Weekly Progressive POPULIST
WHEN ALL THE NEWS THAT FITS JUST ISN'T ENOUGH Weekly news and commentary to supplement our printed edition Friday, July 31, 2026
‘Charitable Giving’ Isn’t What You Think
By ROBERT REICH
I want to start today with a warning about “charitable giving” and end with a primer on wealth inequality. The two are closely related, as I’ll explain.
We’re on the cusp of the biggest gusher of “charitable giving” in history. Beware.
We tend to think of “charitable giving” as unambiguously good because we equate “charities” with organizations that help the poor and equate “giving” with generosity. But both assumptions are wrong.
In fact, the “giving” is actually a giant tax loophole that provides the super-rich a means of dramatically cutting their tax bills while quietly funding their own priorities.
And “charities” under the tax code include elite universities, fancy opera houses, cultural palaces frequented only by the richest of the rich, and nonprofit “think tanks” devoted to right-wing causes.
The problem is that every dollar of “charitable giving” means substantially fewer dollars paid in taxes, because donors deduct their “charitable giving” from their taxable incomes. This tax loophole is especially big and lucrative for the super-rich.
According to the Institute for Policy Studies, up to 74 cents of every dollar donated to charity would have been paid as taxes. In 2022 alone, charitable giving resulted in$73 billion in lost tax revenue.
Here’s the thing. Taxes finance public goods such as public education, scientific research, roads and bridges, nutrition and healthcare for lower-income Americans, and clean water and clean air.
But the “charitable” tax deduction taken by the super-rich finances things that the super-rich want, such as Ivy League universities and culture palaces.
This means a lot of “charitable giving” results in more money for organizations that cater to or do the bidding of the rich, and less for things we all need. Behind the facade of “charitable giving” is a profoundly anti-democratic tax loophole that allows the super-wealthy to effectively substitute their priorities for what would otherwise be public priorities.
Which brings me to the upcoming gusher of “charitable giving” — the consequence of the AI boom and the largest IPOs in history.
Thousands of people with shares of Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, and other AI-related companies have seen, or soon will see, the value of their shares soar into the stratosphere. That means gigantic capital gains.
You don’t need a degree in high finance to understand that these capital gains could also result in big tax payments. If you sell, say, $10 million worth of stock, you could easily face a tax bill exceeding $3.5 million.
Unless you reduce that tax bill through your “charitable giving.”
Hence, the upcoming gusher in charitable giving. According to some estimates, it could be more than $100 billion a year.
Consider: The seven founders of Anthropic, which is expected to have an enormous IPO as soon as this fall, have each pledged to give away 80% of their wealth, which is estimated to be about $90 billion. Anthropic also has a philanthropic matching program, which would mean another $60 billion in funds earmarked for giving. Nan Ransohoff, who heads public goods at the payment processor Stripe, estimates that these will generate between $37 billion and $100 billion to charities annually.
Add in the newly rich created by SpaceX, whose IPO has spawned an estimated 4,400 millionaires (and some 400 employees now worth more than $100 million), as well as OpenAI’s IPO, which is likely to create as many more millionaires and multimillionaires, and you’re talking really big money — and huge incentives for making tax-deductible “charitable contributions.”
Don’t get me wrong. I consider the nonprofit sector of the economy enormously important. I just don’t want the nation’s priorities to be set by the moneyed interests. Their massive political donations already give them extraordinary power.
One reform would be to limit the definition of “charities”— that is, the sort of contributions that warrant tax deductions — to places and institutions that actually serve the poor.
Another reform would be to reduce the tax deduction for “charitable contributions” and increase the capital gains tax rate on very high incomes. (At the very least, raise the capital gains tax rate to match the tax rate on ordinary income.)
And by all means let’s get rid of the “stepped-up-basis-at-death” tax rule, which now allows families to escape all capital gains by leaving appreciated assets to their heirs. For example, consider someone who got OpenAI stock for almost nothing and watched its value explode, and then contributed enough of it to charity to allow her to make a nice living off it without paying any capital gains taxes. She gave the remaining shares to her children when she died. The kids can then sell those shares for what they’re worth at the time of her death — say, hundreds of millions of dollars — yet pay zero capital gains on it.
These three reforms are, or should be, no-brainers. There’s simply no economic or political justification for allowing the super-rich — even the nouveau AI riche— to get giant tax breaks by financing things they prioritize.
Granted, reforms like these don’t stand a chance under Trump or his lapdogs in Congress. (And, sad to say, too many Democrats are also dependent on campaign donations from the moneyed interests.) But these are high on my list for what must be done.
Note: That basic primer on wealth inequality in the U.S. that I mentioned at the start of this post is a video I’ll post on my Substack:
. In the video, I discuss why wealth inequality has gotten utterly out of control, why that’s a huge and growing problem for America, and what must be done about it.
Robert Reich, former secretary of labor during the Clinton administration, is professor emeritus of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and author of “Coming Up Short,” and “The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It.” See robertreich.substack.com.
The Washington Press Corps’ Collaboration with Fascism.
By inviting Trump to trash-talk their First Amendment mission, they soiled themselves.
By DICK POLMAN
Here’s a question for you: If the Fraternal Order of Police were to plan a banquet, would it ever decide to invite, as its keynote speaker, someone who by definition defies law enforcement? In other words, a convicted felon.
No way. And yet the collaborationist leaders of the White House Correspondents Association decided to invite, as its keynote speaker last Friday night, someone who loathes independent journalism, a pathological liar who rapes factual reality. And who’s a convicted felon.
The annual WHCA dinner has long been an insular Beltway bloat-a-thon where bejeweled and tuxedoed newspeople suck up to the newsmakers, but the ‘206 version (restaged after the April event was truncated by gunfire) was truly unique because never before had the dining journalists felt compelled to sit there in quietude and weather a full hour of free-form demagoguery – much of it aimed at them, mocking their core mission.
Nobody walked out. It was the silence of the lambs.
But the winner of the normalization sweepstakes was Jacqui Heinrich, the new WHCA president, who smilingly embraced the fascist guest of honor. No surprise there, because Jacqui works for Fox News, the propaganda outlet that shelled out $787 million in a court settlement after it was outed for amplifying Trump’s relentless lies about the 2020 election.
One outside group, the Society of Professional Journalists, had warned in advance that “it is hypocritical to celebrate the First Amendment in front of the man who relentlessly attacks it.” And indeed he has – sending subpoenas to reporters whose stories he hates, challenging the license renewals of ABC-owned stations because ABC didn’t broadcast his recent prime-time address, banning the Associated Press from the Oval Office, suing the BBC and Wall Street Journal, mocking female reporters’ looks, and much more.
The WHCA’s leaders did more than just celebrate the First Amendment in front of the man. They gave him the podium.
I’m old enough to remember when a president – any president, even Nixon – comported himself with at least a modicum of dignity. But on Friday night, I was magically transported back to my seventh grade cafeteria, where bullies spewed insults between bites of sloppy joes. I duly learned during the dinner that Bruce Springsteen “looks like hell,” that Sen. Adam Schiff is “Watermelon Head because he has the largest head I’ve ever seen with the smallest pencil neck,” that Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert are “terrible people without talent,” that Texas Democrat James Talarico “looks like Alfred E. Newman,” that prosecutor Jack Smith is “a deranged lunatic,” that Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker is “a fat pig,” and that CNN’s Kaitlan Collins looks like a transperson.
I was also informed – this I did not know! – that the word Democrat has been replaced by Dumocrat. Our MAGA professor of linguistics explained it this way: “The word Dumocrat is something that’s come into fashion. I changed the E with a U, and most people don’t know that ‘dumb’ has a B, so we don’t have to worry about that. It’s very quiet. I thought it was quite good, but I haven’t gotten much credit for that.”
You may have heard more eloquent articulation from an unhoused fellow on your street corner. I know I have.
He was on firmer ground while telling lies. I won’t waste your time fact-checking the doozies – that his 2020 election loss was “rigged,” that his war in Iran is “going extremely well,” yadda yadda – because you’ve heard it all before. But one in particular stopped me cold:
“I have a lot of respect for your profession.”
If that were true, he wouldn’t be attacking journalists as “stupid” and “corrupt” and “horrible,” he wouldn’t have filed a lawsuit that posted the home address of a Wall Street Journal reporter (who had to flee with her family for safety), he wouldn’t have issued subpoenas (via his personal law firm formerly known as the Justice Department) targeting New York Times reporters’ family members. And he wouldn’t be intimating that journalists who seek the truth are America’s enemies:
“It’s time to expose the crooked-media deceptions…These are really, really dishonest people, and they’re bad people. And I really think they don’t like our country. I really believe that…These are sick people. You know the thing I don’t understand? You would think they’d want to make our country great again, and I honestly believe they don’t.”
But you won’t find those lines in the WHCA transcript. He riffed those sentiments during a Phoenix speech to his cultists…nine years ago. He is now as he has always been, except worse.
How shameful it was Beltway journalists platformed the enemy of everything they stand for, and reduced their celebratory dinner to a recycled MAGA meetup. Their core principles are trumped by their lust for proximity to power. The odds they’ll learn a lesson from this debacle are roughly one in a million, but if there was one shaft of light in the darkness, one wee moment of joy the other night, it was a remark he uttered near the end of the ordeal:
“You people have no idea how lucky you are. When I’m gone, you’re all gonna be broke.”
“When I’m gone…”
And my heart skipped a beat.
Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net and is distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com. See the online version, with links, at dickpolman.substack.com
A High T, Low IQ Military is the Last Thing We Need
By SABRINA HAAKE
On Tuesday, July 21, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee, hats in hand. The war in Iran has depleted key weapons stockpiles, reducing U.S. inventories of interceptor missiles and stealth cruise missiles to less than halfand costing over $37 billion to date. To the naked eye, these expenditures against a nominal force reflect waste and incompetence: disastrous mismanagement of an undefined, intractable, and escalating war.
Hegseth expected lawmakers to correct his urgent shortfall, but he wouldn’t correct, clarify or explain his own obviously false claims about Iran. Hegseth’s early-in-the-war announcements that Iran’s military had been dismantled, “destroyed and made combat ineffective,” while claiming “historic and overwhelming victory” were obviously untrue, but on Wednesday, July 22, the GOP-led House put another $1 trillion in Hegseth’s hands anyway. Not only did the MAGA wing reward Trump’s incompetent war in Iran with a massive spending boost, it codified Hegseth’s rebrand of the “Department of War,” snuck in Trump’s voter suppression bill, and blocked hormone therapy coverage for gender care just as Hegseth is braying about increased testosterone levels.
Arming a blowhard who delivers culture war braggadocio instead of sober analysis is not confidence inspiring, it’s irresponsible. It’s also dangerous as hell.
Hegseth’s bloodlust
As a Fox News commentator, Hegseth lobbied hard for presidential pardons for war criminals, leading Trump to fully pardon a Lieutenant convicted of murdering two Afghan civilians, and a Major who admitted to the CIA that he killed someone off base in 2010 and buried his remains. For his own activities in Iraq, Hegseth kept a ‘kill board’ totaling up his kills, including dead civilians, providing context for his bloodlust today (“maximum lethality not tepid legality”) and his disdain for restraint (“stupid rules of engagement.”)
Hegseth seems to be grooming U.S. servicemembers for war crimes by modeling how rules and laws do not apply. Added to over 200 extrajudicial killings in South America, he bombed a school in Iran, killing175 grade-schoolers, and is now bombing Iran’s civilian energy infrastructure and water desalination facilities, more war crimes. Millions of Iranians are living under fire in nightmarish hellscapes, compounding anti-American hatred sure to outlast Trump for generations.
This is the same idiocy that blames other countries for climate-change induced wildfires, while pouring gas on the flames. But of all the mistakes, bloodlust, and incompetence displayed to date, none is more dangerous than Hegseth’s new experiments with testosterone.
Hegseth is mandating testosterone testing
On July 16, Hegseth announced mandatory annual testosterone screening and optional T supplements for troops 30 years and older, a new initiative Hegseth claims will ensure enlistees “have the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute best.” What he didn’t announce is that testosterone supplements can cause infertility, shrink testicles, and drive up red blood cell counts, which thickens blood and raises the risk of blood clots and pulmonary embolism.
Even worse is what T supplements can do to overall IQ and cognitive functioning. Medical studies have tracked how increased testosterone levels can induce aggressive behavior because they also change brain wave patterns.
Although Hegseth and other chest beaters think increased testosterone will make men quicker and sharper, medical research suggests the opposite. The relationship between T and IQ is shaped like an inverted U: cognitive performance is strongest when testosterone sits in a moderate range, and declines dramatically at both low and high ends of the spectrum.
In short, when T levels are too high, men get stupid. While that may explain Hegseth’s frequent blunders, excessive testosterone among the troops would present unanticipated and unconsidered risks.
Too much T rots your brain: How excess testosterone impairs cognitive performance
In controlled studies that raised serum testosterone in healthy men to ‘supraphysiological’ levels — beyond what the body normally produces — researchers measured how verbal and spatial memorychanged, confirming a downturn in cognition levels at high doses. Rather than testosterone being simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for the brain, research shows that it can help or hurt cognition depending on where a person’s levels fall relative to their own physiological baseline.
This pattern shows up in the medical research repeatedly, across different populations and cognitive domains. But Hegseth’s directive aims to establish hormonal baselines across the force, which cannot measure or indicate how a person’s levels compare to their own past historical baseline.
None of this makes testosterone a villain. Men with low testosterone face meaningfully higher risk of dementia, and testosterone loss with age also contributes to cognitive decline. The nuance assuredly lost on Hegseth is that pushing testosterone artificially high for younger troops— whether through unsupervised supplementation, misuse of steroids, or aggressive hormone therapy — can backfire, erode memory and impair executive function. Addicted to simplistic maxims, Hegseth seems to think that hormones are simple dials where more is better. But they are biometric signals the brain has evolved to interpret within complex ranges, and stepping too far outside that range — in either direction — comes at a cost.
Will Hegseth have the cognitive bandwidth, or even the professional discipline, to consult medical research before pushing T supplements to millions of servicemembers? Color me skeptical. He’s chief mouth-breather to the most incompetent, destructive, anti-science, anti-intellectual administration the world has ever seen. But he knows that when Trump starts deploying the military against U.S. citizens, aggressive soldiers with low brain function will make the perfect Praetorian Guard.
Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and trial lawyer in Chicago specializing in First and 14th Amendment defense. She writes at SabrinaHaake.substack.com
Is the Smithsonian racist? MAGA makes a case in Newspeak
By CLARENCE PAGE
If you haven’t heard that the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is a hotbed of “anti-White activism,” “illegal alien activism,” and “transgender activism,” the Trump administration and its MAGA allies in Congress have some news for you.
You can read all about it in what news accounts have called a “scathing” 162-page report released July 4 by the White House. It accuses the museum and its leaders of presenting a “radical view” of American history.
Such was the language used by Rep. Tim Burchett, the Tennessee Republican who chairs the House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, in his opening remarks to a hearing titled “Rewriting American History: Examining the Smithsonian’s Efforts to Reshape the Past,” although the “reshaping” amounted to a few choice sound bites.
Burchett claimed the National Museum is pushing radical left-wing narratives, a view that echoed President Donald Trump’s earlier claims, but I cannot confirm that Trump has ever read a book, including his own.
Burchett also noted that these narratives are driven by National Museum Director Anthea Hartig, who believes that history is a “prime tool of social justice” — as if that’s a bad thing.
MAGA’s rhetorical lexicon is full of terms the movement has appropriated from the left, such as “social justice,” which they endow with axiomatically bad connotations. “Social justice warriors” rank next to “wokeness” among the threats supposedly posed by the left.
Seeing lawmakers meet to decide whose version of history is permissible reminds me of what the scholarly Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said about censorship. It “reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is the hallmark of an authoritarian regime.” Heaven help us.
Although the Smithsonian Institution oversees dozens of museums and libraries, plus galleries, historical landmarks and the national zoo, the White House report particularly takes aim at its National Museum of American History.
The report accuses the museum’s leadership of adopting “an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”
That’s pretty grim, and I’m sure President Trump approves. It’s quite a novel way to look at the institution, in my view, and I say that having made countless visits with friends and family over the years.
The report is written in language designed to conceal as much it reveals. It reminds me, as bureaucratic documents often do, of the rules and manufactured “truth” decreed by Big Brother in the authoritarian “Newspeak” of George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.”
Gems like “anti-White activism” and “illegal alien activism” don’t rise to Orwell’s artfulness, but they are Newspeak nonetheless.
It’s nonsense. But it excites cohorts of voters to your side, and depending on how you play it and which podcasters you enlist in the effort, it can gel into a political orthodoxy.
And when your polls are sinking, as Trump’s have been, and midterm calamity appears to be coming for the ruling party, another insult will do in a pinch.
Museum Director Hartig cordially answered questions from two separate House committees about what the report describes as the “ideological capture” of the Smithsonian. More Newspeak.
To their credit, some Democrats pushed back on the GOP Newspeak with blazing rhetoric of their own.
“Welcome to the Republicans’ white pride rally disguised as a Congressional hearing,” Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas declared at the proceeding.
Alas, such frankness is why a lot of Republicans were happy to see her gerrymandered out of her district. Straight talk has its value — when people are ready to hear it.
History is to be argued, a scholarly history teacher taught us in grade school. A lot of Americans, for example, still believe the South won the Civil War, she said. Or should have.
And that’s why, even if the study and practice of historical scholarship is inherently political, it should not follow rules set by hardball partisan politics. Historical debates between scholars can be contentious enough without the interference of the House DOGE Subcommittee.
Diversity is our strength, as I long have long maintained, although MAGA militants deem that little chestnut to be heresy. (Are you listening, Stephen Miller?)
A lot of my diverse fellow Americans believe a wide variety of versions of history. The challenge of maintaining the peace between all those views is enormous and never-ending, especially in these times when the internet offers cheap and accessible platforms to all manner of supposed authorities, whether in reality they are charlatans or actual scholars.
“For more than 180 years, the Smithsonian has served the American public with nonpartisan and independent scholarship, and we remain committed to doing so,” a museum spokesperson said.
Good. History is about the future, wise teachers have told me, not just the next election.
Clarence Page is a columnist at the Chicago Tribune. Email him at clarence47page@gmail.com.
Trump, Obsessed With Commies, Needs To Reckon With the One in the Mirror
By RACHEL MARSDEN
PARIS – Did we all just somehow get shoved into a time machine and transported back to 1980? Because why is the sitting U.S. president talking about communism like he’s trying to win a Cold War reenactment? How can he possibly think this is a winning strategy for midterm elections when he’s been acting like the biggest commie around?
Earlier in July, Trump mentioned communism at a rate of about once every two minutes in a 30-minute spiel, as CNN has pointed out.
“The United States of America will NEVER be a communist country,” Trump wrote on social media just a few days ago.
His political opponents are – you guessed it – commies.
Other nations are also run by commies, but only when they’re not buying American weapons. Once the purchase order goes through, apparently ideology gets relegated to the fine print.
It’s like how Trump and his family have also become chummy with theocratic Saudi Arabia ever since it tossed $2 billion from its public investment fund into Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s investment firm – and even more cash into a series of golf tournaments held at Trump’s own resorts. Now suddenly, we learn this week that he’s cool with the Saudis having nuclear enrichment and power.
The exact same kind of nuclear program that he cites – at least this week – as his reason for being in a useless war of choice with Iran and American troops dying in the Middle East. Guess Iran just hasn’t pulled out the checkbook yet.
Trump made a big show of bringing aboard Elon Musk to slash through wasteful spending at the beginning of his term, eliminating dodgy development cash schemes – only to now revive them in the form of millions of dollars being spent to serve his administration’s own pet causes in Europe, with $12 million going to British civil society sycophants alone, according to the Guardian, citing State Department documents.
Co-opting the government apparatus to serve your personal brand sounds like what Stalin did in the Soviet Union from 1920 to 1950. Or China under the Chinese Communist Party. Or East Germany during the Cold War. Or Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu. All of these have one thing in common. Spoiler alert: none of them spent their days insisting that they weren’t communist.
It’s no wonder that despite Trump’s self-deluded communism obsession, even Republicans now view capitalism about 10 percent less favorably than in 2019, according to a new poll commissioned by Fox News.
And recent election results show a surge among self-identifying socialists. Trump only has himself to blame. Just ask Republicans in Trump’s own party, 42% of whom, as CNN points out, now believe that “the system is rigged in favor of the wealthy.” Up from just 30% in 2018.
Trump was supposed to fix that. To stop a corrupt system from stuffing its pockets on the down low or blowing taxpayer cash on self-serving head-scratchers. Replacing that system with one where you put yourself at the center of the corruption, in full public view, is not what people wanted.
I’m talking about the personal family and friends cashing in on Pentagon contracts. And the U.S. president treating the war he started with Iran for his Israeli donors as an ongoing vehicle for rapidly self-contradicting public statements that seem to serve primarily to manipulate the markets for profit. And if you really want to cash in, you can now pay the American president to get exclusive early access to those statements through his own private platform, Truth Social. The rest of us will have to wait to find out about the start of World War III.
I’m also talking about the constant commie-style hold-ups of America’s allies and of the American people themselves. The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s attempt to make Americans pay extra taxes – otherwise known as “tariffs” – on allied trade. But now Trump’s trying to argue some “forced labor” excuse to bring the cash grab back through the back door.
Europeans currently on their five-week paid vacation from their 35-hour-a-week, full-time job would be thrilled to learn that the American president thinks they’re being treated like slaves. Know who agrees with Trump here in Europe on that issue? Actual commies.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m no fan of the crypto-commies who self-describe as democratic socialists because the commie brand is so toxic, and who are currently racking up electoral wins on the Democrat side. But they’re arguing in favor of taking more money from taxpayers to put it into the usual government-run black hole under the dodgy auspices of serving the collective good. Which somehow still has more populist appeal than Trump’s self-serving approach. People wanted the corruption to stop – not to see it replaced with a feudal system that caters to a party of one.
Don’t want people to gravitate to commies? Then try not acting like you’re an even more unattractive proposition, especially to capitalists.
Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist and host of independently produced talk shows in French and English. Her website can be found at
http://www.rachelmarsden.com
Bros Will Be Bros: Tates’ Taint in White House
By JOHN YOUNG
I want to be the one to name it.
It — the newest scandal to visit our creepily corrupt first family.
It — criminal charges against two brothers who are profiting from truly sleazy and evil activities. In this case — NOT Don Jr. and Eric.
It’s the Tate brothers, Andrew and Tristan: expressedly, passionately fans of our president, and chums with his sons, especially Junior and young Barron. And let’s say it’s for good reason. I’ll explain that in a moment. First, let’s name the scandal. My nominations:
WaterTate.
Porn-a-Lago.
Barron’s first Tate.
Sex, Lies and Videoed Tates.
Tatestein Files.
Over to you, America.
OK, so what’s the scandal? Some in Congress want to know. Some, and we know who, don’t want anyone to know (See “Epstein Files”).
What the Tate brothers are about appears to be exactly what Jeffrey Epstein was about: exploiting young women, some of whom allege rape of the most violent nature, including strangulation as recreation.
Some women have accused the Tate Bros of holding them against their will as sex workers for videos that have made the Tates titans of a sick, misogynist industry that many in the “manosphere” find to be buckets of fun.
They have 11 million followers on X, with Elon Musk having restored privilege after Twitter banned them
Sweet. The Tates, reports The New York Times, “have boasted about recruiting women to make lucrative sexual content, and have sold courses teaching young men how to follow in their footsteps.”
They do more than that. They talk. Their mantra is super-sexism, teaching sad boys to hate and hurt women. For the adult males in the audience, they’re happy to mock the whole concept of statutory rape.
If there’s a gender-based problem in the world, the Tates believe, it’s in the “repression of alpha males.”
If you’ve got a few minutes, listen to The New Yorker’s Heidi Blake about her investigation of these guys:
Last week Andrew Tate was arrested in Miami on British charges of sex trafficking, rape and child pornography. Similar charges have been pending in Romania, to where they fled a few years ago when the heat got hot in Great Britain.
As said earlier, the Tates have friends in the highest places here, and they benefited from them. Romania had them under a travel restriction until the veritable stroke of the Orange Man’s return to power. Then our government intervened. Suddenly Andrew and Tristan were winging it to Florida and saying nice things about this president.
True, he hasn’t said much about them — but his sons have.
Don Jr. has led a chorus saying the Tate brothers have been witch-hunt victims and are First Amendment warriors against wokeness. Others to echo the line include Tucker Carlson, Candace Ross and the sainted Charlie Kirk.
And then there’s Barron, who used his daddy privilege to wrangle a Zoom with Andrew Tate.
Actually, it’s thanks to Justin Waller, reports The New York Times. Waller helps manage the Tates’ affairs. Called by some the “third brother,” according to the Times, Waller has assumed a “big brother” role for 20-year-old Barron, advising him on dating and varied manly things.
Upon Andrew Tate’s arrest, Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, a Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, is calling for Barron to testify to the committee.
Has the White House pulled favors for the Tates? Will the Justice Department follow suit on what Britain has done? A lot of Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplices will give a knowing wink.
Speaking of the sexual assault charges, Heidi Yates says several women alleging rape by Andrew Tate were diagnosed with petechiae — swollen or burst blood vessels from strangulation.
The child pornography charges against Andrew Tate have the taint of what gave Epstein Island its name.
Hey, MAGA, how many times have you called Democrats “groomers”?
With Epstein’s buddies and the Tate Bros, Republicans have schools of groomers right under their noses, and many in the White House have their cell phone numbers.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
Senate Women Losing Numbers -- and Power
By JAMIE STIEHM
SENECA FALLS, N.Y. — Quick: How many women elected to the Senate are serving right now?
The answer is 25, or 25%, one-fourth of all members, according to the Senate Historical Office.
And, I just noticed, there may be an exodus of Senate women coming up in the November election. That number of 25 is a record-breaker, as high as it’s ever been. But after a steady climb, a dramatic decline of women senators is likely on the horizon.
On the Republican side, Joni Erst (Iowa) and Cynthia Lummis (Neb.) are getting out of the game: retiring. Susan Collins (Maine) is vulnerable to a challenger. Most consequentially, Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) is a safe bet for the next governor of her state.
That makes as many as four women Senate Republicans leaving the floor, out the door in the next Congress.
Across the aisle, Minnesota Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith have expressed their intention to leave the “greatest deliberative body.” The plainspoken Klobuchar is favored to win as the next Minnesota governor, and Smith is retiring. The well-respected Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.) is retiring.
That makes as many as three Democratic women senators leaving the chamber as of Jan. 3, 2027.
Seven gone from 25 equals 18, a dramatic decline in representation for American women, whatever party you are. They take their expertise and experience with them.
In Michigan, Rep. Haley Stevens is locked in a tight race versus Abdul El-Sayed in the Democratic Senate primary.
(Note: Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith is up for reelection in Mississippi, considered a safe seat.)
If you’re a Senate birdwatcher, you may wonder why I don’t count Ashley Moody (R-Fla.) nor Darline Graham (R-S.C.), the late Lindsey Graham’s sister. They replaced men senators in their seats but were named by governors, not elected by the people in their states.
That brings us back to 25 elected women senators today, as few as 18 (or 20, if Moody and Graham win full terms in November) tomorrow. The number is going in the wrong direction, and not by accident.
In the current political climate, with President Donald Trump making his scorn for women clear, he’s appointed to his Cabinet an inner circle of white men only. He publicly taunts female correspondents, such as Kaitlan Collins of CNN. Across the river, Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon chief, has fired or demoted a slew of women and Black military officers.
Presidential politics nowadays is almost like golfing at an exclusive club, the one extracurricular activity Trump enjoys. Unfortunately, that contagious state of mind has bled into the legislative branch. Call it contempt, or verbal violence by way of insulting female members of the press.
In fact, for those with a linguistic ear, the word “misogyny” was not even used in everyday American English until Trump trumpeted his rough way with women and was found liable for sexual abuse. His association with the late Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender of underage girls, is under investigation, but we may never know the truth.
Abroad, the same trend is catching on. “As authoritarianism has risen around the world, progress in women’s representation has stalled,” Linda Robinson, a foreign policy expert, writes in her new book, “Women in Power.”
In fact, political discourse that degrades women is part of a playbook for authoritarian leaders. Trump used this strategy against the two women he defeated, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, claiming “weak” women could not stand acting as commander in chief of the armed forces.
As of late last year, women were leaders in 26 countries, Robinson notes. But the number of countries led by women fell by 20% between 2023 and 2025.
“A half-century of gains for women political leaders is in jeopardy,” she concludes.
Women, don’t go out to sea. And we need male allies to support our rightful place in representative democracy.
I just took a field trip to Seneca Falls, New York, a well-preserved small town where the first women’s rights convention met in 1848. Lucretia Mott was the star speaker. Their Declaration of Sentiments came 72 years after the 1776 Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia.
And women didn’t win the vote until 1920, 72 years later. A long time coming.
Jamie Stiehm is a former assignment editor at CBS News in London, reporter at The Hill, metro reporter at the Baltimore Sun and public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She is author of a new play, “Across the River,” on Aaron Burr. See JamieStiehm.com.
Will Trump Swoop In and Save the Tates?
By ELWOOD WATSON
Andrew and Tristan Tate, the far-right social media influencers and self-described misogynists who command a following of young, angry men on the internet, were arrested in Miami on July 18 on rape and sex trafficking charges from the United Kingdom.
The Tates will be held in custody in Florida as they challenge an extradition claim. British law enforcement announced that the brothers face 59 charges between them, including choking and raping women.
Andrew Tate faces further charges relating to “indecent images of a child and extreme pornography.” Such supplemental charges have been issued to a litany of prior ones, including a 2022 arrest in Romania on rape and sex trafficking; however, that case was dismissed on legal grounds as prosecutors continue to investigate disturbing allegations.
Both brothers have denied all wrongdoing, but the allegations paint an abominable portrait of an expansive pornography empire based on physical brutality and a misogynist worldview they feed to boys and young men worldwide.
All this creates a high-profile dilemma for the Trump administration. Will President Trump and his affiliates permit the men to be held accountable for their actions, including possible incarceration in the United Kingdom, or will they intervene to protect their allies? The president’s recent comments indicate that he will refrain from intervening in the Tate saga. Time will tell.
An in-depth investigation by the New York Times revealed one of Trump’s first actions in his second term in office was arranging the brothers’ return from Romania. Numerous Trump administration officials reportedly persuaded Romanian prosecutors to lift the brothers’ travel restrictions. Additionally, White House officials continued to run interference when customs officials confiscated their devices. The brothers immediately began traveling freely again, arrogantly showing up at parties in cities around the world.
It should come as no surprise Andrew Tate was also a longtime admirer of Trump associate Jeffrey Epstein. In a deleted tweet, he once wrote, “EVERYONE wants to be friends with the pimp.” Talk about theater of the perverse.
While both Tate brothers have drawn denunciation and scorn across the political spectrum, they have enjoyed empathetic treatment from numerous influential figures on the right. Although the silence among many of these previous supporters is deafening, they do have some detractors . For instance, conservatives such as Megyn Kelly, Ben Shapiro, and Ron DeSantis have been bitter critics of the brothers and have chastised their fellow conservatives who have embraced the duo. By contrast, others on the right have adopted a “hear no evil, fear no evil, see no evil” stance.
Sexism and misogyny are not limited to one side of the ideological spectrum. They have deep historical bipartisan roots across organizations of various political stripes, including Young Americans for Freedom , Students for a Democratic Society, The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and The Democratic Socialists of America. Many women who participated were active in these movements early in their existence — the mid-1960s to the early 1970s — spoke of the deeply entrenched sexism and misogyny that pervaded these organizations. We are witnessing such consistent and reductive attitudes with contemporary political outlets, such as Turning Point USA, Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, and similar right wing outlets.
As the midterm elections move ever closer, Republicans and a few Democrats seem to be soliciting the manosphere as a vital voting bloc, working under the assumption such an online environment appeals to the vast majority of males.
Graham Platner, the supposedly blue collar yet, in reality, prep school misfit, was virtually worshipped as the left’s answer to the manosphere before his eventual demise. Alpha male Gavin Newsom, governor of California and potential 2028 presidential candidate, has consistently decried what he believes is “a crisis of men and masculinity” and has embraced manosphere figures such as Steve Bannon, Ben Shapiro, and the late Charlie Kirk on his podcast.
Politics does occasionally make peculiar bedfellows.
Whatever President Trump decides, his committed MAGA base will undoubtedly fall in line and accept his choice. Trump has never suffered any significant loss of support for his poor treatment of women or the sexist/misogynist views he shares with the Tate brothers. In fact, he has won the presidency not once but twice in two nonconsecutive terms . Grover Cleveland is the only other president that can claim such a feat.
Remember it was Trump who said he “could shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters.” Sadly, given his politically unremitted MAGA base, he is probably correct.
Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. HIs columns are distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. He is also an author and public speaker.
Who’s to Blame When Parents Choose Not to Vaccinate Their Young?
By FROMA HARROP
What is the death count under Donald Trump? We’re not talking about loss of life in his war with Iran. We’re not talking about natural deaths by aging or unpreventable diseases. We mean Americans who die because they refuse safe vaccines that Trump or his health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., questions or discourages.
A recent occurrence of death and suffering comes from the refusal by many parents to let doctors give their newborns a vitamin K shot. Infants are naturally deficient in vitamin K, which helps prevent blood clots and internal bleeding, which can be horrific. K is a vitamin, not a vaccine. But ill-informed parents have developed suspicion of anything delivered with a needle.
Vitamin K shots were once routinely given, but now many parents refuse them. In 2024, an estimated 5.2% of American babies were not injected with vitamin K, up from 2.9% in 2017. At least 12 such babies have died, and far more have suffered permanent brain damage. Doctors believe the real numbers are far higher than reported.
Who’s to blame — the parents for not studying the matter, or a health department that has cast aspersions on accepted science? Jessica Kirk, a pediatric specialist at a Florida hospital, recalls trying to comfort a grieving parent. “But what I could not bring myself to say to her was, ‘There’s nothing you could have done.’”
Falling vaccination rates are to blame for America’s worst measles outbreak in more than 30 years. Parents are refusing the effective measles, mumps and rubella vaccine over the false claim that it causes autism. Trump is said to be hounding Bobby to look deeper for a link that 138 studies by real scientists could not find. Trump now insists that the shot be broken up into separate injections, based on zero science.
Several children infected with measles died last year, when there were far fewer cases. Many more had to be hospitalized with serious complications.
Trump makes us dizzy complaining that he doesn’t get credit for speeding up development of a COVID-19 vaccine then putting “Bobby,” a vaccine skeptic with a bizarre past, in charge of Health and Human Services. He gushes about having “a Kennedy” from “the greatest political family” in his administration. What fun that must have been.
Trump never directly discouraged Americans from getting COVID shots. But he kept minimizing the severity of the disease. He said it would “go away” or that it was under control. Trump would not receive the vaccine before cameras. That gave Americans who suspected that vaccines posed dangers more reasons to avoid them.
An estimated 250,000 Americans died unnecessarily from COVID by refusing to be vaccinated after the shots became widely available. Who’s to blame? The first Trump administration, or people who didn’t seek out expert advice to get vaccinated?
Trump is allegedly unhappy with Bobby for not doing more to fan suspicion of vaccines. Really, RFK Jr. has done quite enough harm already putting Americans’ health at risk.
Complicating matters for Trump are new findings from a friendly pollster that vaccine skepticism is highly unpopular with voters. In another survey, 80% of adults said they trusted their doctors most, while only 34% put their faith in Bobby.
Why is Trump pushing doubt in mainstream science when he and his family reportedly get all the shots? Could it be fumes circulating in his 80-year-old head? Could it be a pleasurable jolt of power from persuading people to, in effect, gamble with their lives? That possibility is too grim to contemplate.
Suffice it to say, though, the Trump administration is doing real harm, and some of it is costing American lives.
Froma Harrop is a columnist with Creators Syndicate, formerly with the Providence (R.I.) Journal. Follow her on Twitter @fromaharrop. Email fharrop@gmail.com.
Dancing Around the Issue of Our Time
By ART CULLEN
Rob Sand spent a lot more time talking open primaries and ranked-choice voting than he did water pollution or cancer during a packed town hall event in Storm Lake last week.
Who needs political parties? They’re just “private clubs” that keep the game dirty. Can’t we all just get along?
The crowd at Smokin’ Hereford ate it up. They’re hungry for some unity. They hate the acrimony. Love one another, the Norwegian Lutheran fisherman from Decorah implored. Applause. Who doesn’t love neighborly?
It seems to be working. Over 100 people in Sioux Center showed up. Seventy in Sanborn. This is the belly of the beast for a Democrat. But he is not so much a Democrat, Sand insists. You can’t sell that woke stuff in Sanborn. He wishes he could be independent. The two parties are no good, in his telling. They divide us.
Were it not for the Democratic Party, we would not have Social Security and Medicare. The Republicans have been trying to undo them for generations. Were it not for the Republican Party, we might still hold humans in slavery.
Political parties matter. They exist to joust in the battle of ideas, and to elect candidates. Iowa’s system works, if not to the satisfaction of minority Democrats.
Storm Lake is green with algae. Northwest Iowa is hot with cancer — hotter than anywhere. We got hogs and chickens up the wazoo but barely a drop to drink unless you, poor yeoman, pay through the nose. We hate to talk about it, but there is something in the air, and it does not smell like money.
Sen. Catelin Drey, who flipped a Trump district in Sioux City, says water, cancer and housing affordability are what she hears about. Her seat was vacated by a guy named Rocky De Witt who died from cancer. Drey, 38, was treated successfully for uterine cancer. The coincidence should be lost on no one.
Sand dwelled on unity at Sioux Center in his 100 Town Hall tour. Teacher Brock Lehman, a Republican and a cancer survivor, said he wished more people would get informed. Lehman told the Sioux County Radio reporter that he wished that Sand talked about cancer more.
“After what I’ve had to go through — the fear and the medical bills and all that stuff — what are we going to do to fix it?” Lehman said. “That’s one thing that I wish we had more time on, that he could have addressed more … That’s a conversation my wife and I have had. Is it safe to have our kids here? … Why is it that I have to buy a reverse osmosis water system? … Is that right for a human being?”
Sand has suggested investing $20 million into cancer research. He supports levying a fractional sales tax for water quality and natural resource conservation, as approved by voters in a Constitutional amendment in 2010. The legislature ignored the amendment. Sand wants more payments to farmers for conservation. He wants to reinstate funding for stream monitors. He endorses radon mitigation, and says we should not smoke and drink so much. Standard fare from a Democrat who announced another $9 million raised from just friends.
No socialism here, folks.
Sand does not talk about regulation. You don’t hear him preach mandatory stream buffers like they have just over the border from Decorah in Minnesota. We have so many hogs we lost track of how many. Sand’s opponent, Zach Lahn, says he aims to break up the corporate livestock consolidators. (Lahn also wants to exorcize Marxists from our public schools, so there’s that!)
Sand blanches at putting a blemish on corporate ag because it feeds him. You don’t go up against the Farm Bureau. Lahn, by the way, made his fortune (enough to fund his own campaign) working for the Koch Brothers fertilizer and politics empire.
Sand has come a long way. A year ago he did not want to discuss ag pollution. It has made its way into his stump speech. That’s progress. Still, he leads with trashing the two-party system. He says it is the issue of our time. Polls say he may have a lead of nine percentage points, so he obviously knows what he is doing.
Others must be misinformed if they think that a warming climate, toxic water and corporate consolidation are the real issues confronting Iowa in 2026. Creating open primaries does not cure the fact that we will have a hard time growing corn south of I-80 in 25 years because of too many 90-degree days in July. People don’t like to think about that.
You must take it on faith that Sand will put it at the top of his agenda. His mother would want him to. Lutherans want to be good stewards. That’s what Sand is selling. So far, people are buying it.
Art Cullen is publisher and editor of The Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 and is author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland, ” released by Viking Press in 2018, and “Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest: Notes from the Edge of the World,” released by Ice Cube Press of North Liberty, Iowa, in September. Email times@stormlake.com.
JIM HIGHTOWER
AI Billionaires Say: Get Out of Our Way, Fools!
Does becoming a billionaire turn one into an insufferable jerk, or is that an innate quality they bring to the position?
Big-name billionaires — Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg — literally flaunt their irrepressible jerkism, but the disease seems to inflict their entire class of uber-rich corporate royals. Its telltale symptoms are not their grandiose mansions and yachts, but their sudden impulse to instruct us regular people on how to think. In particular, they’re now demanding that we get out of their way so they can remake society in their image.
Jensen Huang, for example, a Silicon Valley techno-whiz who heads Nvidia, which is now the world’s richest corporation. He’s demanding that we transform our economy and social structure into a new order of AI dominance, piously chiding those of us who’re angry about AI’s destruction of our jobs, communities, water, farmland and democracy itself. Tut-tut, the gabillionaire scolds, you petty people must “create new social norms” to advance AI.
Then there’s the little-known honcho of SoftBank, a multi-trillion-dollar Japanese tech powerhouse trying to impose AI supremacy worldwide. He’s now asserting a corporate “morality” of wealth, calling People who question AI “foolish.” He philosophizes that TechWorld “will transform our lives completely and do so in a way that generates profits.”
For whom? For billionaires, of course. So there you have a clear statement of the values and goals of AI profiteers: More for them, no matter the cost to everyone else. SoftBank’s imperious boss laughs at those of us who dare question his vision of an AI plutocracy, calling us fools who are “spitting upward.”
No sir, look again. We are spitting straight at you.
WHY TRUST HIGH-TECH BILLIONAIRES TO SAVE HUMANITY?
Here’s an interesting fact: Dinosaurs dominated Earth for 165 million years — and they assumed they always would.
Which brings us to ... well, us. We bipedal, far-ranging Homo sapiens have certainly established our dominance over modern-day Mother Earth. And even though our reign has only lasted about 200,000 years, we 21st-century humans grandly assume that we’re ordained by the gods to rule ad infinitum over our planet (and beyond).
But — oops! — unfortunately, we’ve based our preeminence on the unsustainable consumption of our domain, rather than on stewardship for the ages. Under the global misguidance of corporate, political, religious, academic and other Powers That Be, our large-brained species has ended up making an awful mess of the nest we inherited. Elite plunderers and profiteers have imposed an ethic of greed, inequality and even inhumanity that is devouring everything from Earth’s climate to our basic human values of fairness and justice.
Leading this careless assault is a clique of arrogant and abusive high-tech gabillionaires who consider themselves geniuses because, well ... they’re rich! Consider Elon Musk, presently the richest of the world’s richest, who postures as an uber-brained deep thinker, social engineer and whirling corporate dervish. He presently runs not one, but three mega-corps (Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX) while also rewriting the rules of free speech, telling Americans how to vote and claiming he’ll save humanity by colonizing Mars.
But wait — strip away the hype and Musk is just another self-serving plutocratic ravager, a cartoonish robber baron whose “genius” lies in (1) taking credit (and profit) from other people, (2) demanding subsidies and special breaks from government, (3) cheating workers and customers and (4) suing everyone for his failures.
If billionaire humanoids like Elon really wanted to save us from extinction, they should do the honorable thing ... by going first.
Jim Hightower is a former Texas Observer editor, former Texas agriculture commissioner, radio commentator and populist sparkplug, a best-selling author and winner of the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Write him at info@jimhightower.com or see www.jimhightower.com.
AI Can Make Life Easier. But It Can’t Build Character.
By BONNIE JEAN FELDKAMP
This summer, my son learned to tread water in the deep end, worked through awkward guitar chords and chased pickleballs that sailed just beyond his reach. Watching him fail, grapple with frustration, try again and improve made me realize something. Technology still can’t build character; you need lived experience for that.
As artificial intelligence grows more capable of writing, researching, calculating and creating, the question parents should be asking is: What experiences still require my child to struggle, adapt and grow? It’s the learning spaces that matter.
Sure, I have an app on my phone to tune my son’s guitar and we can look up the chords to our favorite songs on the internet, but these conveniences do not take away from the fact that my 10-year-old still must build calluses on his fingertips to play the notes on a guitar string. He has to practice difficult strumming patterns again and again until he gets them right. Sometimes he even strums with frustrated tears in his eyes. On the pickleball court, he has to practice his serve, and in the pool, he has to keep treading water. All of this creates deep connections in his brain and puts confidence in his stride ... or strum.
Technology excels by removing the friction in our daily tasks. AI finishes our sentences, corrects our spelling, recommends driving routes and increasingly thinks on our behalf. It saves us time, but it also eliminates the small struggles that build confidence and competence. When’s the last time you had to actually read a map and plan an unfamiliar route?
I am not anti-technology or progress. I haven’t traded my iPhone for a flip phone yet. But I do want my children to understand the benefits of a more analog life: the power of using their own skill sets. There is value in the frustrations of learning. The process is precisely the point. How else do we become resilient? When will we feel the satisfaction of accomplishment if everything is done for us? Where will we discover our sense of pride without it?
Our kids need to develop the grit required to dig in and double down on a skill. When working at something that is hard, triumph is earned in a way not found on the screen. Digital games certainly require persistence, but activities in real life require accountability. Your teammates watch you miss. Your music teacher hears every flat note. You learn to recover in front of other people instead of simply respawning or restarting a level. I want my son to learn to feel the camaraderie of his bandmates and pickleball partner. Character-building doesn’t feel quite as tangible when playing games on Roblox.
Learning a sport or an instrument isn’t just about acquiring a skill. It’s about becoming the kind of person who keeps showing up after missing the shot, hitting the wrong note or failing the swim test. Playing a sport or musical instrument requires children to learn patience and work together while building fundamental skills over time. When a game ends or a concert falls flat, there is no reset button. It’s humbling. You live with that disappointment. You congratulate the other team. You practice for next time. That delayed gratification isn’t something we should hope to remove; it’s crucial in child development because it builds the self-control required to resist short-term impulses while fostering long-term success.
I want to help my son find his gumption and be an active member in his community. I want him to have the ability to be present in social settings without checking his phone for that quick dopamine hit every notification brings. It’s hard. So much of our technology is built to be addictive, especially for children. But the greatest gift we can give them isn’t a shortcut around difficulty. It’s enough opportunities to discover what they’re capable of on the other side of it.
Bonnie Jean Feldkamp is a wife, mother and former opinion editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal. She is an ambassador of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. Find her on social media @WriterBonnie, or email her at Bonnie@WriterBonnie.com. Check out her weekly YouTube videos at https://www.youtube.com/bonniejeanfeldkamp
The Cover-Up Has Begun: First They Put Fauci on Trial, Then They Put History on Trial
The goal isn’t to prove Anthony Fauci lied. It’s to convince Americans that the racist decisions that cost hundreds of thousands of lives were somebody else’s fault…
By THOM HARTMANN
Republicans went totally nutso on Dr. Anthony Fauci this week, trying to catch him with a perjury trap before the US Senate. They called him names, citied lies and pseudoscience, and attacked his integrity.
He withstood asinine statements like Josh Hawley, in an extraordinary bit of projection, saying:
“You became a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar! You’ve done more to harm science than anybody in my lifetime!”
Throughout it all, Fauci retained his composure and refused to take any of their bait.
But the larger story here is what these White supremacist MAGA Republicans were trying to cover up with this deflection strategy.
Libertarian crackpot and fake science fan Rand Paul led this attack, ostensibly designed to sweep the headlines away from dead and dying Americans in Iran, the price of food and rent, and the allegations that Trump was raping children. But the real goal was even more monstrous.
What happened in 2020 can only be called an intentional, racially-based mass murder of American citizens, planned and executed by Donald Trump and Jared Kushner for purely political purposes, and virtually ignored by the American mainstream media.
And these ongoing attacks on Fauci — led by proponents (like Rand Paul) of the discredited, pseudo-science theory that “herd immunity” could have solved the crisis if we only let enough people die from Covid — are part of the effort to whitewash that history.
Here’s what really happened that they don’t want you to remember:
Throughout January and February of 2020, COVID was limited to a few clusters here in the US, all in Blue state cities that were major air hubs like Seattle and New York.
March 2020 was the month when things went to hell here. On March 5th there were 129 known cases and only 11 deaths in the US: just 33 days later, hospitals were using refrigerated trucks as morgues and over 10,000 Americans were dead of COVID
Fear ran through communities and stalked our homes because nobody yet knew for sure how this disease was transmitted or how deadly it would become.
We were washing our groceries with bleach after picking them up at the store’s parking lot from people wearing masks, goggles, and gloves. We bought up all the air filters in the country. We worked from home when we could. We isolated ourselves from other people as much as was humanly possible.
In March and early April, serious COVID outbreaks were showing up across the Northeast and Trump — who had two years earlier shut down both of the two federal pandemic task forces Obama had put into place after the Ebola scare — charged his son-in-law, nepo-baby slumlord Jared Kushner, with responding to the crisis.
Trump put medical doctors on TV daily, the media was freaking out about refrigerated trucks carrying bodies away from New York hospitals, and doctors and nurses — along with Dr. Fauci — were our new national heroes.
By March 7th, US deaths had risen from 4 to only 22, but that was enough to spur federal action. At Fauci’s suggestion, Trump’s official emergency declaration came on March 13th, and most of the country shut down during the following week.
The skies and highways fell silent, the Dow collapsed, and millions of Americans were laid off, but saving lives was, as Dr. Fauci pointed out, the number one consideration.
Jared Kushner put together a task force of preppie 30-something white men he knew from college to coordinate getting Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) from Trump buddies and companies close to Republican members of Congress into hospitals.
They even had a plan for the Post Office to distribute 650 million masks — 5 to every American household — to slow the pandemic.
But then came April 7, just one month later, when The New York Times ran a front-page story with the headline: “Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States.”
It was followed the day later with the all-caps headline across the top of the front page: BLACK AMERICANS BEAR THE BRUNT AS DEATHS CLIMB.
It hit conservative media, Donald Trump, and Jared Kushner like a lightning bolt.
Most of the non-elderly people dying from Covid, the report found, were Black or Hispanic, not White people!
As The New York Times reported on April 7:
“The coronavirus is infecting and killing black people in the United States at disproportionately high rates…
“In Illinois, 43 percent of people who have died from the disease and 28 percent of those who have tested positive are African-Americans, a group that makes up just 15 percent of the state’s population. African-Americans, who account for a third of positive tests in Michigan, represent 40 percent of deaths in that state even though they make up 14 percent of the population. In Louisiana, about 70 percent of the people who have died are black, though only a third of that state’s population is.”
White supremacist Republicans and rightwing media responded with a collective, “What the hell?!?”
Rush Limbaugh declared solemnly that afternoon:
“With the coronavirus, I have been waiting for the racial component.”
And here it was:
“The coronavirus now hits African Americans harder,” Limbaugh giddily intoned, “harder than illegal aliens, harder than women. It hits African Americans harder than anybody: disproportionate representation!”
It didn’t take a medical savant, of course, to figure out why, and it had nothing to do with the biology of race or Covid: it was purely systemic racism. African Americans die disproportionately from everything, from heart disease to strokes to cancer to childbirth, and are also over-represented in low-paid public-facing service jobs where they would more easily catch Covid.
It’s a symptom of a racially rigged economy and a healthcare system that only responds to money, which America has conspired to keep from African Americans for over 400 years. Of course Black people were going to die more frequently from coronavirus.
But the New York Times and the Washington Post simultaneously publishing April 7 front-page articles about that disparity — followed by it leading the news that night on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox “News” — echoed across the rightwing media landscape like a Fourth of July fireworks display.
Tucker Carlson, the only prime-time Fox host who’d previously expressed serious concerns about the dangers of the virus, changed his tune the following day, as documented by Media Matters for America.
Now that Black people were the ones most likely to die if we forced people back to work, Tucker said on April 8:
“[W]e can begin to consider how to improve the lives of the rest, the countless Americans who have been grievously hurt by this, by our response to this. How do we get 17 million of our most vulnerable citizens back to work? That’s our task.”
“The rest,” of course, were White people. Those “vulnerable citizens” Tucker wanted to get back to work were disproportionately minorities. As a report from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus noted:
“Essential workers who needed to work in person, and their family members, were significantly more likely to contract the coronavirus early in the crisis. These essential workers disproportionately earned low wages and were more likely to be people of color.”
On the other hand, salaried workers — overwhelmingly White — were telecommuting. For over a year I did my show from home, for example, as did all my peers at SiriusXM, Free Speech TV, and in most media operations around the country. Everywhere that (mostly White) people could work from home, employers were making accommodations.
But Trump wanted the rest of the economy to recover from the election-year shutdown shock quickly because he knew presidents running for reelection during economic bad times almost always lose. He knew that if he wanted to win that November and stay in the White House, that meant getting “essential” workers like transit drivers, store clerks, and people in slaughterhouses back to their jobs.
Particularly if they were Black or Hispanic, as were the majority of these “essential” workers, particularly in meat packing.
(The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, July 10, 2020, found that among 9,919 cases in 21 states with reported race and ethnicity, 87% of all Covid deaths occurred among racial and ethnic minority workers.)
Brit Hume joined Tucker’s show and, using his gravitas as Fox’s “real news guy,” intoned, in response to the report that mostly Black and Hispanic people were dying:
“The disease turned out not to be quite as dangerous as we thought.”
Left unsaid was the issue of for whom it was “not quite as dangerous,” but Limbaugh listeners and Fox “News” viewers are anything but unsophisticated when it comes to hearing dog-whistles on behalf of white supremacy.
Fully 12,677 Americans were dead by that April day, but now that Trump and the rightwing media knew that most of the non-elderly dying people were and would be Black and Hispanic, priorities were suddenly very, very different.
See the rest of the column at
See Heather Cox Richardson’s Letter from an American at
See more progressive news at https://www.dailykos.com/
and https://www.commondreams.org/
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