Trump found liable for sexual abuse in civil suit, fined $5 million

Hot off the presses: the jury in the civil suit by E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump found him culpable, meaning that the jury decided that it was more likely than not that Trump raped Carroll (the suit was for both battery and defamation) in a Manhattan department store about 30 years ago.

Trump was ordered to pay $5 million.

This isn’t a criminal case, of course, but now he’s been found by a jury of his peers likely to have committed sexual assault. I’m hoping this will be enough to seriously damage his chances of reelection, but remember that he said he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and nothing would happen to him. Let’s hope he was wrong.

Watch the January 6 meetings live

I forgot that the January 6 hearings, Day 2, began this morning, but they’ll continue. The PBS live feed is below.

And it’s getting hot. Here’s a summary of what happened so far today from the New York Times. I’m afraid that if I start watching, I won’t stop!

Former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign chairman told the special House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol that he told his boss on election night in 2020 that he had no basis for declaring victory, but Mr. Trump insisted on doing so anyway.

Mr. Trump “thought I was wrong. He told me so,” Bill Stepien testified, according to a videotaped interview the panel played on Monday at the second in a series of public hearings this month to lay out its evidence.

The testimony came near the start of a session in which the committee planned to describe the origin and spread of Mr. Trump’s election lies, including the former president’s refusal to listen to advisers who told him that he had lost and that there was no evidence of widespread irregularities that could change the outcome. Later, the panel planned to show the chaos those falsehoods caused throughout several states, ultimately resulting in the riot.

“This morning, we will tell the story of how Donald Trump lost the election, and knew he lost the election, and as a result of his loss, decided to wage an attack on our democracy,” Representative Bennie G. Thompson, Democratic of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, said as he opened the hearing.

Among the panel’s initial revelations Monday were:

• Mr. Trump’s campaign advisers, his attorney general and other top officials told him repeatedly that his claims of a stolen election and widespread voting fraud were wrong, but the president insisted on pressing ahead with them.

Feel free to discuss what’s going on as it comes down.

The January 6 assault on the Capitol

Here is the 10-minute video that, I believe, was shown the other day at the Congressional hearings on the January 6 Capitol invasion. It’s an excellent piece of filmmaking, juxtaposing the violence at the building with Donald Trump’s infuriating words.  And, to me, at least, it conveys a sense of how violent the invasion was, and how crazed the invaders were.  “Lock ’em up” was my response to a lot of the video, and, indeed, many will be.

I believe one reader the other day took me to task for saying that this was an “insurrection.” Well, it looks, sounds, and smells like an insurrection to me.

pic.twitter.com/Po7qA3xecf

— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) June 10, 2022

As a supplement, here’s a 40-minute video, produced by the New York Times, on the events of that day. The YouTube description is below:

The Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was perhaps the most widely documented act of political violence in history. The New York Times obtained, analyzed and mapped out thousands of cellphone videos, police bodycam recordings and internal police audio to provide the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why. Our Oscar-shortlisted documentary “Day of Rage” charts in chilling detail how the peaceful transition of power was disrupted by rioters who stormed a seemingly impenetrable seat of government.

It’s more thorough but not as powerful as the shorter video above.

Don’t forget the January 6 hearings tonight

At last some of the Congressional hearings on the January 6 insurrection will be televised—tonight starting at 8 p.m. Eastern Time. All the major networks will carry them.

For a quick guide to what you can expect, see this article in the NYT (click below):

An excerpt:

The New York Times will provide live video of the hearing at nytimes.com along with live discussion and analysis from Times reporters. All of the major broadcast networks plan to carry the hearing live, as do the major cable news networks, with the exception of Fox News.

What will the hearing cover?

Committee leaders have indicated that the focus on Thursday will be on presenting a complete timeline of the riot, beginning with the 2020 election and extending through the riot itself and its aftermath.

Democrats involved in the investigation have said the evidence they present will connect the dots between the monthslong campaign that President Donald J. Trump and his allies waged to discredit the outcome of the election and the effort by rioters on Jan. 6 to disrupt the congressional certification of the results.

The hearing is also likely to highlight the involvement of the Proud Boys, the far-right group whose members played a critical role in the storming of the Capitol. The committee said the witnesses at the session would include Nick Quested, a documentary filmmaker who was embedded with the group in the run-up to Jan. 6, and Caroline Edwards, a Capitol Police officer who was injured at the start of the violence.

There will be more hearings to come, with the next announced one on Monday at 10 a.m. They might be boring, but I expect moments of fireworks.

The Substack writing of Heather Cox Richardson

Reader Steve sent me a link to a Heather Cox Richardson post along with a comment:

You may know that Heather Cox Richardson is the top Substacker in terms of number of subscribers and amount of earnings. I think her opening paragraphs here are the perfect summary of how the USA got to this point in its history.

If a future historian writes about this time, like Gibbons did about the Roman Empire, he or she could use the Reagan presidency as the start of the decline and fall of the USA.

In fact, I hadn’t heard of Heather Cox Richardson (mea culpa), but found out that she is a Professor of History at Boston College, author of six books on history and politics, and is indeed the most widely read author on Substack. Below is the piece I was directed to, which you can read by clicking on it (but subscribe if you read regularly):

I’ll let you read the first three paragraphs for yourself; they recount how Reaganism led to the concentration of wealth among Americans, and, even though Democrats kept getting elected, Republicans started to delegitimize elections, culiminating in the January 6 insurrection. Perhaps she’s right about Reagan, but perhaps she’s not.

I was more interested in this, though:

Today, Maggie Haberman reported in the New York Times that on January 5, Marc Short, then–vice president Mike Pence’s chief of staff, told Pence’s lead Secret Service agent that Trump was about to turn against Pence publicly and that the vice president could be in danger. Clearly, members of the administration anticipated violence on January 6 and, astonishingly, expected it because of the actions of the U.S. president.

Click to read the NYT story. It’s worrisome, but I don’t see any serious evidence that Pence was ever in physical danger—at least from Trump. As hotheaded as Trump is, I can’t believe he’d think he’d survive in politics after masterminding an attack on his own Vice President:

Back to Richardson’s piece, though. It’s about economics, about which I know little and am not inspired to learn more. It’s also a news summary and I don’t see a lot of original thought. But remember, this is the first piece I’ve ever read by her, so the rest may be better. As for this one, I wasn’t inspired by snippets like this:

On Tuesday, Biden published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal touting his economic successes and explaining how he plans to transition from the red hot economy of the past year to stable, steady growth. He promised to work with anyone “willing to have an open and honest discussion that delivers real solutions for the American people.”

Will any Republicans take him up on it? Something else Biden wrote makes me doubt it: “I ran for president because I was tired of the so-called trickle-down economy. We now have a chance to build on a historic recovery with an economy that works for working families.”

Or this, which I already knew because a. it’s three days old (the column is June 3), and because it was reported in all the major media.  Likewise with her last paragraph:

And on Wednesday, as the horrific murders of schoolchildren and teachers in Uvalde, Texas, have been followed by several more mass killings, Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson claimed that Democratic efforts to promote gun safety are not about public health. Instead, he said, Democrats want to disarm the people because they’re afraid of a popular uprising against them because “they know they rule illegitimately.”

Well, yes, I’d heard that, too. In truth, this piece looks more like a news summary than a thoughtful analysis of the news. I read another of her columns, which was more of the same, but with perhaps a bit more analysis.  Still, I read Substack alongside the regular media (which also has op-eds) to garner long-form analysis and original thought, and I haven’t seen a lot of it in the three pieces I read. Still, perhaps people want a thoughtful yet short-form summary of the important news, which might explain Richardson’s popularity.  One of her advantages, too, is that she can explain current events in light of history, as she did in a third column. Still, I find other Substackers more intellectually challenging.

To each their own.

The termites email, even when I’m in Patagonia.

Good morning from Patagonia, as we thread our way down toward the Drake Passage. We’ll have some more photos later today.

Here’s a lovely comment attempted by reader “barube” on my post “The invasion brings out the kooks“, pointing out that a lot of American termites emerged from the woodwork during this invasion.  Reader “berube” underscores that point.

You are a great biologist, but you are wacked out as far as politics goes. Like Sam Harris, you lack any ability to be objective re Trump. Like Shapiro likes to say, the facts do not care about your feelings. The facts are: Crimea was lost under the feckless leadership of Obama. Ukraine may be lost under the even more feckless Biden. There is no way what is happening, would be happening, under Trump. Please seek out help for your Trump derangement syndrome.

Yeah, Trump would have helped Putin take over Ukraine. Here we have another “wacked out” Trump-lover who should know that the proper pejorative is “whacked out”. I believe Trump Derangement Syndrome, which once meant those people who were (properly) driven wild by the ex-President’s lunacy, should now apply to those like “barube”, who think Trump was a fantastic President and would have saved Ukraine had he remained in the White House.

A piece on the Left I wish I’d written (well, at least part of it)

This piece by Fredie deBoer on his eponymous Substack column is free, but do subscribe if you read him often. It’s an analysis of the failure of the Left to unify themselves in a way that can appeal to middle American and defeat the Republicans—things I’m on about all the time. It also answers a question I get all the time: “Why are you always bashing the Left and leaving the Right alone when the Right is clearly more dangerous to America?” Well, I don’t really neglect the Right, and I do agree about the relative dangers. But I do concentrate on the Left, and deBoer explains why better than I can.  And he pulls no punches.

Click to read:

The part I don’t wish I’d written, because I think it detracts from deBoer’s message, is that he writes a LOT about Chris Hayes—a political commentator on MSNBC—using Hayes as an exemplar of what’s gone wrong with the Left. In particular, after Trump was elected, says deBoer, Hayes got woke. This is just a short bit reflecting deBoer’s disappointment with Hayes (even though he says he admires him):

When I think of this refusal to practice introspection, I think of MSNBC host Chris Hayes. I see two great impediments to the American liberal project, and Hayes embodies both: a fixation on Trump that nears the pathological, trapping liberalism perpetually in yesterday’s war, and a studious refusal to speak plainly and critically about the way that the Democratic party has become captured by donors and staffers whose politics are not just wildly out of step with the median American but with the median Democrat. Whether for ratings or to satisfy the contemporary lie that Trump is the worst president ever – you can read Hayes’s own writing from the Bush era to understand why it’s a lie – Hayes cannot quit Donald Trump, and thus like his party cannot settle on a remotely coherent political vision. He’s trapped.

And that’s all I’ll say about Hayes, though deBoer has a lot more to say about him. I don’t think it’s wise to use Hayes as a whipping boy for Woke Democrats, simply because it detracts from deBoer’s message. Plus I don’t know squat about Chris Hayes!

I’m just going to give two long quotes by deBoer because he expresses some of my own sentiments more strongly and with more sarcasm than I could. The bold questions are mine that I think deBoer answers (indented bits):

First, why does he (and your host) concentrate on the perfidies of the Extreme Left rather than the Dangerous Right? deBoer:

Sometimes I get people asking me why I don’t write more criticism of Republicans and conservatives. I’ve made the basic point many times before: those with influence within the conservative movement are too craven or crazy for meaningful written engagement to be worth anything, and those who are interesting and honest have no influence within the conservative movement. You can engage with Ross Douthat, who’s sharp and fair but who the average conservative would call a RINO [JAC: “Republican in name only”], or you can engage with a roster of interchangeable lunatics who lie and dissemble in defense of a cruel revanchist movement. I tend to train my fire on the broad left of center because, as much as I would sometimes like to wash my hands of the whole damn lot of them, they are the half of American politics that could actually reform, that could improve. I see no positive outcome from going through Breitbart posts and pointing out the lies. But Hayes, and other liberal Democrats who grumble and groan about left on liberal criticism, seem to think that if we just keep talking about how awful Josh Hawley and the Proud Boys are, somehow these problems will all sort themselves out.

They won’t. If you’re obsessed with defeating Trumpism, you should realize that you can only do that through securing a broad multicultural coalition, and you can’t do that when you’re alienating Hispanic voters or failing to challenge people in your political orbit when they insist that white children should be taught that they’re inherently and irreversibly racist. 70% of this country is white, Hispanic voters are not remotely as left-leaning as people assumed, immigrants are far from uniformly progressive, women were never actually a liberal stronghold, and you can’t win national elections by appealing only to the kinds of people who say “Black bodies” instead of “Black people.” This is the simple point David Shor has made for over a year, and for his trouble he gets a columnist in the Nation flat-out lying about him. Imagine a political tendency where popularism – literally, the idea that you should do things that appeal to voters – is immensely controversial. Liberalism is not healthy.

And your host will add: yu don’t need me to bash Republicans because there are already a gazillion people who do it, and you can read them instead of me.  Also, I feel more compelled to address problems in my own family (Democrats) than in that bad family across the street. It’s easier to settle family squabbles than reconcile the Hatfields with the McCoys.  Finally, it distresses me that my family is riven by a thousand differences, as well as imbued with apparent ignorance of what Americans want in their democracy—both of which will help spawn Republican victories down the road. At any rate, deBoer is right: we need a multicultural coalition, and the “elites” aren’t helping with that.

Now deBoer is not in my position on the political spectrum. In his Substack bio, he describes himself this way:

I write about everything but have a few jams that I engage with consistently. I am a Marxist of an old-school variety, which means I frequently complain about liberals, social democrats, and whatever “democratic socialism” is.

Second, and finally, what does the Left need?  deBoer, though perhaps “a Marxist of an old-school variety”, says this, first quoting Democratic ex-Senator Harry Reid, who, when asked what message he wanted to leave with America, answered “I want everybody in America to understand that if Harry Reid can make it, anybody can.”

And then deBoer riffs on that:

Does that sound anything like the message American liberalism wants to deliver now? Absolutely not. Today, American liberalism wants to tell you not that America can be a place of justice and equality where we all work together for the good of all, even as we acknowledge how badly we’ve failed that ideal. In 2021 liberalism wants to tell you that the whole damn American project is toxic and ugly, that every element of the country is an excuse to perpetuate racism, that those groups of people Hayes lists at the bottom are not in any sense in it together but that instead some fall higher on an hierarchy of suffering, with those who are perceived to have it too good in that hierarchy deserving no help from liberalism or government or the Democratic party – and, oh by the way, you can be dirt poor and powerless and still be privileged, so we don’t want you, especially if you’re part of the single largest chunk of the American electorate. Anyone who tows the line [sic] Harry Reid takes here is either a bigot or a sap, and politics is a zero-sum game where marginalized groups can only get ahead if others suffer, and Democrats fight to control a filthy, ugly, fallen country that will forever be defined by its sins. That’s the liberalism of 2021, a movement of unrelenting pessimism, obscure vocabulary, elitist tastes, and cultural and social extremism totally divorced from a vision of shared prosperity and a working class movement that comes together across difference for the good of all. In fact, I think I learned in my sociology class at Dartmouth that a working class movement would inherently center white pain! Better to remain divided into perpetually warring fiefdoms of grievance that can accomplish nothing. Purer that way. Now here’s Chris with part 479 of his January 6th series, to show us the country’s biggest problems.

Conservatives run roughshod over the country, and liberals are powerless to stop them, because liberalism has been colonized by a bizarre set of fringe cultural ideas about race and gender which they express in abstruse and alienating vocabulary at every turn. If anyone complains, liberals call them racist or sexist or transphobic, even when those complaining are saying that we can fight racism and sexism and transphobia more effectively by stressing shared humanity and the common good. Republicans tell the American people batshit conspiracy theories about communists teaching Yakub theory in kindergarten; Democrats fight back by making PowerPoint slides about why resegregating public schools is intersectional. We have reactionary insanity that expresses itself in plain, brute language and an opposition that insists that most voters don’t actually have any real problems, using a vocabulary that should never have escaped the conference rooms of whatever nonprofit hell it crawled out of. I cannot imagine a more obvious mismatch, the gleeful conspiracist bloodletting of the right against the sneering disdain and incomprehensible jargon of the left. I wonder who’ll win politically, an army of racist car dealership owners who have already taken over vast swaths of America’s state and local governments, keening for blood and soil? Or the guy in your anthropology seminar who insisted they were the voice of social justice while simultaneously making every conversation all about them?

This is all humorous and snarky, but also rings true. (I suppose deBoer’s Marxism is reflected in his concentration of class instead of race.) Be that as it may, the next time someone asks me why I bash the Left more often than the Right, I’ll just send them this post.

________

Note to deBoer: it’s “toes the line,” not “tows the line.” And it’s a “vise grip” not a “vice grip.”

 

h/t: Steve

MSNBC bashes Jussie Smollett’s guilty verdict as the “crowning jewel” of the Right, a verdict that empowers Trump and his minions

I’ve heard of the Right bashing MSNBC as  the Left-wing equivalent of Breitbart, but I never read or watch MSNBC, so I had no opinion. But my attention was called this morning to two articles on MSNBC that criticize the Smollett verdict—or rather, wring their hands over it—because, say the writers, it gives succor to the right and to Donald Trump and his supporters. And it will hurt members of the LBGTQ community as well, as people won’t believe any claims of gender-based hate crime.

I couldn’t believe this line of thought, but you could read the articles below.  My take on the verdict is that justice was done, that there wasn’t going to be much political fallout except for racists being glad that a black man was convicted, and that, overall, the verdict was not only just, but useful in deterring future hoaxers from trying the same thing. There’s a penalty if you get caught. I was satisfied that justice was done.

But the first article, below, blames the guilty verdict on a proposed future in which LGBTQ people will not be believed when they report real hate crimes. (Smollett is gay.) That’s really messed up: what will make people less likely to believe the claims of victims is HOAX CLAIMS by LGBTQ people: that is, what Smollett did, not what the jury did. What planet does Zach Stafford live on?

Click to read:

First Stafford dismisses any importance of the actual truth of what Smollett claimed, or of the verdict’s affirmation that he lied (my emphasis):

The Jussie Smollett saga may now be technically over after a Chicago jury found the actor guilty Thursday of five of the six counts he faced, but its impact will be — and has already been — felt for years to come. It doesn’t matter if the actor, who starred on “Empire,” really was beaten up by people yelling “This is MAGA country!” and is wrongly being punished or if he did stage an elaborate hoax, as the jury decided he did by finding him guilty of five counts of disorderly conduct.

No, this is what matters:

Instead, the seemingly never-ending questions over the almost three years regarding the truthfulness of his account means the indisputable victims of hate crimes will now carry an even heavier burden of suspicion.

The only winners found as the dust settles are the members of the right who have declared themselves America’s real victims of hate and discrimination — people who have strategically made the Smollett case their go-to example for how the left operates and how it wrongly makes villains out of Donald Trump supporters.

Meaning Smollett’s guilty verdict is their new crowning jewel as our culture wars rage on.

(I believe he means “crown jewel”.)

For crying out loud! Justice was done in this case, and all Stafford worries about is whether the Right will use the verdict to support their crusade against LGBTQ rights? But you know what? The Right will use what they can use, and beefing that Smollett was found guilty will not change that. Similarly, the Left will use what the Left can use, as it did with Smollett’s initial claims. Does Stafford wish he’d been found innocent, even though a ton of evidence said that he was guilty?

Stafford first revealed how the Left buttressed Smollett, as this tweet from Bari Weiss shows. Yes, people weighed in before the fact, jumping to conclusions. But there was no trial, so all I thought was that his story sounded fishy and if he were tried, he’d likely be convicted. As a scientist, one withholds judgment until evidence starts appearing.

This is quite something. https://t.co/MWEuY79cI7

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 10, 2021

Then Stafford gets distraught because as the hoax began to be uncovered, Trump and his son went on social media talking about the flaws of the media, “fake news”, and mocking the “MAGA hat wearing” that was part of Smollett’s claims.

Here’s how Stafford winds up, and I’m not sure what he’s trying to say.

We couldn’t help but cover the story of a Black, gay celebrity who said he’d been attacked by Trump supporters. This wasn’t just because it was a story involving a famous member of the community we covered, but also because for many of us who had been reporting on anti-LGBTQ crimes for years, we believed his case might help shine a light on the fact that LGBTQ folks — especially trans people — were dying at historic rates in the streets. Smollett claimed to have been attacked in those same streets.

Since journalists began accurately reporting trans homicides in the early 2010s, we have consistently seen a rise in anti-LGBTQ violence, with 2021 being the deadliest year on record, specifically for trans people. Black people in this country, regardless of their sexuality, also find themselves over-represented in FBI data documenting hate crimes in the U.S. each year.

With this guilty verdict, it’s really those people who lost — not just Smollett — with the winners being people who are now more emboldened in demanding even more from victims before receiving justice. Sure, Smollett may have lied — or at least was found guilty of it. But statistically most people who report these cases do not lie and are rarely ever believed.

What is so important for us to do in this moment, as we look to what’s next, is to ensure work is done to stop the epidemic of hate facing folks who look like Smollett. Trump supporters are not being subjected to hate crimes for supporting Trump on any level — full stop.

Nor are Biden supporters being subjected to hate crimes for supporting Biden on any level—full stop.

Is Stafford implying that the verdict should have been “not guilty”, thus helping all the true victims of LGBTQ hate crimes down the line? Or is he just bewailing the fact that it will be harder to take those claims seriously? If the latter, then he should be blaming Smollett,  There is no reason to drag the verdict itself into the fight for LGBTQ rights, which is a good fight.  If Stafford is saying that he wished, in the face of the evidence, that the jury should have acquitted Smollett (perhaps for the greater good, which is NOT a reason for a verdict), then god help him.

This piece by Ja’han jones is too slight to have been published, but there is a telling bit at the end. Click to read:

The last bit:

Smollett held throughout the trial that the incident was not a hoax.

Nonetheless, the strange, seemingly ever-changing details in the case have provided nearly three years’ worth of material for comedians and online commentators. Some of it has been quite funny, in fact.

Even more comical, in my view, was the predictable conservative outrage over Smollett’s allegations. Conservatives took to social media in 2019 to express outrage over the dropped charges. How dare someone make such a heinous claim about followers of their dear leader, they screeched. Violent, masked white guys who shout Trump slogans and use chemical agents to attack victims?

Many on the right shamed those of us who knew such a claim was totally plausible — and then the Jan. 6 insurrection happened.

Well, one could say that it was equally funny to see the credulous Left accept such a dubious story.  If Jones thought that Smollett’s story was “totally plausible”, he must have been smoking something. Of course I wouldn’t have thought that the January insurrection was plausible, either, but there are plenty of readers here who either thought it possible or were not surprised when it did happen.

But all this is what we Jews call “pilpul”:  meaningless and endless debate about matters of little consequence. Both writers are trying to make political hay out of a verdict that was just and, in fact, will probably deter hate crimes if it has any effect at all.

Happy Friday!