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INDIANAPOLIS (Fort Wayne's NBC and AP) Republican lawmakers have given their final approval of their partys redrawing of Indianas congressional and legislative districts while brushing off objections that the new maps give them an excessive election advantage and dilute the influence of minority and urban voters.

The Indiana Senate voted 36-12 and the House 64-25 Friday with no Democratic support of the plan, advancing it to Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb for his signature.

Political analysts say the new maps that will be used through the 2030 elections protect the Republican dominance that has given them a 7-2 majority of Indianas U.S. House seats and commanding majorities in the state Legislature.

The maps divide Allen County into parts of four different state Senate districtssomething Democrats and some minority advocates, including the NAACP, have criticized as an effort to water down representation in one of the state's urban communities.

READ MORE: New GOP redistricting maps confusing, divisive says state, county Democrats

You kept the south side and the people of Fort Wayne from having a voice in this legislative body for things that they think are better for them, their families, their loved ones and thats not right, Democratic Sen. Greg Taylor of Indianapolis said.

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Republicans brush off critics, approve Indiana redistricting - Fort Wayne's NBC

A new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation reveals that over half of Republicans (55 percent) believe immigrants and tourists are responsible for current pandemic conditions in the U.S., a much larger proportion than the 32 percent of Republicans who attribute high infection rates to the unvaccinated or to the 28 percent who cite the publics failure to wear masks or maintain social distancing. That pervasive belief that immigrants are to blame for Americas public health crisis suggests that classic scapegoating tactics have led to a dangerous mainstreaming of extremism.

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Classic scapegoating tactics have led to a dangerous mainstreaming of extremism.

There is no evidence that migrants are responsible for the surge in Covid-19 infections in the U.S. or even at the southern border. Across the U.S., Covid outbreaks have consistently been worse in regions and communities with no mask mandates or with low vaccination rates. The delta variant along with three other Covid-19 variants monitored by public health officials circulated in the United States before it was detected in Central America.

These facts havent stopped Republican leaders and conservative commentators from linking reports of migrants at the southern border to the spread of Covid-19. In March, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott accused the Biden administration of releasing immigrants in South Texas that have been exposing Texans to Covid. In August, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis claimed that no elected official is doing more to enable the transmission of Covid in America than Joe Biden with his open borders policies. That same month, former President Donald Trump issued a statement warning that thousands of Covid-positive migrants had passed through Texas without noting that migrants who test positive are quarantined.

Blaming immigrants for the spread of Covid-19 is a lazy but effective tactic that packs a double punch of disinformation. It falsely places the blame for Covids spread on immigrants rather than where it belongs: on a lack of adherence to evidence-based preventative practices such as vaccinations and masks. At the same time, it stokes resistance to perceived liberal immigration policies by focusing on the threat of disease, infestation and infection, by voicing dehumanizing ideas about purity and contamination and by suggesting that immigrants pose an existential threat to Americans.

This is a dangerous game that mainstreams and normalizes extremist ideas. Blaming immigrants for spreading contagious disease is a popular far-right extremist tactic that has been used for generations to both exploit and stoke xenophobic and nativist sentiments and has been used throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.

When such propaganda is spread not only on fringe internet platforms, but also by elected officials whom residents trust as the source of their facts and information, it becomes even more dangerous. Such hateful speech can also incite violence. People dont commit or condone violence against out-groups spontaneously, as Harvards Dangerous Speech project explains: They must first be taught to see other people as pests, vermin, aliens, or threats.

Blaming immigrants is a strategic frame that intertwines anti-elite, pro-nationalist and anti-immigrant discourse all at once. Liberal elites and their lenient immigration laws become the real bogeyman, and those laws must be countered with restrictive immigration policies that will protect people here from the dangerous and destructive force of immigration.

Such hateful speech can incite violence.

We should all be concerned about how anti-immigrant sentiment is being used to deflect attention away from ineffective state and regional public health policies, to discourage people from accepting the science about masks and vaccines and to encourage them to blame others for Covids spread. In linking immigration with the spread of Covid-19, Republicans seek to garner support for stricter immigration laws and persuade voters that the Biden administration is ineffective and dangerous to their health and safety.

But these tactics, which encourage the public to see immigrants as threatening, also lay the groundwork for extremist groups to advocate for violent solutions to address that threat as we have already seen in far-right terrorist attacks across the country and around the globe.

The Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was a clear illustration of the serious threat that propaganda and disinformation pose to our democracy. With a clear majority of Republicans now believing false claims about immigrants role in spreading Covid while simultaneously rejecting public health evidence that would reduce their chances of getting sick it is equally clear that the danger from propaganda is not just to our democracy itself, but to the health and well-being of the people living in it.

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Republicans blaming Covid on immigrants threatens public health and our democracy - MSNBC

Republicans are apparently too busy stoking cultural grievances and recounting votes from the 2020 presidential election to craft a policy agenda for the next election. Looking forward instead of backward would be a better way to build political support and to channel the populism of former President Donald Trump into programs to help working- and middle-class voters.

The alternative for the GOP is to contest the 2024 election as a referendum on Trumps personality and his false claims of election fraud. Republican partisans are convinced; nearly 6 in 10 Republicans and GOP-leaning independents state that believing the 2020 election was stolen from Trump is an important part of what it means to be a Republican, according to a recent CNN poll. And Trumps fantasy is already a big part of the 2022 midterm elections.

But do Republicans really want voters to focus exclusively on Trump?

A healthy political party cant be stuck in the past and it cant be a cult of personality. This should be obvious from Trumps loss in the personality-driven 2020 contest. That year, the GOP couldnt even write a policy platform for its nominating convention. Instead, it released a bizarre statement of fealty to Trump.

If the GOP wants to make inroads among the many voters who arent loyal to the former president, it needs a policy agenda. Such an agenda would communicate the values the party stands for, as well as offering solutions to the challenges citizens face.

In addition to relitigating 2020, much of the party is sounding the alarm about the excesses of progressive social activism derided as wokeism. I, too, am concerned about the issue and think liberal society is undermined by treating people as members of groups rather than as individuals, and by shutting down the marketplace of ideas rather than engaging in it.

Some Republicans have attempted to marry the cultural grievances invoked by the woke label with policy. Take a new bill proposed by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio which, according to his press release, would enable shareholders to hold woke corporations accountable.

Cultural differences have a place in political debate, but they shouldnt be allowed to push out other imperatives. They are not as urgent as improving the quality of education, figuring out how to retrain workers who have been displaced, or reversing the decades-long decline in workforce participation among men. And they are not the top challenges facing households that need better access to affordable child care or higher education.

The GOP is wedded to Trumpian populism, an outlook of grievance that pits the people against the elites, foreigners and immigrants. This analytically impoverished view of the world takes policy debates in unfortunate directions, as Rubios bill shows.

But there are manifestations of populism that point a constructive way forward. A focus on the working and middle classes could channel populist energy in a healthier direction. To keep its coalition together to keep businesspeople and free market enthusiasts on board Republicans need to marry that focus with traditional commitments to the free enterprise system, individual liberty, personal responsibility and advancing economic opportunity.

One opportunity is to shape policies that can highlight the shortcomings of President Joe Bidens agenda. For example, if Biden is able to expand the size and scope of government involvement in health care, child care and higher education, as he has proposed, this gives the GOP the opportunity to offer alternative policies that are rooted in a commitment to free markets, but that still address the legitimate concerns that working- and middle-class households have.

A second major fault line exists over the value of workforce participation. The progressive left is quick to brand large swaths of the labor market as consisting of dead-end jobs and is eager to divorce safety-net programs from work requirements. A marriage of free markets and populism could push back against this, arguing for the value of employment and for the inherent dignity of work, even flipping burgers and unloading trucks.

An agenda around this wouldnt just be laissez faire. Instead, it could consist of expanding earnings subsidies, redistributing income to encourage employment by subsidizing it. Or it could scratch the populist anti-elite itch by chipping away at employer power in the labor market, restricting noncompete clauses in employment contracts and loosening occupational licensing restrictions, all of which advance the interests of big firms and incumbents ahead of workers.

Defining itself against Bidens agenda and rallying around a pro-work flag are just two of several ways that the GOP might create a coalition that includes stop-the-steal Republicans without alienating the partys traditional interests, and that avoids the trap of betting the next election on anger and grievance.

But moving forward productively will require the right leadership. Its harder to say where that will come from than where it wont: the former president.

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Michael R. Strain: Republicans need to be more than the party of Trump - TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press

This is the latest edition of our column that excavates the origins of public figures factually dubious comments. We explain what their claims are referring to, the evidence (or lack thereof) behind them and where they sprang from in the first place.

A few weeks ago, Breitbart News the right-wing, hyperpartisan news site formerly run by Steve Bannon published a truly galaxy brain column. Editor-at-large John Nolte argued that Democrats have been promoting the COVID-19 vaccine not to save lives but instead to trick Republican voters into not getting the jab. Noltes theory concluded that this, in turn, would lead to unvaccinated Republicans getting sick and dying from COVID-19, ultimately helping Democrats electorally.

Nolte claimed that liberals, in a sinister application of reverse psychology, knew that aggressively pushing the vaccine would lead those on the right to resist, putting them at greater risk for severe infection or death. In a country where elections are decided on razor-thin margins, does it not benefit one side if their opponents simply drop dead? Nolte wrote. He then said that the real way to stick it to liberals would be to embrace the Trump Vaccine for the life-saving modern miracle that it is.

Sometimes flawed logic can still lead you to the correct conclusion.

Noltes take has emerged from the toxic politicization of the pandemic in the U.S. Since the COVID-19 vaccine rollout began in the U.S, there has been a partisan gap in vaccination rates. When comparing the rate of fully vaccinated people living in counties that voted for Trump in 2020 with those in counties that voted for Biden, blue counties had a higher vaccination rate by 12.9 percentage points, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Similarly, a Morning Consult poll has shown that Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to say they are unsure of whether they will get the vaccine. Republicans are also more likely to say they do not plan on getting vaccinated, according to that same poll. And its true that more right-leaning areas of the country are seeing more deaths from COVID-19, too: a recent New York Times analysis showed states with some of the highest 2020 vote share for Trump also have the highest death rates.

These differences in vaccination rates and COVID-19 death rates can be attributed to a few factors, including misinformation online and the erosion of trust in institutions such as the medical system and the media over the past few years. It can also be partly attributed to the rhetoric from Republican leaders and figures on the right, especially when you consider that similar partisan gaps have not been seen in other countries.

There is no evidence that those who have encouraged Americans to get vaccinated secretly hoped they would do the opposite.

While the Brietbart columns argument may seem unhinged, Nolte is in fact tapping into a number of right-wing tropes. Conspiratorial thinking has become a habit on the right think the Big Lie or QAnon so proposing a conspiracy to explain Republicans low vaccination rates may not be anathema for many of Noltes readers. Similarly, allegations of Democrats or leftists running false flag operations where the responsible party for an event makes it look like another party is in fact behind the act are common among the far-right. Many have claimed, for example, that the rioters who broke into the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6 were actually members of antifa disguised to look like Trump supporters in order to make the right look bad.

The notion that politicians may be using reverse psychology when referencing the vaccine is also familiar to many on the right, albeit inverted from Noltes presentation of it. Those who oppose the vaccine particularly those who incorrectly believe it to be harmful have been surprised to hear former President Donald Trump promote it, and reverse psychology has been a useful explanation for his seeming deviation from their worldview. These theories claim that Trumps encouragement of vaccinations would make the vaccine less appealing to anti-Trump voters, while arguing that those who support Trump are wise enough to do their own research and avoid it despite his recommendation.

As far as him promoting it, my thought is [he is using] reverse psychology for the sheep with [Trump Derangement Syndrome] [who] will automatically just do the opposite of what he says, one Telegram user wrote in a QAnon chat group. What if Trump is promoting the vaccine to get the Never Trumpers to rethink their decision, wrote another in the same chat. Anything he promotes they will do the reverse. He must know that those of us that are aware of the real and apparent dangers will NOT get it, even with his endorsement.

Nolte also specifically tapped into another American tension: As the partisan gap persists, some on the left have shifted from encouraging those on the right to get vaccinated, to getting frustrated and angry that they still havent. This has manifested in sometimes flippant, sometimes cruel reactions to the high rates of infection and death among unvaccinated Americans. Nolte highlighted Howard Stern, who recently suggested on his radio show that unvaccinated individuals who become sick should be denied medical care. Stern also said it was funny that some conservative radio hosts who spoke out against the vaccine later died of COVID-19. Theres also the r/HermanCainAward subreddit, named after the Republican politician who died of COVID-19 in 2020, a group with 343,000 members that exists exclusively to mock people who expressed anti-vaccine views and later died of COVID-19.

Of course, if Noltes column convinces some vaccine-resisters to get the shot, one might argue that the end justifies the means. But so far the response to the column on the right hasnt been positive. On Breitbarts Facebook post sharing the column, many commenters rejected the argument, noting that their personal motivations for not getting vaccinated had nothing to do with what Democrats said, and pointing out that some unvaccinated Americans are on the left. This is a stupid take. You have clearly bought into the democrat talking point that its only republicans not getting vaccinated when the reality is that people across the board are not getting vaccinated, one Facebook user commented. Similar sentiments were shared on Telegram and the pro-Trump message board patriots.win. Me not getting the Vax has absolutely nothing to do with what the left is saying! one user wrote in a QAnon Telegram group. Another user in the same group noted: But didnt Trump get his vax? It isnt about Trump, its about our personal health.

Using conspiratorial thinking to bring conspiracy theorists back to reality may not be the most effective tactic after all. As one Telegram user put it: Sounds like theyre trying to use reverse psychology by saying they are already using reverse psychology.

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Where Breitbarts False Claim That Democrats Want Republicans To Stay Unvaccinated Came From - FiveThirtyEight

In the 16th hour of a Senate debate earlier this month, Cory Booker rose to speak around 1 a.m. I am so excited! he roared, bunching his shoulders and smacking a fist into his hand, like a pitcher trotting to the mound. Booker, who represents New Jersey, leaned back and put a hand into his pocket. He smiled and raised one eyebrow mischievously. This is a gift, he declared. If it wasnt complete abdication of Senate procedures and esteem, I would walk over there and hug my colleague from Alabama.

Booker was referring to an amendment to the 2022 budget which was the subject of the Senates marathon session and to Tommy Tuberville, Alabamas newly elected senator, who proposed it moments earlier. My amendment is pretty simple, Tuberville said. If your City Council wants to defund their police, dont expect the federal government to make up the difference. Local leaders across the country, he went on, have decided the woke thing to do is cancel their citys police force, but Alabamians would not pick up the tab for the woke defund-the-police movement.

Woke, cancel, defund Tuberville was practically auditioning for a spot on Tucker Carlsons show the next day. But in his turn at the lectern, Booker out-Foxed him. Tubervilles amendment was a gift, he said, because it would put to bed the scurrilous accusation that somebody in this great esteemed body would want to he paused for faux-shocked effect defund the police. Booker urged every senator to not walk, but sashay down to vote for Tubervilles amendment. He ended by calling on the Senate to add language expressing its unanimous support for God, country and knuckle rap of the lectern apple pie.

Booker was, in other words, laying it on thick. The tone was a departure from his typical register, which calls to mind a preacher-turned-therapist. If Tuberville hoped to pin Democratic senators as all-cops-are-bastards radicals or as beholden to Twitter activists of that ilk Booker saw an opportunity to set the record straight. His clip drew chuckles from commentators on CNN and MSNBC, effectively foiling Tubervilles plans. And substantively, Booker got his wish. Tubervilles amendment passed by a vote of 99 to 0, thus completing a canny political turn for Democrats on the tricky matter of policing.

A summer ago, in the wake of George Floyds murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer and the racial-justice protests that followed, the party seemed genuinely split over whether to back growing calls on the left to defund the police. House members from swing districts, like Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, said that the defund movement played into the hands of Republicans by alienating moderate voters. House members from safe districts, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York City, advocated cutting police budgets and redirecting the money toward other public-safety measures.

A core aspiration of the defund movement is to reduce violent encounters between officers and the public by deploying mental-health professionals to respond to some 911 calls. Some cities have started adding such services. Denver, for example, set up an alternative 911 response, with social workers answering some calls; similar pilot projects are in the works in Oakland and Portland, Ore. But however promising, these local experiments arent what many of the loudest advocates for defunding the police had in mind and its not what their slogan, fairly or not, has come to stand for. Defunding the police has become associated with calls to take officers off the streets or even disband departments entirely which can be hard to imagine in real-world terms. What would a city look like if unarmed public-safety officers replaced all the cops with guns? How do you take firearms away from the law enforcers in a country that has tens of millions more guns than citizens?

Most Americans, across all demographics, share these concerns. In March 2021, a USA Today/Ipsos poll showed that just 18 percent support defund. For Black Americans, the figure was a bit higher: 28 percent. But 43 percent of all respondents backed redirecting some police funds to social services. In New Haven, the majority-Black-and-Latino city where I live, the mayors office is working on a new Department of Community Resilience to address violence prevention and crisis response, as well as homelessness, mental health, drug use and prison re-entry. But with homicides and shootings on the rise, the city is also putting more money into the police. Defunding is a nonstarter.

Democrats can come across as craven when they disavow the passionate stance of the left wing of their party. Bill Clinton brought this criticism on himself when he singled out the activist Sister Souljah for her burst of anger toward white people in the midst of the Los Angeles riots in 1992. The Sister Souljah moment has since become shorthand for any strategic break between Democratic politicians and the activist base. Bookers bit of theater in the Senate not only punched left but also aligned Democrats in the chamber with President Biden, who has been in favor of more money for cops for decades.

If Booker successfully distanced his party from the defund movement, the question is what Democrats in Congress will have to show for it. The point of getting the politics right on an issue, after all, is to create a space to make policy. Booker, who has been one of the Senates most engaged members on criminal-justice reform, has worked for months on the Senates version of a police-reform bill named for George Floyd. Ive been bending and contorting myself in every way to try to make a bill that can attract people on both sides of the aisle, Booker told ABC News last month.

But it has been a thankless task. Booker negotiated with two major police unions seeking a broad agreement that would pass muster with Republicans, but when he thought he had the basis for a deal, other law-enforcement unions objected. This led Senator Lindsey Graham to publicly denounce the proposal. Bookers talks with Senator Tim Scott, the negotiator for the Republicans, continue, but its not clear where theyre going.

If Congress does nothing, despite all the promises and the heartbreak of police killings, it will shoulder responsibility for a half-measure the country has seen many times before: more money for the police but no new checks on their power. Democrats who have found their way to safe ground on the politics of defunding now have to keep making the case for what they want to do about policing. Solutions, though, dont often produce punchy TV clips.

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Cory Booker Outfoxed Republicans on Defund the Police. Now What? - The New York Times