Apparently, it’s amazing that limiting traffic stops for ‘secondary violations’ does not magically make white supremacist gangsters not white supremacist gangsters

Gilead

Right-wing militias

Police White supremacist gangs


Fig. 1. Photograph by Lorie Shaull, April 1, 2021, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

The Philadelphia white supremacist gang is still white supremacist:

Traffic stops associated with the targeted violations dropped by 54%, or nearly 16,000 interactions, between 2021 and 2022, according to Councilmember Isaiah Thomas, the bill’s author. His office worked with the Defender Association of Philadelphia to study traffic stops that took place in the first seven months of the legislation’s implementation [barring police from pulling over drivers for some minor infractions].

But during that time, the proportion of drivers pulled over who were Black was unchanged, an analysis shows. And stops for nontargeted reasons, such as running a red light or having excessive window tint, went up by nearly 20%. . . .

Proponents have argued that refocusing police attention away from minor infractions could make the city safer through more effective policing. But the most serious violations — speeding or careless driving — still constitute less than 5% of police stops.[1]

It appears that the gangsters are still adapting to the ordinance, including reporting requirements which, in part, require software upgrades.[2] But the persistence of the racial disparity in traffic stops does not require further study: What Black people say about Black bodies being criminalized remains obviously correct.

Keri Blakinger, “Special counsel urges sheriff to ban the ‘cancer’ of deputy gangs,” Los Angeles Times, March 2, 2023, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-02/la-me-deputy-gangs-report

Anna Orso, Chris Palmer, and Kasturi Pananjady, “Philadelphia’s driving equality law reduced traffic stops but not racial disparities in its first year,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 3, 2023, https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia-driving-equality-legislation-one-year-results-20230303.html

Donald Trump

Coup attempt


Fig. 1. “Jake Angeli (Qanon Shaman), seen holding a Qanon sign at the intersection of Bell Rd and 75th Ave in Peoria, Arizona, on 2020 October 15.” Photography by TheUnseen011101 [pseud.], October 15, 2020, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Apparently, it was not just[3] Merrick Garland who waffled for weeks over searching Mar-a-Lago:[4]

Prosecutors argued that new evidence suggested Trump was knowingly concealing secret documents at his Palm Beach, Fla., home and urged the FBI to conduct a surprise raid at the property. But two senior FBI officials who would be in charge of leading the search resisted the plan as too combative and proposed instead to seek Trump’s permission to search his property, according to the four people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive investigation.

Prosecutors ultimately prevailed in that dispute, one of several previously unreported clashes in a tense tug of war between two arms of the Justice Department over how aggressively to pursue a criminal investigation of a former president. The FBI conducted an unprecedented raid on Aug. 8, recovering more than 100 classified items, among them a document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities,[5]

Sorry folks, this is just too much for me. I’ve already said what I’ve had to say,[6] except that we now know that some senior Federal Bureau of Investigation officials, who would not be nearly so reticent with any other suspect, especially involving classified materials, also need to grow some pairs.

Dylan Byers, “Will Rupert Make a ‘Blood Sacrifice’?” Puck, March 1, 2023, https://puck.news/will-rupert-make-a-blood-sacrifice/

Carol D. Leonnig et al., “Showdown before the raid: FBI agents and prosecutors argued over Trump,” Washington Post, March 1, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/03/01/fbi-dispute-trump-mar-a-lago-raid/

Rachel Weiner, “Trump can be sued by police over Jan. 6 riot, Justice Department says,” Washington Post, March 2, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/03/02/trump-jan6-lawsuit-riot/


COVID-19 Pandemic


Fig. 1. Photograph by author, November 8, 2022.

Dhruv Khullar writes about[7] a Wall Street Journal report that the Energy Department had concluded, with “low confidence,” that COVID-19 likely leaked from a Wuhan lab[8] that Michael Hiltzik thought could itself be politically motivated.[9] It’s well worth reading and I’m not really doing it justice here.

According to the [Wall Street] Journal, the new information, which is in a classified report, but was reviewed by other members of the intelligence community, did not lead others to update their conclusions: four intelligence agencies, as well as the National Intelligence Council, still believe, also with “low confidence,” that natural transmission was responsible, and two remain undecided. (None think that China intentionally created the virus as a bioweapon.) Reviewing the totality of available evidence on the origins of a virus that by some estimates has killed twenty million people worldwide, the American intelligence community has reached a judgment that falls somewhere between not sure and who knows.[10]

The simple fact remains, as I’ve written repeatedly, we don’t fucking know and both Hiltzik[11] and Khullar[12] are clear about this. Something Khullar really adds is a summary of the backstory, some of which I haven’t been paying close attention to:

The covid-origin debate contains many of the elements that have dogged public discourse throughout the pandemic: confirmation bias, political polarization, geopolitical tensions, and the hazards of moderating online speech. In February, 2020, the Republican senator Tom Cotton became one of the first high-profile politicians to suggest that the novel coronavirus could have spilled not out of a wet market but from a research laboratory. He did so without evidence, but cited a paper by Chinese scientists that found that many of the first coronavirus cases couldn’t be linked to the market in question. Cotton’s comments arrived in a charged political milieu, as President Donald Trump took to calling the virus the “kung flu” and the “China virus,” and an international group of scientists published an open letter in The Lancet, condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” Some social-media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, flagged or removed posts that suggested that the virus was man-made or engineered, driving conservatives to claim censorship. (Facebook stopped taking down those posts in May, 2021; Twitter announced it would stop enforcing its virus-misinformation policy last November.) In March, 2021, a report by the World Health Organization released the findings of its review, which deemed the lab-leak hypothesis “extremely unlikely.” But China had appointed many of the scientists who worked on that report and stonewalled a thorough and transparent investigation. Beijing has since dismissed discussion of the virus having escaped from a lab as “a lie created by forces against China.” (The government did not respond to the [Wall Street] Journal’s requests for comment.)

Over time, however, the lab-leak hypothesis has gained wider acceptance, for reasons both evidentiary and political. A natural viral spillover from bats to humans would probably have required an intermediate host, but no such animal has been identified. (The animals in Wuhan wet markets were reportedly killed after the pandemic began.) Wuhan is home to an extensive network of research laboratories, many of which were constructed in the early two-thousands, following China’s experience with sars, which is also caused by a coronavirus. Three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had reportedly fallen ill and sought hospital care in November, 2019, weeks before the first covid cases were identified in connection with the market. (The cause of their illnesses has not been disclosed.) A year after The Lancet letter, another group of scientists published one in Science, arguing that “we must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data.” By July, 2021, Americans were nearly twice as likely to think that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak than by human contact with animals.[13]

The thing about Donald Trump’s presidency is that if you were to ask me for something that wasn’t just completely over the top, I’d be really hard-pressed to supply an answer. I had to look away at times, simply because there are limits even to my tolerance—already tested in studying conservatism for my dissertation—for delving into the black hole that Trump was dragging the entire country into and whose orbit we have yet to escape.

The lab-leak hypothesis initially looked like just one more example.[14] That white Christian nationalists seized upon it[15] made it look like just another conspiracy theory, apparently combining Sinophobia with an already vicious paranoia. It wasn’t until over a year later that I saw reasonable dissent in reputable journalistic outlets.[16]

But I also have limited tolerance for unfounded speculation even when offered by U.S. federal agencies. And where Khullar shines is in arguing that a conclusion either way is unfounded, that we should accept both hypotheses (as hypotheses) until—if it ever does—actual proof appears.[17]

Dhruv Khullar, “Lab Leaks and COVID-19 Politics,” New Yorker, March 3, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/lab-leaks-and-covid-19-politics


  1. [1]Anna Orso, Chris Palmer, and Kasturi Pananjady, “Philadelphia’s driving equality law reduced traffic stops but not racial disparities in its first year,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 3, 2023, https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia-driving-equality-legislation-one-year-results-20230303.html
  2. [2]Anna Orso, Chris Palmer, and Kasturi Pananjady, “Philadelphia’s driving equality law reduced traffic stops but not racial disparities in its first year,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 3, 2023, https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia-driving-equality-legislation-one-year-results-20230303.html
  3. [3]Carol D. Leonnig et al., “Showdown before the raid: FBI agents and prosecutors argued over Trump,” Washington Post, March 1, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/03/01/fbi-dispute-trump-mar-a-lago-raid/
  4. [4]Sadie Gurman and Aruna Viswanatha, “Merrick Garland Weighed Search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago for Weeks,” Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2022, https://www.wsj.com/articles/merrick-garland-weighed-search-of-trumps-mar-a-lago-for-weeks-11660601292
  5. [5]Carol D. Leonnig et al., “Showdown before the raid: FBI agents and prosecutors argued over Trump,” Washington Post, March 1, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/03/01/fbi-dispute-trump-mar-a-lago-raid/
  6. [6]David Benfell, “It is now even more urgently orange jumpsuit time,” Not Housebroken, https://disunitedstates.org/2022/08/24/it-is-now-even-more-urgently-orange-jumpsuit-time/
  7. [7]Dhruv Khullar, “Lab Leaks and COVID-19 Politics,” New Yorker, March 3, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/lab-leaks-and-covid-19-politics
  8. [8]Michael R. Gordon and Warren P. Strobel, “Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, Energy Department Now Says,” Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2023, https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807b7b0a
  9. [9]Michael Hiltzik, “Despite latest reports, there’s still not a speck of evidence that COVID escaped from a Chinese lab,” Los Angeles Times, February 27, 2023, https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-02-27/contrary-wsj-claim-theres-still-not-a-speck-of-evidence-that-covid-escaped-from-a-chinese-lab
  10. [10]Dhruv Khullar, “Lab Leaks and COVID-19 Politics,” New Yorker, March 3, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/lab-leaks-and-covid-19-politics
  11. [11]Michael Hiltzik, “Despite latest reports, there’s still not a speck of evidence that COVID escaped from a Chinese lab,” Los Angeles Times, February 27, 2023, https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-02-27/contrary-wsj-claim-theres-still-not-a-speck-of-evidence-that-covid-escaped-from-a-chinese-lab
  12. [12]Dhruv Khullar, “Lab Leaks and COVID-19 Politics,” New Yorker, March 3, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/lab-leaks-and-covid-19-politics
  13. [13]Dhruv Khullar, “Lab Leaks and COVID-19 Politics,” New Yorker, March 3, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/lab-leaks-and-covid-19-politics
  14. [14]Helen Davidson, “WHO says it has no evidence to support ‘speculative’ Covid-19 lab theory,” Guardian, May 4, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/05/who-says-it-has-no-evidence-to-support-speculative-covid-19-lab-theory-pushed-by-us; Joby Warrick et al., “Chinese lab conducted extensive research on deadly bat viruses, but there is no evidence of accidental release,” Washington Post, April 30, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/chinese-lab-conducted-extensive-research-on-deadly-bat-viruses-but-there-is-no-evidence-of-accidental-release/2020/04/30/3e5d12a0-8b0d-11ea-9dfd-990f9dcc71fc_story.html
  15. [15]Dhruv Khullar, “Lab Leaks and COVID-19 Politics,” New Yorker, March 3, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/lab-leaks-and-covid-19-politics
  16. [16]Deborah Netburn, “Did the coronavirus escape from a lab? The idea deserves a second look, scientists say,” Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2021, https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-05-13/did-coronavirus-escape-from-lab-scientists-urge-second-look; Matthew Rozsa, “A virologist unpacks the lab leak hypothesis,” Salon, May 29, 2021, https://www.salon.com/2021/05/29/a-virologist-unpacks-the-lab-leak-hypothesis/
  17. [17]Dhruv Khullar, “Lab Leaks and COVID-19 Politics,” New Yorker, March 3, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/lab-leaks-and-covid-19-politics

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