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CBS News reports that advocates for refugees evacuated from Afghanistan this past summer as part of Operation Allies Rescue have urged the Biden administration to waive immigration-related fees. Many families arrived to the U.S. with just the clothes on their backs, much less with money in their pockets for work permits and green card applications.

But good news came for them on Monday, when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced it would be waiving U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) fees for thousands of refugees who arrived after July 30. “These actions will help facilitate their resettlement in the U.S. by streamlining the processing of requests for work authorization, Green Cards, and associated services.” Advocates applauded the move.

“Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, one of nine national refugee resettlement agencies, welcomed Monday’s announcement, saying many of the Afghan families her group serves face financial insecurity and are eager to find jobs,” CBS News reported. Work permit and associated fees top nearly $500; green card paperwork more than doubles that amount.

“Today’s announcement provides some much-needed financial relief to our newest Afghan neighbors,” O’Mara Vignarajah wrote in a Twitter thread. “Most of the families we’re serving have no nest egg to draw from, and every expense is a source of stress and anxiety. Removing this financial burden will go a long way in leveling the playing field and setting up these newcomers for success. We are especially grateful to the Biden administration for streamlined processing of work authorization.”

DHS Sec. Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement that by waiving USCIS fees, “we will open doors of opportunity for our Afghan allies and help them begin to rebuild their lives in communities across our country more quickly. These actions demonstrate our ongoing commitment to Afghan nationals who provided valuable assistance to the United States over the past two decades as well as other Afghans at risk.”

CBS News reports that the vast majority of Afghan evacuees, 50,000, continue to be housed at several military bases across the U.S. 14,000 have left these bases for resettlement throughout the country. Among those resettled have been four children orphaned when their mother was killed amid the withdrawal, CBS Evening News said. They are now in Texas with a cousin. “Another 2,000 Afghan evacuees remain at bases in the Middle East and Europe, where U.S. officials have been conducting security screenings and background checks, according to DHS statistics,” CBS News continued.

In a move attempting to lessen the burdens facing agencies working to resettle families within the U.S., the administration late last month announced an initiative that would allow small groups of vetted individuals to form “sponsor circles,” which will be responsible for securing housing and financial support for Afghans. The Sponsor Circle Program mirrors efforts in Canada. That move was similarly applauded by advocates, including O’Mara Vignarajah.

Other recent efforts have also included a campaign urging Americans to donate spare airline miles to refugees leaving U.S. bases. In a release received by Daily Kos, Miles4Migrants and partner Welcome.US said they’re seeking to secure 450 million miles, “needed to provide every evacuee with a flight to their new home.” Thousands of flights have already been secured.

When it comes to applying for necessary documents to help secure their new lives here, O’Mara Vignarajah said in her thread that LIRS clients “have expressed their frustration with the bureaucratic inefficiency that has prevented them from accessing the dignity of a job and the financial security that comes with it. This policy decision is an economic win-win; we can get these families on the road to self-sufficiency, and we can unleash their potential for employers desperate for talented workers amid a labor shortage.”

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As the Kyle Rittenhouse trial continues, the only protester shot by Rittenhouse to survive testified on Monday. Gaige Grosskreutz, a volunteer medic and protestor who was the third and final man shot by Rittenhouse in the summer of 2020, recalled the events that led up to the shooting during Rittenhouse’s murder trial, the Associated Press reported.

Defense attorneys attempted to use Grosskreutz’s testimony to justify their claim that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense because Grosskreutz admitted that he pointed his own gun at Rittenhouse prior to being shot. Rittenhouse stands on trial for killing two men and wounding Grosskreutz.

“I thought the defendant was an active shooter,” 27-year-old Grosskreutz said. When asked what was going through his mind during the incident he said, “That I was going to die.” Grosskreutz was shot in the arm, which resulted in tearing away much of his bicep. Witnesses described it as being “vaporized.”

While the prosecution depicted Rittenhouse as the coldhearted racist killer he is, defense lawyers have been arguing the case of self-defense. Defense attorney Corey Chirafisi attempted to make it seem like Rittenhouse was in danger and acted upon that during the cross-examination. According to Reuters, he asked: “When you were standing 3 to 5 feet from him with your arms up in the air, he never fired, right?”

“Correct,” Grosskreutz responded.

“It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him, with your gun, now your hands down pointed at him, that he fired, right?” Chirafisi continued.

“Correct,” Grosskreutz said. A photo depicting Grosskreutz pointing a gun at Rittenhouse was also shown.

According to Wisconsin’s self-defense law, deadly force is permissible only if “necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm.” Defense attorneys are banking on this law.

However, Grosskreutz did not shoot first, although he “closed in” on Rittenhouse.

“That’s not the kind of person that I am. That’s not why I was out there,” Grozzkreutz said when asked why he didn’t shoot at Rittenhouse. “It’s not who I am. And definitely not somebody I would want to become.” He added that he did not mean to point his gun in the direction of Rittenhouse.

Grosskreutz attended the protest to serve as a medic. He wore a hat that said “paramedic” and carried medical supplies, in addition to a loaded pistol.

“I believe in the Second Amendment. I’m for people’s right to carry and bear arms,” he said, explaining why he was armed. “And that night was no different than any other day. It’s keys, phone, wallet, gun.”

According to Grosskreutz’s testimony, he didn’t act until after seeing Rittenhouse kill a man just feet away. While he was holding his pistol his hands were in the air. Video evidence and a criminal complaint filed days after the shootings last year confirm this.

“At that moment I felt that I had to do something to try and prevent myself from being killed or shot,” Grosskreutz said.

Chirafisi not only attempted to portray Grosskreutz as threatening to Rittenhouse but brought up his lawsuit against the city of Kenosha.

“If Mr. Rittenhouse is convicted, your chance of getting 10 million bucks is better, right?” Chirafisi said.

Grosskreutz’s testimony is pivotal as the trial enters its second week. Multiple witnesses provided testimony that seemed to support the teen’s claim of self-defense last week, Reuters reported. If convicted, Rittenhouse faces life in prison. He has pleaded not guilty and is looking to take the stand under self-defense.

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In the middle of October, right-wing radio host Dennis Prager told his audience that he had contracted COVID-19. He told his audience that he had purposely “engaged with strangers, constantly hugging them, taking photos with them knowing that I was making myself very susceptible to getting COVID. Which is, indeed, as bizarre as it sounded, what I wanted, in the hope I would achieve natural immunity and be taken care of by therapeutics. That is exactly what has happened.” It was a special kind of madness that only Prager could generate.

Prager, like all ultra right-wingers, has been on the bleeding edge of profound misinformation, promoting an anti-flatten-the-coronavirus-curve model of living over during the pandemic. This is the same Prager who told women during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings to just get over sexual harassment and assault. On Monday, video of Prager being interviewed on the Chris Salcedo show, ostensibly to carry oil for his billionaire fracking backers, drew what can only be called one of the most offensive comparisons concerning unvaccinated Americans and the LGBTQ community during the HIV/AIDS crises in the 1980s and 1990s. 

Prager began by reversing reality, explaining that Democratic policies and a culture of climate change fear have led to middle class and lower class folks not being able to afford energy costs. To unwrap this 100% fabricated line of thinking is to leave the real world we all live in. Needless to say, Prager’s basic tapestry is one of fearmongering by liberal elites, making everyone afraid of fossil fuels and big fossil fuel company monopolies. It is the same as Trump, the same as most Republican officials these days: all projections of GOP fearmongering about Big Bird and critical race theory and Dr. Seuss, etc. 

However, Prager wants to connect the fossil fuel energy—the one that recently brought you a wintertime disaster in Texas—to public health measures during the time of COVID-19. Transitioning by calling climate change an “irrational fear” and saying that if our democracy “survived” the current onslaught against it by … Democrats (surprise twist!), historians would ask themselves, “How did people get governed by irrational fears?”

DENNIS PRAGER: Whether it is of the nonvaccinated who are the pariahs of America—as I have not seen it in my lifetime, any pariah group like this. During the AIDS crisis, can you imagine if gay men and intravenous drug users, who were the vast majority of people with AIDS, had they been pariahs the way the nonvaccinated are? But it would’ve been inconceivable. And should have been inconceivable!

The only true thing he says in those few lines is that it “should have been inconceivable.” Every other single thing he says in revising the history of the AIDS crisis under then-president Ronald Reagan is a lie. It is not an opinion. It is factually incorrect.

Ronald Reagan deliberately chose to ignore the rising public health crisis, which he was aware of, along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during his first year in office. His administration joked that it was the “gay plague” in its first White House press briefing. Reagan would not even acknowledge AIDS publicly until 1987, after nearly 41,000 Americans had died from the virus. Reagan was a piece of shit for many reasons, not the least of which was his deadly homophobic policy—or lack thereof—on the AIDS crisis in America.

Remember 14-year-old Ryan White, who likely contracted the AIDS virus through a blood transfusion and then had to fight as some parents and some teachers fought to keep him from being able to attend school in Kokomo, Indiana? He wasn’t even gay. He just had a virus that could only be transmitted through blood, and the same people who refuse to wear masks during a respiratory virus today treated him like a pariah. White’s fight for normalcy in his life put a “face” on the AIDS virus that Americans, because of homophobia and the stigmatization of drugs, had not been able to reconcile. Ryan died at the age of 18 in the spring of 1990.

Meanwhile, we can get in the wayback machine and travel to 2008, when Prager wrote a column for Townhall. On Nov. 25 of that year, probably just in time for Thanksgiving, Prager wrote this: “Even the natural sciences are increasingly subject to being rendered a means to a ‘progressive’ end. There was the pseudo-threat of heterosexual AIDS in America — science manipulated in order to de-stigmatize AIDS as primarily a gay man’s disease and to increase funding for AIDS research.” William F. Buckley Jr., a man who Prager likely had pictures of in his locker and above his bed, wrote this* in March of 1986 in The New York Times:

Everyone detected with AIDS should be tatooed [sic] in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.

The Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, and Johnathan Demme Academy Award-winning film Philadelphia was literally the story of a real-life civil rights lawsuit about discrimination because of HIV and AIDS in the workplace.

Salcedo’s show is a perfect place for this kind of multiverse reading of a bizarro world history where gay men were treated like human beings during the first decades of the AIDS epidemic. His platform is the same one that has brought on former Fox News personalities to argue that Fox News brass should be jailed because they didn’t follow through with the big lie that the election was stolen from Donald Trump by massive voter fraud.

Part of what makes people like Prager dangerous is not that they are simply hateful ignoramuses. It is that people like Prager are bankrolled by hateful billionaires, allowing their drivel to be marketed up and out into the American public, with a patina of legitimacy that is meant to confuse issues and seed general right-wing propaganda. PragerU is Prager’s pretend university that is funded by fracking magnates Dan and Farris Wilks. Through Prager, they promote fossil fuel interests and whatever other alternate reality takes on the material world.

PragerU, a nonprofit, has reportedly been pushing itself into public schools by way of misinforming videos for years.

Five-minute videos are PragerU’s bread and butter. With over 4.8 billion total views, the videos often go viral and have titles like “Just Say ‘Merry Christmas’” and “The Myth of Voter Suppression.” “It’s slick, it’s cute, it has amazing graphics, and their narrators are diverse,” said Ashley Woodson, the head of Freedom School, an educational program for the Abolitionist Teaching Network.

…

Last fall, PragerU began its first massive initiative to concertedly push its content into schools. Known as “PREP,” the educational program already has over 6,000 educators and parents signed up. An annual donation of $25 gives users access to the program’s materials and a private Facebook group with over 1,400 members. Its website says that the media nonprofit launched the program “to give [educators and parents] the resources, support, and tools to teach their children about America’s blessings and limitless opportunities.”

Actor Jeffrey Wright gave a nice summation of Prager and his ilk’s views on the world and what they consider American history, writing:

Stigmatization of dying gays & drug users. When?

Racism. Never existed.

Climate change.

Hogwash.

COVID. Just a flesh wound.

Vaccine. Doesn’t work.

Big Bird. Commie.

White genocide, JFK Jr & The Rapture. Coming soon.

*Buckley was suggesting this solution for a much more communicable virus like, say, COVID-19.

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Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate Sean Parnell testified Monday in a contentious custody battle with his estranged wife, entirely refuting her allegations of abuse against herself and their children.

Parnell, who said he “never” got physical with his wife or their three kids, was not subject to cross-examination and will take the stand again Tuesday.

At the same time, Politico reports that Parnell’s candidacy is on life support and Donald Trump is eagerly trying to revive it. Trump, who endorsed Parnell before the custody battle turned toxic, announced Friday he would hold a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser for Parnell in January.

It’s an obvious effort to shore up a candidacy that is crumbling. Last Friday, Parnell skipped out on a call with donors during which he was expected to field questions about the status of his campaign. As Parnell flounders, some GOP insiders are also questioning his fundraising after he posted a lackluster $1.1 million haul in the third quarter—pretty underwhelming given Trump’s endorsement and how crucial the seat is for Senate Republicans’ takeover prospects next year.

Pennsylvania Republicans have reportedly keyed in on combat vet and hedge fund executive David McCormick to salvage their prospects for keeping the open seat in GOP hands. McCormick hasn’t indicated whether he will run yet, but he would bring to the table business experience, a Bronze Star, a Ph.D. from Princeton, and experience serving as a Treasury official in George W. Bush’s administration.

In the meantime, Parnell’s ugly custody battle is dominating the headlines, and Senate Republicans are bringing their special brand of spinelessness to the discussion. To date, none of them have proven brave enough to even generically denounce abusive behavior as disqualifying. National Republican Senatorial Committee chair Rick Scott spent a Monday appearance on CNN dodging a question about whether Parnell was “still the right candidate” for the job.

“We’ll see who comes out of the primary,” Scott said.

Wow, bold. Of course, denouncing abusive behavior would also call into question the Senate GOP’s Trump/McConnell-endorsed candidate in Georgia, Herschel Walker, who allegedly made a habit of telling his significant others he wanted to “blow” their brains out.  

Senate Republicans are attempting to look neutral while secretly praying Parnell’s candidacy implodes so they can move on. Trump is doing everything possible to save his guy because there’s no one Trump respects more than someone accused of abusing women.

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From the outset of the pandemic, Republicans have seized on anecdotal claims of COVID-killing drugs to either downplay the disease itself or as an excuse to refuse vaccines. Donald Trump was at the front of the line in pushing anti-malaria treatment hydroxychloroquine as a “miracle cure” for COVID-19. As the delta wave took hold, Trump supporters turned to the anti-parasitic ivermectin as their new wonder drug. That’s despite the fact that repeated trials have determined that these treatments are ineffective. Hydroxychloroquine was punted from WHO’s trials after repeated failures to show results. Ivermectin is still involved in some ongoing trials, but it’s not looking good.

However, there are some genuine treatments that are effective in treating COVID-19, one of which has been widely used and pushed by both Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as an excuse to not take the vaccine: monoclonal antibodies. This treatment is available from at least two sources: Regenron, which uses a “cocktail” of two antibodies called casirivimab and imdevimab; and Eli Lilly, which offers bamlanivimab. Both treatments are available under emergency use authorizations from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and both of them have been found to reduce the risk of death by about 70% for patients who take a course of treatment soon after testing positive for COVID-19. However, the cost of these treatment is high, ranging from $1,600 to $2,100 for a course of treatment.

More recently, two new antiviral treatments have completed phase 2/3 testing and are in the process of being made available to the public. These are ritonavir from Pfizer and molnupiravir from Merck. Molnupiravir, which reduced the risk of hospitalization and death by 50%, has now gained approval for its first rollout in Europe. Phase 3 results indicated that ritonavir reduced deaths by 89%. A course of treatment for either drug is expected to cost around $700, but since they are oral treatments that—unlike monoclonal antibodies—don’t require IV administration by a medical professional, they’ll be much cheaper and easier to roll out.

However, there’s another alternative—one that’s already been approved by the FDA, is already in wide use, costs $4 for a course of treatment, and may be better at preventing COVID-19 deaths than all of the above. That alternative is the antidepressant drug fluvoxamine.

The idea that a drug isn’t specifically an antiviral is no reason to discount its worth in fighting against COVID-19 or any other disease. After all, the biggest change in death rates between the first and second wave of COVID-19 came from the widespread use of steroids to control inflammation and make intubation and other forms of breathing assistance more tolerable. 

Hydroxychloroquine first got onto the radar not because of Trump, but because it was one of a group of drugs (disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs) thought to be capable of modifying the communications between cells and the immune system. There were similar anecdotal reports of effectiveness against other diseases, and testing it made sense. What didn’t make sense was Trump standing up to tout the drug as a “miracle” before the data was in—because when that data came in, it showed no positive effect.

In the case of fluvoxamine, it was pulled into COVID-19 studies not because there was thought to be a mechanism by which it would kill the virus, but because it’s one of a group of drugs known as “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.” These drugs recently came to the attention of researchers looking at disease treatment after a 2012 study showed that their actual mechanism of action was by lowering inflammation. Inflammation has a strong association with depression—even if the why of that connection isn’t completely understood. But because SSRIs fight inflammation, fluvoxamine is one of several such drugs that have been tested for effectiveness in fighting the symptoms of COVID-19.

The November 2020 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association contained the results of a small randomized trial conducted by Washington University in St. Louis. The study looked at 152 adults with symptomatic COVID-19, 72 of whom were given placebo rather than fluvoxamine. And the results were good:

Clinical deterioration occurred in 0 of 80 patients in the fluvoxamine group and in 6 of 72 patients in the placebo group.

This was a double-blind, placebo-controlled study—which is about as good as things get on that front. However, the authors acknowledge that “the study is limited by a small sample size and short follow-up duration, and determination of clinical efficacy would require larger randomized trials with more definitive outcome measures.” Because of the date of the trial, none of those involved was vaccinated, and none had been exposed to the delta variant. Washington University began a more extensive trial targeting 1,100 patients last December as part of the broader STOP COVID2 effort.

Fortunately, there already is a larger study. Because another study was recently published in the British medical journal Lancet. 

That study was also a placebo-controlled, randomized trial. But this one involved 1,497 patients in Brazil, 741 patients of whom got fluvoxamine and and 756 who received a placebo. The Brazil study also helped to address the other issue mentioned by the St. Louis researchers in that they extended the length of the study to 28 days after the drug (or placebo) was first administered.

Interpretation of the results from the trial were a bit more complex than those in the St. Louis group as the patients were all considered to be at high risk for significant complications, all of them were  unvaccinated, and some members began treatment while already experiencing severe symptoms. The term “hospitalized” was also a bit different than in other studies as it included any patient treated for over six hours in an ER or specialized COVID center as well as those admitted with severe symptoms.

But the end results were this: Patients who who received a full 8-10 day course of treatment had a 66% lower rate of hospitalization when compared to placebo. The reduction in deaths among this group was 91%.

Even the study in Brazil still isn’t large enough to determine the real value of fluvoxamine in treating COVID-19. For one thing, a significant portion of the patients didn’t complete the full course (those patients saw about a one-third drop in hospitalizations). Neither the St. Louis nor the Brazil study was sufficient to determine the best time to begin treatment, the best dosage, or long-term consequences. But all of that may be derived when full data from the U.S. and Canadian arms of STOP COVID2 come in.

Fluvoxamine, like other SSRIs, does have potential side effects. It can actually make depression worse, as well as causing unpleasant effects like nausea and sweating. Antidepressants in this class are not addictive, but people who take them for a long period can still suffer from withdrawal when stopping—though that shouldn’t be a problem when taken for only a few days. It’s been around since the 1990s, it’s be prescribed to tens of millions of patients, and the interactions and side effects are generally well understood.

Should the results seen so far hold up, fluvoxamine holds promise not just as a cheap alternative to the antivirals being marketed by Merck and Pfizer, but possibly as the best option to keep a patient in the early stages of COVID-19 infection from dying.

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In a move that deprives Senate Republican leaders of one of their most sought-after recruits, Republican Chris Sununu announced Tuesday that he would seek a fourth two-year term as governor of New Hampshire rather than challenge Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan next year. Speculation immediately swirled that former Sen. Kelly Ayotte, who lost an extremely tight 2016 race to Hassan, would be the Senate GOP’s backup choice, but unnamed sources close to Ayotte soon told WMUR’s John DiStaso that she “​​will NOT be a candidate for any office in 2022.”  

We’re not sure if Ayotte tipped off Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell or NRSC Chair Rick Scott about her reported decision to sit out the race, but according to Sununu, they learned about his plans at the same time as the rest of us: The governor revealed he didn’t give any advance notice to McConnell or Scott, saying, “I guess you’ll have to let them know. I haven’t talked to them.”

They sure know now (with McConnell adviser Josh Holmes responding to the Sununu news by tweeting, “Unbelievable”), and it will be up to Team Red to find a new candidate to take on Hassan. However, while the senator will avoid going up against Sununu—who won reelection 65-33 even as Joe Biden was taking New Hampshire 53-45—she’ll still be a top GOP target in a state that can swing wildly from cycle to cycle. There are plenty of Granite State politicians who may now take a look, including some politicians who may have campaigned for governor if he’d decided to take on Hassan.

The only notable Republican currently running for Senate is retired Army Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc, who got into the race a year ago at a time when Sununu all but froze the party’s field, but he’s unlikely to scare anyone off: Bolduc lost the 2020 primary for the Granite State’s other Senate seat 50-42, and he ended September with a mere $58,000 in the bank.

One person who seems uninterested, though, is Scott Brown, the former Massachusetts senator who moved north to unsuccessfully run for the Senate in 2014. Brown said he was focused on helping his wife, ​​Gail Huff Brown, win the 1st Congressional District, and said of another Senate run, “I don’t think so unless something traumatic happens.” (We have no idea what Brown considers “traumatic” for this race.)

Sununu, for his part, will likely be the clear favorite to win a fourth term as governor. A recent Saint Anselm College poll gave him a 56-42 job approval, which, while considerably smaller than his 64-34 score back in August, still puts him well above water. No notable Democrats have launched a campaign for governor yet, though it’s unlikely Team Blue will give him a free pass, especially if more polls show his numbers in decline.

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Representative Paul Gosar’s tweet of an anime video in which the Arizona Republican is shown killing fellow member Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and swinging swords at President Joe Biden has triggered waves of outrage in Washington and calls from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to investigate the legislator’s conduct.

In a statement Tuesday, Pelosi, a California Democrat, condemned Gosar, saying, “Threats of violence against Members of Congress and the President of the United States must not be tolerated.”

Pelosi also called on Kevin McCarthy, the GOP leader in the House of Representatives, to condemn the “horrific video” publicly and call on the House Ethics Committee, as well as law enforcement, to investigate.

A spokeswoman for McCarthy did not immediately return a request for comment.

Gosar, on the other hand, appeared nonchalant on the matter.

“I will always fight for the rule of law, securing our borders and defending the America First agenda,” Gosar told Reuters. Gosar did not immediately respond to the request for comment by Daily Kos.

The violent animation shared by Gosar has triggered waves of outrage from several Democrats including Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island and Rep. Judy Chu of California.

“This is absolutely sick and certainly meets the threshold for his accounts to be suspended,” Cicilline said in reaction to Gosar’s post.

Cicilline introduced a resolution in the House this May calling for censuring members who would not refer to Jan. 6 as an insurrection and singled out Gosar in particular.

Rep. Judy Chu, a California Democrat, in a statement on Twitter put a finer point on the situation Tuesday.

“I won’t share his disgusting video, but since being in Congress, I have seen two colleagues—Gabby Giffords and Steve Scalise—shot. And I have seen a racist mob come for us all with nooses and knives. Paul Gosar should be ashamed, but lacking that, @GOPLeader [McCarthy] must speak out,” Chu wrote.

It is unlikely that a bid for censure would garner the votes necessary to pass the House given McCarthy’s stranglehold over members of the GOP but the pressure is mounting nonetheless. 

Jennifer Gosar, the Arizona Republican’s sister, appeared on MSNBC to decry her brother’s behavior and demanded Pelosi, McCarthy, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, or even Attorney General Merrick Garland to do something more to address the lawmaker’s conduct.

“Where are these people? Does he need to act on his sociopathic fantasy for Representative [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez? I’m very concerned,” she said.

Ocasio-Cortez lamented Gosar’s behavior late Monday, calling the Republican a “creepy member… who fundraises for Neo-Nazi groups.”

“And he’ll face no consequences because @GOPLeader cheers him on with excuses,” the New York Democrat tweeted Monday. “Fun Monday! Well, back to work because institutions don’t protect woc [women of color].”

Last July, Ocasio-Cortez was accosted by Rep. Ted Yoho of Florida, calling her a “fucking bitch” and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, also verbally attacked the New York Democrat.  

“Remember when she stalked my office the first time with insurrectionists and people locked inside. All at my job and nothing ever happens,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.

She continued and said of Gosar: “This dude is just a collection of wet toothpicks anyway. White Supremacy is for extremely fragile people and sad men like him, whose self-concept relies on the myth that he was born superior because deep down he knows he couldn’t open a pickle jar or read a whole book by himself.”

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As usual, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz apparently doesn’t see racism, understand systemic racism, or (the most likely) chooses to ignore the realities of racism in this country. 

During a White House press conference Monday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was fielding questions about the infrastructure bill when April D. Ryan, a White House correspondent for theGrio, asked:

“And also, can you give us the construct of how you will deconstruct the racism that was built into the roadways,” she asked Buttigieg, referring to an article on theGrio. “Can you talk to us about how that could be deconstructed?

“I’m still surprised that some people were surprised when I pointed to the fact that if a highway was built for the purpose of dividing a white and a black neighborhood, or if an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach — or that would have been — in New York was designed too low for it to pass by, that that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices,” Buttigieg responded.

“I don’t think we have anything to lose by confronting that simple reality,” he added.  “And I think we have everything to gain by acknowledging it and then dealing with it, which is why the Reconnecting Communities — that billion dollars — is something we want to get to work right away putting to work.”

Well, Cruz was surprised. His tighty-whities went into a squeezed bunch because he went right over to Twitter to lodge his Brandon complaint. 

This simpleton boiled all of what Buttigieg—an Oxford grad and Rhodes Scholar who speaks half a dozen languages—said into two imbecilic sentences. 

“The roads are racist. We must get rid of roads.” 

“You see, we Hispanics are very, very tall, and we need rich, woke Dems to raise the bridges for us,” Cruz said in a follow-up tweet. “Without Pete’s condescending help, there’s no way we can get to the beach.”

Senator, the bipartisan infrastructure bill isn’t just about repairing roads and bridges, it also has earmarked $20 billion to fix Black and brown communities bruised and beaten by previous infrastructure projects—think poison-filled pipes in Flint, Michigan, and lack of WiFi and affordable housing. 

“I think that the conversation we’re having now about race, inequality, and infrastructure at this level is new, and to me that’s encouraging,” Eric Avila, an urban cultural historian and professor at UCLA, told PBS.

Perhaps Cruz has conveniently forgotten about the fact that often when highways are built in this country, they tear through communities of color to make way for construction.

Popularly known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 established an interstate highway system in the U.S. that spanned 40,000 miles across the country from east to west. 

According to PBS, in a 2016 speech at the Center for American Progress, then-Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said the first two decades of the federal interstate system displaced 475,000 families and more than 1 million people.

“The interstate highway system did not cause all the problems facing urban communities,” Archer wrote. “However, its construction compounded discrimination and exploitation and triggered a process that weakened urban neighborhoods, from which they have never fully recovered,” New York University law professor Deborah Archer told PBS.

The Reconnecting Communities Act will address the “legacy of highway construction built through communities, especially through low-income communities and communities of color, that divided neighborhoods and erected barriers to mobility and opportunity,” a statement from Sen. Tom Carter reads. Carter is chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. 

The statement adds: “This legislation will support local efforts to reconnect and revitalize areas that were harmed by the construction of the interstate highway system.”

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The 1999 Columbine High School mass shooting posed a challenge for the National Rifle Association (NRA). The nation was not yet accustomed to mass shootings in schools, and the NRA had to decide how to respond to public horror. Now NPR has obtained two and a half hours of recordings of internal NRA deliberations on how to proceed, deliberations that laid the groundwork for how the NRA would respond to every mass shooting since then.

The NRA’s national convention was scheduled for just days after Columbine, and it was close by in Denver. The group’s leaders debated cancelling it, but ultimately went ahead, albeit with a scaled-down event. One exchange quoted by NPR lays out the core of the debate.

NRA official Jim Land: “I got to tell you, we got to think this thing through, because if we tuck tail and run, we’re going to be accepting responsibility for what happened out there.”

PR Consultant Tony Makris: “That’s one very good argument, Jim. On the other side, if you don’t appear to be deferential in honoring the dead, you end up being a tremendous s***head who wouldn’t tuck tail and run, you know? So it’s a double-edged sword.”

The NRA, of course, went with tremendous s***head, and has been doubling down on that position for 22 years.

The recordings make clear that it was the NRA calling the shots. The gun industry was not pressuring the organization one way or the other. In fact, the head of an industry trade group had “said they stand ready to help us orchestrate whatever we want to do. They’re just waiting to know.” Then-Senate Majority Whip Don Nickles, an Oklahoma Republican, wanted the NRA to “secretly provide them with talking points.” It was up to the NRA to decide what direction the gun lobby and the Republican Party would go following a deadly school shooting.

Privately, the NRA’s leaders acknowledged how very bad Columbine looked for the organization, and how bad its annual convention, with the attendant gun show, would look. “Don’t anybody kid yourself about this great macho thing of going down there and showing our chest and showing how damn tough we are … We are in deep s*** on this deal … And so anything we do here is going to be a matter of trying to decide the best of a whole bunch of very, very bad choices,” said one. 

”At that same period where they’re going to be burying these children, we’re going to be having media … trying to run through the exhibit hall, looking at kids fondling firearms, which is going to be a horrible, horrible, horrible juxtaposition,” said another. But the exhibit hall was important to draw in people outside of the NRA’s most committed members, a third person said, because, “If you pull down the exhibit hall, that’s not going to leave anything for the media except the members meeting, and you’re going to have the wackos … with all kinds of crazy resolutions, with all kinds of, of dressing like a bunch of hillbillies and idiots. And, and it’s gonna, it’s gonna be the worst thing you can imagine.”

At that convention, the NRA laid the course it has followed ever since following mass shootings: Attack the media and insist that it’s disrespectful to the people murdered by guns to discuss the role of guns in their murders.

“Why us? Because their story needs a villain. They want us to play the heavy in their drama of packaged grief, to provide riveting programming to run between commercials for cars and cat food,” then-NRA President Charlton Heston said of the media. “The dirty secret of this day and age is that political gain and media ratings all too often bloom on fresh graves.”

And because the NRA was committed to ensuring that there would be lots of fresh graves for decades to come, that message has gotten a regular workout. But back then in 1999, with 13 dead at Columbine, they knew just how bad it looked for them, and how important it was to get the right message to get people to look past the gun lobby’s role in that mass killing.

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A year after the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) ended a surveillance program it used for years to predict where crimes might be committed before they happened, the department is using a similar program. Critics say it’s turning out to be yet another gift-wrapped pile of feces stinking up communities of color. Police Chief Michel Moore cited financial constraints the coronavirus pandemic prompted when he announced the department’s decision to end its predictive policing program, Pred-Pol, last April. He has said a year before the decision to cut Pred-Pol that he disagrees with critics who said the program enables racial profiling. “The manner of how we use data is informed by the evolution of technology,” Moore told the Los Angeles Times in October 2019. “We’re going to smartly use our precious resources.”

The next year, he was announcing the “hard decision” to rethink the strategy, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Problem is Moore, a white man, has his eye on the wrong problem. “Rather than re-evaluating their whole business model, they’re just trying to reframe the value of the product,” Albert Fox Cahn, the founder of the anti-surveillance advocacy group Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told The Guardian. “They’re saying: here’s how you can prevent crime by allocating officers and changing patrols and changing who you engage with. And that’s going to result in the exact same outcomes.”

Public documents included in a recent report by the community organization Stop LAPD Spying explain how Pred-Pol and Operation LASER, which the LAPD used chiefly in its predictive policing program, supported long-existing patterns of racial profiling and overpolicing in Black and brown communities. LASER—which stood for Los Angeles’ Strategic Extraction and Restoration—was launched in 2011 to determine exact locations connected to gun and gang violence, the Los Angeles Times reported. It took police some eight years to realize the program wasn’t accomplishing what it promised, with questions raised about how effective the program was as a data-driven strategy relying on algorithms.

“We discontinued LASER because we want to reassess the data,” Josh Rubenstein, the LAPD’s chief spokesman, told the Times in April of 2019. “It was inconsistent. We’re pulling back.”

A month before that revelation, police were targeting a corner in a Black community that Ermias Asghedom, the late rapper who went by Nipsey Hussle, was working to attract Black-owned investment to. He bought the Marathon Clothing Store at Slauson Avenue and Crenshaw Boulevard in 2017 and was ultimately shot and killed in front of the store on March 31, 2019 allegedly by a former friend of his.

“Unknown to the community was that the intersection of Slauson and Crenshaw had been marked a LASER Anchor Point since at least 2016 and was part of a larger LASER Zone since 2015,” authors of the Stop LAPD Spying report wrote in a summary. “A Palantir mission sheet for the intersection from 2017 shows a single patrol car making 103 stops and 3 arrests in a 7-day timespan. The mission sheet directed police to look for a robbery ‘suspect’ described simply as a 16 to 18 year old Black male ‒ not at all descriptive but apparently enough to justify 103 stops.

“Another mission sheet for the 7 days prior shows 58 stops and 7 arrests, all apparently looking for the same 16 to 18 year old Black male ‘suspect.’”

(And yes, that’s the same Palantir software company that works with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to identify immigrants to be deported through data mining.)

Nipsey was being investigated by LAPD based on officers’ claim that his store was a front for “gang activity,” according to the report. City Attorney Mike Feuer had “harassed Nipsey for years based on a ‘maniacal zeal to expel the Marathon Store from Slauson Plaza,’” authors of the report wrote. “At the same time LAPD was working to criminalize the area and the City Attorney was working to expel Nipsey, mega-developers and real estate speculators with close relationships to LAPD were competing against Nipsey and other local Black investors to acquire land and wealth in the area.”

Stop LAPD Spying listed the commercial real estate firm CIM Group and the investment firm Goldman Sachs as two of those companies. “CIM has long collaborated with police on displacement,” authors of the report wrote. “A CIM Group principal with close ties to LAPD also served as president of the Hollywood Property Owners’ Alliance (HPOA), which manages two BIDs (Business Improvement Districts).

“Since November 2014, HPOA paid for an upgrade to LAPDʼs network of wireless surveillance cameras with monitors in the Hollywood Station. CIM also donated rent to LAPD from 2008 to 2018 for the establishment of a substation and ‘logistical base’ at a CIM-owned shopping mall.”

Goldman Sachs helps LAPD access new technologies and resources “without public scrutiny through the Los Angeles Police Foundation,” and in 2019, the company anonymously donated $250,000 through the foundation to fund a “community policing” program in Harvard Park, which is an Opportunity Zone giving investors tax breaks, Stop LAPD Spying wrote.

The group added:

“CSP sites also have been testing grounds for LAPD surveillance, for example with wireless cameras streaming live video to local cop cars at the Jordan Downs public housing complex. Within days of the Opportunity Zone announcement, Goldman Sachs moved fast to pursue these taxbreaks and claimed it would ‘voluntarily measure the outcomes of its projects’ to ‘align their goals with community priorities.’ So not only would the firm exercise massive power to gentrify neighborhoods, it would also assume the role of measuring and translating the communityʼs priorities.

What is starkly clear from these relationships is that while Black residents of South Central were forced to navigate threats of police violence and banishment, outside investors and developers collaborated with LAPD on displacement, even donating salaries, weapons, surveillance equipment, and real estate for police officers deployed in the communities.”

Just because Pred-Pol and Operation LASER are out doesn’t mean the larger inner workings of the policing and tech partnerships harming people of color have halted. Another initiative simply replaced them, The Guardian reported. It uses the acronym DICFP, which stands for Data Informed Community Focused Policing, and the department wrote last year in a brochure for the program that its mission was “to safeguard the lives and property of the people we serve, to reduce the incidence and fear of crime, and to enhance public safety while working with our diverse communities to improve their quality of life.”

Moore wrote in the brochure that “policing strategies that focus solely on proactive suppression may reduce crime, but often leave neighborhoods feeling over-policed, singled out, and unnerved.” He also contended that the “legitimacy of a police department is dependent on a community’s trust in its police officers.”

In its description of DICFP, the department, however, detailed the same strategies that LASER used, compounding distrust in Black and brown communities. “Martin Luther King Jr Park in south-west LA – which documents show was an anchor point in 2016 and 2018 – was also identified as a neighborhood engagement area in March 2020 because the parking lot next to it was ‘where gang members are loitering,’” Guardian writer Johana Bhuiyan wrote. “A section in one of the documents that asks for a description of the ‘crime trend, activity, or quality of life issues’ describes complaints of ‘tailgating activities with barbecue grills and alcohol’ as well as overnight parking and encampments. In order to prevent future crime, the document notes, police did sweeps of the park, cited vehicles and dispatched additional gang units and patrols.

”Where the document asks the officer to indicate which of the three goals of DICFP the project accomplished, nothing is circled.”

LAPD officials have not replied to The Guardian‘s repeated requests for comment.

Shakeer Rahman, a community organizer with Stop LAPD Spying, told the British news website data-driven software helps automate already prevalent police logic. “That includes targeting poor people, targeting unhoused people, targeting Black, brown and disabled people,” Rahman said. “This is now helping to automate those practices and automate the harm, automate the banishment, automate the displacement that policing has always been responsible for.”

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