We start today with Maggie Haberman and Luke Broadwater of The New York Times reporting that, according to accounts provided by witness testimony to the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol, former president Donald Trump told then-chief of staff Mark Meadows that, yes, maybe Mike Pence should be hanged.
Shortly after hundreds of rioters at the Capitol started chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” on Jan. 6, 2021, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, left the dining room off the Oval Office, walked into his own office and told colleagues that President Donald J. Trump was complaining that the vice president was being whisked to safety.
Mr. Meadows, according to an account provided to the House committee investigating Jan. 6, then told the colleagues that Mr. Trump had said something to the effect of, maybe Mr. Pence should be hanged.
It is not clear what tone Mr. Trump was said to have used. But the reported remark was further evidence of how extreme the rupture between the president and his vice president had become, and of how Mr. Trump not only failed to take action to call off the rioters but appeared to identify with their sentiments about Mr. Pence — whom he had unsuccessfully pressured to block certification of the Electoral College results that day — as a reflection of his own frustration at being unable to reverse his loss.
The account of Mr. Trump’s comment was initially provided to the House committee by at least one witness, according to two people briefed on their work, as the panel develops a timeline of what the president was doing during the riot.
Given what we heard Trump say at the Eclipse rally and what he tweeted on Jan. 6., 2021, does anyone really doubt that Trump said something to this effect behind the closed doors of the West Wing?
Brian Broome of The Washington Post writes that once again, after another mass shooting, nothing will happen.
The fact of the matter is that nobody has done anything since Columbine in 1999, or Virginia Tech in 2007, or Sandy Hook in 2012, or Parkland in 2018, and there’s virtually no chance that anyone is going to do anything now. It doesn’t matter that it’s children we’re talking about again. Nothing happened after innocent children were slaughtered the last time, or the time before that, and nothing is going to be done now. Nothing happens after it occurs in elementary schools, or grocery stores, college campuses or churches. Instead, we always defer to those whose fears outweigh others’ right to continue living.
[...]
We are living in a twisted version of “The Lottery,” the classic short story by Shirley Jackson. In the story, the residents of a small fictional town hurry about their day preparing for a big ceremony, which is slowly revealed to be a ritual human sacrifice. Death by stoning. Each year, someone is chosen at random to die, for the good of the town. So that the rest of the townspeople can feel safe. Perhaps so that their god can be appeased, or good crops can be enjoyed.
That’s where we live now. We live in a culture where human beings are randomly chosen to die so that those who feel unseen or who fear the unknown or just love guns don’t have to feel afraid.
But our sacrifices aren’t yearly. They’re daily. One right after the other. Unlike the characters in Jackson’s story,
the people who die in our tale lost their humanity long ago and are immortalized only as statistics. Numbers to be added up.
Gustavo Arellano of The Los Angeles Times considers what it means that a Latino committed a mass murder of other Latinos.
Communities of color have always have to deal with this essentialism when one of our own commits a massacre.
Asian Americans had to deal with ridiculous punditry in 2007 when photos emerged of the Korean-born student at Virginia Tech who killed 34 people posing in ways that referred to a violent Asian film.
Muslims always have to remind people that Islam is not a religion of terrorism just because someone invokes Allah while launching an attack on U.S. soil.
So when a minority kills on such a horrific scale as Uvalde, it’s easy and understandable to call for color-blindness.
But when it’s one of your own killing their own kind, then what?
We can’t pretend that the sickness of mass shootings is a whites-only phenomenon fueled mostly by racial hatred. Minorities are supposed to be “better” than that, we tell ourselves. We’re supposed to protect our own from horrors like Uvalde — and yet we can’t.
There is a lot to unpack in Mr Arellano’s essay.
I think back to some of the conversations that I was having with a variety of mixed-race and Black friends in the mid to late 1990s about the revelations of Catholic priests’ sexual abuse and the cover-up by the Catholic Church hierarchy. I talked to a lot of people that seemed to think that such abuse was limited to the Catholic priesthood and, within all-Black groups that I talked to, to the white Catholic Church.
I told everyone of those crowds then, repeatedly: “Don’t think that this isn’t happening within your denomination or within the Black Church; it is.” Truth was, I had already heard several stories from friends of mine about pastoral sexual abuse in both white and Black Protestant churches.
I’m also thinking of the disbelief, even among some in law enforcement, that a Black man could have possibly been the culprit of the 2002 DMV-area sniper attacks; that disbelief was grounded in white supremacy. Frankly, I never understood what made people think that a Black man could not have possibly been the DMV sniper, I quite vividly remember the summer of 1984 when there was a Black serial killer duo in the Midwest (granted, the Alton Coleman murder spree was a very different murder spree from the John Allen Muhammad-Lee Malvo murder spree).
When I say that I’m a Black American, Black is the adjective and American is the noun.
One of the most despicable things about racism and white supremacy is that it’s not limited only to the beliefs that white people have about “others” and the actions taken against “others”; it’s not as if Blacks or Asians or Latinos or other ethnicities have a mutant gene that prevents us from believing the disinformation of white supremacy.
We don’t. We “others” also have to be taught to unlearn white supremacy. Really, every American of every race/ethnicity should be taught to unlearn white supremacy. Part of what it means to be an American living within the American culture is to implicitly or explicitly learn about white supremacy—the critical race theory that’s been in effect and taught since, and before, the founding of this nation.
That includes American gun laws (well, lack thereof, nowadays) and American gun culture, which have strong underpinnings of white supremacy.
Mr, Arellano is right: The Uvalde murderer was a Latino American who acted in very typical American fashion. Maybe that’s why right-wingers have been so quick to try to “other” the Uvalde murderer.
Moving on, Renée Graham of The Boston Globe says that nothing has changed since the week of May 25, 2020, and George Floyd’s murder-by-cop.
On the same day of Floyd’s death, a white woman provoked a confrontation when a Black man asked her to abide by leash laws in New York’s Central Park. He videotaped her as she called 911 and falsely claimed that “an African American man is threatening my life.” That viral video sparked discussions about how this woman tried to use her privilege and a racist lie to provoke police to punish a Black man.
Before that week’s end, the last minutes of Floyd’s life would dominate the news and social media. If not for Darnella Frazier’s cell phone video, his death would have been forgotten; Minneapolis police lied and initially called it a “medical incident during police interaction.” Instead it became a worldwide call to root out the police violence and entrenched racism that enabled Floyd’s death.
[...]
Nothing higher has come from Floyd’s murder, and America’s very ugly filthy war against Black people is unwavering. The evidence lies in plain sight as Republican-led legislatures curtail voting rights and right-wing school boards ban some of the same books that topped bestseller lists two years ago. We’ve seen the proof in insurrectionists who breached the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to overthrow a fair election and the white supremacist who allegedly drove 200 miles on May 14 to kill Black people in a Buffalo supermarket.
Dhruv Khullar of The New Yorker wonders if the COVID-19 pandemic will ever end.
Twenty-seven months into the covid-19 pandemic, our defenses against the coronavirus seem at once stronger and more penetrable than ever. A growing majority of the U.S. population now has some immunity to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, whether from vaccination, past infection, or both. However, staggeringly infectious members of the Omicron family have demonstrated an ability to evade some of those protections. Since April, they have led to a quadrupling of daily coronavirus cases; the U.S. has been reporting more than a hundred thousand a day, but, because widely used at-home tests don’t show up in official tallies, the true number could be five or even ten times higher.
When the original Omicron, BA.1, swept the country this winter, it was by far the most contagious variant to date. But a subvariant that emerged more recently, BA.2, appears to be thirty per cent more transmissible, and one of its descendants, BA.2.12.1, is more contagious still. Unfortunately, people who have recovered from BA.1 infections can be reinfected by Omicron subvariants. According to some estimates, the U.S. could see a hundred million coronavirus infections this fall and winter. “This is approaching one of the most transmissible pathogens in history,” Eric Topol, the director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, told me.
Yet the country’s response has been one of indifference. No state currently requires masks in public places, even though the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that a third of Americans should consider wearing them, and New York City recently recommended them indoors. When a judge struck down a federal mask requirement for trains and airplanes, the Biden Administration appealed, but did not seek to immediately reinstate the mandate. In April, less than a third of Americans said that they were even “somewhat worried” about getting COVID-19, the lowest proportion since July, 2021, and fewer people were socially distancing than at any time during the pandemic. A third of the population believes that the pandemic is over, including more than half of unvaccinated Americans and nearly six in ten Republicans.
Amanda J. Calhoun writes for The Boston Globe about what racist “medical brutality” looks like.
Over a year ago, Dr. Susan Moore filmed herself on Facebook just weeks before she died of COVID-19 in a suburban Indiana hospital. In a viral video, she discussed racist treatment from staff, including delays in her care, devaluing of her symptoms, and undertreatment of her pain.
Just as a White policeman can kill an unarmed Black man, claiming he was a threat, so, too, can Black patients die because the doctor neglected to treat them adequately, thinking their symptoms were not worth follow-up.
As with underreported police killings, we may never know how many.
Medical brutality looks different from police brutality. This kind of brutality kills Black patients by neglect. It kills them by delaying surgery on my friend’s brother after he sustained a traumatic brain injury and bled out. It kills them by not bothering to aggressively treat my grandmother’s breast cancer and letting her die, leaving behind eight children; the youngest was 11. It kills them by not investigating when a Black woman says she is bleeding too much from postpartum complications and hemorrhages to death.
The Kyiv Independent pens a response to a May 19 piece by The New York Times editorial board.
Dark times have always shed light on those willing to compromise their values to preserve their daily comforts. Neither a French president, a German intellectual, nor an award-winning American newspaper are exempt from being wrong.
As a newsroom witnessing the war from inside Ukraine, we want to set the record straight.
Ukraine winning the war with Russia isn’t “unrealistic” or even “likely.” If we want the world to be anything like what we know it to be, then Ukraine winning is the only option.
And Western financial and military support for Ukraine is the only way to establish “long-term peace and security on the European continent” that the New York Times editorial board is rooting for.
Ukraine’s belief in its victory isn’t based on overconfidence. It’s based on necessity.
Any concession to Russia now will lead to another war sooner or later, while Ukrainians stuck in any region occupied by Russia will be tortured, raped, or killed. The New York Times is running story after story about the living hell through which Russia puts Ukrainian civilians in occupied territories. Meanwhile, its editorial board is suggesting that Ukraine should cede territories to Russia, where more atrocities will undoubtedly happen.
I can only imagine The Kyiv Independent’s response to former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Two words.
Andrey Pertsev, writing for the Russian independent news outlet Meduza, says that frustrations within the Kremlin about Russia’s war with Ukraine and with Russian President Vladimir Putin are mounting.
Sources close to the Kremlin said the “hawkish” position (most popular among Russia’s security elites) is simple: “They figure, since we’re entangled there already, there’s no going soft now. We need to go even harder.” This would entail a broad mobilization of reservists, and “playing to win,” ideally by capturing Kyiv itself.
The Kremlin, however, isn’t ready to declare a full mobilization. In early April, citing the results of closed sociological studies, sources with knowledge of the Putin administration’s domestic policy work told Meduza that even the Russians who say they support the “special operation” in Ukraine are reluctant either to volunteer for the fight or to send their own relatives to the frontlines.
At the same time, Russia’s major businesspeople and most of the “civilian” state officials are also unhappy with the president’s actions and criticize him for failing to take real steps toward peace with Ukraine. Meanwhile, economic difficulties mount by the day.
“The problems are already visible, and they’ll be raining down from all sides by the middle of the summer: transportation, medicine, even agriculture. There was just nobody thinking about the scale [of the sanctions],” a source close to the government told Meduza, adding that no one in the Kremlin calculated the consequences of European countries completely boycotting Russian oil and gas. While such a boycott is still being discussed in the EU, Meduza’s sources say the president and his more “militant” advisers nevertheless dismiss the prospect as an empty threat by the West.
Julia Ioffe of Puck News interviews former Russian diplomat Boris Bondarev.
Most Americans don’t understand how important this is in the Russian state system: that everyone has to vysluzhyt’sya, manage up and brown-nose, making sure you please your bosses and that they notice you. If you’re, say, a criminal investigator, that means opening unnecessary criminal investigations so that your numbers look better and the bosses give you a promotion. What did this look like at the Foreign Ministry?
It’s extremely important. You have to constantly be showing your superiors that you’re doing a good job, that you stand out. Then you’re moved up the ladder. So, for example, I’m reading what my colleague Dmitry Polyanskii [the first deputy permanent Russian representative at the U.N.] is writing from New York. He used to be a normal, intelligent person. Now, I read his tweets and it’s insane. It’s just pure propaganda, with some notes of psychosis. But he’s doing this so that the bosses in Moscow notice him and so that he gets a big, important job in Moscow. It’s very important in our system. Because our system is very opaque and it doesn’t change, unlike the American system. I don’t know the American system too well, but it seems to me that American civil servants, when they make some kind of decision, they take into account what American voters think. In our system, no one cares about our voters. The only thing that matters is that your immediate supervisor notices you and thinks highly of you. That’s it.
Bondarev and his family now live under the protection and security of the Swiss government.
Finally today, The Grammarian writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer that you can call the Buffalo shooter’s mad scribbles a lot of things, but we should not be calling it a “manifesto.”
Manifesto is one of those words for which some dictionaries only scratch the surface.
Merriam-Webster’s manifesto definition is bare-bones: “a written statement declaring publicly the intentions, motives, or views of its issuer.” I love Merriam-Webster, but this definition sucks: It is too broad to be useful. An identical definition could apply to a word like thesis — that thing you were taught to put at the beginning of every research paper or essay you ever wrote — which carries very different weight.
The Oxford English Dictionary gives more helpful context: “A public declaration or proclamation, written or spoken; esp. a printed declaration, explanation, or justification of policy issued by a head of state, government, or political party or candidate, or any other individual or body of individuals of public relevance, as a school or movement in the Arts.” Not bad, except for that annoying capitalization of Arts. As a second definition, the OED offers: “In extended use: a book or other work by a private individual supporting a cause, propounding a theory or argument, or promoting a certain lifestyle.”
Which of these OED definitions best applies to the Buffalo shooter?
Peace. And Happy 20th Anniversary to Daily Kos!
