26 August 21
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Most of these people are lost causes, and we know exactly whom to blame.
ne of the most disturbing aspects of the rise of Donald Trump is the extent to which his followers came to believe that this carnival-barking, semi-literate, faux-successful businessman with five children by three women, zero relevant experience, and a reputation for f--king people over and being completely full of shit was (and remains) their lord and savior. Despite repeated evidence that they shouldn’t believe a single thing he says, Trump’s supporters have made it clear that they’re more than happy to buy whatever this bloated Jim Jones is selling. (If that comparison seems extreme to you, know that a person who was literally at the Jonestown massacre thinks it’s apt.) So it would stand to reason that if Trump had wholeheartedly endorsed getting vaccinated against COVID-19, members of his base would have been trampling one another to get a shot the moment they were available, as if the jabs were deeply discounted 62-inch flat-screen TVs on Black Friday.
Of course Trump chose not to do that. Instead, he got his vaccine in secret, and since leaving office in January has refused to do anything more than say during random interviews that he “would recommend” getting inoculated before quickly changing the subject; earlier this month, the Daily Beast reported that “despite pleas from multiple friends and advisers,” he’s repeatedly rebuffed the idea of mounting “anything resembling a real effort to get his supporters vaccinated,” as it would be helping Joe Biden. All of which has unsurprisingly led to huge swaths of Republicans choosing not to get a lifesaving vaccine and outlets like Fox News peddling all manner of misinformation about vaccines, like that they aren’t actually necessary and are in fact liberal plots.
At some point over the weekend, though, someone must have drilled it into Trump’s head that things are really, really bad out there: The delta variant is absolutely ripping through unvaccinated communities and leaving numerous parts of Trump Country with nary an ICU bed, and “deathbed vaccine regrets” are now a thing. Because at a rally on Saturday, he did something crazy—he actually came out, in public, and told his supporters to get their shots. And then something perhaps even crazier happened, given how these people feel about him (which, as previously mentioned, is that he’s basically Jesus Christ, if Jesus Christ were one of the worst people on earth): They booed him.
Per USA Today:
Former president Donald Trump was briefly booed at a rally on Saturday in Alabama after telling his supporters they should get vaccinated against COVID-19. Trump, who held a rally in Cullman, about 50 miles north of Birmingham, touted to rallygoers that the three vaccines—Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson—were developed in under nine months during his presidency. He then suggested that they get the vaccine.
“You know what? I believe totally in your freedoms. You got to do what you have to do, but I recommend: Take the vaccines. I did it—it’s good,” he said.
You can hear it here for posterity:
Obviously if we weren’t literally talking about life and death here, seeing Trump get booed by the monster of his own making would be a real delight. But since we are, it’s actually pretty terrifying. If he can’t convince his followers to get their shots, what hope do we have left?
As The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake put it:
It was a sight to behold: Trump being booed at a rally by his own supporters. A look at the archives suggests that’s largely unprecedented, save for when Trump praised Tom Brady at a 2016 rally in Maryland. To be clear, this was a small portion of the contingent at the rally. It was also in Alabama, which is one of the most vaccine-resistant states in the country (current vaccination rate ranking: 50th out of 50 states). We often oversell the importance of the loud and passionate few in these settings. But this was still Trump getting heckled by his own supporters, which hasn’t really happened for a reason. Trump’s base has generally been all about the man, and less about the policies and details. But here, they didn’t like the actual details.
It was also merely the latest evidence that the monster that has been created, however much culpability there is for Trump personally, won’t go away quietly.
Trump never could have purged his party of all of its vaccine skepticism, but there is plenty of evidence he could have made a significant difference—if for no other reason than it might have sent a cue to some allies who have filled the vacuum by pushing dubious claims about vaccines.
Take, for instance, the reaction from Fox News after the FDA gave Pfizer’s COVID vaccine full approval:
Or the fact that, according to a report released by Facebook over the weekend, the most popular link on its platform from January to March of this year was “an article raising concerns that the coronavirus vaccine could lead to death.”
In other words, even if Trump has decided to start throwing his weight behind vaccinations, it may be too late. On the very same night he told his supporters to get their shots, he of course also told the ones booing: “That’s alright. You got your freedoms. But I happen to take the vaccine. If it doesn’t work, you’ll be the first to know. I’ll call up Alabama. I’ll say, ‘Hey, you know what?’ But it is working. But you do have your freedoms.”
So yeah, for numerous reasons, f--k that guy.
Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa.; Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., center; Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.; and Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., talk in front of the U.S. Capitol on July 30, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Kent Nishimura/Getty)
ntil 11 days ago, the Democratic Party had a unified strategy to advance President Biden’s legislative agenda. The plan was to pass two bills: a bipartisan infrastructure deal favored by the moderates and a partisan social-welfare bill favored by progressives. The moderates couldn’t get their bipartisan bill without the progressives, and the progressives couldn’t get their partisan bill without the moderates.
Nine House Democrats blew up the deal. After refusing to support the House budget vote, they extracted a promise to vote for the infrastructure bill by the end of September. But the upshot is the same as ever: Both factions need to cooperate with each other to get their bills. Either both will pass, or neither will.
The nine rebels, led by Josh Gottheimer, claimed their intention was merely to make sure the bipartisan bill didn’t perish, on the pretext that a ten-year infrastructure plan had to be passed right away in order to get shovels into the ground.
A number of reporters and commentators have taken Gottheimer’s reasoning at face value. But Gottheimer’s motive had very little to do with the infrastructure bill. What he wanted was to gain leverage over the other bill. If infrastructure passed the House first, he and other moderates would be able to negotiate from a position of one-sided strength, or walk away from the table entirely, on the reconciliation bill that will form the basis of Biden’s domestic legacy.
The Gottheimer 9 didn’t get the promise to vote on the infrastructure bill before voting on the rule. They only got a promise to vote on it by September 27. Importantly, while they have a promise to bring the bill to the floor, they have no assurance the infrastructure bill will pass. Unless large numbers of Republicans vote for it — a prospect that currently appears unlikely — the infrastructure bill will still need overwhelming support from the Democratic caucus. And getting that means making a deal with the liberals on the reconciliation bill. The negotiating dynamics haven’t changed.
September 27 can serve as a deadline for Democrats to make some kind of internal agreement on the reconciliation bill. Moderate Democrats in the Senate have already said they won’t support the full $3.5-trillion-over-ten-year spending plan passed by the Senate Budget Committee. What they need to do over the next five weeks is settle on a number acceptable across the party. If they don’t, liberals in the House can probably vote down the bipartisan bill, knowing they can always turn around and approve it later once a deal is in hand.
What does seem to have changed is the disposition of the rest of the party toward the Gottheimer 9. The spectacle of a tiny faction throwing the party into disarray and breaking an informal understanding that their margins were too narrow to permit individual members to make extravagant personal demands seems to have generated enormous resentment. Politico reports that House Democrats vented their anger at the Gottheimer 9 at a caucus meeting. Democrats from Trump-leaning districts have either abstained from joining Gottheimer, or — like Representative Susan Wild — openly pleaded with them to back down.
The primary success of Gottheimer’s rebellion has been to seize for himself and his band the coveted “moderate” label. News reporters who had once used the “moderate” description for a different, larger faction of Democrats from purple districts now apply it to Gottheimer and his allies — the majority of whom come from safe Democratic seats. Whatever concerns they harbor about the reconciliation bill — specifically its higher taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals — it’s not reelection.
Indeed, not only do most of the House Democrats who used to be identified as moderate still support the Biden-Pelosi strategy of negotiating the two bills in tandem, so do Third Way and the New Democrat Coalition, the main institutions associated with the party’s center.
Gottheimer’s plan was always unlikely: He wanted to extort the vast majority of his party into surrendering its negotiating leverage to him, but his plan required them to cooperate by voting for the bill he wanted to pass, on his schedule. What he succeeded in doing was gumming up the works in Congress, increasing the perception that Biden’s party couldn’t govern, and cementing a media narrative that benefited him personally at the expense of Democrats most in danger of losing their seats.
A Proud Boys rally descended into violence on Sunday in Portland, Oregon. (photo: Mattieu lewis-Rolland/Getty)
Far-right Proud Boys regularly carry handguns and other groups have adopted less lethal weapons
The Portland police bureau charged a 65-year-old man from Gresham, Oregon, over a gunfight in the city’s downtown during violent clashes on Sunday. Authorities say Dennis Anderson drew a concealed handgun and shot at a group of anti-fascists who were trying to expel him from the area. At least one of the anti-fascists shot back, according to authorities, with seven shots exchanged between the two sides.
Proud Boys and members of other far-right groups regularly open-carry handguns during protest, and the shootout fueled the growing concern about the presence of firearms at rallies taking place across the US.
But other violent incidents in Portland on Sunday showed how participants have also increasingly adopted less lethal, but still dangerous, technologies as weapons for political street fighting.
On Sunday afternoon, about 200 Proud Boys and members of other far-right groups clashed with a smaller group of anti-fascists near an abandoned Kmart in the city’s outer north-east. The confrontation became a running street battle, with participants fist-fighting and attacking each other with pepper spray.
The two camps also resorted to other tactics they had deployed during previous demonstrations. Anti-fascists threw fireworks, repeating a tactic that some leftwing protesters have long used in contentious events in Portland and beyond. Similar munitions were used in several confrontations with police during Portland’s long string of protests last summer, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
At one point on Sunday, a firework thrown by an anti-fascist exploded in the forecourt of a gas station, raising alarm on all sides of the confrontation.
Some Proud Boys, on the other hand, were carrying airsoft guns, replica firearms that fire pellets with compressed air and are usually used in recreational combat games or combat training.
Those weapons, along with paintball guns, first made an appearance during clashes in August 2020, when a group of far-right brawlers used them to shoot gas-propelled pellets at a far larger group of leftwing protesters. A Guardian investigation at the time showed that participants had planned for weeks to employ the devices in a way that maximized their destructive impact.
Since then, the weapons have been used at every Portland protest where far-right groups have showed up, including on 29 August 2020, when passengers in vehicles participating in a pro-Donald Trump truck convoy shot pedestrians with the devices.
Hours after those vehicle attacks, Jay Danielson, a supporter of Patriot Prayer, a far-right street protest group that made high-profile incursions into Portland throughout the Trump era, was shot dead by a self-identified anti-fascist, Michael Reinoehl. Reinoehl himself was later shot dead by police in Lacey, Washington.
Although airsoft and paintball guns are unlikely to kill, medical researchers say that they pose a significant risk of injury to eyes, heads, and other extremities. There were an estimated 10,080 emergency room visits attributable to non-powder guns including airsoft and paintball guns across the US last year, according to data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System.
The use of airsoft and paintball guns, just like any weapon, can be prosecuted when they are used to threaten others. Earlier this month, a Portland resident was arrested for pointing an airsoft weapon at a journalist, under a statute that penalises the misuse of “dangerous or deadly weapons”. But they are not subject to any specific federal or state laws, and nor are they covered by firearms laws.
The weapons’ legal status, as well as their non-lethality, have made them an attractive option for extremist groups in and outside of the US, said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s program on extremism.
Lewis argued that the Proud Boys were likely to continue to use the weapons in Portland and anywhere where there was a “lax local response” to the group’s activities from law enforcement.
On Sunday, the absence of police during the confrontations raised questions about whether authorities in the city were willing, or able, to stop the violence.
The Portland police bureau (PPB) chief, Chuck Lovell, announced in repeated statements in advance of the unpermitted rally that protesters “should not expect to see police officers standing in the middle of the crowd trying to keep people apart”.
The tactic gave rally-goers and counter-protesters free rein, while employees of businesses located near the fracas told local media that they felt abandoned by law enforcement.
New data on firearms at demonstrations
The concerns over the events in Portland come as a new report by two national non-profits, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (Acled) and Everytown for Gun Safety, showed that over the last year and a half, “armed demonstrations”, at which individuals other than law enforcement officers were carrying firearms, were nearly six times as likely to turn violent or destructive compared with unarmed demonstrations.
Researchers did not determine whether the presence of firearms provoked violent acts, or if participants tended to arm themselves ahead of events that were likely to be violent, said Dr Roudabeh Kishi, a researcher for Acled.
But while “it can be hard to tell the chicken from the egg”, she added, guns “may heighten tensions and intimidate protesters who aren’t accustomed to seeing them”.
Additional data from Acled highlighted the scale of violent protests in Portland.
Between 1 January 2020 and 30 July 2021, Portland saw 128 demonstrations that were violent and/or destructive, amounting to 31% of the total number of demonstrations in the city in that period. This was more than 10 times higher than the national average of 3% of demonstrations becoming violent or destructive.
In the same time period, Portland saw 21 armed demonstrations – about 4% of all armed demonstrations across the country in that time. Fourteen of those – or 67% – turned violent or destructive in that period, whereas only 16% of armed demonstrations did in the country as a whole.
Kishi cautioned that it was “important to consider the context in Portland”, adding that an “aggressive, militarized response to the demonstrations” last summer helped push “some peaceful protests into violent or destructive riots”.
Sen. Joe Manchin. (photo: Getty)
n many ways, politics is a theater for policy discussions, told through varied layers of symbolism and stage management. Politicians signal meaning in the colors they choose to wear, the towns they visit and the venues they appear in. On the outside, activists stage elaborate performance art, like handing out flip-flops to shame candidates who switched positions, or flying prop-planes with slogans dragging behind on banners.
The moves don’t have to be terribly subtle to have a desired effect. There certainly won’t be any level of subtlety at political events in Charleston, W.Va., tomorrow. Organizers say it’s too late to chase any degree of nuance as they build a case against West Virginia’s notoriously apolitical politician, moderate Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin.
“We really have a crisis in the character of the nation right now. On the one hand, you’ve got Republicans who seem to never see anything that will lift the masses of the people that they like. They are committed to a retrogressive public policy. They believe in treating corporations like people,” says the Rev. William J. Barber II, a co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival, which positions itself as an heir to the civil rights movement’s activism and has been merciless to Manchin. “On the other hand, you’ve got so-called moderate and centrist Democrats, who did not swear to uphold the moderate or the centrist Constitution. They swore to uphold the Constitution. Somehow or another, when they get in… they follow the lead of the Chamber of Commerce rather than the Constitution.”
Manchin represents one of the poorest—and whitest—states in the country. West Virginia was second only to Wyoming in its support for Donald Trump last year. Manchin initially refused to back Democrats’ aggressive voting-rights bills and later appeared at a Texas fundraiser with Republicans trying to roll them back in that state. He is no fan of Democrats’ big-ticket infrastructure plans and won’t scrap the filibuster to do other legacy-defining ideas. And he was one of eight Democrats to vote against upping the minimum wage to $15-an-hour as part of a Democratic-only COVID-19 relief bill. In a 50-50 Senate that tilts to Democrats only when Vice President Kamala Harris breaks a tie, Manchin effectively has veto power.
Which is why Barber, after meeting today with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is heading to West Virginia to pressure Manchin. When Barber last showed up with activists in the state in June, Manchin changed his tune on voting rights. Now, Barber tells TIME, he wants Manchin to keep evolving on voting rights, the filibuster, a minimum-wage hike and workers’ rights. It’s an ambitious agenda, for sure, but one that can trace its roots back to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
The plan is for 151 cars—or more—to motorcade to Manchin’s office in Charleston to celebrate the 151st anniversary of the 15th Amendment, which effectively gave Black men the right to vote. And, once there, they’ll demand a $15-an-hour minimum wage. The launching point for this parade? The site of the Battle of Blair Mountain—the 1921 labor fight that was the largest armed uprising since the Civil War, during which the feds turned their guns on workers to keep them from demanding rights. The lead-off car for this week’s march will be a hearse, carrying what organizers say will be a symbolic representation of Manchin’s backbone.
Chekhov, this isn’t. But for organizers, the time for polite petitions and subtle symbolism is over.
“We know in West Virginia, we are bright red. And for years we have kind of overlooked some of the things that Manchin’s done because we know he’s trying to appease both sides of the party,” says Pamela Garrison, a 61-year-old self-described “professional cashier” who has worked her whole life for minimum wage and plans to participate tomorrow. “Sen. Manchin, how can one man have that much power and not use it for good? We’ve overlooked it for years, but it’s down to where these [issues] are too important… to be on the fence. So we want to know: Which side are you on? On the side of the people? Or are you on the side of the corporations?”
(These same organizers have a beef with the other most moderate Democrat in the Senate, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and have heckled her, too.)
If all of this feels like a lot, well, it is. But it’s not without precedent.
When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the famous March on Washington in 1963, it wasn’t solely about civil rights. In fact, one of the march’s platform planks was a $2-an-hour minimum wage. You guessed it: that would be about $18 these days, adjusted for inflation.
The 15th Amendment in 1870 was the last of the Reconstruction-era changes to the Constitution designed to make it illegal for state and federal officials to deny Americans the right to vote based on race, color or previous state of slavery. More than a century later, Americans are still fighting for these rights as voting rights come under fire and Congress just this week started work on yet another outline to countermand state-level efforts to restrict voting in places like Georgia and Texas.
Finally, the staging ground at Blair Mountain sets the stage for a worker-rights debate that, especially in the poorest corners of this country, speaks to the rampant unfair conditions facing Americans. The same streak of populism that helped Trump win the White House is alive and well on the left in West Virginia, where folks like Garrison have had enough. It’s why she was with the protest in June and she’ll be at the front tomorrow.
“He heard us because we were in his face,” she says. “We’re not here being courteous. We’re here demanding, before it’s too late. I’m here for my kids, my grandkids, because I don’t want a democracy only in name. I don’t want to be Russia.”
A spokeswoman for Manchin said the Senator is always listening to his constituents. “Sen. Manchin appreciates The Poor People’s Campaign advocacy efforts, which is why he met with the group several months ago,” the spokeswoman said. “He continues to listen to the concerns West Virginians share and seek solutions to the issues facing our state.”
Still, the pressure is mounting on Manchin, a smart politician who, as this newsletter has noted many times before, may be the last Democrat capable of winning statewide in West Virginia for some time. But he also knows how to win. Which is why activists are keenly aware of this fact: in 2020, just 3% of voters in West Virginia identified as Black—the exact margin of Manchin’s victory in 2018. In other words, the few Black voters in the state could decide whether Manchin keeps his job after he is expected to next face voters in 2024. Symbols don’t cast ballots, but they carry tremendous power in determining who might choose to do so.
Abigail Echo-Hawk, a researcher and advocate, center left, and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, center right, are among the Indigenous women pushing for more resources for murder investigations. (photo: Chelsea Stahl/NBC News)
Indigenous women are demanding a reshaping of the criminal justice system in a way that values their lives.
bigail Echo-Hawk was part of a small team of researchers at the Seattle Indian Health Board that released a landmark study in 2018 on the number of missing and murdered Indigenous women. The report not only hinted at the hidden magnitude of the problem — documenting more than 500 cases, predominantly in the Western United States, stretching back to the 1940s — it also highlighted major shortcomings in the crime data used to understand the issue.
In the absence of comprehensive government information, Echo-Hawk and her colleagues combed media reports, reached out to the families of victims across Indian Country and called community leaders and organizers to compile their study.
“ We need to understand the base issue of the problem,” said Echo-Hawk, the executive vice president the Seattle Indian Health Board and a citizen of the Pawnee Nation. “Where are we? What does the data look like? What do the leaders need?”
Three years later, there is still no definitive count of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the U.S., in part because of underreporting of crimes and police reports that misclassify Native American women as white or Hispanic. Police generally do not document victims’ tribal affiliation — often, police forms lack a field for this information — which means even tribal governments don’t understand the scope of the problem among their own citizens. But based on available research, more than 4 out of 5 American Indian and Alaska Native women experience violence in their lifetime, according to a 2016 National Institute of Justice study.
Without better data, this ongoing legacy of colonial violence, in which Indigenous women and children across North America were subjugated and exploited for hundreds of years, has been effectively hidden. Native people have been made invisible in the data policymakers use to address the public’s needs and allocate the necessary funding and attention, researchers and advocates say.
Echo-Hawk is one of many Indigenous women demanding a reshaping of the criminal justice system in a way that values their lives. She and others are pushing the issue to the forefront by pressuring public officials and policymakers to fund efforts to address the problem and by showing them, through testimonials and research, the cost of inaction.
“We refuse to let our people die in silence,” Echo-Hawk said.
In the last few years, nearly a dozen states have created task forces on the issue, and Echo-Hawk and other Indigenous researchers and advocates are pushing more states to do the same — and to fund the changes the panels recommend. In Minnesota, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, a Democrat who is White Earth Band of Ojibwe, has pushed for funding for justice reforms. The task force there led to the recent establishment of an office to investigate cold cases, using Covid-19 relief funding.
This month, Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson, a Democrat, announced his state would create a task force as well. The 21-member group of representatives from tribal nations, community outreach organizations and the criminal justice system will look at best practices for data collection and crime reporting. The task force has $500,000 to spend over the next two years and hired a small staff.
“The incomplete nature of the data, if I’m putting it charitably, has been a challenge for us,” Ferguson said.
Addressing the patchwork of criminal jurisdictions in Indian Country — which requires prosecutors, and sometimes law enforcement, to determine whether tribes, the state or the federal government has authority in a case — is already difficult, he said. But it’s an even more daunting task when law enforcement doesn't know how many cases exist.
One of Echo-Hawk’s strategies is a novel workaround: Since law enforcement generally does not collect data on tribal affiliation, this year she helped the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, which covers Seattle, set up a system to gather this information from victims and their family members when a case is referred for prosecution. The office also created a system to share resources and information with tribes.
Aubony Burns, a senior deputy prosecuting attorney in King County, said she and her co-workers found the Seattle Indian Health Board’s report “startling,” and after an inventory of their cases, she said they realized “we had huge holes in just the basics of our data.”
For Burns, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation who works in the office’s sexually violent predator unit, it was an urgent call to action to collect better crime data, which determines the prosecutions that get resources and attention. “If we’re not keeping it right and addressing it in the correct way, then it’s really useless, right?” she said.
The program is new, but Burns said in the coming months she expects data on tribal affiliation to illuminate the needs of the Indigenous peoples in King County.
Since the 2018 study, both the Seattle Police Department and the Washington State Patrol have put funding toward cases involving missing or murdered Indigenous people, but neither has started gathering tribally specific data. The Seattle Police Department has worked with the Seattle Indian Health Board to analyze the data collection process and hired a data adviser on this issue, said Sgt. Randall Huserik. The Washington State Patrol has hired two tribal liaisons to review data for racial misclassifications, help families report crimes and investigate older cases, said Capt. Neil Weaver.
Echo-Hawk secured a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to start the work being done in King County, which she hopes to see replicated outside of Washington. Next month she and her colleagues will share that work in a toolkit for other prosecutors interested in collecting and analyzing tribally specific victim data.
“It is true, community-led police reform,” Echo-Hawk said. "What we’ve done in the King County prosecutor’s office can be replicated in any county in the country, large or small."
There’s also action at the federal level. Under the direction of Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first Native American to hold the position, the department is building a missing and murdered unit within the Bureau of Indian Affairs to support investigations and coordinate services with the families of victims.
For Annie Forsman-Adams, a researcher on Washington’s new task force and a member of the Suquamish Tribe, a key component is buy-in from police departments to not only collect more detailed data, but also to create new ways to gather it by building trust in the communities they patrol. For many police departments, that could mean training officers on the complexities of Indigenous identity.
“At the end of the day, that’s how we’re going to collect good data,” she said.
oise from the nearby pagoda roused Aung and his family before dawn on April 9. Peering out his window, he saw dozens of soldiers shouting and cursing as they streamed onto trucks, rifles slung across their chests. It was barely 4 a.m.
hen the people of Rio Blanco first saw workers bringing heavy construction machinery into their village along the sacred Gualcarque River in Honduras 15 years ago, they went to Berta Isabel Cáceres for help.
