Republicans ramp up the racism to deflect blame for COVID surge

Everyone knows that is unvaccinated Trumpers spreading delta, but Republicans want to blame immigrants instead

By AMANDA MARCOTTE

SALON
PUBLISHED AUGUST 6, 2021

LARRY, CURLY, MOE

Greg Abbott, Ron DeSantis and Tucker Carlson (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty )

The GOP strategy to tank Joe Biden's presidency was supposed to be a simple one: jack up COVID-19 rates by convincing Fox News viewers that only filthy liberals get vaccinated, then blame Biden for the surge while a media plagued by bothsidesism plays along.

But the plan hit one little, unforeseen snag: The mainstream media, which did play along for a bit with headlines blaming Biden, suddenly switched gears in mid-July. The severity of the delta variant surge pushed the media to actually start covering both the anti-vaccine propaganda apparatus at Fox News and the fact that COVID-19 hot spots appeared concentrated in parts of the country where people mainline such propaganda. Now, the whole evil scheme has gone sideways. Polling shows Americans are blaming right-wingers and the unvaccinated instead of Biden — and now Republicans are in a panic.

And what do Republicans always do in a panic? Old-fashioned race-baiting.

Rather than blame the obvious culprits for the pandemic — Fox News-addled anti-vaxxers — Republicans are increasingly accusing immigrants at the Southern border of bringing in COVID-19, and Biden of supposedly letting them. After Biden rightfully called out Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, for his part in letting COVID-19 run rampant, DeSantis pitifully tried to hit back by claiming Biden "imported more virus from around the world by having a wide-open southern border."

Other Republican politicians have been echoing this "blame Mexico" talking point, from Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas accusing the Biden administration of allowing a "super spreader event because their open border" to Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds arguing that "the problem is the southern border is open."

Unsurprisingly, Fox News is leaning hard into this "blame immigrants, not the unvaccinated" messaging, often with a side dose of contrasting the supposedly dangerous dark-skinned immigrants with the supposedly pristine lighter-skinned people around the world.

Bret Baier of Fox News was interviewing Centers for Disease Control head Rochelle Walensky last week and complained that his "in-laws live in Austria, they cannot come here to see their six-month-old baby because of the EU travel ban," but that "migrants come across the southern border from other countries with more COVID." Walensky calmly replied, "what we really need to do is spend our time getting our communities vaccinated," but of course, Breitbart and other right-wing outlets portrayed her as somehow too "woke" to deal with the scary disease-ridden foreigners who they clearly believe are identifiable via skin color.

As usual, there's a heavy amount of coordination on the right around the new, race-baiting tactic. The Wall Street Journal and New York Post are both on the blame-immigrants-not-the-unvaccinated train. And Fox News is a steady drumbeat of scare stories about COVID-positive immigrants, all meant to give viewers an excuse for remaining unvaccinated because they can blame "dirty" immigrants instead of the homegrown unvaccinated Americans who are passing the disease rapidly.

It's all, of course, completely ridiculous. Glenn Kessler wrote a Washington Post fact check that focused on COVID-19 rates among border crossers, noting "so far we do not see evidence to support" the claim that it's a major factor in the current surge. But frankly, Kessler's fact check severely understates the case, from a sheer mathematical point of view. Thousands of unvaccinated immigrants at the border simply do not have the numbers to be a greater threat to public health than literally millions of native-born Americans who refuse to get vaccinated.

Any fool who can read a map sees the main problem with the "blame the border" gambit, which is the parts of the U.S. that actually border Mexico are seeing less of a surge than parts that other parts that border water and/or border other U.S. states.

Yep, the hot spots are running through the Bible Belt more than the Southwest. We also have actual scientific data that shows the delta variant surge that's causing our current woes is flowing more through Branson, Missouri — where vaccine-eschewing GOP America goes to party — than McAllen, TX.

None of this makes any logical sense, and not just because the Biden administration does have policies to turn people away at the border for being a COVID-19 threat. Even if one accepts the premise that immigrants are adding in any significant way to the COVID-19 problem, why is that an excuse not to get vaccinated? One would think that a belief that people are bringing in COVID-19 is all the more reason to do what offers, by far, the highest level of protection: vaccination. And yet "scary brown-skinned immigrants are bringing disease!" is being used as a justification by white conservatives to avoid taking basic prevention measures.

Of course, none of it is meant to be rational.

Republicans are turning to racism for the same reason they always do, to turn off any remaining capacity for critical thinking among their base, replacing it with inchoate fear and rage over the very existence of people that don't look or talk or act exactly like them. As usual, the GOP elite doesn't care how many people get sick or die. All they care about is giving their voters some stupid thing to rant and rave about, so they can shut off their brains and not think about how foolish it is to keep voting for people who are killing them to score political points

Will this new "blame immigrants, not the unvaccinated" narrative work? It will, in the same way the "blame China" gambit worked: To give Fox News viewers a talking point to scream at relatives who express concerns about their unvaccinated status and give Republican politicians a way to make noise while running away from their own responsibility for this crisis.

What it won't do is cause the COVID-19 surge to end any time soon. For that to happen, ordinary Republicans need to suck it up and start getting vaccinated in larger numbers. And the longer that their leaders keep feeding them excuses not to do so — such as blaming immigrants — the longer this pandemic will drag out. And the longer that goes on, the angrier the vaccinated majority will get with unvaccinated red hats for being such selfish, whiny babies in the face of a global pandemic.


AMANDA MARCOTTE
is a senior politics writer at Salon and the author of "Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself." Follow her on Twitter @AmandaMarcotte and sign up for her biweekly politics newsletter, Standing Room Only.

Ted Cruz Knows Why Delta Variant Raging In Unvaxxed, Unmasked Americans: LOOK, ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS!

Doktor Zoom

August 05, 2021 01:59 PM

 

Would you trust the word of a booger eater? (See, that's an ad hominem fallacy!)

Ted Cruz is just the latest Republican to try to distract from the deadly rise in coronavirus cases by blaming it all on undocumented immigrants. And why not? It's a convenient way to shift the blame for rising hospitalizations and deaths from people who refuse to get vaccinated or even so much as put a cloth over their mouths and noses to a favorite rightwing target, even if it doesn't make a lick of sense. If Republicans thought they could get away with blaming the surge of new infections on gay people or on abortions, they absolutely would (and we're sure we'll see that happening soon enough, too).

Cruz took to the friendly cablewaves of Sean Hannity's Old Time Xenophobia Hour on Fox News last night to join Hannity in accusing President Joe Biden of fomenting the "biggest super spreader event that has been ongoing since January 20th" because immigration authorities aren't keeping all migrants locked up forever or deporting them. A few facts to keep in mind before we get to the "diseased immigrant" panic here:

1) The only migrants being released into the US now are families with minor children who are claiming asylum in the US. That means they're authorized to be in the country until their cases are heard. 2) Migrants who test positive for COVID are for the most part being released to charities that then place them in local motels or hotels while they're under quarantine. 3) Vaccination rates in Mexican border cities are far higher than in most US red states, thanks to outreach efforts by the Mexican government and the lack of a political party trying to get people to die.

Nonetheless, Hannity was happy to imply that the real crisis in America isn't that COVID is rampaging through unvaccinated Americans, many of whom have been scared away from getting vaccinated by his own network — a situation that's finally starting to change even just the tiniest amount, thank Crom.

Naturally enough, Hannity had high praise for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis's attempt to rave about immigration to distract from his own state's explosion of COVID cases, and said that if we really want to get serious about fighting the pandemic, we should "close the border."

Yes, really.

Then he brought on Cruz to insist that efforts to control the spread of the virus are really about "control," not science, because Ted Cruz will lie about anything.

Hannity: Now I'm going to argue, you know, the high rate of COVID positivity at that border, any American that is infected because Joe's not enforcing the laws of this country, you can blame Joe Biden for COVID, and if you die, I would put the blame on him too.

Why — why won't they stop this super-spreader event? Because it's happening in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands.

We'll just jump in here and note that earlier in the broadcast, Hannity had been fulminating about the release of 7,000 migrants who had tested positive in — and remember, most of them quarantined in hotels paid for by charities. Now it's like millions or maybe billions!

Cruz agreed it's just horrible, raising every possible scary thing in the world:

Sean, you're exactly right. People across the state of Texas, across the country are pissed and should be pissed. People are dying and Joe Biden doesn't care. Kids are getting assaulted, sexually assaulted, raped, and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris don't care.

We've had over a million illegal immigrants in the last six months under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and they don't care.

You take the city of McAllen, releasing 7,000 illegal immigrants into McAllen, all of whom are positive with COVID. And I put that in perspective, McAllen is a city, its population is about 141,000. That means 5 percent of the population of the city consists now of illegal immigrants who've tested positive for COVID that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are just dumping there one after the other after the other because they won't enforce the law.
And instead what does Joe Biden do? He lectures the state of Texas. He lectures the state of Florida. He cannot stand that our states are opening. He cannot stand that our schools have been open. He cannot stand that people are going back to work.

He wants to get back to the jack-booted thugs.

Again, Cruz is talking about legally admitted asylum seekers who have quarantined away from the public. You know, before their children went and murdered everyone.

This is a familiar refrain for Cruz, who made essentially the same bogus claim back on July 15 as well. It may soon be added to the 2024 Republican platform for all we know.

Again, just to emphasize who's really a danger to Texans and the rest of America, let's also note that today, Cruz continues to promote the virus in the name of "Freedom":

As for migrants, Hidalgo County Judge Richard Cortez (despite the title, he's the county's chief executive, not a judicial official) makes clear that asylum-seekers are tested on release from federal custody, and that they have a positivity rate of about 8.3 percent, which Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel for the American Immigration Council, notes is far lower than the 12 percent positivity rate for Texans overall, and that even those numbers may be misleading since at this point in the pandemic, ordinary Texans seeking testing are more likely to be experiencing symptoms, "so the true rate of COVID in the Texas population as a whole is unknown."

Not that facts are likely to get too much in the way of the ongoing "Scary Diseased Immigrant" panic, which as we've noted is one of the oldest anti-immigrant lies this nation of immigrants has.

[Fox News / Border Report / Border Report]

 Doktor Zoom

Doktor Zoom's real name is Marty Kelley, and he lives in the wilds of Boise, Idaho. He is not a medical doctor, but does have a real PhD in Rhetoric. You should definitely donate some money to this little mommyblog where he has finally found acceptance and cat pictures. He is on maternity leave until 2033. Here is his Twitter, also. His quest to avoid prolixity is not going so great.

Report spotlights GOP 'millionaires caucus' that stands to benefit from obstructing tax hikes on the rich

Jake Johnson, Common Dreams
August 06, 2021

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. (Mande Ngan/AFP)

A new analysis by the government watchdog group Accountable.US finds that two-thirds of GOP senators—and more than 40% of House Republicans—are millionaires who stand to personally benefit from obstructing tax hikes on the wealthy proposed under Senate Democrats' reconciliation package, which aims to invest in climate action and the tattered social safety net.

"For corporations to successfully derail reform for working families, they will depend on the help of their millionaire friends in Congress who themselves stand to benefit from maintaining a broken status quo."
—Kyle Herrig, Accountable.US

Provided exclusively to Common Dreams, the report (pdf) spotlights a total of 125 lawmakers who make up what Accountable.US dubs the "Republican Millionaires Caucus," a group characterized as hell-bent on preserving Trump-era tax cuts that "overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest individuals, including themselves."

The new report was accompanied by an online search tool designed to help members of the public determine whether their representatives are among the lawmakers attempting to stonewall the proposed tax increases on the rich.

"The Republican Millionaires Caucus would rather protect tax giveaways for their big corporate donors and people like themselves than help build a lasting economy that works for everyone," Kyle Herrig, the president of Accountable.US, told Common Dreams.

"Under the Trump tax cuts for the rich, big corporations raked in massive profits as the middle class continued to disappear," said Herrig. "Now that new leaders are trying to level the playing field for everyday workers and their families, corporations are spending millions of dollars to stop it—and many in Congress are carrying their water."

While the details have yet to be finalized, the $3.5 trillion reconciliation proposal that Senate Democratic leaders outlined last month is expected to call for tax hikes on wealthy individuals and large corporations, as well as billions of dollars in funding to help the Internal Revenue Service crack down on rich tax cheats. Those changes to the heavily skewed tax code would help finance major investments in green energy, child care, long-term care for the elderly and people with disabilities, and other Democratic policy priorities.

Senate Democrats are gearing up to turn their full attention to the reconciliation package as soon as this weekend, when the chamber is poised to advance a $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill that does not include any tax increases. As Common Dreams reported last month, Senate Republicans stripped IRS enforcement funding from the bipartisan measure.

Congressional Republicans have repeatedly made clear that they view any rollback of the Trump tax cuts—which slashed both the corporate tax rate and the top individual rate—as a "red line" they're unwilling to cross. As such, the GOP is expected to unanimously oppose Democrats' sweeping reconciliation bill.

"In just a few days, our colleagues will start ramming through yet another reckless taxing and spending spree," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) complained in a floor speech on Thursday.

McConnell—whose net worth is estimated to be around $34 million—is one of the Republican lawmakers highlighted in the Accountable.US analysis, which notes that "many members of the Millionaires Caucus already have histories of flaunting their wealth or shamelessly violating the public trust to serve their own interests."

The report cites several specific examples:

Sen. Ron Johnson, who had a minimum net worth of $14 million in 2018, paid "out of his own pocket" to fly in his children's private jet during the pandemic and demanded a provision of Trump's tax plan that benefited pass-through entities while maintaining a multimillion-dollar stake in his own pass-through company;

Sen. Rick Scott—who has been worth $91.75 million and abandoned his promise to put his assets in a blind trust when elected—expedited approval of a pipeline that benefited his investments while Florida's governor and enjoyed a 33% increase in wealth during his first year as a U.S. senator; and

Rep. Darrell Issa has a net worth of $250 million and has repeatedly used his office for personal gain—including arranging $800,000 in earmarks to boost his real estate's value by 60%, attacking the Treasury Department's forced sale of Merrill Lynch after the firm handed over a billion dollars in transactions for him, and repeatedly working to benefit his auto electronics firm.

In opposing tax increases on the wealthy and large corporations, the "Republican Millionaires Caucus" is out of step with the U.S. electorate.

According to a survey (pdf) released Thursday by the progressive polling outfit Data for Progress, a majority of voters overwhelmingly support increasing the corporate tax rate to the pre-Trump level of 28%, hiking taxes on rich individuals, and raising taxes on millionaire investors.

"After years of exploiting tax loopholes at the expense of low and middle-income Americans, corporations were the first in line for taxpayer aid when the pandemic hit as millions of families lost their jobs and their livelihoods," Herrig said. "For corporations to successfully derail reform for working families, they will depend on the help of their millionaire friends in Congress who themselves stand to benefit from maintaining a broken status quo. It's time these lawmakers fix their priorities."

Inside One Company’s Struggle to Get All Its Employees Vaccinated

At an optical business in New York City, it took months of coaxing, a cash bonus and a weekly testing mandate to persuade 90 percent of the staff to get a coronavirus vaccine.


John Bonizio, the owner of Metro Optics Eyewear, Denise Fitzpatrick, a store manager, and Brett Schumacher, the company’s general manager. They have been trying to nudge their employees to get vaccinated against the coronavirus.Credit...Laila Stevens for The New York Times

By Nicole Hong
Aug. 6, 2021

Tiara Felix loves her job at an eyewear store in the Bronx, where she spends five days a week managing customer orders in a back-room lab, surrounded by colleagues fitting and cutting lenses for glasses.

But there is one thing that could prompt Ms. Felix, 31, to leave: a vaccine mandate.

“There’s no choice,” she said. “I’ll have to quit.”

Ms. Felix is among the six remaining unvaccinated employees at her company, Metro Optics Eyewear, who have been unmoved by a monthslong campaign by their bosses to persuade every employee to voluntarily get a coronavirus vaccine.

Time is running out. Employers across the United States are now confronted with the same question of whether to fire workers who refuse to get vaccinated, a dilemma that carries new urgency as the rapidly spreading Delta variant leads to a surge in hospitalizations among the unvaccinated and threatens to stall the economic recovery

This week, New York City became the first American city to announce a vaccination requirement for workers and customers at a variety of indoor venues, including restaurants, gyms and theaters. Across New York City, 66 percent of adults have been fully vaccinated.

The new rules followed weeks of pressure by city leaders on private businesses to mandate vaccines or frequent testing as a condition of employment. A growing number of companies, including Facebook, Microsoft and the fitness chain Equinox, have announced that employees must be vaccinated to return to the office.

But the issue can be particularly complicated for the many small businesses that provide jobs to more than three million people in New York City, about half of the city’s work force.

They often employ lower-income workers, who polling has shown are less likely to get vaccinated because of a mix of factors, including distrust of public health officials, limited access to vaccine sites and less of an ability to take time off work. Losing even one employee by requiring vaccinations can have an outsized impact, especially in a summer where help-wanted signs have dotted restaurants, corner stores and salons across the city.

Tiara Felix, a Metro Optics lab worker, said she was skeptical about getting vaccinated and that she would likely quit if the company forced her to do so.Credit...Laila Stevens for The New York Times

At Metro Optics Eyewear, which has four stores in the Bronx, home to the lowest vaccination rate in New York City, it has been a painstaking journey to persuade 90 percent of employees to get vaccinated.

Most of the company’s 58 employees live in the Bronx, where the business has been offering eye exams and selling glasses for four decades. Fifty-eight percent of adults in the borough are fully vaccinated, compared with 75 percent of adults in Manhattan.

John Bonizio, 63, the owner of Metro Optics, was ecstatic when he learned in January that optometrists and their staff members would be among the first groups eligible for the vaccine. During the chaotic early days of the rollout, Mr. Bonizio found a hospital with plenty of vaccine appointments available and offered to schedule them for every employee.

About half of the staff members rushed to get a shot. But because his employees interact with dozens of patients and customers each day, he wanted everyone to be vaccinated.

When he called the employees to ask why they were hesitant, their answers foreshadowed the resistance that would unfold in the coming months around the country.

Some people said they did not trust the government, citing false conspiracy theories that the vaccines contained tracking microchips planted by the authorities. Others noted that the vaccines had not yet been formally approved by the Food and Drug Administration and worried that getting vaccinated would interfere with their ability to have children. (Scientists have said there is no evidence that the vaccines affect fertility or pregnancy.)

One employee said she was concerned because she thought a vaccine had caused the characters in the film “I Am Legend” to turn into zombies. People opposed to vaccines have circulated that claim about the movie’s plot widely on social media. But the plague that turned people into zombies in the movie was caused by a genetically reprogrammed virus, not by a vaccine.

Talking to employees about the misinformation they saw spreading on social media was like walking on eggshells, said Brett Schumacher, 38, the company’s general manager. Trying to persuade a skeptical co-worker to trust the government and health officials in the middle of the workday can be awkward.

“We do have one person who is just anti-vax, period,” Mr. Schumacher said. “I didn’t get into the full reasons behind it because that kind of stuff just makes my blood boil.”

Mr. Bonizio considered firing employees who refused vaccines, but said he felt uncomfortable telling employees to “get an injection they’re opposed to or else they can’t work or feed their family.” He was also unsure about the legal implications of doing so.

CNN said on Thursday that it had fired three employees for going to the office unvaccinated, one of the first known examples of a major American corporation terminating workers for ignoring a workplace vaccine mandate.

The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued guidance in May that said employers were allowed to require vaccines for employees who physically enter the workplace. The agency also said that employers administering vaccines could not offer “coercive” incentives to get vaccinated, but did not explain precisely what it was banning.

Mr. Bonizio said it should be up to the government to require vaccines, not private businesses.

“We have to turn around and mandate vaccines because the government’s afraid to do it?” he said. “What happens if we get sued? Are they going to protect us?”

The close-knit work culture at Metro Optics also gave management pause about requiring vaccines. Some employees have worked at the company for decades. At a company Christmas party one year, Mr. Bonizio sang a version of “Mambo No. 5” with every employee’s name in it. When his stores temporarily closed during the pandemic, he kept the entire staff on the payroll.

So instead of a mandate, he and his managers tried persuasion and incentives.

“You have to be careful how you present it,” said Denise Fitzpatrick, 51, a store manager. “You can’t just tell them they have to get it, because then they’ll say, ‘Who are you to tell me?’”

The bosses shared lighthearted selfies after getting the vaccine and reiterated that there were no lingering side effects. They framed vaccination as a way to protect the health of fellow colleagues. The company arranged car pools to shuttle employees to vaccination appointments. Employees who got vaccinated early on received $1,000 bonuses.

It still wasn’t enough.

Mr. Bonizio said his efforts were also thwarted by confusing rules around vaccine access in the city. After one employee lined up for an appointment at Yankee Stadium, she was told she could not get vaccinated there because she did not live in the Bronx. A week later, she contracted the virus.

In March, Metro Optics announced a new requirement. Anyone who was still unvaccinated would have to submit to weekly Covid-19 tests.

The requirement proved enough of a hassle that it prompted another wave of employees to get vaccinated, leaving only a handful of holdouts.

Policing the weekly tests has now become the biggest challenge. One employee told Mr. Bonizio that she had gotten tested but that the results would be delayed. He later found out she had lied to him, he said.

Employees who refuse to get tested are sent home. A sales associate recently resigned from her job after managers sent her home for failing to submit a test for weeks.

“If you’re mandating testing, you better have a system in place to monitor this, because people will figure out the holes,” Mr. Bonizio said.

Months of coaxing have been unable to sway Ms. Felix, the lab worker, who said her bosses still tell her to get the vaccine “every chance they get.”

She spent the pandemic selling clothes she designed on Instagram before a family friend recruited her to join Metro Optics earlier this year.

She finds the frequent testing to be a nuisance, but she said she prefers it to a vaccine mandate. Ms. Felix, who lives in the Bronx, said the only vaccinated member of her family is her grandmother. She described the city’s latest incentive to give $100 to anyone who gets vaccinated as “desperate,” saying it made her even more skeptical.

On Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said that new vaccinations were up 40 percent in the past week compared with the first week of July, an increase he attributed to the recent mandate announcement and the $100 incentive.

“How are you going to force something on us that’s not even F.D.A. approved?” Ms. Felix said.

The agency has authorized the vaccines for emergency use, and Pfizer could receive full approval for its vaccine as soon as next month.

“It’s our choice,” Ms. Felix added. “I don’t want no foreign object or vaccine in my body that they’re not even sure what it is.”

Metro Optics has decided to require all new full-time employees to be vaccinated.

But Mr. Bonizio, who is facing a shortage of optometrists, recently interviewed one who said she did not want the vaccine. He is debating testing her out part-time.


Nicole Hong writes about New York City's economy. Before joining The Times, she was a law enforcement reporter for The Wall Street Journal, where she was part of a team that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 6, 2021, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Coaxing and $1,000 Bonuses: A Workplace Struggles to Vaccinate

Josh Hawley's Orwellian "Love America Act" and the fascist campaign to rewrite history

Hawley's proposed law is ludicrous — but the global fascist movement's struggle to commandeer history is no joke

By CHAUNCEY DEVEGA

SALON
PUBLISHED AUGUST 6, 2021

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) talks to reporters after an amendment vote on the infrastructure bill at the U.S. Capitol on August 4, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Donald Trump may no longer be president, but the American people are still stuck in a state of malignant normality that his presidency brought into being.

Psychologist John Gartner describes such a state of being this way:

Malignant normality is when a malignantly narcissistic leader takes control of society and gradually changes reality for everyone else. So their crazy internal reality becomes enacted in the lived true external reality of that society. This is how a leader can come in and change the mores of their society.

In his role as national cheerleader and secular priest, President Biden is trying to provide moral leadership and healing for a traumatized nation, still shell-shocked by the Trump movement's continuing assault on democracy and society.

Biden's efforts have provided only short-term relief. The neofascist threat is escalating; Biden and the Democrats have shown themselves largely impotent against it. The coronavirus pandemic is now resurgent because of a new variant and Trump's followers' refusal to be vaccinated.

For these and many other reasons — most notably, extreme wealth and income inequality and the global climate crisis — America is becoming a dystopia.

The collective emotional state of many Americans, or at least those who are paying attention and still care, is frustration and unease.

Malignant normality creates a playground for fascism and other forms of right-wing maleficence. The Jim Crow Republicans and other elements of the white right are taking advantage of this broken America to escalate their attacks on free speech, reason, truth, reality, human and civil rights and multiracial democracy by weaponizing the nearly meaningless term "critical race theory." (Yes, the term has a real meaning in academic discourse, but not as bandied about by Republicans in 2021.)

For the likes of Sen. Josh Hawley, the notorious Missouri Republican, such a crisis is a dream opportunity. Last week, Hawley proposed a bill called the Love America Act of 2021, which would deny federal funding to schools that teach the real history of America and the centrality of racism and white supremacy to the country's origins. The key text of this document reads:


RESTRICTION ON FEDERAL FUNDS FOR TEACHING THAT CERTAIN DOCUMENTS ARE PRODUCTS OF WHITE SUPREMACY OR RACISM — … [N]o Federal funds shall be provided to an educational agency or school that teaches that the Pledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution of the United States is a product of white supremacy or racism.

Hawley's "Love America" bill is not a joke. It is a statement of shared principles and loyalty to an anti-democratic, racial-authoritarian movement that is winning victories all over the United States.

For example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is now mandating thoughtcrime surveys to determine the political beliefs of teachers and students in public colleges and universities.

Florida has also "banned" the teaching of "critical race theory" in public schools, and will permit — in practice, this may mean encourage — students to record classes without the knowledge or consent of their teachers. This potential surveillance is an obvious form of intimidation or threat against intellectual freedom, and specifically targeting teachers and other education professionals who are perceived as "liberal" and therefore "unfair" to conservatives.
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The Republican-controlled Texas Senate has passed legislation overturning a requirement that the history of the civil rights movement be taught in public schools. That legislation would also remove a course requirement that the Ku Klux Klan should be condemned. As I wrote recently for Salon:

... the requirements removed from the state's curriculum include two speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., any mention of Latino labor organizers Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, and any mention of Thomas Jefferson's long-term relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved teenage child who bore six of his children. The bill bars any use of the New York Times' 1619 Project and "prohibits teaching that slavery was part of the 'true' founding of the United States" and removes the requirement to study the "history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong."

Tennessee has proposed fining school districts at least $1 million if a teacher "willingly violates" state laws against discussing racism, white privilege or sexism in class. Education Week reports, "Teachers could also be disciplined or lose their licenses for teaching that the United States is inherently racist or sexist or making a student feel 'guilt or anguish' because of past actions committed by their race or sex." Similar forms of censorship will be imposed in Oklahoma, where "educators could have their teaching licenses suspended or revoked and schools could lose accreditation if an investigation finds evidence that they taught about racism and sexism in ways that violated the law." Parents in that state will be allowed "to inspect curriculum, instructional materials, classroom assignments, and lesson plans to 'ensure compliance.'"


These attacks on the teaching of actual history are an Orwellian attempt to control both the present and the future in order to remake America as an apartheid regime. Realpolitik is also in play here: Facing changing demographics and political unpopularity, Republicans seek to use a larger culture-war strategy to win elections and hold onto power by any means possible.

White supremacists and other right-wing ideologues, in the longer view, want to destroy public education and replace it with their own propaganda indoctrination program. One important element is "racial erasure," in which the truth about American history is replaced with fantasies of white innocence, white nobility and white supremacy.

As Clint Smith writes in the Atlantic, for many so-called conservatives, "history isn't the story of what actually happened; it is just the story they want to believe. It is not a public story we all share, but an intimate one, passed down like an heirloom, that shapes their sense of who they are. Confederate history is family history, history as eulogy, in which loyalty takes precedence over truth."

Perhaps most important, the right-wing moral panic over "critical race theory" is a way of to erase from public memory the struggle waged by Black Americans for centuries to defeat white supremacy in its various forms. To that point, chattel slavery and the Jim Crow regime were America's native forms of fascism. Black people defeated those forces and in doing so saved American democracy from its own worst impulses. To erase the Black Freedom Struggle is to make the case that American fascism will be victorious and that resistance is futile.

It is also crucial to understand that America's state of malignant normality is not isolated or unique, but is part of a neofascist attack by the global right on multiracial and multiethnic democracy around the world. As de facto spokesman for the American white right, Fox News host Tucker Carlson has taken a pilgrimage to Hungary, now under the one-party rule of Viktor Orbán, who has become a role model for the Jim Crow Republican Party and the American neofascist movement.

Orbán has created a fake democracy in Hungary, where elections still occur and tepid opposition is permitted, but in practice he can remain in power indefinitely. He has silenced the free press, crushed any serious democratic opposition, encouraged political violence against his regime's "enemies" and attacked colleges, universities and other centers of learning. The obvious goal is to silence dissent and produce obedient and compliant citizens who do not seek to exercise critical thinking or speak back to power.
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In an essay for Vox this week, Zack Beauchamp discusses the larger significance of Carlson's pilgrimage to Budapest:

In his Monday monologue, Carlson told his listeners that they should pay attention to Hungary "if you care about Western civilization, and democracy, and family — and the ferocious assault on all three of those things by leaders of our global institutions." He tweeted out a friendly photo with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and is confirmed to speak at a government-supported conference in Budapest on Saturday. ...

[R]ight-wing observers, typically social conservatives and nationalists, see Orbán's willingness to use state power against the LGBT community, academics, the press, and immigrants as an example of how conservatives can fight back against left-wing cultural power. They either deny Fidesz's authoritarian streak or, more chillingly, argue that it's necessary to defeat the left — a chilling move at a time when the GOP is waging war on American democracy, using tactics eerily reminiscent of the ones Fidesz successfully deployed against Hungary's democratic institutions.
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Beauchamp observes that the "Republican turn against democracy" and the American right's growing interest in Orbán's Hungary, expressed with unusual frankness and eloquence by Rod Dreher of the American Conservative, "is in significant part fueled by the right's sense of leftist ascendancy — heightened by electoral defeats in 2008 and 2020 and strengthened by defeat in culture war battles like same-sex marriage":

This, ultimately, is what makes Carlson's pilgrimage to Budapest so worrying. The Fox host's massive following gives him unusual power to set the terms of the conversation on the right; when he talks, Republicans from Trump on down listen. His bear hug embrace of Orbán could not only bring the Dreher view out into the open but also strengthen its influence over the GOP.

Republicans today aren't directly imitating Orbán; they have their own anti-democratic playbook, drawn from all-American sources. Carlson's active embrace of Hungary's strongman risks making that connection more direct, giving Republicans more ideas for how to seize control and a more powerful sense of justification in doing so.

For those who believed that Biden's election could clear the haze and wake the American people up from the living nightmare of the Trump regime, these last seven months have been increasingly painful. And now the pandemic's third wave arrives as a gut punch to them as well. Biden and other Democratic leaders still appear obsessed with "bipartisanship" and to this point have refused to act with the "urgency of now" to fight back against Republican attacks on Black and brown people's right to vote. Even under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Department of Justice seems to be protecting Donald Trump instead of investigating and prosecuting him for his crimes against democracy. The overall effect is like being smothered.

Conditions are likely to get worse — perhaps much worse, with Republicans likely to recapture one or both houses of Congress in 2022 and Trump likely to return as a presidential candidate in 2024 — before they get better.

To survive and triumph over American neofascism Americans' well of endless optimism must be fortified with something more durable and realistic, such as the formula suggested by Italian philosopher and activist Antonio Gramsci: "optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect." In Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks," he wrote: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."
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That is precisely where Americans find themselves now: The waking nightmare of the Age of Trump, from which we have not escaped, is one such "morbid symptom." Recognizing that truth may make it possible to return to full political and social consciousness, and begin the real work of repairing and rebuilding American democracy.


CHAUNCEY DEVEGA

Chauncey DeVega is a politics staff writer for Salon. His essays can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com. He also hosts a weekly podcast, The Chauncey DeVega Show. Chauncey can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.MORE FROM CHAUNCEY DEVEGA • FOLLOW CHAUNCEYDEVEGA • LIKE CHAUNCEY DEVEGA

The Capitol Rioters Attacked Police. Why Isn't the FOP Outraged?

Police unions aren’t usually bashful about defending officers, but they’ve been conspicuously subdued in discussing the January 6 attacks.
By Adam Serwer

ALEX BRANDON / POOL / AFP via Getty
AUGUST 5, 2021
About the author: Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics.

On Tuesday, the National Fraternal Order of Police decided to “clear up confusion” about its position on the January 6 assault on the Capitol by enraged Donald Trump supporters. “Those who participated in the assaults, looting, and trespassing must be arrested and held to account,” it said in a statement. “We continue to offer our support, gratitude, and love to our brothers and sisters in law enforcement who successfully fought off the rioters, and we will be with them as they grieve and recover, however long that may take.”

The FOP does not often have to clarify its position on matters of public concern; the organization is usually rather strident in expressing its views. For example, in 2016, the FOP demanded that Walmart cease selling black lives matter T-shirts. It denounced Nike for its ad campaign involving Colin Kaepernick, who was purged from the NFL for protesting police misconduct. If you go to the FOP’s Twitter feed, you can find a steady stream of clips from conservative outlets such as Newsmax and Fox News showing FOP representatives attacking policies like bail reform, slamming Democratic elected officials, and blaming Black-rights activists for the recent rise in homicides. These posts are interspersed with tributes to homicide victims, attacking “rogue prosecutors,” “activist judges,” and “progressive policies” for their deaths.

From the July/August 2021 issue: The authoritarian instincts of police unions

Local FOP chapters, meanwhile, are also not exactly known for being demure. The former head of the Houston FOP, now the vice president of the national FOP, dismissed a woman and a disabled Navy veteran who were killed in a botched drug raid by officers seeking heroin as “dirtbags.” (No heroin was found.) The Miami FOP boycotted a Beyoncé concert, charging that she had used her Super Bowl halftime show in 2016 “to divide Americans by promoting the Black Panthers.” In Chicago, the local FOP president defended the rioters who stormed the Capitol. “You’re not going to convince me that that many people voted for Joe Biden,” he said. “Never for the rest of my life will you ever convince me of that. But, again, it still comes down to proof.” He later apologized.

What you won’t find on the national FOP Twitter feed, however, are condemnations of the Capitol rioters who attacked police officers on January 6 deploying this sort of unrestrained bombast. You won’t find any clips of FOP members on Fox News confronting its prime-time hosts for mocking the testimony of police officers who faced the mob that day. You won’t even find the FOP highlighting the compelling testimony of those officers, whose recollections paint a vivid picture of the rioters and their motives. You will find only the FOP’s careful statement seeking to clear up “confusion” about its position, a deeply unusual situation for the FOP to be in.

Officer Harry Dunn, who is Black, testified that he was called the N-word by rioters who were infuriated that he had mentioned voting for Joe Biden. Sergeant Aquilino Gonell, an Army veteran and immigrant, testified that he was called a “traitor” and said that, “for the first time, I was more afraid to work at the Capitol than during my entire Army deployment to Iraq.” By contrast, D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges, who is white and who can be seen on video bloodied and being crushed by rioters, said that some of them tried to “recruit” him, with one asking, “Are you my brother?”

The catalyst for the Capitol riot was the fact that Trump, the sitting president of the United States, had engaged in a months-long propaganda campaign to convince his supporters that Biden had been illegitimately elected, and indulged a series of hare-brained schemes to cling to power even after being defeated including pressuring Republican legislators to void the results in their states, imposing on the Justice Department to declare the results fraudulent, demanding the Supreme Court declare him winner by fiat, and telling state election officials to “find” fraudulent votes as pretext for him to contest the outcome. The behavior of the mob on January 6, however, is difficult to comprehend without grasping how Trump and the rioters understand the role of police.

Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed formal segregation, police in Jim Crow states enforced the color line. Even where the law didn’t explicitly mandate discrimination, police were tacitly, if not explicitly, expected to enforce a de facto color line by local and state political leadership. “I feel just as strongly about what has happened to law and order in this country as does George Wallace,” Richard Nixon told an interviewer while running for president in 1968.

The laws have changed, but many Americans have never abandoned the belief that police are obligated to enforce America’s racial hierarchies. The role of American policing, in their view, is less to uphold the law than to act as a kind of sectarian militia for “real Americans,” which is to say, Trumpist Republicans. Trump encouraged police to abuse people of color, but when he and those around him came under investigation, he turned his anger on law enforcement. As Chris Hayes wrote in 2018, “If a young black man grabs a white woman by the crotch, he’s a thug and deserves to be roughed up by police officers. But if Donald Trump grabs a white woman by the crotch in a nightclub (as he’s accused of doing, and denies), it’s locker-room high jinks.” On January 6, Hodges testified, a rioter shouted, “‘Do not attack us. We’re not Black Lives Matter’ as if political affiliation is how we determine when to use force.” Well, yes. That’s exactly what they think.

The officers at the Capitol who fulfilled their oath by protecting lawmakers from a mob in thrall to a dangerous fantasy—that they could change the outcome of the 2020 election through violence—are now being attacked as traitors. “To my perpetual confusion,” Hodges testified, “I saw the ‘thin blue line flag,’ a symbol of support for law enforcement, more than once being carried by the terrorists as they ignored our commands and continued to assault us.” One Trump supporter accused of assaulting officers during the riot was photographed that day wearing a patch with a symbol of the murderous Marvel Comics vigilante the Punisher, decorated with the colors of the “thin blue line” flag.

The apparent discrepancy is simple to explain. The officers were seen as treasonous by the rioters because they were supposed to join the mob in overthrowing the constitutional order and casting down the liberal usurpers, as well as the illegitimate multiracial coalition that brought Democrats to power. They viewed the officers holding to their vow to defend the Constitution as betraying their true obligations, as Trump and the mob understood them.

Because the right hold the police in such high regard, the Fraternal Order of Police is uniquely positioned to disabuse conservatives of the idea that the rioters were heroic or that the riot itself was carried out by leftists, and any other manner of conspiracy theories deployed to obfuscate what happened on January 6. The organization is ideally suited to pressure Republican lawmakers to support the commission examining the incident, and to criticize those who seek to turn that process into a circus or rewrite the events of the day. The union could use its stature to attack the legitimacy of right-wing political violence, and to reject the harmful notion that the role of American police is to act as a partisan militia, rather than to impartially enforce the law.

The FOP has chosen instead to remain meekly silent on the Capitol riot, in effect reserving harsher language for protesters against police brutality than for a mob that brutalized police. When asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper why the FOP was not more forcefully defending the Capitol Police officers, FOP President Patrick Yoes offered a tame paraphrase of the group’s press release, and insisted that he had not seen Fox News hosts maligning these officers as emotionally weak cowards on the network that he and his subordinates frequently appear on for friendly interviews. (The FOP did not respond to a detailed list of queries from The Atlantic.)

The 'adamant insurrectionists': New data reveals the widespread 'radical beliefs' of aggrieved Trump fans

Alex Henderson, AlterNet
August 06, 2021

Trump supporter holds a Confederate flag outside the Senate Chamber. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP)

Some far-right pundits who are critical of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's select committee on the January 6 insurrection have argued that Democrats simply need "get over it" and move on rather than continue to dwell on what happened seven months ago. But one of the problems with that argument is that insurrectionists themselves haven't gotten over the 2020 presidential election, buying into the Big Lie and the debunked conspiracy theory that the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. And a troubling University of Chicago study finds that almost one in ten Americans favor violence in order to put Trump back in the White House.

The study was conducted for the University of Chicago's Project on Security and Threats, which — according to Robert Pape, a political science professor — "has been updating its demographic studies of the nearly 600 Americans arrested for the January 6 attack to build as complete and current a picture as possible of this mass political movement with violence at its core."

"One might have expected fires to fade, the FBI arrests to have a chilling impact on violence to support Trump, or the deplatforming of Trump himself from Facebook and Twitter to lower the temperature," Pape explains. "But our most recent nationally representative survey of 1070 American adults fielded by the National Opinion Research Council…. found, most strikingly, that 9% of Americans — believe the 'use of force is justified to restore Donald J. Trump to the presidency.'"

Pape continues, "More than a fourth of adults agree, in varying degrees, that 'the 2020 election was stolen, and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.' We also learned that 8.1% — that equates to 21 million American adults — share both these radical beliefs. From a statistical point of view, this number is extrapolated from a range between 6% (15 million) to 11% (28 million), where we have 95% confidence that the true number falls within."

"Of the roughly one tenth of those who think force is justified to restore Trump," Pape reports, "90% also see Biden as illegitimate, and 68% also think force may be needed to preserve America's traditional way of life."

Pape adds, "Today's 21 million adamant supporters of insurrection also have the dangerous potential for violent mobilization. Our survey also asked pointed questions about membership and support for militia groups, such as the Oath Keepers, or extremist groups, such as the Proud Boys, to which approximately, 1 million of the 21 million insurrectionists are themselves or personally know a member of a militia or extremist group."

Moreover, Pape warns, the Project on Security and Threats found that among "adamant insurrectionists," 63% believe in the Great Replacement and 54% support QAnon. The Great Replacement, which Fox News' Tucker Carlson has promoted on his show, is a far-right conspiracy theory claiming that people in federal governments are plotting to "replace" whites with non-whites. And QAnon believes that the federal government of the United States has been infiltrated by an international cabal of child sex traffickers, pedophiles, Satanists and cannibals and that Trump was elected president in 2016 to fight the cabal.

"Without a sound risk analysis of the drivers of American political violence," Pape writes, "it is hard to see how developing policies, far less strategies to mitigate the risk of future election-related violence, could be genuinely possible."

Vaccines: Two centuries of skepticism

Agence France-Presse
August 06, 2021

Israel's vaccination campaign has got moving faster than other advanced nations(AFP)

Wariness and outright hostility to vaccines did not start with Covid-19, they date back to the 18th century when the first shots were given.

From real fears sparked by side-effects, to fake studies and conspiracy theories, we take a look at anti-vax sentiment over the ages:

- 1796: First jab, first fears -

Smallpox killed or disfigured countless millions for centuries before it was eradicated in 1980 through vaccination.

In 1796 the English physician Edward Jenner came up with the idea of using the milder cowpox virus on a child to stimulate immune response after he noticed milkmaids rarely got smallpox.

The process -- coined "vaccinus" by Jenner (from cow in Latin) -- was successful, but from the outset it provoked skepticism and fear.

Before Jenner a riskier method of inoculation known as "variolation" existed for smallpox, introduced to Europe from Ottoman Turkey by the English writer and wit Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

- 1853: Mandatory shot -

In Britain the smallpox vaccine became compulsory for children in 1853, making it the first-ever mandatory jab and triggering strong resistance.

Opponents objected on religious grounds, raised concerns over the dangers of injecting animal products, and claimed individual freedoms were being infringed.

A "conscience clause" was introduced in 1898 allowing skeptics to avoid vaccination.

- 1885: Pasteur and rabies -

At the end of the 19th century, the French biologist Louis Pasteur developed a vaccine against rabies by infecting rabbits with a weakened form of the virus.

But again the process sparked mistrust and Pasteur was accused of seeking to profit from his discovery.

- 1920s: Vaccines heyday -

Vaccines flourished in the 1920s -- shots were rolled out against tuberculosis with the BCG in 1921, diphtheria in 1923, tetanus in 1926 and whooping cough in 1926.

It was also the decade that aluminum salts began to be used to increase the effectiveness of vaccines.

But more than half a century later these salts became the source of suspicion, with a condition causing lesions and fatigue called macrophagic myofasciitis thought to be caused by them.

- 1998: Fake autism study -

A study published in the top medical journal The Lancet in 1998 suggested there was a link between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella shot known as the MMR vaccine.

The paper by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues was revealed years later to be a fraud and retracted by the journal, with Wakefield struck off the medical register.

Despite subsequent studies demonstrating the absence of any such link, the bogus paper is still a reference for anti-vaxxers and it left its mark.

Measles killed 207,500 people in 2019, a jump of 50 percent since 2016 with the World Health Organization warning that vaccine coverage is falling globally.

- 2009: Swine flu scare -

The discovery in 2009 of "Swine flu", or H1N1, caused by a virus of the same family as the deadly Spanish flu, caused great alarm.

But H1N1 was not as deadly as first feared and millions of vaccine doses produced to fight it were destroyed, fuelling mistrust towards vaccination campaigns.

Matters were made worse by the discovery that one of the vaccines, Pandemrix, raised the risk of narcolepsy.

Of 5.5 million people given the vaccine in Sweden, 440 had to be compensated after developing the sleep disorder.

- 2020: Polio conspiracy theories -

Eradicated in Africa since August 2020 thanks to vaccines, polio is still a scourge in Pakistan and Afghanistan where the disease, which causes paralysis in young children, remains endemic.

Anti-vaccine conspiracy theories have allowed it to continue to destroy lives.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban banned vaccine campaigns, calling them a Western plot to sterilise Muslim children.

© 2021 AFP

North Korea conducted tests at Yongbyon nuclear facility, report says

North Korea conducted multiple nuclear tests after expelling international inspectors from Yongbyon in 2009. File Photo by Siegfried C. Hecker/UPI | License Photo

Aug. 6 (UPI) -- North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear facility was up and running several times between late 2020 and February, according to a Japanese press report Friday.

A draft report from a panel of experts for the United Nations sanctions committee on North Korea said there is evidence Yongbyon is active, citing infrared imagery of the nuclear site, the Nikkei reported.

The U.N. draft report stated that "the external construction of a light water reactor seems to be complete" and that "installation of machinery is likely to be in progress."

But experts also said the 5-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon was not showing signs of activity. The reactor ceased to operate in 2018.

The report described the activity as "tests," but did not specify what kind of tests had been carried out. North Korea conducted six nuclear tests in 2006, 2009, 2013, twice in 2016 and once in 2017.

AS I HAVE POINTED OUT BEFORE THESE ARE NOT PROVEN BY RADIOACTIVITY COUNTS THEY COULD BE ULTRA HIGH EXPLOSIVES WHICH CAN PRODUCE SIMILAR SEISMIC READINGS

The report will come under U.N. review before being released in September. It could be used as evidence to impose sanctions on individuals and entities, according to the Nikkei.

North Korea's ability to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons has raised concerns at international agencies.

Olli Heinonen, a former International Atomic Energy Agency deputy director general, recently said on 38 North that North Korea likely produced about 1,190 pounds of highly enriched uranium at Yongbyon by the end of 2020.

North Korea also invested heavily in the facility after expelling IAEA inspectors in 2009. North Korea built two halls in the decade that followed, with one hall capable of containing 2,000 centrifuges for uranium enrichment, according to Heinonen

Walmart, Amazon creating new demand for carbon credits

Retailers are purchasing carbon credits from growers to lower greenhouse gas footprint.

Forrest Laws | Aug 03, 2021

Walmart and Amazon may not be the first entities that come to mind when farmers are thinking about environmental stewardship. But the two business giants have begun playing a role by helping breathe new life into the once moribund carbon market.

They and other companies are making commitments to lower their greenhouse gas footprint and purchasing carbon credits to follow through on those pledges, according to David M. “Max” Williamson, an attorney with Williamson Law & Policy in Washington, D.C.

This isn’t the first time carbon markets have been poised to play a role in helping farmers contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, Williamson told participants in the Mid-South Agricultural and Environmental Law Conference, which was held online again this year due to Covid-19 concerns.

“We were pretty much there before the economic crisis with mortgage-backed securities and the global economic recession occurred in 2008,” said Williamson, an environmental and energy lawyer who began working on carbon credit contracts in the early 2000s. “There was a lot of momentum building for ag carbon in that timeframe.”

Williamson said some might remember the Chicago Climate Exchange. The CCX was essentially a pilot project that was set up in conjunction with the Chicago Board of Trade, which at one time handled most of the corn, soybeans and soft red winter wheat futures trading in the U.S.

“They had an interesting focus on soil and range land, and the payments were not bad,” he said. “They averaged about $750 a ton and that's for carbon dioxide that you could show was absorbed or taken up in the soils on these farmlands.”

Investing in carbon credits

Fast forward to 2019 and companies like Walmart and Amazon have begun investing in carbon credits to demonstrate to consumers that they are trying to lower their carbon or greenhouse gas footprint and reduce the impact of global warming.

“They can buy credits from landfills or the dairy farms we talked about, from forestry or industrial emissions projects,” he said. “But this trend of companies making voluntary commitments for their sustainability reports has driven an enormous amount of money into the market.”

A 2019 market report puts the value of the purchases at $282.3 million dollars, but Williamson believes the estimate is understated.

“It's lagging the actual numbers – that’s from 2018,” he noted. “I think today in 2021 it’s well over a billion dollars and growing exponentially. That’s what’s really driving the market opportunities right now.”

Third-party verification is one of the cornerstones of the more recent carbon market activity. “If you have a dairy farm, for example, and you’re collecting methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas, and keeping it out of the atmosphere, how do you prove that?” he asked. “You would go to one of these three nonprofit entities that have set up standards and act as a clearinghouse for auditing.”

Those are the Climate Action Reserve or CAR, the American Carbon Registry or ACR and the Verified Carbon Standard, which is often referred to as VERRA. Participants submit data to them and, if the standards are met they issue carbon credits, which can be sold to Walmart, Amazon or some other buyer.