The United States of Conspiracies
Everything you need to know for Tuesday, Dec. 1: Our winter of evictions + recap lightning round!
Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2020
9 days until Hanukkah
13 days until the Electoral College votes
24 days until Christmas
30 days until this cursed year ends
50 days until this cursed presidency is over
Ed. note: I’m sorry I missed yesterday’s newsletter. Sunday was my anniversary—weird, I know, that someone has put up with me for 11 years—and I never got around to putting it together. So today, we’ll do a catch-up lightning round.
Today’s Number: 17.8 million
US adults who live in households that are behind on rent or mortgage payments. About 5.8 million of them expect to face eviction or foreclosure in the next two months.
ABOVE THE FOLD
—> What Did We Miss?
—> 5 local and state stories:
The number of COVID cases has grown by at least 21.7% in each Triangle county since the beginning of November. Comparatively, that’s not bad: “Other parts of North Carolina have seen both cases and deaths soar in greater numbers. In Mitchell County, which borders Tennessee in Western North Carolina, cases have more than doubled since the start of the month—from 247 on Nov. 1 to 517 on Sunday. That’s the largest per capita increase in the state during that span. Since Nov. 1 the number of positive cases has grown by at least 40% in 19 other counties. Since the start of October, coronavirus deaths have doubled in half of North Carolina’s 100 counties.”
Most of the thousands of ballots Paul Newby has challenged in the race for SCONC chief justice belonged to Black voters: “Newby, a Republican who currently holds a seat on the high court, leads Democratic opponent and sitting Chief Justice Cheri Beasley by fewer than 500 votes in the unofficial results. That close margin and an ongoing recount kept the State Board of Elections from certifying the race. That recount resumes Monday. But state election officials must also rule on the dueling challenges filed by each campaign over ballots cast in the contest. … The N&O’s analysis shows that the Newby campaign challenged the ballots of Black voters at nearly three times the rate of white voters, a disparity that largely persists regardless of party.”
Legal Aid sued North Carolina court officials, alleging that they had violated the CDC’s eviction ban: “In the lawsuit, filed on Nov. 9 in Wake County Superior Court, Legal Aid alleges that court officials are not following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s nationwide eviction moratorium. … In its lawsuit, Legal Aid alleges that court officials at [the Administrative Office of the Courts] are not following the CDC order or Cooper’s executive order. ‘The problem is, even though the CDC passed this order, it’s not having the intended effect of actually stopping evictions or slowing the spread of COVID in North Carolina,’ said Isaac Sturgill, a Legal Aid attorney.”
Legends Nightclub has a new landlord: “On Tuesday, Raleigh real estate firm CityPlat paid $4.3 million for two properties situated on about half an acre at 330 E. Hargett St. and 119 S Harrington St., across the street from Weaver Street Market and The Dillon. … [Vincenzo] Verdino and Legends owners Tim Bivens and Matt Cozi said there are currently no plans to make changes to the property. But a redevelopment is likely at some point down the road. ‘Legends was founded in the Warehouse District in 1990 and is proud to have participated in the revitalization and growth of downtown,’ Bivens and Cozi said in a statement. ‘We’re looking forward to fully reopening to serve our patrons in collaboration with CityPlat, ensuring our continued success for the future.’”
Charlotte’s beleaguered restaurants are bracing for another shutdown—and I can’t help but imagine the Triangle’s are too: “Unlike other states around the country, Governor Roy Cooper hasn’t tightened restrictions on restaurants and bars, but he warned on Tuesday that the state could have to if metrics don’t start improving. It’s a message many in the food and beverage industry were both expecting and hoping wouldn’t come. … A few owners I spoke to say another shutdown of dine-in service could mean the end of their restaurant.”
Most Durham County court hearings have been canceled after a COVID outbreak in the DA’s office: “Trials at the courthouse are already on hold until January. Now criminal superior, most district and domestic violence court hearings are canceled through Friday. Some district court cases, including first appearance hearing at the jail, will still be held. Sarah Willets, a spokesperson for the DA’s Office, would not say how many people are in quarantine and how many, if any of them, tested positive for the virus, citing employee privacy. Since Oct. 30, eight people who were at the courthouse have tested positive for COVID-19, according to Durham County courthouse notices.”
—> 5 1/2 national and international stories:
Trump finally pardoned Michael Flynn, who innocently lied to investigators about his innocent conversations with Russia’s ambassador: “The presidential pardon appeared to bring to an end the drawn-out legal saga of Mr. Flynn. The Justice Department had moved in the spring to withdraw the charge against him after a public campaign by Mr. Trump and his allies, but the judge overseeing the case, Emmet G. Sullivan, had held up the request to scrutinize its legitimacy.”
Now that a Democrat is about to become president, Republicans are pretending to care about the deficit again: “Republicans are preparing to reembrace their inner deficit hawks after greenlighting big spending bills under President Trump. GOP senators say they expect to refocus on curbing the nation’s debt and reforming entitlement programs starting in 2021, as the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the debt has surpassed the size of the American economy.”
Related: Now that a Democrat is about to become president, Republicans are pretending to care about transparency again.
The DOJ wants to execute lots of people—maybe with firing squads—before Biden takes over: “The Justice Department has rushed to change the rules around federal death penalties as they expedite a slew of scheduled executions in the final days of the Trump administration, including expanding possible execution methods to include electrocution and death by firing squad. The approved amendment to the ‘Manner of Federal Executions’ rule gives federal prosecutors a wider variety of options for execution in order to avoid delays if the state in which the inmate was sentenced doesn't provide other alternatives.”
NRA executives used the gun group’s funds as a personal piggy bank: “After years of denying allegations of lax financial oversight, the National Rifle Association has made a stunning declaration in a new tax filing: Current and former executives used the nonprofit group’s money for personal benefit and enrichment. The NRA said in the filing that it continues to review the alleged abuse of funds, as the tax-exempt organization curtails services and runs up multimillion-dollar legal bills. The assertion of impropriety comes four months after the attorney general of New York state filed a lawsuit accusing NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre and other top executives of using NRA funds for decades to provide inflated salaries and expense accounts.”
Iran’s top nuclear scientist was assassinated: “One of Iran's most prominent and well-guarded nuclear scientists was killed Friday in a daytime ambush on a rural road outside Tehran, an attack Iran's foreign minister blamed on Israel and that sharply raised regional tensions in the closing weeks of the Trump administration. … Analysts said the timing of the attack appeared linked to the impending change of U.S. administrations.”
NATION & WORLD
—> The United States of Conspiracies
“As far as the civil war goes,” Jason Strickland, the mayor of the 1,400-person town of Sundown, Texas, told Reuters recently, “I don’t think it’s off the table.”
Strickland, an oilfield production engineer, joined a militia-type outfit called the South Plains Patriots. As another member explained, “If President Trump comes out and says: ‘Guys, I have irrefutable proof of fraud, the courts won’t listen, and I’m now calling on Americans to take up arms,’ we would go.”
They, like two-thirds of Republicans, say they’re certain that Donald Trump won re-election but had his victory stolen through a vast conspiracy of ballot-stuffing election officials and vote-switching vote-counting machines hacked by foreign powers. (It’s not clear how many of them mean it.)
Trump is still fanning the flames.
He spent Sunday morning on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox News show, gaslighting about how he had “tremendous proof” of fraud and claiming that his loss was “statistically impossible.” He spent Sunday night—after 60 Minutes aired an interview with the election security chief Trump fired for saying the election was “the most secure in American history”—venting on Twitter: “We have some big things happening in our various litigations on the Election Hoax. Everybody knows it was Rigged.”
Actually, nothing is happening in their “various litigations.”
On Friday, a federal appeals court rejected Trump’s request to block Pennsylvania from certifying its results. On Saturday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court tossed a Republican congressman’s lawsuit alleging that a law passed by the Republican legislature to make mail-in voting easier violated the state constitution, so all mail-in ballots should now be thrown out and Trump should be declared the winner. (That was a real argument, I swear to God.)
Similarly, the much-hyped “Kraken” lawsuits filed by not-quite-official Trump lawyer Sidney Powell against Georgia and Michigan became instant internet gold not just because of Powell’s hilarious unfamiliarity with spellcheck, but also for their fusillade of factual errors, unproven assertions, absurd arguments, citations of random tweets, and even ethical breaches.
By now, it should be obvious to anyone with firing neurons and access to Google that this smorgasbord of paranoia and ignorance is based on nothing more than the delusional rantings of an addled 74-year-old. While I could spend thousands of words rebutting these claims—no, Detroit didn’t have more votes than registered voters; no, there’s nothing unusual about urban counties reporting late; no, Dominion Voting Systems was never affiliated with Hugo Chavez—ultimately, there’s little point. Conspiracy theories are self-reinforcing. They’re impervious to fact-checks.
As Lin Wood tweeted (and Trump retweeted) before he and Powell filed the Georgia lawsuit: “Enemies of America will deny its allegations. Do NOT believe them. Believe Sidney & me. We love America & freedom. Our enemies do not.”
It pains me to be an enemy of America, but there’s an issue we need to reckon with: Tens of millions of Trump voters have become unmoored from reality, many with fundamentalist certitude. And this belief in a low-rent conspiracy theory—which some Republicans argued justified staging legislative coups — will soon become an article of faith.
Our democracy withstood Trump’s attacks, barely. But that’s hardly cause for celebration. This year was less an aberration than the culmination of the cynical, total-war politics Republicans have employed since the Gingrich era, one that brooks no compromise and prospers by tearing down political systems. Fortified by a feedback loop of propaganda—first talk radio and Fox News, then the clickbait sites Facebook delivered to Boomers’ feeds, now the Pravda-esque OANN and Newsmax—the GOP became a breeding ground for conspiracy theories.
To be sure, belief in conspiracy theories isn’t a conservative pathology. It’s a human trait, primed by millions of years of evolution, arguably driven by the same forces that create religions: a need to see patterns in noise and causal agents to explain phenomena. People across the political spectrum who lack trust in institutions tend to embrace conspiracies out of “motivated reasoning”—an effort to validate a pre-existing worldview inconsistent with the available facts.
But here’s the difference: The more knowledgeable liberals become, the less likely they are to buy conspiracies. For conservatives, the opposite is true.
As reliant as Trump was on the “poorly educated” white working class, and as eager as the left has been to paint his followers as illiterate dolts, his most fervent and politically engaged supporters—those who embraced his anti-liberal, anti-expert, anti-elitist messaging—had college degrees.
These are exactly the people research says comprise the high-knowledge, low-trust sweet spot in which conspiracy theories take root, flourish, and thrive. Nothing or no one short of Trump himself can convince them that Biden won. And the party’s elites—the ones who know better—have been cowed into silence, terrified of landing on the wrong side of an angry tweet, hoping this insanity will disappear when Trump does.
It won’t. And Trump’s not going anywhere. Come Jan. 20, he’ll no longer be president, but he’ll remain head of the Republican Party in everything but title.
The problem isn’t just that the inmates took over the asylum. It’s that radicalization has inertia. It devours the impure. Already, Trump turned on Georgia’s far-right governor and Republican secretary of state for not helping him steal the election. He threatened to have Ohio’s governor primaried for acknowledging Biden’s win. He spurned Fox News for the more obsequious OANN, and his supporters followed.
So long as Trump and his acolytes and wannabes control the GOP, the party will be wedded to the fiction that he lost because of a conspiracy no one quite understands and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president. No deviation from the orthodoxy will be tolerated. Republican states will erect barriers to mail-in voting to “restore trust.” Republican senators will hold hearings on election fraud so Lindsey Graham can grill Dominion executives about their seances with Hugo Chavez’s ghost. Maybe Q will moderate a 2024 GOP presidential forum.
America now has two political parties, but they’re not Democrat and Republican in the traditional sense. One is a broad, loose-knit, often ineffective coalition stitched together by its fear of the other guys; the other is, well, the other guys, who have lost their fucking minds.
We shouldn’t pretend this isn’t the case or kid ourselves that it’s going to get better before it gets worse.
That’s all for today. Thanks for reading.