MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on how Democrat Jamie Raskin brought out the receipts to show how the Republican’s latest whistleblower conspiracy was an utter sham.
Monday, July 3, 2023
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Eastman Disbarment Trial - July 3, 2023 Updates
July 3, 2023 updates about the disbarment trial of attorney John Eastman, for his involvement in Donald Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
Biden says world leaders ask him why Trump has not been held accountable for Jan. 6 insurrection
A series of stories paint an unflattering picture of some of our federal law enforcement agencies. First, the Senate Homeland Security Committee issued a report cataloguing some of the FBI and DHS failures in advance of and on January 6, 2021. As NPR reported, "FBI, Homeland Security ignored massive amount of intelligence before Jan. 6, Senate report says." This report comes on the heels of the troubling revelations, as first reported by The Washington Post, that the "FBI resisted opening probe into Trump's role in Jan. 6 for more than a year." And now, in an interview with MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace, President Joe Biden says that leaders of democracies around the world have been asking him why Donald Trump has not been held accountable for the insurrection. Our federal law enforcement agencies need to fundamentally reform their practices and priorities, and start aggressively holding accountable people of power and privilege, influence and connections.
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Trump ARIZONA CRIMINAL PLOT is Finally EXPOSED
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Federal Judge Hits Proud Boys with MASSIVE Ruling They Didn’t See Coming
Michael Popok of Legal AF reports on a DC judge entering a 1 million dollar judgment against the “seditious conspiracy” felons, the Proud Boys, and its leadership, for vandalizing one of DC’s oldest Black churches when they gathered in the Capitol a month before Jan 6 to scout out the future scene of their crime.
Robert Reich | If Trump Wins, He'll Turn the Justice Department Into a Vendetta Machine
02 July 23
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
A second Trump presidency would kiss nonpartisan criminal justice goodbye. We must protect the attorney general’s independence
In other words, if Trump is re-elected, you can kiss nonpartisan criminal justice goodbye.
His remark made me think back almost a half century ago, to when I was a rookie lawyer in the Department of Justice.
The department was in shambles, discredited by the political abuse and corruption of Richard Nixon and John Mitchell, the attorney general.
To restore trust in the department, President Gerald Ford appointed Edward Levi attorney general. In naming Levi, who had been president of the University of Chicago and the dean of its law school, Ford found someone whose reputation for integrity was impeccable.
As Levi said at his swearing-in: “Nothing can more weaken the quality of life or more imperil the realization of the goals we all hold dear than our failure to make clear by words and deed that our law is not an instrument of partisan purpose.”
Levi set out to insulate the justice department from politics, instituting rules limiting White House involvement in law enforcement decisions.
The Senate Watergate committee chairman, Sam Ervin, didn’t think Levi’s rules went far enough to protect the department from an unscrupulous future president. Ervin wanted to make the justice department an independent agency with an attorney general appointed by the president every six years and removable only for neglect.
At the time, I thought Ervin’s proposal too extreme. I assumed America had learned its lesson from Watergate and would never again elect a president as repugnant as Nixon, willing to sacrifice the institutions of government to his own political ambition.
Yet there was some precedent for Ervin’s view. The position of US attorney general was originally viewed as an independent, semi-judicial role – analogous to that of judges.
Congress established the office of the attorney general in the Judiciary Act of 1789 – the same act that created the federal court system, as distinct from acts establishing executive departments.
In the original draft, attorneys general would be appointed by the US supreme court, not the president. Congress changed this so that attorneys general would be appointed exactly like federal judges.
When George Washington appointed the nation’s first attorney general in 1789, Thomas Jefferson referred to him as “the attorney general for the supreme court”.
Early attorneys general shared offices with the court. Their budgets were line items under the federal judiciary, not the executive. Originally, the attorney general was not even in line to succeed to the presidency.
Even after the attorney general became a key part of the executive branch and the Department of Justice was established in 1870, presidents continued to respect the need for prosecutorial independence.
Until Nixon and the scurrilous John Mitchell.
But surely, I said to myself at the time, Nixon and Mitchell were the extremes. Edward Levi’s reforms were adequate.
Then came the worst offender of all. During his presidency, Trump viewed the department as an extension of his own will – even claiming: “I have an absolute right to do what I want to with the justice department.”
Trump interfered in the department’s prosecutions of Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, fired the FBI director James Comey for investigating possible collusion between Russia and Trump associates, and demanded that the department reopen a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton.
John Dean, former White House counsel to Nixon, described Trump’s efforts to use the justice department for personal gain as “Nixon on stilts and steroids”.
Now, Trump threatens that if re-elected he’ll turn the department into his own personal vendetta machine. If there weren’t already enough reason to fear a second Trump presidency, this would be it.
Public trust in our governing institutions has already sunk to a new low – due in large part to Trump’s first term, his subsequent big lie that the 2020 election was “stolen”, and now his second big lie that Biden is orchestrating a “witch-hunt” against him.
Even if Biden is re-elected, it will be necessary to deal with the damage Trump and his Republican enablers have wrought.
Perhaps Sam Ervin’s proposal for an independent justice department should be given more serious consideration.
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Mitch McConnell speaks with reporters following a closed-door caucus lunch, at the Capitol in Washington, July 19, 2022. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
This week’s decisions by the court rejecting Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, invalidating university affirmative action policies and allowing small business owners to oppose giving services for same-sex marriages give Democrats an opportunity to play offense.
Democratic candidates can make a straightforward argument on the campaign trail that the court’s 6-3 conservative majority, which last year struck down Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to an abortion, is the direct result of Republican control of the Senate.
No person played a greater role in shaping today’s court than Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who held the seat of late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia vacant for more than a year in 2016 to prevent then-President Barrack Obama from putting a third justice on the high court.
McConnell proved pivotal four years later when he expedited the confirmation of conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett through the Senate in the weeks before the 2020 presidential election, flipping the seat long held by late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Those two seats filled by conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch and Barrett made the difference between what would have been a 5-4 Democratic majority on the court and today’s 6-3 conservative majority.
Those maneuvers are reaping huge legal victories for religious and fiscal conservatives on a range of hot-button issues related to abortion, debt forgiveness, racial justice and gay rights.
Democrats say the decisions will put the court itself in the spotlight in next year’s election and help mobilize their voters in Senate battleground states across the country.
“Democrats were already fired up because of Roe v. Wade,” said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. “It will mobilize Democrats, particularly Democratic younger women who are already turning out and registering in record numbers.
“This is a pattern which just shows a Supreme Court that is taking away our freedoms and moving the country backward and Democrats are very, very strongly engaged and women are very strongly engaged by that narrative,” she said.
Democrats say each of the court’s controversial decisions will mobilize multiple key constituencies in Senate battlegrounds ranging from younger women and minorities to LGBTQ voters and people with student loan debts.
The court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization last year overturned the right to an abortion.
This month, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the six conservative justices struck down affirmative action policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In Biden v. Nebraska, the court in a decision released Friday rejected Biden’s $400 billion student debt forgiveness plan.
Also on Friday, the conservative majority ruled in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis to uphold a businesswoman’s right to deny services to same-sex couples because of religious convictions.
“If you take this whole record, you have a [get out the vote] plan for the Democrats,” said Lake, who argued the court’s recent decision in Glacier Northwest v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which ruled a company could sue a union for striking if it hurts their business, would also mobilize union-affiliated voters.
The labor case was decided 8-1 in favor of a concrete company with liberal justice Ketanji Brown Jackson offering the only dissenting vote.
Steve Jarding, a Democratic strategist who previously served as an advisor to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said the court’s recent decisions “are changing decades of precedent” impacting “millions of Americans.”
He said “if the Democrats use it right as an issue” they can move voters to support Senate Democrats in key races.
“This is the court that Republicans wanted, that Republicans gave America and now they’re dismantling the social fabric of the country,” he said. “The public doesn’t normally pay attention to the court but with these rulings this goes beyond the court. This is a court the Republicans packed.”
He noted the court’s decisions are not only dramatic but in some cases they reversed decades of established precedent, altering a national landscape that voters had become accustomed to over a half-century.
The court’s decision on affirmative action overturned a precedent set in 1978 in Regents of University of California v. Bakke. Last year’s Dobbs decision overturned the precedent Roe v. Wade established in 1973.
Jarding said voters who don’t like the court “fundamentally changing the fabric of America” can “express outrage about it at the ballot box.”
“I’ve never in my lifetime seen so many dramatic decisions come down in such a short period of time and that makes this a legitimate political concern,” he added.
Senate Republicans, however, are not shying away from the court’s decisions on affirmative action and student debt.
McConnell hailed both rulings as big wins. He praised the court for making “clear that colleges may not continue discriminating against bright and ambitious students based on the color of their skin” and derided Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan as “socialism.”
“The president of the United States cannot hijack twenty-year-old emergency powers to pad the pockets of his high-earning base and make suckers out of working families who choose not to take on student debt,” he said.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) attacked the decisions, calling the ruling on affirmative action “a giant roadblock” on the march toward racial justice and the opinion on student debt relief “disappointing and cruel.”
Philip Letsou, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said Democratic incumbents running in states that voted for former President Trump in 2016 and 2020 will have a tough time running against the court.
“If Joe Manchin, Jon Tester, and Sherrod Brown want to run on supporting Joe Biden’s illegal student loan bailout, racial discrimination in college admissions, and painful abortions up to the ninth month of pregnancy, we welcome their decision,” he said.
“Attacking Brett Kavanaugh backfired on Senate Democrats spectacularly in 2018, and it will backfire again if Democrats make attacking the Supreme Court their campaign pitch for 2024,” Letsou added, noting that incumbent Democratic Sens. Claire McCaskill (R-Mo.), Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) and Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) lost their re-election bids after Senate Democrats went to war against Trump’s second nominee to the Supreme Court.
Whit Ayres, a prominent Republican pollster, said the court’s decision to overturn the right to an abortion will have the most impact on the 2024 election and questioned whether decisions on student debt relief and affirmative action will move the needle much in Senate battlegrounds.
“The way it would have an effect is through the abortion ruling,” he said of the court’s salience as a political issue next year. “This affirmative action ruling is fully consistent with majority public opinion and that’s not going to be an issue.
“It’s hard to make the Supreme Court itself an issue unless you’re talking about a presidential campaign with a new president who’s going to nominate justices. The way it becomes an issue is through the abortion ruling,” he said.
“In 2022, that really stimulated Democratic turnout down the ballot,” he said.
Ayres said the decision on student loan forgiveness could sway voters “in certain places” but asserted there are “as many arguments against providing that relief as there are for” it, especially among “people who had student loans and paid them off” and are “wondering where the fairness is.”
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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg speaks in the South Court Auditorium on the White House complex on May 8, 2023. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
“Who are you trying to help? Who are you trying to make better off?” Buttigieg asked on Sunday.
But that didn’t stop him from wondering why DeSantis couldn’t do anything better with his time—and getting in one devastating dig at the 2024 hopeful.
“I'm going to leave aside the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up shirtless bodybuilders and just get to the bigger issue that is on my mind whenever I see this stuff in the policy space,” Buttigieg told Dana Bash during Sunday’s State of the Union. “Which is, again, who are you trying to help? Who are you trying to make better off? And what public policy problems do you get up in the morning thinking about how to solve?”
Buttigieg was referring to a video posted on Friday by the “DeSantisWarRoom” Twitter account, which spliced videos of Trump seemingly embracing LGBTQ support with clips of DeSantis’ actions as Florida governor that have targeted the community, including his laws on trans rights and his comments on drag queens. The video also seemingly compared DeSantis to American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman and The Wolf of Wall Street’s Jordan Belfort, though it offered no explanation for their association.
The video, which was posted the same day the Supreme Court ruled that businesses may choose not to serve LGBTQ people if its owners feel their religious beliefs are violated, was regarded by critics as homophobic, including by groups that represent gay and lesbian Republicans.
“Conservatives understand that we need to protect our kids, preserve women's sports, safeguard women's spaces and strengthen parental rights, but Ron DeSantis' extreme rhetoric goes has just ventured into homophobic territory,” the Log Cabin Republicans, one of the largest such groups, wrote on Twitter on Friday.
Christina Pushaw, the campaign’s rapid response director, defended the advert as a mere critique of the federal recognition of Pride Month and the “poison” that is “identity politics.”
“Opposing the federal recognition of ‘Pride Month’ isn’t ‘homophobic,’” she wrote in response to Richard Grenell, an openly gay former Trump official. “We wouldn’t support a month to celebrate straight people for sexual orientation, either... It’s unnecessary, divisive, pandering.”
Still, in his State of the Union interview on Sunday, Buttigieg could not see the public good the video brought, touting his own department’s work in addressing flood management in Kentucky and a railroad crossing in North Dakota as counterexamples.
“These are the kinds of problems that most of us got into government, politics, and public service in order to work on,” Buttigieg said. “And I just don’t understand the mentality of somebody who gets up in the morning thinking that he’s going to prove his worth by competing over who can make life hardest for a hard-hit community that is already so vulnerable in America.”
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Protesters for and against affirmative action demonstrate on Capitol Hill on Thursday. The Supreme Court ruled that race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional. (photo: Anna Moneymaker/NPR)
Though the opinion focuses on higher education, some legal experts say it could lead to changes in commonplace workplace initiatives like diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and environmental, social and governance commitments.
"I already think that there are going to be some real repercussions," said Alvin Tillery, a political science professor at Northwestern University, who runs a consulting firm that works with organizations and companies, including Google and Abbott, on DEI-related programs.
Tillery says he expects the mainly conservative groups that backed Students for Fair Admissions' lawsuit — which was the subject of the Supreme Court's ruling — to shift their focus in part onto race-conscious programs in the workplace.
"I think that that is likely already happening, and so businesses will have to be prepared for that," he said.
Doing away with DEI-style programs has been a consistent part of conservative political messaging in recent years. Several right-leaning groups have already begun calling for further action, including America First Legal, a nonprofit run by former Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller that's focused on doing away with race-focused policies.
"This ruling means we can strike hard legally in our courts now and win major victories. Now is the time to wage lawfare against the DEI colossus," Miller wrote in a statement following the court's decision.
But Tillery doesn't expect any changes to DEI initiatives overnight. He argues that those programs fall under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and that companies can maintain their programs by reframing their language.
"The current structure of the workforces in corporate America suggests that there are tons of gaps between the races," Tillery said, adding, "Diversity, equity and inclusion work can be reframed as trying to figure out what's behind the processes creating these gaps and then filling the void by creating structures and processes to make sure that you're not discriminating under Title VII."
Plus, race-conscious programs already widely exist throughout the country — including within many large and influential companies nationwide. And ahead of the court's decision, many companies had already weighed in and advocated to keep affirmative action policies within higher education in place.
Last summer, more than 80 major corporations and businesses filed three briefs with the Supreme Court in support, arguing these policies help increase workforce diversity and improve company performance.
"Experience in a diverse university environment prepares students to interact with and serve racially diverse client and customer bases and to work with people of all backgrounds," according to one brief written by over 60 prominent businesses, including Apple, General Electric, Google and Johnson & Johnson.
"The result is a business community more aligned with the public, increased profits, and business success," it added.
Plus, to Tillery, many of the larger companies he consults for understand the importance of maintaining race-conscious programs, especially as members of Generation Z and future generations enter the workforce.
"And so while the Supreme Court, they live in a rarefied space where most of us don't live because we live in the real world, business leaders are going to need to figure out a way to make this work if they're going to source future talent and sell to future consumers," he says. "And that's just the reality of it."
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Demonstrators gather outside the Moms for Liberty meeting in Philadelphia, Friday, June 30, 2023. (photo: Nathan Howard/AP)
The group's co-founder, Tiffany Justice, said during its annual summit over the weekend in Philadelphia that Moms for Liberty will use its political action committee next year to engage in school board races nationwide. It also will “start endorsing at the state board level and elected superintendents.”
Her comments confirm that Moms for Liberty, which has spent its first two years inflaming school board meetings with aggressive complaints about instruction on systemic racism and gender identity in the classroom, is developing a larger strategy to overhaul education infrastructure across the country.
As the group has amassed widespread conservative support and donor funding, its focus on education ensures that even as voters turn their attention to the 2024 presidential race, school board elections will remain some of the most contentious political fights next year.
Moms for Liberty started with three Florida moms fighting COVID-19 restrictions in 2021. It has quickly ascended as a national player in Republican politics, helped along the way by the board's political training and close relationships with high-profile GOP groups and lawmakers. The group's support for school choice and the “fundamental rights of parents” to direct their children's education has drawn allies such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a leading GOP presidential contender, and the conservative Heritage Foundation.
The group has been labeled an “extremist” organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center for allegedly harassing community members, advancing anti-LGBTQ+ misinformation and fighting to scrub diverse and inclusive material from lesson plans.
Justice said in an interview that she and her co-founder, Tina Descovich, were two moms who “had faith in American parents to take back the public education system in America” and that they “fully intend on reclaiming and reforming" that system.
So far, the group has had mixed success at getting its preferred candidates elected. In 2022, slightly more than half of the 500 school board candidates it endorsed across the country won. In the spring of 2023, fewer than one-third of the nearly 30 candidates it endorsed in Wisconsin were elected.
Focusing on state-level candidates could give Moms for Liberty an opportunity to assert its influence on some of the positions that have more control in determining curriculum, said Jon Valant, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has studied education policy.
A close partnership with the conservative training organization the Leadership Institute and added money from a growing donor base also could help the Moms for Liberty run more electable candidates and help them win in 2024.
Monty Floyd, vice chair of the Moms for Liberty chapter in Hernando County, Florida, knows what it’s like to have the group’s support in a political campaign. He ran for school board in 2022 and received the group’s endorsement, as well as $250 from its Florida-based PAC.
Floyd lost that race but plans to run again in 2026, he told The Associated Press at the summit. He looks forward to seeing how the group’s political influence grows and said that even more than the money, the national network of Moms for Liberty provides a “great resource” to a candidate.
“The wealth of knowledge they have and the network of support and just the advocacy tips that we’re learning from the speakers today,” he said. “They have good advice to give. So you kind of learn a lot about what you can improve in your messaging.”
Moms for Liberty may face obstacles, however, as its rising national presence has driven a countermovement of activists who oppose it, Valant said.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said she thinks groups such as Moms for Liberty have “created more action and more energy” among teachers unions.
“We have 41 new units that we have organized as the AFT this year. We've never had that,” she said. She said the union would “do what we have to do” during elections to show the contrast between its endorsed candidates and Moms for Liberty candidates.
Beyond unions, Moms for Liberty is likely to face opposition from grassroots groups and voters who “just don't agree with their vision of what public education should be,” Valant said.
Martha Cooney, a Pennsylvania educator who was one of about 100 protesters dancing and holding signs outside the summit Saturday afternoon, agreed. She said that as Moms for Liberty tries to assert more political power, she and others will continue to stand in its way.
“They are a very small minority who are trying to act like they represent this whole nation, and they do not,” Cooney said.
Moms for Liberty did not answer questions on which races it would focus on in 2024, besides making it clear that it would not endorse in legislative races or the presidential election.
But even as the group says it will not get involved in the White House race, Republican candidates have tried to harness Moms for Liberty's influence and broad network of more than 120,000 members in 45 states to woo its voting bloc and benefit their primary campaigns.
Five GOP candidates gave speeches during the gathering in Philadelphia, which ended Sunday. They included DeSantis and former President Donald Trump. The rivals tried to outflank each other with claims that “woke ideology” had overtaken education and that pronouns and “critical race theory” needed to be struck from classrooms.
“I think moms are the key political force for this 2024 cycle,” DeSantis said in his address to attendees Friday.
Other Republican presidential candidates who appeared at the summit included former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who brought his wife and two children to the stage Saturday. He pledged to prioritize parents' rights and shutter the U.S. Department of Education if elected.
“The membership of this organization is just a small tip of the iceberg of a broader pro-parent movement, pro-children movement in our country,” Ramaswamy told reporters at the summit. “And so how important is that? You better believe it’s pretty darn important.”
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Ret. Lt. Col. Bob Alexander stayed closeted in the Air Force for 20 years because of the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy. He came out when the policy ended, and when he retired, he decided to help those who weren't discharged honorably because of their sexual orientation. He resides in Washington D.C., and works as a cybersecurity attorney. (photo: Keren Carrión/NPR)
"I just decided that I would just follow the rules in terms of not acting on my sexuality. Which meant that for the first 12, 14 years I was alone, celibate, not dating," he says.
Around the same time Stephan Steffanides joined the Navy, just like his father, uncle, grandfather and great uncle, among others.
"My family's been serving this country for all of the last century," Steffanides says.
He served aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, stationed at Norfolk, Va. But two years into his enlistment, Steffanides got spotted at a gay bar near his base.
"They cut my locker open and found some gay magazines," he says. Not only was it against the military regulations, gay sex was still illegal in Virginia, and many other states.
"They threw me in the brig, put me on bread and water — it was humiliating --for being gay," says Steffanides.
Advocates estimate that 114,000 troops were pushed out of the service over the decades due to their sexual orientation, often with a less-than-honorable discharge. That means no automatic VA benefits or free VA health care. It makes getting a civilian job tough because employers often ask about military service. Many vets find it easier to omit that they served rather than explain an other-than-honorable discharge. That's what Steffanides received.
And to make matters worse, that's how he was suddenly outed to his family.
"They wanted nothing to do with me. It was all arguments that destroyed my family life," he says.
"I turned to drugs and alcohol as soon as I got out of the Navy, and within a couple of years I was homeless and living in the streets. I spent 20 years in the streets," says Steffanides.
Meanwhile, Bob Alexander spent those 20 years rising through the ranks.
In 1993 President Bill Clinton tried to end the ban, but landed instead on a policy known as "don't ask, don't tell." As long as they kept it secret, gay and lesbian troops could serve.
"Being closeted under 'don't ask, don't tell' was like being a ghost at your own funeral. Being trapped there and having to listen to people say not very nice things about you, right?" Alexander says.
Critics say "don't ask, don't tell" was a false compromise. About 14,000 people were kicked out of the military for their sexual orientation during the 17 years it was enforced. Some troops felt like they'd been ordered to lie, says Alexander.
"The way I handled it mostly was I moved a lot. I never stayed anywhere long enough for people to really get to know me too well," he says.
At least twice he nearly got caught. Rumors sprouted about how he wasn't dating women or had reported on others for using homophobic slurs. Alexander would jump on the next chance to move, even if it wasn't great for his career. One of those jumps happened near the financial crisis of 2008; he couldn't sell his house and had to walk away from the mortgage.
"In the 22 years I was in the military, I think I had 11 separate permanent duty assignments, and that's not including deployments," he said.
Then on Sept. 20, 2011, after a long campaign by activists, the Obama administration ended the ban. In the years since, the integration of gay and lesbian troops has been heralded as a huge success with no effects on unit cohesion or combat readiness, according to the Pentagon. At the time it was uncharted territory, and Alexander, by then a lieutenant colonel, sat in a room full of senior officers talking about how to handle gay service members.
"I said, you know what, 'I'm a gay service member,' " he said. " 'Send them to me and I will handle it.' And that's how I came out."
For the rest of the day, Alexander says, colleagues came up to congratulate him on his courage and his sacrifice over decades. Though he'd already reached his 20-year mark for full retirement, Alexander ended up staying another year and a half.
"The rest of my time in the military was absolutely exceptional. These folks were wonderful, once the fear was gone, once the unknown was unmasked," he said. "After everything I'd been through, that validation in the end was very meaningful."
Alexander knew that validation was missing for untold numbers of other veterans, so he then started a second career: as a lawyer.
Alexander's first project was with the San Francisco-based veterans charity Swords to Plowshares, trying to help gay veterans with other-than-honorable discharges. He just had to find them.
"I put up flyers all over the Bay Area in the gay bars, places I knew that these LGBTQ veterans would frequent. And I got nothing, no response at all," he said.
The reasons for that are complicated. Troops were often kicked out with euphemistic charges like "violation of an order" or "indecent behavior." So it's hard to say exactly how many veterans were expelled and how many might still be alive — and without the benefits they're due.
A Pentagon spokesperson said the military has granted 90% of applications to discharge review boards. But the total figure granted is 1,375, as of March 2023 – a tiny fraction of the number advocates believe are out there.
Besides the lengthy process of a military discharge review board, there's a much simpler path. With most other-than-honorable discharges, the VA can "characterize" a veteran's discharge as honorable for VA health care and most benefits (excluding the GI Bill home loan and education funds.)
"Bottom line, if you're a veteran or survivor or family member who was impacted by 'don't ask, don't tell,' come to VA. We're going to do everything in our power to get you the benefits you've earned and so richly deserve," says Sue Fulton, a VA assistant secretary.
The VA says it has changed the "character of discharge" to honorable for 73% of veterans who apply. But VA doesn't track the number of those that involved "don't ask, don't tell."
The Pentagon told NPR it has done extensive outreach in the years following repeal. But several current and former defense officials said that the Pentagon is uniquely able to take a more proactive approach – a deep dive through military records to find people and inform them of the opportunity to claim their benefits.
That's unlikely in the current political climate though. The Pentagon was pushed to ban drag shows on military bases, the VA has been criticized for flying pride flags, and some republicans in Congress are calling the U.S. military "woke" and trying to restrict all military transgender care and diversity initiatives.
Some vets don't want to be found.
There's another complication to repairing the damage done to veterans under "don't ask, don't tell" and earlier bans on LGB troops: Some vets don't want to be found. They may never have told their families. For many, revisiting the past is traumatic.
Bob Alexander learned this in his early attempts.
Alexander spent hours at Pride events in San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., handing out his flyers, and he realized even the word "veteran" might have been off putting.
"They probably didn't even look at the flyers. Since they were told by the military, they were told by the VA, told by society that they were not veterans," he says .
Eventually, he looked where the need was most desperate — among the homeless. And that's where he met Stephan Steffanides, 20 years since his discharge from the Navy for being gay.
"I was in the street, living in the gutter, literally behind a trash can," says Steffanides.
Steffanides had no idea the policy had changed in 2011, and that he was now eligible for VA housing and health care and disability. Anything involving the military made him anxious. When he saw Alexander's booth at a homelessness service fair, his boyfriend had to walk him there.
"I think Stephan had a panic attack," Alexander says. "Just approaching a nonprofit veteran service organization was traumatic for him."
Steffanides was shocked when Alexander and his colleagues said they could help.
"They told me, 'You know what? We don't leave our wounded on the battlefield. You served your country for two years and regardless of your discharge, we don't want to see you suffering,' " says Steffanides.
Upgrading Steffanides' paperwork with the Pentagon is still ongoing, but the process with the VA was done in just a matter of months.
"It was a simple letter from them saying ... 'For the purposes of VA, we find your service to be honorable,' " says Alexander. "Just that acknowledgement from the VA that he's a veteran was like a light shown down on him."
"It was spiritual for me," says Steffanides. "I was so, so proud. And it inspired me to be of service to others."
Steffanides now runs a support group in San Francisco for LGBTQ veterans, and records their oral histories.
"I can continue to be the person that I wanted to be when I was much younger and I had joined the service to serve my country. There's still ways I can do that," he said.
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Barrington Sanders, a Miami-Dade mosquito control inspector, sprays a pesticide to kill adult mosquitoes Thursday in Miami. (photo: Joe Raedle/WP)
Rising temperatures are shifting mosquitoes — and the diseases they carry
It’s the mosquito — and, increasingly, it’s on the move.
These global shifts, which will only accelerate as the planet warms, have sparked concern that the diseases mosquitoes carry will exact an even higher toll in the months and years to come.
In June alone, five cases of locally transmitted malaria were discovered in Texas and Florida: the first cases acquired in the United States in two decades. These cases, experts say, are unlikely to have a connection to warming temperatures — conditions in Florida and Texas are already suitable for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. But as urban heat islands expand and temperatures rise, mosquito-borne diseases are expected to travel outside of their typical regions.
“Climate change allows the creeping edge of mosquito ranges to expand,” said Sadie Ryan, a professor of medical geography at the University of Florida.
Earlier this year, Georgetown University researchers published a paper in Biology Letters demonstrating that malaria mosquitoes’ ranges have already shifted in Africa over the past century, farther from the equator and into higher altitudes.
Malaria cases worldwide declined steadily for nearly two decades. But that progress stalled as cases have flatlined and even ticked up in some countries in the past few years. Cases increased to an estimated 247 million in 2021 from a recent low of 231 million in 2018, according to data from the World Health Organization.
Mosquitoes don’t kill the way a shark or a lion does: Instead, they are “vectors” for many painful and life-threatening diseases, from dengue fever to malaria to chikungunya. When a mosquito “bites” someone — by stabbing a needle-filled proboscis deep into a blood vessel — it both sucks out blood and leaves some of its own saliva behind.
That saliva, when contaminated by virus or parasite, can make people sick, often painfully so. Dengue fever is also known as “breakbone” fever; the name chikungunya comes from an African word meaning “to be contorted,” as patients often bend over from severe joint and muscle pain.
And there is reason to think that those excruciating and sometimes deadly diseases will spread as temperatures warm. Like all insects, mosquitoes are coldblooded and rely on ambient temperatures to sustain their body temperatures. They thrive, particularly, on temperatures between 50 and 95 degrees Fahrenheit — and, unlike most humans, who wilt under high humidity, mosquitoes love damp air.
In the United States, for example, many regions are already seeing an increase in “mosquito days” as temperatures rise. According to a report from the research and communications nonprofit Climate Central, between 1979 and 2022, many areas of the country saw an increase in days when temperature and humidity were a kind of “Goldilocks zone” for mosquitoes.
“We’re definitely seeing this prolonging of seasons” for mosquitoes, Ryan explained.
Different mosquitoes thrive under different temperatures. The Anopheles mosquito carries malaria; the Aedes aegypti and the Aedes albopictus mosquitoes carry diseases like dengue and chikungunya. But the A. aegypti thrives at higher temperatures than the A. albopictus. As different parts of the world warm at different rates, some mosquito-borne diseases will thrive while others will be put under stress.
According to a study published in 2019, both species are expected to spread northward in the United States over the next 30 years. By 2050, the A. aegypti could increase its range in the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest; the A. albopictus could make it as far north as Michigan and Minnesota.
There are other factors that are also changing the patterns of disease transmission. As urban areas expand and populations increase, mosquitoes like the A. aegypti — which love living around humans — can find more places to live and more people to feed on. The species has made gains in Southern California, for example, infuriating the region’s residents.
In some regions, there may be winners and losers of the mosquito migration. Many mosquito-borne diseases have an upper limit for easy transmission — if it gets too hot, diseases like dengue won’t be as prevalent in broiling tropical regions and will instead continue to shift toward the poles.
But Ryan says this shouldn’t offer much comfort. “Temperatures that are too hot for dengue transmission are going to be no fun for anyone to live in,” she said.
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