TBR News June 23, 2020

The Voice of the White House
Comments: “Trump is highly agitated over the concept of main-in voting ballots for the next Presidential election in November. Why is this? Because it is possible, very possible because it has happened before, to tamper with electronic voting machines. But tampering with mail-in ballots is virtually impossible. So whenever you see an article about Trump’s fury at the concept of mail-in voting, consider his reason.”

Trump’s Approval Rating
June 20
USA Rating
Approve Disapprove
35%      65%

The Table of Contents
• Smart Society, Stupid People
• Do masks protect from Coronavirus?
• William Barr Has Turned the Justice Department Into a Law Firm With One Client: Donald Trump
• ‘Everybody hurts’: Trump’s sad ‘walk of shame’ after Tulsa rally delights critics
• Trump faces pressure to reset campaign after Tulsa rally caps gloomy week
• Poll: Democrats, Independents, GOP All Turning on Trump Amid Coronavirus, Protests
• Trump attacks mail-in voting with new series of false claims
• WANTED: SPIES. CIA turns to online streaming for new recruits
• Innovation Should Be Made in the U.S.A.
• The Encyclopedia of American Loons

Smart Society, Stupid People
June 21, 2020
by Jeffrey A. Tucker
American Institute for Economic Research
We’ve lived through the most bizarre experience of human folly in my lifetime, and perhaps in generations. Among the strangest aspects of this has been the near universal failure on the part of regular people, and even the appointed “experts” (the ones the government employs, in any case), to have internalized anything about the basics of viruses that my mother understands, thanks to her mother before who had a solid education in the subject after World War II.
Thus, for example, are all governments ready to impose new lockdowns should the infection data turn in the other direction. Under what theory, precisely, is this supposed to help matters? How does reimposing stay-home orders or mandating gym closures mysteriously manage to intimidate a virus into going away? “Run away and hide” seems to have replaced anything like a sophisticated understanding of viruses and immunities.
So I decided to download Molecular and Cell Biology for Dummies just to check if I’m crazy. I’m pleased to see that it clearly states that there are only two ways to defeat a virus: natural immunity and vaccines.
The book completely left out the option that almost the entire world embraced in March: destroy businesses, force everyone to hide in their homes, and make sure that no one gets close to anyone else. The reason that the text leaves that out is that the idea is essentially ridiculous, so much so that it was initially sold as a strategy to preserve hospital space and only later mutated into a general principle that the way to beat a virus is to avoid people and wear a mini-hazmat suit.
Here is the passage:
For all of recorded history, humans have done a deadly dance with viruses. Measles, smallpox, polio, and influenza viruses changed the course of human history: Measles and smallpox killed hundreds of thousands of Native Americans; polio killed and crippled people, including US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and the 1918 influenza epidemic killed more people than were killed during all of World War I.
For most viruses that attack humans, your only defenses are prevention and your own immune systems. Antibiotics don’t kill viruses, and scientists haven’t discovered many effective antiviral drugs.
Vaccines are little pieces of bacteria or viruses injected into the body to give the immune system an education. They work by ramping up your own defensive system so that you’re ready to fight the bacteria or virus upon first contact, without becoming sick first. However, for some viral diseases no vaccines exist, and the only option is to wait uncomfortably for your immune system to win the battle.
A virus is not a miasma, a cootie, or red goo like in the children’s book Cat in the Hat. There is no path toward waging much less winning a national war against a virus. It cares nothing about borders, executive orders, and titles. A virus is a thing to battle one immune system at a time, and our bodies have evolved to be suited to do just that. Vaccines can give advantage to the immune system through a clever hack. Even so, there will always be another virus and another battle, and so it’s been for hundreds of thousands of years.
If you read the above carefully, you now know more than you would know from watching 50 TED talks on viruses by Bill Gates. Though having thrown hundreds of millions of dollars into cobbling together some global plan to combat microbes, his own understanding seems not to have risen above a cooties theory of run away and hide.
There is another level of virus comprehension that came to be observed in the 1950s and then codified in the 70s. For many viruses, not everyone has to catch them to become immune and not everyone needs a vaccine if there is one. Immunity is achieved when a certain percentage of the population has contracted some form of virus, with symptoms or without, and then the virus effectively dies.
This has important implications because it means that vulnerable demographics can isolate for the active days of the virus, and return to normal life once “herd immunity” has been realized with infection within some portion of the non-vulnerable population. This is why every bit of medical advice for ederly people has been to avoid large crowds during the flu season and why getting and recovering for non-vulnerable groups is a good thing.
What you get from this virus advice is not fear but calm management. This wisdom – not ignorance but wisdom – was behind the do-no-harm approach to the polio epidemic of 1949-1952, the Asian flu of 1957-58, and the Hong Kong flu of 1968-69. Donald Henderson summed up this old wisdom beautifully: “Communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.”
And that’s what we did for the one hundred years following the catastrophic Spanish flu of 1918. We never again attempted widespread closures or lockdown precisely because they had failed so miserably in the few places they were attempted.
The cooties theory attempted a comeback with the Swine flu of 2009 (H1N1) but the world was too busy dealing with a financial crisis so the postwar strategy of virus control and mitigation prevailed once again, thankfully. But then the perfect storm hit in 2020 and a new generation of virus mitigators got their chance to conduct a grand social experiment based on computer modeling and forecasting.
Next thing you know, we had this new vocabulary shoved down our throats and we all had to obey strangely arbitrary exhortations. “Go inside! No, wait don’t go inside!” “Stay healthy but shut the gyms!” “Get away from the virus but don’t travel!” “Don’t wear a mask, wait, do wear a mask!” (Now we can add: “Only gather in groups if you are protesting Trump”)
People started believing crazy things, as if we are medieval peasants, such as that if there is a group of people or if you stand too close to someone, the bad virus will spontaneously appear and you will get infected. Or that you could be a secret superspreader even if you have no symptoms, and also you can get the virus by touching almost anything.
Good grief, the sheer amount of unscientific phony baloney unleashed in these terrible three months boggles the mind. But that’s what happens in any panic. Apparently.
Now, something has truly been bugging me these months as I’ve watched the incredible unravelling of most of the freedoms we’ve long taken for granted. People were locked out of the churches and schools, businesses were shuttered, markets were closed, governors shoved through shelter in place orders meant not for disease control but aerial bomb raids, and masks were mandatory, all while regular people who otherwise seem smart hopped around each other like grasshoppers.
My major shock is discovering how much sheer stupidity exists in the population, particularly among the political class.
Forgive a defense of my use of the term “stupid” but it is technically correct. I take it from Albert Camus and his brilliant book The Plague (1947). “When a war breaks out, people say: ‘It’s too stupid; it can’t last long.’ But though a war may well be ‘too stupid,’ that doesn’t prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.”
Indeed it is true.
It was only last February when we seemed smart. We had amazing technology, movies on demand, a smartphone in our pockets to communicate with everyone and reveal all the world’s knowledge. There was peace more or less. There was prosperity. There was progress. Our medical systems worked. It seemed that only a few months ago, we had it all together. We seemed smart. Until suddenly stupid took over, or so it seemed.
Actually we weren’t smart as individuals. Our politicians were as dumb as they ever have been, and massive ignorance pervaded the population, then as always. What was smart last February was society and the processes that made society work in the good old days.
“Please explain.”
I shall.
Consider the social analytics of F.A. Hayek. His major theme is that the workings of the social order require knowledge and intelligence, but none of this essential knowledge subsists within any individual mind much less any political leader. The knowledge and intelligence necessary for society to thrive is instead decentralized throughout society, and comes to be embedded or instantiated within institutions and processes that gradually evolve from the free actions and choices of individuals.
What are those institutions? Market prices, supply chains, observations we make from the successful or unsuccessful choices of others that inform our habits and movements, manners and mores that work as social signals, interest rates that carefully coordinate the flow of money with our time preferences and risk tolerances, and even morals that govern our treatment of each other. All these come together to create a form of social intelligence that resides not in individual minds but rather the process of social evolution itself.
The trouble is that a well functioning society can create an illusion that it all happens not because of the process but rather because we are so damn smart or maybe we have wise leaders with a good plan. It seems like it must be so, else how could we have become so good at what we do? Hayek’s main point is that it is a mistake to credit individual intelligence or knowledge, much less good governments with brainy leaders, with civilizational achievements; rather, the real credit belongs to institutions and processes that no one in particular controls.
“To understand our civilisation,” Hayek writes, “one must appreciate that the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection — the comparative increase of population and wealth — of those groups that happened to follow them.”
The lockdowns took a sledgehammer to these practices, processes, and institutions. It replaced them nearly overnight with new bureaucratic and police-state mandates that herded us into our homes and arbitrarily assigned new categories: elective vs non-elective medical procedures, essential vs nonessential business, permissible vs. impermissible forms of association, even to the point of measuring the distance from which we must be separated one from another. And just like that, via executive order, many of the institutions and processes were crushed under the boot of the political class.
What emerged to take its place? It’s sad to say but the answer is widespread ignorance. Despite having access to all the world’s knowledge in our pockets, vast numbers of politicians and regular people defaulted back to a premodern cognition of disease. People did this out of fear, and were suddenly and strangely acquiescent to political commands. I’ve had friends tell me that they were guilty of this back in the day, believing that mass death was imminent so the only thing to do was to shelter in place and comply with the edicts.
The seeming intelligence that we had only in February suddenly seemed to turn to mush. A better way to understand this is all our smartest institutions and practices were crushed, leaving only raw stupidity in its place.
Truth is that we as individuals are probably not much smarter than our ancestors; the reason we’ve made so much progress is due to the increasing sophistication of Hayek’s extended orders of association, signalling, capital accumulation, and technological know how, none of which are due to wise leaders in government and industry but are rather attributable to the wisdom of the institutions we’ve gradually built over decades, centuries, and a millenia.
Take those away and you reveal what we don’t really want to see.
Looking back, I’m very impressed at the knowledge and awareness that the postwar generation had toward disease mitigation. It was taught in the schools, handed down to several generations, and practiced in journalism and public affairs. That was smart. Something happened in the 21st century to cause a kind of breakage in that medical knowledge chain, and thus did societies around the world become vulnerable in the presence of a new virus to rule by charlatans, hucksters, media howlers, and would-be dictators.
With lockdown finally easing, we will see the return of what seems to be smart societies, and the gradual loss of the influence of stupid. But let us not deceive ourselves. It could be that we’ve learned nothing from the fiasco that unfolded before our eyes. If economies come to be restored, eventually, to their former selves, it will not be because we or our leaders somehow beat a virus. The virus outsmarted everyone. What will fix what the political class has broken is the freedom once again to piece back together the institutions and processes that create the extended order that makes us all feel smarter than we really are.

Do masks protect from Coronavirus?
by Dr. Liji Thomas, MD
Medical net news

Why face masks?
Both the novel coronavirus and other coronaviruses like SARS and MERS are spread through airborne droplets created through coughs and sneezes, which reach the lungs either through the air or by contaminating surfaces which are then touched with a hand that is then brought to the nose or mouth.
In the very similar SARS outbreak, also of Chinese origin, face masks protected against 80% of flu-like illnesses provided they were worn all the time when needed. However, less than half of people in that study actually wore it as they should have. Both surgical masks and the P2 type had the same protective effect.
CDC recommendations for health workers dealing with novel coronavirus patients is to wear N95 masks that fit the face closely and don’t allow much air to percolate unfiltered through the sides. It filters out 95% of particles sized 0.3 micrometers or larger. However, coronaviruses are on average about 0.1 micrometers in size, which means they could slip through. Beards and hair also prevent the mask from fitting well. This could also be the case with children, while people with breathing difficulties could find it hard to tolerate these masks.
Ordinary surgical masks could be pretty useless as they are too loose to keep out unfiltered air. Cloth masks may absorb moisture and thus promote bacterial breeding, encouraging respiratory infections. Some previous studies show that respirator masks like the N95 do keep out fluorescent spray.
To add to the controversy, there are conflicting opinions on how to wear face masks properly to keep out or keep in germs, depending on whether the wearer is healthy or sick. Health authorities say the only way to wear a mask the right way is to have the colored side facing out and the white side towards the face. This is because the colored side is waterproof, keeping out moisture, while the white side is absorbent, to keep the moisture-laden air containing the germs from the lungs from passing out to infect other people. Says one nursing expert’s post, “When wearing face masks in order to protect oneself from infections, make sure the white part is facing the face and the blue panel is facing out.” And this is really the whole function of a face mask – it wasn’t designed to keep out viruses in the air.
Sensible precautions
With the current craze for masks, many sellers, both in real-time and online, have sold out their entire stock and shortages are now routine around the locations where cases were confirmed. Companies like 3M have, in response, increased their production. Only people who are infected, think they may be infected, and those who stay with them or care for them, need face masks, according to the CDC.
So what is the best thing to do?
Experts say non-medical personnel don’t even need masks, and even medical people only need them for this purpose if they’re taking care of novel coronavirus patients. The Australian government has made it mandatory for doctors, other medical staff and patients to wear masks during consultations and will use its own stockpile of masks if medical staff find it impossible to get as many as are needed. Other than this, only patients who are sick need masks, it says.
Masks would be useful even in other situations, like sick people who keep coughing, or feel really ill, whether it is a novel coronavirus infection or a bad case of the flu. The purpose of asking these patients to wear masks when they are in public spaces, a doctor’s office or an emergency room is to keep others from being infected. For ordinary people, it isn’t harmful, in most cases, but won’t be of much help, say most health experts.
Sure, there’s nothing wrong with wearing a mask, as long as it doesn’t lull you into a false sense of security so that you neglect to follow the proven and most effective ways to protect your health, namely:
Frequent and meticulous handwashing with soap and hot water
Avoid touching eyes or face
Eat well-cooked food
Maintain good immunity by healthy sleep, food and exercise habits
Keep away from suspected cases

William Barr Has Turned the Justice Department Into a Law Firm With One Client: Donald Trump
June 22, 2020
by James Risen
The Intercept
The corruption and politicization of the Department of Justice under William Barr is now complete. It will take a generation to reestablish its credibility and independence.
Under Barr, the Department of Justice has two objectives: to suppress any investigation of President Trump and his associates, and to aggressively pursue investigations of his political rivals. The attorney general has turned the Justice Department into a law firm with one client: Donald Trump. Barr doesn’t even hide his intentions any longer.
In May, after Barr moved to drop the charges against Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser — even after Flynn had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI — Barr defended his actions in the case by saying that “history is written by the winners.” That is the kind of statement that might be expected from an amoral bureaucrat in a police state rather than the chief law enforcement officer of the United States.
Barr’s latest move to protect Trump came over the weekend, when he fired Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. One of the nation’s most important federal prosecutors, Berman has been conducting a series of sensitive investigations into Trump associates. Berman prosecuted Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, and has prosecuted two associates of Rudy Giuliani, who is another Trump personal lawyer. Berman also brought charges against a Turkish state-owned bank in a case in which Turkey’s autocratic president has personally sought Trump’s help.
Barr clearly thought that Berman was causing too much trouble for Trump — so he decided to fire Berman and install Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Jay Clayton, a Trump golfing buddy with no experience as a prosecutor, into the position. Barr tried to push Berman out late Friday night, no doubt thinking that a nation distracted by a pandemic and protests would barely notice.
But Berman refused to go quietly. He quickly saw Barr’s move for exactly what it was: a raw attempt to shut down ongoing Trump-related investigations. Berman announced that he was refusing to leave, leading to a dramatic standoff.
While the standoff continued into Saturday, Barr’s actions sparked outrage among legal professionals and political leaders. Sen. Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who is the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, went to the heart of the matter in a brief statement. “Bill Barr was hired to personally protect the President,” Warner said.
As the standoff moved into Saturday, Barr finally blinked. He fired Berman, but instead of trying to put Trump’s friend Clayton in the job, Barr said that Berman’s own deputy, Audrey Strauss, would take over as acting U.S. attorney. That move placated Berman, who then agreed to leave.
Barr probably was forced to compromise when he realized that he lacked the critical support of Senate Republicans. They can read the polls showing Trump’s support is cratering, and key leaders signaled that they were unwilling to go along with Barr’s latest move to protect Trump from the rule of law.
The most important statement came from Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who said Saturday that he would follow long-standing Senate tradition and only move to confirm a new U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York if the two New York senators approved of the nominee. That meant that Graham was handing a veto over Barr’s scheme to the Democrats.
Barr’s move came at what may be a critical time for the Trump-related investigations that Berman’s office has been conducting.
In October 2019, Berman’s prosecutors charged two men, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, in a complicated plot to violate campaign finance laws. Parnas and Fruman had been aiding Trump and Giuliani in their long campaign to get Ukrainian officials to fabricate information about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter — the same scheme that led to Trump’s impeachment. The New York Times reported last year that Berman’s office was also investigating Giuliani himself, to determine whether he had violated federal lobbying laws in his efforts to gather dirt on Biden in Ukraine.
In January, Parnas publicly broke with Giuliani and Trump, and his lawyer told the Times that he was willing to cooperate with the prosecutors in New York investigating Giuliani and his Ukrainian scheme. Parnas spoke just as the Trump impeachment proceedings related to the same issues were underway. It seems likely that he has been talking with the prosecutors in Berman’s office ever since, telling them what he knows about Giuliani’s Ukrainian schemes to help reelect Trump.
If Giuliani is indicted in connection with the anti-Biden Ukraine scheme, that would revive Trump’s impeachment as a major issue in the presidential campaign. And that could explain why Barr moved against Berman now.
Since he became U.S. attorney general last year, Barr’s campaign to protect Donald Trump and punish his enemies has led him to bulldoze the traditions and norms of the Department of Justice that have generally prevented it from being used as a weapon to protect presidents. What is most disturbing is the prospect that Barr is now providing a road map for a future attorney general to do the same.

‘Everybody hurts’: Trump’s sad ‘walk of shame’ after Tulsa rally delights critics
Video of Trump disembarking Marine One after lower than expected turnout as his campaign rally has been captioned, narrated and set to music in memes
January 22, 2020
by Luke O’Neil
The Guardian
Considering that there are few aspects of his job that Donald Trump seems to actually enjoy performing besides speaking to his fervent fan base, Saturday’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma was meant to help the rudderless president get his stride back.
With the coronavirus pandemic having kept Trump from the campaign trail for months, advisers had hoped the energy of the crowd would bolster his flagging spirits.
It does not seem to have worked.
Confronted with a much lower-than-expected turnout for an event the campaign had touted as being in high demand, the president was reportedly angered and dumbfounded.
A video of Trump disembarking Marine One back in Washington later that night captured the seemingly exhausted and defeated tenor of the president perfectly.
Naturally Trump critics were quick to make sport of the video and still pictures from the “walk of shame.” When was the last time, as many asked on Twitter, you saw a man walking, quite literally, with his hat in his hand?
Others likened the president seeming to divine a foreboding turn for his fortunes to other leaders throughout history in a similar position.
Or to a dejected New York Mets fan heading home after a brutal loss.
Or to Homer Simpson.
Or to Cersei Lannister from Game of Thrones.
Far and away the most common fun being had was with layering in musical choices including selections from the likes of Radiohead, REM, Foreigner, Simon and Garfunkel, Johnny Cash and the plaintive closing credits piano from the Incredible Hulk television show.
This morning, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany insisted on Fox News that Trump was actually happy with the sleepy, low energy crowd. “The president was not angry at all,” she said. “The president was quite energized. I was with him after the rally. It was a huge success. His speech got rave reviews. He was in good spirits on Marine One.”

Trump faces pressure to reset campaign after Tulsa rally caps gloomy week
President heads to Arizona for border-wall event in what amounts to a relaunch of a relaunch
Donald Trump trails Joe Biden in polls both nationally and in battleground states.
June 23, 2020
by David Smith in Washington
The Guardian
Donald Trump flies to Arizona on Tuesday under pressure to change course in his re-election bid after a dismal week culminated in the debacle of thousands of empty seats at a campaign rally.
The US president was reportedly angry on Saturday when his first rally in three months, a defiant gamble amid the coronavirus pandemic intended as a daunting show of force, backfired with poor attendance in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a Republican heartland.
In what amounts to a relaunch of a relaunch, Trump now travels to Arizona, a battleground state, to embrace his most comfortable signature issue with an event marking the 200th mile of his wall on the US-Mexico border (most of the construction has in fact replaced existing barriers).
The president will then speak at a “Students for Trump” event in Phoenix. Despite soaring cases of coronavirus in Arizona, his campaign team will be hoping for an enthusiastic turnout to get back on track. It is not known when Trump will hold his next full rally.
Trump trails his Democratic opponent Joe Biden in numerous polls, both nationally and in competitive states such as Arizona, in some cases by double digits. Observers argue that Tulsa was a warning that he needs to reset, not least because of the health risks of big indoor rallies – but there appears to be little chance of him heeding advice.
“From what I’ve been told, Trump just insists on these rallies and he wants more and not fewer compared to 2016 because he’s got all of the trappings of office and he can fly Air Force One low so people can be awed and all the rest of it,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.
“Obviously, he didn’t calculate properly for the pandemic and other factors. He thinks they can correct it and go on. He wants one every couple of weeks or more frequently. He didn’t learn a thing. His campaign staff would gladly give them up, along with the tweets, if they could. But they can’t.”
Trump aides claimed that more than a million people had requested tickets for the Tulsa rally. The city fire marshal’s office reported a crowd of just less than 6,200 in the 19,000-seat venue, with few wearing face masks; eight members of the campaign’s advance team have tested positive for Covid-19.
The president’’s meandering one-hour-41-minute speech may come to be seen as exhibit A of a campaign struggling for direction and at risk of defeat in November. He was criticised for taking a scattergun approach to Biden, a reflection of how his team’s various and shifting lines of attack on the former vice-president have failed to gain traction.
The remarks also defended Confederate statues and indulged racist terms such as “Kung flu” while failing to mention Black Lives Matter or George Floyd, the African American man killed last month by police in Minneapolis whose death sparked nationwide protests. Polls suggest Trump’s unwillingness to strike a chord of national unity alienates voters of colour, suburban women and independents.
Frank Luntz, a pollster and Republican consultant, said: “He uses words that make his re-election less likely. Calling his supporters ‘warriors’ appeals to his supporters, but nobody else. Americans are not looking for a warrior. They are looking for empathy and understanding and compassion. If you’re looking for a warrior, you’ve already decided you want Donald Trump. If you’re looking for social justice, you’ve already decided you’re voting for Joe Biden.
“There’s only 6% of the American people that are truly undecided; 94% have made up their minds. That means your words and your phrases have to be precise. He keeps talking about law and order. The public wants public safety. He talks about draining the swamp. The public wants a more efficient, more effective and more accountable government. The words that he’s using are actually making his case more difficult because they don’t resonate with that 6%.”
The White House and the Trump campaign, however, denied media reports that Trump had rebuked his staff or that campaign manager Brad Parscale was skating on thin ice after overpromising and underdelivering so spectacularly.
Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, insisted on Monday: “The President was very pleased with the rally. I was with him. And I just have to say these media reports that he was somehow furious on the plane – there is no grounding in fact to that.”
She added: “A political pundit wrote to him that it was one of the all-time great speeches they’d ever heard … The speech made his message so clear and compelling that no one could possibly have missed it. And it was so great to be out of the swamp and in the country. And those comments are how the president feels, too.”
Tim Murtaugh, the campaign’s director of communications, said: “President Trump is eager to keep hitting the campaign trail and holding more rallies to speak directly to the American people … There was a massive media push to crush the Trump rally, and still 12,000 people bravely showed up.(Comment: The actual number of attendees was ca 6,000…in an auditorium that could seat 20,000!)
“This is approximately 11,990 more people than attended the last Biden event. The enthusiasm is with President Trump. As of Monday morning, more than 11.3 million people had watched the President’s speech on our digital platforms. There is an enthusiasm gap – it is real and it is wide.”
But with Trump under fire for boasting at the rally that he told staff to slow virus testing, Tuesday’s stop in Arizona will not be straightforward. The state’s positive test rate is at a seven-day average of more than 20%, the highest in the country.

Poll: Democrats, Independents, GOP All Turning on Trump Amid Coronavirus, Protests
Trump lost support in almost equal measures from Democrats, independents and Republicans amid the coronavirus pandemic and widespread protests.
June 10, 2020
by Alexa Lardieri
US News and World Report
Approval of President Donald Trump plummeted 10 points from his record high a month ago, with Democrats, Republicans and independents contributing in about equal percentages to his falling job approval.
A Gallup poll conducted from May 28 to June 4 found that just 39% of people think Trump is doing a good job, a 10-point decline from his highwater mark of 49%, which he’s registered in five of Gallup’s 10 polls this year. Fifty-seven percent of Americans disapprove of Trump.
The president’s approval ratings have always seen a strong partisan divide, with the most recent ratings among Republicans at 85%, independents at 39% and Democrats at 5%.
But those numbers represent an almost even across-the-board drop in percentage since last month, with a 9% decline among Republicans and 7% declines from both independents and Democrats, who had given Trump the highest marks of his presidency at 14% in May.
While a dramatic drop from last month’s high, 39% is not the president’s most dismal rating. In December 2017, Trump garnered just 35% approval.
Approval of President Donald Trump plummeted 10 points from his record high a month ago, with Democrats, Republicans and independents contributing in about equal percentages to his falling job approval.
A Gallup poll conducted from May 28 to June 4 found that just 39% of people think Trump is doing a good job, a 10-point decline from his highwater mark of 49%, which he’s registered in five of Gallup’s 10 polls this year. Fifty-seven percent of Americans disapprove of Trump.
The president’s approval ratings have always seen a strong partisan divide, with the most recent ratings among Republicans at 85%, independents at 39% and Democrats at 5%.
But those numbers represent an almost even across-the-board drop in percentage since last month, with a 9% decline among Republicans and 7% declines from both independents and Democrats, who had given Trump the highest marks of his presidency at 14% in May.
Trump’s falling numbers come on the heels of several tumultuous weeks across the country as the U.S. responds to the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread protests over the death of George Floyd.
While a dramatic drop from last month’s high, 39% is not the president’s most dismal rating. In December 2017, Trump garnered just 35% approval.
Trump’s approval fares worse than other presidents since 1938, who have seen an average approval rating of 53%. During the same period of their presidencies, previous leaders have garnered an average of 51% approval, and Trump’s June approval trails nearly every president since 1956, excluding George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter.
President Barack Obama earned a 46% approval rating during the same period of his presidency in June 2012.

Trump attacks mail-in voting with new series of false claims
President suggests foreign countries will print millions of ballots and send them to voters
June 22, 2020
by Sam Levine in New York
The Guardian
Donald Trump launched a fresh attack on mail-in voting on Monday, making a series of false allegations to suggest the 2020 election will be tainted by fraud.
The president has been advancing untrue claims about mail-in balloting for months, fueling concerns he is laying the groundwork to contest the results of the 2020 election.
On Monday, he put forward a new theory, claiming that foreign countries would print millions of mail-in ballots and mail them to voters.
The idea was previously advanced by US attorney general William Barr earlier this month and the attorney general repeated it in a television interview on Sunday.
Trump made the claims after reports he was seething after a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where attendance was far below what his campaign had projected. Trump told the Politico news site last week that expanding vote-by-mail was his “biggest risk” as he seeks re-election.
Experts have said that it would be nearly impossible for a foreign country to orchestrate the kind of fraud Trump and Barr are hyping.
Many election offices have systems in place to closely track mail-in ballots and have other methods of verifying the identity of a voter such as comparing the signature on the ballot to ones on file.
“There are many checks and balances in place to ensure that nobody could just print ‘millions’ of ballots and vote them,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, who works with election officials across the country.
“We have decades of experience enforcing these security measures, including during world war II, confirming the integrity of mail voting. That’s why election officials from both parties, including most Republicans, promote mail voting and vote by mail themselves.”
Different jurisdictions are required to print ballots with different combinations of races and layouts, depending on where a voter lives. There can even be specific paper stocks required for ballots – all measures that would make it extremely difficult for a foreign power to simply print and mail out ballots.
In Wake county, North Carolina, for example, there are nearly 100 different ballots for voters this fall depending on where they live, tweeted Gerry Cohen, a member of the county board of election. All of mail-in ballots are examined at a public meeting by all five members of the county board, he added.
“It’s ridiculous. You can’t just print ballots. There is a specific process with vendors or internal to election offices. Ballot tracking is a way that you can add security,” said Amber McReynolds, CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute and a former election official in Denver. “If either Barr or Trump had toured an election office or had advisers that know the process, they would know this is not feasible.”
In a separate tweet on Monday, Trump pointed to the fact that Americans have voted during times of war to suggest that Covid-19 was merely being used as an excuse to “cheat”. But members of the military have long voted by mail and there is a long history of expanding access to the ballot because of war, Alexander Keyssar, a historian who has studied elections, told NBC News in April.
Trump has continued to attack voting by mail even though he and other members of his administration have frequently used it. On Monday, Business Insider reported that the vice-president, Mike Pence, and his wife, Karen, voted in the Indiana primary this month using the Indiana governor’s mansion as their address. Pence had done the same in 2018.
Indiana’s constitution says that someone does not lose their residency if they are called away from the state on federal service, said Ian Hauer, a spokesman for the Indiana secretary of state, Connie Lawson. A Pence spokesman tweeted that the governor’s mansion was still the legally correct address for the Pences to vote absentee.

WANTED: SPIES. CIA turns to online streaming for new recruits
June 22, 2020
by Mark Hosenball
The Intercept
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. defense and spy agencies played a major role in creating the internet, and now the CIA is turning for the first time to online streaming services to recruit spies between the ages of 18 and 35.
“It only takes one new piece … of foreign intelligence … and everything can change in an instant,” a CIA officer tells a classroom full of apparent recruits in the opening sequence of a new advert released by the agency on Monday.
“Start a career at the CIA and do more for your country than you ever dreamed possible,” the officer concludes the pitch reminiscent of Hollywood films.
The online recruitment campaign was conceived before social distancing measures were needed during the novel coronavirus pandemic, Central Intelligence Agency spokeswoman Nicole de Haay said. The agency has typically sought out future spies by targeting college students through “traditional” methods such as job fairs, she said.
The agency said in a statement it had cut 90, 60 and 15-second versions to run nationwide on entertainment, news and lifestyle streaming services.
More than 70% of U.S. households subscribe to at least one of Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime, according to Leichtman Research Group.
“To get the top talent we can’t just rely on traditional recruiting methods,” said de Haay.
In a speech at Auburn University last year CIA director Gina Haspel said it had the best recruiting year in a decade and wanted to make the agency “an employer of choice for all Americans.”
While the target audience for the streamed video spots is 18-35, all potential recruits would be considered, de Haay said.
Some of the CIA’s most famous foreign allies, including British spy agencies MI5 and MI6, have historically recruited officers through social connections, although more recently they have also turned to online recruitment pitches.
Reporting By Mark Hosenball; editing by Michelle Price and Grant McCool

Comment: Imagine telling people that you work for the CIA! In some circles, this would be tantamount to claiming membership in a pedophile club.

Innovation Should Be Made in the U.S.A.
Offshoring by American companies has destroyed our manufacturing base and our capacity to develop new products and processes. It’s time for a national industrial policy.
November 15, 2019
by Sridhar Kota and Tom Mahoney
WSJ
In 1987, as the Reagan administration was nearing its end, the economists Stephen S. Cohen and John Zysman issued a prophetic warning: “If high-tech is to sustain a scale of activity sufficient to matter to the prosperity of our economy…America must control the production of those high-tech products it invents and designs.” Production, they continued, is “where the lion’s share of the value added is realized.”
Amid the offshoring frenzy that began in the late 1980s, this was heterodox thinking. In many quarters, it still is. Even as trade tensions with China have deepened, many U.S. political and economic leaders continue to believe that offshoring is not only profitable but also sound economic strategy. Manufacturing in China is cheaper, quicker and more flexible, they argue.
With China’s networks of suppliers, engineers and production experts growing larger and more sophisticated, many believe that locating production there is a better bet in terms of quality and efficiency. Instead of manufacturing domestically, the thinking goes, U.S. firms should focus on higher-value work:”innovate here, manufacture there.”
Today many Americans are rightly questioning this perspective. From the White House to Congress, from union halls to university laboratories, there is a growing recognition that we can no lnger afford the outsourcing paradigm. Once manufacturing departs from a country’s shores, engineering and production now-how leave as well, and innovation ultimately follows. It’s become increasingly clear that “manufacture there” not means “innovate there.”
What’s the solution? It’s time for the U.S. to adopt an industrial policy for the century ahead- not a throwback to the old ideas of state planning but a program for helping Americans to compete with foreign manufacturers and maintain our ever more precarious edge in innovation.
Consider the results of the original offshoring craze of the 1960’s, which centered on consumer electronics. The development of modern transistors, the establishment of standardized shipping containers and creation of inexpensive assembly lines in East Asia cut costs for consumers and created huge markets for televisions and radios; it also catalyzed the Asian manufacturing miracle. Though American federal research investment in the decades that followed enabled the invention of game-changing technologies such as the magnetic storage drive, the lithium-ion battery and the liquid crystal display, the country had, by then, already let go of consumer electronics manufacturing. Asia dominated.
Since the turn of the millennium, the off-shoring trend has accelerated, thanks to China’s entry into the World Trade Organization and major investments in workforce and production capacity by other Asian nations. U.S.-based companies began to contract out both design and product-development work. A 2015 study by the consulting firms Strategy& and PwC found that U.S. companies across sectors have been moving R&D to China to be closer to production, suppliers and engineering talent- not just to reap lower costs and more dynamic markets. An estimated 50% of overseas-backed R&D centers in China have been established by U.S. companies.
Innovation in manufacturing gravitates to where the factories are. American manufacturers have learned that the applied research and engineering necessary to introduce new products, enhance existing designs and improve production processes are best done near the factories themselves. As more engineering and design work has shifted to China, many U.S. companies have a diminished capability to perform those tasks here.
Manufacturing matters- especially for a high-tech economy. While it’s still possible to argue that the offshoring of parts assembly and final production has worked well for multinational companies focused on quarterly earnings, it is increasingly clear that offshoring has devastated the small and medium-sized manufacturers that make up the nation’s supply chains and geographically diverse industrial clusters. While the share of such companies in the total population of U.S. manufacturers has risen, their absolute numbers have dropped by nearly 100,000 since the 1990’s and by 40,000 just in the last decade. Numbers have fallen in relatively high-technology industries such as computers, electronics, electrical equipment and machinery.
The loss of America’s industrial commons-the ecosystem of engineering skills, production know-how and comprehensive supply chains- has not just devastated industrial areas. It has also underined a core responsibility of government: providing for national defense. Recent Pentagon analyses of the defense industrial base have identified specific risks to weapons production, including fragile domestic suppliers, dependence on imports, counterfeit parts and material shortages. Meanwhile despite tariffs, manufacturing imports continue to set records, especially in advanced technology products. Dependence on imports had virtually eliminated the nation’s ability to manufacture large flat-screen displays, smartphones, many advanced materials and packaged semiconductors. The U.S. now lacks the capacity to manufacture many next-generation and emerging technologies.
This is to say nothing of the human suffering and sociopolitical upheaval that have resulted from the hollowing out of entire regional economies. Once vibrant communities in the so-called Rust Belt have lost population and income as large factories and their many supporting suppliers have closed. The shuttering last March of the GM plant in Lordstown, Ohio- resulting in the loss of some 1,400 high-paying manufacturing jobs- is just the latest example. It joins a list that includes most of the long-established furniture industry in North Carolina, large steel mills in places like Bethlehem, Penn., and Weirton, W.Va. and the machine tool industry that once clustered around Cincinnati. Real wages across the country have been stagnant for decades, and though the causes are debatable, he loss of manufacturing jobs and the dramatic decline in manufacturing productivity growth have certainly played major roles.
In terms of long-term competitiveness, the biggest strategic consequence of this profound decline in American manufacturing might be the loss of our ability to innovate- that is, to translate inventions into production. We have lost much of our capacity to physically build what results from out world-leading investments in research and development. A study of 150 production-related hardware startups that emerged from research at MIT found that most of them scaled up production offshore to get access to production capabilities, suppliers and lead customers. As for foreign multinationals, many participate in federally funded university research centers and then use what they learn in their factories abroad. LG, Sharp and Auo, for example, were partners in the flexible display research center at Arizona State University funded by the U.S. Army, but they do not manufacture displays here.
The slow destruction of the U.S. industrial eco-system is a clear case of market failure, and the government has an important role to play in remedying it. Thanks to continued federal funding in the sciences, the U.S. is still the best in the world in groundbreaking scientific discoveries and inventions. But the federal government must do more than invest in basic research; it must also fill the innovation deficit by creating a new infrastructure for R&D in engineering and manufacturing.
The American government invests about $150 billion annually in science and technology, significantly more than other advanced industrial nations. Yet relatively little of this is devoted to the translational R&D in engineering and manufacturing needed to turn basic research results into successful commercial products. Germany, Japan and South Korea spend three to six times as much as the U.S. on industrial and production technologies. These three advanced nations have high wages and strict regulations, and their energy costs and levels of automation are higher that in the U.S.
Historically, American companies have performed this essential translational research, but in the past two decades of cost cutting to maximize quarterly earnings, corporate R&D labs at GE,IBM, Xerox, AT&T and other industrial giants invented new products and production processes, ranging from semiconduictors and lasers to MRI machines and industrial robots. In too many industries, this translational R&D capability has been lost, or at least seriously downsized, and the U.S. has lost its leadership position.
Aerospace is the main counter example, where the U.S. continues to lead in advanced technology. It is the last major industry that has maintained a strong trade surplus. Not surprisingly, it is also more dependent on government customers- mostly the Department of Defense- and the beneficiary of substantial government R&D investments in basic and translational research. Though few would call it such, this amounts to a successful industrial policy to support an industry deemed critical to national defense. It’s an example that needs to be replicated.
Unless something is done, the weak U.S. industrial commons will continue to create incentives for American companies to manufacture offshore, innovate offshore and weaken national competitiveness. A strategic and coordinated national effort is needed that moves beyond tax and trade policy, which, so far at least, has not resulted in an American manufacturing resurgence.
This national effort- call it Industrial Policy 2.0- should focus on ensuring that hardware innovations are manufactured in this country. The idea is not to recover lost industries but to rebuild lost capabilities. The U.S. needs to leverage its dominance in science and technology to create future industries to provide us with first-mover advantages in reclaim American leadership in manufacturing.
The first step would be to create a new federal agency responsible for the health of U.S. manufacturing. A number of agencies currently have manufacturing-related programs, but there is little or no coordination or strategy. Defense alone cannot solve this challenge because defense procurement needs are dwarfed by commercial markets, and defense-specific technologies may have few commercial applications.
A new agency is needed to signal new priorities. This National Manufacturing Foundation, as it could be called, would be a cabinet-level agency focused on rebuilding America’s industrial commons and translating our scientific knowledge into new products and processes. What policies might it promote?
• To maximize the wealth and jobs created from our national R&D investments, the
results must be manufactured in the U.S. Any licensee of federally funded research resuts should be required to manufacture at least 75% of the value added in this country, with no exceptions and no waivers.
• An additional 5% of the federal science and technology budget should be invested in engineering and manufacturing R&D and process technologies. This included creating translational research centers as innovation hubs around the country. Affiliated with major research universities and institutions, these centers would take promising basic research results and perform the translational R&D necessary to demonstrate the viability of large-scale commercial production.
• Developing hardware typically requires more resources and time than developing software. Public-private partnerships could provide the needed patient capital. State-level programs in Massachusetts, Georgia and other states already provide encouraging examples, The South Carolina Research Authority, for example, provides grants, loans and didrect investments to a portfolio of companies, roug.ly 40% of which are manufacturers. Leveraging defense procurement and other federal spending would help too, as would the targeted use of Small Business Administration loans.
• Restoring innovation in domestic manufacturing will require much greater investments in human capital. The country needs significantly more graduate fellowships in engineering for qualified domestic students and many more four-year engineering technology programs that focus on application and implementation rather than concepts and theory. American multinationals need to do their part by revamping internship and apprenticeship probfams to fill the skills gap.
Industrial Policy 2.0 would not be the industrial policy discussed and often criticized in past decades, it would not pick winners and losers but would keep other countries from taking advantage of our winners; it would make sure the U.S., not its economic rivals, benefits from American know-how. The goal would be to maximize innovations in hardware technologies and, in doing so, to create high-value products, well-paying jobs, national wealth and national security.
Such steps are essential to generating a strong return on the U.S. taxpayer’s enormous investments in science and technology. For too long Americans have suffered from the self-inflicted wound of hollowing out our industrial capacity. Other countries have moved quickly to take our place, It’s time for the U.S. to act.

The Encyclopedia of American Loons

Tom Trento

Tom Trento is a wingnut’s wingnut and, as such, of course a serious conspiracy theorist. Trento is director of the anti-“Shariah Islam” group The United West and sees the threat of creeping sharia and Muslim conspiracies virtually everywhere. So for instance, Trento saw strong connections, existing exclusively in his own mind, between the Occupy Wall Street movement and jihadists, claiming in particular that Occupy Orlando was a “move by a Muslim activist to take over control of ‘Occupy Orlando,’ in the ‘spirit of the Arab Spring.’” Trento warned especially about Shayan Elahi, a local Democratic activist, Muslim civil-rights attorney and legal counsel for Occupy Orlando, whom Trento says is “associated with CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood” because that’s how information about Elahi is filed in Trento’s paranoid mess of a mind, or: “Once we watched Shayan Elahi in action, running around, signing up speakers, providing direction, telling people what to do, we started to connect the dots to the stated Face Book Mission Statement of ‘Occupy Orlando,’ which reads, ‘…we plan to use the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic of mass occupation to restore democracy in America.’” Yes, there are some dots to be connected here, but the resulting picture isn’t exactly flattering to Tom Trento. Trento’s claims were, however, picked up and promoted e.g. by failed Senate candidate Joe Miller.
Meanwhile, Trento has promoted the wingnut conspiracy theories of John Guandolo, including the claim that John Brennan is a Muslim convert, as well as the “independent journalism” of Laura Loomer. He is also the one-time National Security Chairman for the Tea Party National Convention. He did not do a more reasonable figure in that position. (He has in general, not unexpectedly, exhibited some trouble when it comes to drawing simple distinctions about politics).
United West (UW) is recognized as an active hate group in the United States by the SPLC and its core mission is to advocate for laws “to halt the expansion of Shariah law in the USA and other Free Nations,” something that for Trento includes treating accused terrorists who cite Islamic religious beliefs as their rationale as military combatants. UW has also called for cutting UN funding for programs that assist Palestine refugees and has tried to dissuade voters from casting ballots for Muslims who pursue elected office in the United States.
Previously, in the early 1990s, Trento headed a Denver-based outfit called Christian Research Associates (CRA), which peddled “young earth creation science” in the Rocky Mountain states and worked to restrict poor women’s access to abortion.
Diagnosis: Deranged extremist who is clearly willing to subvert evidence, reason and democratic processes to reshape the US in his preferred image – it is not entirely unreasonable to suspect that part of what’s driving the paranoia of creeping-sharia conspiracy theorist is a certain sympathy with the political means and systems they associate, by projection, with their perceived opponents. Trento has plenty of supporters, connections and donors, however, and should not be overlooked

Penny Nance

Penny Nance is the current president of Concerned Women for America (CWA), the fundamentalist, wingnut activist hate group founded by Beverly LaHaye – they call themselves an amalgam of “policy experts and … activists[s]” who take an explicitly anti-feminist approach to politics as a means to “protect and promote Biblical values among all citizens.” The CWA opposes any efforts that “intervene with natural human life,” including secular education, stem cell research, divorce, UN conferences and treaties, publicly funded HIV screenings or STD treatment programs, voluntary childlessness, pornography (mostly because the proliferation of and lack of regulation for pornography somehow promotes gay rights and premarital sex), sex ed, gambling, and gay marriage. As for what they support, the CWA emphasizes “traditional families” and the woman’s place being within the home (with exceptions for themselves (and Michele Bachmann), of course, who do important work). They also support teaching intelligent design creationism in public schools, advocate school prayer, and claim that it is unconstitutional for public schools to require reading material that conflicts with the religious values of parents (not that they otherwise care much for the Constitution). Nance was previously a Federal Communications Commission advisor on children’s social and media concerns.
Anti-feminism
According to CWA, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is part of “the war on women”. Of course, the year before claiming this Nance had claimed that the phrase “war on women” is a piece of “phony, focus-grouped rhetoric” geared to “raise money and hackles”, but measures to protect women from violence is a different enemy indeed (Nance has subsequently had a series of bizarre views about what the “real war on women” might be). In particular, according to Nance, VAWA “hurts sex-trafficking victims,” since a non-tortured connection between premises and conclusions is unimportant when Talking Points. It is also a bit unclear how much she really cares for victims of trafficking.
Meanwhile, anti-men conspiracies are everywhere, especially in Hollywood. The movie Frozen, for instance, is emasculating men by having female protagonists that don’t end up marrying as the culmination of the narrative. After criticizing Frozen, Nance and Steve Doocy went on to lament the absence of male heroes in Hollywood movies.
Among CWA’s perceived main enemies is the “nefarious” Planned Parenthood. At present, Nance is hopeful that the Department of Justice will go after them for a variety of issues that she falsely thinks they are guilty of after visiting a variety of conspiracy outlets. Now, she may of course be somewhat justified in that hope given the current administration; Nance is aware of this, of course, and has expressed her deepest gratitude for the election of the Trump: “our nation just received a second chance, a chance we never could have earned or deserved. Millions of people like you and me fought hard on our knees, praying earnestly and asking God to heal our land. He heard, and he showed us great mercy.” (She came around pretty quickly to that conclusion after starting out rather skeptical – but then, political expediency trumps ethics every time for these people; morality is relative except when it is not.)
Due to her views and reasoning skills, Nance was for a while among Trump’s candidates for ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues. In 2014, she also wanted to be chairman of the board of the new National Women’s History Museum, which she opposed because she claimed it would “indoctrinate” visitors with feminism.
Reason
When Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx proposed a “Day of Reason” alongside a “Day of Prayer”, Nance objected. Why? Apparently reasonand thinkingand education leads to genocide. “You know the Age of Enlightenment and Reason gave way to moral relativism [this is … not correct]. And moral relativism is what led us all the way down the dark path to the Holocaust [this is … not correct, either – quite the opposite, in fact] … Dark periods of history is what we arrive at when we leave God out of the equation,” said Nance. Yes, advancing science, opposition to the monarchy, and focusing on education, personal freedom and the separation of church and state lead to Hitler. Nance does not like reason. At least she makes sure she walks her talk and makes no attempt to use it herself. And the claim that reason caused Hitler is pretty out there, even as far as rightwing Godwins go.
She followed up by doubling down on her claims.
Gay marriage
Most of what is bad in the world is, as Nance sees it, connected to the marriage equality issue. Same-sex marriage is, according to Nance, like “counterfeit money” that “takes at something that’s the real deal and diminishes it,” and will accordingly “hurt everyone”. Meanwhile, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is engaging in treason, no less, for officiating at a gay wedding, mostly since words means whatever Nance wants them to mean to serve her rhetoric.
In particular, legalizing gay marriage means that opponents of gay marriage activists should get ready for “persecution”. It will also lead to the end of America: equal treatment for same-sex couples would eviscerate religious freedom, and “in losing religious freedom, we lose America,” said Nance. And of course there is a conspiracy here: Zeh gays are plotting to take your children! “The Day of Silence” is an excellent example: As Nance sees it the Day of Silence is an effort by “LGBTQ activists” to “infiltrate schools” and “get to your children.” In particular, the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network – which is a tool for LGBT activists who “are going around you to get to your children” – is “working tirelessly to infiltrate schools and influence children across the country” and “taunting and bullying kids in public school and shaming them regarding their religious beliefs that favor traditional marriage.”
And not the least, the Girl Scouts of America’s policy to accept transgender young people “on a case-by-case basis” is “just one more slap in the face to Christian parents,” since not acting in accordance with fundie wingnuts’ hatred of other people is oppression. Also, gay leaders will “dismantle” the Boy Scouts and put “our young sons at risk”.
Diagnosis: Pretty indistinguishable from a range of moronic bigots we’ve already covered, but yeah: delusional, moronic, bigoted conspiracy theorist. Nance is also a pretty influential figure still, and should not be underestimated as a force of evil, hate and harm.