News bits: American style hate & bigotry goes global, etc.

Twitter has become a global hellscape of hate and fascism: 

Hate speech rises on Twitter in its

largest markets after Musk takeover

Those cuts went deepest outside North America, where more than 75 percent of the company’s 280 million daily users live and where Twitter already had fewer moderators who understood local languages and cultural references and where the political landscape could be chaotic and prone to violence.

Musk cut virtually all staff in Brazil, allowing an unmoderated surge in misinformation that helped fuel this month’s attacks on the country’s government center.

.... the platform had already been like a “sewer” in her country [Australia] before Musk let some of the worst users back on.

“You can’t expect them not to behave like sewer rats, and you probably should expect that further pestilence is going to expand to the user base,” said Inman Grant, who has written the company twice and reminded it that she can order abusive material to be taken down. “It’s becoming a cesspool.”

That is the kind of serious damage a single fascist billionaire can do to truth and democracy. Musk now ranks right up there with Rupert Murdoch and other top fascist propagandists.

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Why we will never know the truth about the origin of COVID: The WaPo reports that China has revised its official COVID death toll from 37 to 60,000. We all knew that the official death toll was a gigantic lie. Apparently the whopper became so blatant that even professional liars could not maintain it. That tells you how much you can trust about anything the Chinese government says about COVID. I bet the real death toll is at least about 200,000, but we are never going to know, are we?

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Christofascist Republican Party plans -- Exonerate Trump!!: In addition to impeaching, investigating and slandering lots of Democrats including Joe and Hunter Biden, House Christofascists are probably going to expunge the impeachment of Trump for his role in the 1/6 coup attempt. House fascist leader McCarthy commented: “But I understand why individuals want to do it, and we’d look at it.” 

Millions of well-meaning people still do not see much in the way of threat to democracy, truth or civil liberties from the Republican Party. Apparently, most do not see fascism, theocracy or brass knuckles capitalism. The next two years are going to be a real festival of fascism, theocracy and brass knuckles capitalism grounded in lies, slanders and more crackpottery than even QAnon can handle. Well, OK, Qanon can handle it.

Infrastructure alert!

We are gonna need a bigger clown car!

Vote fraud update: Republicans are guilty again

The GOP continues to howl in self-righteous moral outrage at all the massive vote fraud in elections. So far, most of what tiny little has been found has been by Republicans. Business Insider writes:

Republican candidate's wife arrested and charged with casting 

23 fraudulent votes for her husband in the 2020 election

Kim Phuong Taylor was arrested Thursday and accused of multiple counts of voter fraud.

Prosecutors say Taylor cast 23 fraudulent votes for her husband in the 2020 election.

Jeremy Taylor, her husband, is an elected Republican.

Yes indeed, one can reasonably argue that we should wait for the case to be decided in court. But in view of the last few years of Christofascist Republican politics, one can reasonably tentatively believe that Kim Phuong Taylor is guilty. Republican ideologues appear to have far less respect for the rule of law than Democratic ideologues or Democrats generally.

Compared to the ~20 alleged fraudulent votes that the radical right DeSantis allegedly found in Florida, Republican vote fraud in Iowa is much worse than in Florida. Because of that, Iowa should be stripped of its 1st place in Democratic Party primaries, while it should stay 1st in Republican Primaries.

23 fraudulent votes? The horror, the horror . . . . . LOCK HER UP!! LOCK HER UP!! LOCK HER UP FOREVER!! HECK, EXECUTE HER!!! 

That is just fair and balanced, far more than what the raging hater, blatant liar and self-professed incompetent nincompoop Tucker Carlson recently said in public about all liberals in America:

“That loathing [of liberals] clouded my judgment. I was like, ‘I dislike these people so much. What they’re doing is so wrong. It is helping so few people and hurting so many. It’s so immoral on every level that I just want it to be repudiated.’ And I wanted that so much, not because I like the Republicans — I really dislike them more than I ever have — but I dislike the other side more,” he added, saying, “I did learn that, like, I have no freaking idea what goes on in American politics.”

MAGA!! He has no freaking idea of what goes on in American politics!!

Qualified immunity: A major weakness in civil rights protections

One of the key weaknesses in personal civil liberties arises from a legal concept called qualified immunity. In most (essentially all) situations, the Supreme Court established a qualified immunity concept that shields government employees from liability for unconstitutional infringement of a person’s rights. That happened 40 years ago. But in a recent lawsuit, the Nevada Supreme Court threw out the qualified immunity shield and allowed a person whose rights had been infringed to sue the responsible government employees. 

This story constitutes a major step forward in Nevada for defense of civil liberties. Nationwide, the situation is complex and usually impossible for average people to rely on to vindicate their civil liberties. Forbes writes:

In a landmark decision late last month, the Nevada Supreme Court unanimously ruled that victims of wrongful searches and seizures have the right to sue the responsible government officials. Just as critically, the court firmly rejected qualified immunity as a potential defense against those lawsuits. The court’s twin holdings will better ensure that government officials can actually be held accountable for their misconduct.

“Absent a damages remedy here, no mechanism exists to deter or prevent violations of important individual rights,” Justice Elissa Cadish wrote for the court. And “a right does not, as a practical matter, exist without any remedy for its enforcement.”

What became a pivotal ruling for civil rights started because Sonja Mack just wanted to see her boyfriend. Back in 2017, Mack traveled to High Desert State Prison to visit her partner, who was then behind bars. While waiting, Mack said she was approached by two correctional officers, who then conducted a “demeaning and humiliating” strip search of Mack. Even though officers didn’t find any drugs or contraband, the prison still banned Mack from seeing her boyfriend and revoked her visitation privileges.

Mack sued, arguing that being strip searched violated her rights under the Nevada Constitution. Mirroring language found in the Fourth Amendment, the Nevada Constitution safeguards “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable seizures and searches.”

Yet Nevada’s legislature, like more than 40 other states, never passed a civil rights act that expressly let individuals sue the government employees who infringed their constitutional rights. Only state lawmakers, the Nevada Department of Corrections argued, have the power to make government workers liable for civil rights violations. 

.... the Nevada Supreme Court refused to import the legal doctrine of qualified immunity. Created by the U.S. Supreme Court four decades ago, qualified immunity shields all government workers from liability, unless they violated a “clearly established” right. Since that usually requires finding an almost identical case as precedent—a very high bar to clear—qualified immunity prevents victims from holding the perpetrators accountable.[1]  

Though the Nevada Supreme Court ruling is currently limited to searches and seizures, it’s already making an impact. Consider Stephen Lara. A veteran who served in the Marines for 16 years, Stephen had his entire life savings—over $87,000—confiscated by a Nevada state trooper. He was never charged with a crime.

Stephen didn’t back down. Just one day after the Institute for Justice filed a lawsuit, the government returned the cash it wrongfully seized. But the rest of his lawsuit was put on hold while the Nevada Supreme Court considered Mack’s case. Now with a resounding win for individual rights, Stephen’s case to hold the officers accountable can finally move forward.

“The wheels of justice for Stephen Lara can finally move forward after being on hold for more than a year,” said Institute for Justice Attorney Ben Field, who participated in oral argument for Mack v. Williams. “As we urged, the Nevada Supreme Court holds that ordinary people like Stephen can sue for damages when government officials go over the line and violate the most basic guarantees in the state constitution.”

One can see where this will probably ultimately wind up, i.e., before the radical right, Christofascist US Supreme Court. If so, that court in its virulent hostility to civil liberties will probably (~70% chance ?) establish an invigorated qualified immunity that obliterates the Nevada court ruling. The new and improved qualified immunity will go from a shield that state courts, like the Nevada Supreme Court, can negate to one that state courts cannot negate. That is the sentiment that Christofascism holds toward civil liberties. The question is whether it can get the job done. Time will tell.

Source: Institute for Justice

Footnote: 

1. The Institute for Justice writes:

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO SHOW THAT A RIGHT IS “CLEARLY ESTABLISHED”?

To show that a right is clearly established, a victim must identify an earlier decision by the Supreme Court or a federal appeals court in the same jurisdiction holding that precisely the same conduct under the same circumstances is illegal or unconstitutional. If no decision exists, qualified immunity protects the official by default. Importantly, when courts grant government workers qualified immunity, they do so despite the fact that the government worker has violated the Constitution or they simply do not address that issue at all.

The reach of anti-woke law

The radical right vilifies teaching of CRT, non-heterosexuality and other topics that Christian nationalists, most Republicans and other right wing extremists hate. Their propaganda tells us that such things cannot be taught to young children who are not ready to deal with these realities. The reality is quite different. ProPublica writes:

Jonathan Cox faced an agonizing decision. He was scheduled to teach two classes this past fall at the University of Central Florida that would explore colorblind racism, the concept that ostensibly race-neutral practices can have a discriminatory impact. The first, “Race and Social Media,” featured a unit on “racial ideology and color-blindness.” The second, “Race and Ethnicity,” included a reading on “the myth of a color-blind society.” An assistant sociology professor, Cox had taught both courses before; they typically drew 35 to 40 undergraduates apiece.

As recently as August 2021, Cox had doubted that the controversy over critical race theory — which posits, among other things, that racism is ingrained in America’s laws and power structure — would hamstring his teaching. Asked on a podcast what instructors would do if, as anticipated, Florida restricted the teaching of CRT in higher education, he said that they would need to avoid certain buzzwords. “What many of us are looking at doing is just maybe shifting some of the language that we’re using.”

But a clash with state law seemed inevitable, once Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, proposed what he called the strongest legislation in the nation against “the state-sanctioned racism that is critical race theory.” Last April, DeSantis signed the Individual Freedom Act, also known as the “Stop Woke Act,” into law. It bans teaching that one race or gender is morally superior to another and prohibits teachers from making students feel guilty for past discrimination by members of their race. And it specifically bars portraying racial colorblindness — which the law labels a virtue — as racist. A DeSantis spokesperson, Jeremy Redfern, told me in an email that the law “protects the open exchange of ideas” (italics in the original) by prohibiting teachers from “forcing discriminatory concepts on students.”  

A month before the fall 2022 semester was set to start, he scrapped both courses. Students scrambled to register for other classes. “It didn’t seem like it was worth the risk,” said Cox, who taught a graduate course on inequality and education instead. “I’m completely unprotected.” He added, “Somebody who’s not even in the class could come after me. Somebody sees the course catalog, complains to a legislator — next thing I know, I’m out of a job.”  

Fearful that legislators will retaliate by cutting their budgets, few top university administrators have publicly criticized the laws, which put institutions as well as individual teachers at risk. Indeed, UCF Provost Michael Johnson told faculty last July that the university would “have to take disciplinary action” against any faculty member who repeatedly violated the Individual Freedom Act because it couldn’t afford to lose a “catastrophic amount” — $32 million — in state funding linked to graduation rates and other metrics. (Johnson declined an interview request.)

So this anti-woke movement is not aimed only at protecting young children. The broader goal is completely cancelling discussion of inconvenient history and human behavior in education at all levels. This looks, talks and walks like bigoted Christofascism, even if there is no single iron fisted leader heading the charge of the radical right against democracy and inconvenient truth.

The US is becoming at least two different countries over time. Red states are looking less and less like blue states. People are sorting themselves and moving to where they are more comfortable. The Union and respect for it is slowly fading away.