Independent News

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This week on The Downballot, cohosts David Beard and David Nir covered a lot of ground:

• Elections this past week in Wisconsin and California
• An interesting turn of events in the Pennsylvania Senate race, where the Democratic primary race went negative for the first time
• Madison Cawthorn and why Republicans are finally turning against him
• Important European elections that have taken place recently or are coming up on the docket very soon

Beard and Nir also spoke to guest Ali Lapp, founder of House Majority PAC, the largest Democratic super PAC that is devoted to helping Democrats win House races nationwide. The trio discussed how House Majority PAC goes about its work and the races that it’s focusing on this year, as well as the role redistricting has played in Democrat’s strategies.

You can listen below, or subscribe to The Downballot wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find a transcript for this week right here. New episodes come out every Thursday!

In California, a special election was recently held for the remainder of Rep. Devin Nunes’ term. Former GOP state Assembly Leader Connie Conway took first place in the runoff that’s going to be held June 7. She took 64,000 votes—about 35%. Democrat Lauren Hubbard, an official at the California Department of Water Resources, is in second with 20%, though as Beard notes, that figure is not final yet because there are a few other candidates with about 15% of the vote each: GOP businessman Matt Stoll and another Democrat and Marine veteran, Eric Garcia.

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

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

In Wisconsin, a number of local elections were held last week. In one notable race, fake Trump elector Kelly Ruh (who tried to help Donald Trump steal the election in 2020 by being one of the Wisconsin electors for Donald Trump) lost her reelection as an alderperson in De Pere, a town near Green Bay. Down in Milwaukee, acting mayor and Democrat Cavalier Johnson decisively won Tuesday’s special election, beating conservative Bob Donovan by a 72 to 28 margin. Johnson made history as the first black person elected to lead Milwaukee, though he will have to run for a full term in 2024.

Beard thinks that Wisconsin was, overall, a “mixed bag”:

There were some Democratic victories, some Republican victories, which is not the worst news, I think, compared to where we’ve seen in the past. These before-November elections that take place are lower turnout; you can really see wipeouts one way or another when it’s a big wave year. So the fact that it wasn’t a terrible night for Democrats … does provide a little bit of hope that a wave is not imminent later in the year, but that’s obviously just one factor among many that we’re going to continue to keep watching.

Moving on to the topic of Madison Cawthorn, Republican Sen. Thom Tillis announced that he would be endorsing state Sen. Chuck Edwards, who is running against Cawthorn in the May 17 GOP primary. While it is a pretty unusual move to see a sitting senator endorse a challenger to a member of Congress from his own state, as Nir explained, there were many underlying reasons for this:

Though the coke and orgy stuff got all of the attention, that’s not really why Tillis and other Republicans finally have painted a target on Madison Cawthorn’s back. The real problem is that Cawthorn has just behaved like a celebrity who cares much more about the national right-wing media circuit and the attention he gets in D.C. than about his constituents back home. And in fact, that’s exactly something that Tillis specifically cited, saying, ‘It comes down to focus on the district, producing results for the district. And in my opinion, Mr. Cawthorn hasn’t demonstrated much in the way of results over the last 18 months.’

Moving up north to Pennsylvania, where just this week for the first time, the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate turned negative on the airwaves. The race is primarily a contest between two candidates, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and Congressman Connor Lamb, both of whom are from Western Pennsylvania. Nir gave listeners a rundown of the situation:

Fetterman has led in all the polls. He simply has greater name recognition. And it seems that Lamb’s allies think that the only way to stop Fetterman is to attack him on TV ads. But boy, did they screw up. A Super PAC called Penn Progress started airing an ad that tried to contrast Lamb, describing his background as a Marine and a prosecutor, with Fetterman, and saying that Fetterman is ‘a self-described socialist.’ But there was a big problem, at the end of the piece, there was a huge correction that said, ‘This piece said that John Fetterman is a self-described socialist. He is not.’ So this ad was based on a claim in an article that was retracted. And as a result, Fetterman’s campaign sent a letter to TV stations that were airing the ad, asking them to take the ad down because it contained a falsehood.

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

The pair wrapped up their weekly rundown by quickly previewing some international elections to watch in Hungary and France. Hungary held a general election this past Sunday, in which Prime Minister Victor Orbán won a fourth term in office with 54% of the vote—up more than four percentage points from his last election victory in 2018. His party also retained a two-thirds majority in Parliament, thanks to some pretty significant gerrymandering that his party has implemented in the past. In Orbán’s victory speech, he listed a number of what he called left-wing groups or organizations that he had overcome in this victory, among them: the left in Hungary, the EU, and Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros (who is often the victim of antisemitic attacks in Hungary). He also included Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which seems incredibly strange, Beard opined, though Zelenskyy has attacked Orbán for being one of the most reluctant of the EU leaders to support Ukraine or to provide aid to Ukraine.

This follows an increasingly popular conservative model of thinking and governing, Beard notes: “The Conservative Political Action Committee, CPAC, which is one of the biggest conservative groups in the [United States], they are gathering in May in Hungary where their headline speaker will be Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán. So they aren’t really trying to hide their affection for him and for their desire to emulate what he’s done in Hungary here.”

Over in France, there’s a related situation going on, where the first round of the presidential election is going to be taking place on Sunday, April 10. The two leading candidates are centrist president Emmanuel Macron and far-right leader Marine Le Pen, both of whom are expected to advance to a runoff that’s going to take place two weeks later. Polls have shown Le Pen narrowing her deficit in that runoff to single digits after she lost to Macron five years ago by a landslide 32% margin.

Beard offered this analysis of the situation:

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

In the second half of the show, Beard and Nir welcomed Lapp on to share more about the work House Majority PAC is doing.

“So the details of what House Majority PAC is and how it differs from the DCCC or even candidate campaigns can be tough to parse for a lot of people. Can you give us a brief rundown of the unique role that HMP plays and how it functions as an independent expenditure PAC?” Beard asked.

Lapp replied:

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

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

“We work really closely with other organizations. I like to think of us as the air traffic control of House world … and we really try to help [other organizations] make good decisions in their House independent expenditure work. We really see ourselves as helping them understand who the candidates are, what forces are at play,” Lapp added. “We have a decently sized staff of House experts, so when these organizations who may not have as big a staff decide, ‘Hey, we’d like to play in this race,’ we can immediately help them with good information, sharing our polling data, sharing our research, and helping them help us win House seats.”

Asked about redistricting, Lapp admitted that redistricting does affect their planning, but as a result, the organization stays very flexible. As she put it, “We’re very nimble, we’re able to move quickly when we need to. And that’s really important in a redistricting cycle more than any other kind.”

Beard pointed out that HMP has actually put out a few things recently, most recently releasing an ad called “Rescued” that touts Biden and the Democrats’ economic successes over the past 18 months or so, along with some research from Blue Rose Research about how positive the ads’ impact would be. “So how did that come about? And what’s the rationale for an ad like that that doesn’t focus so much on a specific House or House races, but really has a much broader national focus?” he asked.

Lapp believes it’s crucial to start setting the table for the dialogue that needs to happen this fall:

We need to start talking about the economic successes that Democrats have brought to the American people and what we’re still doing every day to make things better for them. In that ad, we specifically talked about the job growth we’ve had, the economy turning around and what we’ve been doing lately, Biden doing his work to lower gas prices, the House voting on Congresswoman Angie Craig from Minnesota’s bill to cap the price of insulin. These are things that have a real impact on families’ pocketbooks, and we think we need to be talking about them even more aggressively than we already have been. So we felt that we should produce this ad, release it, try to get as much play as we can and potentially show what we believe is the right path to talking about the economy as we head into the fall elections.

Nir noted that a few media markets on HMP’s list seemed to cover some districts that definitely got worse for Democrats during the redistricting process—for instance, Arizona’s 2nd District, Michigan’s 10th District, or Texas’ 15th District. “How do you make decisions about whether a seat is worth the investment, especially when it’s gotten redder in redistricting?” he inquired.

This is a huge part of our mission at House Majority PAC, Lapp explained:

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

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

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

Closing out, Lapp acknowledged that this is going to be a tough cycle, but that HMP is up to the challenge.

“We’ve got so many good Democratic candidates running. And look, 2020 was not a great year down-ballot, even though Joe Biden won the presidency. So a lot of Democrats that held some of the toughest districts were not reelected in 2020. And the Democrats from really tough districts that were reelected in 2020, they’re battle-tested. They are strong candidates, they fit their districts really well, and most of them got districts that are at least a little bit better as a result of redistricting,” Lapp said. “So we have every confidence in their ability to win this cycle. We’re there to support them. We know you guys are, we hope your listeners are, and we really appreciate the support.”

The Downballot comes out every Thursday, everywhere you listen to podcasts. As a reminder, you can reach our hosts by email at [email protected]. Please send in any questions you may have for next week’s mailbag. You can also reach us via Twitter @DKElections.

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I’m on vacation this week and thought this blast-from-the-past cartoon might be a good reminder of what was going on when Russia took over Crimea back in 2014. Some similar threads still today.

If only we knew about Paul Manafort back then and the dirty dealings he was doing in Ukraine for his client, Viktor Yanukovych.

I’ll be back with new material next week. Please fix the world when I’m gone.

Thanks.

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Charles P. Pierce/Esquire:

Eric Boehlert’s Spirit Was Decades Younger and His Wisdom Decades Older

One of the only media critics who mattered has died at 57 years old.

He was gloriously unimpressed by reputations. He was the implacable foe of journalistic laziness in all its forms, especially as expressed through access journalism and the reportorial arch-heresy of Both Siderism. Take him all in all, he was something of a proud throwback to what the craft of journalism ought to be. It pains me as a professional to know that a lot of famous yahoos are going to get a freer ride now that he’s gone, although I feel certain that the likes of Dan Froomkin and Margaret Sullivan—and, in its own little way, this shebeen—will carry on his work as best we all can.

Joan Walsh/The Nation:

Eric Boehlert Got Everything Right About Our Petty, Self-Congratulating Media  
From his early coverage of political reporters’ savaging Al Gore to his incisive critique of their Joe Biden coverage right before he died, he got it. And he will be missed.

Many fine journalists have written tributes to Eric’s insight and bravery in covering the media, and also his generosity and warmth as a colleague and friend. What more can I add? Well, we worked together at Salon for five years in the early 2000s, and I was frequently his editor. I went looking for some of his early pieces for us, and I found treasure. Whether even his admirers know it or not—and many do, but not all—Eric has been on the same story for the last 23 years: the callow, irresponsible way that our Beltway media has covered Democrats in these decades.

And he has fucking crushed it.

WaPo:

Trump deflects blame for Jan. 6 silence, says he wanted to march to Capitol

The former president struck a defiant posture and repeated false claims in an interview with The Washington Post.

Trump, speaking Wednesday afternoon at his palatial beachfront club, said he did not regret urging the crowd to come to Washington with a tweet stating that it would “be wild!” He also stood by his incendiary and false rhetoric about the election at the Ellipse rally before the rioters stormed the Capitol. “I said peaceful and patriotic,” he said, omitting other comments that he made in a speech that day.

In fact, Trump said he deserved more credit for drawing such a large crowd to the Ellipse — and that he pressed to march on the Capitol with his supporters but was stopped by his security detail. “Secret Service said I couldn’t go. I would have gone there in a minute,” he said.

He’s our best GOTV tool. 

Taylor Lorenz/Twitter:

The NYT announced a new policy on Twitter today and it’s very disappointing and contradictory to see. This is not how a newsroom should approach the internet or social media. It only deepens the NYT’s vulnerability to bad faith attacks. Let me break it down.

For the majority of my career I ran social strategy for newsrooms. I wrote social media guidelines for large media cos. A good social policy is about *supporting* your staff, protecting them against bad faith attacks, and recognizing that we all live as full humans online now. 

These two things are in direct contradiction w/ each other. The issue w/ NYT is that they consistently buy into bad faith attacks online and punish their journalists when they’re subject to gamergate style smear campaigns.

David Axe/Daily Beast:

Two COVID Variants Just Combined Into a ‘Frankenstein’ Virus

First identified in the U.K., the ultra-infectious “XE” subvariant could already be spreading undetected in America.

The first subvariant of Omicron, the latest major variant of the novel coronavirus, was bad. BA.1 drove record cases and hospitalizations in many countries starting last fall.

The second subvariant, BA.2, was worse in some countries—setting new records for daily cases across China and parts of Europe.

Now BA.1 and BA.2 have combined to create a third subvariant. XE, as it’s known, is a “recombinant”—the product of two viruses interacting “Frankenstein”-style in a single host…

But don’t panic just yet. The same mix of subvariants that produced XE might also protect us from it. Coming so quickly after the surge of BA.1 and BA.2 cases, XE is on track to hit a wall of natural immunity—the antibodies left over from past infection in hundreds of millions of people.

HuffPost:

Ketanji Brown Jackson Makes History As First Black Woman On Supreme Court

For the first time ever, the court will no longer be a majority of white men.

Jackson, 51, was confirmed in a 53-47 vote. Every Democrat voted for her, along with three Republicans: Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Susan Collins (Maine) and Mitt Romney (Utah). When the vote was over, the Senate chamber erupted with cheers and applause from the balcony.

Jackson’s confirmation seals a promise by President Joe Biden, who vowed as a candidate to pick a Black woman for the Supreme Court.

With Jackson on the court, white men will not be a majority of justices for the first time ever.

Amy Knight/WaPo:

Is a coup against Putin possible? Russia’s history offers clues.

Vladimir Putin has never faced a serious challenge to his power. But his disastrous war in Ukraine could change that…

The most likely threat to his rule comes from within the regime. Russia’s history offers some insights.

There have been two successful coups d’état since the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 — the overthrow of Stalin’s dreaded secret police chief Lavrenti Beria in June 1953 and the ouster of Communist Party First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev in October 1964. Aside from the execution of Beria and six of his associates, these coups were relatively bloodless. In both cases, the support of the security services and the Soviet military were crucial to their success.

Jessica Bruder/Atlantic:

A COVERT NETWORK OF ACTIVISTS IS PREPARING FOR THE END OF ROE

What will the future of abortion in America look like?

Ellie snugged the rubber stopper into the mason jar. She snipped the aquarium tubing into a pair of foot-long segments and attached the valve to the syringe’s plastic tip. In less than 10 minutes, Ellie had finished the project: a simple abortion device. It looked like a cross between an at-home beer-brewing kit and a seventh-grade science experiment.

The two segments of tubing protruded from the holes in the stopper. One was connected to a cannula, the other to the syringe. Holding the anatomical model, Ellie traced a path with the tip of the cannula into the vagina and through the cervix, positioning it to suction out the contents of the uterus. Next, to show more clearly how the suction process works, she placed the cannula into her coffee. When she drew back the plunger on the syringe, dark fluid coursed through the aquarium tubing and into the mason jar, collecting slowly within the diamond-patterned glass.

I had read about such devices before. But watching the scene on the beach towel brought history into focus with startling clarity: Women did this the last time abortion was illegal.

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Russia continues to shift already-battered forces toward Eastern Ukraine and has made new moves around Kherson, but there’s still no clear picture of what Russia’s actual next plans might be. There are hints that Russian leaders are focused on capturing a broad section of the country centered around Kramatorsk, which would allow Russian troops to fully encircle deeply dug-in Ukrainian defenders who have long held back separatist aims in the Donbas—but outside observers are skeptical that Russia could pull off such an ambitious operation. Each of the logistical problems that plagued Russia in its Kyiv assaults—from lack of coordination to lack of communication to long supply lines that were relentlessly (and very successfully) hounded by Ukrainian territorial defenders—would only be doubled; the battalions Russia is sending have already seen hard fighting and heavy losses.

Russian leaders, however, might be so desperate for something that can be portrayed as victory that they are willing to throw as many troops as is necessary at Ukrainian defenses. We’ve circled from pre-war predictions—most positing that Russia would tear through Ukraine’s defenses like steel through paper—to experts struggling to come up with a scenario in which Russia cobbles together any military victory at all.

That does not mean it is not possible. It also doesn’t mean Russia will not continue to inflict horrific violence on Ukrainian civilians—the only Russian military skill that appears to have survived Putin’s purge of competence. Today’s updates:

• The Kherson bulge, the Kramatorsk gap
• Lies, damn lies, and … WTF is that?
• ‘Looking behind us now, into history back’
• ‘Ukraine biolabs’ conspiracy theory pushed by Kremlin and Tucker originated with QAnon fan

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The CoreCivic-operated Otay Mesa Detention Center in California is back in the news for the usual, but no less horrific, reason: it’s abusive treatment of people in its custody.

The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that a number of immigrants have reported sexual misconduct by a staff worker, who they say walked into their cells unannounced and stared at their groins and buttocks while making inappropriate remarks. One of the men said that during one of these unwanted visits, the staff worker had a visible erection.

“It’s pretty disturbing for me to even relive this,” Erik Mercado told The San Diego Union-Tribune. He recalled that when he questioned the staffer about what he was doing in his cell, the staffer responded that he was “looking for something big.” 

RELATED STORY: Psychologist further traumatized immigrants detained at odious facility, civil rights complaint says

The private prison profiteer said the complaints were under investigation, and claimed that the company “is committed to the safety and dignity of every person entrusted to our care,” the report said. But the record doesn’t lie: Otay Mesa Detention Center is an abusive shithole that should be shut down.

“Sexual abuse ranging from verbal harassment to the extremes of rape are rampant, and it’s often covered up by the perpetrators,” Freedom For Immigrants’ Amanda Díaz told The San Diego Union-Tribune. She manages the free legal hotline attacked by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Mercado and three other men also reported the abuses to through the hotline. “ICE operates under a veil of secrecy, and it leaves those who have been harmed with pretty much no path for justice.”

Other immigrants said in a civil rights complaint last month that they were mocked, belittled, and further traumatized by a contracted psychologist after asking for mental health care. Sergio Manrique Gutierrez said in the complaint that Hrysso Fernbach was mocking him within minutes of sitting down in front of her.

“On that day I was in her office and within three minutes she said to me, ‘There is nothing wrong with you … Let me guess, you’ve been here since you were a little kid and this is all you know… You want me to write you a letter for the judge so he can let you stay here.’” Manrique Gutierrez had “struggled with psychotic and mild neurocognitive disabilities for many years,” the complaint said. He said visiting this doctor, who already had a disturbing history even before arriving to Otay Mesa, “only made me feel worse than I did before seeing her.”

It seems that if CoreCivic truly were “committed to the safety and dignity of every person entrusted to our care,” this doctor wouldn’t have been treating vulnerable people at Otay Mesa in the first place.

House lawmakers joined advocates last fall in urging the Biden administration to terminate Otay Mesa’s contract, citing “repeated violations of the ICE standards and the excessive waste of federal funds.” They noted a DHS inspector general report confirming the facility had at the start of the pandemic tried to force immigrants into signing a liability form protecting the site if they wanted a protective face mask.

ICE is also abusing immigrants at huge benefit to private prison companies, lawmakers noted at the time. “The contracts to run these facilities are designed in such a way—particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the September 21, 2021 DHS enforcement priorities—to guarantee government waste,” legislators said. “ICE pays an estimated $1.34 million dollars every day on unused beds through guaranteed minimum contracts, such as the ones with Otay Mesa and Adelanto.” They noted that from April 2020 to March 2021, CoreCivic reaped $22 million for used beds.

RELATED STORIES: ‘Repeated violations’: California lawmakers call on DHS to end three ICE contracts in state

San Diego’s wretched Otay Mesa immigration prison is seeing near-record COVID-19 cases

Detainees were told they’d have to sign contract letting facility off the hook if they wanted masks

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As Daily Kos continues to cover, the heinous, hateful “Don’t Say Gay” law in Florida is dangerous for LGBTQ+ students, plus those who are questioning and allies. Queer youth already face structural and systemic barriers and obstacles when it comes to mental health, in addition to being at higher risk for becoming homeless, leaving high school without a diploma, and facing verbal and physical harassment and abuse. 

That’s bad enough as it is, but an under-discussed element of the law (and copycats popping up around the nation) is the way it targets public school teachers, coaches, and other staff. Do LGBTQ+ teachers essentially need to go back into the closet? Whose identity is “inappropriate” and whose isn’t? (We know the answer to that one.) How do teachers know the line between being supportive and being “too” supportive? 

One example comes to us from Kentucky, where music teacher Tyler Clay Morgan wrote a message of support for LGBTQ+ students on the classroom board on March 30, according to local outlet WB on 9. After outcry, he has since resigned from his job and says he has received threats of violence over it.

RELATED: School board president received death threat against family prior to local election. Guess who won?

The message read: “YOU ARE FREE TO BE YOURSELF WITH ME YOU MATTER!” in rainbow colors. A trans pride flag and pride flag were also included. Morgan, who taught at West Irvine Intermediate School, which serves third through fifth grades, confirmed he did write the message on the whiteboard, according to local outlet WKYT. 

Sadly, we don’t know what conversation ensued in the classroom, but according to Estill County Superintendent Jeff Saylor, the conversation went “far beyond the music curriculum.”

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

In a longer statement, Saylor wrote in part that while teachers “of course” sometimes veer from lessons plans, the conversations in Morgan’s classroom allegedly exceeded those norms. “It is my job to make sure that parents are not surprised by these types of situations,” he wrote. 

Sounds a lot like the parental rights discussions are spooking administrators already, huh?

Not all people have taken an issue with what happened, though. Local outlet LEX 18 spoke to a parent who asked to be anonymous and said they appreciate the teacher’s effort to provide a “safe space” for “ANY student to be themselves.”

Henry Sparks, a former student at the high school, told the outlet that having a teacher like Morgan could have been life-changing for him when he was a student, as he recalled hearing homophobic slurs from a young age. 

“He was literally trying to make a safe atmosphere for these kids to be themselves and learn,” Sparks told the outlet. “Which is something I was not able to do.” He added that he didn’t feel he had a safe space to learn as a youth.

As a gay person myself, I relate to this: I wasn’t “out” entirely in high school (if I even had a concept of what that looked like), but I cannot imagine how reassuring it would have been to have a teacher in my life who explicitly, openly, warmly supported LGBTQ+ people and that I didn’t have to guess or worry about how people “really” felt. Of course, I was (and am) privileged in many ways: I’m white, cisgender, and able-bodied, for example. For LGBTQ+ people who live with multiple marginalized identities, having a supportive adult in their life might make an even bigger impact. 

“I still firmly believe more work needs to be done in Kentucky,” Morgan wrote in a Facebook post about his resignation. “Especially in Eastern Kentucky, to ensure that more resources are provided to make sure all students feel safe, secure, and seen.”

In addition to Morgan’s situation, we have to remember the young children who are losing a teacher. For youth who were drawn to Morgan’s message of inclusion, watching them leave the classroom so soon after might be traumatizing or anxiety-inducing, as it could send a message that support and acceptance are going to get them in trouble in some way. Again, this ultimately suggests to young people that they should stay in the closet, and that’s an enormous (and unfair) emotional burden. 

Again, we don’t know what was said in the classroom, but from what we know, the board’s message seems appropriate, loving, and, dare I say, educational. It’s almost like conservatives are hoping young people won’t learn acceptance or inclusion and will be all the easier to manipulate into conservatism as adults. 

Again, talk about grooming, huh?

You can catch brief local video coverage below.

Sign the petition: Demand the Senate pass the Equality Act and protect the LGBTQ community from discrimination.

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When we in the United States discuss the Caribbean diaspora—including the nearly 13 million U.S. citizens of Caribbean ancestry—rarely do we think of Canada. Our neighbor to the north has a Caribbean immigrant and ancestored population of about 1 million people, and they have faced struggles for civil rights as what Canada dubs “visible minorities,” a term coined by Black Canadian activist Kay Livingston in 1975. 

Today, let’s meet two amazing Black Caribbean Canadian women: a politician and a dub poet.

Caribbean Matters is a weekly series from Daily Kos. If you are unfamiliar with the region, check out Caribbean Matters: Getting to know the countries of the Caribbean.

While searching for Caribbean news items for this series, I came across a video promoting the documentary Steadfast: The Messenger and the Message. I admit that I knew zero about the subject of the film, the Hon. Jean Augustine, P.C., C.M., O.Ont., C.B.E., as she’s styled in Canada; while I was aware that Canada celebrates Black History Month, I didn’t know Augustine, 84, was the person behind that legislation. 

Here’s the Steadfast theatrical trailer.

Some background on the Hon. Augustine.

Augustine is one of a large number of Caribbean immigrants who came to Canada in the years following World War II. She was born on September 9, 1937, in Grenada, an island nation in the southeastern Caribbean Sea that was then still part of the British colonial empire. She grew up in a village called Happy Hill near Grenada’s capital of St. George’s. Her father, Ossie Simon, was a sugarcane-plantation worker, but he died before she was a year old after a deadly bout with tetanus, which he contracted during a visit to the dentist.

Augustine’s mother, Olive, was already expecting a second child when her husband died, and the entire family was adopted by an older woman in the village, whom they called “Granny.” Granny had no children of her own, but owned some property and was moderately well-off. Such communal and charitable arrangements were more commonplace in West Indian society during Augustine’s youth. Granny’s was a household in which Augustine was encouraged to excel in school, and she did. She won a scholarship to a local Roman Catholic school, where she earned top grades. During her high-school years, she founded an all-girl band and also hosted her own youth program on a local radio station before graduating a year early.

Augustine’s first job was as a schoolteacher in Grenada, but her pay was less than $10 a month. On Sundays she would write letters for other Grenadians who had never learned to read or write, but wanted to keep in touch with relatives living overseas. This experience exposed Augustine to people who had left the West Indies in search of better economic opportunities, and at the age of 22 she herself moved to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to take a job as a nanny. She arrived on a special visa the Canadian government gave out to citizens of other nations inside the British colonial realm, which required her to work one year as a domestic servant. After that period was finished, she would then be free to stay in Canada permanently if she wished.

Augustine would go on to make history in Canada in 1993 when she was elected to the House of Commons; nine years later, she would become the first Black woman to serve as a cabinet minister.

But Augustine has impacted generations. Unilearnal’s Anne Moreau is the co-creator of the YouTube series 28 Moments of Black Canadian History. In the 2020 episode below, Moreau talks about life as a Black woman in Canada, as well as the impact of learning about and then meeting Hon. Jean Augustine.

Moving on to the other star of today’s story, April 5 marks the 70th birthday of Lillian Allen, one of the founders of the dub poetry movement in Canada.  

Krista L. Roberts wrote Allen’s bio for the Canadian Encyclopedia. 

Lillian Allen was born the fifth of ten children. She was raised and grew up in Spanish Town, a historic city about 17 kilometres west of Kingston, Jamaica. Allen’s father was a civil servant and a leader at the local church; her mother was also an active community member who played a large role in educating her children. In 1969, at the age of 17, Allen left Spanish Town to attend the University of Waterloo in Kitchener, Ontario. That same year, she moved to New York City, where she landed a job working at the Caribbean Daily. It was in the pages of this paper that she first  published, “I Fight Back,” a dub poem that gained a considerable amount of recognition. While living in New York, she also studied communications and Black studies at City College of New York, as well as creative writing at New York University. During  this time, she became heavily involved in the dub poetry scene.

Allen moved back to Jamaica in 1973, and the next year she returned to Canada and settled in Toronto, where she enrolled in the newly formed English and Creative Writing Program at York University. She was one of the first students to graduate from the program, with a BA, in 1978. While in school, Allen served as a community legal worker in Regent Park, a public housing estate in Toronto with a large population of Afro-Caribbean immigrants. She also worked as an education coordinator for the Immi-Can youth project,and contributed research and lyrics for the reggae band Truths and Rights […]

In 1989, Allen’s poem “Unnatural Causes” was the subject of a National Film Board film. The short film features images of politicians basking in luxury and comfort interspersed with images of homeless women and archival footage of Canadian protest movements. In 1993, Allen co-produced and co-directed the documentary Blak Wi Blakk, about the life and work of the dub poet Mutabaruka. In 1999, she released her third album, Freedom and Dance. She was a driving force in the 2003 founding of the Dub Poets Collective, alongside Afua Cooper, Klyde Broox, Chet Singh, Clifton Joseph, di’b young and Sankofa Juba, and in 2004 she hosted Wordbeat, a CBC Radio program on poetry and spoken word.

Give a listen to “Unnatural Causes”:

As Kerstin Knopf writes in Views of Canadian Cultures:

The piece “Unnatural causes” contextualizes the clash between Canada’s postcard image as the perfect multicultural nation and the various images of (immigrant) poverty and homelessness that are likely to be ignored in national discourses. In the poem’s idealized city and country “a curtained metropolitan glare/ grins a diamond sparkle sunset.” The picture postcard of Toronto that is sent home transports false illusions into the world. Canada’s postcard images construct it as an immigrant “fairy land,/ where everything is so clean/ a place where everyone is happy/ and well taken care of” as the voice of the receiver of the postcard reflects. But the postcard glosses over society’s unpleasant spots and does not reveal that in the “silvered city/ hunger rails beneath the flesh,” people make their homes in streetcars and bus stops and stay thirsty “at the banks of plenty.” To affirm this ‘unpostcardlike’ side of Canadian society, Allen introduces the character of Caroline Bungle, a homeless woman, who “tugs her load […] on the front steps of abundance” and whose life is a “dungle of terror/ of lost hope/ abandonment.”

Here’s a video tribute to Allen.

In 2021, Allen published Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen. In her review of the book for The Walrus, Kaie Kellough writes this of Allen’s lasting impact—and those who tried to thwart it:

The arrow-like precision of Allen’s voice helped fashion a new narrative of who a Canadian artist could be and what they might address. In 1984, Allen was part of a small group of dub poets who tried to join the League of Canadian Poets, a national organization that, for many years, was the face of English-language poetry in the country. Their application was rejected on the grounds that Allen and the others were performers and therefore failed to meet the league’s membership criteria at the time. The group countered that they write poems, but they also perform them, and performance is a form of publishing. They were eventually admitted. The instance of discrimination masquerading as formal artistic distinction marked Allen. The initial rejection suggested that a Black poet who maintains an oral practice cannot really be a poet. Instead of accepting that and practising their art form on the margins of the literary scene, Allen and her contemporaries demanded that the definition change.

Hope you enjoyed meeting these two phenomenal sisters, and that you will join me in the comments for more discussion and the weekly Caribbean news Twitter round-up.

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Cavalier Johnson made history Tuesday when he was elected Milwaukee’s first Black mayor.

“This city, for the first time in our 176-year history, has elected its first Black mayor. We did it,” Johnson told his supporters.

The 35-year-old Democrat and former alderman trounced his challenger, Alderman Bob Donovan, with a 72% to 28% margin in a special election for an abbreviated two-year term, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports—in a predominantly white city, to boot.

In 2016, Johnson was elected as an alderman to the city’s Common Council and was elected council president in 2020. He took over as acting mayor last December when Mayor Tom Barrett resigned to take a position in President Biden’s administration as the U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg, according to the Journal Sentinel.

RELATED STORY: Nation’s oldest National Park Service Ranger Betty Reid Soskin retires at age 100

CNN reports that Johnson’s campaign focused on public safety with a plan “to combat reckless driving and for safer Milwaukee streets.”

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

In his victory remarks, Johnson admitted that “we’ve got a lot to do,” and talked of jobs, crime, and restoring a healthy relationship with the residents and government, the Journal Sentinel reports.

“At the local level, we don’t control gun law. So we need our partners at the state level to be here with us. To work on that issue to make sure that guns don’t end up in the hands of people who would cause death, harm, and destruction,” Johnson said Wednesday when he spoke with reporters.

With the election of the city’s first millennial mayor, Milwaukee Public Schools senior student Dulce Medina told WTMJ-TV she feels his election offers a sense of opportunity. “I think he just opened up a doorway for us. He took the step for us, and we are going to make a leap. … I think we are going to do great things after high school.”

Medina’s sentiments reverberated in Johnson’s speech Tuesday following his historic win.

“I hope that all the Black and Brown boys and girls who wake up tomorrow, and they get ready for school—they do so knowing that we have shown here today—that no matter where you live, or how much or how little your parents make, and no matter the color of your skin—that in Milwaukee, there’s a place for you too,” Johnson said.

As The Root reports, Johnson’s victory follows another historic win as Ed Gainey, a former lawmaker in Pittsburgh, became that city’s first Black mayor in more than 200 years.

According to the U.S. Census, both Pittsburgh and Milwaukee are predominantly white. Milwaukee is 42% white and 38.8% Black and Pittsburgh is 66.4% white and 23% Black.

Johnson will be officially certified as mayor on Apr. 13.

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Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin are among the five Senate Democrats who have joined Senate Republicans in introducing a bill that seeks to usurp Biden administration action, and delay the plan to end Stephen Miller’s debunked policy that has for more than two years used the pandemic as an excuse to stomp on U.S. asylum law. The other three Democrats are Mark Kelly, Maggie Hassan, and Jon Tester.

The legislation would require the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which is undoubtedly not an immigration agency, to work with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on “a plan to Congress about how the government would address a potential spike in migrant arrivals once Title 42 is lifted,” CBS News reported.

“The Biden administration was wrong to set an end date for Title 42 without a comprehensive plan in place,” Kelly claimed. But CBS News reported that “DHS has said it is preparing for the end of Title 42, citing a 16-page plan that includes surging resources and personnel to the border.”

RELATED STORY: Border state advocates say they’re ready to welcome asylum-seekers following Title 42 announcement

Both Kelly and Hassan are soon facing reelection. Raphael Warnock, who is also up for reelection, is not among the legislation’s supporters but has stated his opposition to the Biden administration’s decision. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that his opposition has angered Latino and immigrant rights advocates who helped secure his Senate win in 2020. “Your statement is deeply concerning to us, considering our commitment to supporting policies that ensure the humane treatment of migrant communities,” groups said.

For Republicans to oppose any and all governance by the Biden administration is expected. But for any Democrat to join them in seeking to preserve, even just temporarily, a white supremacist policy that tries to void our U.S. asylum laws and obligations is deeply shameful, and pure cowardice in the name of political expediency. Community Change Action co-president Lorella Praeli tweeted that the Biden administration’s decision “just returns us to the February 2020 status quo. This should not be controversial.” To believe it is falls into Miller’s trap.

“For the GOP, the border is all politics, no solutions,” America’s Voice executive director Frank Sharry said on Thursday. “All Republicans have to offer are ugly attack ads, ‘open borders’ falsehoods, and the same cruel and chaotic policies that Trump and Stephen Miller advanced.” Pro-pandemic Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has already made it clear he intends to use the policy to derail further relief. Sharry said Democrats must stand up to him, not next to him. And if they believe the plan isn’t sufficient enough, “get in there and help make it stronger.” But for the love of God, don’t enable the GOP’s bad-faith efforts.

“Democrats can walk and chew gum at the same time,” he continued. “We can have a secure border and a fair and functional asylum system. We can be humane and orderly. Let’s be who we are as a party and a nation, rather than emboldening a party that seeks to dehumanize immigrants and refugees to score political points.” 

America’s Voice has previously noted how even as a border control measure (which both the previous administration and current one have claimed it never has been), the policy has been a failure. “Title 42 incentivized individuals to repeatedly try to cross the border to apply for asylum, and these recidivists drove the number of ‘encounters’ well beyond the actual number of individuals apprehended,” the group said.

Robert Menendez, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, tweeted a pushback clearly directed at his colleagues. “Reminder for anyone who needs to hear this: responsible stewardship of our border, and honoring our moral and legal obligations to treat immigrants and refugees with dignity, are not mutually exclusive. We can, and MUST, do both.”

Praeli added that “Democrats must not waiver or buckle to Republicans’ racist fear-mongering—they should reject any bill or amendment that blocks access to asylum at the border or otherwise prevents the administration from ending #Title42.” She added that “Democrats cannot allow the Republicans to define the terms of this debate. #Title42 represents the Trump-Miller vision for U.S. border policy.” 

Asylum is legal immigration, despite Stephen Miller’s efforts to make us think otherwise. So will Democrats defend U.S. asylum law and vulnerable people, or side with a white supremacist twerp?

RELATED STORIES: 

GOP states waste no time suing over Biden admin’s termination of anti-asylum Title 42 policy

Biden admin broadens vaccine access for migrants in custody as it reviews future of Title 42 order

Biden administration readies new policy intended to speed up asylum process

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It was only a couple of weeks ago that Tucker Carlson was fulminating loudly—along with his sidekick, Glenn Greenwald—that there were secret American “biolabs” in Ukraine engaged in creating “bioweapons,” which were more than enough to justify Russia’s invasion. Carlson discussed it in three episodes, one of them featuring Greenwald. Then it mutated into another variation on their favorite narrative blaming Hunter Biden for the world’s ills.

Now we know just how gullible they were: ADL investigators have ascertained that the original source of the theory—a since-deplatformed Twitter user under the nom de plume @WarClandestine—is in fact a fringe QAnon follower from rural Virginia who reveled in having his concocted claims amplified not just by Fox News, but even the Kremlin. The episode once again illustrates the three-way relationship between online far-right extremists, the mainstream right-wing media ecosystem, and the global authoritarian powermongers.

The ADL’s Center on Extremism identified Jacob Creech, a self-described former restaurant manager and Army National Guard veteran living in rural Virginia, as “Clandestine,” the originator of the biolab conspiracy theory. He has a long and colorful history of posting QAnon material dating back to 2018, and more recently posted tweets hoping for the lynchings of Ottawa police officers.

On Feb. 24, he published a thread claiming that “U.S. biolabs” in Ukraine were the real targets of Russian airstrikes.

“China and Russia indirectly (and correctly) blamed the US for the C19 [Covid-19] outbreak,” Creech tweeted. “And [they] are fearful that the US/allies have more viruses (bioweapons) to let out.” The invasion, he posited, was a smokescreen for Russia to destroy U.S. biolabs in Ukraine, thus preventing another global pandemic.  

The theory caught on like wildfire when Alex Jones’ InfoWars program picked it up and ran with it. In almost no time at all, it was being aired on Fox News by Carlson. He invited Greenwald onto his program on March 10 to discuss it.

“It’s clearly a case where the U.S. government has been lying, it has mounted a disinformation campaign, if you will, designed to cover up what it is doing and nobody in the press corps seems interested in finding out what’s at the bottom of this. Why is that?” Carlson asked.

“When the government comes out and emphatically denies that they have biological weapons,” Greenwald said. “We know they’re not telling the truth.”

Carlson also ranted at length about it on his March 14 show, seemingly confused about the relatively simple and clear explanations for what these biolabs are all about. (The theories focused on labs associated with the U.S. Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, created to decommission Soviet-era chemical and biological weapons. Gavin Wilde, a security consultant at the Krebs Stamos Group, told NBC News the program “has long provided fodder for Russian propaganda campaigns” that target Russian residents.)

Russian state TV has extensively replayed clips of Carlson’s rants. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov went out of his way to praise Carlson and Fox News while condemning mainstream Western media coverage of the invasion.

“We understood long ago that there is no such thing as an independent Western media. In the United States, only Fox News is trying to present some alternative point of view,” he said.

Creech, as the ADL reports, reveled in all the attention:

As the biolab theory continued to gain traction, Creech repeatedly took credit for coming up with the conspiracy and celebrated its dissemination in mainstream spaces. “YOU GUYS TUCKER’S OPENING STATEMENT IS THE BIOLABS STORY. The story is on the most watched show in America,” Creech wrote on Telegram on March 9, shortly after Tucker Carlson’s broadcast began. “HOLY SHIT WE FUCKING DID IT.” In a follow up post, Creech wrote, “I am trying to get in contact with Tucker [Carlson], [Dan] Bongino, [Jesse] Watters, [Steve] Bannon, Alex Jones. If they wanna use my thread and they wanna send this mainstream, then I guess it’s time to go mainstream.”

Subsequently, Creech has become a minor QAnon celebrity, twice appearing on RedPill78, a popular QAnon show hosted by Zak Paine. “I’m the one who wrote the [Twitter] thread that kind of took the world by storm. If you’re hearing about the bio labs it was me,” Creech said on Feb. 26. He also appeared on election fraud conspiracy theorist Seth Holehouse’s show Man in America, telling the audience that “they’re trying to establish a narrative that Russia is going to be the one releasing these biological weapons after they said there were no biological weapons in Ukraine. So now they’re in this mass cover-up phase.”

The emergence of the biolabs claims also brilliantly illuminates the key role that American disinformation centers—particularly right-wing conspiracy theorists and the right-wing media ecosystem that amplifies them—play in enabling authoritarian propaganda. Russia’s original propaganda pretext for invading Ukraine—namely, that Ukrainian government and military leadership was run by Nazis—was never made to appeal to right-wing extremists who might in fact relate to those Nazis. Instead, it was pumped up by faux leftists in the pro-Syrian/“anti-imperialist” sector whose shrinking reach never included the broad swaths of the right already inclined to support Putin.

“The ‘biolabs’ are serving as a false justification for why Russia invaded Ukraine. It’s defensive,” Clint Watts, a senior fellow at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University, told NBC News. “They create a situation where they go to a populist audience, push out talking points, get the audience primed and make it true later.”

Gaslighting, of course, has become Carlson’s specialty. In reality, Carlson spent most of the month prior to the invasion praising Putin and echoing Russian propaganda: running down Ukraine, deriding it as a “State Department client state”—not a democracy, but “a tyranny”; and claiming that Russia just wants to keep its borders secure, everything the fault of Joe Biden. So much so that he became the hero of Russian state television, where his rants were translated and replayed and he was praised as an astute American.

Carlson mostly dropped discussion of the biolabs, however, since that March 14 episode, until 10 days later on March 24, when he spouted off at length parroting a Kremlin claim—promoted earlier that same day by the Russian Defense Ministry, complete with colorful graphs and charts—that Hunter Biden, the president’s son, was financially connected to these same labs. Even as he raised the claims, Carlson mocked anyone who might claim he was being a willing dupe for Russia.

The Kremlin continues to push the claims apace, claiming—with the assistance of China’s Xinhua news agency—that Ukraine intended to deploy the pathogens supposedly developed in these biolabs against the populations of Donbas and Russia, and recruiting friendly “experts” to demand an investigation of the labs. It has become a staple of their daily talking points about the war with Ukraine.

The ADL notes that the spread of these kinds of disinformation in the mainstream ecosystem poses a serious challenge for democracy itself:

As the war in Ukraine rages on, the biolab conspiracy has quickly emerged as the prevailing narrative among QAnon adherents to explain Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Not only does it “justify” the invasion in their eyes, it also validates their belief that Covid-19 is a U.S.-created bioweapon. This flood of disinformation could have far-reaching implications in the long term, sowing further distrust in democratic institutions and exacerbating political polarization.