Shakespeare provided the model for Astroturfing in Cassius’ fake letter to Brutus in Act II, Scene 1, line 651 of Julius Caesar:

‘Brutus, thou sleep’st: awake, and see thyself.
Shall Rome, &c. Speak, strike, redress!
Brutus, thou sleep’st: awake!’
Such instigations have been often dropp’d
Where I have took them up.
‘Shall Rome, &c.’ Thus must I piece it out:
Shall Rome stand under one man’s awe? What, Rome?
My ancestors did from the streets of Rome
The Tarquin drive, when he was call’d a king.
‘Speak, strike, redress!’ Am I entreated
To speak and strike? O Rome, I make thee promise:
If the redress will follow, thou receivest
Thy full petition at the hand of Brutus!

So, this is something of an experiment. [Update on 14 August at 0419—the unofficial video lasted about 24 hours.] The video above is a third-party posting and not the official clip from tonight’s show. I want to see how long this stays up. You can watch the official clip here.

As Emma Gonzalez and Matt Deitsch discuss with Trevor, the focus between now and election day, 6 November, is the Vote For Our Lives initiative. They want people to first, register to vote and second, vote. They don’t care how you vote, they just care that you vote.

Former First Lady Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama is also all over the challenge.

In the interview, I was particarly taken by Gonzalez’s menition of Dr. King’s Six Principles of Nonviolence.

PRINCIPLE ONE: Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people.
PRINCIPLE TWO: Nonviolence seeks to win friendship and understanding.
PRINCIPLE THREE: Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice not people.
PRINCIPLE FOUR: Nonviolence holds that suffering can educate and transform.
PRINCIPLE SIX: Nonviolence believes that the universe is on the side of justice.

The young women and men devoting their lives to saving other lives have a ten-point—zero of which involve taking guns away from law-abiding American citizens—program that includes:

How we saves lives:
1. Fund gun violence research.
2. Eliminate absurd restrictions on the ATF.
3. Universal background checks
4. High-capacity magazine ban.
5. Limit firing power on the streets.
6. Funding for intervention programs.
7. Extreme risk protection orders.
8. Disarm all domestic abusers.
9. Gun trafficking.
10. Safe storage and mandatory theft reporting.

Deitsch’s closing statement: There is no normality. I know that you want us to be kids, but we have more important things to do.

These kids, these young men and women have all our backs.

When the founders signed off on our constitution, they provided a backdoor in Article V—much the same way computer programmers often provide a way into their code that bypasses all safe guards and passwords—of their historic document that allowed for a do-over. Article V reads:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states [emphasis mine, JH], shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section* of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.

Congress, and the several states proceeded to (more or less peacefully, the Reconstruction Amendments: 13, 14 and 15 being the exceptions) amend our constitution 21 times. The election of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932 changed the landscape.

In 1934, the first of succession of millionaire-(now billionaire)-funded political entities was created to combat the existential threat to wealth and power embodied in the new president. This American Liberty League was the direct ancestor of today’s Tea Party and neither the mission, nor the funding, of these groups has altered or veered in 84 years. The unholy grail over the years has always been the complete rewriting our constitution; to rip out any and all pesky amendments that inconvenience the 1 percent in their quest for more.

The emphasized section in Article V above is their way to grasping that grail.

There may have been as many at 700 calls for a Constitutional Convention—most in the 20th century—in our history. All have failed. At such a convention the Constitution would become a blank sheet of paper. All and any aspect of our government—structure of the presidency and congress, freedoms granted to women and African Americans, restrictions of the franchise—become a matter for discussion and change. The previous calls were never a real threat. The presidency of Donald John Trump has changed all that.

And, despite hand wringing to the contrary, the threat is real.

Jamiles Lartey, reporting in Conservatives call for constitutional intervention last seen 230 years ago for The Guardian, writes:

Unity among conservatives seeking an article V intervention is paramount. For the convention to be triggered, all 34 states have to ask for the same thing. Once they do though, critics argue the floodgates open. “Once you call a convention literally anybody can bring up anything,” said Jay Riestenberg, a spokesperson for the non-partisan watchdog group Common Cause. “We can bring up an amendment to overturn Roe v Wade or the Civil Rights Act,” Riestenberg added.

[former Oklahoma Senator Tom] Coburn and [staff council at Convention of States Rita] Dunaway both bristled at the possibility of what is known as a “runaway convention”, where conventioneers go beyond their original mandate, perhaps so far as to write an entirely new constitution. This is technically what happened during the framing of the current constitution in 1787, when attendees were tasked with amending the Articles of Confederation, but wound up crafting something new entirely.

Coburn cited the three-fourths barrier – three out of four states need to agree for any proposal made to become law – a firewall to concerns over “runaway”. “All it takes is 13 judiciary chairmen, in 13 states, to stop anything stupid that might come out of that,” Coburn said. “Nothing’s going to happen, I’ll stake my life on that.”

Amending rewriting our Constitution via a Constitutional Convention would be akin to allowing a medical student using a double-bladed axe to perform an appendectomy on an unanesthetized patient.

Coburn may be willing to stake his life, but I’m not.

* The first clause of Article I, Section 9 reads: The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person. and The fourth clause of Article I, Section 9 reads: No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.

Every Friday Michael Harriot—self acclaimed World-renowned wypipologist. Getter and doer of “it.” Never reneged, never will. Last real negus alive—explores prejudice, bigotry and xenophobia (he prefers the word racism) as manifested in the various missives received in the office The Root and publishes, and responds to, his picks of the week in the Clapback Mailbag.

Always a great read, I found the first exchange particularly important because the subject is one dear to me: complicity.

From: Aric

To: Michael Harriot

I wanted to know if it’s possible to be white and conservative without being a bigot or viscous [sic] criminal? I’m a college student but have never encountered these so called “neo-confederates” you mention in your piece about diversity of thought. I just wanted to know if it’s possible that I could believe in conservative values and not be a bigot. Or is conservatism rooted in ‘racist ideologies’?

Harriot responds:

Dear Aric:

You ask a very important question that needs to be parsed carefully.

Imagine that you were a cop investigating a series of bank robberies. During the course of your investigation, you discovered a recording of 10 people discussing whether or not they should rob banks.

On the tape, they take a vote on robbing their first bank and six agree to take part. When they vote on the second bank robbery, eight vote in favor of robbing the second bank. Seven more agree to rob bank number three and the amounts of those who agree to participate vary over a series of 10 robberies.

You finally round up all 10 guys who were in the room, and they each confess to being a part of the bank robbery planning committee. They confess to spending the money. However, every single one of them swears that they didn’t believe in what their cohorts were doing. They admit that they voted yes, but they said they didn’t go to the banks or drive the getaway car. They just liked the group.

Are they bank robbers?

Of course they are.

When our president orders the launching of cruise missiles and women and children, who are not the targets, die, are we mass murderers?

When our president arranges the sale of weapons to a friendly power and those weapons are used to slaughter civilian populations, are we also responsible?

When our president places children in cages to discourage the illegal activities of their parents, do we bear guilt?

My answer to each of these is yes.

The degree of our responsibility is directly related to how much of our time we devote to letting our president—indeed all our elected officials—know that we do not support these actions.

Please note that I name no individual here. The President of The United States of America is my president, regardless of whether or not I exercised my franchise or for whom I cast my vote. Every adult holding the franchise is complicit in the actions of our elected officials. We did not send them on some impossible mission for which we get to disavow any knowledge.

We are responsible. We are complicit.

And then there’s The Space Force Anthem…

One of my favorite questions discussed during my tenure hosting the oldest continuous Socrates Cafés came at the end of 2010. The question was: How would an absence of Free Will change our legal system? Reading Samira Shackle’s Should we treat crime as something to be cured rather than punished? for The Guardian, took me back to that evening. She begins:

Usually, facial trauma doesn’t kill you, but it can cause significant disfigurement. Working as a surgeon in Glasgow in the early 2000s, Christine Goodall treated hundreds, if not thousands, of patients with injuries to the neck, face, head and jaw. Sometimes, the injuries were caused by a baseball bat, with shattered bones and bruising as bad as from a car accident. More often than not, it was a knife. A slash across the forehead or cheek, leaving a scar etched across the face; a machete wound to the jaw, slicing through the skin and breaking the bone underneath.

One young man came into the hospital in the middle of the night with a knife wound across his face. Goodall dreaded the morning ward round the next day, when she would have to tell him that it would be impossible to avoid a serious scar. But his reaction surprised her. “He was very offhand about it,” she says. “Some of his friends came to see him later that afternoon and I realised why it wasn’t going to be a problem for him – because they all had one. He’d just joined the club.” The incident has stayed with her, an indication of how bad the situation in her city had become.

So, how do you stop, or at least severely curtail, the violence? We know this: you don’t curb the violence by doing more of what you’ve been doing.

In 2005, Karyn McCluskey, principal analyst for Strathclyde police, wrote a report pointing out that traditional policing was not actually reducing violence. These reports always include a list of recommendations. “One was tongue-in-cheek,” recalls Will Linden, who worked for McCluskey as an analyst at the time. “‘Do something different.’ I don’t think it was meant to stay in there. But the chief constable said: ‘OK, go do something different.’”

McCluskey’s team, led by her and her colleague John Carnochan, started by pulling together evidence on the factors driving violence. “Particularly in Scotland, it was poverty, inequality, things like toxic masculinity, alcohol use – most of which were outside the bounds of policing,” says Linden. Next, they looked around the world to find and learn from pioneering programmes working to prevent violence. This was the foundation of the Violence Reduction Unit, of which Linden is now the acting director. It took elements of those programmes and focused on garnering support from a range of Scottish agencies – the health service, addiction support, job centres and others. Since the VRU was launched in 2005, the murder rate in Glasgow has dropped by 60%. The number of facial trauma patients passing through the city’s hospitals has halved, Goodall says, and is now around 500 a year.

The VRU’s strategy is described as a “public health” approach to preventing violence

Yesterday I listened to what may have been the best Sound of Ideas conversation yet. Mike McIntyre guide his guests on the topic: Tackling Youth Violence In Cleveland. I can well imagine Goodall and McCluskey nodding vigorously if they had tuned in.

The VRU’s public health approach suggests that:

[B]eyond the obvious health problems resulting from violence–the physical injuries and psychological trauma–the violent behaviour itself is an epidemic that spreads from person to person. One of the primary indicators that someone will carry out an act of violence is first being the victim of one. The idea that violence spreads between people, reproducing itself and shifting group norms, explains why one locality might see more stabbings or shootings than another area with many of the same social problems.

“Despite the fact that violence has always been present, the world does not have to accept it as an inevitable part of the human condition,” says the WHO guidance on violence prevention. It says: “Violence can be prevented and its impact reduced, in the same way that public health efforts have prevented and reduced pregnancy-related complications, workplace injuries, infectious diseases, and illness resulting from contaminated food and water in many parts of the world. The factors that contribute to violent responses–whether they are factors of attitude and behaviour or related to larger social, economic, political and cultural conditions–can be changed.”

But across much of the world, being tough on crime is a vote-winner, which makes this a hard sell. How did Glasgow do it? As they investigated what it actually means to treat violence as a health problem, the VRU looked first to Chicago.

Some 20 years before 66 people were shot and 12 killed in a single weekend, American epidemiologist Gary Slutkin returned to Chicago from Ethiopia and found his hometown in the grip of a skyrocketing homicide rate. In talking about the recent murderous weekend of violence, our president, with his always ready hyperbole, described the situation as an absolute and total disaster. Slutkin wouldn’t disagree, but his solutions were world’s apart from those of the president.

His ideas about tackling the problem began as a personal project: he gathered maps and data on gun violence in Chicago. The parallels with the maps of disease outbreaks he was accustomed to were unavoidable. “The epidemic curves are the same, the clustering,” he says. “In fact, one event leads to another, which is diagnostic of a contagious process. Flu causes more flu, colds cause more colds, and violence causes more violence.”

This was a radical departure from mainstream thinking about violence at the time, which primarily focused on enforcement. “The idea that’s wrong is that these people are ‘bad’ and we know what to do with them, which is punish them,” says Slutkin. “That’s fundamentally a misunderstanding of the human. Behaviour is formed by modelling and copying. When you’re [looking through] a health lens, you don’t blame. You try to understand, and you aim for solutions.”

He spent the next few years trying to gather funding for a pilot project that would use the same steps against violence as the WHO takes to control outbreaks of cholera, TB or HIV. It would have three main prongs: interrupt transmission, prevent future spread, and change group norms. In 2000, it launched in the West Garfield Park neighbourhood of Chicago. Within the first year, there was a 67% drop in homicides. More funding came, more neighbourhoods were piloted. Everywhere it launched, homicides dropped by at least 40%. The approach began to be replicated in other cities.

“When we were trying to control outbreaks of HIV, it was all about changing your thinking about risky sexual behaviour,” says Slutkin. “That’s much harder to change than violent behaviour. People don’t want to change sexual behaviour – but they don’t actually want to have violent behaviour.” Although there were many deeper structural factors contributing to Chicago’s violence – poverty, lack of jobs, exclusion, racism and segregation–Slutkin argued that lives could be saved by changing the behaviour of individuals and shifting group norms.

So what went wrong? How did gun violence kill 12 and wound 66 more? Do you have to ask? The money ran out. Or, more correctly, the money was shifted to programs that benefited big corporations like those that run private prisons. Shackle continues:

On a sunny evening in downtown Chicago, I watch Slutkin give a talk to an audience of young professionals. In Chicago, homicides reached a 20-year high in 2016, and the following year President Donald Trump threatened to “send in the feds”. Slutkin presents graphs showing that every time Cure Violence’s funding is cut in a certain area, shootings spike, and when it returns, they drop. (Critics argue that it is impossible to draw conclusions about causality, due to other factors at play.) “Despite massive amounts of data, it’s hard to get funding for this,” Slutkin tells the audience. “Mass imprisonment has no good data–but it’s funded. This is the only epidemic health problem not being tackled by the health department.”

Why would we expect empirical evidence to beat out profits?

When you ask voters about write-in votes you’ll typically get stories involving Disney rodents or family pets. Nobody wins anything with a write-in campaign. Until this week. Ryan Grim, reporting in How Bad are Things for the GOP? A Democratic House Candidate got 30,000 Write-In Votes in Michigan for The Intercept, explains:

In April, Michigan officials who oversee elections kicked Democrat Matt Morgan off the congressional ballot, leaving the Republican incumbent, Rep. Jack Bergman, to run unopposed in the general election.

That was the plan, at least, until primary day on Tuesday, when more than 30,000 Democratic voters cast write-in ballots in Michigan’s 1st Congressional District. That’s nearly eight times as many votes as Morgan needed to be resurrected and placed on the November ballot.

Wow. Just wow. See what the National Democratic Party machine can do when… Oops.

Morgan, a progressive Marine veteran, pulled off the successful turnaround without help from the national party or progressive organizations set up to support vets. Instead, he had filmmaker Michael Moore and a team of hundreds of volunteers who made sure voters knew that, even though there was nobody on the ballot, they could still vote for Morgan

In Marquette County, in fact, Morgan got nearly as many votes as Bergman did. The county credited him with 4,388 votes to Bergman’s 4,522, even after disqualifying a chunk of votes.

The candidate was booted from the ballot based on a technicality: His petitions listed a Post Office box rather than a physical address. His campaign turned the petitions in on March 6. An official got back to the campaign on April 29, explaining the address snafu, and saying that they had until the end of the day to withdraw or they were likely to be disqualified, said Joe Vanderbosch, Morgan’s spokesperson.

They refused to withdraw, so the Michigan Board of State Canvassers booted Morgan. The campaign took the decision to the Michigan Court of Appeals and lost in a 2-1 judgment. Instead of appealing further, the campaign turned to the write-in option instead. “We wouldn’t have ever chosen to do business this way, but when we look back on it, it has been a great opportunity,” Morgan told The Intercept. “It kicked our field program off, it incensed voters, it really turned people out.”

In order to make it onto the ballot, Morgan needed to win 5 percent of the total votes cast in the district for governor on the Democratic side, a figure that came to roughly 3,700 votes. His Marquette County total alone should qualify him for the ballot.

I have no doubt that a large number of marginalized candidates are paying very close attention to Morgan’s victory.

Of course, pro-catholic, pseudo-christian conservatives are politely, if not predicably, telling Pope Francis to stay in his lane and shut the fuck up on the death penalty.

I’m not the sports guy, so when billionaire owners of sports teams steal scam millions—perhaps the one theme Roldo Bartimole is best known for—in tax dollars Cuyahoga County residents, I literally feel the pain.*

The now Plain-Dealer-shunned (see below) New York Times—thanks to Sam Allard’s work—has taken notice.

Michael Powell, reporting in LeBron or Not, the Cleveland Cavaliers Get Millions for Arena Renovation for The Grey Lady, writes:

Northeast Ohio offers a tale of two legacies.

LeBron James departed for Los Angeles earlier this summer and left behind a spectacular gift for his hometown Akron, Ohio: a new elementary school for at-risk children and tens of millions of dollars for college scholarships.

An hour’s drive to the north, the Cavaliers lost that same superstar. But Dan Gilbert, the team’s billionaire owner, and N.B.A. executives can take solace in having capitalized on James’s success to pull off a perfectly legal shakedown of a not-so-economically-healthy city.

With arm-twisting and attacks on ministers and community organizers and hints that they just might depart, the Cavaliers and their allies last year persuaded county and city governments to underwrite most of a $140 million upgrade of the team’s Quicken Loans Arena.

The journalist Sam Allard of Cleveland Scene has put this deal under a microscope, and he noted a nice bit of synchronicity: On the same day James signed his four-year deal with the Los Angeles Lakers, Cuyahoga County made its first payment on the arena, forking “more than $4 million over to investors yesterday, beginning a 17-year repayment schedule.”

Sam, Roldo, hell, any thinking county resident paying attention knows the rest of the story.

Sadly, Powell does not think this will end well. He concludes:

There is only one near certainty: Long before the bonds are paid off, the Cavaliers will demand a new arena and the dance will start all over again.

We have the lake, we have tax payers. What we don’t have is a genuine tea party.

*I have to wonder if the ginormous tax bump on my property taxes is related to this story.

So, I canceled my subscription to The Plain Dealer back in 1992 when I was sitting at the breakfast table reading the comics and realized that those were the only pages I really cared about. Whenever I pick up the paper in a waiting room, or occasionally at a lunch counter, I still turn to the comics first, and last.

Roldo Bartimole is shaking his head right now, and as a journalist I ought to be chagrined at that admission, but I’m not. Even in the last century, newspapers were so last century.

I was introduced to The Plain Dealer when I was an undergraduate at Ohio University in the early ’80s when I read a friend’s copy. At about the same time I took place in what was then called a University Professor course taught by my mentor and advisor Byron Scott on news and the Internet.

Just as we learned of the threat of global warming in the ’60s and did nothing, so too did journalists learn of the existential threat of the Internet to news in the ’80s and did nothing. My personal observation is that the people with the power to make the change figured—rightly so—that they would be long retired by the time the problem because an imminent threat. Why should they, again like those muddying the waters on climate change, endanger their retirement for what was going to be someone else’s problem?

Now their successors are wringing their hands and wracked by lamentations. Perhaps the most recent manifestation of this hankyfest came last week when WCPN’s Sound of Ideas host Mike McIntyre lead the discussion on: The State of Print Journalism; Statehouse Update.

They’re wringing their hands while they’re wringing every last penny they can to ensure their retirement. Sam Allard, writing in The Plain Dealer Has Discontinued New York Times Wire Service for Scene, has just the latest scheme to collect a few coins from the knacker:

Plain Dealer editor and president George Rodrigue has confirmed to Scene that Ohio’s largest newspaper has discontinued its subscription to the New York Times syndicate service. That subscription allowed the PD to reprint news articles and opinion pieces produced by the Times and its global network. The wire reports are crucial for the PD, which, due to a depleted staff, regularly and heavily supplements its print edition with syndicated stories.

The decision, Rodrigue said, was “entirely due to financial considerations.”

Surprise, surprise.

In a comment to Allard’s piece, Roldo wrote:

You let them off too easily Sam.

The Plain Dealer is depriving all Cleveland area people from the strong journalism of the New York Times.

Rodrigue blames money but I smell a cave-in to conservative interests who don’t want to read especially the strong editorial positions of the Times on President Trump, our national disaster.

Maybe they could use some of the dollars the Newhouse chain got from selling their Superior Ave. headquarters to the city.

This is a shameful act by the PD.

I would argue that this is just business, but then business and shameful acts too often go hand in hand.

*Although in the Burnsian/Mnuchinian world, the squeal does provide a certain gratification.

More than a century ago President Theodore Roosevelt cultivated a trust-buster image, but with a caveat. If a company gained economic dominance, he reasoned, playing fair—using what Roosevelt called a rule of reason—then government should stay away. In 2018 we might wonder what Teddy would think of our current crop of trusts.

Ralph Nader, writing in Apple’s CEO Tim Cook— Serf Labor, Overpriced iPhones, and Wasted Burning Profits, explains:

The New York Times screamed its Headline—“In 1997, Apple was 90 Days from Going Broke. On Thursday [Aug. 2, 2018], It Became the first publicly traded American company to be valued at… $1,000,000,000,000.” The first trillion dollar company!

The boosters and commentators cheered, adding, “How High Could it Go?” In CEO’s Tim Cook’s announcement, we learned that there were $20 billion more of the shareholders money spent on wasteful stock buybacks. Stock buybacks enable fatter compensation metrics for Apple’s bosses (see Steven Clifford’s The CEO Pay Machine). Corporate managers love stock buybacks.

Earlier this year Apple executives dictatorially announced that it was going to spend $100 billion to buying back its stock, without of course, receiving the owners-shareholders’ approval. The owners might have preferred that some of that amount be used to pay them greater cash dividends. More far-sighted shareholders consider the presumably longer-view: institutional shareholders might have recommended more productive and equitable uses for that vast sum.

Some suggestions: Two billion dollars (a mere 2 percent of that $100 billion) would double the wages of its 1.3 million serf-workers driven to the wall Continue Reading »

Cast your vote in Michael Harriot’s The 2nd Annual World Wypipo Tournament: Who is the Worst?

Meanwhile, the hits just keep rolling in…

[Updates on 9 August:

A Belligerent Patriots Fan Tried to Bully a Black Woman Out of ‘His’ Neighborhood and Got Shut All the Way Down [Updated]
‘Because He’s Black’: New Mexico Store Clerk Calls Police on College Student Buying Snacks

Outraged Mother Speaks Out After 11-Year-Old Daughter is Tased in the Back by Off-Duty Cincinnati Cop [Update]]

White Driver Who Called Black Motorist ‘Monkey,’ Swears He’s ‘Not Racial’ Because He Has Biracial Grandkids

White Brooklyn Firefighter Shouts Racist Insult at Medical Technician: ‘Just Do Your Job You Black Bitch’

Video Shows Detroit Cop Beating a Naked Black Woman Who May Have Been Mentally Ill

Video: Louisiana Cops Strangle Black Man to Death for Asking to See Arrest Warrant

Previously…

Before there was steel or iron or oil or coal, even before there was corn, wheat and soybeans, cotton drove the American economy. Controlling the fair market price for cotton, deciding which textile mills—those in New England or Old England—is the principle cause of the American Civil War. Together the Union and Confederate forces lost some 625,000 dead and saw an additional 475,881 wounded; all because the 1 percent, on both sides, could not tolerate not being wealthy.

Because getting the average man to risk his life for the lavish lifestyle of the rich is difficult, presidents Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Finis Davis had to create more noble causes. In the South that was states’ rights. In the North that was preserving the Union. (Lincoln was at least marginally honest if you accept that preserving the union was code for keep the textile mills working. Nearly 160 years after Fort Sumter, we are still not over our Great Civil War.

Writing in Pride and prejudice? The Americans who fly the Confederate flag for The Guardian, Donna Ladd highlights one facet: why is the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia still relevant.

To many white people in the south and beyond, the Confederate flag is a sign of historic pride and defiance to whatever is currently called liberalism; to most black Americans, the flag stands for white supremacy and racial violence. Today, the symbol often appears at “pro-white” rallies and is a lightning rod in America’s calcifying racial divides.

The flag’s history is fraught and complicated, as was the bloody civil war that erupted in 1861 between the US south–where America’s slave trade had relocated and expanded by the mid-1800s–and the north. After the north won, it imposed a harsh Reconstruction on the south that still fuels white resentment today.

The post-war white south embraced the Confederate battle flag, making it their sentimental symbol of the “lost cause” of the war. By the time Mississippi embedded it into its new state flag in 1894, the flag was used to both honor the Confederate dead as well as a romanticized version of the war’s purpose.

By the mid-20th century, the flag symbolized white resistance to ending segregation laws. The Ku Klux Klan flew it at lynching parties and angry mobs waved it outside public schools as black children enrolled; in front of of white “segregation academies” and next to leering dogs unleashed on black protesters wanting the right to vote. (Today, its supporters say the KKK co-opted it.)

In April 2001, Mississippians voted along race lines to keep the flag as it was. The debate reignited in 2015 after Dylann Roof killed nine black people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. A photo soon emerged of him holding a Confederate flag.

On the world’s stage, the battle flag is second only to Germany’s national flag from 1935 to 1945 in its power to raise passions and wreck havoc on civil discourse and tranquility. To be fair, the latter was first the flag of the National Socialist Part before it became Germany’s national flag and the former was a military flag. In the 21st century, however, those are distinctions with differences. One of the people that Ladd listened to in her listening tour in Mississippi was Larry McCluney Jr. Ladd wrote:

McCluney, 53, is a national officer in the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which accepts male descendants of southern soldiers. SCV was created in 1896 for the “vindication of the cause for which we fought” and to ensure “that a true history of the 1861-1865 period is preserved.” SCV members worked with the United Confederate Veterans and other groups in the early 20th century to demand school textbooks supporting the revisionist view that the south fought for a just “lost cause” that was decidedly not slavery.

McCluney has taught history and government for 25 years to mostly black Delta students.

“People like me… it’s in our blood. We know about our family, their sacrifices,” he says of his 20 ancestors who fought for the Confederacy.

“Slavery was an issue, but not the cause,” the teacher tells me. He repeats SCV’s selective semantics with precision: the south seceded over “states’ rights” to financial independence; the north and Abraham Lincoln weren’t against slavery at the outset; northern tariffs were killing the south; few southerners and soldiers owned humans; slavery was fading anyway; and it wasn’t about white supremacy.

The balance of Ladd’s piece continues to lay out the twists and turns, complications and confusions and ultimately comes this close a acknowledging that economics were, and are, at the heart of our continuing economic conflict. In bringing her piece to a close, she writes:

On the last day, I again sit with Lindy Isonhood, this time at Deer Hollow, their other home farther south where Ira’s Confederate man cave, as Kate is calling the rooms we’ve seen, is packed with deer antlers, a boar’s head trophy, and little rebel flags. Ira is in the backyard posing for pictures in front of his Confederate flag.

Lindy has thought about our first conversation overnight and wants to understand why I do not support the flag.

“The war really was about slavery, and they didn’t hide it then,” I say as she listens intently. “But I don’t believe everyone who likes the flag is racist. Many people were taught certain things.”

I add that the division most hurts poor whites and people of color.

Lindy nods, describing her childhood of poverty when the family’s land was all they had left. Her sister would exchange clothes with a black friend, she says. “My family, we were poor. When I graduated from high school, we didn’t have an indoor toilet.”

I think that Michael Shaara and Ron Maxwell—the writers for the 1993 film Gettysburg—came as close to the truth as anyone when they created this scene.

Previously, Oliver examined elected judges and public defenders.

And no, our District Attorney County Prosecutor is not a white dog…

[Update on 7 August at 0713: Trump crashes Columbus rally for Troy Balderson.]

On Tuesday, Ohio voters in the 12th Congressional District go to the polls in a special election that pits Republican Troy Balderson against Democrat Danny O’Connor and the stakes are higher (and closer) than we’re used to. So high, in fact, that we have enough dirty (Russian?) tricks to warm even Richard Milhous Nixon’s cold shriveled heart.

John Fund, reporting in Columbus, Ohio, Is America’s Test Market for National Review, writes:

Everyone who’s looking for midterm clues is watching Tuesday’s special election for Congress in Ohio’s twelfth congressional district, which includes part of Columbus. President Trump inserted himself into the race by holding a rally for GOP candidate Troy Balderson on Saturday, so the election will also be viewed as a referendum on him. The latest independent poll by Monmouth University shows Balderson with a razor-thin lead, 44 to 43 percent, over Democrat Dennis O’Connor.

It’s appropriate that Columbus is holding such a bellwether race. The area has long been known as a favorite for companies testing products. Its demographics are almost identical to those of the rest of the country. “It was a microcosm of the U.S., in that what happens here will probably happen elsewhere,” Shashi Matta, at Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business, told Columbus Monthly in 2015.

Small wonder then that Tuesday’s special election there is getting so much attention.

Small wonder indeed. Ohioans know that you can pretty much point a camera at random at a Republican rally and catch an embarrassment. Jeremy Pelzer did so and grabbed this great photo. David Boddiger, reporting in These Trump Fans Might Want to Reevaluate Their Wardrobe has more details.