FOCUS: The Senate Tells Women to Smile More and Talk Less Lindsay M. Chervinsky, The Daily Beast Chervinsky writes: "March is Women's History Month and the 2021 theme is 'Valiant Women of the Vote: Refusing to Be Silenced.' And yet, as a country, we still tell women that the best way to get ahead is to keep their mouths shut."
It’s nice we study women’s history in March, but it means nothing if women must remain quiet or hold themselves to different standards than men in order to succeed in government.
A few weeks ago, Neera Tanden withdrew her nomination for director of the Office of Management and Budget after the Senate prepared to reject her candidacy. Her qualifications were not in question, nor her past experience. Instead, senators focused on Tanden’s use of social media and her sometimes caustic tweets. There is zero chance that a man would be rejected under the same circumstances. Similarly unfair expectations have been applied to other female candidates put forth by President Joe Biden.
Not long after Tanden’s contentious hearing, Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland fielded questions far more intense than those posed to her predecessors. Haaland was narrowly confirmed, but other female candidates, especially women of color, face uphill battles for confirmation, including Vanita Gupta and Kristen Clarke, Biden’s choices for associate attorney general and the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division. Republicans have put forth dubious objections to both candidates. They’ve argued that Gupta is anti-cop, despite her endorsement from police unions, and that Clarke is anti-Semitic, despite her endorsement from the Anti-Defamation League. They’ve raised no objections about their expertise.
Another example occurred in the summer of 2020, as Democratic nominee Biden considered candidates to be his running mate. Biden had promised to pick a woman early in the campaign, but his advisers clashed over which woman. Some of Biden’s allies worried that Kamala Harris was “too ambitious,” as though every male vice president hasn’t nursed ambitions to become president one day themselves. Many of their objections derived from her pointed criticism of Biden’s past positions on racial issues. They preferred a candidate who hadn’t spoken freely or voiced her opinions during a primary debate. Of course, these concerns obscured Biden’s own history as a presidential candidate in 2008, when he had routinely criticized Barack Obama, before becoming his vice president.
Once again, that double standard was on glaring display as senators responded to Neera Tanden's nomination. Senator Joe Manchin announced he would vote no on the nomination because of Tanden's mean tweets, arguing that they would undermine bipartisanship. Yet Manchin voiced no such objection when former President Donald Trump nominated Ric Grenell, an infamous Twitter troll who was forced to delete thousands of sexist and racist comments from his Twitter account, as ambassador to Germany. One would think that bipartisanship would be at least as important when an ambassador represents the nation on the world's stage.
Similarly, Susan Collins revealed that she would vote no because Tanden didn't have the required “temperament” to lead the Office of Management and Budget. What temperament is required to lead OMB exactly? Whatever standard Collins applies for OMB leadership must also apply to the Supreme Court—a lifetime position with almost no oversight.
Never was this double standard more obvious than in the Senate hearings for Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court. He screamed, cried, insulted the senators, declared his love of beer, and contemptuously rejected any suggestion that he may have harmed others. Meanwhile, Christine Blasey Ford retained her composure, calmly answered demeaning questions, and risked her safety and reputation to do the right thing. Collins voiced no such concerns about Kavanaugh, despite his antics during his confirmation hearing. Ford was deemed the untrustworthy one, and Kavanaugh was rewarded with a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land.
This double standard is especially insulting given how Tanden and Kavanaugh comported themselves in the Senate chambers. Knowing that women are always expected to apologize for how their words make others feel, Tandem apologizedfor any harm she may have caused and accepted the rebukes delivered by senators on live television in front of millions of viewers. Kavanaugh offered no such remorse for his actions and sputtered with rage that senators would have the audacity to ask for an apology.
With Manchin and Collins voting no, Tanden pulled her nomination and OMB is left without the benefit of her leadership. She would have brought unique firsthand experience with so many of the programs under the agency’s oversight, an essential qualification offered by few candidates. I hope that the Department of Justice won’t be deprived of Gupta and Clarke’s expertise as well. But more importantly, I grieve for the girls and young women who are watching. It’s nice that we study women’s history in March, but it means nothing if we are also sending a very clear message that women must remain quiet or hold themselves to different standards than men in order to succeed in government and politics.
There are over 520,000 elected offices in the U.S.—and, shockingly, Democrats aren't competing in up to 75% of them, letting the GOP steamroll their way to power across the country.1
So today, MoveOn is announcing that we're launching a major initiative to recruit hundreds of diverse, progressive MoveOn members to run for uncontested down-ballot races across the country.
We are expanding our partnership with Contest Every Race to help end GOP dominance in down-ballot races by making sure no Republican runs for office without a Democratic challenger.
There are dire and dangerous consequences when we allow the GOP to win without even putting up a fight.
And we're seeing those dire consequences play out right now in real time.
This year alone, the GOP has introduced more than 250 pieces of legislation to make it harder to vote.2 And in many states, the GOP has supermajorities that allow them to pass any piece of legislation they desire.
But it's not just attacks on our democracy. The right wing has used their long-held supermajorities to attack abortion rights. In the last decade, GOP-run state legislatures have passed more than 400 laws aimed at restricting access to abortion.3
Of the local elections that Republicans win, 70% have no challenger.4 It's time we fight back. And it's time we stop letting the GOP win elections and stroll into office without even challenging them.
Which is why we're gearing up to recruit hundreds of diverse, progressive MoveOn members to run for office and challenge the GOP's stranglehold on state and local offices.
With your help, we will be able to provide strong support for endorsed candidates, including trainings on how to do the following:
Recruit and organize volunteers.
Raise grassroots donations.
Most effectively use social media to get their message out.
And more.
We know the next elections may seem far away, but in many states and localities, candidates are already filing paperwork to run for office.
We don't have a moment to spare. Please, if you can, will you start a $5 monthly donation to help power our long-term efforts to challenge the GOP in down-ballot races?
Thanks for all you do.
–Brieanna, Chris, Mark, Erik, and the rest of the team
In statehouses across the country, Republican lawmakers are fighting to keep voters from the polls and ensure a Republican victory in 2022. Over 250 dangerous voter suppression bills have been filed already this year in a coordinated attempt to suppress the vote and ensure a red wave.
These bills limit voting times and vote by mail. They return us to archaic voter identification laws designed to stop voters of color. In the swing state of Georgia, the GOP has even tried to end voting on Sundays specifically because of grassroots movements to turnout Black voters after Sunday morning church services.
But there's good news -- we're hard at work to make sure the GOP won't win in 2022 -- no matter what underhanded tactics they pull. We're fighting to fund progressive candidates to unseat pro-voter suppression Republicans. And the progressives we helped elect in 2020 are pushing forward the For the People Act, which will wipe away the GOP's awful voter suppression laws and make sure ALL Americans can exercise their right to vote.
But with Republicans putting all they have into clinging to power, we can't win this fight alone. You've helped us achieve so many progressive victories before, but this is one of our biggest hurdles yet -- and it will decide the future of our Democracy. Can you chip in even just $5 right now to stand up to Republicans?
Republicans are doubling down, but together we can make sure they fail.
Thank you so much for upholding our Democracy,
Progressive Majority PAC
Progressive Majority PAC is leading the fight against Trump's GOP and their dangerous and divisive agenda by supporting elected progressives, helping elect even more progressive Democrats to Congress, and protecting the gains we made in the past election. This movement is powered by progressives like you.
Progressive Majority PAC 410 1st St, SE Suite 310 Washington, DC 20003
The United States cannot prosper and remain a vigorous democracy when so few have so much and so many have so little. While many of my congressional colleagues choose to ignore it, the issue of income and wealth inequality is one of the great moral, economic and political crises that we face — and it must be dealt with.
The unfortunate reality is that we are moving rapidly toward an oligarchic form of society where a handful of billionaires have enormous wealth and power while working families have been struggling in a way that we have not seen since the Great Depression.
Today, half of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, 500,000 of the very poorest among us are homeless, millions are worried about evictions, 92 million are uninsured or underinsured and families all across the country are worried about how they are going to feed their kids. Today, an entire generation of young people carry an outrageous level of student debt and face the reality that their standard of living will be lower than their parents. And, most obscenely, low-income Americans now have a life expectancy that is about 15 years lower than the wealthy. Poverty is a death sentence.
Meanwhile, the people on top have never had it so good. The top 1% now own more wealth than the bottom 92%, and the 50 wealthiest Americans own more wealth than the bottom half of American society — 165 million people. While millions of Americans have lost their jobs and incomes during the pandemic, over the past year 650 billionaires have seen their wealth increase by $1.3 trillion.
The growing gap between the very rich and everyone else is nothing new.
Over the past 40 years there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class and working families to the very wealthiest people in America. In 1978, the top 0.1% owned about 7% of the nation’s wealth. In 2019, which is the latest year available, they own nearly 20%.
Since 1985, the bottom 90% of Americans have seen their share of our nation’s wealth plummet from 34% to just 24% in 2019. Today, the top one-tenth of one percent owns nearly as much wealth as the bottom 90% and the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 92%. Unbelievably, the two richest people in America, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans combined.
If income inequality had not skyrocketed over the past four decades and had simply stayed static, the average worker in America would be earning $42,000 more in income each year. Instead, as corporate CEOs now make over 300 times more than their average employees, the average American worker now earns $32 dollars a week less than he or she did 48 years ago — after adjusting for inflation. In other words, despite huge increases in technology and productivity, ordinary workers are going nowhere in a hurry.
Addressing income and wealth inequality will not be easy, because we will be taking on some of the most powerful and well-financed entities in the country including Wall Street, the health insurance industry, the drug companies, the fossil fuel industry and the military-industrial complex. But it must be done.
I am going to do everything I can in the Senate to take on the wealthy and the powerful. But I cannot do it alone, which is why I am counting on you today to help send a powerful message to my colleagues in Congress.
Please sign my petition — tell Congress to have the courage to stand up to the most powerful people in this country and address the moral, economic and political crises of massive income and wealth inequality.
Here is some of what Congress and the president can do in the very near future.
We must raise the minimum wage from the current starvation wage of $7.25 an hour to a living wage of at least $15 an hour. A job should lift workers out of poverty, not keep them in it.
We need to make it easier, not harder, for workers to join unions. The massive increase in wealth and income inequality can be directly linked to the decline in union membership in America.
We need to create millions of good-paying jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure — our roads, bridges, wastewater plants, sewers, culverts, dams, schools and affordable housing.
We need to combat climate change by fundamentally transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels towards energy efficiency and renewable energy, which will also create millions of good-paying jobs.
We need to do what virtually every other major country does by guaranteeing health care to all people as a human right. Passing a Medicare for All program would end the absurdity of us paying twice as much per capita for health care as do the people of other countries, while tens of millions of Americans are uninsured or under-insured.
We need to make certain that all of our young people, regardless of income, have the right to high-quality education — including college. And that means making public colleges and universities tuition-free and substantially reducing student debt for working families.
And yes. We need to make the wealthiest people and most profitable corporations in America start paying their fair share of taxes.
Growing income and wealth inequality is not just an economic issue. It touches the very foundation of American democracy. If the very rich become much richer while millions of working people see their standard of living continue to decline, faith in government and our democratic institutions will wither and support for authoritarianism will increase. We cannot let that happen.
That is why Congress needs to take bold action to address the absurd levels of wealth and income inequality in this country. Enough is enough.
Please add your name to tell Congress to have the courage to stand up to the most powerful people in this country and address the moral, economic and political crises of massive income and wealth inequality.
Thank you for all you are doing to continue our collective struggle for justice.
Right now it’s all very small donations. It’s inspiring but we need to augment that with a few slightly larger donations. Even as much as one hundred dollars really picks up the effort of the smaller donors.
FOCUS: Sidney Powell's 'Just Kidding' Defense Is Seriously, Literally Nuts Matt Lewis, The Daily Beast Lewis writes: "During the 2016 presidential campaign, journalist and author Salena Zito observed that when it came to Donald Trump, 'the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.'"
When people enter into the political arena, invent crazy conspiracy theories, and stoke violence and sedition, millions of Americans do take them seriously.
uring the 2016 presidential campaign, journalist and author Salena Zito observed that when it came to Donald Trump, “the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” Zito deserves credit for coining a memorable phrase that certainly sounded plausible back when we were all trying to fathom how Trump won. By 2020, however, it was clear that Trump’s fans were, in fact, taking him literally. The Capitol insurgency that occurred after months of Trump claiming that 1) the election had been rigged and 2) we were losing our country was proof enough.
But it’s mainly been on my mind because of an assertion made by pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell’s own lawyers in her $1.3 billion Dominion defamation suit. They claimed that “no reasonable person” would believe the conspiracy theories spun by Powell. This puts to lie the whole “seriously/ literally” shell game that has been going on for the last five years. When people enter into the political arena, invent crazy conspiracy theories, and stoke violence and sedition, millions of Americans do take them seriously and literally.
Let’s begin with the suggestion that “no reasonable person” would believe Powell’s assertions. This is (sadly) false. For example, a February poll from the University of Houston found that 83 percent of Texas Republicans believed there was widespread election fraud. Many average Americans (reasonable or not) seriously believed the kinds of lies Powell was intent on spreading. Could it be that the “no reasonable person” standard no longer achieves its intended goal in modern 21st century America, where surreal is the new normal and where shows like Saturday Night Live sometimes can’t compete with reality? I mean, excluding the “reasonable people” still leaves you with, what, 74 million Americans? Sarcasm aside, we are literally talking about a good third of the country. I am reminded of the woman who told Adlai Stevenson, “Governor, every thinking person would be voting for you.” Stevenson, the story goes, retorted, “Madam, that is not enough. I need a majority.”
It is true that Powell was merely one of the voices pushing bogus claims and conspiracy theories, but her voice was one of the most prominent. A quick refresher is in order. Prior to taking on this cause, Powell represented former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Prominent conservatives like past FEC chairman Trey Trainor personally vouched for her honesty. She was also considered to be part of an “elite strike force” of Trump lawyers (as Trump tweeted, a “truly great team”). Newsmax also identified her as such.
Powell joined Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani at a press conference held at the Republican National Committee. Among her many outrageous assertions, Powell alleged that Georgia’s Republican governor and secretary of state were paid off; she also claimed that a plot involving deceased Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez helped rig the election for Joe Biden via Dominion Voting Machines. Powell then appeared on various conservative outlets and shows, including Fox News, Fox Business (where she said “dead people” had voted), and even the Rush Limbaugh show (where she was interviewed by guest host Mark Steyn).
This is all to say that, although you and I might have always seen Powell as a crank, she had (on paper) solid professional and mainstream conservative credentials—not to mention the imprimatur of the Republican National Committee, America’s Mayor, and the President of the United States of America.
The reality is, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t claim to be a serious person engaging in the serious world of politics and ideas, spread toxic poison with a megaphone that reaches millions, and then cry “just kidding” when your attempts to actually overthrow an election fail.
Ideas have consequences, and the ideas we are dealing with now are deadly serious—including the notion that the election was stolen in a coup and that American democracy is in jeopardy. Allowing these serious allegations to be hand-waved away retroactively—just because they didn’t work—under the guise of harmless trolling, political theater, lulz, or satire would not only mean half the country would continue to believe that Biden is an illegitimate president, it would also encourage more irresponsible rhetoric and behavior.
I’m just sad that this is our last line of defense and our only real deterrent. It will likely take a lawsuit from a private company to discourage future demagogues and their accomplices from pursuing perverse incentives. Lawsuits may be the only effective mechanism left to hold irresponsible and dangerous actors accountable for their actions. I guess it’s better than nothing.
RSN is actually built to function with a small fraction of the readers contributing on a monthly basis. When we struggle to get 1% of the Readers to respond with a contribution during the course of a funding drive, that simply isn’t reasonable.
When people help to the extent that they can RSN becomes a powerful voice.
s Mark Zuckerberg testifies in front of Congress today on the proliferation of extremism on his platform, hundreds of far-right militias are still using Facebook to organize and recruit new members. A new report finds that more than 200 militia pages and groups were active on the platform as of March 8 — despite promises from Facebook leadership to crack down on such activity after militias played a key role in leading the violence at the Capitol on January 6th. The report also found the platform directs people who “like” certain militia pages to look at other pages, essentially helping the groups recruit new members. The groups have posted content supporting the Capitol attack, cheering on the Proud Boys, and promoting broader anti-government violence.
Time and time again, Facebook leadership has failed to properly address the radicalization and extremism rampant on the platform. They’ll release a carefully worded statement purported to show their commitment to tackling the problem, and then not follow through. And as we’ve seen multiple times now, this refusal to truly crack down results in real-world violence and even death. Mark Zuckerberg must be held accountable for his complicity in the surge of far-right extremism.
he US accused the security forces of a "reign of terror" on Saturday, the deadliest day since last month's coup.
Coup leader Min Aung Hlaing and his generals still threw a lavish party that night for Armed Forces Day.
On Sunday, funerals were held, with some reports the military had tried to intervene in the mourning.
More than 400 people have now been killed in the suppression of protests in Myanmar since the 1 February coup.
The military seized control of the South East Asian country after an election which Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) party won by a landslide.
What has been the international response?
The defence chiefs of a dozen nations, including the UK, on Sunday issued a rare joint statement condemning the military's violent actions.
The US, Japan and Australia were also among the signatories of a statement that said: "A professional military follows international standards for conduct and is responsible for protecting - not harming - the people it serves."
The US said it was "horrified" by the killings. Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused the military of "sacrificing the lives of the people to serve the few."
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was "deeply shocked" by the violence, and British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab called it a "new low".
UN Special Rapporteur Tom Andrews called for an international emergency summit.
China and Russia have not joined the criticism, which means taking action through the UN Security Council - where they have vetoes - could be difficult.
What's the latest on the streets?
On Sunday, families held funerals for some of those killed the day before.
One was for Kyaw Win Maung, who was shot dead in Mandalay.
Another service in the city was held for Aye Ko, a father of four.
"We are told by the neighbours that Aye Ko was shot and thrown into the fire," one relative told AFP news agency. "He was the only one who fed the family, losing him is a great loss for the family."
Reports from Myanmar are difficult to confirm, but some local media said security forces had tried to intervene in funerals. Burmese-language outlet The Irrawaddy said police tried to arrest people at a service for a student union member killed in the town of Phaya-Gyi.
Protests are also reported to be continuing despite Saturday's crackdown, with rallies in towns including Katha and Hsipaw.
How has the military responded?
The military has not commented on the killings.
Early on Saturday it held a parade for Armed Forces Day and heard a speech from the coup leader Min Aung Hlaing, who said he wanted to "safeguard democracy" but also warned against "violent acts".
Representatives of Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand attended.
On Saturday evening a luxury military party was held in the capital Nay Pyi Taw, drawing an angry response from some on social media, including Burmese activist Maung Zarni:
A number of Twitter posts placed pictures of the party alongside images of victims.
What happened on Saturday?
Anti-coup activists had called for peaceful protests but they soon turned violent as the security forces opened fire in more than 40 locations.
The commercial centre, Yangon, saw dozens of deaths, but killings were recorded from Kachin in the north to Taninthartharyi in the far south.
The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) monitoring group confirmed more than 90 deaths. Local news site Myanmar Now puts the death toll at 114, while the United Nations said it was receiving reports of "scores killed" and hundreds injured.
The director of the Burma Human Rights Network in UK told the BBC the military had shown it had "no limits, no principles".
"It's a massacre, it's not a crackdown anymore," Kyaw Win said.
Children among the dead and injured
Moe Myint, BBC Burmese
Fourteen-year-old Pan Ei Phyu's mother says she rushed to close all the doors when she heard the military coming down her street. But she wasn't fast enough. A moment later, she was holding her daughter's blood-soaked body.
"I saw her collapse and initially thought she just slipped and fell. But then blood spurted out from her chest," she told BBC Burmese from Meiktila in central Myanmar.
It was the randomness of the killings that was particularly shocking. Armed with battlefield weapons, the security forces appeared willing to shoot anyone they saw on the streets. The brutality they showed they were capable of is on another level from what we have seen since the coup.
Neither side - the military nor the pro-democracy movement - is willing to back down. The military thinks it can terrorise people to achieve "stability and security". But the movement on the streets, led by young people, is determined to rid the country of the military dictatorship once and for all.
It's painful to have to count the mounting dead, especially the children.
California's Supreme Court decided an arrestee could not be detained solely because they lack the resources to post bail. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
alifornia's Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that it is unconstitutional to keep people behind bars simply because they cannot afford bail.
The unanimous decision signals that going forward, California judges will be required to assess a defendant's ability to pay bail when they set it.
"What we hold is that where a financial condition is nonetheless necessary, the court must consider the arrestee's ability to pay the stated amount of bail - and may not effectively detain the arrestee 'solely because' the arrestee 'lacked the resources' to post bail," Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar wrote in the decision.
The justices concurred that there may be circumstances where the "need to protect community safety may conflict with the arrestee's fundamental right to pretrial liberty," but said that, "in order to detain an arrestee under those circumstances, a court must first find by clear convincing evidence that no condition short of detention could suffice and then ensure the detention otherwise complies with statutory and constitutional requirements."
The decision came out of a case brought forth by Kenneth Humphrey, a San Francisco man accused of robbing a man for $7 and a bottle of cologne. In 2017, Humphrey was charged with first-degree residential robbery and burglary against an elderly victim, inflicting injury on an elder adult, and misdemeanor theft. A judge initially set Humphrey's bail at $600,000 before reducing it to $350,000.
It is unclear how the state will maintain a standard threshold for the "need to protect community safety," Santa Clara University law professor David Ball told the the East Bay Times.
According to the American Bar Association, around 500,000 people are currently in jail because of their inability to pay bail while they wait for their cases to be heard.
The problem of being unable to make bail disproportionately impacts communities of color, according to the Northern California American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU also found that Black and Latino people are far more likely than whites to be denied bail and held in pretrial detention.
In one of the most well-known examples, 16-year-old Kalief Browder was sent to New York City's Rikers Island after he was accused of stealing a backpack. A judge denied Browder the right to bail, and the teen spent three years - two of which were in solitary confinement - at the jail. He died by suicide at 22.
The Prison Policy Initiative, a non-profit that works on prison reform, found that Black defendants are at least 10 to 25% more likely than white defendants to be denied bail or detained pretrial.
Additionally, the PPI said, "Black and brown defendants receive bail amounts that are twice as high as bail set for white defendants - and they are less likely to be able to afford it."
Bail reform organizations hope California's decision will help set precedent in other states.
"I am pleased other people will have the same opportunities I had to change their lives and they will not have to wait in jail for years because they are too poor to pay bail," Humphrey said in a statement Thursday, according to the Huffington Post.
Demonstrators stand outside of the Georgia Capitol building, to oppose the HB 531 bill on March 3, 2021 in Atlanta, Georgia. (photo: Megan Varner/Getty Images)
t was a cold December morning outside the Georgia State Capitol and a man named Jerry was rattling off numbers like they were fantasy football statistics.
“They had 150,000 absentee ballots that went to neighborhoods all over New York City. People in New York, a lot of them, filled ‘em out and sent ’em back to Georgia,” Jerry explained. (He didn’t want to give his real last name — “I’m going to give ‘Trump’ instead,” he told me.) “10,500 felons voted in Georgia illegally. There was about 2,500 dead people that voted — “
A woman lingering nearby broke in: “ — 18,000 people that voted that weren’t 18 yet.”
Jerry nodded sagely. “And then you get about 160,000 ballots in those four briefcases that they voted late that night when they ran everybody out of the Georgia Convention Center… ”
There is no evidence for any of these claims — multiple investigations discredited them as fictions promoted by Donald Trump and his allies in the wake of the November election — but Jerry, one of about 30 demonstrators who were milling around outside the state capitol’s barricades on a Sunday morning, cited them as articles of faith. (“You can look on the computer at the numbers,” he told me.)
Besides him, there was an 88-year-old grandmother leaning on her walker, an Uncle Sam teetering on a Segway, and several armed men, including one outfitted head-to-toe in tactical gear, with a long gun dangling from his shoulder and a handgun fastened to his hip.
The night before, almost everyone had made the pilgrimage to a regional airport in Valdosta, where Trump railed against the injustices visited upon him in Georgia for more than 100 minutes, telling the crowd, “They cheated and rigged our presidential election… When the numbers come out of ceilings and come out of leather bags you start to say ‘What’s going on?’ ”
“Your governor could stop it very easily if he knew what the hell he was doing,” Trump added, as the crowd chanted back: “Stop the Steal!”
Nse Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project, a voter registration and engagement group, remembers being unnerved when armed militia members started showing up outside the [Georgia] capitol. “People were like, ‘You’re being hysterical, the guns are just like a show of force.’ And then they burst into the [U.S.] Capitol and killed people,” Ufot says. “And it’s all based on the same lie: the lie that there’s widespread voter fraud.”
In the immediate aftermath of the November election, Georgia was cited as proof that the system still worked. Yes, the president pressed the secretary of state to “find” more votes for him and, yes, he tried to enlist the governor in an effort to overturn the results and, fine, he sort of threatened both with the prospect of jail. But in the end, they did refuse — and that’s something, right? The guardrails held. Kind of.
But as time has worn on, it’s become clearer just how corrosive Trump’s insistence on that alternative reality was and continues to be. On January 6th, it drew thousands of die-hard supporters to D.C., where five people died in the riot at the Capitol. Now, it’s fueling a furious effort to limit voting rights around the country. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, legislators have introduced more than 250 bills that would make it harder to vote in 43 states — more than seven times the number of bills compared to the same point in 2020.
And Georgia — the most closely contested state in the country — is at the white-hot center of that fight. In November, Trump’s lie split the Georgia Republican Party in two, pitting the officials in charge of administering the state’s elections — like Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger and Gov. Brian Kemp — against Republicans in the state legislature and their constituents protesting outside.
It is still dividing Republicans in the state today. Most have spent the past few months lining up behind a raft of new voting restrictions that respond specifically to the fictions Trump promoted — efforts that include a crack-down on mail-in voting. But there are others in the GOP who worry the changes could end up backfiring by making it harder for their own party members to vote Historically, Republicans in Georgia “were very intentional about making vote-by-mail easier because it was largely the province of older white voters,” Stacey Abrams told Rolling Stone in November. “For years, Republicans beat us at vote-by-mail. They had a practice history of it. They took advantage of it.”
In the last few weeks, as Republicans debated the new restrictions — several of which explicitly target the Black voters who helped secure Democrats’ victories in November and January — a handful of GOP members walked out of the debate in protest. Among them was Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, who presides over the state senate, though he doesn’t vote on legislation.
“Republicans have lost a lot of credibility when we walk into the room to try to talk about electoral reform because of the misinformation campaign that was spread for nearly 10 weeks,” Duncan tells Rolling Stone.
He’s remained adamant that no widespread fraud took place in November, but he hedges when asked if his colleagues subscribe to the same belief. “I think there’s some out there that have a deep-felt conviction that there were some election anomalies,” Duncan says. “I think that there’s a number of folks that are reacting to their district — or their district genuinely wants them to take steps forward — and I understand that. There’s those out there that would rather see small incremental steps taken around election reform, and that’s really where the camp I sit in is.”
Duncan is not alone in that camp, but it is a small minority within his party. Despite the controversy and attention paid to the bills in the House and the Senate, both measures passed this month with the support of the majority of Republicans without much suspense.
The Georgia House bill would require a photo ID for absentee voting, limit the amount of time voters have to request an absentee ballot, impose new restrictions on ballot drop boxes, and limit early voting hours on weekends. The Senate bill that would end automatic voter registration, ban drop boxes for mail ballots outright, while seriously restricting absentee voting and early voting.
Abrams has denounced the effort in Georgia — and similar efforts underway in Arizona and New Hampshire — as “the largest push to restrict voting rights since Jim Crow.”
The separate pieces of legislation went through a conference process to reconcile their differences. The Georgia House of Representatives passed the bill on Thursday. It will need to be passed by the Senate before being sent to Gov. Kemp for his signature.
Some of the most odious provisions — like banning no-excuse absentee voting and ending the Sunday voting favored by black churches — were stripped out in conference. But Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of Fair Fight, a group co-founded with Abrams to stop voter suppression, is raising alarms about language that was inserted without any previous debate in the House or Senate. If the new provisions had been law this past November, she says, the outcome in Georgia could have been very different.
The first, Groh-Wargo says, would allow people — anyone, really — to challenge any voter’s registration and ability to cast a ballot. Advocates fear the measure could be used to racially profile voters, with the goal of either intimidating them from voting or knocking them off the voter rolls completely.
That fear is rooted in recent history. In 2015, State Representative Barry Fleming, sponsor of the bill and former Hancock County attorney, defended the majority-white Hancock County Board of Elections and Registration when it was sued, accused of systematically questioning the registrations of more than 180 black citizens in the city of Sparta.
The new language could easily empower a well-funded organization to do it at a much greater scale, Groh-Wargo says: challenging and knocking hundreds of thousands of voters off the rolls. A conservative Texas-based voter-fraud watchdog called True the Vote already tried it in Georgia in November.
“They challenged 360,000 registered Georgians, many of whom were in the military, many of whom were out-of-state taking care of relatives with Covid,” Groh-Wargo says. (Fair Fight sued to stop True the Vote; that litigation is still underway.) The language as it’s written would make it easier for groups like that to prevail: it allows for an unlimited number of challenges to a person’s registration and their ability to cast a vote. And it would require the local board of elections to hold a hearing on each challenge within 10 days. If the board of elections doesn’t comply, it would be grounds for state officials to remove them and install their own people to run the elections.
“It would allow what True the Vote did to really upset the apple cart,” Groh-Wargo says. “I could stand outside a polling location and if I am racist against Asian-American women, I could look up everybody on the voter rolls that [has the name of] an Asian-American woman, or take pictures of people standing in line and then go try to figure out who they are and challenge their eligibility.”
Targeting and challenging the registration of enough Black, Asian, or Latino voters — the multiracial coalition that helped push Joe Biden over the top in Georgia in 2020 — is one way to shrink Democrats’ margins, but it’s the ability to issue those challenges at scale, combined with the newly created power to take over the local board of elections, that would make it possible to do exactly what President Trump unsuccessfully tried to pressure officials in Georgia to do in November.
The more pointed provisions of the law strips power from Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger – who rebuffed Trump’s attempts to change the election results — and puts it in the hands of the state legislature, removing him from the state election board and allowing the legislature to install more than half of the board’s members.
“In practical terms,” Groh-Wargo says, “that could have meant in big Democratic counties, the state election board could have completely interfered, taken over their county board of elections’ certification process or their audit process, and delayed, mucked around and screwed around with certification — basically play ball with the Trump team in a different kind of way.”
With the new provisions combined, she warns, “you can just see that the far right fringes can really just take over election administration… These things work together to allow these conspiracy theorists to have a lot more power than they did last year.”
With the end of the legislative session rapidly approaching, the outlook in Georgia is bleak. Democrats and advocates for voting rights are considering the options they have left: petitioning Gov. Kemp to veto the bill, or pressuring corporations with ties to Georgia to bring their influence to bear against the legislation. Several civic groups, including the New Georgia Project, are waging a pressure campaign on companies urging them to end their financial support for the Republicans supporting the bill. “There’s no doubt in my mind that Coca-Cola or Georgia Power or U.P.S. could have stopped this in its infancy,” Ufot says.
Failing that, they are looking to the federal government for action that could blunt some of the measures under consideration in Georgia. Democrats took control of the U.S. Senate in January by winning both of Georgia’s Senate seats — seats they won, ironically, with some help from Donald Trump’s lies about the election. Depending on who you ask, Trump either convinced enough Georgians their vote didn’t count that they simply didn’t show up to the polls for the January runoff, or he fired them up so much that on January 5th, some of his most devoted supporters were traveling to D.C. to storm the Capitol rather than voting in the runoff that day.
“Even though I’m a Republican, and even though I voted for him, I’m mature enough to look at the scenario and realize that he beat himself in [the 2020] election cycle,” says Duncan. “And unfortunately, that same rhetoric and that same approach beat two Republican U.S. senators here in the runoff.”
Whatever the reason, the dual victories of Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff could prove critical to passing the kind of federal voting-rights protections that would render many of the measures presently under consideration in Georgia moot. But to pass legislation like S1, the For the People Act, which would protect and expand voting rights, Democrats would still need to change the Senate rules by reforming or ending the filibuster.
Warnock addressed that issue in his first speech on the Senate floor in March. “This issue is bigger than the filibuster,” he said. “This issue — access to voting and preempting politicians’ efforts to restrict voting — is so fundamental to our democracy that it is too important to be held hostage by a Senate rule, especially one historically used to restrict the expansion of voting rights. It is a contradiction to say we must protect minority rights in the Senate while refusing to protect minority rights in the society. We must find a way to pass voting rights — whether we get rid of the filibuster or not.”
For now, legislators not just in Georgia, but in states around the country retain a broad authority to restrict voting access — although there are questions about whether it’s good politics to do it. There are already indications of a backlash brewing in Georgia: State Rep. Barry Fleming, sponsor of the legislation, was asked to resign from his other role, as Hancock County attorney, after locals there protested his role in crafting the voting restriction package. Research from 2016 suggests that attempts to suppress the vote actually had a motivating effect on Democratic turnout. And Republicans have spent so much of the legislative session avenging Trump’s loss, that they’ve failed to adequately address the needs of their constituents in the midst of a once-in-a-century pandemic.
Out of all 50 states, Georgia — a state of 11 million people and an early coronavirus hotspot — currently ranks 49th in vaccinations. “They are playing with fire,” Groh-Wargo says of the Republicans. “Georgians want to get their vaccine. They want to get back to normal. They want to get the kids in school… In this legislative session, [the Republicans] did not expand Medicaid, hospitals have been closing, they did not go to the Department of Health to get more money. They’ve been focusing on all this voter suppression crap.”
The suspect accused of killing 10 people at a Colorado grocery store this week follows a deadly pattern among mass shooters: 98% of perpetrators are male. (photo: Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews/Denver Post/Getty Images)
Why Nearly All Mass Shooters Are Men Michel Martin and Emma Bowman, NPR Excerpt: "A staggering 98% of these crimes have been committed by men, according to The Violence Project, a nonpartisan research group that tracks U.S. mass shooting data dating back to 1966."
his week, a shooting attack at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., left 10 people dead. Just days earlier, eight people were fatally shot in a rampage targeting spas in the Atlanta area.
As with almost every mass shooter in recorded U.S. history, both of the suspects in the recent attacks are men.
A staggering 98% of these crimes have been committed by men, according to The Violence Project, a nonpartisan research group that tracks U.S. mass shooting data dating back to 1966.
"Men just are generally more violent," said the group's president, Jillian Peterson, a forensic psychologist and professor of criminology and criminal justice at Hamline University. "There are many theories as to why that is."
As NPR has reported, researchers say that men, more than women, tend to externalize their problems and look for others to blame, which can translate into anger and violence. And when women do choose violence, guns are not typically their weapon of choice.
If men vastly outnumber women as mass shooters, those perpetrators are often a model for the next male shooters who "see themselves in them," Peterson said, a phenomenon she noted is particularly true in young, white men. Violence Project data show that white men are disproportionately responsible for mass shootings more than any other group.
"They study the perpetrators that came before them," she said. "Many school shooters study Columbine, for example; other university shooters study the Virginia Tech shooting. And they really are kind of using those previous shootings as a blueprint for their own."
The following excerpts have been edited for length and clarity.
Interview Highlights
On why mass shootings were largely nonexistent during the pandemic
During the pandemic, we saw this type of shooting fade away for a number of reasons. The most obvious reason is places just weren't open. We weren't gathering en masse, we didn't have public spaces like schools and workplaces for this to take place.
Second of all, these mass shootings really faded from the headlines. We weren't talking about them, we weren't thinking of them. And because of that, that social contagion aspect of mass shootings really faded away.
And then the third piece is we were all kind of collectively grieving. We were all collectively going through this trauma and suffering through this global pandemic. So it's possible that individuals didn't feel as personally aggrieved during the past year.
But at the same time, as a psychologist, I've been worried about all the risk factors that we know of for mass shootings that have been exacerbated in the pandemic. So, trauma, experiencing a mental health crisis, suicidality, time online and access to firearms have all increased.
On what needs to happen to prevent mass shootings in the future
There's no one answer to the policies that we need to have in place. We can kind of work our way backwards and say, these are individuals who are in crisis, who have very easy access to firearms. And are there simple things we can do like universal background checks or safe storage that prevent that ease of access?
But we can also go further back and talk about things like, how do we make sure everybody's trained in crisis intervention and suicide prevention? How do we build trauma-informed schools, and go even further back? I think there's a lot of things that we can do as a society and even as individuals to help disrupt that pathway to violence.
On encouraging signs that show future mass shootings can be prevented
I would say, in particular, the media coverage seems to have shifted. I'm not seeing as much of the perpetrator in the news cycle. I'm not seeing the perpetrator's name and face everywhere, which we know is what contributes to the social contagion.
I think we are having these conversations about gun policies that we could put in place — like red-flag laws, waiting periods — that might have prevented this type of shooting. I am hopeful that people are really done with this and really ready to make the changes that we need to make to prevent future victims.
Sunday Song: Edwin Starr | War Edwin Starr, YouTube Starr writes: "Oh, war it's an enemy to all mankind. The point of war blows my mind."
Edwin Starr's groundbreaking 1970 albumWar and Peace.
War, huh, yeah What is it good for Absolutely nothing War, huh, yeah What is it good for Absolutely nothing Say it again, why’all
War, huh, good god What is it good for Absolutely nothing, listen to me
Oh, war, I despise 'Cause it means destruction of innocent lives
War means tears to thousands of mothers eyes When their sons go to fight And lose their lives
I said, war, huh good god, why'all What is it good for Absolutely nothing say it again
War, whoa, lord What is it good for Absolutely nothing, listen to me
It ain't nothing but a heart-breaker (War) friend only to the undertaker Oh, war it's an enemy to all mankind The point of war blows my mind War has caused unrest Within the younger generation Induction then destruction Who wants to die, ah, war-huh, good god why'all What is it good for Absolutely nothing Say it, say it, say it War, huh What is it good for Absolutely nothing listen to me
It ain't nothing but a heart breaker (War) it's got one friend that's the undertaker Oh, war, has shattered many a young mans dreams Made him disabled, bitter and mean Life is much to short and precious To spend fighting wars these days War can't give life It can only take it away
Oh, war, huh good god why'all What is it good for Absolutely nothing say it again whoa, lord
What is it good for Absolutely nothing listen to me it ain't nothing but a heart breaker (War) friend only to the undertaker Peace, love and understanding Tell me, is there no place for them today They say we must fight to keep our freedom But lord knows there's got to be a better way
Oh, war, huh good god why'all What is it good for you tell me Say it, say it, say it, say it
Huh good god why'all What is it good for Stand up and shout it nothing
DOD can be remembered for poisoning others with AGENT ORANGE that continues to inflict damage, depleted uranium weapons that were extensively deployed and now this TOXIC BURNING of PFAS.
CAPE COD water has been contaminated due to the MILITARY's irresponsible use of PFAS.
It's time to restrict the damage DOD continues to cause!
The Department of Defense has ordered the burning of 20m pounds of AFFF – despite risks to human health
One of the most enduring, indestructible toxic chemicals known to man – Aqueous Film Forming Foam (AFFF), which is a PFAS “forever chemical” – is being secretly incinerated next to disadvantaged communities in the United States. The people behind this crackpot operation? It’s none other than the US military.
As new data published by Bennington College this week documents, the US military ordered the clandestine burning of over 20m pounds of AFFF and AFFF waste between 2016-2020. That’s despite the fact that there is no evidence that incineration actually destroys these synthetic chemicals. In fact, there is good reason to believe that burning AFFF simply emits these toxins into the air and onto nearby communities, farms, and waterways. The Pentagon is effectively conducting a toxic experiment and has enrolled the health of millions of Americans as unwitting test subjects.
AFFF was invented and popularized by the US Armed Forces. Introduced during the Vietnam War to combat petroleum fires on naval ships and air strips, AFFF was the whizz kid of chemical engineering that forged a synthetic molecular bond stronger than anything known in nature. Once manufactured, this carbon-fluorine bond is virtually indestructible. Refusing to become fuel, this herculean bond overpowers and tames even the most incendiary infernos.
Almost from the moment they started using AFFF, the military amassed worrisome evidence about the environmental persistence of synthetic carbon-fluorine compounds, their affinity for living things, and their impact on human health. As the US Armed Forces became the largest consumer of AFFF in the world, troubling questions about what happens after the fire were brushed aside. US military bases at home and abroad encouraged the promiscuous spraying of AFFF in routine drills while firefighters were told it was as safe as soap.
Synthetic carbon-fluorine chemistry, now classified as per- and poly- fluorinated compounds (PFAS), are coming into focus today as fuelling an unprecedented environmental crisis. After the briefest moment of practical utility, PFAS compounds come to haunt life with roving mobility, torpid toxicity, and a monstrous immortality. As we now know, exposure to trace amounts of these “forever chemicals” is strongly linked to a host of cancers, developmental disorders, immune dysfunction, and infertility. Exposure has also been linked to aggravated Covid-19 infections and weakened vaccine efficacy.
From Portsmouth, New Hampshire to Colorado Springs, Colorado, the last decade has witnessed communities near military bases waking up to a nightmare of PFAS contamination in their water, their soil and their blood. “Mapping the sites of PFAS contamination in the United States, the Department of Defense stands out as a significant contributor to this dismal list,” Dave Andrews of Environmental Working Group (EWG) told me.
In its initial survey of military bases in December 2016, the Armed Forces identified 393 sites of AFFF contamination in the United States, including 126 sites where PFAS compounds infiltrated public drinking water. (The Department of Defense has active remediation plans at a small fraction of those sites.) In 2019, DOD admitted those numbers were “under-counted.” The Environmental Working Group’s popular map of PFAS contamination puts the current number of polluted military sites at 704, a number that continues to rise.
As does potential liability. While some states file suit against the manufactures of AFFF, the fingerprints of the US Armed Forces are all over the scene of the crime. When federal scientists moved to publish a comprehensive review of the toxic chemistry of AFFF in 2018, DOD officials called that science “a public relations nightmare” and tried to suppress the findings.
Beyond damning internal emails, the military is still in possession of a tremendous amount of AFFF. As the EPA and states around the US begin to designate AFFF a hazardous substance, the military’s stockpiles of AFFF are starting to add up to an astronomical liability on the military’s balance sheet. Perhaps thinking the Trump Administration presented an opportune moment, the Pentagon decided to torch their AFFF problem in 2016.
Despite AFFF’s extraordinary resistance to fire, incineration quietly became the military’s preferred method to handle AFFF. “We knew that this would be a costly endeavor, since it meant we’d be burning something that was engineered to put out fires,” Steve Schneider, chief of Hazardous Disposal for the logistics wing of DOD, said in 2017 as the operation got underway.
Only one detail stood in the way of this grand plan: there is no evidence that incineration destroys the toxic chemistry of AFFF.
Noting the “strong flame inhibition effects” of the carbon-fluorine bond, a 2020 EPA report concluded, “It is not well understood how effective high-temperature combustion is in completely destroying PFAS.”
In a 2019 technical guide for incinerators, the EPA wrote that our grasp of the “thermal destructibility” of PFAS is sparse, thinly extrapolated, and currently inoperable. An influential interstate environmental council refused to endorse burning AFFF last year, noting incineration is still “an active area of research.”
Nor was such hesitation restricted to environmental agencies. Even as it was sending tanker trucks of AFFF to incinerators in 2017, the military itself noted “the high-temperature chemistry of PFOS […] has not been characterized” (PFOS is the major PFAS ingredient in AFFF), and “many likely byproducts will also be environmentally unsatisfactory.”
But that hasn’t stopped the Pentagon from going ahead and quietly burning the chemical anyway. As the military was sending AFFF to incinerators around the country, the EPA, state regulators, and university scientists all warned that subjecting AFFF to extremely high temperatures would likely conjure up a witches brew of fluorinated toxins, that existing smokestack technologies would be insufficient to monitor poisonous emissions let alone capture them, and that dangerous chemicals might rain down on surrounding neighborhoods. Weighing out its own liability against the health of these communities, the Pentagon struck the match.
Like so much else in the Trump Administration, the reckless rush to burn AFFF unfolded almost completely out of public view. The intrepid reporting of Sharon Lerner at the Intercept and an Earth Justice lawsuit against DOD opened a window into this debacle in 2019. As information percolated back into communities near the incinerators, spirited advocacy helped push the crackpot logic of the entire operation further into unflattering visibility in Ohio and New York.
This winter, I partnered with citizens groups and national advocates to compile and publish all available data on the incineration of AFFF. As my students and I gathered together scattered shipping manifests, tracked down details about incineration facilities and nearby communities, and started to get our head around the toxic fallout of the burning AFFF, this militarized operation gained a new definition: gross negligence.
Not only is burning AFFF extremely ill-advised, but the six hazardous waste incinerators contracted to do so are habitual violators of environmental law. Since 2017, two of the contracted incinerators were out of compliance with some environmental laws 100% of the time according to the EPA (Clean Harbors incinerator in Nebraska, Clean Harbors Aragonite in Utah), two were out of compliance 75% of the time (Norlite incinerator in New York, Heritage WTI incinerator in Ohio), and the remaining two were out of compliance 50% of the time (Reynolds Metals incinerator in Arkansas, Clean Harbors incinerator in Arkansas). The EPA has issued a total of 65 enforcement actions against these six incinerators in the past five years alone.
Not that the military was expecting the best. Even as it shelled out millions of dollars to the hazardous waste industry to burn AFFF, the military did not specify burn parameters nor emission controls. The military also withdrew typical documentation requirements of hazardous waste, noting in the contract that incinerators “will not be required to provide Certificates of Disposal/Destruction.” When it came to burning AFFF, the Pentagon didn’t want to know what was really going on at these incinerators.
Mixing shoddy burn operations with fire-resistant toxicity, this multi-million-dollar debacle did not so much eradicate the military’s AFFF problem as redistribute it.
The WTI Heritage Incinerator, which burned at least 5m pounds of AFFF, is located in a working class Black neighborhood in East Liverpool, Ohio. When it was built in 1993, residents were told this mammoth incineration could help stem the exodus of factory jobs. Instead of paychecks East Liverpool got some of the worst pollution in the US. The modest homes and nearby elementary school have become home to appallingly routine emissions of dioxins, furans, heavy metals, and now PFAS. Residents call it what it is: environmental racism.
“We didn’t get any answers,” Alonzo Spencer told me. Residents started asking the WTI Heritage Incinerator about AFFF last year. Describing rising rates of cancer in his community and worried about the “close proximity of the facility to schools,” Spencer doesn’t understand why the military and the incinerator would try to burn AFFF, nor why they are so secretive about it. “They just don’t seem to have any incentive to be truthful about what they’re doing to this community,” he said.
Tucked into a scrappy working-class neighborhood in Cohoes, NY, the Norlite Hazardous Waste Incinerator burned at least 2.47m pounds of AFFF and 5.3 million pounds of AFFF wastewater, likely in violation of their operating permits. In the shadow of the smokestack lies the Saratoga Sites Public Housing, a squat brick complex where emissions routinely cloud the playground. Over the past four years, residents told me of paint peeling from their cars and waking some nights to searing pain in their eyes. Norlite, they said, “tear-gassed” them in their own homes. The potential byproducts of subjecting AFFF to extremely high temperatures include the wartime ingredients of tear gas.
Places like East Liverpool and Cohoes are the destinations of AFFF that we can track. Some 5.5m pounds of AFFF, 40% of military’s stockpile, was sent to “fuel-blending” facilities where it was mixed into fuels for industrial use. It is not clear where the AFFF laden fuel went next, although the DOD contract stipulates incineration should be the endpoint. If you live in the United States, it’s possible it might have been burned in your community. And, because AFFF is a “forever chemical” that doesn’t break down, that pollution could likely plague communities for generations.
While much remains out of public view, there is good reason to think the military continues to burn AFFF. It is well past time to enact sensible national restrictions on the incineration of AFFF and to begin robust investigations into the communities where AFFF was burned.
The very name of the Department of Defense speaks to the military’s duty to defend, not harm, its own people. By all accounts, the Pentagon is endangering the lives of countless people through its reckless handling of AFFF. Communities witnessing this environmental catastrophe first-hand demand justice and accountability. When will their government hear them?
uring the 2016 presidential campaign, journalist and author Salena Zito observed that when it came to Donald Trump, “the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” Zito deserves credit for coining a memorable phrase that certainly sounded plausible back when we were all trying to fathom how Trump won. By 2020, however, it was clear that Trump’s fans were, in fact, taking him literally. The 
s Mark Zuckerberg testifies in front of Congress today on the proliferation of extremism on his platform, hundreds of far-right militias are still using Facebook to organize and recruit new members. A new report finds that more than 200 militia pages and groups were active on the platform as of March 8 — despite promises from Facebook leadership to crack down on such activity after militias played a key role in leading the violence at the Capitol on January 6th. The report also found the platform directs people who “like” certain militia pages to look at other pages, essentially helping the groups recruit new members. The groups have posted content supporting the Capitol attack, cheering on the Proud Boys, and promoting broader anti-government violence.
he US accused the security forces of a "reign of terror" on Saturday, the deadliest day since last month's coup.
alifornia's Supreme Court 
t was a cold December morning outside the 
