Month: June 2024

Here’s what I’ve found interesting: John Oliver explains Project 2025 and what’s at stake in a potential Trump second term, I ask why A24 is burying its January 6 insurrection documentary, Reggie Jackson reminds us about the realities of Jim Crow, conservative politicians push to ban no-fault divorce, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warns us that marriage equality is in danger, what banning abortion travel could look like, and the media is partially responsible for Americans falsely beliving crime rates are rising.

#1

Trump’s Second Term (Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, HBO)

John Oliver discusses Donald Trump’s plans for a second term, why it could be much worse than his first term, and what Trump has in common with a hamster.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Most of our friends, relatives, and voters will refuse to read all 900 pages of Project 2025’s policy proposals for the next Republican president before the election—or ever. I get it. That’s not what summer reading is about. However, they may be willing to watch John Oliver provide a humorous and entertaining explanation of what Donald Trump’s supporters are preparing to do. Oliver reviews Project 2025’s key proposals and the individuals and organizations funding the effort. He explains how Project 2025 would greatly expand the power of the president and demonstrates what is at stake for those who want to see our nation’s democratic experiment continue. There are reasons why John Oliver wins all of the awards. I hope you will watch this episode on YouTube and share it with your friends.

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#2

Why is A24 Burying Its January 6 Documentary?

THE SIXTH is a feature documentary produced in collaboration with A24. Directed by Academy Award®, Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmakers Andrea Nix Fine and Sean Fine, THE SIXTH takes you inside the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol through six personal accounts and never-before-seen original footage. Featuring Congressman Jamie Raskin, DC Metropolitan Chief of Police Robert J. Contee III, his officers, Daniel Hodges and Christina Laury, photographer Mel D. Cole and Congressional staffer Erica Loewe. Their interwoven experiences share an unflinching account of how race, service and truth defined that pivotal day.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans have been far too successful in rewriting the history of the January 6, 2021, insurrection. Polls indicate that nearly 70 percent of Republicans believe alternate histories about that day’s events—that it was a peaceful protest or federal agents instigated the violence. Trump opens many of his rallies with a musical tribute featuring a choir of prisoners who have been charged with crimes related to the insurrection. I suspect we are going to see Donald Trump lie about January 6 during the presidential debate since he lies about it at his rallies. So, it would be helpful if voters had an easy opportunity to be reminded about what actually happened that day. I’ve previously covered A24’s decision to renege on a widespread free streaming release for this insurrection documentary. Yes, it can be rented or purchased. But that limits how widely it is seen. The documentary’s makers are instead seeking donations and community partners to increase awareness of the movie. This movie is too important to be buried. A24 should face pressure to return to its original distribution plans. I hope you will watch the trailer to be reminded of the violence and fear that the insurrection created as our nation’s streak of peaceful transfers of power ended.

#3

Reggie Jackson, on live TV from Rickwood Field, shares stark stories of racism (C. Trent Rosecrans, The Athletic)

In unsparing terms, Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson talked during a live national television appearance Thursday about the reality of coming up as a young Black ballplayer under Jim Crow. Between sepia-toned features voiced by A-list Hollywood stars on Fox’s pregame coverage of Major League Baseball’s game at historic Rickwood Field, Jackson teared up as he recalled the taunts, racial epithets and threats of violence he faced as a minor leaguer in segregated Birmingham.

“I said I would never want to do it again,” said Jackson, whose comments were uncensored. “I walked into restaurants and they would point at me and say, ‘The n—– can’t eat here.’ I would go to a hotel and they’d say, ‘the n—– can’t stay here.’ We went to Charlie Finley’s country club for a welcome home dinner and they pointed me out with the N-word, ‘he can’t come in here.’ Finley marched the whole team out. … Finally, they let me in there and he said, ‘We’re going to go eat hamburgers. We’ll go where we’re wanted.’”

The game was scheduled as a celebration of the Negro Leagues and its players, with special tributes to Willie Mays, the Hall of Famer and former Birmingham Black Barons outfielder who died Tuesday at age 93. But Jackson’s interview was a reminder of just what he and so many others dealt with not only at Rickwood, but beyond its fences.

“Coming back here is not easy,” Jackson said. “The racism when I played here, the difficulty of going through different places where we traveled — fortunately, I had a manager and I had players on the team that helped me through it — but I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Like many American institutions, Major League Baseball tries to hide some of the ugly truths of its history. So, I am grateful to Reggie Jackson for providing so much truth in his answer during the Fox Sports broadcast of the historic game at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama. What Jackson describes happened in 1967. That’s not ancient history. I was born four years later. I watched Reggie Jackson dominate the American League as a child and teenager. As Cup of Coffee’s Craig Calcaterra writes, “Jackson was not describing life in the Negro Leagues or during the heart of the Jim Crow era. What he described took place twenty years after baseball was integrated, over a decade after de jure segregation was outlawed, three years after the Civil Rights Act was passed, and two years after the Voting Rights Act was passed. It was a time when many who are reading these words were alive, some of whom were adults. Jackson himself was an active major leaguer into the late 1980s yet he faced the sort of bigotry and discrimination that many people in this country tend to casually assume was the stuff of ancient history if, indeed, they even acknowledge it ever happened.” We have seen the Supreme Court remove some of the civil and voting rights protections created during that era. We must not minimize what happened. We must confront it and those who want to return us to that era.

#4

Conservative US lawmakers are pushing for an end to no-fault divorce (Eric Berger, The Guardian)

Some prominent conservative lawmakers and commentators are advocating for ending no-fault divorce, laws that exist in all 50 US states and allow a person to end a marriage without having to prove a spouse did something wrong, like commit adultery or domestic violence.

The socially conservative, and often religious, rightwing opponents of such divorce laws are arguing that the practice deprives people – mostly men – of due process and hurt families, and by extension, society. Republican lawmakers in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Texas have discussed eliminating or increasing restrictions on no-fault marriage laws.

Defenders of the laws, which states started passing a half-century ago, see legislation and arguments to repeal them as the latest effort to restrict women’s rights – following the overturning of Roe v Wade and passage of abortion bans around the country – and say that without such protections, the country would return to an earlier era when women were often trapped in abusive marriages.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

I know. This idea seems extreme. For goodness sake, Ronald Reagan—yep, him—approved the nation’s first no-fault divorce law in 1969 as California’s governor. How could Republicans go against him? But they will. And after seeing the Supreme Court overturn the right to abortion, we must be clear about the possibility the movement to end no-fault divorce will succeed if Donald Trump wins the presidential election. This isn’t an overreaction. This effort is related to efforts to ban abortion, contraception, and IVF. Restoring these rights, once they are lost, will take generations. It’s better to fight to preserve them now.

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#5

Sonia Sotomayor Just Sounded a Dire Warning About Marriage Equality (Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern)

The Supreme Court dealt a blow to the fundamental rights of married couples on Friday in an important and ominous immigration case, Department of State v. Muñoz. Justice Amy Coney Barrett held—over the dissent of all three liberals—that American citizens have no constitutional “liberty interest” in living with their foreign spouses, denying them the most basic protections against arbitrary government discrimination. Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s fierce dissent condemned Barrett’s opinion as, among other things, an unsubtle assault on marriage equality for LGBTQ+ Americans.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Oh yeah, Republicans are coming after marriage equality as well. It’s a good thing Californians will have a chance to remove the zombie Proposition 8 language from our Constitution before the Supreme Court can make marriage equality bans possible again.

#6

What Banning Abortion Travel Looks Like (Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day)

I cannot stress enough how important this piece by reporter Candice Norwood at The 19th is. Reporting on a policy briefing from the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI), Norwood writes about what traveling out-of-state for an abortion looks like for someone on parole or probation. The short version is that they need government approval to leave their state—navigating a maze of logistical and financial barriers that make it impossible to get timely care, assuming they can get care at all.

PPI researcher director Wendy Sawyer tells Nowrood they “have to literally go and ask permission from their probation parole officers, or from the court, to cross state lines,” and that “you have to give really detailed information about what your travel plan is.”

In addition to The 19th’s terrific article, I highly recommend reading PPI’s briefitself. It details how even those who get permission to travel will have to deal with serious delays due to fees and logistical coordination. For something like abortion—where how far along you are in pregnancy can determine where you can legally get care or what kind of abortion you can obtain—the difference of a few days means everything.

In effect, this is a travel ban on some of the most vulnerable women in the country. And as is the case with so many other abortion-related issues that disproportionately impact marginalized communities—like criminalization or ‘anti-trafficking’ mandates—what happens to one group today comes for the rest of us tomorrow.

Reading through PPI’s brief and Norwood’s article, I realized that the system in place for those on parole or probation is pretty much exactly how Republicans would implement travel restrictions for any pregnant person: Permission slips and state notifications, bureaucratic red tape that keeps people from getting timely care.

If that sounds like a reach to you, please remember that it was less than a year ago that Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall argued in a legal brief that states have the right to restrict pregnant women’s travel.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Valenti makes a vital point in this edition of her newsletter. Republican forced-birth leaders in red states are trying to figure out how to keep women from leaving their states to get reproductive health care. As Valenti often explains, this is how restrictions and bans are created. They begin incrementally—starting with the most vulnerable—and expand to bans over time. If Donald Trump wins this election, there will be no sanctuary states. He’ll also likely get to appoint young replacements for at least two Supreme Court Justices. These are generational stakes.

#7

Why so many Americans have misconceptions about crime trends (Judd Legum, Popular Information)

According to the latest FBI data, violent crime and property crime are down sharply in 2024. The new data shows substantial drops in every category, including murder (-26.4%), rape (-25.7%), robbery (-17.8%), and property crime (-15.1%). These declines follow steep drops in violent crime and property crime in 2023. 

And yet, according to a recent Gallup poll, “77% [of Americans] believe there is more crime in the U.S. than a year ago.” Why?

There are two key factors. First, high-profile politicians are constantly making false claims about crime rates in the United States…The second factor creating misconceptions about crime is how these comments are covered by major media outlets.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Yes, Republicans are lying about how much crime is happening in our country. But, as Legum notes, far too much of our media coverage is also misleading—especially at the headline level. Headlines repeat the charge without mentioning it is false. We need editors to understand that many people will not read past the headline while reviewing social media or push notifications on their phones. The fact that voters are wrong about what is happening should embarrass reporters and editors, whose job is to inform us about the facts.

Thank you for reading Things I Find Interesting. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Let me know what you think about what you’ve read. Send me things you’ve found interesting! You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com. 

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In this edition: Biden the successful oil trader, the Supreme Court doesn’t deserve credit for its abortion medication decision, post-Constitutional is the new MAGA phrase for dictatorship, Missouri sets execution date for an innocent man, discussing Trump’s gibberish, Idaho GOP calls IVF murder, Sam Bankman-Fried’s proposition still on California’s ballot, the threat from fentanyl-laced mail-in ballots, thank you William Anders for Earthrise, and a graduation celebration.

#1

How Joe Biden ‘broke OPEC’ and rewrote the rules for oil trading (Chris Hayes, All in With Chris Hayes)

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, has had massive influence over American politics for six decades. President Biden’s “incredible” oil market trading has broken this influence. Dan Dicker joins Chris Hayes to discuss how Biden got ahead in oil production and what that means for the transition to clean energy.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

My initial reaction to seeing the preview of this story was, “Wait, what?” My frustration that more people did not understand what happened grew with each answer energy analyst Dan Dicker gave to each question Chris Hayes asked. I think this segment is a must-watch (which is why I’ve embedded it above). But, if you prefer, Dicker explained how Biden pulled off this success in his newsletter a few days after the interview. Oil traders saw that the United States was determined to lower the oil price by selling from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and wisely decided they could not win that battle. Prices came back down. After the oil price fell, Biden refilled the reserve at a significant profit. Government intervention worked. So, yeah, this story should be a bigger deal.

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#2

The Supreme Court’s Abortion Pill Ruling Should Satisfy Nobody (Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, Slate)

If you blink, you might just miss the fact that today’s decision is not a win for reproductive freedom, not an end to attacks on abortion, and not even the end of the road for this particular litigation. It is a status quo decision that allows the FDA to continue to regulate safe drugs and that precludes objectors from running into courts with nothing more than feelings. But a good thing to bear in mind is that although SCOTUS dodged a bullet, the threat to abortion care looms larger than ever. Whether it’s new systemic attacks on in vitro fertilization, overt plans to use Comstock to end abortion rights by way of executive action, state court attacks on reproductive freedom, or a second, less publicized abortion case still pending at the Supreme Court, Thursday wasn’t a triumph for abortion rights; it was a push.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

I was frustrated with much of the coverage of the Supreme Court’s decision to throw out an absurd attempt to ban abortion medication. I saw too much punditry about the Supreme Court taking a moderate stance—or even protecting access. As Lithwick and Stern explain, the Supreme Court did not go that far. It rejected a case that never should have seen a courtroom—while also dropping strong hints about how a successful case might work. We should not allow these Justices to claim unfounded legitimacy because of this rare moment of judicial sanity.

#3

The new word for dictatorship just dropped: ‘post-Constitutional.’ You should be alarmed (Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer)

The vast majority of people who found reporter Beth Reinhard’s eye-opening article on the internet also got a headline that was a lot less wishy-washy: “Trump loyalist pushes ‘post-Constitutional’ vision for second term.” It swaps out the weasel word “muscular” for a term that neither I nor you probably had heard before: “post-Constitutional.” It is the scariest word in America right now.

Simply put, Vought — who’s crafting the details for a wannabe president who is definitely not a detail guy — thinks that a “woke” liberal order has already shattered the 1789 U.S. Constitution written here in Philadelphia, which would liberate Trump to essentially make his own rules if he returns in January. Here’s how Vought himself describes it: “We are living in a post-Constitutional time” — a claim he repeated on X/Twitter just last month. Insiders say the 48-year-old who believes he is on a mission from God could end up chief of staff in a second Trump administration.

“Post-Constitutional” is, of course, just a euphemism for dictatorship.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Donald Trump’s supporters do not plan to repeat the mistakes of his first presidential transition. They have plans this time. We should not let Trump and his MAGA fans get away with obscuring what they hope to do. Bunch correctly notes what “post-Constitutional” actually means. The Washington Post’s Beth Reinhard does a great job laying out what Russ Vought plans to do in the profile to which Bunch is reacting. They are not hiding the ball from us. We should not minimize the danger to our democracy. We must not normalize how extreme these ideas are. A presidential election is not how we amend or replace the Constitution. We need to make sure voters understand the clear choice they have this November.

#4

“That is not justice”: Missouri sets execution date for a man who even prosecutors say is innocent (Nandika Chatterjee, Salon)

The Missouri Supreme Court has set an execution date — September 24th at 6 p.m. —  for defendant Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams, despite prosecutors insisting that he is completely innocent.

It is not the first time the 55-year-old has faced execution. On two separate occasions, Williams’ execution was halted to conduct further investigation and DNA testing. The results, including DNA on the murder weapon, show no connection between him and the crime.

And now it seems the state’s Republican governor is refusing to free a man who prosecutors say is innocent, setting the stage for him to be put to death for a crime he does not appear to have committed.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Yeah, you read that correctly. It’s an outrage. As the Innocence Project explains, a 2016 DNA test (which was not available when he was convicted) proved that Williams was innocent of this crime. We are now potentially just a few months away from the state of Missouri executing an innocent person because our justice system prioritizes finality over the truth. No court has reviewed this exculpatory DNA evidence—and so Williams continues to face execution. Our justice system should prioritize the truth. People who have been convicted should be able to access improved technology and scientific techniques. It is terrible enough that Williams has remained in jail after the DNA evidence cleared him. Now he once again faces the uncertainty and stress created by having the courts schedule an execution date. What justice is served by executing an innocent person?

Thank you for reading Things I Find Interesting. This post is public so feel free to share it with your family and friends.

#5

Let’s Talk About Trump’s Gibberish (Tom Nichols, The Atlantic)

Sure, it seems funny—Haha! Uncle Don is telling that crazy shark story again!—until we remember that this man wants to return to a position where he would hold America’s secrets, be responsible for the execution of our laws, and preside as the commander in chief of the most powerful military in the world. A moment that seems like oddball humor should, in fact, terrify any American voter, because this behavior in anyone else would be an instant disqualification for any political office, let alone the presidency. (Actually, a delusional, rambling felon known to have owned weapons would likely fail a security check for even a visit to the Oval Office.)

Nor was the Vegas monologue the first time: Trump for years has fallen off one verbal cliff after another, with barely a ripple in the national consciousness. I am not a psychiatrist, and I am not diagnosing Trump with anything. I am, however, a man who has lived on this Earth for more than 60 years, and I know someone who has serious emotional problems when I see them played out in front of me, over and over. The 45th president is a disturbed person. He cannot be trusted with any position of responsibility—and especially not with a nuclear arsenal of more than 1,500 weapons. One wrong move could lead to global incineration.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

If historians exist in the future, there will be animated conversations trying to figure out how someone who rants about the relative benefits of dying by electrocution rather than from a shark bite ended up being one of two people who could be elected president. These weird asides aren’t just Trump being Trump. It’s a serious situation. The job of political candidates is to tell us what they intend to do if elected. The job of reporters and voters is to take those words seriously. What Trump says is not a gaffe. Elected Republicans have made clear they will do whatever Trump demands of them. There are no formal checks and balances on a president’s ability to launch nuclear weapons. Trump should not get a pass because he’s an entertainer. The words he says mean what they mean. We should take those words literally and seriously.

#6

Idaho GOP Platform Calls IVF ‘Murder’ (Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day)

It was just a few weeks ago that I broke the news that the Texas’ GOP platform calls for abortion patients to be punished as murderers, including with the death penalty. Now another state Republican party is going all in on anti-abortion extremism—this time in Idaho. 

Idaho Reports reveals that Republicans have expanded anti-abortion language in the party platform to oppose “the destruction of human embryos.” That’s right, the Idaho GOP is coming out against IVF. But it goes even further than that. The platform actually defines the destruction of embryos—a common part of the IVF process—as murder:

“We oppose all actions which intentionally end an innocent human life, including abortion, the destruction of human embryos, euthanasia, and assisted suicide.”

This section comes after language defining abortion as murder, and calling for “the criminalization of all murders by abortion within the state’s jurisdiction.” Now, that language has been part of the party’s anti-abortion plank for some years, but given that increasing calls for abortion patients to be punished under homicide laws, it’s worth revisiting. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it a thousand times again: Republicans are being very explicit about the future they want, the question is whether we’re going to listen to them.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

The forced birth advocates are not resting. They are pushing forward toward their goal of ensuring government-mandated pregnancies are the norm. A narrow conservative religious sect is demanding obedience from all of us. They are coming for IVF. They are coming for contraception. They are coming after the blue states that are doing what they can to be safe havens for reproductive health care. The two parties are not the same on this issue. The two presidential candidates are not the same on this issue. Voters face a clear choice this November. I hope we listen to what Republicans are telling us.

#7

The Last Trace of Sam Bankman-Fried’s Political Ambitions (Jeremy B. White, Politico Magazine)

Only one vestige of Bankman-Fried’s once grandiose plans to reshape American politics endures. This November, voters in his native California are on track to see a proposal on the ballot to fund a major new pandemic prevention program by taxing the rich, which Bankman-Fried helped to launch and bankroll.

At this point, however, it is a zombie ballot initiative. The campaign to sell it to voters has seen its cash on hand dwindle from more than $15 million at its peak to a reported $78 on hand at the end of last year. A fleet of political consultants once on retainer have signed up to work on other campaigns instead. Politicians who lined up to throw their support behind the proposal stopped talking about it after the main benefactor was disgraced.

The rise and fall of the Pandemic Early Detection and Prevention Institute Initiative is a distinctly Californian story — featuring faddish philanthropy, the Silicon Valley boom-and-bust cycle, policy dilletantes, money and a byzantine ballot measure process that can give political issues a life of their own.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Oh yeah, this is a real thing. I hope this part of the story makes it into the inevitable docu-dramas to come about the collapse of FTX. It is the latest example demonstrating how someone can get almost anything they want on the California ballot as long as they have enough cash. That wasn’t what the creators of the initiative system intended. Yes, we should do more to prepare for future pandemics. But was Sam Bankman-Fried’s idea the best one—even before his convictions? How will California voters react when they see this on their ballots this October and November? I imagine this proposition will fail—but that won’t make our pandemic problems disappear. I suspect any political will to deal with the issue before the next crisis is already gone.

#8

Add Fentanyl-Laced Mail-In Ballots To The List Of Threats Election Officials Must Guard Against In The Fall (Khaya Himmelman, Talking Points Memo)

Election officials across the country are learning how to use Narcan, implementing new rules about glove-wearing while opening mail, and figuring out how drug-sniffing dogs will fit into their ballot processing systems ahead of the 2024 election. These new processes are a response to 2020 election threats and yet another stark reminder of the dangerous world election workers now find themselves in.  

“In the past, although people have been aware that there is a possibility of things being mailed to an office it didn’t rise to the level of priority that I think that it has in this moment since it has actually happened,” Tammy Patrick, Chief Executive Officer for Programs of The Election Center told TPM.

In Lane County, as Dawson described, staff now opens mail in a separate room that can be closed off in the event that it contains a dangerous substance. The county has also developed best practices for how to respond if a dangerous substance is found in a mail-in ballot or another form of mail, which involves covering the mail with plastic and identifying where the mail was received from in order to quickly notify the secretary of state’s office and the FBI.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

I fear election staff and volunteers will face many dangerous moments as the November election nears. I fear the situation will continue to deteriorate because of a dynamic Aaron Rupar explained on X (the website that used to be known as Twitter). Rupar wrote: “If you don’t watch a lot of right-wing TV, you might not realize that Trump is so popular he can’t possibly lose a fair election and Biden is cowering in despair, constantly on the verge of dropping out. So if/when Trump loses, it’s very easy for these viewers to be convinced that they had it stolen from him. They’re easy marks.” Yep. A bunch of people who watch only right-wing media think Trump is way ahead. How are they going to react if that isn’t the outcome? They aren’t going to blame Trump. They are going to attack officials and volunteers. It seems more likely each day that we are going to witness a tragedy about an election worker because of all the lies and disinformation being shamelessly shared by the Republican Party and conservative media.

#9

William Anders Obituary (Michael Carlson, The Guardian)

It may be that the most famous picture from the US space programme is not the shot of Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, but the image of Earth, seen rising above the moon’s horizon, an image relayed from space on 24 December 1968 by the crew of Apollo 8 – Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders.

It was Anders, who has died aged 90, who snapped the “Earthrise” photograph, which was not part of the mission’s scheduled protocol. And it was he who read first from the Book of Genesis during their live transmission from lunar orbit that Christmas Eve.

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth,” he read. “And the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

Anders spoke later of the ecological impact of the image, contributing as it did to a shift in perspective articulated by the poet Archibald MacLeish in the New York Times the following day, Christmas Day. The photograph enabled us, MacLeish wrote, “to see the Earth as it truly is, small blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats”.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

It is one of the most important photographs in history. I am glad William Anders was inspired to take it. It was visual evidence of how fragile our place in the universe is. The cosmic jury is still deliberating whether our species learned the lessons it should have learned from it.

Quick Pitches

• Donald Trump had lots of negative opinions about felons. Now he is one (Lois Beckett, The Guardian)
  The problem, though, is not that Donald Trump is getting treated better than others accused or convicted of crimes. The goal should be to treat the accused and convicted more like Trump has been.
• If You’re Attacking Dolly Parton, You’ve Lost The Whole Entire War (Evan Hurst, The Moral High Ground)
  The Federalist doesn’t just provide extreme religious conservative judges.
• It’s Time to Switch to a Privacy Browser (David Nield, Wired)
  Some tips if you’d like to protect more of your data while surfing the web.
• 10 Inventors Who Came to Regret Their Creations (Kenny Hemphill, Mental Floss)
  The list includes the atomic bomb, the AK-47, and Comic Sans.
• The Eras Tour Stage: See the Intricate World-Building of Every Set in Taylor Swift’s Most Ambitious Shows Ever (Katherine McLaughlin, Architectural Digest)
  I enjoyed learning more about how the sets work as one of the people who watches these concerts many weekends via live streams.

The Closer

From the Proud Dad Department: my eldest son, Arik, graduated over the weekend from the University of California, Santa Barbara with High Honors in Computer Science. He also earned the right to be one of the Standard Bearers for the ceremony as one of the five members of his class to finish with a 4.0 GPA. He came into view for me right as he handed the banner to one of his fellow standard bearers after leading the procession.

Post-Game Comments

Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:

“Personally, I vote as if my vote is the deciding ballot. I know it isn’t, of course, but it focuses my mind and makes me take the civic duty of voting seriously. People have given their lives for my right to stand in that booth, and when American democracy is facing a clear and existential threat, their sacrifice deserves something more than the selfish calculations of the Jimmy Clean Hands caucus.”—Tom Nichols (“The Jimmy Clean Hands Election,” The Atlantic)

Thank you for reading Things I Find Interesting. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Let me know what you think about what you’ve read. Send me things you’ve found interesting! You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com. 

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Here’s what I’ve found interesting: the media needs to start sharing the full story about Trump, the Texas GOP platform endorses the death penalty for abortion patients, Trump’s social media posts focus on revenge, Senator Dick Durbin needs to start doing his job, a D-Day hero gets recognition after decades of racism, Fontana police psychologically torture a suspect into falsely confessing that he killed a person who was alive, a peek into a far-right group chat, and a Texas school board member changes her mind after reviewing what’s actually in the school curriculum.

#1

Voters still aren’t getting the full story on Trump. Journalists need to fix that ASAP. (Jennifer Schulze, Heartland Signal)

Top secret government documents hidden in his bedroom

Promising to testify but then not testifying in his hush money trial

Amplifying Nazi talk. Again

Threatening a third term. Again

Hinting at a birth control ban. Again

These are just some of the Trump things that happened recently, and none of them got sufficient news coverage. Some Trump stories were completely ignored, while others were given the one-and-done treatment instead of sustained in-depth coverage. A few were just plain wrong. None seem to comprehend the pattern of behavior.

It’s been 9+ years of Trump dominating the country’s politics, and in that time, there has certainly been smart, impactful coverage of his aberrant campaigns and his disastrous presidency. But that is the exception, not the rule.

In fact, I’d argue that the mainstream media coverage of Trump has gotten worse especially in the past year as journalists still try to apply normal reporting practices to an abnormal candidate. When you add in the robust right-wing propaganda efforts by Fox and other extremist media outlets, we find ourselves being practically swallowed whole by lies and disinformation.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Recent polls show that a significant number of American voters believe things that are demonstrably untrue. It even goes beyond the vibecession where voters tell pollsters that the economy is in recession (it’s not), stock markets have fallen (they have recently achieved record highs), and unemployment is near a 50-year high (it’s actually near a 50-year low). We also have recently learned that 17 percent of voters blame Joe Biden for the loss of the constitutional right to abortion (Brian Klaas explains why that’s obviously incorrect). Reporters and editors have been defensive when asked about this disconnect, sometimes saying it isn’t their job to support Biden. That is true—but that’s also not the point. There is a difference between supporting Biden and providing as much coverage of the stock market records as they did when Trump was in office (to take just one example). Informing voters is perhaps the media’s most important job, but several polls demonstrate that too many voters are not perceiving reality. I wish we lived in a world where this failure would lead our elite media to reconsider how they should cover this election.

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#2

Texas GOP Platform Endorses Death Penalty for Abortion Patients (Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day)

We need to talk about Plank 35 in the Texas GOP platform. Because while there’s been lots of coverage about how extremist the state’s Republican convention was, people seem to have missed the fact that delegates adopted a platform that calls for abortion patients to be punished as murderers. In Texas, that could mean the death penalty.

I wish I was exaggerating.

The GOP’s platform demands “equal protection for the preborn,” and for Texas legislation to give fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses “equal protection of the law.”

If you’re a regular reader, you know that “equal protection” is a call for abortion to be treated as homicide, and for abortion patients to be prosecuted as murders. (Remember South Carolina’s Prenatal Equal Protection Act, and Georgia’s Prenatal Equal Protection Act? Both were bills to make abortion punishable as a homicide.)

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

As Valenti explains, we should be treating this plank like the “big fucking deal” it is. Many Republican politicians are claiming to be moderates on reproductive rights, even as they support ideas like this one and refuse to defend the right to access contraception. They are not moderates. They are hoping they can get through this election cycle without answering for their extremism and the Christian nationalist ideology that is its foundation. These rights are on the ballot this November, and only by re-electing Joe Biden will we have the chance to push back against these extreme ideas.

#3

Revenge: analysis of Trump posts shows relentless focus on punishing enemies (David Smith, The Guardian)

A major study of Donald Trump’s social media posts has revealed the scale of the former US president’s ambitions to target Joe Biden, judges and other perceived political enemies if he returns to power.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), a watchdog organisation, analysed more than 13,000 messages published by Trump on his Truth Social platform and found him vowing revenge, retaliation and retribution against his foes.

The presumptive Republican nominee has threatened to use the federal government to go after Biden during a second Trump administration 25 times since the start of 2023, the study found. These threats include FBI raids, investigations, indictments and even jail time.

He has also threatened or suggested that the FBI and justice department should take action against senators, judges, members of Biden’s family and even non-governmental organisations.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

These threats have grown in their intensity after a jury convicted Trump of felonies. We know that elected officials are scared of defying Trump because of their fears of being the target of a violent reaction. We have seen Trump supporters try to dox the jurors and post violent threats against them, the judge, and the prosecutors. They aren’t being subtle. We must not consider these empty threats. We should be clear about what Trump and his supporters will do if they gain control of the Department of Justice. We should expect that Trump’s rhetoric will become more threatening as we approach election day.

#4

Dick Durbin needs to step up and do his damn job (Noah Berlatsky, Public Notice)

Even though the hearing was conducted in obvious bad faith, it was in some ways successful, at least in the limited sense that Republicans grabbed a lot of headlines and forced Garland to spend a day on the defensive. Virtually every major news outlet [gave] it extensive coverage, ranging from the New York Times to MSNBC to Newsmax.

The hearing meant that for at least a day, everyone talked about whether the DOJ is treating Trump unfairly, rather than about, say, whether Trump should step aside from the GOP presidential nomination given his felony convictions, or whether Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito should recuse himself after an insurrectionist flag was flown over his house.

Congressional oversight hearings give Congress a chance to focus the national conversation on what members want to talk about. It gives them a chance to pressure executive branch officials to adopt congressional priorities, or to explain and potentially embarrass themselves.

In contrast, Democrats in the Senate have been bizarrely reluctant to use hearings to advance their agenda. Dick Durbin, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has refused to hold hearings to investigate egregious evidence of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas receiving gifts from far right billionaires, or to demand answers from Alito about his apparent embrace of the insurrection. Instead, he’s posting weak statements on social media meekly calling for right-wing members of the Court to do a better job policing themselves.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Can we really blame some voters for wondering why they work so hard to get Democrats a majority when their leaders refuse to use the powers it gives them? It is shameful that there have been no hearings about the Supreme Court’s ethical failures. Why hasn’t the Senate asked about Jared Kushner’s two-billion-dollar investment from Saudi Arabia? Or why one of Kushner’s projects in Belgrade will include the creation of a “memorial dedicated to all the victims of NATO aggression?” A Congressional hearing may not directly change the actions of the Supreme Court Justices or Kushner. However, the media coverage it generates will inform more voters about what’s at stake. Plus, voters will see Democrats willing to fight for their values and to protect the Constitution and our democracy. That matters! Having the chairperson’s gavel creates opportunities. I am tired of seeing the Democrats fritter them away.

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#5

The Forgotten Hero of D-Day (Garrett M. Graff, Politico Magazine)

By 10 a.m., small pockets of shell-shocked U.S. troops had rallied and fought their way to the cliffs overlooking Omaha Beach, but the beach behind was a chaotic scene of wounded men and discarded equipment; bodies of the dead and the nearly dead rolled in the surf. As Woodson recounted, “There was a lot of debris and men were drowning all around me. I swam to the shore and crawled on the beach to a cliff out of the range of the machine guns and snipers. I was far from where I was supposed to be, but there wasn’t any other medic around here on Omaha Beach. … I had pulled a tent roll out of the water and so I set up a first-aid station. It was the only one on the beach.”

He’d stay there on the sandy and rocky beach, treating the wounded, for the next 30 hours, working through the day, the night and nearly all of the next day — all while trying to treat his own shrapnel injuries to his groin and back — before he was evacuated himself. Woodson comforted and collected the injured, administered sulfa powder, bandaged wounds, tightened tourniquets, dispensed plasma, removed bullets and even amputated one soldier’s foot. As a historical commission that examined his record later summarized, “For 30 continuous hours while under enemy fire, Woodson cared for more than 200 casualties. Even after being relieved at 4:00 p.m. on 7 June, Woodson gave artificial respiration to three men who had gone underwater during a [landing craft’s] landing attempt. Only then did Woodson seek further treatment.” Over the course of his time on the beach, Woodson almost certainly saved dozens or even scores of lives.

All told, the U.S. suffered around 3,700 casualties at Omaha Beach, including about 800 dead, meaning that if that estimate is approximately accurate, Woodson personally helped treat somewhere around five to seven percent of all U.S. casualties on the bloodiest beach of D-Day.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Corporal Waverly B. Woodson Jr. did not receive the honors he was due for his heroic actions on D-Day because of racism and administrative errors. As Graff explains, “Not a single one of the million-plus Black personnel who served in World War II, many of whom ultimately did serve bravely on the front lines and assumed huge personal risk in combat, received one of the 432 Medals of Honor awarded during the war.” Woodson’s heroism was noted then, but until this past Monday, he had not received any recognition. Finally, the Pentagon announced this week that Woodson will posthumously receive the Distinguished Service Cross, the second-highest medal for combat valor. It’s a step—but more is required to ensure the non-white heroes of the Second World War receive the recognition they deserve. Their families deserve it—and history should demand it. I hope you’ll read Graff’s story to learn more about Woodson and the racism we still need to overcome.

#6

‘Psychologically tortured’: California city pays man nearly $1m after 17-hour police interrogation (Sam Levin, The Guardian)

A California city has agreed to pay $900,000 to a man who was subjected to a 17-hour police interrogation in which officers pressured him to falsely confess to murdering his father, who was alive.

During the 2018 interrogation of Thomas Perez Jr by police in Fontana, a city east of Los Angeles, officers suggested they would have Perez’s dog euthanized as a result of his actions, according to a complaint and footage of the encounter. A judge said the questioning appeared to be “unconstitutional psychological torture”, and the city agreed to settle Perez’s lawsuit for $898,000, his lawyer announced this week.

The extraordinary case of a coerced false confession has sparked widespread outrage, with footage showing Perez in extreme emotional and physical distress, including as officers brought his dog in and said the animal would need to be put down due to “depression” from witnessing a murder that had not actually occurred.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Yes, you read that correctly. Fontana police officers psychologically tortured a person enough to get him to falsely confess to killing someone who was quite alive. Many people do not understand why innocent people would falsely confess to crimes. The Innocence Project explains why in this article. This horrifying story shows what the police can do when they wrongly think they know the story. It should not be legal for the police to lie to a suspect during an interrogation. The officers here should be fired. Writing a check should not make this atrocity go away. Many innocent people have been convicted of crimes they did not commit because they thought they could trust the police enough to help. Talk to an attorney before you make that error.

#7

Off Leash: Inside the Secret, Global, Far-Right Group Chat (Ken Silverstein, The New Republic)

In his book In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, Erik Larson cites a cable sent to the State Department in June 1933 by a U.S. diplomat posted in Germany that provided a far more candid assessment of the Nazi leadership than the one that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration was then conveying to the public. “With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand,” read the cable, which was written five months after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. “Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.”

I’ve thought about that passage from the cable many times over the past several weeks as I’ve been reading excerpts from a private WhatsApp group chat established last December by Erik Prince, the founder of the military contractor Blackwater and younger brother of Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education during President Donald Trump’s administration, who invited around 650 of his contacts in the United States and around the world to join. Prince, who has a long track record of financing conservative candidates and causes and extensive ties to right-wing regimes around the world, named the group—which currently has around 400 members—“Off Leash,” the same name as the new podcast that he’d launched the month before.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

It is quite revealing to see what far-right supporters will write when they think they are only texting their fellow travelers. I am surprised so many supposedly security-conscious people trusted that no one in a group larger than 600 would leak the conversations. Thankfully for us, a few people did. Silverstein gives us a glimpse into what far-right people from across the world are thinking about current events: “Participants chirpily discussed the desirability of clamping down on democracy to deal with their enemies at home and regime change, bombings, assassinations, and covert action to take care of those abroad.” I don’t think people reading this newsletter will be surprised that such a group would include people who felt this way. However, it is still eye-opening to see who is involved and how they look forward to becoming more powerful worldwide after a Trump victory.

#8

A GOP Texas school board member campaigned against schools indoctrinating kids. Then she read the curriculum. (Jeremy Schwartz, Texas Tribune and ProPublica)

Gore, the co-host of a far-right online talk show, had promised that she would be a strong Republican voice on the nonpartisan school board. Citing “small town, conservative Christian values,” she pledged to inspect educational materials for inappropriate messages about sexuality and race and remove them from every campus in the 7,700-student Granbury Independent School District, an hour southwest of Fort Worth. “Over the years our American Education System has been hijacked by Leftists looking to indoctrinate our kids into the ‘progressive’ way of thinking, and yes, they’ve tried to do this in Granbury ISD,” she wrote in a September 2021 Facebook post, two months before the election. “I cannot sit by and watch their twisted worldview infiltrate Granbury ISD.”

But after taking office and examining hundreds of pages of curriculum, Gore was shocked by what she found — and didn’t find.

The pervasive indoctrination she had railed against simply did not exist. Children were not being sexualized, and she could find no examples of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that examines systemic racism. She’d examined curriculum related to social-emotional learning, which has come under attack by Christian conservatives who say it encourages children to question gender roles and prioritizes feelings over biblical teachings. Instead, Gore found the materials taught children “how to be a good friend, a good human.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

This is a remarkable story about someone who believed a narrative about our schools, ran for the school board, and discovered what she thought was false. I have a lot of respect for Courtney Gore’s willingness to follow the evidence. Unfortunately, she found that her allies were not interested in learning the truth. Worse, she would face threats of violence for not following the script. I wish what we see in this story was not such a rare outcome.

Quick Pitches

• Will Someone Please Buy the Donald Trump Movie? (Matthew Belloni, Puck)
  In the last issue of this newsletter, I discussed how a documentary about the January 6 insurrection may have been buried by its distributor. Here’s another movie, that received Oscar buzz at Cannes but still hasn’t found a distributor in the United States. What an interesting election-year trend.
• CHP isn’t supposed to aim less-lethal munitions at protesters’ heads and fire into crowds. It did at UCLA (Sergio Olmos, CalMatters)
  This is a clear-cut abuse of power. If the CHP’s leadership—and our elected officials—can’t prevent these abuses, we need to replace them.
• What’s in a swing? A metrics explainer (Noah Woodward, The Advance Scout)
  Major League Baseball started providing a number of new batting metrics this year. Woodward explains what they mean—and what we don’t understand—and how baseball teams and fans could put them to use.
• Does One Line Fix Google? (Ernie Smith, Tedium)
  Would you like to get search results without all of the junk Google has added to them in recent years? You may want to try the new “web” filter that makes Google search results appear as they did about a decade ago.
• It’s a trap! The economic argument against blowing up the Death Star (Peter Armstrong, CBC News)
  An economist explains why destroying it created a Galactic depression worse than what the United States faced in the 1930s.
• The ‘Sift’ strategy: A four-step method for spotting misinformation (Amanda Ruggeri, BBC News)
  Some tips that I fear are going to be extremely useful this election year.

Post-Game Comments

Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection:

“Trump’s disdain for excellence is neither a personal quirk nor an anomaly among autocrats present and past. It is logical: they see the work of government as worthy only of mockery, and so they continue to mock it when they have power.” (Masha Gessen, Surviving Autocracy)

Thank you for reading Things I Find Interesting. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Let me know what you think about what you’ve read. Send me things you’ve found interesting! You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com. 

Please help me spread the word about this newsletter by sharing this post via email or on the social media network of your choice. And if you haven’t already, please consider signing up for a free or paid subscription. 

Here’s what I’ve found interesting: Trump’s Unified Reich video, 12 courageous Americans, Democrats need to defend the Trump jury verdict, Alito’s insurrectionist flags, the creation of a fake assassination plot, big tech can’t be trusted with abortion data, a British nurse may be a victim of a false conviction, what happened to the distribution of a January 6 insurrection documentary, and a bridge protest in Jacksonville kicks off Pride Month.

#1

Awful New Info About Trump and “Reich” Video Shows Deep MAGA Sickness (Greg Sargent, The New Republic)

The creator of the “Reich” video has done some of the most virulent work along these lines, the Times demonstrates. And so, when Trump’s social media feed shares a video like this that hails a coming “unified Reich” built on dramatic, far-reaching acts of national purification, it opens a window on a larger phenomenon: this shadow zone where Trump and his leading operatives encourage mass fascistic shitposting and propaganda—and seek to harness the energies released by it.

It’s a key tell that the Republicans alarmed by this kind of politics immediately saw the broader significance of this video’s genesis. As longtime GOP strategists Brian Riedl and Alyssa Farah Griffin pointed out, the video’s very creation—and even the blaming of a Trump staffer for sharing it—only illustrate the existence of a large junior staffer set that’s fluent in online fascistic political language, which Trump and his operatives see as indispensable to their own movement.

Meanwhile, Trump and his leading propagandists are aggressively seeding the discourse with their own fascistic language. In recent months, Trump has described migrants as “poisoning the blood of our country,” invented a new category called “migrant crime,” threatened to root out “vermin” in the government who oppose him, floated terminating parts of the Constitution, and vowed to be “dictator,” albeit only “on day one.”

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

I know there’s a lot going on at the moment, but I fear we moved past this incident too quickly. We should be alarmed when a presidential candidate decides to post about creating a Reich—especially when he has previously demonstrated a fondness for such rhetoric. We have no reason to believe this was a mistake made by a low-level staffer. Over the years, felon Donald Trump has shown that he is not careless about his social media postings, and he has told audiences that only one other person can post on his accounts. The Trump campaign is pushing the envelope. It is openly working with people who create extreme content. Such rhetoric has no place in a democracy, and we must not let Trump and his supporters minimize the damage they are doing.

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#2

Trump’s not wrong. The system is broken. Everyday Americans saved us. (Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer)

One of the things that the Trump trial revealed is how much America has changed in exactly 50 years since Watergate and the resignation of the last thoroughly criminal president, Richard Nixon. That year saw one huge mistake — successor Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon, which only boosted the fiction that a president is above the law — but 1974 also showed how back then, the system largely did work. Congress members from both parties probed White House crimes and voted for impeachment. The Supreme Court was unanimous in forcing Nixon to turn over his tapes. Some news outlets, like the Washington Post and CBS, were aggressive in chasing the truth.

In 2024, the system is largely not working. A corrupted, partisan federal judiciary slow-walks Trump’s other cases. Milquetoast newsroom leaders are too afraid of bias allegations to fight for democracy. The Republican Party has become a dangerous cult that uses threats of retribution or even violence to enforce discipline. It took 14 Americans outside of these warped elite circles — Judge Merchan, DA Bragg, and the 12 citizens who served on the jury — to finally put the brakes on a naked Trump’s seemingly unstoppable crime spree.

In a year dominated by cowards, the courage of the Trump jury is remarkable. With their anonymity preserved (so far, anyway), these seven men and five women were able to look at Trump’s behavior and judge him without fear of getting primaried or losing their six-figure salary or all the other craven reasons that prevent our elite watchdogs from doing their job. They were serious about their civic duty and deliberated for 10 hours before declaring what we all have seen with our own eyes.

Donald Trump is a felon.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

We have heard multiple stories about how Republican elected officials have been unwilling to hold Donald Trump accountable because they fear how the felon’s supporters will respond with violence against them. U.S. Senator Mitt Romney went into detail about this dynamic with the author of his biography. Their fear is understandable, but repeatedly giving in to Trump is not consistent with protecting our democracy and our Constitution. So, yes, we should take a moment to thank the jurors who took their responsibility seriously. They did so despite the reasonable fear they could face a violent reaction—especially given how much identifiable information some reporters shared about them. We need to see more of this courage on display this year to turn back this attempt by authoritarians to capture our Republic. Our governmental systems and our political and media elites are not going to save us. Only our votes can do that this November.

#3

Democrats Need To Join The Fight Over The Trump Verdict Now (Brian Beutler, Off Message)

In the almost 48 hours since a New York jury returned its verdict against Donald Trump, many liberals who are normally sanguine about the Democratic Party’s approach to partisan combat have found themselves astonished by what they’ve seen. As their response has taken shape, Democrats have revealed fundamental disunity over how and even whether to exploit the fact that their principal opponent is a convicted felon.

The grand jury returned its indictment over a year ago. The trial has been ongoing for over a month. With all that time to prepare for any combination of outcomes, Democrats seemingly did nothing, and are thus largely paralyzed. No rousing defense of the rule of law. No assertion that 34 felony convictions should be disqualifying for a major-party presidential nominee.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

The late Vince Lombardi has questions. As do I. That there would be a verdict in this case this past week should not have come as a surprise to anyone sentient. Beutler has written often about the Democratic Party’s unwillingness to fight back and, ahem, actually do the politics. Yes, President Biden should be cautious with his statements. But (with a few exceptions), I have to wonder where in the hell the rest of the party’s leadership has been. Republicans are all over the media trying to discredit the jury’s verdict. The pro-felon talking points are on display. Despite what lying U.S. Senator Susan Collins (among others) has said, District Attorney Alvin Bragg did not promise to prosecute Trump during his campaign. The felon Trump is also not the only person Bragg’s office has charged with these offenses. President Biden had nothing to do with this verdict as it was a state matter. These lies will seep into the public’s consciousness unless there are people on the air defending the jury process. A leading Republican think tank is displaying the American flag upside down. Twelve GOP Senators are promising to shut down all policy debates and confirmations. The fight is here despite the evident preference of senior Democrats. And, most importantly, why should voters care that a felon now leads the Republican Party if Democrats are afraid to discuss the issue?

#4

Alito’s Aggrieved Letter to Congress Tips His Hand in the Jan. 6 Cases (Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, Slate)

On Wednesday, Justice Samuel Alito released a letter dismissing concerns over the New York Times’ reports of insurrectionist flags flying outside his homes. Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse had sought to have Alito recused from any Jan 6.–related cases because of these flags, but the justice has now spurned their requests. His statement, filed on Supreme Court letterhead and overflowing with Alito’s trademark aggrievement, is best interpreted as either an unreconstructed piece of lawless trolling or a meditation on the nature of female autonomy. It will at least clear up one thing: The justice has not been chastened by recent events and will carry forward his nihilistic attitude into the explosive final weeks of this term.

Alito stands accused of flying two controversial flags. The first was an upside-down American flag at the justice’s Virginia house, flown in the days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, as the court was considering major election-related cases. The second was an “Appeal to Heaven” flag seen last summer over his New Jersey beach house. Both symbols are connected to movements that supported the insurrection, along with authoritarianism and religious extremism. Durbin and Whitehouse, along with a group of Democratic representatives, believe that this apparent support for insurrectionist-flavored ideas requires him to step aside from the term’s Jan. 6 cases.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

Is anyone surprised that Justice Alito isn’t going to recuse himself? After lying repeatedly during his confirmation hearings about his respect for precedent, he is now leading the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court majority as it checks off the list of Federalist Society dream outcomes. Alas, this moment of Supreme Court crisis requires more than a series of calm letters from Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin (D-Illinois). Senator Durbin, where is the damn hearing about Supreme Court corruption? Let Alito, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justice Clarence Thomas refuse to show. Highlight the crisis! Empty chairs can create compelling moments! A hearing now won’t immediately lead to reform, but it would start that conversation and allow people to debate these issues. Our government’s series of checks and balances only works when a branch is willing, you know, to check what the other branches are doing. Democrats have the gavels in the Senate. It is long past time for chairs like Senator Durbin to start using that authority. At a minimum, perhaps he could ask Justice Alito why his wife is the only woman in the country he believes should be able to make decisions.

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#5

How the right-wing echo chamber constructed a Biden assassination plot against Trump (Matt Gertz, Media Matters)

The story that emerged from the right-wing media echo chamber posits that pro forma language provided to FBI agents before the 2022 search which stated that “law enforcement officers of the Department of Justice may use deadly force when necessary” was actually part of a Biden scheme to assassinate Trump. This is both a horrific accusation to make without evidence and facially absurd for any number of reasons. (Why would the Biden administration issue assassination orders in writing and then conduct the Mar-a-Lago search on a date specifically selected because Trump would be in New York instead?) But it spread quickly from its initiation by a key figure in the right’s January 6 disinformation community, through the ranks of MAGA influencers, to Trump himself, and then to the Fox News airwaves.

By Tuesday night, Trump’s campaign had issued a fundraising email in which the presumptive Republican presidential nominee alleged of the Biden administration, “You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable … Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”

The startlingly quick adoption of an unhinged conspiracy theory shows how the right-wing media apparatus operates, dreaming up convoluted but inflammatory nonsense and bombarding their audience with it. Here’s how it happened.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

The spread of this conspiracy theory provides a clear example of how disinformation spreads through the radical-right media ecosystem. Right-wing activists transformed standard FBI policy into an insane story where the soon-to-be felon was a target of a potential assassination. This process took less than six hours. Gertz takes us through the steps, starting with one activist, going to Truth Social, and ending with the Republican National Committee and Fox News. This kind of lie will have consequences. It will be almost impossible to correct the record here with Trump supporters. I fear some will use this lie as an explanation for why they resorted to political violence.

#6

Big Tech could give this 19th-century antiabortion law an Orwellian facelift (Nicole Gill, Fast Company)

Former President Donald Trump reaffirmed his commitment to criminalize abortion, telling Time last month he would not intervene in decisions to monitor or prosecute pregnant people. Trump’s fervor to limit reproductive freedom is far from surprising—after all, he has repeatedly taken credit for overturning Roe v. Wade. But buried in the wide-ranging interview was a new clue to how he might go about it: the Comstock Act.

The Comstock Act is an 1873 law that bans the mailing of “obscene” materials, including birth control and “instruments” used for abortions. This so-called  “zombie” law has flown under the radar for the past 50 or so years, largely because it was rendered unconstitutional by Roe v. Wade. But in our post-Roe era, antiabortion advocates—including Speaker Mike Johnson, America First Legal, and the Heritage Foundation—are attempting to resurrect Comstock and use it to ban access to medication abortion. Some argue an anti-choice president could go farther and use Comstock to ban abortion outright, nationwide, without a vote from Congress. And while the Biden administration has refused to enforce Comstock, a future president could easily decide the opposite. Trump himself flirted with enforcement of the Comstock Act in his Time interview, noting he would make a statement about the law “in the coming weeks.” 

The threat of Comstock is real and should be taken seriously. But this isn’t just a reproductive rights issue—it’s also about tech accountability. That’s because from emails to search queries to things we buy online, virtually everything we do online is tracked and stored by Big Tech companies. And all of this data is evidence that federal officials can, and will, use to prosecute abortion.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

In previous issues of this newsletter, I discussed why we must take the Comstock Act threat seriously. Gill adds urgency to this conversation by noting how technology companies—not known for protecting our personal data—can make things worse for women. In this article, Gill demonstrates how companies like Google track and retain sensitive location and search data in their servers. Forced-birth advocates are already using this data to build criminal cases regarding abortion services. We need to do more to make sure people who can become pregnant are aware of the risks potentially created by the retention of search, location, and period tracking data. We should anticipate that technology companies will not try to protect their users should felon Donald Trump win this election and revive Comstock Act enforcement.

#7

A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It? (Rachel Aviv, The New Yorker)

Letby had worked on a struggling neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital, run by the National Health Service, in the West of England, near Wales. The case centered on a cluster of seven deaths, between June, 2015, and June, 2016. All but one of the babies were premature; three of them weighed less than three pounds. No one ever saw Letby harming a child, and the coroner did not find foul play in any of the deaths. (Since her arrest, Letby has not made any public comments, and a court order has prohibited most reporting on her case. To describe her experiences, I drew from more than seven thousand pages of court transcripts, which included police interviews and text messages, and from internal hospital records that were leaked to me.)

The case against her gathered force on the basis of a single diagram shared by the police, which circulated widely in the media. On the vertical axis were twenty-four “suspicious events,” which included the deaths of the seven newborns and seventeen other instances of babies suddenly deteriorating. On the horizontal axis were the names of thirty-eight nurses who had worked on the unit during that time, with X’s next to each suspicious event that occurred when they were on shift. Letby was the only nurse with an uninterrupted line of X’s below her name. She was the “one common denominator,” the “constant malevolent presence when things took a turn for the worse,” one of the prosecutors, Nick Johnson, told the jury in his opening statement. “If you look at the table overall the picture is, we suggest, self-evidently obvious. It’s a process of elimination.”

But the chart didn’t account for any other factors influencing the mortality rate on the unit. Letby had become the country’s most reviled woman—“the unexpected face of evil,” as the British magazine Prospect put it—largely because of that unbroken line. It gave an impression of mathematical clarity and coherence, distracting from another possibility: that there had never been any crimes at all.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

As Aviv explains in an interview with Nieman Lab’s Sarah Scire, it is illegal to read this story in the United Kingdom, even though it raises significant questions about the misuse of data and whether the investigators have fallen prey to confirmation bias and other fallacies. UK media have presented Letby’s guilt as the only obvious conclusion. However, Aviv explains in detail why that may be wrong. It is possible there were no crimes at all, but these tragedies resulted from systemic failures. One of the causes of false convictions is investigators focusing on data that supports their theory while rejecting evidence that tells a different story. Aviv’s research raises serious doubts about the theory supporting Letby’s guilt.

#8

Pleading the 6th (Peter Hamby, Puck)

Filmmakers Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine want to make sure that’s not the case. Their harrowing and (extremely) intense documentary, The Sixth, produced by A24 and Change Content, tells the story of January 6 through six people who lived through the violence, just by showing up for work that day: D.C. Metro police officers Daniel Hodges and Christina Laury, former D.C. police chief Robert Contee III, freelance photographer Mel Cole, former congressional staffer Erica Loewe, and Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin.

…

The Sixth is not for the faint-hearted—you can watch the trailer here—but the filmmakers say that’s the point. It isn’t about Trump or Biden. “That day, it wasn’t about what side of the aisle you were on,” Sean Fine told me in a conversation I had with the filmmakers over the weekend. “People were running for their lives.” It’s a horror movie in some ways, hopeful in others. 

The release of the film has been trailed by controversy. The Fines—Oscar-, Emmy-, and Peabody-winning filmmakers—have suggested that A24 and Amazon are limiting the scope of the release after making initial promises about its distribution. (Politico wrote about the dispute earlier this month.) I asked the Fines about A24, what media coverage of January 6 missed, whether the riot was actually an organized conspiracy, and more, in our lightly edited conversation below.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

In this interview, the makers of this vital documentary are doing all they can not to burn bridges, even as they raise questions about the unexpected limits of its distribution. How can the A24 studio run a major publicity program for its Civil War film earlier this year but bury this non-fiction film? As Hamby notes, only five percent of respondents to a recent poll named the insurrection as the thing they remember from the felon Donald Trump’s presidency. We cannot let the end of our national tradition of peaceful transfers of power fall into the memory hole.

#9

Locals Defy DeSantis Pride Light Ban, Light Bridge Up With Flashlights In Jacksonville (Erin Reed, Erin in the Morning)

On Friday night, Jacksonville residents took to the Main Street Bridge to celebrate Pride Month. Just weeks prior, Governor Ron DeSantis’ administration and the Florida Department of Transportation issued an edict banning rainbow-colored lighting on bridges during Pride Month, mandating that all such lighting be replaced with red, white, and blue, the colors of the American flag. Residents, however, were undeterred. They carried flashlights and rainbow gels, took their positions, and proceeded to light up the bridge themselves.

WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING: 

I want to thank these Floridians for demonstrating what a real freedom summer feels like. This was an inspiring protest!

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