We begin today with Hugo Lowell of the Guardian preview of the third hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

The panel will first examine the genesis of Trump’s pressure campaign on Pence to adopt an unconstitutional and unlawful plan to reject certified electors from certain states at the congressional certification in an attempt to give Trump a second presidential term.

The select committee then intends to show how that theory – advanced by external Trump legal adviser John Eastman – was rejected by Pence, his lawyers and the White House counsel’s office, who universally told the former president that the entire scheme was unlawful.

The select committee then intends to show how that theory – advanced by external Trump legal adviser John Eastman – was rejected by Pence, his lawyers and the White House counsel’s office, who universally told the former president that the entire scheme was unlawful.[...}

The select committee will additionally show that Trump’s false public remarks about Pence having the power to refuse to count votes for Biden – Pence had no such power – directly put the vice-president’s life in danger as the mob chanted “hang Mike Pence”.

Jacqueline Alemany, Josh Dawsey, and Emma Brown of The Washington Post report exclusively that Ginni Thomas also maintained email contact with Trump lawyer John Eastman.

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol has obtained email correspondence between Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and lawyer John Eastman, who played a key role in efforts to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, according to three people involved in the committee’s investigation.

The emails show that Thomas’s efforts to overturn the election were more extensive than previously known, two of the people said. The three declined to provide details and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

The committee’s members and staffers are now discussing whether to spend time during their public hearings exploring Ginni Thomas’s role in the attempt to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, the three people said. The Washington Post previously reported that the committee had not sought an interview with Thomas and was leaning against pursuing her cooperation with its investigation.

Now does Liz Cheney want to investigate that?

Justin Hendrix of JustSecurity tells us about a massive database of tweets about misinformation, disinformation, and rumors” that were spread on Twitter about the 2020 election.

On the same day the Committee laid out evidence that Trump and his associates knew the election was lost even as they cynically pushed the Big Lie, a group of researchers from the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public and the Krebs Stamos Group* published a massive dataset of “misinformation, disinformation, and rumors spreading on Twitter about the 2020 U.S. election.” The dataset chronicles the role of key political elites, influencers and supporters of the President in advancing the Big Lie, exploring how key narratives spread on Twitter.

Published in the Journal of Quantitative Description, the paper accompanying the dataset is titled Repeat Spreaders and Election Delegitimization: A Comprehensive Dataset of Misinformation Tweets from the 2020 U.S. Election. The dataset, which the researchers named ElectionMisinfo2020, “is made up of over 49 million tweets connected to 456 distinct misinformation stories spread about the 2020 U.S. election between September 1, 2020 and December 15, 2020,” and it “focuses on false, misleading, exaggerated, or unsubstantiated claims or narratives related to voting, vote counting, and other election procedures.”

“President Trump and other pro-Trump elites in media and politics set an expectation of voter fraud and then eagerly amplified any and every claim about election issues, often with voter fraud framing,” said one of the lead researchers, Dr. Kate Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington and co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public. “But everyday people produced many of those claims.” The new report sheds light on how these claims proliferated from the margins to the nation’s Capitol.

Robin Givhan of The Washington Post writes about all the former president’s men and women.

As a candidate and as president, Trump liked to make his hires based on whether folks looked the part; he liked his statesmen and generals and personal representatives to exude “central casting” charisma and looks that are easy on the eye. And now these stars were stuck in videos with as much sheen as community access cable.

In his deposition, former Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller is answering questions in muffled tones from behind a face mask while sitting in a stark, characterless room. The man once charged with speaking for the voluble Trump requires subtitles to make his words discernible. Ivanka Trump is positioned against an empty marble-patterned wall in hues of gray, from the color of lint to the color of saliva. Her heavy makeup only emphasizes that no amount of artifice can improve upon the dismal facts.

The elite circle of people who catered to a man who prided himself on his cinematic acumen has lost the power of its props, its costuming and its messaging. For an administration that loved nothing more than to surround itself with American flags by the dozens, there were few flags waving in the background as the pack of former colleagues, advisers and enablers sat through questioning by just-the-facts government lawyers. Instead of being wrapped in the accoutrements of patriotism, they were surrounded by all the trappings of grifters, cheats and con-men stuck in an interrogation room. The crafty pugilists were on the defensive.

Heather Digby Parton of Salon writes about the so-called guardrails of democracy that really weren’t guardrails at all.

The January 6 committee is now looking closely at what happened after that in the period between the election and the Capitol riot. What they have found is that the remaining protectors of the guardrails didn't do much to stop Trump from attempting to overturn the election.

Their reticence to do something other than watch from the sidelines led to Trump empowering Rudy Giuliani and the rogues gallery of misfits and weirdos who helped him spread the Big Lie that led to the insurrection. Some of the anonymous heroes even suggested in the press that Trump just needed to cry it out and then he would bow out gracefully. The Jan 6 committee hearing this week revealed that within the White House during this period they called themselves "Team Normal" apparently because they knew the Big Lie was a big lie and they didn't go out of their way to help Trump spread it. However, some helped Trump lay the groundwork for his claims that the election was being rigged and only balked after the fact when he insisted that it was. Some of them helped him raise hundreds of millions of dollars in a clear-cut scam while others are even currently working for people who are running for office on the Big Lie platform. They all stayed mum about what Trump and his crazy accomplices were up to. It's good they are telling the truth under oath to the committee but it doesn't speak well of them that they didn't step up when it really counted. Their silence led to death and mayhem and an ongoing crisis in our democracy.

The Washington Post reported some new details about the one group in "Team Normal" who did manage to hold Trump back from doing his worst in those final days: the lawyers in the Department of Justice(DOJ) and the White House Counsel's office. While Jared Kushner testified that he dismissed them as a bunch of whiners, it was their threats to quit that kept Trump from firing the Acting Attorney General and replacing him with an obscure toadie named Jeffrey Clark who was somehow persuaded that he could take over the DOJ and use it to help Trump overturn the election.

It occurs to me that Fiona Hill described a similar “two-track” way of working as it pertained to Ukraine during the first impeachment trial although, in that case, the foreign service and national security civil servants weren’t content to “watch from the sidelines.” 

Frida Ghitis of CNN writes about the Trump campaign’s election grift.

The Trump campaign’s alleged grift was well underway long before Election Day. He showed no compunction about tricking his supporters. In one of the most shameless scams, the Trump campaign extracted tens of millions of dollars by setting up the donations page on the campaign website that by default turned every donation into a recurring payment, according to reporting last year by the New York Times.

The scam snagged huge amounts of money. Among those who got caught up in it were Trump supporters – including a cancer patient – who saw their bank accounts drained. Complaints about the scheme overwhelmed fraud lines at credit card companies, according to the Times report. Despite issuing more than $122 million in refunds, campaign spokesman Jason Miller downplayed the controversy, arguing campaign records showed only a small percentage of complaints.

Not content with that shakedown, the campaign added another default setting, a so-called “money bomb” that doubled the donation of Trump supporters they took for suckers.[‘’’]

Trump’s campaign transgressions are in keeping with Trump’s own decades’ long track record of pushing the envelope on financial matters, no matter the consequences for others.

However, EJ Montini of the Arizona Republic says that the grifted, “cultists” that they are, don’t care.

Instead of election challenges, the select committee pointed out that the money solicited by Trump went to “a conservative organization employing former Trump staffers, to the Trump Hotel Collection, to the company that organized the rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol last Jan. 6” and others.

Amanda Wick, a lawyer for the Jan. 6 committee, said, “The evidence developed by the select committee highlights how the Trump campaign aggressively pushed false election claims to fundraise, telling supporters it would be used to fight voter fraud that did not exist. The emails continued through Jan. 6, even as Trump spoke on the Ellipse. Thirty minutes after the last fundraising email was sent, the Capitol was breached.”

The cultists do not care.

They refuse to believe.

They refuse even to hear the evidence, perhaps out of fear that they might believe, and they do not want to risk that. It’s a mindset that is difficult to imagine.

Charles Blow of The New York Times wonders if the U.S. will survive this period of mass hysteria.

John Cassidy of The New Yorker talks about The Federal Reserve’s biggest interest rate hike in 28 years and wonders will it stem the tide of inflation.

In addition to raising the rate, Powell indicated that another three-quarter-point hike is possible at the Fed’s next meeting, in July. The members of its policymaking committee also raised their predictions for where the federal funds rate will be at the end of this year and next year—to 3.4 per cent and 3.8 per cent, respectively. “We anticipate that ongoing rate increases will be appropriate,” Powell said. [...]

When inflation began to rise last year, Powell resisted calls from some quarters—yes, that’s you, Larry Summers—for the Fed to hit the monetary brakes, describing the rise in prices as “transitory.” He dropped this term late last year, in time for the economy to be hit by the Omicron variant, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and a fresh lockdown in China—each of which carried a further inflationary shock. In retrospect, the Fed made an error by not starting to raise rates sooner, although, given that inflation is a global problem—it’s running ​​at 8.1 per cent in the eurozone and 7.8 per cent in the United Kingdom—it’s not clear how much of a difference a quicker policy reversal in the U.S. would have made.

In any case, the big question now is whether the Fed can raise rates at a more rapid pace than it previously anticipated, and bring inflation down, without knocking the economy into an outright recession. According to a new survey conducted by the Financial Times and the University of Chicago, which was published on Sunday, more than two-thirds of academic economists think that Powell won’t pull it off: they are predicting that a recession will start next year.

Damian Carrington of the Guardian writes about the enormous rise in temperatures in an area of the Arctic.

The heating is occurring in the North Barents Sea, a region where fast rising temperatures are suspected to trigger increases in extreme weather in North America, Europe and Asia. The researchers said the heating in this region was an “early warning” of what could happen across the rest of the Arctic.

The new figures show annual average temperatures in the area are rising across the year by up to 2.7C a decade, with particularly high rises in the months of autumn of up to 4C a decade. This makes the North Barents Sea and its islands the fastest warming place known on Earth.

Recent years have seen temperatures far above average recorded in the Arctic, with seasoned observers describing the situation as “crazy”, “weird”, and “simply shocking”. Some climate scientists have warned the unprecedented events could signal faster and more abrupt climate breakdown.

It was already known that the climate crisis was driving heating across the Arctic three times faster than the global average, but the new research shows the situation is even more extreme in places.

Steven Erlanger of The New York Times writes about the additional arms that the U.S. and its allies are sending to Ukraine.

The package, detailed by Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III after a meeting with allies at NATO headquarters in Brussels, includes more long-range artillery, anti-ship missile launchers and more rounds for howitzers and for a sophisticated American rocket system on which Ukrainians are currently being trained. Overall, the United States has now committed about $5.6 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia invaded on Feb. 24.

Mr. Biden said in a statement that he had told President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine about the new weapons during a 40-minute call Wednesday morning. Mr. Zelensky and his aides have recently ramped up public pressure on the West to supply vastly more of the sophisticated armaments it has already sent, questioning their allies’ commitment to the Ukrainian cause and insisting that nothing else can stop the inexorable, brutal Russian advance in eastern Ukraine.

Western officials and arms experts caution that flooding the battlefield with advanced weapons is far slower and more difficult than it sounds, facing obstacles in manufacturing, delivery, training and compatibility — and in avoiding depletion of Western arsenals.

David M. Herszenhorn, Barbara Moens, Hans von der Burchard, Jacob Hanke Vela, and Maia de La Baume of POLITICO Europe report on the lack of unanimity by European Union members to approve Ukraine’s request for membership.

The European Commission on Friday is expected to recommend formal candidate status for Ukraine and for neighboring Moldova, but the final decision requires unanimity among the 27 EU heads of state and government who will gather for a European Council summit in Brussels next week but still don’t agree on what to do.

Rejecting Ukraine’s request — or even a fudge nodding to future “membership perspective” — would be a devastating blow for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, potentially demoralizing many of his more than 40 million citizens, and especially his military, which continues to take heavy causalities as it fights off Russian invaders who are now occupying large swathes of the south and east of the country.

Such a rejection would also further inflame Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fantasies about reclaiming a sphere of influence resembling that of the Soviet Union and its superpower status during the Cold War. Supporters of Ukraine’s membership bid say that anything less than candidate status would encourage Putin to prolong the war.

On the fifth anniversary of the tragedy at the Grenfell Tower in London, Stephen Rand of The Article writes that Grenfell and the UK’s Rwanda “extradition” policy are indicators of a Conservative Party gone wrong.

The Grenfell Tower calamity was so tragic and sobering because, when we saw the faces of the deceased, we saw people who were, in effect, in the care of the state. The people who burned alive or suffocated in that tower block were the vulnerable and voiceless, the very people whom Michael Gove had said the Conservatives needed to support. Those were the people whom the state has let down for decades. To say that the Conservative government of five years ago alone had blood on its hands is to misjudge the scale of the issue. The victims of Grenfell were let down by the whole apparatus of the state for years — by Left and Right alike.

There is an inquiry into the disaster which will report later this year, and it must be allowed to run its course before anyone jumps to conclusions. At the same time, it is wrong to use the inquiry to dodge questions and let the indignation so many felt five years ago splutter into disinterest. It’s already clear that the residents of Grenfell had foreseen and warned of the tragedy before it took place, but were ignored by a system which should have been designed to help them. It ’ s also clear that the inquiry will paint a picture of victims, not only killed in their homes, but neglected through numerous iterations and layers of the state. However, it is a stain on the memory of all those who died that nothing of any real worth has been done to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.[...]

If Grenfell happened because of disinterest and inaction, the Rwanda deportation policy represents the exploitation of the vulnerable and voiceless for political gain. Thanks to ranting from the likes of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Priti Patel and Liz Truss need to be seen to be doing something — anything — about people coming over the Channel on dinghies. They seem to think the answer is to be found in the crime and punishment policies of the 18th century. In 1788 the starving were punished for poaching by being transported to Australia. In 2022 asylum seekers are flown to a 21st century penal colony in Rwanda. It’s sickening.

Finally today, José Gomes Temporão, public health minister under former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva writes for AlJazeera that the U.S. should be prioritizing equitable access to COVID vaccines for Latin America.

Comprised of mostly middle-income countries, Latin America’s governments have found themselves truly caught in the middle. They do not have resources comparable to those mobilised by wealthy countries in response to the pandemic. But neither can they benefit from international support programmes often targeted only at low and lower-middle-income countries.

As pharmaceutical companies have prioritised selling doses where they can secure the highest profits and without a shared approach to advance the interests of the region as a whole, accessing COVID-19 vaccines has been an uphill struggle for the continent. As a result, more than 200 million people remain unvaccinated across the region.

A combination of large urban populations, heavy chronic disease burden, weak health systems, and a seriously unequal global vaccine rollout has led some experts to warn that Latin America could be the most vulnerable region in the world to the emergence of a new variant. This is not just a Latin American problem, but a problem for everyone.

Everyone have a good day!

We start today with Jon Allsop of Columbia Journalism Review critiquing both the substance and the spectacle of the first of six meetings of the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol.

Last night, at 8pm Eastern, the preemptive noise ceased and the hearing began. Bennie Thompson, the committee’s Democratic chair, immediately started to lay out Trump’s culpability for the events of January 6, calling the attack on the Capitol “the culmination of an attempted coup”; then, Liz Cheney, the Republican vice-chair, picked up the thread, introducing videos of pretaped testimony that showed people close to Trump—his former attorney general William Barr; his daughter Ivanka—calling his claims of a stolen election “bullshit,” to borrow Barr’s word. There followed a harrowing montage packaging never-before-seen footage of the insurrection, followed by a break, followed by live testimony from two witnesses: Nick Quested, a British documentarian who was embedded with the extremist group the Proud Boys around the time of the insurrection, and Caroline Edwards, a police officer whom the mob knocked violently to the floor and who later slipped in her colleagues’ blood. The hearing concluded with another video montage, this time showing insurrectionists testifying that they had answered Trump’s call. The whole thing was over in a crisp two hours.[...]

Ahead of the first televised hearings in Trump’s 2019 impeachment, I wrote that pundits weren’t totally wrong to focus on optics given that persuading the public to care was the point at this staging post in a much broader political process; the problem, I wrote, was that many pundits have a sensationalized and shallow definition of what makes for good TV… The committee, I would argue, couldn’t deviate too far from the way congressional hearings typically look and sound; if it had done so, the hearing would not recognizably have been a hearing, and could easily have sacrificed its own gravitas and slipped into genreless confusion.

Within these obligatory boundaries, I found the hearing short, sharp, and innovative. Most of the committee’s members were not given the opportunity to grandstand, making it easier for viewers to focus their attention on the evidence and witnesses. Edwards’s testimony was wrenching in an understated way; if a single moment of the hearing stood out to me, it was watching her calm reaction, across a split screen, as she was shown footage of the mob slamming her to the floor. The committee was smart, too, to segue straight from its montage of unseen riot footage to a break, allowing the networks to cut in with commentary. If I had to compare the hearing to a work of journalism, I’d not pick public radio but a comprehensive magazine article: there were newsy scoops in there, but its much greater value came in laying out truths that we already knew with a searing depth, emotional resonance, and fresh perspective.

John Nichols of The Nation applauds Chairman Bennie Thompson’s use of the word “coup” in describing the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

The message was that the deadly January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump “was not a spontaneous riot.” It was the product of a conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and to keep Trump in office as an illegitimate pretender to power. And, the chairman of the January 6 Committee explained, “Donald Trump was at the center of that conspiracy. And ultimately, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, spurred a mob of domestic enemies of the Constitution to march down to the Capitol and subvert American democracy,”[...]

This was not a military coup d’état in which the generals of the armed forces employ their weaponry in order to remove the duly elected president or prime minister of a country. This was a self-coup, another form of coup d’état, in which a leader overrules the other branches of government in order to assume illegitimate and illegal power.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the scholar of fascism and authoritarian leaders who teaches history at New York University, immediately recognized the significance of the committee chair’s statement. “Kudos to Chairman Thompson for calling it a coup,” she said, shortly after Thompson finished his remarks. “Some still call it a riot, which does not capture the larger political design of overturning our democracy.”

Peter Bergen of CNN interviewed British documentary filmmaker Nick Quested about his embedding with the Proud Boys.

BERGEN: So, you reached out to the Proud Boys.

QUESTED: Yeah. We called up the Proud Boys. On November 4, 2020, when President Donald Trump falsely claimed that he won the election before a winner had been declared, we were like, “Oh, here you go.” Because one of the fundamental tenets of America is having a peaceful transfer of power. I called up Enrique Tarrio, the head of the Proud Boys. He liked the film “Restrepo” that war reporter Tim Hetherington, Sebastian [junger], and I made together. And he just said to come down. So we went down to DC on December 11, 2020 and started working.

BERGEN: When a revolution happens, even the revolutionaries sometimes have no idea what is going to happen. To what extent did the Proud Boys know this was going to happen on January 6?

QUESTED: I don’t know. We did definitely look at the Proud Boys and say, “Well, are Proud Boys Jacobins? Are they Brown Shirts? Or are they football hooligans?” Or is it just Trumpism? Because that was a very unifying factor throughout the Proud Boys. There are no RINOs in the Proud Boys. It is the cult of Trump, and they were the muscle.

Marcela Garcia of The Boston Globe explores how anti-blackness among Latinos can lead to them joining white supremacist organizations.

The go-to explanation is the “Hispanics are not a monolith” mantra, which, while accurate, also feels a tad superficial. Sure, my identity and political views as a Mexican American raised in Mexico but living in Boston for the past two decades are likely to be different from a second-generation Mexican American from McAllen, Texas, or a recently-arrived Venezuelan refugee in Miami. It’s how some of the Proud Boys’ appeal to Latinos in the Miami area has been explained: Cubans and Venezuelans’ fear of communism and socialism made them turn to the Republican Party and, in some cases, drove them to become right-wing activists.[...}

While it may still be shocking for people to learn who the leader of the Proud Boys is — a Latino who, as the Capitol attack unfolded, reportedly took credit for it, writing in an encrypted text, “Make no mistake. We did this” — this isn’t the first time that Latinos have been involved in a self-identified, self-professed white supremacist collective, according to Hernández. Other examples of Latinos linked to white nationalist groups: Juan Cadavid, originally from Colombia, took part in pro-Trump violent clashes in Southern California in 2017; Alex Michael Ramos, a Puerto Rican from Georgia who beat a Black man during the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, also in 2017; and Nick Fuentes, the young white nationalist influencer of Mexican American descent.

What drives a non-white person to take part in violence against racial minorities? “What’s the best way to distance yourself from feeling like you’re part of an oppressed group? It’s to align yourself with those who are part of the oppressors,” said Hernández. Additionally, whiteness has been very elastic throughout history, she said. “People who today we think of as white people with Italian American or Irish American ancestry were, at the turn of last century, viewed as non-white. Whiteness sort of expanded to include them.”

Manuel Roig-Fanzia of The Washington Post Magazine discloses that during Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein searched through Attorney General John Mitchell’s home office at the behest of his wife, Martha Mitchell.

On this particular Sunday, Martha was calling Woodward with an invitation. Her husband, recently indicted for a second time in the cascading Watergate scandal, had left her, moving out of their Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan. Would Woodward and his reporting partner, Carl Bernstein — she always pronounced it, incorrectly, as “bern-STINE” ― like to come up and look through her husband’s home office?

Woodward, discussing the episode at length publicly for the first time in an interview at his Georgetown home, said he did not want to miss such a rare opportunity. The sequence of events shows Mitchell at her most swaggering but also offers a glimpse at the reportorial techniques that made Woodward and Bernstein two of the most celebrated journalists of the 20th century. [...]

Satisfied that they were working with a solid source and were on firm legal ground, Woodward and Bernstein headed for the airport and caught the Eastern Air Lines shuttle to New York. When they arrived midafternoon, Martha Mitchell greeted them at the door of her Fifth Avenue apartment. She held a martini in her hand. She was “gracious” and “a little drunk,” Bernstein recalled. Mitchell gave the reporters a tour of the well-appointed space with its floral print sofas. Then, she pointed down a long hallway. John Mitchell’s office.

“Have at it, boys,” she told them. “Please nail him. I hope you get the bastard.”

Now that is a dish that was served ice cold, lmbao.

Paul Waldman, also of The Washington Post, wonders about the reasons behind the rampant crime wave in rural America.

So how do we explain this? None of the things conservatives blame for crime — progressive prosecutors, lenient Democratic politicians, police feeling disrespected by racial justice protests, a lack of religious piety — are present in these places.

If — as we’ve all been told again and again — voters are fed up with “soft on crime” Democrats and are ready to “send them a message” in November’s midterm elections, to whom should a message be sent about the rural crime wave? And what should that message be?

The causes of the rural crime wave are as complex as those of urban crime, but at heart they’re about the pandemic. It isolated people from the friends, family and institutions that traditionally provide support. For many it caused sickness and grief. It elevated everyone’s stress level, brought new mental illness, left people feeling angry and powerless. Many took those experiences and tensions out on each other. [...]

My guess is that they wouldn’t say it’s a failure of political leadership. After all, in many if not most of the affected rural areas, every public official — from the sheriff to the mayor to the county council all the way up to the House member, the senators and the governor — is a conservative Republican.

Melissa Gira Grant of The New Republic warns that Pizzagate-like conspiracies are now targeting all LGBTQ people and can take place in any city.

Now, a little more than five years later, 25 percent of Republicans identify as believers of the Pizzagate successor QAnon, and the far right’s capacity for street violence has grown. At the same time, where once most elected Republican officials would at least nominally distance themselves from Pizzagate-pushers out on the fringe, that wall has largely eroded. Across the country, GOP lawmakers have waged a legislative crusade targeting queer and trans kids, smearing opponents as “groomers,” language that rhymes with the “pedophile” claims that inspired the attack on Comet Ping Pong. And where once the targets of these conspiracy theories were largely confined to a select group of Democratic lawmakers and their allies, the fearmongering—amplified by Fox News and prominent conservative social media accounts—is now targeted at all LGBTQ people, from national figures to members of your local community. The stage is set for a Pizzagate in any city.

Ms. Grant was writing about the incident at a Pride event in the Oak Lawn section of Dallas last week but sure enough...

Bible-browbeating bigots is nothing new at Pride events; I’ve encountered them. Armed neo-Nazi white supremacists, however, is something rare.

Be careful out there.

Inside Climate News reports on a study that concludes that “divisive” cultural issues and disinformation campaigns is delaying action on climate change.

A team of researchers and environmental advocates are urging governments and Big Tech companies to do far more to stop rampant online disinformation campaigns, which they say aim to delay action on the climate crisis by intentionally dragging the issue into the culture wars now dominating Western politics. Failing to stop such campaigns, the groups warned in a new report, could further splinter unity at November’s climate talks and jeopardize a global effort that has struggled to slash planet-warming emissions.[...]

The report, which analyzed hundreds of thousands of social media posts over the last 18 months, found that despite promises from tech companies in recent years to crack down on the spread of “fake news” on their platforms, posts with misleading or false information about climate change continue to flourish online. It also found that much of the disinformation is coming from a small group of actors who wield a large sphere of influence online and have found success in sowing doubt over the urgency of global warming by tapping into populist sentiments such as distrust in scientific experts and wealthy elites, as well as a nationalistic and isolationist view of global politics.

For example, the analysis found 6,262 Facebook posts and 72,356 tweets where users blamed other countries for climate change while deflecting the responsibility of their own country. Posts from Western countries tended to highlight the shortcomings of China and India, claiming they were not doing enough so there was no point in anyone acting. The study also found 115,830 tweets and 15,443 Facebook posts that called into question—often inaccurately—the viability and effectiveness of renewable energy technologies.

Robbie Gramer and Amy Mackinnon write for Foreign Policy that Russian war crimes in Ukraine are so vast and unprecedented that efforts by various Ukrainian and international organizations to investigate and prosecute cases are becoming chaotic.

“The national legal system, even with an effective prosecutor’s office, couldn’t cope with 15,000 cases,” Oleksandra Matviichuk, a leading Ukrainian human rights lawyer and the head of the Ukraine-based Center for Civil Liberties, told Foreign Policy during a recent visit to Washington. “And remember, we are a country still at war. We have limited resources.”

There are so many alleged Russian war crimes that the investigative response is also unprecedented. The ICC, the premier intergovernmental body tasked with prosecutions of war crimes, has dispatched 42 investigators to probe possible war crimes in Ukraine, its “largest-ever” team of experts to carry out such a task. Other European countries, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Poland, joined Ukraine in setting up a so-called Joint Investigation Team to cooperate on war crimes investigations, while the U.S. government is funding complementary efforts to document war crimes and support Ukrainian organizations dedicated to doing so. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a leading multilateral organization, has also established an expert mission to document human rights abuses. In Ukraine, meanwhile, the prosecutor general’s office has brought forward several war crimes trials against captured Russian soldiers and is investigating thousands more, while civil society groups are training volunteers on how to properly document evidence of possible war crimes, effectively crowdsourcing the early stages of investigations for future cases.

There’s a growing concern among some U.S. officials and Ukrainian activists that all these concurrent efforts could eventually trip over one another and may start doing more harm than good—that is, unless there’s a central hub set up to coordinate all the work. “It’s been a little bit chaotic,” conceded one U.S. official working on supporting efforts to document war crimes in Ukraine, who spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the media. (Van Schaack, for her part, insisted that these efforts are “decentralized,” but not chaotic, because each group is in constant contact with one another to coordinate their work.)

Rajeev Agarwal of The Diplomat writes about the efforts of India and Iran to reset their diplomatic relationship.

India and Iran share close historical ties from the times of Persian Empire and Indian kingdoms. Iran is an important nation in India’s neighborhood and in fact, the two countries shared a border until India’s partition and independence in 1947. Iran is also important to India as it provides an alternate route of connectivity to Afghanistan and Central Asian republics, in the absence of permission for India to use the land route through Pakistan.

India-Iran relations have, however, witnessed ups and down over the decades, mostly owing to factors that go beyond strictly bilateral issues, like the stoppage of oil imports from Iran after May 2019 owing to U.S. sanctions following the revocation of the Iran nuclear deal, India’s close relations with Israel, and Iran’s ties with China, including signing a 25-year strategic partnership agreement. There are other sticky issues, too, like Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen launching drone attacks against Saudi Arabia and UAE, both close partners to India, or Iran’s statement on the Modi government’s abrogation of Article 370 of Indian Constitution, which gave special status to Kashmir. Iran on its end has not taken kindly to India succumbing to international pressure of sanctions on Iran. However, both countries have tried to keep their engagement above such occurrences and maintain a cordial trajectory of bilateral ties.

Despite the rather subdued engagement with Iran, there are a number of areas of convergence and enhanced engagement for India to consider. Afghanistan presents one such opportunity. The Taliban government has largely been isolated since it took over Kabul in August 2021. Iran was one of the few countries that did not withdraw its embassy from Kabul and has continued to keep its channels of communication open with the Taliban. India, on the other hand, was quick to wind up its embassy in Kabul but has now indicated that it is keen to reopen its embassy in some form shortly. A delegation from India met the Taliban foreign minister in Kabul on June 2. Iran and India have collaborated already in the past on Afghanistan and Iran’s role as a viable direct land route to Afghanistan is undisputable. India and Iran have the potential to forge a common and effective policy of engagement with Afghanistan in the future.

Finally today, Robin Givhan of The Washington Post celebrates the art of photographer Gordon Parks and those that are inspired by him.

Parks died in 2006 at 93, but his artistic impact is as potent as ever. He was a Black man documenting the highs and lows of his people, as well as the broader world. His legacy is expansive, arguably more than any other Black photographer’s. He moved through life wearing cowboy hats, leather bombers and ascots, breaking racial barriers, opening doors for others. His work explored issues of inequality and poverty that still haunt us, launching conversations that continue in art, politics and activism. And most important in 2022, Parks and his foundation help subsequent generations of Black artists see themselves, their communities and their possibilities more clearly. Examining their art, and looking at the ways in which it relates to the work Parks was doing more than 50 years ago, helps us to better understand the impact of history, human nature and systemic racism on our lives today. It also reminds us to pay attention to the simple joys of everyday life.

At a time when the country is spinning in circles trying to make sense of race, ward off inhumanity and define social justice, Parks’s artistic heirs are uniquely positioned to shed light, offer guidance and question the status quo. They’re doing so with heartening audacity and blessed urgency.

“It’s not that I see so much of him in one artist. I see some of him in a lot of artists. I feel Gordon is ubiquitous,” says writer Jelani Cobb, one of the executive producers of a recent documentary on Parks and incoming dean of Columbia Journalism School. “He’s one of those people who may not have the answer, but he helps you understand the right question.”

Everyone have a good day!

We begin today’s roundup with a preview of this week's pivotal hearing from the January 6th Committee: 

More than 500 days removed from the violent attack on the US Capitol, the committee investigating it is ready to show its work. The House select committee will hold its first public hearing this week, on June 9 at 8 p.m. ET. Sources told CNN this hearing will be a broad overview of the panel's 10-month investigation and set the stage for subsequent hearings, which are expected to cover certain topics or themes. While the setup of the hearings has been a work in progress and evolving, sources note, the presentations will likely feature video clips from January 6, as well as some of the roughly 1,000 interviews the committee has conducted behind closed doors.

Over at The New York Times, Annie Karni and Luke Broadwater preview the Democratic messaging strategy:

With their control of Congress hanging in the balance, Democrats plan to use made-for-television moments and a carefully choreographed rollout of revelations over the course of six hearings to remind the public of the magnitude of Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the election, and to persuade voters that the coming midterm elections are a chance to hold Republicans accountable for it.

It is an uphill battle at a time when polls show that voters’ attention is focused elsewhere, including on inflation, rising coronavirus cases and record-high gas prices. But Democrats argue the hearings will give them a platform for making a broader case about why they deserve to stay in power.

Meanwhile, over at The Washington Post, we learn more about the scheme to appoint fake electors and undermine the election:

A staffer for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign instructed Republicans planning to cast electoral college votes for Trump in Georgia despite Joe Biden’s victory to operate in “complete secrecy,” an email obtained by The Washington Post shows.

“I must ask for your complete discretion in this process,” wrote Robert Sinners, the campaign’s election operations director for Georgia, the day before the 16 Republicans gathered at the Georgia Capitol to sign certificates declaring themselves duly elected. “Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result — a win in Georgia for President Trump — but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion.”

Margaret Hartmann looks at “the wildest revelations” so far:

Two days after the 2020 election Donald Trump Jr. sent Meadows a text laying out strategies to ensure his father stayed in office regardless of who actually won, according to CNN. Team Trump went on to pursue the tactics he referenced, including filing lawsuits to challenge election results, demanding recounts, promoting bogus “alternate electors,” and blocking Congress’s certification of a Biden win on January 6, 2021.

“It’s very simple,” Trump Jr. texted to Meadows, “We have multiple paths We control them all.”

Here’s an important piece by Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz at The New Yorker on how the January 6th attack has galvanized the extreme right:

In the seventeen months since the insurrection, Cohen said, a unit of some nine hundred analysts had picked up on a number of disturbing patterns. “Anti-government militia, hard-core white supremacists, and even people more from the anarchist movement have come together,” he said. Their goals are explicit: “assassination of elected officials, and violent activities to resist government activities, or programs.”

The ideological hardening was predictable, and predicted, after the attack on the Capitol, according to Elizabeth Neumann, who served as the D.H.S.’s Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention during the Trump Administration. “On January 6th, we had neo-Nazis hanging out with a bunch of otherwise just maga people,” Neumann said, in an interview. “That’s an opportunity to recruit.”

On a final note, don’t miss this in-depth piece by Jennifer Senior at The Atlantic on Steve Bannon’s continuing assault on our democracy:

Bannon started War Room in October 2019, initially to fight Donald Trump’s first impeachment; in January 2020, the show morphed into War Room: Pandemic. But over time, the show became a guided tour through Bannon’s gallery of obsessions: the stolen election, the Biden-family syndicate, the invaders at the southern border, the evil Chinese Communist Party, the stolen election, draconian COVID mandates, the folly of Modern Monetary Theory, the stolen election.

We begin this morning with Tom Hill of the War on the Rocks blog writing about the monumental difficulties of attaining a negotiated settlement in the war between Russia and Ukraine.

Negotiations to end this war, however, are not only a matter for the Russian and Ukrainian negotiators at Antalya, the Pripyat River, and elsewhere. External parties were part of the war’s structural and proximate causes. The war’s course, and how it ends, will have substantial consequences for many states other than Ukraine and Russia, including strategic interests related to national security and nuclear deterrence. The stability of any deal to end the war will also be shaped by external support, pressures, and guarantees — or lack thereof. One way or another, external states will be involved, and in significant ways, in attempts to negotiate an end to this war. [...]

This article is an attempt to chart some of the hypothetical options for securing a de-escalation, through a discussion of four of the core issues of the conflict: Russian military withdrawal, Crimea, the Donbas, and Ukraine’s independence and foreign policy identity. These options are not a prediction of what kind of war-termination deal will transpire, nor are they a proposal of what the parties should or should not accept. Instead, this is an exercise to illuminate the scale of the challenge for negotiators and to highlight the serious preparations (both in terms of policymaking and in terms of public expectations) that these negotiations will require.

As this analysis demonstrates, the incentives against Russia implementing key components of a peace agreement are significant. Tough trade-offs and external support will be needed for a sustainable peace agreement — including preparation of a clear and coordinated Western offer to Russia on sanctions relief in return for Russia’s acceptance and implementation of Ukraine’s most important demands.

Michael D. Shear of The New York Times reports that President Biden plans to tap into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower oil prices that have skyrocketed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Mr. Biden could announce the plan to tap the reserve as soon as Thursday, said the official, who requested anonymity because the plan was not ready to be announced Wednesday night. The idea would be to combat rising prices at the pump.

The president’s public schedule, which was released Wednesday night, said he would deliver remarks Thursday afternoon on the administration’s “actions to reduce the impact of Putin’s price hike on energy prices and lower gas prices at the pump for American families,” a reference to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. [...]

If fully enacted, the president’s plan would release 180 million barrels from the reserve, which is intended to help the United States weather spikes in demand or drops in supply. About 550 million barrels are in the reserve, which has a reported total capacity of about 714 million barrels.

Bashar Deeb writes for POLITICO Europe writes about European double standards when it comes to refugees.

Indeed, bad actors like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko have sought to blackmail the European Union with threats of allowing migrants to freely cross over from their countries. But what the response to Ukraine shows is that it’s not migrants who are being weaponized; it’s the EU’s own xenophobia. After all, no one can blackmail you with unarmed colored people unless you are scared of them. Only a Europe that is so fearful of its far right that it ends up adopting its racist agenda can be held hostage by people looking for a better life, a safe environment in which to raise their families.

And it’s not just those fleeing violence who suffer when the EU raises its drawbridges. It’s the EU’s own interests as well. When Europe waves in Ukrainians while leaving others floating at sea on engineless life rafts, or executes brutal pushbacks that leave people robbed and stripped naked at its land borders, it is directly supplying the Kremlin and its other enemies with propaganda.[...]

Some Western commentators have added fuel to that fire, with journalists describing Ukrainians as civilized Europeans with white skin and blue eyes, unaccustomed to the horrors of war. Commentary like that adds nothing to the story, but it does dehumanize the displacement experiences of black and brown people.

When I heard these comments, as a Syrian, I could not help but feel insulted, but because of my work, I can see where the problem lies.

Laura Bronner of FiveThirtyEight writes that, yes, Europe is more tolerant of Ukrainian refugees...for now.

In fact, that trajectory is not uncommon in humanitarian crises: Support for refugees can start relatively high in the immediate aftermath of a disaster to only crater as news cycles change, anecdotal accounts of difficulties emerge and sympathies move on. It’s one reason why support for Ukrainian refugees may ultimately prove to be short-lived, too.

There is one point in the scientific literature on public opinion toward asylum seekers that is quite clear, however: Not all refugees are welcome.legal distinctions between refugees and asylum seekers in some places, the terms are often used interchangeably. In a huge, 18,000-person, 15-country European survey, political scientists Kirk Bansak, Jens Hainmueller and Dominik Hangartner found a number of characteristics ranging from refugees’ religion to their ability to speak the language that made people less — or more — willing to accept them.

In particular, Bansak, Hainmueller and Hangartner found that people were 11 percentage points less likely to say they would accept a Muslim refugee than a Christian one. They also found people were less willing to accept men seeking asylum than women. How “deserving” people thought refugees were also played a role, with refugees seeking asylum for economic opportunity being far less accepted than victims of political, religious or ethnic persecution. Victims of torture were also more likely to be accepted, as were asylum seekers without inconsistencies in their stories…

Yes, a lot of the racism and ethnic resentment that led to Brexit was directed at the migration of Eastern Europeans to the UK, for example. The idea that some European countries may get tired of Ukrainian migrants at some point in the future is not as far-fetched as it might seem now.

Heather Cox Richardson begins her latest post at her Letters From an American blog writing about the hiring of Mike Mulvaney by CBS News as introduction of the need of the political media to take Republican batsh*t seriously because of the enormous stakes.

Here’s what’s at stake: On the one hand, Biden is trying to rebuild the old liberal consensus that used to be shared by people of both parties, instituted by Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt to protect workers from the overreach of their employers and expanded under Republican Dwight Eisenhower to protect civil rights. To this, Biden has focused on those previously marginalized and has added a focus on women and children.

Biden’s new budget, released earlier this week, calls for investment in U.S. families, communities, and infrastructure, the same principles on which the economy has boomed for the past year. The budget also promotes fiscal responsibility by rolling back Trump’s tax cuts on the very wealthy. Biden’s signature yesterday on the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, making lynching a federal hate crime in the United States, is the culmination of more than 100 years of work.

Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken are defending democracy against authoritarianism, working to bring together allies around the globe to resist the aggression of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

On the other hand, the Republican Party is working to get rid of the New Deal government. While Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wanted to face the midterms without a platform, Senator Rick Scott (R-FL), who chairs the committee responsible for electing Republican senators, has produced an “11-point plan to rescue America.” It dramatically raises taxes on people who earn less than $100,000, and ends Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act.

With Maine Senator Susan Collins’ “concerns” over the nomination of Judge Ketjani Brown Jackson to the United States Supreme Court having subsided (at least for the time being), Mike DeBonis of The Washington Post writes that attention has turned to the ever-so thoughtful and contemplative deliberation to be made by Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski.

Her vote is being closely watched not only in D.C., where Democrats are eager to put a bipartisan stamp on Jackson’s likely confirmation, but also back home in Alaska, where Murkowski is standing for reelection this year under a newfangled election process in which traditional party primaries have been replaced with an all-comers runoff system that lets voters rank their preferred choices in the four-candidate general election.[...]

Although she backed the vast majority of President Donald Trump’s policy initiatives and nominees, she was among a small number of congressional Republicans who frustrated and ultimately foiled the GOP’s attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Under Biden, she has voted to confirm all of his Cabinet nominees, save for Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, as well as more than 50 of his judicial nominees — a record of cross-aisle comity matched only by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). [...}

Now all eyes are firmly on Murkowski. Collins on Wednesday announced she would back Jackson, saying the judge possessed “the experience, qualifications and integrity” necessary to serve. Graham, meanwhile, has strongly indicated he is likely to oppose Jackson’s ascension to the high court and questioned her aggressively about her sentencing record and other matters during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings last week.

That much has been obvious ever since the data showing the racial disparities was announced and, in response, The Damn Fool called for the churches to be filled on Easter Sunday 2020. NIce to have the data to back it up.

Thomas Edsall of The New York Times writes about both the gender and partisan gaps over whether the United States has become “too soft and feminine.”

Deckman and Cassese found a large gender gap: “56 percent of men agreed that the United States has grown too soft and feminine, compared to only 34 percent of women.”

But the overall gender gap paled in comparison with the gap between Democratic men and Republican men. Some 41 percent of Democratic men without college degrees agreed that American society had become too soft and feminine compared with 80 percent of Republican men without degrees, a 39-point difference. Among those with college degrees, the spread grew to 64 points: Democratic men at 9 percent, Republican men at 73 percent.

The gap between Democratic and Republican women was very large but less pronounced: 28 percent of Democratic women without degrees agreed that the country had become too soft and feminine compared with 57 percent of non-college Republican women, while 4 percent of Democratic women with degrees agreed, compared with 57 percent of college-educated Republican women.

Russell K. Robinson writes for the San Francisco Chronicle that “Hollywood still has a gay problem.”

With her win for Best Supporting Actress, Afro-Latina Ariana DeBose became the first openly queer woman of color to nab one of the film industry’s most coveted awards in an acting category. But if you think her win, and other pro-LGBTQ speeches during the show, mean Hollywood has fundamentally changed, you’re wrong.

Hollywood still has a gay problem.

For decades, heterosexual and cisgender actors have built or capped their careers by playing LGBTQ characters to great acclaim. Think Tom Hanks bravely agreeing to play a gay man dying of AIDS in “Philadelphia” or Sean Penn subverting his macho reputation as a gay political trailblazer in “Milk.” This career strategy continues to pay off. Benedict Cumberbatch’s two Academy Award nominations for Best Actor, including this year for “The Power of the Dog,” were for playing a gay man. Two of Penélope Cruz’s four Academy Award nominations, for her work in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” and this year’s nomination for “Parallel Mothers,” were for playing queer women.

But the career boost does not work in reverse. Openly LGBTQ actors generally do not win acclaim for playing heterosexual, cisgender characters. No one is praising DeBose for “acting straight.” Indeed, DeBose is unusual because openly LGBTQ actors are generally not cast in Oscar caliber movies as queer or straight characters.

Finally, today, Jeffrey Barg, The Grammarian writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer that..well, the definition of a “woman’ is a little complicated.

“Can you provide a definition for the word woman?”

Until recently, Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn would never have dreamed of asking such a question in a Supreme Court confirmation hearing, as she did last week of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. But in 2022, Blackburn properly deduced that she could score a few right-wing culture-warrior points by leaning into GOP anxieties over gender and shifting popular perceptions of it.

Jackson’s response — “No, I can’t. … Not in this context. I’m not a biologist” — sent many Republicans into predictable fits of apoplexy. [...]

By definition, I’m a definitions guy. Dictionaries are invaluable tools in our inexorable quest to be as precise and concise as possible. But as I’ve written previously, dictionaries are an ideal place to start your search and a terrible place to stop.

The definition of woman, which Blackburn faux-pretended was the easiest question she could ask, is a case in point.

Everyone have a great day!

We start off today with Robin Wright of The New Yorker and her review of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s virtual address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress yesterday.

In a concise eighteen minutes, Zelensky outlined an ambitious wish list of actions both to help Ukraine and punish Russia. He once again called for the West to create a no-fly zone—to “close the skies” and to limit the ability of Russian warplanes to strike Ukraine’s cities. If a no-fly zone was “too much to ask,” Zelensky appealed for more advanced missile-defense systems and aircraft. “I call on you to do more!” he said. Despite growing pressure from Congress, President Joe Biden has resisted Zelensky’s request for the no-fly zone, and for the transfer of MiG-29 fighter jets that Ukrainian pilots are trained to fly. Washington fears that any direct U.S. intervention could spark a wider conflict. “That’s called World War Three,” Biden said last week. Zelensky also asked the U.S. to sanction every Russian politician and widen the economic dragnet. “I am asking that Russians do not receive a single penny they can use to destroy Ukraine,” he said. He encouraged individual lawmakers to mobilize aid and support for Ukraine from companies in their districts.

Russia’s aggression and its deadly attacks on civilians have spurred a rare moment of unity in Washington. Zelensky received two standing ovations from Republicans and Democrats alike—before he even started speaking. He received a third at the end of his remarks. The charismatic lawyer turned comic turned politician, who took office in 2019, was once a little-known figure in the U.S., whose name came up only in context of the first Trump impeachment. On Wednesday, he joined a short list of foreign leaders who have addressed a joint session of Congress: Winston Churchill, in 1943; Nelson Mandela, in 1990; and Pope Francis, in 2015.

Only one Republican member of Congress voted to impeach or remove Donald Trump from office for withholding military aid that President Zelensky needed for defensive purposes.

Just sayin’.

Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post asserts that, in part, because of Zelensky’s speech, the United States cannot simply sit on the sidelines when the fate of a democracy is at stake.

There were several new aspects to Zelensky’s message. First, while he asked for a no-fly zone or, as an alternative, aircraft to “protect our sky,” he sought at least the means of shooting down Russian planes: “You know what kind of defense systems we need — S-300 and other similar systems.”

The administration and many lawmakers have opposed a no-fly zone as a dangerous escalation that would inevitably involve military conflict with Russia. Likewise, the administration has resisted pleas for military aircraft as both escalatory and unnecessary. (Ukraine has more than 50 fighter jets.) But air-defense systems might bridge the gap, meeting Ukraine’s needs without raising the risk of World War III.

Second, Zelensky’s concluding appeal for the United States to end its reluctance to provide international leadership might have more impact than any domestic politician, think tank or pundit could. “You are the leader of the nation, of your great nation. I wish you to be the leader of the world. Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace,” he said. With that, he demolished any notion that the United States can remain on the sidelines.

I won’t fault President Zelensky for asking for anything at this time; he needs all the help that he can get. And in principle, I agree with Rubin; when a democracy asks for help under these circumstances, the United States, the so-called greatest democracy in the world, should be willing and ready to do what it can

Brian Klass of The Atlantic writes that Russian President Vladimir Putin fell into “the dictator trap.”

Autocrats such as Putin eventually succumb to what may be called the “dictator trap.” The strategies they use to stay in power tend to trigger their eventual downfall. Rather than being long-term planners, many make catastrophic short-term errors—the kinds of errors that would likely have been avoided in democratic systems. They hear only from sycophants, and get bad advice. They misunderstand their population. They don’t see threats coming until it’s too late. And unlike elected leaders who leave office to riches, book tours, and the glitzy lifestyle of a statesman, many dictators who miscalculate leave office in a casket, a possibility that makes them even more likely to double down.

Despots sow the seeds of their own demise early on, when they first face the trade-off between allowing freedom of expression and maintaining an iron grip on power. After arriving in the palace, crushing dissent and jailing opponents is often rational, from the perspective of a dictator: It creates a culture of fear that is useful for establishing and maintaining control. But that culture of fear comes with a cost.

For those of us living in liberal democracies, criticizing the boss is risky, but we’re not going to be shipped off to a gulag or watch our family get tortured. In authoritarian regimes, those all-too-real risks have a way of focusing the mind. Is it ever worthwhile for authoritarian advisers to speak truth to power?

After playing a significant role in the installation of an American president, I honestly believe that Vladimir Putin believed that he was invulnerable.

Mikhail Viktorovich Zygar, a Russian journalist writing for Der Spiegel, points out that the Russian invasion of Ukraine isn’t the first time that middle-class Russians have sought to leave the country as fast as possible.

The departure of the Russian middle class from the country, which began on Sunday, Feb. 27, has become increasingly infused by panic. That was the day most European countries closed their airspace to Russian aircraft. Many Russians thought that the borders would soon be sealed and that there would be no way out.

The result was an almost tenfold increase in ticket prices from Moscow to Istanbul, Dubai, Yerevan, Baku, Bishkek and even Ulaanbaatar. Russia’s intellectuals flew out in all directions, taking the most bizarre detours. Indeed, the fear of closed borders remains one of the most persistent phobias of all former residents of the Soviet Union.

Over the past 20 years of Putin's presidency, as respect for human rights and freedom of expression has continued to deteriorate, many Russians established a red line for themselves, beyond which they would be willing to emigrate: if the borders were to be closed. Behind this is an historical trauma that Russian society still has not overcome, even though it lies more than one hundred years in the past. In October 1917, the Bolsheviks staged a coup and overthrew the liberal interim government. A few months later, they closed the borders, forbidding travel abroad, much less the export of money and valuables. The Russian nobility, poets of the Silver Age, outstanding avant-garde artists, dancers of the Russian ballet, scientists, writers and journalists were forced to seek ways to escape, abandoning all their possessions.

Andrey Pertsev, writing for the Russian independent news outlet Meduza, interviews a development expert about the effects that sanctions will probably have on ordinary Russians.

According to Zubarevich, it’s city dwellers, not villagers, who will experience the effects of the coming economic downturn most acutely. That’s because they have more to lose.

“Income per capita in Moscow is twice as high as that of Russia as a whole,” Zubarevich told Meduza. “Consumer demand in Moscow will change as the food and beverage industry shrinks. Housing, utility, and transport costs aren’t going anywhere. It’s too early to talk about anything else, because consumption patterns haven’t changed yet, but I will say that Moscow is skewed towards the service sector, and the risks there are quite high.”{...]

Even outside of the cities, where people can grow their own food in a pinch, nobody will be spared completely. “We’re at the beginning of a giant experiment: how will consumption patterns shift? Grocery stores aren’t going away, but everything else is an open question,” said Zubarevich. “But people [in rural areas] have gardens: they’ll plant more potatoes, some will grow cucumbers and tomatoes, some have animals — chickens, pigs. Life in those towns is a lot more closely tied to the land, so their losses will be mainly due to inflation.”

I’ve gotten sick of articles like this and this that seem to be extolling President Zelensky as paving the way for some sort of redefinition of some sort of old school version of manhood. Laszlo Solymar writes for The Article about some important history about the “spoils of war” that Soviet soldiers felt free to take in 1945 in Budapest.

That women can be regarded as spoils of war is not a new thing. When I came across the concept in my early teens I could not understand why, after the victory at Troy, Agamemnon brought Cassandra, quite openly, to his Royal palace in Argos. According to my understanding at the time, men were supposed to keep their wives and mistresses apart. Then it was explained to me that Agamemnon got Priam’s daughter as part of the post-war settlement and Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, should have accepted that. Well, she did not and that led to all kind of deceit and murder and eventually to her own demise.

The above reference to a Greek tragedy intends only to show that the idea of women as spoils of war is not a 20th-century invention. History is full of them, although very few of these women left written testimonies. I know something of the subject because I was in Budapest in January 1945 when the Soviet Army occupied the city. They were supposedly liberating the country. In fact, there was widespread plunder, looting and rape. They did not do it in an organised manner, in contrast to Berlin where rape was institutionalised. In Budapest it was a random, but not infrequent, event, left to the initiative or conscience of the individual soldier.

And there was looting, of course. The Hungarian language was enriched by new words, e.g. zabralni which came from zabirovatj, the Russian word meaning to rob with violence. The combat troops coming first concentrated on watches. The second and third waves were less discriminatory: they took everything: shoes, dresses, coats.

And not to at all diminish what happens when women are treated as “the spoils of war,” some men are treated the same way.

That’s what some people consider to be an “old school version” of manhood in a time of war.

Jon Allsop of the Columbia Journalism Review writes about how foreign policy “experts” shape American foreign policy views.

One age-old criticism has been that US networks, in particular, are overly reliant on “expert” pundits with professional and financial ties to the US national-security establishment and defense industry, and rarely give a platform to longstanding anti-war activists. That’s happening again with the Ukraine war. (Just yesterday, CBS News added H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, as a “foreign policy and national security contributor.”) These pundits are (mostly) not apologists for Putin’s invasion—far from it—and they do have expertise relevant to the current moment. Nor do they always agree. But they are not experts in the sense that media people often understand that word—an authority figure who can help put an issue or debate in its proper context—as much as actors often steeped in a particular foreign-policy worldview.

The experts to whom news consumers are exposed influence what they think about the war, and US policy “options” with regard to it. So does the language that they, and we, use. While it is part of our job to convene debates between insightful people, it is not our job to present asymmetrical policies as two equal sides of a coin or to hide the ramifications of those policies behind euphemistic language. As Putin has escalated his war, we’ve heard demands, from US foreign-policy elites but also from Ukrainian leaders, for a NATO “no-fly zone” over Ukraine, sometimes preceded by the adjectives “limited” or “humanitarian”—language that sounds de-escalatory but would actually entail direct military confrontation with a major nuclear power. Since the Biden administration and politicians and analysts from across the political spectrum oppose a no-fly zone as liable to start World War III, this view has gotten plenty of media airtime, and the policy has been characterized in similar ways by some prominent news reporters. But other journalists have too often bandied about the term without adding much context. This is highly consequential. Polls have already shown that public support for a no-fly zone can recede dramatically when it is characterized as an “act of war” or similar.

Moving into domestic politics, Julio Ricardo Varela of NBC News writes about the prevalence of white supremacist views in Latino communities.

Last week’s news that Enrique Tarrio, the former Afro-Cuban leader of the Proud Boys, was arrested on federal charges surrounding the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has sparked some interest in an apparently paradoxical reality: nonwhite Latino men worshiping at the altar of American white supremacy and providing cover to ensure that white nationalists stay mainstream.

As a journalist who’s been covering Latino communities for years, I know that this supposed paradox has never existed and that the country’s estimated 62.1 million Latinos have ideologies from one extreme to the other. American whiteness is a prize; it is where the power lies, and people like Tarrio would rather bask in that whiteness than fight against it and appear too “woke,” even it means tearing down democracy.

Non-Latino media have long been obsessed with proving the claim that more and more Latinos are longing to become white, which ignores the fact that being Latino is not just a sole racial construct but more of a messy combination with ethnicity. Voices from within the U.S. Latino community have responded by diving into the complexities of what it is to be Latino in modern-day America. While it is apparent that the country has become more multiethnic and multiracial, the quest for what Cristina Beltrán calls “multiracial whiteness” will always have an appeal in our community.

Igor Derysh of Salon that most of the states with the highest per-capita murder rates are states won by Donald Trump in 2020.

In all, eight of the 10 states with the highest per-capita murder rates in the country voted for Trump in 2020. None of those eight states have been carried by a Democrat since 1996. Mississippi had by far the highest murder rate at 20.5 murders per 100,000 residents, followed by Louisiana at 15.79. Alabama, Kentucky and Missouri all had murder rates higher than 14 per 100,000 compared to a national average of 6.5. The only states that voted for Biden to appear in the top 10 are Georgia — a longtime Republican stronghold that went blue by a tiny margin in 2020 — and New Mexico.

Large blue states that have attracted criticism from Republicans had murder rates significantly below the national average. New York's rate was 4.11 murders per 100,000 residents and California's was 5.59. According to the study, Mississippi's murder rate was 400% higher than New York's and 250% higher than California's.

Republicans and the media have also focused on Democratic-led cities in coastal states, but many Republican-led cities have posted much higher murder rates. Despite intensive media coverage of increasing crime in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco district, the murder rate in that city was only half that of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's district in Bakersfield, a Southern California city with a Republican mayor that overwhelmingly voted Trump. Jacksonville, Florida, another Republican-led city, had 120 more murders than San Francisco did in 2020 (with only a slightly larger population) but received a tiny fraction of the national news coverage.

Mariel Padilla and Barbara Rodriguez of The 19th News write that hate crimes against the AAPI community continues to rise in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic waning (for now, anyway).

Hate crimes targeting AAPI people made headlines during the pandemic as officials, from President Donald Trump on down, used xenophobic rhetoric linking the virus with the AAPI community. Then, on March 16, 2021, a White gunman opened fire in three spas in the Atlanta area, killing eight people, including six women of Asian descent. Those attacks galvanized many officials to speak out against the violence, or accelerate their work to prevent it. Congress passed an overwhelmingly bipartisan COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, and President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Atlanta to speak with community leaders and state lawmakers.

In some states, including California, Illinois and New Jersey, policymakers are pushing new legislation, including bills to direct transit agencies to combat street harassment and require Asian-American history in schools. Now, one year later, people are worried that momentum has waned and not enough is being done even as the number of reported incidents of hate, particularly towards women, continues to rise dramatically.

In recent months, two women of Asian descent were fatally shot in spas in Albuquerque. New York City has seen a particularly gruesome stream of violence: a 67-year-old woman of Asian descent was punched 125 times, seven AAPI women were assaulted by the same man, one woman was pushed in front of an oncoming train and another was found stabbed to death in her own apartment after being followed. Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition that tracks incidents of hate, violence, harassment, discrimination, shunning and child bullying against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States, tallied nearly 11,000 hate incidents from March 2020 to the end of 2021, according to its latest findings.

Lenny Bernstein and Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post write that based on the COVID surge presently in Europe, that Americans need to be prepared for another surge here, as well.

Infectious-disease experts are closely watching the subvariant of omicron known as BA.2, which appears to be more transmissible than the original strain, BA.1, and is fueling the outbreak overseas.

Germany, a nation of 83 million people, saw more than 250,000 new cases and 249 deaths Friday, when Health Minister Karl Lauterbach called the nation’s situation “critical.” The country is allowing most coronavirus restrictions to end Sunday, despite the increase. Britain had a seven-day average of 65,894 cases and 79 deaths as of Sunday, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Research Center. The Netherlands, home to fewer than 18 million people, was averaging more than 60,000 cases the same day.

In all, about a dozen nations are seeing spikes in coronavirus infections caused by BA.2, a cousin of the BA.1 form of the virus that tore through the United States over the past three months.

In the past two years, a widespread outbreak like the one now being seen in Europe has been followed by a similar surge in the United States some weeks later. Many, but not all, experts interviewed for this story predicted that is likely to happen. China and Hong Kong, on the other hand, are experiencing rapid and severe outbreaks, but the strict “zero covid” policies they have enforced make them less similar to the United States than Western Europe.

Finally today, Jeffrey Barg, The Grammarian writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer on the vagueness of verbs in Florida’s recently passed “Don’t Say Gay” bill and why that vagueness is dangerous.

In the run-up to last week’s passage of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation — an ignorant assault on LGBTQ Floridians and their families — the bill’s proponents accused its detractors of not having actually read the text. They argued that nowhere does the bill say “don’t say gay,” and that the woke mob was twisting its meaning.

They’re right. The bill doesn’t say “don’t say gay.” But it is a grammatical mess that will make its implementation even more abusive than it appears at first glance.

“Does it say that in the bill? Does it say that in the bill?” Gov. Ron DeSantis upbraided a reporter who asked about “Don’t Say Gay.” “I’m asking you to tell me what’s in the bill because you are pushing false narratives,” DeSantis said.

If you say so, guv. Let’s look at the bill, which reads in part: “Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”

Everyone have a great day!