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Jared Kushner left the White House where he worked as a senior adviser to his father-in-law, set up a private equity firm, and pretty much immediately got a $2 billion investment from, effectively, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia despite the crown prince’s advisers saying that Kushner’s business operations were “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” This was the same crown prince who had a journalist murdered and dismembered during the Trump years, with Kushner running domestic interference to minimize the political consequences of that murder. And that prince just so happens to “invest” $2 billion with a firm just started by someone with no experience in the field—a firm that has gotten very little investment from anyone else since then.

Hunter Biden has never worked in the White House. There’s a great deal of evidence that he has traded on his family name for personal profit, and there’s a federal investigation into whether he paid his taxes or laundered money, but no real evidence that his father has been involved in that in any way. 

Guess which one of these stories the right-wing media cares about: the son-in-law/former White House adviser who got literally billions of dollars from the leader of a foreign government who he had helped while in an official position to do so, or the son/no official affiliation who took millions of dollars for sitting on boards and serving as an adviser in cases where he didn’t have much to contribute beyond his last name? 

RELATED STORY: Jared Kushner got $2 billion in Saudi investment despite ‘unsatisfactory’ business operations

I know you guessed right on that, but here are the numbers. Fox News mentioned Kushner not once from Monday morning after the story about the Saudi investment broke until Tuesday morning, Aaron Rupar reports. Hunter Biden was a different story. In that time frame, Rupar writes, “Fox News/Business mentioned Hunter Biden a whopping 68 times, according to TVEyes transcripts. (The true number is even higher — I counted conservatively by not including reruns of the primetime shows that run early in the morning.)”

This is what you get with a propaganda network. One story simply doesn’t exist on Fox News and the other is a major national issue, used repeatedly to imply that the president is linked to corruption. According to Rupar, during the same time frame, CNN mentioned Hunter Biden once and Jared Kushner twice. MSNBC mentioned Kushner 23 times and Hunter Biden three times. This is during a period when there was breaking news about Kushner and nothing in particular new about the younger Biden, so there was a legitimate reporting reason for some imbalance. MSNBC is often seen as an ideological counterweight to Fox News, but as these numbers show, it really, really isn’t acting in the same determinedly partisan way. (And to be clear, I wish it would! There needs to be a real counterweight to Fox News, but it’s not coming from the corporate media.)

Fox News shapes a world for its viewers in which Republican scandals don’t exist and Democratic ones are all-consuming (even when they’re not really scandals). It works for them. Along with the  Electoral College and the minority rule structure of the Senate, it’s a major driver of Republican power these days. I’m not calling for Democrats to be as shamelessly committed to partisan power above truth or ethics or consistently values-driven positions as Republicans are, but it would be really nice if our side were committed to shouting about the bad stuff the others guys do and equally about the true things that work for us. It would be really nice if a Democratic billionaire or two would fund something, anything, with a meaningful chance of being that counterweight to Fox News. 

When we’re talking about Jared and Hunter, that’s a key difference in the media environment. But of course there’s also a difference in the family environment. Donald Trump hasn’t cut Kushner—or any of his own grifting children—loose because he approves of what they’re doing. Profit by any means is the name of the Trump game, never mind what the laws say, let alone any pesky ethical considerations, as the various investigations into Trump’s own business practices show. By contrast, President Joe Biden has shown no particular sign of approving of Hunter’s business practices. What he’s shown amply is that he loves his son and wants him to thrive after years of addiction and personal upheaval. It would probably be better, politically speaking, for the president to have long since cut his son loose to distance himself from possible scandal.

But where the operative values for the Trumps are profit, pride, and thinking they’re above accountability, the operative value for Joe Biden is always love of family. And Hunter’s situation has been and remains terribly sad. Hunter now faces a kind of accountability to which not a single Trump has yet been subjected—and he should, if indeed he has dodged taxes and/or laundered money and/or acted as an unregistered foreign agent. But the fact that he remains under federal investigation as his father refuses to improperly intervene is telling about the president’s ethics and relationship to the rule of law. Jared, meanwhile? He has $2 billion of Saudi money and no serious worries about accountability. 

RELATED STORIES:

Guess who may have made up to $640 million from ‘outside income’ while in the White House?

Bombshell: Kushner helped create ‘campaign’ shell company that secretly paid Trump’s family members

Long buried report shows that Trump knew Saudi prince bin Salman murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi

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Instead of working to end racial injustice and discrimination within their department, some cops are just finding ways not to get caught. In order to stop videos of them abusing individuals from making it on social media, cops in California have been blasting Disney songs. According to The Washington Post officers in Santa Ana, California, blasted out classics from Toy Story, Mulan, and Encanto at night so that people would not be able to upload videos of them due to copyright reasons.

Alongside a city councilman, locals have expressed concern about the practice. The practice has been used in the past to prevent individuals from posting violent videos that would draw attention to the actions of the department. The latest incident took place on April 4.

In that incident, a police cruiser blasted Disney music at 11 PM on a residential street when a cameraman asked whether or not the department was paid to listen to music. According to local news reports, police officials had been investigating a stolen vehicle at the time.

Santa Ana City Councilman Johnathan Hernandez was also present, who then asked: “Why are you playing Disney music?” He also questioned if the officer lived in the area.

The officer referenced “copyright infringement” in his reply.

The video exchange was posted on the Santa Ana Audits YouTube channel and garnered more than 45,000 views. The channel monitors police exchanges with the public.

In response to the clip, Santa Ana Chief of Police David Valentin said: “My expectation is that all police department employees perform their duties with dignity and respect in the community we are hired to serve.”

But given the history of the practice, Hernandez said he believed the officers were trying to keep the clip off social media.

Hernandez told the Post he plans to introduce a ban on the practice.

“I’m embarrassed that this is how you’re treating my neighbors. There’s children here,” he told the Post. “If you work for the public and there are numerous people out recording you telling you to please turn it off, why wouldn’t anyone in their right mind stop that?”

In one incident last year, cops in Oakland, California, played Taylor Swift’s 2014 song “Blank Space” as they confronted activists. While they did this in an attempt to have videos of them not make it to social media, in this incident footage made it to and stayed on social media.

According to research by Harvard University’s Lumen project, which studies copyright content removal, several videos linked to Black Lives Matter protests have been removed because they contained copyrighted music. The researchers noted that “law enforcement,” or anyone who wanted to stop videos from being shared online, “need only make sure that copyrighted audio is present with sufficiently recognisable clarity and volume in the background of a protest or other event,” BBC reported. 

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Even in the worst of times, Congress can usually get its act together to name federal buildings. It’s kind of a joke about Congress, actually. But House Republicans just got to the point of divisive extremism where they won’t even reliably do that.

Every member of Florida’s congressional delegation had co-sponsored a bill to name a federal courthouse after Justice Joseph W. Hatchett, the first Black man to serve on the Florida Supreme Court and the first Black judge on a federal appeals court in the Deep South. That means Republican Sens. Rick Scott and Marco Rubio and 16 House Republicans, along with 11 House Democrats. The bill had passed the Senate. But then, at the last minute, a majority of Republicans in the House, including co-sponsors, turned against the bill in a moment that resonated with the racist attacks some Senate Republicans leveled at Justice-designate Ketanji Brown Jackson in her Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

RELATED STORY: Far-right Freedom Caucus is poised to have serious sway if Republicans take the House

Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia appears to have singlehandedly turned the vote from a routine vote to name a federal building after a trailblazing judge into a Republican purity test. Clyde circulated a 1999 Associated Press article about one of Hatchett’s decisions relating to prayer in schools. Never mind that Hatchett was following Supreme Court precedent when he ruled against student-approved prayers at graduation ceremonies. This single decision made him toxic among House Republicans, with 89% voting against naming the courthouse after him. Since the bill’s passage was seen as certain, it had come for a vote under a fast-tracked process that required a two-thirds majority, which meant that with Republicans suddenly opposed, it failed.

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All this at the behest of Clyde, a lawmaker most famous for his insistence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was a “normal tourist visit.” Clyde also voted against the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act and against making Juneteenth a federal holiday, which, combined with his active organizing against naming a federal courthouse after a Black judge, kind of starts looking like a pattern.

Clyde did not bring years of credibility within the House to his objection. He’s a first-term representative. Republicans are now so beholden to extremism, so ready to jump at the first hint they might not be pure enough, that a first-termer who should be seen as an embarrassment is able to wield the power to shift a majority of Republican votes. Multiple representatives who had sponsored the bill voted no at the last minute, with one, Rep. Vern Buchanan, saying “I don’t know” why he had changed his mind. 

The last-minute shift shows how undisciplined House Republicans now are by anything except the race to the right. But its echoes of Jackson’s confirmation hearing—in which senators like Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton used routine decisions of the sort made by judges all the time to paint her as a supporter of pedophiles and drug dealers—highlight how willing Republicans are to trash any Black person who is a candidate for an honor. Years of judicial decisions can always be cherrypicked to find something that sounds objectionable to someone, somewhere, but whose decisions are cherrypicked and to what end matters. So Republicans tried to turn Jackson into a pedophile-supporter using a sentencing record that was in line with the averages and in fact similar to that of other judges for whom those same Republicans had voted. And they voted against honoring Hatchett with a courthouse name over a single decision that followed Supreme Court precedent.

As Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said after the vote, “If the standard that we use is one ruling out of thousands, then what else could we conclude but that they are not willing to name a courthouse after a Black person.”

RELATED STORIES:

Three Republicans stop anti-lynching bill from passing unanimously in House

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That Supreme Court confirmation hearing was so racist. We can’t ignore it or normalize it

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Will Larkins, a 17-year-old junior at Winter Park High School in Winter Park, Florida, recently went viral online for giving a presentation on the 1969 Stonewall uprising to their history class. Larkins gave the presentation on March 31 and requested that a classmate film the presentation, which they gave in a dress and pearls, to post to social media later. Larkin reportedly received permission from their teacher to give the presentation, though according to the Washington Post, the teacher wasn’t actually familiar with Stonewall to begin with.

The class was learning about history from the 60s and 70s in the United States, and Larkin reportedly asked the teacher if they’d be covering Stonewall, and the teacher replied by asking what Stonewall was. According to the post, the teacher reviewed the 10-minute PowerPoint presentation Larkins put together before they spoke in front of the class.

Larkins, who founded the Winter Park High’s Queer Student Union, has openly opposed Florida’s hateful Don’t Say Gay bill, and has organized a walkout for students in protest of the discriminatory legislation. They’ve also written about their perspective for The New York Times and even testified against the bill in the Senate in Tallahassee, Florida, at the end of February. Now, according to Metro Weekly, Larkins has been moved to a different class and placed under an “investigation.”

RELATED: Ever wondered why we file taxes the way we do? According to Elizabeth Warren, we can thank the GOP

“Essentially, people were fed up with the abuse,” Larkins (accurately) explains in the video clip, adding that Stone was a “tipping point” for many LGBTQ+ people after decades of being discriminated against and targeted by police.

Here is the initial tweet and video from Larkins about their presentation.

According to updates Larkins shared on Twitter, the student they asked to film the class received a “referral” from school officials, and several other students who filmed the presentation did not. Larkins also shared a photo from a location they describe as their new history class which features a yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” sign on the wall. While the meanings of this flag have changed throughout history, it’s now commonly understood to be a symbol of the far-right.

“All of this really plays into a larger issue of adults not really respecting the youth’s voices,” Larkins told LGBTQ+ outlet Xtra in an interview. Larkins went on to say they do have some “allyship” within the school’s administration, but they still don’t understand why they’re effectively being punished. 

“When I look back to elementary school, I wonder how different my childhood would have been had my classmates and I known that I wasn’t some tragic anomaly, a strange fluke that needed to be fixed,” Larkins shared in their Times op-ed that ran on March 12.

“People in support of the bill always ask, ‘Why do these subjects need to be taught in schools?’ To them I would say that if we understand ourselves, and those around us understand us, so many lives will be saved,” they continued.

Larkins is right, of course. We already know LGBTQ+ youth report higher rates of depression, anxiety, bullying, and harassment. We already know they’re more likely to leave high school without a diploma. Trans youth, in particular, are being unfairly targeted over sports opportunities, in addition to basic dignities like using the bathroom and locker room. All students deserve to learn accurate, inclusive history, and that includes LGBTQ+ history. 

In terms of the Don’t Say Gay bill, this situation is actually a great example of how far the decidedly vague legislation can go. Supporters of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis have said the bill only refers to young students, up to the third grade, and suggests people are overreacting by how far it can go.

But the bill drops some very broad language, referring to age-appropriate curriculum for any level, and this example from a high school classroom is a great demonstration of that. Who decides what’s appropriate, especially if the subject is inherently inappropriate at least some of the time?

There’s no level of LGBTQ+ inclusion conservatives are going to agree is appropriate—especially not if this becomes an easy issue they can latch onto just in time for midterm elections.

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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s stunt forcing commercial trucks to undergo unnecessary secondary inspections at ports of entry is turning into an economic and political disaster: a 60% drop in commercial traffic, continued protests by outraged Mexican truckers, and now condemnation from a fellow right-wing state official.

The Texas Tribune reports Texas Agriculture Commissioner and similarly terrible Republican Sid Miller labeled Abbott’s policy—which was launched in retaliation for the Biden administration’s just decision to end use of Stephen Miller’s white supremacist policy stomping on U.S. asylum law—“political theater.”

The report said the official told Abbott in a letter that his stunt “is not stopping illegal immigration,” but instead “stopping food from getting to grocery store shelves and in many cases causing food to rot in trucks—many of which are owned by Texas and other American companies.” Miller called Abbott’s stunt an “economy killing action.”

RELATED STORY: Abbott’s increased truck inspections in response to Biden admin leading to huge delays, rotting food

Abbott’s stunt was similarly slammed in a lengthy statement from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which called the Texas Department of Public Safety’s checks of commercial vehicles after they’ve already been checked by U.S. border officials “additional and unnecessary,” and have led “to traffic disruptions and critical impacts to an already-strained supply chain.”

“Local trade associations, officials, and businesses are requesting the Texas state government discontinue their additional border truck inspection process because it is not necessary to protect the safety and security of Texas communities and is resulting in significant impacts to local supply chains that will impact consumers and businesses nationally.”

Mexico’s government similarly slammed the policy, “estimating that two-thirds of normal trade was being held up and costing ‘significant revenue’ for both U.S. and Mexican businesses,” Reuters reported. As noted earlier this week, Mexican truckers frustrated over delays to their work and livelihood blocked bridge traffic in protest of Abbott’s shenanigans. These protests have continued,  Reuters said.

“Traffic at a fourth bridge connecting Reynosa to Pharr, Texas, was also halted on Tuesday by drivers who parked their trucks and began barbecuing on the Mexican side of the port of entry, according to photos sent to Reuters.” Trucker Raymundo Galicia told Reuters that it took him 17 hours to cross the border and back because of Abbott. “I get paid the same whether it takes me an hour or ten hours to cross, so this is affecting us a lot,” he said.

The Texas Tribune said that at least $60 million in goods and services go across the Pharr Bridge every single day. In terms of Mexican produce going to the U.S., it’s “the busiest land crossing.” Abbott’s stunt is set to raise food prices and make getting certain produce impossible, hurting families in Texas.

But as when he was confronted about the human costs of his Operation Lone Star scheme, he’ll likely just complaint about the president. Oh wait—Caller Times reports an Abbott spokesperson was already doing that. Mark Miner “sought to pin the blame on Biden,” the report said.

“It’s going to be very bad for the Texas economy. It’s going to be very bad for the national economy,” Abbott’s Democratic challenger for governor, Beto O’Rourke, told Caller Times. “When you see those trucks lined up miles deep all the way into Mexico, what you’re seeing is inflation, what you’re seeing is higher prices at the grocery store, and what you’re seeing are more supply chain problems. We are calling on Greg Abbott to end this policy today.”

Pointing to the agriculture commissioner’s statements, Rep. Veronica Escobar tweeted that “even Republicans agree” that Abbott’s unnecessary secondary checks “will have catastrophic consequences for families at the grocery store and businesses working to keep their doors open. It’s time for the Governor to put an end to his harmful directives.”

RELATED STORIES: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott peddles horrific plan to kidnap immigrants, then backtracks

Escobar says Abbott’s plan to get asylum-seekers out of Texas is more ‘politics of hate and cruelty’

Texas refuses to be transparent about Operation Lone Star. Probably because it’s all a scheme

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Welp, I guess it’s official: Former Trump lackey Mark Meadows has been removed from North Carolina’s voter rolls. That means he can’t pretend to live in a mobile home in Scaly Mountain in Macon County, North Carolina, in order to vote there while actually living in Virginia—where he also apparently registered to vote.  

Melanie Thibault, Macon County Board of Elections director, told the Asheville Citizen Times Tuesday that she consulted with the North Carolina Board of Elections staff after discovering that Meadows was registered in North Carolina and Virginia. The board removed him from their voter rolls.

“What I found was that he was also registered in the state of Virginia. And he voted in a 2021 election. The last election he voted in Macon County was in 2020,” Thibault said.

RELATED STORY: Voter fraud finally uncovered by GOP: Mark Meadows investigated in North Carolina

Meadows was removed in accordance with General Statute 163-57, which states:  

“If a person goes into another state, county, municipality, precinct, ward, or other election district, or into the District of Columbia, and while there G.S. 163-57 Page 2 exercises the right of a citizen by voting in an election, that person shall be considered to have lost residence in that State, county, municipality, precinct, ward, or other election district from which that person removed.”

As first reported by The New Yorker in September 2020, about three weeks before North Carolina’s voter registration deadline for the general election, Meadows—a devout Stop the Stealer—claimed to be living in a 14-foot-by-62-foot mobile home in North Carolina, where he never actually lived. But he voted absentee using that address in the 2020 general election. Meadows, a former Asheville resident and Western North Carolina congressman, was actually living in Virginia at that time.

In March, an investigation into Meadows’ possible voter fraud was launched by the State Bureau of Investigation.

“The allegations, in this case, involve potential crimes committed by a government official,” Macon County District Attorney Ashley Hornsby Welch wrote in a letter to the attorney general’s office on March 14.  

Nazneen Ahmed, a spokesperson for North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein’s office, told CNBC at the time that “we have agreed to [Welch’s] request” to take responsibility for the investigation.

“We have requested that the Department of Justice’s Special Prosecutions Sections investigate alongside the State Board of Elections,” Ahmed said. “At the conclusion of the investigation, we’ll review the findings.”

As we’ve reported in the past, it remains to be seen what if any penalty will come to Meadows. But when it comes to the same thing happening to people of color, the outcome is quite clear.

In February, Pamela Moses, a Black woman, was sentenced to six years in prison for trying to register to vote. And in 2019, Lanisha Diresha Bratcher, another Black woman, was charged with a felony for voter fraud after she tried to vote while on probation.

RELATED STORY: Either Mark Meadows is living in a mobile home in North Carolina or he’s committed voter fraud

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During a trip to Menlo, Iowa, on Tuesday, President Joe Biden suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin was carrying out “genocide” against the Ukrainian people.

When reporters later asked Biden to elaborate, the president said, “Yes, I called it genocide, because it’s become clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of even being able to be a Ukrainian.”

Biden said the “evidence is mounting” week by week of the “horrible things” Russia has done in Ukraine.

“We’ll let the lawyers decide internationally whether or not it qualifies,” Biden added, “but it sure seems that way to me.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy welcomed Biden’s assessment, calling him “a true leader.”

“True words of a true leader @POTUS,” Zelenskyy tweeted. “Calling things by their names is essential to stand up to evil. We are grateful for U.S. assistance provided so far and we urgently need more heavy weapons to prevent further Russian atrocities.”

President Biden’s strong leadership on Ukraine, empathy for its people, and clear-eyed reflections on Putin’s brutal war are becoming an important part of how many Americans view the war. It has also typically reflected the thinking and sentiment of a broad coalition of the American people.

Biden’s off-the-cuff remark last month that Putin “cannot remain in power” was initially viewed by the media as a gaffe. But several polls have since shown that Biden’s comment was very much in line with the sentiment of roughly two-thirds of Americans—or even more.

Demonizing Putin—not that he needs any help—also continues to highlight the existential threat posed by the Trump-Putin axis. 

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It’s tax season (federal taxes are due April 18), and as millions of people crank up their computers and download Intuit’s TurboTax or H&R Block’s software, they are the unwitting victims of a multiyear, multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign by those companies to make you pay them to do your taxes. The dirty little secret is that the IRS already has the tax information they need about your income and how much tax you’ve paid. That’s reported to them with every paystub from your employer.

In fact, for most people the IRS could just send out pre-filled forms that taxpayers would only need to sign off on. The vast majority of people, about 70%, use the standard deduction and don’t bother to itemize, and could thus let the IRS do all the work—since the IRS has already done all the work! But Intuit and H&R Block exist precisely to make money off of you by keeping taxes far more complicated. They’ve even circumvented the one big effort on the part of the federal government to change that.

For about 20 years, the Free File Alliance, a group of private-sector tax preparation companies, have been working in partnership with the IRS to provide free online tax preparation and filing services. An investigation by public interest news organization Propublica in 2019 documented how the companies behind both TurboTax and H&R Block hid the free option for filing on their websites. Intuit actually added code on its webpages to block Google from locating the free file site in searches. Following Propublica’s exposé, Intuit changed the code so that the free version showed up in searches.

TurboTax has not been part of the Free File program since 2020, and has been under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission since Propublica’s investigation in 2019. Last month the investigation has started to show fruit. Intuit was sued by federal regulators last month for continuing deceptive practices in advertising with its “bogus advertisements pitching ‘free’ tax filing that millions of consumers could not use.” It also filed a complaint “asking a court to order Intuit to halt its deceptive advertising immediately” to prevent “ongoing harm to consumers rushing to file their taxes.”

“TurboTax is bombarding consumers with ads for ‘free’ tax filing services, and then hitting them with charges when it’s time to file,” said Samuel Levine, director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection. “We are asking a court to immediately halt this bait-and-switch, and to protect taxpayers at the peak of filing season.” Anyone who received a 1099 form for work in the gig economy, or anyone who earned farm income, can’t use TurboTax’s free product. The income limit for using free file this year, by the way, is an adjusted gross income of $73,000.

So if you haven’t already done your taxes, don’t use TurboTax on principle if for no other reason. But also because they’ve been lying to you about their “free” service.

In the meantime, here’s Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) talking about one of her long-term projects, the Tax Filing Simplification Act, and how these companies have been ripping us off for many years, not to mention making this whole process a lot more difficult than it needs to be.

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Road rage has been on a steady creep in the United States since 2016, but new analysis published this month offers a clearer glimpse into the staggering and needlessly tragic episodes of gun violence plaguing the nation’s roads and highways. 

Everytown Research and Policy reported on April 4 that more than 500 people in America were shot and wounded or killed in more than 700 road rage conflicts last year. That translates to a shooting, injury, or killing on the road roughly every 17 hours. 

RELATED STORY: Georgia just became the 25th state to let people carry concealed guns with no permit and no training

There’s not a definitive answer on why road rage incidents are exploding, but researchers suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic might be the culprit, as it has played a significant role in upping people’s stress levels across the board. 

Road Rage Deaths and Injuries, 2016 to 2021 by Daily Kos on Scribd

Many of the factors that upped stress during the pandemic also coincide with the typical triggers for gun violence generally, like unemployment and a lack of affordable housing.

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Domestic violence shootings have also increased since the pandemic began. Just this week in Kentucky—home to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s constituents—the state’s attorney’s office noted that domestic gun violence rocketed up an additional 30% in 2021 compared to just before the pandemic began in 2019. 

The uptick in road rage is not surprising either when one considers the huge number of guns that Americans purchased in the last few years alone. In 2020, the nation broke its own record for gun sales with 22.8 million guns sold. In 2021, according to one estimate by the National Firearm Industry and Trade Association, sales dipped just slightly with 18.5 million guns sold. 

The number of first-time gun buyers also went up by about a third last year, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation. This January, the organization reported that 5.4 million people purchased a gun for the very first time in 2021. 

Though gun violence and road rage have become more ubiquitous, the push by law enforcement across the U.S. to track and study the data has been slow to come online and no federal database on road rage yet exists. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that the Dallas Police Department, for example, only began tracking road rage shootings for the first time last year. 

According to the Times, the department found that in Dallas alone, 45 people were wounded and 11 were killed by guns in a heated moment of road rage. Even in cities like Austin, Texas, incidents were up. The city’s population is largely liberal and though liberals often do not own guns at the same rate as their conservative counterparts, that did not stop Austin police from reporting more than 160 episodes of people “pointing or firing a gun at drivers” and 15 road rage shootings.