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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

Attorney General Merrick Garlandissued a memoon Monday directing the Department of Justice and the FBI to launch a series of additional efforts in the coming days designed to address the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel.

The Garland memo looks like an effort to use the FBI tothreaten and silence parentswho are outspoken opponents ofcritical race theory in schools. That alone would be a stunning partisan abuse of power. What Garland has done, however, is even more disgraceful.

Maybe Garland doesnt actually intend to use the FBI to go after parentsmaybe he knows that he doesnt have that power. In that case, hes trying to trick parents into thinking that he does. This tactic, he hopes, will suppress parents free speech, and throw a bone to a powerful ally of his political party.

Even a few FBI agents questioning parents may be enough to convince others that standing up for their values is not worth the risk.

To understand what Garland is doing with this memo, youll need a short primer on the background facts and government legalese.

Starting with the facts: What is this rise in criminal conduct against school officials? You wont find any evidence cited in Garlands memo.You wont find any evidence in theFBIs crime dataeither.

This claim is parroted from alettersent to President Joe Biden by theNational School Boards Associationa powerful leftist group representing many of the school boards around the country pushing critical race theory curricula. That letter made vague claims about threats and acts of violence against school board members from parents who oppose critical race theory.

The letter complained about disruptions by angry parents but managed to find only one example of violence against a school official (likely a security guard), which was handled by local law enforcement.

Most of the letter is the National School Boards Association clutching its pearls, aghast that justifiably angry parents are zealously advocating for their childrens interest. The tactics thus far employed certainly are nothing compared to the riots of the summer of 2020 that destroyedover a billion dollarsin property and resulted in multiple deaths.

Those tactics were not decried by the National School Boards Association and its liberal friends. In fact, the current vice presidentorganized financial supportto the criminals engaged.

The National School Boards Association is not really concerned about an isolated instance of violence adequately handled by local law enforcement. It is much more upset that it is powerless to stop parents from exercising their First Amendment rights to push back against critical race theory in the classroom.

And so, in a move that is nearly a reflex among many leftist organizations, it asked the government to lend it some of its law enforcement power to shut up its meddling critics. Garland was only too happy to oblige. In doing so, he has made a hypocrite out of himself and Biden.

When Biden announced Garlands nomination, hepromised to uphold the independenceof the DOJ from the political influence of the White House. Garlandpromised the same, saying:

I have spent my whole professional life looking up to Ed Levi and the other post-Watergate Attorneys General who stood up on behalf of the Department against impermissible pressure and influence. If I am confirmed as Attorney General, I intend to do the same.

There is no clearer example of political influence seeping into the DOJ than a demand letter to the president from a leftist advocacy group turning into a DOJ memorandum in less than a week.

But Garlands weaponization of the DOJ has a problem: There is no conceivable basis for federal law enforcement action against these parents.

Unlike Attorney General Eric Holder, who twisted and abused the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Actto silence pro-life advocates, Garland cant find any law that he can similarly mangle to silence parents. If he could, he would have put it in the memo.

But the parents dont know that.

And here enters the government legalese.Garlands memo fails to cite any basis for law enforcement action by the DOJ or the FBI, but it hides that with a morass of official language that says nothing more than that federal law enforcement will provide some advice to local school boards.

FBI agents and federal prosecutors (who have nothing better to do, apparently) will travel the country giving school boards the phone number of their local police and the web address of the FBIs internet tip line.

After the sound and fury calms, nothing beside remains.

What do we make of all this?

First, there is no reason to bring federal law enforcement into this; local authorities have this under control.

Second, Garland has demonstrated, disappointingly, that he is beholden to powerful leftist political groups and perfectly happy to let them use the threat of federal governments law enforcement power to suppress their critics right to free speech. The promised impendence of the DOJ is a farce.

Third, it is more important to Garland to spend scarce law enforcement resources appeasing liberal interest groups than on more pressing national concerns.

Fourth, some good news, parents need not be afraid. It is their constitutional right to push back in legal ways against schools teaching children critical race theory.

Go forth to the school boards and make your voices heard.

This piece originally appeared in The Daily Signal

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Attorney General Garland Abuses Power He Doesn't Have to Threaten Parents - Heritage.org

RALEIGH, N.C. (WNCN) With people able to watch live online, state lawmakers began the process of drawing new electoral district maps Wednesday, as experts predicted a legal battle likely will follow once the maps are approved.

Following the 2020 Census, the Republican-controlled General Assembly is tasked with creating new districts for both chambers of the state legislature and the U.S. House based on shifts in the states population.

If the past 40 years worth of history tell us anything, North Carolina redistricting will go from the legislature to the lawyers, said Dr. Michael Bitzer, an expert in politics at Catawba College. This process reflects the dynamic that redistricting is the most intensely partisan activity in American politics.

In recent years, courts have thrown out maps generated by in North Carolina for racial and partisan gerrymandering.

Due to North Carolinas population growth, the state is gaining a seat in the U.S. House, bringing the total to 14.

The maps, however they are drawn, will likely include this 14th Congressional district (this new Congressional district in the state) to be a Republican-leaning district, Bitzer said.

Republicans leading the states redistricting effort are aiming to have maps approved by the end of the month, which could then be subject to legal challenges depending on how theyre drawn. Candidate filing for the 2022 primary begins Dec. 6.

The dynamics of what we have seen from the Biden Department of Justice with the statement about Section 2 and the Voting Rights Act, to the former Attorney General Eric Holder who has targeted North Carolina as a potential litigation site over redistricting. I think this going to end up probably in both state and federal court, Bitzer said. Its anybodys guess how that will go, but the process probably will play itself out all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Legislators have set up two rooms where the public can watch the redistricting process live and see edits made to proposed maps as they occur.

Is there this map thats already been drawn? I would have to say of course there is. Theyre not starting, really, with a blank canvas, said Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause NC. Its only transparent to a point.

With Democrats in Congress holding slim majorities leading into the 2022 midterm elections, Phillips expects there to be intense national attention on what lawmakers approve.

I suspect that folks are coming in knowing what they need to do, that the maps both sides want will be drawn, he said. Is this more of a performance? I would have to say in some ways it is because we dont have an independent entity.

Rep. John Torbett (R-Gaston County) is one of the members overseeing the process in his chamber.

Historically speaking, I think no matter what we do theres probably already litigation in a can somewhere just with blanks waiting to be filled in, he said. Maybe we can get through just once without a string of litigation.

Sen. Ben Clark (D-Hoke County), who is not running for re-election to the General Assembly but still undecided on a run for Congress or another office, said hes concerned about racial data not being included in the process and the lack of ability to analyze the maps to make sure theyre compliant with the (Voting Rights Act).

If we dont have transparency then the potential for lawsuits is quite high. But, if we have transparency, then when things are being done improperly, they can be called out at that time and hope corrections can be made, he said.

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North Carolina redistricting will go from legislature to the lawyers, expert says - WNCT