Kevin Drum

By chance, I happened to mention exactly this to a friend of mine last night:

Are you aware how much the constant threat of violence, principally from MAGA sources, is now warping American politics? If you wonder why so few people in red America seem to stand up directly against the MAGA movement, are you aware of the price they might pay if they did?

....Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump’s federal Jan. 6 trial, has been swatted, as has the special counsel Jack Smith.... The Colorado Supreme Court likewise endured terrible threats after it ruled that Trump was disqualified from the ballot.... Mitt Romney faces so many threats that he spends $5,000 per day on security to protect his family. After Jan. 6, the former Republican congressman Peter Meijer said that at least one colleague voted not to certify the election out of fear for the safety of their family.... In 2021, Reuters published a horrifying and comprehensive report detailing the persistent threats against local election workers.

It's telling that this comes from David French, who is sensitive to it—and willing to talk about it—because he and his family have been persistently under threat thanks to his anti-MAGA stand.

So far, these threats have been generally hollow. They come from angry Trump supporters who want to intimidate their opponents, not kill them. But that's how it's started in other times and places too, and there's not much question that it's inspired by Donald Trump himself. He approves the violence of January 6. He constantly threatens to throw Joe Biden in jail when he becomes president. He's going to sweep up and deport every illegal immigrant in the country. His top generals deserve to be killed for opposing him. The language of anger and violence is not even below the surface of everything Trump says. It's right out in the open.

The history of egg prices is the history of bird flu:

Here is Robin Abcarian on Atlanta DA Fani Willis:

After watching her testify for nearly two hours on Thursday, I think she made a convincing case that she did not [do anything wrong]. If anything, she spent more money on him than he did on her.

But by engaging in a romantic relationship with Wade (and believing she was under no obligation to disclose it), she handed her opponents — on a golden platter — an opening to challenge her integrity.... It’s mind-boggling. And so, so disappointing.

I'm not saying Abcarian is either right or wrong about this. But it's a perfect example of the hack gap I was talking about yesterday. Abcarian concludes that Willis did nothing wrong, but nonetheless spends the next thousand words wringing her hands over Willis's "bad judgment."

I know it can get tedious to ask, "What if it was a Republican?" But go ahead. Ask. There would be no hand-wringing. Quite the contrary: every single Republican with a pulse would be fighting back relentlessly over "Democrat smears." They'd be digging up dirt on the lawyer and her clients who questioned Willis. Donald Trump would be writing ALL CAPS Truth Social rants about the unfairness of a justice system that allows a travesty like this.

But not us! The fact is that Willis really didn't do anything wrong. Office romances may not always be a great idea, but they're common as dirt. The only problem is that Willis brought charges against a guy named Michael Roman for organizing slates of fake electors in the 2020 election, and it so happens that Roman has had a long career as an oppo investigator for the Koch network and then for Donald Trump. So he put his skills to work looking for dirt:

When fellow conservative operatives wrote on X that Roman was “the guy who busted Fani Willis” and that his 127-page court filing was “an object lesson in why you don’t indict the oppo guy,” he clicked like on the posts.

Over a career as a political operative and investigator, including for the conservative Koch brothers’ network, he has been described as intensely private and driven in his work. He has hired former CIA analysts to train his staff, arranged for drones to surveil campaign rallies and used military terminology, according to former colleagues. While working for Trump in 2020, he recruited poll-watchers for what the campaign called the “Army for Trump,” oversaw election-day operations and played a key role in organizing the “alternate elector plan” that is central to the charges in Fulton County, records show.

Even after employing his legendary skills, Roman found nothing except the office romance. But he decided to take a flyer on a long-shot accusation of financial impropriety against Willis anyway.¹ Why not?

It's bogus, and under normal circumstances none of us would care even slightly about Willis's onetime relationship with Wade. It would be a throwaway line in profiles and nothing more. There's just nothing there. But because an aggrieved oppo researcher's lawyer filed a tortured, bank-shot complaint and Fox News rallied around, suddenly we're all taking it seriously. Why?

¹It's worth keeping in mind just how ridiculous the accusation is. Basically, Willis and Wade both paid for various things during their relationship. But Roman's lawyer has pointed solely to the items paid for by Wade and touted this as evidence that Willis benefited from gifts given by Wade. It's completely absurd.

We have finally reached the logical conclusion of the belief that life begins at conception:

An embryo created through in-vitro fertilization (IVF) is a child protected by Alabama’s wrongful death act and the Alabama Constitution, the Alabama Supreme ruled on Friday.

....The Supreme Court held in a 7-2 decision that parents of frozen embryos killed at an IVF clinic when an intruder tampered with an IVF freezer may proceed with a wrongful death lawsuit against the clinic for alleged negligence.

Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker explained in, um, a wide-ranging concurring opinion:

[The principle against killing] has deep roots that reach back to the creation of man "in the image of God." Genesis 1:27 (King James).... Man's creation in God's image is the basis of the general prohibition on the intentional taking of human life. See Genesis 9:6 (King James).... Finally, the doctrine of the sanctity of life is rooted in the Sixth Commandment: "You shall not murder." Exodus 20:13 (NKJV 1982).

....The theologically based view of the sanctity of life adopted by the People of Alabama encompasses the following: (1) God made every person in His image; (2) each person therefore has a value that far exceeds the ability of human beings to calculate; and (3) human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself.

....Carving out an exception for the people in this case, small as they were, would be unacceptable to the People of this State, who have required us to treat every human being in accordance with the fear of a holy God who made them in His image.

Parker goes on to cite Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Rev. John Sutherland Bonnell, Glanville Williams, Petrus Van Mastricht,¹ John Calvin, and the book of Jeremiah. I have to say that even in Alabama I didn't realize judicial opinions could rely so explicitly on the endorsement of a particular strand of Christian theology. But I guess I know better now.

It's not clear what the practical implications are, aside from no one in Alabama ever being willing to perform IVF again. The potential cost is just too high. But would-be parents should feel free to come to California if they're tired of big government regulating valuable businesses out of existence and making their services unavailable to hardworking families.

¹In a footnote, Parker tells us:

Petrus Van Mastricht (1630-1706) was a Dutch Reformed theologian and professor at the University of Utrecht. He was a favorite of Jonathan Edwards, a leading minister in the First Great Awakening and later President of Princeton University. Edwards opined that, "for divinity in General, doctrine, Practice & Controversie; or as an [sic] universal system of divinity, [Van Mastrict's Theoretical-Practical Theology] is much better than … any other Book in the world, excepting the Bible."

Here's the latest from our fully lucid and astute former president:

Idiocy aside, there are two serious things to say about this. First, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is probably the closest thing we have to a hell on earth. If there's any country in the world we should take refugees from, it's Congo.

The second is this:

Donald Trump is no stranger to refugees from Congo. Biden may be a little ahead, but Trump admitted 8,300 per year when he was president. I don't imagine he remembers this anymore, but he did.

The latest kerfuffle over Joe Biden's age reminds me of the power of the hack gap. Cast your thoughts back over a few recent high-profile incidents:

In 2016, liberals supported Hillary Clinton during her email difficulties, but hardly wholeheartedly. They constantly wrung their hands over her "admittedly poor judgment," "adversarial communication style," and "habit of pushing the envelope."

In 2021, liberals didn't even waffle: they just threw themselves in with gusto over the outrage about Joe Biden's "chaotic" withdrawal from Afghanistan. They might as well have been a wing of the Republican Party.

In 2022 Biden passed the biggest climate legislation in American history. Liberals applauded, but tepidly. It didn't have everything they wanted, you see. And anyway, Joe Manchin certainly wasn't about to get an ovation from them.

Today, liberals are all over the media lamenting Joe Biden's elderliness. They don't call him "President Poopy Pants," as they do on Fox, but language aside they might as well.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump says the 2020 election was stolen and conservatives are all in. House Republicans ludicrously claim that Alejandro Mayorkas has committed impeachable offenses, and conservatives are thoroughly on board. They're equally on board with the Hunter Biden jihad. And the "persecution" of Trump. And the claim that CRT is ruining our schools. And looking the other way at Trump's obvious cognitive decline.

Now, in the long run maybe it's good that liberals are publicly willing to say things even if they're politically harmful. But it's hard not to be reminded of Robert Frost's aphorism that a liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel. After all, it turned out that Hillary Clinton did nothing wrong except get caught in the middle of a classification snit between State and CIA. The Afghanistan withdrawal was remarkably smooth under the circumstances. And Biden seems to be fully capable and competent even if he does look old.

Conservatives these days are willing to defend even the most lunatic theories with total devotion. Liberals, by contrast, are barely willing to wholeheartedly defend even the things where they legitimately have the better of the argument. I'm not sure where this all ends.

Last month, GAO audited the auditors. That is, they took a look at IRS audits of rich people to see how much, on average, they collected from them. Here are the results:

Oddly enough, the enormous jump in 2022 is because of a Republican initiative. By 2020 audit rates of rich people had gotten so low—down from 30% to 7%—that even Donald Trump's Treasury Department was a little embarrassed about it. So Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin ordered the IRS to audit at least 8% of high-income returns.

That's not a huge bump, but along with some extra funding it caused tax collections from the rich to increase from $200 million to $2 billion. And keep in mind that this is just low-hanging fruit: it's extra money collected with basically no pushback. The IRS got it just for asking.

A little bit goes a long way! Just imagine what this is going to look like when the increased IRS funding in the Inflation Reduction Act really kicks in. It's no wonder that Treasury now figures it can collect an extra $77 billion per year when it really turns on the audit machine.

I suppose this is well known among a select group of people, but not to me. So here is Albert Einstein after visiting the United States in 1921, just after his general theory of relativity had been confirmed via eclipse sightings. The quotes are from a story that ran on page 9 of the New York Times:

The excessive enthusiasm for me in America appears to be typically American. And if I grasp it correctly the reason is that the people in America are so colossally bored.

....New York, Boston, Chicago and other cities have their theatres and concerts, but for the rest? There are cities with 1,000,000 inhabitants. Despite which what poverty, intellectual poverty!

....Above all things there are the women who, as a literal fact, dominate the entire life in America. The men take an interest in absolutely nothing at all. They work and work, the like of which I have never seen anywhere yet.

This surprisingly detailed monologue was attributed to something Einstein told a "sympathetic-looking Hollander." But the Hollander in question was actually a Dutch reporter:

At the beginning of July, Einstein agreed to an interview with Nell Boni, a young Berlin correspondent for the Dutch newspaper Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (who was also a family acquaintance). “He basically thought he was talking off the record,” [Ze'ev] Rosenkranz says.

Einstein's remarks were in German, translated to Dutch for the newspaper interview. Then they were translated back into German for the German press and finally into English for the Times.

When the shit hit the fan, Einstein initially tried to blame the whole thing on poor translation, but apparently kept digging himself into a deeper hole:

While Einstein issued one response after another, “he’s not exactly denying everything that he said,” according to Rosenkranz. “He wasn’t upset by the views that were published as much as how they were perceived and the selectiveness of it.”

This isn't really the Albert we've all come to know and love, is it? At the same time, he wasn't entirely wrong, was he?

POSTSCRIPT: There's endless complaining these days about how the New York Times "bigfoots" smaller news outlets, basically taking their stories and re-reporting them without giving any credit. But that's nothing! The 1921 piece about Einstein was literally cut and pasted from the Dutch newspaper with not only no attribution, but with an opening paragraph that makes it sound like a Times exclusive of some kind. That's bigfooting.

A few weeks ago NBC News reported on a suicide crisis among Hispanics. What's the cause? A variety of the usual suspects:

The pandemic hit young Hispanics especially hard .... parents don’t speak English .... poorer households .... cultural barriers .... cultural and systemic obstacles .... minorities face added economic and societal obstacles .... may not receive culturally sensitive mental health screenings .... bias .... culturally taboo .... unstable living conditions.

You knew a chart was coming, didn't you? Here it is:

Since the start of the century, Hispanic suicide rates (a) have been consistently far lower than non-Hispanic rates, and (b) have grown at a slower pace than non-Hispanic rates. Ironically, though, this is consistent with all the lazy reasons tossed out in the NBC article, since these Hispanic obstacles have always been around.¹ Nothing changed about them in the past ten years, which is consistent with no special Hispanic change in suicide rates either.

Suicide is up among nearly all demographics in the US over the past 20 years. It's not clear why, nor is it clear if something new is happening or if rates are simply reverting to their past levels, which were quite a bit higher than today. It's easy to cherry pick specific years and demographics (Hispanics from 2012-2022) that show somewhat higher growth than usual, and then call it a crisis. And maybe it is. But probably not.

POSTSCRIPT: What's unfortunate about the NBC approach is that it makes no attempt to figure out what's really caused Hispanic suicide rates to increase over the past decade. Most likely it's just short-term statistical variance: non-Hispanic suicide rates grew faster in the aughts and Hispanic suicide rates caught up in the teens. But maybe that's not it. And if it's not, wouldn't it be nice to know where the rise is really coming from? Instead we get a bunch of standard race tropes that haven't changed over the years and therefore probably haven't caused any change. The real reason, which ought to be something that happened around 2012, is apparently of no serious interest.

¹The exception is the assertion that the pandemic hit young Hispanics especially hard, but this is presented with zero evidence.

Everyone is familiar with the Amber Alert system. It's for abducted children, and it's named after Amber Hagerman, who was kidnapped and murdered in 1996. For some reason, though, its original backers thought it would be better to have a more official name for it, so by the time it was legislated nationwide in 2003 it had become America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response. Thus it is now the AMBER Alert.

I didn't know this until last night, but it eventually turned out that Amber Hagerman had two problems: she was white and she was a child. Here in California this has spurred the creation of an entire rainbow of alerts:

Would you like to go through a timeline?

2003: AMBER Alert for abducted children who are 17 or younger.

2011: Blue Alert, for cops who have been attacked or killed.

2012: Silver Alert, for missing elderly folks who are cognitively impaired.

2022: Yellow Alert, for hit-and-run suspects who have killed someone.

2022: Feather Alert, for suspicious disappearances of Native Americans of any age. The motive for this is a little hazy but has something to do with tribal sovereignty. It is already a source of contention because local police don't approve every request.

2024: Ebony Alert, for suspicious disappearances of Black women or Black persons age 12-25 who suffer a mental or physical disability. The motive is again a little hazy, but apparently has something to do with the fact that Black children go missing at higher rates than white children. Also, according to the Black and Missing Foundation, racist law enforcement often classifies Black people as "runaways" while white people are classified as "missing," and therefore eligible for an alert.

2024: Endangered Missing Advisory, for any disappearances which, somehow, aren't covered by all the other alerts.

So there you have it. Before yesterday, if someone had told me about an "Ebony Alert," I would have thought it was a straight-up joke. But it's not. California now has segregated alerts for Black and white children.