NEW: Florida sent undercover agents to a drag show in Orlando. The agents reported seeing no "lewd acts" on stage. But the state is still trying to punish the theater that hosted the event. https://t.co/iGw1IJz8Fz w/ @anaceballos_

— Nicholas Nehamas 🏝 (@NickNehamas) March 20, 2023

Signature Bank offered easy money to the city’s most predatory landlords.

“Signature’s loans were even configured to provide a separate pool of cash to buy tenants out of rent-stabilized units.”https://t.co/sAoa52pnVn

— NY Working Families Party (@NYWFP) March 20, 2023

100%. I just wrote a two-part series about this for @Jacobin and @econhardship: https://t.co/9Pja2HyXWk

— Nora De La Cour (@nora_delacour) March 20, 2023

When I was attending junior high and high school, we did not have school buses, except for students who were attending “magnet” programs. Lunch wasn’t half as expensive as it is now. But I think universal lunch for pre-K to HS graduation seems reasonable if we have free bus rides.

Wokeness Has Replaced Socialism as the Great Conservative Bogeyman

During Barack Obama’s first term, the American right became fixated on the supposed threats of communism and socialism. At the time, it felt like another weird throwback trend from the Cold War, along with flared jeans, gated reverb, or Jell-O molds. The proximate causes were clear enough—huge government spending to bolster the economy (by, uh, bailing out banks, but whatever) and efforts to expand health-insurance coverage—even if fears of a coming socialist America were clearly overhyped.

Seen from today, that moment looks less like a quirky cyclical trend and more like the passing of an era. “Wokeness” has supplanted socialism as the primary bogeyman among conservative politicians and pundits. The eclipse is evident in Google search trends and Fox News time allocation, and it has also been on vivid display over the past week, as leading figures in the Republican Party and right-wing media have portrayed the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank as a case of woke values undermining sound business practices and diversity, equity, and inclusion supplanting the profit motive. Complaints about bailouts have been mostly the province of the left—which objects not to government spending but to helping the wealthy.

As I wrote last week, the claim that DEI crashed SVB makes no sense and is based on practically no evidence. The swiftness with which prominent Republican politicians leapt on the narrative drew some puzzled reactions. “My theory is that a large and growing number of prominent conservatives (politicians, media personalities, etc.) are incapable of even feigning fluency in fiscal policy because they’ve been talking about culture war stuff nonstop for like eight years,” my colleague McKay Coppins wrote on Twitter. He’s right, and the shift is less incidental than intentional, driven by currents both inside and outside of the political right.

Part of this is because capitalism has won—or rather, it continues to win. Insofar as any real question exists about the merits of socialism versus capitalism, the population has long since reached stasis on it. Though self-described democratic socialists such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are still prominent in the Democratic Party, Joe Biden’s more moderate approach is what dominates the party now.

Two other changes have also pushed the socialism charge to the side, at least for the moment. First, after the initial pink scare of the early Obama years, both parties shifted their focus more toward racial politics, a dynamic that continues today. Second, the dominant faction in the Republican Party, embodied by Donald Trump and now Ron DeSantis, has abandoned its commitment to limited government, instead embracing a muscular role for the state—especially in enforcing conservative cultural values against the progressive ones labeled as “woke.”

Defining what conservatives mean by wokeness is, as the writer Bethany Mandel learned the hard way this week, not easily done. For the purposes of discussion here, it also isn’t necessary. Many people use the term in different ways, to describe a general constellation of progressive ideas on race, gender, and sexuality, but what matters is the fact that they are using it, and using it somewhat indiscriminately. After all, most of what an earlier generation of conservatives called “socialism” wasn’t really socialist, either.

The term woke originates in Black slang and is popular in youth culture, both of which are helpful for understanding their interpretation on the right. The election of Obama, the nation’s first Black president, was briefly hailed as evidence that the United States had transcended race, a moment that was followed immediately by race reasserting its central role in American politics. The reaction to Obama included a huge spike in white identity politics (driven in part by rising immigration), openly racist rhetoric, and debates over police killings of people of color. Trump exploited this opportunity, making appeals to racial resentment one of the foremost elements of his campaign and presidency.

Although some characteristics of the wokeness discourse (including critiques of free speech, a focus on equitable outcomes, and critical race theory, the actual academic movement) are somewhat novel, much of the backlash to wokeness is just repackaged versions of old racial backlash (most notably the frequent use of critical race theory to mean practically any discussion of racism) or critiques of political correctness. Because woke vernacular, like support for progressive causes, is especially popular among younger people, wokeness has also become a battlefield for fighting old generational conflicts between the more liberal young and more conservative older generations.

In perhaps a more subtle shift, right-wing figures may be less inclined to complain about overweening state power because some conservatives have now embraced the possibilities of big government. One form this takes is support for entitlements. Paul Ryan, a dominant intellectual figure in the Obama-era GOP and a man who had dreamed of capping Medicaid since his keg-drinking days, is now a lone voice in the wilderness. Donald Trump beat the GOP presidential field in 2016 in part by promising not to cut Social Security or Medicare, and that view has become mainstream. This year, leading Republican figures in Congress vowed not to cut them, either, which is probably good politics though it renders their budget-slashing aims basically impossible. Fiscal conservatives find themselves marginalized in the party.

But some conservative politicians and pundits have also warmed to the idea of using the state to punish their ideological opponents—just the sort of behavior they warned about under totalitarian communist regimes. Tucker Carlson, the right’s leading media figure, endorses the use of the state to harass the COVID-cautious. DeSantis, a former Tea Party stalwart, has reinvented himself as a lite authoritarian, eager to wield government power to tell private companies how to conduct their business. He’s not alone. Republicans across the country are seeking ways to bully companies out of environmental, social, and governance approaches, deriding them as woke. The irony is that in many cases these companies are adopting the trappings of progressivism not out of any deep ideological commitment but instead because they see it as a business advantage.

Meanwhile, conservatives warning about censorship of conservative views have turned to speech codes and trying to force tech companies to host certain viewpoints at the insistence of the government—oxymoronically pursuing censorship in order to save free speech from wokeness.

“Socialism” has faded as a rallying cry because this conservative movement can hardly pretend to be horrified by big government, and it has learned that its voters aren’t especially interested in cutting spending programs, either, at least the ones that benefit them. Attacking wokeness fills that void—we might even cheekily call this the GOP’s successor ideology—with an alternative that is malleable enough to apply to nearly any situation. But as the SVB story demonstrates, the malleability is also a weakness. If wokeness is an explanation for everything, it is also an explanation for nothing. Although it’s a good way to gather a range of cultural resentments, it offers little in the way of policy ideas to improve lives, even in contrast to vague promises such as trickle-down economics. No one has yet provided any explanation of what an anti-woke bank-regulation regime might look like—and no one will. This is an attack suited to a party that exists only to campaign, with no interest in actually governing.

Trump’s Brute Force Strategy To Make His Indictment Threat Universal

One of Donald Trump’s less-appreciated political skills is getting his supporters to view attacks on him as attacks on them. His supporters have often seen him that way, viewing criticism of Trump’s presidency or of him personally as an attack on the political movement he leads and, therefore, on them. The tactic works.

Or: It generally does. When Trump’s primary frustration was the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and possible overlap between that effort and his campaign, turning the probe into a perceived attack on his supporters was tricky. Sure, there was a lot of “the Deep State is out of control and could do this to you,” but it’s not clear that this really landed. Instead of building his base’s reserves of empathy, the Russia probe drew from them. Instead of Trump making everyone the victim, he mostly fell back on complaining about being a victim himself.

Since he lost the 2020 election, though, he’s had better luck. That’s particularly true of the probes underway in New York and Georgia, where he has opted to point at a potent worry for his base: reverse racism.

Over the weekend, Trump declared on social media that he expected to be indicted this week by a grand jury empaneled by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. He’s been attacking Bragg for some time now, but the idea that things were coming to a head triggered a new round of scattershot protests from the former president.

At the platform he helped launch, Trump posted a lengthy, all-caps attack on Bragg, accusing the D.A. of letting murderers “walk free” and insisting that Bragg had “presided over the biggest violent crime wave” in the city’s history, which is not even close to true. But he led with his core frustration: that Bragg is a “racist, [George] Soros backed D.A.”

This “Soros-backed” claim is not a new one from Trump or others on the right. Soros, a left-wing philanthropist, is a frequent target of the right in part because of his willingness to spend to influence politics and, in some quarters, because he is Jewish. The link to Bragg is by no means direct: Soros has backed a nonprofit called Color of Change that includes a political action committee committed to electing Black candidates. Bragg, who is Black, received the group’s backing.

Bragg being Black is also why Trump accuses him of being “racist.” Trump has done this before; he has accused New York Attorney General Letitia James of being racist, as well as Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani Willis. The two characteristics all of those prosecutors have in common are that they are Black and are involved in investigations into Trump.

Now we lumber into familiar territory when we’re talking about Trump. Does he actually think they are racist against him, echoing concerns about discrimination against Whites that is common among White Republicans, or is he simply being opportunistic? The answer, as it usually is, is that it’s probably a mix of both. Trump is both a driver and consumer of right-wing rhetoric, and it’s hard to disentangle what he believes from what he believes to be useful.

The effect is the same. Trump is not simply hoping that his supporters view him as a victim of an overzealous prosecutorial effort, as he hoped they might during the Russia travails. He is, instead, amplifying the idea that these Black prosecutors are coming after him because he’s White. While most Trump supporters were not likely to face a probe by the FBI’s counterintelligence infrastructure, most are White. And many of them think that Whites are targets of discrimination as often as Black or Hispanic Americans.

For years, conservative media has been rife with stories about how White Americans are disadvantaged relative to non-Whites, an exemplar of the form of political judo that tries to turn a weakness into a strength. Here’s Trump indicating to his heavily White often upper-middle-class supporters that Black officials might be targeting him just because he is also White. He’s turning fears of “reverse racism” into an empathy engine.

This isn’t his only tactic, certainly. In another all-caps post on social media, Trump suggested that this wasn’t just Black people unfairly attacking a White person but leftists attacking the right.

“Remember, the same animals and thugs that would do this to perhaps 200 million people,” he wrote, “but actually all Americans, are the communists, Marxists, RINOs” — “Republicans in name only” — “and losers that are purposefully destroying our country!”

All of the left is trying to undermine everyone on the right. Black officials are trying to take down White Americans. So what are his supporters to do?

“It’s time!!!” he wrote in another post. “ … They’re killing our nation as we sit back & watch. We must save America! Protest, protest, protest!!!”

All of this sounds disconcertingly like the period between the 2020 election and Jan. 6, 2021. Then, too, Trump cast his efforts to retain power as a rejection of a powerful left-wing establishment that wanted to muffle his base.

“We’re all victims,” he told the audience at a December 2020 rally before the Georgia runoff Senate elections that were held on Jan. 5, 2021. “Everybody here, all these thousands of people here tonight, they’re all victims, every one of you.” Less than two weeks later, he was encouraging supporters to travel to Washington on the day that evolved into the Capitol riot, telling them that there would be a “[b]ig protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

People showed up. At his rally near the White House that morning, Trump repeated his argument that they were all victims.

“It almost seems that they’re all going out of their way to hurt all of us and to hurt our country,” he said.

You know what happened next.

US Maternal Mortality is 10 Times Higher than in Australia. Why?

America is in a maternal health crisis. According to new CDC data released this week, the rate of maternal mortality – defined as deaths during pregnancy or within 42 days of giving birth – rose by 40% in 2021. At a rate of 33 deaths for every 100,000 live births, 1,205 women died of maternal causes that year. That rate was more than twice as high for Black women, whose maternal mortality rate was 70 deaths for every 100,000 live births. The latest federal compilation of data from reviews of maternal deaths suggests that 84% were preventable.

At long last, some recognition of the pain after childbirth. Why is women’s suffering so ignored?

Experts believe that 2021’s spike in maternal mortality can be attributed at least partly to the Covid-19 pandemic, though it’s not clear exactly how. Perhaps infection and exposure to the virus made pregnant women more vulnerable; perhaps the pandemic caused some women to delay or forgo prenatal care as hospitals strained to treat the surge of virus patients and shutdowns made all kinds of care harder and riskier to get.

But even before Covid-19, America has long been an outlier in maternal deaths, with dramatically higher rates of women dying in or as a result of childbirth than in peer nations. America has ten or more times the rate of pregnancy-related death in Australia, Austria, Israel, Japan, and Spain.

The women reflected in 2021’s data died from high blood pressure and from infections; they died from hemorrhage, and from blood clots, and from strokes. They died because doctors incorrectly administered epidurals, or botched c-section procedures, and they died because they weren’t given oxygen when they needed it.

More broadly, they died because pregnancy is a totalizing physical experience, one that challenges and changes the body in profound, irreversible ways that are kept from public discussion by ignorance and taboo, and they died because they lived in a country where medicine is rationed and unaffordable, where women’s healthcare has been starved of both talent and investment, and where disregard for both public health and for female pain has left vast swaths of pregnant people vulnerable in ways that reflect more on the values of their society than on the fragility of their bodies.

They also died, it should be said, from racist negligence. The racial disparities in the data are staggering: Black women are dramatically more likely to die in childbirth. Some of this can be attributed to the broad health disparities between Black Americans and other groups – the result of the strains of poverty, overwork, exposure to pollution, and vulnerability to violence that have long kept Black people in the US physically overtaxed and under-cared for.

But the higher rate of maternal mortality among Black women in America also appears to come from negligence and contempt directed at them by medical providers, who allow racist fictions about Black women’s tolerance for pain, or about their propensity for drug use, or about the worthiness of their lives, to infect their attitudes and degrade the quality of their care.

This seems to be what happened to Sha-Asia Washington, a 26-year-old Black woman from Brooklyn killed in 2019 by allegedly incorrectly administered anesthesia while delivering her daughter, Khloe, by emergency c-section. And it seems to be what happened to Shalon Irving, an epidemiologist at the CDC in Atlanta, who died after being sent home repeatedly from the hospital when she presented with symptoms of out-of-control blood pressure in the days after delivering her daughter, Soleil.

These are women who should be alive, pursuing their dreams; they should be raising their daughters, and making their friends laugh. Bias, negligence and indifference cost them their lives, cost their children their mothers, and cost us all the benefit of their talents and presence.

The maternal mortality rate in America is likely to get worse before it gets better. The dramatic increase in deaths in 2021 was the third consecutive year that the rate rose – the trend is only going in one direction. And the 2021 data was collected before the US supreme court’s June 2022 Dobbs decision, which reversed Roe v Wade and led to the enforcement of laws across dozens of states that forbid or delay medically necessary abortions. This means that pregnant women are getting sicker, and waiting longer for care; it also means that many doctors are now frightened of the legal repercussions they will face for intervening to save pregnant women’s lives. More bodies will accumulate; more lives will be cut short; more women will be lost to the cruelty, indifference, scarcity and fear that now pervades our medical system.

But the logic of the anti-choice movement and the Dobbs regime poses not just a logistical hazard to women’s health, but also a moral one. After all, the anti-abortion laws that are now in effect in a majority of states are wildly antagonistic towards pregnant women. They pose pregnancy and childbirth as punishment; they treat the pregnant patient as a person whose pain is deserved, a just consequence of recklessness or immorality.

It’s not hard to imagine how the logic of these bills might seep into the broader culture, creating social, professional, and, yes, medical environments where pregnancy is treated as a moral failing, and pregnant women are regarded with open contempt. After all, how else do you describe a country that has made giving birth extraordinarily dangerous – and now is forcing more and more women to do it?

Attention House watchers: Here’s the full NRCC target list presented to GOP lawmakers in Orlando yesterday.

More here: https://t.co/PpPnrQvokq pic.twitter.com/YB0vjzMTcL

— Max Cohen (@maxpcohen) March 20, 2023

In the spirit of @orlbucfan who loves open threads, I present this YT.

First ▶️ @HawleyMO had the @NRSC launch one of their first attack ads this cycle against me.

Then ▶️ He told his top donors our Senate race "is going to be one of the closest in America."

Now ▶️ A new poll proves it: Hawley is vulnerable. We can beat him.https://t.co/pgoHljYK6f

— Lucas Kunce (@LucasKunceMO) March 20, 2023

I guess Hawley isn’t running for POTUS, or at least next year.

According to CBO, the Republican pledge to balance the budget while extending the Trump tax giveaways and imposing enormous cuts to critical federal programs is IMPOSSIBLE.

You read that right. Mathematically, it cannot be done.https://t.co/nTgRX0pWgr

— Senate Budget Committee (@SenateBudget) March 20, 2023

I don’t recall Whitehouse was much for social media when it came to committee reporting, but I’ve noticed it more after he took over the Senate Budget committee. Bernie remains on the committee.

some news: starbucks has confirmed with the senate's health, education, labor, and pensions committee that howard schultz's early departure as ceo will not affect his scheduled testimony next week. the committee looks forward to hearing from him on march 29th at 10am.

— mike casca (@cascamike) March 20, 2023

#EastPalestine dioxin levels are at 700 ppt.

2010 EPA guidelines found an increased cancer risk at just 3.7 ppt.

Yet the federal and state cleanup threshold is 1,000 ppt, so there is no legal requirement for US or Ohio EPA to test and remove that soil.https://t.co/CR90EQvEXu

— CoalfieldJustice (@CoalfldJustice) March 20, 2023