Harriet Torry, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. economy contracted at a record rate last quarter and weekly jobless claims rose for the second straight week, amid signs of a slowing recovery as the country continues to struggle with the coronavirus pandemic.

The Commerce Department said U.S. gross domestic product—the value of all goods and services produced across the economy—fell at a 32.9% annual rate in the second quarter, or a 9.5% drop compared with the same quarter a year ago. Both figures were the steepest in records dating to 1947.

It’s a good thing we elected a businessman whose market savvy uniquely positions him to be able to shield the American economy from disaster and deliver us to a new era of economic prosperity. No, wait.

It’s a good thing we have the opportunity to reelect a businessman whose market savvy uniquely positions him to be able to fix the American economy after he drove it into the ground by fumbling the federal response to a global pandemic.

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 24

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Jim Morrill and Francesca Chambers, reporting for The Charlotte Observer:

Trump had forced Republicans to move the event to Florida after failing to get guarantees he could have a full house in Charlotte because of the coronavirus. But Jacksonville, like the rest of Florida, has been hit with a surge of COVID-19 cases. Trump said Thursday it was irresponsible to hold the convention there.

“I told my team it’s time to cancel the Jacksonville, Florida, component of the GOP convention,” he told reporters at the White House. “We’re going to do some other things with tele-rallies and online the week that we’re discussing ... I’ll still do a convention speech in a different form. But we won’t do a big crowded convention per se, it’s just not the right time for that.”

Womp womp.

Too bad they moved it from Charlotte.

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

That didn’t take long. Just fourteen days to add another million cases — that’s a 33% increase from July 9th — and it’s almost entirely the south’s fault. Like I said when we hit three million, these next few are on us.

On the bright side (ha), at least the Trump administration seems to be taking this a little bit more seriously now. 
God knows how long that’ll last, but hopefully it’s not an act.

Southerners, listen up:

• Stop being selfish and put on a mask. Don’t confuse inconvenience with oppression.

• Wash your hands, and carry some hand sanitizer.

• Don’t listen to antivaxxer bullshit. Or do, honestly, cause if you’re that far gone you’re beyond reason. If your kids die from COVID-19 because you won’t get them their shots, don’t act surprised, Darwin called that shit like a hundred years ago. Can’t believe we’re still having the conversation about vaccines.

• Stay home.

• Push your representatives to renew the $600 weekly unemployment benefit so that people whose jobs aren’t essential can stay home.

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 23

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Matthew Pierce, writing for The Daily Boulder:

Marco Rubio showed his true colors on Saturday by sharing a photo of him and the late Elijah Cummings to pay tribute to the late Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) – a beloved civil rights icon.

Rubio took to Twitter where he shared a photo of him and Cummings with a message that read: “It was an honor to know & be blessed with the opportunity to serve in Congress with John Lewis, a genuine and historic American hero. May the Lord grant him eternal peace.”

Of course, Rubio’s first attempt also had a typo in it.

Lots of other Republicans apparently felt obligated to say a something as well. Even Bryan Kemp made a statement, the Georgia governor who, in the words of podcast host and former National Security Spokesman Tommy Vietor, “has done more to disenfranchise black voters in Georgia, maybe than anyone else alive at this moment”.

The Republican response to Lewis’s death has been disgusting and hypocritical. They would be doing everyone a favor, themselves included, by keeping Lewis’s name out of their mouths (as well as MLK’s, Abraham Lincoln’s, and a long list of other people who actually stood up for true American ideals). They’ve spent their careers trying to undo the progress made by people like Lewis, so it’s cowardly and in poor taste for them to cling to his legacy now that he’s dead. It’s obvious gaslighting.

Quick note: if your response to Rubio’s and Sullivan’s blunders is “it was a mistake anyone could make, they look the same!”, you’re a racist.

UPDATED: 7/23/20, 23:19

Alana Wise, reporting for NPR:

President Trump took to the White House briefing room on Tuesday to praise his administration's response to the virus that has killed more than 140,000 Americans so far. In a reversal of his recent statements and tone, he acknowledged the severity of the pandemic and urged Americans to comply with preventative measures. 

"It will likely unfortunately get worse before it gets better," Trump said in uncharacteristically somber remarks, encouraging Americans to social distance, practice good hygiene and wear masks.

The president said his administration is in the process of developing a strategy for the coming months, including developing treatments and vaccines for COVID-19. 

Trump — who has mostly cast mask usage as a personal choice and declined to wear one himself — urged people to wear face masks, citing a spike of cases in the Sun Belt in recent weeks. 

"Whether you like the mask or not, they have an impact," he said.

Is this a realization that their plan of ignoring the pandemic and hoping it will disappear was not only stupid and ineffective, but costing them support? Is it just an attempt to correct course for their political strategy? I truly hope so, becuause if it’s the result of some new discovery about the virus, we should be scared. What could the administration have learned that would caused Trump to change his tone so suddenly and drastically?

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

Erica Werner and Jeff Stein, reporting for The Washington Post:

The Trump administration is trying to block billions of dollars for states to conduct testing and contact tracing in the upcoming coronavirus relief bill, people involved in the talks said Saturday.

The administration is also trying to block billions of dollars that GOP senators want to allocate for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and billions more for the Pentagon and State Department to address the pandemic at home and abroad, the people said.

Point me in the direction of a single public health expert who says we need less testing. I’ll wait.

Of course we don’t need less testing, we need far more testing, and we need more accurate tests. I’ve been saying this for months, as has anybody with a brain. The fact that Trump thinks we need less testing indicates at best a wholly political approach to addressing the pandemic, and at worst a complete misunderstanding of object permanence.

One of the best ways to safely get the economy back up and running would be to let people who we suspect have immunity (those with COVID-19 antibodies) go out and keep businesses afloat while those who haven’t yet been exposed continue to stay home. The crazy thing is that if everyone played along, we could put this whole thing behind us in a matter of weeks. Blocking funding for testing would be idiotic, selfish, and cruel (nothing new for the Trump administration), but it’s also a huge miss from a political perspective: Americans love an opportunity to rally behind their president to achieve a common goal or defeat a common enemy. Why would the Trump administration pass up such an opportunity during an election year? It’s remarkable hubris and short-sightedness.

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 22

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A few of my most despised senators have teamed up again, but this time, they’re not trying to destroy strong encryption so that the government can spy on us, they’re just peddling some xenophobic bullshit clearly designed to pander to their base.

Senators Thom Tillis, Marsha Blackburn, and Tom Cotton (all from my despised senator list) have joined forces again, this time with Senators Martha McSally and Josh Hawley to introduce legislation that provides an avenue for U.S. citizens to sue the Chinese government for the loss of life and financial hardships they’ve endured as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Not only do they blame China for the pandemic’s disastrous (yet preventable) effects on the U.S., but the press release on Tillis’s website goes so far as to compare the COVID-19 pandemic to 9/11, as if it was somehow an instance of state sponsored terrorism (which won’t help to tamp down preposterous, idiotic, completely unproven conspiracy theories that the coronavirus was designed as a weapon in a Chinese lab). They purport that their bill “is closely modeled after the 2016 Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), that gave more legal remedies to victims of terrorism, particularly those of 9/11 victims”. Again, obvious pandering, this time packaged with a pathetically weak comparison.

These senators have a remarkable ability to talk out of both sides of their mouth. They’re simultaneously downplaying the severity of the pandemic to make the Trump administration’s inadequate response seem acceptable (god forbid they piss off the Trump klan), and hyping up the death toll and financial costs to rile up their base against a common (and more or less manufactured) enemy. 

The bill doesn’t provide any directive or course of action for citizens seeking to hold the United States government responsible for the ongoing, reckless negligence that they’ve branded as a “response” to the disease.

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 21

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John Gruber, everybody:

Trump’s problem with Bush isn’t partisan. It’s about adherence to foundational American ideals such as the rule of law, and the idea that the President of the United States is the leader of all Americans, not just those who support him. Say what you want about Bush’s presidency, when the nation faced a true crisis on 9/11, he brought the nation together. 

When faced with this crisis, Donald Trump, mind-bogglingly, drove the country further apart. His remaining supporters are with him not despite this, but because of it, like pigs wallowing in mud.

Zachary Cohen, Luke McGee, and Alex Marquardt, reporting for CNN:

Russian cyber actors are targeting organizations involved in coronavirus vaccine development, according to a new warning by US, UK and Canadian security officials on Thursday that details activity by a Russian hacking group called APT29, which also goes by the name “the Dukes” or “Cozy Bear.” […]

Cozy Bear is one of two hacking groups linked to Russian intelligence that is believed to have accessed the Democratic National Committee's internal systems in the lead-up to the 2016 US election, but Thursday's announcement is the first time this group has been named in connection to cyberattacks related to the coronavirus pandemic.

The NCSC, which is the UK's lead technical authority on cyber security and part of the UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), assessed that APT29 "almost certainly operate as part of Russian Intelligence Services". […] This assessment is also supported by partners at the Canadian Communication Security Establishment (CSE), the US Department for Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Security Agency (NSA), the NCSC said. […] "APT29's campaign of malicious activity is ongoing, predominantly against government, diplomatic, think tank, healthcare and energy targets to steal valuable intellectual property," according to a press release.

Russia? Conduct a cyber attack against the United States!? They would never!

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🇨🇦 Canada: 0

🇬🇧 United Kingdom: 0

🇷🇺 Russia: 1

🦠 COVID-19: 20

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Today, the United States surpassed three million cases of COVID-19. This is an astonishing number already, but it represents just one percent of the country’s population. The scariest part is that this pandemic could — and likely will — get much worse. If the northeast was to blame for the first two million cases, then the south is certainly to blame for this million (and the next two or three, at this rate).

I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m ready for this nightmarish campaign of sickness, death, and governmental negligence to come to its end and be placed definitively in the trash can of history. But some shortsighted people can’t reckon with the fact that the easiest way for us to truly and safely end the lockdowns and get the economy back on its feet (and restart sports, and educate our kids, and take the masks off, reopen businesses, and...) is to decisively beat the virus so that people will feel safe when we’re able to do those things, so we seem to be stuck in this hellscape indefinitely. Beating the virus means wearing masks, avoiding crowds, washing your hands; you know the drill. At this point, if you aren’t doing all you can to help our country move past this embarrassing chapter of our history, then you’re a selfish, irresponsible asshole.

And again, it’s important to ask ourselves why our country has done such a remarkably poor job of dealing with this compared to the countries we usually like to be compared to. Could it have anything to do with our incompetent Commander in Cheeto? You decide.

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 18

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I live in the south, and though many people here don’t realize it yet, we’re about to get slammed with a wave of COVID-19 infections. In conversations with family members, friends, and coworkers, a frustrating trend has popped up where, even after being presented with valid data or charts showing the increases in COVID-19 cases in the south, they still seem largely unbothered. When you ask why this is, you typically get one of two responses.

The first retort that comes up from people here in the south who aren’t taking the pandemic seriously is that they think hospitals are greatly exaggerating the number of cases they have in an effort to acquire three to four times more money from insurance companies. This piece from USA Today explains some of the details behind that. While it would be possible for a hospital to exaggerate their numbers and receive more money, the amount of the increase in funding is far less significant than fearmongers would have you believe. Additionally, the piece seems to indicate that only Medicare is subject to these possible manipulations, not private insurers. Regardless of these finer details, allow me to pose two questions.

1. Many people claim to know nurses and other hospital staff who provide them with “insider knowledge” of this alleged insurance fraud. But how could one trust the word of such a source, if that source is a person who regularly sees such fraudulent and immoral activities transpiring and doesn’t have the integrity to speak out publicly or report them?

2. If the rise in COVID-19 cases is primarily attributable to dishonest hospital staff, why are states in the sun belt experiencing such an explosion of cases while other areas of the country are not? Do the people who live there suffer from a lack of morals that allows them to be comfortable with their complicity (a lack of morals which, if based on areas with more reported COVID-19 cases, doesn’t seem to affect the northeast or the west coast)? Or is it more likely that the demonstrably less defensive responses of the states with the most severe increases (Florida, South Carolina, Arizona, Texas, etc.) simply led to an increase in new infections in the region?

Another rebuttal they’ll offer to support their dismissal of the gravity of the pandemic is the high number of people who experience mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. It’s true that many people who have COVID-19 won’t know it. However, we may not be looking for symptoms in the right places: from the start, we’ve compared sickness caused by the coronavirus to the flu. We looked for respiratory symptoms, but we didn’t necesarily spend a lot of time looking at what other dots we could connect. It’s possible that we missed some things, and new evidence suggets as much. Just this week, we learned that in addition to the serious respiratory symptoms many COVID-19 patients are experiencing, they’re also experiencing serious neurological symptoms. From an opinion piece in The New York Times by Melinda Wenner Moyer:

Earlier this month, French researchers reported that 84 percent of Covid patients who had been admitted to the I.C.U. experienced neurological problems, and that 33 percent continued to act confused and disoriented when they were discharged.

According to Dr. Mady Hornig, a psychiatrist and epidemiologist at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, the possibility that neurological issues “will persist and create disability, or difficulties, for individuals downstream is really looking more and more likely.”

Note that the French President is a very liberal man, and it wouldn’t make any sense for the “fake news media” (which presumably exists in France) would drum up false conspiracies about COVID-19 to make their President look worse.

If you’re in the south and you still don’t believe this is a big deal, you may not be thinking rationally. Maybe you’re stuck under the spell of Trump’s demagoguery, forced to deny the validity of anything that could cast him in a negative light. Or, maybe you have COVID-19, and it’s affecting your cognitive abilities. Whatever the case may be, I encourage you to take a hard look at the data that supports your arguments and question its legitimacy (assuming you have any data to point to).

If you’re in the south and you’re capable of rational thought, check out these charts. They’re frightening but they’re informative, and it’s important for everyone to understand the weight of the threat we face. This is not a left versus right issue. Like it or not, how you react to this will affect others, and how others react will affect you.

Check out CopyrightBro’s COVID-19 coverage roundup.

From the opinion of the court in the case of LITTLE SISTERS OF THE POOR SAINTS PETER AND PAUL HOME v. PENNSYLVANIA ET AL.:

For over 150 years, the Little Sisters have engaged in faithful service and sacrifice, motivated by a religious calling to surrender all for the sake of their brother.

Mmmmmm, I bet they have.

“[T]hey commit to constantly living out a witness that proclaims the unique, inviolable dignity of every person, particularly those whom others regard as weak or worthless.” […] But for the past seven years, they—like many other religious objectors who have participated in the litigation and rulemakings leading up to today’s decision—have had to fight for the ability to continue in their noble work without violating their sincerely held religious beliefs.

The oppression of Christians is unending. Listen, The Little Sisters of The Poor Saints Peter and Paul just really believe in raw dogging it while taking absolutely no precautions and having no backup plan, alright? And they want their employees to enjoy the benefits of bareback gut beating that doesn’t account for its consequences, too. What’s so wrong with that?

In all seriousness, devout conservative Christians, riddle me this: is it worse for someone to have premarital sex with a condom/birth control, or is it worse for someone to have premarital sex without a condom/birth control and subsequently get an abortion? You can’t be pro-life and anti-contraceptive (at least, not if you have even the most basic understanding of cause and effect and human biology). Just because you decided to give up a fulfilling sex life doesn’t mean you have the right to strip others of the same privilege. Sex is a natural part of the human experience, not something to repress or shame; it’s puritanical and archaic that Christian institutions still get off on trying to deny that basic fact and prevent others from expressing their sexuality healthily in the year of our lord 2020.

UPDATED: 7/10/20, 10:09

These charts are startling. The south is heading into a peak similar to the one New York experienced, and we are woefully unprepared for it.

Those charts are interactive over on 91-DIVOC.com, so if you head to their site, you can touch any point to see the specific data behind it. The data itself is from Johns Hopkins University and the WHO, so you can trust it (unless you’re a complete COVID denier or someone who thinks it’s caused by 5G towers/was started in a lab/etc.).

While it’s true that COVID-19 isn’t as deadly as we first thought, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t still extremely bad for a ton of people. While a lot of people who get the virus will be asymptomatic, they can still spread it to others. There’s no way to know whether you’ll be someone who experiences the symptoms of not, and it’s selfish to decide that “it’s worth the risk”. People who do experience symptoms get seriously sick, and are appearing to suffering long term problems ranging from difficulty breathing because of scar tissue in their lungs to permanent loss of smell. And that’s not to mention the fact that people are dying. Nearly 130,000 Americans have died: that’s more than the number of American soldiers and civilians who died in World War One.

If you’re in the south, please, do all you can to keep yourself and those around you safe. Here is a list of some of the most important things we all need to do in order to keep this from really getting out of hand.

• Make a concerted effort to stay home more and avoid crowds.

• If you need to go somewhere, try to use a drive-thrus or use curbside pickup at stores. Also, remember to sanitize items you bring into your home. Spritzing groceries with hydrogen peroxide is a great way to get germs, including coronavirus, off of your items (which plenty of other people likely touched).

• If you must go into a public place where you’ll be around people you don’t know, please wear a mask. It isn’t difficult, and it’s not that uncomfortable. Find a cool mask and get excited about wearing it; they don’t have to be boring and ugly to be effective.

• Use lots of hand sanitizer and wash your hands with soap frequently.

• Don’t hoard toilet paper. Or anything else, for that matter.

• Reach out to your representatives and let them know that you expect them to do what’s necessary to keep us safe, from enforcing social distancing and implementing mask requirements, to ensuring that the pandemic unemployment benefits (which end this month) get extended so that people employed in nonessential industries can stay out of work without living in poverty.

Finally, to those who say that this pandemic presents us with a choice between letting a bunch of people get sick and saving our economy, listen up. That line of thinking is being fed to you. It is a false choice. There’s no reason we can’t do both, and in fact, stopping the pandemic definitively will be the best way to get the economy back up and running like normal. Doing a half assed job like we did the past few months is only going to prolong the pain from a belly up economy with 11% unemployment (a number which is about to jump back up). Even if businesses are open, they aren’t going to be successful if people don’t go to them because they’re scared of contracting a deadly virus. It isn’t hard to understand.

Also, Donald Trump still thinks the pandemic is going to “disappear”, so make of that what you will. Plenty of other countries have figured this out, why hasn’t ours?

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 17

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UPDATED: 7/9/20, 19:09

If you’d asked me a few days ago to produce a list of my ten most despised senators, it would’ve included the likes of Richard Burr, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Thom Tillis, Marsha Blackburn, Tom Cotton, and Ted Cruz (’ll freely acknowledge the pattern here: they’re all members of the same group, senators who make bad faith arguments to defend the status quo).

Yesterday, three of them teamed up to give me yet another reason to hate them, and this time, it wasn’t over their support for racist, homophobic, xenophobic policies, but rather a technology issue.

A little bit of important context: the FBI and Apple got into a big showdown several years ago. The FBI asked Apple to unlock an iPhone that had belonged to the San Bernardino mass shooter, and Apple refused. They said no because iPhones use such a strong form of encryption that the only way technically possible for Apple to have unlocked it would have required them to write an altered version of iOS that they could put on this phone to bypass the passcode. Because that altered version of iOS could then be installed on any iPhone, it would have effectively created a backdoor into EVERY iPhone (Apple CEO Tim Cook described this hypothetical, altered version of iOS as “the software equivalent of cancer”). Apple was right to refuse the FBI’s request to create that altered version of iOS, and after several months, the FBI backed down.

Marsha Blackburn, Tom Cotton, and Lindsey Graham proposed legislation that would outlaw what’s know as “end-to-end” encryption. End-to-end encryption is used by Apple to encrypt iMessages, FaceTime calls, and other important data, but it’s also used by just about every other company and industry on planet earth. It’s used to protect sensitive financial information, patient health records, government documents; basically, everything that needs to stay truly private and secure is protected by the type of encryption these senators are seeking to outlaw. The reason for that is because data that is end-to-end encrypted can only be accessed by the individuals on either end of a line of communication, and no companies or governments have backdoors to access your information. Not everything needs that strong level of encryption, but a lot of things do. These senators want to take away your ability to truly protect your digital data and keep your information and communications private. If an altered version of iOS is the software equivalent of cancer, banning end-to-end encryption is the digital equivalent of demanding that people leave their front doors ajar 24/7.

Two talking points in particular come up every time this conversation gets started, and it’s important to address them head on. One of those issues is child pornography. Nobody is arguing that we shouldn’t prosecute people who abuse children; that isn’t what this is about. The other issue I’d terrorism. They say that by allowing people to encrypt their data in a way that is completely secure, you’re enabling terrorists a safe haven to plot attacks against America. Frankly, these are both tired tropes. They’re bad faith arguments peddled by people who favor less privacy and more invasive government surveillance capabilities, because while “we need to do this to stop terrorists and child abusers” sounds great on its face and will quickly garner public support, it doesn’t do as well when you explain to people what the real trade off is and how it significantly weakens their own privacy and safety. It’s unreasonable and unfair to suggest that because a small number of criminals could find ways to use end-to-end encryption to facilitate illegal activities, that the rest of us shouldn’t have access to it as a means to protect our most sensitive data from bad actors and prying government eyes. We will all be subject to a lot more abuse and attacks if we fling open the gates that protect our most sensitive data.

Also of note: the three senators pushing this legislation are all Republicans, but if there’s a political angle here, I’m missing it. I don’t see how this is a Republican issue at all; conservatives are usually the ones fighting for more restricted government, not a complete shredding of civil liberty. The only thing I can think is that maybe the republicans think this will help them with their base by showing that they’re trying to expand the capabilities of police to prosecute crime. As I mentioned before, that doesn’t really add up because if we allow end-to-end encryption to be allowed, the detrimental effects to law abiding citizens would far outweigh any positive impact on law enforcement’s ability to stop crime.

If this bill becomes law, it will be much worse than the Patriot Act. We’ll find ourselves a lot like the Chinese, living in a surveillance state where the government has unchecked ability to spy on its citizens. Contact your representatives and voice your opposition to this proposal.

Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, and Michael Schwirtz, reporting for The New York Times:

American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops […]

Twenty Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019, but it was not clear which killings were under suspicion.

The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step

We don’t need to make this about Obama, but can you imagine what would Republicans would (rightfully) be saying if they found out he’d known for months that Russia was paying the Taliban to kill American troops and did nothing to stop it? Where is the outrage?

There is no way to justify this. It is treason. It warrants impeachment, removal from office, and prosecution.

We’ve known that Trump doesn’t actually care about our servicemen and women (hail President Bone Spurs), but this is the most shocking and confronting example yet. He’s already been losing a ton of support within the military (if you know a service member, ask them what they think of Trump right now), and it could be a real turning point for many civilians in Trump’s base who genuinely care about supporting our troops.

Anyone who still supports Donald Trump doesn’t support our troops, they spit on their graves. After this, “Trump supporter” and “patriot” are mutually exclusive categories. Anyone still making excuses for this treasonous president should be ashamed of themselves, but they won’t be, because they’ve convinced themselves that maintaining the status quo of a white, racist, homophobic, xenophobic America led by an orange man with thirty or so rape accusations is of greater importance than the lives of those sworn to defend our nation and our constitution.

On Saturday, Donald Trump had his first campaign rally since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Before it even began, it was shrouded in controversy for a multitude of reasons. First of all, it’s pretty fucking stupid to plan a rally with tens of thousands of people in close proximity in the middle of a highly infectious global pandemic in a state where new cases are rising. Of course, the Trump administration’s response the COVID-19 has mostly been to ignore it, so this isn’t surprising. Secondly, they planned the administration on June 19th, a holiday that has been largely ignored, but which celebrates freedom by commemorating the day when slaves in Texas learned of their emancipation. They also planned the rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. If you don’t know anything about Tulsa, start here:

In the early 20th century, Tulsa was home to the "Black Wall Street", one of the most prosperous Black communities in the United States at the time. Located in the Greenwood neighborhood, it was the site of the Tulsa Race Massacre; it has been called "the single worst incident of racial violence in American history", in which mobs of white Tulsans killed black Tulsans, looted and robbed the black community, and burned down homes and businesses. Sixteen hours of rioting on May 31 and June 1, 1921, was ended only when National Guardsmen were brought in by the Governor. An official report later claimed that 23 Black and 16 white citizens were killed, but other estimates suggest as many as 300 people died, most of them Black. Over 800 people were admitted to local hospitals with injuries, and an estimated 10,000 Black people were left homeless as 35 city blocks, composed of 1,256 residences, were destroyed by fire. Property damage was estimated at $1.8 million. Efforts to obtain reparations for survivors of the violence have been unsuccessful, but the events were re-examined by the city and state in the early 21st century, acknowledging the terrible actions that had taken place.

As per usual, Trump’s campaign is engaging is cruel, race baiting division tactics by holding a rally in Tulsa on Juneteenth. Oklahoma is a state Trump won by 36 points: there was absolutely no legitimate political reason for him to hold a rally here, this was done entirely out of malice, and his campaign clearly thought they could pass it off as a coincidence. They did eventually conceded to reschedule the rally for June 20th after being criticized for the decision.

On Twitter, the Trump campaign bragged about having given out over a million tickets, and many users pointed out that if that many Trump fans showed up, roughly 980,000 ticket holders we be stuck outside during the event because the venue, the Bank of Oklahoma Center arena, only seats about 20,000 people.

The time for the rally came, 1,000,000 fans however, did not. Not only did a million people not show up, they didn’t even get close to 20,000, with nearly the entire upper bowl of the BOK arena center completely vacant. As reported by The Hill, the Tulsa Fire Department has announced that roughly 6,000 people (supporters, event staff, paid actors, security, etc.) attended the event in total. Not a huge number when you consider how much Trump hyped the event up. It’s also been hilariously pointed out that even The Wiggles managed to sell out this venue, while Trump could hardly reach 33% capacity giving away free tickets.

Trump tweeted photos of the event that were taken from angles clearly intended to highlight the crowd, but even in his own photos, you can see the empty seats in the upper bowl.

Here’s a more honest view:

The Trump campaign said recently that over one million tickets were requested for the Tulsa rally, the first rally in months due to covid-19.

Trump proclaimed that there wouldn’t be an empty seat.

I’ll let this video inside the rally speak for itself. pic.twitter.com/se6er6j49m

— Elizabeth Thomas (@lizzkatherine_) June 20, 2020

I’m sure Brad Parscale and Tucker Carlson will come up with all sorts of crazy reasons why the event’s attendance was so low. They’re already blaming it on the coronavirus and liberal protestors blocking the entrances, but let’s consider that for a second. A bunch of Trump supporters don’t even believe in the coronavirus, and the ones who do have made it well known that they aren’t very worried about it. Also, there probably would’ve been crowds outside if these mythical protesters were preventing people from entering the BOK Center, but there weren’t. In fact, there were so few people outside that they canceled the address Trump had planned to give for all the fans who wouldn’t be able to get in once the venue reached capacity.

Trump claims to have a silent majority, but a more more accurate phrase may be “invisible majority“.

We’re adding a point to our COVID-19 scoreboard based on the fact that our president was stupid and arrogant enough to have a rally during a pandemic.

🇺🇸 United States: 0

🦠 COVID-19: 16

UPDATED: 7/9/20, 19:07

Ashley Cullins, reporting for The Hollywood Reporter:

Tucker Carlson doesn't have an obligation to investigate the truth of statements before making them on his show, and his audience doesn't expect him to report facts, a lawyer for Fox News told a New York federal judge on Wednesday. […]

Fox News' attorney Erin Murphy argued that […] a reasonable viewer would know [Carlson’s] show offers "provocative things that will help [them] think harder," as opposed to straight news.

"What we’re talking about here, it’s not the front page of The New York Times," said Murphy. “It’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, which is a commentary show.”

It’s always fun to see lawyers forced into corners where the safest legal route is to acknowledge the ugly truths about the companies they work for.

Sounds like Trump is gonna have to make a hard pivot to OANN, now that his longtime favorite network has more or less admitted to serving up fake news.

Ali Breland, reporting for Mother Jones:

The fact that the upside red triangle has been an explicit piece of deadly Nazi iconography for seven decades hasn’t deterred Trump’s 2020 campaign from using them in Facebook ads. This week, the campaign started running a series of ads, disparaging Antifa demonstrators and featuring a large, bright red, upside-down triangle. Antifa, is of course, short for anti-fascist. The red triangle was sewn on uniforms of people interned in concentration camps, including anti-fascist political prisoners. Millions of Soviet and Western anti-fascist soldiers died defeating Nazism, including hundreds of thousands of Americans.

“Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups are running through our streets and causing absolute mayhem. They are DESTROYING our cities and rioting—it’s absolute madness,” reads one 2020 Trump ad featuring the symbol.

In case you don’t understand the parallels, refer to this chart used by the Third Reich. It specifies which badges should be afixed to the uniforms of concentration camp prisoners to denote the nature of their crimes against the reich. For those of you who haven’t recently brushed up on your German history and German language skills, the word “politisch” in the first column of the chart above the red symbols refers to political prisoners. Political prisoners included a variety of people, including anti-fascists, socialists, communists, and others who were critical of Hitler’s regime.

Image from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website, available at https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/classification-system-in-nazi-concentration-camps

The President of the United States is campaigning for reelection using a Nazi concentration camp symbol.

Nazis used the red triangle to mark political prisoners and people who rescued Jews.

Trump & the RNC are using it to smear millions of protestors.

Their masks are off. pic.twitter.com/UzmzDaRBup

— Bend the Arc: Jewish Action (@jewishaction) June 18, 2020

The similarities are not subtle. The Trump campaign is growing more brazen in their fascism by the day.

Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said the company “removed these posts and ads for violating our policy against organized hate. Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group’s symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol.”

In the name of giving credit where it’s due, this is one rare example of Facebook doing the right thing by removing the ads. (You should still #deletefacebook, though.) It’s worth pointing out that Facebook’s decision to remove these ads highlights just how egregious they were, given Facebook’s tendency to let Trump get away with things.

See also: my thesis paper, which explores the experiences of men who bore the pink triangle in Nazi concentration camps.

Ed Kilgore, reporting for The Intelligencer:

In a sweeping and consequential 6-3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the workplace anti-discrimination provisions of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banning discrimination on grounds of sex protect LGBTQ employees.

In Bostock v. Clayton County, Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion for himself, Chief Justice Roberts, and the Court’s four liberals (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan).

From the opinion penned by Gorsuch:

Sometimes small gestures can have unexpected consequences. Major initiatives practically guarantee them. In our time, few pieces of federal legislation rank in significance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There, in Title VII, Congress outlawed discrimination in the workplace on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Today, we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender. The answer is clear. An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.

Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result. Likely, they weren’t thinking about many of the Act’s con-sequences that have become apparent over the years, including its prohibition against discrimination on the basis of motherhood or its ban on the sexual harassment of male employees. But the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands. When the express terms of a statute give us one answer and extratextual considerations suggest another, it’s no contest. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.

Few facts are needed to appreciate the legal question we face. Each of the three cases before us started the same way: An employer fired a long-time employee shortly after the employee revealed that he or she is homosexual or transgender—and allegedly for no reason other than the employee’s homosexuality or transgender status.

Gerald Bostock worked for Clayton County, Georgia, as achild welfare advocate. Under his leadership, the county won national awards for its work. After a decade with the county, Mr. Bostock began participating in a gay recreational softball league. Not long after that, influential members of the community allegedly made disparaging comments about Mr. Bostock’s sexual orientation and participation in the league. Soon, he was fired for conduct “unbecoming” a county employee.

Donald Zarda worked as a skydiving instructor at Altitude Express in New York. After several seasons with the company, Mr. Zarda mentioned that he was gay and, days later, was fired.

Aimee Stephens worked at R. G. & G. R. Harris Funeral Homes in Garden City, Michigan. When she got the job, Ms. Stephens presented as a male. But two years into her service with the company, she began treatment for despair and loneliness. Ultimately, clinicians diagnosed her with gender dysphoria and recommended that she begin living as a woman. In her sixth year with the company, Ms. Stephens wrote a letter to her employer explaining that she planned to “live and work full-time as a woman” after she returned from an upcoming vacation. The funeral home fired her before she left, telling her “this is not going to work out.”

[…]

Some of those who supported adding language to Title VII to ban sex discrimination may have hoped it would derail the entire Civil Rights Act. Yet, contrary to those intentions, the bill became law. Since then, Title VII’s effects have unfolded with far-reaching consequences, some likely beyond what many in Congress or elsewhere expected. But none of this helps decide today’s cases. Ours is a s-ciety of written laws. Judges are not free to overlook plain statutory commands on the strength of nothing more than suppositions about intentions or guesswork about expectations. In Title VII, Congress adopted broad language making it illegal for an employer to rely on an employee’s sex when deciding to fire that employee. We do not hesitate to recognize today a necessary consequence of that legislative choice: An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law.

This is a truly historic ruling, and I hope everyone can appreciate the gravity of this moment, particularly for those of us who find ourselves attracted to members of the same sex, as well as others who don’t identify as the gender associated with their biological sex.

I’m particularly glad to see Justice Gorsuch on the right side of history. I’d imagine his ruling feels like as much of a slap in the face to conservative religious bigots and homophobic Trump supporters as it feels like an unexpected, resounding victory for those fighting for equality under the law.

For your records: dissenting justices include three straight men, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh (who still likes beer).

UPDATED: 06/15/20, 17:00

Judd Legum in Popular Information:

Several companies that have publicly embraced the Black Lives Matter movement are among the largest corporate contributors to [shitbag racist] Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR).

Quick digression: it’s absolutely rich that one of our nation’s premier shitbag racist senators has the last name “Cotton”.

Cotton has positioned himself to the right of Trump on criminal justice issues. He was one of a handful of Senators to oppose the First Step Act, a modest piece of bipartisan legislation aimed at narrowing racial disparities in federal sentencing. […] The United States has the world's largest — and disproportionately Black — prison population. But Cotton argues America has an "under-incarceration problem."

Time and again, Cotton has shown little regard for Black Americans. He has a 6% rating from the NAACP. And yet, some of the corporations embracing the Black Lives Matter protests in U.S. cities have donated tens of thousands of dollars to Cotton's campaigns.

The list of corporations and their contributions to Cotton:

• Bank of America — $15,000

• Wells Fargo — $15,000

• Walmart — $18,500

• AT&T — $21,000

• Coca Cola — $2,500

• PriceWaterhouseCoopers — $22,500

Do with that information what you will, discerning readers.

Whether it’s Black Lives Matter, Gay Pride, or some other social cause, it’s time that we start making companies put their money where their mouths are. It would be regressive for us to allow them to keep up this habit of only caring when they can make a PR move for social clout.