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Here’s to hoping Florida is ready for another four years under a lying, conniving, anti-vaxxer, anti-mask governor who soundlessly kicked off his reelection campaign Friday, all while raising millions over the past several months via a political action committee—so very shady. 

Under Florida law, once a person becomes a candidate they must sign a campaign oath and file a financial disclosure within 10 days before beginning to raise money. The money is limited to $3,000 from any single person or entity. Hence Gov. Ron DeSantis’ sexy relationship with a political action committee, which can legally collect unlimited money, as long as it remains disconnected from a campaign. 

At a press conference in Pasco County, Florida, DeSantis officially signed paperwork adding his name to the 2022 ballot, allowing him to start running ads and speaking at campaign rallies. But here’s the rub: By skirting the law and waiting to throw his name in the hat, DeSantis has managed to raise $53 million under his Friends of Ron DeSantis political action committee. 

“We’re not going to be doing really anything in terms of public announcements ‘til after the legislative session, but you know, you got to prepare for these things,’’ DeSantis said when a reporter asked him Monday when he would formally announce his reelection. 

According to the Miami Herald, DeSantis raised donations of $25 or less “while also collecting dozens of five- and six-figure contributions, the majority of which are from out of state.” 

Also, DeSantis has taken advantage of his position in the past year by connecting his press events with his gubernatorial announcements, and then using those announcements to campaign for money. 

From offering signing bonuses to any out-of-state law enforcement members willing to move to Florida to skirt vaccine mandates, to issues on immigration and federal mask mandates, as soon as DeSantis proclaims a position to the legislature and makes a public announcement in a press conference, a fundraising email drops into a donor’s box. 

As the Miami Herald reports, when DeSantis went after public education last week, spewing his vitriol to ban mask and vaccine mandates, $100,000 in contributions rolled into his account from the DeVos family—the wealthy relatives of former President Donald Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, aka the dumbest member of Trump’s Cabinet, hands down. 

According to NBC News, in September, DeSantis’ donors included Ken Griffin, the GOP megadonor and billionaire founder of the Citadel hedge fund. Griffing donated $5 million to DeSantis’ campaign in April, the largest donation he has received this year. In May, DeSantis got $500,000 from WeatherTech founder David MacNeil, $250,000 in March from Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, and $250,000 in February from former Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, who moved to Florida after he lost reelection. 

In September DeSantis used Sean Hannity’s Fox News (or Pravda, as I like to call it) program to deflect from his plans to run for president in 2024 and instead announce his reelection campaign. 

“I’m not considering anything beyond doing my job,’’ Desantis said in response to a question about a possible presidential run.  “We’ve got a lot of stuff going on in Florida,’” DeSantis said. “I’m going to be running for reelection next year.”

Another talented grifter, challenging Republican Florida voters to play a fun game of Three-card Monte. Good luck folks! It’s not as if DeSantis hasn’t had over 60,000 residents die of COVID-19 on his watch while poo-pooing vaccines and masks.

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President Joe Biden this past weekend said he supported financial settlements for asylum-seeking parents and children who were forcibly separated at the southern border by the previous administration and subsequently filed legal action against the federal government, CNN reports. The president in his remarks Saturday, said families “deserve” compensation.

“If in fact, because of the outrageous behavior of the last administration, you coming across the border, whether it was legal or illegal, and you lost your child, you lost your child, is gone, you deserve some kind of compensation no matter what the circumstance,” he said. To be clear, asylum is legal immigration. Families were following the law by asking for relief at the border. But as to what the settlement amounts will be, “I have no idea,” Biden continued. “I have no idea.”

The remarks come just days after the president shot down reports that his administration has been in talks for possible settlements of up to $450,000 for victims of the family separation policy. That number had been initially reported by The Wall Street Journal. “’ $450,000 per person? Is that what you’re saying?’ Mr. Biden said when asked by Fox News reporter Peter Doocy about the payments The New York Times reported last week. “That’s not going to happen.”

Following a swift rebuke from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the White House then clarified the president’s remarks. The civil rights organization filed a class-action lawsuit in 2019 on behalf of separated families and has been in negotiations with the Justice Department. In her remarks Thursday, White House Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden was “perfectly comfortable” with settlements, but didn’t specify an amount. 

“If it saves taxpayer dollars and puts the disastrous history of the previous administration’s use of zero tolerance and family separation behind us, the president is perfectly comfortable with the Department of Justice settling with the individuals and families who are currently in litigation with the U.S. government,” she said. But ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero said the president’s initial remarks (as well as predictable outrage from Republicans) may have hurt settlement talks.

“Shortly after Biden’s comments, lawyers from the Justice Department reached out to lawyers representing the families, including those from the American Civil Liberties Union,” NBC News reported. Romero said in the report that Justice Department officials “communicated on Wednesday evening that the settlement numbers for separated families were higher than where the settlement could land.” The Wall Street Journal said negotiations have continued.

“The president’s comments and congressional pushback certainly appear to have affected negotiations,” Romero said in that report. “It’s not hard to put two and two together.” 

Media Matters said Fox News has been aggressively pushing against settlements, including hosting Stephen Miller, the white supremacist aide who helped implement this very policy in the first place. House Republicans have also introduced legislation seeking to block settlements. Party of family values, or something. As noted before, if Republicans wanted to avoid costly settlements, they should have supported asylum law and demanded the previous president stop his cruelty. But that would have required standing up to him, wouldn’t it?

Like also previously noted, Physicians for Human Rights said in a 2020 report noted that the family separation policy constituted “torture,” concluding that it was a form of enforced disappearance. “Parents who asked U.S. officials about the wellbeing and whereabouts of their children were not given answers for weeks and months at a time,” the report said. “I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye,” one father said after he was falsely accused of being a gang member. He was separated from his four-year-old son for months. 

Calling it a “litany of horrors,” the Atlantic in 2019 called this humanitarian disaster the number one “unthinkable” moment of  the previous president’s administration.” Forcibly yanking children from their parents,” Ashley Fetters wrote, “is of a piece with some of the darkest moments of American history: the internment of Japanese Americans; the forcible separation of American Indian children into special boarding schools; slavery.”

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A conversation has unfolded on social media—and God help us all—it has the audacity to be about the concept of being “woke,” “staying woke,” and all matters “wokeness”-related. This idea of staying woke was created by Black people and until recent years was regarded exclusively in our communities as a word of warning form sister to sister, brother to brother. Keep your head on the swivel. Be on the lookout for racism in disguise, racial profiling in disguise, white supremacist messaging in disguise. Stay vigilant. Stay educated. Stay woke.

Vox magazine writer Aja Romano narrowed down the originating use of the phrase to the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 after police expressed discontentment with Brown walking in the street. Romano wrote that “‘stay woke’ suddenly became the cautionary watchword of Black Lives Matter activists on the streets, used in a chilling and specific context: keeping watch for police brutality and unjust police tactics.”

Then like many a phrase before it, white people caught on to the warning and ruined it. The challenge to stay woke, or to educate yourself on injustices hidden in plain sight—like police brutality—became isolating reminders to some that not only were they uneducated, but uncool and incapable of keeping up with popular lingo, Black lingo. So they have apparently retreated to that warm and cozy place of resenting Black people, America’s favorite scapegoat. 

In a PBS Newshour rant Wednesday, Democratic strategist James Carville blamed election losses— including Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s recent loss to Republican Glenn Youngkin in the Virginia gubernatorial race—on “stupid wokeness.”

“Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey,” Carville said of McAuliffe’s loss and Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy’s close-call victory in New Jersey. “Look at Long Island, look at Buffalo, look at Minneapolis. Even look at Seattle, Wash.” Carville called the activist movement to use a portion of law enforcement budgets to fund social and mental health services “‘defund the police’ lunacy.” He reprimanded school boards acting to rename schools once named after former presidents who owned slaves. “People see that,” Carville said, “and it’s just really (having) a suppressive effect all across the country, and Democrats, some of these people, need to go to a woke detox center or something.

“I mean they’re expressing a language that people just don’t use, and there’s a backlash and a frustration at that.”

The funny thing is I don’t disagree with Carville’s observation, but I part ways with him on what we should do about that observation. Although relying on coded language, Carville shared a certain truth about a portion of white Democrats. Black people are expressing a language that white people don’t use, and there’s a backlash and a frustration with that.

After decades of ignoring racism, downplaying it with phrases like “pulling the race card” and rendering it practically nonexistent in mainstream news media, George Floyd’s violent death at the hands of a white Minneapolis cop forced a national conversation about racism in America. White people had to sit with it as they had their morning coffee. They had to have conversations with their children about it, some for the first time, and now these same white people are sick of it because they have the luxury of being sick of it. They can turn off their cellphones and television screens and not have to encounter racism anymore. Black people cannot. 

Reecie Colbert, a political commentator and founder of the social media haven Black Women Views Media, pointed out in a soul-affirming and profanity-laced video that McAuliffe didn’t run on defunding police or renaming schools. “This is gaslighting, and you know I have to say that whether it’s Republicans or Democrats, y’all know how to talk in your code speak,” she said. “So wokeness is a euphemism for Blackness, is what you’re trying to say.”

She added: “What you’re saying is recognizing racism and offering prescriptions against white supremacy is creating a backlash, and well, that would actually be somewhat accurate, but guess what? You don’t have a motherf—ing choice but to do it because you’re not going to keep the base of the Democratic party, which is Black people and people of color, by siding with the racists, with the white supremacists.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones ”warned journalists on Twitter Sunday not to engage. “Say what you mean, and more importantly, make the people you are interviewing say EXACTLY WHAT THEY MEAN. Do your jobs,” in a tweet.

Hannah-Jones has been targeted by Republicans for her “1619 Project” in The New York Times Magazine and her correct assertion in the piece that slavery has had an undeniable effect on American society. Her advice to journalists came after CNN State of the Union co-anchor Dana Bash asked Democratic Sen. Mark Warner on Sunday: “Are Democrats too woke, senator?”

Thankfully he didn’t answer that question, but he also didn’t have the opportunity to answer the more specific questions I would have preferred Bash press Warner on—how important should addressing racism be to the Democratic Party, and if addressing racism is a priority, how does the party plan to marry that priority with Democrats like Carville who feel reporting on racism or “wokeness” is overdone? 

Warner didn’t have to answer those questions. He instead got to focus on the branding of the “defund the police” movement. “Listen, I don’t support defund the police,” he said, while also championing a call of the movement for more community-based approaches to policing. 

“This is how propaganda works,” Hannah-Jones tweeted with video of the interview. “Mainstream media normalizes murky, dog-whistle terminology that is used to stoke white resentment. What is woke here @DanaBashCNN and how was the extremely moderate candidate who did not run on CRT ‘too woke’?”

On the campaign trail, Youngkin emphasized his opposition to critical race theory in schools, a nonexistent threat Houdini-like Republicans have made appear real. The theory is a framework for interpreting law that maintains racism has an undeniable effect on the legal foundation of American society, and fittingly, it is usually taught at the graduate or law school level. That, however, didn’t stop Youngkin from promising support of a ban on critical race theory in K-12 schools and tweeting a campaign video featuring the outrage of a white mom who years earlier tried to get author Toni Morrison’s classic novel, Beloved, banned from her son’s Advanced Placement English curriculum. 

Morrison’s novel has nothing to do with critical race theory. It does, however, focus on the devastating effects of slavery, which Republicans have also deemed inappropriate for schools in a toxic rebranding of critical race theory to mean anything related to racism or Blackness. The only enlightening element of Carville’s political analysis is the reminder that Republicans aren’t the only ones who feel that embracing Blackness equates to political sabotage. 

“And before people disingenuously complain ‘woke’ is denigrating to older people, it’s actually pundits like Carville using terms like ‘woke’ to insult voters under 45 that’s denigrating,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “Don’t wonder why youth turnout falls when Dems talk about them like this.”

RELATED: ‘How fitting is this rebuke to GOP racism?’ It’s like Toni Morrison was speaking directly to GOP mom

RELATED: Guess what, Karen? CRT is a straw man backed by GOP billionaires who don’t even care about the issue

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As his ally Ted Cruz launches another conservative crusade against a freakin’ puppet, Sen. Josh Hawley, most famous for abetting an attempt to topple our nation’s government, announces his own new political theme will be “masculinity.”

Yes, this is Josh Hawley we’re talking about. Yes, this is the campaign theme he’s going to adopt after he claimed in a speech that more men are watching porn and playing video games these days because of “years of being told” that “their manhood is the problem.”

We still don’t know how that might work, by the way. One might think that current generations are playing more video games and watching more porn these days (if they actually are) due to the notable trend of The Internet Exists. Apparently, though, conservatives believe their menfolk are drowning themselves in Mario Cart and internet porn because the local Costco refused to take “three wicked flexes, five grunts, and one opening of a really tight screw-on cap” in lieu of payment.

Or something. “Our manhood is under attack” is one of those weird conservative tics that is both so omnipresent and so poorly described that it’s become something of a chupacabra to the rest of us. Maybe it exists, maybe it doesn’t, all we know is that in conservative circles it’s known for marathoning PornHub while whining about how unappreciated it feels.

In an AXIOS interview, Hawley attempted to explain what the hell he’s on about:

“Well, a man is a father. A man is a husband. A man is somebody who takes responsibility.”

Yeah, okay. That narrows it down. Not quite the crack narration of “man, woman, person, camera, TV,” but it definitely qualifies as a series of words. Feels a bit like the first-pass lyrics to a Disney Mulan song?

“I think you put together lack of jobs, you put together fatherlessness, you put together the social messages that we teach our kids in school, I think we’ve got to confront that and its effects.”

Conservative men are watching porn because they’re sad about what their kids are learning in school? Okay, now you’ve really lost me. I’m beginning to think Hawley arrived at his new theme of “masculinity” by picking words out of a hat.

Now, there is something that’s a bit troubling about Sedition Josh’s gravitation toward “masculinity” as his own self-chosen political theme. Josh Hawley is widely known to be very ambitious. Hawley has already taken multiple actions to ally himself with the Big Lie, claiming election fraud that doesn’t exist in service to an attempt to nullify a U.S. election to allow a would-be strongman to retain power regardless of the vote totals.

And the movement Hawley has been attempting to wedge himself into the leadership of considers hyper-masculinity to be a very important thematic element. Paranoia over supposed lost masculinity both helped create and helped sustain European fascism of the last century, a sort of “brittle manhood” widely acknowledged by scholars as a central theme of fascist thought.

Donald Trump was a spectacularly unlikely exemplar of that “new man” idolized by the fascist right. He may have been an out-of-shape golf cheat who couldn’t masculine his way down a flight of stairs, but he was unrelentingly crude, was openly contemptuous and cruel toward women, and personified the sort of crass belligerence that the conservative far-right idolizes as a path toward restoring male dominance over the too-uppity womenfolk. The man may have been the first president to hint at his own penis size during a televised presidential debate.

Who are the avatars of conservative masculinity today? Thickheaded bullies who don faux-military apparel and storm government offices while waving flags in support of people who are worse. Hawley wants to insert himself into that discussion as he did the Big Lie itself, latching on as a way of convincing the common rabble that whatever they believe, he’s willing to shout about it.

But Hawley may, ahem, be misunderstanding what his supporters are yelling. You’re going to climb up in front of a crowd of male Trump supporters and tell them the problem is that they’re watching too much porn these days? Really?

Ehhhh. Well, good luck with that.

Really, though, while it once may have been uncanny how Donald Trump and his team managed to bumble into each of the core themes of fascism solely, or at least it seemed at the time, due to his own uncontrollable narcissism and insistence on surrounding himself with conservative C-listers, there is nothing bumbling about the Republican adaptation of each of those themes one after another, polishing them, assembling them, and marketing them as what the party now stands for—the beliefs that its candidates must abide by to remain in good standing with the movement. The explicit propaganda of the Big Lie, claiming that the last American presidential election was “rigged” or “stolen” as means of undermining a democratic vote that the party knows well and true that it lost, has now become party mandate. The themes of a great replacement jeopardizing American greatness (and whiteness), “attacks” on white conservative masculinity, and above all the growing belief among the Republican base and their pundits that violence is both justified and may now be required to reform American according to their beliefs—these are all overtly fascist themes.

It is not likely that Hawley will be that new fascist avatar, no matter how much he wants it. His performances are too insincere. His contempt for the other is too obviously pantomimed, not at all like the true guttural hate that Trump and his top allies revel in. Hawley may be a prep-school version of a hoodlum, but the movement wants the real thing.

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The Senate is on a razor’s edge heading into next year’s midterms, and all Republicans have to do is net one seat to retake the majority. It’s a time when any ordinary party not controlled by Donald Trump would be lining up a slate of candidates with wide-ranging appeal.

But for Trump, that means littering the GOP field with alleged wife and child abusers. Senate GOP campaign chair Rick Scott demonstrated once again Monday morning that Senate Republicans don’t have the moral fortitude to declare a history of abuse disqualifying.

Sen. Scott of Florida was asked on CNN whether Trump-endorsed Sean Parnell was “still the right candidate” for Pennsylvania’s open Senate seat after his estranged wife gave damning testimony last week about Parnell’s alleged patterns of abuse. Scott dodged.

“We’ll see who comes out of the primary,” Scott said. “Facts will come out. We’ll find out exactly what people think. I think what ultimately happens is people are going to look at somebody’s background and say is that the type of person they want and also are they talking about the issues I care about.”

CNN’s Brianna Keilar responded, “But is this the type of person you want? … You have someone whose wife is saying that he strangled them and that he left welts on their child. I think that’s a fair question to ask you if this is the right guy for this job.”

But given a second chance, Scott doubled down on the GOP’s particular brand of spinelessness.

“Brianna, I’m not supporting or opposing people in primary. I am the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee,” Scott offered, using neutrality as a get-out-of-jail-free card for having to demonstrate any basic sense of decency.  

Scott was, in fact, the second Senate Republican who couldn’t bring himself to say the GOP doesn’t support wife batterers or child abusers.

Asked about the abuse allegations last week, Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who is vacating the seat, entirely ducked the question. “I really don’t have anything for you right now,” Toomey told HuffPost reporter Igor Bobic.

The GOP establishment has already embraced the candidacy of another alleged domestic abuser, Herschel Walker. None other than GOP Leader Mitch McConnell himself linked arms with the Georgia Senate candidate a couple of weeks ago, bowing to Trump’s wishes on someone who hasn’t lived in Georgia in decades and is dragging a boatload of baggage with him into the race.

Now, Senate Republicans are opening the door to potentially putting another abusive candidate on their roster. According to Scott, if Parnell wins the GOP primary, his alleged history of wife and child abuse is just fine by Senate Republicans. Maybe McConnell will issue a statement asserting that Parnell “is the only one who can unite the party,” just like he did for Walker.

Perhaps having an abusive history will become the GOP’s new litmus test for its candidates.

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In January, American citizen Evan Neumann was allegedly seen punching police officers as he berated them and used a metal barricade as a battering ram while he and a violent mob attacked the U.S. Capitol. After months on the run, this weekend Neumann resurfaced on television in Belarus announcing his quest for political asylum.

The 48-year-old former resident of Mill Valley, California, appeared on the state-controlled Belarus-1 TV network on Sunday. Neumann told a correspondent he fled the U.S. for Europe this summer after charges against him for his alleged role in the insurrection went public.

The Department of Justice filed six charges against Neumann in March but did not unseal them until July. The criminal complaint included charges of assaulting police, obstruction of law enforcement, unlawfully entering a restricted building, disorderly conduct, engaging in physical violence on restricted grounds, and violent entry on Capitol Grounds.

U.S. Assistant Attorney Brian Kelly initially asked for Neumann’s records to be kept under seal to preserve the integrity of the case. But in June, prosecutors asked a judge to unseal the documents so the public could aid law enforcement in tracking Neumann down.

On the FBI’s “lookout” list by Jan. 27, it was an anonymous tipster and reported “family friend” of Neumann’s who clued authorities into his residence in Mill Valley. An affidavit accompanying Neumann’s charges detailed how in February the FBI’s special surveillance unit watched Neumann travel from his home to the San Francisco International Airport.

FBI special agents stopped him for an interview at the airport, where Neumann admitted to flying to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 5 and back to California on Jan. 7. He stopped short, however, of answering any questions about whether he entered any federal buildings during his trip to D.C.

“Neumann admitted that he interacted with law enforcement in Washington, D.C. but declined to elaborate further or to answer if he had any physical engagement with law enforcement,” the previously sealed affidavit states.

In security footage from Jan. 6, Neumann is allegedly seen speaking directly to officers and can be heard verbally abusing them. He suggested to cops that lawmakers inside the Capitol were “gonna kill your fucking children, they are gonna rape them, they are gonna imprison them,” court records showed. 

When officers asked Neumann to back off, he allegedly responded: “No, you can’t tell me what to do, you piece of shit.”

Neumann, appearing to sport a gas mask and a “Make America Great Again” cap in the Jan. 6 footage, was also heard reportedly telling officers that the crowd would “overrun” them.

“I’m willing to die, are you?” Neumann said.

Neumann is also seen numerous times in footage, prosecutors allege, grabbing a metal barricade and using it to aggressively break up a line of officers. Prosecutors said Neumann swung his closed fist at police repeatedly, at times successfully striking them.

The Moscow Times—first to report the interview—said that during Neumann’s spot with Belarus state TV, he was described by the network correspondent as “the same type of simple American whose shops were burned by Black Lives Matter activists.”

That description is steeped in Russian propaganda that has been unleashed in recent years targeting racial and social divisions in the U.S. In 2018, according to a comprehensive report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, since 2016 disinformation agents from the Russian firm the Internet Research Agency (IRA)—funded by Kremlin oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin—have manipulated and infiltrated online social spaces and specifically spaces where Black Americans talk politics, elections and civil rights, or advocate for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Similar manipulations of online social media platforms unfolded ahead of the 2020 U.S. election. In an investigation by CNN, it was revealed at length how Russian troll farms were erected in places like Ghana and Nigeria and how locals were hired to agitate racial animus online.

Notably, the 2018 committee report found no single group of Americans was targeted by IRA operatives more than Black Americans.

In the minutes-long interview where the Belarus-1 chyron reads “Goodbye, America!” just below his face, Neumann claims he fled there because he was being stalked by security officials in Ukraine. He also claimed he was subjected to wild boar, snakes, and an unforgiving swamp-like crossing when he moved from Ukraine to Belarus.

In the segment, Neumann recounts how he flew from the U.S. to the European Union in March, feigning that he was on a business trip. He then took a train from Switzerland to Germany where he eventually secured a car. He then drove from Germany to Poland in short order and by mid-March, he settled in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. After staying for just four months in a rented apartment, he told Belarus-1 he fled to Belarus at night on foot. A report by ABC in July indicates Neumann sold his U.S. home in Mill Valley last April—just after charges were filed—for a substantial $1.3 million.

There is no extradition treaty between the U.S. and Belarus, meaning someone convicted of a crime in one nation does not have to be forcibly returned to another to face trial or sentencing.

A representative for the FBI did not immediately return request for comment Monday.

This is does not appear to be Neumann’s first foray into so-called political revolution. Department of Justice footage from Jan. 6 featured in Neumann’s criminal complaint highlights how he wore a scarf commemorating Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution during the Jan. 6 attack. Neumann also listed himself as an attendee at the Orange Revolution in 2004 and 2005. That revolution involved a series of intense protests in response to the overturning of the rigged election of Viktor Yanukovych.

Yanukovych, notably, rose to power in part because of his backing from ally and Russian President Vladimir Putin, but also thanks to the heaps of political consulting offered to him by none other than Paul Manafort, former President Donald Trump’s onetime campaign chairman-turned-convict-turned-pardon-recipient.

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The House passed the first part of President Joe Biden’s big economic and infrastructure plans Friday in a 228 to 206 vote. That’s the $1.2 trillion bipartisan hard infrastructure bill negotiated in the Senate with Republicans—and Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, though mostly with Republicans. Now that it has passed, they are of course giving all the credit to the former guy. Which is what any Democrat gets for trying to be “bipartisan” with the crew of Republicans and which was totally predictable because it’s exactly what they did when the bill passed in the Senate back in August.

The bill provides about $550 billion in new spending—the other half of the $1.2 trillion total is already authorized money lumped in. It’s heavy on current fossil fuel-dependent infrastructure like roads and bridges, but does add in broadband, water, and energy system investments. It will, according to the Congressional Budget Office, add $256 billion to the deficit over the next decade. This is a key number to keep in mind as the Senate deficit peacocks who wrote this bill screech about the deficit when it comes to passing the other part of Biden’s agenda, the Build Back Better (BBB) plan. The Joint Committee on Taxation determined this plan will raise about $1.5 trillion in revenue and not add to the deficit long term.

The hard infrastructure bill, or BIF as it has become to be known, has $110 billion for surface transportation—roads and bridges—with $40 billion of that for bridges; $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations; $39 billion for transit; $55 billion for water systems; $1 billion for Biden’s original $20 billion plan to “reconnect” communities of color; $66 billion for freight and passenger rail; $65 billion for broadband; $25 billion for airports; $73 billion to modernize the energy grid; and $21 billion toward environmental remediation.

What is in this bill is good and necessary and does much of the great stuff the White House is claiming on transit, electric vehicles, rebuilding ports and airports, clean drinking water, and climate change resilience programs. All of these areas are seeing the largest investments ever.

Which is absolutely necessary because of decades of neglect, but which is also insufficient without the follow up of the BBB budget reconciliation bill, and which is why those two bills had been linked throughout the negotiating process. Biden’s promises to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to half of 2005 levels simply cannot happen with this bill alone.

The bill as described by Beth Osborne, director of advocacy group Transportation for America, follows “the old fashioned approach to change, which is to create a little bitty program to change a problem that we’ll continue to create with a much larger pot of money.” She points to another example: the slashing of President Biden’s critical $20 billion plan for “reconnecting” communities of color that were bulldozed through in previous roadbuilding sprees. It’s now $1 billion. “I would suggest you look back at other $1 billion programs created throughout the history of the reauthorization process and see which ones grew into anything mighty,” Osborne said.

The historic investment in clean drinking water in BIF is also inadequate by itself. A report from E2 Environmental Entrepreneurs on lead pipes details the limitations. The bipartisan bill puts $15 billion into a revolving fund for water utilities to replace lead pipes, but only if they want to—they won’t be required to do so. That $15 billion would replace just 25% of the lead pipes in the U.S. E2 estimates that the full $45 billion Biden called for originally would “create and support 56,080 jobs annually for 10 years, or a total of 560,800 job-years.”

The $550 billion in climate remediation in BBB is essential to reaching Biden’s goals and starting to future-proof the nation against climate change. It includes tax credits for clean energy production and the manufacture of clean energy technology components. It increases tax credits for the purchase of electric cars and clean technology like solar panels, as well as their manufacture. The original mix of carrots (tax credits and grants) and sticks (fines and penalties for delaying the transition to clean energy production) is pretty much all carrots now. However—and this is fairly big—the legislative text the House drew up based on Biden’s framework includes a fee for oil and gas operators per metric ton of released methane.

This is a historic achievement by President Biden and the Democrats and should be celebrated as a step along the way to achieving his goals—but only a step, because it’s only part of the job done. Without the profound investments included in the BBB—even as constrained as it has become in the hands of Manchin and Sinema—it’s not going to be enough.

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=If you’re wondering like the rest of us how an inane, straw man issue such as critical race theory (CRT) could be the fulcrum to catapult GOP darling, Glenn Younkin, into the governor’s seat… well, let’s just say, it wasn’t white suburban Karens, toiling away on their own in some grassroots effort. It was a carefully crafted scheme by GOP operatives funded by billionaire donors such as Koch Industries working as puppet masters and using white, scared parents as the mouthpieces. 

According to reporting by The Daily Beast, several of Virginia’s anti-CRT groups were found to have backing by lobbying firms, Koch groups, former Trump officials, and The Federalist Society. 

These deep pocket groups used Virginia’s non-degreed Karens as the face of CRT (a curriculum that isn’t even taught in their kids’ schools) because these GOP-backed entities knew they could count on their PTA moms who’ve historically been there to fight the good fight against Black and brown people, and this was an issue they could easily unite them around.  

Virginia’s anti-CRT efforts were conducted primarily by rabid dog Ian Prior—former press secretary for the National Republican Congressional Committee, former comms director for the Karl Rove super PAC American Crossroads, and a former official in the Justice Department under former one-term President Donald Trump. Today, Prior works as a GOP operative behind Fight for Schools and launched Parents Against Critical Theory (PACT), even though he claims to be just another concerned Virginia parent. 

Prior’s group, Fight for Schools, is backed by 1776 Action, a nonprofit led by former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Dr. “Uncle” Ben Carson. 

Prior’s name doesn’t appear on the PACT’s website, the group was supposedly founded by Scott Mineo, another Loudoun County, Virginia parent, and another mad dog who has welcomed money from 1776 Action. 

“Our kids have the right to develop their own opinions, free from indoctrination and school-sanctioned bullying. Instead of opening young minds, Loudoun County school leaders are policing them. This is not education; it is coercion,” Mineo told Washington Examiner in June. 

Prior has appeared on Fox News at least 15 times, and according to Media Matters, “Prior currently runs his own political communications consulting firm, is co-founder of a political newsletter, and is a senior counsel and spokesperson for Unsilenced Majority, ‘a grassroots conservative advocacy organization opposed to cancel culture in all forms’ helmed by other Republican and right-wing media figures.”

The Daily Beast reports another significantly funded group is the Free to Learn Coalition, which is apparently connected to the Concord Fund, also known as the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), a nonprofit run by Leonard Leo, a big bucks conservative activist, and Federalist Society executive. JCN, run by Carrie Severino, a former law clerk of Justice Clarence Thomas,  spent at least $10 million in ads to support the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett. Severino is a staunch pro-lifer and helped to draft legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act. 

Then there is the group Parents Defending Education, founded by Nicole Neily, who also happens to be a Koch network alum, formerly working at the Independent Women’s Forum and as the president of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, founded in 2009, and identified by Columbia Journalism Review as “the Koch’s leading media investment to date.” 

Patti Hidalgo Menders is president of the Loudoun County Virginia Republican Women’s Club. But Menders is not just another suburban mother of six fighting against Virginia’s equity and inclusion curriculum in schools, she’s also a GOP strategist. 

“The folks who fund this also oppose public education, the distribution of public goods, and the power of collective action. It ties up in a nice package with a big bow: To undermine democracy,” Maurice Cunningham, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and the author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, told The Daily Beast. 

The GOP has found its dupes again, only this time it’s a bunch of racist scared suburban moms, who are fighting a desperate battle against having little Johnny and Karen from being labeled as racists after they learn about their violent and colonizing history in this nation. Of course, all of this is just smoke and mirrors, because once again, the Republican party is using these people and their fear simply to gain power.

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Really, how hard is it to wear a mask? The first civil war in this country was fought over the profound moral tragedy of chattel slavery. If a second one is fought because Donald Trump didn’t want to smear his topcoat of Sherwin-Williams Burnt Sienna, I will be officially depressed.

Of course, Trump started this culture war when he politicized the virus. Instead of using the crisis to unite the nation behind sensible public health measures, he employed it as a wedge to unify and rile his political base; the following story is just one example of the all-too-predictable result.

Ricki Collin and Amy Hall, two Portland, Oregon-area anti-maskers, were arrested in Eugene, Oregon, on Wednesday after Hall engaged in an old-timey donnybrook with the owner of a local cookie establishment—because law and order are only important if you’re using them as a cudgel to marginalize people of color, apparently.

Watch:

As you can see from the video, these two parboiled clown sharts walked into the Crumb Together bakery in Eugene, Oregon, with their camera rolling, clearly ready to rumble over mask requirements.

In August, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown reinstated the state’s indoor mask mandate amid the surge of the COVID-19 delta variant. So far, Oregon has done a pretty good job of mitigating COVID-19, ranking 46th in the nation in COVID-19 deaths per capita. That’s likely at least partly due to the mask requirements and the buy-in of the state’s residents, at least in heavily Democratic municipalities like Eugene, Portland, and Salem. 

But, hey, there’s no success great enough that it can’t be belittled by little people with little minds. 

After Collin and Hall walked into the bakery, Hall confronted the owner while Collin filmed the conversation. The owner asked the maskless couple to leave. Eventually, Hall shoved the owner, which prompted the shopkeeper to retrieve a baseball bat from behind the counter. Then they fought like hell as the owner shouted, “Get the fuck out!”

But here’s the best part: Convinced they had the moral high ground, Collin and Hall tracked down the Eugene police to show them the video they’d taken, hoping to get the baker in trouble. Instead, they were promptly arrested, because they were breaking the law. Oops!

How sad. Hall was taken away in cuffs. Let’s all shed a single briny tear.

Shockingly, this isn’t the pair’s first run-in with the law over statewide mask requirements.

KEZI-TV, Eugene:

Collin has an open trespassing case in Washington County and is charged with seven misdemeanors, including trespassing while in possession of a firearm.

He has reportedly posted several videos to a YouTube channel in which he is seen confronting law enforcement and others about mask mandates.

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by Sravya Tadepalli

This story was originally published at Prism.

On Tuesday, a record number of voters cast their ballots using ranked-choice voting, a system that allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference. For the first time, ranked-choice voting determined elections in 31 municipalities, up from only seven last year. The kinds of communities that have adopted ranked-choice voting are wide-ranging, including large, diverse cities like San Francisco; small, predominantly white communities like Basalt, Colorado; and several towns in Utah. Through ballot initiatives, residents in Ann Arbor, Michigan; Westbrook, Maine; and Broomfield, Colorado, voted on Tuesday to adopt the ranked-choice voting system in future elections.

“We are really excited about the outcome in Broomfield,” said Emma Donahue, political director for RCV Colorado and campaign manager for Better Ballot Broomfield. “Ranked-choice voting stops vote splitting, allows communities to have a bigger say in their elections, and people feel they don’t just have to pick the candidate who has the most money, but the candidate that has their values.”

Ranked-choice voting has grown in popularity across the country in recent years, with 42 jurisdictions presently implementing some version of it. In most ranked-choice voting systems, voters rank candidates for elected office in their order of preference. If one candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes in the first round, that candidate is elected. If no candidate gains a majority, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their votes are reallocated to the voters’ second choice candidates. This process goes on until one candidate wins a majority.

One of the most popular arguments in support of ranked-choice voting is that it gives more opportunities for independent and third-party candidates to win elections. In both the 2000 and 2016 presidential elections, a substantial number of left-leaning voters cast their ballots for the Green Party, creating a “spoiler effect” that reduced the total number of votes for the Democratic candidate and in some states, handed victory to the Republican. In a ranked-choice voting system, people could vote for a third-party candidate without fear of vote-splitting. If the third-party candidate is unpopular, they are eliminated and a third-party voter’s second choice is considered in the automatic runoff. Ranked-choice voting allows voters to vote for third party and independent candidates without fear of inadvertently contributing to the election of an ideological opponent.

Recent research found that California cities that adopted ranked-choice voting had more candidates of color running for office and more women candidates of color winning. A study by FairVote, an organization that advocates for ranked-choice voting across the country, found that voters of color tended to rank more candidates than white voters, and candidates of color benefitted from the system at a higher rate than white candidates.

In Ann Arbor, where residents overwhelmingly voted in favor of adopting ranked-choice voting on Tuesday, community members expressed excitement about the possibility of having more inclusive and less partisan elections.

“Most [supporter] comments have been about breaking the two-party system and having more selection in their options,” said Pat Zabawa, communications director for the Rank MI campaign. “Some were unsure, but on the other hand they were pretty excited to hear about it being implemented in the primaries.”

Ann Arbor actually briefly adopted a ranked-choice voting system in the 1970s, after a Republican candidate won a three-way race in 1973 without a majority. When the system was adopted in 1975, Ann Arbor elected its first Black mayor. The city dropped ranked-choice voting soon after that election, but proponents have used this example to show its potential for diversifying elected officials. According to FairVote, approximately 41% of winners in 1,422 ranked-choice voting elections have been people of color.

“The win, especially the high margin, means that we have renewed energy to advocate for ranked-choice voting in other cities throughout the state,” said Zabawa after hearing the election results. “I personally am very excited to learn that so many people in the Ann Arbor community support improving its elections with ranked-choice voting and aren’t afraid of improving their democracy in this way.”

Experimenting with ranked-choice voting

The New York City mayoral election primary in June was the city’s first use of the ranked-choice voting system, generating one of the largest and most prominent tests in the country. With a field of 13 candidates to choose from, voters had the opportunity to rank up to five candidates on their ballots. Eric Adams, who garnered around 30% of first-choice votes in the Democratic Party mayoral primary, went on to secure the nomination, eventually winning the mayoral election. New Yorkers turned out in record numbers for the mayor’s race, and 95% of voters said the ranked-choice voting system was easy to understand. 

While cities like San Francisco and Minneapolis adopted the system for municipal elections in the 2000s, Maine became the first state to adopt ranked-choice voting in 2016, after people cast their votes in favor of the new system. The initiative process was led by grassroots organizers who wanted to preserve Maine’s tradition of independent and third-party candidates, while also ensuring that candidates had the support of the majority. At the time Maine adopted ranked-choice voting, nine of the state’s last 11 governors had won with only a plurality.

Several opponents launched legal challenges to the system in the following years, arguing that it was unconstitutional, but lawsuits were repeatedly rejected. Maine has now used ranked-choice voting for multiple state and federal election cycles.

More than 50 jurisdictions across the country are expected to use ranked-choice voting in their next election.

Sravya Tadepalli is a freelance writer based in Oregon. Her writing has been featured in Arlington Magazine, Teaching Tolerance, the Portland Tribune, Oregon Humanities, and the textbook America Now. Sravya is also a 2018 Harry S. Truman Scholar.

Prism is a BIPOC-led non-profit 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.