Clear and Present Danger

In 2004 a senior advisor to President George W. Bush famously told journalist Ron Suskind that people like Suskind lived in “the reality-based community.” They believed people could find solutions to problems through careful study of discernible reality. But, the aide continued, Suskind’s worldview was obsolete. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” the aide said. “We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality— judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

We appear to be in a moment when the reality-based community is challenging the ability of the MAGA Republicans to create their own reality.

Central to the worldview of MAGA Republicans is that Democrats are socialists who have destroyed the American economy. Trump calls Harris a “radical-left. Marxist, communist, fascist” and insists the economy is failing.

In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, today, Harris laid out her three-pillar plan for an “opportunity economy.” She explained that she would lower costs by cutting taxes for the middle class, cutting the red tape that stops housing construction, take on corporate landlords who are hiking rental prices, work with builders and developers to construct 3 million new homes and rentals, and help first-time homebuyers with $25,000 down payment assistance. She also promised to enact a federal ban on corporate price gouging on groceries and to cap prescription drug prices by negotiating with pharmaceutical companies.

Harris said she plans to invest in innovation by raising the deduction for startup businesses from its current $5,000 to $50,000 and providing low- or no-interest loans to small businesses that want to expand. Her goal is to open the way for 25 million new small businesses in her first four years, noting that small businesses create nearly 50% of private sector jobs in the U.S.

Harris plans to create manufacturing jobs of the future by investing in biomanufacturing and aerospace, remaining “dominant in AI, quantum computing, blockchain, and other emerging technologies, and expand[ing] our lead in clean energy innovation and manufacturing.” She vowed to see that the next generation of breakthroughs—“from advanced batteries to geothermal to advanced nuclear—are not just invented, but built here in America by American workers.” Investing in these industries means strengthening factory towns, retooling existing factories, hiring locally, and working with unions. She vowed to make jobs available for skilled workers without college degrees and to cut red tape to reform permitting for innovation.

“I am a capitalist,” she said. “I believe in free and fair markets. I believe in consistent and transparent rules of the road to create a stable business environment. And I know the power of American innovation.” She said she would be pragmatic in her approach to the economy, seeking practical solutions to problems and taking good ideas from wherever they come.

“Kamala Harris, Reagan Democrat!” conservative pundit Bill Kristol posted on social media after her speech.

For his part, Trump has promised an across-the-board tariff of 10% to 20% that billionaire Mark Cuban on the Fox News Channel called “insane” and Quin Hillyer of the Washington Examiner warned “would almost certainly cause immense price hikes domestically, goad other countries into retaliating, and perhaps set off an international trade war” that could “wreck the economy.” Cuban then told Jake Tapper of CNN that Trump’s promise to impose 10% price controls on credit card interest rates and price caps is “Socialism 101.”

Yesterday, more than 400 economists and high-ranking U.S. policymakers endorsed Harris, and today, the members of former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley’s presidential leadership teams in Michigan, Iowa, and Vermont announced they would be supporting Harris, in part because of Trump’s economic policies.

While Trump insisted yet again today that “the economy is doing really, really badly,” the stock market closed at a record high today for the fourth day in a row.

In other economic news, for nine years, Trump has said he will find a cheaper and better way to provide healthcare to Americans than the Affordable Care Act, although on September 10 he admitted he has only the “concepts of a plan.” Today the Treasury Department released statistics showing that 4.2 million small business owners have coverage through the ACA. Losing that protection would impact 618,590 small business owners in Florida, 450,010 in California, 423,790 in Texas, and 168,070 in Georgia.

Trump has made a claim that crime has risen dramatically under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris central to his campaign rhetoric. The opposite is true. Two days ago, on September 23, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released its official report on crime statistics from 2023 compared with 2022. Those statistics showed that murder and non-negligent manslaughter fell by 11.6%. Rape fell by 9.4%. Aggravated assault fell by 2.8%. Robbery fell by 0.3%. Hate crimes fell by 0.6%.

Central to the worldview of MAGA Republicans is that immigration weakens a nation and that immigrants increase crime and disease. First Republican vice presidential nominee Ohio senator J.D. Vance and then Trump himself repeatedly advanced the lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating their neighbors’ pets and bringing disease.

Clergy members from multiple faiths have asked politicians to stop their lies about Haitian immigrants, and today the leader of Haitian Bridge Alliance, a nonprofit organization that represents the Haitian community, filed a charges against Trump and Vance for disrupting public services, making false alarms, telecommunications harassment, and aggravated menacing and complicity.

Immediately, Representative Clay Higgins (R-LA), who in the past supported Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and filmed a selfie inside a gas chamber at Auschwitz, posted on social media: “Lol. These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters…but damned if they don’t feel all sophisticated now, filing charges against our President and VP. All these thugs better get their mind right and their *ss out of our country before January 20th.”

After an outcry, Higgins took the post down. According to House speaker and fellow Louisiana Republican Mike Johnson, who called Higgins a “very principled man,” Higgins took it down after he “prayed about it.” Johnson seemed unconcerned about his colleague’s racism, saying, “we believe in redemption around here.”

But in a statement, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) called Higgins’s statement “vile, racist and beneath the dignity of the United States House of Representatives. He must be held accountable for dishonorable conduct that is unbecoming of a Member of Congress. Clay Higgins is an election-denying, conspiracy-peddling racial arsonist who is a disgrace to the People’s House. This is who they have become. Republicans are the party of Donald Trump, Mark Robinson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Clay Higgins and Project 2025. The extreme MAGA Republicans in the House are unfit to govern.”

On Monday, Dan Gooding of Newsweek reported that although Trump said on September 18 he would go to Springfield, he will not. Republican Ohio governor Mike DeWine had warned that the local community would not welcome a visit from the former president.

Republican politicians and candidates, including Trump, embraced North Carolina gubernatorial candidate and current lieutenant governor Mark Robinson, who trumpeted the extremists’ MAGA narrative. The September 19 revelation by CNN reporters Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck that Robinson had boasted on a pornography website that he considers himself a “black NAZI!”, would like to reinstate slavery, and would like to own some people himself, and shared the sexual kinks in which he engaged with his wife’s sister prompted most of his campaign staff to resign.

Andrew Egger of The Bulwark reported today that on a different online forum, Robinson called for a political assassination as well as making racist attacks on entertainer Oprah Winfrey and former president Barack Obama. Robinson has called all the information released about him “false smears” and has said “[n]ow is not the time for intra-party squabbling and nonsense,” but declined help tracking down those he claims falsified his online comments. Today, multiple media outlets reported that top staff in Robinson’s government office are stepping down.

Reality hit hard this week in Texas, too, where U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez yesterday approved the auctioning off of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s media business, the aptly-named InfoWars. Jones insisted that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting  was a “hoax” designed to whip up support for gun restrictions, and that the grieving parents were played by “crisis actors.” Juries found Jones guilty of defaming the families of the murdered children and causing them emotional distress.

The auction of his property will enable the families to begin to collect on the more than $1 billion the jurors determined Jones owed them for his reprehensible and harmful behavior.

In the past few months, politicians and certain media outlets have latched on to a narrative that recent immigrants, especially undocumented ones, are causing spikes in crime. Instead of gathering data and examining the issue empirically, they are making this broad assertion based on highly publicized individual incidents of crime by undocumented immigrants. All acts of violence must be taken seriously. But policymakers should not attribute blame to entire classes of people when individuals commit crimes.

The research does not support the view that immigrants commit crime or are incarcerated at higher rates than native-born Americans. In fact, immigrants might have less law enforcement contact compared to nonimmigrants. Focusing on the facts is imperative, especially given that immigration has become a top issue for voters ahead of the election.

Substantial research has assessed the relationship between immigration and crime. Numerous studies show that immigration is not linked to higher levels of crime, but rather the opposite. Studies have also examined the impact of the concentration of immigrants in a community on crime patterns, finding that immigration is associated with lower crime rates and an increase in structural factors — such as social connection and economic opportunity — that are linked to neighborhood safety.

When looking specifically at the relationship between undocumented immigrants and crime, researchers come to similar conclusions. Numerous studies show that undocumented immigration does not increase violent crime; research examining crime rates in so-called sanctuary cities also found no discernable difference when compared to similarly situated cities without sanctuary policies. One study that focused on drug crimes and driving under the influence found that unauthorized immigration status was associated with reductions in arrests for those offenses.

The research also shows that overall, immigrants have a similar or even lower likelihood of incarceration compared to native-born Americans, a trend that holds for immigrants from various source countries. For example, one study found that undocumented immigrants are 33 percent less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the United States. Indications of a negative relationship between immigration and crime also emerge when looking at conviction rates. In a Texas study, undocumented immigrants were found to be 47 percent less likely to be convicted of a crime in 2017 than native-born Americans. More recently, a study looked at census data over a 150-year period; since 1870, incarceration rates of immigrants are actually slightly lower than U.S.-born people and that gap widens in recent years with immigrants 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born citizens.

Despite claims from conservative media and campaign rhetoric pointing to immigration as the cause of crime increases, there is no evidence that immigration — and in particular the recent influx of immigrants to Democratic-run cities — is causing a “crime wave.” For one, direct data on the causes behind recent increases in crime is limited, especially as it relates to undocumented immigrants. Crime is complicated – attempting to isolate single factors to explain crime trends, especially when the full impact of the Covid-19 pandemic is still being born out, would be misguided. However, some factors to consider are the socioeconomic instability largely caused by the pandemic, gun violence and an increased prevalence of guns in communities, and disruptions to community life and increased social isolation. Although some policymakers and media pundits readily assume a correlation, research does not substantiate the assumption that any increase in crime is caused by the recent influx of immigrants.

What’s more, the arrival of record numbers of immigrants at the United States–Mexico border over the past two years has not corresponded with an overall increase in crime in so-called “blue” cities where many of the recent arrivals have settled. In most places, the opposite has happened — crime, including violent crime, has trended downward (other than larceny and a small increase in robbery) after peaking across the country in 2020. This has been true since the spring of 2022, the year Republican governors, including those in Arizona, Florida, and Texas, began transporting undocumented immigrants to cities with more immigrant-friendly policies, including Boston, Chicago, New York, and Washington.

As a recent NBC News analysis shows, crime overall was down in most of the cities targeted by Texas from April 2022 through 2023, though Washington is a notable exception. According to an analysis by the Council on Criminal Justice, crime has dropped since April 2022 across many categories, such as aggravated assault (including assault committed with a firearm) and carjackings, in most of the cities where information was reported. Where increases did occur, including in the categories of robbery and shoplifting, those trends began in 2021, before the current upsurge in undocumented immigrants. Nor has there been a surge in violent crime in states and counties along the U.S-Mexico border corresponding to larger immigration flows.

In New York, a sanctuary city that has received the most immigrants from Republican-run border states, crime decreased in most major categories in 2023 compared to the year before, as confirmed by a January report from the New York City Police Department. This follows reductions in most crime categories in the city in 2022. New York City remains one of the safest big cities in the country despite sensational claims that it is being overwhelmed by crime.

Although some have tried to portray the areas of New York City where immigrants are temporarily being housed as crime-ridden, the existing data does not support that contention. In four precincts that have large migrant shelters, data shows no unifying trend in crime rates. One precinct saw a drop in crime rates, two saw a rise, and one remained static.

Narratives equating immigrants with danger and criminality are nothing new. They gain prominence in public discourse in a cyclical fashion, typically after surges in immigration. Waves of immigration by new groups — historically, Irish, Catholic, Jewish, Italian, Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, and German people — were often followed by backlashes linking them with crime and disorder. This is centuries-old discourse aimed primarily at boosting a contemporaneous politics of exclusion, not one seriously concerned about the true causes of crime.

A 1931 report by the National Commission of Law and Enforcement acknowledged this: “The theory that immigration is responsible for crime, that the most recent ‘wave of immigration,’ whatever the nationality, is less desirable than the old ones, that all newcomers should be regarded with an attitude of suspicion, is a theory that is almost as old as the colonies planted by Englishmen on the New England coast.”

Perpetuating this myth today may be counterproductive to public safety, particularly when decision-makers adopt policies that target whole communities. Such policies can potentially fracture communities — for example, by breaking up millions of mixed-status households. They may also harm police-community relationships by increasing the risk that punitive immigration enforcement could increase immigrants’ fear of law enforcement and reluctance to report crime.

Painting all immigrants with a broad brush can perpetuate harmful stereotypes that help foster hostility toward their communities. This in turn can have a detrimental impact on law enforcement’s ability to conduct investigations and eventually hold perpetrators accountable; many people may not report crimes to police or cooperate with an investigation or prosecution due to distrust and fear of retaliation based on their immigration status. It can also detract from efforts to address the reasons why some people commit crime, be it economic conditions, behavioral health issues, or poverty.

All told, the factors that drive crime rates are extraordinarily complex and can rarely be reduced to one cause. Policymakers should refrain from blaming immigrants as a group for increased crime where data does not substantiate those claims. Doing otherwise will hinder the development of effective crime prevention policies that can help make communities safer for everyone.

The DC-based Heritage Foundation has long spread disinformation about elections, claiming there is widespread voter fraud despite ample evidence to the contrary. More recently, it has gained attention for its authoritarian and antidemocratic Project 2025 plan for a second Trump administration.

Ahead of this fall’s election, Heritage has been at the forefront of pushing the lie that noncitizens are registering and voting in significant numbers, laying the groundwork for election deniers to use in case the results don’t go their way.

Now its efforts to undermine trust in elections have taken a dangerous new turn — a boots-on-the-ground approach to fish for voter fraud where there is none. In July, men working with Heritage knocked on the doors of suspected noncitizens in an apartment complex outside Atlanta, asking about the residents’ citizenship status and whether they are registered to vote. The pair misrepresented themselves as being with a company that assists Latinos with navigating the election system and secretly videotaped their interactions.

Several of the people said they were noncitizens and had registered, which the Heritage Foundation touted as supporting its false claims on the topic — but according to state investigators, the New York Times reported, there is no record of any of these people being registered. At least one of the people recorded told investigators that she was just giving answers she hoped would make the two men go away.

But Heritage posted the videos to its website and claimed that based on a mere 7 people, 14 percent of noncitizens in Georgia were registered to vote — an estimated 47,000 people. It’s a ludicrous assertion. The office of Georgia’s Republican secretary of state dismissed the video as a “stunt.”

Earlier this year, the Heritage Foundation used its social media presence to amplify similar deceptive behavior, which led to online harassment and death threats for the leader of a nonprofit assisting asylum-seekers. In April, Anthony Rubin — the founder of Muckraker, an online media website with “very, very powerful” ties to Heritage — and his brother misrepresented themselves as staff members of an immigrants rights organization seeking to volunteer at a nonprofit providing services to asylum-seekers in Matamoros, Mexico. Rubin kept trying to get staff at the nonprofit to state they would help migrants vote for Biden. In a multi-part thread on social media, Heritage posted a snippet of a conversation between Rubin and the head of the nonprofit, in which she is misconstrued as encouraging noncitizens to vote.

In its quest to convince people that fraud is rampant, the organization has now resorted to unconscionable behavior that puts people at risk of harassment. Secretly videotaping people in conversations under false pretenses is not a way to expose voter fraud, — which itself is vanishingly rare — but it is a way to get false information, risk intimidating eligible voters in violation of federal and state laws, and sow doubt in the integrity of our elections.

The Heritage Foundation is using old scare tactics

While these methods may be new to the organization, we’ve seen them before from others. And it hasn’t ended well for the perpetrators.

Project Veritas, a right-wing activist group, long used unverified, undercover, and deceptively edited recordings to misconstrue the truth, including about supposed voter fraud. In 2020, the group published an unverified video that the campaign of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) had collected ballots illegally, as well as videos falsely alleging voter fraud in one Pennsylvania city. In the Pennsylvania incident, the group ended up settling a lawsuit brought by the local postmaster and publicly apologized, noting that it was not aware of any evidence of fraud in the that city during the 2020 election.

In 2016, a Project Veritas member infiltrated a democratic consulting firm and secretly recorded conversations. The firm claimed the  footage was then “heavily edited” to suggest that the firm conspired to incite violence at Trump rallies and promote voter fraud. In a civil lawsuit, Project Veritas was found liable for misrepresentation and violating wiretapping laws, and was required to pay $120,000 in damages. And in 2009, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe secretly recorded conversations with staff at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). ACORN was a network of community-based organizations advocating for low and moderate-income families. The deceptively edited videos construed ACORN employees as advising O’Keefe on tax evasion. But the videos set off a political firestorm that led to public funding for ACORN to be cut off, effectively shuttering the organization. Later, O’Keefe faced a civil lawsuit from a former-ACORN staff member and settled for $100,000.

In 2016 and 2017, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a conservative legal organization, published two reports purporting to show that thousands of noncitizens were registered to vote in Virginia. The reports included the home addresses and phone numbers of many innocent people, including U.S. citizens. Four of those citizens sued PILF for defamation and voter intimidation. The case settled in 2019, and the leader of PILF was required to issue a written apology.

The disgraceful tactics employed by these groups have failed to hold up in court time and again, and now Heritage looks like it wants to join their ranks.

As for the issue of noncitizen voting — it’s a myth. Noncitizen voting does not occur in any significant manner, and it’s already illegal under federal and state law. The Heritage Foundation’s actions are hurting our democracy, not helping it.

Someone should have warned Trump about Jack Smith — FAFO.

(Sep 21)  At Trump’s rally in Wilmington, NC: 90-degree temperatures and no shade. Two dozen people are in a medical tent & more lined up outside. Some people are hitting the exits. Trump has not yet arrived.

Trump supporters getting sick due to the campaign’s lack of care and concern for their well being has become a common sight at the ex-president’s rallies.

What has also become common is people walking out on him while he is still talking.

Trump’s speeches vary between 60 and 90 minutes. For the sake of contrast, during the 2016 campaign, Trump’s speeches more often clocked in at 30-40 minutes. During the 2024 campaign Trump has been speaking longer and wearing his crowds out to the point where they get up and leave.

https://x.com/i/status/1837582908925567419

 

I don’t believe it.

She — or most likely, Trump –= paid a ghost writer to site down with her, write down some words, turn the words into a book, and self-publish (because they knew a legitimate publisher would not touch the trash).

In this book, she defends her days as a model (translation:  paid “escort”) saying that nude photos of her “celebrate the human form.”

And if you believe that . . .

 

 

And stupid people will fall all over themselves to send money to this con man, money that they will lose.