Heather Cox Richardson

seth meyers GIF by Late Night with Seth Meyers

So annoying.

Or, don’t ask them… just do it, because it’s pretty much true.

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Yeah, why not just do it. The constant politeness comes across as pretty weak by this point.

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I appreciate people holding onto their values, though. And it doesn’t really matter what tone people take, the right is going to demonize people, regardless. Tone hardly matters at this point.

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Ah, another Dem use of banana republic!

I wonder if this is a coordinated Dem effort. :thinking:

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I’d rather not look at it! :wink:

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No prob, just close your eyes and listen to it instead!

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Yes Sir, we don’t want bananas. Right? Especially no right wing bananas.

hairstyle GIF

Yeah, about that…

In 1904, the American author O. Henry coined the term to describe Honduras and neighbouring countries under economic exploitation by U.S. corporations, such as the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita).

So, basically the US corporate banana created the blueprint banana republic.

A banana republic is a country with an economy of state capitalism, whereby the country is operated as a private commercial enterprise for the exclusive profit of the ruling class.

Anything comes to mind?

the profit, derived from the private exploitation of public lands, is private property, while the debts incurred thereby are the financial responsibility of the public treasury

Anything?

The Wikipedia article on the Banana Republic has it all. Railroad tycoons! 1000% profit! A failed uprising, self-stylised as “revolution”! Military and governmental backing from the US for the right-wing militia and US mercenaries!

Wait, did Russia take a page out of that book and translated it for the 21st century, or is this already conspiracy bullshit I am making up?

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Yeah well, ain’t that Amurica?

Suspicious Meme GIF by MOODMAN

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March 1, 2023 (Wednesday)

Drugmaker Eli Lilly announced today that it will cap the cost of insulin at $35 a month, bringing costs for people with private insurance and those without insurance who sign up for Lilly’s copay assistance program into line with the $35 cap for Medicare recipients Congress imposed with the Inflation Reduction Act last August.

Republicans all voted against the Inflation Reduction Act and explicitly stripped from it a measure that would have capped the cost of insulin at $35 for those not on Medicare. They continue to oppose the measure. On February 2, 2023, newly elected House Republican Andy Ogles (TN) introduced his first bill: a call to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, claiming it “took a gigantic step toward socialized medicine.” The bill had 20 far-right cosponsors.

At the time he introduced the bill, Ogles presented himself as an economist with a degree in international relations from Middle Tennessee State University. Since then, an investigation by NewsChannel 5 in Nashville revealed that he took one course in economics and got a “C” in it, and that his resume was similarly exaggerated across the board. Ogles won a seat in Congress after the Republican state legislature redistricted Nashville to make it easier for a Republican to win there.

Lilly’s announcement in the face of Republican support for big pharmaceutical companies is a bellwether for the country’s politics. Biden has pressured companies to bring down the price of insulin—most notably by calling for such legislation last month during his State of the Union address—and is claiming credit for Lilly’s decision. But there is more to it.

The astronomically high price tags on U.S. insulin compared to the rest of the world have become a symbol of a society where profits trump lives, and there is growing opposition to the control pharmaceutical companies have over life-saving drugs. A number of other entities, including a nonprofit company in Utah called Civica Rx, the state of California, and a company run by billionaire Mark Cuban, have all promised to produce generic insulin at a fraction of what pharmaceutical companies are currently charging. Lilly’s announcement is likely a reaction to the changing moment that has brought both political pressure and economic competition. The company’s leaders see the writing on the wall.

The administration continues to work to create positive change in other measures important to ordinary Americans. This month ends temporary increases in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, previously referred to as “food stamps.” At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Congress boosted SNAP payments, keeping as many as 4.2 million people out of poverty. Congress ended those extra benefits late last year through the Consolidated Appropriations Act that funded the government. About 42 million Americans receive SNAP benefits, and the end of that boost will cut those benefits by $90 a month on average.

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack wrote an op-ed at CNN today, promising that the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers SNAP, will do its best to protect families losing the expanded benefits. It will work to adjust benefits to rising prices, expand school lunch programs, and promote access to the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program.

“Our country was founded to support the prosperity and potential of Americans in every corner of the nation,” Vilsack wrote. “Under President Joe Biden’s administration, we’re making good on this promise.”

Yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing about the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex. Congress passed the amendment in 1972 and sent it off to the states for ratification, but they imposed on that ratification a seven-year deadline. Thirty states ratified it within the next year, but a fierce opposition campaign led by right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly eroded support among Republicans, and although Congress extended the deadline by three years, only 35 states had signed on by 1977. And, confusing matters, legislatures in five states—Idaho, Nebraska, Kentucky, South Dakota, and Tennessee—voted to take back their earlier ratification.

In 2017, Nevada became the first state to ratify the ERA since 1977. Then Illinois stepped up, and finally, in 2020, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the amendment, putting it over the required three quarters of states needed for the amendment to become part of the Constitution. But now there are legal challenges to that ratification over both the original deadline and whether the states’ rescinding of previous ratifications has merit.

The Senate hearing was designed to examine whether the deadline could be separated from the amendment to allow the amendment to be added to the Constitution, but it was far more revealing than that.

Faced with the possibility that the ERA might become part of the Constitution, right-wing leaders insisted that the ERA has “just one purpose left,” as the Heritage Foundation put it: “Abortion.” They claim that since, in their view, women are now effectively equal to men across the board in employment and so on, women’s current demand for equality before the law is simply a way for them to capture abortion rights.

Catholic bishops of the United States have written to senators to express “alarm” at the ERA, warning it would have “far-reaching consequences” with “negative impacts to the common good and to religious freedom.” They claim it would require federal funding for abortions and would prohibit “discrimination based on ‘sexual orientation,’ ‘gender identity,’ and other categories.” “We strongly urge you to oppose it,” they wrote, “and any resolution attempting to declare it ratified.”

This fight highlights that the attempt to stop government protection of individuals is really about imposing the will of a minority. A piece by Megan O’Matz in ProPublica today explored how an anti-abortion law firm has been sowing doubts about the 2020 presidential election as part of a long-term strategy to end abortion rights. Led by former Kansas attorney general Phill Kline, whose law license was suspended a decade ago for ethics violations, lawyers at the Thomas More Society worked to restrict access to the vote and to stall President Joe Biden’s inauguration in order to keep Trump in office.

Their efforts thrived on disinformation, of course, and the echoes from the testimony released recently in the defamation case of Dominion Voting Systems against the Fox Corporation continue to reverberate in the fight against public lies. In that testimony, both Fox News Channel hosts and top executives admitted that they knew Trump’s claims of victory in the 2020 presidential election were lies but spread them anyway to keep their viewers from abandoning them for another channel.

Now House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has given exclusive access to 44,000 hours of video from the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to one of those hosts, Tucker Carlson.

Today, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) did an end run around McCarthy to address the problem of disinformation directly at the source. They sent a letter to Rupert Murdoch, chair of the Fox Corporation, and other top Fox executives, reminding them of their damning testimony and reminding them that “your network hosts continue to promote, spew, and perpetuate election conspiracy theories to this day.”

They wrote: “We demand that you direct Tucker Carlson and other hosts on your network to stop spreading false election narratives and admit on the air that they were wrong to engage in such negligent behavior.”

It is an important marker, and if the Fox Corporation can read the writing on the wall as well as Eli Lilly can, it might shift the focus of the Fox News Channel, which already seems to be trying to pull its support for Trump and give it to Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

But that protest is unlikely to change the behavior of right-wing members of Congress. Yesterday, Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Mark Green (R-TN) blamed the Biden administration for the deaths of Caleb and Kyler Kiessling from fentanyl poisoning after their mother, an attorney and conservative activist, testified before the House Committee on Homeland Security. But the young men, along with 17-year-old Sophia Harris, died in July 2020, when Trump was president.

When senior CNN reporter Daniel Dale asked Greene’s office why she had blamed Biden for the deaths, her congressional spokesperson, Nick Dyer, “responded by saying lots of people have died from drugs under Biden and ‘do you think they give a fck about your bullsht fact checking?’” Dale also asked him to comment on Greene’s lies about the 2020 presidential election yesterday. Dyer answered: “F*ck off.”

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Well, that is about as literate a response as i would expect from that asshat’s office. Yup, exactly on par.

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March 2, 2023 (Thursday)

It’s commonly understood that Republican Rutherford B. Hayes won the electoral votes from three contested southern states in 1876 and thus took the presidency by promising to remove from the South the U.S. troops that had been protecting Black Americans there. Then, the story goes, he removed the troops in 1877 and ended Reconstruction.

But that isn’t what happened.

On March 2, 1877, at 3:50 in the morning, the House of Representatives finally settled the last question of presidential electors and decided the 1876 election in favor of the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, just two days before the new president was to be sworn in.

The election had been bitterly contested. Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden appeared to have won the popular vote by about 250,000 votes, but broken ballot boxes and terrorized Black voters in three southern states made it clear the count was suspect. A commission of fifteen lawmakers tried to judge which of the dueling slates of electors from those states were legitimate. In the end, the commission, dominated by Republicans, decided the true electors belonged to Hayes.

To make sure the southerners who were threatening civil war over the election did not follow through, leading industrialists and lawmakers made promises to southern leaders that a Republican president would look favorably on federal grants to southern railroads and would not fill government positions with Republicans in the South, giving control of patronage there to a Democrat.

But what did not happen in 1877, either before or after the inauguration, was the removal of troops from the South.

That legend came from a rewriting of the history of Reconstruction in 1890 by fourteen southern congressmen. In their book “Why the Solid South? Or Reconstruction and Its Results,” they argued that Black voting after the Civil War had allowed Black people to “dominate” white southerners and virtually bankrupt the region and that virtuous white southerners had pushed them from the ballot box and “redeemed” the South. Contemporaries had identified the end of Reconstruction as 1870, with the readmission of Georgia to the United States. But “Why the Solid South” identified the end of Reconstruction as the end of Republican rule in each state.

In 1906, former steel baron James Ford Rhodes gave a date to that process. In his famous seven-volume history of the United States, he said that in April 1877, Hayes had ended Reconstruction by returning all the southern states to “home rule.” In his era, that was a political term referring to the return of power in the southern states to Democrats, but over time that phrase got tangled up with what did happen in April 1877.

During the chaos after the election, President U.S. Grant had ordered troops to protect the Republican governors in the Louisiana and South Carolina statehouses. When he took office, Hayes told Republican governors in South Carolina and Louisiana that he could no longer let federal troops protect their possession of their statehouses when their Democratic rivals had won the popular vote.

Under orders from Hayes, the troops guarding those statehouses marched away from their posts around the statehouses and back to their home stations in April 1877. They did not leave the states, although a number of troops would be deployed from southern bases later that year both to fight wars against Indigenous Americans in the West and to put down the 1877 Great Railroad Strike. That mobilization cut even further the few troops in the region: in 1876, the Department of the South had only about 1,586 men including officers. Nonetheless, southerners fought bitter congressional battles to get the few remaining troops out of the South in 1878–1879, and they lost.

The troops did not leave the U.S. South in 1877 as part of a deal to end Reconstruction.

It matters that we misremember that history. Generations of Americans have accepted the racist southern lawmakers’ version of our past by honoring the date they claimed to have “redeemed” the South. The reality of Reconstruction was not one in which Black voters bankrupted the region by taking tax dollars from white taxpayers to fund roads and schools and white voters stepped in to save things; it was the story of an attempt to establish racial equality and the undermining of that attempt with the establishment of a one-party state that benefited a few white men at the expense of everyone else.

Certain of today’s Republican leaders are engaged in an equally dramatic reworking of our history.

When Florida governor Ron DeSantis last March signed the law commonly called the “Don’t Say Gay” law, he justified it by its title: the “Parental Rights in Education” law. It restricted the ability of schoolteachers to mention sexual orientation or gender identity through grade 3, and opponents noted that its vagueness would lead teachers to self-censor.

Under the guise of protecting children, DeSantis echoed authoritarians like Hungary’s Victor Orbán and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who claim that democracy’s principle that all people are equal—including sexual minorities—proves that democracy is incompatible with traditional religious values. Promising to take away LGBTQ Americans’ rights offered a way to consolidate a following to undermine democracy.

DeSantis sought to shore up his position by mandating a whitewashed version of a mythic past. At his request, in March the Florida legislature approved a law banning public schools or private businesses from teaching people to feel guilty for historical events in which members of their race behaved poorly, the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (Stop WOKE) Act.

In July the Florida legislature passed a law mandating that the books in Florida’s public school cannot be pornographic and must be suited to “student needs”; a state media specialist would be responsible for approving classroom materials. An older law makes distributing obscene or pornographic materials to minors a felony that could lead to up to 5 years in prison and a $5,000 fine. Unsure what books are acceptable and worried about penalties, school officials in at least two counties, Manatee and Duval, directed teachers to remove books from their classrooms or cover them until they can be reviewed.

In January, DeSantis set out to remake the New College of Florida, a public institution known for its progressive values and inclusion of LGBTQ students, into an activist Christian school. He replaced six of the college’s thirteen trustees with far-right allies and forced out the college president in favor of a political ally, giving him a salary of $699,000, more than double what his predecessor made.

On February 28, right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, the man behind the furor over Critical Race Theory and one of DeSantis’s appointees to the New School board, tweeted: “We will be shutting down low-performing, ideologically-captured academic departments and hiring new faculty. The student body will be recomposed over time: some current students will self-select out, others will graduate; we’ll recruit new students who are mission-aligned.”

Then, this Tuesday, the board voted to abolish diversity, equity and inclusion programs at the school. DeSantis has promised to defund all DEI programs at public colleges and universities in Florida.

The attempt to take over schools and reject the equality that lies at the foundation of liberal democracy is now moving toward the more general tenets of authoritarianism. This week, one Republican state senator proposed a bill that would require bloggers who write about DeSantis, his Cabinet officers, or members of the Florida legislature, to register with the state; another proposed outlawing the Democratic Party.

DeSantis and those like him are trying to falsify our history. They claim that the Founders established a nation based on traditional hierarchies, one in which traditional Christian rules were paramount. They insist that their increasingly draconian laws to privilege people like themselves are simply reestablishing our past values.

But that’s just wrong. Our Founders quite deliberately rejected traditional values and instead established a nation on the principle of equality. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” they wrote, “that all men are created equal.” And when faced with the attempt of lawmakers in another era to reject that principle and make some men better than others, Abraham Lincoln called it out for what it was. “I should like to know,” he said, “if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, and making exceptions to it, where will it stop?”

To accept DeSantis’s version of our history would be a perversion of our past and our principles.

But it is not unimaginable.

The troops did not leave the South in 1877.

[Photo: Matthew Brady, Rutherford B. Hayes taking the oath of office, March 4, 1877, Library of Congress, public domain.]

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I’m starting to believe a better way to fight back is to start calling him King Ron. Something like that would emphasize leaders of his type don’t want to govern, they want absolute power to rule. Even folks who support him for religious or supremacist reasons might balk at that. After all, a king could easily take away their freedom.

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Or maybe Ron the Don?

More euphonious, and he is acting like a mafia don, as well as a wannabe king.

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March 3, 2023 (Friday)

Today the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee demonstrated that they will actively fight back against Republicans’ false narratives. House Republicans, led by Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH), have insisted they had evidence of the “weaponization” of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation against Republicans. Jordan has claimed to have “dozens and dozens of whistleblowers…talking about what is going on, the political nature at the Justice Department.”

These allegations that Republicans are victims of a “deep state” follow Trump’s insistence that the FBI’s investigation of the ties between his 2016 campaign and Russian operatives was “a witch hunt” led by Democrats. Jordan and other Republican members of Congress developed that same theme in their performances defending Trump during his first impeachment trial. Trump defenders continued to say on television and other media that they were victims of the FBI investigation of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

But now, in charge of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, established under the Judiciary Committee, Jordan and the Republicans actually have to produce evidence of their allegations. So far, they have held one hearing. It was a fiasco as the Republicans’ witnesses, including Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), made rambling statements that rehashed old grievances without presenting any new evidence, and Democrats repeatedly accused Republicans of trying to use the powers of the government to advance political talking points.

Recently, Republicans have begun to release pieces of the private interviews they conducted with those claiming they could prove the FBI was persecuting Republicans. Rather than permit them to establish a false narrative, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), and the top Democrat on the weaponization subcommittee, Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands), today released a deeply researched and footnoted 316-page report that shreds the Republicans’ story.

The report reveals the Republicans’ “dozens and dozens of whistleblowers” are, so far at least, three witnesses—whistleblower is actually a specific category and they do not meet that standard—who have left the FBI and have complained that the agency is biased against “conservatives.” Two of them lost their security clearances before they left, and while committee Republicans refused to show Democrats the men’s suspension notices, one revealed in his testimony that the notice arrived after he had improperly accessed documents from the FBI’s classified system. All three embrace a number of conspiracy theories. Under oath, they provided only right-wing accusations of bias without being able to attest to any first-hand knowledge of the things they alleged.

The witnesses did not come forward on their own; they were identified by former administrators in the Trump administration, including fervent Trump loyalists Kash Patel and Russell Vought. Patel provided money and legal services to two of the witnesses and found one of them a job at Vought’s right-wing think tank, the Center for Renewing America, after he left the FBI.

The witnesses were all fervent Trump supporters who were sympathetic to those involved in the January 6th attack. One of them claimed that the January 6th attack was a “set-up” and that it was “a larger #Democrat plan using their enforcement arm, the #FBI.” He described the FBI as “the Brown Shirt enforcers of the @DNC,” a reference to Nazi Storm Troopers. Another has repeatedly called for the FBI to be “defunded,” “dismantled,” “dissolved,” “aborted,” “abolished,” and “completely eliminated and eradicated from the federal government.”

In a section of the report titled “An Analysis of Witness Testimony Shows That Committee Republicans Are Working to Advance a Politically Motivated Messaging Campaign Unsupported by the Evidence,” Nadler and Plaskett show how the witness testimony directly rebutted the Republicans’ talking points. Under examination, the witnesses disproved that the Department of Justice was trying to pad its case numbers regarding domestic violent extremism, that it had diverted resources from child abuse cases to pursue January 6 offenders, and that the FBI had overreacted to threats of violence against school administrators and local political officials, all Republican talking points.

The Democrats provided extensive evidence to suggest that Patel was egging on the witnesses to help push Trump’s fight against the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Biden administration. Now, they said, it appears that he and his allies are trying to use the subcommittee in this same effort. The Democrats expressed “serious concerns” about the possible coordination between Patel and the Republican committee members.

They explained: Patel is currently a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America (CRA), a MAGA think tank that pushed the House Republicans to establish the subcommittee. The CRA was founded by Christian nationalist Russell Vough—now working with the Republicans on their budget plan—and is funded by the Conservative Partnership institute (CPI), which is run by former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and former senator Jim DeMint (R-SC).

Axios author Jonathan Swan described CPI as “a who’s-who of Trump’s former administration and the ‘America First’ movement,” “the hub of the hard right in Washington.” Their headquarters is where the right-wing extremist “Freedom Caucus” meets, and the notoriously stingy Trump authorized a $1 million donation to the CPI in 2021.

In short, the Democrats are suggesting that the House Republicans who established the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government are themselves trying to weaponize the government to advance the interests of Trump and the MAGA Republicans. Nadler and Plaskett quoted Jordan’s statement at the August 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference, when he promised that his investigation would “frame up the 2024 race when I hope and I think President Trump is going to run again and we need to make sure that he wins.”

The official Republican House Judiciary Twitter account responded vaguely: “Cherry-picked leaks. Partial transcripts. All to disparage brave whistleblowers. Democrats should be ashamed.”

But, just as they did with the Republicans’ reluctance to show the American people their budget plan, the Democrats are calling the Republicans’ bluff. “We urge Chairman Jordan to schedule the public testimony of these individuals without delay,” Nadler and Plaskett wrote. “The American public should be able to judge for themselves whether these witnesses or their allegations are remotely credible.”

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Always

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And also evidence that it doesn’t matter how virtuous or ruthless the Dems are: the GQP will fabricate justification for breaking laws, rules, and decorum.

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March 4, 2023 (Saturday)

Winter has at last caught up with us, but it’s behind schedule. Snow has arrived with enthusiasm in New England at the same time the longer days make it clear that Spring is on its way.

Going to get a real winter night’s sleep tonight, but will be back at it tomorrow.

[Photo, Blizzard, by Peter Ralston.]

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March 5, 2023 (Sunday)

President Joe Biden spoke this afternoon in Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the 58th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when law enforcement officers tried to beat into silence Black Americans marching for their right to have a say in the government under which they lived. Standing at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which had been named for a Confederate brigadier general, Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator who stood against Black rights, Biden said: “On this bridge, blood was given to help ‘redeem the soul of America.’”

The story of March 7, 1965, commemorated today in Selma, is the story of Americans determined to bring to life the principle articulated in the Declaration of Independence that a government’s claim to authority comes from the consent of the governed. It is also a story of how hard local authorities, entrenched in power and backed by angry white voters, worked to make the hurdles of that process insurmountable.

In the 1960s, despite the fact Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived in Selma, Alabama, the city’s voting rolls were 99% white. So, in 1963, local Black organizers launched a voter registration drive.

It was hard going. White Selma residents had no intention of permitting their Black neighbors to have a say in their government. Indeed, white southerners in general were taking a stand against the equal right of Black Americans to vote. During the 1964 Freedom Summer voter registration drive in neighboring Mississippi, Ku Klux Klan members worked with local law enforcement officers to murder three voting rights organizers and dispose of their bodies.

To try to hold back the white supremacists, Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, designed in part to make it possible for Black Americans to register to vote. In Selma, a judge stopped voter registration meetings by prohibiting public gatherings of more than two people.

To call attention to the crisis in her city, voting rights activist Amelia Boynton traveled to Birmingham to invite the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to the city. King had become a household name after the 1963 March on Washington where he delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech, and his presence would bring national attention to Selma’s struggle.

King and other prominent Black leaders arrived in January 1965, and for seven weeks, Black residents made a new push to register to vote. County Sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2,000 of them on a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.

Then, on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed man, 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson had run into a restaurant for shelter along with his mother when the police started rioting, but they chased him and shot him in the restaurant’s kitchen.

Jackson died eight days later, on February 26. Black leaders in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression.

On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured the skull of young activist John Lewis and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.

Images of “Bloody Sunday” on the national news mesmerized the nation, and supporters began to converge on Selma. King, who had been in Atlanta when the marchers first set off, returned to the fray.

Two days later, the marchers set out again. Once again, the troopers and police met them at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but this time, King led the marchers in prayer and then took them back to Selma. That night, a white mob beat to death a Unitarian Universalist minister, James Reeb, who had come from Massachusetts to join the marchers.

On March 15, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.

The marchers were determined to complete their trip to Montgomery, and when Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, refused to protect them, President Johnson stepped in. When the marchers set off for a third time on March 21, 1,900 members of the nationalized Alabama National Guard, FBI agents, and federal marshals protected them. Covering about ten miles a day, they camped in the yards of well-wishers until they arrived at the Alabama state capitol on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people.

On the steps of the capitol, speaking under a Confederate flag, Dr. King said: “The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.”

That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.

On August 6, Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Johnson recalled “the outrage of Selma” when he said, “This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.”

The Voting Rights Act authorized federal supervision of voter registration in districts where African Americans were historically underrepresented. Johnson promised that the government would strike down “regulations, or laws, or tests to deny the right to vote.” He called the right to vote “the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men,” and pledged that “we will not delay, or we will not hesitate, or we will not turn aside until Americans of every race and color and origin in this country have the same right as all others to share in the process of democracy.”

But less than 50 years later, in 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. The Shelby County v. Holder decision opened the door, once again, for voter suppression. Since then, states have made it harder to vote. In the wake of the 2020 election, in which voters handed control of the government to Democrats, Republican-dominated legislatures in at least 19 states passed 34 laws restrict­ing access to voting. In July 2021, in the Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee decision, the Supreme Court ruled that election laws that disproportionately affected minority voters were not unconstitutional so long as they were not intended to be racially discriminatory.

When the Democrats took power in 2021, they vowed to strengthen voting rights. They immediately introduced the For the People Act, which expanded voting rights, limited the influence of money in politics, banned partisan gerrymandering, and created new ethics rules for federal officeholders. Republicans in the Senate blocked the measure with a filibuster. Democrats then introduced the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would have restored portions of the Voting Rights Act, and the Freedom to Vote Act, a lighter version of the For the People Act. Republicans blocked both of those acts, too.

And so, in 2023, the right to vote is increasingly precarious.

As Biden told the crowd gathered in Selma today, “The right to vote—the right to vote and to have your vote counted is the threshold of democracy and liberty. With it, anything is possible. Without it—without that right, nothing is possible. And this fundamental right remains under assault.”

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March 6, 2023 (Monday)

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) met in Washington, D.C., over the weekend, sparking speculation over the 2024 Republican presidential field. Hard-right figures like Donald Trump and his loyalists Mike Lindell, the MyPillow entrepreneur, and Kari Lake, who lost the 2022 race for Arizona governor, attended, along with House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) and right-wing media figure Steve Bannon, but many of those testing the 2024 presidential waters gave it a miss.

CPAC started in 1974, and since then it has been a telltale for the direction the Republican Party is going. This year was no exception.

CPAC was smaller this year than in the past, and it showcased the Republican extremism that is far outside the mainstream of normal American politics. “Feels like MAGA country!” Donald Trump, Jr., told the crowd.

The headliner was former president Trump, twice impeached, deeply involved in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and embroiled in a range of criminal investigations. In his speech, Trump embraced his leadership of those hardening around a violent mentality based in grievance that echoes that of fascist movements.

“In 2016, I declared: I am your voice,” he said. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”

He claimed that he and his followers are “engaged in an epic struggle to rescue our country from the people who hate it and want to absolutely destroy it…. We are going to finish what we started. We started something that was a miracle. We’re going to complete the mission, we’re going to see this battle through to ultimate victory. We’re going to make America great again.” After listing all the “villains and scoundrels” he and his followers would “demolish,” “drive out,” “cast out,” “throw off,” “beat,” “rout,” and “evict,” he continued: “We have no choice. This is the final battle.”

Other Republican hopefuls are waiting in the wings. Trump has, in fact, never won the popular vote, and his leadership has brought historic losses for the party, but his control over his voting base makes him the front-runner for the Republican nomination.

Other candidates seem to be hoping that criminal indictments will knock Trump out of the race and open space for them without making them take a stand against Trump and thus alienate his followers. It seems likely that if such an indictment were forthcoming, they would blame Democrats for Trump’s downfall and hope to ride to office with his voting bloc behind them, without having to embrace that voting blocs’ ideology.

That hope seems delusional, considering the increasing emphasis of the Trump Republicans and their imitators on violence. The Republicans are hitting on a constant refrain that crime is on the upswing in the U.S. Since crime does not, in fact, seem to be rising, it seems worth noting that an emphasis on crime justifies the use of state power to combat that crime and normalizes the idea of violence against “criminals,” a category the Republican Party is defining more and more broadly. This will be an extremely difficult genie to stuff back into a bottle, especially as leading Republican figures are increasingly talking in martial terms and referring to the U.S. Civil War.

That emphasis on violence corresponds with something else on display at this year’s CPAC: how completely the Republican Party now depends on a false narrative constructed out of lies.

CPAC fact checkers had their work cut out for them. Linda Qiu of the New York Times found Trump repeated a number of things previously identified as incorrect as well as adding some new ones. Politifact fact checked other speakers and found they, too, continued to develop the idea of a country run by those who hate it and are eager to undermine it. Various speakers said the Department of Justice is calling parents worried about their kids’ educations “terrorists” (false), fentanyl will kill you if any of it touches your skin, thus putting us all at deadly risk (false), cartels have “operational control” of the U.S.-Mexico border (false), and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky has said he wants America’s “sons and daughters to go die in Ukraine” (again, false).

Right-wing media amplifies this narrative. Depositions in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against the Fox News Corporation made it very clear that both Fox News executives and hosts work closely with Republican operatives to spread a Republican narrative, even when it is based on lies—in that case, in the lie that Trump won the election, which they privately agreed was ridiculous. So, when House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) gave to FNC personality Tucker Carlson exclusive access to 44,000 hours of video from the footage from the Capitol on January 6, 2021, he indicated the Republicans will continue to try to garner support with a false narrative.

Carlson’s coverage of the videos started tonight, with him depicting the rioters as “sightseers” and claiming that other media outlets have lied about the violence on January 6. In reality, Carlson simply didn’t show the many hours of violent footage: more than 1,000 people have been arrested on charges relating to their actions surrounding January 6, more than half have pleaded guilty, and around one third of those charged were charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding police officers.

McCarthy’s desperation to maintain the party’s narrative shows in his unilateral decision to give Carlson exclusive access to that video. A wide range of media outlets are clamoring for equal access to the footage while congressional Democrats are demanding to know on what authority McCarthy gave Carlson that access. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol had arranged to transfer the films to the National Archives, but when the Republicans rewrote the rules in January, they instead transferred the video to the House Administration Committee.

McCarthy did not consult the committee when he gave access to the films to Carlson. Nor did he consult House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-CA), who has noted that releasing the films without consultation with the Capitol Police is a security risk. Instead, McCarthy apparently coordinated with Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), chair of the Subcommittee on Oversight. Loudermilk led a tour of the Capitol complex on January 5, 2021.

Representative Norma J. Torres (D-CA), ranking member of the Oversight Subcommittee, told Justin Papp of Roll Call that McCarthy “totally went around, not just the subcommittee, but the entire committee…. I hope Ethics will have something to say about this. I think it needs to be investigated on all different levels.” In contrast, House Administration Committee chair Bryan Steil (R-WI) appeared unconcerned with the end run around the responsible committee, saying that “the key is that we’re balancing the transparency that’s needed for the American people with the security interests of the House.”

Republicans are planning to take this disinformation campaign across the nation. Despite their insistence that they want to slash government spending, Republican leaders are in fact urging their colleagues to engage in “field hearings” that will take their “message” straight to voters at a time when they are not managing to accomplish much of anything at all in Washington. Jordan’s Judiciary Committee has requested a travel budget of $262,000, more than 30 times what it spent on travel last year and 3 times what it spent before the pandemic, and it is not just the Judiciary Committee that is hitting the road.

As Annie Karni and Catie Edmondson of the New York Times noted today, this also means that they speak at the plants of Republican donors, thus giving them free advertising. Congressional Democrats say they received almost no notice of these trips.

News broke today that an Israeli tech firm has uncovered a vast network of as many as hundreds of thousands of fake Twitter accounts designed to promote Trump and his vision, creating the illusion that he is more popular than he is. The analysts at the firm, Cyabra, believe the system was created within the U.S. “One account will say, ‘Biden is trying to take our guns; Trump was the best,’ and another will say, ‘Jan. 6 was a lie and Trump was innocent,’" said the engineer who discovered the network, Jules Gross. "Those voices are not people. For the sake of democracy I want people to know this is happening.”

Republicans have advanced an increasingly false political vision—what theorists call a “virtual political reality”—since the 1980s, and now their base has hardened into true believers who claim to be willing to fight for their vision. But in the years since Trump took office, previously uninterested Americans have seen what it means when those who believe in that vision take power.

Those who believe in equality before the law are standing up for that principle. Tonight, for example, social media is flooded with video clips refuting Carlson’s narrative point by point, suggesting that McCarthy’s decision to help him shore up the Republican narrative might only have strengthened its opponents.

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