#they did the travel ban right at the beginning of the previous presidency too

[fly-chicken]

A Pragmatic and surprisingly comforting perspective about the Trump 2nd Presidency from the ACLU

***Apologies if this is how you found out the 2024 election results***

Blacked out part is my name.

I’m not going to let this make me give up. It’s disheartening, and today I will wallow, probably tomorrow too

AND

I will continue to do my part in my community to spread the activism and promote change for the world I want to live in. I want to change the world AND help with the dishes.

And I won’t let an orange pit stain be what stops me from trying to be better.

A link to donate to the ACLU if able and inclined. I know I am

[taofarren]

Tina The Cortina

It was December in Cape Town and the South African president decided to surprise us with the gift of additional lockdown restrictions. Alcohol was banned, and spending time on the beach or sea in any capacity was suddenly highly illegal.

With our surf plans turned on their head, my girlfriend, Renske, and I decided to head in the opposite direction of the forbidden ocean, and celebrate New Years Eve in the Cape wine lands. It had been a debate in my mind between taking my mom’s plastic, yet reliable car, and returning before she got home from holiday the next week, or taking Tina, my 1969 canary yellow Ford Cortina, and having the freedom of cruising home when we wanted to. We chose risk, pleasure and freedom!

Renske had always accepted my car without too many questions, but during this particular trip she teased me each time we drove up the smallest hill. “Babe, are you sure we can make it up this one?”.

Of course I defended Tina the Cortina loyally.  For a 52 year old lady, she had taken me on many successful adventures, and could surely handle a slow cruise to the wine lands. I was almost offended that Renske was teasing her. It didn’t cross my mind that it came from a place of real concern.

Half way through the journey I realised this was my longest trip Tina and I had taken in the three glorious years we had spent together.

My previous car had packed out after surviving me through the madness of my late teens. There were only terrible replacement options available within my very limited budget at the time. A ridiculously bright yellow car constantly popped up within the Gumtree search results, and I browsed the pictures as a joke. Yellow was my least favourite colour, and I wouldn’t dream of having a car that obnoxiously bright. Curiosity, and lack of a better option lead me to a test drive with the owner in Grassy Park. Despite my terrible driving and constant stalling of the old clutch, I instantly fell in love.

Just the feeling of sitting in the car felt so right. There is instantly a connection when driving a machine that old. The low seat, the thin steering wheel, having to throw my entire body weight into each turn of the power steering-less wheel. This was a real car. I couldn’t explain it, but I knew I had to have her.

We agreed on a straight swap. His keys for mine at the traffic department. As happy as I was, I was too scared to tell my parents. In our initial chats about potential new cars, they shot down any idea of something classic and dangerous. I knew she was exactly the match that they were dreading, and I hid her from them until it had truly sunk in, and there was no turning back for me. They had to meet and accept her whether they liked her or not.

Even though she caused my mothers head to shake in disappointment, everywhere else she went, people would whip their heads around and smile. Whether a passenger or an observer, it instantly made you happier.

From the beginning, this car was surrounded by an invisible force-field of love. This came in handy, as rather stupidly, I think I only wore the stiff seatbelt a handful of times.

1969 must have been a time of minimal accidents, as this particular model had no headrests, and there was no such thing as an emergency stop. Stopping would require you to jump on the brake about 30 metres in advance. Surprisingly (most probably due to the colour), I never had a single accident other than driving very slowly into a few walls.

Contrary to popular belief, owning a classic car is not about self-image, and in this case, most definitely not a “chick magnet”. To most women it was just an old yellow car. Once they had their photo for Instagram, the reality of the journey would set in, and it would be a true test of their level of “maintenance”.

It was in fact more of an old man magnet. Or rather every man. From the day I got her, old men asked me complicated questions about her regularly. I learnt about her anatomy by rushing home to Google what on earth they had asked me.

Almost every day I had offers to buy her. Even though these  were mostly from car guards, petrol attendants, and a few times from a persistent garbage truck driver, I would obligingly take down their numbers, knowing I would never sell her. I knew that Tina enjoyed the attention and got the ego boost she deserved.

I wasn’t the only one to feel an emotional pull. It seemed to be the car that many people’s parents had, and seeing it triggered fond memories of their youth.

I was once approached timidly approached by an elderly lady who I mistook for a Jehovah’s witness:

“Excuse me!”.

“Good morning?” I enquired, squinting up at her, while flashing my most realistic, fake smile. She stooped in closer - Her wide eyes magnified by thick glasses,  grey hair exploding out from underneath a Christian hat.

“Did you know that my mother had this car when I was younger?”

She blinked at me expectantly.

I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to have known that, but I decided to humour her.

“Uh…. Good memories?”

She leaned in closer with a crooked grin;

“Yes… especially on the back seat!”

She giggled and walked off with a vacant smile

A few days later, the memory of that lady’s grin still fresh in my mind, a beggar at a traffic light told me that his father had the car when he was younger. Cheerfully, I responded along the same lines, saying that he must have been a great man, to which he responded:

“No, he was a horrible man”, and walked away sadly.

Despite constantly threatening to overheat in traffic, she dominated the city roads. To get across a busy intersection, I would slowly drive into the middle of the road, and people would smile and let me in, just to stare at her beautiful square bum with glassy eyes.

She had a knack with roadblocks too. On a particular incident, with the car filled with mates drinking beers after sundowners on the beach, I was pulled over with a lit joint in hand. I panicked and stalled diagonally across the road.

“Fuck fuck fuck”

I tried to casually stamp the joint out with sandy feet as the policeman walked over with a serious look on his face. Smoke hung in the sweaty interior and the beer bottles on the floor clinked to a halt as he leant down to the window.

“Excuse me sir… what year model is this?”

“Uhm,1969” I replied nervously

“Yoh, look after her hey!” He smiled as he waved us through.

One of the main reasons I had rationalised the choice of a classic car, was that I would learn about how cars actually worked, feeling so detached from my previous modern car. Over the years I learnt intimately what was possible to break in a car, as everything slowly fell apart.

Electrical faults, numerous flat tyres, the radiator exploding in the middle of a petrol station, ball joints seizing, the floor rusting through to the road, using torches as flashlights to get home at night. I got really good at putting my ego aside and asking people for help.

For summer there was definitely no air con. The beautiful black pleather seats became stove plates against your skin, and the only fan was created by the draught rushing through the holes in the bodywork.

This cooling system, so useful in summer, became a freezer in winter. Long johns, extra hoodies, a beanie and gloves were always packed in the trunk. To this day, the usually comforting sound of rain outside the window shocks me awake. I would lie in bed as it poured down, dreading the inevitable puddles filling up the car floor through these holes and the aged window seals.  

Strangely enough, the lack of headrests and questionable seatbelts made me feel more alive. The constant struggle to keep the loose steering wheel in a straight line, while listening to every sound in case of a problem, forced me into complete presence.

I saw so much more while travelling slowly. It felt like a leisurely stroll while on holiday, compared to a frantic run. Even if I was late it was literally impossible to drive faster. I learnt that at this point, it wouldn’t help to stress. Pushing the car further than its current 90 km/h top speed would most probably result in something breaking or flying off. I was forced to relax and enjoy myself in every situation.

Every ride, no matter how short, felt like an adventure, a real road trip. Each time I arrived at my destination, I was overcome with gratitude for having accomplished a magnificent feat.

On the streets I was instantly respected. I would pull up to traffic lights next to the latest luxury cars in elite places like Bantry Bay, and have the driver wind down his window to tell me how much he loved my car. When I’d ask them to swap, they would chuckle and zoom off while I tried not to stall.

We also received major street “cred” within the more alternative communities. This came in most useful when working on a documentary with the Ocean View Spinners, a community who passionately (and illegally) spun their cars until their tyres burst. I eventually realised it was safe to park inside the actual spinning parking lot,  and upon seeing Tina for the first time, their perception of me shifted. Even though I refused their offers to spin her, I became one of them.

I was invited to an event in a township in Paarl to shoot one of their sessions. When we met at sunrise, their car was too full to take me, as it was a big family affair. The young pit crew boys fought over who would join me in my car for the journey, and eventually all piled in. Their excitement and pride of just being a passenger in Tina filled me with an ovewhelming sense of gratitude as we cruised past the grannies of Fish Hoek main road. A white boy driving while they hung out the window, hooting and hollering to their rap music blaring from a portable speaker.

At the Lavender Hill traffic lights, a notorious crime hotspot, the fun spluttered out along with the engine. Dead. In the worst place possible. Literally a bright yellow sitting duck with doors that couldn’t lock, and a boot full of camera gear. Even though they were the pit crew for the spin car, they were youngsters, and didn’t have any tools or the right knowledge. Internal panic kicked in as I ran through unrealistic solutions in my head. My internal spinning was interrupted by someone pulling in behind us. Sweating, I reached for the locking mechanism that didn’t exist on this model. Hijacking clearly wasn’t a problem in 1969 either It was a member of the Ocean View spinners convoy and most importantly, a mechanic.

They all crowded into the bonnet and fiddled until she begrudgingly returned to life. A few hundred metres of relief, before another cut out. Another stressed session of heads crammed together and hundreds of theories thrown around before we were back on our way.

During the event in Paarl, I was so overwhelmed by the deafening sound and smell of the cars being whipped around the “pitch”, that I completely forgot about my own car troubles. As the sun began to dip, it was advised that we leave the township and start the long drive home. Tina was towed out in amongst the traffic jam of exhausted spin cars and we started the painful process of resuscitation. The Spinners were just as tired as the cars, but they kept their patience with the old lady. An eventual tow-start and I was instructed to not let her cut out, whatever I do. No stops allowed on the hour long journey home.

Night shortly fell, and as we rattled along the road, one of the headlight fuses bumped out of place. The two headlights in their full glory hardly lit Tina’s path, now we were reduced to a single headlight. I couldn’t risk stopping to re-adjust it as I was sure she would cut out wherever she rested. I tuned out the passengers as they animately debated the events of the day, and zoned into the sound of her unhappy engine. We had lost the rest of the convoy on the highway, and this time I didn’t even want to contemplate what would happen if we broke down in the middle of nowhere in the dark. I stressed us the whole way back to Ocean View, and as soon as we turned into the road and Tina saw our destination, she cut out.

This time she was done for the day, and nothing would bring her back to life. After everything she had been through that day, she had to spend the night in Ocean View. I got a lift home from the spinning crew, and arriving without a car, and a black face full of tyre particles, I wasn’t quite sure how to explain the day to my family. “Good, thanks” had to do.

After a few weeks of rehabilitation, Tina was returned by a mechanic in Ocean View but still wouldn’t run properly. For more than a month she sat in the winter rain, while I desperately tried to figure out what parts she needed, and from where I could source them. Because she was so old, it was difficult to find someone that understood her.

She sat there limp and lifeless. My only form of freedom in those lockdown months, dead without much hope.

I eventually found the part that would get her moving and to Uncle Wasief, the world’s most reliable mechanic. He delivered the news that it had finally come to the crucial moment we had both been expecting: Very soon, I had to either let her go, or give her a complete makeover.

He fixed her up as best as he could until then, and we were temporarily back in action.

That day, I made a promise to her to give her the love she needed. I wouldn’t just take from her, but would listen to her requests.

I had all the windows and seats fixed, all the little odds and ends that I had previously dismissed as “character” and saved the quoted amount for a full restoration. She would be booked in at the end of January.

Over the howl of the wind though the holes, the disappointing sound of the portable speaker’s battery dying, brought me back to Renske, and our current journey to the wine lands As we arrived in Franschhoek, I think we both let out a secret sigh of relief, happy that we had made the right choice after all.

After a peaceful week of unnaturally green grass and  far too much bootlegged wine, it was time to return to the city, reality, and the new year. As usual we were running late. This time for the last available Covid test appointment before Renske flew to Kenya for a job. If Tina travelled at full speed with no stops, we could just make it to the appointment on time.

The impressively spacious boot, as well as every other surface of the back seat, was crammed to full capacity We had both of our lives packed into the car: Camera gear, laptops, and weeks worth of clothing.

Driving down the first hill and taking in the beauty of the passing vineyards one last time, Renske abruptly turned to me: “Hey man, I think your car is smoking”.

This wasn’t completely unusual, and I attempted to sniff a few times with my hay fever impaired nose. A few metres later the engine cut out completely. She’d done many strange things, but this was certainly out of character for the old gal. We sat in silence, and heard the usually soothing sound of crackling flames, confusingly out of place on a sweaty 30 degree day.

The smell of smoke quickly formed a grey cloud as I ran around to the bonnet, lifting it to reveal a healthy fire. Right in the middle of my engine bay.

“Uhhhmmm…”

Renske hopped out as my brain struggled to compute the next step.

The only knowledge I have of burning cars is from action movies, where they quickly explode in a ball of fire. The passengers are generally running away, or flying through the air in slow motion. Sometimes both. Not interested in the flying option, we started to grab all our bags, and run them up the hill.

During each frantic trip, we tried to figure out which bags were the most important, as we took them higher and higher. If we can only grab a few bags before it explodes, what do we take? My beach umbrella rolled down the hill and my toothbrush flew through the air as unzipped bags vomited our lives out.

“Tao, your laundry!”

Your mind gets a bit muddled under that life or death pressure, and you start to ask yourself important questions about attachment. I was aware that Renske kept running back for random things that seemed unnecessary, yet I couldn’t help worrying about Sunny, the dashboard Hula girl.

After the toothbrush was successfully rescued, Renske remembered that her laptop was right in the front near the flames. Without a second thought, I sprinted to the car and grabbed it. As a video editor, my fear of losing saved work will always be far, far greater than potential death of any form.

We eventually sweated our hundreds of bags to the top of the hill and we stood to truly take it all in. It really was a beautiful sight that I will never forget. There was not a breath of wind on the perfect summer day. Plumes of smoke billowed out of the bright yellow car, framed by lines of vineyards and a perfectly still lake. Not a single part of me could feel sad while taking in such a surreal scene. The sight of this paradoxical beauty was enhanced by the anticipation of it exploding, and lighting up the nearby crops. Realising that this was not the ideal way to thank the farm owner for the lovely stay, I quickly called her up.

“Hi Ginny, quite a strange one, but my car is on fire. Ya… my car…. We were driving and it lit up…… Ya….. I was wondering if there was any chance you could please call the fire department?”

A few moments later, Francois the farm manager roared past. He barely parked before sprinting towards the burning car, wielding a fire extinguisher in each hand. In the shock, I had forgotten that I was a photographer, and I quickly grabbed my camera, and ran to join him. I was now filled with a different sense of urgency: to capture the tragedy.

A few photos, yet still no explosion as Francois and the fire extinguishers quickly snuffed out the flames. The dodgy wiring in the bonnet had reacted to some leaked oil, and everything in the engine bay was toast. The interior, which was the only part of her that hadn’t fallen apart in our love affair, was completely untouched. During her last dashboard hula dance, Sunny’s dress had been partly undone, yet not entirely removed by the flames. Her dignity was proudly intact as she obliviously continued to play her ukulele in amongst the smoke.

Once the curious farm workers cleared off, and the insurance company was notified, I found myself sitting alone with Tina’s burnt carcass in the shade of the vineyard.

Strangely enough, the only thing that came to my muddled mind was regret that we didn’t ever have sex in her extremely comfortable back seat.

Nothing could have prepared me for the many life lessons learnt by owning a classic car as my daily runner.

It’s amazing how adaptable we are as humans, and what we can overcome for love. Broken window? No problem, open the other one. It’s just how it was.

Their age allows you to understand and accept their imperfections, and this understanding leads to love and compassion.

As we all struggle to come to terms with our own constantly changing and ageing bodies, would it be possible to treat ourselves with the same level of compassion?

I was snapped out of my reverie by the tattooed tow truck drivers from Bellville arriving. A quick elbow bump and signature, and they winched her onto a flatbed truck.

I watched as she was towed away on her last ever journey; a burnt chunk of bright yellow metal to everyone she passed.

If only they knew.

Dear old Tina the Cortina . My friend, saviour, teacher and true love.

[jeichanhaka]

The Robbed That Smiles

Chapter One: The Beginning

Schhh...Clink!

The sound of the wrist irons being clamped down echoed in the hotel foyer, silencing the mischief god’s mirthful retelling of the latest trick he’d pulled. A moment passed and then another, before either Loki or the guests he’d been regaling reacted. The latter’s response was to sidle away uncomfortably after a minute, while the former simply frowned at his older brother.

“Really?” Loki raised an eyebrow and sighed, automatically testing the irons clamped to his wrists. It was unlikely, but part of him hoped that the handcuffs were fake and that this was the set up to some elaborate prank. After all Midgard’s yearly mischief day was approaching and Thor’s human friends kept insisting on including the Asgardians in Midgardian traditions. “What have I done now?”

“Don’t.” Spoke Thor, shaking his head and sighing exasperated at his brother. “You know why.”

Loki contemplated for a moment, before shaking his head. “Can’t say that I do. Perhaps you can enlighten me to what I’ve done wrong this time, brother?” The mischief god asked, following along beside his brother as Thor led him towards the hotel doors. “Last time it was shouting ‘fire!’ in that building with the seats and large screen and the puffy corn.”

“Popcorn.” Thor muttered, correcting his brother’s word choice out of habit. Ever since Asgard was destroyed and the Asgardians had to resettle on Earth, Thor found himself being teacher and guide to his people. Such that he corrected his brother without thinking.

Loki scowled, tensing at being treated like an ignorant child at lessons. “I knew it was called that.”

Thor rolled his eyes, leading his brother to the Avengers transport van that had over the past few years been used to transport Loki more than anyone else. One or two of the Avengers had even cheekily dubbed it the ‘Loki Apprehension Vehicle,’ going so far as to paint those words onto the van. Until Loki, apprehended for some misdemeanor level of mischief, had noticed and quipped about going to the ‘Lav.’ With a straight face.

It took a moment and reread for Stark to have the van logo changed back to its previous one. It took over a year for Loki to get tired of the joke - especially with how it annoyed certain of the Avengers. Thor was one of those least affected, though mostly because it reminded him of how his brother used to be as a child. Before envy twisted him. Sure, even as a child Loki used to do things like disguise himself as a snake and stab Thor in some misguided game, but his younger brother had done so for laughs. Laughs and attention, rather than to cause any real harm.

“How was I to know it was against Midgardian laws? You didn’t even know.” Loki continued, referring to an occasion seven months back when the mischief god had yelled ‘fire’ in a crowded cinema. That prank had escalated quickly, very quickly and if it hadn’t been due to Stark helping to negotiate community service and a fine, Loki would’ve been exiled from another Midgardian country. (The first being Norway where the displaced Asgardians had settled, the second being the UK. Then China. He’d been unofficially exiled from New Asgard since his first week on Earth.)

“This isn’t about the cinema incident.” Thor said after pushing Loki onto the back passenger seat of the van.

“I know.” Loki muttered, taking one look at Banner already sitting in the seat behind the driver’s and sat down. In the middle seat, knowing from previous experience that his brother would be sitting on the other side, preventing him from reaching either door. “If it were, you’d also be on the hook. You ‘encouraged’ that prank according to the Midgardian judge when you failed to discourage me shouting ‘fire’ when only you, I, and the Warriors Three were in the cinema.”

“....” Thor frowned, rubbing his forehead above his eyepatch, a headache starting to pulse.

“You encouraged that?” Banner questioned, looking over at Thor.

Though all the Avengers knew about the cinema prank incident, only Stark and Rogers knew that Thor had been deemed partially at fault. Or that the Warriors Three had also been charged same as Loki, having encouraged the mischief by laughing along with the prankster; only stopping when Midgardians ended up hurt in their panicked rush outside. Their punishment had been being sent back to New Asgard and being forbidden to travel outside it for six months a piece. The Midgardian judge had wanted to do the same with Loki, but couldn’t due to Loki having no ‘home country’ other than the US at the time. (Thankfully that judge hadn’t known of Loki’s Jotunn heritage, otherwise the Midgardians may have demanded the mischief god sent to Jotunheim.)

“I...didn’t know it was…”

“Illegal? Wrong? Potentially dangerous?” Banner said, attention focused on Thor. The thunder god frowned but said nothing, offering no excuse. Banner sighed and shook his head. “I’m starting to suspect Loki is not the only one at fault for his behavior.”

“I’m right here.” Loki growled, eyes gleaming with annoyance. “Mind including me in your conversation which clearly involves me?” There was a pause, during which Banner glared at Loki wordlessly. The mischief god gulped, remembering his previous encounters with the man and his ‘green guy’ alter-ego. “...you’re not still annoyed from that prank last week?”

“Of course not. Like I’d be annoyed you created an illusion of the city being destroyed and making me think I did it.” Banner spat sarcastically.

“I…” Loki fumbled over what to say, his first instinct was to say it was just a prank and that Banner should lighten up. That instinct was curtailed by a survival one and the painful memory of going up against the other guy. “I apologize and will not do that again, you have my word.”

Banner just gave Loki a look, one that screamed ‘yeah, right’ but also held the threat of ‘you better not.’ Sensing the hostility, the memory of being crushed by the ‘other guy’ playing in his subconscious, Loki turned to his brother. At least Thor knew his sense of humor and mischief, and while his brother could beat him senseless in a fight, Thor wouldn’t kill him over a prank.

“So...care to tell me what I’ve done this time to be transported in this l….”

“Don’t even dare call it the ‘lav.’” Came Spark’s voice from the front of the van through the video-radio dashboard. In order to be able to curtail Loki’s antics whenever the mischief maker went too far, while also maintaining enough Avengers at the ready in case of true hostiles, Stark had fitted the van with self and remote driving capabilities.

“...lovely vehicle?” Loki asked, smirking at getting the playboy billionaire to call the van by the short-lived moniker. “I assume something serious if you’re sending the Ban-Hammer.” He quipped, gesturing from Banner to Thor as he spoke. His eyes got a more mischievous gleam to them when someone on Stark’s end laughed.

“Loki….” Thor sighed and rubbed the skin around his eyepatch, starting to lose his battle against the headache pulsing there. “You can’t seriously not know why you’re in trouble.”

“Because of a prank.” Loki replied flippantly, stating the obvious, and earning groans and eyerolls in response. “I’d just like to know which….” He fell silent as the direction the van was heading clicked, and a smug, mischievous grin appeared on his face. It became more pronounced the closer they got to their destination and the enormous statue.

“That. That is why.” Thor scowled, pointing towards the Statue of Liberty. Or what was supposed to be the Statue of Liberty, but was now a gigantic statue of Loki.

“Oh...that.” Loki drawled, keeping his grin subdued as he spoke. “Wonder how that got there.”

“Very funny.” Banner muttered, not at all amused.

“Care to explain why you replaced Lady Liberty with a statue of yourself?” Stark asked through the video-radio dashboard.

“...I look better?”

“As a statue? Yes, I am starting to think you would be better as just a statue.” Stark retorted, the last of his patience fizzing out. His thinly disguised threat causing Thor to protest in defense of his brother. “So do a lot of people down here in Washington. I’ve been informed that if you don’t fix this in the next 30 minutes, you’re going to be spending the rest of your life in a subterranean base in Antarctica.”

“That’s one of Midgard’s polar caps, right?”

“Yeah. And I already informed the president you’d be able to survive there easily, Frosty.”

Loki glowered, his good humor gone at the nickname born from the avenger learning of his Frost Giant heritage. Taking a few more moments to weigh his options, including one in which he eliminated the billionaire and took over the avengers, Loki shrugged and lifted his bound wrists. “Fine. Take these off and I’ll get to it.”

“No. Spell comes off first, then cuffs.”

Loki laughed uncomfortably. “What spell? My magic’s dampened.” He showed his forearms, indicating the iron cuffs, which had been made to curtail his magic.

“Wha…DON’T TELL ME YOU ACTUALLY REPLACED THE FUCKIN’ STATUE OF LIBERTY WITH AN ACTUAL FUCKIN’ STATUE OF YOURSELF!!!!”

“Of course not.” Loki replied, calming Stark down a mite and smirking when he heard Rogers chastising Stark about his language. “My statue stands regally above all. It’s not doing anything so vulgar as ‘fucking.’”

“Loki!” Thor gaped at his brother, his head pounding like all the armies of the dead were stomping around in his skull. “You….”

“You FUCKIN’ idiot!” Stark hollered. “Thor, I know Loki’s your brother, but I am going to build the strongest fucking prison and drop him into the ocean. Or a volcano.”

“Loki. Come on. Undo your spell.”

“It’s not a spell.” Loki replied, calmly. Once more showing the iron cuffs around his wrists. He looked at Thor, asking him wordlessly to take off the shackles. “Thor. Brother. I won’t be able to restore the statue in 30 minutes. I can cast an illusion spell to make it seem restored though. At least until it is.”

Thor ground his teeth, about ready to deny Loki the opportunity to fix the prank so the mischief god would have to suffer the consequences. In the end he sighed and unlocked the cuffs. “Fine. But you’re not going anywhere until the statue is actually restored.”

“All right.” Said Loki, already waving his hand, turning the statue of him back into Lady Liberty. Seeing this Thor sighed in relief, his headache a bit less biting and Banner visually relaxed, leaning back in his seat. “A bit dull. But if the Midgardians prefer it…” The mischief god shrugged, the next second teleporting from the van before either his brother or Banner could react.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Stephen Strange frowned, one of the ancient one’s forbidden tomes laid open on the table. Quietly he read it, aided in understanding the archaic script by his photographic memory and experience with the other tomes. His magic was also a boon for reading this particular book - although written in sanskrit script, the language was odd, as though it was written in code. Or some obtuse form of poetry and metaphor.

On top of that, the text itself kept changing. Whenever he wasn’t looking directly at a word or sentence, it seemed to exist as a jumbled mess of multiple words. Like some kind of literary schrodinger’s cat. His magic helped to slow the jumble, so that the constant changing of words didn’t overwhelm his peripheral vision, or give him a headache. Though he couldn’t shake the suspicion that he was missing out on a lot by doing so. This book was one that required manual reading in order to truly absorb its knowledge, it was regrettable that he didn’t have enough time to study it at leisure.

‘Well, that isn’t entirely true.’ Strange thought and glanced towards the display holding the Eye of Agamotto. He considered briefly using the Infinity Stone’s time magic on the tome, but dismissed the idea. Even if the use of time magic wasn’t dangerous, he suspected that reversing or pausing time on the schrodinger-esque script wouldn’t give him the effect he wanted. It could even backfire.

Ttrrring!

The alarm trilled through the Sanctum, pulling Strange’s attention away from the tome. The sound indicating the intrusion of a non-Sanctum cleared sorcerer into the building, albeit one that wasn’t necessarily hostile. That alarm was much different and made to be silent except to Sanctum resident wizards.

Brow furrowing, Strange opened a magic window beside him to check on who his visitor was - and immediately rolled his eyes. Not even bothering to close the ancient tome with the schrodinger text, he teleported Loki to the library. Right across the table.

“Wh….” The mischief god scowled, barely able to stop himself from falling face forward on the hardwood floor. Even though he’d expected it the moment he entered the building, being teleported by Doctor Strange’s magic was disorienting. Something Loki suspected was done purposely to annoy him. Or perhaps as payback over when he’d attacked New York years ago. “You don’t have to do this every time.”

“I disagree. Just last week you tried ‘borrowing’ one of the books in the forbidden section of the library. And that was after you asked to ‘look at’ the Eye of Agamotto.” Strange crossed his arms and beheld the trickster with a piercing gaze. “If it wasn’t for your brother vouching for you, I’d block you from even touching the Sanctum door, let alone entering through it.”

Loki scowled and rolled his eyes, grumbling at the acknowledgment that his brother was the reason Strange tolerated him in the Sanctum library. Strange simply continued gazing at the mischief god, his expression bored and also highly observant.

“I assume you’re here to lay low while your brother and Stark smooth things over after your most recent bout of mischief.” The wizard drawled and with a wave of his hand, blocked off access to the more dangerous and powerful books in the library. Only the more innocuous volumes were left accessible to the trickster’s peruse.

“Seriously.” Muttered Loki, not surprised but still annoyed by Strange hoarding away most of the interesting parts of the collection. “There’s no need to treat me like a child that may accidentally burn the house down.”

“I know.” Countered Strange. “I’m treating you like an adult who may deliberately burn the house down and call it a prank.” He waited, barely reacting to the glower Loki gave; the next moment the mischief god shrugged and took one of the remaining books from its shelf.

“I don’t know why you bother. It’s highly unlikely that the Libraries on Asgard didn’t have the equivalent or superior volumes on their shelves. Thus I already know all this ‘dangerous information’ you’re trying to keep from me.” Loki mumbled, skim reading through the book in his hands. His pretense of indifference didn’t fool Strange, who noticed the mischief god side-glancing over at his own open book.

“If that’s what you think, you’re free to check out the city library.” Strange retorted, returning his attention to the forbidden volume in front of him. “But I assume the people of New York won’t be too happy seeing you after today’s statue switcheroo. And yes, I know about it.”

Loki started to respond but then just shrugged, and sat down against the shelf, returning to his book. It may have been more becoming to sit at a table or desk, but he generally preferred reading in a more relaxed position. “...what did you think?”

“Of what?”

“Me beating you to it.”

Stephen Strange blinked and closed the book he was reading, turning his attention back to the trickster. “You’re saying you switched the Statue of Liberty with a statue of yourself, just to throw a wrench into my and Wong’s similar plan for an April’s Fools Day prank?”

Loki nodded. “Yeah.”

Strange groaned, and gaped at Loki as though the mischief god was the strangest and most foolish being he’d met. “You do realize that April first is two whole months away?!”

Loki shrugged. “So? It’s a Midgardian tradition I can wholeheartedly get behind. That and their Autumn tricks and treats holiday.”

The human sorcerer thought a moment, about to correct the mischief god and his misunderstanding, but instead shrugged and returned to his ancient tome. It wasn’t his job to explain to the god why pulling an April Fool’s Day prank before the actual day was terrible and bound not to be given leeway. His job was simply to protect the Earth, and so far as Thor’s brother wasn’t planning to or had caused actual harm, he was content to focus on actual threats.

The primary one being the being or beings behind the uncovering of the Infinity Stones in recent years, and more importantly why whoever they were hadn’t made a move in years. That was why he currently was pouring over the ancient tome, trying to pin down its schrodinger script and to make sense of its metaphors.

It had, on his initial skim through, mentioned the stones. But try as he did to pinpoint which page it’d appeared on, Strange couldn’t find the mention. He could conjure it in his thoughts thanks to his photographic memory, but the actual page was gone. Like it had never existed. That rankled the human sorcerer more than the inactivity of whatever beings had maneuvered the Infinity Stones into the Avengers’ paths.

“Mandel ad Infinium.” Loki muttered, leaning over the table and the book Strange was reading. His own eyes scanning over the pages and narrowing in interest at the fluctuating text, part of which he’d read aloud. His reading of the script was much different than the human sorcerer’s and in the back of his thoughts sparked a memory of an Asgardian text he’d read as a child. One about an artifact that changed form often but was mostly seen as either tapestry or tome, with text that was never the same on subsequent readings. “This book…”

“W….” Strange shut the book and glared at the mischief god, wondering how Loki got so close without him noticing. His intense focus on the ancient text was probably to blame. “Go read one of the other books.” He gestured towards the bookshelves, essentially shooing the mischief god away.

Loki simply gave Strange a look that said ‘you did not just tell me what to do,’ although with a bit more attitude. Rather than saying anything, the mischief god grabbed for the book, managing to touch the cover before Strange could warp him away using portal magic.

Brrrclasssh! Bbrrtoomm!

An explosive crashing sound rocked through the building, knocking the book from either man’s reach as well as throwing the two sorcerers across the room. Following the first shockwave came similarly powerful tremors whose origin points were widely scattered across the city and outside it.

“Shit.” Strange muttered, pulling himself up while Loki uttered similar curses in both English and Asgardian. The tap of footsteps approaching caused both of them to tense and ready themselves for an attack. Stephen Strange in order to defend the city, and Loki for self-preservation.

The owner of the footsteps scoffed as another shockwave rippled through the building, knocking the two sorcerers off balance again. Long enough for her to pick up the ancient tome and skim through it, noting that it was her target.

“Put that back. This isn’t a lending library.” Strange quipped as Loki lunged at the interloper with knives drawn, and he opened a portal to grab the book back. The human sorcerer’s eyes widened when his fingers grasped empty air, passing through the book. That same second, Loki halted his lunge and turned his attack quickly towards a space five feet towards the left where the thief stood.

“Illusions? You really think you’ll trick me with such paltry magic?!” The mischief god laughed, seeming about to strike the other when he ‘disappeared,’ showing off his own illusion magic. He then appeared behind what at first glance seemed to be empty space, but quickly proved to be otherwise as he pressed the blade of one of his knives against the thief’s throat. “I’m Loki, of Asgard. Master of….”

“Loki? Your name’s Loki?” The thief asked, raising an eyebrow and ignoring Strange taking back the ancient tome. All her attention was focused on the god of mischief, as though the damage to the building and her brief bout against them were afterthoughts. “Child of Laufey?”

Loki scowled at the reference to the father who abandoned him. “Only biologically.” He spat, before referring himself as Odinson and god of mischief. “Anyway, if you know I am, you must also know who my brother and his friends are. You and whoever sent you won’t get away with this attack.”

“....” The thief didn’t reply, a peculiar expression on her face. As though digesting information that was difficult and befuddling. Before either sorcerer could say anything, she burst out laughing. The sort of laughter that follows a self-deprecating joke or gallows humor. She muttered, through her laughter. “It was a dimensional rift. Dimensional.”

“Is this a joke to you?” Strange approached, his expression one of bewildered anger as he gestured towards the damage inside and outside the building. “You just destroyed a massive amount of the city and you’re laughing?”

“Wha...oh.” The thief shrugged and gave a quick wave with her hand. Immediately the damage to the building and city outside vanished, to the astonishment to both men. The only part that remained damaged was the wall, the table the two men crashed into, and a few of the bookshelves. “There. Better?”

“Wh….”

“You cast an illusion over the entire city?” Loki asked through clenched teeth, part impressed and part annoyed that he hadn’t realized it sooner. He immediately grabbed the thief more firmly and pressed his knife tighter against her neck, both reactions the result of wondering if she was an illusion.

“Hey. It’s cool. I’m not going anywhere.” The thief replied, tensing as the knife blade nipped at her skin. “And yes. It was pretty much an illusion. Took a lot fucking out of me, too.”

“All right.” Strange muttered, brimming with a mix of annoyance, impatience and indignation. Within just a motion or two of his hands, he bound the thief with magic binds around her hands and feet. He further secured her above an open portal in the floor at her feet, ready to drop her in an endless pit at the very first attempt at escape. “Who are you? Who sent you? And why are they after the Og Infinium tome?”

The thief grinned, giving another terse laugh. “No one sent me. I thought to use the book to get home.” She paused and swallowed back another chuckle. “As for who I am…” She glanced towards Loki, the mischief god scowling annoyed at Strange easily taking the thief from him. “...you’re not going to believe me.”

“Try me.” Strange replied, glaring at the thief.

The thief in response simply pointed towards Loki.

“Why are you pointing to me?” Loki blinked, confused but also immediately noting the mistrust rising in the human sorcerer’s eyes. He bristled and shook his head. “No. I have nothing to do with this woman or her attempt to steal that book. I….”

“That’s not what I meant, quim.” The thief scowled at Strange, her voice more menacing without laughter. “I am my universe’s version of him.”

“...Come again?” Strange gaped at the thief, while Loki stared wide-eyed at the woman, searching for evidence of her lying. He blinked and gave his own breathy laugh when he detected no sign of deception.

The thief narrowed her eyes. “Name’s Lokki. Goddess of Mischief, last Jotunn, and should be ruler of Asgard, Midgard, and the rest of the Nine Realms.” She cocked her head to the side, her sea-hue eyes glaring at the human sorcerer.

0000000000

A/N: I hope you like this. It’s my first MCU fanfic.

As I’m unsure of how to quickly differentiate Loki from female Loki that doesn’t require the constant description of gender except by tweaking the spelling of the name, I opted to use Lokki to refer to the female. (Both spellings are to be pronounced the same, it’s just to allow those reading this to be able to quickly discern which is which.)

[bellboy905]

Trump now fancies himself a “wartime president.” How is his war going? By the end of March, the coronavirus had killed more Americans than the 9/11 attacks. By the first weekend in April, the virus had killed more Americans than any single battle of the Civil War... On the present trajectory, it will kill, by late April, more Americans than Vietnam. Having earlier promised that casualties could be held near zero, Trump now claims he will have done a “very good job” if the toll is held below 200,000 dead.

[...]

That the pandemic occurred is not Trump’s fault. The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault. The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s fault. That states are bidding against other states for equipment... is Trump’s fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump’s fault too. Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault again. 

[...]

For three years, Trump has blathered and bluffed and bullied his way through an office for which he is utterly inadequate. But sooner or later, every president must face a supreme test... that cannot be evaded by blather and bluff and bullying. That test has overwhelmed Trump... He is failing. He will continue to fail. And Americans are paying for his failures.

The coronavirus emerged in China in late December. The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak on January 3. The first... person known to have succumbed to COVID-19... in the United States died on February 29. The 100th died on March 17. By March 20, New York City alone had confirmed 5,600 cases. Not until March 21, the day the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services placed its first large-scale order for N95 masks, did the White House begin marshaling a national supply chain to meet the threat in earnest. 

[...]

Those were the weeks when testing hardly happened, because there were no kits. Those were the weeks when tracing hardly happened, because there was little testing. Those were the weeks when isolation did not happen, because the president and his administration insisted that the virus was under control. Those were the weeks when supplies were not ordered, because nobody in the White House was home to order them. Those lost weeks placed the United States on the path to the worst outbreak of the coronavirus in the developed world.

[...]

Through the early weeks of the pandemic, when so much death and suffering could still have been prevented or mitigated, Trump... made two big wagers. He bet that the virus could somehow be prevented from entering the United States by travel restrictions. And he bet that, to the extent that the virus had already entered the United States, it would burn off as the weather warmed. Those two assumptions led him to conclude that not much else needed to be done. 

[...]

On January 18, Trump (on a golf excursion in Palm Beach, Florida) cut off his health secretary’s telephoned warning of gathering danger to launch into a lecture about vaping... Two days later, the first documented U.S. case was confirmed... Yet even at that late hour, Trump continued to think of the coronavirus as something external to the United States... In a January 22 interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, he promised:

We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.

Trump would later complain that he had been deceived by the Chinese. “I wish they could have told us earlier about what was going on inside,” he said on March 21. “We didn’t know about it until it started coming out publicly.”

If Trump truly was so trustingly ignorant as late as January 22, the fault was again his own. The Trump administration had cut U.S. public-health staff operating inside China... from 47 in January 2017 to 14 by 2019, an important reason it found itself dependent on less-accurate information from the World Health Organization. In July 2019, the Trump administration defunded the position that embedded an epidemiologist inside China’s own disease-control administration, again obstructing the flow of information to the United States.

[...]

On January 31, the Trump administration at last did something: it announced restrictions on air travel to and from China by non-U.S. persons. This... has become Trump’s most commonly proffered defense of his actions. “We’ve done an incredible job because we closed early,” Trump said on February 27. “We closed those borders very early, against the advice of a lot of professionals, and we turned out to be right. I took a lot of heat for that,” he repeated on March 4. 

[...]

Because Trump puts so much emphasis on this point, it’s important to stress that none of this is true. Trump did not close the borders early. In fact, he did not truly close them at all... The ban applied only to foreign nationals who had been in China during the previous 14 days, and included 11 categories of exceptions. Since the restrictions took effect, nearly 40,000 passengers have entered the United States from China, subjected to inconsistent screenings.

[...]

A few days after the restrictions went into effect... Trump’s impeachment trial ended with his acquittal in the Senate. The president, though, turned his energy not to... the virus, but to the demands of his own ego. The president’s top priority through February... was to exact retribution from truth-tellers in the impeachment fight... Late on the evening of April 3, Trump fired... Michael Atkinson, the official who had forwarded the Ukraine whistleblower complaint to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, as the law required. 

[...]

Intentionally or not, Trump’s campaign of payback against his perceived enemies in the impeachment battle sent a warning to public-health officials: keep your mouth shut. If anybody missed the message, the firing of Captain Brett Crozier... for speaking honestly about the danger facing his sailors was a reminder... The president’s lies must not be contradicted. And because the president’s lies change constantly, it’s impossible to predict what might contradict him.

[...]

Throughout the crisis, the top priority of the president, and of everyone who works for the president, has been the protection of his ego. Americans have become sadly used to Trump’s blustery self-praise and his insatiable appetite for flattery. During the pandemic, this psychological deformity mutated into a deadly strategic vulnerability for the United States.

For three-quarters of his presidency, Trump has taken credit for the economic expansion that began under... Barack Obama in 2010. That expansion accelerated in 2014, just in time to deliver real prosperity over the past three years. The harm done by Trump’s own initiatives, and especially his trade wars, was masked by that continued growth. The economy Trump inherited became his all-purpose answer to his critics. Did he break laws, corrupt the Treasury, appoint cronies, and tell lies? So what? Unemployment was down, the stock market up.

Suddenly, in 2020, the rooster that had taken credit for the sunrise faced the reality of sunset. He could not bear it.

Underneath all the denial and self-congratulation, Trump seems to have glimpsed the truth. The clearest statement of that knowledge was expressed on February 28... at a rally in South Carolina... Somebody in his orbit seemed to already be projecting 35,000 to 40,000 deaths from the coronavirus... and his answer to that estimate was, “So far, we have lost nobody.” He conceded, “That doesn’t mean we won’t.” But he returned to his happy talk. “We are totally prepared.” And as always, it was the media's fault. “You hear 35 and 40,000 people and we’ve lost nobody and you wonder, the press is in hysteria mode.”

By February 28, it was too late to exclude the coronavirus from the United States. It was too late to test and trace, to isolate the first cases and halt their further spread... It was too late to refill the stockpiles that the Republican Congresses of the Tea Party years had refused to replenish, despite frantic pleas from the Obama administration. It was too late to produce sufficient ventilators in sufficient time.

But... it was still not too late to arrange an orderly distribution of medical supplies to the states, not too late to coordinate with U.S. allies, not too late to close the Florida beaches before spring break, not too late to bring passengers home from cruise lines, not too late to ensure that state unemployment-insurance offices were staffed and ready, not too late for local governments to get funds to food banks, not too late to begin social distancing fast and early. Stay-at-home orders could have been put into effect on March 1, not in late March and early April.

So much time had been wasted by the end of February. So many opportunities had been squandered. But even then, the shock could have been limited. Instead, Trump and his inner circle plunged deeper into two weeks of lies and denial, both about the disease and about the economy... As late as March 9, Trump was still arguing that the coronavirus would be no worse than the seasonal flu... But the facade of denial was already cracking... The overwhelmed president responded by doing what comes most naturally to him at moments of trouble: he shifted the blame to others.

The lack of testing equipment? On March 13, Trump passed that buck to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Obama administration. The White House had dissolved the directorate of the National Security Council responsible for planning for and responding to pandemics? Not me, Trump said... Maybe somebody else in the administration did it, but... “I don’t know anything about it.” Were ventilators desperately scarce? Obtaining medical equipment was the governors’ job... Did Trump delay action until it was far too late? That was the fault of the Chinese government for withholding information... On March 27, Trump attributed his own broken promises about ventilator production to General Motors... Masks, gowns, and gloves were running short only because hospital staff were stealing them, Trump suggested on March 29... Were New Yorkers dying? On April 2, Trump fired off a peevish letter to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer: 

If you spent less time on your ridiculous impeachment hoax, which went haplessly on forever and ended up going nowhere (except increasing my poll numbers), and instead focused on helping the people of New York, then New York would not have been so completely unprepared for the “invisible enemy.”

Trump’s instinct to dodge and blame had devastating consequences for Americans. Every governor and mayor who needed the federal government to take action, every science and medical adviser who hoped to prevent Trump from doing something stupid or crazy, had to reckon with Trump’s psychic needs as their single biggest problem.

[...]

The federal response has been dogged by suspicions of favoritism for political and personal allies of Trump. The District of Columbia has seen its requests denied, while Florida gets everything it asks for. The weeks of... denial and delay have triggered a desperate scramble among states. The Trump administration is allocating some supplies through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but has made the deliberate choice to allow large volumes of crucial supplies to continue to be distributed by commercial firms to their clients... In his panic, Trump is sacrificing U.S. alliances abroad, attempting to recoup his own failure by turning predator. German and French officials accuse the Trump administration of diverting supplies they had purchased to the United States. On April 3, the North American company 3M publicly rebuked the Trump administration for its attempt to embargo medical exports to Canada, where 3M has operated seven facilities for 70 years. Around the world, allies are registering that in an emergency, when it matters most, the United States has utterly failed to lead.

[...]

As the pandemic kills, as the economic depression tightens its grip, Donald Trump has consistently put his own needs first... He has never tried to be president of the whole United States, but at most 46 percent of it, to the extent that serving even the 46 percent has been consistent with his supreme concerns: stealing, loafing, and whining. Now he is not even serving the 46 percent. The people most victimized by his lies and fantasies are the people who trusted him... who harmed themselves to prove their loyalty to Trump. 

[...]

In the past, Americans could at least expect public spirit and civic concern from their presidents. Trump has mouthed the slogan “America first,” but he has never acted on it. It has always been “Trump first.” His business first. His excuses first. His pathetic vanity first.

[...]

He has taken so much that does not belong to him, that was unethical and even illegal for him to take. But responsibility? No, he will not take that. Yet responsibility falls upon Trump, whether he takes it or not. No matter how much he deflects and insults and snivels and whines, this American catastrophe is on his hands and on his head.

[phroyd]

The emails, which Miller sent to the conservative website Breitbart News in 2015 and 2016, showcase the extremist, anti-immigrant ideology that undergirds the policies he has helped create as an architect of Donald Trump’s presidency. These policies include reportedly setting arrest quotas for undocumented immigrants, an executive order effectively banning immigration from five Muslim-majority countries and a policy of family separation at refugee resettlement facilities that the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General said is causing “intense trauma” in children.

In this, the first of what will be a series about those emails, Hatewatch exposes the racist source material that has influenced Miller’s visions of policy. That source material, as laid out in his emails to Breitbart, includes white nationalist websites, a “white genocide”-themed novel in which Indian men rape white women, xenophobic conspiracy theories andeugenics-era immigration laws that Adolf Hitler lauded in “Mein Kampf.”

Hatewatch reviewed more than 900 previously private emails Miller sent to Breitbart editors from March 4, 2015, to June 27, 2016. Miller does not converse along a wide range of topics in the emails. His focus is strikingly narrow – more than 80 percent of the emails Hatewatch reviewed relate to or appear on threads relating to the subjects of race or immigration. Hatewatch made multiple attempts to reach the White House for a comment from Miller about the content of his emails but did not receive any reply.

Miller’s perspective on race and immigration across the emails is repetitious. When discussing crime, which he does scores of times, Miller focuses on offenses committed by nonwhites. On immigration, he touches solely on the perspective of severely limiting or ending nonwhite immigration to the United States. Hatewatch was unable to find any examples of Miller writing sympathetically or even in neutral tones about any person who is nonwhite or foreign-born.

Miller has gained a reputation for attempting to keep his communications secret: The Washington Post reported in August that Miller “rarely puts anything in writing, eschewing email in favor of phone calls.” The Daily Beast noted in July that Miller has recently “cut off regular contact with most of his allies” outside the Trump administration to limit leaks.

Miller used his government email address as an aide to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions in the emails Hatewatch reviewed. He sent the majority of the emails Hatewatch examined before he joined Trump’s campaign in January 2016 and while he was still working for Sessions. Miller also used a personal Hotmail.com address in the emails and did so both before and after he started working for Trump. Hatewatch confirmed the authenticity of Miller’s Hotmail.com address through an email sent from his government address in which he lists it as his future point of contact:

“I am excited to announce that I am beginning a new job as Senior Policy Advisor to presidential candidate Donald J. Trump,” Miller wrote from his government email on Jan. 26, 2016, to an undisclosed group of recipients. “Should you need to reach me, my personal email address is [redacted].”

Katie McHugh, who was an editor for Breitbart from April 2014 to June 2017, leaked the emails to Hatewatch in June to review, analyze and disseminate to the public. McHugh was 23 when she started at Breitbart and also became active in the anti-immigrant movement, frequently rubbing shoulders with white nationalists. McHugh was fired from Breitbart in 2017 after posting anti-Muslim tweets. She has since renounced the far right.

McHugh told Hatewatch that Breitbart editors introduced her to Miller in 2015 with an understanding he would influence the direction of her reporting. For that reason, and because Miller would have regarded her as a fellow traveler of the anti-immigrant movement, McHugh sometimes starts conversations with Miller in the emails, seeking his opinion on news stories. Other times, Miller directly suggests story ideas to McHugh, or tells her how to shape Breitbart’s coverage. Periodically, Miller asks McHugh if he can speak to her by phone, taking conversations offline.

“What Stephen Miller sent to me in those emails has become policy at the Trump administration,” McHugh told Hatewatch.

Miller shares link from white nationalist site

Miller sent a story from the white nationalist website VDARE to McHugh on Oct. 23, 2015, the emails show. White nationalist Peter Brimelow founded VDARE in 1999. The website traffics in the “white genocide” or “great replacement” myth, which suggests that nonwhite people are systematically and deliberately wiping white people off the planet.

McHugh started the email conversation by asking if Hurricane Patricia could drive refugees into the United States. The hurricane battered parts of Central America, Mexico and Texas, and the media heavily covered the storm. Miller replied to her by underscoring the possibility that Mexican survivors of the storm could be given temporary protected status (TPS), a George H.W. Bush-era policy that would enable them to live and work in the United States for a limited stay:

McHugh, Oct. 23, 2015, 6:10 p.m. ET: “This being the worst hurricane ever recorded, what are the chances it wreaks destruction on Mexico and drives a mass migration to the U.S. border?”

Miller, Oct. 23, 2015, 6:12 p.m. ET: “100 percent. And they will all get TPS. And all the ones here will get TPS too. That needs to be the weekend's BIG story. TPS is everything.”

McHugh, Oct. 23, 2015, 6:22 p.m. ET: “Wow. Ok. Is there precedent for this?”

Miller, Oct. 23, 2015, 6:31 p.m. ET: [VDARE link]

The VDARE story by Steve Sailer, an anti-immigration activist who traffics in discredited race science, focused on instances in which the United States offered refugees temporary protected status. The article was posted the same day Miller shared it with McHugh.

In September, the Trump administration denied temporary protected status to residents of the Bahamas fleeing the destruction of Hurricane Dorian despite widespread destruction.

“I don’t want to allow people that weren’t supposed to be in the Bahamas to come into the United States, including some very bad people and some very bad gang members and some very, very bad drug dealers,” Trump said of Bahamians on Sept. 9.

The ethnic makeup of the Bahamas is more than 90% black, according to statistics from the CIA. The administration has also attempted to cut TPS for residents of other countries, including Honduras and Nepal. Sailer mentioned both Honduras and Nepal in the context of TPS in his VDARE story.

Emails show that White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller recommended racist French novel "The Camp of the Saints" to conservative website Breitbart News in 2015.

Miller recommends ‘Camp of the Saints’ to Breitbart

Miller recommended in a Sept. 6, 2015, email that Breitbart write about “The Camp of the Saints,” a racist French novel by Jean Raspail. Notably, “The Camp of the Saints” is popular among white nationalists and neo-Nazis because of the degree to which it fictionalizes the “white genocide” or “great replacement” myth into a violent and sexualized story about refugees.

The novel’s apocalyptic plot centers on a flotilla of Indian people who invade France, led by a nonwhite Indian-born antagonist referred to as the “turd eater” – a character who literally eats human feces. In one section, a white woman is raped to death by brown-skinned refugees. In another, a nationalist character shoots and kills a pro-refugee leftist over his support of race mixing. The white nationalist Social Contract Press plucked the 1973 book from relative obscurity and distributed it in the United States.

At the start of the email chain in which Miller touts the novel, he sends McHugh and Breitbart editor Julia Hahn a National Journal article on Iowans debating immigration at 8:03 p.m. ET on Sept. 1, 2015. McHugh replies:

McHugh, Sept. 1, 2015, 8:49 p.m. ET: “‘Next America.’ We’re being invaded and talked into tolerating it.”

Miller, Sept. 1, 2015, 9:01 p.m. ET: “It’s treated as organic. No mention of voluntary policy which can be shut off.”

Miller returns to the subject of nonwhite immigration on Sept. 6, 2015. He sends McHugh a link to a tweet from conservative pundit David Frum that reads, “Half of all violent crime in Germany committed by ‘foreign youths.’” (Hatewatch reached out to Frum for more context about his tweet but did not receive any response.) McHugh responds to Miller’s email about Frum’s tweet with a follow-up remark about Europe, and Miller sends a link to a Vox.com article suggesting that SAT scores have dropped in part because of the inclusion of more “poor and nonwhite students” than in previous years. Miller then suggests Breitbart take a look at “The Camp of the Saints.”

McHugh, Sept. 6, 2015, 3:34 p.m. ET: “[Breitbart editor] Neil [Munro], Julia [Hahn] and I are going to do a series of stories on [nonwhite SAT scores] to break it down. Neil says it’s easier for people to digest that way and change their minds.”

Miller, Sept. 6, 2015, 3:41 p.m. ET: “On the education angle? Makes sense. Also, you see the Pope saying west must, in effect, get rid of borders. Someone should point out the parallels to Camp of the Saints.”

Hahn wrote a Breitbart story on Sept. 24, 2015, headlined “‘Camp of the Saints’ Seen Mirrored in Pope’s Message.” The article ran 18 days after Miller’s email on the same theme. Hahn is now an aide to Trump.

While “The Camp of the Saints” was relatively obscure then, websites such asVDARE and the white nationalist American Renaissance helped make it a fixture in the white nationalist community. VDARE created an entire searchable tag called “Camp of the Saints.” At the time Miller flagged the book to Breitbart, VDARE had run more than 50 posts under “The Camp of the Saints” tagline, including some referring to Pope Francis’ rhetoric about accepting refugees. Sailer, who authored the VDARE post Miller had shared earlier, ran a story on the pope’s statements about accepting refugees on the same day Miller raised the issue with Breitbart.

Elizabeth Moore, a spokesperson for Breitbart, responded to Hatewatch’s request for comment about Miller's relationship with editors at the website with the following statement:

The SPLC claims to have three- to four-year-old emails, many previously reported on, involving an individual whom we fired years ago for a multitude of reasons, and you now have an even better idea why we fired her. Having said that, it is not exactly a newsflash that political staffers pitch stories to journalists – sometimes those pitches are successful, sometimes not.

It is no surprise to us that the SPLC opposes news coverage of illegal-immigrant crime and believes such coverage is disproportionate, especially when compared to the rest of the media, which often refuse to cover such crimes.

No one in our senior management has read the book, “Camp of the Saints,” but we take The New York Times at their word that it is a “cautionary tale,” and the National Review at theirs that “the central issue of the novel is not race but culture and political principles.”

The Trump administration has said it will cap the number of refugees allowed into the United States at 18,000 in the coming fiscal year, drastically reshaping America’s role as a haven for people fleeing devastation and war. The White House has also said it plans to allow state and local governments to block refugee resettlement in their areas.

Read On ... 

Phroyd

[orbemnews]

Inside Twitter’s Determination to Lower Off Trump SAN FRANCISCO — Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief govt, was working remotely on a non-public island in French Polynesia frequented by celebrities escaping the paparazzi when a telephone name interrupted him on Jan. 6. On the road was Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s high lawyer and security skilled, with an replace from the true world. She mentioned she and different firm executives had determined to lock President Trump’s account, briefly, to stop him from posting statements which may provoke extra violence after a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol that day. Mr. Dorsey was involved in regards to the transfer, mentioned two individuals with information of the decision. For 4 years, he had resisted calls for by liberals and others that Twitter terminate Mr. Trump’s account, arguing that the platform was a spot the place world leaders may communicate, even when their views had been heinous. However he had delegated moderation selections to Ms. Gadde, 46, and often deferred to her — and he did so once more. Mr. Dorsey, 44, didn’t make his misgivings public. The following day, he preferred and shared a number of tweets urging warning in opposition to a everlasting ban of Mr. Trump. Then, over the subsequent 36 hours, Twitter veered from lifting Mr. Trump’s suspension to shutting down his account completely, slicing off the president from a platform he had used to speak, unfiltered, with not simply his 88 million followers however the world. The choice was a punctuation mark on the Trump presidency that instantly drew accusations of political bias and recent scrutiny of the tech trade’s energy over public discourse. Interviews with a dozen present and former Twitter insiders over the previous week opened a window into the way it was made — pushed by a bunch of Mr. Dorsey’s lieutenants who overcame their boss’s reservations, however solely after a lethal rampage on the Capitol. Having lifted the suspension the subsequent day, Twitter monitored the response to Mr. Trump’s tweets throughout the web, and executives briefed Mr. Dorsey that Mr. Trump’s followers had seized on his newest messages to name for extra violence. In a single publish on the various social networking website Parler, members of Twitter’s security group noticed a Trump fan urge militias to cease President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. from getting into the White Home and to combat anybody who tried to halt them. The potential for extra real-world unrest, they mentioned, was too excessive. Twitter was additionally underneath stress from its staff, who had for years agitated to take away Mr. Trump from the service, in addition to lawmakers, tech buyers and others. However whereas greater than 300 staff signed a letter saying Mr. Trump’s account have to be stopped, the choice to bar the president was made earlier than the letter was delivered to executives, two of the individuals mentioned. On Wednesday, Mr. Dorsey alluded to the tensions inside Twitter. In a string of 13 tweets, he wrote that he did “not rejoice or really feel pleasure in our having to ban @realDonaldTrump” as a result of “a ban is a failure of ours finally to advertise wholesome dialog.” However Mr. Dorsey added: “This was the correct determination for Twitter. We confronted a rare and untenable circumstance, forcing us to focus all of our actions on public security.” Mr. Dorsey, Ms. Gadde and the White Home didn’t reply to requests for remark. Since Mr. Trump was barred, a lot of Mr. Dorsey’s considerations in regards to the transfer have been realized. Twitter has been embroiled in a livid debate over tech energy and the businesses’ lack of accountability. Lawmakers similar to Consultant Devin Nunes, a Republican from California, have railed in opposition to Twitter, whereas Silicon Valley enterprise capitalists, First Modification students and the American Civil Liberties Union have additionally criticized the corporate. On the similar time, activists world wide have accused Twitter of following a double customary by slicing off Mr. Trump however not autocrats elsewhere who use the platform to bully opponents. “It is a phenomenal train of energy to de-platform the president of the US,” mentioned Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Legislation Faculty who focuses on on-line speech. “It ought to set off a broader reckoning.” Mr. Trump, who joined Twitter in 2009, was a boon and bane for the corporate. His tweets introduced consideration to Twitter, which generally struggled to draw new customers. However his false assertions and threats on-line additionally induced critics to say the location enabled him to unfold lies and provoke harassment. Lots of Twitter’s greater than 5,400 staff opposed having Mr. Trump on the platform. In August 2019, shortly after a gunman killed greater than 20 individuals at a Walmart in El Paso, Twitter known as a workers assembly to debate how the gunman, in a web-based manifesto, had echoed lots of the views that Mr. Trump posted on Twitter. On the assembly, known as a “Flock Speak,” some staff mentioned Twitter was “complicit” by giving Mr. Trump a megaphone to “canine whistle” to his supporters, two attendees mentioned. The workers implored executives to make adjustments earlier than extra individuals received harm. Over time, Twitter turned extra proactive on political content material. In October 2019, Mr. Dorsey ended all political promoting on the location, saying he anxious such adverts had “vital ramifications that at present’s democratic construction will not be ready to deal with.” However Mr. Dorsey, a proponent of free speech, declined to take down world leaders’ posts, as a result of he thought of them newsworthy. Since Twitter introduced that yr that it will give higher leeway to world leaders who broke its guidelines, the corporate had eliminated their tweets solely as soon as: Final March, it deleted messages from the presidents of Brazil and Venezuela that promoted false cures for the coronavirus. Mr. Dorsey opposed the removals, an individual with information of his pondering mentioned. Capitol Riot Fallout Up to date  Jan. 17, 2021, 2:54 p.m. ET Mr. Dorsey pushed for an in-between answer: appending labels to tweets by world leaders if the posts violated Twitter’s insurance policies. In Could, when Mr. Trump tweeted inaccurate details about mail-in voting, Mr. Dorsey gave the go-ahead for Twitter to begin labeling the president’s messages. After the Nov. 3 election, Mr. Trump tweeted that it had been stolen from him. Inside a couple of days, Twitter had labeled about 34 p.c of his tweets and retweets, in accordance with a New York Instances tally. Then got here the Capitol storming. On Jan. 6, as Congress met to certify the election, Twitter executives celebrated their acquisition of Ueno, a branding and design agency. Mr. Dorsey, who has usually gone on retreats, had traveled to the South Pacific island, mentioned the individuals with information of his location. When Mr. Trump used Twitter to lash out at Vice President Mike Pence and query the election end result, the corporate added warnings to his tweets. Then as violence erupted on the Capitol, individuals urged Twitter and Fb to take Mr. Trump offline totally. That led to digital discussions amongst a few of Mr. Dorsey’s lieutenants. The group included Ms. Gadde, a lawyer who had joined Twitter in 2011; Del Harvey, vice chairman of belief and security; and Yoel Roth, the pinnacle of website integrity. Ms. Harvey and Mr. Roth had helped construct the corporate’s responses to spam, harassment and election interference. The executives determined to droop Mr. Trump as a result of his feedback appeared to incite the mob, mentioned the individuals with information of the discussions. Ms. Gadde then known as Mr. Dorsey, who was not happy, they mentioned. Mr. Trump was not barred utterly. If he deleted a number of tweets that had stoked the mob, there can be a 12-hour cooling-off interval. Then he may publish once more. After Twitter locked Mr. Trump’s account, Fb did the identical. Snapchat, Twitch and others additionally positioned limits on Mr. Trump. However Mr. Dorsey was not offered on a everlasting ban of Mr. Trump. He emailed staff the subsequent day, saying it was necessary for the corporate to stay in keeping with its insurance policies, together with letting a person return after a suspension. Many staff, fearing that historical past wouldn’t look kindly upon them, had been dissatisfied. A number of invoked IBM’s collaboration with the Nazis, mentioned present and former Twitter staff, and began a petition to right away take away Mr. Trump’s account. That very same day, Fb barred Mr. Trump by way of at the very least the top of his time period. However he returned to Twitter that night with a video saying there can be a peaceable transition of energy. By the subsequent morning, although, Mr. Trump was again at it. He tweeted that his base would have a “GIANT VOICE” and that he wouldn’t attend the Jan. 20 inauguration. Twitter’s security group instantly noticed Trump followers, who had been saying the president deserted them, publish about additional unrest, mentioned the individuals with information of the matter. In a Parler message that the protection group reviewed, one person mentioned anybody who opposed “American Patriots” like himself ought to go away Washington or danger bodily hurt through the inauguration. The protection group started drafting an evaluation of the tweets and whether or not they constituted grounds for kicking off Mr. Trump, the individuals mentioned. Round midday in San Francisco that day, Mr. Dorsey known as in for an worker assembly. Some pressed him on why Mr. Trump was not completely barred. Mr. Dorsey repeated that Twitter must be in keeping with its insurance policies. However he mentioned he had drawn a line within the sand that the president couldn’t cross or Mr. Trump would lose his account privileges, individuals with information of the occasion mentioned. After the assembly, Mr. Dorsey and different executives agreed that Mr. Trump’s tweets that morning — and the responses that they had provoked — had crossed that line, the individuals mentioned. The worker letter asking for Mr. Trump’s elimination was later delivered, they mentioned. Inside hours, Mr. Trump’s account was gone, aside from an “Account suspended” label. He tried tweeting from the @POTUS account, which is the official account of the U.S. president, in addition to others. However at each flip, Twitter thwarted him by knocking down the messages. Some Twitter staff, fearing the wrath of Mr. Trump’s supporters, have now set their Twitter accounts to personal and eliminated mentions of their employer from on-line biographies, 4 individuals mentioned. A number of executives had been assigned private safety. Twitter has additionally broadened its crackdown on accounts selling violence. Over the weekend, it eliminated greater than 70,000 accounts that pushed the QAnon conspiracy idea, which posits that Mr. Trump is preventing a cabal of Devil-worshiping pedophiles. On Wednesday, staff gathered nearly to debate the choice to bar Mr. Trump, two attendees mentioned. Some had been grateful that Twitter had taken motion, whereas others had been keen to go away the Trump period behind. Many had been emotional; some cried. That afternoon, Mr. Trump returned once more to Twitter, this time utilizing the official @WhiteHouse account to share a video saying he condemned violence — but in addition denouncing what he known as restrictions on free speech. Twitter allowed the video to stay on-line. An hour later, Mr. Dorsey tweeted his discomfort in regards to the elimination of Mr. Trump’s on-line accounts. It “units a precedent I really feel is harmful: the ability a person or company has over part of the worldwide public dialog,” he wrote. However he concluded, “Every little thing we be taught on this second will higher our effort, and push us to be what we’re: one humanity working collectively.” Supply hyperlink #Cut #Decision #Trump #Twitters

[day0one]

Stephen Miller’s Affinity for White Nationalism Revealed in Leaked Emails           November 12, 2019

In the run-up to the 2016 election, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller promoted white nationalist literature, pushed racist immigration stories and obsessed over the loss of Confederate symbols after Dylann Roof’s murderous rampage, according to leaked emails reviewed by Hatewatch.

The emails, which Miller sent to the conservative website Breitbart News in 2015 and 2016, showcase the extremist, anti-immigrant ideology that undergirds the policies he has helped create as an architect of Donald Trump’s presidency. These policies include reportedly setting arrest quotas for undocumented immigrants, an executive order effectively banning immigration from five Muslim-majority countries and a policy of family separation at refugee resettlement facilities that the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General said is causing “intense trauma” in children.

In this, the first of what will be a series about those emails, Hatewatch exposes the racist source material that has influenced Miller’s visions of policy. That source material, as laid out in his emails to Breitbart, includes white nationalist websites, a “white genocide”-themed novel in which Indian men rape white women, xenophobic conspiracy theories and eugenics-era immigration laws that Adolf Hitler lauded in “Mein Kampf.”

Hatewatch reviewed more than 900 previously private emails Miller sent to Breitbart editors from March 4, 2015, to June 27, 2016. Miller does not converse along a wide range of topics in the emails. His focus is strikingly narrow – more than 80 percent of the emails Hatewatch reviewed relate to or appear on threads relating to the subjects of race or immigration. Hatewatch made multiple attempts to reach the White House for a comment from Miller about the content of his emails but did not receive any reply.

Miller’s perspective on race and immigration across the emails is repetitious. When discussing crime, which he does scores of times, Miller focuses on offenses committed by nonwhites. On immigration, he touches solely on the perspective of severely limiting or ending nonwhite immigration to the United States. Hatewatch was unable to find any examples of Miller writing sympathetically or even in neutral tones about any person who is nonwhite or foreign-born.

Miller has gained a reputation for attempting to keep his communications secret: The Washington Post reported in August that Miller “rarely puts anything in writing, eschewing email in favor of phone calls.” The Daily Beast noted in July that Miller has recently “cut off regular contact with most of his allies” outside the Trump administration to limit leaks.

Miller used his government email address as an aide to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions in the emails Hatewatch reviewed. He sent the majority of the emails Hatewatch examined before he joined Trump’s campaign in January 2016 and while he was still working for Sessions. Miller also used a personal Hotmail.com address in the emails and did so both before and after he started working for Trump. Hatewatch confirmed the authenticity of Miller’s Hotmail.com address through an email sent from his government address in which he lists it as his future point of contact:

“I am excited to announce that I am beginning a new job as Senior Policy Advisor to presidential candidate Donald J. Trump,” Miller wrote from his government email on Jan. 26, 2016, to an undisclosed group of recipients. “Should you need to reach me, my personal email address is [redacted].”

Katie McHugh, who was an editor for Breitbart from April 2014 to June 2017, leaked the emails to Hatewatch in June to review, analyze and disseminate to the public. McHugh was 23 when she started at Breitbart and also became active in the anti-immigrant movement, frequently rubbing shoulders with white nationalists. McHugh was fired from Breitbart in 2017 after posting anti-Muslim tweets. She has since renounced the far right.

McHugh told Hatewatch that Breitbart editors introduced her to Miller in 2015 with an understanding he would influence the direction of her reporting. For that reason, and because Miller would have regarded her as a fellow traveler of the anti-immigrant movement, McHugh sometimes starts conversations with Miller in the emails, seeking his opinion on news stories. Other times, Miller directly suggests story ideas to McHugh, or tells her how to shape Breitbart’s coverage. Periodically, Miller asks McHugh if he can speak to her by phone, taking conversations offline.

“What Stephen Miller sent to me in those emails has become policy at the Trump administration,” McHugh told Hatewatch.

Miller shares link from white nationalist site Miller sent a story from the white nationalist website VDARE to McHugh on Oct. 23, 2015, the emails show. White nationalist Peter Brimelow founded VDARE in 1999. The website traffics in the “white genocide” or “great replacement” myth, which suggests that nonwhite people are systematically and deliberately wiping white people off the planet.

McHugh started the email conversation by asking if Hurricane Patricia could drive refugees into the United States. The hurricane battered parts of Central America, Mexico and Texas, and the media heavily covered the storm. Miller replied to her by underscoring the possibility that Mexican survivors of the storm could be given temporary protected status (TPS), a George H.W. Bush-era policy that would enable them to live and work in the United States for a limited stay:

McHugh, Oct. 23, 2015, 6:10 p.m. ET: “This being the worst hurricane ever recorded, what are the chances it wreaks destruction on Mexico and drives a mass migration to the U.S. border?”

Miller, Oct. 23, 2015, 6:12 p.m. ET: “100 percent. And they will all get TPS. And all the ones here will get TPS too. That needs to be the weekend's BIG story. TPS is everything.”

McHugh, Oct. 23, 2015, 6:22 p.m. ET: “Wow. Ok. Is there precedent for this?”

Miller, Oct. 23, 2015, 6:31 p.m. ET: [VDARE link]

The VDARE story by Steve Sailer, an anti-immigration activist who traffics in discredited race science, focused on instances in which the United States offered refugees temporary protected status. The article was posted the same day Miller shared it with McHugh.

In September, the Trump administration denied temporary protected status to residents of the Bahamas fleeing the destruction of Hurricane Dorian despite widespread destruction.

“I don’t want to allow people that weren’t supposed to be in the Bahamas to come into the United States, including some very bad people and some very bad gang members and some very, very bad drug dealers,” Trump said of Bahamians on Sept. 9.

The ethnic makeup of the Bahamas is more than 90% black, according to statistics from the CIA. The administration has also attempted to cut TPS for residents of other countries, including Honduras and Nepal. Sailer mentioned both Honduras and Nepal in the context of TPS in his VDARE story.

Miller recommends ‘Camp of the Saints’ to Breitbart Miller recommended in a Sept. 6, 2015, email that Breitbart write about “The Camp of the Saints,” a racist French novel by Jean Raspail. Notably, “The Camp of the Saints” is popular among white nationalists and neo-Nazis because of the degree to which it fictionalizes the “white genocide” or “great replacement” myth into a violent and sexualized story about refugees.

The novel’s apocalyptic plot centers on a flotilla of Indian people who invade France, led by a nonwhite Indian-born antagonist referred to as the “turd eater” – a character who literally eats human feces. In one section, a white woman is raped to death by brown-skinned refugees. In another, a nationalist character shoots and kills a pro-refugee leftist over his support of race mixing. The white nationalist Social Contract Press plucked the 1973 book from relative obscurity and distributed it in the United States.

At the start of the email chain in which Miller touts the novel, he sends McHugh and Breitbart editor Julia Hahn a National Journal article on Iowans debating immigration at 8:03 p.m. ET on Sept. 1, 2015. McHugh replies:

McHugh, Sept. 1, 2015, 8:49 p.m. ET: “‘Next America.’ We’re being invaded and talked into tolerating it.”

Miller, Sept. 1, 2015, 9:01 p.m. ET: “It’s treated as organic. No mention of voluntary policy which can be shut off.”

Miller returns to the subject of nonwhite immigration on Sept. 6, 2015. He sends McHugh a link to a tweet from conservative pundit David Frum that reads, “Half of all violent crime in Germany committed by ‘foreign youths.’” (Hatewatch reached out to Frum for more context about his tweet but did not receive any response.) McHugh responds to Miller’s email about Frum’s tweet with a follow-up remark about Europe, and Miller sends a link to a Vox.com article suggesting that SAT scores have dropped in part because of the inclusion of more “poor and nonwhite students” than in previous years. Miller then suggests Breitbart take a look at “The Camp of the Saints.”

McHugh, Sept. 6, 2015, 3:34 p.m. ET: “[Breitbart editor] Neil [Munro], Julia [Hahn] and I are going to do a series of stories on [nonwhite SAT scores] to break it down. Neil says it’s easier for people to digest that way and change their minds.”

Miller, Sept. 6, 2015, 3:41 p.m. ET: “On the education angle? Makes sense. Also, you see the Pope saying west must, in effect, get rid of borders. Someone should point out the parallels to Camp of the Saints.”

Hahn wrote a Breitbart story on Sept. 24, 2015, headlined “‘Camp of the Saints’ Seen Mirrored in Pope’s Message.” The article ran 18 days after Miller’s email on the same theme. Hahn is now an aide to Trump.

While “The Camp of the Saints” was relatively obscure then, websites such as VDARE and the white nationalist American Renaissance helped make it a fixture in the white nationalist community. VDARE created an entire searchable tag called “Camp of the Saints.” At the time Miller flagged the book to Breitbart, VDARE had run more than 50 posts under “The Camp of the Saints” tagline, including some referring to Pope Francis’ rhetoric about accepting refugees. Sailer, who authored the VDARE post Miller had shared earlier, ran a story on the pope’s statements about accepting refugees on the same day Miller raised the issue with Breitbart.

Elizabeth Moore, a spokesperson for Breitbart, responded to Hatewatch’s request for comment about Miller's relationship with editors at the website with the following statement:

The SPLC claims to have three- to four-year-old emails, many previously reported on, involving an individual whom we fired years ago for a multitude of reasons, and you now have an even better idea why we fired her. Having said that, it is not exactly a newsflash that political staffers pitch stories to journalists – sometimes those pitches are successful, sometimes not.

It is no surprise to us that the SPLC opposes news coverage of illegal-immigrant crime and believes such coverage is disproportionate, especially when compared to the rest of the media, which often refuse to cover such crimes.

No one in our senior management has read the book, “Camp of the Saints,” but we take The New York Times at their word that it is a “cautionary tale,” and the National Review at theirs that “the central issue of the novel is not race but culture and political principles.”

The Trump administration has said it will cap the number of refugees allowed into the United States at 18,000 in the coming fiscal year, drastically reshaping America’s role as a haven for people fleeing devastation and war. The White House has also said it plans to allow state and local governments to block refugee resettlement in their areas.

McHugh says Miller told her to aggregate from American Renaissance Miller suggested McHugh draw information from an American Renaissance article in early July 2015, she told Hatewatch. McHugh’s recollection is backed up by emails appearing to refer to that article, which focused on a favorite topic of Miller’s in the emails – interracial crime.

McHugh told Hatewatch that Miller called her on a workday afternoon to discuss a story on “AmRen,” shorthand for American Renaissance among the site’s readers.

“It was after lunchtime. I was sitting at my desk with my MacBook, and as Miller was speaking, I was looking away … to better concentrate on what he was saying,” McHugh recalled to Hatewatch. “Miller asked me if I had seen the recent ‘AmRen’ article about crime statistics and race. I responded in the affirmative because I had read it. Many of us [on the far right] had read it. I remember being struck by the way he called it ‘AmRen,’ the nickname.”

The article was published on American Renaissance on July 1, 2015, and called “New DOJ Statistics on Race and Violent Crime.” McHugh identified the story as the one flagged by Miller when Hatewatch presented it to her. The American Renaissance article by white nationalist Jared Taylor celebrates the Department of Justice reporting Hispanics in a separate category on crime statistics “rather than lumping them in with whites.”

Hatewatch identified the email chain that led to the phone conversation McHugh relayed. The conversation started July 7, 2015, when Miller contacted McHugh, then-Breitbart head Steve Bannon and editor Matthew Boyle in an email with the subject line, “A data point worth adding to any coverage of the crime issue.”

In the opening email, Miller discusses “Shapiro’s piece,” which likely refers to a July 7, 2015, Breitbart story by pundit Ben Shapiro called “Is Trump Right?” McHugh replies, sharing a National Review article by Heather MacDonald, a conservative essayist and researcher:

McHugh, July 7, 2015, 3:19 p.m. ET: Wow. We’ll likely never see any stats on interracial crime come from the DOJ ever again, but they have added “Hispanic” as a category rather than classifying them all as “white.” [National Review link]

Miller then removes Bannon and Boyle from the thread to converse privately with McHugh. He asks if they can get on the phone to speak and sends her two links to FBI crime statistics.

Miller, July 7, 2015, 3:35 p.m. ET: “Let me know when you can talk re: immigrant crime. Have some thoughts.”

McHugh, July 7, 2015, 4:45 p.m. ET: “I can chat now if you’re free.”

Miller, July 7, 2015, 5:03 p.m. ET: “What's your best #? [FBI crime link 1] [FBI crime link 2]

The fact that Miller addresses McHugh privately immediately after she shares MacDonald’s National Review story is noteworthy: Taylor’s American Renaissance post, which is focused on crime statistics, analyzes the MacDonald story and links to it in its opening line.

Miller appears to refer to the phone conversation again nearly two months later in an email with the subject line “touching base”:

Miller, Sept. 1, 2015, 2:38 p.m. ET: “Hey Katie, Hope all is well. Was curious to see if you were still planning a story with the DOJ crime victims' data.”

McHugh, Sept. 1, 2015, 2:56 p.m. ET: “Hi Stephen, yes, I’d like to. Can we touch base tomorrow morning/early afternoon after I write a couple of assignments?”

Miller, Sept. 1, 2015, 3:10 p.m. ET: “Absolutely”

Miller’s name also has appeared on American Renaissance as an author. On July 19, 2005, the white nationalist website republished a piece he wrote for the right-wing online publication FrontPage Magazine called “Santa Monica High’s Multicultural Fistfights,” regarding his high school alma mater. American Renaissance commonly republishes stories from other publications that fit into its racist agenda. Hatewatch reached out to American Renaissance for a comment twice about how Miller’s post came to appear on its website but did not receive any reply.

In the article, Miller blames the left for a variety of problems in the nation’s schools, including “excusing black and Hispanic misbehavior by holding those students to a lower standard.”

Confederate flag removals upset Miller after church murders White nationalist Dylann Roof murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015. Roof’s attack triggered a national conversation about racial hatred in the United States. In response, Amazon.com and other retailers made efforts to pull the Confederate flag from their websites and stores.

Miller sought to create a counternarrative to this news through Breitbart, the emails show. He emailed McHugh with the subject line “defies modern comprehension” on June 23, 2015, following the news about the retailers, and highlighted a statistic about the deaths of Confederate soldiers with a link to history.com:

Miller, June 23, 2015, 3:10 p.m. ET: “‘22.6 percent of Southern men who were between the ages of 20 and 24 in 1860 lost their lives because of the war.’” [history.com link]

McHugh told Hatewatch that she and Miller spoke on the phone about the subject of Amazon yanking Confederate flag merchandise after the email. Miller appears to refer to that call in his next email and suggests that McHugh write about how Amazon was selling “commie flags.”

Miller, June 23, 2015, 3:31 p.m. ET: “That's a really, really, really good point.

Have you thought about going to Amazon and finding the commie flags and then doing a story on that? I think you've hit on something potentially profound.”

McHugh, June 23, 2015, 3:32 p.m. ET: “Yes, definitely. There’s all kinds of hammer and sickle merchandise, Che shirts, Stalin shirts… the list goes on and on.”

Miller, June 23, 2015, 3:36 p.m. ET: “I think that would be a very big story. Reveals just the stunning corporate hypocrisy that defines our modern culture.”

McHugh, June 23, 2015, 3:42 p.m. ET: “Yes, and extra lulz: [Former Obama White House press secretary] Jay Carney, who’s a senior advisor or something for Amazon, displayed Commie propaganda IN HIS HOUSE.” [Daily Caller link]

Miller, June 23, 2015, 4:33 p.m. ET: “This would be the perfect time to resurrect that fact. Brilliant.”

McHugh, June 23, 2015, 5:07 p.m. ET: “I’m going to go full Info Wars here: It’s not a coincidence that in the midst of pushing the US-ending trade deal, we’re seeing a historic artifact of real America be demonized and destroyed.”

Miller, June 23, 2015, 5:11 p.m. ET: “I betcha they also sell lots of che gueverra garb too.”

McHugh, June 23, 2015, 5:13 p.m. ET: “Oh they do. It took a long time to write a very short piece because I feel gripped with anger and despair. But if there was ever a time to stay cheerful, this is it!!”

Miller, June 23, 2015, 5:14 p.m. ET: “shoot me link when you have.”

McHugh and Miller continued to trade emails about the subject later that night. McHugh mentioned that “Confederate monuments [are being] vandalized in the US.” She sent Miller a link to the story she wrote based on their conversation, “Amazon takes down Confederate flag, continues to sell communist merchandise,” noting it was “leading Breitbart.”

Miller replied:

Miller, June 23, 2015, 10:34 p.m. ET: “what do the [Confederate monument] vandals say to the people fighting and dying overseas in uniform right now who are carrying on a seventh or eighth generation of military service in their families, stretching back to our founding?”

The emails show that Miller returned to the subject in subsequent days, tying the debate to immigrants and leftists. He sent an email June 24, 2015, with the subject line “story idea”:

Miller, June 24, 2015, 2:07 p.m. ET: “1. Should people of Spanish descent, especially those living in immigrant communities, be banned from displaying the Spanish flag given Spanish conduct in Latin America? 2. Should [Univision anchor] Jorge Ramos apologize for Spanish conduct in Latin America, and redress it by ensuring more people of indigenous backgrounds have hosting duties on his network? 3. Should the cross be removed from immigrant communities, in light of the history of Spanish conquest?”

Miller brought up the issue again one day later:

Miller, June 25, 2015, 10:38 a.m. ET: “When will the left be made to apologize for the blood on their hands supporting every commie regime since stalin?”

Preserving Confederate monuments has resonated with the far right, and Trump has repeatedly played to those views.

Following the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally, for example, when white nationalists and neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protect a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, Trump appeared to defend them, saying that there were “very fine people, on both sides.” A man who marched with white nationalists at Unite the Right murdered antiracist demonstrator Heather Heyer in a car-ramming attack that Aug. 12. Five days later, Trump tweeted:

“Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.”

Miller focuses on racial identity of killer with ‘alt-right’ beliefs In his emails to Breitbart, Miller also discussed the coverage surrounding another killer who espoused racist beliefs. Chris Harper-Mercer, a student at Umpqua Community College, killed nine people at the Roseburg, Oregon, school Oct. 1, 2015.

The following day, newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times reported that Harper-Mercer espoused a combination of white supremacist and antireligious beliefs, which typically intersect with ideologies espoused by the “alt-right” movement online.

Before Harper-Mercer’s motivations became apparent, Miller’s response was to single out his race:

Miller, Oct. 2, 2015, 12:06 a.m. ET: “[Harper-Mercer] is described as ‘mixed race’ and born in England. Any chance of piecing that profile together more, or will it all be covered up?”

McHugh replied by sending Miller a story she wrote on Harper-Mercer that attempted to show he was connected to a person on MySpace who had praised Islamic terrorism. Miller replied with enthusiasm to it:

Miller, Oct. 2, 2015, 11:28 a.m. ET: “Your eds need to make that the LEDE.”

Miller says he reached out to anti-Muslim extremist Pamela Geller Pamela Geller is a writer and pundit known for her extreme anti-Muslim views. Geller once said, “Muslim immigration is tied directly to Islamic terror.”

Miller claimed to be discussing story ideas with Geller in an email using the subject line “Sweden took my idea” on July 23, 2015. Miller shared a link to a Canadian blog called Blazingcatfur.ca about Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigrant party, planning a gay pride parade through a Muslim-dominated neighborhood. Leaders of the Sweden Democrats have struggled to shake their party’s reputation as fascist. Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven has called the Sweden Democrats “a neo-fascist single-issue party” with “Nazi and racist roots,” according to German broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

Miller sent the email to McHugh, Hahn and Bannon, then still head of Breitbart:

Miller, July 23, 2015, 11:37 a.m. ET: “[Link] I suggested Pamela Gellar do this to illustrate the absurdity of the Left's theory that you can't do anything which violates the tenets of fundamentalist Islam. What is more important to the Left: their ‘gay rights’ agenda, or appeasing Islamist immigrants?”

Bannon, July 23, 2015, 11:39 a.m. ET: “Wow!!!”

Miller, July 23, 2015, 11:50 a.m. ET: “This would have caused the american liberal media to collapse”

Hatewatch reached out to Geller twice for comment about any contact she might have had with Miller but did not receive any reply.

Miller forwards Infowars link to aid McHugh’s reporting Miller forwarded a link from conspiracy website Infowars on July 21, 2015. Infowars is an antigovernment website that promoted a false story suggesting the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was staged, among much other misinformation.

The Infowars story was syndicated from CNSNews.com, a right-wing website, and Miller sent it with the subject line, “for your islam story.” The story highlighted comments by the Rev. Franklin Graham advocating an end to Muslim immigration to the United States.

Miller also forwarded multiple links to McHugh on Muslims from Refugee Resettlement Watch, an anti-immigrant, far-right website lauded by VDARE’s Brimelow.

Miller backs immigration policies Hitler once praised Miller refers to President Calvin Coolidge multiple times in emails to Breitbart. Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924. The legislation was based on eugenics and severely limited immigration from certain parts of the world into the United States. White nationalists lionize Coolidge, in part for his remarks condemning race mixing.

“There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons,” Coolidge wrote in a 1921 magazine article, as quoted on American Renaissance. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. … Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.”

In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler portrayed the U.S. law as a potential model for the Nazis in Germany. James Q. Whitman, the Ford Foundation professor of comparative and foreign law at Yale Law School, noted this detail in his book “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law.”

“Absolutely, Hitler talks about the law in ‘Mein Kampf,’” Whitman told Hatewatch. “He suggests that the U.S. was the only country making the type of progress the Nazis were trying to establish.”

Miller brings up Coolidge on Aug. 4, 2015, in the context of halting all immigration to America. Garrett Murch, who also was an aide to Sessions, starts the conversation by emailing McHugh, Miller and three other Breitbart employees, including Hahn, to note something he heard on a right-wing talk radio show:

Murch, Aug. 4, 2015, 6:22 p.m. ET: “[Show host] Mark Levin just said there should be no immigration for several years. Not just cut the number down from the current 1 million green cards per year. For assimilation purposes.”

Miller, Aug. 4, 2015, 6:23 p.m. ET: “Like Coolidge did. Kellyanne Conway poll says that is exactly what most Americans want after 40 years of non-stop record arrivals.”

Another example of Miller mentioning Coolidge happens Sept. 13, 2015, when he criticizes Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham for appearing too sympathetic to refugees. Miller sends an email to McHugh and Hahn with the subject, “Tucker asks McCain, Graham how refugees are good for Americans,” with a transcript of a discussion between the two senators and Tucker Carlson of Fox News.

Miller, Sept. 13, 2015, 7:53 p.m. ET: “this is a good chance to expose that ridiculous statue of liberty myth. Poem has nothing to do with it: [Link] Indeed, two decades after poem was added, Coolidge shut down immigration. No one said he was violating the Statue of Liberty's purpose. BTW: have you noticed how [Ben] Carson and [Carly] Fiorina are preening [Marco] Rubio-like daily in front of the media to show them how they are good and decent Republicans unlike Mr. Trump? Finally, speaking of refugees, did you see the expanded list I emailed of foreign-born terrorists on Friday afternoon?”

McHugh said the email exchange led to her Breitbart post called “Lindsey Graham: Pretty Poem Says USA Must Adopt Unknown Muslim Men from Jihad-Syria." McHugh’s Sept. 14, 2015, story treats Arab men as a danger to Americans in the suburbs: “Graham’s position is almost a threat: Boots on the ground in Syria, or your sleepy suburb gets a ‘diverse’ surprise.”

Miller cites Coolidge again in the context of Ellis Island on April 28, 2015, when he sends McHugh a New York Times article that the immigration museum there would be adding new galleries:

Miller, April 28, 2015, 11:38 p.m. ET: Something tells me there is not a Calvin Coolidge exhibit.

Miller also brings up Coolidge in the context of Immigrant Heritage Month on June 2, 2015. He sends a link from an MSNBC report about the start of the month:

Miller, June 2, 2015, 7:05 p.m. ET: This would seem a good opportunity to remind people about the heritage established by Calvin Coolidge, which covers four decades of the 20th century.

Miller’s comment about “four decades” refers to the time between the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, or Hart-Celler Act, which abolished racial quota laws for immigration. Miller’s vision on immigration equates “heritage” with a time in which American laws were dictated by discredited race science.

Miller posits conspiracy theories about immigration Miller helped shape one of McHugh’s stories for Breitbart titled “Ted Kennedy’s Real Legacy: 50 Years of Ruinous Immigration Law,” the emails show. The story focused on the legacy of the Hart-Celler Act from the perspective that the removal of racial quota laws harmed the country. Miller flagged the story idea to McHugh:

Miller, March 30, 2015, 1:49 p.m. ET: “They opened the Ted Kennedy center today in Boston. Another opportunity to revisit the ’65 immigration law.”

After McHugh’s story was published, Miller emailed her, “The eds should make your piece the overnight lead.” He went on to suggest that the reason no other publication covered the anniversary of the law the same way Breitbart did was because elites wanted to keep the country in the dark about immigration. White nationalists typically argue that whites are being replaced in the United States because outside forces seek to do them harm.

Miller, March 30, 2015, 10:24 p.m. ET: “Just let this sink in: Kennedy was honored today, fifty years after pushing through this law, and you're the only writer in the country who published a piece even mentioning the law and what it did.”

McHugh, March 30, 2015, 10:31 p.m. ET: “That is … very disturbing.”

Miller, March 30, 2015, 10:35 p.m. ET: “Elites can't allow the people to see that their condition is not the product of events beyond their control, but the product of policy they foisted onto them.”

McHugh, March 30, 2015, 10:42 p.m. ET: “Right. Immigration is something that we can only vote to have more of — immigration ‘reform’ is a moral imperative — but it’s impossible, evil, racist to reverse immigration, and you don’t think that the government can deport 11 million anyway, do you?”

Miller, March 30, 2015, 10:44 p.m. ET: “They want people to feel helpless, retreat into their enclaves, and detach. Our job is to show people they can still control their destiny. Knowledge is the first step. Btw - Bannon was praising your work on this to me again.”

In his emails, Miller uses slang and rhetoric about immigration that would be familiar to people who read white nationalists discussing the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. He refers to demographic changes brought about by immigration as “new America” multiple times in the emails. It’s a phrase VDARE sometimes uses. Here are some examples of Miller using similar language in emails to Breitbart over nearly a week in July 2015:

“The ruined city of L.A.,” referring to his hometown on July 9, 2015. “New Charlotte,” pointing to an article about employers in Charlotte, North Carolina, hiring more bilingual staff on July 14, 2015. “New English,” about then-current GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush speaking Spanish on the campaign trail on July 14, 2015. “More lies about new america,” linking to a Wall Street Journal opinion piece from July 2015 that lays out the degree to which immigrants are less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes. Miller also discussed diversity in apparently mocking tones as America’s “national religion” on Nov. 23, 2015. He cited a story about a possible lawsuit from the family of Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old Muslim boy who was arrested after bringing a reconstructed digital clock to his Irving, Texas, high school in 2015.

Miller, Nov. 23, 2015, 5:07 p.m. ET: “[Link] Like the mystics of old, the one sure way to get rich in modern America is to offer yourself up as virtue signal to those seeking to prove themselves members in good standing of the national religion – diversity.”

Exploring Miller’s reported ties to white nationalist figures Hatewatch re-examined Miller’s reported relationships with prominent figures from the white nationalist movement in light of information uncovered during its investigation into his emails to Breitbart.

Before entering into politics, Miller was in contact with Brimelow, the VDARE founder, and Richard Spencer, who went on to become arguably the most notorious white nationalist in America. Spencer helped build the alt-right movement and was a central figure of the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Miller knew and interacted with these men while studying at Duke University as an undergraduate, according to a first-hand account and email evidence. The interactions with Brimelow occurred about eight years after he founded the white nationalist VDARE.

Miller and Spencer, while serving together as members of Duke’s Conservative Union, a politics-focused club for students, arranged for Brimelow to debate journalist and University of Oregon professor Peter Laufer in March 2007 on Mexican immigration to the United States.

Laufer told Hatewatch he ate dinner at a local restaurant with Brimelow, Miller and Spencer when he visited Duke. He described the atmosphere between him and the men as collegial despite their ideological differences. Laufer also called the interactions “gross,” given the others’ outspoken anti-immigrant beliefs.

The meetup was also confirmed through an email Spencer sent to Laufer that the journalist Michael Brown first obtained in 2017 for the nonprofit blog Electronic Intifada. Brown forwarded that email to Hatewatch in August. It lays out logistical details of the event and mentions Miller by name – just as Brown reported in 2017.

Hatewatch reached out twice to Brimelow to ask about Laufer’s account of the events but did not receive a reply. Hatewatch also contacted Spencer, who replied by email that he does not correspond with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Spencer has acknowledged his relationship with Miller before in Mother Jones:

“It’s funny no one’s picked up on the Stephen Miller connection,” he told the magazine in October 2016. “I knew him very well when I was at Duke. But I am kind of glad no one’s talked about this because I don’t want to harm Trump.”

HuffPost reporter Christopher Mathias, who writes about far-right events, told Hatewatch that Spencer made a similar remark to him in October 2017 when he was covering a speech by the white nationalist leader at the University of Florida. “I don’t want to get [Miller] in trouble,” Mathias says Spencer told him when he asked about his relationship with the White House aide.

Miller denied having any ties with Spencer to Mother Jones:

“I have absolutely no relationship with Mr. Spencer. I completely repudiate his views, and his claims are 100 percent false,” Miller said then.

Laufer’s account of the events mirror more closely to what Spencer has said:

“There is absolutely no question they were working together,” Laufer told Hatewatch. “We all perhaps have relationships in our college days that we’d like to forget. But to suggest [Spencer and Miller] weren’t working in concert to create this event is false. They were intimately involved in the planning of the dinner and the event. This was a partnership, and for Miller to suggest otherwise would be false.”

Hatewatch asked Laufer if he had any other impressions of the future White House adviser after having met him as a college student:

“It was evident to me Miller was not interested in a multicultural society,” he said.

[dailymemesworld]

A 1,000-bed Navy hospital ship, the Comfort, docked in Manhattan. Federal guidelines warning against travel and gatherings were extended through April. In Washington, talk turned to expanding paid sick leave.

RIGHT NOW

About three out of four Americans are or will soon be under instructions to stay at home. In New York, the governor said that 1,218 people had died, and that 9,517 people in the state were hospitalized with the virus.

Here’s what you need to know:

As the virus’s impact expands, Washington mulls more emergency measures.

China says it’s halting the virus’s spread. Is that true?

Agony in Spain and Italy as deaths climb and lockdowns are extended.

“Doctors are getting sick everywhere.” Health workers confront fear as colleagues fall ill.

As the virus spreads behind bars, there are calls rising to free inmates.

The virus sweeps into Detroit, a city that has seen its share of hardship.

Oil prices are sliding as energy demands erode.

Image

Lawmakers left the Capitol after voting on the coronavirus stimulus plan on Friday.Credit...Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

As the virus’s impact expands, Washington mulls more emergency measures.

As the toll of the coronavirus continued to mount — overwhelming hospitals and sickening health care workers, spreading through jails, playing havoc with the economy and making deadly inroads in more cities — federal lawmakers and Trump administration officials turned their attention Monday to new measures to try to contain the fallout.

In a sign of how fast the virus is upending life in the United States, officials in Washington were already beginning to chart the next phase of the government’s response on Monday — just days after enacting a $2 trillion stabilization plan, the largest economic stimulus package in modern American history.

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“We have to pass another bill that goes to meeting the need more substantially than we have,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said on Sunday, ticking off a list of Democratic priorities, including increased protections for workers on the front lines and a further expansion of the paid sick leave provisions approved in previous legislation.

Maryland became the latest state to issue a stay-at-home directive on Monday, meaning that roughly three out of four Americans are or will soon be under instructions to stay indoors as states try to curb the spread before their hospitals are overwhelmed. And school systems around the country have extended closings that superintendents once hoped would be brief.

See Which States and Cities Have Told Residents to Stay at Home

In an attempt to stop the spread of the coronavirus, more than half the states and the Navajo Nation have given directives, affecting about three in four U.S. residents.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican who has favored local action over statewide mandates, said he would sign an order codifying a patchwork of local rules urging residents of the southeast corner of the state to remain at home. It would apply to Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe Counties.

Local Florida governments have taken wildly different approaches to restricting interactions. While the city of Jacksonville shut down its beaches, St. Johns County to the south did not. A striking photo taken over the weekend showed bare beaches on one side of the county line and crowded sand on the other. (St. Johns County later closed its shoreline.)

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President Trump — who retreated Sunday from his earlier hope to get the country back to normal by Easter after public health experts warned that lifting the social distance guidelines too soon could lead to far more deaths — continued to express optimism. Mr. Trump said Monday that he and his advisers expected the number of people who test positive to peak around Easter, though he cited no data to back up his claim.

“That’s going to be the highest point, we think, and then it’s going to start coming down from there,” Mr. Trump said during an interview on Fox & Friends. “That will be a day of celebration, and we just want to do it right so we picked the end of April.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the United States’ leading infectious disease expert, said on Monday that the country as a whole would see the death toll rise.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw over 100,000 deaths,” he said.

A 1,000-bed Navy hospital ship, the Comfort, docked in Manhattan Monday morning to free up beds in the city’s overwhelmed hospitals so they can treat more coronavirus patients. A small field hospital was being constructed in tents in Central Park. And in hospitals and clinics around the city, typically dispassionate medical professionals are feeling panicked as increasing numbers of their colleagues get sick.

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1:12U.S. Navy Hospital Ship Comfort Ship Arrives in New York City

A 1,000-bed Navy ship, the Comfort, has 12 operating rooms, a medical laboratory and more than 1,000 officers.CreditCredit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

The economic toll continued to be staggering. Macy’s, which also owns Bloomingdale’s and Bluemercury, said on Monday that with stores closed and sales down it would furlough the majority of its employees this week. Macy’s had 130,000 part-time and full-time employees as of Feb. 2. And oil prices hit their lowest levels since 2002 on Monday as Brent crude, the international benchmark, fell nearly 6 percent to $23.50 a barrel and West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. marker, briefly fell below $20.

The sharp economic contraction caused by the spreading coronavirus epidemic is causing demand for oil, the world’s largest source of energy, to evaporate

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In jails and prisons, where social distancing is impossible and sanitizer is widely banned, authorities across the country have moved to release thousands of inmates to try to slow the infection, but the infections continued. The Rikers Island jail complex in New York City had at least 139 confirmed cases of the virus. A week ago, the Cook County jail in Chicago had two diagnoses; by Sunday, 101 inmates and a dozen sheriff’s deputies had tested positive. And at least 38 inmates and employees in the federal prison system have the virus, with one prisoner dead in Louisiana.

And in Detroit, an American city that has seen more than its share of struggles in recent years, the virus was posing a new, lethal test. In less than two weeks, 35 people with the virus have died there. The police chief tested positive for the virus, and more than 500 police officers are in quarantine.

“Everybody is starting to understand that this virus is looking for more hosts,” Mayor Mike Duggan of Detroit said in an interview. “Even if you’re young and healthy.”

By Sunday evening, with more than 5,400 cases, Michigan was fourth in known cases among the states, behind New York, New Jersey and California.

[bigyack-com]

They Fled Coronavirus in Europe. Border Agents Asked if They’d Visited China or Iran.

When Pam Mundus and a friend landed in Milan for a weeklong vacation on Feb. 23, uniformed airport workers in face masks, attempting to contain the spread of the new coronavirus, took their temperatures.But when Ms. Mundus returned home on a direct flight from Rome to New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport on March 1, no one questioned her about her time in Italy or whether she might have been exposed to the illness. At that stage, the State Department had already urged Americans to reconsider travel to Italy; there were at least 1,500 cases there and 34 deaths related to the coronavirus by then.“The only question we were asked was, ‘Have you been to China?’” Ms. Mundus, 62, said in a phone interview from her home on eastern Long Island, where she has been in self-quarantine since her return.President Trump has claimed credit for slowing the spread of Covid-19 in the United States by imposing a ban in late January on some travelers who had recently been to China. His administration has since barred entry to travelers who have been in Iran, nearly 30 European countries and the United Kingdom.But several experts say the experience of Ms. Mundus shows the limited effectiveness of the administration’s travel restrictions, which followed outbreaks in affected countries by days or weeks. The administration never even imposed restrictions on passengers who had been to South Korea, which also faced a large outbreak.And the restrictions applied only to foreign citizens, despite the fact that the virus could be transmitted just as easily by the many Americans returning home in droves, who were getting confusing and inconsistent messages on how to protect themselves and their communities — or in many cases, no advice at all.“The policy makes no sense,” said Danielle Ompad, an epidemiologist at the N.Y.U. School of Public Health. “It was based on nationality, not risk of infectiousness, and the two are not synonymous.”Josh Michaud, an associate director for global health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, went further last week. When Mr. Trump barred Europeans from entering the United States, he tweeted that the move “makes about as much sense as a homeowner installing a fire alarm in the living room while the kitchen is going up in flames.”Between Feb. 2 and March 4, the federal Customs and Border Protection agency identified 63,743 incoming passengers for closer medical screening who had recently spent time in China, Iran or the countries in Europe’s Schengen region, a C.B.P. spokeswoman said in an email. Of those, 242 were sent to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention airport stations for quarantine staff assessment, and 28 were then referred to the hospital, according to a C.D.C. spokesman.On Tuesday, the president said airport personnel had done a “really incredible” and “fantastic” job of screening returning passengers. Crowds at several airports occurred because “everybody was screened and screened very carefully,” he said. “They didn’t want to rush it.”But some passengers from Europe described the screening procedures as erratic at best.Ari Minelli, a New York City architect who cut short a trip to Spain, landed at Newark Liberty International Airport on Friday evening, but was not provided any guidance on self-monitoring or self-quarantine. Spain by then had more than 4,000 cases and had just declared a state of emergency.Mr. Minelli, who flew home from Barcelona through London, was asked before he boarded the flight in England only if he had been to China or to Iran. But the epicenter of the outbreak had already shifted to Europe.During the flight, Mr. Minelli filled out a customs form saying he had been to Spain. But he was not given any health forms to fill out nor any instructions on quarantine.“It seems they were operating under a previous set of regulations,” said Mr. Minelli, who, like Ms. Mundus, decided of his own accord to self-quarantine for 14 days.In recent days, some passengers said they were given forms to fill out on the plane that asked about their travel history and symptoms, and whether they had contact with anyone who was sick. The form also included a box for “measured temperature.”But Jolien Louis, 20, a George Washington University student from Queens, N.Y., who flew home from London on Monday, said that when she tried to hand the health forms to the person at Kennedy Airport inspecting her passport, he was not interested. She told him she had just been to Barcelona, but he told her to “keep the paperwork.”What screening did occur may also have created conditions conducive to spreading an infection that should be avoided during a pandemic, experts said.As hordes of American travelers rushed home from Europe in a panic in recent days — after Mr. Trump announced sweeping restrictions on travel from Europe last week, without making clear that United States citizens and residents would be allowed to come home — travelers were packed together in close quarters in airports, sometimes for hours.“That probably caused more transmissions than it prevented,” said Ira M. Longini, co-director of the Center for Statistics and Quantitative Infectious Diseases at the University of Florida.Asked about procedures for screening returning passengers, a spokesman for the C.D.C. said passengers returning from Italy and South Korea were processed in a different way than passengers from China and Iran.Those who had been in Italy and South Korea were supposed to be screened for symptoms before departure. But the exact screening was left up to those countries, the spokesman said.Airline crews were supposed to distribute cards with written information to these passengers. Those on connecting or indirect flights were to get the information from Customs and Border Protection.Passengers who had recently been in China or Iran were to complete questionnaires about their travel history and any symptoms, and to have their temperatures taken. Those without symptoms were to be given instructions on what to do if they felt ill, and those with symptoms were to be evaluated by a C.D.C. health officer and transferred to a hospital for further assessment and isolation if necessary.But the C.D.C. spokesman said that anyone returning from affected areas — China, Iran, South Korea, Europe’s Schengen area and Britain — should have received a card with information telling them to stay home for 14 days, not go back to work or school, avoid crowds and mass transit, and maintain distance from other people while monitoring their temperature. No one interviewed for this story received the card.Debbie Hasbrouck, 67, lives in McCormick, S.C., and spent three weeks in Verona, Italy, in February and March visiting a son who plays professional basketball there. But when she arrived in Atlanta on March 5, having changed planes in Paris, all the customs officer wanted to know was whether she had been to China.She has stayed home since her return, but recently developed symptoms consistent with the coronavirus and sought care at a local emergency room. Doctors did a comprehensive work-up, but were unable to test her for the coronavirus because diagnostic kits are in short supply.Casey DeSimone, a junior at SUNY-Albany who lives in New Paltz, N.Y., and planned to spend the spring semester studying in Milan, returned to Kennedy Airport on a direct flight from Milan on March 3.Her temperature was taken as part of security screening before she boarded the flight in Milan, she said. But she was given no information or guidance, either on the flight or afterward.The customs officer who checked her passport at Kennedy only asked if she had been to China or Iran in the past two weeks. She and her mother, who had picked her up from the airport, stayed home for 14 days.The C.D.C. says any traveler who has come back from a region where there is widespread community transmission of the coronavirus should stay home for 14 days and quarantine themselves.They should take their temperature with a thermometer two times a day, and watch for fever, cough or trouble breathing. “Stay home and avoid contact with others,” a C.D.C. spokesman said, when asked for instructions for returning travelers. “If you do get sick, call ahead to your doctor before you go to a doctor’s office or emergency room.”With community transmission now occurring in places throughout the United States, travel bans are not likely to have any effect on curbing the epidemic at this point, experts say.“It is possible to contain an epidemic at the source, but you have to act really quickly and have airtight containment and mitigation right from the beginning,” said Dr. Longini.Generally, however, “travel bans are usually put in place when it’s far too late for them to be effective.” Read the full article

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/world/sudan-coup-protesters-defy-curfew-after-military-ousts-bashir/

Sudan coup: Protesters defy curfew after military ousts Bashir

Image copyright EPA

Image caption Anti-government protesters continued to throng the streets of Khartoum

Thousands of protesters have vowed to stay on the streets of the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, in defiance of a curfew imposed by the country’s new military council.

Long-time President Omar al-Bashir was overthrown and arrested on Thursday after months of street protests.

But demonstrators say the military council is part of the same regime.

The fresh stand-off has raised fears of a violent confrontation between protesters and the army.

There is also a real danger that different elements of the security forces and militia could turn their guns on each other, BBC World Service Africa editor Will Ross says.

The UN and the African Union have both issued calls for calm.

A mood of celebration that followed news of 75-year-old Mr Bashir’s arrest quickly evaporated when organisers of the demonstrations called for a mass sit-in outside military headquarters to continue.

“This is a continuation of the same regime,” said Sara Abdeljalil of the Sudanese Professionals Association. “So what we need to do is to continue the fight and the peaceful resistance.”

Sudan’s unrest in 300 words

Bashir ousted: Five significant moments

Later, an official statement carried by state-run media said a curfew would run from 22:00 local time (20:00 GMT) to 04:00.

“Citizens are advised to stick to it for their safety,” it said, adding: “The armed forces and the security council will carry out its duty to uphold peace and security and protect citizens’ livelihoods.”

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionAnti-Bashir protesters celebrate

Crowds on the streets of Khartoum waved flags and chanted “Fall, again!” – refashioning their previous anti-Bashir slogan of “Fall, that’s all!”.

Mr Bashir is the subject of an international arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC), which accuses him of organising war crimes and crimes against humanity in Sudan’s western Darfur region.

It is not clear what will happen to him now that he is in custody.

How did the coup unfold?

Early on Thursday, military vehicles entered the large compound in Khartoum housing the defence ministry, the army headquarters and Mr Bashir’s personal residence.

State TV and radio interrupted programming and defence minister Awad Ibn Ouf announced “the toppling of the regime”. He said Mr Bashir was being held “in a secure place” but did not give details.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionThe announcement was made by the defence minister Awad Ibn Ouf

Mr Ibn Ouf said the country had been suffering from “poor management, corruption, and an absence of justice” and he apologised “for the killing and violence that took place”.

He said the army would oversee a two-year transitional period followed by elections.

Are military takeovers on the rise in Africa?

The minister also said a three-month state of emergency was being put in place.

Sudan’s constitution was being suspended, border crossings were being shut until further notice and airspace was being closed for 24 hours, he added.

‘A volatile and unpredictable situation’

This is a military coup with no clear roadmap for how the generals plan to hand over power to civilian rule.

The fear will be that they have no such intention. The security elite has calculated that removing Omar al-Bashir and imposing a curfew will buy them time and end the protests. If so this represents a serious miscalculation.

The Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA) – which has spearheaded the demonstrations – and other civil society groups have made it clear they won’t accept a cosmetic change. They have the numbers and are highly organised.

The military has the guns and the capacity for imposing brutal repression. But what then? A crackdown will not resolve the desperate economic crisis that brought years of simmering resentment on to the streets last December.

There is also the question of the cracks within the Sudanese security establishment, evident during the clashes between soldiers and intelligence/militia forces in recent days. It is a volatile and unpredictable situation that demands cool heads and compromise on the part of the military. The stability of Sudan depends on how they react to continued protests.

How did protesters react?

The SPA said the military had announced a “coup” that would merely reproduce the same “faces and institutions that our great people revolted against”.

It urged people to continue the sit-in outside the military complex – that began on Saturday – and to stay on the streets of cities across the country.

“Those who destroyed the country and killed the people are seeking to steal every drop of blood and sweat that the Sudanese people poured in their revolution that shook the throne of tyranny,” the statement read.

The SPA has previously said that any transitional administration must not include anyone from what it called the “tyrannical regime”.

How did the protests begin?

Demonstration began in December. They were originally triggered by a rise in the cost of living, but crowds then began calling for the president to resign and his government to go.

Image copyright AFP

Image caption Omar al-Bashir had been in power since 1989

Government officials said 38 people had died since December but Human Rights Watch said the number was higher.

In February, it looked as though the president might step down, but instead Mr Bashir declared a state of national emergency.

What international reaction has there been?

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appealed for “calm and utmost restraint by all” and urged a transition that would meet the “democratic aspirations” of the people. The UN Security Council is to discuss the situation in a closed-door meeting on Friday.

UK Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said that a two-year military council was “not the answer”.

“We need to see a swift move to an inclusive, representative, civilian leadership. And we need to ensure there’s no more violence,” he said on Twitter.

The US called on Sudan’s military to bring civilians into the transitional government and said a two-year timeline was too long.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionSudan protests: So what’s going on?

The African Union condemned the military takeover. AU Commission chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat said it was not an appropriate response to the challenges facing the country and the aspirations of its people.

Russia, which has twice hosted Mr Bashir, called for calm and said it was monitoring the situation.

Amnesty International’s Secretary General Kumi Naidoo said that justice was “long overdue” for Mr Bashir.

“Omar al-Bashir is wanted for some of the most odious human rights violations of our generation and we need to finally see him held accountable,” Mr Naidoo added.

Who is Omar al-Bashir?

Formerly an army officer, he seized power in a military coup in 1989.

His rule has been marked by civil war. The civil conflict with the south of the country ended in 2005 and South Sudan became independent in 2011.

Another civil conflict has been taking place in the western region of Darfur. Mr Bashir is accused of organising war crimes and crimes against humanity there by the ICC.

Despite an international arrest warrant issued by the ICC, he won consecutive elections in 2010 and 2015. However, his last victory was marred by a boycott by the main opposition parties.

The arrest warrant has led to an international travel ban. However, Mr Bashir has made diplomatic visits to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.

[lorajackson]

Fauci confirms NY Times report Trump rebuffed social distancing advice

Health adviser says on CNN ‘you could logically say if you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives’ * Coronavirus – live US updates * Live global updates * See all our coronavirus coverageProminent US public health adviser Dr Anthony Fauci appeared on Sunday to confirm a bombshell New York Times report which said he and other Trump administration officials recommended the implementation of social distancing to combat the coronavirus in February, but were rebuffed for almost a month.Asked on CNN’s State of the Union why the administration did not act when he and other officials advised, Fauci said: “You know … as I have said many times, we look at it from a pure health standpoint. We make a recommendation. Often, the recommendation is taken. Sometimes, it’s not.“…It is what it is. We are where we are right now.”More than 530,000 cases of Covid-19 have been confirmed in the US, with almost 21,000 deaths. Officials currently expect a death toll of around 60,000 by August.CNN host Jake Tapper asked if Fauci thought “lives could have been saved if social distancing, physical distancing, stay-at-home measures had started [in the] third week of February, instead of mid-March”.> There was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then> > Dr Anthony Fauci“It’s very difficult to go back and say that,” Fauci said. “I mean, obviously, you could logically say, that if you had a process that was ongoing, and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives. Obviously, no one is going to deny that.“But what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated. But you’re right. I mean, obviously, if we had, right from the very beginning, shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.”Since the White House issued social distancing guidelines on 16 March, much of the US has gone into lockdown, shuttering the economy and leading to unprecedented and potentially ruinous unemployment.Chafing against such conditions in an election year, Donald Trump has voiced an eagerness to reopen the economy as early as 1 May. The president has also said he will listen to advisers if they counsel against such a move.On Sunday, Fauci, other experts and governors of hard-hit states were skeptical. Phil Murphy, governor of New Jersey, the state with the highest death toll after New York, told CBS’s Face the Nation: “If we start to get back on our feet too soon … we could be throwing gasoline on the fire.”One of Trump’s most vocal supporters in the US media, Fox News host Sean Hannity, followed the president in attacking the Times.“Hey [Maggie Haberman],” Hannity tweeted, to one of six reporters on the byline of Saturday’s report. “…You should Thank [Trump] for the Travel Ban(s) put in place while you and [the New York Times] were fixated on impeachment and advising people to travel to China. NYTimesEpicFail.”Trump restricted travel from China before travel from Europe. The Times has reported that scientists believe most of the first Covid-19 cases in New York came from Europe, reporting which has prompted presidential tweets.In reply to Hannity, Haberman wrote: “Weird. Six bylines on our story about how the president handled the growing threat of the coronavirus but just one he’s focused on. Something there but I can’t put my finger on it…”The only female reporter on the Times story also tweeted footage of Fauci’s remarks.“This is confirmation of our story,” she wrote, “which focused on various moments the president had to take the threat more seriously and didn’t, in no small part due to the culture of government he’s created.”Trump has complained about the Times’ use of anonymous sources. On Sunday, executive editor Dean Bacquet responded.Bacquet told CNN’s Reliable Sources there were some anonymous sources but the story was “based on many on-the-record interviews, documents. There is a tremendous email chain among scientists inside and outside the government where they talk about the growing crisis.“So, I would suggest that people read it, rather than take the president’s tweet at its word. It is a very well-documented, powerful chapter in understanding why the government was so slow in dealing with this pandemic.”Bacquet also said: “I would hope that the president reads it, because I think his tweet maybe indicates that he had not read it. And I think he will see a very important historic portrait of a government that was slow to deal with crisis.”The editor was asked about his previous comparison of the coronavirus outbreak and the US government response to it with the terror attacks of 11 September 2001. In New York alone, more than three times as many people have now died of Covid-19 as died on 9/11.Bacquet said he did not know if the government’s failure regarding the pandemic was of the same magnitude as failing to prevent the attacks on New York, Washington and an airliner which crashed in Pennsylvania.“I think we have a lot more reporting to do,” he said. “It’s clearly a failure.”

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[goarticletec-blog]

Donald Trump hit of judges ideological gap correct

New Post has been published on https://www.articletec.com/donald-trump-hit-of-judges-ideological-gap-correct/

Donald Trump hit of judges ideological gap correct

President Trump wasn’t wrong last week when he pointed to an obvious ideological gap between judges nominated by a Democratic president versus those nominated by a Republican — but legal experts said his mistake was in coupling it with such naked criticism of the judiciary. 

A Washington Times analysis of significant judicial decisions on immigration cases over the last two years shows that 53 of the 54 Democratic judges who issued or signed onto opinions in immigration cases ruled against the Trump administration’s get-tough approach.

By contrast, among GOP-appointees to the federal bench, 15 judges have backed the administration in immigration cases and 13 have not.

An earlier Times analysis of rulings in Obamacare-related cases found a split just as striking. More than 90 percent of Democratic-appointed judges backed the Affordable Care Act, while nearly 80 percent of GOP-nominated judges found legal fault with the 2010 law and the way the previous administration carried it out.

Legal scholars say it’s not so much the party labels, but the competing judicial philosophies that are playing out in those numbers — though they say most judges do try to live up to their profession as independent arbiters of justice.

“Even though most Americans recognize that judges have political views, there is a basic assumption among many or most Americans that judges ultimately will place the rule of law ahead of politics,” said William G. Ross, a professor of law and ethics at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama.

He said presidents, too, have generally avoided criticizing the courts for fear of antagonizing voters who would conclude a broadside was intended to undermine respect for the rule of law or to interfere with judicial independence.

Mr. Ross said Mr. Trump broke tradition with his complaints last week — and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s rebuke was warranted.

“Although I generally believe that both presidents and justices should scrupulously refrain from criticizing one another, I believe that Chief Justice Roberts’ statement was justified in the wake of President Trump’s unprecedented remarks,” he said.

Mr. Trump was incensed last week after a ruling by U.S. District Judge Jon S. Tigar in California that blocked the president’s get-tough approach toward immigrants living in the U.S. illegally abusing the asylum system. Mr. Trump called him an “Obama judge” and blasted the broader judicial 9th Circuit, which covers the federal courts on the country’s west coast, saying he doesn’t get a fair shake from them.

That drew an unconventional retort by Chief Justice Roberts, who insisted the judiciary is independent and doesn’t divide along presidential lines.

“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for,” the chief justice said in a statement issued by the Supreme Court.

The Times analysis shows, however, that there is a clear break in judicial outcomes based on which president did the appointing. And Chief Justice Roberts has been a part of that.

In the travel ban case, by the time the courts got to ruling on Mr. Trump’s third, current version, the divisions were clear. Of the 27 judges who issued or joined rulings at the district, circuit or Supreme Court levels, 19 were Democrat appointees. Every one of them ruled against the ban.

All of the eight Republican nominees, meanwhile, backed the president’s powers to issue the ban — including Chief Justice Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion for the court, which was indeed split 5-4 along presidential appointment lines.

Cases dealing with sanctuary city laws are an exception. Both Democrat- and Republican-appointed judges alike have ruled illegal the Trump administration’s attempts to crack down on jurisdictions that refuse cooperation with deportations.

Cases involving the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children to stay in the country, are mixed, with most Republican judges siding with the Trump administration, but one judge named by President George W. Bush ruling against the current administration.

And the political dividing line returns on the case involving immigrant teen girls who were in the U.S. illegally and in federal custody demanding that the government facilitate their abortions. Every Democrat-appointed judge has ruled in favor of the immigrant teens, while every GOP appointee has sided with the Trump administration.

“No serious observer doubts that there are ideological differences among judges that influence decision-making on some hot-button cases, and that those differences often correlate with party,” said George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin.

However, he faulted Mr. Trump for this particular attack, saying he didn’t see proof of bias and said the president has made a habit of attacking the legitimacy of judicial review.

“Trump’s comments might have caused less controversy if they were not part of a long string of inappropriate attacks on the judiciary,” Mr. Somin said. “Previous presidents have occasionally made dubious statements about the court’s [such as President] Obama’s notorious attack on Citizens United during the State of the Union, but Trump is unusual for doing so with such frequency.”

That 2010 attack by Mr. Obama was striking.

During his 2010 State of the Union address, he blasted the Supreme Court justices to their faces over a ruling just days earlier on campaign finance. In response, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., appointed to the court by Mr. Bush — and a nominee Mr. Obama tried to filibuster as a senator — could be seen mouthing the words “Not true.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley noted on Twitter last week that Chief Justice Roberts didn’t rebuke Mr. Obama for his in-person attack.

Mr. Somin said ideological splits among judges often say something about the merits of the arguments.

“When judges on one side of the political spectrum are unified on an issue and those on the other are split on an administration policy, it likely means that the administration’s position is either weak — as in the sanctuary cities cases, where both GOP and Democratic appointed judges have almost uniformly ruled against Trump — or relies on arguments that appeal to only one side of the ideological divide,” he said, noting the travel ban case as an example of the later.

Charles Gardner Geyh, a scholar of judicial ethics and independence at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law, said ideology does have a subconscious effect on judges but that doesn’t make them biased.

“The data show that judges take law quite seriously, and that in relatively simple, straightforward cases, where the law and facts are fairly clear (which is most of the time) judges will reach the same result regardless of partisan background,” he said in an email. “The media’s focus, however, is understandably not on the easy cases — which are rarely newsworthy — but on the controversial cases, which are controversial often because the facts or law are uncertain.”

He said in those instances, what he called “the margins where a gap in the law exists” judges’ ideology can affect their approach to the case.

“The best evidence suggests that ideologically motivated reasoning at the margins is subconscious, which helps to explain why the chief [justice] is absolutely right when he says that judges do not think of themselves as Obama judges or Trump judges,” he said.

He warned that things could go wrong if judges are selected for their partisan leanings, and the public begins to doubt judges’ independence.

“Which, I suspect, is why Chief Justice Roberts took the unprecedented step of speaking out,” he said.

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[todaynewsstories]

Overshadowed by Kavanaugh drama, new Supreme Court term looms

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court begins its new term on Monday in an awkward position, down one justice as the fierce fight unfolds in the Senate over confirmation of President Donald Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to a lifetime job as a justice.

FILE PHOTO: The building of the U.S. Supreme Court is seen in Washington, U.S., June 26, 2017. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas/File Photo

With eight justices rather than the usual nine, the court was set to hear arguments in two cases as it opens its nine-month term, according to tradition, on the first Monday of October.

Justice Anthony Kennedy retired effective in July, leaving the court ideologically deadlocked with four conservatives and four liberals on the bench awaiting the outcome of the Kavanaugh battle. Trump nominated the conservative federal appeals court judge in July but his confirmation in the Senate remained in doubt over sexual misconduct allegations that he denies.

Unlike prior years, when a series of major cases awaited the justices, there are no blockbusters yet on their calendar. Their first argument on Monday is a property rights case involving protected habitat for a warty amphibian known as the dusky gopher frog.

The court’s previous term, which ended in June, included more 5-4 decisions than usual, with conservatives in the majority. These rulings included approving Trump’s travel ban on people from several Muslim-majority nations, prohibiting a type of regulation of anti-abortion clinics, and banning certain public-sector union fees.

“After a term of challenging cases and issues, and an unusually high number of 5-4 decisions, as I see it, we needed our summer break,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joked to an audience last week.

FILE PHOTO: A general view of the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, U.S., November 15, 2016. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo

For the current term that runs through next June, the court does have some important cases, though none yet of the magnitude of the biggest from the previous term.

One case over whether a state and the federal government can each prosecute a person for the same crime could impact Trump’s willingness to pardon people like Paul Manafort. Trump’s former campaign chairman was convicted in August of financial crimes by a jury in Virginia and then pleaded guilty in September to reduced charges in Washington brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller as part of an investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 election.

Other cases include whether the U.S. attorney general has too much power in determining to whom the federal sex offender registry applies, and whether a state can execute a convicted murderer who, after a series of strokes, forgot the crime.

A number of hot-button issues may still be teed up for the justices this term, including disputes the court did not resolve last term over the constitutionality of an electoral map-drawing practice called partisan gerrymandering and whether people who run businesses can refuse service to gay couples because of religious objections to same-sex marriage.

“The real meat of the coming term is what’s in the pipeline,” Trump administration Solicitor General Noel Francisco said at an event organized by the Federalist Society, a conservative lawyers’ group.

Major cases making their way up from lower courts include disputes over various abortion restrictions in Republican-led states, whether a federal law against sex discrimination also prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation, and Trump’s plan to restrict transgender troops in the military.

Even if only some of those issues come before the justices “we might be talking about this term as one of those blockbuster years that is comparable to what we saw last year,” Francisco said.

Reporting by Andrew Chung; Additional reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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[orbemnews]

Inside Twitter’s Choice to Lower Off Trump SAN FRANCISCO — Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief government, was working remotely on a personal island in French Polynesia frequented by celebrities escaping the paparazzi when a telephone name interrupted him on Jan. 6. On the road was Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s high lawyer and security skilled, with an replace from the true world. She stated she and different firm executives had determined to lock President Trump’s account, quickly, to stop him from posting statements which may provoke extra violence after a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol that day. Mr. Dorsey was involved in regards to the transfer, stated two folks with information of the decision. For 4 years, he had resisted calls for by liberals and others that Twitter terminate Mr. Trump’s account, arguing that the platform was a spot the place world leaders might communicate, even when their views had been heinous. However he had delegated moderation choices to Ms. Gadde, 46, and often deferred to her — and he did so once more. Mr. Dorsey, 44, didn’t make his misgivings public. The following day, he appreciated and shared a number of tweets urging warning in opposition to a everlasting ban of Mr. Trump. Then, over the following 36 hours, Twitter veered from lifting Mr. Trump’s suspension to shutting down his account completely, chopping off the president from a platform he had used to speak, unfiltered, with not simply his 88 million followers however the world. The choice was a punctuation mark on the Trump presidency that instantly drew accusations of political bias and recent scrutiny of the tech trade’s energy over public discourse. Interviews with a dozen present and former Twitter insiders over the previous week opened a window into the way it was made — pushed by a bunch of Mr. Dorsey’s lieutenants who overcame their boss’s reservations, however solely after a lethal rampage on the Capitol. Having lifted the suspension the following day, Twitter monitored the response to Mr. Trump’s tweets throughout the web, and executives briefed Mr. Dorsey that Mr. Trump’s followers had seized on his newest messages to name for extra violence. In a single put up on the different social networking web site Parler, members of Twitter’s security staff noticed a Trump fan urge militias to cease President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. from coming into the White Home and to battle anybody who tried to halt them. The potential for extra real-world unrest, they stated, was too excessive. Twitter was additionally beneath strain from its staff, who had for years agitated to take away Mr. Trump from the service, in addition to lawmakers, tech traders and others. However whereas greater than 300 staff signed a letter saying Mr. Trump’s account should be stopped, the choice to bar the president was made earlier than the letter was delivered to executives, two of the folks stated. On Wednesday, Mr. Dorsey alluded to the tensions inside Twitter. In a string of 13 tweets, he wrote that he did “not rejoice or really feel delight in our having to ban @realDonaldTrump” as a result of “a ban is a failure of ours finally to advertise wholesome dialog.” However Mr. Dorsey added: “This was the proper resolution for Twitter. We confronted a rare and untenable circumstance, forcing us to focus all of our actions on public security.” Mr. Dorsey, Ms. Gadde and the White Home didn’t reply to requests for remark. Since Mr. Trump was barred, lots of Mr. Dorsey’s considerations in regards to the transfer have been realized. Twitter has been embroiled in a livid debate over tech energy and the businesses’ lack of accountability. Lawmakers equivalent to Consultant Devin Nunes, a Republican from California, have railed in opposition to Twitter, whereas Silicon Valley enterprise capitalists, First Modification students and the American Civil Liberties Union have additionally criticized the corporate. On the identical time, activists all over the world have accused Twitter of following a double customary by chopping off Mr. Trump however not autocrats elsewhere who use the platform to bully opponents. “This can be a phenomenal train of energy to de-platform the president of the US,” stated Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Regulation College who focuses on on-line speech. “It ought to set off a broader reckoning.” Mr. Trump, who joined Twitter in 2009, was a boon and bane for the corporate. His tweets introduced consideration to Twitter, which generally struggled to draw new customers. However his false assertions and threats on-line additionally induced critics to say the location enabled him to unfold lies and provoke harassment. Lots of Twitter’s greater than 5,400 staff opposed having Mr. Trump on the platform. In August 2019, shortly after a gunman killed greater than 20 folks at a Walmart in El Paso, Twitter referred to as a employees assembly to debate how the gunman, in a web based manifesto, had echoed lots of the views that Mr. Trump posted on Twitter. On the assembly, referred to as a “Flock Speak,” some staff stated Twitter was “complicit” by giving Mr. Trump a megaphone to “canine whistle” to his supporters, two attendees stated. The workers implored executives to make modifications earlier than extra folks obtained damage. Over time, Twitter grew to become extra proactive on political content material. In October 2019, Mr. Dorsey ended all political promoting on the location, saying he apprehensive such advertisements had “vital ramifications that right this moment’s democratic construction will not be ready to deal with.” However Mr. Dorsey, a proponent of free speech, declined to take down world leaders’ posts, as a result of he thought-about them newsworthy. Since Twitter introduced that 12 months that it will give larger leeway to world leaders who broke its guidelines, the corporate had eliminated their tweets solely as soon as: Final March, it deleted messages from the presidents of Brazil and Venezuela that promoted false cures for the coronavirus. Mr. Dorsey opposed the removals, an individual with information of his considering stated. Mr. Dorsey pushed for an in-between resolution: appending labels to tweets by world leaders if the posts violated Twitter’s insurance policies. In Could, when Mr. Trump tweeted inaccurate details about mail-in voting, Mr. Dorsey gave the go-ahead for Twitter to begin labeling the president’s messages. After the Nov. 3 election, Mr. Trump tweeted that it had been stolen from him. Inside a couple of days, Twitter had labeled about 34 % of his tweets and retweets, in keeping with a New York Instances tally. Then got here the Capitol storming. On Jan. 6, as Congress met to certify the election, Twitter executives celebrated their acquisition of Ueno, a branding and design agency. Mr. Dorsey, who has typically gone on retreats, had traveled to the South Pacific island, stated the folks with information of his location. When Mr. Trump used Twitter to lash out at Vice President Mike Pence and query the election consequence, the corporate added warnings to his tweets. Then as violence erupted on the Capitol, folks urged Twitter and Fb to take Mr. Trump offline completely. That led to digital discussions amongst a few of Mr. Dorsey’s lieutenants. The group included Ms. Gadde, a lawyer who had joined Twitter in 2011; Del Harvey, vice chairman of belief and security; and Yoel Roth, the top of web site integrity. Ms. Harvey and Mr. Roth had helped construct the corporate’s responses to spam, harassment and election interference. The executives determined to droop Mr. Trump as a result of his feedback appeared to incite the mob, stated the folks with information of the discussions. Ms. Gadde then referred to as Mr. Dorsey, who was not happy, they stated. Mr. Trump was not barred fully. If he deleted a number of tweets that had stoked the mob, there can be a 12-hour cooling-off interval. Then he might put up once more. After Twitter locked Mr. Trump’s account, Fb did the identical. Snapchat, Twitch and others additionally positioned limits on Mr. Trump. However Mr. Dorsey was not offered on a everlasting ban of Mr. Trump. He emailed staff the following day, saying it was necessary for the corporate to stay in keeping with its insurance policies, together with letting a consumer return after a suspension. Many employees, fearing that historical past wouldn’t look kindly upon them, had been dissatisfied. A number of invoked IBM’s collaboration with the Nazis, stated present and former Twitter staff, and began a petition to instantly take away Mr. Trump’s account. That very same day, Fb barred Mr. Trump by way of not less than the top of his time period. However he returned to Twitter that night with a video saying there can be a peaceable transition of energy. By the following morning, although, Mr. Trump was again at it. He tweeted that his base would have a “GIANT VOICE” and that he wouldn’t attend the Jan. 20 inauguration. Twitter’s security staff instantly noticed Trump followers, who had been saying the president deserted them, put up about additional unrest, stated the folks with information of the matter. In a Parler message that the protection staff reviewed, one consumer stated anybody who opposed “American Patriots” like himself ought to depart Washington or danger bodily hurt through the inauguration. The protection staff started drafting an evaluation of the tweets and whether or not they constituted grounds for kicking off Mr. Trump, the folks stated. Round midday in San Francisco that day, Mr. Dorsey referred to as in for an worker assembly. Some pressed him on why Mr. Trump was not completely barred. Mr. Dorsey repeated that Twitter needs to be in keeping with its insurance policies. However he stated he had drawn a line within the sand that the president couldn’t cross or Mr. Trump would lose his account privileges, folks with information of the occasion stated. After the assembly, Mr. Dorsey and different executives agreed that Mr. Trump’s tweets that morning — and the responses they’d provoked — had crossed that line, the folks stated. The worker letter asking for Mr. Trump’s elimination was later delivered, they stated. Inside hours, Mr. Trump’s account was gone, aside from an “Account suspended” label. He tried tweeting from the @POTUS account, which is the official account of the U.S. president, in addition to others. However at each flip, Twitter thwarted him by knocking down the messages. Some Twitter staff, fearing the wrath of Mr. Trump’s supporters, have now set their Twitter accounts to non-public and eliminated mentions of their employer from on-line biographies, 4 folks stated. A number of executives had been assigned private safety. Twitter has additionally broadened its crackdown on accounts selling violence. Over the weekend, it eliminated greater than 70,000 accounts that pushed the QAnon conspiracy principle, which posits that Mr. Trump is preventing a cabal of Devil-worshiping pedophiles. On Wednesday, staff gathered nearly to debate the choice to bar Mr. Trump, two attendees stated. Some had been grateful that Twitter had taken motion, whereas others had been keen to go away the Trump period behind. Many had been emotional; some cried. That afternoon, Mr. Trump returned once more to Twitter, this time utilizing the official @WhiteHouse account to share a video saying he condemned violence — but additionally denouncing what he referred to as restrictions on free speech. Twitter allowed the video to stay on-line. An hour later, Mr. Dorsey tweeted his discomfort in regards to the elimination of Mr. Trump’s on-line accounts. It “units a precedent I really feel is harmful: the facility a person or company has over part of the worldwide public dialog,” he wrote. However he concluded, “The whole lot we study on this second will higher our effort, and push us to be what we’re: one humanity working collectively.” Supply hyperlink #Cut #Decision #Trump #Twitters

[day0one]

How Trump Killed Tens of Thousands of Americans 3 hrs ago

On July 17, President Donald Trump sat for a Fox News interview at the White House. At the time, nearly 140,000 Americans were dead from the novel coronavirus. The interviewer, Chris Wallace, showed Trump a video clip in which Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned of a difficult fall and winter ahead. Trump dismissed the warning. He scoffed that experts had misjudged the virus all along. “Everybody thought this summer it would go away,” said Trump. “They used to say the heat, the heat was good for it and it really knocks it out, remember? So they got that one wrong.”

Trump’s account was completely backward. Redfield and other U.S. public health officials had never promised that heat would knock out the virus. In fact, they had cautioned against that assumption. The person who had held out the false promise of a warm-weather reprieve, again and again, was Trump. And he hadn’t gotten the idea from any of his medical advisers. He had gotten it from Xi Jinping, the president of China, in a phone call in February.

The phone call, the talking points Trump picked up from it, and his subsequent attempts to cover up his alliance with Xi are part of deep betrayal. The story the president now tells—that he “built the greatest economy in history,” that China blindsided him by unleashing the virus, and that Trump saved millions of lives by mobilizing America to defeat it—is a lie. Trump collaborated with Xi, concealed the threat, impeded the U.S. government’s response, silenced those who sought to warn the public, and pushed states to take risks that escalated the tragedy. He’s personally responsible for tens of thousands of deaths.

This isn’t speculation. All the evidence is in the public record. But the truth, unlike Trump’s false narrative, is scattered in different places. It’s in emails, leaks, interviews, hearings, scientific reports, and the president’s stray remarks. This article puts those fragments together. It documents Trump’s interference or negligence in every stage of the government’s failure: preparation, mobilization, public communication, testing, mitigation, and reopening.

Trump has always been malignant and incompetent. As president, he has coasted on economic growth, narrowly averted crises of his own making, and corrupted the government in ways that many Americans could ignore. But in the pandemic, his vices—venality, dishonesty, self-absorption, dereliction, heedlessness—turned deadly. They produced lies, misjudgments, and destructive interventions that multiplied the carnage. The coronavirus debacle isn’t, as Trump protests, an “artificial problem” that spoiled his presidency. It’s the fulfillment of everything he is.

Trump never prepared for a pandemic. For years, he had multiple warnings—briefings, reports, simulations, intelligence assessments—that a crisis such as this one was likely and that the government wasn’t ready for it. In April, he admitted that he was informed of the risks: “I always knew that pandemics are one of the worst things that could happen.” But when the virus arrived, the federal government was still ill-equipped to deal with it. According to Trump, “We had no ventilators. We had no testing. We had nothing.”

That’s an exaggeration. But it’s true that the stockpile of pandemic supplies was depleted and that the government’s system for producing virus tests wasn’t designed for such heavy demand. So why, for the first three years of his presidency, did Trump do nothing about it? He often brags that he spent $2 trillion to beef up the military. But he squeezed the budget for pandemics, disbanded the federal team in charge of protecting the country from biological threats, and stripped down the Beijing office of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Trump has been asked several times to explain these decisions. He has given two answers. One is that he wanted to save money. “Some of the people we cut, they haven’t been used for many, many years,” he said in February. “If we have a need, we can get them very quickly. … I’m a businessperson. I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them.”

His second answer is that he had other priorities. In March, at a Fox News town hall, Bret Baier asked Trump why he hadn’t updated the test production system. “I’m thinking about a lot of other things, too, like trade,” Trump replied. “I’m not thinking about this.” In May, ABC’s David Muir asked him, “What did you do when you became president to restock those cupboards that you say were bare?” Trump gave the same answer: “I have a lot of things going on.”

Trump prepared for war, not for a virus. He wagered that if a pandemic broke out, he could pull together the resources to contain it quickly. He was wrong. But that was just the first of many mistakes.

In early January, Trump was warned about a deadly new virus in China. He was also told that the Chinese government was understating the outbreak. (See this timeline for a detailed chronology of what Trump knew and when he knew it.) This was inconvenient because Trump was about to sign a lucrative trade deal with Beijing. “We have a great relationship with China right now, so I don’t want to speak badly of anyone,” Trump told Laura Ingraham in a Fox News interview on Jan. 10. He added that he was looking forward to a second deal with Xi. When Ingraham asked about China’s violations of human rights, Trump begged off. “I’m riding a fine line because we’re making … great trade deals,” he pleaded.

Trump signed the deal on Jan. 15. He lauded Xi and said previous American presidents, not Xi, were at fault for past troubles between the two countries. Three days later, Alex Azar, Trump’s secretary of health and human services, phoned him with an update on the spread of the novel coronavirus. On Jan. 21, the CDC announced the first infection in the United States. Two of the government’s top health officials—Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases—said the virus was beginning to circulate around the world.

Trump would later claim that he saw from the outset how grim the situation was. That was clear, he recalled, in the “initial numbers coming out from China.” But at the time, he told Americans everything was fine. “We’re in great shape,” he assured Maria Bartiromo in a Fox Business interview on Jan. 22. “China’s in good shape, too.” He preferred to talk about trade instead. “The China deal is amazing, and we’ll be starting Phase Two very soon,” he said. On CNBC, Joe Kernen asked Trump whether there were any “worries about a pandemic.” “No, not at all,” the president replied. “We have it totally under control.” When Kernen asked whether the Chinese were telling the whole truth about the virus, Trump said they were. “I have a great relationship with President Xi,” he boasted. “We just signed probably the biggest deal ever made.”

The crisis in China grew. In late January, Trump’s medical advisers agreed with his national security team that he should suspend travel from China to the United States. But Trump resisted. He had spent months cultivating a relationship with Xi and securing the trade deal. He was counting on China to buy American goods and boost the U.S. economy, thereby helping him win reelection. He had said this to Xi explicitly, in a conversation witnessed by then-National Security Adviser John Bolton. Trump also worried that a travel ban would scare the stock market. But by the end of the month, airlines were halting flights to China anyway. On Jan. 31, Trump gave in.

His advisers knew the ban would only buy time. They wanted to use that time to fortify America. But Trump had no such plans. On Feb. 1, he recorded a Super Bowl interview with Sean Hannity. Hannity pointed out that the number of known infections in the United States had risen to eight, and he asked Trump whether he was worried. The president brushed him off. “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China,” said Trump. That was false: Thanks to loopholes in the ban, the coronavirus strain that would engulf Washington state arrived from China about two weeks later. But at the time of the interview, the ban hadn’t even taken effect. The important thing, to Trump, was that he had announced the ban. He was less interested in solving the problem than in looking as though he had solved it. And in the weeks to come, he would argue that the ban had made other protective measures unnecessary.

There were three logical steps to consider after suspending travel from China. The first was suspending travel from Europe. By Jan. 21, Trump’s advisers knew the virus was in France. By Jan. 31, they knew it had reached Italy, Germany, Finland, and the United Kingdom. From conversations with European governments, they also knew that these governments, apart from Italy, weren’t going to block travel from China. And they were directly informed that the flow of passengers from Europe to the United States far exceeded the normal flow of passengers from China to the United States. Trump’s deputy national security adviser, Matthew Pottinger, pleaded for a ban on travel from Europe, but other advisers said this would hurt the economy in an election year. Trump, persuaded by Pottinger’s opponents, refused to go along.

Not until March 11, six weeks after blocking travel from China, did Trump take similar action against Europe. In a televised address, he acknowledged that travelers from Europe had brought the disease to America. Two months later, based on genetic and epidemiological analyses, the CDC would confirm that Trump’s action had come too late because people arriving from Europe—nearly 2 million of them in February, hundreds of whom were infected—had already accelerated the spread of the virus in the United States.

The second step was to gear up production of masks, ventilators, and other medical supplies. In early February, trade adviser Peter Navarro, biomedical research director Rick Bright, and other officials warned of impending shortages of these supplies. Azar would later claim that during this time, everyone in the administration was pleading for more equipment. But when Azar requested $4 billion to stock up, the White House refused. Trump dismissed the outcry for masks and ridiculed Democrats for “forcing money” on him to buy supplies. “They say, ‘Oh, he should do more,’ ” the president scoffed in an interview on Feb. 28. “There’s nothing more you can do.”

The third and most important step was to test the population to see whether the virus was spreading domestically. That was the policy of South Korea, the global leader in case detection. Like the United States, South Korea had identified its first case on Jan. 20. But from there, the two countries diverged. By Feb. 3 South Korea had expanded its testing program, and by Feb. 27 it was checking samples from more than 10,000 people a day. The U.S. program, hampered by malfunctions and bureaucratic conflict, was nowhere near that. By mid-February, it was testing only about 100 samples a day. As a result, few infections were being detected.

Fauci saw this as a grave vulnerability. From Feb. 14 to March 11, he warned in a dozen hearings, forums, and interviews that the virus might be spreading “under the radar.” But Trump wasn’t interested. He liked having a low infection count—he bragged about it at rallies—and he understood that the official count would stay low if people weren’t tested. Trump had been briefed on the testing situation since late January and knew test production was delayed. But he insisted that “anybody that wants a test can get a test” and that “the tests are all perfect.” Later, he brushed off the delay in test production and said it had been “quickly remedied.” He complained that additional tests, by exposing additional cases, made him “look bad.”

To keep the numbers low, Trump was willing to risk lives. He figured that infections didn’t count if they were offshore, so he tried to prevent infected Americans from setting foot on American soil. In mid-February, even as he refused to bar Europeans from entering the United States, he exploded in anger when more than a dozen infected Americans were allowed to return from Japan. “I hated to do it, statistically,” he told Hannity. “You know, is it going to look bad?” In March, he opposed a decision to let passengers off a cruise ship in California. “I’d rather have the people stay” offshore, he explained, “because I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship.”

When the spread of the virus in the United States could no longer be denied, Trump called it the “invisible enemy.” But Trump had kept it invisible. The CDC would later acknowledge that due to woefully insufficient testing, the overwhelming majority of infections had gone undiagnosed. Models would show that by mid-February, there were hundreds of undetected infections in the United States for every known case. By the end of the month, there were thousands.

Trump didn’t just ignore warnings. He suppressed them. When Azar briefed him about the virus in January, Trump called him an “alarmist” and told him to stop panicking. When Navarro submitted a memo about the oncoming pandemic, Trump said he shouldn’t have put his words in writing. As the stock market rose in February, Trump discouraged aides from saying anything about the virus that might scare investors.

The president now casts himself as a victim of Chinese deception. In reality, he collaborated with Xi to deceive both the Chinese public and the American public. For weeks after he was briefed on the situation in China, including the fact that Beijing was downplaying the crisis, Trump continued to deny that the Chinese government was hiding anything. He implied that American experts had been welcomed in China and could vouch for Beijing’s information, which—as he would acknowledge months later—wasn’t true. On Twitter, Trump wrote tributes worthy of Chinese state propaganda. “Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation,” he proclaimed.

On Feb. 10, just before a rally in New Hampshire, Trump told Fox News host Trish Regan that the Chinese “have everything under control. … We’re working with them. You know, we just sent some of our best people over there.” Then Trump walked onstage and exploited the political payoff of his deal with Xi. “Last month, we signed a groundbreaking trade agreement with China that will defeat so many of our opponents,” he boasted. He told the crowd that he had spoken with Xi and that the virus situation would “work out fine.” “By April,” he explained, “in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”

Trump didn’t tell the crowd that he had heard this theory from Xi. But that’s what the record indicates. There’s no evidence of Trump peddling the warm-weather theory prior to Feb. 7, when he had an overnight phone call with Xi. Immediately after that call, Trump began to promote the idea. Later, he mentioned that Xi had said it. When Fauci, Messonnier, Azar, and Redfield were asked about the theory, they all said it was an unwise assumption, since the virus was new. The American president, against the judgment of his public health officials, was feeding American citizens a false assurance passed to him by the Chinese president.

Three days after the rally in New Hampshire, Trump defended China’s censorship of information about the virus. In a radio interview, Geraldo Rivera asked him, “Did the Chinese tell the truth about this?” Trump, in reply, suggested that he would have done what Xi had done. “I think they want to put the best face on it,” he said. “If you were running it … you wouldn’t want to run out to the world and go crazy and start saying whatever it is, ’cause you don’t want to create a panic.” Weeks later, Trump would also excuse Chinese disinformation about the virus, telling Fox News viewers that “every country does it.”

Trump envied Xi. He wished he could control what Americans heard and thought, the way Xi could control China’s government and media. But Trump didn’t have authoritarian powers, and some of his subordinates wouldn’t shut up. As the virus moved from country to country, Fauci, Redfield, and Azar began to acknowledge that it would soon overtake the United States. On Feb. 25, when Messonnier said Americans should prepare for school and workplace closures, the stock market plunged. Trump, in a rage, called Azar and threatened to fire Messonnier. The next day, the president seized control of the administration’s press briefings on the virus.

On Feb. 26, shortly before Trump held his first briefing, aides gave him bad news: The CDC had just confirmed the first U.S. infection that couldn’t be traced to foreign travel. That meant the virus was spreading undetected. But when Trump took the podium, he didn’t mention what he had just been told. Instead, he assured the public that infections in the United States were “going down, not up” and that the case count “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” He predicted that America wouldn’t “ever be anywhere near” having to close schools or distribute more masks, since “our borders are very controlled.” When a reporter pointed out that the United States had tested fewer than 500 people, while South Korea had tested tens of thousands, Trump shot back, “We’re testing everybody that we need to test. And we’re finding very little problem.”

Trump’s eruption brought his subordinates into line. Shortly after the president’s angry call to Azar, Redfield told Congress that “our containment strategy has been quite successful.” At her next briefing, for the first time, Messonnier praised Trump by name. She parroted his talking points: that the United States had “acted incredibly quickly, before most other countries” and had “aggressively controlled our borders.” Azar, in testimony before the House, went further. When he was asked to explain the discord between Trump and his medical advisers, the health secretary argued that Americans, like citizens of China, needed to be soothed. The president, Azar explained, was “trying to calm” the populace because, as “we see in China, panic can be as big of an enemy as [the] virus.”

Having cowed his health officials, Trump next went after the press. He told Americans to ignore news reports about the virus. On Feb. 26 and Feb. 27, Trump denounced CNN and MSNBC for “panicking markets” by making the crisis “look as bad as possible.” He dismissed their reports as “fake” and tweeted, “USA in great shape!” At a rally in South Carolina on Feb. 28, he accused the press of “hysteria,” called criticism of his virus policies a “hoax,” and insisted that only 15 Americans were infected. Weeks later, he would tell the public not to believe U.S. media reports about Chinese propaganda, either.

In the three weeks after his Feb. 26 crackdown on his subordinates, Trump opposed or obstructed every response to the crisis. Doctors were pleading for virus tests and other equipment. Without enough tests to sample the population or screen people with symptoms, the virus was spreading invisibly. Fauci was desperate to accelerate the production and distribution of tests, but Trump said it wasn’t necessary. On a March 6 visit to the CDC, the president argued that instead of “going out and proactively looking to see where there’s a problem,” it was better to “find out those areas just by sitting back and waiting.” A proactive CDC testing program, lacking presidential support, never got off the ground. Nor did a separate national testing plan—organized by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner—which was supposed to be presented for Trump’s approval but, for unknown reasons, was never announced.

Trump also refused to invoke the Defense Production Act, which could have accelerated the manufacture of masks, gloves, ventilators, and other emergency equipment. In January, HHS had begun to plan for use of the DPA, and in early February, some members of Congress suggested it might be needed. But Trump declined to use it until the end of March. When he was asked why, he said that governors, not the president, were responsible for emergency supplies and that telling “companies what to do” might upset the “business community.”

The president’s most decisive contribution to the death toll was his resistance to public health measures known as “mitigation”: social distancing, school and workplace closures, and cancellations of large gatherings. Messonnier and others had warned since early February that Americans needed to prepare for such measures. On Feb. 24, Trump’s health advisers decided it was time to act. But they couldn’t get a meeting with Trump, because he was off to India to discuss another trade deal. When he returned, he blew up at Messonnier for talking about closing schools and offices. The meeting to discuss mitigation was canceled.

Mitigation required leadership. The president needed to tell Americans that the crisis was urgent and that life had to change. Instead, he told them everything was fine. On March 2, he held another rally, this time in North Carolina. Before the rally, a TV interviewer asked him whether he was taking more precautions because of the virus. “Probably not so much,” Trump replied. “I just shook hands with a whole lot of people back there.” The next day, he said it was safe to travel across the country, since “there’s only one hot spot.” On March 5, at a Fox News town hall, he repeated, “I shake anybody’s hand now. I’m proud of it.” On March 6, visiting the CDC, he was asked about the risks of packing people together at rallies. “It doesn’t bother me at all,” he said.

As schools and businesses began to close, Trump pushed back. On March 4, he dismissed a question about further closures, insisting that only “a very small number” of Americans were infected. On March 9, he tweeted that the virus had hardly killed anyone and that even in bad flu seasons, “nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on.” Italy locked down its population, the NBA suspended its season, and states began to postpone elections. But through the middle of March, as advisers urged the president to endorse mitigation, he stood his ground. Finally, as the stock market continued to fall, Trump’s business friends agreed that it was time to yield. On March 16, he announced mitigation guidelines.

By then, the number of confirmed infections in the United States had surged past 4,000. But that was a fraction of the real number. The CDC would later calculate that in the three weeks from “late February to early March, the number of U.S. COVID-19 cases increased more than 1,000-fold.” And researchers at Columbia University would find that the final two-week delay in mitigation, from March 1 to March 15, had multiplied the U.S. death toll by a factor of six. By May 3, the price of that delay was more than 50,000 lives.

On March 23, a week after he announced the mitigation guidelines, Trump began pushing to rescind them. “We have to open our country,” he demanded. He batted away questions about the opinions of his medical advisers. “If it were up to the doctors, they may say, ‘Let’s keep it shut down,’ ” he shrugged. But “you can’t do that with a country, especially the No. 1 economy.” The next day, the stock market soared, and Trump took credit. Investors “see that we want to get our country open as soon as possible,” he crowed.

Trump fixated on the market and the election. In more than a dozen tweets, briefings, and interviews, he explicitly connected his chances of reelection to the speed at which schools and businesses reopened. (Trump focused on schools only after he was told that they were crucial to resuming commerce.) The longer it took, he warned, the better Democrats would do in the election. In April, he applauded states that opened early and hectored states that kept businesses closed. In June, he told workers in Maine, “You’re missing a lot of money.” “Why isn’t your governor opening up your state?” he asked them.

Trump pushed states to reopen businesses even where, under criteria laid out by his health officials, it wasn’t safe to do so. He called for “pressure” and endorsed lawsuits against governors who resisted. He issued an executive order to keep meat-processing plants open, despite thousands of infections among plant employees. He ordered the CDC to publish rules allowing churches to reopen, and he vowed to “override any governor” who kept them closed. In April, he made the CDC withdraw an indefinite ban on cruises, which had spread the virus. In July, he pressed the agency to loosen its guidelines for reopening schools.

He continued to suppress warnings. In April, he claimed that doctors who reported shortages of supplies were faking it. When an acting inspector general released a report that showed supplies were inadequate, Trump dismissed the report and replaced her. When a Navy captain wrote a letter seeking help for his infected crew, Trump endorsed the captain’s demotion. The letter “shows weakness,” he said. “We don’t want to have letter-writing campaigns where the fake news finds a letter or gets a leak.”

Having argued in March against testing, Trump now complained that doctors were testing too many people. He said tests, by revealing infections, made him “look bad.” When Fauci and Deborah Birx, the response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said more tests were needed, Trump openly contradicted them. In July, he claimed that 99 percent of coronavirus infections were “totally harmless”—which wasn’t true—and that the testing system, by detecting these infections, was “working too well.”

Fauci, Birx, Redfield, and other health officials pointed out that mitigation was working. They argued against premature resumption of in-person social activities, noting that the virus wasn’t under control and might roar back. Trump publicly overruled them, tried to discredit them, and pressured them to disavow their words. To block Fauci from disputing Trump’s assurances that the virus was “going away,” the White House barred him from doing most TV interviews. In June, when Fauci said resuming professional football would be risky, Trump rebuked him. “Informed Dr. Fauci this morning that he has nothing to do with NFL Football,” the president tweeted.

Trump interfered with every part of the government’s response. He told governors that testing for the virus was their job, not his. When they asked for help in getting supplies, he told them to “get ’em yourself.” He refused, out of pique, to speak to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or to some governors whose states were overrun by the virus. He told Vice President Mike Pence not to speak to them, either. He refused to consult former presidents, calling them failures and saying he had nothing to learn from them.

Trump didn’t just get in the way. He made things worse. He demanded that Wisconsin hold elections in early April, which coincided with dozens of infections among voters and poll workers. (Some researchers later found correlations between infections and voting in that election; others didn’t.) He forced West Point to summon cadets, 15 of whom were infected, back to campus to attend his commencement speech in June. He suggested that the virus could be killed by injecting disinfectants. He persistently urged Americans to take hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug, despite research that found it was ineffective against the coronavirus and in some cases could be dangerous. Trump dismissed the research as “phony.”

The simplest way to control the virus was to wear face coverings. But instead of encouraging this precaution, Trump ridiculed masks. He said they could cause infections, and he applauded people who spurned them. Polls taken in late May, as the virus began to spread across the Sun Belt, indicated that Trump’s scorn was suppressing mask use. A Morning Consult survey found that the top predictor of non-use of masks, among dozens of factors tested, was support for Trump. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey found that people who seldom or never wore masks were 12 times more likely to support Trump than to support his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. Some scientific models imply that Trump’s suppression of mask use may have contributed to hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths.

On June 10, Trump announced that he would resume holding political rallies. He targeted four states: Florida, Texas, Arizona, and Oklahoma. The point of the rallies, he explained, wasn’t just to boost his campaign but to signal that it was time to “open up our country” and “get back to business.” When reporters raised the possibility that he might spread the virus by drawing crowds indoors, he accused them of “trying to Covid Shame us on our big Rallies.”

Despite being warned that infections in Oklahoma were surging, Trump proceeds with a rally at a Tulsa arena on June 20. To encourage social distance, the arena’s managers put “Do Not Sit Here” stickers on alternate seats. The Trump campaign removed the stickers. Trump also refused to wear a mask at the rally—few people in the crowd did, either—and in his speech, he bragged about continuing to shake children’s hands. Two weeks later, Tulsa broke its record for daily infections, and the city’s health director said the rally was partly to blame. Former presidential candidate Herman Cain attended the rally, tested positive for the virus days afterward, and died at the end of July.

At the rally, Trump complained that health care workers were finding too many infections by testing people for the virus. He said he had told “my people” to “slow the testing down, please.” Aides insisted that the president was joking. But on June 22, in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, he said he was only half-joking. He affirmed, this time seriously, that he had told “my people” that testing was largely frivolous and bad for America’s image. Weeks later, officials involved in negotiations on Capitol Hill disclosed that the administration, against the wishes of Senate Republicans, was trying to block funding for virus tests.

Two days after the Tulsa rally, an interviewer asked Trump whether he was putting lives at risk “by continuing to hold these indoor events.” Trump brushed off the question: “I’m not worried about it. No, not at all.” The next day, June 23, the president staged another largely mask-free rally, this time in a church in Arizona, where a statewide outbreak was underway. Days later, Secret Service agents and a speaker at the Arizona rally tested positive for the virus. On June 28, Trump urged people to attend another rally, this time featuring Pence, at a Dallas church where five choir and orchestra members had tested positive.

In his interview with Wallace, which aired July 19, Trump conceded nothing. He called Fauci an alarmist and repeated that the virus would “disappear.” He excoriated governors for “not allowing me to have rallies” and accused them of keeping businesses closed to hurt him in the election. He claimed that “masks cause problems” and said people should feel free not to wear them. He threatened to defund schools unless they resumed in-class instruction. As to the rising number of infections, Trump scoffed that “many of those cases shouldn’t even be cases,” since they would “heal automatically.” By testing so many people, he groused, health care workers were “creating trouble for the fake news to come along and say, ‘Oh, we have more cases.’ ”

Since that interview, Trump has attacked and belittled his medical advisers. He lashed out at Birx for acknowledging the ongoing spread of the virus. He retweeted a false claim that Fauci was suppressing hydroxychloroquine “to perpetuate Covid deaths to hurt Trump.” When Fauci told Congress that infections had increased due to insufficient mitigation, Trump rebuked him and blamed the surge on increased testing. And when Dave Portnoy, a wealthy Trump supporter, complained that his stocks tanked every time Fauci called for mitigation, Trump assured Portnoy that the doctor’s pleas would go nowhere. “He’d like to see [the economy] closed up for a couple of years,” Trump said of Fauci. “But that’s OK because I’m president. So I say, ‘I appreciate your opinion. Now somebody give me another opinion.’ ”

It’s hard to believe a president could be this callous and corrupt. It’s hard to believe one person could get so many things wrong or do so much damage. But that’s what happened. Trump knew we weren’t ready for a pandemic, but he didn’t prepare. He knew China was hiding the extent of the crisis, but he joined in the cover-up. He knew the virus was spreading in the United States, but he said it was vanishing. He knew we wouldn’t find it without more tests, but he said we didn’t need them. He delayed mitigation. He derided masks. He tried to silence anyone who told the truth. And in the face of multiple warnings, he pushed the country back open, reigniting the spread of the disease.

Now Trump asks us to reelect him. “We had the greatest economy in the history of the world,” he told Fox News on Wednesday. “Then we got hit with the plague from China.” But now, he promised, “We’re building it again.” In Trump’s story, the virus is a foreign intrusion, an unpleasant interlude, a stroke of bad luck. But when you stand back and look at the full extent of his role in the catastrophe, it’s amazing how lucky we were. For three years, we survived the most ruthless, reckless, dishonest president in American history. Then our luck ran out.

[theconservativebrief]

To understand what the Trump administration is thinking about separating families and locking kids up at the border, you have to understand Stephen Miller’s foundational political belief: It’s better to stir controversy, at any price, than it is to engage constructively.

The architect of Donald Trump’s immigration policy and the White House’s resident troll, the 32-year-old White House senior policy adviser believes it’s good to “trigger the libs,” so to speak, with “the purpose of enlightenment.” To Miller, working constructively across the aisle isn’t as useful as “melting snowflakes.”

To Miller, there’s no reason to moderate a view or a policy, especially not when it comes to his deepest passion: immigration restrictionism. It’s subject he was passionate about even in high school and one over which he bonded with former boss, then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, a longtime immigration hardliner. It’s no wonder, then, that Miller designed the initial version of Trump’s travel ban, barring people from several majority-Muslim countries from entering the US for 90 days, and refugees for 120 days.

As Republicans are beginning to call the Trump policy of separating children and parents at the border utterly cruel, Miller’s response is a reminder that not only does he not care, the cruelty is by design. “No nation can have the policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement,” Miller said in an interview with the New York Times. Enforcing that policy was a “simple decision.”

The popularity of the family separation policy is plummeting, and conservative pundits and politicians are jumping ship en masse. Even Trump administration officials who supported the separation policy in early 2017 are now attempting to pretend such a policy doesn’t exist.

Miller’s strategy of “melting snowflakes” might be his most deeply held belief. But on family separation, it’s divided the right and pushed the left back into the activist square.

My colleague Dara Lind has a terrific explainer on the family separation policy:

As a matter of policy, the US government is separating families who seek asylum in the US by crossing the border illegally. Dozens of parents are being split from their children each day — the children labeled “unaccompanied minors” and sent to government custody or foster care, the parents labeled criminals and sent to jail.

Per Lind’s research, between October 1, 2017, and May 31, 2018, at least 2,700 children have been split from their parents.

Family separation isn’t based on any law, and such policies may have had their origins in previous administrations — as Lind pointed out, the law addressing unaccompanied children was passed in 2008 and signed by President George W. Bush. But while Trump administration officials argue that they’re simply “doing their jobs,” videos released by Border Patrol of young children and women being kept in cages are causing an uproar across the country.

BREAKING: Border Patrol @CBP just gave us this video of the detention facility we toured yesterday in McAllen, Texas. We weren’t allowed to bring in cameras, or interview anyone. To be clear: this is government handout video. pic.twitter.com/Zjy80qIZFZ

— David Begnaud (@DavidBegnaud) June 18, 2018

Some conservative personalities have attempted to provide cover for the administration, arguing that cages aren’t cages, for example.

But overall, Trump’s White House is receiving significant pushback from conservatives, including members of Congress with high profiles within the right, and even pastors on Trump’s evangelical advisory board. Former first lady Laura Bush wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for a “more moral” answer to the problem of illegal border crossings, while Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) told CNN that Trump could “stop this policy with a phone call,” adding, “If you don’t like families being separated, you can go tell DHS stop doing it.”

Rep. Mia Love (R-UT) called the policy “horrible,” adding this message to Trump: “This is not a right or left issue. This is right or wrong. This is what it takes to be the leader of the free world. This is what it takes to be the leader of a free country.”

In a Facebook post, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) wrote of the policy: “Family separation is wicked. It is harmful to kids and absolutely should NOT be the default U.S. policy. Americans are better than this.” And Sasse pointed out that while “some in the administration have decided that this cruel policy increases their legislative leverage … This is wrong. Americans do not take children hostage, period.”

It’s that final point that’s received significant pushback — that children are being used as leverage to force Democrats to agree to a border wall or another form of immigration restriction. (Per a White House leaker: “The thinking in the building is to force people to the table.”) Even former Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly said that the Trump administration “will not win on this one.”

The government should know how bad this looks and how innocent children are actually suffering. That kind of scenario is unacceptable to most Americans as exemplified by former First Lady Laura Bush’s withering criticism. https://t.co/F4PKL00xLS

— Bill O’Reilly (@BillOReilly) June 18, 2018

The Trump administration hasn’t really tried to win the public conversation on family separations. As conservative writer Ross Douthat pointed out on Twitter, the policy didn’t begin with a public discussion or explanation for separating young children from their parents, or by making the case to Congress for more family detention facilities. It started by taking kids from their parents first and attempting to assuage demands for legislation later.

You can’t say “we’re being forced into this” if you didn’t make any effort to sell the public and Congress on the alternative system before you chose this one. And the fact that the Trump WH doesn’t do normal salesmanship/policymaking, bc incompetence, is an insufficient excuse.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) June 18, 2018

That’s not a bug within the Trumpian system, it’s a feature of Stephen Miller’s approach. It’s also similar to the approach of former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who agreed publicly with Miller in 2016 about the purported “massive problem” of immigration and who said Sunday on ABC’s This Week: “I don’t think you have to justify it.”

Miller’s reason for being in the White House and in politics is immigration restrictionism. When he joined the Trump campaign in 2015, conservative polemicist and immigration hardliner Ann Coulter tweeted, “I’m in heaven!”

And nothing has changed since 2015. As Miller told Breitbart in May, he believes the border with Mexico “is the fundamental political contrast and political debate that is unfolding right now.”

But Miller has no interest in convincing the opposition of the correctness of his views. Like he did in high school and in college at Duke University, he simply wants to enrage. As National Review columnist Dan McLaughlin told me, this follows his boss’ style of political discourse. “A hallmark of the Trump approach to politics is the assumption that politics is all about activating emotional reactions, not persuading anyone to change their mind.” In short, “triggering the libs.”

Republicans are trying to win the 2018 midterms. For members of Congress, that includes motivating the base — but it’s also about winning over moderates and independents too.

The Trump-Miller approach plays well with Breitbart readers and immigration restrictionists. But it’s not turning out to be hugely popular among Republicans. In the first Quinnipiac poll on children being separated from their parents at the border, voters oppose it 66 to 27. And though Republicans support it 55 to 35, that’s incredibly low in comparison to Republican support for, say, Trump himself.

Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway distanced herself from the policy, telling Meet the Press that “nobody likes this policy.”

FULL INTERVIEW: @KellyannePolls joins #MTP in an exclusive interview and says, “As a mother, as a Catholic, as someone with a conscience… I will tell you nobody likes this policy,” on the issue of family separation at the border.https://t.co/FBm12m7lI4

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) June 17, 2018

It’s no wonder, then, that faced with such opposition, members of the administration not named Stephen Miller have resorted to arguing that the family separation policy isn’t a real policy at all. (This was before saying a day later that children taken away from their families by that “nonexistent” policy were being well-treated.)

But despite the linguistic gymnastics, the fundamental policy remains unchanged, as does the political strategy. The outrage and hoopla around the cruelty of the policy is the whole point. Even if the strategy backfires in the fall midterms, Miller’s game — drive the outrage, refuse to retreat — will remain the same.

Original Source -> Stephen Miller believes in controversy as political strategy, even if it means jailing children

via The Conservative Brief