REST IN POWER
Rep. Ilhan Omar's father has died from COVID-19 complications
Sarah Al-Arshani
 

Rep.-elect Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., joins House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California and newly-elected members at a news conference to discuss their priorities when they assume the majority in the 116th Congress in January, at the Capitol in Washington, Friday, Nov. 30, 2018. Associated Press/J. Scott Applewhite

Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota announced late Monday that her father died from COVID-19 complications.

"No words can describe what he meant to me and all who knew and loved him," Omar wrote in a statement on her father's death.

Omar is the first Somali-American to serve in Congress and often credited her perseverance to her father, who helped raise her from infancy after her mother passed away.

Rep. Ilhan Omar announced on Monday that her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, died from complications of COVID-19.

The Minnesota Democrat released a statement on her father's death late Monday that included an Islamic phrase "‎Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'cuun," which means "Surely we belong to God and to Him we return."

"It is with tremendous sadness and pain that I share that my father, Nur Omar Mohamed, passed away today due to complications from COVID-19," Omar wrote. "No words can describe what he meant to me and all who knew him. My family and I ask for your respect and privacy during this time."
—Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) June 16, 2020

Omar is the first Somali-American and one of the first Muslim women to serve in the US House Representatives. Her widely covered road to Congress revealed she spent her early years as a refugee who fled Somalia with her family in the early 1990s.

Omar often credited her determination to her father, who The New York Times reported raised her after her mother died while she was still an infant.

On the eve of her historic swearing-in to Congress last January, she tweeted a photo of herself and her father arriving at Virginia's Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, the same airport that she arrived in as a refugee many years earlier.

"23 years ago, from a refugee camp in Kenya, my father and I arrived at an airport in Washington DC," Omar wrote alongside the photo. "Today, we return to that same airport on the eve of my swearing in as the first Somali-American in Congress."
—Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) January 2, 2019

Omar told the Times that she often encountered bullies while growing up in suburban Virginia, which her father dismissed as "doing something to you because they feel threatened in some way by your existence."

As of late Monday, the novel coronavirus had infected more than 2.1 million and infected more than 116,000 in the US.

Flushing the toilet could create a 3-foot vortex of airborne coronavirus poop particles, a new study shows

Holly Secon

Multiple studies have found traces of the coronavirus in infected patients' poop. New Africa/Shutterstock


Multiple studies have found traces of the coronavirus in infected patients' poop.
A new study found that when toilets are flushed, they create a cloud of tiny aerosol droplets — which could contain the virus — up to 3 feet above the toilet bowl.

The cloud can remain there for about one minute and might land on other surfaces around the bathroom.

It's unclear if you could be infected from this level of exposure because scientists still don't know how much of the virus you need to be exposed to in order to get sick.

But you should close the toilet lid before you flush to prevent this cloud from escaping into the bathroom.

It's well-known by now that the coronavirus can spread from person to person via respiratory droplets.

But droplets aren't the only bodily fluid that the virus can travel in: Multiple studies have found traces of it in infected patients' poop.

A new study from the American Institute of Physics evaluated how far these potentially viral poop particles could spread when you flush a toilet. It found that a toilet's flush could spew tiny droplets from the toilet — and the material inside — up to 3 feet from the toilet, which could land on other surfaces around the bathroom.

It also found that the turbulence from a flush generated such small particles that they could float in the air around the toilet for up to a minute, where they could be inhaled by another bathroom user. Shared bathrooms can be risky for this reason.

"One can foresee that the velocity will be even higher when a toilet is used frequently, such as in the case of a family toilet during a busy time or a public toilet serving a densely populated area," Ji-Xiang Wang, a coauthor of the study who researches fluid dynamics at Yangzhou University, said in a press release.

It's unclear if the amount of virus that would be in these particles is enough to infect another person, but you should still lower the lid before you flush.

The study helps highlight the risks that could be posed by shared bathrooms as the US and other countries reopen. In general, four main factors raise your risk of catching the virus: enclosed spaces, crowds, close contact with others, and difficulty social distancing.

A small enclosed space like a bathroom presents a high risk, particularly if many people are sharing it.

Toilet flushes create a 'vortex' of droplets above the bowl

The researchers used a fluid-dynamics model to track the movement of the droplets in a toilet bowl after a flush.

When a toilet flushes, water from the tank above the bowl is pushed down into the water in the bowl — creating turbulence and changes in airflow.

The researchers studied two common types of siphon toilets. One has a single toilet inlet valve for flushing water. The other has two inlet valves, which create a rotating flow.

These valves determine the amount of pressure that the water used for flushing applies to the raw waste in the bowl. That means different amounts of the wastewater in the bowl will be spewed out.

The simulation results for flushing a one-valve toilet for 1.4 seconds. American Institute of Physics

For both types of toilets, as the water pours into the toilet bowl from one side, it splashes the opposite side, creating a vortex near the far wall.

The vortex continues upward in the air above the bowl because of inertia.

"Therefore, an airflow vortex also appears in the air zone above the toilet seat," the researchers wrote. The droplets in this vortex are carried to a height of up to 3 feet. The droplets are so small that they can float there for up to one minute.

A two-valve toilet creates an even faster vortex, forcing about 60% of these small particles into the air even more quickly, the simulation shows.

If there is infected fecal matter in the toilet, the clouds will contain them.

Still, it's unclear if these viral poop clouds can get you sick

It's unknown whether these small particles can get you sick because scientists are still not sure how much of the coronavirus you need to be exposed to in order to get infected.

The particles that are spewed from a toilet are tiny — they're known as aerosols, which are smaller than the droplets that the virus prefers to travel in.

Scientists agree that the virus is primarily transmitted through respiratory droplets — particles larger than 5 micrometers — when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or speaks.

Brooklyn's Domino Park on May 17 in New York. AP Photo/Kathy Willens

A clear solution to this dangerous problem is to close the lid before flushing. But in many countries, including the US, toilets in public restrooms don't typically have lids.

The researchers said a new toilet design could help prevent infectious-disease transmission. A toilet with a lid that closes automatically before flushing, for example, could avoid the issue.

The CIA's massive 'Vault 7' leak resulted from 'woefully lax' security protocols within the agency's own network, an internal report found
Sonam Sheth

People pose with laptops in front of projection of binary code and CIA emblem in this picture illustration taken in Zenica Reuters


The theft of highly classified cyberweapons from the CIA in 2016 resulted from the agency's elite hacking unit's failure to secure its own systems from intruders, according to an internal report obtained by The Washington Post.

The CIA discovered the breach when the radical pro-transparency group WikiLeaks published the information in a release dubbed "Vault 7." US officials say the breach was the largest unauthorized disclosure of classified information in CIA history.

Security protocol within the hacking unit that developed the cyberweapons, housed within the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence, was "woefully lax," the report found.

Moreover, the CIA may never have discovered the breach in the first place if WikiLeaks hadn't published the documents or if a hostile foreign power had gotten a hold of the information first, according to the repor

The Central Intelligence Agency's elite hacking team "prioritized building cyber weapons at the expense of securing their own systems," according to an internal agency report prepared for then-CIA director Mike Pompeo and his deputy, Gina Haspel, who is now the agency's director.

The Washington Post first reported on the document, which said the hacking unit's failure to secure the CIA's systems resulted in the theft of highly classified cyberweapons in 2016.

In March 2017, US officials discovered the breach when the radical pro-transparency group WikiLeaks published troves of documents detailing the CIA's electronic surveillance and cyberwarfare capabilities. WikiLeaks dubbed the series of documents "Vault 7," and officials say it was the biggest unauthorized disclosure of classified information in the agency's history.

The internal report was introduced in criminal proceedings against former CIA employee Joshua Schulte, who was charged with swiping the hacking tools and handing them over to WikiLeaks.

The government brought in witnesses who prosecutors said showed, through forensic analysis, that Schulte's work computer accessed an old file that matched some of the documents WikiLeaks posted.

Schulte's lawyers, meanwhile, pointed to the internal report as proof that the CIA's internal network was so insecure that any employee or contractor could have accessed the information Schulte is accused of stealing.

A New York jury failed to reach a verdict in the case in March after the jurors told Judge Paul Crotty that they were "extremely deadlocked" on many of the most serious charges, though he was convicted on two counts of contempt of court and making false statements to the FBI.

Crotty subsequently declared a mistrial, and prosecutors said they intended to try Schulte again later this year.

The report was compiled in October 2017 by the CIA's WikiLeaks Task Force, and it found that security protocol within the hacking unit that developed the cyberweapons, housed within the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence, was "woefully lax," according to the Post.

The outlet reported that the CIA may never have discovered the breach in the first place if WikiLeaks hadn't published the documents or if a hostile foreign power had gotten a hold of the information first.

"Had the data been stolen for the benefit of a state adversary and not published, we might still be unaware of the loss," the internal report said.

It also faulted the CIA for moving "too slowly" to implement safety measures "that we knew were necessary given successive breaches to other U.S. Government agencies." Moreover, most of the CIA's sensitive cyberweapons "were not compartmented, users shared systems administrator-level passwords, there were no effective removable media [thumb drive] controls, and historical data was available to users indefinitely," the report said.

The Center for Cyber Intelligence also did not monitor who used its network, so the task force could not determine the size of the breach. However, it determined that the employee who accessed the intelligence stole about 2.2 billion pages — or 34 terabytes — of information, the Post reported.

The US coronavirus response is a national disgrace

IN CANADA COVID-19 ON DECLINE
Most developed countries have throttled the coronavirus and are gradually resuming life as usual. But not the United States. The U.S. response to the coronavirus is by far the worst in the G7. And it's still one of the worst in the world.

Germany, Italy, Spain, South Korea, Japan, the UK… all were hit hard by the coronavirus. And all have now reduced their new cases to a small and manageable number.

Meanwhile, after plateauing but never fully declining, cases in the United States have begun growing again.

Here, from Our World in Data, is a chart showing new confirmed cases per day per million people. Yes, confirmed cases are being boosted by increased testing. But testing capacity has increased everywhere. And still the US is an outlier.

Our World in Data CLICK TO ENLARGE

Nearly 120,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus, and about 750 are still dying every day. Meanwhile, our president is just saying more stupid things ("If we stop testing, we'd have very few cases") and pretending the problem no longer exists.


You can believe that the coronavirus is not a serious threat to you, your family, or your community. You can point out that the coronavirus is mostly killing old and sick people. You can observe that "life is risky" and that we choose to live it anyway. You can believe that "lockdowns" were overkill and that the government should have focused on mask-wearing instead.

But you cannot deny that the US has royally screwed this up and that we'll be paying for our incompetence for months if not years.

The US coronavirus response is a national disgrace. — HB

NYPD officers claiming they were 'poisoned' at a Shake Shack shows how broken policing isManny Fidel

A Shake Shack in New York City. Noam Galai/Getty Images


The New York City Detectives' Endowment Association alleged three NYPD officers were "intentionally poisoned" at a Shake Shack in Manhattan, and the president of the organization said police were "under attack."
Soon after, an investigation found there was "no criminality," and the incident was deemed an accident.
The constant presumption of guilt by police officers is just one example of how the policing system in America is broken.
This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.


On Tuesday, the Twitter account for the New York City Detectives' Endowment Association — a union representing current and former NYPD detectives — shared an extremely urgent message: Three NYPD officers were "intentionally poisoned" at a Shake Shack in Manhattan.

Twitter/@NYCPDDEA

This "attack" at the hands of sinister essential workers made waves online, even prompting a response from former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang.

To no one's surprise, it was soon determined that there was no criminality involved in the incident. Instead, these workers were guilty of first-degree cleanliness, a felony in the state of foregone conclusions. As it turns out, employees had recently cleaned a milkshake machine, and some residue from the cleaning products accidentally made its way into the milkshake ingredients.

This isn't the first time police have accused workers of messing with their food. Police officers in America have a bizarre relationship with accusations of food tampering, and in a lot of cases, they're either wrong or lying.


Vice's Katie Way wrote that these accusations "don't have to be literally true, because to the law enforcement officers who tell them and the people who share them, they feel true." And so despite these accusations being false, the messaging is already cemented. In this case, Paul DiGiacomo, the president of the Detectives' Endowment Association, sent a message to officers that police were "under attack." It's cops versus the world.
Guilty until proven innocent

All of this is indicative of one of the ways the police system in America is broken: the constant presumption of guilt by police officers.

The first thing the Detectives' Endowment Association did after finding out their officers were sick was accuse Shake Shack employees of intentionally harming the cops. How many steps did the association skip to come to this conclusion?

Like DiGiacomo expressed, there's this notion that cops are constantly under attack. In actuality, officers are a part of one of the most protected classes in society. Government support, in addition to powerful police unions, acts as a social and legislative shield, protecting cops even when they're in the wrong. But the people who are supposedly perpetrating these attacks on police often belong to marginalized groups and are conversely not very protected.


This twisted logic that police — who, by the way, carry firearms at all times — are the ones systemically under attack and need another layer of protection is absurd. And the insistence to jump to conclusions based on that logic has led to many avoidable incidents where police officers kill Americans who weren't doing anything illegal.

Philando Castile was shot and killed after he notified a police officer that he was licensed to carry a firearm. Tamir Rice was shot and killed after he was found playing with a toy gun. John Crawford III was shot and killed at a Walmart because he was holding a BB gun that he was in the act of purchasing from said Walmart.

This is the often deadly thought process that goes into likening Shake Shack employees to jaded "Game of Thrones" characters who poison their enemies.

One can't help but ponder the purpose of an accusation leveled by police in the first place. What is the value of an accusation from the people who are supposed to be investigating said accusation? The public does not need to know that police think they've been poisoned before they find out if they've actually been poisoned.


It's no small task, but if police officers and departments were trained to properly assess a situation before acting recklessly, lives could be saved.


This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author(s).

Former Fed Chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen signed a letter with 130 top economists imploring Congress to prevent 'prolonged suffering and stunted economic growth'

Joseph Zeballos-Roig

Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke. Alex Wong/Getty Images

A group of 130 top economists including Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen signed a letter with 130 top economists calling for Congress to act and prevent "prolonged suffering and stunted economic growth."

"If Congress fails to act, state and local governments face potentially disastrous budget shortfalls, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates the unemployment rate will likely be more than 11 percent at the end of the year," the letter read.

Congress is set to debate relief spending next month, but Democrats and the GOP are far apart on what should be put into the legislation.

Former Federal Reserve Chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen signed a letter alongside 130 top economists calling on Congress to pass additional relief measures and prevent "prolonged suffering and stunted economic growth."

"Policymakers in Congress and the Federal Reserve responded to this crisis with unprecedented levels of economic support for those affected, but more needs to be done," the letter said. It was published on Tuesday by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a think-tank focused on inequality.

It went on: "If Congress fails to act, state and local governments face potentially disastrous budget shortfalls, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates the unemployment rate will likely be more than 11 percent at the end of the year."

The group of economists included two Nobel laureates and three former heads of the Council of Economic Advisers such as Jason Furman, who led it during the latter half of the Obama administration. Other prominent signatories were Emmanuel Saez, Robert Solow, Heather Boushey, Cecilia Rouse, and Alan Blinder.

The economists warned that the coronavirus pandemic and ensuing economic fallout would be "especially damaging" to communities of color, given Black, Latinx, and Native Americans were both dying and losing their jobs at greater rates compared to white Americans.

"Evidence from the Great Recession indicates that a prolonged economic downturn will seriously damage the economic opportunities and wealth accumulation of all Americans, but especially of families of color," the letter said.

They called for another robust federal response to continue expanded unemployment benefits in some form, as well as aid to cash-strapped states, and "investments in programs that preserve the employer-employee relationship."

"An adequate response must be large," the letter said, "commensurate with the nearly $16 trillion nominal output gap our economy faces over the next decade."

Congress is set to kick off debate for another stimulus package in late July, though Democrats and Republicans are deeply divided over its shape.

Democrats are urging to aid states and extend generous unemployment benefits, while Republicans call to shield businesses from coronavirus-related lawsuits and enact measures to encourage people to head back to work.

Lawmakers have authorized around $3.5 trillion in relief spending so far, including the $2 trillion Cares Act passed in March. But the web of assistance programs put in place four months ago is set to expire over the summer as the $600 federal boost in weekly unemployment benefits phases out on July 31 with no replacement in place.

Many states are finalizing their budgets at the end of June, raising the prospect of another wave of layoffs that have already topped 1.5 million government workers.

On Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell testified to the Senate Banking Committee that a prolonged recession would deepen the economic pain felt by jobless people and throw more businesses into bankruptcy.

"The longer the downturn lasts, the greater the potential for longer-term damage from permanent job loss and business closures," Powell told lawmakers.

FLASHBACK OR DEJA VU ITS UP TOO YOU 

IN 2009 GOP SENATE LEADER MCCONNELL DECLARED OBAMA A ONE TERM PRESIDENT AND SAID NO TO ANY OF HIS LEGISLATION

WHEN IT CAME TO BUSH OBAMA TARP MCCONNELL CUT IT IN HALF, MEANING

IT WAS OF LIMITED EFFECT IN PREVENTING GOVERNMENT LAY OFFS.

Microsoft employees would rather work from physical offices than work remotely, CEO Satya Nadella says

HEY MSWORKERS YOUR BOSS WANTS YOU BACK AT THE OFFICE

Ashley Stewart

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Stephen Brashear/Getty Images





Microsoft employees would rather work from dedicated workspaces in physical offices with good network connectivity than work from home, CEO Satya Nadella said Tuesday at a conference for computer vision researchers. 

Companies should always have the option of allowing remote work, Nadella said, but they shouldn't replace "one dogma with another."

Microsoft is one of the biggest winners from the pandemic-forced shift to remote work. Its Teams work chat app, for example, grew from 44 million to 75 million daily active users in less than two months.

Microsoft is one of the biggest winners in the shift to remote work during the coronavirus crisis, but the company's CEO and employees apparently aren't sold on making it permanent.

Microsoft employees, according to CEO Satya Nadella, have made it clear that they want dedicated workspaces in physical offices with good network connectivity.

"In the Seattle region, where we have sent a lot of people home, we're realizing people would rather have workspace at work once the COVID-19 crisis goes away," Nadella said during Tuesday's CVPR 2020, a conference for computer vision researchers.

While employees may be getting fed up with such a long stretch of Wi-Fi and bandwidth issues at home, Nadella envisions a future of more flexibility. Remote work should always be an option, he said.

"At a core level, we will always want to have this capability of remitting every function inside of our enterprise: whether it's remote sales, remote operations, remote support — remote work at scale," Nadella said."It's going to be foundational to business continuity and resilience."

Instead of making the shift to remote work permanent and "replacing one dogma with another," Nadella painted a picture of a post-COVID-19 crisis world in which companies evaluate the effectiveness of remote work for different roles and business functions, and leave physical space for employees.

As of now, Microsoft has told employees they can work from home until October, unless they're required to be on-site. The company is still in the middle of a multibillion-dollar headquarters renovation intended to make space for 8,000 additional employees.

While Microsoft faced some challenges during the pandemic, such as capacity issues for its cloud business and supply chain constraints, the shift to remote work has in many ways become a boon for the company. Microsoft beat Wall Street expectations in its most recent quarter and its work chat app Teams grew from 44 million to 75 million daily active users in less than two months. The crisis also forced Microsoft to speed up projects and make decisions more quickly.

AT&T is laying off thousands of workers and shutting down at least 250 stores

• AT&T is cutting 3,400 jobs and shutting down more than 250 stores, a union representing the company's workers said on Tuesday.
• The job cuts are part of the economic effect of the coronavirus pandemic and the carrier's efforts to focus on growth areas, AT&T said.
• The layoffs come during a period of change for AT&T as chief operating officer John Stankey prepares to take over as CEO in July.

READ MORE

1. Beijing

Poll: Americans are the unhappiest they’ve been in 50 years

By TAMARA LUSH June 16, 2020 
 In this May 10, 2020, file photo, a merchant prepares a floral arrangement on Mother's Day at the Los Angeles Flower Market in Los Angeles. Americans are more unhappy today than they’ve been in nearly 50 years. That's according to the COVID Response Tracking Study, conducted in late May by NORC at the University of Chicago. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — It’s been a rough year for the American psyche. Folks in the U.S. are more unhappy today than they’ve been in nearly 50 years.

This bold — yet unsurprising — conclusion comes from the COVID Response Tracking Study, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. It finds that just 14% of American adults say they’re very happy, down from 31% who said the same in 2018. That year, 23% said they’d often or sometimes felt isolated in recent weeks. Now, 50% say that.

The survey, conducted in late May, draws on nearly a half-century of research from the General Social Survey, which has collected data on American attitudes and behaviors at least every other year since 1972. No less than 29% of Americans have ever called themselves very happy in that survey.

Most of the new survey’s interviews were completed before the death of George Floyd touched off nationwide protests and a global conversation about race and police brutality, adding to the feelings of stress and loneliness Americans were already facing from the coronavirus outbreak — especially for black Americans.

Lexi Walker, a 47-year-old professional fiduciary who lives near Greenville, South Carolina, has felt anxious and depressed for long stretches of this year. She moved back to South Carolina late in 2019, then her cat died. Her father passed away in February. Just when she thought she’d get out and socialize in an attempt to heal from her grief, the pandemic hit.

“It’s been one thing after another,” Walker said. “This is very hard. The worst thing about this for me, after so much, I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Among other finding from the new poll about life in the pandemic:

— The public is less optimistic today about the standard of living improving for the next generation than it has been in the past 25 years. Only 42% of Americans believe that when their children reach their age, their standard of living will be better. A solid 57% said that in 2018. Since the question was asked in 1994, the previous low was 45% in 1994.

— Compared with surveys conducted after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 and after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Americans are less likely to report some types of emotional and psychological stress reactions following the COVID-19 outbreak. Fewer report smoking more than usual, crying or feeling dazed now than after those two previous tragedies, though more report having lost their temper or wanting to get drunk.

— About twice as many Americans report being lonely today as in 2018, and not surprisingly given the lockdowns that tried to contain the spread of the coronavirus, there’s also been a drop in satisfaction with social activities and relationships. Compared with 2018, Americans also are about twice as likely to say they sometimes or often have felt a lack of companionship (45% vs. 27%) and felt left out (37% vs. 18%) in the past four weeks.

What is surprising, said Louise Hawkley, a senior research scientist with NORC at the University of Chicago, was that loneliness was not even more prevalent.

“It isn’t as high as it could be,” she said. “People have figured out a way to connect with others. It’s not satisfactory, but people are managing to some extent.”

The new poll found that there haven’t been significant changes in Americans’ assessment of their families’ finances since 2018 and that Americans’ satisfaction with their families’ ability to get along financially was as high as it’s been over nearly five decades.

Jonathan Berney, of Austin, Texas, said that the pandemic — and his resulting layoff as a digital marketing manager for a law firm — caused him to reevaluate everything in his life. While he admits that he’s not exactly happy now, that’s led to another uncomfortable question: Was he truly happy before the pandemic?

“2020 just fast forwarded a spiritual decay. When things are good, you don’t tend to look inwards,” he said, adding that he was living and working in the Miami area before the pandemic hit. As Florida dealt with the virus, his girlfriend left him and he decided to leave for Austin. “I probably just wasn’t a nice guy to be around from all the stress and anxiety. But this forced an existential crisis.”

Berney, who is looking for work, said things have improved from those early, dark days of the pandemic. He’s still job hunting but has a little savings to live on. He said he’s trying to kayak more and center himself so he’s better prepared to deal with any future downturn in events.

Reimagining happiness is almost hard-wired into Americans’ DNA, said Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside.

“Human beings are remarkably resilient. There’s lots and lots of evidence that we adapt to everything. We move forward,” she said, adding that she’s done happiness studies since the pandemic started and found that some people are slightly happier than last year.

Melinda Hartline, of Tampa, who was laid off from her job in public relations in March, said she was in a depressed daze those first few weeks of unemployment. Then she started to bike and play tennis and enrolled in a college course on post-crisis leadership.

Today, she’s worried about the state of the world and the economy, and she wonders when she can see her kids and grandkids who live on the West Coast — but she also realizes that things could be a lot worse.

“Anything can happen. And you have to be prepared,” she said. “Whether it’s your health, your finances, whether it’s the world. You have to be prepared. And always maintain that positive mental attitude. It’s going to get you through it.”

___

The survey of 2,279 adults was conducted May 21-29 with funding from the National Science Foundation. It uses a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.

How Trump Tries to Tar Black Lives Matter Without Seeming Racist

Kelly Weill, The Daily Beast•June 16, 2020

Doug Mills/Getty

If you got all your news from Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, you wouldn’t know that Black Lives Matter marches, some with more than 10,000 attendees, have been taking place across the country for weeks. But you might think anarchists had ended the rule of law in Seattle.

The racial justice protests that emerged nationwide after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police are popular—more so than past movements for Black lives, like the demonstrations that swept the country in 2014 and 2015. Polling by Reuters and Rasmussen this month both put the movement’s popularity at over 60 percent among all Americans.

From the newest movement’s outset, however, Trump and some of his favorite media circles have overlooked the protests’ popularity—and their focus on Black life—in favor of fearmongering about anarchists and anti-fascists associated with the demonstrations.

“It's a distraction technique,” Jennifer Mercieca, a Texas A&M associate professor focusing on political rhetoric, told The Daily Beast. “It's called the red herring.”

Meet the Gun Club Patrolling Seattle’s Leftist Utopia

Mercieca, whose forthcoming book delves into Trump’s rhetorical maneuvers, said the president and commentators on media outlets like Fox News and One America News Network have sought to identify some protesters as an “aggressive, anti-American vanguard,” distinct from the rest of the Black Lives Matter movement.

For Trump, this “vanguard” takes the form of leftists, anarchists, and anti-fascists. Although these movements often overlap with racial justice causes, Trump has tried to cast them as a separate, malignant presence. “It’s ANTIFA and the Radical Left,” Trump tweeted on May 30, apparently in response to property destruction at an early protest. (Arrests so far have overwhelmingly not implicated anti-fascists.) “Don’t lay the blame on others!”

The ploy lets voices on the right tar the Black Lives Matter movement without engaging with the cause’s central demands.

“Instead of focusing on the central concerns of systemic racism, you focus on this insurgency and insurrection,” Mercieca said, protesters whom Trump has characterized as “this terrible group of people who are determined to overthrow the government, who are using Black Lives Matter as cover.”

Writer Zoé Samudzi noted the distracting work of the “outside agitator” narrative in the early days of the protests.

“This paternalistic use of ‘outside agitator’ is doing some impossibly heavy lifting to mask your terror of black people,” Samudzi tweeted in late May. The tactic has previously been used to downplay Black activism, notably by the Ku Klux Klan.

“‘Outside agitator’ is also historically antisemitic,” Samudzi continued, “it suggested naïve, pliable blacks were being led astray into disruptive communistic thought and behaviors under the influence of anti-capitalist Jewish Bolshevism. So there’s that to beware of, too.”

Though Trump has tweeted little about racial justice and police brutality in recent days, he has repeatedly raged against Seattle, where activists (many of them anarchists) have set up shop in approximately six blocks that have been vacated by police. Those six blocks, called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), have dominated conservative media. On Monday, Fox News’s first “hot topic” tab was “Seattle.” “George Floyd” was only the second trending topic, despite inspiring the nationwide protests. Fox also issued an apology last week after it was found to have photoshopped a gunman into less threatening pictures of the CHAZ. (The outlet also used a picture of a fire in Minneapolis as the lead image of a story about the CHAZ, with the headline “Crazy Town”.)

Some of the negative media blitz around antifa fears have grown louder than the Black Lives Matter coverage. An analysis by DFRLab (the Atlantic Council’s digital research shop) found that antifa-related stories were a social media goldmine.

“Many of these stories are alarmist in nature, misrepresenting or fabricating violent incidents in order to maximize their digital traction,” DFRLab found. “Over time, they have begun to claim a larger share of antifa-related content. Indeed, according to Google Trends, total search interest in ‘antifa’ outperformed that in the Black Lives Matter movement between May 25 and June 7.”

Mercieca noted that many Black Lives Matter activists have radical demands, like police abolition, and that trying to pin the movement’s radicalism on anarchists and anti-fascists can make the rest of the movement look misleadingly mild.

“If you're hanging all of that on these antifa radicals, then that means that you're projecting a more moderate resolution than what Black Lives Matter protesters really want,” she said. “And I don't know that that's the case.”

While any attribution of rational political motives to Trump is a dangerous game, the right’s antifa obsession lets its leaders criticize protesters without stoking the ire of a population that seems increasingly supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement. (Neither the Trump campaign nor the White House immediately returned a request for comment for this story.)

In a Monmouth University poll this month, 76 percent of respondents described racial discrimination as “a big problem.” That’s up from 68 percent of respondents in 2016 and 51 percent in 2015. Even 71 percent of white respondents, Trump’s base, agreed that racism was a “big problem.”

The poll also asked Americans’ opinions on the protests that erupted after George Floyd’s death; 57 percent of respondents described protesters’ anger as “fully justified,” with another 21 percent saying the rage after George Floyd’s death was “partially justified.”

A Rasmussen poll this month found that 62 percent of respondents viewed Black Lives Matter favorably, a dramatic upswing from the meager 37 percent who approved of the movement in 2016. A similar Reuters poll conducted early this month found that 64 percent of American adults were “sympathetic to people who are out protesting right now,” with just 27 percent describing themselves as unsympathetic. (By contrast, 49 percent of respondents to a Rasumssen poll this month said they agreed with Trump’s comments that antifa should be labeled a “terrorist organization,” despite it not being an organization, but a political stance in opposition to fascism.)

The Black Lives Matter movement’s surging popularity is all the more astounding given that, in recent years, right-wingers subjected Black Lives Matter to almost-identical “domestic terror” accusations as the anti-fascist movement currently faces. A 2017 petition calling on the White House to “formally recognize black lives matter as a terrorist organization” was later uploaded virtually verbatim to apply to anti-fascists, the blog Defending Rights and Dissent noted.

But shifting overt animosity to the specter of black-clad anarchists likely won’t make Black marchers any safer.

Sanford, Maine, is nowhere near the former Confederacy. Nevertheless, when Black Lives Matter protesters marched down the small city’s streets this weekend, they were greeted by heavily armed men flying the battle flag of the slavery-defending states. The counter-protesters claimed they weren’t trying to threaten Black Lives Matter marchers, but taking up arms against potential anti-fascists. A local urban legend, like many circulating the country, falsely claimed anti-fascists planned on traveling to Sanford en masse to engage in activities like “firebombing businesses.”

Sanford’s police chief cited the rumors, without evidence, and later texted the city’s WMTW that, “apparently antifa and the rest of the anarchists stayed home.”

Either way, Black Lives Matter marchers found themselves staring down semi-automatic rifles and a Confederate flag.

Read more at The Daily Beast.