News bits: Radical right stealth tactics; Law firm sues robot for illegally practicing law; Woke definition

Mother Jones writes about the stealth tactics that radical right authoritarians and Christian theocrats sometimes use to minimize public backlash against anti-democracy extremism:

On a Saturday afternoon in August 2019, South Dakota Republican state Rep. Fred Deutsch sent an email to 18 anti-trans activists, doctors, and lawyers with the text of a bill he planned to introduce that would make it a felony for doctors to give transgender children under 16 gender-affirming medical care. “I have no doubt this will be an uphill battle when we get to session,” Deutsch warned the group. “As always, please do not share this with the media. The longer we can fly under the radar the better.”

The message was one in a trove of emails obtained by Mother Jones between Deutsch and representatives of a network of activists and organizations at the forefront of the anti-trans movement. They show the degree to which these activists shaped Deutsch’s repressive legislation, a version of which was signed into law in February, and the tactics, alliances, and goals of a movement that has sought to foist their agenda on a national scale.

At the time, there was little precedent for such bills, and Deutsch’s legislation, called the Vulnerable Child Protection Act, was killed in the Senate after doctors showed up at the South Dakota statehouse to argue they should not be sent to prison for following the medical consensus.

“Please do not say that the South Dakota effort failed!!” Margaret Clarke, general counsel for the Alabama branch of the Phyllis Schlafly–founded Eagle Forum, replied. “You successfully inspired, encouraged and counseled numerous VCAP [sic] efforts around the country. You established the ideal witness list that we are all still following in our individual states…And, most importantly you connected us all to each other. This is just the beginning.”

Indeed, Deutsch’s bill has proved influential in the recent surge of anti-LGBTQ lawmaking. This legislative session, at least 18 states have considered bills containing language closely resembling the text of the Vulnerable Child Protection Act. The leaked emails reveal how Deutsch’s proposal helped proponents of the national movement to restrict gender-affirming care establish a playbook for their now-common attacks.

Sometimes the radical right is out in the open and sometimes it operates with as much secrecy as I can manage to get away with. It depends on the circumstances and location. 

Regardless, one can see this as another example of disciplined and coordinated efforts that radical right Christian nationalists are using to replace our secular Constitution with authoritarian Christian sharia law. 

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Lawyers sue robot: Business Insider writes: 

• DoNotPay, which uses AI [artificial intelligence] to provide legal information, is facing a proposed class action lawsuit.

• The complaint claims that DoNotPay has been practicing law poorly and lacks a license.

• DoNotPay CEO Joshua Browder pledged to fight the lawsuit that he said had "no merit."

The complaint argues: "Unfortunately for its customers, DoNotPay is not actually a robot, a lawyer, nor a law firm. DoNotPay does not have a law degree, is not barred in any jurisdiction, and is not supervised by any lawyer."

DoNotPay claims to use artificial intelligence to help customers handle an array of legal services without needing to hire a lawyer. It was founded in 2015 as an app to help customers fight parking tickets, but has since expanded its services. DoNotPay’s website claims that it can help customers fight corporations, beat bureaucracy, find hidden money, and "sue anyone."  

"Time and time again the only people that win are the lawyers. So I wanted to do something about it, building the DoNotPay robot lawyer to empower consumers to take on corporations on their own," Browder said.

This is an interesting lawsuit. Legal self-help books and other legal texts and journals have been publicly available for decades. What’s the difference between reading a book written by a human and reading what a computer spits out? The AI can be programmed with all current law, making it probably more knowledgeable than the people writing the self-help books. 

And, the AI can also be programmed with (i) law treatises, court reporters (journals that publish every case that courts decide) and text books written by experts in their fields, and fact patterns, legal rationales and holdings in every court case that has been ignored, or partly or completely upheld or overturned since the founding of American courts after the Constitution started coming into effect in 1789 after its ratification in 1788.  

And, although it is probably usually a mistake, American law permits a person to be their own lawyer and practice law for themselves in court.

Josh Browder, peeving off human 

lawyers since 2015

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A concise description of the anti-woke concept - a two-headed thing, one bad, one good: Since anti-woke appears to be the centerpiece of the DeSantis presidential campaign and powerfully motivating to most of the radical right base, it seems timely to try to describe or define what it is and isn't. MSNBC discusses the concept:

Many Republican leaders have made “anti-wokeness” a cornerstone of their political agenda, but DeSantis has led the pack by upending the lives and liberties of Floridians through authoritarian book bans and speech codes. 

Following last year’s passage of the Parental Rights in Education Act -- also known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law — banning discussion of race, sexual orientation, and gender identity in public schools, countless Floridians have lost their rights. Teachers in same-sex marriages left or lost their jobs. Children of gay parents now fear mentioning their parents’ sexual orientation at school. Librarians must undergo state training on the law, and face losing their livelihood if they lend books blacklisted by the state education board.

The governor’s war on K-12 programs has expanded since that bill: DeSantis banned a high school Advanced Placement class on African-American studies, claiming it was “indoctrination.” He is now angling to ban all AP courses in Florida, something surely anathema to parents hoping their children will attend reputable universities.

And DeSantis is also targeting higher education institutions, which most states strive to showcase as incubators of groundbreaking ideas, pedagogy, and research. He carried out a hard-right takeover of New College, a small liberal arts school within the state’s public university system, stacking its board of trustees with anti-critical race theory demagogue Christopher Rufo and other fringe figures from the Christian right and MAGA world. “The mission has been I think more into the DEI, CRT, the gender ideology rather than what a liberal arts education should be,” DeSantis declared, referring to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives as well as critical race theory.

The MSNBC article points out that a poll conducted by Ipsos, shows that 56% of Americans consider “woke” a positive term, meaning “to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices.” More than a third of Republicans agree with that definition. However, 39% agreed with a negative definition: “to be overly politically correct and police others’ words.” 

Maybe this anti-woke thing is not as good an issue as anti-abortion to rally the radical right as I had imagined. It seemed that all the cognitive and social factors that authoritarian radicals played on with the abortion issue were inherent in the woke issue. Maybe that’s is not so true if this poll data is probative. It feels like the definition the poll used does not really capture how the radical right base feels about this issue. Time will tell how the woke issue plays out.

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CLARIFICATION: I use the term Taliban here to mean something different from it's usual meaning, which is normally Sunni fundamentalist hardliners. Here I refer to Taliban as any hard core, religious zealot elites in any country who exercise power grounded mostly in any religion or theocratic dogma, not secularism. (see comments here)

From the religious zealot files: Iranian Taliban poisons school girls: The Jerusalem Post writes:

Poison gas attacks on schoolgirls in Iran have shocked the world for months, from with the first reports in November, at the height of the protests against the regime triggered by the death of a young woman in the custody of its morality police.

Sources inside and out of Iran have provided The Media Line [TML] with a true picture of the extent of the incidents, including the names of many of the schools singled out for attack, the exact dates on which many of the attacks took place and the number of people affected.

Iranian schoolgirls poisoned all over the country

More than 1,000 schoolgirls at more than 26 schools in 25 of Iran’s 31 provinces have now been hit by the poison gas since the first attacks in the city of Qom in November, when 15 schools were targeted. The victims reported a smell akin to rotten oranges, followed by nausea, headaches, and finally shortness of breath left them urgently seeking medical attention.

Evil targets for the righteous Iranian Taliban

Tacit support from the Iranian regime

In fact, TML’s Iranian sources and experts on the issue have suggested that the attacks are being carried out either at the behest of the government or at least with its tacit support. This, they say, is being done in order to distract the public from the ongoing protests against the regime and place responsibility for the causes of the unrest on a handful of “arbitrary Talibani extremists” who can be dealt with by the authorities “to exonerate the entire Islamic system.”

An atmosphere of terror

Similarly, [TML’s sources] suggest, the poison attacks could be a move to create “an atmosphere of terror” among protesters and therefore prevent growing numbers from joining them as Iranian society reels from poverty, corruption and an unaffordable cost of living.

This has been going on since last November? This is the first I’ve heard of corrupt, enraged religious zealots from the Dark Ages poisoning Iranian school girls. How did I miss this?

Q: Worldwide and in the US individually, has religion become more harmful than beneficial to the human condition and long-term human well-being and civilization sustainability, e.g., Christian nationalists in the US are anti-democracy, anti-inconvenient fact and truth, pro-climate change and rigidly authoritarian theocratic?

A funny but informative lawyer story

Stuff like this helps inform people about how the American justice system works for at least some non-elites. This a total hoot but packed with details about how it works:

When you’re a public defender, you’re pretty useless — until suddenly, you aren’t

I am a public defender.

I am the vanguard of justice. I am the bulwark against tyranny. I am a hoot at dinner parties. I am this author’s Tinder bio. I am venerated by the new progressive zeitgeist.

I am the corporeal manifestation of professional burnout.

I am useless. So fucking useless.

There’s a dull reality to my job, which is that my clients have almost always done the thing they’re accused of doing. And usually the evidence against them is overwhelming — not even a close call. Yet I am duty-bound to poke, prod, and bluff my way into exaggerating a weakness with the government’s case. This usually doesn’t work.

For example, one time a client was picked up for his sixth drunk-driving incident. He had been prohibited from driving eons ago, but that hadn’t stopped him before. In addition to DUI No. 6, he was charged with fleeing the scene after crashing into another car. The fleeing was ineffectual, if only for the fact that he literally imprinted his license plate number onto the other car. I saw the picture of the imprint, with a mirrored alphanumeric sequence perfectly legible on the metal body. Cops found his car billowing thick, black smoke in a parking lot in front of a nearby AutoZone. My client hadn’t gotten far from the scene: He was in the driver’s seat, having already passed out and pissed his pants.

So yeah, when I meet with clients I shrug a lot and give the “what-do-you-want-me-to-do?” look. I try to shift delicately into the gentle social worker persona and talk about damage control, which invariably means telling them that accepting a plea deal is the least bad option. This is one reason why almost everyone chooses to plead guilty. Ninety-four percent of state cases and 97% of federal cases are resolved by a plea deal, to be exact.

All this means I inhabit a different role than you may think based on TV shows or the occasional op-ed about the noble role of public defenders. I’m not a special agent who parachutes into the enemy hideout to orchestrate and negotiate an elaborate hostage release; I’m just the widget inspector. I’m there to sit at the assembly line with a checklist on a clipboard and make sure that my client’s rights are not violated too much throughout the process. And we literally used a checklist for DUI cases — six pages of potential rakes we could only pray a cop stepped on: Yes, yes, you have video of the guy swerving all over the road, his speech is as slurred as mud, and he has a small cargo ship’s worth of empty beer bottles in the back. BUT was the temperature of the liquid simulator solution utilized as the external standard for the breath sample machine measured by a thermometer which was properly certified by the state at the time? Hmmm?

It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally the cops do fuck up. Sometimes they don’t notice the thermometer certification lapsed two days prior, and of course you pounce on that. But this almost never happens, and it also underscores how fungible my own contributions are. Anyone plausibly qualified could replace me and it would not make a difference for the most part.

I’m borderline useless, in other words.

But there are terrifying exceptions to this rote monotony that forever haunt me. Like the one time I cast a spell in court with eleven magic words.

***

This happened early, when I was still a baby public defender. My client (different from License Plate Man above) was an illegal immigrant from Mexico. He was already on probation for one DUI when he was caught driving drunk a second time, seven years after the first. A judge released him from jail provided that his family fork over a small ransom for bail and that he agree to having his whereabouts monitored by an ankle bracelet. He would have to come back to address his probation issues in two weeks.

The ankle bracelet company sends me an update a few days later. My client had visited their office, informed them that he intended to flee the country because he was scared of jail, then underscored his statement with a flourish by taking out a knife and cutting off the ankle bracelet in front of them. In terms of the ratio between effort and impact, this was easily one of the simplest ways he could have irredeemably fucked himself over. But I did not have time to dwell on this. His actions meant I had one less client to worry about, since clearly he had decided to take his chances on the lam rather than in court.

Two weeks pass and I’m in court. Just a normal day: I review the sign-in sheet to see which defendants, of the cases I had prepped, did me the courtesy of showing up. Our caseloads aren’t always as bad as advertised because many of our clients don’t come to court, for reasons ranging from malicious (they’re reenacting a certain 1993 thriller starring Harrison Ford) to banal (the notice was lost in the mail).

Then I see his name — Bracelet Cutter. I turn and scan the row of benches in the gallery and he’s quietly sitting in the back, apparently oblivious to the shitstorm of his own creation he has walked into.

I motion for him to step out in the hallway and my first question is “What the FUCK are you doing here?” He looks down, ashamed, and explains he realized that if he had fled, his family would have remained liable for the bond they put up to get him released. “I am here to take responsibility,” he says.

There was no need for me to pillory him any further. He panicked and fucked up, but that was done. Unfortunately, I was completely ill-prepared to handle his case, as I had reasonably assumed he had successfully peaced out of the country (and out of the justice system’s grasp) by now. We went in front of the judge and I announced that my client was turning himself in to jail so that I could better prepare for his case. We’d be back in court in another two weeks.

***

In part because of those aforementioned stats on the frequency of guilty pleas, public defenders have garnered a reputation for being trial-averse, for pressuring clients to cop a plea just to keep the machine humming along. I think this reputation is ill-deserved. It’s completely counter to my own experience, at least, as few things are talked about with as much awed respect among one’s public-defender peers as the number of trials you have accumulated. It’s the functional equivalent of an attorney’s XP level.

Jury trials are sexy and cool and exciting, even despite the abysmal prospects for acquittal. But the understandable focus on dramatic moments can cause people to lose sight of potentially far more consequential proceedings that lack the luster and allure. Like probation hearings.

I hate probation hearings so much.

The gravitational center of the criminal justice system is not the judge, but the prosecutor. Prosecutors can summon criminal charges from the ether or dispel them into nothingness, if they so choose. The Trial Tax is real, so if you want to avoid getting resolutely fucked at sentencing, your best bet is to play nice from the start. This is what makes accepting a plea deal so irresistible to so many clients. Judges say they ultimately decide — sure, whatever — but in practice, a prosecutor’s offer recommendation is virtually guaranteed to be adopted. Judges are busy, and the vast majority used to be prosecutors themselves. A current prosecutor’s blessing on a deal is generally all the oversight a judge cares to invest. If the deal recommends no jail time, you’ll get no jail time. This is what I told all my clients, and it was always true.

But there’s a caveat, in that many little- or no-jail deals are paired with a laundry list of legal obligations that are monitored by the courts for many years. In addition to not committing new crimes, the obligations can be as simple as attending a class about how drugs are bad. Courts enforce this scheme by imposing the statutory maximum amount of jail time (a year for most misdemeanors), but simultaneously suspending nearly all of it. Think of it as setting aside a bucket of jail days that can be doled out as needed if a client didn’t adhere to the agreement.

Doling from the bucket was what the probation calendar was for. Clients who had already pled guilty were summoned back to court because they had fucked up somehow and needed to explain themselves to the judge.

During these probation hearings, the prosecutor would recite the list of violations and recommend a sanction. My job was to come up with a plausible-sounding justification and make a counteroffer for sanction, and the judge would probably just split it down the middle. Sometimes it’s 30 days of house arrest. Sometimes 90 days of jail. If jail, sometimes clients had a week to turn themselves in. Sometimes the court marshals were summoned to take them to jail immediately. All this in the span of 5-10 minutes per person, one after the other. Assembly line humming.

***

Generally, we had no way of knowing when someone would be summoned back to court for a probation hearing until it was scheduled. Our paralegals scanned the calendars and dove into our archives to retrieve a client’s file. I tried to call my clients prior to court appearances, but this was often a lost cause as numbers were frequently disconnected, out of service, or linked to full voicemail boxes. The best that you could eventually hope for was for the client to actually show up to court so that you could confer for the requisite five minutes in the adjoining hallways and stairwells before the proceedings.

But as much as Bracelet Cutter fucked up his prospects in other ways, at least there wasn’t any question as to whether he’d show up for his hearing — he was in jail, after all. I swung by with an interpreter (his English was passable, but not great) to fill him in on the details and answer his questions. I felt ready for the hearing.

The day came. Bracelet Cutter’s mother, wife, and children were in attendance in the gallery. The court churned through its list of cases until it was our turn.

Recall how plea deals are structured, and how the entire purpose of a suspended jail sentence is to dangle the anvil over someone’s head to “encourage” them to do the things they’re supposed to do. The bargain means you avoid jail time so long as you meet your obligations. But what if, perhaps through your repeated and extended frittering away of your opportunities to stay out of jail, there is no realistic expectation you’ll ever meet your obligations to the court? Rather than continue burning up the court’s resources, judges could instead impose a hefty jail sentence now and just close the file. This is affectionately known as “Impose & Close.”

On this day, luckily, the prosecutor was not feeling particularly bloodthirsty. He was going to recommend the mandatory minimum sanction of 48 hours in jail, which my client had more than already served by now, and leave the rest of the jail time suspended, meaning he wouldn’t have to serve it as long as he behaved himself. I was more than happy to cosign on that recommendation, excited to see the judge rubber-stamp our joint agreement.

Despite the good sign, though, I was still cautious — I had not walked into the hearing with much confidence. I knew that my client’s decision to cut off an ankle bracelet and threaten to flee to Mexico was going to be on the judge’s mind, and I knew that the worst approach with her would have been to ignore the issue completely. After effusively agreeing with the prosecutor’s recommendation, I got ahead of the issue. I started by acknowledging what happened, framing it from the standpoint of a poor guy panicking in a stressful situation, and highlighted the extended meeting I had with him while he was in jail. His family members in the gallery served as helpful props in my argument. After all, why would he flee the country when *gesturing widely* his family is right here?

This did not work. The judge said that she had no confidence that my client would be able to meet his legal obligations. She then turned to the prosecutor and asked what the recommended jail sentence was to close the file out. Which meant Impose & Close was happening.

This was a full-blown red alert moment, and by far the worst possible outcome. Now that a probation period appeared to be off the table, the prosecutor was no longer tied to asking for just two days in jail. The price to close the file would be 180 days. I stood up and did my best to slide in and emphasize that neither party requested to close out the file, and repeated my spiel.

The judge politely listened and then imposed 180 days in jail. The reactions came in waves — my client’s mom yelled out in anguish first because she could understand the judge, and then her son followed after the court interpreter delivered the bad news in Spanish. My client was handcuffed and slumped in his chair, disconsolate. This didn’t just mean six months in jail; ICE kept watch over the local jail rosters, so the sentence was not only long but virtually assured his deportation.

I tried to focus, to ignore the sudden cacophony reverberating around me. I remained standing and stared at nothing in particular. Fifteen seconds passed. What now? Was there anything I could do? Was there anything I should do?

Thirty seconds passed, and the only audible sound was the shuffling of paper and murmurs across the gallery. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to try, so I strung together a hastily improvised request to the judge — hereafter known as the Eleven Magic Words:

“Is there anything the court would like to review to reconsider?”

There are words recognized within legal circles to have near magical properties. The Supreme Court will tell you that all you need to immediately and forcefully end a police interrogation is to unambiguously ask for a lawyer. Declarations etched in steel by a dying man have the power to move trillions in assets. Even the lowly comma, or the absence thereof, can overturn entire industries. But the eleven words I uttered that day are not valorized or dissected by any scholars. They shoulder no inherent legal significance. And yet, they earned their title for what happened next.

Nothing but silence now. The judge peered directly at me over her glasses. She then asked for the file back from the clerk and barely even opened it before announcing, “All right. Mr. Meskhout, I’ll go ahead and give him an opportunity. Since you have asked.”

The judge then imposed two days in jail. Two days instead of one hundred and eighty.

The cacophony started up again — outcries of joy (and some confusion) this time rather than anguish. I gathered that neither my client nor his mom quite understood what the fuck had just happened. I certainly didn’t.

“Since you have asked.”

My heart rate skyrocketed and my eyes twitched. I remained standing and did my best to maintain composure.

“Since you have asked.”

I kept replaying that sentence over and over in my head. This wasn’t how it was supposed to work. I was not supposed to have this much power. I’m supposed to be useless, remember? A widget inspector. There was something thoroughly unconscionable about what had just transpired. I uttered eleven magic words in the right combination and this man’s life trajectory shifted radically, likely from near-assured deportation to continued freedom in the United States. I am not supposed to have this much power.

To say that I felt fear is an understatement. But I kept all of this to myself. This was my last hearing for the morning and I could go back to my office now and process at my pace.

I hastily scrawled my signature on the court order and walked out of the courtroom. My client was escorted out by the jail guard right behind me. Normally, inmates get their hands and feet shackled together before they step out. My client was completely unshackled. And normally, the jail guards waste no time heading to the security elevator they have exclusive access to, but my client was headed in the opposite direction.

I saw where he was going. His children had been sitting on a bench in the hallway. My client ran forward and bent down to embrace them both, and all I remember him exclaiming was “¡Niños!” The jail guard was calmly walking right behind this unfolding security breach beaming and carrying the shackled chain in his hands. My client finished hugging his children then promptly stood up and placed his hands behind his back to be shackled again. The guard and my client continued taking the long way to the security elevator.

I was awestruck by the unexpected display of humanity by the guard. I have no idea when they negotiated this, but he broke all kinds of protocol just to let my client have this brief embrace with his children.

I walked into the main elevators by myself, watched the doors close, and waited for the cab to start moving. Once I knew I was alone and safely insulated by several layers of steel and concrete, I finally let out the primal scream I had been holding in this whole time.

Once the heart palpitations calmed, I reflected on what transpired. I certainly would love to believe it was the Eleven Magic Words that did the trick that day — that would reflect well on my legal acumen and provide me a modicum of agency within this chaos. But that is a self-serving delusion that would also imbue the criminal justice system with a patina of legitimacy it has no rightful claim on.

In all likelihood, the judge changed her mind because fuck you — that’s why. They’re human after all, subject to the same tempestuous emotional storms as the rest of us, including the same impulses that might prompt you to idly fantasize about a horrific vehicular rending of the guy who just cut you off on the road. Despite that human fallibility, they’re nevertheless endowed with a terrific amount of real power over other people’s lives. Maybe if they’re addressed as “Your Honor” enough times per minute, they’ll believe it and act accordingly.

Or maybe I should jettison the fake humility and just take credit. Based purely on the sequence of events (I said something, a thing happened), I have a legitimate basis to exploit this story to flatter myself and impress attractive individuals. Yet this too has horrifying implications.

Either way, every day since, I wonder whether I will clock out at the end of the day as the mild-mannered widget inspector I normally am. Every morning I wonder whether that day has Eleven Magic Words and, if it does, whether I’ll be able to figure them out. And every day that potential scares the shit out of me.

And yet, I still do the work. I’m still a public defender.

Well, at least I thought that was funny.

Yea or nay?

I stumbled across this video this morning and was really taken by it.  I’m not in the habit of hero-worship anymore, like in my younger days, but Steve Schmidt says this so well (as usual) that I felt it was worthy of an OP here on DisPol.

So, if you have 7-8 minutes to spare (the video is really quite captivating, but you only need to see the first half to get the gist), I think it’s well worth the view. 

Some important points that were made:

- Leadership is a character test

- It should be tempered with a sense of idealism

- The candidate must be fearless about losing

- They must believe in something

- Leadership cannot be ceded to the craziest elements of a society who should be institutionalized

- A leader must be honest, including telling people about  inconvenient truths

________

After viewing, here are the questions:

Q1: Do you disagree with any of Steve’s comments?

Q2: What would you add to Steve’s comments?

Q3: Do you believe there are any potential POTUS prospects that meet the requirements that Steve sees as necessary?  If yes, who would that be?

Thanks for chiming in.

News bits: About the persistence of poverty; Anti-woke is pro-discrimination, anti-democracy

Sociologist Matthew Desmond has studied the sources of persistent poverty and finds that insufficient spending is an important root cause. He argues the evidence points to an imbalance of power between poor people and those who are not poor. It is even more important than diversion of welfare dollars by states for non-welfare spending.  Desmond writes for the NYT Magazine:  

A fair amount of government aid earmarked for the poor never reaches them. But this does not fully solve the puzzle of why poverty has been so stubbornly persistent, .... [isn’t that some kind of fraud?]

There are, it would seem, deeper structural forces at play, ones that have to do with the way the American poor are routinely taken advantage of. The primary reason for our stalled progress on poverty reduction has to do with the fact that we have not confronted the unrelenting exploitation of the poor in the labor, housing and financial markets.

As a theory of poverty, “exploitation” elicits a muddled response, causing us to think of course and but, no in the same instant. The word carries a moral charge, but social scientists have a fairly coolheaded way to measure exploitation: When we are underpaid relative to the value of what we produce, we experience labor exploitation; when we are overcharged relative to the value of something we purchase, we experience consumer exploitation. For example, if a family paid $1,000 a month to rent an apartment with a market value of $20,000, that family would experience a higher level of renter exploitation than a family who paid the same amount for an apartment with a market valuation of $100,000. When we don’t own property or can’t access credit, we become dependent on people who do and can, which in turn invites exploitation, because a bad deal for you is a good deal for me.

Our vulnerability to exploitation grows as our liberty shrinks. Because undocumented workers are not protected by labor laws, more than a third are paid below minimum wage, and nearly 85 percent are not paid overtime. Many of us who are U.S. citizens, or who crossed borders through official checkpoints, would not work for these wages. We don’t have to. If they migrate here as adults, those undocumented workers choose the terms of their arrangement. But just because desperate people accept and even seek out exploitative conditions doesn’t make those conditions any less exploitative. Sometimes exploitation is simply the best bad option.

See why I keep harping on the critical importance of always keeping track of where power and wealth flows? See why I keep pounding on the radical right for attacking and shrinking civil liberties and deregulating businesses while empowering business over consumers? 

I continue to argue that what we are witnessing right now is a gigantic war between the organized, disciplined, well-funded authoritarian radical capitalist and Christian theocratic forces against the messy herd of cats forces fighting for democracy and civil liberties. The authoritarians are fighting for concentrated power and wealth for the elites. The democrats are fighting for somewhat more distributed wealth and power for the masses 

That’s my narrative and I’m sticking to it unless some really compelling contrary evidence comes on the scene.

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Personal safety tip: Always keep an eye on personal power flows.

Anti-woke = pro-discrimination, pro-authoritarian/theocracy, and anti-democracy: If one is paying attention, one will certainly have noticed by now that radical right anti-woke measures in laws usually change how power is distributed. 

Power usually flows from targeted groups, usually minorities such as the LGBQT community, to businesses and corporations or to inherently authoritarian/theocratic red state governments or religious organizations. In essence, the anti-woke movement is focused on withdrawing civil liberties and consumer protection powers from the federal government and individuals and redistributing it to elites.

Accumulating more power is what the anti-woke movement is primarily focused on. A secondary focus is rewriting and whitewashing inconvenient history.** Hence the book bans that anti-woke elites are heavily promoting in their dark free speech campaign.

As we all know, more wealth usually comes with more power. The anti-woke movement serves the elites at the expense and freedom of the masses.

Or, is there a lethal flaw or two in that reasoning?

** For example, this is the kind of inconvenient history that radical right anti-woke authoritarians and theocrats are whitewashing by forcing it to be removed from public schools:

‘Slavery was wrong’ and 5 other things some educators won’t teach anymore

To mollify parents and obey new state laws, teachers are cutting all sorts of lessons

Excerpts from Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Passages from Christopher Columbus’s journal describing his brutal treatment of Indigenous peoples. A data set on the New York Police Department’s use of force, analyzed by race.

These are among the items teachers have nixed from their lesson plans this school year and last, as they face pressure from parents worried about political indoctrination and administrators wary of controversy, as well as a spate of new state laws restricting education on race, gender and LGBTQ issues.

Making power flow from the people to the elites,

and making ignorance flow to the people