How natural gas powers renewables

How natural gas powers renewables

Lately I’ve been getting targeted natural gas industry ads featuring former Democratic Senators Mary Landrieu and Heidi Heitkamp making the case that natural gas and renewable energy shouldn’t be seen as enemies and are, in fact, are best friends. Politico even has a sponcon article by the senators with the headline “Politics Aside: The fact is natural gas is accelerating our clean-energy future.”

Sadly, the natural gas industry is not giving me any money, but I find their basic argument here persuasive; it seems both factually true and also somewhat underappreciated by the world at large.

When Barack Obama was president he talked a lot about his efforts to accelerate renewable energy, and in fact renewables surged an incredible amount. But so did natural gas. When Donald Trump was president, the politics and the rhetoric both flipped and gas production surged even more. But so did renewables. And this isn’t a coincidence or weird historical irony; there’s a deep complementarity between solar and wind power on the one hand and natural gas on the other.

Where I break with the paid shills, though, is that it seems to me that there are two sides to this coin.

The industry is correct that people who care about the environment should probably be less critical of the natural gas industry. In addition to its complementarity with solar and wind, gas has lower emissions than coal or oil. Environmentalists really should see increased gas production as reducing greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution, at least on the current margin.

But a zero-carbon electrical grid can’t burn natural gas. And the upshot of the complementarity, in that case, isn’t so much that natural gas is good but that driving fossil fuels off the grid is very expensive with a strategy focused solely on wind and solar. Abandoning fossil fuels is going to mean also embracing some combination of nuclear, geothermal, and hydro.

Gas and renewables are special friends

Here are some stylized and somewhat simplified facts about energy:

It’s easy to turn gas and hydro plants off and on to generate electricity in response to demand.

Coal and nuclear plants are hard to turn on and off; they work best when they run constantly.

Solar panels and wind turbines produce a variable amount of electricity depending on how sunny or windy it is at any given time.

Demand for electricity varies both according to the time of day (we use less when people are asleep) and according to the season (we use more in the summer when air conditioners are on).

A lot of stuff, notably cars and home heat, that is currently powered by fossil fuels could be converted to electricity with existing technology.

Points (1) and (3) make natural gas and renewables very good complements.

The cost of generating electricity via natural gas is largely the cost of buying the gas and burning it. By contrast, renewables have very low operating costs. The cost per megawatt of a utility-scale solar plant is basically the cost of building it divided by the number of megawatts it generates. So if you go build the plant somewhere that gets a lot of sunshine, your cost per megawatt is very low.

But in practical terms, the question a utility has to ask isn’t “what is the cost per megawatt of the electricity that the solar installation creates?” but “what is the total cost of relying on the solar installation?”

Now imagine building a solar plant in a community where all the power currently comes from natural gas. With newly installed solar capabilities, less gas is burned when the sun is shining and the community relies on cheap solar power instead. But if the community is instead currently getting all its power from coal, the calculus is different. A coal plant can’t simply be switched off during the day and then on again at night. In that case, the practical cost of making the switch is the cost of building the solar installation plus the cost of building a natural gas plant plus the cost of burning gas when the sun isn’t shining. From the utility standpoint, the question is about the all-in cost of making the switch — so the price of natural gas is just as relevant as the price of solar panels.

The big increase in domestic gas production, in other words, isn’t distinct from the increased use of renewables. Gas, wind, and solar teamed up to crowd out coal.

And in doing so, they did a lot to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and clean up the air. Gas is cleaner than coal, and gas + renewables is a lot cleaner.

So that’s the case for fracktimism — it’s cleaner than coal and it’s driven the renewables transition forward.

Renewables’ costs get worse on different margins

There’s this old joke in Maine about the fractal coastline and the sparse road network — “you can’t get there from here.”

And by the same token, while gas helps renewables move forward, the problem is that the intended destination is a world where you’re not burning the gas at all.

The issue isn’t that you can’t use solar power without a gas backup, but that the cost-effectiveness of renewables declines a lot when you’re not simply talking about flipping the gas switch on and off. Right now, renewables generate a small enough portion of our energy that each marginal solar panel delivers 100 percent of its electricity to the grid and we just burn less gas. But meeting 100 percent of peak electricity demand with renewables would still require burning gas on cloudy days. Adding more solar panels would decrease the amount of gas burned when it’s overcast. But since you were already meeting 100 percent of peak condition electricity demand from renewables, you’re now wasting electricity on the margin — that means the effective cost per megawatt starts going up.

In other words, when people say that renewables are cheap, they are completely correct, at the current margin. It would be very, very affordable to take wind and solar from their current 10 percent of the U.S. electrical system to 20 or even 30 percent. But as renewables get bigger, their cost profile starts getting worse.

That’s in part because gas complementarities get worse and in part because the most optimal locations are used first and subsequent builds have to settle for worse and worse ones.

To an extent, this can be fudged since over time people are switching to more EVs and heat pumps so aggregate electricity demand is rising. But in terms of a zero-carbon future, this in some ways makes things worse. Right now electricity demand is much higher in the summer than in the winter because people use electricity to cool their homes but (usually) not to heat them. This goes together nicely with the fact that there is more daylight in the summer. But to switch from gas-powered home furnaces to heat pumps powered by renewables is tough given the short winter days. There’s wind, too, of course. But to be really assured that people will be able to heat their homes in December and January, you’d need massive overbuilding of wind/solar relative to electricity demand during more benign conditions.

Again, I want to be clear that I’m not saying this is impossible — people have been arguing about it for years, and you could do it if you wanted to. My point is simply that the actual progress that renewables have actually made in the actual world has been driven by complementarities with gas. An all-renewables grid is a different idea entirely and one with fundamentally less appealing economics.

Other ideas probably have lower environmental impacts

This whole time I’ve been talking about gas, wind and solar, and coal. But there are of course other energy sources.

A really ideal one for these purposes is hydropower because hydro, like gas, can be turned on and off. With pumps, hydro can even be made to run backward and can be used as long-term storage. So a country like Norway that has tons of hydropower can use it in lieu of gas as a solar/wind complement and go down to zero use of fossil fuels. It’s funny that the country best-positioned for that outcome is also sitting on top of huge oil and gas reserves, but that’s why the Norwegian center-left has a pure energy abundance strategy, focusing a lot on electrification and renewables while doing nothing at all to reduce fossil fuel production. The plan is to have a zero-carbon economy that also exports tons of fossil fuels until the rest of the world stops burning them.

This is also why the environmentalists who are criticizing a plan to build a big transmission line to bring hydropower from Quebec down to New York have lost the plot. If you want a renewables-centric zero-carbon strategy, then hydro is by far the best friend you have.

As a broader strategy, though, almost all of the really promising dams have already been built. But even if they hadn’t been, the ecological cost of damming rivers is non-trivial. And that’s the real issue here. There’s no such thing as a way to make electricity that doesn’t have some kind of ecological footprint, and that includes the renewables themselves. After all, the escalating cost of renewables once you run out of gas complementarities really just amounts to the fact that you need to build more stuff. However many wind turbines and solar panels get you to a 50 percent renewable grid, you can’t just double that number to get to 100 percent — you’re dealing with worse locations and times of day when there’s less wind and sunshine, so you need to build redundantly and enhance with batteries.

That represents a financial cost, but it’s also a literal consumption of open space. I think that if you look at it in a fair-minded way, the potential environmental cost of drilling more holes in the ground for geothermal exploration or setting aside more sites for nuclear waste storage is quite a bit lower than the land use consumption that’s required by redundant build-out of renewables. Maybe some kind of huge technological breakthrough with batteries will ease some of these tensions, but the batteries themselves are made out of stuff that needs to be mined. So especially compared to geothermal, I don’t know why you’d have a strict preference for one kind of hole over another.

Long story short, the gas industry propagandists are onto something, and the success of renewable energy at the current margin is significantly dependent on the expanded output of cheap natural gas. To some extent, congratulations are therefore due to America’s frackers. But the real upshot Landrieu-Heitkamp Thought is that the government should be friendlier to nuclear and advanced geothermal power. These industries aren’t paying me either (though I do have an Oklo-branded coffee mug), but more to the point, they don’t seem to be paying anyone in Washington enough to get their ideas prioritized.

This is a shame because a future of abundant zero-carbon energy probably requires more emphasis on non-solar/wind sources of zero-carbon electricity. The cheap renewables buildout is really, in part, a natural gas buildout.

Why are women voters moving to the left?

Why are women voters moving to the left?

Read time: 4 minutes

Stephen Bush

 4 HOURS AGO

Why are women voters moving to the left?

Across the democratic world, women are increasingly choosing to support progressive parties

One reason why traditional social democratic parties have struggled is that while they are winning over some graduates, they are still doing very poorly among rich graduates .

In 1911, Winston Churchill, then a Liberal minister, warned the prime minister, HH Asquith, that if the government pursued votes for women, it risked dying “like Sisera, at a woman’s hand”. One reason why the Liberals were divided over the issue is that some feared that extending the vote to women on the same basis then enjoyed by men would enfranchise women without economic ties but who benefited from inheritances, boosting the electoral power of the Conservatives and hurting that of the Liberals.

In the present day, the economic position of the average British woman is significantly better than it was when her forebears were first given the vote. She is more likely to have gone to university, more likely to have a seat in Parliament, more likely to be a judge, to sit on the board of a FTSE 100 company, or to be a billionaire. She lives longer and is more likely to own property. But on the electoral battlefield, she has gone from a winner to a loser.

Throughout the 20th century, the average British woman was more likely than the average British man to have backed the victorious Conservatives. In the 21st century, the traditional gender gap has gone into reverse: by the time of the 2019 election, the average British woman was more likely to have backed Labour than the average man. The gender gap was 13 points.

The story of British women’s changing electoral behaviour is pretty typical. For most of the 20th century, women were more likely than men to back parties of the right across the democratic world. Today, however, it is the other way round: female voters have moved, in the words of Beyoncé, to the left, to the left.

What’s driving the switch? I don’t think that what we are seeing here is a story of the right failing to win over women. That Mitt Romney and Theresa May underperformed among women as much as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson did is a pretty good sign that the gap can’t be credibly explained through the personalities of individual candidates either.

Although there is a clear liberal-conservative gender divide in voting behaviour, there is not as clear a divide on an issue-by-issue basis. Although female voters in the United Kingdom and United States are more likely to have liberal positions on transgender rights, they are also more authoritarian on crime. In Israel, Israeli women are more likely to agree with a number of policy positions close to the right’s heart, but they are also more likely to support stronger welfare states and be liberal on a swath of social issues.

A big part of the difference here is “salience”, which is the polite way of saying how much of a flying one voters can be persuaded to give about a particular issue. Polled on the issues, Israeli women are more rightwing on security issues than men, but that they go on to vote for parties of the left suggest they care less. In the UK, although there was no statistically significant difference between how men and women voted in the Brexit referendum, men were more likely to prioritise the outcome in the elections that followed. As a result, Labour did worse among pro-Leave men than it did among pro-Leave women in 2019. But that the “gender gap” is actually a “salience gap” doesn’t get us any closer to understanding why it exists in the first place.

I think the big change here is actually an economic one. Many more men are living into retirement age — generally, but not always, an age bracket that parties of the left struggle to make inroads with. Many more women — 57 per cent of students in the UK are female, and just 43 per cent are male — are entering higher education, and, across the democratic world, graduates are more likely to vote for parties of the left than the right.

Further heightening the gender gap, while women with a degree are more likely to receive an individual boost to their earnings compared to women without one, male graduates are still likely to earn more. And one reason why traditional social democratic parties have struggled is that while they are winning over some graduates, they are still doing very poorly among rich graduates, or at least not doing well enough to compensate for the loss of votes in areas that were once dominated by industrial production.

While the average woman might be more likely than previously to have a high-paying job or sit on a company board, she is also still more likely to be fielding questions about childcare and her children’s report cards — which would also account for those differences in salience. The new gender gap is not a strange countervailing force to the new economic positions of men and women; it is a consequence of them. Churchill’s fears that a large group of voters without workplace ties would cause difficulties for liberal parties proved right — but not necessarily in the way he might have expected.

stephen.bush@ft.com

Three big takeaways from Trump’s missing Jan. 6 phone logs

Three big takeaways from Trump’s missing Jan. 6 phone logs

Greg Sargent — Read time: 4 minutes

Yesterday at 10:42 a.m. EDT

In another bid for the “Worse than Watergate” files, it turns out there is a seven-hour gap in Donald Trump’s phone logs on the day of the insurrection attempt. According to documents obtained by The Post and CBS News, there is no record of then-President Trump’s calls on Jan. 6, 2021, from just after 11 a.m. to shortly before 7 p.m.

That means there’s a big black hole in the record when it comes to Trump’s conversations throughout the period during which the mob assaulted the U.S. Capitol and violence raged over several hours.

The documents, which were turned over to the House select committee examining Jan. 6, do show that Trump had many calls before 11 a.m. and after 6 p.m. that were apparently related to the coup effort. That suggests Trump held many calls related to the insurrection between those two times that are not officially accounted for.

Here are three big takeaways:

The noncooperation of Trump’s allies makes this story worse.

We already know Trump spoke to many key players by phone while the violence unfolded, thanks to dogged reporting and the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation thus far.

Calls such as these are among those that should be in the phone logs but aren’t. The Post reports that the committee is investigating whether Trump used burner phones during that period, but whatever we learn on that front, this whole story is made worse by the fact that those key players are refusing to cooperate with the committee.

But it’s also likely Trump came to see the violence as helpful to intimidating his vice president, Mike Pence, and possibly lawmakers as well, into executing the scheme of delaying the electoral count. Trump reportedly called at least one GOP senator to press him for help delaying the count while the violence raged, another call that isn’t in the logs.

“He was using the leverage of the violent insurrection to keep the inside political coup against Pence going,” Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the Jan. 6 committee, told me.

So the refusal of participation from key players who spoke to Trump during that period — and could illuminate his potential understanding of the violence as a weapon to complete the procedural coup — is the other piece of the coverup. It makes the missing phone logs look even worse.

“Most everyone not cooperating with the committee is helping shield Trump from public disclosure about what happened during that period,” Raskin said.

The Jan. 6 committee may already have records of missing calls.

It’s not clear why the phone logs are missing records of that seven-hour period — the committee is investigating this as well — and truthfully, the explanation might not end up being scandalous.

But either way, the committee might be able to confirm many of Trump’s calls during that period, anyway, and indeed might already have done so.

That’s because the committee has already subpoenaed the phone records of some of these key players, as CNN recently reported, and this includes Meadows. The committee has already started receiving some of this information, per CNN.

The point is that calls between Trump and people such as Meadows and McCarthy can be confirmed via this other route. That won’t reveal what transpired in the calls, but, by further confirming calls not listed in Trump’s logs, this will illustrate what is missing from them.

As Crooked Media editor in chief Brian Beutler notes, the missing phone logs give sordid new meaning to McCarthy’s recent threat that a GOP-controlled House will punish telecom companies that cooperate with the committee:

The hole in the logs strengthens the case for the committee to ignore McCarthy’s threats and proceed in assembling those phone records, to see what’s missing from Trump’s logs, a source familiar with the committee’s thinking points out to me.

The case for subpoenaing lawmakers might have just gotten stronger.

The committee is debating whether to subpoena members of Congress such as McCarthy and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who also talked to Trump on Jan. 6. The source close to the committee tells me the missing phone logs might strengthen the case internally for subpoenaing them, because there should be more pressure on those lawmakers to testify about these calls with Trump.

Whether to subpoena lawmakers is a complicated question without obvious answers. Needless to say, they would resist and slow-walk the subpoenas, probably with much success.

But still, whatever we learn about the missing phone logs, subpoenas directed at those lawmakers — combined with their resistance — might starkly illustrate to the public how determined Trump’s allies are to help whitewash his insurrection attempt, which sparked the worst U.S. political violence in recent memory.

Cawthorn’s ‘orgies’ line shows how right-wing politics can boomerang

Cawthorn’s ‘orgies’ line shows how right-wing politics can boomerang

Paul Waldman, Greg Sargent — Read time: 5 minutes

It takes a lot to get Republican members of Congress angry at one of their own. But Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) managed to do it, not just by being a uniquely repugnant figure, but also by claiming to reveal the dark underbelly of official Washington in a way that Republicans apparently found offensive.

What’s important is the particular tale Cawthorn offered. It shows how far-right systems of thought can boomerang on those who try to benefit from the political energies unleashed by them — while still maintaining distance from their sources to avoid getting too tainted.

Cawthorn told a podcast host that the “sexual perversion” in Washington is so rampant that even Republicans are involved. His fellow Republicans are aghast, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has vowed to discipline him.

Cawthorn is one of a new breed of Republican representatives who operate in the most fetid gutters of the new political pathways carved by Donald Trump. This class includes worthies like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), Lauren Boebert (Colo.) and Matt Gaetz (Fla.): They’re basically professional media provocateurs who also happen to have gotten elected to Congress.

These lawmakers marinate in various far-right conspiracy theories and other assorted crackpottery, even if they claim to not be adherents. Central to those theories is that the political enemy is not just wrong about policy or ideology, but has created a secret, horrifying world of decadence and perversion.

At the far end, QAnon believers think Democratic leaders run a transnational pedophile ring. While “respectable” Republicans won’t say that, they will badger a Supreme Court nominee for hours about child pornography, in apparent awareness of how deep QAnon sentiments run within the GOP base.

But Cawthorn went too far when he responded to a question about whether the over-the-top melodrama “House of Cards” accurately depicted Washington:

The sexual perversion that goes on in Washington, I mean being kind of a young guy in Washington, where the average is probably 60 or 70. You look at all these people, a lot of them that I’ve looked up to through my life, I’ve always paid attention to politics … Then all of a sudden you get invited to, “Well hey, we’re going to have kind of a sexual get-together at one of our homes, you should come.” What did you just ask me to come to? And then you realize they’re asking you to come to an orgy. Or the fact that some of the people leading on the movement to try and remove addiction in our country, and then you watch them do a key bump of cocaine right in front of you.

While we can’t prove Cawthorn made this up, let’s just say the idea that he’s being invited to orgies by lawmakers in their 60s and 70s strains credulity. And Cawthorn’s long history of making up stories is precisely what turned him into a right-wing superstar.

True or not, Politico reports that at a meeting of GOP representatives, many were angered with Cawthorn for portraying his own colleagues as “bacchanalian and sexual deviants.” One complained that he’s fielding questions about orgies from constituents.

Which highlights the danger in indulging the conspiracy theorist’s view that the surface world always hides something grotesque and disturbing beneath it. It’s one thing to say that about Democrats, these Republicans believe — that’s all well and good. But if you say that about all of Washington, they’re implicated, too.

Yet in recent days, we’ve seen how the lurid fantasies of the far right, and particularly the alarm about “perversion,” are becoming more and more incorporated into the rhetoric of supposedly mainstream Republicans.

Consider laws and proposals advancing in many GOP state legislatures limiting how gender and sexual identity are taught. Many of these, in addition to muzzling teachers, also seem designed to advance an underlying premise: that parents should constantly fear that their kids risk falling prey to perverts and deviants around every classroom corner.

Sometimes Republicans make this obvious. In defending Florida’s odious “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law Monday, the governor’s spokesperson tweeted, “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children.” The term “grooming” refers to pedophiles preparing children to be sexually abused.

This sort of proposal goes beyond Florida to include other proposals around the country. A bill in Georgia would ban encouragement of classroom discussion of sexual orientation, a vaguely worded proposal obviously meant to imply this poses a terrifying threat. An Oklahoma bill bans from school libraries books that are about “sex” in some way or are even “of a controversial nature,” which seems designed to foment similar panic.

“A lot of these bills rest on the belief that at all hours of the school day, students are surrounded by constant threat of perversion, and that teachers are complicit in that threat,” Jeffrey Sachs, a political scientist who closely tracks these laws, told us.

“These bills see schools as cesspools of deviancy” Sachs said, and as “places where students will be, quote, ‘tricked’ into thinking of themselves as gay or trans.”

This tendency has metastasized all over the place. The claim that children everywhere are being “groomed” into some form of depravity has become ubiquitous on the right; as Fox News host Laura Ingraham recently asked, “When did our public schools, any schools, become what are essentially grooming centers for gender-identity radicals?”

Various laws attacking trans people are regularly justified with claims that they are defenses against creeping deviancy. Even giving a trans teen love and support is characterized as “abuse,” a horror from which children must be protected.

Ultimately, this sort of language has become almost like the air lawmakers such as Cawthorn breathe. But as this latest episode shows, these tendencies can boomerang: The lure of depicting Washington as a kind of bottomless cesspool of degeneracy — a guaranteed right-wing applause line — led Cawthorn to accidentally hit his own colleagues with friendly fire in the form of charges of “sexual perversion.”

As those colleagues no doubt want Cawthorn to know, such claims are supposed to be aimed only at leftists and liberals.

Ukraine has been winning the messaging wars. It’s been preparing for years.

Ukraine has been winning the messaging wars. It’s been preparing for years.

Torey McMurdo — Read time: 5 minutes

My research examined how the country learned to craft a powerful national narrative — and limit Russian misinformation

Yesterday at 7:45 a.m. EDT

Members of Congress give Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a standing ovation before he speaks in a virtual address to Congress in Washington on March 16. (Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times/Pool/AP)

Before the Ukraine invasion, many observers believed that Russia had an advantage in propaganda. But since the war began, journalists and academics alike have expressed admiration for Ukraine’s savvy information narratives and President Volodymyr Zelensky’s effective wartime messaging. This isn’t as surprising as it seems. As my research shows, Ukraine laid the groundwork for its information advantage well before the invasion. Over many years, Ukraine has learned how to limit Russian information exploitation and craft a national narrative.

Russia built a stronghold in Ukrainian media

In 2019, I interviewed dozens of Ukrainian political organizers, journalists and scholars in Kyiv about Russia’s ongoing information war — which had been underway since Ukraine’s independence in 1991 — and Ukrainian efforts to combat it. These interviews revealed Russia’s continuing influence on Ukrainian media. Galyna Zelenko, political science chair at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, estimated in our interview that over 90 percent of Ukrainian media had at one point been backed by Russian investments.

This was facilitated by a controversial 1990s Ukrainian program that privatized state-owned industries and gave vouchers to citizens so they could hold ownership in state property and land. The program was supposed to empower citizens by giving them a share in Ukraine’s wealth. Instead, it allowed several prominent Ukrainian oligarchs to exploit illegal voucher trading and take control of key businesses, including TV companies. Russia used its relationship with these oligarchs to infiltrate Ukrainian media.

Ukraine began to tackle this problem seriously in 2021. But over nearly 30 years of Ukrainian elections, Russia had seized many convenient opportunities to shape the political narrative. In our discussions, Denys Rybachok — an adviser to the Committee of Voters of Ukraine — distinguished Western efforts to influence elections from Russian ones. Western messaging embraced democratization, he said, while Russia’s aimed to either aid or “spoil” a particular candidate and to undermine Ukraine’s government.

My research at the Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine identified how Russia had used Ukrainian media to promote its preferred candidates in every election since the early 1990s, including the one that elected Zelensky. “The keys to Ukraine’s elections have always been in Moscow,” Zelenko told me. Rybachok also emphasized how many Russia-aligned oligarchs have been elected to parliament, allowing Russia to promote its preferred narratives during both parliamentary and presidential elections. This helped Russia consistently fill Ukraine’s information space with messages intended to undercut its government.

Ukraine responded by building up defenses

This long history of Russian manipulation helps explain Ukraine’s recent successes. Many of those I interviewed emphasized that Putin’s targeting of Ukrainian media when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 had provoked Ukrainian officials to restrict Russian broadcasts and media content. This was striking, Rybachok commented, because 74 percent of Ukrainian adults received their news from Ukrainian TV. Limiting TV broadcasts helped shape how Ukrainians thought about politics. Even though citizens were hesitant about efforts to silence Russian media, they still saw Ukrainian television as the country’s most “trusted” news source in 2019, suggesting that TV had withstood Putin’s onslaught.

Turmoil in Ukraine leading up to the Crimea crisis also affected Ukraine’s information space by changing the relationship between Putin and many Ukrainian oligarchs. In 2013, wide-scale Euromaidan demonstrations unfolded across Ukraine, fueled by the public’s growing desire for European integration; concerns over President Viktor Yanukovych’s refusal to sign a European Union free-trade agreement; and backlash against Yanukovych’s crackdown on protesters. Inaccurate coverage by Russian-aligned media of police brutality against protesters increased Ukrainians’ disdain toward Russian misinformation. This expanded support for stricter limits on Russian media in Ukraine. The unrest led to the 2014 Maidan Revolution and the removal of Yanukovych, which Putin used as a pretext for Russia’s invasion of Crimea.

These events in 2014 further strained Putin’s ties with Ukrainian oligarchs who had amassed a fortune in Ukrainian media. Many oligarchs moved closer to the Ukrainian cause because of political uncertainty, shifting public opinion and financial interests in European integration. Following Yanukovych’s departure, some oligarchs were granted by the interim government controversial political appointments in ethnically Russian-majority eastern provinces.

The reported goal of these appointments was to provide stability both for the government and for Ukrainians there, who were familiar with those oligarchs. However, Russia still maintained influence through other Ukrainian oligarchs with strong ties to the Kremlin, such as Viktor Medvedchuk, who held a 24.66 percent stake in a popular Ukrainian television channel.

In 2021, the U.S. government said Russia had put Medvedchuk on a “short list” of politicians it might use to replace Zelensky in a coup. Zelensky’s government put Medvedchuk under house arrest. The government also levied sanctions on some oligarchs, including Medvedchuk, for promoting “anti-Ukrainian propaganda.” At the time, many Ukrainians criticized this as government overreach.

But in 2019, Viktor Zamyatin of the Razumkov Center, a Kyiv-based think tank, suggested in our interview that this new gulf between the Putin-backed narrative and blossoming Ukrainian patriotism might also suggest a growing national recognition of the need for a distinctly Ukrainian information space.

Zelensky’s media profile builds on these efforts

Many political organizers I interviewed said Zelensky’s aspirations expanded existing grass-roots efforts to confront Russian propaganda, such as StopFake and Euromaidan PR. These efforts happened at the same time that citizens started watching more Ukrainian-focused television, a signal that they’ve more fully embraced a Ukrainian national identity.

These initiatives have paid dividends over the past month. Ukraine benefited from Zelensky’s personal media experience, and Ukrainians often recognize information manipulation when it is happening. The Ukrainian government, independent organizations and Western partners are also undertaking measures to combat Russian information exploits, including Russian plans to use fake videos of a Ukrainian attack as an excuse to invade.

Since Putin’s invasion, four Ukrainian oligarch-owned media channels have collaborated with the parliamentary channel to broadcast the same programming, reinforcing the Ukrainian parliament’s message. Telegram, a communications app used in Zelensky’s presidential campaign despite its susceptibility to privacy issues and Russian misinformation, has this past month been widely used by the Ukrainian government and armchair sleuths alike to debunk Russia’s wartime propaganda.

Some of these actions were controversial when introduced. Together, they have mostly helped Ukraine to build an information advantage against Russia. If Ukraine succeeds in resisting the invasion, these communication strategies are likely to help sustain a shared narrative of national resilience and national solidarity after the war is over.

Torey McMurdo (@tormcmurdo) is a PhD candidate in political science at Yale University and an information warfare-qualified officer in the U.S. military. The content expressed does not represent an official position of the U.S. Department of Defense.

The right is done retreating in the culture war. It’s time to roll back rights.

The right is done retreating in the culture war. It’s time to roll back rights.

Paul Waldman — Read time: 4 minutes

Columnist

Clockwise from lower left, Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) confer during a break in testimony for Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson at her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Republicans revealed a great deal about themselves during the confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court, little of it flattering. If you were paying close attention, you might have caught the signs of a significant change in their ambitions, not only for the Supreme Court but also for the broad culture war that animates their party.

After years of cultural retreat — on abortion, on gay rights, on race — right-wingers are now convinced that the moment is right for what they’ve dreamed of but could never hope to bring about: rollback.

They are no longer content to limit their losses, find remote hills where they can make a principled stand, and cultivate a sense of victimization. More than they have in decades, they now believe they can undo what has been done. They’re already showing signs of success, and this might turn out to be the most important feature of the Biden-era right-wing backlash.

The most obvious victory they’ll achieve is on abortion. With a 6-to-3 conservative supermajority, the Supreme Court is likely to overturn Roe v. Wade in months. Republican-run states are not waiting; one after another is moving to outlaw most abortions, as Texas has and Idaho just did.

The GOP senators questioning Jackson barely bothered discussing abortion, as though Roe’s demise was already a done deal. But a few did show that their ambitions go beyond that.

Fact checks found no inconsistencies in Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's sentencing record in regards to child-pornography cases. (Video: Adriana Usero/The Washington Post, Photo: The Washington Post)

Before the hearings, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) released a video in which she said that Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that said states cannot ban contraception, was “constitutionally unsound.” Not long after, Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) illustrated his devotion to states’ rights by saying that he even opposed Loving v. Virginia, which outlawed state bans on interracial marriage. (He later attempted to walk the statement back.)

Overturning Griswold and Loving might be unlikely, but consider a less outlandish conservative goal. During the hearings, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) used some of his time questioning Jackson to go after the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case that guaranteed marriage equality.

You might have thought that was a settled argument, especially considering how Republicans have treated the issue in recent years. While they haven’t changed their position on it, for the most part they just stopped talking about it. It ceased to be an effective mobilizing tool, and trumpeting their opposition to marriage equality brought with it too much political danger.

But they don’t seem to think so anymore. We don’t know whether the court majority would reconsider Obergefell as it goes on what will be a rampage across the legal landscape, but it might. That case was decided 5 to 4 — and two of those five justices are gone, replaced by two conservatives.

Meanwhile, nothing less than a sweeping anti-LBGTQ offensive is underway in state after state, supported by congressional Republicans and reinforced every day in conservative media. Sometimes it takes the form of an impossibly cruel targeting of transgender kids and their families, and sometimes it involves legislation like the “don’t say gay” bill recently passed in Florida.

It’s happening on race as well, especially when it comes to schools. Republicans are moving to snatch books out of school libraries and mandate a teaching of history that amounts to a new Lost Cause narrative: Racism was little more than a momentary lapse in our national judgment and something that no longer meaningfully exists — which means all attempts to address it must be dismantled.

This new aggressiveness reflects not a change in substantive beliefs but a change in perspective. It’s not that Republicans today hate trans kids, or women who need abortions, any more than they did 10 or 15 years ago. What has changed is what they think they can do about it.

It’s true that the GOP as a whole has shifted to the right since then, but that’s only part of the story. Polarization and the effective strategies Republicans have deployed to entrench minority rule have led them to conclude that they don’t really need to persuade many people in the middle of the ideological spectrum, let alone any Democrats.

Once you decide that, it alters your entire approach to politics. You can be more forthright, more bold and more ambitious. And it helps if the other party is a bunch of timid milquetoasts who are constantly terrified that someone might criticize them, which is exactly what Democrats are.

That isn’t to say that over the long run, Republicans aren’t losing these arguments, because for the most part they are. They can’t stop the ever-increasing acceptance of LGBTQ Americans. They can’t stop America from growing more diverse.

But for the moment, they’re done with retreat. It’s time for a rollback. And they’ll keep going until Democrats find a way to stop them.

Russia’s been hit by a financial Cold War

Russia’s been hit by a financial Cold War

Robert Person — Read time: 5 minutes

The Kremlin is juggling the stability of the ruble — and surging inflation

Yesterday at 6:00 a.m. EDT

In an interview last week, the U.S. official credited with designing sanctions against Russia described Russian President Vladimir Putin’s countermeasures as “desperate.” One of those measures is a little-noticed move to prevent capital from leaving the country. My research on the economics behind Russian grand strategy shows it is a tactic that will undermine Russia’s economic growth in the long run, but the Kremlin has few other options.

Countries seek the “impossible trinity” in international finance

Russia’s decision to limit the flow of money out of Russia, and even within Russia, is the predictable consequence of an international finance concept known as the “impossible trinity,” or “trilemma.” According to the trilemma, national economic policymakers try to achieve three goals.

First, they want to maintain open access to international capital flows. This allows growth-enhancing investment to flow into the country — and allows capital to flow out of the country in search of profitable investment opportunities abroad.

Second, governments want to maintain stable exchange rates. A volatile currency makes it hard for firms, investors and households to plan for the future, and the uncertainty hinders investment and international trade.

Third, policymakers strive to use their domestic monetary policy to stabilize the economy when they need to. When central banks lower interest rates during a recession, for instance, more money pumps into the economy, which stimulates investment and spending. Or, when prices are rising fast, central banks can increase interest rates to pull money out of circulation and tame inflation.

But countries can’t achieve all three goals

This juggling act has a big catch, though. A country can only choose two of the three goals, as trying to do all three at once is impossible. This is why Russia is in such an uncomfortable position.

Most countries prefer to use monetary policy to achieve macroeconomic stability. That explains Moscow’s recent decision to raise a key interest rate from 9.5 percent to 20 percent. The goal was to support the Russian ruble exchange rate by “soaking up” excess rubles on currency exchange markets. This reduces the money supply and targets rising inflation.

Because Russia raised interest rates to check inflation, that means the Kremlin can now only pursue one of the remaining two goals: exchange rate stability or international capital flows.

But sanctions on the Bank of Russia prevent it from using its foreign reserves to support a stable exchange rate. That’s because banks outside Russia hold upward of $400 billion of Russia’s total $640 billion in foreign reserves. Most of those funds are now frozen and out of the Kremlin’s reach, and Western banks are barred from exchanging those reserves on open markets.

The consequence is that everyone who has rubles is scrambling to get rid of a currency that’s suddenly worth much less than before. As people flood the market with unwanted rubles, trying to exchange them for dollars and euros, they further drive down the exchange rate.

The ensuing collapse of the ruble has been extraordinary. In mid-February, the currency was trading at about 75 rubles to the dollar. As sanctions came into full effect, the rate fell to $1 to 150 rubles, before rebounding somewhat.

Because the economic and political consequences of a ruble meltdown and threat of Weimar Germany-style hyperinflation are terrifying to the Kremlin, the Russian government now has to impose draconian capital controls if it wants to achieve its goal of exchange rate stability.

Russia’s financial Iron Curtain

Having chosen monetary flexibility and exchange rate stability, Russia has no choice but to sacrifice capital flows across its borders. Under current conditions, if dollars, euros and rubles were allowed to flow freely across Russia’s borders, this would upset Russia’s money supply and the ruble’s precarious position. So Russia has turned to capital controls to seal off its monetary policy from the outside world.

The trilemma effect is already in action — Russia has gone to extraordinary lengths to lock down the flow of capital out of Russia, and even restrict currency flows domestically. On Feb. 28, the Foreign Ministry ordered Russian exporters to sell 80 percent of their foreign currency and buy up rubles instead, a move designed to prop up the exchange rate.

The Russian government also blocked foreign investors from cashing out billions of dollars of investments in Russia, barred companies from paying dividends to overseas shareholders and restricted payments to foreign investors on ruble-denominated debt.

Next, the government limited Russians from withdrawing more than $10,000 from existing dollar accounts. More troubling for ordinary Russians was the simultaneous announcement that they cannot exchange their rubles for dollars within Russia. Instead, they are forced to hold on to their rubles, come what may, as part of the government’s attempt to prevent a massive ruble sell-off.

Are these tough controls working? Yes. Though greatly weakened, the ruble has stabilized recently to around 100 rubles to the dollar. Moscow has achieved its monetary autonomy and exchange rate stability, but at a tremendous long-term cost.

The looming financial Cold War

Even before the war in Ukraine and Western sanctions sent the Russian economy careening, economists expected Russia’s growth to slow. The recent capital restrictions now leave international investors unwilling and unable to invest in Russia’s economy for years to come.

Russia’s economic future looks bleak: Economists predict a 15 percent drop in gross domestic product this year. It’s too soon to tell whether the pain of sanctions will force Putin to back down. Nor do we know whether economic pain will spur Russians to protest. But there can be no doubt about the long-term economic consequences of the financial war being waged against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.

Robert Person (@RTPerson3) is an associate professor of international relations at the U.S. Military Academy and director of West Point’s International Affairs curriculum. A Council on Foreign Relations term member and faculty affiliate at West Point’s Modern War Institute, Person is the author of a forthcoming volume on “Russia’s Grand Strategy in the 21st Century” (Brookings Press, 2023).

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not represent the official policy or position of the U.S. Army, Defense Department or U.S. government.

I’m an optimist about higher education

I’m an optimist about higher education

Sam Altman from OpenAI recently did a thread about how “US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears.”

I have no idea how close to collapsing people think American higher education is, so it’s difficult for me to offer a clear view on that. But I think the whole thread is emblematic of a tendency among successful technology executives to understate the resilience of the elite aspects of American college education — the sort of schools that they dropped out of, in other words.

Altman dropped out of Stanford. Patrick Collison dropped out of MIT. Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard. I’m very bullish on all those places. But by definition, most of American higher education is not elite. Even though those schools and others like them occupy a huge share of the discourse, they constitute a very small part of the overall system.

I do think it’s true that the larger, less elite parts of the system are going to go through a rough time over the next few years — fundamentally not for the kind of big-think political or ideological reasons that people like to yell about, but because of demographics and economics. The United States has a shrinking supply of teenagers and a growing demand for labor, so the least elite schools are going to be competing not only with each other for a dwindling supply of customers, but with employers who are increasingly willing to offer what will sound like a very good deal to people who are not that into school.

So expect tumult. But the image you should have in your head is an 18-year-old who’s not great at math or particularly into books going to work at Burger King rather than attending community college, not a high school valedictorian choosing to launch a new startup rather than go to Princeton.

We’re running out of teens

When I first went to Camp Winnebago in the summer of 1991, there were three ghost bunks — functional sleeping accommodations that were simply unoccupied due to low enrollment. By the summer of 1996, they were all full. And when I returned in the summer of 1999 as a counselor, they’d added bunks.

This was pretty typical of the trajectory of the United States of America. My birth year of 1981 was a bit of a demographic dip: there are more people a bit older than me (hence the empty bunks) and also more people a bit younger than me (hence the re-opened bunks). If you combine that growing population with a secular trend toward a larger share of teenagers enrolling in college, we ended up with a huge college enrollment boom in the mid-to-late aughts right after I graduated. Then we got the Great Recession and a sluggish recovery that created a situation in 2011 or 2012 where lots of young people saw higher education as a refuge from the bleak labor market.

But the number of people in the 18-24 youth bracket peaked back in 2013 and has been falling since then (the 2020 numbers go up a bit because of Census statistical revisions).

This has resulted in a fall in the number of new first-year students enrolling in college. As with so many other things, this data reports with an annoying lag, but as of 2019 there was no decline in the rate at which young Americans enroll in college. But the actual number of new first-year students has fallen considerably despite that steady rate because the population of young people is dropping.

This, much more than anyone’s hot takes, is the basic business model issue for higher education going forward. Even if it doesn’t lose any appeal at all, it is running out of customers. And that now intersects with a labor market that is much stronger at the lower end.

Youth employment is booming

One of the biggest economic changes between how things are today and how things were 10 years ago is that right now it’s really easy to get a job.

It’s almost never the case that a person without relevant skills or experience can get a really lucrative, desirable, or glamorous job. But today you could definitely get a job. Somebody will hire you, teach you what they want you to do, and offer you hours as long as you are willing to show up on time and do what you’re supposed to do. That’s not really asking so much of the labor market. But it’s not something that the labor market was providing in 2012. And while it doesn’t necessarily make a huge difference to the median worker who is older and has some experience in a specific field, this is transformative from the perspective of people who are at the margins of the labor market.

That includes teenagers, where — as you can see — employment levels have continued rising from the recession low even though the number of teens has dropped.

The Atlanta Fed’s wage growth tracker also shows that nominal wages have been rising especially quickly for young people and low-wage workers.

So in addition to facing a dwindling pool of customers, higher education faces increasingly robust competition from the alternative of just getting paid to work. But while the discourse tends to care a lot about things like kids with a 1600 on their SATs doing the Thiel Fellowship instead of getting woke brainwashing at Yale, the typical case is probably more like dropping out of Generic Cardinal Direction State in order to get a bonus and shift from part-time to full-time hours at Walmart.

And of course, as the tech people themselves could tell you when they have their heads on straight, that’s how disruption works — it starts at the bottom end of the market with the customers who are worst served by the product. The biggest student loan issues aren’t with people who attended the most expensive schools; it’s with people who didn’t finish their degrees or who enrolled in programs that don’t garner much respect and thus end up not enjoying much of a college earnings premium. The fact that it’s now pretty easy for just about anyone to get an entry-level job while more companies are dropping formal degree requirements means those marginal students now have more options. This is driving some schools out of business or into mergers, and I think constitutes a real source of pressure on the institution. But rather than causing college to collapse, I think American higher education as a social practice basically emerges stronger.

A more competitive higher ed sector

For the first time in a long time, college tuition is growing more slowly than average inflation.

That’s largely because average inflation is growing so fast. But nominal wages are also growing fast, and that’s the important thing here. The ratio of gasoline prices to nominal wages is getting worse, but tuition costs are growing more slowly than wages. Aggregate student debt is shrinking as enrollment falls, tuition cost growth slows, and inflation rises.

You could imagine a situation where this causes a downward spiral for colleges as a whole. But I don’t think that’s what we’re looking at here.

Because the thing about college is a lot of people like it! Not just because college is fun and has parties and stuff, but because a lot of people learn a lot of interesting things at college. I think I’m pretty decent at learning things on my own. But I took plenty of classes in college that involved close readings of dense texts or detailed technical matters, and I’m very bad at studying that kind of thing independently. Without the formal structure of a technical logic class, I’d never have been able to get through the proof of the diagonal lemma or all the technical aspects of Tarski’s undefinability theorem or Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Some people absolutely could do that. But I couldn’t.

The discipline of formal learning helped a lot with that. And with reading “Anna Karenina.” And with understanding David Lewis’ arguments about causation and possibility.

And even though I generally don’t use this information in my day-to-day work, it actually does come up from time to time. But more to the point, doing the work of struggling through it taught me things about how to learn and how to know what I don’t know.

The nice thing about a world in which colleges need to compete harder for the patronage of a dwindling population of 18-year-olds is that the schools themselves need to try to raise their game. And with the labor market options for the less academically inclined improving, that means schools have an opportunity to focus on providing a good value to people who really do want a college education. That’s what college should be, not a rent-seeking opportunity exploiting economic fears. Rather than collapsing, I think good programs are going to shine while weak ones struggle.

The student visa opportunity

With domestic demand for college declining, it’s as good a time as ever to rethink the extent to which the United States has squandered foreign demand for American college education.

Student visas got less popular under the Trump administration, which kept looking for ways to make them more burdensome and harder to get. The smart strategy should be just the reverse. If you can pull an 1100 SAT score and are willing to pay tuition, it should be incredibly easy to get a visa to study in the United States. And if you complete a reasonable program and someone wants to hire you, it should be easy to stay and work.

American colleges and universities, despite the haters, dominate global rankings and are a strong American export industry. Some secular trends in demographics and the labor market are going to hurt the worst actors in higher education, but that’s only going to make things better. We should let the customers buy the product!

The Wrong Prosecutors Are Being Recalled

The Wrong Prosecutors Are Being Recalled

Lara Bazelon — Read time: 11 minutes

March 27, 2022.

An Illinois state representative just introduced a bill to authorize a recall against State’s Attorney Kim Foxx for creating “a crisis of confidence in the Cook County judicial system.” In June, San Francisco residents will decide whether to oust District Attorney Chesa Boudin, elected in November 2019. And in Los Angeles, an effort to recall DA George Gascón, who took office less than 18 months ago, has support from the Association of Deputy District Attorneys for Los Angeles County, a group representing local prosecutors. (Initial recall attempts against Gascón and Boudin, both launched in 2021, failed to gather enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.)

While it is true that any California elected official can be recalled for any reason, the provision authorizing this remedy in the state constitution was designed as a bulwark against corruption and malfeasance. Should the Illinois bill become law, it would do the same in Foxx’s case. What have these prosecutors done to warrant a recall?

Tim Butler, author of the Illinois bill, said Foxx gave “preferential treatment” to defendants like Jussie Smollett, who faked a hate crime more than three years ago. But Foxx said she used her discretion not to pursue charges against Smollett to focus on prosecuting serious violent crime—a routine decision in an extraordinary case. Responding to the special prosecutor’s report that she abused her discretion and misled the public about her decision-making, Foxx denied wrongdoing, saying that “differences of opinion as to how a case was handled do not signify an abuse of discretion.” Butler’s focus on Smollett is particularly strange because Smollett is being punished for his crime: After Foxx recused herself, he was tried by a special prosecutor, convicted on five counts of felony disorderly conduct, and sentenced to serve 150 days in jail and 30 months’ probation, and must pay nearly $150,000 in fines and restitution. (A judge just ordered Smollett’s release pending his appeal.)

Butler also said that Foxx’s refusal to file charges in a recent murder case exemplified her mistreatment of crime victims. But in that case—a 2021 exchange of gunfire in Chicago that left one person dead and two injured—Foxx’s office said it lacked sufficient evidence to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt and added that the police agreed with her decision. In the Gascón recall, proponents simply point to his policies such as refusing to seek the death penalty, demand cash bail, or charge juveniles as adults—the very positions he told voters he would take. (Gascón has since modified some of his positions.)

A statement from one of the campaigns to recall Boudin is similarly centered on an individual case, Troy McAlister’s. On Dec. 31, 2020, McAlister was on parole when he stole a car at gunpoint in another city and then drove to San Francisco, where he struck and killed two women. The statement blames Boudin for referring his previous arrests to the parole division instead of filing new charges. Since then, Boudin has been blamed for many tragedies—and for public health problems that the criminal legal system is ill-equipped to handle—by those who want to recall him. Safer SF Without Boudin claims that car break-ins and burglaries are at a “crisis level in San Francisco.” But it’s the police—not prosecutors—who make arrests, and the performance of the San Francisco Police Department (which has a nearly $700 million budget) is dismal. Arrests have declined by an average of 60 percent per reported offense from 2010 to 2021, according to a recent report from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization. The SFPD’s rate of reported offenses solved by an arrest—8.8 percent—is extremely low compared with other major city departments’, and the SFPD arrests Black residents at nearly 10 times the rate it arrests people of other races. (Editor’s note: In 2020, Chesa Boudin launched the San Francisco District Attorney’s Innocence Commission, which is chaired by the author.)

Whatever one thinks about the policies of progressive prosecutors like Boudin, Gascón, and Foxx, the recall movements are not about misconduct in office but rather about outrage over their policies, which the voters elected them to carry out. The usual remedy for disapproval of an elected official’s performance is to vote for another candidate at the next election. Recalls—which circumvent that process—are an extreme measure that should be reserved for extreme cases.

But “extreme case” prosecutors are not being recalled. In fact, quite the opposite: Two of the most infamous in recent memory may be reelected. Consider Todd Spitzer, the DA in Orange County, a wealthy, populous jurisdiction in Southern California, seeking to be reelected in June. For years, Spitzer remained close with senior prosecutor Gary LoGalbo, despite LoGalbo’s alleged serial sexual harassment of the women in the office. “This one is for the spank bank,” he allegedly told one colleague as he snapped a picture of her bottom. “I’ll use it later.” A county investigation corroborated many of the claims, and there are at least four lawsuits against the Orange County DA alleging sexual harassment by LoGalbo, known in the office as “Scary Gary.” (LoGalbo, who served as the best man at Spitzer’s wedding, resigned in December 2021.)

In February, a viral video surfaced showing Spitzer saying the N-word multiple times during a speech at the Iranian American Bar Association. Spitzer was repeating an epithet used by a defendant, but in the speech, he said “effing” to avoid using “fucking” while repeating the racial slur in full. The same month, former prosecutor Ebrahim Baytieh, whom Spitzer fired for his own misconduct, accused Spitzer of making racially inappropriate comments at a meeting about whether to seek the death penalty against a Black defendant. The case involved a double murder where the defendant’s alleged motive was jealousy over a white ex-girlfriend. Spitzer inquired about the race of the defendant’s other previous girlfriends, and said that Black men date white women to get “themselves out of their bad circumstances and bad situations,” according Baytieh, who contends that Spitzer violated state law by improperly taking the race of the victim into account. (Spitzer denies violating the law but admits he said that Black men seek out white women to elevate their “stature in the community.”)

Then there is Amy Weirich, the district attorney general in Shelby County (Memphis) who is seeking a second full term in November and has been credibly accused of committing misconduct for nearly 20 years. In 2005, the Tennessee Supreme Court described Weirich’s arguments as “improper” and “unseemly” when she repeatedly referred to two defendants on trial as “greed and evil.” In a separate 2017 decision throwing out the death sentence she secured against one of them, a federal appellate court characterized Weirich’s additional misconduct—elicitation of false testimony and suppression of evidence—as unfathomable coming from “any competent prosecutor.” The same year, the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility reprimanded Weirich for making improper closing remarks in a different murder case. The conviction was reversed on appeal, and the defendant later entered a plea to voluntary manslaughter while proclaiming her innocence. Weirich also enables misconduct by her deputies. In 2014, she defended one of her senior prosecutors whose “blatantly false, inappropriate and ethically questionable behavior” in another capital case led to another overturned conviction and his own discipline by the Tennessee Supreme Court.

Earlier this year, Weirich made headlines for her decision to prosecute Pamela Moses on a felony voter fraud charge, alleging that she filled out a registration form knowing that her criminal record barred her from doing so. Moses, who said that she relied upon her probation officer’s assurance that her actions were legal, was convicted and received a six-year prison sentence. A judge ordered a new trial after it was revealed that the state failed to turn over information pointing to the probation officer’s incompetence. Following a public outcry—Moses is Black and received a punishment far in excess of that imposed upon white people facing similar charges—Weirich shot back that Moses “set this unfortunate result in motion” by exercising her right to a jury trial rather than pleading guilty to a lesser offense. Moses is now out on bond, and her attorneys are pushing for Weirich to drop the charges against her.

I have seen the impact of true prosecutorial misconduct firsthand. Over the course of my 20-year legal career, I have represented innocent people who were locked up for decades for crimes they did not commit because of unethical and unlawful actions by the state. I serve pro bono as the chair of the San Francisco District Attorney’s Innocence Commission*, which investigates wrongful conviction cases. The cost of misconduct is measured in lives lost within the criminal justice system. The fact that prosecutors who misuse their role, sending innocent people to prison for years, face few consequences should give us all pause.

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that prosecutors have absolute immunity from civil liability for any actions they take during trial and have left it to the state bar to impose discipline. But that rarely happens. Weirich’s disciplinary case was unusual, and despite her documented record of egregious wrongdoing, the private reprimand she got was a slap on the wrist. Prosecutors who committed misconduct in criminal cases that led to exonerations were disciplined only 4 percent of the time, according to a 2020 report by the National Registry of Exonerations, which has documented more than 3,000 wrongful convictions dating back to 1989.

That is consistent with my experience. Since 2018, I have filed eight bar complaints against prosecutors in California, Minnesota, and Georgia with documented histories of misconduct in an effort to hold them accountable. Because I was acting as a disinterested law professor rather than a disgruntled litigant, I hoped that the state bar would take these complaints seriously, especially considering the wealth of documentation I provided in each case. But, as I noted last year, not one has resulted in so much as a public reprimand. And California is far from alone in this regard. In 2020, a Louisiana Supreme Court justice noted that it had been 15 years since the court upheld discipline for a Brady violation and that “no prosecutor in Louisiana has been disciplined for failure to disclose favorable information since, despite numerous published opinions finding Brady violations and high-profile exoneration cases.” This lack of discipline occurred despite Louisiana being a locus of prosecutorial misconduct, from wrongful convictions in Shreveport to fake subpoenas in New Orleans.

The progressive prosecutor movement that has taken root in the past few years was a reaction against such misconduct. It was also driven by a reaction against the punitive status quo: In Philadelphia, DA Lynne Abraham obtained more than 100 death sentences during her tenure from 1991 to 2010, and at one point one of her prosecutors was responsible for nearly 20 percent of all death sentences in Pennsylvania. Abraham was followed by Seth Williams, whose tenure ended when he was indicted in federal court on bribery and extortion charges. This is the pre–Larry Krasner history of Philadelphia, and yet it’s Krasner who faces a recall of sorts, too: Former Pennsylvania U.S. Attorney William McSwain recently said he will lead an effort to pass a state constitutional amendment to have the Philadelphia DA appointed by the governor.

The recalls against progressive DAs, whether they intend to or not, threaten to return prosecutor offices that are trying to turn away from these practices back to the era of hyperpunitiveness—and impunity.

The “Watermarked Ballots” Theory Ginni Thomas Texted Mark Meadows Is Even Crazier Than It Sounds / By Jeremy Stahl

The “Watermarked Ballots” Theory Ginni Thomas Texted Mark Meadows Is Even Crazier Than It Sounds

Jeremy Stahl — Read time: 8 minutes

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On Thursday, the Washington Post and CBS News broke the news that Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, had frantically texted with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the weeks following the 2020 election and leading up to the Jan. 6 insurrection to discuss an array of conspiracy theories alleging that the presidential election had been stolen by Democrats.

The implications of the report are astounding for a number of reasons. First, it means that the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice was deeply enmeshed in Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Second, it means that this justice’s wife could come under scrutiny by the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Third, it means that in January when Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenting vote in an 8–1 decision by the court to allow the release of National Archives documents surrounding the events of Jan. 6 to the select committee, he was protecting documents that might implicate his wife—a clear conflict of interest that should have demanded recusal. It’s uncertain how all of this will play out, though Democrats do not seem to have the votes to impeach and remove Thomas, who was released from the hospital on Friday after spending several days there with an infection, and will thus likely not attempt that route.

There’s much more that has yet to be made public: The Post reported that the exchanges “pause after Nov. 24, 2020, with an unexplained gap in correspondence.” What we do know now, though, is just the full extent that Clarence Thomas’ wife has embraced the most radical and demented conspiracy theories of QAnon and Alex Jones.

Specifically, the Post describes a deleted YouTube video forwarded to Meadows by Thomas. It’s worth diving deeper into that clip to further understand just how far into QAnon territory Thomas has gone, and how the conspiracy theory about “watermarks” that captured her attention after the election still animates many conservatives.

Here’s how the theory is introduced in the Post report:

The first of the 29 messages between Ginni Thomas and Meadows was sent on Nov. 5, two days after the election. She sent him a link to a YouTube video labeled “TRUMP STING w CIA Director Steve Pieczenik, The Biggest Election Story in History, QFS-BLOCKCHAIN.”

Pieczenik, a former State Department official, is a far-right commentator who has falsely claimed that the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was a “false-flag” operation to push a gun-control agenda.

The video Thomas shared with Meadows is no longer available on YouTube. But Thomas wrote to Meadows, “I hope this is true; never heard anything like this before, or even a hint of it. Possible???”

“Watermarked ballots in over 12 states have been part of a huge Trump & military white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states,” she wrote.

Thomas further said she believed that the Bidens might ultimately be locked up in Guantanamo Bay, quoting a passage about “military tribunals for sedition” that had circulated on right-wing websites.

The deleted video appears to be this Nov. 5 interview with Pieczenik with Infowars host Owen Shroyer.

In it, Pieczenik—a former Carter administration official who has spent recent years writing spy novels—describes a theory that has become foundational to those who claim the election was stolen.

As Pieczenik said to Shroyer:

This is really a sting operation, contrary to what everybody else said. Trump knew this was happening. Eric knew this was happening and warned the public. I knew this was happening, however I could not say anything about it. What happened was we marked, watermarked every ballot with what’s called the QFS block chain encryption code. In other words we know pretty well where every ballot is, where it went, and who has it, so this is not a stolen election. … All of this is part of the sting operation we’re running. And let me tell you that 48 hours ago, not only did we put markers on those ballots, but I can say now with the permission of people in the intelligence community and elsewhere that we have sent out thousands and thousands of national guard to 12 different states. … This is our counter-coup against the Bidens. … [Arrests are] coming not just down the road, they’re being implemented. … People will be arrested as of tonight, tomorrow, and it will go on for quite a while and this was a total sting operation. … We use [the watermark] in any way that we need to use it in terms of counting, knowing which ones were fake, which ones were not, it’s a very sophisticated code.

For anyone not steeped in this world, this is all a bit challenging to even comprehend. The debunking website Snopes, though, wrote a comprehensive explanation of this conspiracy theory a week after it emerged. As Snopes explains, “QFS” is short for “quantum financial system,” a supposedly secret financial system that conspiracy theorists believe was passed into law in the 1990s and will wipe out debts. “A ‘quantum blockchain system’ is like the ‘quantum financial system’— an imaginary notion,” Snopes notes. According to this “nonsensical” theory, the technology was supposedly embedded by the federal government on ballots to differentiate real ballots from false ones that were allegedly dumped into the system by Biden and his backers. As Reuters journalist Brad Heath reported, this specific conspiracy theory was supported by at least one of the affiants in an early Trump election lawsuit in Michigan. As that “witness” wrote on Facebook:

On Sunday, November 8, 2020, a recount of ballots nationwide was being done by elite units of the National Guards [sic]. To prevent fraud, official ballots had been printed with an invisible, unbreakable code watermark and registered on a Quantum Blockchain System. As of writing, in five states, 14 million ballots had been put through a laser scanner – 78% of which failed because there was no watermark to verify the ballot. Of those ballots that failed, 100% had checked for Biden.

When Ginni Thomas referred to the “white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states” in a text to the White House chief of staff, she was referring to a theory that the Trump administration secretly watermarked millions of ballots in order to catch the Democrats in the act of stealing the election. Conspiracy theorists also understood a connection between the “watermarking” theory and a 2018 QAnon thread which cryptically warned adherents to “watch the water.” And QAnon—the cultlike belief in a Democratic cabal of child predators—received a boost this week from a series of Republican attacks about child porn sentencing during Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings.

At this point, you might be thinking that more than a year after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, these theories might no longer hold as much sway in the world Thomas inhabits. However, less than a year ago, the Cyber Ninjas’ ostensible audit of the election results in Arizona used ultraviolet lights to hunt for secret watermarks that had allegedly been inserted by Trump. And just this week, Alabama’s Republican attorney general refused to say that Biden had been legally elected. Meanwhile, Shroyer—the Infowars host of the program on which the theory originated—is fighting charges related to his presence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 by claiming that if he deserved arrest “then Jesus Christ or the Dalai Lama would have been arrested for trying to be a peacemaker.”

Ginni Thomas was also at the Trump rally that sparked the mob attack on Jan. 6. Meanwhile, her husband continues to sit on nation’s highest court and participates in cases that might directly implicate his wife. The distance from the furthest reaches of far-right fairy tales to the highest seats of power has almost never been shorter.

The Kremlin tries to stifle Radio Free Europe — and its audience surges

The Kremlin tries to stifle Radio Free Europe — and its audience surges

Margaret Sullivan — Read time: 4 minutes

As the U.S.-funded broadcaster is forced to shut most of its Russian operations, its Web traffic indicates that Russian people are eagerly consuming its stories

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Russian citizens in Moscow lead a protest of their country’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 27. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has noticed a surge of interest its stories about the war even as the Kremlin has tried to restrict its operations. (Evgenia Novozhenina/Reuters)

Radio Free Europe, the U.S.-funded operation that got its start by piping American-flavored news through the Iron Curtain in 1950, could see big trouble brewing for its Russian operation in recent years.

The Kremlin kept putting the screws to its Russian-language broadcasts, throwing up ever more regulatory hurdles. But it was in late 2020 that the hammer really came down. The “media regulator” demanded that every broadcast, digital story and video carry an intrusive disclaimer at the top stating that what followed was the product of a foreign agent.

“Basically, it was like telling our audience to go away,” said Jamie Fly, the CEO of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, as the organization has been known since a 1976 merger.

That labeling would interfere with the private nonprofit’s mission at a core level. So, Fly told me, “we refused to comply.”

What followed was a storm of fines — eventually, $13 million worth. In May 2021, bailiffs arrived at the network’s Moscow bureau to start enforcement efforts to collect the fines.

The timing seemed anything but coincidental. The Russian government started bankruptcy proceedings just as the Ukraine war was beginning last month. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — which receives much of its funding from the same U.S. agency that oversees Voice of America — shut down much of its operations in Russia just as many international journalists were forced to flee the country, social media platforms were blocked or banned, and Russia’s independent media was being silenced.

It’s all part of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s effort to wage information warfare within Russia to eliminate any possible contradiction of the party line that the Ukrainian incursion isn’t an invasion or a war, but a “special military operation” necessary for national security.

But the story didn’t end there. The Russian people are searching for information, however they can. The proof is in the numbers, Fly told me.

In the first three weeks after the invasion, page views from Russia to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty sites skyrocketed to 26 million, more than 50 percent more than an earlier corresponding period. Video views from Russia to their YouTube channels more than tripled to 237 million. And this was happening despite sites being blocked within Russia.

“Despite the Kremlin pressure, people are still hungry for the truth,” Fly told me. “To some extent, they see through the propaganda, and they want to explore broader sources of information.”

He and his colleagues are particularly proud of the on-the-ground reporting in Ukraine, such as a March 10 video headlined “Ukrainian Troops Attempt to Drive Russian Forces from Village Near Kyiv.” There have been thorough reports about civilian deaths in Mariupol and about mortar fire directed at Ukrainian interior minister and journalists.

Many listeners and viewers are getting around Russia’s media barricades through the use of VPNs (virtual private networks) and “mirror sites” that duplicate content but use a different URL.

This reminds Fly of how Russians during the Cold War would try to tune in Radio Free Europe by fiddling with the radio dial: The Kremlin habitually changed the frequencies in an attempt to obscure what they considered dangerous American propaganda. “Unfortunately, we’re going back to our roots,” he said.

There’s been a price to pay beyond the monetary fines and regulatory hassles. In recent weeks, four freelance journalists who work for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty have been detailed or harassed by Russian police. Many others have been labeled individual foreign agents.

“It’s scary, but total information control was always the goal,” Fly told me. The organization has filed suit against the Russian government at the European Court of Human Rights, though it’s unclear how a verdict would be implemented.

(Against the evidence, the Kremlin has long denied inhibiting press rights in Russia. Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, last year deemed complaints about the obstruction of journalistic work “a fiction and a lie,” insisting that “we welcome the activities of the U.S. media in our country.”)

Suspending the Moscow bureau after 31 years of operation was a tough blow, Fly told me. But through freelancers, tips and videos generated by the audience and other means, “we’re still trying to report from the ground and we’re not abandoning the Russian audience.”

If information is power, this is a power struggle for the ages.

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By trashing Jackson, the GOP magnified a right-wing court’s legitimacy problem

By trashing Jackson, the GOP magnified a right-wing court’s legitimacy problem

E.J. Dionne Jr. — Read time: 4 minutes

Yesterday at 8:00 a.m. EDT

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) questions Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson on the second day of her confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill on March 22. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

By choosing the low road and smearing Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson with false charges and vile innuendo, conservative Republicans did more than engage in self-besmirching behavior. They also missed an opportunity to advance what should have been their larger purposes. They will come to regret their choice.

President Biden nominated an exceptionally qualified and engaging jurist who is poised to become the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. Republicans had an opportunity to address two problems at once — at no cost to their overall objective of turning the U.S. Supreme Court into a rubber stamp for conservative ideology.

By offering Jackson at least a respectful hearing, Republican senators could have taken a step toward easing the legitimacy crisis the Supreme Court confronts because of the GOP’s relentless packing of the nation’s highest judicial body. Rejecting extreme partisanship might have lowered the political temperature around the court, to the benefit of its 6-to-3 conservative majority.

And by avoiding the racial tropes they trotted out — denunciations of critical race theory, which Jackson has never embraced, and talk from Sen. Ted. Cruz (R-Tex.) about books teaching that “babies are racist” — the Republicans could have shown they mean what they say about judging people by “the content of their character.” Momentarily at least, they might have backed the party away from backlash politics.

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There would have been no cost to any of this because Jackson’s confirmation, now nearly assured with her endorsement on Friday from Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), will not change the balance on the court at all. She is replacing another liberal (and one of her mentors), Justice Stephen G. Breyer.

Alas, as Carl Hulse, the New York Times’s veteran Washington correspondent dryly observed, “Republicans could not help themselves.”

What happened last week was not just politics as usual. The relentless attack on Jackson’s sentencing in child pornography cases was despicable. By sheer force of repetition, amplified by conservative media, an obviously brilliant jurist and devoted mother will forever be branded in the minds of some Americans as “soft on child porn.”

It’s revolting because, as The Post’s Glenn Kessler showed in a meticulous fact check, the claim by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) that Jackson “has a pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook” amounted to “twisting the judge’s record.” It’s contemptible because as Linda Qiu reported in the New York Times, “all of the Republican critics” of Jackson “had previously voted to confirm judges who had given out prison terms below prosecutor recommendations” on child sex abuse crimes. The words “double standard” don’t begin to capture what’s going on here.

And it’s truly astonishing (though, alas, not surprising) that Cruz pressed Jackson on the racial content of children’s books that he said were taught at Georgetown Day School, where she serves on the Board of Trustees. Kudos to Jackson for telling Cruz of the books: “They don’t come up in my work as a judge which I am, respectfully, here to address.” The word “respectfully” did a lot of nice work in that sentence.

To turn the nomination of the first Black woman to the court into an occasion for raising racial themes Republicans plan to use in the 2022 and 2024 election campaigns was to kick away the chance the party had to show that it means what it says in declaring its faithfulness to “colorblindness.”

Of course there were Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, notably Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), who approached their task thoughtfully. But even the admirably gracious Sasse announced Friday that while Jackson was “an extraordinary person,” he would have to vote against her because “we disagree on judicial philosophy.” The clear message: The GOP wants to keep even “extraordinary” liberals off the court.

What conservatives don’t want to acknowledge is how much damage they have already done by taking control of the court through the raw exercise of political power. Beginning with the blockade of Merrick Garland’s nomination in 2016 and culminating in the rushed confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett just days before the 2020 election, Republicans have sent the message that not the law, not deliberation, but partisan manipulation is at the heart of the court’s decision-making.

The court’s conservative justices have reinforced this view with rulings on voting rights, gerrymanders and campaign finance that are tilted to the benefit of Republicans, moneyed interests and voter suppression. If the six-justice majority continues with its habits of overreach, precedent-breaking and indifference to the will of Congress, it will only harden the view that it is exercising arbitrary authority on behalf of a predetermined agenda.

A showdown seems inevitable. But Senate Republicans might have bought some time and eased the antagonism had they treated Jackson’s nomination as something other than an opportunity for mean-spirited political messaging.

Abortion activists must learn to lose well

Abortion activists must learn to lose well

In right-leaning state capitals, it is as though Roe v. Wade is already gone. Anticipating that the Supreme Court will soon limit if not eliminate the half-century-old constitutional right to an abortion, legislators are growing increasingly creative beyond merely moving up the stage in pregnancy at which abortion bans apply. 

Pro-choice activists are likely hunting for fresh strategies and innovative tactics that will help them win these fights. But there’s another element of a successful long-term campaign: learning how to lose. 

There are, simply, good ways to lose public-policy fights and bad ways to lose public-policy fights. If they can learn how to lose well, activists now have an opening for large-scale public education, not only in states that are set to pass new laws but the rest of a country whose citizens, media, and politicians are newly engaged with the topic. It is a chance to talk about who gets abortions and why, and what harm they and their families will experience if access to the procedure disappears.

One potential model can be found, surprisingly, in a movement now studied for its speedy triumph. While the cause of same-sex marriage is today recalled as a smashing success, for most of its life it was an immediate political loser at both the state and federal levels. That forced marriage activists to question what they could hope to accomplish in the face of inevitable defeat, and pushed them towards an approach that Evan Wolfson, the founder of the single-issue group Freedom to Marry and the movement’s leading strategist, called “losing forward.” 

The first breakthroughs for marriage equality, in the 1990s, came through state courts, but in each case — in Hawaii, Alaska, and Vermont — hard-won legal progress was clawed back by political opposition. At the same time, dozens of other governors signed bills to ensure same-sex unions would never be recognized in their states. But conservative activists soon realized those laws offered no defense against a state’s own courts ruling that gays and lesbians were already entitled to marry. So they redrafted their bans in the form of constitutional amendments, which more than half of states ended up adopting via referendum, almost all in a span between 2004 and 2008. Only one state then rejected a constitutional amendment when put before voters — Arizona, which ended up reversing itself two years later — and many of them passed by landslide margins.

In nearly every instance, gay-marriage opponents were assured victory from the moment they decided to change the law. Yet at first gay-rights activists gamely tried to defeat them: they raised money, commissioned opinion research, and sought the clearest path to turn lawmakers and voters against the proposal. Almost always they would turn to messages that aimed to build opposition to the ban rather than support for marriage equality.

Sometimes they focussed on technical details of how the ban was drafted, like the time in 2004 that activists went to Columbus to lobby legislators against a state ban by brandishing a letter in disapproval from Ohio State University president. Her argument against the Defense of Marriage Act: the Buckeyes would suffer in competition with Big Ten rivals because the new law would foreclose a school’s ability to one day offer domestic-partner benefits to prospective employees.

Most frequently, the campaigns would end up avoiding the topic of marriage or homosexuality altogether. “Proposition 8 would be a terrible mistake for California,” Senator Dianne Feinstein warned in the closing ad in the failed campaign against a 2008 ban in that state. “It changes our Constitution, eliminates fundamental rights, and treats people differently under the law.”

Individual legislative or electoral campaigns, whether for a candidate or over an issue, are reflexively structured to maximize their vote share. It’s quite possible that the university-competitiveness argument helped turn a few Republican lawmakers against Ohio’s Defense of Marriage Act on its way to 18-15 passage in the state senate, or that the Feinstein ad cut Proposition 8’s margin of victory from seven or eight points to under five. But they left gay-rights activists no better off in the broader debate than they had been before.

In the years that followed, Wolfson pushed advocates to think of these individual state-level conflicts as part of a longer public conversation. Instead of scheming to win the attention of political elites or media coverage for their issue, as activists often found themselves forced to do, opponents had elevated it for them. Rather than using arguments framed against the opposition proposal, they began using the spotlight to talk about why gays and lesbians sought to marry, prominently featuring same-sex families who had previously been absent from campaign ads. In 2012, not only did activists end up defeating a constitutional ban in Minnesota, but the type of campaign they ran — on the merits of gay marriage rather than shortcomings of the proposed amendment — created the political momentum for the governor just months later to sign into law that for the first time recognized same-sex unions in the state.

If, as expected, the Supreme Court this year upholds the constitutionality of a Mississippi law banning abortion after fifteen weeks, and that of a similar but more creatively drafted statute in Texas that courts have thus far permitted to stand, conservative legislators elsewhere are likely to immediately replicate those measures. A decision that undoes Roe v. Wade, even in part, will be read as an invitation to test what if any restrictions federal courts will consider off-limits. The Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion-rights think tank, has identified 26 states “certain to likely to ban abortion” in such a scenario. (Some already have so-called “trigger statutes” that would do so automatically.) A Missouri bill would empower private citizens to sue anyone who helps a resident travel out of state for a procedure, one in South Dakota would forbid consultations via telemedicine, while thirteen states have proposals to prohibit abortions for the purpose of sex selection.

For abortion-rights supporters, some of these fights will be plainly unwinnable from the outset, just as the gay-marriage bans were. Nevertheless, the natural instinct of activists will be to do everything they can to stop such bills wherever they pop up, especially since — unlike in the gay-marriage fight — state governments will be rolling back a right citizens have taken for granted rather than trying to block a new one.

In their quest to limit the damage, activists may be inclined to win over legislators by quarreling with a proposal’s particulars — like, for example, why a six-week cutoff is too early for many women to be aware of pregnancy, or the risks of using a novel mechanism to punish abortion providers. They may want to argue that the decision to let private citizens sue for damages, a concept developed specifically to keep courts from blocking implementation, violates our historical tradition of judicial review or creates perverse incentives through bounty rewards.

Perhaps as a result of the pressure or public-opinion shifts around the particulars of a six-week ban leads a state legislature to exempt rideshare drivers — who appear liable under the Texas and Missouri laws — from responsibility if they deliver someone to a clinic. Maybe those seem like effective mitigation, making the best of a bad situation, and shrinking legislative margins buck up abortion-rights supporters with the feeling of momentum.

But the bills will still become law, and the overall future of the pro-choice movement lies not in convincing the public that six-week bans are wrong, or that enforcing them with private bounties is misguided public policy. The movement’s goal is building a durable coalition that values a broad understanding of reproductive freedom, not just increasing resistance to narrow proposals defined by their opponents. Most of the near-term battles are lost, but the conflicts themselves do not have to be lost opportunities.