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This story was originally published at Prism.

by Rohan Zhou-Lee

It was a gray day in New York City’s Chinatown on March 20 when a large group of protesters gathered at the southern tip of Columbus Park. Approximately 2,000 protesters were in attendance, united around a common goal: resisting the world’s tallest mega jail. Led by Neighborhoods United Below Canal, protesters marched in opposition to the demolition of the Manhattan Detention Center prison in Chinatown, commonly known as “the Tombs,” for a new one. Construction on the new $8.3 billion 40-story jail is projected to last until at least 2027.

The sale of the Tombs was signed under former Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2017 and remains intact under Mayor Eric Adams as part of the pact to close Rikers Island and build other “humane” jails in all boroughs except the majority white and conservative Staten Island.

At the Chinatown rally, Grace Lee, a candidate for New York State Assembly, cited environmental concerns with demolition in her speech, emphasizing the release of asbestos.

“Don’t the people of Chinatown have a right to breathe clean air and live in safe places?” she asked.

With the new jail, the government and its leaders are proving that they never will uphold the dignity nor affirm the humanity of Asian Americans. Opponents of the new jail’s construction have pointed out that it will have a negative impact on small businesses, particularly restaurants, which have already been affected by the pandemic and the rise in anti-Asian hate and racism. The jail’s construction noise will also severely impact the health and wellness of the elderly living in the senior center nearby. At a Lunar New Year parade this year, Adams said that he would speak to concerned locals about the construction of the facility. However, what Adams has yet to understand is that Chinatown belongs not only to Chinese residents but also to the Chinese folks who have been displaced by gentrification. For many of the protesters, prisons are a physical reminder of how policing has historically been used as a form of anti-Asian hate and oppression.

Chinatown has long resisted the carceral system, and much of that history is documented by Chinese American photographer Corky Lee. In April 1975, law enforcement beat a Chinese American man named Peter Yew for interfering in a minor traffic incident. He was taken to the precinct, stripped, beaten again, then charged with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer. In response, Chinatown businesses closed on May 19 with signs reading “Closed To Protest Police Brutality,” and 15,000 people marched on city hall demanding justice. Shortly after, Yew’s charges were dropped. In 1982, Mayor Ed Koch introduced a $101 million plan to build a new jail. This involved the displacement of residents through selling buildings and giving each tenant only $250 to relocate. An estimated 12,000 protestors rallied and blocked entry to the Brooklyn Bridge, ultimately deterring the new jail’s construction.

Currently, the prison system remains a deep threat to Asian Americans. In the Trump administration’s first year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) increased its deportation efforts by 150%. In the 2018 fiscal year, most of the deportees in New York City were Chinese, followed by Indian immigrants. Before ICE was even established, the incarceration of Asian Americans increased by 250% in the 1990s alone. Since 1998, at least 15,000 Lao, Cambodian, and Vietnamese incarcerated immigrants and refugees have received deportation notices—and 80% of those were given based on previous records, not current offenses. This prison-to-deportation pipeline is distinctly anti-Asian.

In the struggle against policing and incarceration, many New York-based Asian American organizing groups like Red Canary Song uplift tragic examples of police overreach and violence. Many remember Yang Song, a Chinese immigrant woman who worked in a spa in Flushing, Queens. Shortly after she confided to her mother that she reported being sexually assaulted by an undercover police officer in 2017, New York Police Deparment officers raided Song’s place of work, and she fell four stories to her death. Others would name Angelo Quinto, who died after a mental health crisis in 2020 when police put a knee to his neck in an incident hauntingly similar to the murder of George Floyd. Some people also remember Christian Hall, who was shot by police last year while experiencing a mental health crisis. Detailed footage of the police shooting has yet to be released to the public.

True safety for our Asian American and Pacific Islander communities means the abolition of prisons and policing everywhere. Jails do not belong in our communities. I don’t want prisons for human beings. I want a center for healing, for restorative justice. There is no such thing as the humane caging of human beings, not when the 13th Amendment subjugates people to involuntary servitude.

Chinatown is also one of the few places I can access the culture of two of my great grandfathers, one deported to Jamaica and the other to the U.S. as a Paper Son during the Chinese Exclusion Act. It is where at a separate Lunar New Year celebration, an elderly woman—a complete stranger—held my hand for a few seconds as we watched the lion dances together. I may not live there, but Chinatown is a home for me, and to see it under systemic racist attacks and policing is simply shameful.

Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places, and issues currently underreported by national media. We’re committed to producing the kind of journalism that treats Black, Indigenous, and people of color, women, the LGBTQ+ community, and other invisibilized groups as the experts on our own lived experiences, our resilience, and our fights for justice. Sign up for our email list to get our stories in your inbox, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

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This is infuriating, and it shows why Republicans so often act in bad faith—because acting in bad faith works. For them, at least.

While it would be nice if voters acted in their best interests by, say, supporting candidates who might measurably improve their lives, they actually appear to respond a lot more readily to fear. Which is somewhat ironic, since my biggest fear is that Donald Trump will be released on our country again like a sack of diarrhetic feral cats on the International Space Station hot bar. And this kind of shit ain’t helpin’, let me tell ya.

Turns out voters really liked President Biden’s expanded child tax credit, which was part of his economy-boosting American Rescue Plan. But those warm, fuzzy feelings appear to have evaporated since Republicans colluded with Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to kneecap Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which would have taken a permanent bite out of child poverty. 

Voters who received expanded child tax credits payments in 2021 ended the year more likely than not to support Democratic candidates for Congress in this year’s midterm elections. But months after that benefit expired, a new Morning Consult/Politico survey shows Republicans have made up that ground. […]

• Among parents or guardians with at least one child under 18 in the household who received the expanded child tax credit payments, 46% said they are most likely to vote for a Republican congressional candidate this year while 43% said they’re inclined to back the Democratic candidate.
• The narrow GOP advantage among this group stands in contrast with Democrats’ lead of 12 percentage points in late December, before the benefit expired. It also continues a trend first captured in a survey conducted in February.

Thanks, Joe Manchin! You really did your party a solid. 

Listen and subscribe to Daily Kos Elections’ The Downballot podcast with David Nir and David Beard

Of course, if you liked the child tax credit and want it back, it would only make sense to elect more Democrats so that two selfish, corporate-aligned quislings would no longer be able to scuttle President Biden’s best-laid plans. The alternative is electing candidates from a party that has vowed never to help parents pay for anything, ever.

But, to be brutally honest, most people don’t think things through that much. All they saw was a vital benefit being taken away and Democrats, who technically control two branches of government, failing to deliver on their most aspirational promises.

So by this time next year, we may very well be stuck with a Republican-controlled Congress, which will gut families’ hopes and dreams for another two years at least.

Oddly, among all voters, Democrats are now tied with Republicans on the generic ballot—which suggests pulling the rug out from under voters hurts you more than never lifting a finger for them in the first place. No wonder Republicans are so giddy about their midterm prospects.

Of course, our message on this should be simple: If you want some breathing room for yourself and other families, you’d be mad to vote for a Republican. Democrats are promising to help you, and Republicans are promising not to. But so much gets lost and distorted in the fog of a congressional campaign. Who/what will be the light that breaks through? 

We need better messaging, people. What say you?

It made comedian Sarah Silverman say, “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT,” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE. 

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On this week’s episode of The Downballot, we’re joined by Ali Lapp, the founder of the House Majority PAC—the largest super PAC devoted to helping Democrats win House races nationwide. Lapp discusses HMP’s role in the broader Democratic ecosystem, how the organization decides which districts to target, and promising research showing the positive impacts of a new ad touting Democrats’ record on the economy.

Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also recap elections this week in California and Wisconsin; explain why Republicans are finally turning on Madison Cawthorn (it’s not really about cocaine and orgies); pick apart a huge blunder that led the first attack ad in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary for Senate getting yanked off the air the very day it debuted; and provide updates on international elections in Hungary and France.

David Beard:

Hello and welcome. I’m David Beard, contributing editor for Daily Kos Elections.

David Nir:

And I’m David Nir, political director of Daily Kos. The Downballot is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency, from Senate, to city council. Email us with your thoughts or questions you’d like us to answer at [email protected] or find us on Twitter, @DKElections.

David Beard:

And please subscribe to The Downballot wherever you listen to podcasts and leave us a five star rating and review. But let’s go ahead and jump into today’s episode. What are we going to be covering today?

David Nir:

On today’s show, our guest is Ali Lapp, who is the founder of the House Majority PAC, which is the largest Super PAC on the Democratic side that is devoted to helping Democrats win House races nationwide. We’re going to be talking with her about how HMP goes about its work and the races that it’s focusing on this year, as well as the role redistricting has played in Democrat’s strategies. But before we talk with Ali, we are going to be running down our weekly hits on the most recent stories making news in the world of downballot elections.

David Nir:

There were in fact, some elections this past week in Wisconsin and California that we are going to recap. There was also an interesting turn of events in the Pennsylvania Senate race, where the Democratic primary went negative for the first time. We have Madison Cawthorn on tap once more; find out why Republicans are finally turning against him. And then we’re going to be discussing a couple of European elections that have taken place recently or are coming up on the docket very soon.

David Beard:

Great. Let’s go ahead and dive in.

David Nir:

Now, it’s time for our weekly hits, where we discuss the stories making the headlines and those that maybe are slipping past the headlines in the world of downballot elections. Beard, what have you got for us?

David Beard:

Well, this week there was a Tuesday, so that means that there were elections here in America, because we have elections almost every Tuesday somewhere. The two states we’re looking at are Wisconsin and California this week. In California, there was a special election for the remainder of representative, Devon Nunes’s term, former assembly minority leader, Republican Connie Conway took first place in the runoff that’s going to be held June 7th. She took 64,000 votes and about 35%. While right now, Democrat Lauren Hubbard who’s an official at the California Department of Water Resources, is in second with 20%, though that’s not final yet because there are a couple other candidates with about 15% each, GOP businessman, Matt Stoll and another Democrat Marine veteran, Eric Garcia.

David Beard:

There are still mail ballots that can be received and be counted, so that hasn’t been called yet. But I think the expectation is that Conway and Hubbard will advance to the runoff, which is again, June 7th. Neither one of them are running for any congressional seat in November because the seat is changing a lot in redistricting. So assuming Conway wins where she’s the favorite because it’s a pretty Republican leaning seat at the moment, she’ll already be a lame duck Congresswoman when she’s sworn in later in the summer. Again, if she wins.

David Nir:

One thing I should note is that Republican candidates combined for 65% of the vote in the first round of the special election, so that presents pretty daunting odds for Democrats. Though the second round is happening on the same day as the regular statewide primary, that hopefully means turnout will be higher, but I’d say this seat is very likely to remain in GOP hands.

David Beard:

Yeah, I think that’s the assumption. Then up in Wisconsin, there were a number of local elections for Wisconsin’s spring election that they have every year. One notable race that our friends at Bolts Magazine highlighted was that fake Trump elector Kelly Ruh, who tried to help Donald Trump steal the election in 2020 by being one of the Wisconsin electors for Donald Trump, she lost her reelection as an alderperson in De Pere, a town near Green Bay. So that was very good news. And then down in Milwaukee, acting mayor and Democrat Cavalier Johnson, decisively won Tuesday’s special election, beating conservative Bob Donovan by a large 72 to 28 margin.

David Beard:

Johnson who made history as the first black person elected to lead Milwaukee will then have to run for a full term here in a couple years up in 2024. And looking more broadly, I’m not going to go through all of the other various small elections that took place in Wisconsin, but it was overall a mixed bag, I would say. There were some Democratic victories, some Republican victories, which is not the worst news, I think, compared to where we’ve seen in the past, these before November elections that take place that are maybe lower turnout. You can really see wipe outs one way or another when it’s a big wave year.

David Beard:

So the fact that it wasn’t a terrible night for Democrats, I’m not saying it was a good night by any means, but the fact that it wasn’t a terrible night does provide a little bit of hope that a wave is not imminent later in the year, but that’s obviously just one factor among many that we’re going to continue to keep watching.

David Nir:

Well. And since last week was a week, that meant there was another opportunity for Madison Cawthorn to completely humiliate himself. But this time it seems like there were finally consequences for him. By now, I’m sure you have heard about his cocaine and orgies claim, it’s completely bonkers, total made-upcrap. It upset Republicans in a way that his fascistic rhetoric never could. But the most important thing is that just the other day, Republican Senator Thom Tillis announced that he would be endorsing state Senator Chuck Edwards, who is running against Madison Cawthorn or in the May 17 GOP primary.

David Nir:

Now, that’s a pretty unusual move to see a sitting Senator endorse a challenger to a member of Congress from his own state. But really, though the coke and orgy stuff got all of the attention, that’s not really why Tillis and other Republicans finally have painted a target on Madison Cawthorn’s back. The real problem is that Cawthorn has just behaved like a celebrity who cares much more about the national right-wing media circuit and the attention he gets in [Washington], D.C., than about his constituents back home. And in fact, that’s exactly something that Tillis specifically cited saying, “It comes down to focus on the district, producing results for the district. And in my opinion, Mr. Cawthorn hasn’t demonstrated much in the way of results over the last 18 months.”

David Nir:

And there’s another factor here as well that we’ve talked about on the show before, when Republicans rolled out their first congressional map last year, Cawthorn made this crazy decision to announce that he was going to run in an essentially brand new district that he hadn’t really represented at all, in a way to buttress conservative credentials, expose him to more of the state and also possibly to block another top Republican in the state legislature from running for that seat. And so, after Cawthorn announced that he was switching districts, that’s when Chuck Edwards got into the race for Cawthorn’s original seat, and then Cawthorn got screwed by reality.

David Nir:

The state court struck down the GOP map as an unconstitutional gerrymander and replaced it with a much fairer map, and that meant that the district Cawthorn wanted to run in, the new seat, didn’t exist anymore. It was turned into a very swingy district that would not suit a maniac like Cawthorn at all. So he tucked his tail and went back home to his district, the 11th in Western North Carolina, and the far Western tip of [District] 8, except the problem was Chuck Edwards said, “I’m not going to defer to you. I actually never stopped caring about Western North Carolina even when you were showboating off in other parts of the state.”

David Nir:

So because Cawthorn tried this whole district shopping shenanigan, he netted himself a challenger who simply just wasn’t going to budge on his way home. And Tillis is not the only major Republican who is supporting Edward’s challenge. How speaker Tim Moore and State Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger are also backing him. CNN reports that others may as well. Now, Cawthorn is still likely to win renomination. Even Edward’s own polling shows him trailing, but we still have about six weeks ago until the primary, quite a lot can happen. And like I said, it’s quite unusual for your own home state Senator to decide he wants you gone from the state’s delegation. So there may yet be other shoes to drop for Cawthorn.

David Beard:

There are certainly a lot of things a U.S. Senator can do to make your reelection a lot more difficult if they put their mind to it. And I’ll just add, since you already took us to North Carolina, I’ll just note that I didn’t take us to North Carolina; you took us to North Carolina. That this past week, there was a heroic victory by my alma mater, UNC, in the final four over Duke, which led to a narrow loss to Kansas. But to bring it back to politics, there was a heartwarming photo for any Southern Democrat of Democratic governor Roy Cooper, Democratic governor Laura Kelly of Kansas at lunch, hosted by Democratic governor John Bel Edwards of Louisiana, where the Final Four was played.

David Beard:

So I saw that photo and it warmed my heart, as did the victory over Duke, the narrow loss to Kansas less so.

David Nir:

Well, I should note also that Laura Kelly kicked off the first ad of her reelection campaign during that same game. So hopefully she got some warm fuzzies from associating herself with her home state school’s win.

David Beard:

Yeah. She’s got the election this year, the other two don’t, so by all means, she should take it all that she can.

David Nir:

So we’re going to migrate away from what seems to be our perversely favorite state of North Carolina, up to Pennsylvania, where just this week for the first time, the Democratic primary for Senate turned negative on the airwaves. The race is primarily a contest between two candidates, Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman and Congressman Connor Lamb, both of whom are from Western Pennsylvania. Fetterman has led in all the polls. He simply has greater name recognition. And it seems that Lamb’s allies think that the only way to stop Fetterman is to attack him on TV ads. But boy, did they screw up.

David Nir:

A Super PAC called Penn Progress started airing an ad that tried to contrast Lamb describing his background as a Marine and a prosecutor with Fetterman, and saying that Fetterman is, “A self-described socialist.” A huge problem, the ad cited an NPR piece from a couple of years back that did, yes, describe Fetterman as a self-described socialist, except at the end of the piece, there was a huge correction that said…

David Nir:

So we’re going to migrate away from what seems to be our perversely favorite state of North Carolina, up to Pennsylvania, where just this week for the first time, the Democratic primary for Senate turned negative on the airwaves. The race is primarily a contest between two candidates, Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman and Congressman Connor Lamb, both of whom are from Western Pennsylvania. Fetterman has led in all the polls. He simply has greater name recognition. And it seems that Lamb’s allies think that the only way to stop Fetterman is to attack him on TV ads. But boy, did they screw up.

David Nir:

A Super PAC called Penn Progress started airing an ad that tried to contrast Lamb describing his background as a Marine and a prosecutor with Fetterman, and saying that Fetterman is, “A self-described socialist.” But there was a big problem, at the end of the piece, there was a huge correction that said, “This piece said that John Fetterman is a self-described socialist. He is not.” So this ad was based on a claim in an article that was retracted.

David Nir:

And as a result, Fetterman’s campaign sent a letter to TV stations that were airing the ad, asking them to take the ad down because it contained a falsehood. And they said Fetterman has never called himself a socialist. And in fact, they even pointed to an interview he gave a few years ago where someone asked him directly, “Do you describe yourself as a Democratic socialist?” And he flat out said no. And the amazing thing was that at least one TV station in the Philadelphia area already yanked the ad off the airwaves. It’s pretty much the fastest I’ve ever seen. It was literally the same day it went up, according to [the] Fetterman campaign, it was taken down.

David Nir:

And the reason why this ad was vulnerable to this demand by the Fetterman campaign is that under federal law, TV stations have to air any ad that campaigns send them as long as they’re paid for. And this can include stuff that TV stations would never air. There was an ad a few years ago where a campaign try to get attention by having the candidates say, “Fuck the NRA,” and that was actually broadcast on TV. But third-party ads, TV stations aren’t obligated to run them. And because of that, because they’re not obligated to run them, that also means they can potentially be held liable for any defamatory or false content.

David Nir:

The Fetterman campaign’s letter, these campaigns send these letters all the time, but it’s essentially a veiled threat or not so veiled threat saying, “If you don’t take this ad off, we might Sue you for publishing defamatory content.” So third party ads like the one from this group Penn Progress really have to be vetted very, very carefully to make sure they aren’t vulnerable to being taken off airwaves. But man, what a huge blunder that the NPR piece in questions literally had the correction appended to it. There’s truly no excuse for this.

David Nir:

The thing though is that this might be a blessing in disguise because the idea that this group is attacking Fetterman for being too liberal or too far to the left in a Democratic primary, that seems completely crazy to me. If anything, that might make Fetterman more popular with voters. So Lamb’s team really needs to go back to the drawing board here. But I think that Fetterman remains the favorite in the Democratic primary here.

David Beard:

Yeah, it’s been a strange primary Lamb obviously has a lot of positives to the fact that he’s a very good candidate, he can run a strong campaign. But Fetterman had great name recognition and a very positive view amongst Democratic voters in a big state like Pennsylvania. So it was always going to be tough to overcome that. And this is not going to help at all.

David Nir:

There was originally a thought perhaps Lamb decided to run for Senate instead of seeking reelection because he was worried that his district in the House would be made considerably worse. But in fact, it actually got better in redistricting. Unfortunately, the filing deadline passed several weeks ago, there’s no chance of him switching races. But really, I think that ultimately, this is going to prove to be a mistake for Conor Lamb and that he should have sought another term in the House.

David Beard:

I’m going to wrap up our weekly hits by taking us back to a couple of international quick hits. Over in Europe, this time, over in Hungary and France. So in Hungary, there was a general election this past Sunday. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán won a fourth term in office with 54% of the vote, which was actually up more than four percentage points from his last selection victory in 2018. And his party retained a two thirds majority in parliament thanks to some pretty significant gerrymandering that his party has implemented in the past. Yes, gerrymandering is not just for here in America, it does happen in other, in other places as well, very severely in Hungary.

David Beard:

Now, Orbán is a right-wing autocrat who’s curtailed press freedoms, he’s eroded judicial independence, and he’s undermined multiparty democracy both with the gerrymandering and in other ways. This year, the opposition actually united against him for the first time, as opposed to running in a number of different parties. And that’s in large part due to the fact that the electoral system is partially first pass the post. Like it is here, where if multiple candidates run, it’s just, whoever gets the most votes wins the election. So obviously, with Orbán party being such a large figure, if you’re running two or three different candidates, it becomes so much harder to beat him or his candidate. Whereas if you unite against one candidate, you have a much better shot.

David Beard:

But unfortunately, they were unable to break through really outside the capital area and received just 34% of the vote overall. Now, Orbán’s been close with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, though he has walked that back a bit in the past few weeks in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine. He hasn’t been single handedly trying to block EU sanctions, though he has been on the more reluctant end of things. He’s been one of the last countries: once you got the rest of the countries on board, Hungary wouldn’t stand in the way, but he certainly hasn’t been helpful in that area.

David Beard:

He also hasn’t been allowing any lethal arms to be either donated from Hungary or transported through Hungary. And Hungary is one of the countries that shares a border with Ukraine, so that has caused some obstacles at time. There was some hope that this would hurt him with the electorate, but unfortunately, that just didn’t happen as we see here. And as we’ll talk about a little bit in France, it seems that despite a lot of concern in Europe over what Russia is doing in Ukraine and a lot of sympathy for the Ukrainian people, that hasn’t really translate to changing electoral habits, at least so far.

David Beard:

And in Orbán’s victory speech, he lists a number of what he called left wing groups or organizations that he’s overcome in this victory, amongst them, the left in Hungary, the EU, Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros, which is often the victim of antisemitic attacks in Hungary. And including that, he also include Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which seems in incredibly strange, but Zelenskyy has attacked Orban for being one of the most reluctant of the EU leaders to support Ukraine or to provide aid to Ukraine.

David Beard:

So he had called out Orban by name earlier since the invasion had happened. And Orban clearly has seen him as somebody to oppose, which is really concerning as now he’s almost certainly going to be part of the EU for at least the next few years.

David Nir:

And of course Zelensky is a Jew, so easy for Orban to lump him in with Soros. I’ve watched what’s gone on in Hungary these last many years, and I feel like what has happened there is what the GOP would very much like to do to America, to create a country where they can win a narrow majority of the vote or not even a majority of the vote and still win super majorities in the legislature and do exactly all the things that Orban has engaged in, especially undermining judicial independence and packing the courts with their cronies. It really does feel like there, but for the grace of God go we, example for us, whatever is going on in Hungary, it’s like an early warning system for us.

David Beard:

Absolutely. And Republicans aren’t really hiding that. The Conservative Political Action Committee, CPAC, which is one of the biggest Conservative groups in the country, they are gathering in May in Hungary where their headline speaker will be Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban. So they aren’t really trying to hide their affection for him and for their desire to emulate what he’s done in Hungary here.

David Nir:

Yeah. I think they’ve been cowed into silence about their previous favorite autocrat who was of course Putin, and now they’re transferring their affection to Orban. And of course, Tucker Carlson is completely in love with Orban. And I think even broadcasts some episodes from there and has repeated and amplified his crazy antisemitic conspiracy theories. So it’s a bad situation all around. There’s really nothing good whatsoever that can be said about the situation there.

David Beard:

Yeah, exactly. And then over in France, there’s a related situation going on. Hopefully, will not turn out as badly as Hungary has turned out. But the first round of the presidential election is going to be taking place on Sunday, April 10th. The two leading candidates are centrist president Emmanuel Macron and far right leader, Marine Le Pen. They’re both expected to advance to a runoff that’s going to take place two weeks later, polls have shown Le Pen narrowing her deficit in that runoff to single digits after she lost to Macron five years ago by a landslide 32% margin, it was almost two to one the degree to which Macron defeated Le Pen.

David Beard:

Le Pen like much of the far right in Europe has been close with Putin in the past, like Orban has been. But as we saw in Hungary, as I mentioned, that doesn’t seem to be a major factor in voters’ decision making in these countries, it’s been much more about things like the cost of living and other domestic concerns. So that’s going to be something we’re going to watch closely. Obviously we’ll have the results of the first round next week, and then the results of the runoff a few weeks later. But Le Pen is definitely a major concern there and something to watch

David Nir:

That concludes our weekly hits. Next up, we will be talking with Lapp, the founder of the House Majority PAC, the largest Super PAC in the country to help Democrats in House races nationwide. Stay with us.

David Beard:

Today. We’re joined by Ali Lapp, the founder of House Majority PAC. House Majority PAC also known as HMP is an independent expenditure pack or Super PAC that works to elect Democrats to the House of Representatives. And on a personal note, she is also my former boss from when I worked at HMP back in 2012. So thank you so much for joining us, Ali.

Ali Lapp:

Absolutely. It’s always nice to join someone who was around for the inaugural cycle of House Majority PAC.

David Beard:

Yeah. It’s come a long way since then.

Ali Lapp:

It has.

David Beard:

So the details of what House Majority PAC is and how it differs from the [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] DCCC or even candidate campaigns can be tough to part for a lot of people. Can you give us a brief rundown of the unique role that HMP plays and how it functions as an independent expenditure PAC?

Ali Lapp:

The reason that House Majority PAC exists is because our campaign finance laws in this country are really confusing. And so the way that we have to operate is we are completely independent of candidates and party committees. When I look at House races, I like to think of it as a house, a literal house that someone would live in with three different wings. And one wing of that house are the candidate and their campaign committees. They’re allowed to work with certain people who work at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, they work with their state parties, they can work with the DNC. And they operate in that wing of the House.

Ali Lapp:

Another wing of the house is where the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s independent expenditure resides. They are the most isolated wing of that house. They really can only talk to themselves, they cannot coordinate with any other organizations, including the candidates, or outside groups who are supporting those candidates. And then the third wing of the House, I think is the biggest wing of the house, is where House Majority PAC resides. And in that wing, we also have groups like the League of Conservation Voters, EMILY’s List, labor unions who have independent expenditure arms, and we all operate independently of those other two wings and do whatever we can to make sure that the House Democrat in the races that we care about is going to win their election.

David Nir:

So just a small clarification. You mentioned that the DCCC’s independent expenditure arm is basically entirely isolated. Is HMP permitted to talk with other Super PACs such as those run by the League of Conservation Voters or EMILY’s List, other groups that you were mentioning.

Ali Lapp:

Absolutely. We work really closely with other organizations. I like to think of us as the air traffic control of House world. And so we work very closely with EMILY’s List independent/expenditure arm, which is called Women Vote, and League of Conservation Voters, as you mentioned. 314 Action is a great organization that supports candidates with a science background or who want to promote a science agenda. And we really try to help them make good decisions in their house independent expenditure work. We really see ourselves as helping them understand who the candidates are, what forces are at play. We have a decently sized staff of House experts, so when these organizations who may not have as big a staff decide, “Hey, we’d like to play in this race,” we can immediately help them with good information, sharing our polling data, sharing our research and helping them help us win House seats.

David Beard:

And so with this forced separation from the party and the candidates and their campaigns, how does HMP stand up this whole campaign operation largely on its own in coordination with these other folks. But you’re doing the biggest grunt work in terms of building up these different House races, and particularly doing it as opposed to a senate or a governor’s side where there’s at max 30 or 50 races. There’s 435 House races, obviously you’re not going to play in all of those, but you could easily play in 50 or more than that.

Ali Lapp:

Oh, absolutely. Look, we hire amazing people like you, who do this work for us. We have a really, I think, systematic way of organizing House races. We hire a political desk, a research desk, an assistant, and they take on a portfolio of 20 to 30 races. And they really have to understand these races inside and out through publicly available sources. So we do morning clips on all of these critical House races/ They’re watching and transcribing every single ad that comes out from the candidates, from the party committees. And we largely follow the candidates lead in these races.

Ali Lapp:

Sometimes you do have a candidate who might be an amazing candidate, but they had a really tough primary, or they just don’t have the fundraising network to do all that they would like to do. And so sometimes we do have to step in and do a little more, but generally, we follow the candidates lead, we try to reinforce their message, educate voters on the Republicans candidates, shortcomings. It’s an easy way of saying go negative on the Republican. We essentially are a critical part of these campaigns without them actually being able to tell us directly what to do.

David Nir:

Ali, obviously redistricting has upended the playing field across the country in so many states this year, and I’m wondering, how has the remapping process affected your planning for this year and your timeline in terms of getting involved with races, especially since we have some big states like Florida that haven’t even finished the redistricting process yet?

Ali Lapp:

When I founded House Majority PAC in 2011, it was also a redistricting cycle. So we have some experience at dealing with the logistics of redistricting and waiting for states to finish their maps. And certainly back in the 2012 cycle, Beard will remember this, we were waiting on states like Minnesota and others who just were taking forever in the courts to actually finalize their maps. We’re facing the same thing this year, as you mentioned, Florida is still not done. Florida’s a big state, there’s a couple of swing districts in there. So we would love to get Florida done with good maps as soon as we can, but we have to wait.

Ali Lapp:

It does affect our planning, we have to be very flexible, which is something I think we’ve always been good at House Majority PAC. We’re very nimble, we’re able to move quickly when we need to. And that’s really important in a redistricting cycle more than any other kind.

David Nir:

The big question in 2022 and one we have addressed in some way, shape or form in almost every episode of The Downballot so far is how to tackle the fact that the party in power almost always loses seats in a midterm when they control the White House. And this is especially acute given that the Democrats majority right now in the House is only five seats. Obviously, Joe Biden’s approval ratings are not strong and haven’t been for a while. From a broad perspective, how is HMP addressing this situation? Do you operate in this kind of environment? Obviously you went through the 2014 cycle, another difficult midterm under somewhat similar circumstances. How do you manage during an environment like this?

Ali Lapp:

This is obviously a very tricky cycle and it’s not just the historic nature of a midterm election when you hold the presidency, which as you said, traditionally is not great for the party who holds the White House. We know that, we know that we have hurdles to holding the majority, but the other factor that’s playing in here is it’s just a time of such uncertainty in America right now. We’ve just been through this pandemic, we’ve had enormous economic upheaval. There are a lot of social and cultural issues that put people on edge around the country, it’s a very divisive time. I think following the presidency of Donald Trump has just made people retreat to their corners.

Ali Lapp:

So it’s a really tumultuous time, and I think voters are feeling that and voters are generally on whatever side of the aisle are angrier than they normally are, and that’s something we have to reconcile and something we have to figure out if we’re going to hold the majority. Look, Biden’s numbers as you said are not great, and the most important thing that could happen for House electoral success is for Biden to improve his approval ratings. And I know that they’re trying and he’s got actually a lot of good things to run on and it’s something that we feel strongly that they should be talking about and celebrating some of the successes even more.

Ali Lapp:

If you look back at where we were before Biden was elected, our country has moved in the right direction so enormously, whether it’s from COVID or it’s on the economy, things are moving in the right direction, but I don’t feel like voters are giving us enough credit for that. And rather than question why and point fingers, we at House Majority PAC are just trying to make that case to voters. So that’s something I think is very important. We are also, look, I’ll be upfront with you, we have not done a ton of district by district polling.

Ali Lapp:

We like to save that for when the data’s a little fresher and we’re about to start communicating, but we’re really interested in looking at important voter groups around the country and trying to listen to them and understand their frustrations and figure out what we need to do as House Democrats to better communicate with them and connect with them so that we can hold our majority and possibly expand it this November.

David Nir:

So I’m curious, I know it’s going back eight years now, but are there any examples from 2014 where HMP may be snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, any particular topics or ads you recall running at any specific races then that might offer instructive lessons for the environment we’re facing this November?

Ali Lapp:

Yeah, that’s a good question. I was actually just thinking about this the other day. And I think one of my biggest takeaways from 2014 is that you have to remember that what you’re doing really matters, even when there is a big wave or a mini-wave environment, like there was in 2014, I would say there was a moderate Republican wave. And what we really had to do is figure each race out individually. And I know that sounds simple, but it’s really not. And it really is about understanding what’s going on in a specific district.

Ali Lapp:

One race that I think back to a lot was the reelection of Scott Peters in San Diego. And he was facing a relatively moderate Republican challenger who was a Councilman. A lot of national Republicans were very excited about his candidacy and he had a personal scandal that broke about a month before the election. There were a lot of possible outcomes to that scandal. We could have really overplayed our hand, it could have backfired, it was a very tricky thing to figure out. And I am really proud of the work that we did at HMP to understand that issue and figure out how to communicate about it in a way that was effective. And it was a very close election win for us.

Ali Lapp:

I think if we had not handled that particular issue so well, we very well could have lost that seat. It was a very tough district in a tough environment. And so that’s the lesson I take away, and the way I want to approach these races, this cycle, you can’t just say, “Everything’s terrible, we’re going to lose this race. And this is too hard.” You really have to understand on what’s going on the ground and be very sophisticated, be willing to make tough decisions and find effective ways to communicate to voters no matter how challenging.

David Beard:

And we’ve seen in past cycles over and over again, that maybe strong campaigning and advertising maybe can’t take you from a 50-seat loss to a 50-seat win or vice versa, but in every one of these waves that we’ve had for both Democrats and Republican, good candidates and good campaigns have withstood them and overcome those waves because they were better candidates or because they were able to successfully attack their opponents. So it’s very possible, it’s just something that, as you said, has to be really done on a case by case basis.

Ali Lapp:

Absolutely. It’s one of the main reasons I founded House Majority PAC in 2011, after the 2010 disastrous midterm election, you can see that the Republicans had all these allies on their side, American Crossroads was all the rage back then. And they came in late and put the hammer down on some Democrats that didn’t even think they were vulnerable. And they were always going to win the House that year, but I know that all of the outside spending they had on their side, the extra advertising, it gave them extra seats, which were then, it was much harder for us to then come back from that in 2012, because they had such an advantage in 2010.

Ali Lapp:

So the whole mission of House Majority PAC was to even the playing field and make sure we were fighting fair and they weren’t out communicating us so that no matter what the national environment, we were doing the very best we can to win as many House seats as possible for Democrats.

David Beard:

HMP has actually put out a few things recently, which is exciting for us because we get the chance now to talk about them. One thing that just came out this week is HMP released an ad called Rescued that touts Biden and the Democrats economic successes over the past year and a half or so, along with some research from Blue Rose Research about how positive the ad’s impact would be. So how did that come about? And what’s the rationale for an ad like that that doesn’t focus so much on a specific House or House races, but really has a much broader national focus?

Ali Lapp:

Well, we think we need to start setting the table for the dialogue that needs to happen this fall. We need to start talking about the economic successes that Democrats have brought to the American people and what we’re still doing every day to make things better for them. In that ad, we specifically talked about the job growth we’ve had, the economy turning around and what we’ve been doing lately, Biden doing his work to lower gas prices, the House voting on Congresswoman Angie Craig from Minnesota’s bill to cap the price of insulin. These are things that have a real impact on family’s pocketbooks, and we think we need to be talking about them even more aggressively than we already have been.

Ali Lapp:

So we felt that we should produce this ad, release it, try to get as much play as we can and potentially show what we believe is the right path to talking about the economy as we head into the fall elections.

David Nir:

You did some research suggesting that the ad does actually have the impact that you were hoping it would. Can you talk a little bit about those findings? And also, we’d like to get into the nitty-gritty of politics here. Can you talk a little bit about how that research was done? How do you test an ad?

Ali Lapp:

Well, there’s a number of different ways that research firms will test ads. I think the best way to do it is as organically as possible. You don’t just show voters an ad and say, “Hey, did you like that? Yes or no.” Because you’re not really going to get the reaction you would get if they saw it just naturally. So I like the kinds of ad tests where voters see an ad, they’ll see a couple different ads that are political, and then maybe they’ll see an ad for Bounty paper towels, and they’re asked, how would they vote in their congressional election or in a presidential election. And if you can get a gauge on that, you can get a sense of how much you’re actually moving voters based on the ad that they’ve seen.

Ali Lapp:

So we found, or Blue Rose Research found, that the ad that we produced on the economy increased respondent’s views that America’s on the right track by over 2% and approval for President Biden’s handling of the economy by nearly 2.5%. So again, that sounds like a small number, but that is a pretty big number in terms of just one viewing of an ad. What we really take away from that is that this is the kind of messaging that will work, that will improve voters’ views of what’s happening in the economy. And it’s really, it’s not that complicated, it’s simply talking about what we’ve done that’s gone right and what we’re still doing to continue to make things better.

David Beard:

The other big news that HMP recently announced was the $100 million in TV and digital ad reservations for this fall in many media markets across the country. First off, why make these reservations and announcements now? And then how do you decide which of these markets are going to go up now, which need to be announced and reserved now, and which do you wait on?

Ali Lapp:

Well, I’ve always been a big fan of reserving your television time early for two reasons. One, you are able to lock in lower television rates. And this is something that frankly, our side, the Democratic side did much better than Republicans for many years, they didn’t reserve rates. So you might get to the middle of October and we’re running an ad in the Philadelphia market that maybe for a week we’re paying $500 for, but the Republicans, because they did not reserve the time early and they just placed it in the middle of October, they might be spending $800,000 a week for that same amount of air time.

Ali Lapp:

So Democrats really have been far more efficient than Republicans for years. Sadly, they have caught on and I’m expecting to see a big House reservation from our Republican counterpart any week now, but it does lock in those lower rates and media is incredibly expensive. So any savings you’re able to get from that is really, really important. The second reason why I’m a big believer of reservations is, kind of addresses the question you asked earlier, Beard, how do we work with if all these other entities if we’re not allowed to legally talk to them? This is our way of saying, “Hey, we’re going to be on television these weeks at this level in Bakersfield, California, or in Los Angeles, or Phoenix.”

Ali Lapp:

And it does allow those candidates and party committees who care about the same races to know what we’re doing and be able to plan a little bit around it. We’re thrilled we were able to make such a large reservation this year, as you said, over 100 million in TV and digital reservations thus far. I know we’re going to be able to provide really robust, strong advertising for our Democratic incumbents and challengers this year.

David Nir:

I’m just curious since $100 million is such a large amount, even in today’s politics, how do all these TV stations across the country, how does that work mechanically? How do they know you’re good for it since obviously you won’t be paying for these ads just yet, is that right?

Ali Lapp:

Yeah, that’s right. You generally will send out the money literally a couple days before your reservation starts, which is a good thing because our fundraising, like all political organizations happens late and we could never put all that money down right now. So look, I think part of it is House Majority PAC has been around for a decade now, we have a track record of being good on our commitments. That’s not to say these reservations can’t change, they can and do often. There are times when maybe a race you thought would be competitive is not competitive, or maybe one of our ally groups wants to step up and spend a million dollars in a race, and that allows us to take a million dollars and put it in into a different race.

Ali Lapp:

These are not signed in blood, they’re not locked in, but this is our intention to spend. And I think what you’ll find if you look back at the last decade is that generally when organizations, whether it’s us, the DCCC, or on the Republican side, make reservations, they’re adhered to with somewhere between 85 and 90% consistency at the end of the day.

David Nir:

One question I have in relation to this, when you put out your press release announcing these reservations, you announced it by media market rather than by congressional districts. So it might say, “New York City, X million dollars, Las Vegas, Nevada, Y million dollars.” And at Daily Kos Elections, we did our best to try to figure out what districts we thought matched up with, which media markets. And of course, there’s some guesswork, like you said, of course also, you don’t necessarily know which races you’re going to devote the money to because it’s early.

David Nir:

But one thing that stood out is there were a few media markets on your list that seemed to cover some districts that definitely got worse for Democrats during the redistricting process, for instance, Arizona’s 2nd district or Michigan’s 10th district, Texas’ 15th district. How do you make decisions about whether a seat is worth the investment, especially when it’s gotten redder in redistricting?

Ali Lapp:

Well, that’s a huge, huge part of our mission at House Majority PAC. So unlike a candidate who goes out and polls and tries to figure out how do I best talk about my biography and my issues and how should I run my race, when we’re polling, we’re also trying to get a really good sense of a district’s viability because there are limited resources even with $100 million TV reservation, and we have to make our best judgment about which districts are the best to invest in. We don’t want to spend in districts that our Democratic candidate is going to win by 10 points, nor do we want to spend in districts where our Democratic candidate is going to lose by 10 points.

Ali Lapp:

So you really have to try to focus in on those ones where you are spending is going to be the decision maker and whether or not a race is won or lost. The way that we do it is really not that complicated, we obviously we do a lot of public opinion research in these districts, we poll, sometimes we do focus groups. We look at the strengths of the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate. We look at their fundraising and their ability to run a robust campaign. We think about how many allies we have in a race and whether or not they’re going to be able to invest in there as well. We look at the level of Republican commitment in a race as well.

Ali Lapp:

And we ultimately, we also have to take into account the cost of a race, frankly. If there are two races that are looked to be equal in terms of our ability to win them, but one of them is four times as expensive as the other, we’re all about numbers at House Majority PAC, we need to get to 218 or more. So we look at where we can get to the most Democratic House district, and we really have to evaluate every race in that context.

David Nir:

On the flip side, even though we as Democrats are facing a difficult year, there are still a number of opportunities to go on offense, especially because Democrats were maybe surprisingly aggressive in redistricting in a number of states. There are seats now that look much more enticing, districts like Illinois 13, or Michigan’s 3rd, or New Mexico’s 2nd. Can you talk to us a little bit about the districts where you’re looking to go on offense and what some of your top targets might be?

Ali Lapp:

Absolutely. And look, first, I should say, we talked a little bit about redistricting earlier and I really should give a huge shout out to the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. I’m so proud to have been one of the founding board members of that organization. Literally people say how come Democrats don’t plan ahead? We’re not strategic. Literally five or six years ago, a group of us got together and said, “We need to start thinking about the redistricting that’s going to happen in five or six years. And we need to make sure Democrats are better positioned there.”

Ali Lapp:

We were thrilled to get Eric Holder to lead that organization, and it has been a huge, huge game changer. And really, if we’re able to hold the House, they deserve a ton of credit. For the lawsuits that they have filed and won, for the aggressive map making that we’ve had in some states, we have much fairer maps. Democrats can compete in a much better way because we have better maps. Right now under the current lines, there are 224 districts that Joe Biden carried, after redistricting, there will be over 230. So even though the national environment is tougher, we have more Biden districts to compete in.

Ali Lapp:

That is not only good for 2022, it’s huge for the rest of this decade, and I just couldn’t be any happier about that. And it’s largely as a result of redistricting that we do have some really good offensive opportunities. We have a couple in California, anyone who follows House politics knows who David Valadao is and the Central Valley of California, a House Republican who holds a very Democratic district, but has been traditionally very challenging to beat. We have a great Democratic candidate there. Congressman Valadao is actually facing a really, really tough primary on the Right, and it’s entirely possible he may not be on the ballot in November because of this right-wing Republican challenger that he’s got.

Ali Lapp:

So we’re watching that really closely. There’s only one Democrat on the ballot, which is really important for us to make sure that we’re not locked out. We have that crazy primary in California where the top two candidates advance from, and it’s not a partisan primary. So that’s when we’re really excited about. Down in Orange County, Congresswoman Michelle Steel is in a more Democratic district than she has now. It is a district that Joe Biden won with over 53% of the vote. She has a really strong candidate in Jay Chen. I’m very excited about our prospects in that district.

Ali Lapp:

I think you may have mentioned Illinois 13, which is downstate. We’ve got a terrific candidate there. It was the Rodney Davis seat, but Congressman Davis has been put into a very safe Republican seat, and this is now a really good Democratic seat, Joe Biden got nearly 56% of the vote there. So that’s a great pickup opportunity. I’ll holler a couple in New York, which I think are really great out on Long Island in New York 1, which is the far Eastern side of Long Island. There is a Democratic primary in that district, but from a district that Trump won, it is now over 55% Biden district. It changed a lot. And that is obviously a very winnable seat for us.

Ali Lapp:

One of the highest profile races last year was incumbent Democratic Congressman Max Rose was challenged by Republican Nicole Malliotakis in the Staten Island, Brooklyn area, the Republican Nicole Malliotakis won. It was a Trump plus 10 district, it is now a Biden plus 10 district, huge swing. Max Rose is running again. He’s a great candidate. I fully expect that he’ll win that seat. And then up in Syracuse, John Katko, Republican Congressman has held that forever. He’s retiring this year. We have a couple of Democrats running there, but I feel great about winning that seat.

Ali Lapp:

It was always a Biden seat, it is now a Biden seat that he won with 59% of the vote. So hopefully that is a nice, safe Democratic seat. We’re excited about that. And then we also have two brand new districts, one in the Denver suburbs in Colorado, one in the Portland suburbs in Oregon, which are both Biden-won districts, and there are primaries there, but we’re really excited about the prospects of picking those seats up as well.

David Beard:

And Katko is one of those classics at withstanding Democratic waves, seemingly too, to their campaigns credit, they ran great campaigns and we would not be able to knock them off in the past, and luckily now, partially, maybe because of redistricting partially because of the increasing Trump nature of the caucus, he is retiring, making it a much more open runway to take that seat.

Ali Lapp:

Very exciting. He’s always been very difficult to beat, one of the last legitimately moderate members of Congress. They’re retiring in droves.

David Nir:

Ali, thank you so much. This has been incredibly illuminating. How can our listeners find out more about House Majority PAC work and support what you guys do?

Ali Lapp:

You can find us online at the housemajoritypac.com. That’s probably the easiest place to go and find our Twitter handle, Facebook or ads we’ve run in the past. There’s of course, a place where you can donate and contribute. We’re thrilled to have a really strong vigorous grassroots network of supporters, which anyone who runs a big organization like ours will tell you those grassroots donations are really important because they give you a stable funding base. You’re not so reliant on the whims of big donors and such. So we really appreciate all of the support that we have gotten from all over the country.

Ali Lapp:

And that’s really grown a lot in the last four to five years. So we’re incredibly grateful for that. Look, it’s going to be a tough cycle, but we are up for the challenge. We’ve got so many good Democratic candidates running. And look, 2020 was not a great year down ballot, even though Joe Biden won the presidency. So a lot of Democrats that held some of the toughest districts were not reelected in 2020. And the Democrats from really tough districts that were reelected in 2020, they’re battle tested. They are strong candidates, they fit their districts really well, and most of them got districts that are at least a little bit better as a result of redistricting.

Ali Lapp:

So we have every confidence in their ability to win this cycle. We’re there to support them. We know you guys are, we hope your listeners are, and we really appreciate the support.

David Beard:

Ali Lapp, founder of House Majority PAC, thank you so much for joining us.

Ali Lapp:

Thank you.

David Beard:

That’s all from us this week. Thanks to Ali Lapp for joining us. The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach us by email at [email protected]. If you haven’t already, please like, and subscribe to The Downballot and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to our producer, Cara Zelaya and editor, Tim Einenkel. We’ll be back next week with a new episode.

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While Ukrainian defenders brace for a large-scale Russian attack in the east that may or may not ever come, the mood seems eerily similar to that of the war’s first days and first push towards Kyiv. In principle, Russia’s new plan appears to be to sweep south from Izyum and north from the Mariupol region to capture all or most of Donetsk and Luhansk, cutting off the dug-in Ukrainian positions that have held stable in the war against Russian-backed separatists for years.

In practice, this all relies on Russian commanders showing skills that they haven’t yet shown, marshaling forces on a scale they haven’t yet been able to marshal, the protection of supply lines longer and more tenuous than the ones that quickly fell to pieces around Kyiv, all with a makeshift assemblage of battered troops pulled from other offensives and, theoretically, mercenary forces pulled from elsewhere.

In other words, Russia’s top-level strategy is believed to be implausibly ambitious by the military experts who have watched the war unfold to date—and even that ignores the onset of Ukraine’s rainy season, turning much of the front into the sort of thick mud slurry that has claimed seemingly as much Russian armor as Ukraine’s human defenders have.

One new variable on the scene is the appearance of a new Russian general who at least in theory will be taking command of a Ukrainian invasion that up until now had no visible leadership at all. Aleksandr Dvornikov is said to have earned the favor of Russia’s leadership through, bluntly, a campaign of war crimes in Syria, where he oversaw the sort of civilian bombings that Russia has become infamous for elsewhere.

But again: In practice, the number of Russian generals who have targeted civilian populations when they could not rout the enemy military consists of approximately All Of Them. It is standard Russian military doctrine at this point, though we likely underestimated the extent to which Russian generals have chosen the strategy not as institutional preference but due to what now is more clearly seen as staggering Russian incompetence at combatting armed opponents—forcing Russian commanders to prefer civilian targets so as to report back to the home office with news of at least something that can plausibly be spun as success.

The Russian military north of Kyiv, for example, has heroically been lobbing missiles at Ukrainian wheat farms, where at least one Russian missile successfully destroyed three of the Russian military’s most-feared opponents: farm tractors. Russia also destroyed six large granaries, Ukrainian officials say. There is no tactical advantage in destroying granaries, but we can deduce that Russian artillery commanders are primarily occupied with shelling any building large enough to be visible from a distance. Granaries are among the biggest, so here we are.

Everything we’ve seen on the Donbas front so far is a continuation of Kyiv-area tactics. Russia launches battalion-sized raids into enemy territory; Russian forces get decimated by Ukrainian defenders with access to anti-armor weapons and, now, able to target those advances with precision artillery strikes; Russian forces retreat while continuing to shell whatever civilian infrastructure happens to be within range. That Russia was able to finally capture Izyum is significant, but even it faces the Kyiv problem. The supply lines are long, winding through contested areas, and Ukraine can bring the same tactics that it used around Kyiv to whittle down Russian columns before they ever make it to the frontlines.

The rest of it looks eerily familiar. It’s unclear what new order this new Russian general is being installed to impose, but a campaign of shelling cities, destroying granaries and missile strikes on crowds of fleeing civilians is something that all the other Russian generals have been accomplishing very well on their own. It may only be another name to pin the resulting war crimes to, in the aftermath of all this.

If Gen. Dvornikov doesn’t fall out of a Moscow window a month or two from now, of course.

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In the post-Trump era, it seems like nothing can really shock Americans anymore. That is why Republican senators like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Marsha Blackburn felt they could vomit up and spew whatever specious or scurrilous attacks that struck their fancy during the confirmation hearings for newly confirmed Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Pandering to a country with a thoroughly polarized electorate, they believed they’d face no significant consequences for their behavior, and even less from the Republican base whose votes sustain each of their perches in office. Personal nastiness has become a badge of honor among these types, ever since Donald Trump smoothed their paths with his own brand of arrogant, strutting insouciance and disrespect.

They also knew that once the hearings were over, the sheer ubiquity of our instant-gratification news media would immediately move on to the next outrage. That whatever the next shiny object du jour happened to be would swiftly relegate their shameful performance to that vast memory hole where egregious, hyperpartisan political behavior goes to die.

The sad aspect to all of this is that we are now at a point where such behavior by Republicans has become normalized. We already knew it would not have mattered whether President Biden had nominated a different Black woman to the court, one with a completely distinct background and life experience than Justice Jackson. For the vast majority of Republicans who voted against her confirmation—including the ones who simply, quietly voted “Nay” without ever making a spectacle of themselves like Cruz, Hawley, Cotton, and Blackburn—the only important thing for them was that she was nominated by a Democrat. That was all the reason they needed to oppose her, mainly because they believe Americans who make up their political constituencies would tolerate nothing less than complete rejection of an otherwise wholly, eminently, even superlatively qualified nominee. But the fact that she was also a Black woman provided the additional impetus for many of them to abandon any sense of decency whatsoever.

Listen and subscribe to Daily Kos Elections’ The Downballot podcast with David Nir and David Beard

Now Republicans are doubtlessly ready to move on, most perhaps even feeling invigorated by their display of fealty to the Trump ethic as they recede into the warm cesspool of backwash provided by Fox News, the only major media outlet that treats them fawningly without ever criticizing them. But perhaps there is something that those Americans not thoroughly zombified and in thrall to right-wing media can take away from this display.

Anita Hill retains a place in the nation’s collective memory precisely because her vile treatment during Justice Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings—at the hands of a Judiciary Committee, then an exclusively male club of U.S. senators—sparked a backlash that ultimately transformed that body and the House of Representatives as well, prompting Americans just one year later to elect five women to the Senate and 47 more to the House. The face of this country has not been the same  since that time, with women advancing to the speakership, the vice presidency, and winning the popular vote for the presidency. There are now more women in Congress than at any time in history, thanks in large part to the treatment afforded to Anita Hill.

On Thursday, Professor Hill authored a piece for The Washington Post, published before Justice Jackson’s confirmation, in which she argued for revisions to the Judiciary Committee’s rules on questioning nominees.  She states:

I know something about being mistreated by the Senate Judiciary Committee. During the confirmation hearing for Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991, I was subjected to attacks on my intelligence, truthfulness and even my sanity when I testified about my experience working for the nominee at the Education Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In a spectacularly low moment, senators sought out slanderous statements from my former students.

She knew that Jackson, much like herself, would be compelled to face not only racist but sexist attacks, as well.  After initial media reports suggested “that Republicans would offer little resistance to Jackson’s confirmation,” Hill says she also knew, “from painful experience, that assessment was overly optimistic.”

Even so, I was shocked by the interrogation of Jackson, a nominee with stellar credentials and more judicial experience than any of the sitting justices when they were nominated. It was obvious that no matter how composed, respectful or brilliant her responses, her critics’ only goal was to discredit her. […]

Gotcha questions like how to define a woman, asked by Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R), have no place in the hearing room, and fall short of what should be expected of the Senate during its exercise of its advice and consent role. The same is true of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R) focus on how critical race theory is supposedly being taught in the private school on whose board Jackson sits. A confirmation hearing should be about learning how a person will judge, not how well she handles specious browbeating.

Realistically, Hill also probably knows that our political system is now so paralyzed that any change to the rules about questioning nominees is highly unlikely. She also realizes that the divisions in this country are now to a point where any transformation in the minds of the electorate about how women, particularly Black women, were treated during these hearings is likely to be measured, at best, blunted by the intractability of partisan divisions.

Still, Americans may not forget what they saw in Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination process. More Americans voiced their support of Justice Jackson than any of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, with polls showing very high levels of disapproval of the Republicans’ tactics. Importantly, the hearings provided a firsthand reminder for Americans about what the Republican Party really stands for. Black women, in particular, took serious notice of the mistreatment and hyperbolic abuse Jackson was subjected to.

Paul Waldman, writing for The Washington Post, believes the political consequences of Justice Jackson’s hearings may turn out to be significant. Waldman observes that the GOP did itself no favors with their references to “pedophilia” and “Nazism,” QAnon-esque tropes that do not resonate with the vast majority of the electorate. While they may have pleased the most hardcore of their base, that base is not embraced by the rest of the country. Nor did the Republicans’ constant interruptions, hectoring, and grandstanding toward Jackson escape the notice of women, particularly Black women. Waldman writes:

It will be some time before we can fully judge the political impact of this confirmation, though one clue as to how this will resonate in the future will be found in whether Democrats bring up this confirmation more often than Republicans do. But it undoubtedly intensified the currents already shaping our politics: Democrats reaching for the mainstream, and Republicans running eagerly to embrace their extremist fringe.

Donald Trump may still hold sway over the Republican Party, but QAnon and its bizarre fantasies don’t appeal to the majority of the American public. Neither did the relentless, thoughtless abuse that was heaped upon Justice Jackson endear Republicans to anyone but their rabid base. Although we no longer live in a time where such tactics might galvanize an entire electorate, in the long run, the GOP’s cynical calculation may have done them much more harm than good.

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This article was originally published at Prism.

The Supreme Court is set to hear a case on April 26 that will determine whether the Biden administration can repeal the controversial Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy. The policy, officially known as Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), forces asylum-seekers to stay in shelters at the Southwest border as they await their immigration proceedings in an already backlogged immigration system.

The Biden v. Texas case questions whether a part of the U.S. code requires the Department of Homeland Security to continue enforcing the policy. Biden initially suspended the program in February 2021 after pressure by immigration advocates, but after Texas and Missouri sued the federal government, a federal judge ordered it be reinstated in August. Now the Supreme Court will decide whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit erred by concluding that the decision by Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas to terminate MPP had no legal effect.  

“It’s clear to us that the Department of Homeland Security has rightly concluded that ‘Remain in Mexico’ is inherently flawed and puts the lives of people returned to Mexico in danger,” said Kennji Kizuka, ​​associate director of research and analysis for refugee protection at Human Rights First. “We hope the Supreme Court does the right thing and allows the department to end the policy.”

The court order reinstating the policy went into effect in December 2021 and was accompanied by an expansion to include all asylum-seekers from the Western hemisphere, namely Haitians.

Life at the border has proven to be dangerous. According to a joint report with Human Rights First, between February 2019 and February 2021 there were at least 1,544 publicly reported cases of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping, and other violent assaults against asylum-seekers and migrants forced to return to Mexico under this program. These attacks include 341 cases of children who were kidnapped or nearly kidnapped in an already backlogged immigration court system, leaving them in the extremely dangerous situations they were trying to escape.

According to data from the Department of Homeland Security, since the program was reinstated in December 2021, 1,569 asylum-seekers have been enrolled in the policy and are being processed in Mexico. Upon being entered in the program, Customs and Border Protection screens asylum-seekers for fear of returning to Mexico. If an asylum-seeker is found to have a reasonable fear of persecution or torture, or if they are particularly vulnerable (if they are LGBTQ+ or have health issues), then they are disenrolled from MPP. Once disenrolled, they are referred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for a custody determination, where they may be allowed to enter the country and stay with family or another host, or they will be placed in a detention center.

“It is an arbitrary decision, we have seen,” said Margaret Cargioli, directing attorney for the Immigrant Defenders Law Center. “Once they’re in that detention center, that’s where they have to await their removal proceedings with an immigration judge.”

Cargioli said she had one client who was bisexual, had a hearing disability, and had a sponsor in the U.S. But they were arbitrarily sent to a Louisiana detention center. Cargioli also said the program has caused harm to thousands of asylum-seekers and is riddled with access to counsel barriers and due process issues for those exercising their right to asylum in the U.S.

Julia Neusner, a refugee protection attorney with Human Rights First, interviewed people returned to Mexico under MPP in Juarez in December and has been observing MPP court in Tijuana since the policy was reinstated. Neusner has heard countless stories of people in Tijuana who are in MPP and have been beaten and robbed outside the shelter.

“People who have been returned under MPP have already been victims of violent crimes,” Neusner said. “People are afraid to leave the shelters. They know they’ve run a high risk of being kidnapped.”

As a result of the dangerous circumstances, many people have reported having symptoms of severe mental health issues to Neusner, including depression and anxiety. One person she spoke to reports they had never had insomnia before, and now he cannot sleep at all.

“It’s not a consequence just of the danger they face,” Neusner said. “But also the uncertainty and being isolated and in a country that’s not their own country without their network.”

Additionally, many people in MPP have difficulty accessing lawyers from Mexico since they need U.S. lawyers familiar with U.S. immigration proceedings. According to information from Trac Immigration, 63,295 asylum-seekers were unrepresented in their deportation proceedings during the first iteration of MPP during Trump’s presidency from 2019 until it was rescinded by Biden in February 2021. According to Neusner, there are not many U.S. lawyers who take MPP cases since they cannot meet in person in the border cities. The few nonprofits that do take MPP cases are overwhelmed. Neusner attended MPP hearings earlier this week and consistently heard people say they could not find legal representation.

Of the seven cases she observed, three were coming for their second hearing and had been in MPP for a month already. They were initially issued a continuance so they could find a lawyer but have not been able to find any representation. The judge issued them another month-long extension. The four other cases were also granted a month-long extension so they could find a lawyer. Initially, everyone in MPP is given a document with phone numbers for pro bono service providers, but asylum-seekers say they are overwhelmed with other cases.

“I would like to see this program end once and for all,” Neusner said. “It denies people their due process, right to seek asylum under U.S. and international law. The Biden administration did the right thing at the outset by getting rid of this policy.”

Prism is a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people, places, and issues currently underreported by national media. We’re committed to producing the kind of journalism that treats Black, Indigenous, and people of color, women, the LGBTQ+ community, and other invisibilized groups as the experts on our own lived experiences, our resilience, and our fights for justice. Sign up for our email list to get our stories in your inbox, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

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Oh, you GQP. How you manage to screw up basic facts. That’s okay. On this one, I’m giving you a pass.

The Federalist led their coverage today with this blaring headline: “Cancel Your Disney Vacation And Go To Dollywood Instead.” What are they talking about? Why, Disney is that woke company that they want to punish because of all their pro-LGBTQ support, and they have had enough of it. 

From the author of that piece:

“It’s not just the recent visibility of the longstanding fact that Disney’s post-Walt corporate leadership works to undermine sexual wholeness, but also about the greedy commercialization of the Disney brand.”

Ok, there, so you are boycotting Disney by going to Dollywood because of Disney’s overly liberal values? Ooh boy. Do I have a surprise in store for you. 

Do they remember when Dolly stood up against marriage bans for LGBTQ Americans?

Parton is a longtime ally of the LGBT community, with many considering her a gay icon. She supported same-sex marriage in the United States as early as 2009. She has advocated for trans people regarding North Carolina’s bathroom bill. Not to mention, she has often dedicated her smash hit “Jolene” to the drag queens who dress like her at her concerts.  

Do they recall how she supported feminist icons and pushed back against conservative ideas, going on CNN to talk about the bathroom bans being bad legislation?

Did they forget her contributing an Oscar-nominated hit song to Transamerica?

Or maybe they were not aware of Dolly Parton’s plan to provide the employees of Dollywood a no-expense college education.

Vivian Topping, director of advocacy and civic engagement at the Equality Federation, and Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights

Just wanted to let you know, kind folks at The Federalist, that if you want to punish Disney, this is a silly way to do it. I trust Dolly Parton to use your money for good causes, though, so go ahead! Travel to Dollywood. In that, I am agreed.

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There is nothing that can match hearing jazz performed live, in a club; I say that as a longtime collector of recorded music, a jazz radio listener, and a former DJ. I’m not talking about concert venues, where you sit in your seat and applaud politely (or enthusiastically) after each set—though they too have their place in history, as do the big outdoor “jazz festivals.”

Like so many businesses, the COVID-19 pandemic put a serious crimp in attendance at jazz clubs across the country and sadly, some longtime venues have had to close. April is Jazz Appreciation Month in the U.S, and when pondering this installment of Black Music Sunday, I got to thinking about the venues where I’ve done a lot of appreciating jazz myself: the jazz clubs of New York City. The city of my birth was where I first got to experience live jazz, and plays a major role in that history, so it’s our focus this week. But fear not: In Sundays to come, you can expect visits to other cities and their jazz scenes.

The name that inevitably pops up in any conversation about New York’s jazz clubs is the iconic Cotton Club. It’s a venue that featured a who’s who of the jazz elite during the Harlem Renaissance, including Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Fats Waller, Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, Bessie Smith, The Mills Brothers, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Adelaide Hall, and tap dancers like the Nicholas Brothers.  And yet the other side of the Cotton Club’s history points to an underbelly of racism and segregation which is often unacknowledged, brushed over, or overshadowed by the luster, fame, and talent of the Black stars who performed there. 

This compilation offers an aural glimpse of what live music sounded like in the Cotton Club back then … though I certainly cringed when I heard Duke Ellington introduced as “the greatest living master of jungle music.”

You can find the track list from Jazz Essential here.

The Cotton Club opened in December 1923, after prominent British bootlegger Owney Madden took over the club from boxer Jack Johnson, who opened the space as Club DeLuxe in 1920.

Jazz and classical music streamer service Vialma has more:

[Madden] had his eyes set on using the club to bring the thriving Harlem music scene to a whites-only audience. This experience would be accompanied by ‘Madden’s Number One’ booze, a luxury to the Prohibition-struck upper-class white population of New York.

Upon taking over, Owney set about swiftly rebranding the Club DeLuxe, which included increasing its capacity from 400 to 700 and installing an entirely new décor built around the exotic plantations and jungles which purportedly reflected the origins of the black population of the Harlem neighbourhood of New York. The staff were hired and dressed to serve this offensively inaccurate aesthetic, with a dark-skinned waiting team in smart red tuxedos and a young, light-skinned troupe of tall dancers in skimpy showstopping attires. His final stroke before the club opened was to rename it the Cotton Club after the light brown colouring of raw cotton.

Langston Hughes was a “rare” Black patron allowed into the club. As the African American Registry notes, he made it clear in his autobiography, The Big Sea, that he was not a fan.

Following his visit, Hughes criticized the club’s segregated atmosphere and commented that it was “a Jim Crow club for gangsters and monied whites”. In addition to the “jungle music” and plantation-themed interior, Hughes believed that Madden’s idea of “authentic black entertainment” was similar to the entertainment provided at a zoo and that white “strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers – like amusing animals in a zoo.”  Hughes also believed that the Cotton Club negatively affected the Harlem community. The club brought an “influx of whites toward Harlem after sundown, flooding the little cabarets and bars where formerly only colored people laughed and sang.” Hughes also mentioned how many of the neighboring cabarets, especially black cabarets, were forced to close due to the competition from the Cotton Club. These smaller clubs did not have a large floor or music by famous entertainers like Ellington.  

Additionally, Hughes wrote, Black folks in Harlem “did not like the Cotton Club.”

[N]ow the strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers–like amusing animals in a zoo.

The Negroes said: “We can’t go downtown and sit and stare at you in your clubs. You won’t even let us in your clubs.” But they didn’t say it out loud–for Negroes are practically never rude to white people. So thousands of whites came to Harlem night after night, thinking the Negroes loved to have them there, and firmly believing that all Harlemites left their houses at sundown to sing and dance in cabarets, because most of the whites saw nothing but the cabarets, not the houses.”

Hughes also noted that some Black-owned clubs made the “grievous error” of emulating the Cotton Club’s segregation policies—to their own peril.

Claudia Roth Pierpont, writing about Duke Ellington for The New Yorker in 2010, minced no words.

More than half a century after the Civil War, the most famous night club in New York was a mock plantation. The bandstand was done up as a white-columned mansion, the backdrop painted with cotton bushes and slave quarters. And the racial fantasy extended well beyond décor: whites who came to Harlem to be entertained were not to be discomfited by the presence of non-entertaining Negroes. All the performers were black—or, in the case of the chorus girls, café au lait—and all the patrons white, if not by force of law then by force of the thugs at the door. Ellington had to ask permission for friends to see his show. Ironically, it was the Cotton Club that allowed Ellington to expand his talents, by employing him to arrange and compose for a variety of dancers, singers, miscellaneous acts, entr’actes, and theatrical revues.

These two film clips—which I believe to be from a season four episode of American Experience titled “Duke Ellington: Reminiscing in Tempo”—set the scene at the Cotton Club when Duke Ellington’s band was hired.

Kareem Abdul- Jabbar also took a scathing look at the Cotton Club’s history in his book, On the Shoulder of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance, cited here in an NPR review.

The Cotton Club was part of a bizarre tradition in Harlem that included other fancy clubs such as Connie’s Inn and Small’s Paradise. These clubs, though operating in the heart of black Harlem, catered exclusively to white customers. Yet, in their shows and decor they still promoted an idealized but wholly inaccurate black lifestyle similar to those in minstrel shows. Menacing bouncers were stationed at the doors to make sure no black faces were admitted to the establishments, located on the same blocks where these black men and women lived. Eleven such segregated clubs were listed in Variety, but the most famous and popular of the group was the Cotton Club, the largest, fanciest, highest-priced, which featured the most extravagant shows.

[…]

Duke Ellington and his orchestra were the house band from 1927 to 1931, and again in 1933. Between 1931 and 1933, Cab Calloway took over as bandleader. 

Other Harlem clubs trying to compete with the Cotton Club were sometimes met with violence. The Plantation Club tried to imitate the Cotton Club’s style and venue by hiring Cab Calloway and his orchestra away from the Cotton Club. Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher” routine was famous and a big attraction. Cotton Club owner Madden was not pleased, so he sent a few of his men over to the Plantation Club to break up the place. They destroyed tables and chairs, shattered glasses, and dragged the bar out to the curb. Calloway returned to the Cotton Club.

Here’s that famous Calloway routine:

The BBC’s 1985 documentary, The Cotton Club Remembered, doesn’t focus on the racial segregation at the club, though at one point, the Nicholas Brothers disagree with Cab Calloway about whether Black customers were allowed.

The Cotton Club, of course, was far from the only club in Harlem.

Things were very different at the Savoy Ballroom, which was integrated.

If I could take a time machine back to Harlem, I’d be at the Savoy, not the Cotton Club—even if it weren’t segregated.

Harlem offered many more places to go—just take a look at this 1932 nightclub map of Harlem (see a larger version at the Library of Congress).

Please Join me in the comments section below for even more music from the Harlem Renaissance period, and feel free to post your favorites from the era.

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We begin today with Sabrina Tavernise of The New York Times writing about the shattering of the illusions about a country that she loves.

I lived in Russia for nine years, and began covering it for The New York Times in 2000, the year Mr. Putin was first elected. I spent lots of time telling people — in public writing and in my private life — that Russia might sometimes look bad, but that it had a lot of wonderful qualities, too.

But in the weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine, I have felt like I am watching someone I love lose their mind. Many of the Russian liberals who had turned to “small acts” are feeling a sense of shock and horror, too, said Alexandra Arkhipova, a Russian anthropologist.

“I see lots of posts and conversations saying these small deeds, it was a big mistake,” she said. “People have a metaphor. They say, ‘We were trying to make some cosmetic changes to our faces, when the cancer was growing and growing in our stomachs.”

I began to wonder whether Russia was always going to end up here, and we just failed to see it. So I called Yevgeniya Albats, a Russian journalist who had warned of the dangers of a K.G.B. resurgence as early as the 1990s. Ms. Albats kept staring into the glare of the idea that at certain points in history, everything is at stake in political thought and action. She had long argued that any bargain with Mr. Putin was an illusion.

Those “small acts” that Ms. Tavernise refers to are Russian liberals that decided to drop away from electoral politics after the failure of the 2012 protests against Putin and turned, instead to working with and for “nonprofits and local governments.”

Anton Troianovski, also of The New York Times, writes about the ever-deepening culture of person-to-person surveillance within Russia.

With President Vladimir V. Putin’s direct encouragement, Russians who support the war against Ukraine are starting to turn on the enemy within.

The episodes are not yet a mass phenomenon, but they illustrate the building paranoia and polarization in Russian society. Citizens are denouncing one another in an eerie echo of Stalin’s terror, spurred on by vicious official rhetoric from the state and enabled by far-reaching new laws that criminalize dissent.

There are reports of students turning in teachers and people telling on their neighbors and even the diners at the next table. In a mall in western Moscow, it was the “no to war” text displayed in a computer repair store and reported by a passer-by that got the store’s owner, Marat Grachev, detained by the police. In St. Petersburg, a local news outlet documented the furor over suspected pro-Western sympathies at the public library; it erupted after a library official mistook the image of a Soviet scholar on a poster for that of Mark Twain.

Oh, that sounds familiar.

David Masciotra of the Daily Beast laments the lack of national coverage of the trial of the Wolverine Watchmen who threatened to kidnap, rape, and assassinate Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

The contemporary landscape features Donald Trump’s Jonestown-like personality cult, brazenly white nationalist Republican members of Congress, and right-wing pundits, like Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, who sound like street-corner skinheads. As a consequence, it is hardly a surprise that threats of violence against public officials have become alarmingly routine.

In only a small sampling of districts, Reuters found 220 examples of death threats against school board members. Similarly, the Brennan Center for Justice reports that one in six election officials have received direct threats against themselves and their families since November 2020. Hopped up on their own “stop the steal” supply, right-wing activists have become vicious and devoted to the point that USA Today reports political intimidation might “jeopardize the 2022 midterms,” due to widespread resignation of election officials.[…]

Threats of violence against Whitmer did not begin with the unsuccessful plot, but with the storming of Michigan’s capitol building in Lansing in April of 2020. President Trump instructed lunatic supporters to “liberate Michigan,” and on cue, they obeyed his order—carrying firearms into the rotunda, surrounding police officers, and shouting for the deaths of Whitmer and other state officials in “protest” at COVID-19 restrictions against businesses. The same Wolverine Watchmen who would later discuss plans to assassinate Whitmer participated in the siege.

Susan J. Demas of Michigan Advance wonders how many LGBTQ children will have their lives destroyed by the Republicans.

While many stuffy legal scholars and political analysts sniffed that liberals were ridiculous to suggest that Obergefell would be overturned after former President Trump reshaped the court, it’s now almost a foregone conclusion. After all, the court has signaled its eagerness to wipe away 50 years of precedent on abortion rights with Roe v. Wade. And many Republicans, including all three Michigan attorney general candidates, are comfortable dumping the landmark Griswold v. Connecticut decision legalizing birth control.

But Republicans aren’t waiting for the Supreme Court to commence the great rollback on LGBTQ+ rights. One of their key 2022 election themes is using gay and trans kids as punching bags.

That includes Republicans like Michigan GOP Co-Chair Meshawn Maddock spreading bizarre memes falsely claiming schools are offering litter boxes to kids who “identify as cats.” That isn’t a thing, despite what your cranky uncle posted on Facebook, but it is a great way to stigmatize trans students.[…]

It’s almost as though the far-right is trying to redefine what it means to be a bad parent. You might think someone doing everything they can to ensure their children (and others) contract COVID makes them a poor candidate for being Mom of the Year. But Republicans are countering that really, the worst thing a parent can do is just have an LGBTQ+ kid.

Michelle L. Norris of The Washington Post grounds incoming Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation to the Supreme Court in a centuries-long history that Republicans would rather not be taught in schools.

Jackson was born in 1970, when the victories of the civil rights movement were beginning to manifest themselves in housing, employment, sports, education and entertainment. But racial divisions remained stark after decades of legally sanctioned segregation that followed 250 years of legal enslavement of Blacks.

Because neither the passage of laws nor the dismantling of racial codes erased the deeply ingrained narrative of racial inferiority. America had long been invested in the separation of races and, to be more specific, the automatic privilege that comes with White skin. The vestiges of slavery and segregation are still with us, and yet we find ourselves in a time when the party that so viciously opposed Jackson’s nomination wants to eviscerate the teachings and discussions of our nation’s racial history and focus instead on the progress America has made.

They argue that we should not dwell on all that old-timey stuff like chains and shackles, dogs and hoses, or white hoods and black bodies swinging from trees. Well, to understand and fully appreciate the progress we’ve made, you need more than a passing understanding of the dark places Americans dwelled within the sanction of law to keep bodies in bondage, to keep people oppressed, to keep human beings in a subjugated state that mocks the core tenets of our Constitution.

Monica L. Wang writes for the Boston Globe that investments in behavioral research are essential for public health.

Human behavior, such as the choice not to vaccinate (or worse, actively propagate misinformation designed to stoke unsubstantiated fear), is central to the nation’s most prevalent, obstinate conditions, including heart disease and obesity. To successfully improve health outcomes, reduce costly chronic disease management, and prevent infectious disease outbreaks, it is imperative to understand the link between what drives health behavior (our thoughts) and what catalyzes behavior change (our choices). And understanding the science of human behavior means investing in it. Unfortunately, social and behavioral health scientists remain the minuscule minority in the pool of externally funded scientific investigators.

Federal funding of social and behavioral science is about $2 billion, with the Department of Health and Human Services (primarily NIH) providing the lion’s share of investment. To put that number in context, the total research budget of NIH is over $40 billion. Widening the aperture to include investments in prevention and public health (of which behavioral research closely aligns), we find that the funding allocation is actually declining. In the two decades preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, preventive care spending by the government as a share of total national health expenditures dipped below 3 percent.

This should be deeply concerning to the public.

First, all roads of medical research inevitably require some form of behavior change on the part of individuals. From the life-saving to the banal, medical interventions require people to actually engage in choices or changes. This might mean making dietary changes, scheduling an appointment for a cancer screening, swapping out smoking for a nicotine patch, taking medication as directed, or opting to vaccinate. Short of widespread strategies such as adding fluoride to drinking water or mandating seatbelt use (which, notably, still requires human adherence), improving public health means that decision-makers in government and health care need to understand and apply the science of how to shift behavior at the population level.

Marc C. Johnson writes for Idaho’s Lewiston Tribune that disinformation has become the hallmark of this era.

Russian television, a veritable Fox News of lies and distortion and totally controlled by Putin, dishes a daily misinformation diet to people who have been lied to for so long that many have given up trying to ascertain the truth. While it would be foolish to put much faith in public opinion polling emanating from a country so thoroughly brainwashed, it appears most Russians, without ready access to independent reporting about the war, believe the lies pushed by the former KGB agent who is responsible for this madness.

Here’s how this disinformation reality connects to domestic politics, and the clear and present danger it presents to American democracy. For a decade or more, the politics of the United States have been swamped by a deluge of lies with much of the lying amplified by people in high places and by cynical and manipulative media figures. […]

The purpose of all this lying is, of course, to fuel grievance — make people mad — but also to confuse. Is there really a world-wide child sex abuse network, as QAnon has claimed? Did presidential election ballots disappear in Michigan? Was COVID-19 a Chinese communist plot?[…]

The disinformation — the lies — have become so prevalent that it is nearly impossible to keep track, and that is another aspect of what one-time Donald Trump “strategist” Steve Bannon infamously called “flooding the zone with s#@t.”

Mr. Johnson’s editorial is good from beginning to end.

Fact: The only politician more popular in Ukraine than Boris Johnson is Volodymyr Zelensky.

Part of the reason is that Britain trained much of the Ukrainian army even prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Elisa Braun and Maïa de La Baume of POLITICO Europe explain that part of the reason for the tightening polls in today’s French elections is that French President Emmanuel Macron spent too much time… being president and not enough time campaigning..

Observers say the president is in trouble because he’s pursued a strategy that has cast him too much as an above-the-fray father of the nation and global crisis manager — trying to mediate in the war in Ukraine, for example, rather than engage in the rough and tumble of a traditional campaign, when French voters want to hear directly from the candidates.

“In a way, the war suited him perfectly at first: We were going to have something in a form of non-campaign, with a president who had to show himself as supervising everything, as a protective father,” said Raphaël Llorca, a communications expert and author of a book entitled “The Macron Brand.”

“But the big mistake was to consider that this momentum would last until April,” Llorca said.[…]

By contrast, many experts say, Le Pen is coming across as a skilled communicator, who campaigned relentlessly in France’s heartlands and focused on everyday issues, above all the rising cost of living. “Le Pen did a proximity campaign, visiting a lot of small towns and villages,” said Mathieu Gallard, research director at polling firm Ipsos. “Her trips were not very much covered by the national press but had a big echo in local media.”

“She gave an impression of proximity, which is very important for French voters,” Gallard said.

Finally today, Secunder Kermani of BBC News explains some of the reasons why Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan lost a no-confidence vote in Pakistan’s Parliament yesterday.

Mr Khan has insisted his focus is on improving governance, and he has made some impressive expansions to the social welfare system, introducing a health insurance scheme in large parts of the country, for example.

However, in other areas he has faltered. His decision to appoint an inexperienced and underqualified political newcomer to a key position, chief minister of Punjab, the country’s most populous province, was widely ridiculed.

At a loss to explain why Mr Khan refused to replace his appointee, Usman Buzdar, despite overwhelming criticism, rumours spread that the prime minister’s wife, a spiritual guide of sorts, had warned him Mr Buzdar was a good omen and – if he were to be sacked – his entire government would collapse.

There were other challenges, too. The cost of living in Pakistan has been rocketing up, with sharp rises in food prices and the rupee falling against the dollar.

Imran Khan’s supporters blame global conditions, but public resentment against him has been rising. “The Sharifs might’ve filled themselves up, but at least they got work done,” has become a common grumble.

Everyone have a great day!