Crooked Media - What A Day: More like No CollusiOANN

Friday, June 12, 2020
BY SARAH LAZARUS, BRIAN BEUTLER, & CROOKED MEDIA

-Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) with yet another nuanced, well-argued opinion

In a throwback to the days before pandemic was cool, the stock market tanked on Thursday, as rich people surveyed the landscape and realized coronavirus didn’t “disappear” and Donald Trump isn’t “a competent president who cares about Americans.”
 

  • New outbreaks, exacerbated by Trump’s decision to pretend the virus doesn’t exist, have state and local officials second guessing the steps they’ve taken to relax social-distancing restrictions, and, in some cases, what they’ve done with their lives. Amid a surge of cases, the Orange County, CA, health officer resigned, rather than cave to pressure (including a death threat) to rescind the county’s mandatory mask-wearing rule. (Her replacement caved instantly, which health care providers at increasingly crowded emergency rooms and ICUs surely appreciate.) 
     
  • Orange County isn’t the only place where public-health workers trying to do the right thing have faced harassment. Disinformation about contact tracers has flourished (where else) on Facebook, which first ignored the problem, then dragged its feet before removing a small sampling of threatening posts, without addressing the larger issue. Contact tracers help identify and test people who’ve been in contact with COVID-positive individuals, so they can be tested and quarantined before potentially spreading the virus to others. Right-wing conspiracy theorists have rewarded them for this service by comparing them to gestapo: another thing health care providers at increasingly crowded emergency rooms and ICUs surely appreciate. 
     
  • Against this backdrop, Gov. Kate Brown (D-OR) has paused Oregon’s reopening plan, citing a “significant increase in COVID-19 infections in counties across Oregon.” Oregon had escaped the acute outbreaks that forced California and Washington into early lockdowns, but facing case surges, Brown has decided to hold county applications to further relax public-health restrictions for seven days. 

Most governors haven’t shown Brown’s level of concern for human life, and that’s in large part because Trump (through bullying and threats, backed by loyalist Republican governors and officials) has made following science-based best practices nearly impossible. Not that they don’t know any better. 
 

  • Trump intends to resume cramming thousands of people with COVID comorbidities into crammed spaces to mock social-distancing and mask-wearing practices campaign rallies next week, but only for the truly committed MAGA-heads who will sign liability waivers in case they catch a deadly virus at the venue. 
     
  • In other “take no responsibility” news, the White House has devoted what remains of its coronavirus response to modeling responsible behavior blaming Mexico for the continued U.S. coronavirus epidemic. There is, to be clear, no basis for this accusation. Cross-border traffic is down dramatically. The U.S. is experiencing case spikes both along the border and in the interior of the country, because Trump failed to suppress the epidemic here. And Mexico’s outbreak is far less widespread than ours. But that hasn’t stopped the White House from “floating a theory.”

 

We’ve gone from worrying about a second wave of coronavirus infections later in the year to the infuriating reality that the first wave never crashed. Now, as the virus infects tens of thousands of new victims and kills almost a thousand each day, Trump has determined that 1) the public is just going to have to deal with it, and 2) he’ll shoulder none of the blame. It’s up to us to see that he fails in those ambitions.

The first two episodes of Unholier Than Thou are out today! Join award-winning journalist and editor Phillip Picardi on his quest to better understand his relationship with spirituality by learning how faith plays a role in other people’s lives.  Listen & subscribe wherever you get your podcasts 

One America News Network appears to have made itself a venue for Russian interference in the 2020 election. President Trump’s new favorite cable channel, which has been peddling anti-Biden conspiracy theories for months, said it has obtained several hours of secret recordings from then-Vice President Joe Biden’s meetings with Ukranian officials. OAN hasn’t revealed what’s on the tapes, but if they exist they’re likely sourced from Russian intelligence, and probably doctored. A few weeks ago a Trump-friendly Ukrainian lawmaker released selectively edited phone calls between Biden and then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko (which lined up with everything Biden has said publicly). OAN’s involvement marks a major escalation in Russian interference since 2016, which comparatively was just an experimental dry run. U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul likened what he’s seeing now to tactics the Kremlin has used against its domestic political enemies: “It’s not to convince you of a different point of view. It’s to convince you that there is no truth.” 

Filmmaker and journalist Daniel Lombroso spent nearly four years embedded with the alt-right to make the documentary White Noise, in an effort to understand why the white-nationalist movement appeals to many younger Americans. Both of Lombroso’s grandmothers are Holocaust survivors, making the project deeply personal. In spending hundreds of hours with conspiracy theorists, far-right influencers, and white-nationalist-leaning politicians, Lombroso found the movement’s leaders to be well-educated and wealthy, with a message of historical grandeur and a(n empty) promise of a better future for their followers. It’s tempting to chalk racist extremism up to ignorance, but the reality is more complicated, and defeating hate movements will require understanding how they gained a foothold in the first place.

The Louisville, KY, Metro Council has passed Breonna’s Law, a ban on no-knock warrants named for Breonna Taylor. (Good, but not a substitute for arresting the police officers who killed her.)

New York lawmakers have passed the Eric Garner Anti-Chokehold Act, which criminalizes the use of chokeholds that result in injury or death. 

Chicago’s Semicolon Bookstore has raised over $120,000 for an initiative to give away free books to local kids.

The NFL, Twitter, Square, and Nike have announced plans to make Juneteenth a company holiday. 

. . . . . .


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