The Minnesota Model

Kamala Harris has named Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate for the 2024 election. It has become increasingly apparent that this was about the best choice she realistically could have made. Walz seems like a man constructed in a lab to help Democrats win a close election: a midwestern governor who not only has “Aggressively Normal Dad” vibes, as the New York Times put it, but who is also an aggressively sincere advocate for something resembling social democracy with the policy record to back it up.

A lot of the excitement surrounding Walz right now seems to stem from the assumption that he’ll help the Harris campaign defeat Trump in November. That’s understandable, given how real and dangerous the possibility of a second Trump term has felt over the past few months. Just a month ago, some Democrats were going on the record saying that they were “resigned” to a second Trump term. At the very least, it’s a relief to see them actually trying to win. But the value of Walz goes beyond his ability to get Kamala Harris into the White House. He provides a blueprint for how she can be successful once she’s there. If she does win, she’ll face the challenge of actually governing, and she’ll need all the help she can get. If she does manage to win the presidency, current predictions suggest that in the best-case scenario, she’ll come in with a gossamer thin majority in the House and Senate with which to try to pass policy. Looking back at Walz’s domestic agenda as governor of Minnesota provides us with a sense of direction for what Democrats could accomplish nationally.

 

The Biden administration was an example of how not to govern. Elected on a mandate to improve conditions in a nation being pummeled by the COVID pandemic and Trump’s failure to adequately address it, the Biden administration squandered the brief period of popularity they enjoyed in the first few months of their term, dragging their feet on filibuster reform until it was far too late. As a result, many of their policy priorities were either winnowed down (like gun reform, green energy expansion)—or completely abandoned (like maintaining the expanded child tax credit, passing the PRO Act, and protecting abortion rights nationally after the reversal of Roe v. Wade).

Joe Biden spent much of his early presidency laboring under the delusion that Republicans would have some “epiphany” and decide to meet his party halfway to pass significant legislation, something that largely did not happen. And in the rare cases that it did, like the bipartisan infrastructure bill or the post-Uvalde gun reforms, the result was something thoroughly watered down from what Democrats had initially hoped to pass. Of course, defenders of the Biden administration at the time would tell you that Biden was at the mercy of obstinate members of his own party, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who refused to sign onto any legislation that lacked Republican support. But as Branko Marcetic argued at the time in Jacobin, Biden had plenty of tools of coercion and persuasion he could have used to get them on board. A hypothetical President Harris will not have to deal with Manchin and Sinema obstructing her legislative agenda like Biden did—as they will both be out of the Senate. But the problem ran deeper than those two. As Sam Brodey reported for the Daily Beast, other Democrats considered Manchin and Sinema to be a “heat shield” that allowed them to avoid having to stick their own necks out to tank liberal proposals.

The lesson you could take from this is that with a slim majority, you simply have to lower your expectations for what can be accomplished. But this is not true at all. It is still possible to not only govern in such conditions but to have one of the most productive legislative sessions in recent memory. We know this because it’s exactly what Tim Walz did in Minnesota last year.

Walz didn’t achieve much during his first term as governor, for the most part because any legislative goal he attempted to achieve had to make it through a Republican-controlled legislature. In 2022, an election where both chambers were expected to lean Republican, Walz’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party surprisingly achieved a legislative trifecta for the first time since 2012 by the slimmest of margins: with a 34-33 Senate majority and just a six-vote edge in the House, a situation that gave him even less room for defections than Biden had at the beginning of his term.

At the national level, Democrats took their narrow majority as a sign that they needed to proceed with caution and seemed to govern from a place of fear. But in Minnesota, the DFL saw their first opportunity to wield power in a decade and decided to make the most of it.

In response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, which had unleashed a wave of ruthless state-level abortion bans around the country, one of the Minnesota DFL’s first acts in 2023 was to codify the rights to an abortion and contraception into state law, which would make it more difficult for it to be overturned by a future state supreme court case. In a display of exceptional party discipline, the caucus weathered dozens of Republican amendments designed to weaken the bill. Two months later, the legislature passed another bill which made the state a “safe haven” for abortion seekers in the many surrounding states where it is banned or heavily restricted. Minnesota also declared itself a refuge for transgender people living in states with bans on gender-affirming care. It also banned the abusive practice of gay “conversion therapy.”

Minnesota took steps toward a more humane criminal justice system. The legislature granted voting rights to 55,000 people with prior felony convictions, something which had been a legislative priority for attorney general Keith Ellison since he entered the legislature two decades before. Minnesota banned the practice of sentencing minors to life in prison and allowed for the possible supervised release of at least 40 people who’d been behind bars since they were children. It granted undocumented immigrants the right to obtain a driver’s license. (Republicans are currently losing their minds over this one even though this policy has allowed undocumented immigrants to more easily participate in society and has also improved road safety in general.) And Minnesota became the 23rd state in the country to legalize recreational cannabis and wiped out conviction records for 58,000 people, with more on the way.

The Minnesota legislature also entered government with a large budget surplus that they put to fantastic use. One of their biggest goals was to tackle child poverty, which had doubled nationally in 2022 after the U.S. Congress allowed the expanded child tax credit to expire. If you know about any of the Minnesota legislature’s policy accomplishments, it’s that they passed free breakfast and lunch for all public school children. But Minnesota also passed its own sizable child tax credit that is expected to cut child poverty in the state by a third and has already benefited nearly half a million children. Minnesota introduced the “North Star Promise,” which guarantees free tuition at public colleges for students from families who make less than $80,000 per year. The state has poured huge investments into education, affordable housing, public infrastructure, and green energy.

And Minnesota became perhaps the nation’s most progressive state for workers. Last June, it passed a package of policies, including 12 weeks of paid family leave and 12 weeks of paid medical leave. And against furious objections from business interests, it introduced numerous new workplace protections: it banned non-compete clauses in employee contracts, prevented employers from holding “captive audience” union-busting meetings, allowed teachers’ unions to bargain over educator-to-student ratios in their classrooms, and introduced new regulations on the conditions of work in Amazon warehouses and meatpacking plants. Last month, a new $15 minimum wage took effect.

At the same time, neighboring red states were going hog wild enacting right-wing policies: banning abortion, cracking down on the freedoms of LGBTQ people, and gutting labor protections and welfare spending. This created a sense among Minnesota Democrats that their power was ephemeral and needed to be used to its fullest potential to prevent future backsliding.

Journalist Peter Callaghan, who has covered the legislative session extensively for MinnPost, described their attitude as follows in an interview with Democracy Now!:

They pretty much decided a couple of things. One, they had four years, meaning they could lose the House in two years, but they couldn’t lose the Governor’s Office or the state Senate until '26. So, whatever they passed could stay in place for these four years — it's harder to rescind things than it is to pass things — and that they were going to make a list and check it off as they went.

This was not just a figurative list, but a literal one that Walz kept in his office.

It’s clear that Walz’s attitude towards governing is fundamentally opposite to that of the national party and a lot of other state level Democratic governments who tend to err on the side of caution at the risk of jeopardizing their electability. As he put it in an interview with the Washington Post, “I thought this would be a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and it should be viewed that way. And I've always said you don't win elections to bank political capital. You win elections to burn the capital to improve lives.”  (...)

On one level, the benefit of passing these policies speaks for itself: they are likely to improve a lot of people’s lives. But they have also generated a sense of possibility about what more can be achieved and that is generating enthusiasm for political participation. As Sarah Jaffe recently chronicled in a piece for In These Times, the last few years have seen an explosion of activism under the so-called “Minnesota Model”:

It’s a process that has built up over years, as a small group stacked up wins and more and more groups joined them. […] The Minnesota Model has yielded gain after gain: free school meals and driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants; getting Amazon to negotiate with workers for the first time; a $15 minimum wage (with proposals to bring it up to $20); so many union contracts it’s hard to count, for janitors and tenants and teachers.…

[T]hat alliance changed the face of Minnesota politics, bringing about the Democratic trifecta that passed policies statewide that were goals for members of the alignment.

And while Minnesota’s legislative blizzard was framed as something done with the expectation that lawmakers would soon lose power, this might not happen. Nationwide, Democrats, who failed to pass much of their professed agenda during the years 2021-2024, are still polling better than Republicans on the generic ballot, and at least one pollster projects them to hold onto the House in Minnesota. If people will vote for a party that delivered only a sliver of its professed agenda, imagine what accomplishing many things that make people’s lives better could do! (...)

 

It speaks to how little we’ve come to expect from the Democratic Party—both at the national level and in other states—that Minnesota’s legislative session is seen as such a departure from what is normal. But if the Democrats have power after 2024, there’s a good chance that the circumstances will look something like what Walz stepped into in Minnesota. They have an obligation to learn from what that state has been doing right. Walz seems to be an exceptional talent for a lot of reasons. But I think the single most important thing is that he understands the importance of taking action while you have the opportunity.

by Stephen Prager, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Sorry for the politics. Not much else going on at the moment with the convention sucking the air out of everything. Naturally, if you read through the whole article, you'll see the inevitable cries of Socialism! Marxism! Progressives! Screw 'em. Most people who throw those labels around have almost no reading or historical perspective to know what they even mean (or their different flavors). C'mon Dems. See what works, and get rid of what doesn't (at least try!)

***

"There is a contradiction at the heart of the Republican Party that does not exist at the heart of the Democratic Party. Democrats are united in their belief that the government can, and should, act on behalf of the public. To be on the party’s far left is to believe the government should do much more. To be among its moderates is to believe it should do somewhat more [ed. like helping normal people avoid not getting punked by corporations at every turn]. But all of the people elected as Democrats, from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Senator Joe Manchin, are there for the same reason: to use the power of the government to pursue their vision of the good. The divides are real and often bitter. But there is always room for negotiation because there is a fundamental commonality of purpose.

The modern Republican Party, by contrast, is built upon a loathing of the government. Some of its members want to see the government shrunk and hamstrung. This is the old ethos, best described by Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist who famously said: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” [ed. Good thing Medicare and Medicade, Social Security, school lunches for children, infrastruce improvement (roads, bridges, electrical grid, waste disposal, web connectivty, fire response, public parks, libraries, etc). - aren't  all on the kill switch.. oh, wait...]. The Trumpist faction is more focused on purging government institutions of the disloyal [ed. like Nazi's]. “I think that w hat Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single middle-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,” JD Vance said in a 2021 podcast interview. “Replace them with our people, and when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and when the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

Either way, to become part of the government as it exists now — to be engaged in the day-to-day process of governing — is to open yourself to suspicion and potentially mark yourself for a later purge." Ezra Klein - Trump Turned the Democratic Party Into a Pitiless Machine (NYT).]

via:

How Right-Wing Propaganda Works

“In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen.…The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out ‘Swine! Swine! Swine!’ and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen.…In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.” — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four via:

Kat Abughazaleh has watched a lot of Fox News. As an analyst for Media Matters, her job was to monitor the Fox primetime shows, producing videos documenting some of the most deranged stories to appear on the network. Somebody has to keep track of what's going on in the right's media ecosystem, and we're glad that Kat performs this valuable public service. Examples of her work include videos about Mike Huckabee's indoctrination program, the "right-wing Amazon", Tucker Carlson's post-Fox career, Conservapedia, and her weekly Fox roundups. We can laugh at the right's media, but its effects are alarming. Introducing Fox News to a market turns people more conservative and many people have disturbing stories of how their relatives have had their minds poisoned by the stream of hatred and paranoia that Fox transmits into their brains. See our Current Affairs profile of Rupert Murdoch for more.

Kat joined us recently to talk about how right-wing propaganda works. What is the typical story? Why is it effective? How can we fight this stuff? How is the right trying to ensure that its messages go unchallenged? Kat tells you everything you didn't know about the right's media apparatus and gives us some practical advice for how we can combat it.

Nathan J. Robinson

I suppose the first thing I want to do is thank you for your service. Your bio on Twitter says that you watch Fox News so the rest of us don't have to. So, perhaps you could begin by telling our listeners and our readers some of what you do endure this on a regular basis.

Kat Abughazaleh
It's kind of fun if you're the specific brain type that I have—if you're a masochist, that's what it is. It's kind of fun if you're a masochist.

Robinson
Other people would not have fun doing what you do.

Abughazaleh
Yes, when I was at Media Matters, I was on night shift, which was a small team, and we all got along really well. There was never any conflict on night shift. And that's because our brains were all broken in the same way. We knew so many things about Dan Bongino and Brian Kilmeade that the average person, even the pretty fervent Fox viewer, just wouldn't know. I know about Sean Hannity's eclectic blend of martial arts that he does, including “pain day”, which is a regular day on his schedule where he gets his sensei to beat the shit out of him.

Do I wish I knew that? No.
Do I know that? Forever.

Robinson
It's fascinating, the knowledge that you now have because you have watched so much Fox News. As I understand it, you watch the prime-time schedule of Fox News, look for important or ridiculous things to cover, note it down.

Could you tell us about your process?

Abughazaleh
My job when I was on night shift was to watch Fox, 4 to 11pm. All of us had different shows that we watched regularly. But, people would get out sick, or just get tired of listening to Hannity's voice. When I started at Media Matters, I watched Laura Ingraham for the first couple months, and then moved to Hannity.

Watching Hannity is its own special type of mind melt. It gets to a point that after a couple of weeks, you can do an entire 20-minute Sean Hannity monologue, just off the cuff. He says the same shit every single night. And then I moved on to Tucker Carlson, who then got fired. Since then, I've been watching The Five a lot.

You build up this knowledge—when you first start, it's kind of hard because you're trying to figure out these inside jokes that others in the field might have, or what the hell someone's talking about. There's a lot of lore in the Fox News and the right-wing mediaverse. There's so much lore, and all of it is useless. But when you do this job, you learn all of it. (...)

Robinson
What I like about what comes of this total immersion over time is that, as you've been describing, you start to understand how the propaganda machine works. Fox News is very powerful. People might ask, and I'm sure they ask you, why would you do this? Why would you subject yourself to this? Is this really important? These people are so full of shit and their material is so lazy.

But I think it is important because there are studies that show that when Fox News comes into a market, it turns the audience more conservative in that city or town. It's very effective. So, what have you come to understand about how this propaganda is put together?

Abughazaleh
The thing that I think many people ignore when it comes to this stuff is the danger in Fox News is it's the most watched cable news channel. Sure, the audience skews very much on the older side—you can just look at the ads to know that—but also, the chokehold it has over the GOP.

My old boss, Andrew Lawrence, used to say, Roger Ailes started Fox to help the GOP, and now the GOP is doing everything it can do to get on Fox. It's inverted. It's flipped upside down. When Tucker was on Fox News, every single thing the GOP did was to get two minutes on Tucker's show—everything. And he was dictating policy.

You think about when Kevin McCarthy was running for Speaker, and they did, what, 15 votes? That's because Tucker held the Speakership hostage. He listed demands for the House Speaker, and until McCarthy agreed to meet those demands, the vote didn't go through. That's a cable news host holding the third most powerful position in the country hostage to get the January 6th tapes. That was one thing Tucker really wanted, and Kevin McCarthy gave them to him. He also wanted a Frank Church style committee to investigate how Big Tech is attacking conservatives led by Thomas Massie, and then Massie came on the Friday after Kevin McCarthy was elected Speaker, to thank Tucker for getting him that committee.

It's less to that point now. You have things that show up on Fox News that are coming up in the GOP and vice versa: DEI, all these things about drag brunches and banning that. It's less centralized now that Tucker is interviewing Catturd.

 
Robinson
People might not know what that sentence that you've just spoken means.

Abughazaleh
I hope they don't, but yes, Tucker's irrelevant now. Fox didn't need Tucker, Tucker needed Fox, despite what Alex Jones said last week on a show with Tucker. It's more about how Fox informs the right-wing political apparatus that shows what's being introduced into the mainstream. Because there's stuff from the far right that once you see it on Fox, that's how you know the window is shifted.

Robinson
Tell us about some of those things then, and about what Fox News is trying to do to its audience. Because there's a Fox News method. You've done this feature where each week, you highlight stories that appear on Fox that don't appear anywhere else. There seems to be a common technique that underlies all of this, which is, "here's a thing that you should be mad about," or some new people for you to hate.

Abughazaleh
Exactly. And different hosts have different strategies for this. Like I said, when Tucker was there, he was really good at this. He had almost a week-long schedule where he’d slowly introduce a topic, for example, with the theory that 80,000 IRS agents were going to audit you at gunpoint. But now you have different hosts. There's less of that centralization.

But you look at, for example, when Trans Day of Visibility landed on Easter this year. You were being attacked with it every hour, with them saying Joe Biden is "transing" Easter. And that makes no sense. But then, you go to Easter dinner that night and you kind of hear from your grandfather about how Easter is trans now. It's just kind of repetition. I don't want to be like "everything's Orwellian," but when I actually read Nineteen Eighty-Four, I thought, damn, that's a really good tactic to make people think a certain way. (...)

Robinson
It's really very sad, though, because there have been all these news reports about how this poison that is put in people's brains destroys families. People talk about how their relative that they loved, who was a totally normal, loving, wonderful person, but now just watches Fox News all day, and all they do is rant. And the level of paranoia and terror on this network—there was the story about the guy who watched Fox News, and then a teenage Black kid came to his door and rang the doorbell and he just shot him. He's just sitting there in absolute terror that there are people coming for you. It seems to be that one of the core Fox News messages is just "be afraid." (...)

Robinson
Tell us then, for those of us who haven't exposed ourselves to a similar amount of this stuff, if I were to watch Fox News for a week in the prime time, what are the sorts of things that I could expect to see? What's the typical week of stories?

Abughazaleh
Things have really flared up with a bunch of different big stories between the Trump verdicts and Hunter Biden and all this stuff, but definitely something about Hunter Biden. Doesn't matter what it is, it’s something about Hunter Biden. We all know that's who we're voting for in this election: it’s Donald Trump versus Hunter Biden. Something about DEI, especially if there's anything that happened on a plane—someone's going to blame that on hiring too many Black people.

Robinson
Really? So, the air traffic control problems are not a labor story.

Abughazaleh
No, it's not a labor story about how Reagan fucked up the entire airline industry, even now, 40 years later. It's a story of how DEI, about how diversity and equity initiatives, are making airlines hire unqualified Black people, and therefore, that's why Boeing has all the doors fly off their planes, despite the fact that all pilots have to have the exact same qualifications. The reason that there's a race disparity—sorry, this gets me so pissed off—the reason there are equity initiatives in the first place is because there is a racial disparity that doesn't provide opportunities to people who are qualified. But to Fox, doors are flying off planes because of too many Black people. So, you'll definitely hear something about that. And the trans people are trying to get your kids or whatever.

Robinson
There's a cartoon that I always liked, which features Rupert Murdoch, an immigrant, and a construction worker, and Rupert Murdoch has a big plate of cookies. The construction worker has one cookie, and the Rupert Murdoch is telling the worker that immigrants are trying to take your cookie. Meanwhile, Murdoch has the giant pile.

by Denis Lushch

What you discussed there indicates something that's really important about a media organization like this, which is the attempt to redirect people's ire away from the actual power elite. Take the Boeing story: we know the Boeing story is a story of corporate malfeasance, a story of the pursuit of profit at the expense of safety. It's actually a pretty clear-cut situation. It's a great parable of how capitalism will kill you because people will cut corners to make more money. And yet, that can be reframed and shifted to point to those who have absolutely no power. Now they are the ones trying to crash your planes, kill your children, and put everything you care about at risk.

Abughazaleh
Right. And completely ignoring international politics—not even touching that, just the national stuff—the way that Fox treats labor unions and just straight up ignores gigantic labor movements here is disgusting. They love to fetishize the working class and the middle class and how we're all good American boys here, but you're spitting in the face of anything that could help what you hope to be your audience and idealizing as your audience.

That's something that a lot of Boomers do in the first place. I grew up in Texas, where "union" is a bad word. They really do—not just Fox, but all American power structures—as much as they can try to get us to want what's worse for ourselves. (...)

They do have contempt for their audience. That's what it is. The anti-intellectualism movement is so dangerous. I think it is one of the most dangerous things in our country right now, and it's being led by people like Fox News hosts, who all have college educations and degrees. I remember Pete Hegseth talking about Donald Trump with other guests, and all three of those guys went to Ivies. All of them studied history or literature. It's so hypocritical. And by targeting education—what they're doing with charter schools and DEI, taking out CRT, banning books, all of this stuff—they want you to want what's worse for yourself.

So many of our parents, especially if you're a woman or someone of color, have died or uprooted their entire lives to give us education, and Fox News is getting people to turn it away voluntarily, and that's what they want. They want you to be uneducated.

Robinson
I remember when Gretchen Carlson was on Fox News. She went to Stanford and Oxford, and yet she would play a moron on Fox News, and pretended that she didn't know what the word ignoramus or czar meant. She'd just play a dummy on purpose.

Abughazaleh
Tucker used to that too. He used to say, I don't even know what “stochastic” means, that's not even a real word. You know what that means, because you're inspiring it. (...)

Robinson
I do want to just take a moment to remind people Fox News was built by a serial sexual predator, Roger Ailes. This guy was kind of undiscussed.

Abughazaleh
Women weren't allowed to wear pants at the network until like 2016.

Robinson
One of the most evil people in the history of television, just a total and complete monster, although Murdoch manages to slip out of view a little bit. You pointed out earlier that the hosts are kind of interchangeable. Tucker thought he mattered, but he didn't. He's dispensable. He didn't even realize, I don't think, that he was dispensable. Glenn Beck was once huge on Fox News.

Abughazaleh
O'Reilly. I think O'Reilly had a bigger cultural impact than Tucker. Tucker is still relevant on the far right. But with O'Reilly, you had people in the center who claim they were liberals that would say, sometimes I just turn on O'Reilly to see what he has to say, he has some ideas—almost like a Bill Maher figure now, except no one had caught on yet. And Tucker didn't really have that appeal to a wider audience, but the appeal he did have was very focused. It was very effective. They're still suffering a bit from firing him, but they still have the numbers. They still have a shit ton of money. All these hosts are dispensable.

Robinson
And behind it all is this evil Australian billionaire. 

Abughazaleh
I just have to say, one of my least favorite things in the world is when people say the FCC should do something about Fox. Because, guess what? The FCC does not have jurisdiction over Fox News or any cable news channel. And there's one of these almost Boomer type memes, where it has a bunch of text, and it's like a history lesson: in 1980 whatever, Rupert Murdoch came here, and then Reagan eliminated all these laws. I did an entire series debunking this myth. There aren't really any legal measures that the country can take against cable news. There isn't really a classification for cable channels, but CNN is in the same classification as Fox. They're all entertainment, if you want to call them that. And honestly, the government shouldn't be responsible for arbitrating the truth.

Robinson
Right. That's its own set of dangers. (...)

Robinson
For people who are on the Left like you and me, but who are not like you and me in that they don't expose themselves to right-wing media, is there anything that they misunderstand or don't really realize about right-wing media? Or something that you've come to understand by watching so much of this stuff that you wish other people who share your politics would understand or appreciate?

Abughazaleh
Two things: one is from the perspective of a monitor of this type of stuff, and the other is from the perspective of someone who grew up conservative.

Many people that watch this stuff and that are very entrenched in right-wing media, that consume it like the air they need to breathe. They don't care if they're wrong. If you have something to debunk their latest insane theory, they don't care. Their brain will find a way to warp around that and come up with an entirely new reality in just moments. You look at the inauguration, scrolling down on Rumble, there were so many people who were devastated because Joe Biden wasn't executed right before he swore himself into office. And within about 30 minutes—probably less than that, in 10 minutes—those same people would say, "actually, this is just a part of all the plan that Trump has to take over the world again," or take over the country and take it away from Joe Biden.

So, they're able to shift their thoughts. They can keep the cognitive dissonance. And once you get a crack in it, that's one of the best things you can do. Just get one teeny, tiny crack. But unless they're ready to face that, if someone's not going to take all of your well-researched arguments in good faith, you can't make them.

But also, at the same time, I grew up conservative, and I think about how a lot of people want to lecture others or shame them, people that just genuinely don't know better. We do such a great job in this country of brainwashing people who are raised conservative. You're taught an alternate set of truths, and you have to relearn all that when you realize they're not real, and that's hard. It's hard to admit that the things you were taught, the things that you and your loved ones believe or believed, are not real. That's difficult to admit. You feel embarrassed, you feel kind of lonely. It's confusing.

And I think instead of trying to write everyone off, especially like in the South—there are so many progressive and liberal people in the South that are just being repressed by the same people who are creating the brainwashy type material for the well-intentioned people that are on the Right there. Not everything's a lost cause. I think a lot more empathy and realizing that these people are people—there's a whole system that's been created to keep these ideas in place—would help people on the Left a lot. There wouldn't be propaganda if we weren't winning.

Robinson
On the subject of the failure of fact-checking: I've just been observing debates online between a lot of people on the Right and those who are saying, "but crime is going down." And the reaction is very interesting. The first person says "look, the statistics are actually showing that crime goes down." And immediately it's just, "Well, the statistics are fake, and the Left is not reporting all the crimes that are happening." And so, your fact checks with your little charts are just going to produce a new conspiracy about the making of the charts.

I want to ask you about what lessons have come out of your studies about how to fight this stuff. What you're saying is consistent with what I got from an interview I recorded with an ex-Jordan Peterson fan. We talked about the process of leaving Jordan Peterson behind and what it had taken to shatter his faith in this man. He really believed that this man was a brilliant intellectual, and so to not believe that made him feel stupid. He had to think, I was a fool—I believed this man was smart, and I didn't know how to identify a smart man clearly, so I must be a stupid person. That's really not easy to come to terms with.

And so, two of the lessons that came out of what you said there are first, we actually have to have some empathy for people who swallow propaganda, and then second, we need a kind of positive alternative that is more than just fact checks.(...)

Abughazaleh
Yes, it's very entertaining to watch. If you divorce yourself from the awfulness of knowing that people are watching this and thinking that they're being educated, it becomes really funny. (...)

But it can get violent. I know many people who have been swatted. I know people who are currently living in a hotel because someone just showed up at their door. I make a point whenever I post something to make sure that there is nothing that sees out my window. When I'm in Texas, if someone asks what I do, when I visit my family, I just say research or whatever. I don't elaborate because it's easy to say you're being dramatic or this is ridiculous. But looking at so many people in progressive spaces, the threats that we get are not ridiculous. You get threats with people saying, "I saw you at such and such place wearing this outfit."

And that goes for every individual that I know. Institutions like Media Matters took great care of their employees in making sure that their safety was a priority, making sure that if they were being attacked they had the support they needed. I remember when OAN was a big thing. They would put my coworkers faces on the screen, and then they would have to go private on all their accounts because you just get a bunch of OAN watchers flooding their DMs. They thrive on attacking because they don't have anything else.

Robinson
No, and obviously, what we have discussed is the way that this propaganda machine is trying to whip those people into a frenzy of hatred and get them to feel like people like yourself and your colleagues are destroying Western civilization, or whatever it is that they are in a war against. They're told outright that they are fighting evil.

Abughazaleh
And with everything that's going on abroad—I'm Palestinian, so I get a fun little addition on there. I got that before everything, but now it's really bad. But you have people like a certain billionaire who owns a social media company, and Libs of Tiktok—people like that—and they'll tweet about you and say that it wasn't intended to have you targeted or anything, but that's what happens. And they know that. Chaya Raichik of Libs of Tiktok literally posed with a newspaper, pointing out that everywhere she targets faces bomb threats: children's hospitals, libraries, schools. She is delighted by it because they know that when they say something, when they say such and such school is hosting a parent's night for anyone who has two daddies, that place is going to get threats.

It’s just like when Tucker Carlson used to put someone's face on the screen and say their name over and over again, instead of using a pronoun. I remember he did one episode on Nina Jankowicz, and he just kept saying her name over and over and over again because he wanted to get it in your head. This is the target.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: Denis Lushch
[ed. I would've titled this Fox in the Whorehouse, but that's just me. How many people have the same story: some relative or friend who's deeply into watching Fox News and now is no longer recognizable. It's like a cross between cult indoctrination and Stockholm Syndrome. See also: What I’ve Learned From Collecting Stories of People Whose Loved Ones Were Transformed by Fox News (Intelligencer).]

Billie Eilish

[ed. Listening to Billie on my new headphones. Yay... : ) See also: The Best Of Billie Eilish ~ Greatest Hits Full Album 2024.]

The Little Streamer That Could

When Nicole Parlapiano joined Tubi as its marketing chief two years ago, one of the most searched questions about the decade-old streaming service was, “Is it a scam?” It was free, after all, and consumers were skeptical.

“Would it put a virus on your computer?” Ms. Parlapiano said. “People wouldn’t even touch it.”

That’s not an issue now.

Tubi has exploded in popularity over the last 18 months, establishing itself as one of the most popular streaming outfits in the United States. It now consistently outranks Peacock, Max, Paramount+ and Apple TV+ in total viewing time, according to Nielsen — and is drawing even with Disney+. Only YouTube, Netflix, Amazon and Hulu are still ahead.

The streaming service, which is owned by the Fox Corporation, runs a different business model from those competitors. In addition to being free — with revenue coming from advertising — it doesn’t require an account to use, making it more similar to services like Roku and Pluto. And it comfortably commands more engagement than those peers, according to Nielsen.

“We’re like the little engine, and it’s just getting better and better,” Anjali Sud, Tubi’s chief executive, said.

Its sudden rise has come as something of a shock to many competitors, as well as investors.

Unlike its biggest rivals, which allocate huge budgets for original programs or premium sports rights like the N.F.L. or the N.B.A., Tubi’s library contains tens of thousands of older shows and movies, many that seem to have been collected from the bargain bin. Some popular programs on the service include the 1970s procedural “Columbo,” and an early 2000s UPN sitcom, “Everybody Hates Chris.”

Horror, thriller and true crime programs also do particularly well, executives said. Tubi also has reruns of older network programming like “Empire” and “Scandal.” (...)

For the vast majority of the last decade, Tubi was not a serious player in the streaming wars. Ms. Sud said that before she joined the company last year, she was only dimly aware of it. “None of my family, none of my friends were Tubi viewers,” she said.

Fox bought Tubi for $440 million in 2020, the media company’s effort to move into streaming. It has since become something of a favorite for Lachlan Murdoch, Fox’s chief executive, who often touts its growth to investors in earnings calls.

Rich Greenfield, an analyst at LightShed Partners, said that consumers have become increasingly tolerant of commercials on streaming, and Tubi’s popularity boils down to one thing: “People love free.”

Another analyst, Tim Nollen of Macquarie, said that he was caught off guard by the sudden success of Tubi, along with other free streaming services.

“They seem to be largely venues for people to find random old things that they wouldn’t have normally thought to watch,” he said. “In many households, they have replaced the TV set that people would just leave on all the time. Now they put on Tubi and leave it on.” (...)

Revenue is growing. Mr. Nollen, the analyst, estimated that Tubi drew about $900 million in revenue over the last year compared to $775 million from the year before. (A Tubi spokeswoman declined to comment.)

At this point, there are advantages to forgoing a subscription business. Profits have been difficult to wrangle in streaming for major media companies, and cancellation rates are surging. Between April and June, there were roughly 45 million sign-ups in the United States for video subscription services, but also 43 million cancellations, according to Antenna, a subscription research firm. That’s the narrowest quarterly margin since Antenna began keeping records.

But Tubi executives also said that the volatility of the streaming business is benefiting them. As other companies raise prices — the Disney+ no-commercial tier will increase to $16 a month this fall, up from $7 a month just five years ago — and produce fewer shows and movies, a free service like Tubi is helping fill the vacuum for consumers, they said.

by John Koblin, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Richard B. Levine/Alamy Stock Photo

Chappell Roan Confronts The Sickness Of Modern Fandom

Chappell Roan Confronts The Sickness Of Modern Fandom

Over the past few years, I’ve become increasingly hesitant to identify as a fan of any living artist. There are plenty of artists whose work I like, or even love, but the entire concept of being a fan, and what the act of fandom entails, has shifted in ways I find both alienating and disturbing. What was once a straightforward expression of admiration—I’m such a fan!—has lately become more like a claim of obsessive entitlement.

Fans do not simply enjoy an album; they are in love with the person who created the work. Fans follow the celebrity object of their affection on Twitter and Instagram and TikTok and watch their every move. Fans join forums with other fans, who all believe that the celebrity is communicating with them via a series of riddles and hidden messages, which sometimes they really are.

I’m not the only one made uncomfortable by this situation. Artists, unsurprisingly, are expressing their distaste for the consequences of modern fan culture. Indie pop darling Chappell Roan posted two videos to TikTok yesterday that went megaviral. In the two videos, which combined have more than 15 million views, Roan speaks straight to the camera, imploring her fans to realize that she is not an object for them to play with, and more importantly, that they do not actually know her at all.

“I don’t care that abuse and harassment, stalking, whatever, is a normal thing to do to people who are famous or a little famous or whatever,” Roan says. “It’s weird how people think that you know a person just 'cause you see them online, and you listen to the art they make. That’s fucking weird!”

A number of the comments on these videos were from people replying to this plea for privacy with the exact sort of behavior that prompted it. It’s the cost of being famous, they said. Cry me a river, they said. We made you, they said. Maybe that’s because it is rare for a celebrity to set a firm boundary on how their fans interact with them. She is refreshingly direct—there’s no perfunctory hedging about how of course she is grateful for the attention, no self-effacing asides where she explains how she knows what a privilege this all is. She is not going on Oprah, teary-eyed, to explain how she has been hurt. She is looking her fans right in their eyes and telling them to knock it off.

The comments for the videos have since been turned off. The boundary is clear. The question is whether or not the fans will be able to respect it.

Roan’s rise to fame has been rapid, and somewhat unexpected. After signing to Atlantic Records as a teen, the label dropped her after the release of her single “Pink Pony Club” in 2020. The album she’s blowing up for this year, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, was released in September of 2023, to some critical acclaim but not a ton of attention. What did get her attention was opening on Olivia Rodrigo’s sell-out Guts Tour last summer, along with memorable performances on NPR’s Tiny Desk and at Coachella. She released a new single in April, in the midst of this spike in attention, called “Good Luck, Babe,” that peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100.

A chart released by the company Chartmetric shows her monthly Spotify listens rocketing over the past year like a hockey stick graph. Currently, she has over 30 million listens per month. A few months ago, she had only 1 million. Her song “HOT TO GO!” with its helpful spelling and arm-centric coordinated dance, has become equally popular among Peloton moms, sorority girls, and alt lesbians. Many people believe that the camo Harris-Walz campaign hats are inspired by Roan’s camo Midwest Princess hats.

Roan's rise has been meteoric, and she has shared already how hard this has been on her. During a June show in North Carolina, she cried on stage. “I just want to be honest with the crowd and I just feel a little off today because I think that my career has just kind of gone really fast, and it’s really hard to keep up,” she said. “And so I’m just being honest that I’m just having a hard time today.” In June, she told host Drew Afualo on the podcast The Comment Section that “People have started to be freaks—like, follow me and know where my parents live, and where my sister works. All this weird shit.”

by Kelsey McKinney, Defector | Read more:
Video: HOT TO GO/YouTube

How the "Working Class Republican" Scam Works

The Republican Party under Trump would like to opportunistically cast itself as a “working class” or “pro-worker” party. As a starting point to today’s conversation: this is bullshit, and the pundits who give it credence only help the bullshit spread more widely. Many labor journalists including myself have written long pieces laying out the policy reasons why this is bullshit. (Here’s one by me on the awful labor elements of Project 2025, here’s Dave Jamieson on JD Vance’s bullshit, here’s Steve Greenhouse on the Republicans’ bullshit, and you can Google for many, many more.) I’m not going to belabor, hehehe, the reasons why it is bullshit here. What I want to do today is to briefly sketch out what actually makes up the alleged shift in the GOP, and what is going to happen, generally speaking, if we allow it to flourish.

A classic pro-labor political agenda, by which I mean “a political agenda that will actually help the working class,” consists of things that will strengthen worker power—more and stronger unions, and a government framework to help rather than hinder those unions—and things that will rein in corporate power. This is common sense, when you remember that there is a natural and omnipresent power struggle between capital and labor under our system of capitalism. Companies and investors and managers are always trying to seize more power for themselves in order to keep wages and worker power low, and the labor movement seeks to empower workers to fight against this. So: help workers get stronger, in the form of unions, and put guardrails on the excesses of corporations, via corporate regulations and taxes. Labor policy is quite detailed and labor law is its own morass of nitpickery that even I do not fully understand but in general it is easy to comprehend who a policy agenda is trying to help and who it is not trying to help by using the above framework. Do not evaluate these things based on who has more pickup trucks at their political rallies or who uses what songs for their ads or who you would like to attend a football game with or who wears a flannel shirt. (Or even who shows up to put on a concerned face at a picket line.) Evaluate the various political agendas based on whether they legitimately make worker power greater and restrict corporate power, or not.

If “build worker power and restrict corporate power” are the two pillars of left wing labor policy, here are the two pillars of the Republican Party as a Working Class Party of today:

1. Anti-immigration. This, not union power, is the bedrock of what the Republicans are selling as their working class agenda. Instead of saying “companies are stepping on workers’ necks,” they say instead, “immigrants are taking money out of workers’ pockets.” Notice that any conversation on this topic by the right wing shifts almost immediately into a rant against immigration. It never goes from “we want to help workers” to “we want to build unions.” It always goes from “we want to help workers” to “immigrants are the problem.” This is the number one sleight of hand at work in all of this. Whenever an allegedly pro-worker Republican starts talking about the perils of immigration, stop him and ask him instead what he wants to do to build more and stronger unions so that working people will actually have the ability to take their fair share of the economy back. The answer will be bullshit, I guarantee.

No matter where you land on the immigration issue—whether you think it is mostly a humanitarian crisis in which working people of the world are artificially divided and oppressed by arbitrary borders in order to benefit capitalists (true), or whether you think immigration is a serious problem for the American working class because immigrants are stealing American workers’ jobs (not true in the sense of being a national crisis, but perhaps true in spots)—the one thing that is definitely true is that immigration is not the most important part of a pro-worker labor policy. It is at best a secondary concern. The heart of a pro-worker labor policy is union power and corporate regulation. Republicans instead want to sell the idea that the American economy is a zero-sum battle between American workers and immigrants coming in to take jobs and money and housing and resources from those American workers. As a matter of fact, the American economy is not zero-sum, and the job market is not a zero-sum contest between natives and immigrants, and the affordable housing crisis was not caused by immigration, and in the long run immigration grows rather than shrinks the economy.

So while there are legitimate questions of logistics and resources necessary to take in and assimilate large numbers of immigrants into America and its economy in the least harmful way, the fact that these questions are always swapped into the labor policy discussion is just pure scaremongering by Republicans. It is just a way to use racism to distract from the fact that Republicans hate unions. If you find that analysis too blunt, we can say that it is a way to demonize an other in order to avoid addressing the genuine questions at the heart of American capitalism that cause the working class to lack power. Going forward, just count the seconds from when someone asks these Republicans about the working class to see how long it takes them to start demonizing immigrants. And then see how long it takes them to start talking about how to build stronger unions. The answer will speak for itself.

2. Culture war transposed onto companies. If you are genuinely concerned about the fact that big corporations have too much power and workers have too little, restricting corporate power is its own goal. Restoring the fair balance of power is an end in itself. In the case of the Working Class Republican Party, that is not how it works. Republicans are still the party of business. They do not want to restrict corporate power in order to empower the working class. What they do instead is to take their culture war issues—gay rights, trans rights, “DEI” aka racism, and other right wing/ religious obsessions—and apply them to corporations. So they hate “big tech” and whatnot not because those companies are too powerful and are therefore detrimental to the working class economically, but because they believe those companies are too powerful and are therefore detrimental to right wing values culturally.

This is a pretty clear distinction! Although one that routinely befuddles national pundits. “Buhhhh, Josh Hawley and JD Vance said big tech companies are bad… is this populism?” No. This is culture war, applied to corporations. Instead of saying, for example, “Anheuser-Busch needs to sign a strong contract with its union in order to help workers live better lives,” you say, “Anheuser-Busch sucks because Bud Light had a trans person in an ad!” To me, it does not seem hard to see which of these positions represents true concern about the dangerous imbalance of power between workers and corporations, and which one is just bigotry masquerading as populism. But a lot of pundits seem mystified. (...)

That’s it. Those two elements are the core of the Working Class Republican Party. The fact that the national political media takes this seriously as some sort of meaningful shift in policy is a testament to the fact that we really need more experienced labor reporters in this country. It is very dumb.

Now, let me make a prediction to you about how this will play out, if Trump and Vance ascend to the White House. Corporations, which employ many lobbyists who are attuned to these things, will perceive that the Republican anti-corporate push is rooted not in a genuine distaste for corporate economic power but rather in a distaste for the trappings of progressivism that major corporations don for PR purposes. So what will corporations do? They will change their outward appearances. They will retire the pride flags and they will stop putting trans people in ads and they will stop putting out Black Lives Matter statements and they will stop touting their DEI policies. And they will tell their ad agencies to put more American flags in their ads.

This will be enough to satisfy the Republican Party. They will be able to proclaim victory in their culture war against woke corporations. Said corporations will proceed to conduct business as usual. The Republican Party will enact its typical anti-union policies and cut corporate taxes and scrap corporate regulations, and carry out flamboyant and draconian anti-immigrant efforts, as they always do. This regulatory environment will be good for corporate power and correspondingly bad for worker power and union power. 

by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. Exactly so. Republican administrations (and some Democratic ones, too) since Reagan have principally focused on these two issues: big tax breaks and trade protection for corporations; and vilification of immigrants. Oh, and one more too: privatization of public resources (vilification of government). See also: Public Ownership of Public Goods (HtW):]

"You don’t get a bill when a fire truck comes to your house. You do get a bill when an ambulance comes to your house. The only reason why this strikes anyone as normal is custom. Fire departments are publicly owned. They are a service that the government provides to all of us. If, a hundred years ago, fire departments had become private businesses, so that anyone whose house caught on fire also got stuck with a $5,000 bill for extinguishing services, then people living today would mostly accept that as the natural state of affairs. It is easy to see that America’s division between public and private services does not follow any rule at all, except this: Under capitalism, the private sector will try to take over all services, always, and only constant government action will keep public services public.

Do I need to say that this is stupid? This is stupid. If you were designing a common sense rule to govern what services should be publicly owned, it would be something like, “The public should own the things that all the public uses.” In fact, I think that if you asked most people, you would find that they already take this for granted, whether they have thought much about it or not. Why is the fire department public and not private? Because anyone might need it at any time. It’s a common good. It makes sense to be publicly owned. This is also why the police department is public. It is why parks are public. It is why the postal service is public. It is why schools are public. It is why most roads are public. It is the basic rationale for most of the things that the government controls and runs and provides to the public as a service. It is common sense.

A moment’s contemplation of this basic principle is enough to make you start wondering about all the things that aren’t public. Within the group of “Things that everyone needs more or less equally,” why is there such an arbitrary division between the publicly run things and the private ones? Why do we get firefighters, but not doctors? Why parks, but not stadiums? Why roads, but not banks? Why not, you know, food? When you take a vital service and privatize it, you ensure that it will run according to a private profit motive rather than running with the goal of providing the best service to the public. America’s health care system is the most glaring example of the human cost of this. The aggregate number of years of human life that we sacrifice in order to allow a relatively small number of people to get rich off of owning and selling health care is a staggering moral crime. The underlying principle, though, applies across many other less flashy goods and services."

***

See also: Everyone into The Grinder: "One of the most direct ways to improve a flawed system is simply to end the ability of rich and powerful people to exclude themselves from it. If, for example, you outlawed private schools, the public schools would get better. They would get better not because every child deserves to have a quality education, but rather because it would be the only way for rich and powerful people to ensure that their children were going to good schools. The theory of “a rising tide lifts all boats” does not work when you allow the people with the most influence to buy their way out of the water. It would be nice if we fixed broken systems simply because they are broken. In practice, governments are generally happy to ignore broken things if they do not affect people with enough power to make the government listen. So the more people that we push into public systems, the better.

Rich kids should go to public schools. The mayor should ride the subway to work. When wealthy people get sick, they should be sent to public hospitals. Business executives should have to stand in the same airport security lines as everyone else. The very fact that people want to buy their way out of all of these experiences points to the reason why they shouldn’t be able to. Private schools and private limos and private doctors and private security are all pressure release valves that eliminate the friction that would cause powerful people to call for all of these bad things to get better. The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems. Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves."

Why is Fentanyl in Cocaine?

Last Sunday, the Wall Street Journal, ran a huge feature story about three “high achieving” New Yorkers who ordered cocaine from the same phone-order delivery service. A social worker, a finance executive, and a young lawyer all died from fentanyl overdoses after placing their cocaine order. According to the unsealed criminal complaint, the cocaine had a mix of fentanyl and acetylfentanyl in it, which are potent synthetic opioids that an unsuspecting user has little tolerance for.

The Journal’s reporting, based on the complaint and numerous interviews, offers a vivid account of these people’s lives just before they died. But neither the complaint nor the story answers the central question on everybody’s mind: Why is there fentanyl in cocaine?

Since this story came out, multiple people have sent me DMs and emails asking: What the fuck? Why would “dealers” do this to their customers? What business sense does this make?

The government wants to charge the people they say are involved in this delivery service with running a narcotics conspiracy that resulted in death. “In the course of a single day, the defendants’ Delivery Service caused the deaths of three unrelated victims in Manhattan by selling the victims purported cocaine that was, in fact, laced with fentanyl,” the complaint reads.

There’s a subtle thing I picked up on here. The government says the Delivery Service indeed sold the cocaine “laced” with fentnayl. But they do not say, nor am I aware that they are alleging, that the Delivery Service did the actual lacing. And that’s what I want to zoom in on here: 1) At what level in the supply chain was the fentanyl mixed into cocaine? and 2) Why is this happening? (...)

The events I’m writing about ocurred during March 2021.

Why do dealers add fentanyl to cocaine?

Most dealers are not doing this. When something terrible like this does happen, I think it says much more about the state of the drug market and its structural dynamics than the people who are working in that market.

The main reason I’ve heard from researchers and analysts about the cocaine-fentanyl phenomenon is that there is simply too much illicit fentanyl being manufactured. There is way too much fentanyl and not nearly enough of the old school agriculturally produced drugs like cocaine and heroin that people very much want and seek out. This is a supply-side problem, not a demand-side problem. There is a surplus of street fentanyl out there and this excess fentanyl supply has to go somewhere. Someone, somewhere, is on the hook for it.

The illicit drug supply chain, like all markets today, is complex and multi-layered. And I think that market dynamics happenning above the retail sales level (e.g. The Delivery Service) is where this excess/surplus fentanyl gets mixed into cocaine. It could be happening via some accidental contamination. A brick of fentanyl accidentally gets added to cocaine and nobody notices. Then drug buyers who work closer to the retail-level make a bulk purchase and they get stuck with contaminated product.

Those who run retail-level sales operations typically go through middle-men who act as a go between, seperating the street level from bigger brokers and regional distributors. My speculation is that the fentanyl is being mixed into cocaine supplies at these upper-levels of the market, perhaps several rungs above the retail-level.

In this Manhattan case, it appears the Delivery Service eventually realized something was wrong with their product. I think the evidence in the complaint makes the case that it was not them who did the actual lacing. After they already made some sales of a “new batch” it seemed they realized their drugs were tainted and something was going very wrong.

I want to start with one part of the complaint that appeared in the WSJ article that really stuck out to me. It’s a text message exchange between one of the now deceased customers, Amanda Scher, a social worker, and the dispatcher. “On that March day, Ms. Scher texted a number stored in her phone as ‘Jason Melissa’” to place a cocaine order.

“Question first,” Ms. Scher wrote.

“Is it the same as it was Sunday? Because that was not good lol, had to get rid of it.”

“No new…Batch,” came the reply.

“Def better,” Ms. Scher texted about two hours after the delivery.

Texts came in from the delivery-service number:

“Hey try not to do too much because it’s really strong”

“Hey boss lady you heard”

“Lol”

The WSJ piece shows the Delivery Service then making a bunch of panicked phone calls and texts to the customers hours after they purchased their orders. Around six hours after the “cocaine” delivery to the young lawyer, her phone pinged and it was the DeliveryService:

“Hey”

“Hey you there”

Seven calls came in that night and the next morning from the delivery-service number.

The same thing happened to the social worker. After “cocaine” was delivered to her, the Delivery Service made three FaceTime audio calls to her phone that went unanswered. Then came a text the next morning: “Hey can you give me a call back I need to ask you something real fast.”

From the WSJ piece, based on the complaint, “The day after the deliveries, Mr. Rainey sent Mr. Ortega screenshots of home drug testing kits, and Mr. Ortega switched to a different phone to take drug orders, prosecutors alleged.” Mr. Ortega and Mr. Rainey are defendants in the case, accused of running the “narcotics conspiracy.”

It seems that the Delivery Service eventually realized their batch was tainted, and that doesn’t mean it was them who did the lacing. Maybe they knowingly bought a bad batch and had no other sources, so they bought it tried to fix it. Maybe the realized their batch was bad after using a fentanyl test strip, and then sent panicked messages to their customers.

Based on the frenzy of calls and messages to their customers, one thing that seems unlikely is that this delivery service wanted to intentionally harm or poison people. The DEA often labels drug dealers as cold-blooded murderers; predators who prey on people suffering with addiction, who don’t care about safety or human life. The messages sent by The Service to their customers that were obtained by law enforcement do not sound like cold-blood murderers. The Service sounds like people who are scared.

But this whole ordeal is also also confusing. Because it appears that this wasn’t the first time that the Delivery Service sold “bad” cocaine. The text messages between the social worker and the Delivery Service add another layer to this story. The social worker wanted to place an order with the service, but she told them that she had to get rid of her last batch because it was so bad. Was that batch also cut with fentanyl? Was that batch just very weak? What was going on there?

Again, I can only speculate based on what I know about the drug market right now.

I think this particular service struggled to obtain quality product. I think they realized something was wrong with their product, which they likely bought from a mid-level supplier above them in the supply chain. Maybe the Delivery Service bought drugs as they usually do but this batch was contaminated and they were stuck with what they got.

The retail-level sellers at the bottom of the supply-chain, the people who itnerface with customers, were maybe left with only bad choices. That’s the nature of prohibition markets. If they ditch the bad batch and don’t sell it, then they are likely to lose out on a lot of money. So they see selling it as their only choice. What do they do? They try to cut it. They try to dilute it. They try to make do with what they’ve got, just as many small businesses in America do.

Unless they’re good chemists, the retail-level attempts to fix their product isn’t really going to work. Especially with a cocaine and fentanyl combo, where customers are using their five senses to test the quality of the drug all the time. They taste it. They smell it. They look at it. Then finally they feel it. They are feeling for a stimulating cocaine high, which is the opposite of what fentanyl does. The consistency, taste, smell, and psychoactive effect are all wrong. Perhaps that’s why the social worker “had to get rid” of the last batch. Maybe she got lucky that time and survived because she only did a tiny bit and got rid of it.

After that incident, the Delivery Service maybe had the same product and they tried to do something to improve the quality and called it “a new batch.” This is something I’ve seen dealers do a lot. They say they’ve got something good, something new, but it’s the same old junk. It’s like a crappy sale at Kohl’s. Customers arrive all excited only to see the stuff on sale is the boring shit they don’t want.

Interestingly, the social worker responded that the new batch was “def better.” Maybe the Delivery Service bought better cocaine and added it to the bad batch. But the fentanyl was still there. At first taste, the cocaine hit them first, so they used more and more. And the fentanyl crept up.

Fentanyl can hit fast, but snorting still takes roughly 10 minutes to really hit. It’s not like the movies. The effects of snorting are not instantaneous. Using this bad batch, the unwitting user is in a totally precarious place and could very well die if they’re alone and no one is there with naloxone to revive them. It seems that was the case in each of these three deaths. The social worker, the lawyer, and the finance executive used alone and died.

by Zachary Siegel, Substance |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. See also: The cops and local news won’t stop lying about fentanyl (WTHW):]

"None of which is to say that fentanyl isn’t actually dangerous when used and (I know you know this) anyone out there using right now should be especially careful. It’s just that it quite simply does not attack you like a sentient alien molecule riding on the air from host body to host body as the cops would have us believe.

The reason they want us to believe it does is obvious to anyone reading this but just to lay it out anyway the more dangerous the job of a cop appears and the more that idea is laundered through the media the harder it becomes for people to push back against anything they say or do never mind get anywhere remotely near something like defunding them. After all look at how valiant they are out there risking their lives every day to rid the streets of the scourge of dangerous drugs. For us.

It also provides further justification for destroying the lives of the people they arrest for possession of said drugs. If people like this can use drugs this dangerous they must naturally be inhuman....

Plenty of drug users also know right off the jump that these overdose stories are fake. If fentanyl was really deadly to the touch or somehow magically defied gravity and lingered in the air, people everywhere would be dropping like flies. And yet, it’s only cops who seem susceptible to fentanyl’s magical properties."

The Good Tourist

The good tourist: can we learn to travel without absolutely infuriating the locals?

Tourism has never had a great reputation, given that the very word “tourist” is pejorative. At best, it suggests someone whose interest is superficial and whose understanding of a place is nonexistent. What’s the first thing you think, when you hear the phrase, “They’re a bit of a tourist”? You think, that person is annoying. But the word’s reputation has plummeted further in recent years. Anti-tourism movements are springing up across the world...

Part of this is about sheer volume: the number of people crossing an international border as tourists (rather than displaced people or migrants) in 2023 was 1.3 billion, which is not only a complete bounceback post-Covid, but an almost 25-fold increase since the 1950s...

When you look at anti-tourism movements as a whole, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that travel is one of those nice things we no longer deserve. But into that sorry picture steps the travel journalist Paige McClanahan with her book The New Tourist. We can still travel, she says, and more than that, it’s important that we do; we just have to get a lot better at it.

The old kind of tourist, she writes, is “a pure consumer who sees the people and places he encounters when he travels as nothing more than a means to some self-serving end: an item crossed off a bucket list, a fun shot for his Instagram grid, one more thing to brag about to his peers”. The new tourist, by contrast, is humbled by the unfamiliar, not unsettled by it, she “embraces the chance to encounter people whose backgrounds are very different to her own, and to learn from cultures or religions that she might otherwise fear or regard with contempt”. Maybe that doesn’t sound groundbreaking – in brief, when you’re away, try being your best self – but it cuts to the heart of a book that is part a modern history of international travel, part manifesto for it...

The first chapter of The New Tourist goes back to how we got here: 50 years ago, when newlyweds Tony and Maureen Wheeler set off from the south of England to drive to India. They weren’t the first to try the hippy trail, but they were the first to launch a publishing empire off the back of it: Lonely Planet. Many of us who took our first trips as adults holding one of these guides will remember the sensibility of them: it was all about budget travel, getting in and out of a place on a fiver. The Wheelers changed the terms of tourism entirely – the true traveller didn’t waltz in like Lady Muck, paying top dollar for everything. This new kind of tourist liked to be called a “traveller” and went to out-of-the-way places, craving the authenticity of the locals’ experience, not luxury.

But this had its downsides, namely that these “travellers” had the same footprint but a lot less money. No offence – and this is my opinion, not McClanahan’s – the Wheelers made an absolute fortune off performative non-materialism and lauded being “off the beaten track”, while beating every track so hard you could see the tracks from space.

Lonely Planet guides, by the turn of this century, had become more about the high end, but there is a broader tension, which McClanahan exemplifies with Bhutan – where you pay a really sizeable visitor sustainable development tax of $100 a person every day – versus Nepal, the “backpacker’s superhighway”. “In Bhutan,” she says, “you had to come with an organised tour and had to be led by a local tour guide. They were very explicitly going for lower volume, higher quality tourism.” She felt plugged in to Bhutan, “saw villages that felt untouched” (tourism in Bhutan has existed, in tiny numbers, since 1974); Nepal, heaving with visitors, didn’t come close, “although the landscapes were beautiful, of course”. It would be crude, though, to make that into a creed that you should only travel if you’re loaded. Maybe, rather, it means start by going to places where they want you.

by Zoe Williams, The Guardian |  Read more:

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