The 5 most ludicrous GOP excuses for opposing a Jan. 6 commission

The 5 most ludicrous GOP excuses for opposing a Jan. 6 commission

Washington Post

Opinion by 

Greg Sargent

Columnist

May 25, 2021 at 11:53 p.m. GMT+9

Violent rioters try to break through a police barrier at the Capitol on Jan 6. (Julio Cortez/AP)

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Remember when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell pretended he was seriously considering support for the commission to examine the Jan. 6 insurrection, and a lot of very smart people pretended to believe him?

Last week, the Kentucky Republican insisted he wanted to read the “fine print” on the bill creating the commission, which has passed the House. Barely 24 hours later, he announced his opposition.

Now CNN is reporting that Senate Republicans are all but certain to filibuster the bill. And Republicans are concocting a ludicrous new set of excuses for this action.

This will generate lots of outrage. But that isn’t the right sentiment. It implies that on this matter, Republicans can be shamed into following latent principles that they might otherwise adhere to if criticism of them is pointed enough.

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But their excuses are so untethered from anything remotely resembling good-faith argumentation that no such presumption is deserved. A better response is to point out that Republicans oppose the commission because it will incriminate them, and that their phony justifications are merely about obscuring this truth — and nothing more. Here’s a rundown:

The commission is too “partisan.”

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) says he’ll oppose it “until they make it bipartisan.” But the commission would be evenly divided between members appointed by Republicans and Democrats. And it cannot issue subpoenas without approval from at least one Republican and Democratic member.

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Other GOP senators have argued that the Democratic-appointed chairperson will have total control over staff picks. But that, too, is mostly nonsense.

The bill creating the commission requires the chair to appoint staff “in consultation” with the Republican-appointed vice chair, and “in accordance with rules agreed upon by the commission,” which require some GOP agreement.

The commission does give the chair some control over investigative direction, since he or she can seek information from any government agency. But control over staffing will be limited by GOP input, and staff will play a big role in setting that direction.

Indeed, the claim that this reasonable structure is “partisan” really means that for Republicans, only a structure granting them absolute veto power over investigative direction will be permitted to count as “bipartisan.”

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The timing is all wrong.

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) claims it’s “too early” to examine the insurrection. That’s strange, since nearly five months have passed. Blunt notes that the 9/11 Commission began work 14 months later, which appears to mean this commission should wait until March 2022 to begin.

Meanwhile, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) complains the commission’s work will end up “dragging on indefinitely.” Putting aside the comedic value in one GOP senator claiming it’s too early and another insisting we can’t let this run too long, the commission must issue its report by Dec. 31, 2021. That’s seven months from now — a relatively short time span for such investigations.

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The commission has been hijacked by politics.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) insists that the commission “has been hijacked for political purposes.” Similarly, Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) whines that the commission would “open up an area” that will help Democrats in the “next cycle of the elections.”

But the report’s deadline is before the 2022 elections begin in earnest. If anything, this bends over backward to prevent politics, including the midterms, from hijacking the commission.

Still, it’s telling that Hagerty fears the “area” of the commission will hurt Republicans — that is, the subject matter will hurt them. Which leads to the next objection.

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The commission should also focus on police protests.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) claims the commission’s scope should include “what happened in Portland and Seattle and Minneapolis."

What no Republican can seriously explain is why a full accounting of Jan. 6 should also look at leftist political violence (which Republicans themselves have relentlessly hyped). That’s because there isn’t any good reason for it.

Remember, Republicans spent months pretending that left-wing elements were responsible for the Jan. 6 violence, that the insurrectionists weren’t Trump supporters, and that the rioters were a false flag operation, among other things.

All this has been thoroughly discredited. Thus, any demand that a Jan. 6 commission also investigate leftist violence is really an effort to keep alive the fiction that there’s equivalent radicalization on both sides.

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Republicans want to water down the commission’s focus so it isn’t primarily about what actually did cause the riot — extreme right-wing radicalization, actively fed and exploited by Republicans themselves, and by their nurturing of Donald Trump’s lies about 2020.

Other existing committees should do this.

Some Republicans insist that existing committees can do this work, and that the commission is superfluous. But as Democrats point out, ongoing congressional investigations are narrowly focused on matters such as Capitol security.

And so, this objection is really a demand for investigations to remain narrow and to avoid a broader look at the causes of the insurrection — which, again, would implicate the role of Republicans in fomenting extreme right-wing radicalization.

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What’s more, it’s strange that Republicans would pass on a chance for a commission that they would have more control over than they wield over existing congressional committees.

Indeed, if Republicans do kill the commission, Democrats can set up a select committee. As a good Just Security piece explains, while this isn’t quite as good as a commission, it would create real investigative power, with subpoena and investigative direction under control of Democrats, potentially running through 2022.

So Republicans offering all these ludicrous excuses should perhaps be careful what they wish for.

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Carl Schmitt, leading exponent of Nazi political thought, would feel at home in today's GOP

Carl Schmitt, leading exponent of Nazi political thought, would feel at home in today's GOP

By John Stoehr

Why does "fascism" still get side-eye from mainstream commentators?

Journalist John Harwood had a piece in CNN Sunday reflecting on an essay published in 2012 that accurately predicted the coming of today’s GOP. “Let’s just say it: the Republicans are the problem” was written by Thomas Mann, who was at the time with the Brookings Institution, along with Norm Ornstein, who is still with the American Enterprise Institute. The Republicans, they said, had become “ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” Sound familiar?

I have been teaching a class for a few years, on and off, at Yale and Wesleyan on how to understand American politics. I assign Mann and Ornstein’s essay every time. But I didn’t know some important context Harwood provides, meaning that the essay landed with a thud nine years ago, even among what are now called anti-GOP conservatives.

Hardwood calls on Charlie Dent to comment. He’s a former Republican moderate from Pennsylvania, who is now a talking head for CNN. He told Harwood that, “I thought they overstated things.” He added: “I don’t like where we’re heading, but don’t think it’s inevitable that we get to that terrible place.” William Kristol pooh-poohed Mann and Ornstein’s essay, too. He told Harwood of his feelings at the time. “People like me were thinking, ‘Yeah, there are some kooky people around, but c’mon.’” That was before Donald Trump’s ascent and the consequent demise of his magazine, The Weekly Standard. (Kristol later joined other anti-GOP conservatives to found The Bulwark.)

It doesn’t take genocide to make a fascist. What it takes a particular and particularly coherent worldview in which everyone outside one’s group is the enemy.

Harwood’s piece is good. I encourage you to read it. But I want to make the case for a more prescient essay. It was published in 2004 in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq by The Chronicle Review, an obscure monthly supplement to The Chronicle of Higher Education, itself obscure. I assign it alongside Mann and Ornstein’s essay. But if theirs had little impact, Alan Wolfe’s had none at all. (No one in the United States Congress or the Washington press corps is being asked how they feel about it now.) With all due respect to Mann and Ornstein, I think Wolfe’s is more important, because it gives a name to “where we’re heading,” a name that even John Harwood seems to avoid.

Alan Wolfe is a political scientist and sociologist at Boston College. He is or was the director of its Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life. In 2004, he was searching for ways to explain Republican behavior after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the launch of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was, in other words, doing what Harwood did, but instead of looking to pundits like Mann and Ornstein, Wolfe looked way, way back to scholars like himself, this time to Carl Schmitt, who was briefly the leading exponent of fascist political thought. Fascism is “where we’re heading” now, but Wolfe saw the first stirrings of it over 17 years ago.

Here’s the tip jar!

Using Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political as a lens through which to see the politics of the early 2000s, Wolfe wrote that “the most important lesson Schmitt teaches is that the differences between liberals and conservatives are not just over the policies they advocate but also over the meaning of politics itself.” Wolfe goes on to explain that:

Liberals think of politics as a means; conservatives as an end. Politics, for liberals, stops at the water’s edge; for conservatives, politics never stops. Liberals think of conservatives as potential future allies; conservatives treat liberals as unworthy of recognition. Liberals believe policies ought to be judged against an independent ideal such as human welfare or the greatest good for the greatest number; conservatives evaluate policies by whether they advance their conservative causes.

Liberals instinctively want to dampen passions; conservatives are bent on inflaming them. Liberals think there is a third way between liberalism and conservatism; conservatives believe that anyone who is not a conservative is a liberal. Liberals want to put boundaries on the political by claiming that individuals have certain rights that no government can take away; conservatives argue that in cases of emergency … the reach and capacity of the state cannot be challenged.1

I think Alan Wolfe used the word “conservative” for a couple of reasons. One, because he didn’t feel like being charitable that day. Two, and more likely, “fascist” was not available to him in 2004. I like to think if he were to rewrite this essay, he’d make room for conservatives like Norm Ornstein, or Liz Cheney for that matter, in order to establish the boundaries of acceptable behavior in a liberal democracy in which some things really are above politics, such as the political legitimacy of a rival faction.

“Fascist,” however, continues to get side-eye from mainstream commentators like John Harwood, I think because it so easily evokes images of gas chambers. But as Wolfe makes clear, it doesn’t take genocide to make a fascist. What it takes is a particular and particularly coherent worldview in which everyone outside one’s group is the enemy. As Harwood said, Mann and Ornstein were right. Their diagnosis of the GOP is undeniable. But Alan Wolfe was more right. What’s more, he gave us a vocabulary.

We should use it.

—John Stoehr

Original link here: https://stoehr.substack.com/p/carl-schmitt-leading-exponent-of

What comes after the "defund" fad?

What comes after the "defund" fad?

(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

I think the May 14 New York Times article “The Spike in Shootings During the Pandemic May Outlast the Virus” by Troy Closson was a kind of watershed moment in the crime discourse.

Not because the article was so amazing, but because it represented an interpretive pivot on how progressives are perceiving the 2020 murder surge. It has long been orthodox in certain circles to insist that the huge increase in shootings last year was caused by the Covid-19 pandemic (something that I am open-minded about), which you see continued in Closson’s headline which describes it as a spike “during the pandemic.”

This idea of a pandemic-violence link was typically wielded to brush aside any consideration of issues related to policing and law enforcement. But in Closson’s piece, people who uncritically accept the pandemic framing are also telling you that the end of the pandemic doesn’t mean the tide of violence will recede.

As a journalist, I am frankly more interested in forward-looking policy solutions than backward-looking causal analysis. People often engage in rhetoric where the presumption is that “how do we fix Y” is very tightly linked to “X was the cause of Y,” but the real world often doesn’t work like that. If there’s shaving cream on the floor, you don’t jam it back into the canister. Ending the pandemic would be a good idea whether or not it was the cause of the crime surge. If even now even believers in Covid-Induced Crime Theory don’t think the end of the pandemic will reverse the crime surge, then I think we can agree that it’s time to start talking about solutions.

A backlash or not

I referred to defunding the police as a “fad” last fall, which I believe helped inspire my former colleague Fabiola Cineas to write this article arguing that it’s not a fad. People sometimes accuse me of not reading or understanding activist perspectives on this, but I promise that I have read them — I simply disagree. But, curious people should read her piece as it conveys those perspectives better than I possibly could.

Nonetheless, defunding the police was a fad, and I believe it’s now a fad that is ending.

Andrew Yang has been leading most polls for the New York City mayoral race despite criticism from wildly unrepresentative activist groups who are mad that he supports a police response to anti-Asian hate crimes and that his campaign is full of ties to the Bloomberg administration and the NYPD union. But the real kill shot for defunding is that more recent polling suggests Yang may lose after all — to Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, a former police officer who is running the most straightforwardly tough on crime campaign in the race.

New York voters rate public safety and crime as their top concern. In Portland, voters say downtown has become “much less safe” after the past twelve months and want an increased police presence.

Now on the other hand, Larry Krasner, perhaps the most famous of the new wave of reform DAs, won reelection in Philadelphia despite a high-profile effort to unseat him. I think I’m probably glad that he won. Handing out long prison sentences is a high-cruelty, low-efficacy means of fighting crime. The fact that the local police union got beaten so badly also suggests to me that some concern trolling ought to be aimed at these institutions. I get that cops liked Donald Trump, but for New York City union leader Patrick Lynch to give a prominent and highly-public endorsement to Trump is just political malpractice, the sort of which they try to drum out of you in the labor movement. The people who rep big city cops in blue and purple states need to get a grip and try to cater somewhat to the opinions of the people they work for.

Meanwhile, one thing about Philadelphia is that while they had 123 more murders in 2020 than in 2019, which is horrifying, that’s a slightly smaller-than-average increase for an American city in percentage terms. In general, the murder surge was uncorrelated with whether or not a county has elected a reformist prosecutor.

Mostly, though, I don’t want to hang the case for taking crime seriously purely on the basis of fear of backlash. Crime victimization is very highly concentrated, and an absence of backlash could simply indicate indifference to or isolation from suffering communities. The problem with the huge increase in murders is that it’s bad for people to be killed.

Murder is really bad

Not to be too much of a troll, but this huge increase in bloodshed is a very serious problem.

To get a sense of the scale, according to Mapping Police Violence, there were 1,126 people killed by police officers in 2020. By contrast, the increase in murders in 2020 added 1,907 victims just in the 51 big cities that we have data on. Mapping Police Violence puts on their website that “Black people were 28% of those killed by police in 2020 despite being only 13% of the population” in big text. That is a lot. But nearly half of homicide victims are Black, a greater disproportionality.

I had Morgan Williams, Jr. on The Weeds on Friday talking about some research he has done on race and crime:

When Missouri repealed an old Prohibition-era gun control law, there was a big increase in Black murder victimization in Kansas City and St. Louis, with no change in white victimization.

There was also an increase in the rate of police officers getting shot at, and a decline in aggravated assault arrests and weapons arrests.

Conversely, every incremental addition of 10police officers abates about one homicide and also a bunch of other violent crimes. In per capita terms, the effects are twice as large for Black victims as for white ones.

The extra officers also generate a lot of arrests on low-level “quality of life” charges for things like liquor law violations.

A point that runs through our conversation is that murder victimization is highly concentrated. Some of that has to do with residential segregation and concentrated poverty. But the other point that Williams makes about this is that you have a lot of “preemptive violence.” In other words, how a person responds to a given situation is, in part, a function of his estimate of the other person’s response — when your perception is that a lot of people are shooting guns and killing people, then you are more likely to want to arm yourself and use deadly force.

Below is a map I made on an interactive tool the D.C. government has for visualizing crime geography. What you’ll see is that violence is heavily concentrated in a few parts of the city — especially east of the Anacostia River and around North Capitol Street. Murders in the past two years are indicated with a red dot.

In any other context, these kinds of disparities would be considered a first-order social justice priority, and frankly I think they deserve to be in this context, too.

I read Randall Kennedy’s book, “Race, Crime, and the Law” over 20 years ago and strongly recommend it to others. One of the things he details is that part of the historical tradition of racially biased policing in the United States was essentially ignoring crime in Black neighborhoods as long as it was seen as contained and not afflicting the white community.

Addressing police staffing

In terms of “defunding the police,” the good news and bad news is that relatively few cities actually enacted meaningful cuts in police spending. That’s good news in the sense that it’s a bad idea. It’s bad news in the sense that if the spike in murders was clearly attributable solely to spending cuts, we could reverse the cuts and fix the problem. But in fact, the surge was much broader and more general than that.

What is true, however, is that the number of police officers per capita has been dwindling since the aughts.

State and local governments came under a lot of fiscal pressures thanks to the Great Recession and the fact that a lot of cops who were hired in the 1990s started hitting their 20-year retirement thresholds. With crime rates mostly falling, I think city governments reasonably did not see this as a big problem.

But if crime is rising, then turning it around makes sense.

During the 2020 campaign, I made the point several times that Democrats were pushing for state and local aid money that Donald Trump was trying to block. When Biden won, that aid money passed — over the objections of Republicans. State and local money are what police are made of, and I think Democrats should talk about that during the midterms. And if Trump runs again in 2024, Biden should talk about the many times Trump proposed cutting police funding.

The opportunity of summer jobs

Of course there are lots of non-policing ideas for reducing crime.

Raising alcohol taxes, as I suggested yesterday, deserves to be high on that list.

There are also several high-quality studies showing that youth summer job programs reduce violent crime. This one I think is particularly relevant given all the “labor shortage” buzz that’s been circulating since the great reopening of the economy got underway.

Twitter avatar for @jenniferdoleac

March 18th 2018

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Whether you think Unemployment Insurance, child care responsibility, or fear of Covid is what’s making it hard to fill job openings, teenagers are good candidates. They are at less risk of Covid, less likely to have child care responsibilities, and not normally eligible for Unemployment Insurance. So the circumstances are right for cities and counties to run unusually successful summer job programs that connect kids to work.

Paying for quality

Rafael Mangual from the Manhattan Institute parallels my argument about police staffing levels but adds two other “tough on crime” points.

One is that he criticizes recent criminal justice reform moves on bail and pretrial detention. Here, I think it’s important to distinguish between two different ideas. One is that there’s been a move away from money bail, in which your ability to avoid pretrial detention is essentially a function of the financial resources at your disposal. Two is that there’s been a move to engage in less overall pretrial detention. These are related, and in many cases both reforms have been made at once — but, they are conceptually separate. The alternative to money bail is pretrial detention based on some form of risk assessment.

It seems plausible that some jurisdictions have miscalibrated the risk environment and are letting too many people back out on the streets. That’s different from saying that we should make people’s ability to avoid pretrial detention conditional on having money at their disposal.

The other thing Mangual argues is that we have gotten too harsh on police misconduct, and this is making it too difficult to recruit and retain officers.

I do not love this idea. Police misconduct is a serious problem. If you go back to the Ferguson protests, the context there was a longstanding crisis of police legitimacy in Black communities that, thanks to social media and lower crime rates, was now spreading to white liberals. It’s true that higher crime and backlash to protest-adjacent looters have now delegitimized the delegitimizers in the eyes of many people. But to have a functional criminal justice system, you need to address the root causes of that legitimation crisis and hold officers to a higher standard of conduct.

That being said, I think you need to be attentive to the point Mangual is raising, which is that even if all your reform ideas are good, you are still making cops’ lives more difficult. If you want to raise the standard for conduct without making the job less attractive, you probably need to pay more — higher entry-level salaries at least, and then with a flatter pay structure over time — or else you’re going to have problems.

Everyone hates this analogy, but the basic situation with police officers is parallel to the one with public school teachers, yet with the partisan alignments reversed. A lot of conservatives got it in their heads that if you just cracked down on “bad teachers,” better teachers would magically appear to fill the void. The real world doesn’t work like that, and actually, after all the fierce Bush and early-Obama fights about weakening teachers’ job protections, very few were fired with cause because principals hate being stuck with vacancies to fill. What you would need to do is actually give them much bigger budgets to work with so you’d have fewer voluntary departures and more applicants.

I think the same applies to the police. And a very natural version of left-right disagreement about law enforcement would be for tax-averse conservatives to be stingy with financial compensation and say we should let cops be abusive toward marginalized communities in lieu of paying them, while progressives argue that quality public services are worthy of investment. I take the progressive side of that debate. But getting there requires acknowledgment that violence in the streets is a serious problem, and that while bad policing is seriously bad, good policing is vitally important.

Are Republicans no longer small-d democrats?

Are Republicans no longer small-d democrats?

Washington Post

Opinion by 

Greg Sargent

Columnist

May 25, 2021 at 4:11 a.m. GMT+9

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

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Michael Brendan Dougherty is challenging the claim that Republicans are generally abandoning democracy. Because his piece is a comprehensive effort to develop this counter-argument, it should be engaged.

Dougherty’s case is a response to John Ganz’s argument that Republicans are jettisoning any meaningful commitment to majority rule, "either through open rejection of its legitimacy or a more subtle redefinition of democracy into something unrecognizable.”

Dougherty says this is “overstated.” But in defending this, Dougherty simply doesn’t engage with important ongoing trends and events that are central to our politics right now.

Dougherty argues that Ganz’s claim largely is empirically false:

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Republicans run in democratic elections, and when they win, they take office and exercise the powers of those offices. When they lose, they don’t. And they begin positioning for the next election.

To buttress that idea, he says:

The January 6 riot was a disgrace. But it’s hardly fair to imply that “the GOP candidate’s supporters” were all for it. A small rabble of Donald Trump’s supporters did it, at Trump’s instigation. Most Republicans have shrugged at the arrests of those participating in the riot. Wherever material help was solicited in overturning the result of the election for Trump, elected Republicans balked.

Yes, Republicans have mostly condemned the rioters. Yes, it’s unfair to conflate the rioters with all Trump supporters. Yes, many Republicans do accept electoral losses. Yes, some Republicans rebuffed Donald Trump’s pressure to subvert the 2020 election’s outcome. In fact, those Republicans were instrumental in preventing it.

But Dougherty’s framing evades a great deal. Many Republican lawmakers declined to contest Trump’s claim that the outcome was illegitimate for many weeks, which probably helped inspire the rioters. They’re refusing a commission that would place the riot and the role of Trump’s election lies (and the GOP nurturing of them) at the center of its investigation.

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Meanwhile, Republicans who did vouch for the integrity of Trump’s loss are facing purges, censure and primary challenges. And the House GOP just elevated someone who strengthened her case for a leadership position precisely through her public questioning of the legitimacy of that loss and through her support of active efforts to further delegitimize it.

It’s hard to gauge the degree to which such activities define an entire party. But they plainly represent a serious retreat on commitments to democracy. They clearly raise valid concerns about how far Republicans will go in disregarding the idea that future electoral outcomes are binding and in seeking to invalidate them.

But Dougherty declines to engage with the real meaning of all that.

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Dougherty also insists liberal Democrats confuse conservative suspicion of unchecked majoritarianism and faith in “republican institutions” with hostility toward democracy. Dougherty grants that conservatives don’t support “unqualified majority rule,” but calls on critics to acknowledge “different types of conservative resistance to democracy,” noting that conservatives take cues from James Madison’s suspicions about democracy.

But as Steven Taylor notes, this confuses the meaning of Madison’s suspicions of direct democracy (as opposed to representative) and allows these to overshadow his more germane belief that majority rule is the core of republicanism.

What’s more, no one claims Republicans should commit to “unqualified” majority rule. Ganz certainly does not, as his reply to Dougherty clarifies.

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Liberal Democrats do dislike some less majoritarian features of our system (the electoral college, Senate apportionment) that conservative Republicans embrace. But the former do support liberal democracy’s commitment to safeguarding individual rights against majority encroachment. There are ongoing arguments about the content and definition of these rights — as there should be — but the liberal Democratic position is not to favor pure majoritarianism.

Indeed, it’s true, as Dougherty says, that liberal Democrats cheer certain court decisions overruling majoritarian legislative decisions. But again, this just reflects differing conceptions of things like the proper content of rights and the reading of the law. In some cases, liberals favor judicial limits on how far majoritarian legislative decisions can go in burdening rights. In others, conservatives do. We differ over specifics. (Yes, there’s motivated reasoning on both sides.)

But those arguments aren’t the ones driving our democracy debate. These are over how our representatives are chosen and over the rules of political competition structuring those contests. They are over how far one can go in manipulating those rules for partisan ends — and in contesting or subverting outcomes in those contests over representation — while still remaining faithful to liberal democratic commitments.

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Liberal Democrats increasingly believe the electoral college and Senate flout fundamental majoritarian principles of representation. Conservative Republicans don’t find that concerning. The former think voting should be as easy as possible. The latter think restrictions are good and are escalating them in many states.

It’s hard to specify the point where such GOP stances cross over from legitimate views of how the rules of political competition should be structured into something more fundamentally hostile to democracy. That itself will be perpetually contested.

But it seems obvious Republicans are moving on a spectrum toward greater reliance on anti-majoritarian tactics, and toward increasing manipulation of those rules toward that end. And it’s fair to worry that Republicans are moving toward maximal tactics in resisting hated electoral outcomes.

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I think those who sympathize with conservative populism — as Dougherty does — should acknowledge that such sympathies demand a more forceful challenge to these developments, and if they disagree, to defend that position.

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The right is dwelling on slanderous myths about the origins of covid-19

The right is dwelling on slanderous myths about the origins of covid-19

Washington Post

Opinion by 

Michael Gerson

Columnist

May 25, 2021 at 5:49 a.m. GMT+9

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) arrives on Capitol Hill on Feb. 11. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

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The universe of MAGA politics and media regularly defies Darwin. It is an environment in which the least-fit ideas tend to thrive.

Such is the case with its treatment of the origins of the coronavirus. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has heavily implied that the National Institutes of Health collaborated with Chinese scientists to engineer a supervirus that somehow got released in Wuhan, China. And Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, as is typical, turned an implied lie into a vile slander. “More than any other single living American,” Carlson has charged, “Tony Fauci is responsible for the covid-19 pandemic.”

The prosecutors of this charge have credibility problems. Paul has a history of playing down the pandemic, dismissing the importance of masks, putting his Senate colleagues at risk of deadly infection and refusing to take the coronavirus vaccine. If more Americans had followed Paul’s covid example, far fewer of them would still be breathing. Carlson, meanwhile, has set himself the task of distracting attention from President Donald Trump’s lethal bungling of the United States' initial pandemic response. In both cases, political need is the father of scurrilous blame shifting.

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It is true that a whisper of conspiracy generally moves faster than a briefing book of refutation. And complex scientific matters are particularly easy to distort. But this matter is not especially complicated.

The charge? That the NIH funded “gain of function” research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology that genetically modified bat viruses to become more lethal and easier to transmit.

The reality? In the aftermath of the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in 2003 — which emerged from bats — the NIH funded studies to sample and investigate bat viruses in China. It would have been odd to do such work in, say, Luxembourg, given that the guilty bats originated in China. As part of these experiments, viruses were tested to determine whether various spike proteins from existing bat viruses could infect human cells. That is very different from modifying these viruses to become more transmissible or deadly (which is the formal definition of “gain of function” research).

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Fine points are generally lost on committed fabulists. But this distinction is not fine. There is a large scientific and ethical distinction between genetic techniques that test the properties of pieces of viruses such as the spike protein that occur in nature, and modifying viruses to become more transmissible or virulent in humans. And we know from laboratory analysis that none of the coronavirus work done under NIH funding corresponds to the novel coronavirus as it actually emerged.

The very limited amount of “gain of function” research funded by NIH generally happens in the United States, under the strictest controls. The terms of the grant in China did not permit such research. The charge that the United States funded the creation of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19, is categorically false. Claiming otherwise is a despicable calumny.

This does not mean that the origins of the coronavirus are clear. It appears that the closest related viruses to SARS-CoV2 are found hundreds of miles away from Wuhan, where the outbreak first took hold. Most likely, this was a natural event, caused by a leap of the coronavirus from an animal species to humans. But there is still no clear evidence of how or where that happened. So the possibility can’t be excluded that this virus was under study at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (possibly carried in cell culture or in the animal where it evolved) and was accidentally released — perhaps by an infected lab tech. (The more diabolical conspiracy theory that the Chinese built the virus from scratch is much less likely, given that the pathogen shows no signs of tampering and used a method of binding to the human cell that was not predicted by previous research.)

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All this uncertainty has led to broad discontent with China’s compulsive secrecy. The first examination of these issues by the World Health Organization did not inspire much confidence, and was criticized by the United States, the European Union, a global chorus of scientists and the director general of the WHO itself. The NIH has strongly supported mounting a second WHO investigation, to be given unimpeded access to all materials needed to assess what happened in Wuhan in late 2019.

But this kind of necessary reckoning becomes considerably less likely if the U.S. political system remains focused on absurd partisan charges against American public health leaders. The manias and vendettas of Paul, Carlson and the populist right are helping shield Chinese authorities from scrutiny. Every vile, unjustified charge against an American official delays the next stage of Chinese accountability. Every moment in which American politics is occupied with MAGA myths about covid-19 is a Chinese victory.

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The case for higher alcohol taxes

The case for higher alcohol taxes

By Matthew Yglesias, SlowBoring.com

May 23, 2021

It turns out that alcohol is pretty bad

This is not particularly in the news, but I think one of the most underrated basic public policy points around is that the consumption of alcoholic beverages is a pretty serious public health problem.

Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a drink now and then, and I enjoyed more drinks more frequently when I was younger. A lot of people derive immense satisfaction out of alcohol as a complement to socializing or find winding down with a glass of wine at the end of the day to be incredibly relaxing.

But I don’t think we really have any kind of clear consensus on how to weigh everyday pleasures against public health concerns. About 40,000 people die each year from injuries inflicted by firearms, of which more than half are suicides. In some social circles in the United States, that’s seen as an acute crisis worthy of drastic political action to curtail the tide of violence. CDC stats say about 95,000 excess deaths each year can be attributed to alcohol abuse, of which about 10,000 are drunk driving fatalities. So looked at one way, booze is deadlier than guns. Looked at another way, gun murder is a more serious problem than drunk driving. Either way, to the extent that you’re inclined to see the gun situation as worth major legislative action, I think it’s certainly worth looking at alcohol as well. Indeed, scholars think that something like 40% of murders involves the use of alcohol, so the issues really are fairly comparable.

Obviously, we’re not going to create mandatory background checks for buying liquor or ban high-capacity kegs of beer. But there are some attractive policy options in this space — like taxes — that could generate revenue while saving lives.

Alcohol has gotten much more affordable

We tax alcohol in the United States, of course, but we’ve chosen to do it in a slightly odd way that treats beer, wine, and liquor differently.

As a side note, the favorable tax treatment of beer relative to liquor helps explain the rise of “hard seltzer.” You could combine vodka and carbonated water in a can, but that would be taxed as liquor. Eventually, people figured out a process for creating a flavorless malt liquor — “hard seltzer” — that is taxed like beer. But as you can see here courtesy of David Roodman, the big picture is that inflation has eroded the value of all of these taxes.

This is particularly significant because household income has also risen a lot since 1960. So the real value of the tax on beer and spirits has not only fallen considerably, but the affordability of paying the booze tax has surged over the generations.

And of course, there is also the underlying product. Certain things have seen their prices rise much faster than the rate of overall inflation — that’s normally labor-intensive services like child care and education. Other things, mostly related to computers, have gotten much cheaper. Alcoholic beverages are about average — the nominal price is higher than it was 30 or 40 years ago but in line with overall inflation. So as incomes have risen, alcohol has gotten more affordable.

Drinking causes problems — not just for the drinker

When German Lopez made the case for a higher alcohol tax at Vox a few years ago, he noted that “if you care about gun violence, or car crashes, or the current drug overdose crisis, or HIV/AIDS, you should care about alcohol — because alcohol’s annual death toll is higher than deaths due to guns, cars, drug overdoses, or HIV/AIDS ever have been in a single year in America.”

With crime on the rise, I think it’s particularly important to note the role of alcohol in perpetuating violence.

“Take any dimension of the problem you like, except for source country violence,” the late crime scholar Mark Kleiman told the Washington Post in 2013. “All illegal drugs combined are to alcohol as the Mediterranean is to the Pacific.”

He explained that surveys of incarcerated people reveal that half the people in prison were drunk at the time they committed their offense. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they wouldn’t have committed the crime if they’d been sober. But we all know that drunkenness reduces inhibitions and time-horizons (that’s why it’s fun, right?), and uninhibited people who don’t think about long-term consequences commit more crimes.

That interview ran eight years ago, and at the time, I think Kleiman’s point about this mostly played as a kind of somewhat theoretical argument about drug policy. It was perverse to be so harsh on marijuana and so lax on alcohol. The rational course was to legalize recreational cannabis in some form (including high taxes) and to also put higher taxes on alcohol. Today though, with crime creeping back onto the public agenda, I think it’s more of a first-order thing. If you want cities to reduce crime without resorting to more policing, higher alcohol taxes do that. And if you want cities to reduce crime by hiring more police, well, higher alcohol taxes generate revenue.

Back when higher alcohol taxes were in the mix as a potential revenue source for the Affordable Care Act, Kleiman estimated that doubling the tax on beer would generate a five to 20% drop in assaults.

Of course there’s more to alcohol than crime. But I dwell on the crime a bit because it’s politically salient, as it underscores that alcohol isn’t just a paternalistic public health issue (the way smoking is), and also because it suggests the CDC death toll may be an understatement. If a drunk person gets in a fight and the fight turns deadly, or if a drunk person does a carjacking that turns fatal, those are assault deaths, not alcohol deaths. But we would have fewer of them with less drinking. Alcohol is also strongly related to rape and sexual assault.

Alcohol taxes hit richer people harder

American politics is very averse to any kind of tax increase that doesn’t strictly target the richest people. And you will hear it said that alcohol taxes are regressive.

But alcohol consumption rises with income, and as these CDC simulations show, higher taxes on alcohol would hit more affluent people harder.

For the sake of honesty, it is worth saying that as far as I know, basically any tax on consumption of anything that normal people buy ends up being regressive with respect to really rich people. That’s because, on the one hand, rich people save a lot of money — recalling that something like buying a $3 million beach house counts as “saving” in the national accounts. Rich people also buy a certain amount of special rich people products like yachts and luxury watches that no normal person would ever buy. So beer expenditures end up being a smaller share of income for someone earning seven figures than for a normal working-class person.

This Gallup survey is also telling, revealing that abstention from alcohol is a low-income working-class phenomenon in the United States.

So unless you’re going to eschew literally any kind of broad-based tax whatsoever, I think alcohol taxes fit a plausible concept of progressivity.

I would add to the CDC analysis, though, that the American practice of taxing per unit of volume isn’t the only way to do this. For reasons that are pretty obvious, the public health people mostly worry about the minimum price of the cheapest drink. But you could combine a price floor with an ad valorem tax of X% on the retail price of the drink.

That would raise more revenue and make the tax more progressive. I also tend to think that, in basic political terms, normal people think that people who drink very expensive bottles of wine are ridiculous. But I will admit I don’t have polling to back me up on this — it’s just a guess.

Higher taxes mean less drinking

A lot of people seem to be skeptical that higher alcohol taxes would have a meaningful impact on any alcohol-related problems.

Conveniently, not only is there a lot of research out there about this, but David Roodman reviewed it for the Open Philanthropy Project and, in many cases, did replications of the underlying studies. And the evidence is pretty clear that higher taxes mean less drinking. There is even a convenient pattern that explains why this isn’t a universal finding. Roodman says that the “overall pattern across the quasi-experiment studies is that the larger the experiment—the larger the price change—the clearer the effects. The 7% tax hike in Alaska on October 1, 2002, and the 18% cut in Finland on March 1, 2004, are leading examples.”

So while you can find studies that find a null effect, it seems pretty clear across the whole set of studies that alcohol consumption is responsive to prices, and overall it seems like every 1% increase in the price of alcohol leads to a 0.5% reduction in consumption.

If all of that fall in consumption came from pushing light drinkers into total abstention, the public health gains would be small. The idea that moderate drinking is good for you appears to be a myth, but we don’t see very strong evidence for major harms from moderate drinking either.

Roodman’s view is that looking only at alcohol-related disease, “a 10 percent price increase would cut the death rate 9-25 percent,” saving several thousand lives per year.

Thinking broader on taxes

In terms of what’s immediately on the congressional agenda, I think Emily Stewart and the Biden administration have it right — just tax the rich.

Indeed, I would further note that Biden “pays for” new spending in part with a timing mismatch with his Jobs Plan. You have 15 years of revenue offsetting eight years of spending. That’s appropriate, I think, given today’s low interest rates. In effect, you are financing the infrastructure with borrowing and then paying it back over time.

But even though Biden’s proposals are big, they’re not big enough to be a “forever agenda” for American politics. As a candidate, Biden promised significant investments in Section 8 housing vouchers and Title I funding for K-12 schools. His expanded Child Tax Credit cuts out the richest 2% of families to save a little money, but that contributes to administrative burdens that reduce participation among the genuinely eligible in a way that saves another good chunk of change. But those are bad savings; we should make the program genuinely universal.

The post-ACA health care system really is a lot better than the prior system in a way that people often underrate. Slow Boring, for example, probably wouldn’t exist without the ACA exchanges. But it’s still really, really, really not a perfect system, and we need to do more here. I like the Data for Progress public infrastructure for care idea a lot.

But the reason Biden hasn’t even proposed the full Biden Agenda is there really are limits to how much revenue you can plausibly squeeze out of just the very rich. You need to persuade people to endorse some broad-based taxes as well. And while I’m not going to try to tell you that a higher tax on booze can pay for a full social democratic welfare state (it absolutely cannot), what is true is that in the realm of broad-based taxes, taxing booze is one of the best kinds of taxes — delivering significant gains to public health and public safety even before you spend the money.

The mess in Maricopa

The mess in Maricopa

Washington Post

By Dan Zak

MAY 21, 2021

PHOENIX — Something spooky has been happening here in Maricopa County. Weird spooky, crazy spooky, this-has-never-happened-before-in-America spooky.

“We’re in uncharted waters,” says Tammy Patrick, a former Maricopa elections official.

“It’s a clown-car farce,” says Terry Goddard, a former Democratic attorney general of Arizona.

“It’s unacceptable,” says Grant Woods, a former Republican attorney general who has since become a Democrat. “I think it should stop.”

“All you have left now is the crazies leading the crazies,” says Democratic state Sen. Rebecca Rios. “It is mind-boggling and frightening that it has gone this far.”

Jack Sellers, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, called an emergency meeting Monday to deal with the situation, which he described as “a grift disguised as an audit.”

Erin Patrick O’Connor/ The Washington Post

What is going on in Maricopa County? For the past month, in a basketball arena in Phoenix, Arizonans have been tallying ballots from the 2020 presidential election — even though the ballots have already been officially counted, and verified via a hand count of a statistically representative subset, for an election that was conducted fairly, checked repeatedly, adjudicated nationwide and certified over and over again, for nearly seven months now.

Every time, the checks have confirmed that Joseph R. Biden beat Donald J. Trump for the presidency. Every time, Trump die-hards have doubted the outcome.

And so, last month, the Republican-led Arizona Senate took custody of all the nearly 2.1 million ballots from Maricopa County and then gave those ballots to a private company called Cyber Ninjas, a Florida cybersecurity firm that has never conducted an election audit, and whose CEO has been associated with social media claims that the election was fraudulent and with pro-Trump lawyers who filed election lawsuits last year.

“In my 28 years of doing elections I have never seen a private takeover of any kind of public process related to an election,” says Kim Wyman, Washington state’s Republican secretary of state. “It’s the wild, wild West.”

I.

‘It has become so bizarre’

From afar, the process in Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum appears low-key and methodical. The audit is boxes and paperwork and rotating trays that carry ballots past dizzied citizens.

The closer you look and the more you listen, the stranger this situation gets. Over the past month, workers used ultraviolet light to check ballots for watermarks that don’t exist. Cyber Ninjas anticipated an attack by left-wing militants that has not occurred. Doors have been propped or left open in this “large, porous public venue,” as Arizona’s elections director described the coliseum. Pigeons have gotten inside, adding to the concerns that ballots may be suspiciously marked. A former state representative who was on the ballot — and was photographed at a Trump rally in D.C. on the day of the insurrection — was counting votes for a while. What was that about?

“Cant talk … signed a NDA,” wrote former representative Anthony Kern in an email. A nondisclosure agreement is yet another unheard-of component of this “audit,” which its critics refuse to mention without scare quotes.

“It’s amateur hour,” says Jeff Flake, the Republican former U.S. senator from Arizona. “It’s horrible for democracy.”

Ryan Macias, right, an observer for Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, watches as Cyber Ninjas workers examine and recount ballots from Maricopa County. (Courtney Pedroza/For The Washington Post)

“The ballots themselves can no longer be trusted,” says Ryan Macias, an election technology expert who has observed the process from the floor of the coliseum.

Rod Thomson, a spokesman for Cyber Ninjas, questions the credibility of critics who’ve been against a full audit from the beginning. “Cyber Ninjas has continued to follow its contract with the Arizona Senate to conduct the most comprehensive election audit in history,” Thomson wrote in an email to The Washington Post. “Cyber Ninjas has a proven track record in cybersecurity and information technology services and will continue to maintain a high standard of professionalism in completing this engagement as they do all of their engagements.”

Skeptical experts are not the only ones watching this engagement. Hashtag patriots are cobbling together a legend around Maricopa that fits into the cuckoo mythology of Trumpism. Day and night, all around America, armchair conspiracy theorists have scrutinized live video feeds of the process, from nine different angles, broadcast by One America News, the pro-Trump channel that has been given favored access to the property, process and people involved. Followers of QAnon — a sprawling set of false claims that have coalesced into a radicalized movement that the FBI has designated a domestic terrorism threat — believed that a carnival next door was a false-flag operation to disrupt the audit. “The first domino to fall” is how those people are referring to Arizona, and the phrase is being echoed by channels like OAN and stoked by state legislators who supported the “Stop the Steal” movement. Mike Lindell, the pro-Trump pillow magnate, referred to Arizona as “ground zero” at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year. On April 14, Ron Watkins, the website administrator who some suspect is responsible for QAnon, posted that “the world is watching Maricopa.”

“Watch Arizona,” Trump told Mar-a-Lago guests two weeks later, adding, “I wouldn’t be surprised if they found thousands and thousands and thousands of votes.”

My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell is interviewed at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando in February. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

The obsessives have read sinister meaning into the fact that one of the Maricopa County supervisors happens to be named Bill Gates, and that Dominion Voting Systems, whose equipment is used in Arizona elections, runs Microsoft software.

“It has become so bizarre,” says Gates, a Republican member of the board, which helps run elections. The five supervisors, four of whom are Republican, have been painted as traitors for conducting and defending a legitimate election. In February the state Senate fell one vote short of holding the supervisors in contempt, which might have resulted in their arrests. Outside the coliseum, a vigil of Trump supporters erected a huge sign that says “BOARD OF SUPERVISORS IS THE ENEMY OF THE NATION.”

Between the obscure tedium inside the coliseum and the carnival lunacy outside, it’s possible to miss what’s really going on in Maricopa: not an insurrection, but a kind of nonviolent adminsurrection — a haphazard, unprecedented corruption of both the democratic process and public trust, according to a bipartisan array of officials in Arizona and around the country who are worried it will spread to other states.

Says supervisor Bill Gates: “We’ve gone into the rabbit hole.”

President Donald Trump at an campaign rally in Goodyear, Ariz., last October. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

II.

‘You ain’t seen nothing yet’

To understand why the rabbit hole opened here, and why it’s gotten so deep, it helps to understand the terrain. Maricopa County is bigger than New Jersey and more populous than Oregon. Since Arizona achieved statehood in 1912, only a single presidential candidate has won Arizona without carrying Maricopa. Starting in 1952 the county swung Republican in every presidential election — until 2020, when Joe Biden won a slim majority of votes in Maricopa and beat Trump statewide by just 0.3 percentage points, locking down 11 electoral points that were crucial to offsetting losses in swing states such as North Carolina.

Arizona is a prize. You get it by winning Maricopa.

Political scientists had been expecting a blue Arizona at some point, given Maricopa’s 17.5 percent growth in population since 2010 and an increasingly younger, politically active and ethnically diverse voter base, buoyed by Hispanic immigrants and an influx of Californians, who are fleeing regulation and taxes and paying for haciendas in cash.

But heading into November 2020, Republicans in Arizona and elsewhere were primed to see defeat not as a result of demographic trends or political failures but rather as the fulfillment of a prophecy: Trump had promised Americans there would be fraud, especially if he lost.

At 11:20 p.m. on Election Day, when Fox News called Arizona for Biden, social media exploded with the rumor, rebutted by officials, that Trump ballots in Maricopa were rejected because voters used Sharpies. The frenzy manifested in real life when disinformation peddler Alex Jones and furious citizens swarmed the county’s ballot-processing center.

“We don’t know how this is going to end,” Jones bellowed, “but if they want a fight they’d better believe they’ve got one.”

Normal contingencies for verifying the results kicked into gear. Maricopa’s official hand recount of 2 percent of ballots found no irregularity; the voting machines passed tests for logic and accuracy under bipartisan watch. On Nov. 30, Arizona’s Republican governor endorsed the certification of Biden’s win.

That same day, at a Hyatt in downtown Phoenix, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was leading a rogue hearing hosted by Republicans from the state legislature — Republicans who believed Arizona was a red state, no matter what the numbers indicated.

Trump called into the event and said, “I know that we won Arizona.” He assured the legislators that their fight was becoming “legend.”

Giuliani told them: “I’m counting on you to find me a whole bunch of others in the legislature like you, or turn them into you.”

“I think it would be poetic justice if President Trump won by 2,020 votes” after a review of the ballots, said state Sen. Sonny Borrelli (R). He was followed by state Rep. Mark Finchem (R), who five weeks later would be in the area of the U.S. Capitol, as the insurrection unfolded, though he would deny immediate awareness of it.

“Ladies and gentleman, this is a skirmish,” said Finchem on Nov. 30, laying out a vision for the coming months. “You ain’t seen nothing yet. Because when Satan wants to extinguish a light, he will stop at nothing. So be on your guard, put on the full armor of God, and be prepared to fight.”

Trump supporters outside the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum, where the audit of Maricopa County ballots was being conducted. (Courtney Pedroza/For The Washington Post)

III.

‘A new revolution is upon us’

Shelby and Steve were prepared to fight.

“We’re just normal people,” says Shelby Busch. “We’re grandparents.”

She works in the medical field and is a district chair for the Maricopa County Republicans. Steve Robinson, her fiance, works in maintenance. They had distrusted elections for years, even when Trump won in 2016, so they led the charge for a full audit in Maricopa. They say they had heard about hackable software and seen video of purported ballot manipulation. Something was wrong, they thought, and recounting all the votes was a way to get to the bottom of it.

On Dec. 29 they co-founded a political action committee called We the People AZ Alliance, whose website promises to “hold elected representatives accountable” and “take our country back!”

The alliance held rallies outside the Arizona Capitol complex Dec. 30 and Jan. 6 to support an audit and issue a “warning” to politicians.

“A new revolution is upon us,” Steve told a crowd in Phoenix, not long after law enforcement had quelled the insurrection in Washington.

“Let’s get five tyrants out of office,” Shelby said at the microphone, referring to the Maricopa County supervisors, whom they hoped to recall from their positions.

Their PAC started receiving donations from individuals around the country: $100 from a plumber in Hillsboro, Wis., $200 from a real estate agent in Pacific Palisades, Calif., $7,000 from a retired firearms dealer in Apache Junction, Ariz.

In March they got $50,000 from Lindell, the founder of MyPillow, who had recently appeared by video at one of their rallies.

“This is evil versus good, and it’s going to be amazing,” Lindell said to hundreds of cheering Arizonans in Queen Creek, Ariz., on March 10. “We get through this, I believe Donald Trump will be back in office this summer.”

Arizona Senate President Karen Fann (R) said the audit “is not about Trump. It’s not about overturning the election or the electors or anybody else.” (Ross D. Franklin/AP)

Maricopa County and the Republican House speaker declined to legitimize the movement, leaving the Arizona front of Trump’s war to the state Senate, which subpoenaed the county for the ballots. Around the time Trump was calling Georgia’s secretary of state, asking him to “find” 11,780 votes, Maricopa’s Board of Supervisors was receiving phone calls from Giuliani and others who wanted intervention in Arizona.

“It felt like the members of the Senate were being used by outside forces,” says supervisor Bill Gates. “These outside forces reached out to us. And we were not going to engage in those conversations. We had a job to do, and we did it.” (Giuliani could not be reached for comment.)

Karen Fann, the president of the Senate, had a reputation as a reasonable and levelheaded leader. Fann’s district consists mostly of Yavapai County, which nearly rivals Maricopa in land area but contains roughly a twentieth of the population. Between 2016 and 2020, as his margins deflated in Arizona cities and suburbs, Trump nudged up his vote share in Yavapai by 1.4 percentage points. Fann’s decision to back an audit was in service to her constituents, she told “Arizona Horizon,” a local PBS program. She said she received “thousands and thousands” of emails in support, and tried to make the process bipartisan. The Senate retained Cyber Ninjas for $150,000 after Fann consulted with other legislators. (She later explained that a forensics firm that worked for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security would have cost $8 million.)

Fann declined to comment for this article, but she told “Arizona Horizon” that the audit “is not about Trump. It’s not about overturning the election or the electors or anybody else. This is about: 48 percent of the voters in Arizona have no confidence in our electoral system right now, rightly or wrongly so, for whatever reason. And they deserve answers.”

Privately, Fann has described it as a no-win situation, according to state Sen. Rios. Current and former state officials are bewildered by Fann’s actions, and fret about the motives and consequences of the audit. Is it a plan to find “evidence” to justify suppressive voter laws? Who benefits from distrust and chaos?

“Arizona, like other states, has always had that fringe element,” says former senator Flake, “but I guess the only difference now is that some of them are in control.”

Workers and volunteers for Cyber Ninjas examine and recount ballots at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix. (Courtney Pedroza/For The Washington Post)

IV.

‘They are writing the playbook here’

The fringe, as Flake calls it, has taken center stage at the state fairgrounds. The Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum opened on the fairgrounds in 1965 with Bob Hope hosting the Ice Follies, according to the Phoenix New Times. Elvis played here, as did the Phoenix Suns for about a quarter-century. In recent years the coliseum hosted gun shows, a jujitsu championship and MC Hammer. Now it is home to “the most comprehensive forensic election audit in the history of our galaxy,” according to a Twitter account associated with the state Senate.

The activity on the coliseum floor has a Kafka-meets-Willy Wonka vibe. Workers and volunteers in color-coded T-shirts carry out various administrative tasks, Oompa-Loompa-like. Ballots are withdrawn from a chain-link rent-a-fence, slowly unboxed in batches of 100 and spun two at a time on color-coded trays, where three workers look for the tiny bubble (filled in for either BIDEN or TRUMP) as the ballots move by. Then the ballots are reboxed to await their turn on a paper forensics table, where they are photographed. The images are uploaded to laptops, which experts say have not been independently tested or certified. Eventually the ballots are carted to another chain-link cage that is labeled with a pink slip of paper that says “COMPLETE.” When the audit paused May 14 to clear out for high school graduations, about 20 percent of ballots had been tabulated.

“We got 6,000 students — them and their family members — that are going down to the coliseum, just a few yards away from our ballots and our machines,” said county supervisor Steve Gallardo during the emergency meeting earlier this week. “Is that ‘ballot security’?”

The plan is to restart the audit Monday, despite its trail of oddities and the mounting fury over its execution. While Arizonans are carrying out the physical process of the audit, semi-mysterious out-of-towners seem to be involved in its funding and execution. A website started by Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock who claims fraud cost Trump reelection, is soliciting volunteers to work at the audit while trying to raise $2.8 million to support it. (Reached by text, Byrne did not answer a question about where the money was going.) Byrne says he has donated $1 million personally, and predicts an unspecified “titanic victory” around Memorial Day.

Another name that’s echoing around is Jovan Hutton Pulitzer. A “document pattern recognition expert,” Pulitzer once billed himself as the commander of TreasureForce, the “world’s foremost terrestrial treasure recovery team.” He is also the author of many books, including a survival guide titled “How to Cut Off Your Arm and Eat Your Dog.” Pulitzer says he developed a “virtual machine and platform” that can evaluate the authenticity of ballot paper. People orbiting the audit have suggested that his technology is being used to analyze photos of the Maricopa ballots.

“I can’t confirm or deny that,” Pulitzer said during an earnest two-hour phone conversation that covered everything from hanging chads to conquistador spears.

Why not?

“Everybody in these things has NDAs,” he says, adding that he’s a conservative but not a “stop the stealer,” or a QAnon adherent, or the “failed treasure hunter” that Georgia’s secretary of state labeled him in December, after he claimed there were vulnerabilities in Georgia’s election systems.

Erin Patrick O’Connor/ The Washington Post

“I can tell you there are issues and problems, and if these machines can’t tell a real ballot from a fake ballot, we need to look at the ballots to understand what’s going on,” Pulitzer says, adding: “My job is just to understand what happened. I. Don’t. Know. What. Happened.”

That’s a big refrain in Maricopa, and around the country. Something went wrong, and we don’t really know what it is.

“I’m trying to get to the bottom of it,” Sen. Fann has said, without specifying what “it” is.

“The election was stolen,” tweeted Wendy Rogers, a newly elected Republican state senator, on the day of Giuliani’s event in November. “We will get to the bottom of it. People must go to jail.”

“There’s lots of gaps and holes and, really, just misinformation,” said state Sen. Warren Petersen (R) on Tuesday, adding: “I’m trying to get to the bottom of some of these things.”

This is just a race to the bottom, according to current and former officials, who say some Arizona Republicans are worried about getting “Mike Pence’d” — facing political or possibly physical danger — if they don’t support Trump’s continuing attack on democracy. The Maricopa supervisors have been harassed outside their homes, assigned police protection and decamped to Airbnbs to avoid threats.

“My colleagues across the country in Georgia and Michigan and many other states have protection details because their lives have been threatened” since the election, says Kim Wyman, the Washington secretary of state. “It’s frightening.”

Democrat Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, received a security detail after a deluge of threats, but she has remained in the fray. As the state’s top election official, she has excoriated the “fraudit” all over the mainstream media, partly because she fears it will become the norm.

“Look, this is comical to watch,” Hobbs says of the Maricopa mess. “We’ve all laughed at it, watching it unfold,” but “it is very serious. This is precedent-setting. They are writing the playbook here.”

Republican county committees around the country are making requests to do forensic audits, according to multiple state secretaries of state, and local officials nationwide are fielding bizarre offers from unqualified “auditors.” Byrne, the former Overstock CEO, is now backing an audit push in Pennsylvania. Earlier this month, hundreds of people showed up at a town meeting in Windham, N.H., to demand an audit; they turned their backs on the board of selectmen and chanted, “Stop the Steal.” An accountant from Nashua, N.H., has apparently raised $74,000 through a Christian crowdfunding site in an effort to hire Jovan Pulitzer to conduct a “people’s audit” in New Hampshire (Pulitzer says he is not an auditor, and did not initiate contact with New Hampshire or its citizens).

None of this is visible from the floor of the Arizona arena. But on Twitch, Telegram and YouTube, you can see how the rabbit hole that has opened in Arizona is part of a larger warren; a series of tunnels that allow Internet ravings to worm their way into the rhetoric of officials. Recently a claim from one of Lindell’s online documentaries — about a “systemic algorithm” used to elect Biden — ping-ponged around Twitter and into the timeline of an Arizona state senator. A critical post from Ron Watkins on voting software made its way to state Rep. Finchem’s Gab account via a tweet from an OAN reporter.

“There’s nothing we’re doing here that you can’t do in your state,” a Scottsdale real estate agent named Gail said May 7 to her 6,000 subscribers on YouTube. “We contact our senators consistently, and get a ground operation going.”

The state Senate may be orchestrating this audit to shore up the security of future elections, but people online believe it will help put Trump back in the Oval Office. The “domino” metaphor is repeated on message boards and social media, in tweets and videos.

“It’s all ridiculous, but there are people that believe this,” Hobbs says. “We saw what happened on January 6th. I wouldn’t put it out of the realm of possibility that something like that could happen again.”

State Rep. Mark Finchem (R) at his desk during the opening of the Arizona Legislature in January. (Ross D. Franklin/AP)

V.

‘Good intentions’

The audit was supposed to wrap May 14, but now it will end sometime in June, according to Cyber Ninjas, which is still operating under the $150,000 contract with the Senate. What will the audit really cost, though, and who’s paying for it? It took about 17 days to count around a fifth of the ballots; at that pace, the counting would go through July.

Meanwhile, access to voting materials has been granted so permissively via the audit in Maricopa — and through court cases in Michigan and other states — that experts are nervous about the security implications.

“What really worries me is that so many groups are getting the kind of access to the election system that you’d need to make fraud happen in the future,” says J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, adding: “Up until 2020 we were worried about very well-resourced foreign actors like Russia,” but “what’s happening now is creating a very serious potential for a serious domestic threat in 2022 and 2024, the likes of which we’ve never had before. There’s never been this confluence of political actors, technical actors and access.”

Hypothetically speaking, if Maricopa is the front line of a slow-moving adminsurrection, this is what a perimeter breach might look like.

As it stands, private companies and individuals have been granted unprecedented access to equipment, the Arizona Republic reported Wednesday, and the county’s voting systems could be unusable after the audit. Cyber Ninjas told The Post that “all proper care and procedures as outlined in the terms of the contract were executed to ensure confidence with the equipment being used.” But on Thursday Hobbs said this equipment was compromised because “election officials do not know what was done to the machines while under Cyber Ninjas’ control.”

More broadly, Hobbs wonders if bad actors will start infiltrating poll-worker recruitment. Others worry responsible elections officials will be intimidated out of their jobs and replaced by partisan crusaders, who may believe they have to kick in the doors of the sanctum to protect it.

State Rep. Finchem, the Republican who at Giuliani’s hearing spoke of battling Satan, is campaigning to replace Hobbs as secretary of state in 2022. In a recent interview with the podcast “Red Pill News” — a source for news about QAnon and “President Trump’s war on the Deep State,” per a description on iTunes — he suggested that, if fraud is found in Maricopa, the legislature could “reclaim” the state’s presidential electors.

“At this point, that’s the best I’m hoping for,” said Finchem.

Finchem, who did not respond to requests for comment, seems to really believe in what he’s doing. Sincerity underpins “participatory disinformation,” which is the interplay between concerned citizens, who rile each other up with these claims, and the actors who conscript them into real-world battle, explains researcher Kate Starbird, who studies online rumors and social media usage during crises. This is how you get rallies to “Stop the Steal,” affidavits that cry foul at polling places, and 7 in 10 Republicans believing that Biden did not legitimately win enough votes to win the presidency, according to a recent CNN poll.

Matthew Masterson, former senior cybersecurity adviser at the Department of Homeland Security, says he talks every day to elections officials who are being swamped by this type of disinformation.

“This is part of their reality: doing everything by the book, and still being presented with outlandish theories and lies,” Masterson said on a May 4 call coordinated by the National Task Force on Election Crises. “The only people that benefit are those that are raising money off this and, more directly, Vladimir Putin in Russia, who gets to watch us undermine our own democracy.”

Participatory disinformation motivated the Jan. 6 insurrection, says Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington. Before and after Nov. 3, elites spread a message of a rigged election. Audiences engaged with this message, either tactically or sincerely, by generating false or misleading stories of voter fraud that sometimes caught the attention of elites, who then amplified those stories and created an echo chamber of collective grievance that became increasingly violent in tone. Starbird mapped a “retweet network” of the “Stop the Steal” movement, and Arizona was well represented in the run-up to Jan. 6: Finchem, Arizona GOP Chair Kelli Ward and Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) were major nodes of disinformation that encircled Trump’s and spoked outward to countless ordinary Americans, some of whom were ready to take action.

“So many people are doing it with good intentions,” Starbird says. “They’re sincere believers trying to find evidence” to support their theories — which may lead them to misinterpret events. “They’re searching for a greater truth,” and “getting all this positive feedback” on social media. “Your celebrity influencers are actually validating you and telling you that you mean something. It’s such a powerful kind of political participation.”

Last month, about 10 days before ballots started arriving at the coliseum, an event titled “Fight for Freedom: Elections Exposed” was held in Las Vegas. Lindell and Patrick Byrne were featured on the flier. So was Jovan Pulitzer, listed as a “kinematic inventor.” So were self-described normal people: Shelby Busch and Steve Robinson, founders of We the People AZ Alliance. Robinson patched Lindell in via Zoom, and Busch helped to introduce him.

“I feel so blessed to be a part of this,” the pillow king said, to applause from the audience. “And to be fighting out there. I know all of you are doing the same thing.”

Shelby Busch, with her fiance Steve Robinson behind her, speaks at the Arizona Revival Rally at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Phoenix on May 8. (Courtney Pedroza/For The Washington Post)

VI.

‘You don’t take from God’

Shelby Busch and Steve Robinson’s latest rally in Arizona was billed as a “revival,” and for good reason. At a veterans’ memorial near the State Capitol on May 8, speakers framed the audit in biblical terms.

“Put your faith in God, like we have with this audit,” said a woman named Patty, wearing a “Latinas for Trump” shirt. “The election was stolen, and you don’t take from God. I will die fighting. We all need to be there. It is a war.”

“We know who wins in the end,” said a congressional candidate named Jeff Zink, seeming to equate the certainty of God’s final victory with the eventuality of Trump’s.

“That heaviness you feel every day when you wake up?” Busch said. “That’s spiritual warfare.”

Robinson, who referred to Trump as “our rightful president,” said “several states in this nation are soon to follow” Arizona.

After Busch and Robinson spoke to the crowd of about 100, they hustled over to the shade of the state Senate building. They were scheduled to speak remotely at a rally in Georgia featuring Lindell. They smoked Camels and waited in the virtual green room on Robinson’s phone. Away from the microphones, their rhetoric was softer. Their loyalty is to the Constitution, they said, which means fighting corruption and fraud.

“We’re confident it’s happening,” Robinson said, “but we don’t know why.”

The audit, Busch said, “is about identifying the problems so that we can work as a nation to resolve these issues.”

But how could they trust a partisan audit that was conducted without proper oversight? By way of explanation, Busch talked about a 2017 tweet from Hobbs, when she was the leader of the state Senate’s Democratic minority, criticizing Trump for “pandering to his neo-nazi base” in his response to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. Shelby felt Hobbs was referring to all Trump supporters as Nazis. And Hobbs was in charge of the 2020 election in Arizona.

“I understand why you wouldn’t trust this audit,” Busch said, “but can you understand why we don’t trust your election?”

This audit. Your election. What’s happening in Maricopa can seem confounding, but maybe it’s that simple.

The skirmishes continue. Last week, the official audit Twitter account accused Maricopa County of spoiling evidence by deleting election databases. The account shared a screenshot of a database directory, without any explanation of what it meant. The wild claim was retweeted more than 12,000 times and boosted by the usual suspects.

Pulitzer shared the tweet on Telegram, where followers replied with “Firing squad!” and “Time for hanging?”

On Steve Bannon’s podcast, Rep. Finchem, who is hoping to become Arizona’s top election official, wondered if this evidence revealed Maricopa’s “incompetence” or “criminality.”

Patrick Byrne, the former CEO who is raising money for the audit, announced that “we now have the forensic proof of another massive federal felony.”

“Look at that, you guys,” Gail, the Scottsdale real estate agent, told her followers on YouTube, sharing the database screenshot. “I mean, it’s a crime. This is a crime scene.”

The Gateway Pundit, a pro-Trump website that has access to the coliseum, declared that Maricopa officials “DELETED ENTIRE DATABASE DIRECTORY from Voting Machines.”

Trump repeated the accusation, announcing on his website that “the entire Database of Maricopa County in Arizona has been DELETED!”

Jack Sellers, the Republican chairman of the board, called the allegations “false” and “outrageous.”

“This is not funny,” Sellers wrote to Fann, the Senate president. “This is dangerous.” The county released a technical document Monday explaining how the server functioned, which appeared to clear up the matter.

At a meeting Tuesday, a Cyber Ninjas subcontractor said that all this “may be a moot point,” because he’d since been able to “recover” the files in question, though the county described that they were there all along. Was it a misunderstanding? Did someone screw up? It didn’t matter. The crime fantasy had already spread, and Trump was promising “many other States to follow.”

The audit “has nothing to do with overturning the election,” Fann repeated Tuesday.

“The story is only getting bigger,” Trump said in a statement.

And so his supporters will continue to look at Arizona like a domino.

If it doesn’t fall, what will they do? If it does, what falls next?

A worker rests at a paper forensics table at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum. (Courtney Pedroza/For The Washington Post)

dan.zak@washpost.com

Alice Crites contributed to this report.