Opinion

Kim Potter, a 26-year police veteran who killed 20-year-old Daunte Wright during a traffic stop that began with an air freshener and overdue plates, resigned from the Brooklyn Center police department, and has been charged for that killing.

I don't know how to feel about that. Not that I'm upset to see her go or arrested. I'm not. It's just that even though it is heartening to know she won't be patrolling the streets any longer, I don't know if this gets us closer to justice or further away. It's hard to know what justice looks like these days. Or even what the word justice means.

News that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine can cause blood clots in about one in 1 million women under 50 has exploded across the social media world. Republicans, along with countries that hate America, are smiling.

A fellow who runs a couple of communities on a popular social media site called into my program yesterday saying that the vaccine news had caused an "absolute explosion" of vaccine denialism. People who'd been on the fence are now outright opposed to getting the jab.

Recent calls to deprogram QAnon conspiracy followers are steeped in discredited notions about brainwashing. As popularly imagined, brainwashing is a coercive procedure that programs new long-term personality changes. Deprogramming, also coercive, is thought to undo brainwashing.

As a professor of religious studies who has written and taught about alternative religious movements, I believe such deprogramming conversations do little to help us understand why people adopt QAnon beliefs. A deprogramming discourse fails to understand religious recruitment and conversion and excuses those spreading QAnon beliefs from accountability.

There were many bizarre moments during the Trump administration but one of the oddest has to be that time he spontaneously invited the Taliban to Camp David on the anniversary of 9/11 in 2019. The story went that the peace talks preceding withdrawal were on the verge of bearing fruit and President Trump wanted to have a big ceremony like Jimmy Carter did with the Camp David Accords — only much bigger and better. The New York Times reported that during a meeting with various advisers the idea was floated to invite the Taliban to the U.S. and Trump, of course, was thrilled. He could smell that Nobel Peace Prize finally coming home to papa.

This article was originally published at Salon

On Tuesday, POLITICO reported that President Joe Biden's Department of Housing and Urban Development is moving to restore a fair-housing rule that former President Donald Trump attacked with a dog-whistling set of tweets about saving the suburbs.

"The agency will restore the original versions of a 2015 rule requiring cities to address residential segregation in order to access federal funds and a 2013 rule cracking down on unintended discrimination," reported Katy O'Donnell. "The 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule would have required local governments to track patterns of segregation and poverty with a checklist of 92 questions to receive federal housing grants. The Trump administration suspended its implementation in 2018. Officials then proposed a watered-down revision before scrapping it [all together] last summer as former President Donald Trump campaigned on the warning that Democrats were trying to ruin the suburbs by shoving low-income housing down their throats."

Maybe it's just me, but I'm detecting a whiff of panic from the Washington press corps. For one thing, the Biden administration is, so far, running pretty smoothly. Sure, there are serious border problems to manage. One of the vaccines is proving a bit problematic. But otherwise, public servants dedicated to government of, by and for the people under the law and with reverence for the United States Constitution seem to be delivering. After four years of trumpery, White House reporters must be jonesing.

For another, the press corps is having difficulty seeing, understanding and, therefore, reporting the fundamental shifts that have taken place in the last six months alone. The Republicans, it goes without saying, have declared massive resistance to all things Biden even when all things Biden are Godsends to constituents back home who are impatient for the day when the government finally starts delivering for the people. The president and the Democrats, meanwhile, seem unfazed. They knew they weren't going to get help from the Republicans. They have majority numbers to do without.

Donald Trump is a bored old man whose main entertainment these days is making a fool out of Republican fundraisers with his unhinged rants, but, sadly for the rest of us, his impact will be long-lingering, from the mainstreaming of white nationalist rhetoric to the size of the lies Republican politicians feel emboldened to tell. One of the oddest, most annoying legacies Trump leaves behind has the potential to impact not just Republican politicians, but Democratic ones as well: that all they need to do when faced with a scandal, no matter how serious, is to dig in their heels and refuse to resign. Eventually, as Trump's time in office demonstrated, the press will get bored and move on.

The two current examples of this phenomenon come from different sides of the aisle but have a surprising amount in common with both each other and Trump: New York's Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, and Congress' most "Florida man" member, Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz.

The GOP's latest culture war is focused squarely on the nation's transgender community, specifically transgender youth. It isn't a new war, simply a new front in an old war that can be traced back to the famed "bathroom bills" from some years ago that spread across dozens of states. Those bills were introduced in tandem with former President Donald Trump's targeted federal government-led attacks that included the overturning of anti-discrimination statutes protecting trans people and an outright transgender ban in the U.S. military.

Now, in the wake of Trump's humiliating electoral loss, Republicans have accelerated the state-level attacks to a breathtaking level. In just the first three months of 2021, GOP-led state legislatures introduced more bills aimed at transgender people, especially youth, than they did over the entire previous year. There are now more than 80 bills introduced this year alone that, according to Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign, "are not addressing any real problem, and they're not being requested by constituents. Rather, this effort is being driven by national far-right organizations attempting to score political points by sowing fear and hate."

Look, I'm no expert on, well, pretty much anything! But there is one thing I do know. There is one thing anyone can know if they are willing to see. It's that the people we all trust to keep the peace in this country aren't doing a good job of it. What's more, the people we entrust to keep the peace are often themselves responsible for the violence. It's getting to the point where I'm thinking it's a good idea to take away their guns.

This article was originally published at The Editorial Board

Tucker Carlson's at it again.

As Salon's Kaity Assaf reported last week, the unctuous Fox News host delivered more grotesque, racist commentary last week, this time explicitly endorsing the hardcore white supremacist "great replacement" theory on his top-rated TV show. Throwing it out there in a discussion of the assault on voting rights around the country Carlson said, "the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate" with "new people, more obedient voters from the Third World." It's a line Carlson has been called out for before.

If you're named for Andrew Jackson and you're a QAnon guy and you're a self-styled "law-enforcement auditor" who posts traffic stops and other arrests on YouTube, why wouldn't you go the January 6 Capitol riot?

Meet Andrew Jackson Morgan Jr. of Maxwell, Texas. The FBI charged him April 8 with the usual charges of unlawful entry, obstruction of an official proceeding and violent entry or disorderly conduct in connection with the riot. But there's also one for "aiding and abetting" that would suggest an active role in "encouraging" others in the crowd.

For four decades, the basic deal between big American corporations and politicians has been simple. Corporations provide campaign funds. Politicians reciprocate by lowering corporate taxes and doing whatever else corporations need to boost profits.

The deal has proven beneficial to both sides, although not to the American public. Campaign spending has soared while corporate taxes have shriveled.