Peter Navarro indicted and taken into custody

For those who have lost all faith in the system, a reminder that sometimes the system surprises you.

AP News:

EXPLAINER: Can Pa. GOP candidate make voters re-register?

Doug Mastriano, Pennsylvania’s Republican candidate for governor, is perhaps the state’s most prominent peddler of Former President Donald Trump’s lie that widespread fraud cost him the 2020 election.

A state senator and retired US Army colonel, Mastriano says he wants to make everyone re-register if they want to vote again. The concept flatly violates federal law, legal scholars say, and may conflict with state law, not to mention constitutional protections. It is also a throwback to laws designed by white people in past eras to keep Black people or newer European immigrants from voting.

This AP story is wild in its simplicity and directness.

Just Security:

Primer on the Hearings of the January 6th Select Committee

The resource is structured around the key prongs of the investigation itself – how the Select Committee has organized its investigative work – which mirror the key prongs of the campaign to overturn the election. The Committee’s investigative teams are color-coded in name (Gold, Blue, Purple, Red, and Green); this primer has in turn highlighted key facts and findings according to that same organizational structure.

Critically, “January 6th” has, like “Watergate,” become a useful shorthand. But as with Watergate, January 6th represents neither a single nor isolated event, but instead a much broader and more multifaceted effort to stop the transfer of power. We hope this resource is useful in distilling those components and what we critically know – and do not yet know – about each. This resource was produced as a collaboration between Just Security and Protect Democracy.

The Primer is available in Scribd format below and also as a PDF.

On Biden’s gun safety speech:

Jonathan Weiler / Substack:

On Misogyny and the Limits of Our Attention

The struggles under our noses

Meanwhile, #MeToo surged and foundered in the US on the backs of its framing as a celebrity phenomenon. I think of this as the Hollywoodification of the issue. High profile abusers and high profile victims light up the news cycle. They allow news organizations to turn a pervasive social reality into compelling story-telling. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this. Or to put it another way, it might be unavoidable, at least to some significant degree. The revelations of 2017-18 brought focused attention to a fundamental problem. They also helped inspire lots of people to become more active in trying to force their societies to take the problem more seriously.

But, live by the high profile stories, die by the high profile stories. Smarter people than me are now writing about the Johnny Depp defamation case against Amber Heard as the death knell of #MeToo. One could argue that the beginning of the end of #MeToo, at least in the sense of a movement that felt too powerful, too consistent with the prevailing tide of history to be on the wrong side of, was the Kavanaugh confirmation process in 2018. Regardless, whatever consciousness was raised, at least for some, by the graphic documentation of the fact that wealthy and powerful men had spent decades getting away with abusing (mostly) women, the reality of the day-to-day fear and violence that so many women experience has not changed. At all.

Gallup:

‘Pro-Choice’ Identification Rises to Near Record High in US

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• 55% now identify as pro-choice, the highest percentage since 1995
• For the first time, a majority of Americans say abortion is morally acceptable
• Democrats drive most of the attitudinal shifts supporting abortion rights

Alexander Sammon / The American Prospect:

The RNC’s Ground Game of Inches

Inside the secretive, dubious, and extremely offline attempt to convert minorities into Republicans

The RNC community center model is the latest attempt by Republicans to court nonwhite voters, who have long eschewed the party and been demonized by its leading representatives. But 2020’s frenzied election returns suggested an opportunity. Joe Biden’s share of votes from Latinos decreased by eight percentage points compared to Hillary Clinton’s, according to a report from the progressive data utility Catalist. As Vox reported, this marked the “most dramatic shift in a four-year period among the major racial or ethnic groups seen.” The movement was stunning in areas like South Texas, where five heavily Latino counties flipped to Donald Trump.

Biden’s vote share of Black Americans also decreased by three points, and the GOP overperformed with Asian Americans and Native Americans as well. It was something less than a breakthrough with nonwhite voters; Republicans losing Asian Americans by a 27 percent margin exhibited their best performance with any major racial minority bloc. But given the huge turnout increase in 2020, in raw numbers, Republicans put up vote totals that once would’ve seemed impossible even to the Pollyannaish.

HuffPost:

Daughter Of Slain Sandy Hook Principal Would Like You To Stop Asking For Autopsy Photos

Some gun control advocates think showing graphic photos of mass shootings will sway lawmakers. Victims of those same shootings say to quit asking them.

“STOP ASKING ME FOR AUTOPSY PHOTOS,” Lafferty tweeted on Tuesday. “The audacity of those who are asking and demanding Sandy Hook crime scene photos to be released is unfathomable. I envy those who do not and can not understand the weight of this ask. ”