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.

Abortion wars, etc.

Anti-abortion forces slowly inch toward prosecuting women who get an abortion: 

Talk of prosecuting women for abortion pills 

roils antiabortion movement

Alabama attorney general became the most prominent Republican official yet to suggest that abortion seekers could be charged 

The comment reflects a simmering divide within the antiabortion movement, which has long sought to treat women seeking abortions as “victims” and not as targets for punishment.

We can see where this is going. The urge to prosecute women who get or try to get an abortion is strong and relentless with anti-abortion radicals. Sooner or latter the psychological barriers will fall, and women will routinely be prosecuted as murderers. That will take a couple of years to come about, but it very likely is coming, maybe ~85% chance in the next three years. 

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More classified documents found - Biden is screwed, Trump probably gets off the hook (again): 

President Biden’s legal team found additional classified documents when they searched a second location after finding secret government papers in a different Biden office in early November, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

Legal representatives for the president found additional classified material at a second location, a person said Wednesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. The person would not say when that material was found.

What a mess. This will probably neuter any investigation into what Trump did, even thought it should not make any difference at all. But no one is saying much right now. So as usual, we will have to wait for months. Or years. Or forever.

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Regarding the pulse of democracy and tolerance -- things are not getting much better: 

At points in the past half-century, many U.S. antisemitism experts thought this country could be aging out of it, that hostility and prejudice against Jews were fading in part because younger Americans held more accepting views than did older ones.

But a survey released Thursday shows how widely held such beliefs are in the United States today, including among younger Americans. The research by the Anti-Defamation League includes rare detail about the particular nature of antisemitism, how it centers on tropes of Jews as clannish, conspiratorial and holders of power.

The survey shows “antisemitism in its classical fascist form is emerging again in American society, where Jews are too secretive and powerful, working against interests of others, not sharing values, exploiting — the classic conspiratorial tropes,” Matt Williams, vice president of the ADL’s year-old Center for Antisemitism Research, told The Washington Post. 

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Climate update:

Last year was the fifth hottest ever recorded on the planet, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced Tuesday. It was part of an unabated broader warming trend as humans continue to pump massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The year “2022 was yet another ... of climate extremes across Europe and globally. These events highlight that we are already experiencing the devastating consequences of our warming world,” Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus, said in a statement announcing the annual findings.

She said data from 2022 provides “clear evidence that avoiding the worst consequences will require society to both urgently reduce carbon emissions and swiftly adapt to a changing climate.”

Source: WMO

The impending destruction of federalism and the Union by the Supreme Court

The New Republic writes about what happens to the US when the Supreme Court intervenes on behalf of radical right states and takes laws or freedoms away from all other states. The destruction of Federalism and maybe the Union itself arises when blue states refuse to comply with conflicting red state demands. That was roughly how America’s Civil War began in 1861. TNR writes:

Historically, when the Supreme Court strays too far from what the vast majority of the public wants and starts catering to a white Southern minority, nothing good comes of it. When the Supreme Court decided in 1857 not only that Dred Scott was not a free man but that no Black person could be a citizen of the United States or enjoy the rights afforded them by the Constitution, it doomed the country to civil war. In the process of protecting “states’ rights” for white Southerners, the Supreme Court led by Roger Taney trampled both human rights and the rights of free states to prohibit slavery on their own territory.

The echoes of the past are even clearer when you compare the language and reasoning of the Taney and the current Roberts court. The written opinion of Chief Justice Taney in Dred Scott v. Sandford relied on the same sort of “originalist” logic used by Associate Justice Samuel Alito in Dobbs v. Jackson. Indeed, this passage by Taney on why Blacks were doomed to slavery, based on an originalist reading of the Constitution, could have been written by Alito last year:

Yet the men who framed this declaration were great men—high in literary acquirements—high in their sense of honor, and incapable of asserting principles inconsistent with those on which they were acting. They perfectly understood the meaning of the language they used, and how it would be understood by others.… They spoke and acted according to the then established doctrines and principles, and in the ordinary language of the day, and no one misunderstood them. [Note: Historians firmly reject the assertion that no one misunderstood the founders -- that is a key lie at the heart of radical right anti-democratic politics and policy] 

The logic used by the court and the effects of its decisions were described eloquently by Adam Serwer in a 2018 Atlantic article: “They carefully framed their arguments in terms of limited government and individual liberty, writing opinion after opinion that allowed the white South to create an oppressive society in which black Americans had almost no rights at all. Their commitment to freedom in the abstract, and only in the abstract, allowed a brutal despotism to take root in Southern soil.”

As if to drive this point home, the Roberts court ruled in Shinn v. Ramirez that it doesn’t matter if a person is innocent based on the preponderance of the evidence; so long as procedure was followed, the state can still execute people. Justice in the abstract, and only in the abstract, all over again.

Today, the Roberts Supreme Court is poised to do similar damage in perhaps as little as 20 years. We’ve already seen the court strike down most of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in Shelby v. Holder (2013), and it looks ready to finish off the rest of it soon. It’s allowed states to strip Native Americans of their right to vote using the pretext of preventing voter fraud in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. The court decided in Gill v. Whitford (2018) that while it’s unfortunate that partisan gerrymandering undeniably ends democracy, there’s nothing it can do about it constitutionally. 

At the same time, the Roberts court is elevating the dominant forces in our society while striking down the civil rights of minorities. It keeps finding that Christian organizations have a right to government money, while at the same time finding they also have a right to discriminate against LGBTQ people, Jews, etc. This is freedom in the abstract: Even if Jews and LGBTQ people were allowed to discriminate against Christians, it would have a negligible impact on Christians compared to Christians being permitted to discriminate against groups that make up much smaller percentages of the population. It is akin to saying Christians can only shop at Kroger, and Jews can only shop at Jewish-run businesses: The harm falls disproportionately on the minority groups.

All the while, the right flank of the court engages in partisan activity. Associate Justice Samuel Alito openly sneers at and mocks justices who support gun control. Clarence Thomas is married to a woman who supported overthrowing the 2020 election and publicly uses right-wing talking points about “cancel culture.” Amy Coney-Barrett served as a “handmaid” in a right-wing Christian cult. Bret Kavanaugh’s hearings painted him as a beer-swilling alleged rapist with ultrarich parents to pay off his debts incurred by his country-club lifestyle.  

But the real Dred Scott moment will be at hand when red states begin trying to extradite people from the blue states for the crime of getting abortions, providing abortions, or providing transition-related care to transgender people. Deep blue states have been creating haven and sanctuary laws to protect women, doctors, transgender people, and parents of trans youth. Both California and Massachusetts have passed sanctuary laws that would prevent people from being extradited for seeking abortions in their states. Given that eradicating abortion and eliminating health care for trans people have become the top social policy priorities for conservatives, the reaction from powerhouses like the Heritage Foundation has been swift: They see these blue-state moves as a direct threat to their agenda.

We may already see the genesis of the case that breaks the camel’s back on the horizon. Luna Younger is a trans child who was involved in a protracted custody case in Texas. She was also supposedly the reason for Governor Abbott’s move to have Child Protective Services remove trans youth from supportive homes. Eventually, Luna’s supportive mother (a pediatrician) gained sole custody and has moved to California. Her father, Jeff Younger (a ne’er-do-well who lied about his military service, employment, and education), is demanding that the Texas politicians override the state courts and attempt to extradite her back to Texas.

Younger is a right-wing Christian authoritarian. He recently tweeted, “Want to save civilization? Take power and rule.” He also has the connections to make Texas test the legality of sanctuary state laws for women and trans people. Eventually, the Supreme Court will have to decide, are people free once they leave a state like Texas? Or do they remain property of that state forever, even if they leave? Last year the Idaho House passed a bill that would make it a felony punishable by life in prison to help a transgender person under the age of 18 to travel out of state for treatment.

Given this court, we know how it’s almost certain to answer. Just as the Taney court allowed the laws of states to reach out and take freedom away from people who fled north and west, so too would the partisan Roberts court allow these same states to extradite and incarcerate women and parents of trans youth who seek legal, necessary medical treatment elsewhere.

Which brings us to the breaking point: The California attorney general would be under heavy pressure morally and from the voters to refuse to comply. At that point, federalism, and the Union, are dead, as states refuse to recognize the legitimacy of court decisions, and the comparisons with the Taney court are complete.

I will continue to warn about the grave danger the hyper-radical Christian nationalists on the Supreme Court represent to democracy, inconvenient truth, civil liberties, tolerance, pluralism and secularism. 

By now, most people paying attention senses that the danger is real and unfolding in real time. Most of those paying attention but who still cannot see much or any danger, e.g., most Republicans and conservatives, seem to unknowingly or at least implicitly support where America’s radical right is taking us. They falsely see this as mostly patriotic, Christian, solidly constitutional, not bigoted, and neutral or good for America.