The Unified Reich

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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