Big Tech is freaking out over a Senate anti-trust bill that would block the biggest firms—especially Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook—from using their power to give themselves major advantages over other companies, to the detriment of consumers as well. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act was introduced by Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley and received bipartisan support in a January committee vote.
In a Monday speech in Kentucky, Klobuchar detailed the opposition from tech companies. “They have spent $70 million against us in this effort and that doesn’t even count the advertising, that’s just the lobbying from last year,” she said. “And there’s 2,700 lobbyists from those four companies now roaming the halls of Congress.”
When an industry is that upset about legislation, it’s often a sign that it’s going to be effective at cracking down on that industry’s favored abuses, and that’s absolutely the case with this bill. But some advocates for reining in the power of these massive tech companies say there’s one scary provision in the current bill that needs to come out.
The overarching intent of the bill is good: to prevent a company that controls a marketplace from giving itself advantages over competitors who have to use that marketplace. Amazon shouldn’t be able to put its own products at the top of the search results every time. Amazon also shouldn’t be able to force sellers to use its own fulfillment system to qualify for Prime, if the sellers can provide the needed fulfillment standards independently. Google shouldn’t respond to every video search with a YouTube link. Apple shouldn’t privilege its own apps over other equally relevant ones.
Again: That’s good. But the advocacy organization Free Press has warned that one provision in the bill could make it more difficult for companies to deplatform hate speech, through language that “isn’t merely a ban on big platforms giving their own products an advantage over those of companies that want to compete with the likes of Google, Facebook and Apple,” Free Press Action’s Carmen Scurato said in a statement at the time the bill was in committee.
“This provision could require platforms to host hate speech and other harmful content targeting Black and Brown people, the LGBTQIA+ community, women, immigrants, Indigenous people and other targeted populations. It opens the door to arguments that covered platforms are unlawfully discriminating against hate-and-disinformation purveyors by taking them down. State AGs and future FTC officials charged with enforcing this bill could easily but falsely paint apps like Parler or businesses like Infowars as ‘similarly situated’ to other apps and sites that remain available on the covered platforms,” she continued.
The specific concern Free Press cites is that state attorneys general—like the ones who contributed money to the January 6 planning—could sue, “arguing that those terms of service themselves discriminate against certain viewpoints, claiming that what tech companies rightly define as hate speech, incitements to violence, or vaccine disinformation is really just competing political or health information that must stay up,” according to Scurato.
Other groups in favor of anti-trust legislation in tech, like Accountable Tech, are less concerned, because the anti-discrimination provision only applies to businesses, not individuals. (Though that’s a distinction that can be blurry when you’re talking about, say, Alex Jones the individual and Infowars the business.) Citing worries about losing Republican support for the bill, someone from a group that supports it told Protocol in February, “This is a concern about lawsuits that aren’t going to actually be successful.”
But lawsuits themselves can be deterrents from enforcing rules. If Facebook knows that the attorney general of Texas or Mississippi (or whichever one is looking to make a splash and smooth the way up to senator or governor) is going to sue if the company deplatforms a purveyor of hate speech, it’s probably going to be less likely to deplatform them to begin with. Sen. Ted Cruz voted for the bill as a whole in committee—after he tried to expand this language to allow for private lawsuits, saying, “I am more than happy to unleash the trial lawyers.”
This came after years of Cruz attacking social media platforms repeatedly for limiting the platform they give to conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and COVID promoters like Dennis Prager. His angle on any bill having to do with big tech is going to be a serious problem—and his support is a red flag.
Sen. Alex Padilla—who it should be said is from California, where several of the most affected companies are headquartered—raised the concern during committee that, “This provision can be a gift to bad actors seeking to prevent platforms from blocking business users that peddle hate speech or … election disinformation.”
Anti-trust powers should be a more frequently used tool against corporate abuses, and big tech is absolutely ripe for it. But we also don’t want an anti-trust bill that gives Republican attorneys general or regulators a way to protect hate speech and disinformation. In the current Senate there may be a real tension between those two things. But it at least needs to be part of the conversation.
Frank James, the 62-year-old man now under arrest for Tuesday’s mass shooting on a Brooklyn subway, posted a lot of videos to YouTube and Facebook—over 450 of them, more than the number of subscribers he had (429). Mostly using handle prophetoftruth88, these videos all featured him rambling angrily about a range of political topics, most of them racial in nature.
His YouTube account, now deleted, offered a kind of chronology of his descent into far-right extremism: James constantly disparaged other Black people, calling them “cattle” and “domesticated animals” whose intended role in white society was to be a slave; he regularly advocated setting up a separate “homeland” for nonwhite Americans. And he talked a lot about death, warning that “it’s gonna take a lot more death … for us to get the picture about how fucked-up we really are.”
Authorities say James set off smoke grenades aboard a subway at the 36th Street station in the Sunset Park neighborhood and opened fire with a handgun, reeling off 33 rounds before exiting the train with other passengers while wearing a gas mask. Ten people were shot, five of them suffering critical injuries, none of them life-threatening; while another 19 people were injured while fleeing.
James fled the scene in a rented U-Haul van that he shortly dumped, and eluded investigators for over a day, but he was spotted Wednesday in Manhattan’s East Village and taken into custody without incident. “My fellow New Yorkers: We got him. We got him,” Mayor Eric Adams exulted.
Adams was the focus of several of James’ rants. One of them, titled “A Message to the Mayor,” described how he had been through New York City’s mental-health system and experienced emotional violence, the kind that would make someone “go and get a gun and shoot motherfuckers.”
“I made up my mind, kind of told myself, you know, I may have to hurt somebody one day, somebody may have to get hurt,” James said. “Because there’s no way that I’m going to do what society asks me to do, which is to try to be—to work hard to play fair, keep my nose to the old grindstone, pull myself by the bootstraps, you know, go to work, pay my taxes, do everything you asked me to do, and then you’re going to smack me in the face.”
Daily Kos obtained copies of many of James’ videos before they were removed from YouTube and Facebook and reviewed them with the assistance of behavioral scientist Caroline Orr Bueno of the University of Maryland. The amount of hatred he expresses both for other Blacks, as well as Hispanics, Asians, and other nonwhites is noteworthy, as well as his apparent admiration for white supremacists and neo-Nazis for their unapologetic bigotry.
“[N-words] should be wiped off the planet, even though I am one,” James says in one video.
James also believed that the 9/11 terror attacks were “a lie, and a false flag operation” and called 9/11 “the most beautiful day, probably in the history of this fucking world.”
The content of his videos, however, is not obsessively conspiracist as much as it reveals someone who ardently believes in racial segregation. His rhetoric mimics classic white-supremacist language so closely at times—particularly in his attacks on other Blacks for their “ghetto culture”—that it leaves a powerful impression of internalized self-hate.
In one recent rant, he warned that angry white people were preparing to commit mass genocide against Blacks on the scale of the Holocaust:
I keep telling you this: White people and black people, as we call ourselves, should not have any contact with each other. You still refuse to understand this. You want to make up some fuckin’ story about Jesus and the Bible said dumbshit, they don’t see it that way. They hate your fuckin’ guts. And why do they hate your guts? Because they know that your rightful place is as a fuckin’ slave in this country. They know that. You’re the only one that doesn’t realize that.
And now you want to be equal to them by force. They didn’t choose to—they didn’t elect to make you equal. You had to force them to make you an equal. And now they’re just getting more angry, and more angry, that anger’s been building up. And nothing can happen here differently than what happened over in Europe with the Jews.
I want you to believe that that’s possible. …
And if they tried to exterminate us, I would not be mad at them one fuckin’ bit, because a nigger—and that’s what the fuck you are—refuses to understand that you have a serious problem that you have not dealt with since they so-called ‘set you free.’ And they didn’t set you free, they turned you fuckin’ loose. You cannot set free a domesticated animal. You can only turn it loose. And that’s what was done to you.
And your refusal to understand that means the death of your children. It means their early exit off this fuckin’ planet. Your inability to understand that means that your children are gonna die, and they’re gonna be killed in all kinds of ways.
James apparently used a photo of a blue body bag as his avatar on Facebook for awhile, and posted a video there explaining why he did so:
This is where I feel we are as a group of fuckin’ people. Dead. We’re fuckin’ dead.
It represents something in my life too. It represents what I’ve been through, what I’m going through, what I’m gonna go through in the future.
He then voiced his hope that there would be mass death in order to “wake people” up:
And so, as I look at all these situations, and the deaths of these young people, uh … I can’t really say it’s a bad thing. I’m sad to say, it’s not a bad thing at the end of the day. And I’ve told you in the past, I’ll tell you now, it’s gonna take a lot more motherfuckin’ death—it’s gonna take a lot more death, all of a sudden, unexpected death to happen in the so-called Black community in order for us to get the picture about how fucked-up we really are, how out of control we really are.
But I see a day, and I really pray and hope for a day, that this system gets to a point and gets to a place where you’ll have groups of people in power, white people in power, who don’t want to kill us, but just want to separate from us and all those who want to be associated with us, and give us our own quote-unquote ‘homeland.’
As Orr Bueno observes, one of his videos features images of neo-Nazis marching at Charlottesville and the neo-Nazi accelerationist group The Base, but “he speaks about them/their tactics in a strange way, almost as if he admires their tactics even though he detests their cause. (‘They’re planning, they’re plotting, they’re fighting. As they should.’)”
James voices his approval for their agenda—“They want to go back to ‘separate but equal,’ or really, to be perfectly honest with you, separate”—he says, and explains their rationale:
This nation was created for, and by, white men—landholding, rich white men. It was created by them and for them. You were brought here to serve them. And that’s what your role’s supposed to be and it’s not supposed to be anything else except in your mind. But they have to make you believe that you have power. They have to make you believe that you have a say in the government. They have to make you believe, make-believe, some shit that’s not true.
Another video compares Black teenagers in packs to pack animals like wolves and dogs. Other videos ardently defend Russia and Vladimir Putin, suggesting that he has been consuming information from far-right sources—particularly the conspiracist kind:
You hear President Vladimir Putin talk about why he feels the United States is full of shit. He knows why! He knows the United States is full of shit, that’s why he calls it the ‘Empire of Lies.’ And he’s talking about 9/11! 9/11 was a lie, and a false flag operation. That was no Arab terror, I’ll say it for the ten billionth time—that was no Arab terrorist did that shit. So we’re facing—we’re in World War III. Right now!
At other times, he expresses a genocidal hatred of his home community:
This ‘code of the ghetto’ shit is not a lifestyle, it’s a fuckin’ deathstyle. It says we’d be better off fuckin’ dead. The way we think, the way we live in the so-called fuckin’ ghetto or the stinkin’ hood, fuck you, says you oughta die. They ought to fuckin’ exterminate you. Because you have been destroyed. And the way you live proves that.
Orr told Daily Kos that James actions and his videos reflected other kinds of far-right extremism that’s been active in creating political violence, particularly accelerationists, the radicals who want to see the world burn, and the sooner the better:
One thing that struck me was the fact that he used several phrases and referenced several ideas that come straight from white supremacist/accelerationist groups and spaces — like the idea of being “replaced” as a race. Related, I thought it was notable that he talked about The Base in a way that was almost saying, “We (African Americans) should be doing that too”. It seemed like a lot of his ideas were very reactionary — as if he thought the best way to respond to things like violent white supremacy was to answer it with an equal amount of violence from the “other” side.
One possible on-ramp is misogyny. There’s quite a tradition of men from oppressed groups identifying more strongly with their status as a man because it offers higher social status and more power than their racial or ethnic identity. However, I’m not sure that fits here, because although he certainly expressed misogynistic views, he also identified strongly with his racial identity. On the other hand, his anti-gay, anti-trans views would be in line with the sort of more modern, chauvinistic extremism that seems to be more common in South American and some parts of Asia.
Several residents of a retirement community in Florida seem unable to fully understand this basic rule of voting: You only get one vote per election.
After casting two ballots each in the 2020 presidential election, residents of The Villages, a 55+ community in Sumter County, Florida, have pleaded guilty to third-degree felony charges. Charles F. Barnes, 64, and Jay Ketcik, 63, face charges that could carry up to five years behind bars, the Orlando Sentinel reports.
But don’t worry: Barnes and Ketcik won’t face any actual time. According to Click Orlando, the two entered into a pre-trial diversion program where they will be required to do community service and take a (obviously much-needed) civics class, among other conditions.
Here’s where things get strange. In December, Ketcik was arrested on voter fraud charges along with Joan Halstead, 71, and John Rider, 61, who also reside in The Villages, the Orlando Sentinel reports, and although Rider and Halstead have pleaded not guilty, both voted twice in the 2020 presidential election.
According to Best Places, only 31.7% of the residents voted Democrat in the last presidential election, while 67.8% voted Republican. In fact, Sumter county residents have voted Republican in every presidential election since 2000.
And according to the Federal Election Commission, Dem Villages residents donated $793,113 to the Democratic Party and liberal campaigns, while Republican Villages residents gave a total of $2,786,290 to the Republican Party and conservative campaigns.
But it’s not just Florida Republicans who vote illegally.
In October, Donald “Kirk” Hartle made a claim that his wife, who had died in 2017, never got her mail-in ballot, but somehow her ballot was counted by Clark County, Nevada, officials.
The GOP went nuts, claiming fraud. Guess what happened then? Hartle, 55, was charged with two felony counts of voting more than once in the 2020 election and using another person’s name. He was fined $2,000 and sentenced to one year of probation.
In May, Bruce Bartman, 70, of Pennsylvania pleaded guilty to felony perjury and unlawful voting after he was busted for voting for Trump in the 2020 election using his dead mother’s name.
“I was isolated last year in lockdown,” Bartman claimed to the judge. “I listened to too much propaganda and made a stupid mistake.”
Bartman was sentenced to five years probation.
Last but not least, on Tuesday former Trump lackey Mark Meadows was removed from North Carolina’s voter rolls. Why? Because he voted via absentee ballot in North Carolina using the address of a mobile home he’s never even visited, much less lived in, while actually living in Virginia—where he also registered to vote.
If you’ve ever heard Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker talk about politics, it can be cringe-worthy at best, and inaccurate at worst.
Walker has never run for office before and has lived in Texas since 2011, so it’s understandable that he wouldn’t know everything about politics or the state of Georgia. But it doesn’t really excuse the many ridiculous and untrue things he’s uttered. This guy needs help.
Walker has made mind-numbing missteps, such as referring to the late Rep. John Lewis as a senator, even implying that Lewis wouldn’t have supported the bill named in his honor.
“Senator Lewis was one of the greatest senators that’s ever been and for African Americans that was absolutely incredible. To throw his name on a bill for voting rights I think is a shame,” Walker said in an interview. He added that the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act “just doesn’t fit what John Lewis stood for, and I think [Democrats] know that. And I think that it’s sad for them to do this to him.”
So it’s clear Walker doesn’t know that Lewis was a congressman or that the iconic civil rights hero spent his career fighting for voting rights.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC)reports that in order to help him out, Walker’s camp has set up “policy time” to meet with a few Republicans who can school him on what he needs to know—or whatever he’s never learned.
So far Walker has met with Sen. Lindsey Graham, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Sen. Ted Cruz, and according to a source affiliated with Walker, “of course, he speaks regularly with the former president,” according to the AJC.
Walker has additionally set up “listening sessions,” where he meets with industry leaders around the state to learn how federal issues are impacting Georgia.
But in addition to coaching, Walker is also badly in need of honing his skills in explaining his finances.
“According to this candidate’s financial disclosure form, no person or entity paid more than $5,000 for any services provided by him—at the same time, he disclosed an interest in an LLC valued at more than $25 million and that provides ‘business consulting and professional services,’” Stephen Spaulding, a senior adviser at government watchdog organization Common Cause, told GPB. “This may raise questions for voters trying to screen for conflicts of interest who want to know more about who got what from the consulting and professional consulting firm that bears his name and pays him millions in shareholder income.”
The Daily Beastreportsthatin addition to his financial records being loose on specificity, in one case, a business he claims to own may not actually be his.
“According to a review of business records, that company—either Renaissance Manufacturing or Renaissance Hospitality, depending on the telling (though both are now dissolved)—was not his in any common sense of ownership; it was part of a business arrangement with the true owner,” according to The Daily Beast.
On Wednesday, President Joe Biden released a statement on his latest conversation with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy. In the call, Biden not only revealed that he was sending an additional $800 million in “weapons, ammunition, and other security assistance” to Ukraine, he provided some exciting details of just what would be heading down the high-speed pipeline between the U.S. and Kyiv.
These new capabilities include artillery systems, artillery rounds, and armored personnel carriers. I have also approved the transfer of additional helicopters. In addition, we continue to facilitate the transfer of significant capabilities from our Allies and partners around the world.
Mil Mi-17 helicopter in Afghanistan.
The helicopters mentioned here are likely those Soviet-era Mil Mi-17s that were purchased from Russia over a decade ago and refurbished by the U.S. Mi-17s were used by U.S. special forces in Afghanistan, and at least four Mi-17 helicopters were sent by the U.S. to the Afghan military … when it had one. At one point, the U.S. had at least 63 of these helicopters, but it’s not clear how many are still in flying condition and available to send. The fact that any are being sent shows just how quickly things are changing, and how the U.S. is now willing to send systems that just weeks—or even days—ago would have been unthinkable.
Also mentioned here are armored personnel carriers. It’s possible that Biden is talking about M113s since the U.S. has something like 6,000 of the things sitting in storage. However, these are relatively ancient systems. Though they’re still in use by various militaries around the world, there is a much better system available: the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. The Bradley is a generation newer than the M113, and there are also over 6,500 of them sitting around.
It’s almost like someone at the White House was reading kos’ last post.
Bradley Fighting Vehicle.
Now that the taboo against “heavy” weapons is shattered, let’s get the M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle into Ukrainian hands. It is being phased out of the U.S. Army, and there are thousands available for gifting.
The Bradley is nowhere near as difficult and complicated to maintain and supply as a modern combat tank, it can be mounted with tank-killing missile systems, it can protect infantry during the kind of open ground combat we’re seeing in south and east Ukraine, and it can more safely transport infantry to combat zones than softer-skinned vehicles (including through defensive Russian artillery barrages). To get a sense to how much simpler the Bradley is, the training program to maintain it is 12 weeks, while it’s six months for the M-1 Abrams tank. And the Bradley uses regular diesel, not jet fuel like the Abrams.
The Army has been looking to replace the Bradley almost from the moment it appeared. The last basic Bradley rolled off the assembly line over 20 years ago, but there are still variants being made. There are lots of upgrades, modifications, and variations, and there are still a lot of Bradley M2 and M3 and M4 and M6—just a lot of Bradleys—in use out there. But the Army would definitely like to see it depart and make room for whatever comes out of their next-generation plans (which includes plans for an “optionally manned” fighting vehicle that could also operate as a kind of big, heavy, ground-based drone with a gun). Sending a few hundred Bradleys to Ukraine might help speed that along, so this plan should have fans in the Pentagon.
A Bradley M2 packs a crew of three and up to six passengers. Up top is a terrifying 25mm chain gun capable of firing 200 rounds a minute, with some upgraded to 500 rounds a minute. If that’s not enough, a machine gun is mounted along the side, and all the passengers have ports through which they can convert the Bradley into a rolling gun platform. It’s also well armored with both steel plate and reactive armor. Oh, and it generally comes armed with at least two anti-tank missiles. It’s not as fast as the APVs seen driving around Ukraine on both sides of the conflict; a BMP-3 is arguably better if you’re more concerned about shooting than defending your passengers. But in almost all cases, a Bradley is seriously better armored.
The Russian BMP-3 is supposed to have active anti-missile systems that would protect it against incoming weaponry, but the 65 known-dead BMP-3s so far are a pretty good argument that the system does not work particularly well. The Bradley has much thicker steel overlaid with ceramic and explosive plates. They’re not going to fail unless they’re hit hard. It outweighs other APVs by a dozen tons, all of it armor.
In any case, the Bradley—which is armored like a tank—is also going to be vulnerable to anything that might stop a tank. But it’s not going to be taken out by many of the weapons that could stop a more lightly armored vehicle.
This statement from Biden follows word that the U.S. is also working to send artillery to Ukraine, both by replacing older Soviet systems in other NATO countries and possibly by sending some NATO gear that would range the artillery being used by the Russians.
The U.S. has been sending weapons to Ukraine for years, well before Russia rolled across the border. However, in advance of the invasion, the U.S. was very concerned about sending signals that Russia might read as aggressive. It was willing to share with Ukraine a lot of basic supplies and material needed by every military, but drew the line at what was seen as “offensive weapons.” (Which is, of course, a ridiculous term.) Along those lines, it was okay to send Ukraine an anti-tank missile that could be used to take out an armored vehicle, but not okay to send them an armored vehicle.
However, the moment that Russian forces rolled into Ukraine, the line of what was acceptable began to shift. And shift. And shift. The battle that’s brewing in the Donbas region looks to determine Ukraine’s future. And Russia’s future. Which makes it worth both investment and risk on the part of the U.S.
And because God hates writers, just as I was about to press “publish” on this we got the official word.
So it’s not the Bradley after all. This time. Instead, it’s the M113. Which is also … good. It’s just a generation behind. Even so, it beats the hell out of walking, and there’s a reason it’s still in use 60 years (!) after the first one rolled off the line.
The U.S. kept making M113s through 2007, and like the Bradley, the basic chassis of the M113 is at the heart of dozens of other mobile platforms. In a way, there’s a whole M113 “ecosystem” in almost the same way that the Russians have built dozens of other vehicles on the basic frame of a T-72. Here’s another way of putting it: About half of all the armored vehicles in the U.S. Army are based on the M113.
There is certainly no problem with either vehicle’s availability (6,000 sitting in warehouses) or with parts, which could be measured in warehouses. The U.S. doesn’t need them. Ukraine can use them. So, sure, M113s. Most standard M113s are fitted with machine guns and/or grenade launchers. Israel still uses thousands of the things. They are a whole lot better than nothing … just not as good as a Bradley. (You’re welcome to read some disappointment into this.)
Now we also know that it’s 100 Humvees, plus another 300 Switchblades, and 500 more Javelins (or one day’s worth, according to Zelenskyy). We also got a definitive number on those Mi-17 helicopters, which will likely find duties that are not directly on the Donbas front where Russia actually has both air defenses and is willing to risk dipping a jet into Ukrainian airspace for a few minutes. The most welcome item on the list may be the least controversial: 30,000 sets of body armor and helmets. That’s something that will get used.
But it’s not Bradleys. Today. Of course, it wasn’t Mi-17 helicopters yesterday. So … get back to me tomorrow.
Lot of people on Twitter saying “finally!” and “it’s a start!” Daily Kos readers should know better by now. This is actually part of an ongoing series of shipments, now totaling $2.4 billion. It’s not a start, and it’s not the end. Once this is delivered, there will be another $800 billion (or whatever) transfer of more equipment. And the next one will have more Javelins, more Stingers, more Humvees, more artillery pieces, more body armor and helmets, more munitions, and, hopefully, Bradleys.
One thing I left out when talking about this package — and it may be the most important.
AN/TPQ-36 Firefinder radar systems being delivered to Ukraine in 2015.
What’s the best way to put to use the long range artillery the U.S. announced it was sending on Tuesday? That would be taking out Russian artillery. Not only is artillery a devastating weapon in a head-on battle, it’s the “tool” with which Russia has been tearing apart Ukrainian cities one block at a time.
Those AN/TPQ-36 “Firefinder” radar systems that the U.S. is sending to Ukraine have One Job: Find Russian artillery, and feed Ukrainian artillery with firing solutions to make Russian guns go away.
What makes these even better? The Ukrainian army already has some. That’s because an anti-artillery system easily fits into the idea of a “defensive weapon,” so the U.S. has been delivering them for years.
Ukraine knows how to operate these systems and integrate them into an artillery team. They should also already have the training necessary to both repair and maintain the Firefinder.
Who is sending keen gear? The Czechs are sending keen gear. Honestly, Ukraine already has around 400 of these systems still in action. But another tranche — with ammo — doesn’t hurt a thing (well, hopefully it hurts Russian armor).
#Ukraine: Our first glimpse of the RM-70 multiple rocket launcher systems recently delivered to the Ukranian army from Czech stocks. These MRLS are essentially variants of the traditional 122mm BM-21 “Grad”, and at least 20 have been transferred for use. pic.twitter.com/AwuX2uB3yK
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) April 13, 2022
As he throws a wrench into Texas’ economy by forcing commercial truckers to undergo redundant inspections at ports of entry, right-wing Gov. Greg Abbott bussed roughly 30 asylum-seekers to Washington, D.C., as part of his retribution for the Biden administration’s just decision to end use of Stephen Miller’s Title 42 policy.
The Daily Beast reports the eternally disgusting and shameless Republican dropped off the asylum-seekers, who have already been processed by U.S. immigration officials, in front of a building housing a number of media outlets, including Fox News. It was not lost on observers that the right-wing outlet already had some propaganda all set for publishing. What a coincidence.
CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez spoke to a number of these asylum-seekers, many of whom are from Venezuela, Colombia, Nicaragua, and Cuba. “After being released, the migrants said they were offered a bus ride to Washington DC,” she tweeted. “It was voluntary.” If we’re trying to find a silver lining to this stunt, and Lord knows that’s needed these days, its that Abbott’s scheme has meant a free ticket for these vulnerable people. Hopefully some are now closer to reuniting with family already here.
”From DC, some of the migrants are heading to other US cities,” Alvarez continued. Some are headed to Florida, observers noted. “At their final destination, they’re expected to report to ICE and will continue the immigration process,” Alvarez continued.
Keep an eye on the treatment of these asylum-seekers when they reach Florida, because the state under another right-wing official, Ron DeSantis, has aided another Abbott border scheme, Operation Lone Star. American Immigration Council senior policy counsel Aaron Reichlin-Melnick raises an important point: Will Florida Sen. Marco Rubio “decry Abbott’s treatment of Venezuelan asylum seekers”? Maybe he’ll just ignore them. Maybe he’ll accuse them of not being real Venezuelans, as he recently did to Venezuelan activists simply because they challenged him.
“As a long-time DC resident, I hate seeing our town used again as a political prop,” Reichlin-Melnick continued in his thread. “Guess what, Greg Abbott. We’re not afraid of migrants. We are a vibrant immigrant community that has already welcomed tens of thousands of migrants in the last few years. We have heart—unlike you.”
UWD Action Executive Director @GreisaMartinez: “Regardless of whatever political, anti-immigrant stunts Abbott and his fellow Republican allies attempt, we know the truth: We have more than enough resources to welcome all who seek asylum with dignity, humanity, and respect.” pic.twitter.com/E0uRfjX3gK
Tim Young, press secretary for refugee resettlement agency Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, tweeted that while Texas had not informed any D.C.-area groups about the arrivals, “faith organizations, community groups, and kind-hearted Americans stand ready to answer the call to help.” Reichlin-Melnick said the White House should fight Abbott by inviting these asylum-seekers to the White House. “I’m totally serious about this,” he wrote. “The White House could use this as an opportunity to lean in and send a message about welcoming. If the asylum seekers are willing, they can tell people their stories, put a face and a story to a group that is often portrayed as faceless mobs.”
There are no words to describe the gross nature of Abbott’s cruel stunt—or the man himself, for that matter. To think of human beings as nothing more than props—and making it all the more worse is that these are the same people who without any hesitation would refer to themselves as “pro-life” and “pro-family.” Bullshit. You can’t even really say that he cares only about white people, because he’s also willing to make their lives miserable in the name of winning reelection and owning the libs.
As of now, one branch of the United States military is pledging to offer financial, medical, and legal help to families who are impacted by state laws targeting LGBTQ+ youth. This includes helping them to move to a new state if that’s what’s needed, per HuffPost.
The Air Force is the only branch of the military to do this (so far) and it’ll be interesting to see if it becomes a norm across the military. Per a press release, Air Force leaders have promised that military legal personnel is available to offer free counseling to families who need to understand their rights and protections under this slew of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. They’ve also said military medical facilities are available to provide mental health resources, including to children of Air Force families.
Families would be able to move states based on the precedent set in the Exceptional Family Member Program, where one can be reassigned to a different location based on safety needs. Theoretically, this would be useful if a trans youth needed access to safe, gender-affirming health care banned in their current state, or if a family feels oppressed under the Don’t Say Gay law in Florida.
“We are closely tracking state laws and legislation to ensure we prepare for and mitigate effects to our Airmen, Guardians and their families,” the statement from Air Force Undersecretary Gina Ortiz Jone reads in part. “Medical, legal resources, and various assistance are available for those who need them.”
Interestingly, according to Air Force spokesperson Laurel Tingley, who spoke to HuffPost, the Air Force hasn’t yet received any requests for legal advice related to these anti-LGBTQ+ laws. According to Tingley, it’s unknown if more folks are using mental health services, because they don’t track that information.
It’ll be curious to see how Republicans will respond to this news, if they acknowledge it at all. Conservatives love to give lip service to thank military personnel and their families, so it’s very likely that particularly hateful folks will be surprised to see the military making explicit resources and support available. Will their surprise lead to a moment of growth and new awareness and acceptance? We can only hope.
Jared Kushner left the White House where he worked as a senior adviser to his father-in-law, set up a private equity firm, and pretty much immediately got a $2 billion investment from, effectively, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia despite the crown prince’s advisers saying that Kushner’s business operations were “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” This was the same crown prince who had a journalist murdered and dismembered during the Trump years, with Kushner running domestic interference to minimize the political consequences of that murder. And that prince just so happens to “invest” $2 billion with a firm just started by someone with no experience in the field—a firm that has gotten very little investment from anyone else since then.
Hunter Biden has never worked in the White House. There’s a great deal of evidence that he has traded on his family name for personal profit, and there’s a federal investigation into whether he paid his taxes or laundered money, but no real evidence that his father has been involved in that in any way.
Guess which one of these stories the right-wing media cares about: the son-in-law/former White House adviser who got literally billions of dollars from the leader of a foreign government who he had helped while in an official position to do so, or the son/no official affiliation who took millions of dollars for sitting on boards and serving as an adviser in cases where he didn’t have much to contribute beyond his last name?
I know you guessed right on that, but here are the numbers. Fox News mentioned Kushner not once from Monday morning after the story about the Saudi investment broke until Tuesday morning, Aaron Rupar reports. Hunter Biden was a different story. In that time frame, Rupar writes, “Fox News/Business mentioned Hunter Biden a whopping 68 times, according to TVEyes transcripts. (The true number is even higher — I counted conservatively by not including reruns of the primetime shows that run early in the morning.)”
This is what you get with a propaganda network. One story simply doesn’t exist on Fox News and the other is a major national issue, used repeatedly to imply that the president is linked to corruption. According to Rupar, during the same time frame, CNN mentioned Hunter Biden once and Jared Kushner twice. MSNBC mentioned Kushner 23 times and Hunter Biden three times. This is during a period when there was breaking news about Kushner and nothing in particular new about the younger Biden, so there was a legitimate reporting reason for some imbalance. MSNBC is often seen as an ideological counterweight to Fox News, but as these numbers show, it really, really isn’t acting in the same determinedly partisan way. (And to be clear, I wish it would! There needs to be a real counterweight to Fox News, but it’s not coming from the corporate media.)
Fox News shapes a world for its viewers in which Republican scandals don’t exist and Democratic ones are all-consuming (even when they’re not really scandals). It works for them. Along with the Electoral College and the minority rule structure of the Senate, it’s a major driver of Republican power these days. I’m not calling for Democrats to be as shamelessly committed to partisan power above truth or ethics or consistently values-driven positions as Republicans are, but it would be really nice if our side were committed to shouting about the bad stuff the others guys do and equally about the true things that work for us. It would be really nice if a Democratic billionaire or two would fund something, anything, with a meaningful chance of being that counterweight to Fox News.
When we’re talking about Jared and Hunter, that’s a key difference in the media environment. But of course there’s also a difference in the family environment. Donald Trump hasn’t cut Kushner—or any of his own grifting children—loose because he approves of what they’re doing. Profit by any means is the name of the Trump game, never mind what the laws say, let alone any pesky ethical considerations, as the various investigations into Trump’s own business practices show. By contrast, President Joe Biden has shown no particular sign of approving of Hunter’s business practices. What he’s shown amply is that he loves his son and wants him to thrive after years of addiction and personal upheaval. It would probably be better, politically speaking, for the president to have long since cut his son loose to distance himself from possible scandal.
But where the operative values for the Trumps are profit, pride, and thinking they’re above accountability, the operative value for Joe Biden is always love of family. And Hunter’s situation has been and remains terribly sad. Hunter now faces a kind of accountability to which not a single Trump has yet been subjected—and he should, if indeed he has dodged taxes and/or laundered money and/or acted as an unregistered foreign agent. But the fact that he remains under federal investigation as his father refuses to improperly intervene is telling about the president’s ethics and relationship to the rule of law. Jared, meanwhile? He has $2 billion of Saudi money and no serious worries about accountability.
Instead of working to end racial injustice and discrimination within their department, some cops are just finding ways not to get caught. In order to stop videos of them abusing individuals from making it on social media, cops in California have been blasting Disney songs. According to The Washington Post officers in Santa Ana, California, blasted out classics from Toy Story, Mulan, and Encanto at night so that people would not be able to upload videos of them due to copyright reasons.
Alongside a city councilman, locals have expressed concern about the practice. The practice has been used in the past to prevent individuals from posting violent videos that would draw attention to the actions of the department. The latest incident took place on April 4.
In that incident, a police cruiser blasted Disney music at 11 PM on a residential street when a cameraman asked whether or not the department was paid to listen to music. According to local news reports, police officials had been investigating a stolen vehicle at the time.
Santa Ana City Councilman Johnathan Hernandez was also present, who then asked: “Why are you playing Disney music?” He also questioned if the officer lived in the area.
The officer referenced “copyright infringement” in his reply.
The video exchange was posted on the Santa Ana Audits YouTube channel and garnered more than 45,000 views. The channel monitors police exchanges with the public.
In response to the clip, Santa Ana Chief of Police David Valentin said: “My expectation is that all police department employees perform their duties with dignity and respect in the community we are hired to serve.”
But given the history of the practice, Hernandez said he believed the officers were trying to keep the clip off social media.
Hernandez told the Post he plans to introduce a ban on the practice.
“I’m embarrassed that this is how you’re treating my neighbors. There’s children here,” he told the Post. “If you work for the public and there are numerous people out recording you telling you to please turn it off, why wouldn’t anyone in their right mind stop that?”
In one incident last year, cops in Oakland, California, played Taylor Swift’s 2014 song “Blank Space” as they confronted activists. While they did this in an attempt to have videos of them not make it to social media, in this incident footage made it to and stayed on social media.
According to research by Harvard University’s Lumen project, which studies copyright content removal, several videos linked to Black Lives Matter protests have been removed because they contained copyrighted music. The researchers noted that “law enforcement,” or anyone who wanted to stop videos from being shared online, “need only make sure that copyrighted audio is present with sufficiently recognisable clarity and volume in the background of a protest or other event,” BBC reported.
Even in the worst of times, Congress can usually get its act together to name federal buildings. It’s kind of a joke about Congress, actually. But House Republicans just got to the point of divisive extremism where they won’t even reliably do that.
Every member of Florida’s congressional delegation had co-sponsored a bill to name a federal courthouse after Justice Joseph W. Hatchett, the first Black man to serve on the Florida Supreme Court and the first Black judge on a federal appeals court in the Deep South. That means Republican Sens. Rick Scott and Marco Rubio and 16 House Republicans, along with 11 House Democrats. The bill had passed the Senate. But then, at the last minute, a majority of Republicans in the House, including co-sponsors, turned against the bill in a moment that resonated with the racist attacks some Senate Republicans leveled at Justice-designate Ketanji Brown Jackson in her Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia appears to have singlehandedly turned the vote from a routine vote to name a federal building after a trailblazing judge into a Republican purity test. Clyde circulated a 1999 Associated Press article about one of Hatchett’s decisions relating to prayer in schools. Never mind that Hatchett was following Supreme Court precedent when he ruled against student-approved prayers at graduation ceremonies. This single decision made him toxic among House Republicans, with 89% voting against naming the courthouse after him. Since the bill’s passage was seen as certain, it had come for a vote under a fast-tracked process that required a two-thirds majority, which meant that with Republicans suddenly opposed, it failed.
All this at the behest of Clyde, a lawmaker most famous for his insistence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was a “normal tourist visit.” Clyde also voted against the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act and against making Juneteenth a federal holiday, which, combined with his active organizing against naming a federal courthouse after a Black judge, kind of starts looking like a pattern.
Clyde did not bring years of credibility within the House to his objection. He’s a first-term representative. Republicans are now so beholden to extremism, so ready to jump at the first hint they might not be pure enough, that a first-termer who should be seen as an embarrassment is able to wield the power to shift a majority of Republican votes. Multiple representatives who had sponsored the bill voted no at the last minute, with one, Rep. Vern Buchanan, saying “I don’t know” why he had changed his mind.
The last-minute shift shows how undisciplined House Republicans now are by anything except the race to the right. But its echoes of Jackson’s confirmation hearing—in which senators like Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton used routine decisions of the sort made by judges all the time to paint her as a supporter of pedophiles and drug dealers—highlight how willing Republicans are to trash any Black person who is a candidate for an honor. Years of judicial decisions can always be cherrypicked to find something that sounds objectionable to someone, somewhere, but whose decisions are cherrypicked and to what end matters. So Republicans tried to turn Jackson into a pedophile-supporter using a sentencing record that was in line with the averages and in fact similar to that of other judges for whom those same Republicans had voted. And they voted against honoring Hatchett with a courthouse name over a single decision that followed Supreme Court precedent.
As Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said after the vote, “If the standard that we use is one ruling out of thousands, then what else could we conclude but that they are not willing to name a courthouse after a Black person.”
