people, Democrats would win more often. But this is incidental, and the benefits of reform would not just accrue to one party. A reinvigoration of democracy would force the Republican party to become more moderate, move closer to the people, and cease its assault on the constitution. Republican leaders have been pathetically incapable of saving their party from the Trumpian onslaught. So it falls to Democrats to do it for them, not out of love for the Republicans, but out of love for the republic.”

“The Most Terrifying Threat to America Is Middle-Class White Guys Cosplaying a Fascist Uprising,” Jude Ellison Sady Doyle, medium.com “As Trump prepares to exit the White House, Chansley stands as the most vivid symbol of our outgoing president’s legacy. After years of hearing journalists frame Trump as the candidate of ‘the white working class,’ a would-be dictator somehow accidentally bolstered by innocent blue-collar farmers and factory workers, it was validating to see who actually went to battle for him: middle-class white people, often middle-class white men who fantasize about being action heroes. These are guys with midlist foreign cars and podcasts and real estate jobs — weekend warriors who think they’re ready to die for the cause and are unprepared for the taste of prison food. They’re well off enough to buy expensive weapons or elaborate costumes — a coyote-fur headdress like Chansley’s costs between $360 and $500 from online retailers — and so fantasy-prone that they believe wearing a costume is the same as being a soldier. We have seen the enemy, and he is Greg from Accounting.

“Yet Greg, pathetic though he might be, is perhaps the single most dangerous threat we face in the coming years…

“As dopey as the foot soldiers of this movement are, they are being mobilized by serious fascist and white nationalist groups. Their wealth gives them the means to afford the $1,000-plus price tag of an AR-15 rifle and the self-importance and childish obliviousness to other people’s suffering required to fire it into a crowd. It is both saddening and sobering to realize that our deepest problems as a nation are going to stem not from “economic anxiety” or any real experience of deprivation or oppression, but from bored, comfortable white people getting restless that they’re no longer the center of attention….”

“Biden charged the people of this republic with fixing it. So the people need to grow up,” George F. Will, washingtonpost.com

Page 16 of 91

“In 1861, when seven of the 34 states had already voted for secession, the 16th president said in his inaugural address that the nation’s fate was ‘in your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine.’ Today, too, ultimate responsibility for the republic’s trajectory resides in the citizenry.

“Biden’s responsibility involves restoration of institutional norms and equilibrium. Five days before becoming president, he spoke five blunt words that would have been discordant in an inaugural address but that the entire nation needs to take to heart. Commenting on Republican members of Congress who refused to wear masks while crowded into protected rooms during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Biden said: ‘It’s time to grow up.’

“Grown-up American politics requires voters, as well as those they elect, to have the patience to respect constitutional processes. So, some words Biden spoke six weeks ago were heartening. Speaking truth to power is universally praised and occasionally practiced. On Dec. 8, however, in a meeting with supporters, Biden did something even rarer: He spoke truth about power.”

“‘I thought I was following my president,’” Helderman, Hsu and Weiner, washingtonpost.com “A man from Kentucky told the FBI that he and his cousin began marching toward the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 because ‘President Trump said to do so.’ Chanting ‘Stop the steal,’ the two men tramped through the building and snapped a photo of themselves with their middle fingers raised, according to court documents.

“A video clip of another group of rioters mobbing the steps of the Capitol caught one man screaming at a police officer: ‘We were invited here! We were invited by the president of the United States!’

“A retired firefighter from who has been charged with throwing a fire extinguisher at police officers felt he was ‘instructed’ to go to the Capitol by the president, a tipster told the FBI, according to court documents…

“The accounts of people who said they were inspired by the president to take part in the melee inside the Capitol vividly show the impact of Trump’s months-long attack on the integrity of the 2020 election and his exhortations to supporters to ‘fight’ the results.

“Some have said they felt called to Washington by Trump and his false message that the election had been stolen, as well as by his efforts to pressure Congress and Vice President Pence to overturn the result.

“But others drew an even more direct link — telling the FBI or news organizations that they headed to the Capitol on what they believed were direct orders from the president issued at a rally that day…

“Jenna Ryan, a real estate agent from Dallas who has been charged with illegally entering the building, appeared on local television Friday to beg Trump for clemency.

“‘I thought I was following my president,’ she said. ‘I thought I was following what we were called to do… He asked us to fly there. He asked us to be there. So I was doing what he asked us to do.’”

“‘I had no qualms’: The people turning in loved ones for the Capitol attack,” Kari Paul, theguardian.com “In the week after the attacks on the Capitol, there has been a concerted effort to ‘unmask’ rioters online, with self-styled detectives investigating who’s who in videos and photos posted from the attack. Outing family members – either online or to authorities – has marked a new frontier of the rift Trumpism has created in the US….

Page 17 of 91

“More than 140,000 people have sent tips to the FBI reporting participants in the riots on the Capitol on 6 January, resulting in at least 200 arrests. The vast majority of those, according to the Department of Justice, come from friends, family, and other acquaintances of those involved in the attacks…

“The decision to report a family member or publicly out them as espousing dangerous views can make a huge impact in stopping the spread of hate speech, said Talia Lavin, an expert in extremism and white supremacist groups and the author of Culture Warlords.

“‘I applaud the bravery of people who have called out people in their own families for this kind of radicalization’...,

“Leslie said she and her three siblings all stopped speaking to their parents after they got sucked into QAnon, movement surrounding a disproven conspiracy theory that Donald Trump is saving the world from a secret cabal of child abusers. She said she watched her evangelical mother go from being a devout Christian to posting hate speech on Facebook and aligning herself with the far right.

“‘I am really, really angry that I have essentially lost my family to a cult,’ she said.”

“There’s No Healing From This,” Katelyn Burns, medium.com “Just two days after Republican insurrectionists took over the U.S. Capitol and numerous state capitols, and 147 Republican members of Congress voted against the official Electoral College vote certification shortly afterward, those same lawmakers are now begging the country to forgive and forget.

“Respectfully, fuck that….

“Republican calls to move on and heal are nothing but a desperate attempt to ward off the consequences of their own actions. The GOP thought it could get what it wanted — tax cuts for the extremely wealthy and ideological control of the courts—by attaching itself to Trump. Republicans assumed they could use the man whose rallies featured abject violence from their earliest days as a mere pawn for ideological gain.

“Now, having gotten what they wanted, but seeing Trump’s rally violence spread into their own hallowed grounds, they’re desperate to wash the poop stink off their own political reputations.

“But healing cannot happen until those who did wrong face consequences, and the GOP has never faced any serious repercussions for their own actions in the last 50 years….

“There’s no both sides-ing what happened on January 6. Followers of an outgoing president have never before breached the Capitol in a legitimate attempt to overturn that president’s election loss. Those who participated in the assault, along with those in Congress who encouraged and cheered them on, should all face significant consequences.”

“In 2020, COVID Put a Mirror Up to Our Society,” William Rivers Pitt, truthout.org “I am not going to try to make sense of this year, because there was no sense to this year. There was death, and fear, and pain and loss. There was rage, and greed, and deliberate cruelty and a new form of eugenics born of incompetence tied with a bow of hate….

“Name an institution, and COVID has showed precisely where its long-standing flaws live: Politics, education, health care, labor. Name that which you have depended on, and you will find it dented, scarred and twisted…

Page 18 of 91

“Capitalism, American-style, has handled this pandemic with almost seamless irresponsibility. COVID, like water, finds all the cracks and crannies, all the pinholes and rends, and pours through.

“Yet we remained open as a nation for all these long and infected months, plowing workers into meatpacking plants and retail stores because the machine of profit must be fed. Wealth must be extracted — this is the one and only law we have lived under for so long, and COVID is now the pyre upon which the conceits of almighty capitalism burn. The virus is the “Invisible Hand” Adam Smith never saw coming, and it has slapped down our conceits with effortless wrath….

“The ‘money people’ kept trying to shove the marshmallow into a coin slot, kept trying to force everything back to ‘normal’ even as the reaving of COVID ate every argument for anything but paying people to shelter in place and paying businesses to shutter until the virus could be contained and cornered by a vaccine.

“The capitalists wrung their profits from the rest of us, and the fear on the faces of grocery store workers as they wonder who will kill them with a sneeze has been the price of doing business.”

“Trump’s Fraud Claims Died in Court, but the Myth of Stolen Elections Lives On,” Rutenberg, Corasaniti, Feuer, thehill.com “In making their case in real courts and the court of public opinion, Mr. Trump and his allies have trotted out a series of tropes and canards similar to those Republicans have pushed to justify laws that in many cases made voting disproportionately harder for Blacks and Hispanics, who largely support Democrats….

“After bringing some 60 lawsuits, and even offering financial incentive for information about fraud, Mr. Trump and his allies have failed to prove definitively any case of illegal voting on behalf of their opponent in court — not a single case of an undocumented immigrant casting a ballot, a citizen double voting, nor any credible evidence that legions of the voting dead gave Mr. Biden a victory that wasn’t his.

“‘It really should put a death knell in this narrative that has been peddled around claims of vote fraud that just have never been substantiated,’ said Kristen Clarke, the president of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonprofit legal group, and a former Justice Department attorney whose work included voting cases. ‘They put themselves on trial, and they failed’...

“Yet there are no signs that those defeats in the courts will change the trajectory of the ongoing efforts to restrict voting that have been core to conservative politics since the disputed 2000 election, which coincided with heightened party concerns that demographic shifts would favor Democrats in the popular vote.”

“Are Americans Psychopaths?” Impair Haque, medium.com “Here’s a tiny fact. 300,000 Americans are dead of a preventable lethal illness. That’s more people than died during World War II — in less time. And still, there are even more, millions of Americans, who don’t appear to care….

“When the world looks at Americans, it sees people who are really, really different. Weird. Strange. Not right. Something, the world thinks, went badly wrong with these people. Americans creep the entire world out by now, make it shudder, give it the chills. The world knows that there is nobody — and I mean nobody — else in it quite like them. I don’t mean that in a good way…

“Americans are renowned the entire world over by now for what can only be described as incredible levels of cruelty, brutality, violence, stupidity, and indifference. Again — that’s just an observation, not my opinion. If you don’t believe me, ask your friends. Go from one corner to the other of the

Page 19 of 91

globe, and you will hear much the same perspective, whether it’s in France, Canada, China, or Chile. Americans tend to be seen as bullies and fanatics and maniacs. They are laughingstocks now because they have made fools of themselves. They have too many guns and don’t read enough books. They don’t seem to care about anything but money, power, sex, and fame. Certainly not the world, certainly not anything that matters…

“That is what the world thinks. That is what I hear, day in, day out, from my non-American friends, colleagues…

“Now, Americans — of the sane and thoughtful kind — will object, and say: ‘But there are many people in the world like that!’ And Americans are badly wrong about all that. Most of the rest of the countries in the world in which people live such brutal, violent, and ignorant lives as Americans do are dictatorships, authoritarian states, theocracies, or all three. People don’t seem to want to live that way, in indecency and impoverishment and humiliation, dehumanizing one another, exploiting one another in order to live — they are forced to, against their will. Americans are the only people in the world who choose all that.”

“Can Democracy Survive the Age of the Idiot?” Unaired Haque, medium.com “Some people are parasites, infections, cancers upon society, who will drain the rest of us of our virtue and goodness. That’s one of the oldest ideas in the world, and it’s called bigotry. In America, the subtext is always racial: the people who don’t ‘deserve’ decent lives are invariably minorities. The minorities whom white America has always hated.

“The ‘educated’ American has no idea whatsoever that his or her rejection of modern society — which guarantees things like healthcare and retirement and childcare as basic human rights for all — is a function of racism and bigotry. He or she will deny it into the ground, debate you bitterly, and then walk away, angrily, saying you have ‘played the race card,’ or some such thing. He or she has no idea about the underlying motivation and justification for his or her beliefs, which is grounded in centuries of hatred over the color of some people’s skin. ‘They don’t deserve healthcare’ is just the modern equivalent of ‘they’re coming for our homesteads and our women!’ after all. And yet this is still the position the so-called educated American takes….

“There are so, so many kinds of American Idiots. The Trumpist, the one who’ll believe anything his surrogate daddy tells him. The religious nutcase, who wants to live in a fanatical Sharia state. The gun nut. The technology that enables all of their delusions to spread and grow. But to stop there is to fail to really think clearly about idiocy. The idiocy of the ‘educated’ American is no less egregious because they are the ones who stop the side of progress from ever even offering it, pat themselves on the back, and don’t understand how backward and regressive they are in global terms at all.” https://eand.co/can-democracy-survive-the-age-of-the-idiot-ff6450682c0a

“Turkish journalist issues a dire warning about Trump’s ongoing power grab,” Alex Henderson, rawstory.com “‘The U.S. president is trying to steal the election, and crucially, his party either tacitly approves or is pretending not to see it,’ Tufecki warns. ‘This is a particularly dangerous combination, and makes it much more than just typical Trumpian bluster or norm shattering’...

“Americans, Tufecki argues, don’t have first-hand experience with coups d’état. But when she appeared on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ on December 8 to discuss her Atlantic article, she stressed that if the events following the 2020 presidential election were happening in other parts of the world, it would be reported as an attempted coup d’état by a would-be ‘strongman.’

“Tufecki told ‘Morning Joe’ hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, ‘This is an attempt to steal an election…. The fact that Republican leaders are not standing up to (Trump) makes it dangerous….. 74 million people voted for him, and all they’re hearing is that the election was stolen from him’...

Page 20 of 91

“In an Atlantic article published on November 6, Tufecki warned that although Trump is a buffoon, a future would-be strongman might have a lot more self-discipline. And in her latest Atlantic piece, Tufecki warns Americans that democracy isn’t something they can take for granted.

“‘We’re being tested, and we’re failing,’ Tufecki says of her adopted country. ‘The next attempt to steal an election may involve a closer election and smarter lawsuits. Imagine the same playbook executed with better decorum, a president exerting pressure that is less crass and issuing tweets that are more polite. If most Republican officials are failing to police this ham-handed attempt at a power grab, how many would resist a smoother, less grossly embarrassing effort?’” https://www.rawstory.com/2020/12/turkish-journalist-issues-a-dire-warning-about-trumps-ongoing-power-grab/

“What next? Three books for America after Trump,” Lloyd Green, theguardian.com “On 3 November, a majority of the US electorate voted to eject the president from the White House. Yet Donald Trump still refuses to accept the verdict. Populism’s pretense of devotion to ‘the will of the people’ lies in shambles. Conservatives have demonstrated their readiness to jettison democracy for the sake of clinging to power or appeasing an unhinged man-child.

“Ominously, Gen Michael Flynn has demanded martial law and suspending the constitution. Elsewhere, one Michigan Republican called for voiding the vote in Wayne county, thereby disenfranchising Detroit.

“The country was lucky that President Trump and his reelection campaign were so inept. He ultimately lost by a wide margin, and his challenges to the results have been farcical. His rhetoric ramped up in inverse proportion to his ability to produce evidence supporting his charges of systemic ‘fraud’ or ‘rigged’ elections…

“Trump’s attempts to negate millions of votes by challenging state certifications revealed cracks in those foundations. Some shoring-up is clearly needed before the next election cycle begins. A good place to start might be with the appointment of a bipartisan commission that would propose election reforms to Congress and the states.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/06/thomas-ricks-first-principles-jon-meacham-his-truth-is-marching- on-edmund-fawcett-conservatism-trump

“‘Corrosive to democracy': what do Trump's baseless claims really mean?” Sam Levine, theguardian.com “The strategy Republicans are deploying is not just about undermining confidence in the election, it’s also about making it harder to vote in years to come.

“The strategy is not new. For years, Republicans activists have used misleading information to stoke fears about illegal voting, even though there’s substantial evidence voter fraud is not a widespread problem. Republicans have subsequently used to justify measures that make it harder to vote, like voter ID and proof of citizenship laws. Part of that strategy has been to loudly announce lawsuits alleging nefarious activity, grabbing headlines, only to see the claims fall apart in court….

“‘I don’t think it will go away if I’m being honest. The dishonest fraud claims persist because some people benefit from them,’ he said. ‘The right wing echo chamber, they want us to be talking about voter fraud, they want us to have this conversation, even though it’s incredibly rare…It will persist because it’s a powerful justification for these measures that suppress the vote’”... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/13/trump-election-voter-fraud-claims-attack-democracy

“Senate GOP Shatters 123-Year Tradition to Approve Even More Trump Judges,” Igor Derysh, truthout.org “Senate Republicans have bucked a century-old tradition to continue to confirm President Donald Trump’s judges in spite of his election loss.

Page 21 of 91

“The Senate has confirmed six district court nominees since the election, including a 33-year-old attorney with little trial experience who was rated ‘not qualified’ by the American Bar Association (ABA). The move broke a ‘123-year tradition against voting on judicial nominees of an outgoing president of the defeated party during a lame duck session,’ according to Bloomberg Law.

“Judicial nominees of presidents who lost their re-election or whose party was defeated have not been confirmed after an election since 1897, Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies judicial appointments, told the outlet.” https://truthout.org/articles/senate-gop-shatters-123-year-tradition-to-approve-even-more-trump-judges/

“Donald Trump Won, No Matter What Happens Next,” Jessica Wildfire, medium.com “As I write this, 60 million people have voted for a man who spent the last four years playing golf and tweeting. This is the same man who calls one of our smartest scientists an idiot.

“Can you believe that? 60 million….

“They think they’re going to be rich one day, probably by winning the lottery. They don’t want to pay higher taxes when that happens, if it ever does. They vote to ‘own the libs.’

“Watching millennials cry puts a smile on their faces. For people like that, nothing else matters.

“All of these are terrible reasons. Trump voters know this. They don’t care. They don’t pay attention to policy platforms. If they don’t vote out of greed, they do it out of spite….

“Half of Americans are willing to completely screw over the other half, including their own kids, because they think they’ve got a shot at making it into the 1 percent. They would rather destroy everyone’s future than let one woman have an abortion. If it’s not any of those reasons, they just can’t pass up a chance to stick it to liberals.” https://medium.com/the-apeiron-blog/donald-trump-won-no-matter-what-happens-next-203f7c3a55c7

“Post-truth politics: As Trump pushes ‘fraud,’ partisans pick their own reality,” Grier and Hinckley, csmonitor.com President Donald Trump’s false insistence that he is the rightful winner of the 2020 election has exposed like nothing else in his time in office the possibility that America is becoming a post-truth society, where political partisans can’t agree on a unifying framework of facts, and emotion and personal belief steer the winds of public opinion.

Since the vote, Democrats and Republicans seem to be living in different worlds….

“I realize a lot of people are happy about this election and a lot of people are not happy about this election,” said Mr. Schmidt. “One thing I can’t comprehend is how hungry people are to consume lies”...

This divide over what constitutes truth and facts has been developing for some time, say experts. It’s not just the result of the rise of right-wing media outlets such as Fox News or the election of a president whom fact-checkers rate as an unparalleled source of political falsehoods.

It’s also about the rise of social media, the blurring of lines between fact and opinion…

“We are entering an epistemological crisis,” President Obama told Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg. https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2020/1119/Post-truth-politics-As-Trump-pushes-fraud-partisans-pick- their-own-reality

Page 22 of 91

“Seriously, How did he Get So Many Votes? Meghan McNiff,” medium.com “Trump’s wild and unapologetic flaws make his base feel better… Harris describes Trump as a ‘Punch you in the face, Grab you in the Pussy, Eat as many cheeseburgers as I want’ — Jesus. As if he is a savior absolving you of your sins by being so ridiculously terrible….

“I come from a culture laden with alcohol addiction. In a rare moment of clarity, a member of my family once said ‘I don’t like it when anyone else stops drinking, because then I feel like I have a problem’...

“...if you allow yourself to see how Trump is a racist, then you might be too. And if the demonstrators are right, and we live in a country with systemic racism that needs to be adressed — then this whole sense of who you are is threatened. And you just can’t go there. You really can’t. That is not a conscious choice. That is an existential threat that would require you to deal with the painful emotions you have spent your life protecting yourself from.” https://medium.com/an-injustice/seriously-how-did-he-get-so-many-votes-d5ab7f6be36c

“Trump and allies have sought to exclude 1 of every 10 votes in key states,” Aaron Blake, washingtonpost.com “President Trump, his legal team and his allies have endorsed excluding nearly 1 out of every 10 votes in the states that decided the 2020 election.

“That’s the latest count in light of a lawsuit the Trump campaign filed Tuesday in Nevada. The suit explicitly seeks to throw out 130,000 ballots in Democratic-leaning, Las Vegas-based Clark County over allegedly faulty signature-matching technology. Were the suit to succeed, 1 out of every 11 votes in the state would be invalidated…. It’s emblematic of and similar in scale to the Trump team’s effort to exclude ballots in the states that mattered. To date, in fact, lawsuits and other efforts have sought the exclusion of nearly 10 percent of all ballots cast in six key states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The sum is now about 2.5 million votes out of just more than 25 million ballots cast in those states.

“In the four states where the exclusion of ballots has been explicitly requested or endorsed, the number is even higher: 1 out of every 7 ballots.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/19/trump-allies-have-sought-exclude-1-every-10-votes-key- states/

“There’s a lot Biden can do for rural America. Red-state leaders should accept his help,” Jeniffer Rubin, washingtonpost.com “In a preliminary study of the 2020 election returns, the Brookings Institution found that President- elect Joe Biden’s ‘winning base in 477 counties encompasses fully 70% of America’s economic activity, while Trump’s losing base of 2,497 counties represents just 29% of the economy.’ President Trump did not win over these voters by addressing their actual needs. To the contrary, the gap between rural and urban-suburban America on everything from life span to education to wealth continues to widen. Peverty is most acute in rural America.

“Trump won these voters over in large part by telling them that urban elites looked down on them. He made every effort to increase their resentment and rage while doing nothing to help improve these voters’ lives. (You will recall Republicans’ plan to repeal Obamacare generally wound up costing rural Americans more and endangering rural hospitals.) His tariff wars sent farm bankruptcies skyrocketing. Now, red states are among the hardest-hit by the coronavirus….

“Republicans are not likely to pull out excuses about fiscal sobriety and big government when their constituents are getting badly needed help. Biden’s philosophy is that recovery is not a zero-sum game; lots of Americans need assistance from their government. Unlike Trump, who threatens to deny New York the coronavirus vaccine because its governor was mean to him, Biden is not going to

Page 23 of 91

play politics with peoples’ lives. And if he produces real results, the threats of ‘socialism’ and ‘radical Democrats’ will seem a whole lot less relevant. Republicans realize child care is an acute problem in rural America. Child care is part of Biden’s Build Back Better plan. Surely there is a deal to be made.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/15/biden-can-do-something-rural-america/

“Biden won places that are thriving. Trump won ones that are hurting,” Van Dam and Long, washingtonpost.com The parts of America that have seen strong job, population and economic growth in the past four years voted for Joe Biden, economic researchers found. In contrast, President Trump garnered his highest vote shares in counties that had some of the most sluggish job, population and economic growth during his term.

“‘Counties where voters feel better off today than four years ago swung toward Biden,’ said James Chung, co-founder of StratoDem Analytics, which studies local economic trends. ‘Counties that declined over the past four years were more likely to shift even more to Trump.’

“To be sure, Chung found that — as exit polls have shown — education and race most strongly explained voting patterns, but they were followed closely by a county’s economic performance. The economy often decides elections, but the surprise in this case was that good economic performance didn’t appear to favor the incumbent….

“What occurred in 2020 appears to be part of a larger shift in U.S. politics and economics that has been in motion since the turn of the century. In almost every election since 2000, Democrats increased their share of votes in urban areas that are densely populated and prosperous, while Republicans have increasingly become the dominant party for voters in smaller cities and rural areas…

“In 2020, Biden won 490 counties that account for 70 percent of the U.S. economy, while Trump won 2,534 counties amounting to just shy of 30 percent of the economy…

“Increasingly, blue America is diverse, college-educated and heavily invested in professional and tech businesses. In contrast, red America is more White, less likely to have gone to college and reliant on blue-collar sectors like manufacturing, construction and energy.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/11/15/biden-trump-economy/

“The Trump-Shaped Stain on American Life,” Katha Pollitt, thenation.com “For me, though, the hardest thing to reverse is something more nebulous and disturbing: the way Trump has corrupted our understanding of truth and facts and simple human decency. He has turned the most ordinary commonsensical aspects of life into battlefronts in a ridiculous culture war—even wearing a mask to protect yourself from a potentially fatal disease. And no matter what Trump said or did, around four in 10 Americans stood right there with him. Nothing seemed to dent their support: not the boasts and bullying, not the disgusting insults against women, not the shout-outs to xenophobes and white supremacists and neofascists, not the crude belittling of anyone who disagreed with him, from journalists to Dr. . No matter what preposterous charges he throws out at his rallies (recently he claimed that doctors have inflated the number of Covid-19 deaths because they get more money if they attribute a death to the coronavirus), he manages to top them in short order. But his followers remain steadfast, even apparently unto death, according to a new Stanford University study linking his rallies to some 30,000 Covid cases and 700 deaths. They may not believe or like everything he says, but they don’t care; that’s just Donald being Donald, or as evangelicals have described him, King Cyrus being King Cyrus.

“Trump has turned us into a nation of braying bullies and conspiracy theorists and mean people proud of their indifference to the suffering of others. Maybe that’s what too many Americans always were,

Page 24 of 91

but they kept it under wraps for fear of social disapproval. That’s what ‘locker room talk’ means, after all: Boasting about pussy grabbing is fine; just don’t do it where women can hear you. Still, I can’t remember a time when batshit paranoid fantasies like QAnon could infect the minds of so many people, including a newly elected member of Congress. Or when far-right militiamen took guns to state capitols and planned to kidnap and murder a governor. Or when cars and trucks bearing the flags of one candidate tried to push the campaign bus of the other candidate off the road, as Trump’s minions recently did in Texas, only to be given a thumbs-up by the man in the White House. Maybe I’ve led a sheltered life.” https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-consequences/

“It's not 'Trump derangement syndrome' to see that the US has to be good before it is great,” Nick Bhasin, theguardian.com “… the damage he’s done will stay with us for some time. Republicans complicit in the degradation of the country’s character who kowtowed to Trump were re-elected. A QAnon believer will join Congress, as well as a certain other representative who relishes owning the libs.

“As most of the rest of world already knew, the myth of America as an incorruptible force for good in the world was due for dismantling. So in that sense, maybe Donald Trump has done the US a favour in showing us just how ‘normal’ America is, no better than other countries that elect authoritarian populists with delusions of grandeur who encourage fear.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/09/its-not-trump-derangement-syndrome-to-see-that-the-us- has-to-be-good-before-it-is-great

“Getting rid of Trump won't be enough to fix America's broken democracy,” David Daley, .com They won, and then drew themselves sophisticated maps that they have not lost on since: More than 50 million Americans live in a state in which one or both chambers of their state legislature is controlled by Republicans even though Democrats won more votes in 2018. And in the 2012 election, the first on these tilted maps, Republicans kept the House of Representatives despite losing the overall vote to Democrats by 1.4m….

State Republicans rigged rules and entrenched themselves in power. Twenty-five states enacted restrictive voter identification (ID) bills or tightened measures already in place. Texas required ID that the state knew 600,000 registered Latino voters lacked. North Carolina’s legislature studied the exact forms of ID that Black voters were least likely to have, then required those. began enforcing a strict ID bill; then, in 2015, closed almost all of the offices in majority black counties where people could get those IDs…

Between 2014 and 2018, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, 32 million Americans were purged from state voter rolls, disproportionately minority voters, for the flimsiest of reasons. Thousands of voting precincts were also shuttered, predominantly across the south. Once again, this disproportionately affected Black voters. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/07/us-democracy-trump-election-gerrymandering

“Getting rid of Trump won't be enough to fix America's broken democracy,” David Daley, the guardian.com “Even with a Biden administration, the worsening structural inequities embedded in the nation for centuries – and cynically exploited by Republicans to govern with narrow minority support – will still be with us. They are embodied in institutions such as the electoral college, which elected Trump in 2016 despite his losing the popular vote by almost 3 million votes.

“In fact, including Biden, the Democratic candidate for president has won the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections. But in part because of the electoral college’s rural bias (a vote cast for president in Wyoming counts nearly four times as much as a vote cast in California), and in part

Page 25 of 91

because the college heightens the importance of a handful of largely white, midwestern battleground states, Republicans have won the White House with fewer votes twice since 2000….

“Representational fairness is even more dire in the US Senate, which gives disproportionate power to older, whiter, more rural and more conservative interests. Right now, states representing just 17% of the nation’s population could elect a majority of senators. By 2040, the 15 most populous states will be home to 67% of Americans yet represented by just 30% of the Senate. Add up the actual votes received in the winning election of every sitting US senator, and Republicans haven’t won a senate majority since the mid-1990s. Yet they’ve controlled the Senate for 10 of the last 20 years…” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/07/us-democracy-trump-election-gerrymandering

“Postmaster General DeJoy Defies Federal Judge as Mail-In Ballots Surge for Biden, Harvey Wasserman, truthout.org “As of November 3, USPS records in various states showed more than 300,000 absentee ballots had been received but had not gone back out to the election boards.

“On November 3, Judge Sullivan ordered DeJoy to sweep Postal Service facilities in a dozen key districts where those 300,000 ballots had been reported undelivered. Sullivan’s order included processing centers in Detroit, Houston, Atlanta and Philadelphia, as well as in central Pennsylvania, south Florida, South Carolina, Colorado, Wisconsin, Illinois, Arizona, Wyoming and Alabama….

“But DeJoy’s USPS proceeded to ignore Judge Sullivan’s ruling, citing ‘physical and operational limitations.’ The service also complained that complying with the order might disrupt its regularly scheduled service….

“Thus, Judge Sullivan is not happy. DeJoy, he says, ‘is either going to have to be deposed or appear before me and testify under oath … about why some measures were not taken after the court issued its injunction.’

“DeJoy might also be asked about how those missing mail-in ballots — which have trended heavily for Joe Biden — might affect the electoral fortunes of his boss and benefactor, Donald J. Trump.” https://truthout.org/articles/postmaster-general-dejoy-defies-federal-judge-as-mail-in-ballots-surge-for-biden/

“Trumpism is a lifestyle disease, chronic in America,” Phillip Kennicott, washingtonpost.com “No matter what happens to Donald Trump or who assumes the presidency in January, we can say this: He brought the truth of America to the surface. I’ll leave his policies and his politics — to the extent that he ever had policies or coherent politics — to the pundits. As a critic, I can say that he embodied, embraced or inflamed almost everything ugly in American culture, past, present and perhaps future. He made it palpable and tangible even to people inclined to see the bright side of everything. That this week’s election wasn’t a repudiation of Trumpism, that some 6 million more Americans believe in it now compared with four years ago, is horrifying. But it’s also reality, and it’s always best to face reality.

“He also gave our unique brand of ugliness — rooted in racism, exceptionalism, recklessness, arrogance and a tendency to bully our way to power — a name. Trumpism is now rooted in the lexicon, and although white supremacy may be the better, more clinical term for what ails America, Trumpism is a useful, colloquial alternative. It encompasses an even wider category of people that includes not just avowed racists who have publicly supported the president but also those who downplay the problem, or align with it for personal gain, or are simply unwilling to acknowledge its history and persistence. Naming a thing is an essential first step to understanding it,...

“In moments of despair, it’s easy to think that the past four years were a failure of civic discourse, that slightly more than half of America simply failed to convincingly argue against Trumpism.

Page 26 of 91

America, in the aggregate, seems just as stupid as it was four years ago, when it became clear that we would have to learn some painful lessons, and learn them the hard way, through the collapse of competent governance, the destruction of civility and, now, the ravages of a grossly mismanaged pandemic. But if we are stupid in the aggregate, many individual Americans are more clear-eyed and conscious than four years ago. The 2016 election proved that the argument against Trumpism had largely failed, but although losing an argument is maddening, it also makes your argument stronger, clarifies your reasoning and orders your logic. Half of America may be right where it was four years ago, still mired in Trumpism, but some part of the other half of America isn’t just opposed to Trump but also smarter and more cognizant of how Trumpism has rooted itself in the society. That’s not a negligible accomplishment….

“There was white supremacy before we started thinking of it as Trumpism, but before Trump, there also was a tendency to think of it as ‘out there’ rather than ‘in here.’ Now we know it not as a perverse blemish on American culture but as foundational to American culture. That’s progress.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/trump-trumpism-american-life/2020/11/05/93a08a4e-1f7d-11eb- ba21-f2f001f0554b_story.html

“Postmaster General DeJoy Defies Federal Judge as Mail-In Ballots Surge for Biden,” Harvey Wasserman, truthout.org “At a critical turning point in the 2020 election, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a close Trump consigliere, has defied a federal court order meant to track down and deliver some 300,000 mailed-in ballots.

“In turn, federal Judge Emmet G. Sullivan has warned DeJoy that ‘someone might have a price to pay’ for the postal service’s refusal to sweep some 300,000 votes stranded in swing state post offices and deliver them to election boards for counting, where they may, in fact, make a critical difference in the outcome of this astounding election.

“As the battle for the presidency boils down to uncounted mailed-in ballots, Trump’s deconstruction of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has taken center stage….

“Through the summer, DeJoy brutally gutted much of the USPS’s highly evolved functional core, removing sorting machines, trashing long-established procedures, firing essential long-term personnel and removing postal drop boxes throughout the country.

“As USPS revenues plummeted due to the virus, and as service deteriorated, Trump made little attempt to hide that the dismantlement was being done at least in part to undermine the service’s ability to deliver ballots that he thought (correctly) might threaten to end his presidency…” https://truthout.org/articles/postmaster-general-dejoy-defies-federal-judge-as-mail-in-ballots-surge-for-biden/

“Donald Trump Won, No Matter What Happens Next,” Jessica Wildfire, medium.com “There’s a small chance Trump will lose when all the mail-in ballots are counted. It still doesn’t matter. A simple victory wasn’t enough this time.

“We needed a landslide over Trump, in order to reject everything he and his party stand for. We needed to send a message loud and clear that his cruelty and lack of compassion had no place in twenty-first-century America. We missed that shot by a mile….

“Turns out, a lot of Americans were like Trump on the inside. They were selfish and arrogant. They were lazy and judgmental. They were racist and homophobic. They were loud and aggressive. They were waiting for someone to give them permission to show it.

Page 27 of 91

“Trump did just that. He’s shown everyone that you can get away with just about anything, as long as you don’t have a conscience….” https://medium.com/the-apeiron-blog/donald-trump-won-no-matter-what-happens-next-203f7c3a55c7

“A win for Joe Biden would only scratch the surface of America’s afflictions,” John Mulholland, theguardian.com “If the president loses, there will be much talk of a new normality and the need for a democratic reset. Hopes will be voiced for a return to constitutional norms. There will be calls for a return of civility in public discourse and a healing of the partisan divide that scars America. All of that is as it should be. But it ought to come with a recognition that America was broken long before it elected Trump and his departure would be no guarantee that the country will be mended. Many of the systemic issues that afflict the US predate Trump.

“His ugly and dysfunctional presidency has distracted from many of the fundamentals that have beset America for decades, even centuries. But they remain stubbornly in place. If he does lose, America will no longer have Trump to blame. Two two-term Democratic presidents over the past 30 years have not significantly affected the structural issues that corrode US democracy and society, and race is always at their heart….

“Trump can be blamed for exacerbating racial tensions and giving succour to white supremacists but the racial wealth gap runs deeper than his term of office. As the non-aligned Brookings Institution said this year: ‘Gaps in wealth between black and white households reveal the effects of accumulated inequality and discrimination, as well as differences in power and opportunity that can be traced back to this nation’s inception.’” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/01/a-win-for-joe-biden-would-only-scratch-the-surface-of- america-afflictions-donald-trum

“The Winner of the 2020 Election Won’t Be Inheriting a Genuine Democracy,” Stefani Reynolds, medium.com “Is destroying or saving U.S. democracy what the upcoming election is all about? In this interview, political scientist C.J. Polychroniou says it is high time that we did away with the political rhetoric when it comes to U.S. democracy and look at the facts: The U.S. has a highly flawed system of democratic governance and doesn’t even rank among the top 20 democracies in the Western world, and thus is in dire need of major repair. In fact, Polychroniou argues, it is far more accurate to describe the United States as an oligarchy, a regime where an economic elite and powerful organized interests are in virtual control of the policy agenda on most issues of critical importance to public interest while average people are mainly political bystanders.” https://truthout.org/articles/the-winner-of-the-2020-election-wont-be-inheriting-a-genuine-democracy/

“A win for Joe Biden would only scratch the surface of America’s afflictions,” John Mulholland, theguardian.com “If the president loses, there will be much talk of a new normality and the need for a democratic reset. Hopes will be voiced for a return to constitutional norms. There will be calls for a return of civility in public discourse and a healing of the partisan divide that scars America. All of that is as it should be. But it ought to come with a recognition that America was broken long before it elected Trump and his departure would be no guarantee that the country will be mended. Many of the systemic issues that afflict the US predate Trump.

“His ugly and dysfunctional presidency has distracted from many of the fundamentals that have beset America for decades, even centuries. But they remain stubbornly in place. If he does lose, America will no longer have Trump to blame. Two two-term Democratic presidents over the past 30 years have not significantly affected the structural issues that corrode US democracy and society, and race is always at their heart….

“Trump can be blamed for exacerbating racial tensions and giving succour to white supremacists but the racial wealth gap runs deeper than his term of office. As the non-aligned Brookings Institution

Page 28 of 91

said this year: ‘Gaps in wealth between black and white households reveal the effects of accumulated inequality and discrimination, as well as differences in power and opportunity that can be traced back to this nation’s inception.’” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/01/a-win-for-joe-biden-would-only-scratch-the-surface-of- america-afflictions-donald-trum

“How the West Got Covid So Wrong,” Umair Haque, medium.com “In Britain, Covid now ‘exceeds the worst-case scenario.’ In America, a thousand people die a day, and cases are skyrocketing. In Europe, the numbers are exploding. Covid is ripping savagely across the West. But in the East, meanwhile, life is slowly returning to some semblance of normality. That’s a remarkable development — the West, after all, is made up of the world’s richest, most powerful societies. And yet it seems they couldn’t defeat something as tiny as a virus. The East is far poorer, less developed — and yet, it was able to defeat Covid, while the West is in the grip of the pandemic, all over again, worse than before.

“So how did the West get Covid so wrong?

“Margaret Mead once said that the beginning of human civilisation was found in a healed femur. That that single, simple discovery meant that someone took the time to invest in healing someone else’s broken leg — without which they surely would have died. That is what civilization is, and where it begins: the presence of the very first kind of enlightened mind, which can nourish, protect, and elevate another. What does Mead’s Femur have do with the West’s stunning failure that let Covid spiral out of control? As it turns out, everything….

“The young and working class seem to have decided that the lives of these groups are not worth protecting, saving, or investing in, even with the simple choice of taking the social gathering home, or not having it. Let me say it again. Certain groups in Western society have made the decision that the vulnerable’s lives matter less than their right to party, to have a beer and a burger, a cocktail and a steak, a laugh at the pub with friends….

“Now, to the East, this behaviour is both jaw-dropping and bewildering. It goes beyond mere irresponsibility, and is considered something more like stupidity, ignorance, malice, deceit, or all four. To act in such a way as to put your elders, or the ill, especially, at risk, is something that is a grave violation of social norms. Easterners can’t understand why Westerners are behaving like…spoiled children….

“The test of a civilised society is how it treats its vulnerable. Most reasonable people will agree with that. The problem is that that test is precisely the one the West is flunking. Yes, it’s true that healthcare workers are making heroic efforts to save lives. But they are having to do so precisely because the virus is being spread by certain social groups that appear to simply not care.” https://eand.co/how-the-west-got-covid-so-wrong-766772322a3b

“The All-American Narcissist,” Micahel Sendrow, medium.com “Take the current controversy over wearing masks to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. A minor inconvenience has become a question of self-governance. We know the height of self-regard is putting your needs over others. But not wearing a mask, while a sign of selfishness, is also a health risk. Like clinical narcissists, anti-maskers are self-regarding to their own detriment. So perhaps this particular brand of ‘trutherism’ is an essentially American form of delusion — one where deranged ideas of liberty have disastrous consequences.

“This behavior looks a lot like clinical narcissism. But the fact that it reflects a more widespread strain of anti-intellectualism (see: ‘vaccine hesitancy’ or climate change denial) belies a conclusive

Page 29 of 91

diagnosis. Maybe anti-maskers have merely succumbed to the selfish mania built into the American project — which blurs the line between having a behavioral disorder and being an egotistical asshole.

“So we may have a disease, just not narcissism as we understand it…

“The pandemic exposed us to more than just a virus. It challenged the very notion of what it means to promote life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To survive as a modern democracy, America must reckon with the compromises these ideals require. But our economic and governmental systems inherently enable deeply selfish people to prioritize the individual over the collective. This shameful period of American history is a microcosm of the everyday narcissism that pervades American society — the intersection of ‘not feeling like it’ and ‘knowing better.’” https://humanparts.medium.com/the-all-american-narcissist-28daef151277

“Why this election calls into question whether America is a democracy,” Sam Levine, theguardian.com “‘The forces that were fine with poll taxes and literacy tests are the same kinds of forces that are equally comfortable in the 21st century with ‘targeting with almost surgical precision’ in voter IDs and requiring extra hurdles to cast an absentee ballot in the midst of a global pandemic’...

“Underneath it all, many see a cynical attempt by the Republican party to try to preserve power while making it deliberately harder for people less likely to support them – groups like minorities, young people and the poor – to vote. In many places, Republicans have been able to get away with this because of an unprecedented effort in 2010 and 2011 to draw electoral districts that cemented their control of state legislatures…

“For all of the Republican attacks on the right to vote, their most powerful ally has been the United States supreme court as well as the lower federal appeals courts to which Trump has appointed an unprecedented number of judges. The supreme court has taken a brazenly anti-voter stance.” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/30/is-america-a-democracy-us-election-fight-to-vote

“Trump has revealed that ‘truth and reason’ don’t matter to politics: political scientist,” Chauncey Devega, salon.com “[American] myths are numerous, but perhaps begin and end with American exceptionalism, the delusional idea that the United States is fundamentally different from all other nations, and not subject to the laws and patterns of history. Beneath that overarching belief, we find these dogmas: America’s democratic institutions, norms and values are strong and permanent; the free press serves as a resolute guardian of the country’s democracy; the American people are fundamentally decent and American society is healthy; Americans will always reject authoritarianism and fascism, along with large-scale political violence and terrorism are rejected; white supremacy, , misogyny and other antisocial values are largely things of the past; our multiracial democracy, whatever its flaws, is a settled fact....

“These myths are tied together by an assumption on the part of American political elites and other influentials that the American people are reasonable, rational, politically engaged and at least somewhat ideologically consistent. There is no basis in logic or fact for any of those assumptions.” https://www.salon.com/2020/10/25/scholar-larry-bartels-trump-has-revealed-that-truth-and-reason-dont-matter-to- politics/

“'Slayer Pete': Buttigieg emerges as Biden's unlikely Fox News fighter,” Tom Mc Carthage’s, theguardian.com “‘At the end of the day, rights in this country have been expanded because courts have understood what the true meaning of the letter of the law and the spirit of the constitution is.

Page 30 of 91

“‘And that is not about time-traveling yourself back to the 18th century and subjecting yourself to the same prejudices and limitations as the people who write these words.

“‘The constitution is a living document because the English language is a living language. And you need to have some readiness to understand that in order to serve on the court in a way that will actually make life better.”

“Buttigieg then quoted Thomas Jefferson, smiled, and finished with a dagger: ‘Even the founders that these kind of dead-hand originalists claim fidelity to understood better than their ideological descendants, today’s judicial so-called conservatives, the importance of keeping with the times.’” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/13/slayer-pete-buttigieg-joe-biden-fox-news

“Trump Is Urging Republicans to Break the Law,” Sasha Abramsky, thenation.com “Donald Trump has long had a ‘tell,’ a behavioral tic that gives his game away: He has a history of accusing his opponents of doing or planning what he and his supporters are actually doing or planning…

“So the longer and louder Trump goes on about his opponents’ committing electoral fraud, the safer a bet it is that Trump’s people, as he lags in the polls, are gaming outays they can themselves undermine the integrity of the voting process.

“...in several Southern California and Central Valley communities, the state GOP has deliberately violated state law by putting in place more than four dozen of its own unsecured voter drop-boxes, in locales likely to attract conservative voters…

“Meanwhile, Trump seems to revel in the prospect of more election chaos, deliberately seeded and nurtured by state Republicans. On Tuesday and Wednesday, he send out a series of tweets urging Republicans in California to stand firm in their illegal actions—in the wake of which the party suggested it would ignore California’s cease-and-desist letters and keep the boxes functioning—and suggesting that party operatives in New York, Illinois, and elsewhere should pull the same stunt.

“To sum up the broader context for this particularly unsavory Signal: While GOP senators in Washington are twisting themselves into amoral knots to justify their rush-job confirmation of a stunningly conservative Supreme Court nominee—and doing everything in their power to ensure she is in place before an election that the so-called law-and-order president is trying to throw into legal chaos so that vote-count disputes end up before the Supreme Court—that same law-and-order president is busy encouraging dirty-tricks operatives to break state election laws in multiple states simultaneously.” https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-republicans-elections-california/

“Was American History a Conspiracy?” Steve Fraser, tomdispatch.com “News is ‘faked’; elections are ‘rigged’; a ‘deep state’ plots a ‘coup’; Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died suspiciously in bed with a pillow over his face; aides of ex-president Barack Obama conspire to undermine foreign policy from a ‘war room’; Obama himself was a Muslim mole; the National Park Service lied about the size of the crowd at the president’s inauguration; conspiracies are afoot in nearly every department and agency of the executive branch, including the State Department, the CIA, the Justice Department, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI (‘What are they hiding?’). Thus saith, and maybe even believeth, the president of the United States…

“QAnon supporters are only the best known among conspiracy-oriented grouplets issuing alerts about a covert CIA operation to spread lesbianism or alt-right warnings that FEMA storm shelters are really ‘death domes’ and/or places where ‘Sharia law will be enforced’; or dark revelations that the ‘mark of

Page 31 of 91

the beast’ is affixed to the universal price code, smart cards, and ATMs; or, even grislier, radio talk show performer ’s rants about ‘false flag’ events like the slaughter of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where (he claimed) ‘crisis actors’ were employed, paid by , to simulate a massacre that never happened…

“President Trump flirts with such a world of conspiracy thinking. He coyly acknowledges an affinity with it, then draws back from complete consummation, still sensing that it’s good medicine for what otherwise threatens to shorten his political life expectancy…

“Conspiracy thinking has always been an American pastime, incubating what the novelist Phillip Roth once called ‘the indigenous American berserk.’ Most of the time, it’s cropped up on the margins of American life and stayed there. Under certain circumstances, however, it’s gone mainstream. We’re obviously now living in just such a moment. What might ordinarily seem utterly bizarre and nutty gains traction and is ever more widely embraced.” https://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176762/tomgram%3A_steve_fraser%2C_was_american_history_a_conspiracy/

“Take it From Us Survivors. A Second Trump Term Will Be Authoritarianism Unleashed,” Umair Haque, medium.com “…among the news you might have missed is this stunning bit of information. At a rally in North Carolina, Trump said this about federal agents killing an antifascist that witnesses say was unarmed: ‘We sent in the U.S. Marshals. Took 15 minutes, it was over. We got him.’

“Wait. What is that, exactly? Something between a confession, a boast, and a gloat. The President of the United States is apparently bragging about having death squads.

“Now, among the rest of the news of social collapse, political scandal, economic ruin, and chaos, you might think: ‘Is that really such a big deal?’ It is, my friend, it is.

“To survivors and scholars of authoritarianism and fascism, a President apparently confessing to and bragging about having death squads is unbelievably bad. It crosses whatever last few lines of decency and sanity and normality are left in a society.” https://eand.co/take-it-from-us-survivors-a-second-trump-term-will-be-authoritarianism-unleashed-80af3f760b72

“Texas and the Long Tail of Voter Suppression,” Michael Barajas, thenation.com “...the state’s top Republican officials have waged a multipronged battle to restrict ballot access during the pandemic. While voting wars are nothing new to Texas, this year’s election will not only serve as a referendum on Trump but could also determine Texas’s political future for a generation. The barrage of efforts to limit safe voting options for Texans during the pandemic is symptomatic of a deeper sickness in the state’s politics, one that’s become increasingly obvious in recent years as a growing number of eligible Black and Latinx voters threatens the GOP’s stranglehold on power.

“Texas’s regressive voter registration laws are one reason the state consistently ranks at or near the bottom in the nation for voter participation—and why Democratic organizers have long called Texas a ‘non-voting state’ rather than a red one…

“Texas has implemented one of the strictest voter ID laws in the nation, passed legislation making mail-in voting more burdensome, eliminated more polling places than any other state, and attempted to purge tens of thousands of naturalized citizens from its voter rolls…

“Abbott issued an executive order restricting mail ballot collection boxes to one per county after election officials in the state’s largest counties established multiple drop-off sites to counter any problems caused by an expected influx in mail-in voting amid cutbacks and delays at the US Postal Service. Voting rights groups argued that the move targets the state’s most vulnerable voters and

Page 32 of 91

disproportionately impacts minority communities that have already been hit hardest by the pandemic. Abbott’s prohibition on more than one box applies the same to Loving County, population 169, and Houston’s Harris County, population 4.7 million.” https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/texas-voter-suppression-covid/

“How Did We Get Here? Religion,” Jay Sizemore, medium.com “Donald Trump… was already a corrupt individual, and nothing corrupts someone more than the idea of absolute power. Beyond that, factor in the fight-or-flight response of desperation when facing consequences of that corruption. A person who thinks their life is on the line will do anything to prevent facing such a consequence, and Trump knows if he loses his power, he will be subject to legal avenues of prosecution for what he has done while in office.

“Therefore, you see a leader who is attempting to follow the roadmap of Mein Kampf, a book that is widely known to have been kept at his bedside. You see a president holding large rallies throughout his tenure in office, something no other president has done. It’s hard to deny how these rallies have impacted the American consciousness, how they have divided us further, how they have created a cult-like atmosphere among his followers. You see factions of these people forming militias, arming themselves, preparing for violence that they are told the Left is wanting the country to descend to.

“We are at a crossroads. At the risk of sounding like an alarmist, America should prepare itself for the worst. I’m afraid logic can’t win this debate. When it comes to rational thinking, it’s been abandoned now for the drug of worship, and right now, the people choose Donald Trump as their savior.” https://medium.com/politically-speaking/how-did-we-get-here-religion-d1045c4dd0ab

“If Everything Was Rational, We Would Have Revolted by Now,” Lauren Martinchek, medium.com “…one can’t help acknowledging that given everything that we have been subjected to as a nation, if we were living in a period with any sense of rationality or logical outcomes and consequences, people would have revolted by now….

“...when considering everything that we have been living with over the past seven months alone, it frankly seems incredible that it hasn’t happened yet.

“Over two hundred thousand people are dead….

“...those lives were lost as a direct result of our government’s unwillingness to do what is necessary to protect them, not because it couldn’t.” https://medium.com/discourse/if-everything-was-rational-we-would-have-revolted-by-now-21aefae5af38

“Enough with militias. Let’s call them what they really are: domestic terrorists,” Arwa Mahdawi, theguardian.com “Militia (noun): misunderstood white men. Groups of heavily armed individuals whose actions, while not exactly ideal, deserve compassion and should be looked at within a wider socioeconomic context. Instead of rushing to judgment or making generalisations, one must consider the complex causes (economic anxiety, video games, mental health issues) that have triggered these poor guys into committing mass murder, conspiring to violently overthrow the state or plotting to kidnap government officials….

“Much of the media coverage of Whitmer’s would-be kidnappers referred to them as members of a Michigan militia group called Wolverine Watchmen. The wolverine, by the way, isn’t just a Marvel character – it’s an animal that looks like a small bear but is actually part of the weasel family. This seems appropriate because ‘militia’ is very much a weasel word. It’s a way to avoid putting white extremists in the same bucket as brown people. It lends them legitimacy. It obfuscates what these people really are.

Page 33 of 91

“Governor Whitmer, to her immense credit, was having none of it. ‘They’re not ‘militias’,’ she tweeted on Friday morning. “They’re domestic terrorists endangering and intimidating their fellow Americans. Words matter”...

“Trump’s words, Whitmer said in televised comments on Thursday, had served as a ‘rallying cry’ to far-right extremists. Not only had the president refused to condemn white supremacists, he stood on the debate stage last week and told the , a violently racist gang, to ‘stand back and stand by’. When our leaders “stoke and contribute to hate speech, they are complicit”, Whitmer said….

“By downplaying the threat of white nationalist terrorism, by finding politer ways to refer to it, the media have allowed it to proliferate. So please, let’s call things by their name. Enough with the ‘militias’, these people are terrorists.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/10/militias-domestic-terrorists-gretchen-whitmer

“Texas voter suppression tactics recall the Jim Crow era,” Sharon Learner, theintercept.com “Abbott’s proclamation about the ballot drop-off locations is widely seen as voter suppression — ‘yet another thinly disguised attempt to stymie the vote,’ as the state chapter of the ACLU put it. It’s clear that the most populous counties, which tend to vote Democratic, will be hardest hit. Travis County, where Hillary Clinton received 66 percent of the vote in 2016, had just opened four drive-thru locations where voters could hand-deliver their ballots when Abbott announced his order. Now those sites, which were designed to minimize voters’ health risks, won’t be able to open. And Harris County, which contains Houston and is the most populous in the state, has to reverse its plan to let voters return their ballots at 11 locations.

“‘There’s no legitimate reason to close satellite drop-off locations,’ Wesley Story, communications associate at Progress Texas, said of the governor’s decision. ‘This is a blatant attempt by Gov. Abbott to suppress voters because the Texas GOP is afraid of the ballot box.’

“The change in handling absentee ballots during the pandemic is one of a string of recent decisions that has left some Texans feeling both physically threatened and concerned that their votes will not be counted.” https://theintercept.com/2020/10/05/texas-voter-suppression-greg-abbott-absentee/

“Texas voter suppression tactics recall the Jim Crow era,” Sharon Learner, theintercept.com “Pam Johnson Gaskin learned early last week that the election administrator in Fort Bend County, Texas, had decided to add four locations where voters can hand-deliver their absentee ballots, several of which were going to be outside to minimize voters’ chances of being exposed to the coronavirus. ‘I was like, Oh thank you, Jesus. Protesting does work!’ said Gaskin, who lives in the eastern part of the county and had spent the previous several days advocating for the additional drop-off sites.

“But by Thursday afternoon, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had invalidated the county’s decision, issuing a statewide proclamation that limits all 254 counties in the state to only a single site where absentee ballots could be dropped off…

“In Gaskin’s county, which is 855 square miles and has more than 811,000 residents, the only drop- off site is an old Walmart building that has been converted into offices. Rather than having several outdoor drop-off locations allowing voters maximal social distancing and minimal driving, people trying to deliver their ballots in this one location must drive there, show a photo ID, have their temperature checked, and go inside the building.” https://theintercept.com/2020/10/05/texas-voter-suppression-greg-abbott-absentee/

“We Still Aren’t Prepared for the Fact That Trump May Steal the Election,” Ellie Mystal, thenation.com

Page 34 of 91

“Everybody honest knows that last night’s debate didn’t matter to most voters. Trump’s ignorance and incompetence have contributed to over 206,000 American deaths; if you’re still willing to vote for Trump, there’s nothing he can say in a two-hour “debate” that’s going to change your mind….

“But right now, you’d be a fool to believe that Biden will become president just because he wins the most votes or wins the most votes in enough states to give him an Electoral College victory. We already know that Trump will contest the mail-in ballots that will overwhelmingly vote him out of office. We already know that Trump thinks the Supreme Court is a tool to help him contest these ballots. We’ve heard of devious plans to convince Republican state legislatures to vote in slates of electors who will go against the popular will in their states, if necessary. People seem to have largely forgotten that every shred of foreign interference deployed for Trump’s benefit in the 2016 election is being used against our system again in 2020…. At the very least, we know that Trump can count on Attorney General Bill Barr and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolfe to deploy their federal storm troopers to crush opposition to Trump’s continued reign….

“There are ways to fight an authoritarian regime; there are ways to fight a kleptocracy; there are ways to fight fascism. None of them is pretty. None of them involves signing one’s name to a petition and then going on Etsy to find a virtue-signaling beer cozy. None of them is, strictly speaking ‘legal,’ and we can literally see Bill Barr already putting the structures in place to make it illegal to oppose Trump in any way.” https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-election-steal/

“Trump’s ugly rant in Minnesota shows why Republicans fear he’ll lose,” Greg Sargent, washingtonpost.com “But Trump’s claim that Omar ‘tells us how to run our country’ deserves special attention. As Ronald Brownstein notes, by targeting a Muslim immigrant who is a naturalized citizen this way, Trump tells supporters that ‘people of color, big cities, liberals are interlopers’ in ‘their White Christian America.’

“Indeed, Trump’s core claim here is really that the opposition’s voters are simply not entitled to legitimate political representation.

“More than 260,000 American citizens elected Omar to Congress in 2018 to represent them, to give themselves a voice in ‘how to run our country.’ When Trump suggests Omar has no grounds to tell ‘us’ how to do this, his real claim is that his supporters constitute ‘our’ country, and that those who elected Omar don’t have a legitimate voice in running it because they don’t belong to that ‘us’...

“Trump has perverted this whole sentiment into a concrete scheme to deny political agency and representation entirely to those who are outside of what he calls ‘our country.’

“It’s no accident that Trump slides effortlessly between this line about Omar and his lies about voter fraud. They are two sides of the same coin: Trump is already working to delegitimize as many of the opposition’s legally cast ballots as possible as fraudulent. This would put the idea that they aren’t entitled to legitimate representation into operational practice, to maintain ‘our,’ or his, America’s dominance via illicit means.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/01/trumps-ugly-rant-minnesota-shows-why-republicans-fear- hell-lose/

“I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There,” Indi Samarajiva, medium.com “I lived through the end of a civil war — I moved back to Sri Lanka in my twenties, just as the ceasefire fell apart. Do you know what it was like for me? Quite normal. I went to work, I went out, I dated. This is what Americans don’t understand. They’re waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That’s not how it happens.

Page 35 of 91

“This is how it happens. Precisely what you’re feeling now. The numbing litany of bad news. The ever rising outrages. People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you, while you think about dinner. If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down….

“The real question is, who are you? I mean, you’re reading this. You have the leisure to ponder American collapse like it’s even a question. The people really experiencing it already know.

“As someone who’s already experienced societal breakdown, here’s the truth: America has already collapsed. What you’re feeling is exactly how it feels. It’s Saturday and you’re thinking about food while the world is on fire. This is normal. This is life during collapse.

“Collapse does not mean you’re personally dying right now. It means y’all are dying right now. …

“Today I assume you went to work. Bad news was everywhere, clogging up your social media, your conversations. Maybe it struck close to you. I’m sorry. Somewhere in your country, a thousand people died. I’m sorry for each of them. A thousand families are grieving tonight. A thousand more join them every day. The pain doesn’t go away, it just becomes a furniture of bones, in a thousand homes.

“But that’s exactly how collapse feels. This is how I felt. This is how millions of people have felt, including many immigrants in your midst. We’re trying to tell you as loud as we can. You can get out of it, but you have to understand where you are to even turn around. This, I fear, is one of many things Americans do not understand. You tell yourself American collapse is impossible. Meanwhile, look around.” https://gen.medium.com/i-lived-through-collapse-america-is-already-there-ba1e4b54c5fc

“Donald Trump's plot against democracy could break America apart,” Jonathan Freedland, theguardian.com “So now a dark question arises. What will the US’s increasingly progressive majority do if Republican state officials reinstall Trump in the White House, in defiance of the voters? What will they do if that 6-3 court overturns Roe v Wade and bans abortion across the entire country?

“Think for a second how that latter situation will have arisen: it is because the Senate picks the judges, and the Senate enshrines minority rule. With two senators per state, tiny Wyoming (population: 600,000) has the same representation as gargantuan California (40 million). On current trends, 70% of Americans will soon have just 30 senators representing them, while the 30% minority will have 70. When it comes to their right to medical treatment or to rid their streets of military-grade assault weapons, the urban, diverse majority are subject to the veto of the rural, white, conservative minority.

“How long is that sustainable? How long will a woman in, say, California accept the presence of guns and the absence of abortion rights because that’s what a minority of voters in small, over-represented states wants? Serious people are beginning to ask that question.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/25/donald-trump-democracy-america-conservatives-power- us

“This Is How It Happens,” Colin Horgan, medium.com “A man Mayer referred to simply as a ‘philologist’ spoke about the pace of information dissemination during the Nazi rise to power. He explained how Germans like those Mayer interviewed were kept in a state of constant change — a technique Hannah Arendt later described as the ‘perpetual-motion mania of totalitarian movements [that] remain in power only so long as they keep moving and set everything around them in motion.’

Page 36 of 91

“The impacts of that technique, according to the philologist, were significant.

“‘What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise,’ the philologist told Mayer. The Nazi dictatorship was ‘diverting,’ he said, in that it kept people ‘so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated…by the machinations of the ‘national enemies’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us’....

“Because, as the philologist described to Mayer, that broader pattern of constant societal change that totalitarianism imposed had a profound effect on individual agency. It resulted in a kind of personal inertia, even when one had an inkling of what was being set in motion. Things kept getting worse, but, the philologist explained, one struggled to react properly, or convince others that they should be worried, too. ‘In your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist,’’ he explained. ‘And you are an alarmist….’

“That’s because — just as Zweig had described it — ‘each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse,’ the philologist explained. ‘You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.’ But that moment never came. ‘That’s the difficulty,’ the philologist told Mayer. ‘If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes millions would have been sufficiently shocked… But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you to not be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.’

“The constant motion of totalitarianism Arendt would examine years later — the steady movement toward tyranny — is measured as drips, not as a flood.” https://gen.medium.com/this-is-how-it-happens-c289765df373

“Secret CIA assessment: Putin ‘probably directing’ influence operation to denigrate Biden,” Josh Robin, washingtonpost.com “Russian President Vladimir Putin and his top aides are ‘probably directing’ a Russian foreign influence operation to interfere in the 2020 presidential election against former vice president Joe Biden, which involves a prominent Ukrainian lawmaker connected to President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, a top-secret CIA assessment concluded, according to two sources who reviewed it….

“CIA analysts compiled the assessment with input from the National Security Agency and the FBI, based on several dozen pieces of information gleaned from public, unclassified and classified intelligence sources. The assessment includes details of the CIA’s analysis of the activities of Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach to disseminate disparaging information about Biden inside the United States through lobbyists, Congress, the media and contacts with figures close to the president.

“‘We assess that President Vladimir Putin and the senior most Russian officials are aware of and probably directing Russia’s influence operations aimed at denigrating the former U.S. Vice President, supporting the U.S. president and fueling public discord ahead of the U.S. election in November,’ the first line of the document says, according to the sources.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/22/secret-cia-assessment-putin-probably-directing-influence- operation-denigrate-biden/

Page 37 of 91

“Russia is working to undermine confidence in voting by mail, DHS warns,” Harris and Nakashima, washingtonpost.com “Russia is seeking ‘to undermine public trust in the electoral process’ by spreading false claims that mail-in-ballots are riddled with fraud and susceptible to manipulation, according to a new intelligence bulletin by the Department of Homeland Security.

“Many of the claims made by Russian sources are identical to repeated, unsupported public statements aired by President Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr…

“Claims about ballot fraud are belied by numerous studies that show it is so rare as to be essentially irrelevant to conducting fair, accurate elections.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/voting-by-mail-russia-trump-barr/2020/09/04/e3f0e500-ee60- 11ea-99a1-71343d03bc29_story.html

“Fact-checking Trump’s lies is essential. It’s also increasingly fruitless,” Margaret Sullivan, wsshingtonpost.com “‘My biggest takeaway of the last four years is probably realizing the extent to which big chunks of America are living in a different universe of news/facts with basically no shared reality,” was how Charlie Warzel, who writes about the information wars for put it last week.

“… Scottie Nell Hughes — then a frequent surrogate for President-elect Donald Trump and a paid commentator for CNN during the 2016 campaign — said something startling, live on the Diane Rehm radio show: ‘There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, (as) facts.’

“Trump’s false claims, she insisted, ‘amongst a certain crowd . . . a large part of the population, are truth.’

“Belief, therefore, takes the place of fact….

“‘Direct factual contradictions can actually strengthen ideologically grounded factual beliefs.’” https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/fact-checking-trumps-lies-is-essential-its-also-increasingly- pointless/2020/08/28/35fb41de-e947-11ea-bc79-834454439a44_story.html

“Yes, Trump Really is Stealing the Election. And It’s Almost Too Late,” Umair Hague, medium.com Over the last few years, Americans have been party to a particular kind of folly, that’s left the world baffled, and broken the spirit and mind of their society, left them feeble and dull-witted and paralyzed. I don’t just mean the American Idiot, the Trumpist, but the well-meaning American — the liberal (or conservative, but usually liberal) who believes, still, in their own exceptionalism….

Those of us who’d survived authoritarianism, seeing history repeat itself, tried to warn Americans, over and over again, that something very bad and dangerous was happening in America. It wasn’t something to take lightly — but instead pointed to a plunge down the abyss of authoritarian-fascism. And at the bottom of that abyss lay the death of a democracy. That point was going to be reached shortly, because these things go in a predictable sequence...

Americans have let themselves down, let themselves be made fools of: they haven’t thought of the bad guys as nearly bad enough, so they’re perpetually shocked and surprised that men who put kids in cages then beat moms on the streets. What the? To the rest of the world, this level of idiocy is… frankly, laughable. Of course men who put kids in cages will beat moms on the streets — and steal an election.

The sense of outrage, the constant surprise that pundits and well-meaning liberals have expressed over and over again so much for the last few years — it’s baffled most of the rest of the world. And all that’s been the result of the stunningly idiotic narrative that somehow, it wasn’t happening here.

Page 38 of 91

https://eand.co/yes-trump-really-is-stealing-the-election-and-its-almost-too-late-375487499be6

“Louisiana’s Covid test proposal would exclude 'thousands' from mail-in voting,” Sam Levine, theguardian.com “In an unprecedented move, Louisiana’s top election official wants to require a positive Covid-19 test if a voter wants to vote absentee over concerns about the virus. This comes amid a lack of consistent access to testing in the state.

“Louisiana is one of seven states that will still require an excuse to vote by mail this year, only allowing absentee voting if a voter is aged 65 or older or meets certain other conditions such as temporary absence from their county or hospitalization.

“For its elections in July and August, Louisiana eased those restrictions for voters at risk of developing complications from Covid-19 or who had potential exposure to the virus. But under secretary of state Kyle Ardoin’s proposal for the state’s November and December elections released on Monday, those accommodations won’t apply. Instead, a voter would need to test positive for Covid-19 between the end of early voting and election day, currently a week-long period to use the hospitalization excuse to request a mail-in ballot.” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/18/louisiana-election-proposal-positive-covid-test-mail-in-voting

“Why Americans Are Allergic to the Truth” Drew Magary, medium.com “Why us? Over the past few months, I’ve been watching us fall behind practically every other country on Earth in terms of Covid-19 prevention and thinking to myself, Why America? Why are we so vulnerable to misinformation that we have both citizens AND leaders who don’t just ignore the basic truths of the virus, but mock them outright? WHY ARE WE SO FUCKING STUPID?

“But that’s been true of America since well before the pandemic. We are a callow nation built on comfortable lies. You see Americans getting cozy with these lies constantly now….

“If you wanna understand why Americans are so hopelessly addicted to lies, you need to understand the unceasing comfort those lies provide, how almost plausible they are if you look at things a certain way….

“Since the advent of the internet, you have more access to the truth than you’ve ever had. But you also have more access than ever to lies—and, even worse, lies that are easy to swallow. Lies that deftly erase the moral complexity of our history and our present. There are so many of these lies, in fact, that you can easily build a world of them and live inside it forever. And the longer you live inside that fabricated headspace, the more difficult it gets to ever escape it. You’ve invested too heavily in lies to ever desert them. That investment has become tangible policy in America, and it has become more and more robust over the course of decades….

“America is itself a young nation. A brat among its global elders. As such, it has shown a horrifying resistance to maturation, and holy shit, are we paying the price for it right now.” https://gen.medium.com/why-americans-are-allergic-to-the-truth-2ebcae65dd40

“The nation is in a downward spiral. Worse is still to come,” George F. Will, washingtonpost.com “Larry Diamond of the conservative-leaning Hoover Institution at Stanford discerns another scandal:

“‘The hard truth is that there has been a rising tide of voter suppression in recent U.S. elections. These actions — such as overeager purging of electoral registers and reducing early voting — have the appearance of enforcing abstract principles of electoral integrity but the clear effect (and apparent intent) of disproportionately disenfranchising racial minorities.’” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-is-what-national-decline-looks-like/2020/07/14/ef499fd4-c5f0-11ea- b037-f9711f89ee46_story.html

Page 39 of 91

“This is what happens when the war on terror is turned inward, on America,” Hamilton Nolan, theguardian.com “Trump, a fool ruled by impulse rather than strategy, did not build the fearsome machine of government oppression that is now being aimed at his political opponents. This machine was systematically assembled and lovingly tended to by generations of presidents before him – Democratic, Republican, Whig. Trump is only broadening its aperture. All of these tools have been sharpened on the bones of Native Americans and Black people and immigrants and Muslims overseas. America has always needed someone to oppress. Mostly so that we could steal their stuff, but also so that the rest of us didn’t turn against one another. This country has managed to avoid a class war by giving poor white people an array of minorities to abuse, a trick that has benefited rich white people for centuries. We have used injustice not just as a way to get ahead, but as a release valve. Our leaders have long calculated that it is safer to subjugate and mistreat a minority of the population than to risk dissatisfaction in the majority. In doing so, the government has become very adept at creating enemies and wielding power against them in flagrant shows of force….

“We are finding out what happens when the war on terror is turned inward on ourselves…. The Department of Homeland Security has effectively become a White House-controlled paramilitary and domestic surveillance service unaccountable to anyone except Trump and his loyalists. (If we’re being honest, this moment has been inevitable since DHS was panic-created in the days after the September 11 attacks. If there is any more fascist word than ‘homeland’, I haven’t heard it.)

“The basic logic behind gun control is that if there are a bunch of guns lying around, sooner or later someone will get shot. The same holds true for the security state. If you build it, it will eventually come for you. Cloaked in the banality of federal bureaucracy, we have tolerated the creation of a terrifying set of powers that now rest in the small hands of a man who has been waiting his entire life to take revenge on each and every enemy who has slighted him. Barack Obama sat in the White House for eight years and did nothing to dismantle this bureaucracy of soldier-cops. He was too busy using it in foreign drone wars. It’s too seductive to have that power, when you are the one who controls it. Now a worse president has it, and it will be turned, at last, against a bigger chunk of us than ever before.

“Every new outrage is a test of what we will tolerate.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/24/trump-security-state-war-on-terror-america

“American exceptionalism was our preexisting condition,” Dan Zak, washingtonpost.com “Perhaps we ignored our preexisting conditions for too long. In 1979, Jimmy Carter admitted to a national ‘crisis of confidence,’ in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate and energy shortages. But then we shut our eyes and pictured ’s ‘shining city,’ as wealth oozed upward. We believed Bill Clinton’s pep talk about how our best qualities excused our worst, which included prioritizing mass incarceration. We cloaked George W. Bush’s costly foreign policy in pageant-style patriotism and then believed Barack Obama’s insistence that Americans were not as divided as we seemed. Meanwhile, big banks crashed the economy and got bailed out, white people in rural areas started dying ‘deaths of despair,’ black people kept getting killed by police at disproportionately high rates, and more Americans turned to conspiracy theories to make sense of it all and prescription pills to blunt the pain.

“Then a minority of voters elected as president a salesman who built his empire on fraud, spectacle and bankruptcy. Three years and 20,000 ‘false or misleading claims’ later, the reality-show presidency is reaching a dramatic first-season climax marked by mass death…” https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/american-exceptionalism-was-our-preexisting- condition/2020/07/22/158f5ab0-cabc-11ea-91f1-28aca4d833a0_story.html

“When ‘Law and Order’ Means Maximum Chaos,” Sasha Abramsky, thenation.com “The election is barely 100 days away, and the Signal is that Trump—trailing Biden by large margins in national polls—is pursuing a Hail Mary strategy: ramp up the chaos, and double down on the repression.

Page 40 of 91

“In Portland, Ore., heavily armed federal agents in full military camo are now roaming the streets. Some, wearing no identification, picked up protesters and bundled them off in unmarked vans…. they seem to be treating Portland’s streets as legitimate stomping grounds.

“On Saturday evening, a 53-year-old Navy vet had the temerity to ask these federal agents why they were violating their constitutional oath. They responded by savagely beating him with batons— breaking his right hand—and spraying him in the face with pepper spray. The video, which had been viewed over 11 million times by Monday, is as clear a demonstration of the fascist tilt of this administration as anything I have so far seen.” https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/portland-protests-federal-trump/

“This is American Democracy’s Last Chance,” Umair Haque, medium.com “I woke today, as you might have, to news that…secret police were abducting people off the streets of Portland. Heavily armed men, with no badges, driving unmarked cars, simply disappearing people from the streets, with no explanation given. Onlookers horrified as men in fatigues drag protestors away….

“Imagine the following scenario. America’s new secret police descend on cities nationwide — just as their chief has already literally, proudly promised — in a new national policy of repression. They can snatch up anyone they want, anywhere, for whatever reason. They begin doing just that. Oddly — or maybe predictably — they begin targeting critics and opponents of the Administration, whether protesters, or just people out for a walk or a drive. Who’s going to stop them? They’re secret police, after all, operating at a federal level….

“Donald Trump’s pattern of behaviour is exactly that of a fascist hoping to seize power, and remake a nation. There is literally no other word to describe it. Liberals, even conservatives, democrats — nobody else does these things…

“What’s been missing from that checklist in America? Only one thing, really: a secret police force. An SS, a Gestapo. Now there is one.” https://eand.co/this-is-american-democracys-last-chance-e1e53cbc25db

“Watching Trump's paramilitary squads descend onto Portland, it's hard not to feel doomed,” Francine Prose, theguardian “With so much doom to scroll through, it’s hard to know when to stop and pay attention, but one story that jumped out at me – and, I hope, at many others – is the account of how demonstrators in Portland, Oregon, protesting racism and police brutality earlier in July, were tear-gassed, beaten, seized off the street by unidentified, masked federal agents in camouflage and fatigues, hustled into unmarked vans and detained for hours. The agents were reported to work with the US Marshals Special Operations Group and Bortac, the Border Patrol Tactical Unit.

“Government-funded thugs, assaulting citizens, still conjure up repellent images of Hitler’s Brownshirts stomping their fellow Germans, and the street kidnapping of civilians has been the hallmark of authoritarian dictatorships….

“In response to a presidential order ‘Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Activity,’ the acting director of homeland security has created the ‘DHS Protecting American Communities Task Force (Pact) to provide an ongoing assessment of potential civil unrest and property destruction’.

Page 41 of 91

“The italics are mine, but the memo describes the formation of a paramilitary organization, reporting to the federal government and free from the laws, rules and conventions followed (even nominally) by police and the army….

“How much clearer must it be? There are those who would like to see the establishment of an authoritarian state that despise minorities and immigrants, hates women and the poor, and in mid- pandemic, values money and profit over human life. This prospect intensifies the anxiety of many Americans who fear a stolen election, widespread voter suppression, further affronts to the rule of law.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/20/trump-shock-troops-portland-doomed

“The nation is in a downward spiral. Worse is still to come,” George F. Will, washingtonpost.com “Not even during the Civil War, when the country was blood-soaked by a conflict involving enormous issues, was it viewed with disdainful condescension as it now is, and not without reason: Last Sunday, Germany (population 80.2 million) had 159 new cases of covid-19; Florida (population 21.5 million) had 15,300….

“The nation’s floundering government is now administered by a gangster regime. It is helpful to have this made obvious as voters contemplate renewing the regime’s lease on the executive branch….

“This nation built the Empire State Building, groundbreaking to official opening, in 410 days during the Depression, and the Pentagon in 16 months during wartime. Today’s less serious nation is unable to competently combat a pandemic, or even reliably conduct elections. This is what national decline looks like.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-is-what-national-decline-looks-like/2020/07/14/ef499fd4-c5f0-11ea- b037-f9711f89ee46_story.html

“The De-Trumpification of America,” John Feffer, tomdispatch.com “...for the sake of argument, let’s imagine that the election happens and the president loses unambiguously. A majority of Americans will sigh with relief. Still, don’t count on Trump -- and more important, Trumpism -- evaporating like a nightmare at daybreak.

“To begin with, there’s the president’s legendary base of support, the one-third of Americans who’d continue to back him even if he were to shoot someone on New York City’s Fifth Avenue (or, through criminal negligence, effectively murder more than 100,000 people by ignoring a pandemic for 70 days). Such Trumpists aren’t going to suddenly emigrate en masse…

“While Trump may be expendable, Trumpism -- which lies at the intersections of racial and sexual anxiety, hatred of government and the expert class, and opposition to cosmopolitan internationalism -- is not so easily rooted out. Drawing heavily on American traditions of Know-Nothing-ism, America- First-ism, and Goldwater Republicanism, Trump’s essential worldview will survive the 2020 election….

“If their candidate loses in November, Trumpists will dig in their heels just as their predecessors did after Barack Obama’s 2008 victory. Only a month after his inauguration, the Tea Party was already up and running. But the Tea Party will prove child’s play compared to the resistance the Trumpists are likely to mount if their candidate tanks on Election Day 2020. And such resistance could succeed in finishing what Trump started -- disuniting the country and destroying the democratic experiment -- unless, that is, the United States were to undergo a thorough de-Trumpification.

“Other societies have gone through such processes, but those efforts -- Reconstruction after the , denazification in Germany after World War II, and de-Baathification after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003 -- have all been flawed in various ways.”

Page 42 of 91

https://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176718/tomgram%3A_john_feffer%2C_the_de-trumpification_of_america_/

“How coronavirus has created a new split in American life,” Alexandra Vinarreal, theguardian.com “Two Americas have emerged from the coronavirus pandemic: one where protesters cry out, armed, for a return to normalcy, and another which shies away, concerned that the virus is still raging.

“... the teeming bars and pool parties… have become symbolic of much of the United States’ devil- may-care attitude toward Covid-19, especially across a swathe of southern states like Texas that have embraced reopening their economies.

“But even as those mask-flouting crowds go viral, a second contingent watches, shocked, from a safe distance.

“‘We admire our individual freedoms, but the individual freedoms do not outweigh the common good,’ Zernial said. ‘Those are the words that I would like to hear from our leaders, is that they’re all looking out for the common good’...

“‘People are seeing this as a personal decision, and it’s based on our own personal risk tolerance,’ said Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness and a professor of public health and pediatrics at Columbia University. ‘That’s not public health, because in public health, your risk should not be my risk’...

“As Beth Harris watches cases tick ever upward in her North Carolina county, she’s concerned for those who don’t have the privilege to work from home. She expressed irritation with her Facebook friends who rattle off lines such as ‘you only live once’ or ‘I can’t breathe in the mask, so I’m not gonna wear it’.

“‘People say, ‘freedom, I need my freedom,’ but with freedom comes responsibility,’ Harris said.” https://quotes.insure.com/lifeinsurance?src=607901&quadlink=http://o1.qnsr.com/cgi/r?;n=203;c=1669353;s=3086; x=7936;f=202001040924290;u=j;z=TIMESTAMP;&crid=12202274&kwid=154316&spid=ABAACQy

“An Illustrated History of Government Agencies Twisting the Truth to Align With White House Misinformation,” Eric Umansky, propublica.org “It has become a familiar pattern: President Donald Trump says something that doesn’t line up with the facts held by scientists and other experts at government agencies. Then, instead of pushing back, federal officials scramble to reconcile the fiction with their own public statements.

“It happened in March, when Trump pushed his opinion that antimalarial drugs could treat COVID- 19. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an unusual directive that lent credence to the president’s perspective: ‘Although optimal dosing and duration of hydroxychloroquine for treatment of COVID-19 are unknown, some U.S. clinicians have reported anecdotally’ on specific dosages that the CDC then lists. The CDC’s language — which the agency later retracted — shocked experts, who said the drug needed to be treated with caution. The CDC told the agency had prepared the guidance at the behest of the White House.

“Perhaps the best known example of an agency twisting itself into a pretzel stems from “Sharpiegate.” After the National Weather Service’s Birmingham, Alabama, office contradicted Trump’s Sharpie fable that Hurricane Dorian threatened the state, the agency overseeing the office put out a statement backing the president over the scientists. Emails obtained by BuzzFeed and showed just how the episode roiled the agency. ‘You have no idea how hard I’m fighting to keep politics out of science,’ one official wrote. Another email simply had one word: ‘HELP!!!’...

Page 43 of 91

“Congress has also gotten involved. Right before the 2018 elections, Trump made unplanned comments that middle-class Americans would be getting a 10% tax cut. ‘We’ll be putting it in next week,’ Trump said at a campaign rally in Houston. Nobody in the White House or Capitol Hill had even heard Trump talk about it before.

“Republicans responded by saying they were working on rolling out something — reportedly a nonbinding resolution — ‘over the coming weeks,’ as one congressman put it.

“The cuts never happened.” https://www.propublica.org/article/an-illustrated-history-of-government-agencies-twisting-the-truth-to-align-with- white-house-misinformation

“'An embarrassment': Trump's justice department goes quiet on voting rights,” sam Levine, theguardian.com “Trump has said mail-in voting is his ‘biggest risk’ to re-election, and Barr has signaled his opposition to it. The attorney general told Fox News on Sunday that foreign nations could print fraudulent absentee ballots to disrupt the election – something election officials say would be virtually impossible….

“Weeks after Trump took office, the justice department announced it was ending a longstanding legal claim that Texas’ voter ID law – one of the strictest in the country at the time – was passed with discriminatory intent. Months later, the department flipped sides in a different closely-watched case, dropping its opposition to an law that allowed the state to aggressively remove voters from the rolls and argued in support of Ohio at the supreme court. In 2013, the justice department argued Texas should be put under federal supervision after being found to have intentionally discriminated against voters during redistricting so that it wouldn’t do it again. But last year, it reversed its position.

“In all three of the cases, the briefs explaining the reversals were not signed by career attorneys at the department – a strong signal they did not agree with its contents.” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/23/us-justice-department-voting-rights-2020-election

“Fact-checking the GOP’s ‘satirical’ vote-by-mail video’s,” Salvador Rizzo, washingtonpost.com “Documented instances of voter fraud are exceedingly rare in the United States, the odds being lower than those of being struck by lightning, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. More than 250 million votes have been cast via mail ballots since 2000, according to the Vote at Home Institute. In 2018, more than 31 million Americans voted by mail, representing one-quarter of election participants. Five states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington — use mail ballots as the primary method of voting.

“‘Despite this dramatic increase in mail voting over time, fraud rates remain infinitesimally small,’ the Brennan Center says. ‘None of the five states that hold their elections primarily by mail has had any voter fraud scandals since making that change.’

“‘There were 491 prosecutions related to absentee ballots in all elections nationwide between 2000 and 2012, out of literally billions of ballots cast,’ Richard L. Hasen, an elections expert at the University of California at Irvine, wrote…” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/24/fact-checking-gops-satirical-vote-by-mail-video/

“The All-American Way,” Andrew Bacevich, tomdispatch.com “At Riverside Church, King described the U.S. government as ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.’ So it unquestionably remains, perpetrating immeasurably more violence than any other great power and with remarkably little to show in return. Why, then, except on the easily ignored fringes of American politics, are there no demands to ‘defund’ the Pentagon?...

Page 44 of 91

“In 1967, Dr. King warned that ‘a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.’ During the intervening decades, his charge has lost none of its sting or aptness….

“With the exception of cloistered nuns, hippies, and other vanishing breeds, virtually all Americans have been conditioned to buy into the proposition that stuff correlates with the good life….

“The primary civic obligation of U.S. citizens today is not to vote or pay taxes. And it’s certainly not to defend the country, a task offloaded onto those who can be enticed to enlist (with minorities vastly overrepresented) in the so-called All-Volunteer Military. No, the primary obligation of citizenship is to spend.

“Ours is not a nation of mystics, philosophers, poets, artisans, or Thomas Jefferson’s yeomen farmers. We are now a nation of citizen-consumers, held in thrall to the extreme materialism that Dr. King decried. This, not a commitment to liberty or democracy, has become our true national signature and our chief contribution to late modernity.” https://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176717/

“Georgia's voting fiasco is a warning. The November election could be chaos,” David Daley, theguardian.com “Thinking about November, it’s hard to be optimistic. It’s easy to see how the system might fall apart. It’s not one thing, it’s many. State laws requiring too many lengthy steps before voters receive an absentee ballot. Underfunded and overwhelmed election boards. A postal service on the brink of bankruptcy. A dire shortage of poll workers due to the pandemic. A shortage of in-person precincts because, due to Covid-19, senior citizen centers and schools are unsafe gathering spots for voting. A crush of absentee ballots arriving after election day, leading to disputed vote counts and lawsuits. Swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, where officials can’t start counting before election day, delaying results for a week. A mistrustful nation already on edge after a decade of advanced Republican voter-suppression techniques, and a president willing to amplify false claims about voter fraud on Twitter. And a still-raging coronavirus pandemic that could force voters to choose between the health of themselves and loved ones, and their right to vote. A disputed election that lands before a 5-4 US supreme court that looks increasingly political and unfriendly to voting rights.

“What’s intentional and what’s incompetence? It doesn’t matter. It all suppresses the vote, it all makes our elections less fair and less free.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/11/georgia-election-chaos-november

“Georgia's voting fiasco is a warning. The November election could be chaos,” David Daley, theguardian.com “It was impossible to watch Tuesday’s election fiasco in Georgia – the equipment failures, the dramatic reduction in the number of polling precincts, the voting centers that failed to open on time, the insufficient number of paper ballots, the nearly seven-hour lines in many minority communities contrasted with the breeze in whiter, wealthier suburbs – without thinking, ruefully, of US supreme court chief justice John Roberts’ 2013 decision in Shelby County v Holder that ripped the heart from the Voting Rights Act.

“Those interminable lines wrapped across Atlanta and many other minority counties? The waits almost as long as a workday, making a mockery of any notion of a free and fair election? Well, more than 200 precincts across Georgia, disproportionately in minority counties, have been ordered closed since Roberts and the US supreme court cast aside protections that had prevented states and localities with a history of racial prejudice in voting laws from remaking their electoral rules without federal oversight.

Page 45 of 91

“But it wasn’t just in-person voting that malfunctioned on Tuesday. It was also impossible to watch Georgia’s expanded vote-by-mail system meltdown – forcing tens of thousands of voters who requested, but never received, absentee ballots to either join these long lines…

“We are in deep, deep trouble and seemingly completely unprepared for this November’s elections. The alarm bells keep ringing – first in Ohio and Wisconsin, then in Pennsylvania and now Georgia. Yet we hurtle heedlessly toward chaos.

“Many of the problems we face involve intentional voter suppression, such as the surgically focused voter ID bills, precinct closures and voter roll purges (all of which disproportionately target minority voters), which Roberts’ ruling turbocharged across conservative states nationwide.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/11/georgia-election-chaos-november

“America's divide widens: Ignore it no longer,” Ritch K. Eich, thehill.com “In the weeks before Floyd’s death, the COVID-19 pandemic had already put tremendous stress on the fault-line of race and economic class. Big online retailers raked in billions and white-collar professionals worked safely from home while millions of low-wage service-industry workers and small business owners lost their jobs and health insurance or were forced to risk infection by working on site. It became starkly clear who was doing the serving and who was being served.

“The Floyd killing on top of the pandemic lockdowns and the massive wave of unemployment led to people taking out their anger, frustration and stress on their fellow citizens and their own communities.

“As these overlapping crises have been unfolding, if you have looked for leadership at the highest level, you have found little—from the president, Congress, the faith community, or top business leaders. Mayors and governors have been left to bear the brunt of struggling with the pandemic and trying to manage the rioters. The president has no idea what to do or say. Instead, he tweets.

“It is official: We must stop looking to politicians to solve our problems. Simply put, they can’t or won’t do it. They are too cowardly, too self-interested, and too partisan.” https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/politics/501484-americas-divide-widens-ignore-it-no-longer

“As 100,000 die, the virus lays bare America's brutal fault lines – race, gender, poverty and broken politics,” Ed Pilkington, theguardian.com “A country that prides itself on its exceptionalism can now without ambiguity claim that title for its experience of the virus. The United States stands head and shoulders at the top of the world league table of confirmed cases, as well as the total number of deaths.

“There will be much to analyse in coming years about how the US responded to this contagion, including how many lives have been lost needlessly as a result of Trump’s maverick response.

“Already one lesson of the pandemic is clear: America’s deep and brutal fault lines – of race, partisanship, gender, poverty and misinformation – rendered the country ill-prepared to meet the challenges of this disease. The ravages of Covid-19 have revealed the deep cracks in the glittering facade of the richest and most powerful nation on Earth….

“‘The virus encounters deeply racist structures and institutions already in place, against the backdrop of wealth inequality, a militarized state and a commodified culture in which everybody and everything is for sale,’ he said.

“For West, the pandemic has revealed nothing less than the country’s demise. ‘America has become a failed social experiment, a decayed empire that is unable to meet the basic needs of its people.’”

Page 46 of 91

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/28/us-coronavirus-death-toll-racial-disparity-inequality

“Crisis exposes how America has hollowed out its government,” Dan Balz, washingtonpost.com “The government’s halting response to the coronavirus pandemic represents the culmination of chronic structural weaknesses, years of underinvestment and political rhetoric that has undermined the public trust — conditions compounded by President Trump’s open hostility to a federal bureaucracy that has been called upon to manage the crisis….

“The nation is reaping the effects of decades of denigration of government and also from a steady squeeze on the resources needed to shore up the domestic parts of the executive branch.

“This hollowing out has been going on for years as a gridlocked Congress preferred continuing resolutions and budgetary caps to hardheaded decisions about vulnerable governmental infrastructure and leaders did little to address structural weaknesses.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/politics/government-hollowed-out-weaknesses/

“So Long to American Exceptionalism,” Karen Greenberg, tomdispatch.com “Other normal expectations about American life are also breaking down in ways once associated with foreign lands. As George Packer recently wrote in the Atlantic, the federal government now looks more like a failed state than a vibrant democracy. As he put it, the Trump administration’s reaction to the coronavirus crisis was more ‘like Pakistan or Belarus -- like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.’ In fact, the government’s response to the crisis has failed in a striking set of ways…

“In the food industry and elsewhere, from grocery stores to hospitals, safe working conditions have deteriorated as the pandemic spreads, heading in directions previously associated with exploitative, impoverished, and corrupt countries….

“Prisons and detention centers have similarly become incubators for the spread of the disease, as our incarceration system suffers the kinds of deaths that might once only have been possible in countries like Chile, El Salvador, Peru, or elsewhere in Latin America…

“In many ways, the current crisis has, of course, just exposed conditions that should have been attended to long ago. Much that suddenly seems broken was already on the brink when the coronavirus appeared. If anything, the pandemic has simply accelerated already existing trends…

“With Covid-19, the very idea of American exceptionalism may have seen its last days. The virus has put the realities of wealth inequality, health insecurity, and poor work conditions under a high- powered microscope. Fading from sight are the days when this country’s engagement with the world could be touted as a triumph of leadership when it came to health, economic sustenance, democratic governance, and stability. Now, we are inside the community of nations in a grim new way -- as fellow patients, grievers, and supplicants in search of food and shelter, in search, along with so much of humanity, of a more secure existence.” http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176702/tomgram:_karen_greenberg,_so_long_to_american_exceptionalism/

The Conspiracy Theorists Are Winning, Jeffrey Goldberg, theatlantic.com “I had spent years in the Middle East listening to complicated nonsense, and I was familiar with the long and dismal history of Russian conspiracy-mongering. It was always a relief to know that in the United States, conspiracism was usually—not always, but usually—a marginal phenomenon. Men like Jones were more often than not a source of bemusement, not a cause for fear. Healthy societies develop antibodies to protect themselves from fantastical thinking, and America, democratic, free, and transparent, was a healthy society.

Page 47 of 91

“I was wrong, of course.

“‘Your reputation is amazing,’ Donald Trump told Jones in late 2015. ‘I will not let you down.’

“And he hasn’t. Trump does not defend our democracy from the ruinous consequences of conspiracy thinking. Instead, he embraces such thinking. A conspiracy theory—birtherism—was his pathway to power, and, in office, he warns of the threat of the ‘deep state’ with the ferocity of a QAnon disciple. He has even begun to question the official coronavirus death toll, which he sees as evidence of a dark plot against him. How is he different from Alex Jones, from the conspiracy manufacturers of Russia and the Middle East?

“He lives in the White House. That is one main difference.

“This improbable question—how did a person with a weakness for conspiratorial thinking achieve the presidency?—might be among the most consequential of the coming election, which is not merely a political contest, but a referendum on enlightenment values and on reality itself.

“Nonsense is nonsense, except when it kills. And conspiracy thinking, especially when advanced by the president of the United States, is an existential threat.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/shadowland-introduction/610840/

“Wisconsin is starting to resemble a failed state,” Nathan Robinson, theguardian.com “[G]errymandered maps make it virtually impossible for them to ever lose their legislative majority. Wisconsin’s maps were crafted with such micro-precision that even if Democrats managed to win a historically high 54% of the two-party vote – a level they’ve reached only once in the last 20 years — Republicans would still end up with a solid nine-seat majority in the state assembly. In fact, Wisconsin’s maps are so gerrymandered that Republicans can win close to a supermajority of house seats even with a minority of the vote. Analyses of the maps in the lawsuit challenging the maps showed that Republicans are a lock to win 60% of statehouse seats even if they win just 48% of the vote.”

“In a supposedly democratic country, this should be an outrage. How can a government claim legitimacy if it does not require the people’s support?” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/19/wisconsin-coronavirus-supreme-court-failed-state

“If They Walk Like Fascists and Talk Like Fascists…” Sasha Abramsky, thenation.com “Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton kicked off the strategy by announcing this week that he would seek to bar the Lone Star State’s big cities from counting voters’ fear of Covid-19 as a valid reason for their being allowed to vote by mail. That adds a new layer of ugliness to the GOP’s years-long voter-suppression tactics.” https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-gop-coronavirus-fascism/

“There’s no hope for America unless we can pity ourselves,” Phillip Kennicott, washingtonpost.com “… while we may resist self-pity, it seems there may be no going forward, no hope for the country at all, if we can’t take pity on ourselves as a nation. Unless we can see ourselves as the world sees us — including those who say we are broken, corrupt and failing — we may not be able to survive, rebuild and reclaim anything of our past sense of national identity. Unless we can say to ourselves collectively what we say to ourselves individually — we are sick — there’s no hope of any kind of return to health….

“It’s strange, and disorienting as an American, to be an object of pity. Pity has always been our defense against the pain and suffering experienced in places that we condescended to think of as poor, or undeveloped or badly governed. But perhaps a good, deep, excoriating and brief acceptance of

Page 48 of 91

self-pity is the only hope we have, the only way forward, because it’s now clear that we are desperately sick.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theres-no-hope-for-america-unless-we-can-pity- ourselves/2020/05/14/2d567198-955f-11ea-91d7-cf4423d47683_story.html

“Voter Suppression is a Theological Issue,” Wallis and Williams-Skinner, sojo.net “We believe all human beings are made in the “imago Dei,” the image and likeness of God — it’s a core tenet of ours and many other faiths. So any strategy that would negate people’s votes because of the color of their skin is not just a partisan tactic, but rather a denial of their imago Dei, a theological, biblical, and spiritual offense to God. Protecting the right to vote affirms the divine imprint and inherent value of all of God’s children….

“In 2016, in ruling against a particularly egregious voting law in North Carolina, a federal court said certain provisions of the law ‘target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” The court added, “With race data in hand, the legislature amended the bill to exclude many of the alternative photo IDs used by African Americans’ and ‘retained only the kinds of IDs that white North Carolinians were more likely to possess.’

“Those are the facts, and the facts reveal that the Republican Party is complicit in efforts to deny the image of God in black and brown people, including the black and brown body of Christ in America.” https://sojo.net/articles/voter-suppression-theological-issue

“Kentucky’s secretary of state got his ‘head taken off’ by fellow Republicans for making mail-in voting easy,” Travis Gettys, rawstory.com “Kentucky’s secretary of state revealed that he’s been lambasted by fellow Republicans for planning to send out instructions on voting by mail.

“Secretary of State Michael Adams told NPR that he got his ‘head taken off’ by other Republicans for backing absentee voting…

“But he’s meeting strong resistance from his own party, which opposed his plan to send every registered voter a postcard explaining how to apply for an absentee ballot for the state’s June 23 primary.” https://www.rawstory.com/2020/05/kentuckys-secretary-of-state-got-his-head-taken-off-by-fellow-republicans-for- making-mail-in-voting-easy/

“The consequences of Donald Trump’s anti-intellectualism — and how the GOP’s disdain for science has endangered us all,” James Bruno, washingtonmonthly.com “But Trumpism did not come out of nowhere. Undergirding the president’s war on expertise is a recurrent strain of anti-intellectualism in America’s social and political DNA. As the late writer Isaac Asimov observed, ‘There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

“Trump panders to rightwing populists’ contempt for empirical facts and expert knowledge….

“The evangelical movement, a bedrock of Trump’s base, promotes an anti-science culture that rejects critical thinking.” https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/04/24/the-republicans-disdain-for-science-has-endangered-us-all/

“Trump’s lawyers just made appalling arguments to the Supreme Court,” Paul Waldman, washingtonpost.com “On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in three separate lawsuits Trump has filed to stop officials from seeing those returns….

Page 49 of 91

“… what the arguments did reveal is the almost limitless scope of immunity he seeks. Trump believes he should be excused not just from congressional oversight, not just from criminal investigation, not just from questioning by the press, but even from politics itself.

“It’s almost impossible to overstate how appalling the arguments by Trump’s lawyers have been. They have claimed kingly powers for the president — that while he is in office he can’t be prosecuted or even investigated. That, they say, applies to both Congress and prosecutors….

“But we see this again and again: Any of the unpleasant things a president has to deal with — congressional oversight, demands for transparency, critical questioning by the news media — are treated by Trump not as inconveniences but as fundamentally illegitimate.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/12/trumps-lawyers-just-made-appalling-arguments-supreme- court/

“Missouri Republicans on the verge of gutting gerrymandering reform,” Sam Levine, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/11/missouri-republicans-gutting-gerrymandering-reform

Law professor: Virus reveals we all need a class in evidence,” Len Niehoff, freep.com “Numerous public officials and individuals have made dreadful decisions about how to assess and respond to the threat posed by COVID-19. Those errors reveal a fundamental flaw in our K-12 and collegiate education systems.

“We have failed to teach a subject of critical importance, and as a result have imperiled our health, our economy, and our republic.

“We teach it in law school. We call it Evidence.

“COVID-19 has revealed our societal failure to understand what evidence is and to respect how it works. National and local political leaders have made decisions that ignored the evidence. Members of the general public have proved slow to accept the evidence. Measures adopted to help flatten the curve have been met with virulent protests, despite the evidence that they are working.

“We have become a nation of magical thinkers, making decisions based on what we hope is the case and whom we want to believe. When confronted with opposing evidence, we do not engage with it. We dismiss it and stick a label on it: ‘fake,’ ‘phony,’ ‘biased,’ etc. And then we mistake that label for evidence….

“Things like pandemics don’t care about our preferences. They have a ruthless commitment to reality. We need one, too.

“We cannot wait. We all need to becomes students of evidence right here, right now. If we don’t, we will not just repeat the errors of the past. We will blunder into fresh ones that were avoidable, but that our disregard of truth has made apocalyptic.”

“What Trump has revealed about America should embarrass us all: Our country is exceptional in some of the worst ways,” Sonali Kolhatkar, rawstory.com “Even setting aside the origins of this land’s conquest paid for by the blood of indigenous Americans, or the building of economic might on the backs of enslaved Africans, our history is marked with blood, inequality, incarceration, mass shootings, war, waste, over-consumption, and pollution—all rooted in self-righteous nationalism….

Page 50 of 91

“The truth is America does stand out—in some of the worst ways. We are exceptional for having survived so long without a national health program, and for continuing to tolerate obscene inequality that constantly favors the wealthy over the rest of us. This nation is exceptional for imprisoning a larger percentage of our population than any other nation and for continuing to live with the constant specter of gun violence. We are exceptional in being at war for most of the past several centuries. And of course, we are exceptional in having a population large enough to elect a president as horrifying as Donald Trump. These are truly the things that have made America exceptional.” https://www.rawstory.com/2020/05/what-trump-has-revealed-about-america-should-embarrass-us-all-our- country-is-exceptional-in-some-of-the-worst-ways/

“What Trump has revealed about America should embarrass us all: Our country is exceptional in some of the worst ways,” Sonali Kolhatkar, rawstory.com “It is in this context that the New York Times on April 23 published a report about the disappointment among outsiders at the state of America under Trump’s presidency, ravaged by the coronavirus. Titled, ‘Sadness’ and Disbelief From a World Missing American Leadership,’ writer Katrin Bennhold lamented how the pandemic is, ‘perhaps the first global crisis in more than a century where no one is even looking to the United States for leadership.’ Two days later the same paper published another piece on the same topic titled, ‘Will a Pandemic Shatter the Perception of American Exceptionalism?’ In it, writer Jennifer Schuessler explores a profound ‘struggle to reconcile the crisis with the nation’s self-image.’ But America was never exceptional in the ways that historians and self-declared pundits have imagined.

“Offering a harsher and more honest view of the U.S., Calvin Woodward wrote in Associated Press one day after Bennhold’s piece was published that, ‘Coronavirus shakes the conceit of ‘American exceptionalism.’’ Woodward pithily wrote, ‘A nation with unmatched power, brazen ambition and aspirations through the arc of history to be humanity’s ‘shining city upon a hill’ cannot come up with enough simple cotton swabs despite the wartime manufacturing and supply powers assumed by President Donald Trump.’ Perhaps the most cringe-inducing critique of American exceptionalism came from Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole, who wrote, that the’“one emotion that has never been directed toward the U.S. until now’ is ‘pity.’

“Even Naked, America Cannot See Itself In a time of plague, willful blindness is a coping mechanism,” Zak Cheney- Rice, nymag.com https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/coronavirus-inequality-america.html

“What Trump has revealed about America should embarrass us all: Our country is exceptional in some of the worst ways,” Sonali Kolhatkar, rawstory.com “‘America First,’ has been a pronouncement of pride for President Donald Trump and millions of his supporters. Today they have gotten their wish as the United States leads the world during a global deadly pandemic, racing well past other nations in the numbers of COVID-19 infections and deaths. It may not be the ‘first place’ spot that they desire or expect. But it should come as no surprise, for anyone paying attention to the deliberate design of the U.S. economy and infrastructure could have predicted the pandemic’s impact. And indeed, our national hubris may have been our biggest weakness.

“The pressure to conform to the delusions of American exceptionalism has blinded us to our vulnerabilities. We have ignored the perils of our health care system because America was too great to fail. We have looked past ever-increasing wealth inequality because the riches of the wealthy were a measure of our greatness. We have dismissed racial and gender disparities because to admit them would mar the shine of mythical America.

“Over many decades, successive administrations have sucked up our collective resources in order to nurture the military and line the pockets of the ultrarich, leaving our social safety net so threadbare

Page 51 of 91

that we might as well be on our own…. Conservative forces have shaped the U.S. into a society where the notion of ‘survival of the fittest’ guides us. And indeed, in recent weeks conservatives have even said out loud what was usually implied—that the weakest among us may well die, and that is perfectly fine as long as the stock market continues to boom.

“Our national hubris has been a bipartisan affair. Even President Barack Obama tended to fall into the trap, invoking American exceptionalism often in his speeches. But as the COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated with clarity, ideas of the U.S.’s superiority have essentially been delusions of grandeur. They have blinded us to the inevitable failures of an empire that invested in military jets over Medicare for All.”

“COVID-19 will ‘trigger a decline unlike anything seen since the Great Depression’: Pulitzer winner,” Chauncey Devega, rawstory.com “Ultimately, the pandemic has further exposed and exacerbated — for those still somehow in denial about the decades-long reality of America as a decaying empire — deep political, social, economic, cultural and other societal problems.

“The country’s infrastructure is rotting. Trump presides over a plutocratic, corrupt, cruel, authoritarian, pathological kakistocracy. The commons is being to rubble while the ultra-rich extract ever more wealth and other resources from the American people. Excessive military spending has left the United States incapable of attending to the basic needs of its people. A culture of distraction and spectacle has rendered many Americans incapable of being responsible engaged citizens. Our public educational system does not teach critical thinking skills. Radical right-wing Christians, white terrorist organizations and other neofascist paramilitaries and extremists are engaging in a campaign of thuggery, intimidation and violence against multiracial American democracy....

“The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus — like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly — not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it.

“Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state.”

“Welfare for Wall Street,” Nomi Prins, thenation.com “As I wrote in It Takes a Pillage: An Epic Tale of Power, Deceit, and Untold Trillions, instead of the Fed buying those trillions of dollars of toxic assets from banks that could no longer sell them anywhere else, it would have been cheaper to directly cover subprime mortgage payments for a set period of time. In that way, people might have kept their homes and the economic fallout would have been largely contained. Thanks to Washington’s predisposition to offer corporate welfare, that didn’t happen—and it’s not happening now either….

“By now, in our unique pandemic moment, something seems all too familiar. As in 2008, the most beneficial policies and funding will be heading for Wall Street banks and behemoth corporations. Far less will be going directly to American workers through tangible grants, cheaper loans, or any form of debt forgiveness. …

“Ultimately, however, the relief promised will not cover the basic needs of the majority of bereft Americans. With Main Street’s economy sinking right now, it won’t arrive fast enough either. In addition, the highly publicized part of Congress’s relief package that promises up to $1,200 per

Page 52 of 91

person, $2,400 per family, and $500 per child, will be barely enough to cover a month of rent and utilities, let alone other essentials, for the typical working family when it finally arrives.”

“America’s Wannabe Caesar,” Barber and Theoharis, sojo.net https://sojo.net/articles/americas-wannabe-caesar

“Wisconsin’s Pandemic Election is a Red Alert for Democracy in America,” John Nichols, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/pandemic-election-turnout-wisconsin/

“The Next Voter Suppression,” John Nichols, thenation.com “‘Wisconsin’s election offers a nightmare vision of what the whole country could see in the fall,’ warned Ben Wikler, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin’s chairman. ‘A fight where Democrats struggle to balance democracy with public health, and the GOP remorselessly weaponizes courts, election laws, and the coronavirus itself to disenfranchise millions of voters who stand in its way’....

“Republican legislative leaders openly mocked and obstructed efforts by Governor Tony Evers to do what 15 other states had already done: restructure election plans to avoid sending voters to the polls while they were under orders to stay at home. Why? Wisconsin voters were deciding the fate of a state Supreme Court justice appointed by the previous governor, Republican Scott Walker. ‘Republicans,’ observed Politico, ‘calculated that holding the election in the midst of the pandemic gave incumbent conservative justice Dan Kelly a better chance of holding his seat.’ The scheme failed; Kelly was ousted.”

“Wisconsin’s Pandemic Election Is a Red Alert for Democracy in America, John Nichols, thenation.com “While the story of Wisconsin on Tuesday was, as Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes described it, that of an electoral ‘shit show,’ nothing political stays in Wisconsin. The state has for more than a decade provided a template for the national political strategies of Republicans like Trump. There was no hyperbole in Democratic Party of Wisconsin chair Ben Wikler’s assertion that ‘Wisconsin’s election offers a nightmare vision of what the whole country could see in the fall. A fight in which Democrats struggle to balance democracy with public health, and the GOP remorselessly weaponizes courts, election laws, and coronavirus itself to disenfranchise the voters who stand in its way.’”

“The Trump Administration just Changes its Description of the National Stockpile to Jibe with Jared Kushner’s Controvesial Claim,” Aaron Black, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/03/jared-kushner-stands-trump-proceeds-offer-very-trumpian- claim-about-stockpiles/

“Living on a Pandemic Planet,” Raman Menon, tomdispatch.com “Doctors use stress tests to assess the physical fitness of patients. Governments use them to see whether banks have enough cash in reserve to honor their obligations to depositors and creditors in economic crises. The International Monetary Fund conducts stress tests on national financial systems. Now, like several other countries, notably Italy and Spain, the United States faces a different, far tougher stress test imposed by Covid-19. The early results are alarming….

“And this pandemic will subject our political system, economy, and society to a set of stress tests into the distant future.”

“Trump Campaign Declares War on Dems Over Voting Rules for November,” Alex Isenstadt, politico.com https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/03/trump-2020-election-legal-battle-coronavirus-162152

“Wisconsin: the state where American democracy went to die,” Sam Levine, theguardian.com “Less than 72 hours before polls opened in Wisconsin on 7 April, the state legislature convened to weigh an emergency request from the governor, Tony Evers. With Covid-19 cases in the thousands,

Page 53 of 91

Evers implored the lawmakers to delay in-person voting for the state’s presidential primary and mail a ballot to every voter in the state.

“It was a meeting only in name. Republicans, who control 63 of 99 seats in the state assembly, sent just one member. He brought the session to order and then immediately ended it without taking up the governor’s request. It took just 17 seconds. In the Republican-controlled state senate, the same thing happened, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. It took even less time. The legislature’s defiance was a naked display of unabashed power – an elected body refusing its governor’s request and turning its back on its constituents in a time of crisis….”

“Millions of People will Struggle to Pay Rent in April, But Few in Congress Care,” Aida Chaves, theintercept.com https://theintercept.com/2020/03/27/coronavirus-rent-suspension-evictions-bill-payments/

“Texas Closes Hundreds of Polling Sites, Making it Harder for Minorities to Vote,” Richard Salame, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/02/texas-polling-sites-closures-voting

“Wisconsin: the state where American democracy went to die,” Sam Levine, theguardian.com “That assault on democracy began in 2011, when Republicans drew new lines for political districts in Wisconsin. It was part of a national Republican effort, called Project Redmap, to capture state legislatures and, with those victories, to gain control over redrawing the lines of each district. The goal of Redmap was to conjure districts that would advantage Republicans and disadvantage Democrats – a process called gerrymandering. The writer and author David Daley called Project Redmap ‘the most audacious political heist of modern times’.”

“Karl Rove, former senior adviser to George W Bush announced the redistricting effort in the Wall Street Journal, claiming, rightly, that whoever controls redistricting also controls Congress. Later, according to , when Rove addressed potential funders of Redmap in Dallas, he said ‘People call us a vast rightwing conspiracy. But we’re really a half-assed rightwing conspiracy. Now it’s time to get serious’....

“But in 2011, Republicans took it to a new level. They deployed mapmakers to the offices of a law firm across from the state capitol, where they drew different options for maps that tested how much of an advantage could be gained in districts. They closely regulated who had access to the room where maps were drawn, even requiring Republican lawmakers to sign agreements to keep discussions about the maps secret….

“Wisconsin’s maps are so gerrymandered that Republicans can win close to a supermajority of house seats with a minority of the vote.”

“How Alabama Blocked a Man from Voting Because he Owed $4,” Sam Levine, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/27/alabama-voting-rights-alfonzo-tucker

“Torture’s Legacy of Impunity,” Rebecca Gordon, tomdispatch.com http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176664/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_torture%27s_legacy_of_impunity/

“Trump spoke of images he’d ‘never seen before.’ Now there are mass graves in New York,” Philip Kennicott, washingtonpost.com “For much of the last half century, there has been a powerful resistance to images of suffering in America. After the Vietnam War, dubbed the ‘living room war’ because it brought the graphic reality of combat into American homes on a nightly basis, new media standards emerged, largely suppressing the most graphic images of war, famine and natural disaster. The public, squeamish about such things and always ready to complain — ‘not while I’m eating breakfast’ — abetted in the creation of an imaginary cordon around what we now call the ‘homeland.’

Page 54 of 91

“Things would occasionally break through, a starving child seemingly stalked by a vulture in Sudan during a 1993 famine, or bodies lying on the streets of Port-au-Prince after an earthquake in 2010. But when these images pierced the defenses, they circulated as representations of foreign suffering. Often, they weren’t just foreign, but racially or culturally other, images of people with darker skin or different religions than what was then the majority in America.

“The ‘othering’ of these images was essential not just to our sense of comfort and complacency, but to our identity as Americans. There was a fable about American power built into them. They arrived like ambassadors from exotic lands to reassure us: Yes, there is misery in the world, but not where you live. You are different. Your government, your laws, your leadership, your culture will defend you. We suffer to remind you of the blessings you enjoy.

“It was inevitable that this cordon could not hold, not just because there is a surfeit of suffering in the world, nor because suffering would inevitably come to the United States, but because those fantastical ambassadors were wrong. We, too, thought there were structures and systems in place that would defend us; that if ever we faced a terrible shock, we could weather it with less death and more grace and steadiness. But, we were wrong.

“The fantasy went beyond just faith in our governance and a resilient economy. American stability had forged our identity and made us better people. Bad things didn’t happen to good people, at least so long as the good people were us. For as long as we believed the myth, we could behave more recklessly, we could spend without saving, neglect the safety net, eat out the larder and empty the cellar, because we were not the sort of people who starved….

“Not only did the old American stability fail to make us better people, it was never stable in the first place. Not only was the message of the old ambassadors wrong — that Americans are well and safely governed — we must now rethink our identity, from first principles to final conclusions.”

“America: Land of Make-Believe,” Chris Hedges, truthdig.com https://www.truthdig.com/articles/america-land-of-make-believe/

“Coronavirus is Exposing how Foreign Crusades Bled America’s Domestic Resources,” Murtaza Hussein, theintercept.com “The Coronavirus pandemic now ravaging the United States should lead every American to a series of important questions: What are the real threats that I face? What has my government been prioritizing in terms of my — and the nation’s — security? And where has all my tax money been going?

“Considering these questions, it’s hard not to conclude that the American government’s national security priorities have been so askew of reality that they left the country dramatically unprepared for an acute threat to millions of its people….

“The government’s focus has been overwhelmingly on the threat of extremist groups and unfriendly regimes abroad, mostly in the Middle East. Over a period of two decades, the United States spent trillions of dollars waging wars and occupations across the region. These confrontations have won America an ever-growing list of enemies around the world. They are still making life miserable for millions in the Middle East. But their impact on the United States itself is now also being painfully revealed: a country that has spent trillions on foreign wars but is unable to defend its citizens from basic threats like disease and economic collapse….

“Meanwhile, the avalanche of military spending that was released after the September 11 attacks continues to roll onwards. According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, the U.S.

Page 55 of 91

government has spent a staggering $6.4 trillion on its wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan since 2001. This gargantuan number does not even account for interest payments on the borrowing needed to pay for the wars, which could run to as much as $8 trillion….”

“The Future of American Politics,” David Brooks, nytimes.com https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/opinion/us-politics.html

“Trump, GOP challenge efforts to make voting easier amid coronavirus pandemic,” Washington post.com “President Trump and a growing number of Republican leaders are aggressively challenging efforts to make voting easier as the coronavirus pandemic disrupts elections, accusing Democrats of opening the door to fraud — and, in some cases, admitting fears that expanded voting access could politically devastate the GOP.

“Around the country, election officials trying to ensure ballot access and protect public health in upcoming contests face an increasingly coordinated backlash from the right. Much of the onslaught of litigation has been funded by the Republican National Committee, which has sought to block emergency measures related to covid-19, such as proactively mailing ballots to voters sheltering at home….

“‘Republicans in the Legislature are playing politics with public safety and ignoring the urgency of this public health crisis,’ Evers said in statement Saturday evening. ‘It’s wrong. No one should have to choose between their health and their right to vote’...

“Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at School of Law, said such comments reveal that the ‘façade’ is falling away for Republicans, revealing a ‘brazen desire to restrict access to voting.’”

“Science Ranks Grow Thin in Trump Administration,” Gowen Eilperin, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/science-ranks-grow-thin-in-trump- administration/2020/01/23/5d22b522-3172-11ea-a053-dc6d944ba776_story.html

“GOP Sen. Mike Lee: Iran Briefing from Trump Administration was ‘Insulting and Demeaning,’” Savanna Behrmann, usatoday.com https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/01/08/lee-iran-briefing-trump-officials-insulting-and- demeaning/2849148001/

“Coronavirus is revealing how broken America’s economy really is,” Mona Chalabi, theguardian.com “The United States of America, we are told by everyone from the president to the United Nations, is a developed economy. That term, ‘developed economy’, sounds like an endpoint… It’s the contrast that makes the definition – developed economies can only really exist if they are compared to their poorer ‘developing’ counterparts. Covid-19 has merely shown the cracks in a very successful marketing campaign about which category the US falls into.

“So why does the United Nations consider the US as a developed economy when its own statistics so clearly suggest otherwise?...

“The facts are as exhaustive as they are exhausting. There’s one simple conclusion from all of this. We’ve been tricked. We’ve been told that America, like most other majority-white countries, deserves the title ‘developed economy’. It does not… The pursuit of private money in systems built for public good has not worked ethically or practically.

“Why does it matter whether a country is defined as developing or not? Because it means that policymakers here can distract voters into thinking that crises are constantly diplomatic, military or trade based when actually the problems that America needs to fix most urgently are right here –

Page 56 of 91

they’re the crises of health and education. Had those problems been better addressed, the nation would not be struggling as desperately as it is right now.”

“The Decade that Shook America,” David Smith, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/21/decade-that-shook-america-donald-trump-barack-obama-us- politics-race-division

“I Can no Longer Justify being a Part of Trump’s ‘Complacent State.’ So I’m Resigning,” Chuck Park, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-can-no-longer-justify-being-a-part-of-trumps-complacent-state-so-im- resigning/2019/08/08/fed849e4-af14-11e9-8e77-03b30bc29f64_story.html

“Confronting the Coronavirus, Federalism Is Part of the Problem,” Richard Kreitner, thenation.com “Conservative celebrations of federalism have also served to obscure the fact that their authors’ own preference for candidates who seek to weaken the national government has undoubtedly had a hand in enfeebling the federal response and making the actions of states and cities necessary. Some say that if the federal government is ineffective, it’s good to have power in the hands of the states—but the federal government is ineffective precisely because the ideology pushed by the right for at least 50 years has made it that way….

“At the very least, we should be raising difficult, long-postponed questions about how well the present constitutional system is fitted to the exigencies of contemporary life. Our inexcusably delayed response to the virus is not simply a failure of the Trump administration. The encounter with Covid- 19 is a perfect case study in America’s deep-seated dysfunction. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson described the pandemic’s effects in the United States thus far as “a kind of grotesque caricature of American federalism.” We continue to worship the founders as far-seeing, even divinely inspired, political philosophers and constitutional craftsmen. But because the document they bequeathed to posterity nearly two and a half centuries ago is never clear, on almost any subject, about which powers and responsibilities belong to the states and which to the federal government, American politics ever since has been one extended debate…”

“Trump says Republicans would ‘never’ be elected again if it was easier to vote,” Sam Levine, theguardian.com “Donald Trump admitted on Monday that making it easier to vote in America would hurt the Republican party.

“The president made the comments as he dismissed a Democratic-led push for reforms such as vote- by-mail, same-day registration and early voting as states seek to safely run elections amid the Covid- 19 pandemic….

“‘The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,’ Trump said during an appearance on Fox & Friends….

“Democrats often accuse Republicans of deliberately making it hard to vote in order to keep minorities, immigrants, young people and other groups from the polls. And Republicans often say they oppose voting reforms because of concerns of voter fraud – which is extremely rare – or concerns over having the federal government run elections. But Trump’s remarks reveal how at least some Republicans have long understood voting barriers to be a necessary part of their political self- preservation.

“‘I don’t want everybody to vote,’ Paul Weyrich, an influential conservative activist, said in 1980. ‘As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down’....

Page 57 of 91

“The $400m that Congress allocated so far is just a small fraction of what the Brennan Center for Justice estimated election officials need to run elections in November if coronavirus still lingers. Officials need that money to pay for postage, personnel and equipment to process an influx of mail-in ballots.”

“Billionaire-funded Protest is Rearing its Head in America,” Hamilton Nolan, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/27/billionare-funded-protests-america

“Four-star General: ‘I have Wasted 40 Years of my Life’ If Trump’s Lies Represent ‘Who we are,’” Alison Parker, americaindependent.com https://americanindependent.com/four-star-general-i-have-wasted-40-years-of-my-life-if-trumps-lies-represent-who- we-are/

“To Develop a COVID-19 Vaccine, Pharma and the Federal Government will have to Break Old Patterns,” Rachel M. Cohen “Relying on just two companies to produce the seasonal flu vaccine had left the U.S particularly vulnerable. (Britain, by contrast, used five different suppliers.) And despite warnings for years about the dwindling number of U.S vaccine manufacturers, the federal government had done little to intervene. According to a report released by the Institute of Medicine, in 1973, 25 companies produced vaccines for the U.S, but three decades later just five remained. It was a classic market failure: Many drug companies had decided that vaccines were not profitable enough — they were too costly to develop and too underpriced to sell….

“The Bush-era initiatives to improve vaccine availability and medical surge capacity domestically were good starts but underfunded, as are most public health initiatives,” said Dr. Adva Gadoth, an epidemiologist at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.

“America is not the Land of the Free but one of Monopolies so Predatory they Imperil the Nation,” Will Hutton, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/01/america-is-not-the-land-of-the-free-but-one-of- monopolies-so-predatory-they-imperil-the-nation

“Trump EPA is Promoting a Conspiracy Theory Created by Big Tobacco,” Zoe Carpenter, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/environmental-protection-agency-secret-science-big-tobacco/

Heather Digby Parton, “Is the Christian right now in charge of public health inside the Trump administration?” salon.com “It's a full-blown ritual at this point for members of the Trump cabinet and Republicans in Congress to genuflect to the president as if he were a 15th-century pope.”

Chris Hedges, “America: Land of Make-Believe,” truthdig.com “But Roth also knew that resistance was a moral if not a practical obligation in times of radical evil. Defeat might be certain, but dignity and a determination to live in truth demanded a response. We are required to bear witness, even if a self-deluded population does not want to hear, even if that truth makes certain our own marginalization and perhaps obliteration.

“‘One must write, even when one realizes the printed word can no longer improve anything,’ Roth explained.

“This battle against collective self-delusion is a battle I fear we will not win. American society is fatally wounded. Its moral and physical corruption is beyond repair.”

“The Five Ways Republicans will Crack Down on Voting Rights in 2020,” Carol Anderson, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/13/voter-suppression-2020-democracy-america

Page 58 of 91

“How a CIA Analyst, Alarmed by Trump’s Shadow Foreign Policy, Triggered an Impeachment Inquiry.” Miller and Jaffeh, washingtonpost.com https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/how-a-cia-analyst-alarmed-by-trumps-shadow-foreign-policy-triggered- an-impeachment-inquiry/ar-BBWRhvT?ocid=spartandhp

Richard Salame, “Texas closes hundreds of polling sites, making it harder for minorities to vote,” theguardian.com “A Guardian analysis based on that report confirms what many activists have suspected: the places where the black and Latinx population is growing by the largest numbers have experienced the vast majority of the state’s poll site closures.

“The analysis finds that the 50 counties that gained the most Black and Latinx residents between 2012 and 2018 closed 542 polling sites, compared to just 34 closures in the 50 counties that have gained the fewest black and Latinx residents. This is despite the fact that the population in the former group of counties has risen by 2.5 million people, whereas in the latter category the total population has fallen by over 13,000.

“Until 2013, hundreds of counties and nine states, including Texas, with a history of severe voter suppression had to submit any changes they wanted to make to their election systems to the Department of Justice under the Voting Rights Act. The department sought to ensure that the changes did not hurt minority voters. But seven years ago, a supreme court ruling gutted this law and allowed these jurisdictions to operate without oversight.”

Rebecca Gordon, Torture's Legacy of Impunity, tomdispatch.com “On February 5th, the Senate voted to acquit President Donald J. Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. In other words, Trump’s pre-election boast that he ‘could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody’ and not ‘lose any voters’ proved something more than high- flown hyperbole.

“The Senate’s failure to convict the president will only confirm his conception of his office as a seat of absolute power (which, as we’ve been told, ‘corrupts absolutely’). This is the man, after all, who told a convention of student activists, ‘I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president. But I don’t even talk about that.’ Except, of course, he does….

“Trump’s endless boasting about his invulnerability can certainly be blamed on the dismal swamp of his own psyche, but there’s another at least partial explanation for it -- and it lies in the country’s collective failure to hold anyone responsible for crimes committed since 2001 in the ‘war on terror.’ If one administration can get away with confining detainees in coffinlike boxes and torturing them in myriad other ways, why shouldn’t a later one go unpunished for, to take but one example, putting migrant children in cages?...

“Thanks to the cowardice of the Obama administration, no CIA officer or any higher official in the administration of George W. Bush and , no psychologist, no doctor, no one at all has yet been held accountable for the years of torture practiced on a global scale in the war on terror. Donald Trump himself, of course, got elected while publicly proclaiming about waterboarding that ‘I like it a lot’ and he reportedly considered Gina Haspel’s black-site torture experiences a positive part of her résumé when considering her for CIA director. Mitchell, of course, continues to make speeches and collect his royalties. George W. Bush has been rehabilitated as a kindly portrait painter.

“Is it really so surprising, then, that we now have a man in the Oval Office who believes he has ‘the right to do whatever I want as president’? The history of the twenty-first-century war on terror suggests that, if he doesn’t have the right, he certainly appears to have the power.”

Page 59 of 91

“We Read All 2,677 Pages of Ukraine Testimony So You Don’t Have To,” Margaret Taylor, lawfareblog.com https://www.lawfareblog.com/we-read-all-2677-pages-ukraine-testimony-so-you-dont-have

“To Weather Impeachment Hearings, White House Looks to Put Witnesses on Trial,” Shannon Petty, nbc.com https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-impeachment-inquiry/weather-impeachment-hearings-white-house-looks- put-witnesses-trial-n1079041

Chris Hedges, “America: Land of Make-Believe,” truthdig.com “The rhetoric we use to describe ourselves is so disconnected from reality that it has induced collective schizophrenia. America, as it is discussed in public forums by politicians, academics and the media, is a fantasy, a Disneyfied world of make-believe. The worse it gets, the more we retreat into illusions. The longer we fail to name and confront our physical and moral decay, the more demagogues who peddle illusions and fantasies become empowered. Those who acknowledge the truth—beginning with the stark fact that we are no longer a democracy—wander like ghosts around the edges of society, reviled as enemies of hope. The mania for hope works as an anesthetic….

“The embrace of collective self-delusion marks the death spasms of all civilizations. We are in the terminal stage. We no longer know who we are, what we have become or how those on the outside see us. It is easier, in the short term, to retreat inward, to celebrate nonexistent virtues and strengths and wallow in sentimentality and a false optimism….

“Lies are emotionally comforting in times of distress, even when we know they are lies. The worse things get, the more we long to hear the lies. But cultures that can no longer face reality, that cannot distinguish between falsehood and truth, retreat into what Sigmund Freud called ‘screen memories,’ the merger of fact and fiction. This merger destroys the mechanisms for puncturing self-delusion. Intellectuals, artists and dissidents who attempt to address reality and warn about the self-delusion are ridiculed, silenced and demonized. There are, as Freud noted in ‘Civilizations and Its Discontents,’ distressed societies whose difficulties ‘will not yield at any attempt at reform.’ But this is too harsh a truth for most people, especially Americans, to accept….

“America, founded on the evils of slavery, genocide and the violent exploitation of the working class, is a country defined by historical amnesia. The popular historical narrative is a celebration of the fictional virtues of white supremacy. The relentless optimism and reveling in supposed national virtues obscure truth. Nuance, complexity and moral ambiguity, along with accepting responsibility for the holocausts and genocides carried out by slaveholders, white settlers and capitalists, have never fit with America’s triumphalism. ‘The illusions of eternal strength and health, and of the essential goodness of people—they were the illusions of a nation, the lies of generations of frontier mothers,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote.”

“’Pottymouth’: Trump Presides over a Coarsening of American Politics,” Parker and Rucker, thewashngtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/from-hell-to-lynching-trump-presides-over-a-coarsening-of-american- politics/2019/10/23/fb749aee-f02f-11e9-b2da-606ba1ef30e3_story.html

Carol Anderson, “The five ways Republicans will crack down on voting rights in 2020,” theguardian.com “But in 2013, the supreme court declared that racism was essentially a thing of the past and gutted the Voting Rights Act. The results have been calamitous. More than half the states passed a series of voter suppression laws that targeted minority voters, breached a key firewall that protected American democracy, and greased the pathway to install a man in the White House whose racism, greed, and unfitness for office was well known….

“Similarly, the only way that Republicans can protect themselves and a rogue president is to suppress the votes of minorities, the young, and the poor (all of whom vote overwhelmingly for Democrats). In 2020, we’re poised to see more voter intimidation, criminalizing of voter registration drives, disguised poll taxes, attempts to maintain extreme partisan gerrymandered districts, draconian and

Page 60 of 91

flawed voter roll purges, squashing access to voting on college campuses, widespread purchase of hackable voting machines, and a slew of unqualified, rightwing judges appointed to the federal bench to provide legal sanction to the destruction of democracy….

“The final, and overarching ominous sign is Senate Republicans’ determination to pack the federal courts with judges, more of whom than ever before have been rated ‘unqualified’ by the American Bar Association and whose only expertise is hostility to civil rights, including the right to vote. As Dahlia Lithwick wrote, this is a ‘dangerous game of ‘How Many More Judges Can They Ram Through Before Democracy Breaks?’”

“Can the Trump Cult be Deprogrammed? Here’s what this Mind Control Expert Says,” Chauncey Devega, salon.com https://www.salon.com/2019/10/22/cam-members-of-the-trump-cult-be-deprogrammed-after-the-leader-falls-steven- hassan-says-yes/

“Betsy Devos Could Face Jail After Judge Rules she Violated 2018 Order on Student Loans,” Tariz Haddad, newsweek.com https://www.newsweek.com/betsy-devos-could-face-jail-after-judge-rules-violated-2018-order-1463764

Francine Keizer, “Suspense-free impeachment may yet reverberate for years to come,” csmonitor.com “Considered a possible swing vote on the issue of witnesses, Senator Alexander announced late Thursday night he would not call for witnesses because there is no need for evidence ‘to prove something that has already been proven and that does not meet the United States Constitution’s high bar for an impeachable offense.’ With the Iowa caucus coming on Monday, it’s time to ‘let the people decide, he said.

“Democrats vigorously disagreed, saying the president was attempting to manipulate the 2020 elections by seeking help from a foreign leader and would likely continue to do so. Failing to remove him leaves him free to act more as a monarch than a president, subject to checks and balances.

“‘We are witnessing the coronation of Trump, with Mitch McConnell holding the crown, and the Republicans holding his train,’ said Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii to reporters on Thursday.”

“U.S. Senators have Reportedly Piled up to $96 million into Stocks, Including Companies they Regulate,” Theron Mohamed, businessinsider.in https://www.businessinsider.in/US-senators-have-reportedly-piled-96-million-into-stocks-in-companies-they- regulate/articleshow/71220142.cms

J.D. Maddox, “The Day I Realized I Would Never Find Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq,” nytimes.com “It became impossible to square my American sense of free will — our image of ourselves as empowered citizens participating in informed choices — with the reality of the way that we were hoodwinked into going along with the invasion of Iraq.”

“An American President who doesn’t Understand the Meaning of America,” Michael Gerson, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-cant-even-get-american-nationalism-right/2019/09/30/be903b0e- e3a2-11e9-b403-f738899982d2_story.html

“Why would a Whistle-blower Save this Nation of Cowards?” Elie Mystal, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/whistleblower-trump-ukraine/

Luke Savage, “America Needs a Nonvoter Revolution,” jacobin.com “The existence of democratic institutions notwithstanding, presidential campaigns have long been expensive and stage-managed set pieces that cater overwhelmingly to big donors and powerful interest groups. Three people own more wealth than the 160 million poorest Americans combined, and, against the backdrop of an elite gospel valorizing billionaire entrepreneurs and worshipping at

Page 61 of 91

the altar of high finance, tens of millions are beset with spiraling health-care costs, low wages, and a lack of basic dignity in their day-to-day lives. Suffused with racial discrimination, a criminal justice system that needlessly keeps unfathomable numbers of people behind bars, and politicians actively working to make it harder for the most marginalized to vote, American democracy is more a myth than a reality for tens of millions of the country’s inhabitants.

“Changing that injustice means bringing nonvoters to the ballot box like never before, with a politics that loudly champions their interests and, for once, puts the needs of the many before the wealth and power of the few.”

William Webster, “I Headed the F.B.I. and C.I.A. There’s a Dire Threat to the Country I Love,” nytimes.com “The country can ill afford to have a chief law enforcement officer dispute the Justice Department’s own independent inspector general’s report and claim that an F.B.I. investigation was based on ‘a completely bogus narrative.’ In fact, the report conclusively found that the evidence to initiate the Russia investigation was unassailable. There were more than 100 contacts between members of the Trump campaign and Russian agents during the 2016 campaign, and Russian efforts to undermine our democracy continue to this day.”

Douglas Valentine, “The CIA As Organized Crime,” Introduction “… by the time America invaded Iraq in 2003, reporters were embedded in military units. The media became a PR unit of the military and the CIA, with the Orwellian result that the public did not see images of the mangled bodies. The public was denied access to the truth of what its government was actually doing…

“Since Iran Contra, the bureaucracies have instituted incredible obstacles that make it impossible for people to see what’s going on inside their private club. The public is totally reliant now on whistle- blowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, who are then vilified, imprisoned, and/ or chased into exile.”

“The Consequences of No Consequences,” Dahlia Lithwick, slate.com https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/09/impeachment-donald-trump-house-of-representatives- consequences.html

“Too Many Voters Live under Minority Rule. Here’s why,” Arnold Schwarzenegger, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/09/09/schwarzenegger-too-many-voters-live-under-minority-rule- heres-why/

Will Hutton “America is not the land of the free but one of monopolies so predatory they imperil the nation,” theguardian.com “A US political campaign costs 50 times more than one in Europe in terms of money spent for every vote cast. But this doesn’t just distort the political process. It is the chief cause of the US economic crisis.

“Corporations want a return on their money, and the payback is protection from any kind of regulation, investigation or anti-monopoly policy that might strike at their ever-growing market power. Boeing, for example, ensured – as one of the US’s biggest lobbyists – that regulation was friendly to its plans to shoehorn heavier engines on to a plane not designed for them – the fatal shortcut behind the two crashes of the 737 Max 8…. both at federal and state level ever higher campaign donations are correlated with ever fewer actions against monopoly, price fixing and bad corporate behavior.

“Revealed: Georgia Republicans use Power of State to Suppress Minority Vote,” Jordan Wilkie, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/02/georgia-republians-political-opponents-voter-intimidation

Page 62 of 91

Zoe Carpenter, “Trump’s EPA Is Promoting a Conspiracy Theory Created by Big Tobacco,” thenation.com “One of the defining aspects of the Trump administration is the shameless peddling of conspiracy theories. There’s the myth that Democrats installed a spy on the president’s 2016 campaign, for instance, and the one about the Chinese making up climate change. Over at the Environmental Protection Agency, political appointees—including former administrator Scott Pruitt and his replacement, Andrew Wheeler—are promoting a conspiracy theory of their own. They claim that the EPA improperly uses “secret science” to justify unnecessary regulations—and they want to forbid the agency from doing so.

“Claims about ‘secret science’ stem from the fact that many studies linking pollution to illness rely on medical, personal, or occupational records that aren’t public—not for any nefarious reason, but because of patient privacy laws or confidentiality agreements. In 2018, Pruitt proposed excluding these types of studies from future policy-making. Some 600,000 public comments poured in, many of them pointing out that the measure, by excluding a large body of epidemiological research from consideration, would make it difficult for the EPA to fulfill its core mission of protecting public health. But instead of backing down, the EPA is now pushing for a dramatic expansion of its initial proposal. A new draft supplement to the rule, published by The New York Times last week, indicates that the data disclosure requirement could also apply retroactively—meaning that the EPA could use it as justification to gut long-standing clean air and water protections if they were based, in part, on research that incorporated confidential data….

“But the history of the idea indicates otherwise: It was originally ginned up by the tobacco industry for the explicit purpose of hobbling environmental regulators.”

“America Needs a Nonvoter Revolution,” Luke Savage, jacobin.com https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/08/nonvoter-revolution-income-inequality-apathy-voting

Jonathan Freedland, “If Trump survives impeachment, it’s clear who he’ll have to thank,” theguardian.com “The ‘shock’ threshold has now been raised so high that, unless he commits a fresh horror more spectacular than any previous, the impulse is to let Trump off with a shrug. That’s not only the media’s fault. ‘The responsibility lies with us all for letting this lawless, kleptocratic presidency become normalised,’ wrote the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg….

“The consequence is impunity. Note that Trump made that fateful call to Kyiv the day after had testified on Capitol Hill, allowing Trump to believe he was off the hook on the Russia affair. He felt himself beyond the reach of the law. And this is the danger.

“The former UK foreign secretary David Miliband warned that we are living in an ‘age of impunity’, in which states can murder and maim without consequence: think Assad and Syria, or Mohammed bin Salman and Jamal Khashoggi. There is a domestic analogue to that impunity and Trump embodies it. If he is allowed to get away with his crimes, the conclusion his successors will draw is that a US president is, in practice, above the law. Leaders around the world who look to the US will learn a similar lesson, that in the right circumstances you can get away with anything. That includes murder on Fifth Avenue – and much worse.”

“Mitch McConnell is Right. Secure, Open Elections would Elect more Democrats,” Paul Waldman, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/25/mitch-mcconnell-is-right-secure-open-elections-would-elect- more-democrats/

“One Person, One Vote? Not with a Republican Party and Supreme Court Justices like these,” Brian Dickerson, usatoday.com https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/07/04/supreme-court-gerrymandering-2020-census-citizenship- question-column/1622374001/

Page 63 of 91

Chauncey Devega, “Can the Trump cult be deprogrammed? Here’s what this mind control expert says,” salon.com “One of the most universal techniques of subverting our ability to correctly assess reality is through phobia indoctrination. This is the implantation of irrational fears against questioning the leader, the doctrine, or the organization or cult’s policies.

“People who were raised in strict fundamentalist-type religious groups, where they’re not encouraged to make mistakes, think for themselves or use their conscience but rather to obediently follow doctrine and the authority figure, are going to be more susceptible to following someone like Donald Trump. There is also the aspect of physical corporal punishment if they disobey the authority figure or other leader, which plays into their behavior and following a Trump-like leader as well.”

“Are we Becoming too Stupid to Govern Ourselves?” Max Boot, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/are-we-becoming-too-stupid-to-govern-ourselves/2019/05/29/2a17a4f6- 8233-11e9-95a9-e2c830afe24f_story.html?utm_term=.71aa774e777c

“The Trump Administration is Waging a Quiet War on Education,” Ross Barkan. theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/14/trump-betsy-devos-education-quiet-war

Carole Cadwalladr, “What happened when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came face to face with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg,” theguardian.com “We are at an extraordinary crossroads. We have sufficient information to know that Facebook’s platform was used to subvert and undermine elections in the US, the UK and many other countries. But we pretend to be helpless to prevent it happening again. We’re not. We’re simply hamstrung by a government and an opposition that have chosen to ignore it. Ocasio-Cortez’s bold questions don’t just show Zuckerberg up but Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn also.

“Our elections are not safe. And this month Facebook took the decision to make them even more unsafe. Just over a week after Zuckerberg held a closed-door meeting with Donald Trump, we discovered he’d changed Facebook’s policy to allow posts by politicians or parties containing ‘deceptive, false or misleading content’. It’s an extraordinary decision championed by Zuckerberg in a speech in which he said: ‘I believe we must continue to stand for free expression.’

“Facebook’s global head of policy, Nick Clegg, who once railed against the ‘blatant lies’ told in the European referendum, has now sanctioned their use in all political adverts in all elections in all countries across the world.

“We’re not helpless. Ocasio-Cortez shows us that. We are just being betrayed by our government and our opposition. ‘Why is this lying bastard lying to me?’ is a traditional approach to journalism. We in Britain should be asking: why are these lying politicians not taking action over this lying company that is allowing lying politicians to lie to me?”

Chauncey Devega, “Can the Trump cult be deprogrammed? Here’s what this mind control expert says,” salon.com “On the surface, at least, it would seem that Donald Trump’s continual torrent of lawbreaking, his disrespect for the Constitution and democracy, his corruption, racism, nativism, misogyny and overall debasement of human morality and human decency have finally reached a point where he will be held accountable by the Democrats in Congress and then at the polls in 2020.

“But what of the 39 percent (or so) of Americans who continue to support Donald Trump? His popularity among Republican voters continues to be remarkably high and stable (87 percent per Gallup’s most recent poll) given his many failures of policy, including policy decisions that directly hurt his most enthusiastic ‘white working class’ supporters. Indeed, Trump’s base of stable support remains the highest among American presidents in the history of modern polling.

Page 64 of 91

“Despite — or because of — Trump’s apparent criminal behavior and obvious inclinations toward fascism he has a cement-like hold on his supporters. Trumpism can be understood as right-wing political extremism transformed into a cult. This is not just a metaphor. Trump’s lies, his assault on reality, his threats of violence, his cruelty, his demand of absolute loyalty, his manipulation of willing subjects who choose to escape empirical reality, and his shared state of collective narcissism with his followers all fit the definition of a cult.”

“Democracy has been Hijacked by White Men: How Minority Rule now Grips America,” Tom McCarthy, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/24/democracy-has-been-hijacked-by-white-men-how-minority- rule-now-grips-america

“Rich White Men Rule America. How much Longer will we Tolerate that?” Nathan Robinson, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/20/rich-white-men-rule-america-minority-rule

Peter Grier, Jessica Mendoza, “Is US in constitutional crisis? That may not be most important question,” csmonitor.com “President Donald Trump’s pledge of non-cooperation with the impeachment inquiry of the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives may or may not be a ‘constitutional crisis.’ But it is a stark new test of the nation’s founding legal document – perhaps the most important such trial since declined to turn over the White House tapes. How it’s resolved could reset the balance of power between the executive and legislative branches of government in our polarized political age.

“America is Exceptional—In all the Wrong Ways,” Danny Sjursen, truthdig.com https://www.truthdig.com/articles/america-is-exceptional-in-all-the-wrong-ways/

“Can We Stop Pretending Now?” Andrew J. Bacevich, tomdispatch.com http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176548/tomgram%3A_andrew_bacevich%2C_behind_fronds_of_fakery%2C_he re%27s_some_real_news/

Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, p. 124 “‘The Klan does not believe that the fact that it is emotional and instinctive, rather than coldly intellectual, is a weakness. All action comes from emotion, rather than from ratiocination. Our emotions and the instincts on which they are based have been bred into us for thousands of years; far longer than reason has had a place in the human brain.… They are the foundations of our American civilization, even more than our great historic documents…’”

“Money Talks, Big Time: 1% Politics and the Scandals of a New Gilded Age,” Raman Menon, tomdispatch.com http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176546/tomgram%3A_rajan_menon%2C_whose_money_not_yours/

Elie Mystal, “Why Would a Whistle-Blower Save This Nation of Cowards?” thenation.com “We cannot guarantee the safety of whistle-blowers. Oh, we pass all kinds of laws with fancy names like the ‘Whistleblower Protection Act.’ Our presidents sign executive orders called ‘Protecting Whistleblowers with Access to Classified Information.’ But when the rubber meets the road, when a whistle-blower wants to dish about the people in charge of enforcing the laws, all of our acts and proclamations are easily ignored pieces of paper.

“Chelsea Manning lives in the Alexandria Detention Center. Edward Snowden lives in Moscow. People get to be called ‘whistle-blowers’ only when the institutions they’re blowing the whistle on allow it. Otherwise, they’re called ‘criminals’ or ‘spies’ and are subjected to the full weight of the American justice system.

“Now, there are people in Congress, the media, and on the presidential campaign trail who hope that the whistle-blower takes the heroic step of risking their professional career and personal freedom to come forward, to Congress….

Page 65 of 91

“Man, if I were the whistle-blower, I’d tell all of these politicians and pundits to kiss my whole entire backside. We ‘American people’ are a decadent bourgeoisie who won’t storm concentration camps to save children….

“Donald Trump exists because nobody with power in this country has been willing to risk anything to stop him, or his cronies.”

“Land of the Free? How Trump has put America’s Identity in Peril,” Ben Fountain, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/23/ben-fountain-beautiful-country-burn-again-trump-democracy

“The EPA just Revealed that Staffers Destroyed Files under Audit,” Justin Rohrlich, qz.com https://qz.com/1570528/epa-staffers-destroyed-files-while-under-audit/

Dahlia Lithwick, “The Consequence of No Consequences,” slate.com “It is axiomatic, in parenting small children, that for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction. When our children misbehave, we exert our power to check them not merely because they did something wrong already, but to deter them from doing wrong again. If past is indeed prologue, punishment is also necessary for deterrence.

“This is a lesson that some of the Democratic leadership in the House seem to have failed to apprehend. Because they do not seem to realize the cost of the choice to do nothing, less-than- nothing, or worse-than-nothing in response to Donald Trump’s acts of corruption and criminality: It’s not just that his past bad acts go unpunished, but that future bad acts are expressly encouraged….

“House Democrats are, in their acquiescence, in fact training him to go ever further the next time. There are good moral and strategic arguments for the House to do the one thing it is empowered to do in the face of repeated criminality and misconduct and incompetence of this president. But mine is an argument more deeply rooted in the general laws of physics: To do nothing in the face of repeated lawlessness is to court yet more lawlessness in the future.

“The net outcome of doing nothing is not politically or morally neutral. The net outcome is future loss after future loss….

“When House Democrats insist that the public isn’t sold on impeachment yet, it’s another failure of parenting 101: They have trained the public into believing that nothing that has happened warrants action. If the American public is befuddled, it’s because a House majority failed to utilize the only power in its arsenal: that of sober and sustained investigation and public education. Like congressional Democrats, the American public ends up on the lookout for the next big crime, instead of the pileup of what’s come before.”

Schwarzenegger: “Too many voters live under minority rule. Here’s why,” washingtonpost.com “A stunning number of Americans — more than 59 million — live under minority rule in a state where the party with fewer votes in the 2018 election nevertheless controls a majority of seats in the legislature. Democratic candidates for the North Carolina House and Senate won a solid majority of the statewide vote last fall, but Republicans nevertheless won 54 percent of House seats and 58 percent of Senate seats….

“Five other states — Michigan, Wisconsin, , Ohio and Pennsylvania — have minority rule in one or both of their legislative chambers…. While it will come as no surprise that, in all six of these states, the party with the undue majorities also controlled the map-drawing, the statistics should nevertheless chill all of us who believe in the power of one person, one vote.

Page 66 of 91

“The partisan gerrymander in Virginia’s House of Delegates, for example, holds this ugly distinction: Republicans hold a majority of seats — just under 51 percent — with just 44.5 percent of the 2017 vote. That’s the lowest popular vote share for any legislative majority in the nation….

“Wisconsin, where partisan mapmakers maximized their gains with even greater ruthlessness and efficiency, has received no such remedy. Only 44.7 percent of voters there cast ballots for Republican Assembly candidates in 2018, but the GOP nevertheless won 64.6 percent of the seats….

“These states’ upper chambers are just as badly gerrymandered. Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina all have senates where the party with fewer votes holds control — which means the entire legislature is dominated by the minority party. Add to that Ohio: In 2018, just over half of the Buckeye State’s Senate seats were up for election. Republicans won 47.2 percent of the vote but 58.8 percent of the seats.

“Nothing explains this consistent partisan bias other than the maps themselves.”

“Why Oppose Making Election Day a Federal Holiday?” Martin Longman, washingtonmonthly.com https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/01/31/why-oppose-making-election-day-a-federal-holiday/

“What Ilhan Omar said about AIPAC was Right,” Day Barkan, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/ady-barkan-aipac-ilhan-omar/

Luke Savage, “America Needs a Nonvoter Revolution,” jacobin.com “According to the United States Election Project, more than 40 percent of Americans eligible to cast a ballot in 2016 chose to sit the election out. In virtually any other context, a constituency this size would both feature prominently in political commentary and be a hugely significant bloc for which political leaders would compete. Yet, amid the vast cottage industry of post-election debriefs and analyses, you’d often be hard-pressed to find discussion of it at the scale its size implies: measured against the endless media safaris to Trump country, investigations of Russian bot activity, or scolding of third-party activists, the issue of nonvoters pales in terms of tweets and column inches. During campaigns themselves, the millions who regularly decide not to vote hardly ever seem to figure in media coverage and, when they do, it’s most likely as an object of ridicule or contempt.

“It’s well known that the United States has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the developed world — the candidate from the Didn’t Vote party has won every presidential election for the past century. As Tavernise’s investigation of Milwaukee makes clear, one reason for this is deliberate efforts by Republican politicians to suppress the vote, particularly among people of color. But, as it also suggests, many nonvoters simply don’t see themselves reflected in the political system or believe those inhabiting it are working to improve their lives….

“Quite visibly, Congress looks very little like the country it ostensibly exists to serve — with many demographics notably underrepresented in its makeup. Political leaders on average tend to be far wealthier than the typical American, with many inhabiting a socioeconomic environment that’s practically in another galaxy. Presidential campaigns, meanwhile, are often contests between different shades of multimillionaire….

“It should similarly come as no surprise that nonvoters are more likely to be nonwhite and tend to have lower incomes: Pew’s data suggests that nearly half of those who didn’t vote in 2016 were nonwhite, and that more than half had incomes of less than $30,000 a year. Given decades of bipartisan deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, and a general consensus around policies that favor big business, it would be very difficult to make the case that such people’s interests have been well served by either of America’s two major political parties, or that their decision to sit out elections is particularly irrational.”

Page 67 of 91

John Bowden, “Grassley: 'Congress has delegated too much authority to the president', thehill.com "‘The constitutional crisis comes from the elected representatives of the people over the last 80 years making a dictator out of the presidency.’”

“Voter Suppression Carries Slavery’s Three-fifths Clause into the Present,” Imani Perry, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/31/voter-suppression-african-american-james-madison- slavery

“The Shutdown is Revealing our National Character,” Adam R. Taylor, sojo.net https://sojo.net/articles/shutdown-revealing-our-national-character

Tomm Hartmann, “How our republic could die in the age of Trump — in a stunning parallel to the fall of Rome,” alter.net “The forces driving the death of our republic include Trump trying to prosecute those who investigated him for his campaign’s Russia ties and his disavowal of the rights and powers of the first branch of American government, the Congress. Fueling the process for nearly two generations are the right-wing billionaires funding politicians who tolerate the promotion of deadly white supremacist violence, all in the pursuit of lower taxes, higher profits, and a dog-eat-dog political ideology that doesn’t let average people get their needs met through the political process….

“When politicians are terrified that the wrong statement or vote will lose them their political and financial patrons—or could even get them thrown in jail or killed—they cease to be players in a republican democratic drama, and instead become sycophants to and enablers of the plutocrats who have the actual political power, even though they don’t hold office.

“This is the position elected members of the Republican Party find themselves in today relative to the billionaires and industries that own them, and the white supremacists and religious zealots they’ve invited in as allies…”

“Why are so few U.S. Politicians from the Working Class?” Nicholas Carns, theguardiancom https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2018/oct/04/few-us-politicians-working-class

“There is no more Loathsome Creature Walking our Political Landscape than Mitch McConnell,” Charles P. Pierce, esquire.com https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a25956710/mitch-mcconnell-op-ed-voting-bill-democrats/

Eric Boehlert, “A chilling reality: Media's not equipped to deal with Trump’s ramped-up war on democracy,” dailykos.com “Purging the Department of Homeland Security; cheering the cover-up of the Mueller report while claiming federal prosecutors who investigated Russia collusion were guilty of treason; defying a lawful order to turn over his taxes; ordering the Department of Justice to launch criminal investigations into perceived enemies; wishing he could unleash ‘rough’ U.S. soldiers on women and children seeking asylum in America; promising pardons to border officials who break the law; aggressively subverting the independence of the Federal Reserve by nominating two obviously unqualified board members; and inciting violence against a sitting member of Congress.

“That was Donald Trump's recent week, as he clearly escalated his war on democracy and democratic institutions in America. Increasingly, though, it looks like the press simply isn't equipped to deal with his radical and dangerous foray into authoritarianism.

"‘This is how democracies die. The rule of law is slowly strangled. The unthinkable becomes commonplace. The illegal becomes accepted--from violations of the emoluments clause to self- dealing to Federal election law crimes to serial sexual abuse,’ tweeted David Rothkopf, a professor of

Page 68 of 91

international relations. ‘We are dying the death of a thousand cuts. Right now, this week, the president and his band of thugs are winning. They have become unabashed in their attacks on the law.’

“And the press is playing a central role in this dangerous demise. It’s been part of allowing the unthinkable to become commonplace, and last week provided many stark examples. Trump's brazen, anti-democratic behavior becomes more pronounced, and as he appears to operate without the slightest concern of the press for holding him accountable, it seems the American news media doesn’t understand, or won't acknowledge, what is happening, and the dangers that democracy faces. They don't know much about covering authoritarian regimes, or how to respond to them, and they're too busy treating Trump's spectacle as a reality TV show.”

Justin Elliot, “Congress Is About to Ban the Government From Offering Free Online Tax Filing. Thank TurboTax.,” prepublication.org “Last week, the House Ways and Means Committee, led by Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., passed the Taxpayer First Act, a wide-ranging bill making several administrative changes to the IRS that is sponsored by Reps. John Lewis, D-Ga., and Mike Kelly, R-Pa.

“In one of its provisions, the bill makes it illegal for the IRS to create its own online system of tax filing. Companies like Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, and H&R Block have lobbied for years to block the IRS from creating such a system. If the tax agency created its own program, which would be similar to programs other developed countries have, it would threaten the industry’s profits….

“Those efforts have been fueled by hefty lobbying spending and campaign contributions by the industry. Intuit and H&R Block last year poured a combined $6.6 million into lobbying related to the IRS filing deal and other issues. Neal, who became Ways and Means chair this year after Democrats took control of the House, received $16,000 in contributions from Intuit and H&R Block in the last two election cycles.”

“How America’s Ailing Constitution is Encouraging Trump’s Idiotic Shutdown,” Ryan Cooper, theweek.com https://theweek.com/articles/817102/how-americas-ailing-constitution-encouraging-trumps-idiotic-shutdown

“Dear Media, Please Cut the Sob Stories about Trump Voters Hurt by Trump Policies,” Elie Mystal, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/trump-voters-shutdown-media-sympathy/

Phillip Kennicott, “We used to think photos like this could change the world. What needs to change is who we are,” washingtonpost.com “...the president of the United States dismissed an accusation that he had sexually assaulted a prominent author and columnist in the 1990s. He used a phrase similar to ones he has used in the past to deflect similar allegations: ‘She’s not my type.’ It is a terrible thing to say, with a specifically misogynistic meaning in the context of how men practice violence against women.

“But it is a perfect summation of our new and deformed American conscience. It is pithy and dismissive, an invitation to look at people who have been victimized and see only otherness. It shuts down any understanding of trauma before empathy has begun to interrogate how trauma is felt and experienced. It is about looking without seeing, judging without understanding. For anyone who wants an off-ramp to the moral demands made by this image, this could be the universal caption: ‘They weren’t our type.’”

“Democrats Must Slam the Revolving Door Shut,” George Zornick, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/revolving-door-k-street-pay-to-play/

Sabrina Saddique, “Fake news: US braced for new wave of misinformation in 2020 election,” theguardian.com

Page 69 of 91

“As the US gears up for its next general election, half of Americans view fake news as a bigger threat to the country than terrorism, illegal immigration, violent crime or racism, according to a new study….

“...almost 70% of Americans feel fake news and misinformation have greatly affected their confidence in government institutions….

“‘The impact of made-up news goes beyond exposure to it and confusion about what is factual,’ said Amy Mitchell, the group’s director of journalism research. ‘Americans see it influencing the core functions of our democratic system.’”

“The Deep Roots of America’s Rural-Urban Political Divide,” Peter Grier, csmonitor.com https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2018/1226/The-deep-roots-of-America-s-rural-urban-political-divide

“The Trump Era won’t Last Forever. But we must do our Part to End it,” Rebecca Solnit, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/13/trump-era-hope-activism-organise-protest

Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America went Haywire, p. 23 “‘The human understanding,’ he [Bacon] wrote in 1620, ‘when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects; in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of its former conclusions may remain inviolate….wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happen much oftener, neglect and pass them by.’”

“Boy Plunder: The Many Crimes of Jared Kushner,” Greg Olear, medium.com https://medium.com/s/story/boy-plunder-the-many-crimes-of-jared-kushner-1a57aaeed856

“We have Entered a Dangerous Moral Universe,” Patricia J. Williams, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/climate-change-truth-lies/

Ann Jones, “The Man Who Saw Trump Coming A Century Ago: A Reader’s Guide for the Distraught “As Galbraith pointed out in his 2008 book The Predator State, the frustrated predators of the twenty- first century sneakily changed tactics: they aimed to capture the government themselves, to become the state. And so they have. In the Trump era, they have created a government in which current regulators are former lobbyists for the very predators they are supposed to restrain. Similarly, the members of Trump’s cabinet are now the saboteurs: shrinking the State Department, starving public schools, feeding big Pharma with Medicare funds, handing over national parks and public lands to ‘developers,’ and denying science and climate change altogether, just to start down a long list. Meanwhile, our Predator President, when not golfing, leaps about the deconstruction site, waving his hands and hurling abuse, a baron of distraction, commanding attention while the backroom boys (and girls) demolish the institutions of law and democracy.”

“In 2008 America Stopped Believing in the American Dream,” Frank Rich, nymag.com http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/08/frank-rich-2008-financial-crisis-end-of-american- dream.html?gtm=top>m=bottom

“Creeping Fascism no Problem for Trump’s Durable Base,” Paul Street, truthdig.com https://www.truthdig.com/articles/creeping-fascism-isnt-a-problem-for-trumps-durable-base/

Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America went Haywire, p. 5

Page 70 of 91

“What’s problematic is going overboard, letting the subjective entirely override the objective, people thinking and acting as if opinions and feelings were just as true as facts. The American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, every individual free to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control.”

Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy, p. 13 “When you bring your car to your mechanic because it’s making a worrisome noise, you trust that he’s knowledgeable enough to figure out what’s wrong and scrupulous enough not to rip you off. On all things auto-related, your mechanic is an authority. In public life, our pillar institutions and the elites who run them play the mechanic’s role. They are charged with the task of diagnosing and fixing problems in governance, the market, and society. And what we want from authorities, whether they are mechanics, money managers, or senators, is that they be competent—smart, informed, able—and that they not use their authority to pursue a hidden agenda or personal gain.

“We now operate in a world in which we can assume neither competence nor good faith from the authorities…”

“Kevin McCarthy is Inventing Reasons not to Investigate Trump,” Joan Walsh, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/kevin-mccarthy-donald-trump-gop-congress/

Bauerlein and Jeffery, Corruption Isn’t Just Another Scandal. It’s the Rot Beneath All of Them,” motherjones.com “That’s Mueller calling Trump out for lying. Flat out. Yet this president has been so successful in resetting the bar for scandal, it barely rated an ‘eh’ from much of the political establishment.

“MoJo Washington Bureau Chief David Corn calls this the ‘white tablecloth problem’: When you spill red wine on a clean tablecloth, it’s obvious and embarrassing. Spill on a tablecloth covered in stains and oh well, what’s one more?...

“The Russia scandal was never, in the main, about whether the president would be prosecuted for a crime. It was, and is, about a bigger issue: A wealthy politician who hoped to profit from pandering to a foreign autocrat put his own financial interests above those of his country, who abetted a foreign attack, and who lied about it to those he swore to serve.

“There is a word for this, but it’s not collusion. It’s corruption….

“It’s an insidious phenomenon because it is self-sustaining: Autocrats and demagogues benefit from corruption, then run on a platform of fighting it, then take fuller advantage of it once in office. This did not begin with Donald Trump, but the full swamp flowering of his administration has made it plain to a point where people across the political spectrum now consider corruption one of the most significant dangers facing the nation.”

“Crimes aren’t Crimes: Trump and his Allies are Moving the Goalpost to Legally Protect him,” Ryan Koronowski, thinkprogress.org https://thinkprogress.org/trump-republicans-mueller-crimes-arent-crimes-cohen-guilty-05ceec449670/

“Wisconsin Republicans are Shooting themselves in the Foot,” Charlie Sykes, theatlantic.com https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/wisconsin-debacle-wasnt-worth-it-gop/577522/

Janna Ganesh, “Voters’ capacity for being appalled by Trump is waning,” amp.ft.com “The voter is always right, it seems. Political dysfunction must be the fault of politicians. To think otherwise takes the hauteur of a 1950s East Berlin apparatchik.

Page 71 of 91

“It is with some delicacy, then, that I say this: if US President Donald Trump is not brought down for his alleged wrongdoing, it will not be because his inquisitor, Robert Mueller, lacked thoroughness or because his political enemy, the Democratic party, lacked nerve. It is because not quite enough voters minded quite enough. If they did, the pressure would tell on Democrats to seek his impeachment and on Republicans to at least consider voting for it, on pain of electoral rout….

“Some of us never thought public opinion would sustain an impeachment, almost regardless of Mr Mueller’s findings. But this in itself is troubling.

“The report does not say that Mr Trump colluded with Russia in his own election. But it does find that he instructed staff to lie. It finds that he dangled threats and favours before potential witnesses. That he seems likely to not just survive this news, but to remain eminently competitive at the 2020 election, suggests that he is not the story here. The story is modern unshockability….

“Throughout the west, it has become soothing to believe that only the mechanics of politics are faulty. If social media can be better-regulated, fake news better-rebutted, foreign money better-tracked, rogues and chancers would not be able to win elections (or referendums). The possibility that we ourselves have become less discriminating as voters and citizens is too awkward to entertain.”

Meghan O’Rourke, “America's vaccination crisis is a symptom of our broken society,” theguardian.com “Our body politic is splintering and fragmenting, and it is reflected in our vaccination rates. To make a herd, you need to believe in the imagined collective: to be concerned not only about yourself, but the others in the polity….

“In this sense, the debate over vaccination isn’t just about distrust of medicine or a false nostalgia for our “natural” past. It’s also an expression of the limits of American individualism: a natural (if you will) manifestation of a culture that believes realizing one’s own destiny is the apogee of freedom. Our national narrative privileges Thoreau’s prickly but soaring individualism over, say, Jane Addams’s progressive vision of collective service….

“Biss points out in On Immunity that data from the Centers for Disease Control, released in 2014, showed that unvaccinated children are more likely ‘to be white, to have an older married mother with a college education, and to live in a household with an income of $75,000 or more’. By contrast, under-vaccinated children – children who for various reasons are behind on their vaccinations – ‘are more likely to be black, to have a younger unmarried mother, to have moved across state lines, and to live in poverty’. Not vaccinating, in other words, moves risk from one group to another – and in this sense is another version of the exercising of inequality and privilege that contribute to national divisiveness in the first place. One has the sense from this data that the well-off believe the risks of illness don’t apply to them, and are willing to let it fall on others…

“Vaccination, like American politics, is polarized and polarizing. The irony is that it is through its pursuit of ultimate individualism – the exercising of the right not to follow recommendations – that it becomes a dangerous reminder that our bodies, like the body politic, are fatefully interconnected.”

“Midwestern Republicans Try to Kneecap New Democratic Governors,” Robillard and Levine, huffingtonpost.com https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/midwestern-republicans-try-to-kneecap-new-democratic- governors_us_5c05acebe4b0cd916faefc3e

Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America went Haywire, p. 3 “First President George W. Bush’s political mastermind Karl Rove introduced the remarkable phrase reality-based community. People ‘in the reality-based community,’ he told a reporter, ‘believe that

Page 72 of 91

solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore.’”

Carol Anderson, “Trump's regime is leading America in an insurrection,” theguardian.com “America is in the middle of an insurrection. Led this time by another rogue government, only this one is not ensconced in Montgomery or Richmond. The architects of rebellion are in the White House.”

“Dems Vow Quick Action to Bolster Voting Rights upon Taking Power,” Mike Lillis, thehill.com https://thehill.com/homenews/house/419187-dems-vow-quick-action-to-bolster-voting-rights-upon-taking-power

Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America went Haywire, p. 8 “Despite his nonstop lies and obvious fantasies—rather, because of them—Donald Trump was elected president. The old fringes have been folded into the new center. The irrational has become respectable and often unstoppable.”

“In Democrat’s First Bill, Theirs a Quiet Push to Make Public Campaign Finance a Reality,” Akela Lacy, theiintercept.com https://theintercept.com/2018/12/02/public-campaign-finance-hr1/

“Voting after Shelby: How a 2013 Supreme Court Ruling Shaped the 2018 Election,” Patrik Jonsson, monitor.com https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2018/1121/Voting-after-Shelby-How-a-2013-Supreme-Court-ruling- shaped-the-2018-election

Sophia Tesfaye, “After Mueller, White House Press Secretary Is Toast,” salon.com “It can come as no surprise that Sarah Sanders tells lies, it must still be pointed out that calling something ‘a slip of the tongue’ is not even admitting to a lie. She hasn’t quite admitted lying; she’s still lying about her lie. But still there is something weakly rewarding about having that corroborated by an impartial public servant and in black and white on a DOJ document. Spinning is to be expected, since being a press secretary is all about selling the administration’s position. Outright lying, however, breaks the public trust. Doing so from behind the White House podium is indefensible. Sanders should be held accountable for lying to the American people.

“As the official White House representative to the supposedly free press, Sanders alleges to deliver truthful information on the policies of the top elected official in the United States. A press secretary with no integrity shouldn’t have a platform. No reputable news outlet should host her. If she refuses to relinquish her position at the podium, every White House correspondent should ask Sanders, every time she makes a statement: ‘Why should we believe you when you’ve lied to us?’ or ‘Sarah, is this the truth or another slip of the tongue or another statement founded on nothing?’

“But Sanders knows as well as anyone that she will never face consequences for anything she’s ever done — or will ever do.”

Raman Menon, “Money Talks, Big Time: 1% Politics and the Scandals of A New Gilded Age, tomdispatch.com “Despair about the state of our politics pervades the political spectrum, from left to right. One source of it, the narrative of fairness offered in basic civics textbooks -- we all have an equal opportunity to succeed if we work hard and play by the rules; citizens can truly shape our politics -- no longer rings true to most Americans. Recent surveys indicate that substantial numbers of them believe that the economy and political system are both rigged. They also think that money has an outsized influence on politics. Ninety percent of Democrats hold this view, but so do 80% of Republicans. And careful studies confirm what the public believes.”

“What do Republicans have against High-turnout Elections? Everything,” John Nichols, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/voter-turnout-scott-walker/

Page 73 of 91

“’Textbook Voter Suppression:’ Georgia’s Bitter Election Battles Years in the Making,” Khushbu Shaw, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/10/georgia-election-recount-stacey-abrams-brian-kemp

Danny Sjursen, “Democrats Ignore a Progressive Foreign Policy at Their Peril,” truthdig.com “... thanks to decades upon decades of accumulating executive power in an increasingly imperial presidency, it is in foreign affairs that the commander-in-chief possesses near dictatorial power….

“Still, the vast majority of Americans don’t give a hoot about issues of war, peace, and international diplomacy. Why should they care? It’s not as though anything is asked of them as citizens. By cynically ditching the draft, Tricky Dick Nixon took the wind out of the sails of current and future antiwar movements, and permanently cleaved a gap between the U.S. people and their military. Mothers no longer lose sleep over their teenage sons serving their country and they – along with the rest of the family – quit caring about foreign policy.”

“A Threat to Democracy: Republicans’ War on Minority Voters,” Carol Anderson, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/31/a-threat-to-democracy-republicans-war-on-minority-voters

Peter Biskind, “How Pop Culture Primed Us for ‘Alternative Facts,’” theguardian.com “Lots of factors, of course, affect what we choose to believe. One is the power of power. The old saw tells us that ‘History belongs to the victors.’ Now we see that the victors lay claim to ‘reality’ as well as history. An unnamed official in the George W. Bush administration, widely believed to be Karl Rove, disparaged what he called the ‘reality-based community’ for its naïveté. He said, ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.’ Trump merely crossed out ‘empire’ and substituted his own name. When he acts, in other words, he creates his own reality.”

“Rigging the Vote: How the American Right is on the Way to Permanent Minority Rule,” Ian Samuel, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/04/america-minority-rule-voter-suppression- gerrymandering-supreme-court

“New ‘Dark Money’ Documentary Shines Light into the Shadows Cast by the Super-rich,” Jon Schwartz, theintercept.com https://theintercept.com/2018/10/01/new-dark-money-documentary-shines-light-into-the-shadows-cast-by-the-super- rich/

Area Mahdawi, “Beto O’Rourke raised $6.1m in a day – proof there’s too much money in US politics,” theguardian.com “On the one hand, all this fundraising is great. As far as I’m concerned, unseating Trump is priceless. On the other hand, it’s hard not to look at the enormous amounts being raised without feeling a little queasy. There is so much good this money could be doing, it feels like a colossal waste to have it go towards political campaigning; it seems a shame to be investing in rhetoric rather than real change. It also feels incredibly corrupt to have such obscene amounts of money influencing the election process….

“A lot of energy is being devoted to confronting the role of big money in the US elections, and it is cheering to see this crop of Democratic candidates focus on small individual donations rather than corporate funding. Nevertheless, money continues to have an outsized role in US politics and elections get more expensive every year. Candidate spending in the 2010 midterms was $3.6bn; in 2014 it was $3.8bn; in 2018 it was a massive $5.7bn.

“While elections grow more extravagant, the US grows increasingly unequal. One in every 10 kids in a New York City public school is homeless. Flint, Michigan, still doesn’t have clean drinking water. Medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy. We are constantly told that there isn’t enough money to fund social programs, such as universal healthcare or free education. But there always seems to be more money for elections.”

Page 74 of 91

“Billionaires Join Final Push over Michigan’s ‘Rigged’ Voting Map,” Tom McCarthy, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/30/michigan-gerrymandering-redistricting-voters-not-politicians

“We are Watching: Lawyers and Collars” (Video), sojourners.com https://sojo.net/media/we-are-watching-lawyers-collars

Ben Fountain, “Land of the free? How Trump has put America’s identity in peril,” theguardian.com “Some 20 months into his term Trump has been pretty much the president we expected: loud, boastful, bullying, reckless, ruder than the worst-bred minor royalty, tetchy as a wolverine in heat….

“The juggernaut that was launched off the down escalator at Trump Tower back in 2015 rolls on, strewing bodies and busted parts in its wake and one hell of a nasty stink….

“The country is caught in a kind of spell, which is a florid way of saying we’re in the throes of a dire psychological phenomenon whose precedent goes at least as far back as the Salem witch trials. Closer to our own time we can look to the mind magic of Senator Joe McCarthy, or more localized warlocks like Pappy O’Daniel of Texas, spellbinding demagogues whose stories call into question the premise of the entire democratic project. Do we really want to be free? Are we up to the job of exercising our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness with meaningful individual agency.

“Taking it as a given that ‘meaningful individual agency’ requires applying our brains, our experience, our memories, and requires as well making a sustained, good-faith effort to inform ourselves of our reality. This could be as profoundly simple and radical as going to the library every few weeks, checking out a couple of books on history, and reading them, as opposed to taking every post that Google and Facebook steer our way as the gospel truth. Not that books are sacrosanct by any means, but they’re quiet. They allow us the mental space to absorb, reflect, evaluate at our own pace. Learning essential stuff is as much a discipline as going to the gym or sticking to a diet, and an excellent antidote for the modern condition of being numb and dumb….

“We didn’t have to be corralled. Rare is the army or police force strong enough to force that. For it to happen we had to revert to the psychology of the serf who’s too brainwashed or lazy to conjure something better.”

“Republicans Wanted to Suppress the native American vote. It’s Working,” Julian Brave Noisecat. theguardian.com https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/republicans-wanted-to-suppress-the-native-american-vote-its-working/ar- BBOVOeY

“Data Suppression is the GOP’s Latest Anti-voter Tactic for the Midterms,” Steven Rosenfeld, truthdig.com https://www.truthdig.com/articles/data-suppression-is-the-gops-latest-anti-voter-tactic-for-the-midterms/

Branko Mercetic, “The Lives the Free Market Took,” jacobin.com “Tragedies happen every day around the world, whether by accident or other misfortune. But the Boeing plane crashes that have taken the lives of hundreds of unsuspecting travellers were not acts of God, but rather human-made….

“By Wednesday, at least forty-one countries grounded the planes due to safety concerns, with the United States and Canada practically the sole outliers. Justin Trudeau’s government finally relented on Wednesday morning, while the Trump administration continued to defy growing calls within the US, including from Republicans and labor unions, to do the same, reportedly after Trump took a call from Boeing’s chief executive assuring him the planes were safe. Increasingly isolated, the president eventually ordered the planes grounded later that day….

“These deaths were likely not some freak accident. Pilots complained at least five times to federal authorities last year about the model’s autopilot system, many warning that the planes suddenly tilted

Page 75 of 91

nose-down after take-off, which, based on the evidence recovered, appears to be what happened in the Ethiopian flight too. One pilot called the flight manual ‘inadequate and criminally insufficient.’ Another called the shoddy level of training pilots received to fly the planes ‘unconscionable.’ Yet until almost the last possible moment, the Federal Aviation Administration continued to argue that there were “no systemic performance issues” and “no basis to order grounding the aircraft.”

“...Boeing is not just a lobbying juggernaut that donates prodigiously to politicians all over the country; it’s also a company in which numerous members of Congress are personally invested, and it cultivates mutually beneficial financial relationships with top officials. Meanwhile, as William McGee of Consumer Reports told Amy Goodman, these issues are rooted in the FAA’s lax, business- friendly oversight of the very industry it’s meant to regulate, a case of regulatory capture that stretches back long before this administration.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson as found in Jon Meacham, The Soul of America, by Jon Meachum, p. 40 “What counts is not just the character of the individual at the top, but the character of the country—its inclinations and its aspirations, its customs and its thought… ‘The form of government which prevails,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, ‘is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it.’”

“Belief in Widespread Voter Fraud is even Worse than Q-Anon or Birtherism,” David Atkins, washingtonmonthly.com https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/10/20/belief-in-widespread-voter-fraud-is-even-worse-than--or- birtherism/

Hamilton, found in "The Soul of America,' Jon Meacham, p. 27 “The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind, as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of… a President of the United States.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge “In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.”

“Complaints over Voter Suppression Loom over Georgia Governor’s Race” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/us/politics/georgia-voter-registration-kemp-abrams.html

“The System is Rigged,” Jim Wallis, sojourners.com https://sojo.net/articles/system-rigged

Imani Perry, “Voter suppression carries slavery's three-fifths clause into the present,” theguardian.com “Our history is a trail of tears shrouded in myth. Barely an icon can be named without some vile commitments or deeds…. Madison knew slavery was bad, a stain upon the principle of liberty. So much so that the one bondsman he freed was the one he took to the constitutional convention. He was a 24-year-old man named Billey, who had been given to Madison when he was eight. Something happened between the two at the convention, in the midst of all that talk of freedom. Madison did not bring him back to Virginia. He said Billey was no longer fit to be among his fellow slaves because his mind was ‘too thoroughly tainted’. Billey had grown, according to Madison, to ‘covet liberty’. And while he couldn’t blame him, he couldn’t run the risk of his other chattel being infected with such hopes.”

Rebecca Gordon, “A Twenty-First-Century Incredibility Chasm: Life in the United States of Trump,” tomdispatch.com “Most of what we know, we learn not through personal experience, but because of the reports of other trusted human beings. I have never performed the double-slit experiment, but I know that electrons can behave both as particles and waves. I haven’t recorded ocean or air temperatures over the course

Page 76 of 91

of a century, yet I know that on average, the Earth’s air, land, and waters are growing dangerously warmer.

“It’s because so much of what we know depends on the truthfulness of others that the philosopher Immanuel Kant believed lying was always wrong. His reasoning was that when we lie to another person, we fail to respect her infinitely valuable capacity to encounter the world and think about the moral choices she’ll make in it. By refusing to tell her the truth, we treat her not as a person, but as an instrument -- a tool to get something we want. We treat her like a thing….

“However, I am certain of one thing: that truth-telling is the bedrock of democracy. When we routinely assume that our fellow citizens and government officials are lying, it becomes impossible to work together to determine how our neighborhoods, our cities, or our country should function. When we abandon the effort to figure out what is true, we cede the field to anti-democratic leaders who derive their ‘just powers’ not ‘from the consent of the governed’ but from the acquiescence of the willingly deceived.”

“On the Rehabilitation of George W. Bush,” Rebecca Gordan, tomdispatch.com http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176354/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_the_annals_of_rehabilitation/

“Why are so Few U.S. Politicians from the Working Class,” Nicholas Carnes, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2018/oct/04/few-us-politicians-working-class

Nicholas Carns, “Why are so few US politicians from the working class? Theguardian.com “Contrary to the cherished ideal of a government of and by the people, Americans are almost always governed by the very privileged.

“The president is the billionaire head of a global business empire. His cabinet is mostly millionaires. Most members of Congress are millionaires. Most supreme court justices are millionaires. Millionaires make up less than 3% of the general public, but have unified majority control of all three branches of the federal government. Working-class Americans, on the other hand, make up about half of the country. But they have never held more than 2% of the seats in any Congress since the nation was founded….

“In confidential surveys of state legislators, leaders from the working class in both parties are 20 to 50 percentage points more likely to support policies such as social welfare programs, regulation of the private sector, government-backed healthcare and efforts to reduce economic inequality….

“These differences, coupled with the virtual absence of working-class people in our political institutions, ultimately have enormous consequences for public policy. States with fewer legislators from the working class spend billions less on social welfare each year, offer less generous unemployment benefits and tax corporations at lower rates.

“The Cruelty is the Point,” Adam Serwer, theatlantic.com https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/

“America’s New Aristocracy Lives in an Accountability-free Zone,” David Sirota, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/05/americas-new-aristocracy-live-accountability-free-zone- david-sirota

Charles P. Pierce, “There Is No More Loathsome Creature Walking Our Political Landscape Than Mitch McConnell,” esquire.com “There simply is no more loathsome creature walking the political landscape than the Majority Leader of the . You have to go back to McCarthy or McCarran to find a Senate leader who did so much damage to democratic norms and principles than this yokel from Kentucky.

Page 77 of 91

Trump is bad enough, but he's just a jumped-up real-estate crook who's in over his head. McConnell is a career politician who knows full well what he's doing to democratic government and is doing it anyway because it gives him power, and it gives the rest of us a wingnut federal judiciary for the next 30 years. There is nothing that this president can do that threatens McConnell's power as much as it threatens the survival of the republic, and that's where we are….

“Most noxiously, in reference to our present moment, when Obama came to him and asked him to present a united front against the Russian ratfcking that was enabling El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago, McConnell turned him down, flat. Moreover, he told Obama that, if Obama went public, McConnell would use it as a political hammer on Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Obama should have done it anyway, god knows.) McConnell issued a watery denial of these charges, but there's no good goddamn reason to believe him.

“He doesn't have the essential patriotism god gave a snail. He pledges allegiance to his donors, and they get what they want. He's selling out his country, and he's doing it in real-time and out in the open. This is worse than McCarthy or McCarran ever were. Mitch McConnell is the the thief of the nation's soul.”

“The Banality of Brett Kavanaugh,” Meagan Day, jacobinmag.com https://jacobinmag.com/2018/09/brett-kavanaugh-banality-elites-meritocracy

“Thousands at Risk from Rightwing Push to Purge Eligible Voters from U.S. Rolls,” Ed Pilkington, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/23/voters-purges-elections-rolls-americans-pilf

Michael H Fuchs, “Forget the 'border crisis' – it is Trump's shutdown that's made us less safe,” theguardian.com “The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been forced to furlough roughly 5,000 people including special agents, intelligence analysts and attorneys, according to Tom O’Connor, a special agent and president of the FBI Agents Association. While the exact duties of these furloughed employees are unclear, this many people not working could be affecting any range of critical FBI functions from fighting terrorism to organized crime.

“As of early January, 42% of US-based state department personnel and 26% of state’s personnel abroad had been furloughed, with the department making clear to foreign interlocutors that it is closed for business. With furloughed staff, American efforts to stop countries from trying to sell weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or terrorists from attacking America could be hindered. Diplomats not allowed to come to work are diplomats that are not working with allies to defeat Isis or support efforts to strengthen security in Central America – efforts that might actually be effective in reducing the need for refugees and migrants to flee to the United States. While state is calling back employees for a short period of paid work, weeks of damage already done and an uncertain future continue to create dangers.

“In all of the agencies affected by the shutdown there are national security functions being hit hard, with cyber-security being one of the most vulnerable. Repeated breaches of US systems over the years have made clear the regular stream of attacks against US government systems and that strong and vigilant cybersecurity efforts are essential to protecting everything the US government does. CNBC reported that “close to half of the employees within the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) – which works to help secure the nation’s critical infrastructure industries like banking, water, energy and nuclear – are furloughed”. With IT and cybersecurity professionals furloughed across the government, critical functions are being ignored. As one furloughed government IT professional put it: ‘We’ve never tested the limits like this before and I don’t know if they’re equipped to handle it.’”

Page 78 of 91

Rebecca Gordon, “A Twenty-First-Century Incredibility Chasm: Life in the United States of Trump,” tomdispatch.com “A Bush aide (later identified as key adviser Karl Rove) similarly disparaged evidence-based reality, though in his case by favoring facts created not through faith but power. As he so resonantly explained to those stuck ‘in what we call the reality-based community’:

"‘That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”

“Sure, Impeach Kavanaugh. But Don’t Stop there,” David Klion, buzzfeed.com https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/davidklion/impeach-kavanaugh-but-dont-stop-there

“Trump’s Majority is fake,” Juan Williams, thehill.com http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/404720-juan-williams-trumps-majority-is-fake

Stephen Colbert as found in Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America went Haywire, p. 3-4 “‘Truthiness,’ he said.

“Now I’m sure some of the ‘word police,’ the ‘wordinistas’ over at Webster’s, are gonna say, ‘Hey, that’s not a word!’ Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true. Or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books—they’re all fact, no heart…. Face it, folks, we are a divided nation… divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart…. Because that’s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen—the gut.”

Adam Joyce, “Civility Policing Obscures Our Political Reality, sojo.com “Today, civility policing is just one more layer of rhetorical fog which obscures the truth of our political reality ─ how poverty and cruelty are manufactured and sustained by the policy regime of America’s ruling class. In reality, the Trump tax cut is uncivil, the American support of Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen is uncivil, the prison-industrial complex is uncivil, ripping families apart at the border is uncivil.”

“The Ultra-rich who Cashed in on GOP Tax Cuts are Paying Republicans Back,” Harry Cheadle, vice.com https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3q88z/the-ultra-rich-who-cashed-in-on-gop-tax-cuts-are-paying-republicans- back

Carol Anderson, “What is America going to do about its Trump problem in 2019?” theguardian.com “Impeachment will not be sufficient. Nor will a deal where Trump simply resigns and hands over the reins to Vice-President , who was handpicked by now-convicted felon Paul Manafort (guilty of conspiracy against the United States), and, who, as head of the transition team, overlooked the numerous warnings about Michael Flynn as a national security risk.

“The problem, frankly, isn’t simply Donald Trump. He has been aided by a coterie of enablers, who have exploited the fissures, flaws, norms and loopholes in American democracy that allowed the unscrupulous to prosper at the expense of the people and the nation itself.

“Removing Trump, while essential, will not fully address the work that needs to be done. Instead, it is going to take an effort akin to Hercules cleaning out the Augean stables to repair, rebuild and strengthen America.”

“Protecting the Vote in the Name of Faith,” Adam Taylor, sojourners.com

Page 79 of 91

https://sojo.net/articles/protecting-vote-name-faith

“Facebook has Detected a Coordinated Effort to Influence U.S. Politics ahead of 2018 Midterm Elections,” Price and Leswing, bussinesinsider.com https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-coordinated-effort-influence-2018-us-midterm-elections-2018-7

Paul Street, “Creeping Fascism No Problem for Trump’s Durable Base,” truthdig.com “The tyrant’s narcissism is the main attractor to his followers, who project their hopes and dreams. The more grandiose his own sense of self and his promises to his fans, the greater their attraction and the stronger their support. … Through the process of identification, the tyrant’s followers absorb his omnipotence and glory and imagine themselves winners in the game of life. This identification heals the followers’ narcissistic wounds, but also tends to shut down their reason and conscience.”

“The American Sea of Deception,” Paul Street, truthdig.com https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-american-sea-of-deception/

“American Democracy is in Crisis, and not just because of Trump,” Simon Tisdall, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/07/american-democracy-crisis-trump-supreme-court

“Trump’s Allies Struggle to Stop QAnon’s Spread,” Will Sommer, thedailybeast.com https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-biggest-media-fans-struggle-to-stop-qanons-spread

George Zornick, “Democrats Must Slam the Revolving Door Shut,” George Zornick, thenation.com “On Friday, House Democrats introduced legislation took a first step towards halting the revolving door between Congress and the influence industry. House Resolution 1, dubbed the ‘For the People Act,’ is a massive anti-corruption package that aims to expand voting rights, reform campaign finance, and make it harder for people to walk out of Congress or the executive branch and into a lucrative lobbying job….

“HR 1 is arguably the most important anti-corruption legislation introduced in Washington in a generation, though it takes the most timid steps in the areas of the revolving door. It does do several important things: The legislation would outlaw the incentive, “golden parachute” payments from corporations to employees who are leaving to enter a government job. It also implements a two-year ban on federal procurement officers and prevents senior federal officials from taking influence- industry jobs after leaving public service….

“Current lobbyists would also be banned from taking government jobs for two years after their lobbying work ends—or six years if they were a corporate lobbyist. The revolving door certainly swings in both directions.”

“Trump Approvingly Tweets Video of his Rally Crowd Harassing a Journalist,” Zach Beauchamp, vox.com https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/1/17639110/trump-tampa-rally--jim-acosta

“American Society would Collapse if it weren’t for these 8 Myths,” Lee Camp, truthdig.com https://www.truthdig.com/articles/american-society-would-collapse-if-it-werent-for-these-8-myths/

Robert Reich, “Democrats are hunting big game – did big money already bag them?” theguardian.com “But they [Democrats] will do little to slow or reverse the growing imbalance of wealth and power in this country, unless they are pushed to do so.

“Do not ever underestimate the influence of Wall Street Democrats, corporate Democrats, and the Democrats’ biggest funders. I know. I’ve been there.

Page 80 of 91

“In the 2018 midterms, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, big business made more contributions to Democrats than to Republicans. The shift was particularly noticeable on Wall Street. Not since 2008 have donors in the securities and investment industry given a higher percentage

“The moneyed interests in the Democratic party are in favor of helping America’s poor and of reversing climate change – two positions that sharply distinguish them from the moneyed interests in the Republican party.

“But the Democrats’ moneyed interests don’t want more powerful labor unions. They are not in favor of stronger antitrust enforcement against large corporations. They resist firmer regulation of Wall Street. They are unlikely to want to repeal the Trump-Republican tax cut for big corporations and the wealthy….

“We should support Pelosi and the Democrats when they need our support to do the right things. We also need to push them when they need pushing. And we must fight them when they begin to cave.

“We must be unwavering in our commitment to strengthening our democracy and creating an economy that works for all, not just the privileged few. Addressing these issues requires a bold agenda.”

Mike Lilli, “Democrats launch ‘drain-the-swamp’ agenda” thehill.com “The package features dozens of proposals, grouped broadly into three categories: limiting the influence of money in politics, making it easier to vote, and adopting tougher ethics rules for Washington policymakers….

“On the campaign finance side, the legislation would not cap political spending, but would require political organizations to reveal their large donors. The provision is a response to a 2010 Supreme Court decision allowing unrestricted and anonymous campaign spending by corporations and unions.

“The package has provisions to encourage more people to vote by eliminating some of the tough voting requirements adopted by certain states since a 2013 Supreme Court decision gutted central protections of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“It would establish an automatic system of voter registration across the country, for instance, while empowering felons with voting rights nationwide….

“The legislation also takes steps to rein in partisan gerrymandering — the state-based process of drawing district lines to the benefit of one party or the other. The Democrats’ reform package would require states to create independent commissions charged with establishing district lines, thereby taking the task from the hands of partisan lawmakers.”

“If Trump is Lying, Rep. Darrell Issa Says, that’s just what Business Men do,” Alan Pyke, thinkprogress.org https://thinkprogress.org/if-trump-lied-rep-darrell-issa-says-thats-just-what-businessmen-do-c0e6d7d46b70/

“The Republican Congress isn’t even Pretending to do its Job,” Edward Burmilla, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/republican-congress-isnt-even-pretending-job/

Tom Perkins, “Did pro-Israel lobby funding influence Democrats' responses to Ilhan Omar?,” theguardian.com “When the Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar claimed pro-Israel lobby money influenced American politics, in the way other powerful lobbying groups do, she ignited allegations of and sparked a furious debate in her own party. But a look at House Democrats and 2020 presidential candidates’ responses to the resulting row seems to validate her claim.

Page 81 of 91

“House Democratic leaders who drafted a resolution initially aimed at condemning Omar’s remarks received millions from the pro-Israel lobby throughout their congressional careers. Congressman Eliot Engel, who accused Omar of using ‘a vile antisemitic slur’, has taken about $1.07m throughout his career, or about $107,000 per election…

“Similarly, federal election records available on the Center for Responsive Politics’ OpenSecrets website suggest a correlation between pro-Israel lobby campaign contributions and Democratic presidential candidates’ position on the controversy.

“Those candidates who have taken little money from the lobby defended Omar, while those who received the most money criticized her, or were quiet on the issue….

“In a statement, Sanders wrote he fears ‘that what’s going on in the House now is an effort to target Congresswoman Omar as a way of stifling that debate [about Israel policy]’, while Warren said ‘branding criticism of Israel as automatically antisemitic has a chilling effect on our public discourse’....

“‘Being opposed to [Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and the occupation is not the sme as being antisemitic. I am grateful to the many Jewish allies who have spoken out and said the same,’ Omar wrote on Twitter.

“The party’s younger, more progressive wing also came to Omar’s defense, exposing an ideological rift. They also argued that it isn’t antisemitic to question the pro-Israel lobby’s influence.”

“Experts Explain Why Trump Loyalists Refuse to Accept that their Idol is Compromised,” Matthew Rosza, salon.com https://www.salon.com/2018/07/20/experts-explain-why-trump-loyalists-refuse-to-accept-that-their-idol-is- compromised/

“Revisiting Jimmy Carter’s Truth-telling Sermon to Americans,” David Swartz, theconversation.com https://theconversation.com/revisiting-jimmy-carters-truth-telling-sermon-to-americans-97241

Patricia J. Williams, “We Have Entered A Dangerous Moral Universe,” thenation.com “A friend of mine has a new habit of sighing, ‘I’m so glad I’m not 10 years old.’ It’s an interesting way to express her pessimism: by personifying her angst in the figure of a child. She’s worried about the encroaching climate devastation, the current administration’s relentless denialism of reproducible fact,

“I try to resist giving in to dark imaginings, but I share her dread. I don’t know what to do; I am sometimes unable to trust even my own senses. One of the peculiar responses to the proliferation of plundered forests, rising seas, authoritarianism, trolls, bots, dark money, and the politics of what The Washington Post has engagingly labeled ‘bottomless Pinocchios’ is that there are moments when I feel as though I’m dreaming. I don’t trust anything….

“I had just heard about the death of Jakelin Caal Maquin, a 7-year-old Mayan girl who was fleeing Guatemala with her father, and who died while in the custody of the US Border Patrol. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen expressed sympathy over Jakelin’s death, but faulted her family. ‘This family chose to cross illegally,’ Nielsen said on Fox and Friends.

“The language of consumption preference is a semantic tic in the Trump administration, with agency heads styling unspeakable cruelty as a ‘disincentive’ for those who ‘choose’ to flee life-threatening conditions. ‘Choice’ imputes blame; it shifts the burden of responsibility and effectively criminalizes the process of asylum-seeking.

Page 82 of 91

“We have entered a dangerous moral universe.”

Rebecca Solnit, “The Trump era won't last for ever. But we must do our part to end it,” theguardian.com “I believe Trump came to power because people were indifferent and inattentive.

“Quite a lot of people are now neither. If they were dozing, they are now wide-awake; if they were indifferent, they are now passionately engaged. In organizing, in working on electoral campaigns, in standing up for what they believe in. Millions of people have found that justice and truth and human rights are key to their own lives, even when they themselves are not directly menaced; millions have found that they care passionately about public life and public institutions; millions have stood up to make this an era that is truly unprecedented in the level of activism…”

“Jamie Raskin just Delivered a Devastating Take Down of GOP Hypocrisy,” John Nickols, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/jamie-raskin-just-delivered-devastating-takedown-gop-hypocrisy/

“I was a Real Republican, Before the ‘Wingnuts’ Took over my Party,” Mark P. Painter, clarionledger.com https://www.clarionledger.com/story/opinion/columnists/2018/07/13/real-republican-before-wingnuts-took-over- my-party/783167002/

“Winning is not Enough,” Paul Glastiris, washingtonmonthly.com https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/july-august-2018/winning-is-not-enough/

Michael H Fuchs, “In Trump's America, it's important to remember: this isn't normal,” theguardian.com “In the age of President Donald Trump, it is necessary to repeat this mantra constantly. The ways in which Trump breaks norms and shocks the conscience overwhelm America’s capacity to process each event with the appropriate level of outrage and accountability. America’s attention too often moves from one story to the next like sports highlights. Slowly, surely, America’s norms are stripped away….

“The breakdown of norms at home undermines democracy. The breakdown of norms in foreign affairs undermines American security. That is why Americans must continue to remind themselves that what they are seeing right now is not normal and hold Trump to account with vigorous congressional oversight and vocal public pushback.”

“America’s New Revolutionaries Show how the Left can Win,” George Monbiot, theguardian.com https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/america-e2-80-99s-new-revolutionaries-show-how-the-left-can-win/ar- AAzUjDd

“Hey Democrats, Fighting Fair is for Suckers,” Rob Goodman, politico.com https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/07/04/democrats-majority-rules-norms-trump-2020-218947

Tom Perkins, “Flint water crisis: hope for justice as top Democrat vows to review investigation,” theguardian.com “New Democratic leadership in the investigation into the Flint water crisis has sparked hope among activists that a tougher line will be taken on prosecuting officials and compensating victims of the environmental disaster….

“But critics say there’s been little accountability when Republicans headed the investigation and its targets have been let off lightly. None of the crisis’s perpetrators have paid a fine or served a day in jail for poisoning the city’s water or the subsequent cover-up. Likewise, the state isn’t paying reparations for the deaths or health problems resulting from Flint’s lead-tainted water…..

“Though Schuette’s special prosecutor, Todd Flood, initially charged suspects with felonies like

Page 83 of 91

involuntary manslaughter and false pretenses, he ended up negotiating seven plea deals for misdemeanors as minor as “disturbing the peace at a public meeting”.

“At the same time, Schuette spent over $25m in taxpayer money on legal fees, some of which funded the state’s fights against the civil lawsuits seeking compensation.”

“What are We Doing with our Freedom,” Joe Kay, sojourners.com https://sojo.net/articles/what-are-we-doing-our-freedom

“The Right Abandoned Civility a Long Time Ago,” Katha Pollitgt, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/right-abandoned-civility-long-time-ago/

Greg Olear, “Boy Plunder: The Many Crimes of Jared Kushner,” medium.com “‘For all we know, Jared Kushner is the greatest threat to national security since Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Certainly he should be viewed as such until we know for sure.’

“It’s now 18 months later, and it seems certain that Kushner is among the most corrupt and seditious figures ever to work in the White House. The son-in-law and top adviser to the president, the de facto U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia and would-be Middle East peacemaker, is no patriot. To the contrary, Kushner has shown nothing but contempt for the United States: violating its laws, lying to its law enforcement officials, and (possibly) selling its state policy for his own personal enrichment.

“Despite criminal activity breathtaking in both scope and audacity, Kushner tends to receive preferential treatment from the media, like he’s royalty or a popular celebrity and not one of the most dangerous criminals in American history.”

Patrick jonsson, “Voting after Shelby: How a 2013 Supreme Court ruling shaped the 2018 election,” csmonitor.com “‘The sorts of practices that we saw in Georgia conjure up the ghost of Jim Crow,’ says Daniel Tokaji, professor of law at The Ohio State University and author of ‘Election Law in a Nutshell.’ ‘And I don’t mean just for political junkies, but for ordinary people. They look at what happened in Georgia this past election and it is alarmingly familiar’….

“…in 2013, in a case called Shelby County v. Holder, the US Supreme Court took a decisive new stance on voting rights, steering away from former Justice Thurgood Marshall’s idea of the court as an ensurer of racial equity under the law. The high court’s decision repealed a Voting Rights Act mandate that required jurisdictions where voter suppression has occurred in the past to pre-clear voting changes with the Department of Justice.

“Within days, states, primarily led by Republicans, began passing new restrictions that would have previously fallen under Supreme Court oversight. In Georgia, Shelby appears to have prompted an escalation in the removal of voter registrations. According to the Brennan Center For Justice, the state purged 1.5 million voters between the 2012 and 2016 elections, double the number removed between 2008 and 2012. This past July, more than half a million voters were removed from Georgia’s rolls. In June, the Supreme Court upheld a similar purge in Ohio.

“Since 2012, Georgia has closed 214 precincts, leaving one-third of counties in the state with fewer precincts than they had before the Shelby decision.”

Keith Kahn-Harris, “‘White Supremacy’ Is Really about White Degeneracy,” theguardian.com “Consider the contrast between Barack Obama and Trump. Obama is not a perfect human being, nor was he a perfect US president. But it’s impossible to deny his qualities. He is intelligent, competent, witty, plain-speaking, empathetic and has a loving relationship with his family. Obama is also a man

Page 84 of 91

who was not born into wealth and power, and worked hard to make something of his life. Trump is the reverse: incompetent, mendacious, rude and seemingly incapable of non-instrumental relationships. The only way he has made anything of his life is through being born into privilege, with sufficient reserves of family capital to allow him to build a ‘business’ based on little more than bragging.

“Aside from his politics, Trump is simply a man who falls short of any moral code you could care to imagine. Politicians are often cynical, cruel or corrupt, but a complete absence of human decency is rare….

“But for millions of Americans to choose Trump and to continue to support him cannot simply be dismissed as voters “holding their noses” and selecting the individual who could best forward their agenda, regardless of his personal qualities. For a significant proportion of his supporters, it was a deliberate choice for moral degeneracy, even a celebration of it. It is also a reproach to the Obama years and to Obama personally. A bad white man will always be better than a good black man, regardless of the political platforms they support.”

“Cut the Charade and Crown the President,” Markos Kouralakas, Washingtonmontly.com https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/06/28/cut-the-charade-and-crown-the-president/

“Against Civillity,” Sarah Leonard, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/against-civility/

Lee McIntyre, “Lies, damn lies and post-truth,” theconversation.com “I recently wrote a book, titled ‘’ about what happens when ‘alternative facts’ replace actual facts, and feelings have more weight than evidence. Looked at from this perspective, calling Trump a liar fails to capture his key strategic purpose.

“Any amateur politician can engage in lying. Trump is engaging in ‘post-truth.’

“The Oxford English Dictionaries named ‘post-truth’ its word of the year in November 2016, right before the U.S. election.

Citing a 2,000 percent spike in usage – due to Brexit and the American presidential campaign – they defined post-truth as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’

“Ideology, in other words, takes precedence over reality….

“Consider the example of Trump’s recent decision not to cancel two political rallies on the same day as the Pittsburgh massacre. He said that this was based on the fact that the New York Stock Exchange was open the day after 9/11.

“This isn’t true. The stock exchange stayed closed for six days after 9/11.

“So was this a mistake? A lie? Trump didn’t seem to treat it so. In fact, he repeated the falsehood later in the same day.

“When a politician gets caught in a lie, there’s usually a bit of sweat, perhaps some shame and the expectation of consequences.

Page 85 of 91

“Not for Trump. After many commentators pointed out to him that the stock exchange was in fact closed for several days after 9/11, he merely shrugged it off, never bothering to acknowledge – let alone correct – his error.”

“When the White House Can’t be Believed,” David Folkenflik, npr.org https://www.npr.org/2018/06/20/621876079/when-the-white-house-cant-be-believed

“Ohio’s Junk Mail Trick Led the Supreme Court to Approve Jim Crow Voter Purge,” Greg Palast, truthout.org https://truthout.org/articles/ohios-junk-mail-trick-led-the-supreme-court-to-approve-jim-crow-vote-purge/

“Artificial Persons: The Long Road to Citizens United,” David Cole, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/artificial-persons/

Mike Lillis, “Dems vow quick action to bolster voting rights upon taking power,” thehill.com “The goal, Pelosi said, is ‘to reduce the role of money [and] advance fair elections, and one part of that is having the Voting Rights Act early on the agenda’….

“Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.), who has sponsored legislation to restore voting protections lost when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, said the issue will be ‘our first order of business’ in the next Congress….

“In Georgia, a group backing Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams sued the state this week, alleging the elections were rigged to disenfranchise black and other minority voters. In North Carolina, officials are investigating allegations of a fraud scheme targeting Democratic voters. Several of the complaints, in that ongoing probe, came from African American seniors….

“The issue resurfaced in September, when the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, a bipartisan panel, issued a damning report finding that minority voter protections in certain parts of the country were severely weakened by the Supreme Court’s decision. The group urged Congress to intervene.”

“Can America Ever Be,” Lindsey Paris-Lopez, sojo.net https://sojo.net/articles/can-america-ever-be

Aida Chevez, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Leads Opposition to Coal Puppet Joe Manchin for Top Senate Energy Slot,” theintercept.com “Incoming Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is troubled by the prospect of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a staunch ally of the fossil fuel industry, becoming the top Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

“‘I have concerns, and that’s why I say that our issues are not just left and right, but that they’re top and down,’ Ocasio-Cortez said at a Friday press conference held outside the Capitol. ‘I have concerns over the senator’s chairmanship just because I do not believe that we should be financed by the industries that we are supposed to be legislating and regulating and touching with our legislation.’

“Ocasio-Cortez added that the vast majority of Americans agree that lawmakers should not be taking money from the industries they regulate, and the fact that they continue to do so contributes to the disconnect between everyday people and Washington. ‘But in D.C., that’s a controversial opinion,’ she said.

“‘I don’t believe it’s just a party issue. It’s really about an issue of independence, it’s really about an issue of objectivity in our legislation,’ she continued.”

Jacob, Bacharach, “The Egregious Lie Americans Tell Themselves,” truthdig.com

Page 86 of 91

“There’s a verbal tic particular to a certain kind of response to a certain kind of story about the thinness and desperation of American society; about the person who died of preventable illness or the Kickstarter campaign to help another who can’t afford cancer treatment even with “good” insurance; about the plight of the homeless or the lack of resources for the rural poor; about underpaid teachers spending thousands of dollars of their own money for the most basic classroom supplies; about train derailments, the ruination of the New York subway system and the decrepit states of our airports and ports of entry.

“‘I can’t believe in the richest country in the world. …’

“This is the expression of incredulity and dismay that precedes some story about the fundamental impoverishment of American life, the fact that the lived, built geography of existence here is so frequently wanting, that the most basic social amenities are at once grossly overpriced and terribly underwhelming, that normal people (most especially the poor and working class) must navigate labyrinths of bureaucracy for the simplest public services, about our extraordinary social and political paralysis in the face of problems whose solutions seem to any reasonable person self-evident and relatively straightforward.”

“Needed now: A Real and Radical Left,” Paul Street, truthdig.com https://www.truthdig.com/articles/needed-now-a-real-and-radical-left/

“’A Triumph of Collective Narcissism:’ How Trump Unleashed Forbidden Desires,” Chauncey Devega, salon.com https://www.salon.com/2018/04/02/a-triumph-of-collective-narcissism-how-trump-unleashed-forbidden-desires/

Mike Lofgren, Deep State, Chapter 2 “In January 2014, toxic chemicals spilled into the Elk River in West Virginia, contaminating the drinking water of a nine-county area surrounding the state capital and forcing residents to drink bottled water for two months. It was found that the leaking storage tanks had not been inspected by a government agency for fifteen years, and, as it turned out, the law did not require them to be inspected, even though they lay near the river, upstream of the intakes of a drinking water filtration plant.”

Sonali Kolhatkar, “The GOP’s Plot to Destroy our Democracy is Coming into View,” truthdig.com “…Wisconsin’s political landscape looks extremely skewed. Bottari explained, “Democrats swept in this election,” winning the governorship, as well as the lieutenant governor, treasury secretary, secretary of state, and attorney general posts, and all the major positions that voters choose statewide. And yet in legislative races, the Democratic Party gained only one seat. According to Bottari, this is because “Our legislature is the most gerrymandered in the nation”….

“So the midterm elections took place with the skewed district maps in place—and the GOP clearly benefited. Republican state Assembly members won only about 46 percent of all votes on Nov. 6 but took 64 percent of all seats. What this means for the series of bills passed this week is that Republican lawmakers—the least democratically representative elected officials in the state—used their ill-gotten political power to disempower the most democratically representative politicians”….

“When voters are fully engaged in a healthy manner in their democracy, it should not surprise us that they may not choose Republicans—members of a party that has vociferously championed corporate personhood over ordinary people, the rights of fetuses over living babies and mothers, the profits of CEOs over workers and unions, the violence of guns over unarmed civilians and so on. What is happening in Wisconsin symbolizes the latest tactics of a party that has set itself up for minority rule at the expense of democracy.”

Jon Meacham, The Soul of America, Chapter 2, p. 53

Page 87 of 91

Our history and our politics even now are unintelligible without first appreciating the roots of white Southern discontent about the verdict of the Civil War.”

“Rudy Giuliani Admits ‘Spygate’ is Trump PR Tactic against Robert Mueller,” Tom McCarthy, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/27/rudy-giuliani-spygate-robert-mueller-donald-trump

“Political Corruption is Ruing Everything, but We can Fix it,” David Dayen, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/political-corruption-is-ruining-everything-but-we-can-fix-it/

“Senator Warren Grills Mulvaney on Trading Access for Campaign Cash,” Rebekah Entralgo, thinkprogress.com https://thinkprogress.org/warren-confronts-mulvaney-on-lobbyist-meetings-5e52fef49d1b/

John Nichols, “Michigan Republicans Opt for full-on Corruption, thenation.com “As in Wisconsin, where Democrats won every statewide constitutional office for the first time since 1982, Michigan Democrats won the offices of governor, attorney general, and secretary of state for the first time since 1986. As in Wisconsin, Michigan Republicans continue to control a gerrymandered state legislature. And, as in Wisconsin, Michigan Republicans are—in the words of The Detroit News—advancing ‘a slew of lame-duck power play proposals’ to strip powers away from the governor and the attorney general and thwart the will of the people….

“During the 2018 campaign, Benson identified the protection of voting rights and promotion of transparency as top priorities. She ran on a promise to ‘champion reforms that will shine a light on the secret money flowing into the state’s election process and requiring instant disclosure of all political and lobbying money.’

“‘Disclosure is the best way to limit the corrupting influence of money in politics. Citizens have a right to know who is funding candidates for elected office and who is bankrolling the advertisements they see on television,’ declared Benson, whose campaign announced that her goal was ‘to make Michigan one of the best states in the nation when it comes to transparency and accountability.’

“That was a winning message. Voters chose Benson over her Republican rival by a 53-44 margin. The first Democrat elected to the post since 1990, she comes with a clear mandate. Yet, Republicans are rejecting that mandate with a scheme to collapse oversight of campaign finance issues into a so- called ‘fair political practices commission,’ which would replicate the mess that exists at the national level with the Federal Election Commission—where partisan deadlocks have rendered the agency dysfunctional.”

“Is Trump Draining the Swamp—or is the Water Rising?” Linda Feldman, csmonitor.com https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2018/0406/Is-Trump-draining-the-swamp-or-is-the-water-rising

“USDA Secretary Accused of Siding with Industry over Science in New Report,” Jessica Glenza, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/04/usda-sonny-perdue-siding-industry-over-science-report- concerned-scientists

Chris Hedges, “Empire of Illusion,” Chapter 1 “In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion. We ask to be indulged and comforted by clichés, stereotypes, and inspiratonal messages that tell us we can be whoever we seek to be, that we live in the greatest country on earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities, and that our future will always be glorious and prosperous, either because of our own attributes or our national character or because we are blessed by God.”

“A Triumph of Collective Narcissism: How Trump Unleashed

Page 88 of 91

Forbidden Desires” Chauncey Devega salon.com https://www.salon.com/2018/04/02/a-triumph-of-collective-narcissism-how-trump-unleashed-forbidden-desires/

“John Bolton and Gena Haspel are the Consequences of our Failure to Reckon with the Bush Years,” Joshua Keating, slate.com https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/03/john-bolton-and-gina-haspel-are-the-consequences-of-our-failure-to- reckon-with-the-bush-years.html

“What Happens after the Progressive Revolution comes to a City like Durham,” Barry Yeoman, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/what-happens-after-the-progressive-revolution-comes-to-a-city-like-durham/

“We’re Witnessingn a War on Public Life. This is the Cost,” E.J. Dionne, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/were-witnessing-a-war-on-public-life-this-is-the- cost/2018/03/04/ddc94790-1e5f-11e8-9de1-147dd2df3829_story.html?utm_term=.407de0b6a118

“Could it Happen here? Donald Trump, Tony Judt, and the Future of American Democracy,” David Cole, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/could-it-happen-here-donald-trump-tony-judt-and-the-future-of-american- democracy/

“Freakout-onomics: Trump and Republicans Making every Bad Economic Choice Possible,” Jill Lawrence, usatoday.com https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/03/05/trump-tariff-trade-immigration-debt-republicans-both-wrong- side-jill-lawrence-column/393355002/

“The Counterrevolution: Governing our New Internal Enemies,” Bernard E. Harcourt, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/the-counterrevolution-governing-our-new-internal-enemies/

“Congress Investigates Ben Carson’s Housing Department over Staffing Claims,” Jon Swaine, thegurardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/28/ben-carson-housing-department-furniture-inquiry

“It’s Getting Harder to Prosecute Politicians for Corruption,” Peter J. Henning, theconversation.com https://theconversation.com/its-getting-harder-to-prosecute-politicians-for-corruption-91609

“Fox News is Driving us to a Constitutional Crisis,” Kurt Bardella, huffingtonpost.com https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-bardella-fox-news_us_5a7498e9e4b0905433b3d0a7

“Swamp Watch: Trump’s Top Banking Regulator Heads Back to his Wall Street Clients,” David Dayen, theintercept.com https://theintercept.com/2018/01/09/keith-noreika-occ-trump-simpson-thacher/

“Putting the Voters in Charge of Fair Elections,” Tina Rosenberg, nytimes.com https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/opinion/michigan-gerrymandering-fair-voting.html

“The Norwegian Menace,” Ann Jones, tomgram.com http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176376/tomgram%3A_ann_jones%2C_beware_the_viking_hordes/#more

“Martin Luther King’s Call to ‘Give us the Ballot’ is as Relevant Today as it was in 1957,” Arnwine and Nichols, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/martin-luther-kings-call-to-give-us-the-ballot-is-as-relevant-today-as-it-was-in- 1957/

“ Wants to Know why a Banned Banker is a Senior Adviser at the EPA,” Aharon Lerner, theintercept.com https://theintercept.com/2018/01/18/elizabeth-warren-albert-kelly-epa/

“CIA Rendition Flights from Rustic North Carolina Called to Account by Citizens,” Larry Siems, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/17/cia-rendition-flights-north-carolina-citizens-commission

Page 89 of 91

“American Democracy could be at Risk in the 2018 Elections,” Allan J. Lichtman, vice.com https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbyejx/american-democracy-could-be-at-risk-in-the-2018-elections

“Trump’s Lies are not the Problem. It’s the Millions who Swallow them who really Matter,” Nick Cohen, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/05/donald-trump-lies-belief-totalitarianism

“Bit by Bit, Trump is Taking Apart the New Deal’s Glorious Legacy,” Heather Cox Richardson, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/24/bit-by-bit-donald-trump-is-taking-apart-new-deal- glorious-legacy

“The GOP Tax Bill and the Crisis in American Democracy,” Richard Kim, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/the-gop-tax-bill-and-the-death-of-american-democracy/

“The Craziest Part of the Tax Plan is How we got here,” Matt Tyler, vice.com https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ev5d9w/the-craziest-part-of-the-tax-plan-is-how-we-got-here

“There’s Proof: Electing Women Radically Improves Life for Mothers and Families,” Alexandra Topping. theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/iceland-women-government-better-for-mothers-america-lessons

“Democratic Socialism is Having a Very Good Year at the Ballot Box,” John Nickols, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/democratic-socialism-is-having-a-very-good-year-at-the-ballot-box/

“Impeachment Exists for Lying Liars Like Jeff Sessions,” John Nichols, thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/impeachment-exists-for-lying-liars-like-jeff-sessions/

“America is Facing an Epistemic Crisis,” David Roberts, vox.com https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/2/16588964/america-epistemic-crisis

“Manafort’s Role in Democracy’s Corruption Humiliates us all,” Jason Linkins, nbcnews.com https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/manafort-s-role-democracy-s-corruption-humiliates-us-all-ncna816156

“How Big Pharma’s Money—and its Politicians—Fed the U.S. Opioid Crisis,” Chris McGreal, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/19/big-pharma-money-lobbying-us-opioid- crisis?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+- +Collections+2017&utm_term=248691&subid=23901194&CMP=GT_US_collection

“Skewing Democracy White,” Robert Koehler, ravenfoundation.org https://www.ravenfoundation.org/skewing-democracy-white/

“Supreme Court Case Offers Window into how Representatives Choose their Constituents,” Robert Barnes, washingtonpost.com https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-case-offers-window-into-how-representatives- choose-their-constituents/2017/09/22/28732b00-98d0-11e7-87fc- c3f7ee4035c9_story.html?utm_term=.2582ef35e1ba

“America’s Shameful History of Voter Suppression,” Andrew Gumbel, theguardian.com https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/13/america-history-voter-suppression-donald-trump-election-fraud

“Survey: Trump Voters ‘Anti-Islam, anti-feminist, anti-globalist,” Adelle Banks , religionnewsservice.com http://religionnews.com/2017/09/07/survey-trump-voters-anti-islam-anti-feminist-anti-globalist/

“America wasn’t Created with Democracy in Mind: Why Trump Would have Fit in with our Founding Fathers,” Roslyn Fuller, salon.com http://www.salon.com/2017/04/01/why-donald-trump-would-have-fit-in-just-fine-with-our-founding- fathers_partner/

Page 90 of 91

Page 91 of 91