AN ANGRY, SCARED COUNTRY

Primary midterm elections began yesterday, and they confirmed what recent polls have revealed: Americans are angry.  Angry about inflation, about lingering covid, about gas prices.  And Americans are scared.  Scared of violent crime.  In San Francisco, progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin, was ousted in a recall vote because he was seen as being "soft on crime"  (the fact that crime rates in the city did not actually go up under his regime doesn't seem to matter).  This showed that in even a famously progressive city like San Francisco, fear of crime and a desire to get tough and put more cops on the street, can work.  (Plus a multimillion dollar campaign funded by conservatives against Boudin didn't hurt.)

It understandable that the public are upset about the recent spike in violent crime that happened during the pandemic.  The problem is that they are falling into the usual pattern of wanting tougher sentences  and increasing the number of police on the streets.  While these two solutions may seem reasonable, they have proved ineffective in the past.  Take prison, for example: if sending more people to prison reduced crime, then America would have the lowest crime rate in the world, because we already have the largest prison population in the world (China has a billion more people than we do, and incarcerates less people).  And increased policing also does not necessarily mean less crime; as a 2021 New York Times  article pointed out, "For decades, scholars have acknowledged that local crime rates cannot be predicted by officer strength and police budgets. Sometimes a boost for policing is followed by a drop in crime; sometimes it isn’t."  The article went on to mention that increased policing leads to more arrests for low level crimes, which leads to more tension between police forces and the public.

Personally, I think that the recent spike in violent crime can be chalked up to the pandemic; first of all, the pandemic obviously upset and scared Americans, and when Americans get upset and scared, a lot of them go to the gun store.  Gun sales have boomed to record highs in the past two years, with all the potential violence that can bring.  Also, the pandemic has put the entire country on edge; just look at the increase in negative effects that have hit the country since it began: divorces are up, so is depression, drug and alcohol use, overdoses, traffic deaths, I could go on.  Given all that, the increase in violent crime is just one part of a pattern. Really, it's not surprising that people forced to stay inside start to get on each other's nerves, and conflicts that might have ended in shouting matches before, now often end in violence. As a study from the Council for Criminal Justice in February of 2021 said, "domestic violence incidents increased 8.1% after jurisdictions imposed pandemic-related lockdown orders."  It's really important to remember that this pandemic has been transformative, an experience that no one alive has endured before, and the effects of it will be felt for years to come.

Look, I understand that a politician who responds to the public's fears about the recent increase in violent crime by saying that violent crime was worse in the past (which is true) and that the crime rates will probably decrease as the world moves away from the pandemic (which I also think is true), will get clobbered by the voters, but I still think that more police and tougher sentencing is not the answer.  

The big problem with crime in this country is that Americans seem to reject or ignore a simple fact: the US has a higher crime rate than most industrialized countries because it has a higher child poverty rate than most industrialized countries. (A UNICEF study of child poverty in 2012 found that the US had the second highest child poverty rate in the industrialized world).   Really, is it any shock that children that live in neighborhoods where they risk exposure to lead paint or asthma from poor air conditions, and who attend underfunded public schools that treat them like prisoners, often wind up becoming criminals?  That's why it's so frustrating to hear that voters want something done about crime when one of the best tools to prevent crime came and went during the pandemic: the stimulus money for families with children.  During the pandemic, both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations passed stimulus plans that included $300 a month for each child in families making $150,000 a year or less.  While not a lot of money, it lifted millions of children out of poverty.  Sadly, when that money ran out, a second bill that would have made the payments permanent, failed in the Senate.  

Along with reducing child poverty, other common sense ways to lower crime rates include more funding for impoverished public schools, more after school programs, and, heck, even cleaning up vacant lots and putting in more street lights have shown positive results.  These solutions may not bring the strong feeling that locking up bad guys has for Americans raised on cop shows, but they actually provide better results in the long run at a lower expense.   We already have enough people in jail and enough cops on the street. 

NOT AGAIN

For the second time in a month there has been a horrific mass shooting.   It happened in an elementary school in Texas, and this time the targets were mostly schoolchildren around 9 or 10 years old.  It was the second worst school shooting ever, and unlike the other recent shooting, the shooter was killed by the police and we may never know what his motive was.  

What is clear is that once again a uniquely American tragedy has taken place.   And once again there is little to no chance that anything will be done about it.  As Gizmodo pointed out today, prominent Republicans have already sent out tweets that read like they're all filling in the same form letter, sending out "thoughts and prayers" without offering a damn bit of possibility that their party could pass even the mildest form of gun control.  We know this because, after the last shooting at Sandy Hook, Connecticut, in 2012, an attempt to pass an expanded background check failed in congress, and several states actually passed laws making it easier to get a gun.

Personally, I wish that our country could just get rid of the Second Amendment, considering that it was written when a gun could only be fired one shot at a time.  Then we could pass laws like they have in Europe or Japan.  (Japan has around 10 people die from guns each year, the US has around 30,000).  But I know that won't be happening anytime soon.  

But why not make gun ownership like car ownership?  Everyone knows that you don't just get to drive a car when  you turn 16, you have to prove that you can handle it responsibly because, obviously, a car driven recklessly is very dangerous.  So why can't we say the same thing about a gun?  Why not require potential gun owners to take a class in gun safety and then take a written and hands on test to prove that they can handle it securely?  Plus it should be pointed out that both of these shooters were 18 years old, why not say you can't buy a gun until you're 21, on a nationwide level?  Surely beer shouldn't be harder to get than an assault rifle.

Everything I just said in the last paragraph seems like common sense to me, but  common sense and this country's relationship with guns are very different.  During the pandemic, gun sales skyrocketed, and today there are more than guns owned than there are citizens.   And already right wing websites have started spreading conspiracies about this shooting being a "false flag", that is, faked by the government as an excuse to ban guns.  And inevitably the National Rifle Association will issue statements about how teachers should be armed, and how we need more "good guys" with guns.  Even those these two gunmen saw themselves as good guys.  And even those there was a security guard with a gun at the grocery store shooting, who wasn't able to stop the heavily armed gunman.

The depressing reality is that most Americans seem to have a short attention span when it comes to these shootings; we are saddened by them for a few days, and the world and the media move on.  And, while most Americans in polls express support for some of the laws that I just listed, they also  rate gun control as "low" in every list of issues that are important to them in elections.  And with the Republican party poised to retake congress this year, you can forget about any kind of common sense gun policy getting passed.  Right now, we live in the United States of the Nation Rifle Association, and little will change in the near future.

THE SHOOTING IN BUFFALO AND THE GOP MAINSTREAMING OF HATE

 

Last Saturday an armed gunman walked into a grocery store in Buffalo New York and killed 10 people.  As is so often the case when this kind of senseless tragedy happens, conservatives mentioned "thoughts and prayers",  spoke a few lines about the need for "better mental healthcare" and moved on while progressives called for more background checks and other common sense gun control that will never get passed.  This is all grimly predictable. 

But there is another, darker element to this shooting: before carrying it out, the 18 year old gunman posted a racist manifesto online, and most of his victims were African American. (He even travelled to a specifically African American neighborhood to carry out the shooting).   While Republican leaders have, of course, condemned the violence, the words of this young man's manifesto seem eerily familiar to the political speech coming out of the mouths of both Republican politicians and right wing media commentators.  Especially concerning a white supremacist belief known as "replacement theory."

Replacement theory is a noxious belief that's held not only in the US, but in other Western countries too.  Its first proponent was probably French author Renaud Camus in 2011, who used the term “the great replacement” in a reference to an influx of Muslim immigrants in that country.   Put simply, it believes that Western governments (often manipulated by Jewish people), are allowing Western countries to be overrun with non white immigrants who will eventually take over.  

While such a brazenly racist and xenophobic theory was once expressed only on white supremacist websites, conservatives have  mainstreamed it by toning the rhetoric down slightly while keeping the essential message intact.  And they can add a more political twist by alleging, like House Representative Elise Stefanik did in a recent Facebook ad,  that “Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION. Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.”

The most prominent exponent of this theory in American today is Tucker Carlson, the top rated talk show host on Fox News. According to a recent analysis of his show in the New York Times, Carlson has  made a reference to the theory over 300 times on his show in the past few years.  Although Carlson has, of course, distanced himself from the shooter and his manifesto, and its possible that the shooter was inspired more by online white supremacist websites than Fox, the fact that many passages of his manifesto echo sentiments that Carlson has said on the air show show the back and fourth influence that Carlson and white supremacist websites have.  

It's really stunning to see how much the Republican party has changed over the years when it comes to immigration:  back in the presidential debate of 1984, Ronald Reagan said" I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.”  He would later grant amnesty to over a  million undocumented immigrants, without any loss of popularity in his party.  I think the turning point for the party's views on immigration came in 1994, when California GOP governor Pete Wilson, facing a tough reelection campaign, openly embraced a state proposition that would have denied social services to undocumented immigrants.  The ads he ran were very much precursors of the modern conservative style, with hordes of "illegals" swarming into the state to take over.  Both Wilson and the proposition won (the proposition was later overturned by the courts), setting a standard for conservative victory that the right wing media picked up on and that Donald Trump obviously later added to, extending the fear of immigrants  beyond the undocumented and into anyone from, as Trump himself put it, "shit hole countries."  

Although not all Republicans have embraced this view, with Liz Cheney recently tweeting "The House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-semitism. History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse. @GOP leaders must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them." most Republicans have continued to embrace this racist garbage because, quite simply, it works. The only way for politicians to stop playing on the bigoted, xenophobic fears of Americans is for them to start losing elections.  And that doesn't look too likely in the near future. 

THE DEEP DIVISION BETWEEN THE STATES

 

A few posts ago I ridiculed the notion that America would ever start another Civil War.  I stand by that belief, but the upcoming Supreme Court decision overturning Roe Vs Wade is going to show the deepest divisions between states in this country since that conflict, with Anti choice and Pro choice states becoming the new Confederate and Union states. The upcoming legal battles about the different laws in those states is going to be ugly: if a woman travels out of state to get an abortion, can her home state still prosecute her when she returns?  Some are already saying that they will try.  And what about the fact that the majority of abortions are now administered by the pill  mifepristone? How much power will states have to prevent women from getting such pills, which can be taken safely at home?  How will the Anti choice states stop the inevitable illegal market for those pills in their states?  Are they going to try and search for mifepristone in every car that drives into their state?  That would be almost impossible to do.

The Republican Party knows full well how difficult these questions are, so that's why many  of them are avoiding answering them.  Instead, they are trying to focus their outrage onto the leaking of the ruling rather than the ruling itself, as if anyone will care whether the ruling was leaked or not five years from now.  One example of how muddled the current Republican message is came from a talking points memo released by  the National Republican Senatorial Committee that said "Republicans do not want to throw doctors and women in jail. Mothers should be held harmless under the law."  But many Anti choice states have passed laws that will press for criminal charges against both doctors performing abortions and women getting one.  You would think that a party that has been trying to get this ruling for decades would know how to respond to it, but like the dog that caught the car, they aren't sure what to do.

Abortion is, as always, an extremely difficult topic to discuss, and reasonable people can disagree (the biggest fight my parents ever had was about a family member getting an abortion) it is, after all, a question of life and death.  But with Anti choice states poised to pass laws that ban all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest,  and saying that personhood begins at the moment that the sperm hits the egg, I think it's fair to say that the Republican party is about to engage in an overreach on this issue that the  majority of Americans do not agree with.  Time will tell whether they will pay a political price for it or not.  I sure hope they will.

ROE VS WADE STRUCK DOWN

Today a leak of a US Supreme Court document revealed that the court was about to overturn the Roe Vs Wade ruling of 1973 that kept abortion legal nationwide.  While this is no surprise given the current makeup of the court, it still is a game changing decision that could affect the country for decades to come.  

Although the ruling was made in 1973, abortion didn't really become a political issue until 1980 when then president Ronald Reagan aligned his party with the religious, anti-abortion, right.  Ever since, Republican opposition to abortion has been the only stance allowed for the vast majority of Republican politicians.  And now, after over forty years of fighting, the Christian conservatives have finally gotten what they wanted. 

Personally, I think that is utterly despicable.  It infuriates me that the same Republicans who oppose expanding medicaid, demonize families that get food stamps, and vote against paid family leave or national daycare, claim that they care more about "life". To me, this ruling treats women as second class citizens, unable to make their own decisions.  And to add an extra kick in the ribs to this ruling, all 3 of Donald Trump's court appointees (Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett) voted  to overturn.  Yes, the same man who once described himself as "extremely pro choice" and refused to answer when asked if he had ever paid for a woman's abortion,  put the 3 judges on the court who have now tipped the balance of the court  taken away a woman's right to choose.  While Trump may have changed his views on abortion when he became a Republican, his lifelong record of  misogyny has truly come full circle.

 This decision was hardly made because of some mandate from the people, in fact, according to a 2021 Pew research poll, a whopping 70% of the American public do not agree with this ruling, and that number has been slowly but surely creeping up higher and higher over the past few years.   The decision to have an abortion is perhaps the single most contentious issue in the country,  but it is clear that most Americans feel that it is one best made by the woman herself and not the government.   And I can't help but think about how a stunning 53% of white women voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016.  Considering how many of those women were pro choice, how will they feel  now when millions of them discover themselves living in a state where they and they daughters will  have their rights taken away?  

Right now there is nothing that pro choice Americans can do; the court's ruling has been made, and probably half of the states in this country will pass laws restricting or banning abortions.  But now that the pro choice side is on the defensive, it's time for them to organize and motivate themselves like the anti choice movement did decades ago.  If the pro choice movement starts registering more similarly minded voters and getting them to the polls, the results could be a huge backlash against the Republican party, with those white female suburban voters  finally turning against them.  It's possible.  In any event, this ruling has pushed the issue of abortion into politics in a big way for the first time in decades, and who knows how it will turn out.

ARE MEN IN TROUBLE?

 

Recently, comedian Bill Maher (who's work I used to enjoy, but who now seems to be drifting more and more rightward) gave a spoken editorial about the state of men in America, and how men are losing their masculinity because women are forcing them to repress it.  Fox News host Tucker Carlson also did a recent special on his network entitled "The End of Men", in which he also lamented the end of masculinity in America, and recommended testicle tanning(!), among other things as a possible solution. The root of these arguments (and others like them) is that men in America have been too emasculated; that fear of toxic masculinity and rise of women as leaders in both politics and the workforce have turned men into girly men.  There's also a clear implication that the rise of gay rights in the past few decades and the acceptance of trans people have also somehow delegitimized classic heterosexual manhood.

Like a lot of political arguments, there is a core truth here, but's it layered under lies.  Whether testosterone levels are dropping is hard to measure, but it does appear that sperm levels are dropping in men around the world. (Although most of that drop was recorded in one study put out in 2017 that has its critics.)  Assuming that this trend is real, it's a serious problem that could increase the number of miscarriages and unhealthy children being born.  

But is a society run by castrating women to blame for this problem?  No.  While it is true that as human beings have more and more moved away from our primitive ancestors we've had less and less need for masculine strength to protect the species.  But our move to a more civilized world  doesn't account for the potential drop in sperm count.

The real root of the problem may be something far more sinister: the rise of the use of chemicals in products that act as endocrine disruptors.  Shanna Swan, a leading scholar of reproductive health, recently wrote a book called Count Down about this serious problem, and in it she bluntly states that “...our modern world is threatening sperm counts, altering male and female reproductive development, and imperiling the future of the human race.”  Even more depressing is her assertion that those endocrine disrupters are found in literally thousands of different products, with little to no mention of them given on the labels.  (And if you want more proof of how this isn't because of society, she also points out that animal species exposed to these same kinds of chemicals also have the same kinds of problems). 

Other countries in Canada and Europe have moved to regulate these chemicals, but, not surprisingly, America's love of the free market has lead to little or no regulations here.  Just like tobacco companies, manufacturers of lead based products and the fossil fuel industry, chemical companies have gotten away with slowly poisoning the public with their products by lobbying politicians into ignoring the dangers of  those products.  And that has nothing to do with nagging women. 

THE GOP AND THE SOUL OF MITT ROMNEY

 

There is no image that personifies the position of Utah Senator Mitt Romney in the Republican party more than his standing up in congress to cheer for the confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court as members of his own party bitterly slunk out of the room.  (While two other senators in the Republican party joined Romney in voting for her, he was the only one to celebrate her victory).  By refusing to engage in the disgusting political theatrics that Ted Cruz and Lindsay Graham had displayed during Jackson's senate hearing, and then voting for a Supreme Court candidate who was both groundbreaking and qualified, Romney's basic decency had left him applauding alone.

While I didn't vote for Romney back in 2012, he's always struck me as a reasonable man. His governorship of  Massachusetts was mostly moderate, and the campaign he ran against Barack Obama mostly avoided demonizing the president and stuck to the issues.  I say mostly because there was one moment that he would come to regret: during the campaign he met with then TV star Donald Trump and accepted his endorsement.  At that time Trump was mostly known for promoting the  "birther" conspiracy that Obama was not actually a legitimate president.  While Romney never embraced this crazy theory, he was birther adjacent.  

Then, to Romney's credit, he gave a speech on March 3rd of 2016 before Trump had won the Republican nomination,  in which he blasted Trump, saying “Here’s what I know: Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud.  His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He’s playing members of the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House, and all we get is a lousy hat.”  And unlike other Republicans who criticized Trump during his campaign, Romney continued to go after him even after he won.  And he is the only Republican Senator to vote to remove Trump from office in both of the impeachment trials.

The fact that Romney has always been a Republican is no surprise; his father was a Republican Governor himself.  And, before Mitt went into politics, he was a successful businessman.  It's clear that the appeal of the Republican party to him was that it was seen as the party that was pro business and  lower taxes.  His anger at Trump is for what he revealed about the party; that at the end of the day, race was a far bigger factor than tax cuts.  For years, wealthy Republicans like Romney had somehow convinced themselves that the backbone of the GOP, those middle class, blue collar white workers, cared about issues like capital gains tax cuts and regulations, when what they really cared about were issues like Mexican immigrants "stealing" their jobs and black people "exploiting" welfare.  What Trump did was pull off the pro business band aid of the party and expose the gaping wound of bigotry underneath.  And that stung Romney, who clearly was distressed to see the real feelings of Republican rank and file voters laid bare.

So what's a honorable man like Romney to do?  He's no longer welcome at party gatherings, and he was even booed at a Republican rally in his home state of Utah, but I doubt he will ever switch parties or become an independent; the GOP's pro business image is in his blood.  Sadly, with the passing of John McCain and the further Trumpifying of the party, Romney's brand of polite politics is fading in the GOP.  That a former presidential candidate and strong party member could become an outcast in his own party just 10 years later is proof of just how much Donald Trump has stained the Republicans and the country as a whole.  There's no place anymore for decent people in the Grand Old Party.