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DO THREE GUILTY VERDICTS MAKE A DIFFERENCE?-Part 2

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Continuing the discussion of criminal justice in the US begins with an acknowledgement that it ain’t working for anybody. No one in the country feels safe. Conservatives are expert at exploiting that fear while reinforcing it with false narratives about immigrant caravans, antifa, socialism, BLM and Black riots. The specter of Black bodies is a deeply ingrained contrivance to elicit fear among the general population. At the same time, they dispute the real threat that is the rapidly expanding organization of violent and armed white nationalists/supremacists who are encouraged, supported by and intimately tied to elected Republican officials.  

Leaving aside the larger question of national security, how can current threats to personal safety like thieves, rapists, murderers and for nonwhites, law enforcement itself, be addressed? The obstacles to change sit squarely in the leadership of law enforcement and the justice system itself. That resistance will intensify as those in political power feel increasingly threatened by widening public sentiment for change. Among the most important are police unions. Union leaders are steeped in the traditions of a privileged, unaccountable force that imagines itself fighting for their lives against a heavily armed public. They uphold the thin blue line as a matter of principle handed down generationally through police families. Union and affiliated organizational memberships are often dominated by retirees, not active duty officers. In addition, their ranks are drawn from some of the most ferocious proponents of anti-Black racism, handed down at their family dinner tables.  And they are deeply entrenched in the MAGA universe. They have built a fortress around law enforcement, a steel wall against a view inside; an exemption from the normal procedures for investigation of suspects and legal disclosures to prosecutors.

Provisions negotiated within union contracts include a prohibition against officer firing, no matter the malfeasance; an appeals process that typically reverses most officer disciplinary actions and terminations; leave with pay during investigations; internal reviews conducted by departments themselves that generally find no wrongdoing. During investigations, many officers can’t be questioned by prosecutors for weeks, not hours like civilians, opportunities for co-conspirators to “clean up” their stories, encouraged by their union reps. Under the contract in Louisville, former home of Breonna Taylor, no officer can be fired during the duration of the contract. Another recent example is the officer who shot Rayshard Brooks in an Atlanta fast food restaurant parking lot. Despite pending prosecution, he was recently reinstated to the police force because the appropriate waiting period was not observed before his firing. At least, he’ll be on administrative duty although it’s questionable if that’s an appropriate use of tax funds.

Police unions are powerful enough to influence state legislatures to act to protect them. In 22 states, police have a bill of rights which protects them from accountability for their actions. Many limit the ability of civilian police oversight boards to review police misconduct and augmented by police contracts, allow their unions or a police chief to overrule disciplinary actions recommended by those boards. All of that is in addition to qualified immunity.

Beyond the unions, the culture of policing is another significant concern. Police union officials have been overheard making anti-Black slurs and expressing common racist tropes. These attitudes percolate throughout an atmosphere of officer fear. As detailed by Michael Sierra-Arevalo in a podcast, the culture is built around the canon that the officer’s safety is paramount above all else. This leads to paranoia on the street where every situation is dangerous to them personally. Infused into a military training regimen that draws heavily on military tactics, what Sierra-Arevalo has called the “danger imperative”, allows police to defend everything about their every action. Their “us against them” (them implicitly dark-skinned people) perspective is reinforced by their everyday routines that bring them overwhelmingly in contact with people of color. Those hostile interactions generate hostile reactions to officers’ animosity and disrespect in the people they encounter. Officers’ experiences reinforce implicit biases that intermingle with racial stereotypes to further reinforce their biases. To be clear, there are dangerous criminals out there, but not every Black person is dangerous or a criminal. Most 13 year old boys and 30 year old men and 60 year old women are just regular folks, minding their own business. But, in the stereotypical perception of the policing world constructed from the idea that most crimes are committed by descendants of the enslaved, they are all potential criminals. Stalking African Americans wherever they are, in consequence, is the heart of crime prevention in the minds of law enforcement officers. 

 The specter of gun ownership looms over it all. Total US gun ownership is 4 times the adult population. But far more guns are in the hands of white people than African Americans; that’s a no brainer when in 2020, whites make up 60% of the population. In reality, a white suspect is far more likely to be armed than a person of color. And yet, every Black person is probably armed is the idea in these officers’ heads. And cops aren’t stopping white folks often enough to think about them. 

The danger imperative is enhanced by rituals around officers killed in the line of duty. Word spreads quickly when any officer from around the country is injured, whether in car accidents or shootings. Officers travel across the country to attend funerals; national police auxiliaries plan and coordinate funeral arrangements swooping the family up in their vision of the pomp and circumstance. (I’ve had some tangential personal experience in that atmosphere of bullying.) Memorial walls of badges and plaques in departments which stand as reminders of potential dangers before each shift, reinforce this obsession with loss and spread an overarching sense of doom. This is not to say that there is anything wrong per se in honoring friends and colleagues.  

Almost all officers claim that when they’re involved in a shooting, they feared for their life. The fact is they’re scared when they walk out of the station door. This is why they empty excessive numbers of rounds into their victims. Even in the heat of the moment, 2 officers armed with tasers and guns should feel their physical superiority over a suspect armed with a knife running away from them. After all, they are trained to handle these situations. Unfortunately, their training seems to boil down to just shoot ‘em. The standard justification for excessive use of force, fear, is simply the outlook that officers have toward their job and the population they police. The danger imperative is the blank check that underwrites excessive use of force against people of color and their murder. In contrast, law enforcement’s attitude toward whites lacks that same element of fear, no better demonstrated than by its response to the January 6th gang. Authorities were lulled into a sense of safety by the commonality of their skin color. Despite the potential for violence, they failed to prepare. Despite the presence of weapons and the mob’s violent behavior, seditionists were simply released to mill about the streets after the attack was repelled. No excessive use of force there.

The culture of policing also inculcates a tendency to deceive the public in an effort to avoid accountability. Both police officials and prosecutors seem to instinctively falsify their reports and statements about use of force, particularly in cases that result in an injury or death. The incident reports on Breonna Taylor for example were mostly blank without reporting a death from gunshot wounds. The initial statements by police officials and the prosecutor about George Floyd said that there had been a medical emergency and the suspect had died at the hospital. No mention of knees on his neck as the cause of the emergency nor death at the scene while being restrained. The officers must have falsified their reports, even though the whole world would soon see the video of Floyd’s execution. 

The practice of half truthful paperwork appears to be widespread, as departments routinely delay public release of body cam footage or fail to disclose incidents until a bystander or family releases their video or talks to the press. This suggests that officers have some sense that they are behaving badly. The most common officer reaction to most incidents, viewed through the danger imperative prism, is to affirm the appropriateness of any action as a necessity. They take for granted that it will be unpopular with people of color and their sympathisers but believe that the general public will agree. The impulse to cover up comes from a desire to avoid media attention and debate. Their instinct is to draw up the gate to their heavily fortified law enforcement castle, ensuring that all of them are protected against the legal consequences of their missteps. 

In service of the goal of obfuscation, data collection on officer misconduct is strictly controlled by police departments and reinforced through union contracts. Some contracts mandate destruction of complaints and disciplinary records after specified time periods, often 5 years. Over a 10 year career, an officer has 2 chances at a clean slate, leaving them free to employ excessive force with impunity. The only way to gain transparency in law enforcement is the creation of a national database of officer conduct. Police departments need access to hard data about potential hires if they want to avoid officers who either are “bad apples” or have the potential to become one. Their ilk should be eliminated from law enforcement ranks rather than passed around like abusive Catholic priests between parishes. Accountability theoretically becomes a deterrent to bad behavior particularly if the database is open to the public or at least subject to open record investigations.

Whatever the consequences for employment, officers generally pay no legal consequences for killing or injuring suspects. Qualified immunity protects them from prosecution for most activities, another gift of police union lobbying with Congress and state legislatures. Instead, the American public pays for police misconduct. Our tax dollars pay for settlements like Breonna Taylor’s family received, remembering that federal grant dollars supplement local police and municipal budgets. Ironically, Black Americans are paying for being killed in the street in the few cases where civil settlements have been reached. But plenty of that moolah is coming from white, Latinx and Asian taxpayers too. Part of our discussion should include whether taxes should be spent on protecting police officers or on resources that would ameliorate the circumstances that lead to crime in long ignored communities. Perhaps the prospect of exorbitant legal fees and settlements could alter police conduct as well as send officers inclined to work in unconstitutional ways into alternative occupations, maybe security guard or private eye. 

Closely intertwined with the culture of policing is officer training. In a piece in the Atlantic, Olga Khazan points out that some European countries have 4 year police academies which teach the country’s rationale for their justice and legal systems. In contrast, the average training period in the US is about five months in a classroom and another three or so months in the field. Among the 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the US, including 1000 departments with only one person, training is whatever the agency decides. In one or two man departments, there is no training at all; just a do-as-I-do apprenticeship where the officer may have no experience in law enforcement or the body of jurisdictional law. There are no national standards for best practices and procedures. 

The bulk of the training curriculum revolves around military drills and tactics. The emphasis on military discipline has created a paramilitary force, outside the rule of law. From the first day, the armed forces break down a civilian identity to refashion recruits into a cog in a corps, without individual will. A strict hierarchy is welded into place where the soldier must follow a superior’s commands without question or thought. In battle, their life depends on it. The military has its own laws with its own police and court system outside the national system. For the purposes of defense, society has chosen to create an armed force that operates only outside its own soil, except against Native American tribes and in the Civil War, before there was a standing army. But the price for society is an armed body of persons who are outside the rule of law. And when they leave the service, they bring that lawlessness with them to join a body of civilians trained in military maneuvers with the potential to accumulate an armory of automatic weapons.

From New York Times video

Police training replicates that microcosm. Law enforcement sees itself as its own uniformed corps, rules and loyalty codes where a superior officer is a god. In this structure, where questioning a superior is unlikely and reporting one is almost unheard of, a ring of collusion encomposes every person present at an incident and all who discuss it later. They have their own rules of engagement and think their intra-organizational regulations replace federal and state laws, much like the armed services. In parallel, law enforcement glorifies dead officers as fallen heroes defending their country. But they are not at war. They’re trained to believe that they are, but preventing or solving crime is not war. There is no identifiable enemy, only criminal acts, not people or identifiable organizations or countries.

 Following graduation, training updates concentrate in that area as well. Where departments have included implicit racial bias training and de-escalation techniques, these are often one shot engagements or sometimes on line and even when repeated, account for less than 10% of training time. Surprisingly, even firearms evaluations have become less frequent as departments have become more budgetarily strapped. Absent from most law enforcement training is education in federal, state and local laws, keeping in mind that they change every time state legislatures and city councils meet. Nor are the fundamentals of the legal system, including constitutional protections, being taught routinely or being reviewed periodically. This was demonstrated by the Justice Department report on the Baltimore PD at the end of the Obama administration. The report details a Justice Department ride-along where a police sergeant instructs his partner to stop and search a group of Black men on a street corner doing nothing. The sergeant’s response to the question, “What for?” was “make something up”. So ingrained was the police practice that the sergeant didn’t even realize that those actions are constitutionally unlawful search and seizure performed in front of DOJ officials! 

Mimicking the military, law enforcement has tried to create a parallel separate tract nestled within the justice system using the interdependence between the police, prosecutors and judges. In an overcrowded system that is driven by the number of convictions it can achieve, crime solvers have influenced prosecutors and judges to accept their word as truth even when they all know it’s not quite kosher. These cozy relationships are threatened if prosecutors pursue legal action against policemen. Restricted access to court proceedings and a general lack of interest by the public allows the court system to rumble along in its own realm. Plea bargains, the most common resolution of legal proceedings, mean that evidence is never presented in court. Over the years, the judicial process has trapped millions of victims, many of whom are innocent, out of sight of the general public. 

A public safety doctrine with its current emphasis on crime prevention through an assault on minority communities has left those communities unsafe. Calling the police invites in the very people who are stopping and frisking youth for no reason. Does someone with a warrant out for nonpayment of parking tickets call the police when they’re mugged? The police are likely to make the situation worse possibly leading to a confrontation over an outstanding warrant; at the same time, they are unlikely to recover the cash, cards and stolen goods. It’s far more reasonable to go to the ER to treat injuries if severe. A Post Reports podcast retells the story of a woman living in Albuquerque who called the police to check on her father at his home. When the police arrived, they discovered he had an outstanding warrant and when he resisted arrest, they shot him because he raised a shovel over his head. A daughter’s concern for her father resulted in his death at the hands of the police. The fact that there is nowhere else to turn is also illustrated by a bystander to George Floyd’s murder who called 911 to report Chauvin to the police. He was hoping that they would come and stop their colleague from murder. Phillip Goff of the Center for Policing Equity has researched how changing police tactics like minor traffic infractions stops can make African Americans safer. And just as importantly, those departments were willing to listen and change their procedures. So there are remedies when law enforcement accepts alternative approaches to current tactics.

 In the wake of BLM demonstrations and the action by some mayors to discipline officers for misconduct, officers are abandoning their jobs in droves. Police departments, particularly urban ones, are reporting manpower shortages and difficulty recruiting. Whether the officers who quit are disturbed by a loss of privilege and immunity is unclear. The demand from the public to examine police actions and have some role in oversight, particularly in urban departments, is receiving some attention from mayors and that may be making some officers nervous that their past and present behaviors will catch up with them.  

The intense national focus on police has also decreased recruitment and may be skewing the types of recruits who are stepping up. Multiple incidents of racial antagonism from officers have been documented across multiple locations. The events of January 6 have revealed that there is a significant strain of anti-democracy within law enforcement who turned out in some numbers to the Stop the Steal rally and assault on the Capitol. Within the crowd were many who expressed anti-Black prejudice, as detailed by the Capitol Hill police who testified that they were assailed with the n-word. How many of those people were from law enforcement will never be known, but birds of a feather typically flock together. 

Another example is one of the assailants of Ahmaud Arbery, a former policeman, is rumored to have said, after he shot him, that he got Ahmaud, referring to him using a derogatory racial epithet. 

Former military personnel are a significant source of recruitment for law enforcement. Recent investigations have also exposed a significant number of white supremacists within their ranks, a problem that the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense are now attempting to address. Recently, an active duty soldier and a National Guardsman have been indicted for actions on January 6. Former military personnel form a central core of white supremacists militias, some of whom also participated in the January 6 insurrection.

The real difficult areas to cleanse of racial prejudice are the smaller, nonmetropolitan departments, particularly sheriffs of the sort like Arpaio in Arizona. Since the former president, these officers have been seen wearing MAGA hats, Qanon symbols and decals, white nationalist symbols and of course confederate flags without compunction. And these may be areas, given the preponderance of political identifications within them, to recruit officers who don’t hold these beliefs. 

These findings should set the stage to reevaluate what type of people make good law enforcement officers. A disturbing report from Atlanta showed that 93% of their potential recruits were unable to complete the application correctly and only about 1% of candidates were accepted. The authorities decided to change the packet rather than consider what the problems were for those who couldn’t complete it, seemingly a step backward rather than forward. 

Recruitment must screen out both the white supremacists and those who disparage people of color and fire those whose service is marred by these ideologies. Consideration should be given to attitudes of former military personnel and examination of their records before they’re hired. But police leadership and unions, mired in their culture of hostility, can’t be expected to spearhead these changes. Perhaps the new approach to DOJ investigations of police departments initiated by Merritt Garland will bring some new perspectives. However, the DOJ doesn’t have the resources to consider 18,000 departments even though it may be able to make a dent in large and moderate sized urban areas. 

There is some evidence that women tend to be more respectful and are more likely to de-escalate interactions. In concert with an effort to demilitarize police interactions and parcel out functions that can be performed without weapons, recruitment of more women and their promotion up through the ranks must be increased. The British police force which has long incorporated and promoted women to leadership positions is a potential example. 

The difficulty in deciding criteria for officers without a clearer societal understanding of a proper approach to policing and desired law enforcement functions is self-evident. But the undesirable has been well defined. And changes in who is doing the policing can occur as various locations modify their law enforcement agencies. After all, police continue to kill individuals daily, at what feels like an even more hectic pace. 

On the other hand, the recent surge of crime during the COVID19 pandemic has created a public demand for more intense policing rather than less. In this atmosphere, law enforcement agencies are likely to relax their recruitment requirements rather than reexamine and strengthen them. Politicians are more likely to be reactive rather than imaginative and to use public demand as an excuse to double down on current police tactics, particularly in jurisdictions where GOP politics reign. But the length of the process should not be an excuse for failing to start it. 

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to a discussion about the philosophy of policing in the US is the refusal of some people to engage in it at all. In our post-truth atmosphere, and actually around the globe, denial is the signature core of the conservative mediasphere and the MAGA cult. Their spokespersons are masters of creative reconstructions of history and current events which, through constant repetition and reinforcement, have fabricated a parallel universe. There is no better example than Tim Scott, the GOP’s puppet in Black skin. Even as he has detailed some of his encounters with racial profiling by police, some with the Capitol police no less, he towed the party line in his response to Biden’s first joint address before Congress. America is not a racist country he said, a statement that can only be said by someone completely ignorant of history who also refuses to look at his own personal experience in context. Doesn’t he recognize the commonality of his experience with Cory Booker, even though the latter is very light skinned? He might like GOP economic policies but a tour through his state is the best demonstration that they are not intended to meet the needs of people who look like him despite decades with them in place. Is there not something systemic about the centrality of skin color in the lives of nonwhites? Doesn’t he get tired of people who look like him being scapegoated by his party? He’s traded his common sense for a GOP Senate seat. 

It’s not that Scott’s missing an interpretation of history; it’s written in the policies and the documents of the very people who designed them. Their own words state their intentions. The purveyors of America’s myths about itself can easily be identified by anyone who can read. The path from the Civil War through White Redemption to the Lost Cause can be charted through the Daughters of the Confederacy. It’s all there unless your business is denial in order to thwart the threat of the masses to displace the people in power. Those people require that the majority of Americans remain deceived about the forces that control governance, the wealthiest and most powerful few. The powerful rarely concede power willingly and they have the resources to put down most attempts. Doesn’t Scott understand that he only has a seat at the GOP table as long as he is useful to them. They’ll ditch him as quickly as the former president turned on Michael Cohen. 

In the face of an upsurge in the demand for a more just criminal justice system and system of policing, Tim Scott will be the face of the conservative attempt at the federal level. He will try to win the public over to the slicing and dicing of the George Floyd Criminal Justice bill. GOP compromises are aimed at nibbling around the edges of true change to give the appearance that some progress is being made and then trot out the idea from Voltaire, “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”. 

And the federal response is unlikely to make a dent at the local level where every individual officer operates on his recognizance. The department can be sued, but the victim will still be dead and their family will still mourn. One point that Scott has said is immutable is the maintenance of qualified immunity which creates an accountability bubble for officers that is a powerful counterweight to policy and behavioral change. The result will be more Black children, women and men dying at the hands of the police.

Because this will be a struggle against the powers that be, it will be long and bloody. At this point, they hold all the cards: the government, the media, the institutions, the Congress, the economy. The presence of agents of subversion in the House and Senate has never happened in our history. Even on the verge of the Civil War, the secessionists in Congress supported the institutions and accepted the votes that went against them. They admired the structures enough to replicate them in the Confederate States of America.  

It will take a generalized revolutionary movement of the maybe 60% of the population that wants to retain the democratic structures that exist, however flawed, to rise up. They must battle against the opposition of the hard kernel of throwback supporters whose destination is something that never existed in the past, only as a mirage conjured up by the powerful to mesmerize them. The 2020 Census makes continued GOP domination of governmental structures almost a certainty as they exclude more and more of the electorate from access to the ballot and redraw districts to allow candidates to hand pick their electorate to maintain permanent seats. Whether the former president continues to be their mascot or someone else captures center stage, they are well positioned to quash organizational efforts of a majority of the country still invested in maintaining our imperfect democracy. Far fewer are invested in the fight to make the society truly democratic. Even though the republic was designed for lily white men, it’s been updated to encompass white women while we continue to fight over people of color, youths, the poor and non-cis gendered individuals with halting progress toward more inclusion and giant steps back to expulsion. But lukewarm odds of success should not be a deterrent to persistence in the fight. It’s life or death for the first democratic republic in history. 

On May 17, 1954, U.S. Supreme Court rules in Brown v Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional, sparking massive white resistance and violence.

DO THREE GUILTY VERDICTS MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

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Zooming out to a panoramic view, the absurdity of the gatherings in George Floyd Plaza seems obvious. Half a nation and many in the world are rejoicing that a man has been convicted of murder. He’s a white man who murdered a Black man. He’s a white cop, an officially designated protector of the citizenry. A bystander invited the world to watch the execution of a Black man on a city street for attempting to pass a counterfeit $20 bill. Did he even know it was counterfeit? It’s like revolutionary France in “Les Miserables”,  where the poor are sentenced to die by being ignored or imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread. In the US, it is the punishment for standing on a street corner with a couple of buddies. Perhaps a better word than absurdity is revolting.

Cop shows often have a line like “we just arrest them, the jury decides.” Not in Minneapolis. There a cop can be judge, jury and executioner, as shown by the police murder of Daunte Wright during the Chauvin trial. Fortunately, not this one time. This one time, the jury and the judge rendered a verdict on the officer’s conduct. We Black Americans take solace in even the tiniest step. This is the only white cop to be convicted of murdering a Black man while on duty in the state of Minnesota ever. There was a Black cop convicted of murdering a white woman in Minneapolis. The fact that he is Black is significant; the bias in society that Black men are expendable extends to law enforcement officers too. 

About 1000 people are fatally shot by the police each year, according to a Washington Post database. There have been over 800 police shootings in the country so far this year; only 6 cases have been prosecuted. What’s clear from the data is that African Americans make up over 50% of the victims but only 13% of the population. Note also, the database includes only fatal shootings, not injuries or other causes of death. George Floyd is not included here. Unfortunately, good data in this area is scarce because federal reporting from law enforcement agencies is voluntary. Another study found that between 2015-2019, 104 officers were arrested for murder or manslaughter for a shooting while on duty. Only 4 officers were convicted of murder with an average sentence of 12 years. Eighteen were convicted of manslaughter. Forty-five were not convicted. These numbers mean that a significant number of those arrested were not prosecuted. 

For the most part, the cases that get widespread attention are those where the victim is killed, most often by shooting but there is Eric Garner, the victim of a choke hold and of course George Floyd. But there are hundreds of others annually who are injured, like Jacob Blake now paralyzed after being shot in the back by an officer holding his T-shirt.

Still, the conviction in the George Floyd murder is an historic moment. But it means very little for progress in criminal justice. It doesn’t assert that BlackLiveMatters as a general rule. One of the purported cornerstones of this country is the rule of law. We all make a social contract to abide by the law and when violated, to be punished.  We like to believe that our laws are both just* and fair*. As with most things in America, the asterisks mark the exceptions. From its very beginnings, the law in this country has been for white people; Black people weren’t even considered people. Nor were native Americans. Since then, the “less thans” expanded to include brown and yellow skinned people as well. Laws are only as good as their enforcement, by law enforcement officers, prosecutors, judges and juries. The fact that the laws have been written to favorite white groups is augmented by differential enforcement, a subject too broad to discuss here.

There are unique features to the Chauvin trial that are probably associated with that unique outcome. One is the composition of the jury, remarkably diverse for race, age and occupation. Most jurors were under 50 years old, unusual in a system that relies heavily on retired citizens to fill jury boxes. There were a couple of professionals in their ranks. Another feature is that the thin blue line was smashed. In fact, Minneapolis PD, including the chief, went out of its way to deny that Chauvin represented the department. The department disavowed him as an outlier. Unaddressed were the policies and procedures that allowed Chauvin to flourish, because the department wasn’t on trial, the officer was. He was after all a training officer who was teaching his trainees how to act that fateful day. Hopefully, now awaiting trial themselves, they learned what not to do although if justice prevails, they won’t have an opportunity to use their new knowledge in any police department ever again.

And certainly, BLM demonstrations and the discussions around racial justice have changed the prism through which many citizens have begun to view law enforcement. White jurors are no longer convinced that voting to convict a policeman will make their community less safe; minority jurors have seen how police actually make them less safe. This is particularly true in Minneapolis, where the discussion around shifting resources to alternatives to armed officers for particular functions has been ongoing for years. The general population has become increasingly aware that policing in this country is neither fair nor just but disparately applied. The Jan 6 insurrectionists were not thrown on the ground and handcuffed. Paul Manafort was not slammed against a wall and rousted from his home; he was allowed to turn himself in on his own time, in a suit and tie. And these people are traitors to the country, not people with broken tail lights or passing a $20 counterfeit bill.

While Chauvin’s conviction is probably not the beginning of a national trend, hopefully it will spark the beginning of local, state and national discussions about public safety. Law enforcement officers come in all varieties of uniforms, local county sheriffs, small town police, urban police, marshalls, highway patrols, etc. Judges, it turns out, also come with all kinds of credentials. There are county magistrates who, in smaller locations, are generally not lawyers and have no training in the law. There are elected judges, who are not required to be lawyers, just popular with the few voters who cast ballots in their election. At the highest level, there are federal judges, appointed by the Chief Executive and approved by the Senate. And then there is the Supreme Court, the pinnacle of the system that is mistakenly perceived as objective but throughout the major portion of its history has prioritized business and economic interests over individuals. Despite this hodgepodge of entities, they are all imbued with a concept of public safety that imagines boogey-men (and women) who are nonwhite.

In many districts, law enforcement is in the hands of an individual who works solo or runs a department in any way he pleases. Sheriff Arpaio is a perfect example; even when a federal court ordered him to cease his racial profiling and stealing money and property from Hispanics in his Arizona district, he defied the ruling and persisted. It’s no accident that a suspected terrorist in New Jersey engaged in a shootout with police is merely wounded when a Black man leaning against a car window with his hands in the air without a weapon is shot dead. Was the shooter thinking the same thing as the helicopter cop who characterized that man as a “bad dude.” Terence Crutcher was in fact a wholly compliant gentle giant. What are cops thinking when they hesitate to shoot a man actively shooting at them but are quick to shoot a man in his back as he’s running away because the cop thinks he might have a weapon when none is evident? Similarly, a white man who killed several Black people after praying with them in their church is taken to Burger King to eat before being taken to the station but a Black man walking away from several cops is shot dead in the back in a hail of bullets? The lame excuse that each case must be judged on its merits can’t account for the number of cases of white men who are actively killing victims and yet are arrested unscathed compared to the number of Black men who are shot and killed because the police feel threatened when they are holding a gun against a single individual without a weapon. Even after taking fire, the cops just seem more relaxed when dealing with armed people who look like them than they are with unarmed people who don’t. Officer Chauvin appeared extraordinarily composed and relaxed as he choked Mr Floyd to death.

The task ahead is to design a system of public safety that will keep all citizens safe. The country has never had this ideal in mind. Policing was initially designed to restrict the movement of enslaved Blacks. Anyone with brown skin was presumed enslaved and had to demonstrate otherwise. Authority to seize Black people was extended to every white person. By the 19th century, the focus remained on descendants of the enslaved in the South but in northern urban centers, the police who primarily served the wealthy, often used their power to prey on the poor. Corruption and false convictions of the poor were the rule of the day. 

Crowd control

Fast forwarding to the 1960s when LBJ sought to include African Americans in civil and economic society. Within his decisions about the Great Society was the nidus to transform policing into an assault on primarily urban segregated communities across the country. In those years, crime fighting shifted to crime prevention. Crime was theorized to be concentrated in Black youth, somehow predisposed to crime, not by the economic desolation in their communities but by a congenital predisposition. Not so mysteriously, this is a racist trope that sailed over the Atlantic with Black bodies when they were dragged onshore. An initial decision as part of the Great Society to invest in poor communities, where poor always means Black, became a decision to invest in monitoring, policing and jailing Black youth, enlarging the prisons to hold them and upgrading weaponry to assist in the effort.

The war on drugs brought an even more intense invasion to Black communities aimed at the users and small time dealers, not the suppliers. Crack, introduced through Reagan’s Iran-Contra program that used the profits from the drug trade to support Nicaraguan rebels and interdict arms in El Salvador that then secretly supplied arms to Iran in a complicated web of intrigue. Law enforcement militarized its weapons and tactics, prisons expanded into a private industry. Militarized equipment then expanded exponentially as the surplus from Iraq/Afghanistan wars dumped old equipment into police departments through grants and giveaways.

In the meantime, drug use among whites has always been higher than people of color, but their neighborhoods and college campuses were not only spared from scrutiny and raids but also patrols. Living in primarily segregated communities, they could identify a criminal as someone who didn’t belong there by virtue of skin color, but white on white crime seems to escape police notice. The police have no crime prevention programs there as if white youth don’t commit crimes even as the opioid epidemic rages on. Cops so seldom respond when called that most people don’t report theft except for insurance purposes because stolen goods are almost never recovered. White neighborhoods understand this and have taken on their own public safety: gated communities, restricted access and security cameras and guards.

Police departments have evolved new strategies for crowd control as well. America began as a nation of protesters. 2020 showed that the police vision of crowd control- helmets, shields, tear gas, rubber bullets, military regalia, humvies, tanks- in essence military weapons they use to violently attack demonstrators is anything but peaceful. Those scenes are reminiscent of the brutality shown to Russian demonstrators marching peacefully for Alexi Navalny. Russian laws prohibit demonstrations; the US Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and assembly. Violence by police against lawful demonstrations often provokes more widespread personal injuries and property damage. These forces are most often mobilized against demonstrations that are majority nonwhite. They were missing in Michigan where the demonstrators were more heavily armed than law enforcement. They were missing in Charlottesville, when a Nazi flag carrying crowd shouting an anti-Semitic chant marched across the UVA campus. They were missing when the MAGA rally decamped for the insurrection at the Capitol building. Clearly, law enforcement appears to have a problem with assessing risks when it looks through a colored lens.   

The scope of police responsibilities has expanded further. Departments folded their war on Black communities into local government revenue generation, making traffic infractions into the excuse to ratchet up the number of encounters they had with people of color, now on the road outside their communities. Confrontational authorities humiliate and insult victims, searching vehicles without provocation. Resistance often leads to additional charges, arrest and either injury or death. Recently, a stop in Virginia for an expired tag became the opportunity for 2 white deputies, guns drawn, to insult, bully and finally mace an active duty Black soldier with his hands extended through the window as he had been instructed. In video from the officer’s body cam, that officer is later seen subtly threatening the victim not to tell anyone, so the victim doesn’t get in trouble with his military command. The crime and the cover-up. wisely, the soldier filed a civil suit against the department, town government and the 2 officers, the aggressive macer now fired.

After institutions that housed the mentally ill and the handicapped closed, the number of unhoused and mentally ill has exploded as the number of services has shrunk to infinitesimal. Managing this population has fallen to police without training on how to cope with people in crisis. In addition, police have moved into the schools, creating an early tributary into the school to prison pipeline. Even more recently, immigration enforcement has received added emphasis in police departments across the country, not simply in southern border states. 

The failure of the current approach to public safety is very clear. Crime rates have fallen significantly since the 90s, but police case closures have not improved proportionately. Only 25% of reported crimes are solved by arrest. Only 5% of arrests are for violent crimes, 80% are for low-level offenses. The case closure rate for major crimes, murders and burglaries varies from 25-50% over the different jurisdictions. Nationally, police cleared about 60% of murders last year. The clearance rate was lower for aggravated assault 50%, rape, 33% and robbery, 30%. Only 18% of larcenies/thefts, 14% of burglaries and 14% of motor vehicle thefts were cleared. The vast accumulation of “cold cases”, serial murders and rapes are testimony to the poor state of policing. The tendency of police to railroad suspects into confessions, plea bargains and close cases with circumstantial evidence which has resulted in the imprisonment of innocent people contributes to further crimes. Simply put, the criminal is free to commit more crimes when the innocent go to jail. 

It’s pretty clear that what is being done is not working. To summarize, policing as it’s working today neither effectively prevents nor solves crimes as the principal part of their workload has shifted to traffic enforcement and mediating disputes. People do not feel safe in the US and they shouldn’t. Points made in this all too brief summary should be augmented by additional historical exploration to begin to formulate a basis for re-envisioning a new American ideal of public safety. Potential considerations include resolving whether the objective of the justice system is punishment or rehabilitation. How are rehabilitation programs carried out, through education and skills training, treatment of  addiction, PTSD, anger management or solitary confinement and disregard for basic prisoner needs?  Must all convictions result in incarceration or can many instead involve community service with home residence that is supported by adequate resources to live in the community? Is investment in education, business development, skills training, opportunities for higher wage employment, access to fresh produce in neighborhood grocery stores and pharmacies, access to healthcare a better approach to crime prevention than stop and frisk, arrests for low level crimes, fines and extended prison sentences? Does eliminating child poverty lead to better educational outcomes and lower violence in communities? Would a different approach to the availability of illegal drugs actually diminish the supply and break the influence of drug, sex and undocumented immigrant trafficking since the arrest of low and medium level dealers has failed so miserably. These objectives must be made retrospective to change the lives of the presently incarcerated and on parole.

But in the interim because people are dying today, the possibilities for tweaking the system are vast if, and this is a big if, the modifications are revisited as a vision for the ideal evolves. My next blog post will explore some of these ideas.

On April 28, 1936, just before his trial for attempted assault, Lint Shaw, a 45 year old Black farmer, is shot to death by a mob of 40 white men in Colbert Georgia.

WHEN THEY COME FOR YOU

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When they came for indigenous peoples, Americans cheered.

When they kidnapped Africans, Americans exalted in the profits from enslavement and turned their backs.

When they came for the freed descendants of the Africans, the country stayed silent again and again and again and again.

When they came for Mexicans, the country cheered the seizure of their lands in a trumped up war. 

When they came for the Chinese, the country cheered again and again and again.

When they came for the Japanese, the country cheered them on.

When they came for immigrants from countries south of the border, the country stayed silent again and again and again.

When they came for Muslims, the country stayed silent.

This is the reality of American history. When they come for the next group, will you cheer or stay silent? Or act? Do not assume that because you’re considered white today, you will still be tomorrow.

When the KKK dominated Oregon politics.

A WINNING COMBINATION FOR THE GOP

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The 2020 elections were fair without evidence of significant fraud under the very trying circumstances of this coronavirus pandemic. There is no question that this is a true statement, despite the disinformation spread by the former president and his clique of authoritarians. There were the usual incidences of innocent procedural errors, because there is no large enterprise that does not involve human errors, but US security agencies unanimously agreed that the election was secure. However, the populist cult led by the last guy in the White House is trying to maintain the power of a significant number of elected officers across the country in order to return to the presidency. On the surface, that sounds like the GOP represents the majority of the country. In reality, several quirks in the electoral system– the two party system, winner-take-all elections, the creation of legislative districts by the legislatures themselves and the electoral college allow otherwise. Over decades, the Republican party has perfected the art of shaping the electorate to transform its minority party into the ruling party from governor’s mansions and state legislatures to city and town councils. Just looking at the Senate vote on impeachment, the 43 who voted to acquit represent only about 125 million while the 57 senators who voted to convict represent 202 million people. While the Senate is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, the Democrats represent 42 million more people than the Republican half, about 13% of the population. Worse disproportionalities are present across Republican dominated state legislatures.

The party continued to be successful in 2020, with the exception of the presidency, where the electoral college comes in, and the Senate. They made gains in the House and retained control of state legislatures and many local offices. Overall, the Republican Party’s strategy of minority hegemony is still working quite well even though one big one, the Senate, slipped from their grasp. They generated the Big Lie to try to overturn the electoral results, supported a violent attempt to overthrow the government and have settled into the role of the seditionists within until the next round of elections in 2022.

While Georgia was a surprise addition to the Electoral College vote for Biden, it was the epicenter of the loss of the GOP Senate majority. The whimsy of 2 vacant Senate seats at the same time delivered a double whammy. The two Democrats ran as a team; the two Republicans ran as dyed in the wool cult members, appendages of the former president. The Democrats generated a supercharged voter turnout larger than that of the Republicans to narrowly nab both seats. 

Georgia Republicans may have been temporarily thrown off by the pandemic, unable to anticipate how it would affect the voting of the majority they had successfully suppressed in prior elections. But their belief in the superiority of whiteness blinded them to the skills and proficiency of Blackness. They didn’t believe that Stacy Abrams and the numerous organizations who mobilized the votes of people of color could out-mobilize their own forces of authoritarian darkness.

Now Georgia Republicans are engaged in a mea culpa to fix what they screwed up. The legislature where they enjoy a considerable majority, thanks to very effective gerrymandering and the manipulation of the mechanics of voting, is in the process of passing a coterie of bills to limit voting, down to the most minute details. For instance, it will be illegal to provide water or food to voters waiting in the long lines generated by their strategic under-resourcing of polling locations in minority voting districts. Fewer polling places, fewer machines in them, fewer personnel have been the hallmarks. But it is the restructuring of the electoral system that will have the largest impact.

Because absentee voting was the big culprit, the legislature moved to eliminate no excuse absentee voting. Henceforth, each person must present a reason to vote absentee like absence from their precinct, having a physical disability that would prevent them from going to the polls or age 75 years. That done, they moved on to further curtail that much smaller pool of absentees, forcing the majority of their perceived undesired voters into those hours long lines at the polls. One proposal would prohibit third-party and nonprofit groups from sending out applications for absentee ballots, a strike at national organizations that set up websites to facilitate absentee ballot requests in each state. Next up was the requirement of voter ID when requesting the absentee ballot and again when casting it, despite the fact that ID is required to register to vote. Other bills will shorten the time interval to request a ballot, when they can be sent out and the deadline for their receipt. Next up was making it harder to return an absentee ballot by banning ballot drop boxes, forcing ballots to be returned by mail or dropped at an election board office. Another version would limit drop boxes to inside early voting sites where ballots could only be accepted during hours the voting was occurring.

Having tied absentee voting in knots, the legislature has moved against early voting as well. As part of an omnibus bill in the House, the early voting period would be restricted to 9-5, Monday to Friday for three weeks before the election with an additional 9-5 session on the second Saturday before the election. County boards would be able to extend hours to 7 pm, but could add no other days. This was a strategic strike at Sunday voting, a popular day for church organized events to get people to the polls. In a last minute retraction, one allowable early Sunday voting day was reinserted after an uproar from constituents, including their Republican base. 

To limit the number of potential voters, bills have been advanced to eliminate automatic voter registration through the Department of Driver Services which registers or updates registrations each time a person interacts with the department. Not only did this add a huge number of potential voters to the rolls, every new licensee and renewer in the state, it also made it easier to update voter registrations with change of address. 

In an effort to curtail election board funding, county elections offices would be banned from accepting grants from outside organizations. And just to make the process less transparent, the Senate has approved a ban on the public release of any election results until the total number of ballots is reported. They have allowed scanning of the much smaller number of absentee ballots to begin 8 days before election day and will require updating records of who voted within 30 days after election. 

Republicans have doubled down again on the falsehood that voter fraud is a major problem, last expanded during the 2016 campaign by the ultimate winner who suggested that his loss would have been an indication of fraud. Even with the win, the president pushed back against the reality of his popular vote loss by declaring that the margin was full of illegitimate votes by the usual culprits, illegal immigrants, dead people and pets. He dusted off his fantasy again in the run-up to what he probably anticipated would be a 2020 loss, the first plank in his crusade to retain the presidency no matter what the voters wanted. His action was the bridge-too-far personal extension of the GOP’s long standing strategy to engineer electoral victories for a minority party. But El Trumpe’s concern was only for himself, the rest of the party be damned. So now that the party has sunk into worship of a golden idol, the party must hitch its wagon to his entrails or they fear they will suffer the wrath of the gods. (As if the pandemic is not enough; but then again, they don’t acknowledge its reality either.) All that work to control state and local offices washed away.

Unfortunately after decades of propaganda and the emergent dominance of the GOP in elected office, the idea of rampant voter fraud is firmly planted in the national ether. The GOP has built a ferris wheel to continue to ratchet up voter suppression of minorities and the young, the voters who tend to find the party’s racialized themes, both overt and dog-whistled, non-starters for their votes. It’s not that the Democratic alternatives are better in terms of attention to the needs of these groups. It’s just that there is no alternative beyond simply staying home. But the more voters the GOP pushes out of the electorate, the stronger their hold on it will be.

The GOP’s idea of fraud is underpinned by their insistence that the only valid votes are the ones for them; any candidate outside their fold is illegitimate and should not be allowed to rule. Through Qanon, Democrats have literally become the devil incarnate. In this scenario, their attempts to insure their own victory is their patriotic duty; they are saving the country they love. In a battle against the Devil, no weapon is off the table, including the Devil’s own tools: lying, cheating, stealing, character assassination, etc. These tools have replaced policies except for one: dismantle the government so it can’t interfere. The accents of the Confederacy loom large; the Confederates fought to save from extinction what they considered civilization itself, based in the enslavement of fellow human beings reimagined as beasts of burden. But they replicated the same institutions of government as the nation they fought to leave behind. Now, the sole purpose of the effort is to elevate a single individual whose interest lies more with self-aggrandizement than the fate of the nation and its citizens.

Voting in Georgia will never be the same under this regime. Of course, the better angels will challenge these new laws in court, but the process will be slow. The state courts will favor the laws because legislatures have a right to set their electoral policies. The federal courts have not been supportive of voter rights; apparently the idea of one (hu)man, one vote is no longer in fashion. The trail to the Supreme Court is long and slow. If a case were to reach it, its decisions are unlikely to favor wider access to the voting booth. For one, the majority of justices are card carrying members of the party that created the voter fraud lie. In addition, that majority were hand picked by the Koch funded Federalist Society to cite originalism as the source of their rulings when it happens to be convenient. Of course originalism itself is a sham. It is an exercise in divining the thoughts of the Founding Fathers to interpret current events, truly an absurdity. 

There is no way that a 21st century mind can envision the perspective of a 19th century thinker. Poised as it was at the beginning of science and discovery, there were so many things they didn’t know. Those lessons can’t be extracted from the 21st century mind except by a process of extreme denial, a critical component of mental processing. Republicans have elevated denial to a high art. For the justices today, there are broad advances in discovery that can’t be expunged from our world because they are the facts of its physicality, even as flat earthers wish that they were not. 

Even the thought of straight jacketing the Constitution of a nation that occupied only the eastern coast of a vast continent is antithetical to the Framers’ purpose. They left parts of the document purposely vague and room for amendments to accommodate growth and change in the nation they hoped would prosper. Imagine their response to Justice Clarence Thomas, three-fifths of a person, channeling their ultra white thoughts. They could never have anticipated the United States, 50 states strong, would become the leader of the free world burdened with a decades long cold war against Communism, a philosophy that was not even a glimmer in their eyes. Originalism is a betrayal of what the Founders held dear. 

But Republican appointed justices seem determined to turn back the clock to the days of Reconstruction when the Court invalidated the very amendments, 13th, 14th and 15th meant to achieve the promise of the Constitution: a true democratic republic.  Part of the reason the justices were elevated to the Court is to saunter back into the days of yore. 

Georgia is leading the charge to curtail voter access to the polls, a wave that includes states where the former president won handily.  These developments only highlight the battle ahead. We are still only inches away from the brink of authoritarian rule and clawing back from that dangerously tottering edge will take decades. While the media has focused on the drama inside Washington, the real work is at the state and local level where the idea of one party hegemony has burrowed deeply into government itself. 

This is a crisis that the nation has never known before. While the Civil War was a battle to keep the Republic in one piece, January 6, 2021 was the shot across the bow in the battle to keep the Republic democratic. Americans who want a republic committed to freedom, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and the rule of law for every person in the country stand opposed to the Americans who want the dictatorial imposition of whiteness to decide who can be a citizen, who can participate in governance, who can rule the labor force, who decides who will own land and businesses. There can be no middle ground.

On February 26, 2012, 17 year old Trayvon Martin, a Black boy, was shot dead by George Zimmerman, a self appointed vigilante whose defense was the Florida Stand Your Ground Law, ironic since Zimmerman did not stand on any ground. He pursued Trayvon through the streets believing the boy did not belong in his space, a white space. Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder.

THE ELEGANCE OF THE IMPEACHMENT MANAGERS

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An elegant case for the conviction of Donald J Trump was laid out before the nation by House impeachment managers. It was at times poignant and painful as they covered the insurrection against Congress whose members only barely escaped execution. They detailed the call to assassinate the Vice President of the United States. There is no protected free speech that can call for and attempt the assassination of a Vice President. The brutal assault on the Capital and DC police was laid bare. The preparation by the traitorous mob was laid out almost exhaustively. There was testimony from multiple participants that they felt called by “their president” to “stop the steal” which was itself a lie. And then finally the complete inaction of the then president to defend the Capitol against assault, in violation of his oath to protect the nation. It‘s an airtight case. 

The problem is that over half the Republicans in the jury are co-conspirators in the insurrection. They disseminated The Big Lie. Some continue to hold on to it now, particularly in their home districts. They retweeted the calls to fight. Some amplified the calls for violence. The managers’ points apply equally to these Republican Senators as they do to the Proud Boys and others who stormed the Capitol Building. To convict the former president is to convict themselves. To admit the treason is to call themselves treasonous. But to admit their part is too abhorrent for them to do.

To admit their part is not politically expedient as they see it. For these Republicans are all politicians who want to run for another office in a year or three or five. They have to guard their far right flank. The more aggressive individuals are plowing even further right into the company of their allied radicalized militia. They already sold their souls a long time ago.

The defense has provided a couple of faux off ramps. As the House managers have already previewed, the Senate has already voted to establish that it can hold an impeachment trial after a president is out of office. It is the only body authorized by the Constitution to make the rules about impeachment and it has spoken. It should be mentioned that the former president was impeached before he left office and the trial was only shifted to a later date because of manipulations by Senate leadership itself.

There is the free speech argument that is completely baseless, as the defense will try to hone in on isolated words in the speech on the 6th, not the full breath of Trump’s advocacy of violence, dating back even to the Central Park Five. But Senate Republicans have long landed on words that are nonsensical in context hoping they sound appropriate. They know it works in their Fox News media bubble because their audience is not composed of the most discerning thinkers who grapple with nuance. These Republicans just have to say something often enough, exposing the disdain they carry for their “gullible” supporters. In actuality, these people are not their supporters; they belong only to Agent Orange but they tolerate the tail of politicians who cling to him.

Is there a crevice where one or two Republicans will finally have the courage to jump ship and declare enough is enough? Could it be in the mob’s violence toward the police or the call that nearly assassinated VP Pence, the man most loyal to the president thrown under the bus with escalating tweets from Trump as the melee proceeded? Could it be visualizing their own near misses? Or perhaps the revelation of intention exhibited in 45’s glee while watching the violence and his inaction in violation of his oath of office? Could it be a new found investment in a co-equal branch of government? Or perhaps their realization that they themselves have participated in an intentional treasonous cabal? Maybe, that they enabled 45 by failing to convict him the first time impeachment came around? Possibly but far from likely. Their consciences were scrubbed out a long time ago. The Republican party has so debased itself that there is no path out of hell.

The impeachment trial presents in stark contrast the two visions of America battling it out for ascendancy. One, bequeathed from the Founding Fathers, of the superiority of whiteness. The insurrectionists carried their symbols, the Confederate flag, the swastika and Trump flags. The Confederate flag is a remnant from the war that was supposed to actualize the other vision, a land where all inhabitants are created equal. That it still flies is testimony to a defeat turned into victory when the country tired of the effort to fulfill its promise, establishing Jim Crow and segregation and castigation of Blackness from coast to coast. 

The BLM demonstrations of the summer suggested that once again, the many were trying to birth the vision of equality. But it triggered the historic response disseminated directly out of the White House through MAGA rallies encapsulated in the re-raised Confederate flag. January 6th poses the question: how many Americans will choose the dominant white caste over democracy? 

The GOP has answered loudly and clearly, officially stamped by the upcoming acquittal of Donald J Trump for inciting sedition. But maybe the Americans who want to fight for the other vision of America are listening and they will remember when those Republicans run for office in a year or three or five. Or, maybe not.

On February 12,1901 Delaware ratified the 13th Amendment abolishing enslavement after initially rejecting it in 1865.

COVID RESPONSE 2.0 RESET: TESTING

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Until recently, there has been national silence on an essential tool to fight a viral infection that is spread primarily through asymptomatic transmission. The Biden administration has announced 2 initiatives to increase the supply of rapid primarily self administered tests. The core of the problem is identification of people not simply infected but simultaneously capable of infecting others. These are not the same thing; people are infectious early in the course of the disease, then lose the ability to transmit the virus later in the course. The infectious interval is almost surprisingly short.

Once coronavirus invades a victim, the virus must replicate in sufficient numbers to be emitted into the atmosphere for others to inhale. The replication rate is fairly rapid, so a person can become infectious quickly, 2- 3 days before they develop symptoms if they are destined to do so. The mechanism that determines who becomes ill and the many more who don’t is not yet well understood. Viral load, or the number of organisms capable of infecting others, will decline over time, but the virus will remain detectable by PCR tests for a tail perhaps as long as a month. 

The exquisite sensitivity of the PCR test, as well as the technical difficulty in performing it, makes it ill suited for the task of rapidly identifying people capable of transmitting infection. The test’s expense and requirements for specialized equipment, reagents and proficiency limit it to specialized settings, the largest of which are the commercial labs of which there are primarily two, Quest and Labcorps. Overwhelmed by the constant demand, which must be met in the context of all the other medical tests they perform routinely, huge backlogs and delays are the anticipated results. Such delays make testing meaningless; if the virus is transmitted in the first 72 hours and spent after a week, a 3-5 day turnaround time has missed the infectious period. Add to that the limited availability of testing; by the time a nasal swab is tested, the victim has spent their days in general circulation in the community spreading infection, diminishing the impact of isolation after testing. By the time a positive result notification is delivered, the patient is no longer contagious.

Other aspects of the spread of coronavirus infection remain mysterious. While most people infect only one or two others, a few infect dozens to hundreds, i.e. superspreaders. The former president was probably not a superspreader, but someone on the White House staff may have been. Still not clear is whether superspreader events are the result of the circumstances or the presence of specific individuals within the crowd. Some of the effect may be attributed to the patterns of interactions in these days when many people remain wary of interactions with others and restrict interactions to a limited number of people. But there must be other factors at play that have not yet been uncovered. 

Throughout the year since COVID-19 was first detected, the lack of a testing strategy has facilitated its explosive spread across the US. It was wrong from the moment the CDC decided to develop its own test. The agency’s idea was to manage the bulk of the testing, a wrong headed vision that failed to see the enormity of the numbers that would be involved and how logistically expansive the need would be. Nothing seems to have changed much; even the Biden administration seemed to have conceded that adequate population testing is beyond the country’s capacity or at least a proposal seemed to be missing from the flurry of Biden initiatives. And yet, the lack of extensive testing coupled with the absence of a national database that includes all of the testing done hampers our understanding of who has actually been infected. The estimated 30% of the population is almost certainly a gross underestimate. The country is flying blind as the testing desert expands.

Big corporate entities have demonstrated that infection can be contained with frequent testing surveillance, among them the W/NBA, MLB, the entertainment industry as it resumes films and TV production and professional tennis. Their arrangements have allowed athletes to have prolonged intimate contact mixing body fluids, without wearing masks even with loud vocal exclamations known to intensify viral aerosolization. In contrast, choir practices have become superspreader events. These entities have used a combination of isolation bubbles, testing and quarantine. Colleges have also been relatively successful at holding a lid on infections if not completely stopping them; college football and basketball have been less successful, probably because of schools’ insistence on live audiences, but have soldiered on, to the possible detriment of student athletes.

Conversely, food processors, large retailers like Amazon and Walmart, grocers like Krogers have opted out of protecting their workforce, in turn putting the general public at risk. They too could institute widespread workforce testing but the testing would obligate them to provide sick leave pay to insure that workers testing positive could stay isolated. That is not an investment they have any interest in making, deferring to the federal government to provide the benefits they refuse to while they pay negligible amounts into the tax kitty to support them. Their capital has doubly released them from any contribution to the public good, no matter how many ads they put out about their charitable community activity. 

Add to that, even semi government entities like the postal service have not instituted routine testing at least for the parts of its workforce that routinely interact with the public.

Clearly the manufacture of rapid testing and equally important home testing has been retarded by the failure of the FDA to authorize these types of tests. Only one home test has been approved for the market and it’s cost over $100 makes it prohibitive for many. The principal barrier is the use of PCR as the gold standard for sensitivity and specificity, the very thing that makes PCR inappropriate to zero in on the individuals who are capable of transmitting the virus. What rapid testing sacrifices in accuracy is compensated for by frequency; essentially, the more often it’s performed, the more accurate the assessment of viral load. More frequent testing also provides a better indication of when infection occurred and if it is accompanied by contact tracing, it can narrow the scope of investigations. Until the FDA modifies its approach, inexpensive, widely available, rapid home coronavirus testing will not be in our future. Home testing which requires the compliance of a positive tester to quarantine can only be effective if some entity, probably the government as the system is currently structured, provides the resources for working people to stay out of the workplace until no longer infectious.

The need for extensive population testing has been accentuated by the rise of new viral variants as dominant strains has exposed the inadequacy of viral genomic testing. With new cases still rampant, the virus has open ended opportunities to amplify the genetic variants that are a routine part of its replication into better adapted forms to allow the virus to thrive. To our detriment, it is survival of the fittest at its best. The UK has been doing random population testing for some time and the availability of those samples have made it possible for health authorities to better understand the path of its namesake strain to prominence in the population. The amount of genomic analysis being done in the US is paltry and facilities would likely be overwhelmed by any increase in routine population testing samples. It goes without saying that to be able to get a handle on variants will likely require significant investment in viral genomic technology which will almost certainly have to come from government funding as well. The knowledge gained may not actually lead to any different course of action, but it can perhaps tweak or better target particular strategies.

While the public health basics are still our best defense, the advantage of the new vaccine technology is that it can be modified to respond to viral variants in a relatively short time. But as we have seen, the jump to mass production and mass immunization is dependent on collaboration with many other social, business, logistic, commercial and governmental entities. We are in the midst of a demonstration of how screwed up that can be.

Intensive testing could provide a way back to normal long before the infamous herd immunity is achieved. Public schools could reopen safely, with the confidence of teachers, students and parents, if only rapid testing were available to reassure them. Home testing would allow parents to isolate their families before ever getting to school. If only school systems had access to the funding and the political will existed across all communities. Instead Republican run governments are so invested in maintaining pandemic denial that they want schools to simply reopen, community spread high or low. If only a semi-rational approach that responded to community needs dominated politics. We’d probably have to wander back to perhaps the 1950s to find that nonpartisan philosophical approach to governance. Ah the good ole days!

And then there is that other nut, the fantasists who live in La-La-Land, where coronavirus is a hoax dreamed up to attack their fearless leader. No doubt, testing will be construed as a government conspiracy that tramples on the freedom to remain stupid or provides government surveillance data even as their cell phone data tracks everywhere they go and who they interact with and their web search history. Seems they feel safer that ginormous commercial entities like  Apple and Google and Amazon have their data and sell it to almost any Tom, Dick and Harry with the bucks. Go figure.

Imagine Super Bowl Sunday with rapid home testing among those patriots who believe in a country for everyone not one where only white men rule. Recalling that no test is 100%, people could have gathered, almost certain that they could not transmit COVID19 to their friends as they nosh on nachos and chicken wings, high fiving their victories or drowning their sorrows in beer. There would be no subsequent spike in coronavirus cases and deaths over the next month, running neck and neck with the pace of vaccinations and new variants. What a different world for those of us who live in the real one.

For American History Month, James McCune Smith M.D became the first university trained African American physician to practice in the US. After being rejected from American medical schools, he graduated from University of Glasgow in 1837. He was the only practicing university trained Black doctor in the country for over a decade. He served as physician for the Colored Orphan Asylum in New York. He was the first Black author of a scientific paper and to publish in a medical journal. Smith pioneered statistical techniques and research methods including the use of a control group for statistical comparison, now the standard for evidence based research. With his research done in the antebellum period, he was the first to propose  “race” was a social rather than biological category that served only to support enslavement. His arguments foreshadowed by over 150 years current ideas about race as a social construct that creates the circumstances for disparities in health status grounded in socioeconomic circumstances resulting from systemic racial bias.

COVID RESPONSE 2.0 RESET: FIRST MASKING

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COVID RESPONSE 2.0 RESET: MASKING

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Let’s face it, what we have been doing hasn’t worked. SARS-COV-2 is kicking our butts. According to Donald McNeil Jr, about 30% of the population has been infected with the virus, a startling number when you consider the disruption we’ve experienced that was supposed to diminish viral spread. Even though we know what to do, we don’t seem to be able to do it. Other countries like Australia have done what we have not and it has no new cases as of 1.27. That’s 0, zero new cases. 

The vaccine has become the messiah; it will save us if only we can do that right. No such luck. The last administration did help expedite the development process by providing funding and guaranteed purchases, two things that have retarded vaccine development for other diseases. But the new vaccine technology sits on at least 10 years of research done by dedicated scientists. In his usual braggadocio, the former president has taken far too much credit for work that would have made our money, not his, superfluous if not for the scientists past efforts. Still a policy decision that directed our tax dollars to the project sped up the process to get the country to this point. 

But that decision was not enough. The missing details have left us here, pretty much chaos on the vaccine front, and that’s only trying to give it to old people. Or is it? We can’t seem to agree on who should be prioritized, or even if there should be priorities at all. Each state seems to be going its own way. So what else is new? Everybody wants a shot and people are happy to cheat to get one, or actually two. Florida had to make a move to shut down vaccine tourism from surrounding states and other countries. But even as demand is high, some doses have still not been administered. In fact, it’s not even clear where some vials are. The Biden task force admitted that vials have been lost in transition. In the midst of all the hype about electronic tags that allowed shippers to know exactly where each box was located and the temperature inside it, tracking apparently ended at the delivery door. 

Even so, the public perception that we will be saved by the vaccine is misguided. In just the near term, at the topsy-turvy outset of American vaccination efforts, there are no plans about access for the general public yet. Estimates are that at the current pace, 80% of the population will not become immune until the fall. The necessary doses have not been ordered yet, in part because there are still several vaccines not yet FDA approved. Many of those manufacturers also have contracts for pre-ordered doses and have already started mass production in anticipation of FDA emergency authorization. How those vaccines will be integrated into the current immunization strategy is unclear. 

Also, it should not be forgotten that developed countries pledged not to hog the vaccines and committed to stamping out the virus around the globe. Canada stands out as one country that has ordered doses for 3 times its population. As yet, the Biden administration has made no comment on this element, limiting it’s message to it’s war to vaccinate America. Remembering that it is only a week into the new administration, global immunization is still an important consideration. Any plan that aims to push vaccination of the underdeveloped world into the future threatens the ability of the developed world to control viral spread as well as resume global commerce. 

Still, there is hope, as concrete plans are being revised for mass vaccinations. At some point Congress should allocate money to actualize them. Currently, the Biden administration is scrambling to redirect funds from the General Services Administration. The anticipated addition of other FDA approved vaccines can be anticipated to speed up the pace, if they can be mass produced and distributed in a quick start manner. However, glitches have to be anticipated in vaccine production and vaccination supplies because, shit happens. 

As science is making a comeback at least to the national government if not in the general public, we should understand what the science says about the effectiveness of the various vaccines. The vaccine protects against severe disease and death, not unlike the flu vaccine. The element that is unknown is whether it lowers the chance of acquiring infection and transmitting disease. Those things may be true but the data is not yet available because those were not the endpoints of the studies that have been analyzed so far. In part, the exposure rate in the study populations has varied in the tested vaccines and the infection rate in the control populations has been too small to generate good statistical analysis. Those answers may be coming; they’re just not available yet. Consequently, the recommendations for the immunization strategy were aimed at populations at highest risk for severe disease and death, not at the general population to prevent transmission. The bottom line is that the period when coronavirus spread will be lowered to annoyance level is not close at hand. It may fall to a point when it is not overwhelming the health care system and disrupting normal life before then, but coronavirus will remain a menacing threat to re-erupt until the former endpoint is reached.

In the meantime, the same public health maneuvers must be conscientiously applied across the board for the first time since coronavirus was first detected on our shores. The very things the country hasn’t been able to do. Hand washing, facial masking, maintaining physical distancing and one that has received less attention, adequate ventilation of indoor spaces. These are even more important as more contagious new variants become more dominant in the population.

Obviously, face masks are essential but proper use, which has not been emphasized enough, is make or break. If it doesn’t cover the nose, it might as well be in a pocket. The physiology is simple. A respiratory virus comes out of the nostrils as well as the mouth. An uncovered nose in someone infected, symptomatic or asymptomatic, is blowing out viral particles to infect others. Conversely, breathing in air loaded with viral droplets imports particles to the nasal mucosa where the virus can attach and reproduce. The nasopharynx is a connected chamber that joins the mouth, and the trachea, the highway to the lungs, where, because there is an extensive web of small capillaries, the virus can be pumped into the bloodstream to travel to all distal parts of the body.

Even as face masks are essential for the general population, they have been left to home seamstresses, fashion retailers and Etsy artists. Early on it was a question of supply; amazingly it still may be. There has been no wholesale attempt to provide adequate protection with high quality masks for the general public, as large a defect in the former president’s approach as his propaganda campaign against the face mask itself. Whether that would strain the current medical mask pipeline is not yet clear.

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But again, the science is clear. Surgical and N95 masks are an established defense against spread of infection, with N95s being 90% effective when worn properly. They are uncomfortable and not suitable for all day wear. After all, they are meant to be discarded after leaving each patient. This is in part why headgear that replaces goggles, mask and a face shield with one device while keeping the mouth visible is increasingly being used in ICUs. Ultimately, they are less expensive because they are designed for multiple use. In comparison, surgical masks are less effective because they have gaps at the sides and don’t have N95 filtration. They lower infection risk by 60%.

govtech.com

Unfortunately in the scramble to profit off the acute need for medical masks, counterfeits became a big problem without any regulation or enforcement to weed them out. Many an institution and municipality got caught up in the frauds, but they at least have the capacity to verify if an N or K95 mask is authentic. The public has no such capacity, so direct internet marketing and large retailers have sold millions of ineffective N/K95 masks to unsuspecting customers. They may work as well as cloth or surgical masks, but there is no way to know that for sure without evaluating each individual manufacturer. The Biden team should push the FDA or CDC or some agency to issue specifications or labelling requirements that consumers can use to verify the authenticity of N/K95 masks along with instructions for proper fit.

Cloth masks are another entity altogether. Studies done during the pandemic suggest that they can lower risk of infection by as much as 30% depending on construction. The most recent data suggests that they may also lower transmission rates.  The more layers of tightly woven cloth the better; the addition of filters, as mundane as a napkin or coffee filter, increases efficacy. It’s just a question of providing more overlapping fibers where the virus can settle. In that vein, two masks is probably better than one, as Dr Fauci has recently suggested.

But the explosion in the variety of masks, as one short scroll through Instagram can attest, has created a clusterfuck of choices. New brands have new materials that claim anti-viral properties or more effective filtration without any properly conducted scientific evaluation. Since this is commerce, there is no agency tasked with assessing advertising claims; the only recourse is the cumbersome legal process that accompanies an adverse outcome. That is a Sisyphean task. And because there has been no guidance from medical authorities, the public has no standards by which to judge which masks perform well and which do not or if there is any difference at all. So the face mask has evolved as a fashion statement, a purveyor of commercial logos, comedic or political commentary but not a protection against coronavirus spread. 

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Cloth masks should also have an adjustable nose clip to keep it more firmly on the nose. We’ve all had a mask fall away from our noses as we talk. It also helps to keep eyeglasses from fogging. In addition, many people wear their ear straps too loosely, which also allows the masks to fall down. A flexible metal nose strip can be added to masks that people have already bought, some are adhesive or a hot glue gun works so masks can be washed. Masks can be sanitized by heating in an oven for 30 minutes at 167o F but the CDC states that laundering in a washing machine and drying on high heat can also sanitize them.  

The face and neck sleeve is another unstudied piece of clothing. It seems logical that if it covers the mouth and nose with double fabric layers it must be as effective as other face masks. But scientific conclusions are not always logical. One question to consider is if pulling up the sleeve traps any theoretical virus inhaled in a vortex between the mouth and nose that recycles viral droplets. Is that even a reasonable question or just imagination? There’s no way to answer any of it without study. The CDC should develop and widely disseminate detailed guidance about the types of material and structure for effective mask use.

The emergence of more transmissible coronavirus variants makes effective facial coverings even more imperative. There will be more variants coming in the natural order of any RNA virus, some more, some less contagious or deadly. In summary, guidelines for proper nonmedical mask materials, construction, fit and use issued by a federal agency should be part of Biden’s 100 days masks campaign. A great slogan could be “If the mask isn’t covering your nose, it’s not worth wearing.” But the Biden administration should also be moving to shift the general public to more effective surgical masks. Science evolves and we should let it point the way. It would be great if that idea from the previous administration to mail every person 5 surgical masks was implemented as well, given that we still have months and months to go. The FDA should also move to authenticate N/K95 masks and remove fakes from the market and internet. A tall order for sure, but the effort should be made. This is exactly why we need big government.

From the Equal Justice Initiative calendar 2021

On January 27, 1967, a sheriff shot and killed a Black man in Birmingham Alabama during an arrest for not taking his dog to a vet.

46 IS HERE!

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As the fences, razor wire and blockades rose across Washington DC to create our very own Green Zone, there can only be sadness. For DC residents, it must have been frightening to see the military in the person of the National Guard patrolling their streets. Armed military guards in any town is what happens in other countries, not ours. The massive security presence separated inauguration from the people it is meant to serve, an additional barrier to coronavirus precautions that would already limit the crowds. Remembering the gaiety of my own experience during the Obama 2012 Inauguration, the festive atmosphere that ruled despite a biting cold, I could only be sad. Freezing in line to clear security for an inaugural ball, a much hyped affair that provided a video screen of the Obamas first dance, practically obscured by the sea of phones and even iPads recording it. Really; a video of a video! Still there were great musical acts and good music to dance to even if we were plastered together in postage stamp sized spaces at some points. The shared joy of distant proximity to the leading couple of the free world was intoxicating. Frozen toes in toeless pumps were a small sacrifice.

We warmed in the sun while waiting in the security line for a tour of the White House. I had time to stroll through the town, wandering out to Lincoln’s Cottage, the summer home on the outskirts of town meant to survive the summer heat of the capital city. From there, Lincoln could see Union troops camped across the river. Lincoln rode into town unchaperoned, once even being attacked. I discovered the Korean War Memorial, touched the Vietnam War Memorial, the war that launched me into a political movement as it changed the course of many of my friends’ lives. The capital oozes history around many corners; that too is mixed into the routine changing of administrations.

Photo by Denise Raynor

It felt like all that would be denied the first female Vice President who is both Asian and African American as well as the 78 year old President who finally, against long odds, achieved his goal as well as the millions of Americans who wanted to celebrate them. But the Inauguration Committee delivered a fantastic event, completely detached from the armed camp surrounding it. Traditional and civil, as if we awoke from a nightmare with our institutions shaken at their foundations but still standing as we root around in the splinters to inspect the damage.  

Americans will soon forget that the descendants of the enslaved saved our democratic republic for now. President Biden himself has acknowledged that it was dark skinned voters who propelled him to winning the nomination on momentum built from his victory in the South Carolina primary and the outpouring of Black voters in other states. African Americans as a crucial minority in many locations not only came out to the polls but also organized aggressively to put him in office. Republican forces of 45 recognized our outsized contribution in their efforts to overturn the election. The ballots that they wanted thrown out came from specific urban strongholds of Black voters–Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta. MAGA’s belief that the only legitimate voters are white bubbles out of the cauldron of the supremacy of whiteness- Make America White Again. But this is not the first time.

The inauguration evoked not just the pageantry of traditions but a certain civility that the last administration jettisoned off the planet. The Republican seditionists showed up, casually posing for selfies, as if they hadn’t 7 days before continued to propagate the Big Lie on the House floor. The Big Lie that goosed the mob to attack the legislators whom some elements sought to kidnap and perhaps ransom for a continuation of their hero’s reign. Or maybe lynch, as in the Vice President, for whom they had a noose waiting. Some thought that their act of intimidation delaying the certification would win the day and leave the decision in the hands of Congress. These are the messages that Rudy Guiliani was peddling. In the intoxication of the mob, most weren’t thinking anything as they acted instinctively to scream their white rage. 

While many of the inaugural traditions seem false and insincere, the veneer nevertheless reinforces the continuity of the national myth that hangs on the military costumes and reviews, in the musical notes of traditional anthems; in the word for word repetition of the oath of office used since the nation’s inception. To trot them out is to reaffirm that the nation will go on forever, much like Lincoln’s insistence that the Capitol dome should be completed during the Civil War to assert that the Union would continue. And their familiarity brought calm comfort to us weary of the last 4 years when everyday held a new and awful surprise or two or three.

Embedded in the Biden-Harris inauguration ceremony was a vision of America’s loftiest hopes. The variety of skin colors apparent on the stage including the blending of different races in the progeny of those involved projected the possibility of rising to power for the content of one’s character. The message in Spanish in JeLo’s rendition of America screamed that they too are Americans just like those before them who spoke a different language like Yiddish, Italian and German spoken by other immigrant groups even after they became citizens of the country. (A shout out to JeLo for the brilliance of her artistry, whatever her intention!) The inaugural poem that captured the majesty of language in the service of reaching deep emotional reservoirs. Inaugural poets have been eschewed by Republican presidents, one tradition that 45 followed. 

I realized while watching the wreath laying at the Tomb of the Unknown as the 3 former presidents and first ladies waited patiently for Biden and Harris to arrive that we seldom saw 45 waiting with others. He always made a grand entrance and then left immediately when his part was done. He demanded that events go at his pace. The quick in and out, as if he was not part of the human race but above it. 46 is in and of the mass of humanity, evident as he stopped on his short walk down Pennsylvania Ave to talk with reporters and some children standing along the route as if he was drawn by a tractor beam to get close and interact. And Biden ran to the side, unlike his younger predecessor who at best lumbered and at worst gingerly stepped down inclines.

Photo by Denise Raynor

But beneath the veneer of Biden’s calls for unity forged around a common vision of America lies an awful truth; there are not one but two visions. There is the one captured by the Confederate flag walked loudly through the Capitol rotunda, for the first time in history even as the place is still packed with statues of its heroes. It represents the original secessionists now reincarnated within the MAGA movement. They want their America to be the one in which whiteness decides who can be a citizen, who can participate in its republic, who can rule the labor force, who decides who will own lands and businesses. For those people, they must always be white. And the red and brown original settlers of the country must stay subordinated in their assigned roles. Whites will tell them what they are, for they do not rank among the “whos”. (For those who don’t know, Mexicans inhabited the territory, conquered by the Spanish, which was reincarnated as Texas after a war with the US to extend its empire. Similarly California, inhabited by an indigenous population for thousands of years, was conquered by the Spanish and handed over to the US as part of the European treaty that ended the Seven Years War). 

The democracy that stands in opposition reflects the vision of the people who saved it most recently. That is Black, brown, red and yellow people who went to the polls to color in their ideal. Black people have been the persistent nudge in history to save the soul of America. We are the believers who carry the vision of freedom and democracy even as we have been rejected at every turn. There is no more loyal American than an Afro-American. We made it possible for Joe Biden to stand on that podium. We made it possible for the Democrats to have a majority in the Senate to begin his work. We saved democracy again.

This is not our first time. One might start with the economy that made the nation; the commerce, the production and the financial system, all based in traffic and ownership of the enslaved and the products they produced. In 1860, our collective bodies were the most valuable asset in the country, larger even than land values. But beyond our economic role, when the nation was split asunder and the republic was fighting for its very existence, the formerly enslaved numbered 10% of the Union Army, roughly 198,000 men served as soldiers in the U.S. Army and Navy, infusing Union forces with desperately needed troops when they were being slaughtered in large numbers. Moreover, we provided the labor on which the army ran and our flight from Confederate lands deprived their forces of the labor on which they were even more dependent. White men in the South weren’t supposed to work if a dark skinned man was around. We were the labor in the munitions factories that built their weapons. We made the bricks that constructed their fortifications. We filled their bellies.

One could say we earned our freedom in the Civil War, if there is such a thing as earning what is supposed to be naturally ours. And yet, white Americans failed again to act on their ideals after a short interval when they discovered that if someone wasn’t growing cotton, their economy could not recover. And God forbid they should have to live next to, work next to, sit next to or eat with a perceived beast of the field. Their negligence plunged Black Americans into 100 years of the Jim Crow police state. The only thing that saved us from the genocide they perpetrated on indigenous Americans was our hands and our backs, and our distinct visibility.

Still 90 years in, we once again rose up in large numbers to try to claim our birthright, freedom of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. John Lewis, Fanny Lou Heimer and many many other men, women and children would rather risk beatings, lynchings and death than continue to live without their birthright. Many others, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, James Chaney are only a few whose lives were ended early by white partisans fighting for their vision of America. When the pictures splashed across TV, we got 2 laws that were supposed to make good on the trio of Civil War amendments that righted the Constitution still far short of our life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness but were then ignored. Those laws allowed white Americans to pat themselves on the back over their generosity, even as they continued to live their own racially segregated lives which allowed them to ignore the movement of the police state into the country’s urban areas. Walking and riding while Black has always been a thing since the country began.

We tried the courts, but schools are still 85% segregated. Congress, state legislatures, police and the courts evolved a novel permutation to just put us behind bars and lock us out of sight and mind. That combined with maneuvers to eliminate us from electoral participation using lies about election fraud and computer drawn gerrymandered district maps continued to keep us in our designated place, subordinated in the lowest caste. All our oppositional efforts generated a low hum, sometimes rising to a brief bleep before returning to practically inaudible. 

The Confederate vision prospered in Congressional Dixiecrats turned dog whistling Reagan Republicans. It gathered steam while honking at the Obama train as liberal Americans patted their own backs again. Obama was the come-to-Jesus moment for the forces of the Confederate vision which finally blossomed into juicy ripe fruit under 45. Without a regional base of their own in the greatly expanded number of states, they were no longer content to take a slice, they wanted to have the whole damn country this time or they would tear it down.

So President Biden, if you want to achieve national unity you will have to first resurrect a singular vision for the nation that only haltingly emerged briefly as the republic began to stitch itself back together after its first major test. Then it was only half formed, but now more complete, it will require aggressive pursuit of the white supremacists in all their variant forms. While white supremacy will never die, the objective should be to make it socially unacceptable, much as it became in the 80s and 90s. However, the presence of media bubbles may make that impossible; Quanon is in people’s heads and MAGA will remain alive and well as long as Rupert Murdoch can masquerade his media as something other than disinformation in the service of racial animus. There is a whole flock of other media outlets in this category and as long as they have a captive audience, the prospect for dissipating that 40% nut of white supremacists is slim. It’s not the lunatic fringe, but the working farmers, small business owners, cops and firemen, teachers, elected officials, nurses and doctors who believe their color should be privileged over all others even as they don’t understand that is the heart of what they call racism. It’s not how nice they are to the brown or Black person they know at work that determines their racism. It’s the fact that they can’t extend that niceness to every other person who is brown or Black or yellow or red.

On the other hand, a pathway to reassuring anxious elements of the dominant caste that their world is not on the verge of collapse may be 1) conquer the pandemic; 2) provide relief to those affected; 3) restore the economy. However, if the administration intends to engage our problems with equitable solutions, the group imbued with the confederate vision will rear back. The very existence of Vice President Kamala Harris is a torch that lights their ire. The question going forward will be how many Americans want a republic committed to freedom, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for every person in the country. Those Americans who want it will have to fight fiercely to make it happen, neighbor to neighbor, kin to kin, colleague to colleague, policy to policy, legislative bill to legislative bill. It is a democracy only if we can finally make it one and then keep it. A 13% minority has worked hard to make it so, but all Americans who believe that the Bill of Rights and Constitution apply to all of us must remain engaged in the fight to make it so. HIstory tells the story of what happens when they tire of the fight. And we will not be the only ones who will suffer.

From The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman:

Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed

a nation that isn’t broken

but simply unfinished . . .

We are striving to forge a union with purpose

To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and

conditions of man

And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us

but what stands before us

THE GOP IS AT A FORK IN THE ROAD

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When Republicans talk about last week’s insurrection, Abraham Lincoln comes up. He called for the forgiveness of Confederates after the Civil War, they say. They don’t mention that Lincoln was shot dead by a Confederate supporter mourning their surrender. John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators who injured 3 other Cabinet members were hunted down and hanged. Instead, Republicans want to use, ironically, the Confederacy as an example for how the nation should proceed in the wake of Trump’s call to insurrection at the Capitol building. After all, the former CSA president Jefferson Davis was briefly jailed and then pardoned. It was Andrew Johnson who made the decision to allow Confederates to be accepted as full citizens in the country that they had conducted a 4 year war against months before. He decided to reclaim lands already distributed and planted by the formerly enslaved and return them to their enslavers. These ideas are a natural outgrowth of party supporters among the Civil War reenactors and Lost Cause proponents integral to the MAGA movement, misled about the nation’s true history. 

To all of this, I call bullshit! Look where that postwar approach has led the country. It began 100 years of the apartheid police state that was the Jim Crow South. Outside the South, segregation and overt racial discrimination reigned throughout the rest of the country for over 100 years. Despite the 15th amendment, it took 100 years before the formerly enslaved gained the right to vote. It has worked out well for Republicans in whose minds systemic racism doesn’t exist. But it’s been a disaster for the descendants of the formerly enslaved, native born and those who immigrated from the Caribbean. 

Our present catastrophic state is why racial justice demonstrations erupted across the world after the whole nation was invited to watch the lynching of George Floyd without the careful tutelage lavished on the youngsters who were taken to public lynchings in the 19th and 20th centuries. Children were brought to join in the “festivities” so that lynching traditions could be passed down. Today, young adults and their parents without that experiential lens were enraged that a Minneapolis cop invited them to participate in his act of state sponsored terror. How dare he implicate other white people in his inhumanity! He was supposed to be serving the community. Nonwhite BLM marchers were saying Hell, No! I don’t want to be any part of that. 

How ironic for Republican senators to now say that impeachment will increase division in the country! The party that has stoked division for decades thinks divisiveness will be exacerbated by holding the president accountable for sedition. The divide, already as wide as the Pacific Ocean, has no room to expand. This is more political gamesmanship from those who should be ashamed that they have not united with the rest of the country in defense of our security, similar to the unity after 9/11. Their attempt is reminiscent of the Lost Cause rewrite of the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction as befits their  La-La-Land bound supporters. They are trying to hide in plain sight. Yes they enabled the president in every way, shape and form for over 4 years. Yes they have promoted an agenda of disinformation and actively sought the right wing media bubble to spread manufactured scandal and conspiracy theories. No, they have not spoken out against any of it. Even after their lives were endangered during the assault on their workplace, a co-equal branch of government, Senators Hawley and Cruz kept on with business as usual, spreading the big lie of the theft of a Trump victory. No, they have not rejected the election fraud lie as 8 Senators and 139 Representatives voted against certification of the Electoral College certificates. No, some have not stopped spreading it.

It has taken longer for the nerves of others to settle, but as the days tick by, many have recovered their GOP mojo to begin whirling like dervishes. They’ve come out swinging with the party line of promoting national unity. It’s a testament to their moral bankruptcy and partisan gamesmanship. They’re in it for the long haul, anchored in preserving their minority party as the only one meant to rule, even as their numbers are shrinking. Trump allowed them to reach their pinnacle. Republicans believe they can’t allow his influence to wane if their dominance is to continue. There is nothing more divisive than the Divider in Chief.

Contrast the Trump response to that of the Democratic Party in 2016. Yes, the election was stolen from Clinton through Russian “active measures” that goosed the political divide. Liberals and progressives demonstrated, protested and moved to the courts in an attempt to block the major tenets of the president’s reign of cruelty. The supposedly independent legislative branch kowtowed to the executive branch, passing their signature legislative achievement, tax cuts for the rich, and then holding off any other legislation after their 12 year crusade against the ACA died under John McCain’s down turned thumb. Moscow Mitch’s own pet project, crippling the federal court system with partisan hacks for decades to come, has been the sum total of Senate accomplishments outside a ludicrous parade of faux Senate investigations designed to undermine the Mueller investigation. In the face of near economic collapse and escalating COVID19 deaths, they did pass a relief bill that managed to make their rich friends richer. And last but not least, the faux Impeachment trial. 

Liberals concentrated on the voting booth to overturn this GOP hell and were ultimately successful in dislodging the devil, but losses at the state and local level show the power of the presidential bully pulpit to spread chaos and mental mania across the land. But that’s the American way; when you lose an election no matter the reason, you try again. At no point did democrats ever consider organizing an armed coup, an idea that would only occur to a party steeped in autocracy like Republicans. They convinced their constituents that elections are only valid when they win because they told them that. They told them that only they have the right to govern. They told them that the Democratic Party are demons that will destroy them. And they believed. 

After the failure of their armed insurrection, the Republican Party is now at a fork in the road. To the right, the path to the Trump train. Straight ahead, Dump Trump and find a new leader to regain one party rule. Right now, cabinet and administration officials can’t abandon the ship fast enough, hoping the slime won’t seep into any future economic opportunities first and political prospects secondarily. But the majority of those in office, both federally and locally, elected for their fealty to Trump, have no choice. In their vacuous minds, unencumbered by a political ethos, they are unable to envision a path apart from the cult of Trumpology marching orders. Lifted by radiating the cult aura, the candidates attracted to elected office were either true believers or ambitious, self absorbed nihilists searching for fame and fortune. The attack on Capitol Hill hastened the timeline; surveys show that only 15% of Republicans disapprove of the incident, a measure of the extent to which the party is ensconced in La-La-Land. 

As the House forged toward Impeachment, Congressional Republicans were being forced to take a side, even as they are witnessing the monster that they created devouring them. The harassment and intimidation of legislators and their families, at the state and federal levels has struck fear in the hearts of those who might be considering abandoning the ship. Lindsay Graham harassed in the airport. Social media trolls threatening kidnap, torture and death to those who don’t tow the radical extremist line. Rep Alyssa Slatkin, a Democrat from a red district in Minnesota, says that she has been subject to death threats for years. She told Christine Amanpour that her Republican colleagues told her that their safety was uppermost in their minds as they considered their vote on Impeachment. There is no way to thread a path in the middle when the Mafia has a person in their sites. Typical political maneuvering through wordsmithing is not possible in a yes or no vote. A vote to impeach represents the quickest route to being “primaried” out of their seats as well as a life threatening act for their families.

Legislators sincerely wanting to jump out of the Trump gang should contact the FBI to investigate their tormentors and prosecute them. There is probably some federal law against intimidating the votes of legislators. They should then vote against sedition and ultimately resign if they can’t live without fear. They should honestly self-reflect on their path into their predicament and literally repent. However, given the intestinal fortitude within the group, the probability that some members of Congress and the Senate are taking shelter in a popular excuse is high. As fellow seditionists, they should simply resign, as unlikely as a pig taking flight.

So as the impeachment debate proceeded, it was clear that most Republicans were forking right, as would be predicted. Their most coherent argument against impeachment boiled down to this is time to lower the temperature and strive for unity. Apparently, Pelosi is supposed to reach out to them and they have only to accept graciously. Republicans have made no pretense of an ounce of self reflection. I call bullshit political gamesmanship! If they are serious, they have one simple thing to do. Republicans, tell your supporters you lied, as Mitt Romney suggested. Get on Twitter with a simple statement, “there was no election fraud. Joe Biden legitimately beat our guy by 8 million votes.” Stand in your legislative chambers and at your governors’ podia and simply tell the truth. They lost and they can try again in 2024. Of course, this would be most effectively done by their fearless leader. But he has found no way to flip this loss into a win except to lie about it. He sees it as his continuing base of power. So he’s out. But rather than tell their supporters to go home and join the battle against COVID19, many Republicans have refused to abandon the election fraud lie. Some have yet to acknowledge Joe Biden as the legitimately elected president. They simply can’t remember how not to lie.

Leading those on this fork diverging to the far right are Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, positioning themselves to be the next autocratic leader. They radiate ambition and nihilism. Cruz has deluded himself into believing he is charismatic; he is not. This supposedly moral crusader has evolved into a simple power grabber as scraggly as his unkempt beard. There’s something sinister about him. Hawley considers himself a fast rising phenom and bright Harvard educated star meant to outshine the sun. Harvard makes its graduates believe that kind of horseshit in their mantra that it is training leaders even as it doesn’t implant the ethics that should guide leaders through the idea of service. It’s a hard sell, given the wealthy, white entitled clay they have to mold. 

It’s unlikely that the party lead will fall to the Jr who is only a moon that reflects back the sun’s light. If elected, Don Jr would be a front man for his father whom he can’t refuse. But for him to be elected, Agent Orange would have to surrender a piece of the spotlight, an impossibility. That wing of the party has no one else because Trump quashed anyone who got any attention at all. He built a movement about him, not the party. He doesn’t care what happens to it when he’s gone. This wing of the party has nowhere to go in electoral politics. Not even the party’s best efforts to shrink the electorate to only those who support them appears to be a recipe to return to a dominant position in national government in the absence of the threat of widespread domestic terrorism. Here, think about The Troubles in Ireland and Irish terrorism in England. The penetration of La-La-Land should not be underestimated given that they started at almost 40%. On the other hand, many of them don’t often vote unless TheRealityTVPresident whistles them to the polls and he’s whistling only for himself. It seems clear that a bunch of them have opted out altogether, preferring violent guerrilla warfare to the voting booth.

Trump quashed anyone in the party who got any attention at all. He built a movement about him, not the party. He doesn’t care what happens to it when he’s gone.

The White Supremacist in Chief may not have anticipated a competitor that threatens to subsume even his influence. He was the hub where a range of radical right extremist causes could cross pollinate mainstream Republicans. But then there was Q. Qanon centered Trump’s name, the only time that he’s allowed it’s use without an attached financial remuneration, in a far out conspiracy theory that posited Democrats as a group that trafficked in children whose blood they drank. From there it has mushroomed in scope to embrace all kinds of other concerns like anti-vaxxers, supporters of silencing women who have been sexually harassed, abused or raped and involuntary celibates (Incels). The forces have all coalesced in the “Stop the Steal Movement”, it’s primary focus since the election. Trump’s stolen election lie has galvanized and radicalized a large cross section of people who have been mesmerized by ever widening conspiracies. To commit to Q is to walk through the looking glass, into an underground bunker in La-La-Land with an automatic self locking vacuum sealed door. There may be no way out.

Qers may even be beyond Trump’s influence. Qers have their own way to interpret his words. For instance, his announcement that he would skip the inauguration was a signal that he would be safely out of the way of any attempted action. His latest statement that violence did not represent what he stood for they understand as something he just has to say to tamp down criticism. They know he has promoted and supported violence in the past, from beating up protesters in his rallies to the killing of a demonstrator in Charlottesville to aggressive police attacks on peaceful BLM demonstrators. They see it as just another wink, wink. And if that is true, there may be no way to stop the wave of domestic terrorist attacks that will surely come. In recent polls, 64% of Republicans agreed with the statement that the traditional way of American life is disappearing so fast that they may have to use force to save it.

People like Mitt Romney and Jeff Flake may try to gather up the leftovers on the Dump Trump fork. At some point, though, they will have to reckon with the reality that the majority of citizens aren’t buying what they’re selling. As we’ve been tumbled in thunderous seas with  waves of deaths from COVID crashing over us, economic depravity from viral fallout, a momentary recognition of economic and health disparities and the long history of racial violence at the hands of law enforcement, people are less likely to be receptive. The “real” conservative movement will have to reckon with their role in repackaging overt anti-Black racism into the dog whistles of Ronald Regan and his successors then flipped back into overtness by the White Nationalist in Chief. It’s just hard to sell their disdain for people of color in a country that is becoming majority nonwhite. They’ve been trying to adopt the verbiage but it rings hollow in the mouths of those who blame minorities for being the stereotypes that the conditions Republican governance has created when there are NO alternatives. (Not that Democrats haven’t made their own contribution.) The missing ingredient is empathy, the emotion that our caste system has given the upper caste permission to deny in the continuing war to keep the lowest caste in its place through degradation.  

The importance of government to our survival was made manifest as dependence on the largess of corporate America in the COVID response exposed the inherent inequality baked into the prioritization of profit over people. Conservatives’ small government is incapable of meeting the overarching challenges of climate change and racial justice and is in large part responsible for the hole that we now have to dig ourselves out of. The fact that some still refuse to acknowledge climate change in order to recruit new members is appalling and speaks to the party’s propensity for disinformation.

The conservative hew and cry about budget deficits will be central to either path of the splintered GOP. It wasn’t real, just an excuse to divest in the country’s resources. We know that because George Bush 43 built an enormous federal deficit playing with war toys even before the response to the Great Recession. The size of the deficit has never prevented a massive tax giveaway to corporations and the wealthy, the last one creating the foundation for an even larger one as both humanity and the economy yields to the virus. One other critical factor, times have changed. The fact is, with 0% interest rate practically globally, the newest borrowings are a steal. There hasn’t been a better time in the last couple of decades to accumulate a deficit. The smart money would borrow more to repay older debt service.   

These conservatives will have to abandon their attachment to the clearly bankrupt theory of trickle down economics, now thoroughly debunked in practice by the evidence that the wealth stays at the top. That fact is in large part responsible for the emergence of their nemesis, the RealityTVPresident who scooped up all those who saw their government wasn’t listening to them and didn’t give a shit about them. It is the decades of Republican penny-pinching governance that allowed the deterioration of infrastructure, the public school and public health systems among other governmental functions.

They must acknowledge and disavow their role in building the infrastructure for one party rule through guaranteed districts. They shouldn’t hope to claw back to national prominence by retelling the lie of voter fraud in order to restrict voting in elections and repackaging votes to undercut one man, one vote. They must support a level playing field for all candidates. This may be the most difficult step because they have grown up in a party that understood that its message was not a winning one unless they focused on molding the electorate to the most likely susceptible and eliminating those who were not. 

“True” conservatives must honestly reexamine their role in facilitating the rise of Donald Trump and coddling him in office, before they begin to determine the new direction for conservatism in the fragment of the Republican Party that dumps Trump. But they must also understand that if their arguments don’t win over a sufficient majority in the country as it evolves, they must either be happy with minority status or alter their stances to win over more people. That’s electoral politics. If they can’t, they are just another autocratic party vying with a stronger one with more name recognition and the right wing media bubble in tow.      

 In the interim since January 6, more and more evidence is emerging that some Congressmen and perhaps some staff assisted in the planning and execution of the Capitol assault. Some Capitol police have been implicated in providing maps or instructions for moving around the building, reflecting the historical reality that law enforcement has often been supporters if not members of white supremecist groups. There may be some members in the National Guard tasked to defend the inauguration and state capitals who are playing for the other team as well. Republicans should be apologizing for leading their supporters to treason. But Republicans have not yet admitted that they were wrong in supporting and speaking at the rally. They will not admit that they enabled Agent Orange for 4 years or that their failure to convict at the first Impeachment trial led us to this moment. Instead they are trying to isolate January 6 as the first bad act that 45 committed. 

The initial horror over January 6 suggested that the divide might produce some interesting results. Mitch McConnell had given up the stolen election lie just moments before the Capitol was breached. Recently it’s been reported that he thinks 45 should be impeached but that seems to have been a political trial balloon. He then announced that the trial would be delayed until after the Biden-Harris inauguration, seemingly denying the urgency to remove a traitor from office.

 McConnell, always a political survivor without philosophy, ethics or principles seems to be trying to find a middle course outside either fork in the road. In truth, he’s old, he won a 6 year term and is unlikely to run for another. He has lost his majority position which he can hope to recover in 2022; he has no other political aspirations. He can just sit quietly in waiting for that leadership position, particularly if the impeachment trial falls under Shumer’s purview. 

 Liz Cheney stuck her neck out to support impeachment, a move that could earn her a place in the leadership of a newly constituted conservative party. However, her political pedigree smacks of strong autocratic tendencies, including her father Dick who pioneered the unitary chief executive, as close to a monarch as one can imagine. In the near term, it could result in the loss of her party leadership position, death threats and loss of seat.

Elected office is not where the newly constituted Republican party, probably with a new name to erase their shame, will draw new members. It will be in convened meetings with those who left the party under the Trump siege like the people in the Lincoln Project and Jeff Flake. They will have to compete with the wing under Trumpian influence for people who flake off from the cult of Trump. However, they should ask themselves whether they want to welcome chameleons like Lindsay Graham who wants to be anything politically advantageous to anyone. They have to decide if they want to add some principles back into their politics or just bodies.

In the meantime, elected officials in the grips of the Trumpology cult, either as believers or people trying to take advantage of them, will be a fifth column in government under Joe Biden. Hopefully, investigations will expose those who aided and abetted the terrorists and the legislative bodies will expel them. Two newly elected Qanon disciples in the House, Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA) and Lauren Boebert (CO) are lost in the wilderness. Greene says she will propose a bill to impeach Biden for abuse of power on Inauguration Day. The idea demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of the term, given that Biden, a private citizen, will only have been president for an hour or two. Ok, so it’s a publicity stunt where she’s using Congress like Twitter, pushing her brand for maximum likes to raise her profile. Greene refused to wear a mask in a safe room and so may have infected 3 Democratic colleagues to date. She has also refused to go through the newly installed metal detectors and pushed back against Capitol police along with her Colorado colleague who swore she would bring a gun to the Capitol. Guns are allowed in member offices, but not the chamber.  Goebert is also being investigated for tweeting out Pelosi’s location in the building during the riot in direct violation of police instructions not to disclose their secure location. It just has to be said, Qanon believers have lost their minds, but they bring 2 more Republican votes to the House to nibble away at Democratic initiatives. At the same time, they are implants of the radical right sworn to tear down the United States government. 

People like Jim Jordan, Kevin McCarthy, Hawley and Cruz will retain a powerful platform in legislative investigations to distribute KGB planted propaganda and they will pursue the objective McConnell laid out against Barack Obama, to make Biden a one term president. Although the party will not be able to mount investigations, Hunter Biden will return as a topic in any place where conspiracy theories can be snuck in. They will insert their disinformation into confirmation hearings and legislative debates. (Great news that there will be legislative debates in the Senate.) They will use the filibuster to slow legislation in the Senate. They will be the Twitter feed for Trump; they will do the interviews on Trump/FoxNews and OAN. 

More nefariously, these foes of democracy represent a significant security threat. They will have access to secure information that there is no assurance that they will not feel above the law to share. If you support and aid insurrection, a few laws about security should be no barrier. But outside Congress, there are the hundreds (some estimate 25 million Americans are Q at least partial believers) of law enforcement and former military, potential National Guards who believe in #stopthesteal if not Q. One fireman was arrested for beating a cop with a fire extinguisher at the Capitol. At least 3 policemen have been terminated from their local departments for participation in the Capitol storming and it’s still early in arrests of what will hopefully be thousands. Every person who broke through the barriers was at a minimum trespassing; hundreds of Black youths daily are arrested for much less.

On the other hand, the “true” conservative fork will likely lay low, as the Trump inspired violence peaks and coronavirus subsides. They have time. Think about this, doctors say that COVID19 can have long term effects that have not yet been defined. The virus attacks every organ, including blood vessels and the heart.  As a survivor, Trump may have some illness in his future and that could change the political calculus completely.

On January 17, 1834 Alabama legislature passed a law that effectively bans any free Black person from residing in the state.

LA-LA-LAND HIT THE GROUND RUNNING AT THE US CAPITOL

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United States Capitol Building Washington DC

“You’re a traitor!” “You cannot tell us we didn’t see what we saw![the stolen election]” Ted Cruz told the Senate in his speech to reject Arizona’s certificate of electors because a significant number of people believed that the election was stolen from the ArtfulDodgerPresident. What Cruz didn’t say was that they believe that because they have been fed a torrent of lies from the president himself, the ground first prepared in the campaign before he won the election in 2016. A chorus of voices joined in, from Trumpophant GOP politicians to the usual right wing media actors. This is a central tenet of La-La-Land. Rudy Guiliani once said that if the people believe it, then it is a fact. The business of La-La-Land is to transform beliefs into facts, no matter how far they diverge from the realities in our world, no matter how absurd.

La-La-Land is the cudgel with which El Trumpe! holds the country hostage. It is his creation, constructed from the foundation of Obama birtherism and added to bit by bit with bricks of “alternative facts” from Trump/FoxNews and the right wing media bubble. His administration began with a meaningless detail, falsification of the size of the inaugural crowd in defiance of the photographic evidence, an elevation of the new president’s admonition, “do not believe what you see and hear” to the White House press briefing podium. Only he speaks the truth. 

La-La-Land exists in the mind, without real touchstones like wildfires, rising sea levels, polluted waters, deaths from coronavirus. It’s symbols are swastikas, Confederate flags, Qanon tee shirts and red MAGA hats. La-La-Landers call themselves the “real Americans”, having stolen the name of our country for their own as their leader, foisted into the White House with the help of Russian intelligence “active measures”, commanded them to. Their country is 99% white, ours is multiracial. Their territory exists in enclaves scattered across the rural landscape, failed factory towns in the Midwest and the Northeast and sparsely populated states of the far West and of course, the former Confederacy in the South.

The Russians didn’t see a need to help Trump in 2020, thinking that the presidential propaganda machinery supplemented by the multiple GOP  purveyors of disinformation in the Senate and House who continued to spout KGB propaganda would be sufficient. Frankly Putin has become disenchanted with his partnership with the Donald whom he feels has delivered very little concrete advantages for Russia. Gone from Russian state media is complementary coverage of Trump, sometimes even portraying him as a buffoon. Trump had also bungled several efforts with his big mouth, like failing to withhold aid and weapons from Ukraine in search of his own personal anti-Biden campaign. He squeaked through his impeachment trial with the help of his Senatorial co-conspirators, providing another platform for KGB disinformation as Fiona Hill begged them not to do. Most importantly, he has done nothing about the sanctions that are crippling their economy based primarily on fossil fuels. Still, Putin is ecstatic with his progress in sowing destabilizing chaos in the first democratic republic in the world, culminating in the overthrow attempt at the Capitol building. That is a propaganda coup beyond his wildest dreams. “This is what happens in democracies; they crumble while our Russian system is strong. We are the future.” crows Vladimir.

Putin’s successes in chaos sowing have shifted his attention to intelligence gathering as revealed by the months-long hack into US government agencies. This effort may not stop at mere information gathering, but may also include already planted back door levers to disable functionality. The Russians are miles ahead of the US in cyber stealth, much as they were in the race to space. And we will need the kind of all-out effort mobilized in JFK’s moon shot. That means not only MONEY, and the price will be steep, but also political will. Political will is a more difficult problem given the GOP’s determination to cement its one party autocratic rule in alliance with the Red Bear. The Sedition Caucus in Congress and La-La-Lander leadership will do everything possible to thwart efforts to secure the country from the Russian threat. China, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel have also been bad actors in this arena. Keeping the barn door open for Russia keeps it open for them all. 

La-La-Land exists in the mind, without real touchstones like wildfires, rising sea levels, polluted waters, deaths from coronavirus. It’s symbols are swastikas, Confederate flags, Qanon tee shirts and red MAGA hats.

Trump lost the election because he overestimated the extent of La-La-Land’s citizenry. The RealityTVPresident’s decision to focus on La-La-Landers almost exclusively with actions that increasingly alienated his hesitant fringe may have been the error that cost him the election. Additionally, he perhaps did not anticipate the active anti-racism messaging and anti-voter suppression movement that sprang up to counter Russian bot driven efforts to depress African American voters this election cycle. He may have underestimated the need for Putin’s assistance there. He ran almost completely on grievances, primarily his own; the little talk about policy was drowned in pleas for sympathy, more pitiful as the end grew near.  He also did not foresee that the reaction of people of color and their allies to his racist rhetoric concretized in oppressive physical violence in the streets against BLM demonstrators, white, other minority and Black. That anger was mobilized into successful massive Democratic voter registration efforts that knocked the White Supremacist in Chief out of the White House. The Lincoln Project has his number as well and they continue to be ruthless. Apparently, he overestimated his cult’s size or at least the part of it that would vote. 

The same backlash that produced massive Democratic voter registration efforts ended McConnell’s detrimental majority leadership, 45’s final thrust at the GOP even as the party fared well in state legislatures, governors mansions and local governments. He has said he intentionally undermined the Senate runoff to punish MCConnell for insufficient support. Mitch, the savvier politician whose lifeblood is tied to his majority leadership, understood the more effective path and Trump’s election fraud themed rants were not it. 

Citizenship in La-La-Land is granted through feeding at the trough of conspiracy theories peddled across radical right platforms and reflected onto Trump/FoxNews, Facebook pages and vice versa. It’s a virtual revolving door. Members come as the aggrieved, framing their receptiveness to victimhood narratives that promote revenge against the powerful and those they think have invaded their space, misidentifying who both those groups are. It allows them to identify a purported multimillionaire who has done nothing but victimize other people as the savior who would re-establish the world as they thought they knew it. Trump/FoxNews has dimmed as a leading myth purveyor, now dislodged by the rabbithole of conspiracy peddling chat rooms and internet platforms that then pop up in Facebook group feeds. It is a jungle of interconnecting vines in praise of the superiority of whiteness so dense that sunlight can not penetrate it’s interior.

Citizens believe that they are under siege by people of color. They are petrified that their America where white men reigned supreme over their homes, their wives and their political voice in dying. But that America is as fictional as La-La-Land. The power was always in the hands of the wealthy who corralled the majority of white men into believing they were in control as post WWII prosperity, the Jim Crow police state in the South and racial discrimination across the country brought economic prosperity. By the Reagan era, white middle and working class men became less economically secure as wages began to stagnate and unions were attacked. To stave off discontent, the wealthy called upon the tried and true Black bogey man as the cause of their economic stagnation, appealing to their membership in the dominant white caste to apply their knee to the necks of the lowest dark skinned caste. Americans have been brainwashed by whiteness! It is the gift of the robber barons that keeps on giving: our very own white-black caste system. 

But La-La-Land’s imaginary model did not allow the country to flourish in the world as it evolved, although the slippage was not immediately evident. The exclusion of the talents and skills of significant portions of the population disadvantages the country to compete on the world stage. It is a powerhouse that could propel the creativity that will allow us to thrive in a world of globalized competition on the verge of climate disaster.

When the 45th president was inaugurated, he spoke about American carnage. What people, besides his co-architects the Steves Bannon and Miller, didn’t realize at the time was that carnage was what the president intended to bring, not what had happened in the past.

The  parallels between Adolf Hitler’s Brown shirts and the seditionists are undeniable. The obvious one is that many in the mob share with the Nazis a common philosophy of white supremacy, if not all the same overt symbols. They will try to deny it but their rhetoric and actions are completely in sync. But more than that, in 1938 Hitler sent German citizens to join the Nazi SA, a paramilitary army to carry out Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass to corral and beat Jewish people and destroy their businesses, homes and synagogues. In 2021, Donald Trump and his enablers sent his similarly mesmerized La-La-Landers to break the windows of the Capitol building. To those who are not citizens of La-La-Land, that should be bone chilling.

On April 13,1873, armed white men in Colfax LA killed 150 Black people who were peacefully protesting a takeover of the courthouse by the white supremacist loser of the gubernatorial election. The legality of the Colfax Massacre was upheld by SCOTUS when it ruled that the 14th Amendment does not protect citizens from attacks by individuals, preventing federal prosecution of whites who perpetrated lynchings, bombings and massacres of African Americans. This cleared the way for decades of violence against Black citizens.

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