Watch Senator Warnock’s powerful speech in support of (HR1) the For the People Act, a proposed law that would make voting easier and more universal, outlaw partisan and racial gerrymandering and ensure that political campaigns are less driven by “dark money”. A voting rights protection bill long overdue in our great experiment in democracy.
See if you can find a single flaw or misstep in Warnock’s presentation:
If you try to fight your way through bodily pain by working out harder, particularly as you age, you will likely injure yourself. There is a difference between overcoming discomfort, a sign that you’re pushing beyond your boundaries and getting stronger, and fighting pain, a sign that you are hurting your own body.
A few years ago I overdid my last-minute training for the 40 mile Bike NY ride and wound up semi-crippled. I spent weeks in physical therapy, unable to stand without pulling myself up by my arms. I’d ignored my tiredness after a long ride to do an even more rigorous ride the next day, at one point even competing against two young boxers as they did road work on a long, steep incline — and paid a price — barely being able to move the next day– that lasted for months of pain and disability before I could stand from a chair normally. I also seemed to have aggravated the arthritis I never knew I had before. It was a great lesson in the idiocy of not listening to your body when it tells you to rest.
The same goes for the pain that comes out as hurt, anger, an unshakeable feeling you’ve been screwed. It is just as important to listen to this kind of psychic pain, particularly if it is persistent or recurrent. It seems to me that listening to your hurt is the only way out of the sometimes subtle trap that holds you. Learning exactly what hurt you is the only way to avoid it in the future, to do better the next time you encounter the same challenge.
I couldn’t articulate, a few days ago, why I was suddenly still angry at my former friend Paul, a guy I considered a good friend for almost 50 years. He’d insisted, for months, that he had no idea why I’d been so hurt by his silence, bursts of anger and his insistence that I was overreacting to whatever he might have accidentally done to me. I’d told him to go fuck himself, in the end, but it still left me feeling stuck with unfinished business, though I couldn’t explain to Sekhnet what it was. She urged me to forget about it, particularly since Paul and I weren’t friends any more and I’d never hear from him again. For some reason I couldn’t let it go, something was bugging me.
I write every day, for better or for worse, and it gives me an opportunity to process things. I hear some shit-dumb racist representative from Texas (Cow Chip Roy) make a bland comment about what they say in Texas about a long rope and a tall oak tree, how they’ve always used Texas justice to take care of their troublemakers down there — in the context of a hearing about the sudden rise in anti-Asian violence in the wake of Trump’s “Chy-na Virus,” the day after a racist Georgia police captain made the mass-killer’s case that he felt he’d taken grave actions to help others and that the killer had had “a very bad day” (presumably worse than his victims and their loved ones) and, after I unball my fists, that might set me to writing. Sometimes it is something much more subtle, and personal, eating at me and I find that thinking and writing it out as clearly as I can helps me process it sometimes.
Why was I suddenly so intent on smashing my former friend, who turned 65 the other day, in the face? I began by writing him a note, primarily to hurt him. I figured it was the least I could do for the smug, disappointing fellow who claimed to love me like the brother he never had. This desire to inflict pain seemed beneath me, I try to aim higher, but I followed the need to hit back, since my anger seemed legitimate to me (it always does, doesn’t it? Persuasive little fucker, anger). My note had only one line that one would expect of such a letter — it accused him of gaslighting and being a long-time pettifogging bully.
Writing the short note, though momentarily satisfying, made no difference in my mood. Something still irked me. It took seeing what had been missing from the letter to turn on the light in my soul. The reason I was angry is because, in taking an old friend at his word and continually extending him the benefit of the doubt, I had unwittingly collaborated with this experienced litigator/manipulator in the dismissal of my legitimate feelings and the erasure of my clear expression of the reasons for those feelings. How about that for a damned good, specific reason to be pissed off (and to never want to feel that particular anger again)?!
So I wrote the piece I posted yesterday, after reworking the letter to highlight the precise thing Paul kept denying he’d done — the complete dismissal of easily understandable human emotions. It felt like I’d worked something through that will help me (and hopefully others) in the future, add to my clarity the next time someone insists they are incapable of behaving any differently, as Paul consistently did. As many a Black grandmother has told her grandchild: when somebody tells you who they are, believe them.
People are not how we might wish they are, how they could and should be, how they might portray themselves to be. We are all as we consistently act. I wish Paul, with his great intelligence and dark sense of humor, was capable of pausing in his eternal arguments to see things from my point of view — he isn’t. I know that with the right insight he could become this way, I also know he has insisted on his grim view of the inarguable, unalterable darkness in the human heart since childhood. He is an eternal pessimist, which is its own reward, since he will always have this pessimism confirmed by the disappointing world of fatally flawed humans he holds in such dim regard. To allow that I’ve made useful changes in my life would mean his pessimism was more a tic of weakness than a desirable feature of his clear-sighted strength. My own struggles to be less hurtful to others, to my self, if in any way successful, constitute an unanswerable challenge to his assertion that we are all doomed to whatever misfortune we find ourselves suffering and that to believe otherwise is pathetic self-delusion.
I also know that we can only change ourselves, and those changes are always the result of hard, sometimes painful, work that most people shrink from. Paul portrays himself as someone who relies on facts, intellectual rigor and a constant, honest search for truth, though he uses argument to constantly insulate himself from any reckoning with his own pain and to make other people feel culpable for oversensitivity and emotional incoherence when he “inadvertently” hurts them.
How’s that for an asshole personality type?
Why did I remain friends with him since he first jokingly bullied me in Junior High School [1]? How did I not see that gleefully sadistic side of him when I was called back into the typing room (my class had been in the room before Paul’s class arrived) and accused, by the typing teacher, of vandalizing my own typewriter by pulling keys off it? Aside from the obvious reply “Mrs. Landau, if I did want to vandalize the typewriters, which I don’t, why would I have done it to my own typewriter, which would point a finger directly at me?” what could I really say, since I hadn’t pulled any keys off the typewriter?
She might have yielded to this reasonable point, but I never got the chance to make it. Paul, sitting a few seats from where I stood, called out “Look at him! He’s guilty, look at his face, he has nothing to say!!!” Which was true, the mirthful cruelty of this confident-looking class clown motherfucker I’d never seen before had rendered me momentarily speechless. Some of his classmates laughed as I stood there on the spot, at a loss for what to say. I wasn’t laughing though, and if I smiled, it wasn’t out of happiness.
Fifty years to see that this clever lad remained unchanged? Hmmmm. Lesson learned, though.
[1]
I’ve written a lot about the surrogates we tend to draft, people we are unconsciously drawn to because they have salient characteristics of those close to us with whom we have long, complicated conflicts. We try to work things out with them that we can’t work out with the actual sadistic father, or narcissistic mother, or crazy grandfather who did the original damage to us when we were most vulnerable. Paul was a version of my asshole father, in his great intelligence, his occasional wit, his assurances of undying affection and his implacable insistence that he was right, no matter how badly he’d acted. Paul was the last of these relentless motherfuckers that I am going to have to deal with, from the looks of it, and I’ll drink to that.
The other day I took a swing at hurting an old friend who’d wounded me by taking extended advantage of my vow to remain mild, to the extent I can. I couldn’t get over how he’d abused my good will, how much it still hurt and how ready I was to hit him back hard, if metaphorically.
I understood that I needed to do more serious thinking about this final estrangement from a childhood friend, his ultimate betrayal and smug sense of righteousness were hard for me to take, I was still angry. He no doubt felt the same about me, that I’d betrayed his long friendship, which caused him to lash out at me. I wrote what I thought was a decently coherent kiss-off the other day, in one short sitting, and contented myself that he deserved no better, was glad to expend no more effort for a damaged former friend I’m done with.
Something nagged at me though. I recognized even as I wrote it that I was writing for myself, to clarify my understanding, and for whatever value it might have to a stranger who finds herself up against the same kind of abuse. My friend’s abusive “hard truth” style is quite common, and it can be subtle, always couched as highly rational, with your best interests in mind, merely sticking to the detailed facts of the case, being thorough, respectful and challenging, in a super honest way. This style casts the other person as the emotional basket case, constantly off balance in the face of multiple intellectual challenges, while, actually, the hyper-intellectual pose is a grotesque mask for a raging emotional incapacity. My father had this feature, (much to his eventual regret), I was forced to counter it every day growing up, I know it well.
Today I realized that my dashed off note the other day, the quick swing of a 38 ounce baseball bat, had failed to reach the essential part of the exercise — the moment of moral clarity that can only come from understanding and describing the action of the hurtful mechanism precisely, in a way that it cannot be misconstrued. This deliberate digestion of the causes of our own pain strikes me as the key to the process of learning and growing. When it comes to setting it out clearly, sometimes a ball peen hammer turns out to be the proper tool, impossible to see when you find yourself tightly gripping a Babe Ruth sized baseball bat.
So here is the thing that was finally so hateful to me. I’ll phrase the rest addressing Paul, who is the ultimate recipient of this elucidation, which I actually write for all of our use, though probably not for poor Paul’s. I belatedly take him at his word that he’s truly incapable of understanding another person’s mind, that he will never reach the level of basic empathy, and vulnerability, required to grasp this most important bit about friendship and intimacy. None of those things, of course, give him the right to act abusively toward others, but that’s another conversation. Here we go:
In the end I kick myself for my many attempts to “explain” myself to someone so limited in emotional generosity and so determined to be right at all costs. I should have seen the whole picture much earlier on, when you angrily challenged me to tell you to go fuck yourself when you called to confront me about an email you called “snide and inaccurate” (which, in the end, you conceded had not actually been inaccurate).
I am not naive about the wars between people, I have been in many, hold my own, survive. I’ve seen the identical song and dance at the end of a childhood friendship now at least twice, so I recognize its features. I remind myself that I shouldn’t have taken you at your word that our friendship was important to you and that you’d do anything to fix it. That was my fault, I repressed the knowledge, based on long experience, that you were emotionally incapable of dropping the argumentative persona long enough to empathize with a friend in an objectively aggravating situation.
You thanked me, at first, for my mildness in setting out some of the early ugliness between us and asked me again and again to show good will by re-explaining, if I’d be so kind, what I’d already set out clearly. All of the things I raised you left eternally unaddressed. You were intent, I suppose, on prevailing in the ultimate contest: to show that my life, my attempt to become a better person, was bullshit, that you were right — we can’t change, or remain connected to people we love for life. You’d prove, by the ugly end of things, that change is bullshit and so is weak, wishful faith in the better angels of mankind.
Finally you wrote to me hurt, felt I’d said very hurtful things to you. So be it. I was disappointed and very hurt myself, as I let you know the reasons for clearly, over and over, before saying those things that hurt you. In hindsight, I’d have done better simply telling you to fucking fuck off the first time you challenged me to.
The thing that sticks in my craw, and causes me to write today, is your final, madly negating closing argument, the diabolical doubling down — that you supposedly read everything I’d written, reviewed everything I’d said, and found “no clue” about how I’d felt, what I thought, what your possible fault could have been or why I was so cruelly unforgiving.
Let me be precise about why this “no clue” assertion was so toxic to me, after I’d given every clue, hint, anecdote and comment I had in several long, carefully edited no-frills iterations. Each time I yielded to your assurance that you were sincerely struggling to understand an emotional position I’d already explained as clearly as anyone could, I became complicit. Each time I tried yet again to clarify self-evident things, I was acknowledging that perhaps I had somehow not been clear. I’d been clear, and taken hours to be as clear as I was each time. Every time I struggled to further simplify and recast the same points yet again, I was participating in a vicious negation of my ability to be clear.
My father used to run this play all the time, making me state the same obvious concern five or ten different ways, insisting each time that I’d explained nothing while trying to distract me by angrily refocusing on my “rage”. In the end, one Yom Kippur when I was close to forty, I was finally able to patiently defuse this asshole gambit. He had to back down and admit he understood what I’d explained to him several different ways, over the course of a few hours. He agreed to tone down the hostility, though years later he triumphantly told me he’d only pretended to tone it down, proving his perennial point that people can’t change on any fundamental level. He “won” by effectively ending his relationship with the son he loved. A small price to pay, I suppose, for those terrible regrets he had on his deathbed.
With a brutal father, there can be a pay off, if you work hard enough, gain enough understanding and skill, and are able not to get sucked into the ugliness of a fight. With a contemporary surrogate for that brutal, implacable father, as we have obviously cast each other for decades (I see you as a bully, you likely see me the same way– a very self-righteous bully in my case) it is unlikely to work things out, the chances of any meaningful emotional epiphany are minimal. Peer competition comes in, back to our sporting days as adolescents, an unwillingness (or inability) to make ourselves vulnerable, etc.
In the interest of reconciliation, taking you at your word, I put my aggravation in a nutshell for you, more than once: there is nothing more frustrating to me than making a point, particularly in a contentious situation, and having only silence by way of reply.
Your reply was determined silence on every point I raised, you relied on an absolute right not to respond to anything you didn’t want to respond to. You kept resting on your right to engage no point I raised, yielded not a millimeter, except to allow that you still somehow didn’t understand why I was incapable of accepting your belated apology for whatever it was I’d felt you’d done.
And in the end, hurt, you provocatively claim I hadn’t given you a single clue, in all the thousands of words I sent after hours and days of careful thinking, writing and editing. It was a pure negation of my thoughts and feelings, my ability to make them clear, an extremely abusive act. Surely you’re already in a kind of hell for it, since you are clearly willing to pay the price my poor bastard of a father did to be “right”.
I pity you, in a way, but more importantly, I’m writing to process the lesson – it is self-destructive to keep showing good faith to someone you understand to be incapable of returning it. It turns out that even after doing a lot of work on the issue, one can be bullied and, thinking he is on some kind of high road, wind up unintentionally consenting to it. I do not consent to it and I recommend the same approach to everyone I know when someone tries to dominate them.
Unlike you, I believe in the potential of the people I love, our ability to grow and change. I’ve seen close friends evolve in inspiring ways, I’ve seen changes in myself that have kept me from the worst of things. I get better at not hurting [Sekhnet], for example. I’ve also seen my share of Noams, and Friedmans, quietly, implacably enraged people intent on, I don’t know what — prevailing, I guess, for lack of a better word. There are plenty of assholes to contend with on this planet of assholes, but there are also souls worth holding on to, and it is worth the ongoing work to learn how to live this way.
For what it’s worth, I do feel the bitter sadness of your worldview, you poor bastard.
The New York Times released this, eh, surprising news yesterday:
WASHINGTON — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia authorized extensive efforts to hurt the candidacy of Joseph R. Biden Jr. during the election last year, including by mounting covert operations to influence people close to President Donald J. Trump, according to a declassified intelligence report released on Tuesday…
…The reports, compiled by career officials, amounted to a repudiation of Mr. Trump, his allies and some of his top administration officials. They reaffirmed the intelligence agencies’ conclusions about Russia’s interference in 2016 on behalf of Mr. Trump and said that the Kremlin favored his re-election. And they categorically dismissed allegations of foreign-fed voter fraud, cast doubt on Republican accusations of Chinese intervention on behalf of Democrats and undermined claims that Mr. Trump and his allies had spread about the Biden family’s work in Ukraine.
The line we often hear, about shady things done by powerful people, is that it’s not the crime itself, it’s the cover-up that gets you. Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller wasn’t appointed because of well-founded suspicions that the Trump campaign had had strategic help from and over a hundred contacts with Putin’s agents during the lead-up to the 2016 election — he was appointed when Trump fired Jim Comey for not dropping the investigation into Trump’s former National Security Director Mike “Lock Her up” Flynn. Flynn had been reluctantly fired by Trump for lying about his own contacts with Russia, then Trump attempted to squash the investigation and gloated by immediately celebrating Comey’s firing with a bunch of Russians in the Oval Office. It all looked so openly corrupt that Robert Mueller had to be appointed.
Mueller, of course, wound up having to write an entire second volume on Trump’s repeated attempts to interfere with his investigation, cover up his attempts to cover up widespread contacts with Trump’s benefactor Vladimir Putin, instruct his people to stay strong and say nothing, his obstruction of justice. Mueller was forced to do this because Trump’s people lied to him over and over, people like Paul Manafort who Trump later pardoned for not “singing” like a “rat”. Mueller’s short summary of the Obstruction of Justice volume would have made an excellent article of impeachment, but Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic braintrust did not have the stomach for that fight, banking instead on American outrage about Trump’s attempt to shake down the new president of a country few had ever heard of.
One star of the new revelations about Putin’s attempts to sow discord and secure another four years as American president for his pliable friend is slippery Russian intel officer/spy Konstantin Kilimnik:
The report also named Konstantin V. Kilimnik, a former colleague of Mr. Trump’s onetime campaign manager Paul Manafort, as a Russian influence agent. Mr. Kilimnik took steps throughout the 2020 election cycle to hurt Mr. Biden and his candidacy, the report said, helping pushed a false narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, was responsible for interfering in American politics.
During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Manafort shared inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served, according to a bipartisan report last year by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“Kilimnik was back at it again, along with others like Derkach,” Mr. Schiff said. “And they had other conduits for their laundered misinformation, including people like Rudy Giuliani.”
Neither Mr. Giuliani nor his representatives returned a request for comment.
You know, this guy:
Kilimnik was mentioned hundreds of times in the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report about massive Russian interference in the 2016 election that came out in five volumes, the last of them well after Mueller’s discarded work was done. The Republican led committee documented meetings and constant communications between then Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort (Roger Stone’s former partner in political dirty tricks) and Kilimnik, the man the FBI is now seeking for Obstruction of Justice and Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice. They documented how Manafort had shared detailed polling data with Kilimnik, information that might have come into play when Trump’s surgically precise Electoral College victory was engineered. Though he lost he popular vote, he won every district he needed to win for his 78,000 vote Electoral College mandate.
The Republican led committee got much more detailed information on Trump’s collusion/coordination/close work with Russia than Mueller was able to find. And, because Americans are not sophisticated consumers of information, the Republicans on the committee publicly distanced themselves from their own findings, repeating the mantra that it was all a big nothing fabricated by vicious partisans who hated Trump, no matter how much so called evidence of this collusion they themselves had turned up.
Can anyone really be surprised about this “news” that Putin wanted his guy reelected in 2020? During the 2020 campaign Trump and Barr constantly echoed the incendiary and baseless Putin talking point about mail in voting fraud. Evidence? “It’s common sense,” snorted Barr on national TV, more than once. Draw a straight line from that lie about massive potential fraud by those who voted against Trump, through Trump’s constant carping about a rigged election, to his open attempts to sabotage the US mail system by having his megadonor dismantle hundreds of urban high speed mail sorting machines, remove mailboxes and slow down mail delivery by other shenanigans, through literally hundreds of baseless lawsuits to prevent voting or contest electoral losses, to the well-funded months’ long Stop the Steal publicity blitz, to the riot organized and launched to prevent the certification of the election results, to the screaming about the cancellation of Dr. Seuss and the snarling threats of “scorched earth” in the Senate — and… well, Putin’s laughing, anyway.
Maybe he’s right, comrades. This nation may be too fucking stupid and weak to remain a democracy.
Or as the Grey Lady much more elegantly stated it:
McConnell Threatens Retaliation for Filibuster Change as Idea Gains Strength
To be a bit more blunt than the genteel journal of record, which reported the story, if a piece of shit could speak, it would say something pretty much like this:
In his comments, Mr. McConnell threatened that Republicans would turn the rules against Democrats and try to make it virtually impossible to do anything in the Senate if they proceeded with the change. He referred to the fact that the chamber operates under arcane rules often bypassed through what is known as a unanimous consent agreement where no senator objects. If Democrats plunged ahead to gut the filibuster, he warned, Republicans would deny consent even on the most mundane of matters, effectively bogging down the Senate.
“Let me say this very clearly for all 99 of my colleagues,” Mr. McConnell said. “Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin — can even begin — to imagine what a completely scorched earth Senate would look like — none. None of us have served one minute in a Senate that was completely drained of comity, and this is an institution that requires unanimous consent to turn the lights on before noon.”
Mr. McConnell, who noted that he had resisted aggressive demands by President Donald J. Trump to get rid of the filibuster and ram through Republicans’ agenda, said eliminating it would represent a transformative change in government and go far beyond what voters intended in electing Mr. Biden and the evenly divided Senate.
If you read the article you will see that Dick Durbin, number two Democrat in the Senate, made a very coherent argument for changing the filibuster rules to prevent further McConnell/GOP obstruction. He pointed out that McConnell has used it more (and effortlessly, now that it requires only an emailed threat to filibuster rather than standing and speaking for hours to block debate) in recent years than it had ever been used. McConnell is a more prodigious filibusterer and debate killer than his forebear obstructionists, even at the height of the anti-Civil Rights, pro-lynching (and before that pro-slavery) filibusters.
Mr. Durbin noted that it was Mr. McConnell who institutionalized the use of the filibuster, which historically had been used rarely before the Kentuckian was in charge. Mr. Durbin said the procedural weapon was a particularly sore point for him, since it is has for two decades prevented Democrats from enacting the so-called Dream Act, a popular bipartisan bill that he wrote that would create a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants brought into the United States as children. Though it has majority support, it has never been able to clear the 60-vote threshold.
“I brought it to the Senate floor on five different occasions, and on five different occasions, it was stopped by the filibuster,” Mr. Durbin said on Tuesday.
McConnell also changed the filibuster rule under Trump so that it no longer applies to Supreme Court nominees, bringing us the unstoppable 50-48 Supreme Court vote for the immature and hostile Boof Kavanaugh (after a quick, sham background investigation by the FBI) and the historically hurried last minute appointment of ultra-conservative Christian cultist Amy Coney-Barrett 52-48.
In fairness to him, all Mitch has left (as he tries to get Kentucky law changed so a Republican can be appointed when he steps down) was a threat of rage like nobody has yet seen in America, even under the raging idiot who just left office after organizing and inciting a riot to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.
Whatever you say, Mitch. Now somebody, please flush, would you? It stinks in there.
As promised the other day, my long-delayed clubbing of a long-time bully whose bullying I tolerated in the name of our better angels. Here is what I wrote to my former friend of fifty years:
Paul:
I have no illusion about bringing you any insight, or any real desire to help you at this point (even if I could), but here’s a short bit of perspective, written mostly for myself.
You blame me for hurting you in the end in a way that ended our friendship, fair enough. You blame me for being unforgiving, though you told me you never understood why I seemed to demand your abject surrender for something you claimed you couldn’t grasp: what had been so hurtful about your eternal devil’s advocacy, sporadic snarls of impatience and unrepentant flashes of rage. So be it.
I recognize your limited emotional bandwidth, which is not hard to see. You avoid the expression of your personal feelings, preferring the back and forth of spirited argument by way of friendly conversation. Your parents were far from ideal, your father a hectoring bully with only a passing sense of humor, your mother a narcissist eternally loyal to your father’s autocracy. You probably never received the kind of emotional support we all need. You have an understandably grim worldview, people can never truly know each other, people cannot change in any meaningful way. You’ve endured an ugly divorce, the bitter death of another longterm romantic relationship and now the ugly end of your longest, closest friendship – proving your case, I suppose.
You claimed to love me like a brother, regard me as your dearest friend. You were unable to show this love except by eternally arguing that perhaps I was wrong to feel as I did — about everything, from politics, to the end of my long acquaintanceship with Noam, to my anger at having my health insurance illegally terminated, to the frustration of finding no provision of the violated law I could make available to help others similarly screwed. You truly couldn’t relate to any pain I expressed since, as you say, how could you ever know what another person truly feels? Except, of course, to become angry and challenging when you felt that other person was being unhealthily angry, because you cared about them so much.
In the end I kick myself for my many attempts to “explain” myself to someone so clearly determined to be right at all costs. I should have seen the whole picture much earlier on, when you angrily barked at me to tell you to go fuck yourself when you called to confront me about an email you called “snide and inaccurate” (which, in the end, you conceded had not actually been inaccurate).
I should not have taken you at your word that our friendship was important to you and that you’d do anything to fix it. That was my fault, I repressed the knowledge, based on long experience, that you were emotionally incapable of doing what needed to be done, namely, dropping the argumentative facade for long enough to empathize with a friend in an objectively aggravating situation.
In the end, after thanking me for my mildness in setting out some of the early ugliness between us and asking me again and again to show good will by re-explaining what I’d already set out clearly, things you left eternally unaddressed, you wrote that you felt I’d said very hurtful things to you. So be it. I was disappointed and very hurt myself, as I let you know quite clearly, time and again, before saying those things that hurt you.
The thing that sticks in my craw, and causes me to write today, is your final, incoherent closing argument, the diabolical doubling down — that you supposedly read everything I’d written and found “no clue” as to what your fault had been or why I was so unforgiving. The words of a gaslighting bully, unbecoming of anything but a desperate, born-pettifogger.
I pity you, in a way, but more importantly, I’m trying to instruct myself not to show repeated good faith to someone I understand to be incapable of returning it. It turns out that even after doing a lot of work on the issue, one can be bullied and, thinking he is on some kind of high road, wind up unintentionally consenting to it. I do not consent to it and I recommend the same approach to everyone I know when someone tries to unreasonably dominate them.
Have a blessed day, you poor bastard.
If you get punched in the face, although the puncher can claim it was an accident, you know without a doubt that you’ve been punched in the face. The same goes for a beating with a belt, or a stick. The damage done by physical beatings is something I can only imagine, not having experienced them more than a couple of times over my long life. The abuse I’m more familiar with is the emotional variety. This kind of expression of rage can be very subtle, and practitioners of this form of abuse are often very good at justifying themselves, making their mercilessness appear to be entirely your fault.
In recent years we have learned the word “gaslighting” — from a 1939 film in which a husband convinces his wife she’s going crazy by, among other things, turning down the gas light in their home over the course of time and pretending the light is the same as it ever was. It is a smooth variation on reframing, a technique by which whatever you’re upset about is recast from another perspective that makes you unreasonable. You say you’re upset about this, well, actually, THIS is why you’re really upset and that makes you a dishonest, confused idiot simply lashing out irrationally because you’re a jerk.
The damage done is the nagging feeling of self-doubt it creates about your right to your feelings, which can be crippling. You honestly don’t even see you are being abused until very far into the game, if ever. It is easy, many times, to doubt your own lying eyes and ears, when the pressure is kept constant by someone intent on keeping you off balance at any cost.
Many people don’t ever fully recover from this kind of abuse, tending to blame themselves throughout their lives for pain they didn’t cause and mistreatment they did little or nothing to deserve. Lately, during this lockdown I’ve had too much time to brood as I work through an interesting book about evil, which concludes that evil consists, in its essence, of a damaging lie told without contrition. Being less and less able to go for my customary long walks due to the arthritis in my left knee, I keep coming back to my own inability to see bad things for what they are sometimes. Sekhnet tried to reassure me by chalking it up to my good character, my desire to see the best in people, to extend the benefit of the doubt, my attempt to first cause no harm, but it doesn’t feel like a satisfying explanation to me.
There is a masochistic aspect to my unwillingness to let go of people who have shown themselves to be, at best, callous about other people’s feelings and determined to be right at all costs. I keep coming up short when I consider why I didn’t finally cut a very neurotic old friend loose once he, face fully a’twitch, blamed me for deliberately trying to destroy his hellish marriage. Or why I kept trying to explain myself to a very smart old friend who continued to plead ignorance to what exactly he’d done by expressing rage at my anger, precisely how this had hurt me so much, no matter how clearly I explained it to him. It’s this second guy I feel like throwing against the wall a bit now, though our long friendship was shit-canned months back. Though both were adamant in their denial of my right to feel the way I did, or their role in the escalating tension between us, the first guy is already in hell, to a more obvious extent than the second, who remained smugly superior throughout.
I saw a concise little presentation on gaslighting the other day (see below) and as I watched I saw each of this very smart old friend’s responses, set out one after the other. A textbook case of bullying by trying to make me doubt even my own ability to express myself clearly. The point was not whether or not I’d made myself clear (I had) the point was, no matter what I said or wrote, he had a ready reply that dismissed or ignored it outright and he kept falling back on his inability to understand, asking me to please, if I’d be willing, explain it to him again, a little clearer this time. In the end, in telling me how cruelly I’d hurt him (by eventually making clear what a desperate, irredeemable asshole he was?), he insisted none of the thousands of words I’d written him gave him any “clue” why I had felt it necessary, in the end, to be so hurtful to him. Now, because I had been so patient with this guy, acting in good faith with someone who was hellbent on being right, no matter what the facts, I am left with a desire to simply hurt the perennial bully.
The ten examples of gaslighting from the video below are a good starting point, I suppose, for a tart little final fuck you, since he employed every one of these lines over the months I took him at his word that he honestly wanted to repair our friendship. I should be able to get over this anger I am still feeling, but since I am not able to, inflicting a little last bit of hurt may be the best I can do to finish processing it. Let’s run through the list as I mentally prepare my fuck you to this unfunny clown:
“What did I do to you?” This is a good one, my mother used to use this one all the time. I have an image of her, sitting next to me at the kitchen table when I was a kid, screaming in a weird cadence (which makes me think she may have been shaking me to this rhythm) “what… did… anyone… ever… do… to …. you… to make you… so… fucking angry?!”
“Everyone around you isn’t the problem, the problem is you.” In the case of someone who lies at your expense, the problem isn’t that they lied, the problem is that you are such a self-righteous and judgmental prick. This is a newly familiar one to me, and a very hard one to swallow.
“I’m sorry you feel that way.” This is a great one, sometimes expressed in the conditional “if-pology” form “if you felt bad, if I hurt you, I’m sorry.” Neatly dismissive of your right to feel the way you do, leaving open the possibility that nothing bad happened, and beautifully evasive of any role in causing the feelings you are conditionally apologizing for the other person having, if they actually even had such feelings. A classic.
“I don’t remember saying that, I think you made that up.”
“It’s your anxiety that made me do it.” A variation on the theme that you deserve what you get, because it’s all you’re fault, none of it mine, and if you have a problem, you caused it, because you are the asshole, not me!
“You need help.”
“It’s your fault.”
“You’re too emotional” (sorry if you feel that way, asshole)
“It’s not a big deal.”
“Why are you so defensive all the time? You keep attacking me.” This is the last refuge of a gaslighting bully, to make themselves the victim of you. It is this last one, more than another other single reason, that makes me feel like delivering one hard, unequivocal punch to this smart, eternally argumentative fellow’s smug, combative face. I’m not proud of this feeling, but I understand it. There is a certain value, I have to think, to providing this motherfucker with the unambiguous clue he pretended not to have.
Yesterday was the one year anniversary of an early morning drug raid in Kentucky, using a warrant based on outdated intel, that resulted in the killing of an innocent 26 year-old EMT named Breonna Taylor in her own home. The police who broke down her door and began wildly firing into the apartment were not charged in her death, though they left her bleeding with 8 bullet wounds for twenty minutes before any medical efforts were taken to save her (depraved indifference?). As she lay dying they were busy arresting her boyfriend, who fired once at men who broke down the door — men all but one witness said never identified themselves as police. The boyfriend recently had felony charges against him dismissed, after only a year. Remember, this deadly military style assault was to enforce Prohibition, Louisville police were there to intercept illegal drugs, though none were found. Although no police were charged in Taylor’s killing, scores of protesters calling for accountability for the officers and an end to “no knock” warrants, were arrested for, essentially, felony protest. Fair is fair.
Hard as it is to believe, your worldview will determine how you see the facts of this awful case. A good percentage of the country sees this killing simply as an unavoidable tragedy, something that couldn’t have been helped. Some will argue that Taylor’s boyfriend should not have pulled out his licensed gun when he was abruptly woken by the sound of men breaking down the door. Once he fired into the leg of one of the men, whatever happened after that was coming to him. The same people will defend the Stand Your Ground laws that extend the Castle Doctrine (you may defend yourself with deadly force against a deadly threat in your home) to anywhere and anyone you fear might use deadly force against you. A black kid walking down a suburban Florida street is fair game to shoot, as we have learned, if you can prove he scared the shit out of you.
It sounds simplistic, I know, to insist on a premise like all communal hatred resulting in violence flows from the same source. Or making the obvious point about the central role early life experiences play in shaping how we see the world, for that matter. It is beyond dispute that how we see the world, our worldview, not only influences what we believe and how we act, it creates the world we live in, to a great extent. All simplistic and self-evident sounding, I know. but I hope my rambling here will shed some light for us, somehow.
Take every situation where an enraged mob goes after a certain group of people simply based on the other group’s ethnic, religious, racial or political identity and rains living hell down on them. Lately it’s angry American fools bashing elderly Asians, shoving them to the ground, slashing them with knives, because they blame all Asians for the “Wuhan Flu”, as our former president, a big fan of tough talk and violence of every kind, dubbed it. How about that Nobel Peace Prize winner, former political prisoner turned prime minister, Aung San Suu Kyi silent on the mass killings and forced evacuations of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims in her country? Two million Tutsis, slaughtered by hand, in a short, bloody span of time, by machete wielding Hutus, another tribal group. Every “ethnic” massacre is a variation on the same theme. The names change, the victims and perpetrators wear different hats, the methods of killing change, but it’s the same thing, every time. Ever hear of “necklacing?” Hell of a technique, Brownie:
Necklacing is the practice of extrajudicial summary execution and torture carried out by forcing a rubber tire filled with petrol around a victim’s chest and arms, and setting it on fire. The victim may take up to 20 minutes to die, suffering severe burns in the process.[1]
How can one human “necklace” another human? Easy, apparently, given the right set of circumstances. For whatever reason, the mass killing of despised “others” is a regular feature of our common history anytime masses of desperate people get really enraged, particularly when they are encouraged in this violent group mania by their leaders. It’s always a very similar horror story, a few details changed.
I don’t know why the commonality of every instance of mass violence seems so hard to grasp, or why it doesn’t act as a kind of brake on these recurring slaughters. Every time I hear the next atrocity story it reminds me of the grappling in the media with the “question” of exactly why the insane guy with the automatic weapon went nuts and killed a bunch of strangers before blowing his own head off. It’s as if, perhaps this time, the insane “gunman” who went crazy and started massacring before he “turned the gun on himself” will be the first to have a brilliant, totally valid theory for his insanely violent act.
Seeing that horrific black and white clip of the guy in the cap dumping a load of jiggly, rubber human skeletons down a chute in the early 1940s did not instantly convince me of the commonality of all such massacres, (and we’ll stipulate that the Nazi death machine was unique in its scope, size and efficiency) but it had an effect on my thinking about the subject, my view of the world.
You see something like that as a child and it stays with you, changes the way you think about “solutions” that involve the mass torture and murder of our fellow homo sapiens. I think I would have felt the same way if the clip had been of charging Turks on horseback whipping wailing Armenian women, children and old people into a raging river to drown. How are those things different? How is either fundamentally different than a man with a gun and a badge nonchalantly kneeling on another man’s neck until the pleading, handcuffed man stops moving and then keeps his knee there until the man is dead? Each of these things is characterized by what the law, in an excellent phrase, calls “depraved indifference to human life.”
On a certain fundamental level, we are all taught to accept that war, and mass killing, are simply an unfortunate, but sometimes necessary, inevitable part of politics. A particularly muscular form of diplomacy, practiced at the behest of God’s imperfect but powerful vessels. The way we have been helping the Saudi royal family starve the people of Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, or our devastating blockade of Venezuela — a nation we are crippling economically during a deadly pandemic — just other, more coercive forms of diplomacy. Tally ho! These inferior people, given to a tyrannical form of government, or political beliefs we find repugnant, have simply got to learn to get with the program, we’ll gently starve them ’til they wise up!
Back to the personal, the place where “political” and “religious” beliefs, and “morality” are instilled. If your parent was humiliated as a child, as mine were, they will tend to see the world in a zero sum way. They can’t risk being humiliated any more, the possibility is too traumatic, and so they phrase every disagreement or conflict as a war that must be fought to the death. My father, as he was dying, said he always felt we could never have a real discussion of anything, he thought a fight was inevitable. He said that it had been his fault, because he lacked insight and saw everything in blazing black and white — a win-lose battle to the death. He felt every disagreement with his children inevitably led to a fight since he had never learned any other way, in spite of his education, sensitivity and group dynamic training, vast professional experience and highly developed mind.
In the end, as he was dying, it became important to him, as he reviewed his suddenly-ending life, to confront, out loud, for the first time, how crabbed and destructive his view of the world had been. It should have been as simple as “if you’re in pain, and come to me perplexed, let me listen patiently and try to help you instead of fighting you because I’m angry and afraid.” He realized that simple truth of being a decent human too late, as he apologized to me for the only time in his life. “I was wrong,” he said, also for the first time. Why did it take rapidly approaching death to bring these basic human realizations to him? Beats me. Tragic, truly. On the other hand, what a slippery gift he handed me right before he shuffled off and left me to close his dead eyelids with two fingers of my right hand.
There is really no risk to listening quietly to someone else’s pain, if you care about the person. It is often the only useful thing you can do for someone you care about when they are hurt, understanding how they feel. But to many people, the realm of feelings is always fraught and ready to burst into war. A war over who has the right to feel pain, how much pain is reasonable to feel, to express, how outrageous it is to pour out your troubles as though the person you are crying to doesn’t have even worse troubles! If you tell me I hurt you I am no friend if I say “that’s your problem, asshole.” There is a productive conversation, that starts with yielding to the other person’s right to be hurt, without fighting over how contemptible a worm he or she is to feel that way.
In the wake of my projectile vomiting after that searing Nazi footage from Let My People Go, my father was implacable. It was going to be a hard lesson to me. You see– you disobeyed good parental advice, your mother and I both begged you and advised you not to see what you can now never unsee, strictly for your own good, and now you want my pity because what I warned you about came sickeningly true? It’s good for you to remember next time, you contumacious little prick (yeah, look that up in that dictionary you like so much). And, by the way, seven is not too young to start acting like a man, particularly since you are so smart you don’t need anybody’s advice… (etc.)”
An understandable reaction, I understood it, even at the time. Still, not the reaction a child wants or needs. Understandable from a tit for tat perspective, but not from any other, really.
It is also tempting to repeat the treatment you experienced. This is a familiar tic of the victimized, do it to somebody else, as if abusing another victim will make you feel powerful enough to take your shame and hurt away. The way the more violent of the Ukrainians, recently starved en masse by an inhuman enemy, took it out on their own long-time, powerless, enemies when the opportunity to do so without repercussions presented itself.
I recall the vivid TED talk given by likeable neuroscientist Jim Fallon. He was a funny, mild-mannered expert in the configuration of the psychopath’s brain. He had his family tested at one point, and reviewing the brain scans, found one that was a classic psychopath’s brain. It was his own. He shrugged about it, even when his family and friends unanimously confirmed that he showed many traits of the psychopath. The fact that he didn’t flinch at the diagnosis proved that he had that moral nonchalance characteristic of the psychopath. He didn’t pretend to be upset. His point was that if someone with his brain configuration did not have their violence activated by experiencing or witnessing traumatic physical and psychological abuse during a certain early developmental window, they’d grow up to be people who lacked empathy, but who could also joke, be mild mannered, lead productive lives and never commit violence against anyone else.
Fascinating, if sometimes terribly dark, the way our views of the world are often formed by events early in life, before we know very much. I’ll hope to be on to cheerier subjects soon, boys and girls.
A Nazi’s best hope is the same as a Ku Klux Klansman’s best hope. Finding individuals so moved by terror and rage that they will neither question nor shrink from doing whatever you convince them must be done, and rallying millions, if possible, around this righteous work. Not everyone can tie a man to a tree, bullwhip him, break his fingers and then take a blow torch to him. You have to be a certain kind of person to do that kind of work. There are many, however, who will stand by enthusiastically watching the torturer do his job, yelling encouragement, if they truly believe the person catching hell is some kind of devil. Some in the crowd might have to laugh a giddy, drunken laugh to choke down the inner revulsion it would be natural for them to feel, but they’ll be part of the mob that drags the man to the tree, they’ll talk about it with their buddies afterwards, the great thing that was done.
A Nazi’s best hope is convincing enough people, hearing about this lighting up of the night with the burnt flesh of another human, to feel the dead man “had it coming because he was evil.” That’s what propaganda is for. You need to convince enough people, usually not the best or the brightest, doesn’t matter, really, just make enough people willing to act believe, deep down, that they are the instrument of justice, the people singled out for torture deserve it. Once you have enough people on board, more respectable people will finance it, begin signing on for leadership positions, you’ll have all the funding and legitimacy you need. History proves that unscrupulous wealthy people who want unlimited power can always use a violent mob, as long as its violence can be directed toward the right enemies.
Who were the killers of my great-aunts and great-uncles, my mother’s many cousins? Neither Nazis nor klansman as such. They were a members of persecuted nationality who had the misfortune to live in the fertile breadbasket of Europe. They were fucked generation after generation, slaughtered and enslaved for hundreds of years by the Mongols, the Poles, the Russians, whoever had the more powerful military. Stalin, between 1932 and 1933, starved millions of them to death, in the Holodomor, the deadliest man-made famine in history. As many as four million Ukrainians were deliberately starved to death, by a totalitarian Communist madman, while their grain sat in huge piles, guarded by Stalin’s soldiers, waiting for Soviet authorities to take the grain back to the motherland to feed to their citizens [1]. Any hungry Ukrainian who moved toward these mountains of Ukrainian wheat was shot on the spot.
The Ukrainians who scrambled over the corpses of my people, after shooting them, had been arguably driven to their depravity by recent history (the mass starvation had been a decade earlier). The murderous Ukrainians who killed my family don’t get off the hook because so many of them had been murdered, of course (you know what they say about two wrongs…), but you can understand how the despised of the earth might feel like taking it out on a group even more despised, while getting pats on the back from those with the power to exterminate everybody in their path. Ukrainians who opposed the sort of thing that was done to my family, who took what history would regard as a more heroic stance, often found themselves hanging from trees, disemboweled, their children butchered. Makes you think.
Makes me think how often the party that is willing to employ ruthless terror, to lie, threaten, sponsor gruesome violence, often has the final word, at least for a time.
I think of this as I watch the increasingly dangerous American dance of division that has been escalating now for decades, the one funded by our most unscrupulous and well-born right-wing citizens, enlisting a vast, angry army of the easily duped. You can watch it playing out in real time, more and more insanely violent rhetoric and behavior increasingly normalized. You wonder, as a humanist, what is it with the the ubiquity of these Nazi/klan motherfuckers?
Good, constant advertising is the key. Keep the message simple, first of all. Liberty and freedom are the most important American values, everything else comes after that. Americans do not tolerate being coerced, ever, we fought a revolution and countless wars against tyranny of all forms. Tell me to do something I don’t want to, I’ll tell you about my freedom to tell you to shut the fuck up, and if you don’t shut up, I have my freedom to shoot you in your big mouth if you look like you pose any kind of threat to me, my family or my property. You see, that’s freedom and if you want to take it, come on and try. Want to try to make me wear a face mask during an infectious worldwide plague? We’ll see what the Second Amendment has to say about that!
You hear right wing blowhards echoing this very point daily, even after the violent right-wing assault on the Capitol. A defiant Madison Cawthorn stands up in Congress, after being elected in his carefully gerrymandered district, and trumpets this heroic rightwing trope, weeks after a violent, armed mob (arrested insurrectionists in the “peaceful” mob had enough ammunition to kill everyone in the Capitol several times over) took over the Capitol building disrupting the final certification of an election that wasn’t close, or, in their phrase, “stop the steal”. Bellicose, unrepentant, violent rhetoric, tough talk, is a proven winner for fundraising: Cawthorn, Taylor Greene, Hawley, Cruz, and other GOP tough guys are raking it in these days, based on their proud defense of violent extremism, even armed sedition, in defense of liberty, which is no vice, to some.
The so-called decisive victory of Joe Biden, and the narrow Senate majority by Democrats when they got that Black preacher and the Jewish journalist “elected” in the Georgia runoff? Obviously the result of stolen elections, it’s common sense. Besides, all those patriots were doing on January 6th when they overran the Capitol was spontaneously fighting this sickening injustice, in the name of freedom. They paraded through the halls of the Capitol because their freedom and liberty had been stolen from them. They didn’t do anything Jesus Christ Himself didn’t do when He finally had enough and threw the corrupt moneychangers out of the Temple.
This accursed pandemic has provided a kind of high octane fuel to this crazy upping the ante on anything that will up the stakes. We are socially disoriented, frightened, thrown out of normal social and recreational routines, our interactions limited, interpersonal skills frayed, we are all isolated and connected more and more to disembodied voices on the devices we carry with us all the time. Every few minutes we get a notification beep from some opinionated source we may have recently consulted.
Here’s a hot question for your favorite pundit: in light of increased vaccinations, is it reasonable for states to ban all scientific precautions proven to halt community spread? Well, that would depend on who y’all trust, wouldn’t it? Is it crazy or smart politics to weaponize prudent easy to follow precautions to slow the spread of a deadly disease before we actually achieve herd immunity? That would depend on who y’all trust, wouldn’t it?
Depending on what we prefer to hear, we may eagerly learn about more evidence that the former president and an organized group planned, funded, advertised for and incited the January 6th riot, while ordering federal troops to stand down for 3 hours and 19 minutes during the riot, imagining a kind of Alamo (nothing glorious about the original one staged by a bunch of violent American slavery advocates, go google that shit show…) that would galvanize their faithful to obey a higher law, perhaps creating a glorious pantheon of martyrs to rally around. Or, in the alternative, that the patriots who took the corrupt bull by the horns on January 6 were merely spontaneous heroes, acting courageously to prevent the fraud of millions of irrationally angry N-words.
Is there middle ground here? Not really. It was either a riot, an insurrection desperately launched by a powerful madman and his associates to retain power after losing an election by an indisputable margin or an outpouring of spontaneous American devotion to liberty proving that Jesus Christ and the White Race really are the masters of the greatest country in history and cucks who don’t believe that can just suck it.
A study came out Tuesday that concludes that while early in the pandemic the infection and death rates were much higher in Democratically run states (being on the coasts, more densely populated, more tourism, larger airports, more international travelers, etc.) than in less populous Republican ones, by July 4 (neat irony) Blue states had started to control the spread of the disease, while Red states took the lead in infections and death and have surpassed those infection and death rates since [2].
Or, depending on your source of trusted news, the “study” was fake and partisan, paid for by wealthy pedophile blood drinkers like Michael Bloomberg (it was by the “Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Medical University of South Carolina” — duh!) intent on destroying our freedom by convincing us to keep our distance from others, wash our hands and wear masks, depriving us of our God-given freedom to spread whatever invisible so-called disease we want to whoever we want. Who are goddamned child-raping, blood-swilling pedophiles to tell us what to do?
Or, as the governor of Texas might say: y’all hate our freedom. After he reopened the state for business, parties and everything else, no strings attached, his attorney general (the one who brought the Supreme Court lawsuit attempting to throw out millions of votes in states Trump “lost”– the deranged suit signed on to by other Republican attorneys general and members of Congress) is now threatening to sue the city of Austin for trying to mandate reasonable COVID safety precautions like mask wearing and social distancing.
A Nazi’s best bet? That a lie will prove more powerful than any fact anybody can prove with other facts. Once you’ve got that, the sky’s the limit, dream big, any horrible problem in the world, real or simply perceived, will suddenly have a final solution, inspired by the intoxicating liberty of absolute power.
Our best bet? Working together, paying close attention, using the tools we have to organize, make our voices heard, to make sure these autocratic anti-science, alternative reality trumpeting minoritarian motherfucker’s stay in their holes.
At the very least by putting the burden back on the 40 minority party members trying to block debate by making them actively hold the floor continuously in a traditional filibuster rather than forcing the majority to get to 60 by finding 10 votes among a solid block of craven conformists who will not even vote to condemn a president for organizing, funding and inciting a violent riot in their own house — a riot that saw chants to hang their Vice President, suddenly an enemy of their party leader.
That is, you return to the old filibuster rules if you can’t finally get two conservative “moderate” “centrists” in your own party to go along with killing that relic of slavery and white supremacy in the Senate. The filibuster was created by Senators and put into the Senate rules. It takes a 1 vote majority to change the prime tool of obstruction into something that allows legislative debate to take place and laws to be passed and sent to the president for his or her signature.
The anti-fascist party is likely to have only one shot at this preservation of democracy business. It’s going to be a short window. Then we get massive voter suppression in a majority of states, gerrymandered voting for state court judges, to guarantee party loyalists get elected in state as well as federal courts, and, The Thousand Year Reich.
[1]
The Ukrainian famine—known as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death”—by one estimate claimed the lives of 3.9 million people, about 13 percent of the population. And, unlike other famines in history caused by blight or drought, this was caused when a dictator wanted both to replace Ukraine’s small farms with state-run collectives and punish independence-minded Ukrainians who posed a threat to his totalitarian authority.
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[2]
States with Democratic governors had the highest incidence and death rates from Covid-19 in the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, but states with Republican governors surpassed those rates as the crisis dragged on, a study released Tuesday found.
“From March to early June, Republican-led states had lower Covid-19 incidence rates compared with Democratic-led states. On June 3, the association reversed, and Republican-led states had higher incidence,” the study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Medical University of South Carolina showed.
“For death rates, Republican-led states had lower rates early in the pandemic, but higher rates from July 4 through mid-December,” the study found.
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gratuitousblahg 