It’s been a wild year (err, month) for one person on Team Trump — the man who has inspired a thousand memes. Just days after the public was made aware of his COVID-19 diagnosis, Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s lawyer, has announced that his symptoms are “pretty much” gone and that he’s “doing fine.” Giuliani contracted the virus after spending the better part of the last few months flouting public health guidelines and traveling the country — maskless — in his futile attempt to bully state governments into overturning the election results.

It’s possible that Giuliani’s reckless behavior has put more than just his own health at risk — he could end up being a one-man superspreader. Giuliani was seen asking a witness to remove her mask during last week’s Michigan hearing on voter fraud so that people could hear her better. And Mellissa Carone (aka the viral Conspiracy Karen who testified alongside Giuliani last week) says she has no intention of self-quarantining. Following that hearing, in which Giuliani appeared maskless, the Michigan House of Representatives is being accused of violating COVID-19 restrictions.

While the Trump lawyer and veritable walking gif may be feeling better, or in his words “mild,” millions of Americans are still being impacted by the pandemic in the worst way. While Giuliani was promptly admitted to the hospital and given the same treatment President Trump received when he was ill, thousands of Americans are being denied beds because ICUs are full, or being transported to other states in order to receive care because their own hospitals are overwhelmed. More than 100,000 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19 complications and more than 282,000 have died. That number will only grow.

While Giuliani and his ilk have traveled the country like a virus-infected barnstorming operation, insulated from the consequences of their disregard for public health, the people who have paid the price are the most vulnerable and marginalized Americans: immunocompromised people, working-class people who cannot afford to stay home, people working service jobs who have no choice but to go into work every day, and first responders who are on the frontlines of the pandemic. 

Health officials say that mask-wearing is an act of care, something you do for fellow humans to protect them from contracting a deadly virus. Politicians are people we hope choose to enter their job because they care deeply about the American people and want to help enact policies that keep us safe and make our lives better. The blatant carelessness of the people in the highest levels of the Trump administration, the way they continue to actively endanger the lives of the people they are tasked with serving, has shown that they not only believe themselves to be invincible, but that they do not regard the rest of us as worthy of protection.

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Rudy Giuliani Might Be A COVID-19 Superspreader

Michigan's Star Witness Is Conspiracy Karen

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On Thursday, a regular volunteer at Carole Baskin’s Big Cat Rescue sanctuary was seriously injured when she was bit while feeding a tiger named Kimba. The woman, Candy Couser, reportedly unlatched a gate that was supposed to be secured after noticing that the Kimba was not in its usual place and Kimba “grabbed her arm and nearly tore it off at the shoulder,” Baskin said in a statement to the Associated Press.

In her statement, Baskin, the chief executive of Big Cat Rescue, blamed the attack on Couser’s breach of protocol. “This is our universal signal NOT to open a gate” without assistance, Baskin statement said. “It is against our protocols for anyone to stick any part of their body into a cage with a cat in it.”

Baskin rose to national prominence in the Netflix documentary Tiger King which followed Joe Maldonado aka Joe Exotic at his big cat zoo. (Maldonado is currently serving 22 years in prison for a murder-for-hire plot in which he tried to have Baskin killed.) Baskin’s sanctuary claims to be an answer to venues like Maldonado’s, which exploit and breed big cats in order to financially benefit from renting out the cubs. The injury to Couser at Big Cat Rescue occurred on the same day the House of Representatives is set to vote on one of Baskin’s bills, the Big Cat Public Safety Act, which would ban handling of big cat cubs and personal ownership of big cats in places like backyards.

The attack at Baskin’s sanctuary is an example of why big cats should not be kept as bets or handled by humans, she says. “This sort of tragedy can happen in the blink of an eye and we cannot relax our guard for a second around these dangerous cats,” Baskin said. According to the Humane Society, there have been more than 300 dangerous incidents involving big cats since 1990, resulting in four children being killed and dozens of others losing limbs or suffering other traumatic injuries; meanwhile, 16 adults have been killed by big cats in the same time period and “scores have been mauled.”

Viewers of Tiger King saw that danger firsthand. Footage of one of Joe Exotic’s employees, Saff Saffrey, being mauled by one of the cats aired in episode two of the series. Saff is given the choice of facing years of reconstructive surgery or amputation; he chooses the latter so he can get back to working with the big cats. 

Couser was treated for serious injuries at a local hospital and Kimba will be quarantined for the next 30 days. Baskin’s statement indicated that Couser does not want the tiger to be punished or harmed for an incident that Baskin described as “just acting normal due to the presence of food and the opportunity.”

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This week, Senior Advisor and First Daughter Ivanka Trump was deposed as part of an investigation by the Washington, D.C. attorney general’s office into a misuse of inauguration funds by the Presidential Inauguration Committee (PIC). The attorney general’s office sued the Trump Organization and the PIC in January, alleging that the organization violated its status as a nonprofit by misusing more than $1 million in funds and “grossly overpaying” the Trump Hotel for event space for the 2017 presidential inauguration. 

On Tuesday, the eldest Trump daughter sat with investigators to try and explain yet another legal line the Trump administration has crossed. According to the lawsuit, the PIC — under the direction of Rick Gates, the former inaugural committee deputy chairman — paid $175,000 per day for four days to reserve space at the Trump Hotel. Wolkoff expressed discomfort with that fee, noting that it was nearly twice the market rate, and expressed that concern to both President Trump and Ivanka in an in-person meeting as well as in a followup email.

In addition to Ivanka, the attorney general’s office has subpoenaed records from Tom Barrack, chairman of the inaugural committee, first lady Melania Trump, and Gates. Barrack was deposed November 17 and Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, the inauguration’s event planner will be deposed next week. Despite spending, according to her Twitter, 5+ hours in deposition, Ivanka may not be out of the woods just yet.

In her capacity as senior advisor, Ivanka has been in the trenches of the Trump operation for some time now. And although she was spared from similar inquiries in early 2019, Ivanka is no longer off the table when it comes to investigating the Trump administration’s wrongdoings. Now the question remains: Are her crimes enough to land her in jail?

“Ms. Trump’s only involvement was connecting the parties and instructing the hotel to charge a ‘fair market rate’, which the hotel did,” Alan Garten, general counsel for the Trump Organization, told CNN. 

But this is not the first time Ivanka’s name has been mentioned in a lawsuit connected to the dealings of her father’s administration or companies. There are currently two New York state fraud investigations into President Trump and his businesses, which are investigating consulting fees that may have been paid to Ivanka, though she is not the focus of those investigations.

Ivanka’s involvement with negotiations for a failed Trump Tower in Moscow was probed as part of the Mueller investigation and in 2019, the FBI looked into her international business dealings. Last year, Ivanka and her brothers were ordered to receive “mandatory training” on the “duties of officers and directors of charities so that they cannot allow the illegal activity they oversaw at the Trump Foundation to take place again” as part of a settlement in a case that led to the closing of the president’s charity, which the New York attorney general called “little more than a checkbook for payments from Mr. Trump or his businesses to nonprofits, regardless of their purpose or legality.”

Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer who pleaded guilty in 2018 in two separate criminal cases related to his work for the Trump campaign and organization, told MSNBC last month that he believes Ivanka will go to jail before her father does. “I believe Trump does go to jail and if it’s not Trump, he’ll push one of the kids, probably Don, Jr. before Ivanka . . . definitely, Eric before Ivanka, but Ivanka will go to prison before Donald because that’s just who he is,” Cohen said.

Many people in Trump world believe Ivanka may have her own political ambitions after her father leaves office, perhaps eyeing a 2024 presidential run or perhaps even a Congressional seat, but Cohen thinks she would not open herself up to that kind of public scrutiny.

“There’s too much potential dirt that she doesn’t want released,” Cohen said, according to the Washington Post. “It’s easy to say, ‘I‘m doing this, I’m doing that,’ but it’s different to put your entire life out there for the media to excoriate you.”

The president may know that his daughter has been involved in dealings that could get her in legal trouble, which would explain why there are reports that he is looking into preemptively pardoning his children before leaving office — including Ivanka. While Ivanka has not definitively been connected to any legal wrongdoing, she is closely connected to many other people in Trump’s orbit who have been and it remains to be seen how long her luck will last.

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In a turn of events that should surprise absolutely no one, a New Orleans swingers convention held during the middle of a nationwide pandemic has led to at least 41 cases of the coronavirus, with officials classifying the party as a superspreader event. According to organizers, approximately 250 people attended the Naughty N’awlins event which was held inside a local hotel. The convention reportedly hosted only one-tenth of the number of attendees in past years when the country wasn’t facing a deadly pandemic. But after nearly 9 months of pandemic rules, party organizers think that maybe, perhaps, this year’s event was not a good idea.

Bob Hannaford, an organizer for the convention, said he has regrets about holding the event. “If I could go back in time, I would not produce this event again,” he wrote in a blog post. “I wouldn’t do it again if I knew then what I know now. It weighs on me and it will continue to weigh on me until everyone is 100% better.”

The convention took place on November 14 and within two weeks, 41 people had reported testing positive for COVID-19. Though Hannaford does not specify whether hotel workers at the convention have contracted the virus, his post lays out in detail what protocols were put in place, which allows experts to see what went wrong (though it’s safe to say holding a gathering of this size at all was the first, and biggest, mistake).

After consulting with a doctor, rules were put in place and in order to attend the event, attendees agreed to wear masks and had to be tested for the virus beforehand, receiving either a negative test or a test that showed they had antibodies for the virus, which organizers assumed meant the person was “not contagious.” They handed out diaries to each person and asked them to document every person they spent longer than 10 minutes with, whether it was just conversing or sex, to help with contact tracing.

Hannaford describes the New Orleans swinging community as taking “progressive stands on condoms, STDs, consent, BDSM, and bisexuality,” which he felt had prepared them for navigating safety and risk in the age of COVID-19. Clearly, it did not.

In his post, Hannaford blamed “complacency,” not holding the event itself, for the spread of the virus. “In almost every case, [people] admitted to us that they were super diligent on the first two days (Wed & Thurs) and then they relaxed a little on Friday and then they said ‘Fuck it, it’s our last day and many admitted that their lax effort on that final day is probably why they ended up positive,” he wrote.

Despite precautions, the event was held during a country wide upswing in cases. Orleans Parish has reported more than 16,000 coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic with more than 100 new cases being reported daily. “When we ask people to maintain social distance, when we ask people to obey the public health guidelines, there’s a reason for that,” a spokesman for New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell said at a news conference on Tuesday. “And when those guidelines are not adhered to, you see a spike in infections, you see a superspreader event.”

Naughty N’awlins’ website has already been updated to open registration for their 2021 event, which seems, perhaps, ill-advised.

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After an interview on Snapchat, President Barack Obama is receiving blowback for criticizing calls to “defund the police,” which he referred to as “a snappy slogan.” The conversation occurred during a political show on the social media platform called Good Luck America, hosted by Peter Hamby, where Obama joined to promote his new book, A Promised Land. But when asked about making impactful change, the former president gave a confusing answer regarding a movement that seeks to end police brutality.

“You lost a big audience the minute you say it,” Obama said of demands to defund the police, “which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done.” Instead, he suggested advocates for police defunding rally the public around the idea of reforming police departments “so that everyone’s being treated fairly.”

Progressive politicians, many of whom have challenged policies championed by Obama and the Democratic establishment, were quick to respond to the former president’s criticisms. “We lose people in the hands of police. It’s not a slogan but a policy demand,” Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar explained on Twitter. “And centering the demand for equitable investments and budgets for communities across the country gets us progress and safety.”

Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley also stepped in to comment on the president’s statements, saying that she will “never stop fighting” for the justice of unarmed Black people who have been killed by police.

The murders of generations of unarmed Black folks by police have been horrific. Lives are at stake daily so I’m out of patience with critiques of the language of activists.

Whatever a grieving family says is their truth.

And I’ll never stop fighting for their justice & healing.

— Ayanna Pressley (@AyannaPressley) December 2, 2020

We didn’t lose Breonna because of a slogan.

Instead of conceding this narrative, let’s shape our own. It’s time we listen to the people, organize and build coalitions around our own message, and cast a vision that inspires us all to lead for change at the ballot box and beyond. https://t.co/mBg7wanaR6

— Charles Booker (@Booker4KY) December 2, 2020

Despite what Obama and other establishment Democrats have painted of activists, the demand to defund the police is not so radical and merely calling for a redistribution of police funding to other departments. The movement to defund the police surged in June in the wake of a national uprising and reckoning around anti-Black violence at the hands of the police and is a policy demand that asks for money to be rerouted from police departments to other public services.

But, it is different from the demand to abolish the police, which is a larger scale, a reimagining that envisions a world without carceral systems or police officers at all. It is also worth noting that no Democratic candidate in a swing district ran during this past election cycle on calls to defund the police. Obama’s words are merely a reflection of the party’s lack of understanding of the movement at large.

“With all due respect, Mr. President — let’s talk about losing people. We lost Michael Brown Jr. We lost Breonna Taylor. We’re losing our loved ones to police violence,” tweeted Missouri Congresswoman-elect Cori Bush. Bush was elected to Congress after becoming a force for change and a leader in her community in the aftermath of the Ferguson uprising. “It’s not a slogan. It’s a mandate for keeping our people alive. Defund the police.”

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Fifty-six days out from the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, Donald Trump’s Department of Justice announced that it will do something unprecedented: execute people on federal death row during the transition period. There are five executions scheduled before the January 20 inauguration, including one just five days before Biden is sworn in. 

The DOJ, under General Attorney William Barr, ended a 17-year pause on federal executions when they resumed them last summer. In a statement released Friday, the DOJ described the upcoming executions as being for people who committed “staggeringly brutal murders.” Barr’s DOJ has already executed eight people this year, despite many states pausing due to the coronavirus pandemic. But, if these five go forward, it would mean the DOJ under Trump and Barr will have executed 13 people in just six months, which is a huge shift for federal executions that had been quite rare until last year.

The decision to continue executions during the presidential transition period is unprecedented; you’d have to go back over a century, to Grover Cleveland in 1889, to find a president who went forward with executions between an electoral defeat and the swearing-in of their successor. “What is clear is that this administration wants these prisoners dead before Joe Biden takes office,” Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center Robert Dunham told CNN.

It’s possible that the rush to execute people on death row before Biden’s inauguration may be because Biden his against the death penalty and hopes to end it at the federal level when he takes office. “The president-elect opposes the death penalty, now and in the future, and as president will work to end its use,” transition spokesman, T.J. Ducklo, told NPR.

Among the five people scheduled to be executed before January 20 is Brandon Bernard, who will be the youngest person in nearly 70 years to be executed by the United States for a crime committed when he was a teenager. He was 18 when he and a friend were convicted of murdering two youth ministers; his accomplice, Christoper Vialva, was executed in September after he exhausted all of his appeals.

Lisa Montgomery, the only woman currently on federal death row and the first woman to be executed by the U.S. in almost 70 years, is scheduled to be executed on January 12 for killing a pregnant woman, cutting out her baby, and passing the baby off as her own.

Dustin Higgs, a Black man, was convicted of ordering a triple homicide and his execution is scheduled for Martin Luther King Day; Higgs did not actually pull the trigger in the case and the person who did received life in prison.

A Black man named Corey Johnson is also scheduled for execution on January 14. He was convicted of killing seven people as a part of a drug trade and his attorneys are arguing that Johnson has an intellectual disability that should prevent him from being eligible for execution but that no jury has heard evidence to rule on it.

Lastly, Alfred Bourgeois will be executed December 11 for the abuse and 2002 murder of his daughter. His attorney is also seeking to have his case re-tried to take an intellectual disability into account.

Despite the nature of the crimes of all five awaiting execution, advocates continue to push back on the death penalty as an inhumane form of retributivist punishment. The fact that Trump is carrying this out in his final days in office only speaks to the nature of his presidency, and where his priorities lie.

“The federal government has already presided over the executions of eight people so far this year,” Hannah Riley, a spokeswoman at the Southern Center for Human Rights, told NPR. “The death penalty is always unconscionable, but it is especially egregious to carry out executions as hundreds of people are dying of COVID-19 in this country every day.”

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Team Trump Might Cancel Their Gettysburg "Hearing"

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As a treat, on the day before Thanksgiving, members of the Trump administration planned to head to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania for a hearing on unproven election fraud claims. President Trump was reported to be joining his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani — the now infamous host of Four Seasons-gate — who seeks to continue leading the unsuccessful legal charge and prove that Democrats “stole” the Presidential election. However, on Wednesday morning, it was announced that Boris Epshteyn, who was with Giuliani at a presser last week, had tested positive for coronavirus, raising questions about whether Giuliani would be able to travel to the hearing.

The hearing is currently scheduled to be held by the Pennsylvania Senate Majority Policy Committee at the request of Republican Senator Doug Mastriano and is being labeled a “public hearing,” despite most reports listing it as just a press conference. “Pennsylvanians have lost faith in the electoral system” as a result of “issues experienced at the polls, irregularities with the mail-in voting system and concerns whether their vote was counted,” Mastriano said in a press statement. He added that he had heard complaints from “thousands of Pennsylvanians,” though it was unclear who, why, or when.

In case this meeting of the minds needed to be any more theatrical, it’s scheduled to be held at the Wyndham Hotel in Gettysburg — which Google, Expedia, and Hotels.com list as a 3.5-star hotel. In Gettysburg. The fact that this hearing is being held in Gettysburg is an ironic and horrifying twist, as it is the site of the gruesome Civil War battle. This was not lost on observers, who suggested that Trump and the Republicans were once again trying to undermine democracy and galvanize their voter base to believe the election results are somehow fraudulent. “White supremacists want to lose at Gettysburg AGAIN?” tweeted CNN analyst Joan Walsh. “MAGA indeed.”

This is also not the first time Trump has tried to hold an event in Gettysburg. In August, the outgoing president and former reality star suggested the Pennsylvania town as a site for his party nomination acceptance speech, which also incurred the wrath of Twitter and other pundits, though it’s of little surprise that he would attempt this again.

If the event does happen and Trump still attends, it would be his first trip out of the Washington, D.C. area since the November 3 election. Since the election, Giuliani and Trump have been working hard to push the narrative — for which they have yet to produce compelling evidence — that President-elect Joe Biden’s victory is illegitimate. Trump’s legal team has filed a series of lawsuits that continue to be dismissed and eviscerated by judges across the country. “It’s beyond an embarrassment,” lawyer Glenn Kirschner told NBC News of Giuliani and Trump’s legal efforts to overturn the election results. “It’s both really poor lawyering and it has the worst possible motive behind it.”

Many lawyers have asked to be removed from Trump’s legal cases related to the election, including a lawsuit in Pennsylvania, which Giuliani personally argued in court after the rest of the attorneys dropped out of the case. Giuliani’s argument was riddled with errors, including forgetting the name of the judge who was hearing the case. In his opinion dismissing the lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann wrote that Trump’s legal team presented “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations” that were not supported by any evidence. Mr. Giuliani has pledged to appeal and continue the legal fight.

While Trump seems to be (finally) coming to terms with the fact that he lost the election, he is still using mouthpieces — like Giuliani, and his Large Adult Sons — to suggest otherwise. Here’s to hoping the event is canceled and we can avoid yet another gruesome press conference with Rudy at center stage.

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It’s no secret that Team Trump is in the process of falling apart: the outgoing president refuses to concede despite losing both the popular and electoral vote to Joe Biden, and even the vice president appears to be in hiding over this mess. In yet another desperate attempt at a power grab — or, depending on who you ask, a coup — Trump is engaging in election interference, spreading lies and misinformation on television, and filing countless lawsuits (most of which have been dismissed). And at the helm of all of this is Mr. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer and the recent surprise star of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. 

Giuliani has been by Trump’s side since the president hired him during the Mueller investigation, turning a decades-long acquaintanceship into a partnership-of-sorts. Over the course of Trump’s presidency, Giuliani has become known for his role in the Ukraine mess that got the president impeached, and more recently, his appearance at the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference. Even former national security adviser John Bolton has reportedly described him as a “hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up” in regards to his bumbling diplomacy attempts.

But between his baseless lawsuits around invisible voter fraud and his rant about Mickey Mouse in a Pennsylvania courtroom earlier this week, we have to ask: WTF is happening to Rudy Giuliani?

At a press conference on Wednesday regarding efforts by Trump’s team to invalidate votes in Michigan, Giuliani quoted the classic film My Cousin Vinny. Mimicking a courtroom scene from the movie, Giuliani did his best Joe Pesci impression, asking, “How many fingers do I got up?” while he held up two fingers. He then explained how, in the film, the witness wrongly identifies the number of fingers as three.

The purpose of Giuliani’s conference was, of course, to continue pushing a false story of voter fraud in the 2020 election on the American people. “What I’m describing to you is a massive fraud,” Giuliani said, before lashing out at reporters who provided facts that proved otherwise. “You’re lying,” he responded.

But many people watching the presser were distracted by something far more confusing than the nonsense Giuliani was spewing: the brown liquid dripping down both sides of his face. It appeared Giuliani was sweating gravy — or maybe just toxins, or maybe just bronzer — but the internet quickly theorized that it was spray-on hair color that was mixing with beads of his sweat and slowly making its way down his cheeks (see image above for reference). This is the kind of literal storyline from an episode of Frasier that makes the distinction between fiction and reality increasingly difficult to find.

Rudy: Did you all see My Cousin Vinny? pic.twitter.com/SVwMNiIysi

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) November 19, 2020

But beyond the surface-level mocking of Giuliani’s appearance, the former New York City mayor has repeatedly outdone himself in displaying new levels of incompetence. It was Giuliani who led the doomed and now-infamous press conference outside the Four Seasons Total Landscaping (read: his team clearly meant to book the Four Seasons Hotel for the presser, and instead booked the parking lot of a local landscaping company located next to a sex shop). He was also caught on film by actor Sacha Baron Cohen and the makers of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, where he appeared to be putting his hands in his pants while in a hotel room with an actress who was posing as a minor.

Of course, all of this is in line with Giuliani’s sordid history. After all, while he was Mayor of New York City, he smeared the name of a murder victim in order to protect the cop who killed him; often used intimidation as a political tactic; and regularly took credit for things other people had done.

While Giuliani acts as Trump’s talking head (and a melting one at that), spewing lies about “legal ballots” and “election tampering” while pursuing baseless lawsuits on the outgoing president’s behalf, he is only running his own reputation further into the ground — if such a thing is possible. And at then end of the day, Giuliani looks like a losing man on the wrong side of history who’s chances of winning are dripping away right along with his hair dye.

So, perhaps the answer is that there’s nothing wrong (or different, at least) with Rudy Giuliani. He is just still, unfortunately, Rudy Giuliani.

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"Grosse Pointe Antifa" Is 2020's Best Conspiracy

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COVID-19 cases surge across the country and experts worry the upcoming holidays will be catastrophic for the spread of the virus. So, it seems like an opportune time for Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton to tell Americans about the importance of “honoring” the Pilgrims this Thanksgiving. “This year we ought to be especially thankful for our ancestors, the pilgrims, on their 400th anniversary,” the GOP Congressman said in a speech on Wednesday. “Sadly, however, there appear to be few commemorations, parades or festivals to celebrate the Pilgrims this year.” 

If you thought Cotton was going to use this line to segue into talking about the need for Americans to cancel their travel and large family gatherings this year in order to save lives, you obviously are not familiar with the likes of Sen. Tom Cotton. According to him, the lack of celebrations in 2020 is not due to the pandemic that has killed nearly a quarter of a million Americans and counting, but a result of the “revisionist charlatans of the radical left” who want to “rewrite” American history to mark 1619 — the year the first enslaved African arrived in Virginia — as the year the U.S. began. He says that this is happening in order to replace celebrations of 1620 — the date the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.

“Just today for instance The New York Times called the story a myth and a caricature. In the Food Section, no less,” Cotton lamented. “Maybe the politically correct editors of the debunked 1619 Project are now responsible for pumpkin pie recipes at the Times as well.” Cotton was referring to a piece the Times ran about using the racial justice uprisings of the summer and the COVID-19 pandemic as the catalyst for re-examining the Thanksgiving holiday, one that is rooted in a colonial and genocidal history.

Sen. Tom Cotton: “Just today for instance The New York Times called the [Pilgrims’] story a myth and a caricature. In the Food Section, no less. Maybe the politically correct editors of the debunked 1619 Project are now responsible for pumpkin pie recipes at the Times as well.” pic.twitter.com/iO83s62UxH

— The Hill (@thehill) November 18, 2020

Cotton’s speech about the need to honor the Pilgrims as founders of the U.S. and his outrage at the story of the first Thanksgiving being a myth is propaganda of the same sort that kids all over the country have been taught for years — something Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar referred to as a “sense of history [that] doesn’t go beyond your 3rd grade coloring books.” But if Cotton had any interest in engaging with history in good faith, he would see that the Thanksgiving story Americans are taught did not actually happen that way.

While there was, in fact, a feast that occurred between the settlers and the Wampanoag people in 1621, “the whole story about what occurred on that first Thanksgiving was a myth created to make white people feel comfortable,” Linda Coombs, a Wampanoag historian and a member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), told the Times. This is something that most Americans have come to understand.

“The Wampanoags had a history several thousands of years old before the English arrived, and that history shaped who they were, how they responded to other people, their connections to the land, and fundamentally shaped the history of English colonization and Indian response in southern New England,” said David J. Silverman, author of This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving to Salon. “Native people, and the Wampanoags in particular, have struggled with colonialism throughout the centuries, and how this myth of the first Thanksgiving and of Native consent to colonization just hangs around their necks like a millstone.”

Cotton’s nod to honor pilgrims — especially at a time when disease is running rampant in America — is particularly gross and troubleseome. But this is, of course, not his first time being deplorable — nor is it his first time going after the Times. He’s taken shots at the paper in the past after Opinion editor James Bennett resigned for publishing Cotton’s op-ed calling for the state to take up arms against citizens ran in the paper. He also criticized the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “1619 Project” that examined the legacy and impact of slavery on the history of the U.S. and tried to have it blocked from being taught at schools.

Cotton also couldn’t resist taking another shot at it during his Thanksgiving speech. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the “1619 Project,” responded on Twitter by putting the focus back where it belongs: “250,000 Americans dead but I’m glad your priority is the NYT food section,” she tweeted.

Cotton has proven himself to be an unreliable orator of history many times over. So perhaps, instead of celebrating the Pilgrims as heroes on the 200th anniversary of their landing at Plymouth Rock, he promotes and acknowledges the Indigenous Day of Mourning instead.

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Following the Million MAGA March, complete with violence incited by Proud Boys, it makes a certain kind of sense that many people are looking to contextualize the current wave of white supremacy in the U.S. in order not only to understand it, but also to put an end to it. After all, in the weeks surrounding Joe Biden’s win over President Donald Trump, there have been countless acts of domestic terrorism, from Trumpers storming the home of former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to others attacking Biden supporters, unprovoked.

But there’s a right way and a wrong way to contextualize this violence, and one notable failed attempt to rationalize the far-right can be seen in the rise of hashtags like #VanillaISIS and #YallQaeda. Beyond making light of a very real threat in our country, these hashtags are also deeply racist thanks to their use of Muslim terrorist groups as a means to denounce the MAGA movement.

While it’s true that MAGA and its associations with the Proud Boys, Boogaloo Bois, and other local terrorist initiatives are indicative of the danger of extremist sects in our society, invoking Muslim terrorists — specifically — is wholly unnecessary and not even useful. First, it doesn’t help to either create awareness or stop violence, and rather just utilizes the same racist and classist tropes — like lumping in all “rednecks” in with white supremacists (re: “Y’all Qaeda”) — that far right-wing groups do themselves. And second, it fails to take into account the fact that white supremacist terrorists are inherently dangerous enough not to need any further context.

In the years since 9/11, white supremacists have been responsible for three times as many attacks in the United States as compared to Islamist extremists, and yet yet it’s not disgruntled white men who are likely to be profiled as a threat in the U.S. A better point of reference than ISIS would be the KKK — in fact, people like Trump have direct family connections to the Klan, and have even been endorsed by David Duke.

These hashtags appear to have begun around 2016 when the Bundys and Oregon extremists hosted armed standoffs with the government. Even then, while many stopped using the hashtags because it felt “unfair” to compare violent terrorist organizations with one another, that wasn’t a real reason to stop. Now, we are faced with the same moral dilemma. Sure, it’s easy to laugh at a hashtag that pokes fun at cultural tropes, but the implications of this are much deeper — and not laughing at them doesn’t mean you suddenly have to sympathize with the violence that far-right groups have incited.

When we rely on the easy trope, we are actually inciting a devastating level of harm and stigmatization of Muslim-Americans and Muslims worldwide, putting them at risk of violence. The proof of that is in the research, which has shown that people who are exposed to images and news of Muslim terrorism exhibit anti-Muslim prejudice. Not only that, but reducing that reality to a seemingly funny hashtag minimizes the threat that angry armed white men pose. “White people have been fanatical, violent, and murderous for a lot longer than ISIS,” tweeted Shabana Mir, author of the book Muslim American Women on Campus. “I get that it’s playful. But don’t you see how it erases all of the horrors of White settler colonial violence, slavery, Jim Crow, and continuing violence today?”

There are better ways to talk about the violence of the MAGA crowd, and people can do that by looking at the long, long history of white violence and the ways in which whiteness has used violence to conquer and oppress for hundreds of years. Or they can look to the history of the U.S. itself which, as Mir pointed out, is full of violent, racist white people. And then maybe we can just leave ISIS out of this altogether.

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Whether horrified or galvanized by Donald Trump’s rhetoric, the presidential election saw a motivated — and divided — America. Voters who wanted to “Make America Great Again” came out in droves to the polls, hoping to beat Joe Biden’s message of unity. And while they were ultimately unsuccessful, we can learn a lot from looking at who showed up to vote.

This election had more voters than ever before: Two-thirds of eligible Americans turned out to vote in 2020, with nearly 160 million voters casting ballots — 22 million more than in 2016, and the highest proportion of Americans exercising their right to vote since 1900. At the time of publication, Biden has received over 79.3 million votes, while Trump has gotten nearly 73.5 million. While a motivated Democratic Party expected to see a huge surge in votes, what was perhaps most surprising was the additional 10.1 million people who voted for Trump this year than in 2016. After Trump completely mishandled a national pandemic, spewed daily nonsense on Twitter, and literally caged children, who exactly were these 10 million new voters choosing Trump to continue leading the country? 

According to an analysis by the New York Times, Trump picked up votes in Appalachia, the Southern portion of the Piedmont region, rural Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and more agrarian sections of the Midwest. “The president made significant inroads with critical nonwhite swaths of the electorate while also growing his share of rural white voters,” Ken Spain, a Republican strategist, told the Times.

White working-class voters, long the stronghold of Trump’s base, increased their support — thanks in part to a voter turnout drive that the Trump team quietly worked on for years. Trump also received the highest share of non-white votes won by a Republican candidate in 60 years. In South Florida, Trump received 200,000 more votes than he had in 2016, something likely due to Trump’s rhetoric about the Democrats being socialists, which did not play well with the large number of Cuban Americans in the county, many of whom left Cuba under Fidel Castro’s socialist government. In some predominantly-Hispanic counties in Texas, Trump also picked up support. 

Many experts have expressed surprise at the increasing support for Trump in Latinx communities, especially considering Trump’s hardline anti-immigration policies and racist rhetoric, but that analysis is based on characterizing the Latinx community as a monolith — which it is not. It is a racially and ethnically diverse population of people. White Cubans, for example, have at times failed to support immigration reform because they were able to migrate to the U.S. under different conditions than people coming from South and Central America. Even still, the fact that more than one-third of Latinx people voted for Trump shows that the stereotype that Cubans vote Republican and most other Latinx people vote Democrat is a false and oversimplified binary.

Though the election is over, the party line battle is still alive: the Million MAGA March, the Republicans’ refusal to recognize Biden as President-elect, and the threats of violence from Trump supporters over vote-counting make that clear. Some people are even predicting that a 2020 loss sets Republicans up for a 2024 comeback. But everything could change in four years. If Democrats want to beat the GOP, strategists say they’re going to have to work on their messaging and lean into the progressive politics that are winning them seats.

“Unfortunately, we have a lot of good candidates who their message gets overshadowed by millions of dollars of the Republican message that just literally doesn’t even use their own words,” Rep. Tony Cardenas of California, who is running to lead the DCCC, told NPR. “And those are the kinds of tactics that we’re having to combat.”

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One of the officers who shot and killed 26-year-old Breonna Taylor has been sued for sexual assault. Brett Hankison, the officer in question, was not charged with murder for Taylor’s death but was charged with endangering Taylor’s neighbors for firing “blindly” into her apartment, and was fired from the Louisville Metro Police Department. Now, he is being sued for engaging in what a complaint calls a “predatory” pattern of using his position and influence to prey on intoxicated women.

The woman who filed the lawsuit, Margo Borders, initially spoke out about Hankison’s behavior back in June after another woman came forward with story about the former police officer offering her a ride home from The Tin Roof, a bar where he worked as a bouncer. According to her story, Hankison used his role as an opportunity to make unwanted advances on her. Borders says she was a law student at the time of her assault, and she had known Hankison through mutual friends. 

The lawsuit says that Hankison — while in uniform — offered Borders a ride home from the bar and she invited him into her apartment. She left him on the couch while she went to her bedroom to change, where she fell asleep because she was intoxicated. Borders alleges Hankison assaulted her while she was passed out and she woke up and yelled for Hankison to get off her. He later sent her messages implying the incident had been consensual.

Borders was “physically injured, mentally horrified and remained in extreme emotional duress over both the assault and the feeling that any efforts made to hold officer Hankison accountable for his actions would backfire,” the lawsuit says. But she is also not alone: Borders is joined in the suit by nine other women who gave statements alleging sexual misconduct by Hankison, saying that he routinely used his standing as a police officer and job as a bouncer to target women for assault.

Several of the attorneys who filed Borders’ suit also represent the families of Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who is suing the Louisville Metro Police Department. (Aguiar and Lonita Baker are attorneys for Taylor’s family; Steve Romines represents Taylor.) The lawsuit also names former Police Chief Steve Conrad and five other officers, as well as the manager of the bar, alleging that they knew about Hankison’s behavior and failed to intervene. In a statement provided to the Louisville Courier-Journal, The Tin Roof bar says Hankison was terminated from his position there in the spring.

“This police department’s long-standing tolerance for sexual assault by their officers is disgusting,” Aguiar told NBC News. “We intend to hold all who failed to ever report or investigate Brett Hankison responsible. Too many women in this community have suffered for too long.” 

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