2023 Archives

— How a conservative activist spiffed a $1.8 million propaganda campaign to flatter Clarence Thomas — Looks like the Hunter Biden laptop scandal was possibly a Russian hack. — GOP AG's are planning for a “fugitive slave act” to track abortion and trans “felons.” — Red states continue to “shackle” Black people. — How a single lie on Fox “News” threw Michigan’s politics into chaos and is being used to try to flip their legislature from Democratic to Republican. — A lawyer is forging ground that others may will follow about big oil: this could be tobacco all over again. — Geeky Science/Orwell Alert! What is America going to do about AI now being used for “deep fakes” in politics?

Voting rights are essential to maintaining a democracy; without them nations quickly devolve into oligarchy and then autocracy... Without free and fair elections and widespread voter participation, you can’t have a functioning democratic republic. Republicans know this: that’s why they’re trying to end free and fair elections. ... Felon disenfranchisement laws were a common way to suppress the Black vote in the Confederate states, and explains why in Florida one in five African American adults — well over a million — have a felony conviction and, until recently, were unable to vote. And it’s not that Black people are more likely to commit crimes than white people; it’s that they’re more likely to get caught, prosecuted, and convicted. Black people in Florida do not, for example, jaywalk three times more than white people but they are three times more likely to be cited by the police for it.

Most Americans just learned, from reporting this week in The New York Times, that Trump, billionaire-funded rightwing think tanks, and some of the leaders of the GOP have a plan to flip America from a democratic republic into an authoritarian strongman-type of government should he or another like-minded MAGA Republican win the White House in 2024. This would be the death-knell of democracy, the crisis I warn about in my new book, and a historic disaster of almost unimaginable proportions given how much influence our nation has on other democracies around the world. This week that new book, The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, hits the bookstores.

"At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics." —Justice John Paul Stevens’s dissent in Citizens United