We have to call them terrorists
The most perilous moment since 9/11
Welcome to a big Sunday edition of Progress Report.
We had a packed edition for you today — so packed, in fact, that we have to break it up into two newsletters.
Tonight I’ll have some thoughts on a solemn day in our history and the extraordinary challenges we face over the next few months. It’s peppered with news stories, which are highlighted in bold.
Tomorrow, we’ll send out Natalie Meltzer’s must-read deep dive into the coming Congressional elections and how Democrats could hold on to the House.
Just a reminder that we’ll be taking a week or so off sometime in mid-to-late September, all depending on when the baby is born. We’ll return right after that with an expanded roster of writers and coverage from throughout the country going into the stretch run before the midterm elections. Paying more people costs more money, so now would be the perfect time for you to become a premium member of Progress Report.
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Today marks the 21st anniversary of 9/11, which means babies that were born on one of the deadliest days in modern American history are now old enough to legally purchase and drink alcohol. It also means that cynical politicians and partisan TV news hosts are spending an entire day exploiting the cruel deaths of more than 2000 people to advance an agenda that has and will continue to abandon the victims’ families and those that survived the carnage.
As a New Yorker, the conservative cooption of the attacks has always outraged me, in part because those same right-wing pissants spend the other 364 days of the year denigrating us godless big city liberals as we’re forced to live every day with reminders of the history-altering hell that rained down from the sky. Worse, Republicans use the tragedy to rally and scare people into supporting ongoing war and endless loss, to justify human rights violations both here and abroad, and to give cover to the biggest threats now facing the United States.
More than two decades after 9/11, we’re still being forced to take our shoes off at the airport, while it’s becoming taboo to wear a light protective mask just two years into a pandemic that’s killed more than a million Americans. The reason for this seemingly odd dichotomy is depressingly simple: The former was pushed as a necessary measure to thwart foreign threats, while the latter was cynically politicized as a threat to freedom-loving Americans.
The larger picture is unfortunately less obvious, at least to those that shape the daily discourse and national agenda. The ingrained sense of American exceptionalism makes it impossible for most to admit, but the extraordinary number of preventable Covid deaths are casualties of domestic terrorism pursued by GOP governors and political celebrities.
Dying for Ideology
Florida has long been known to underreport its Covid deaths, but the official count is still rather grim. This weekend, the state hit 80,000 Covid casualties, more than half of which were preventable deaths that occurred after vaccines became widely available. At 40,000 unnecessary Covid deaths, Florida is neck and neck with Texas for the most preventable deaths in the nation, and there’s little secret as to why so many people suffered entirely avoidable demises.
When Gov. Ron DeSantis brags about defying federal guidance on Covid prevention during his shadow presidential campaign speeches, he’s really boasting of actively sabotaging scientific efforts to save lives and eradicate the virus. And in doing that, he’s boasting about his body count.
DeSantis punished school districts that insisted on requiring masks, appointed a deranged anti-vaxxer as his surgeon general, and pushed expensive Covid treatments over vaccines. During the early parts of June 2020, he declared Florida open for full business, an attempt to seize the national spotlight that led to the state suffering the most excess deaths in the nation.
This spring, his surgeon general recommended against kids receiving vaccines, and in July, DeSantis inexplicably told a fawning crowd that they were more likely to come down with Covid after receiving a booster shot.
DeSantis has all but admitted that the 40,000 people and counting that have died over the past 20 months, and the thousands that died during the summer prior, were collateral damage in his ideologically radical pursuit of power.
The number of dead Floridians has been exponentially greater than the number of people slain on 9/11, yet the national media covers the governor of Florida’s sustained attacks on his own constituents like a football analyst breaks down an offensive formation or play call.
As I’ve argued before, Covid began morphing from a pandemic into mass murder by the summer of 2020, and the deliberate amplification of disinformation about vaccines constitutes a crime against humanity. There was no greater source of wild conspiracy theories and falsehoods than Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson. Now facing a tight race for re-election, the campaign has hardly touched on his relentless promotion of dangerous quack medicine.
What do you call people that try to bring down a democratic government?
Conservatives, long freed of shame, also use the attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon to illustrate their supposed patriotism, performing solemn remembrances that also serve to reaffirm their belief in an implied set of American ideals. The professed loyalty to a free society would seem to conflict with the praise so many of them shower on a band of reactionary paramilitary psychos that tried to use violence to overthrow American democracy, but support for the January 6th insurrection has never been steeped in logic or consistency.
There is a bottomless well of examples of the GOP’s deliberate and premeditated attacks on the American people, but the unwavering fealty to the partisan lens and “objective” journalism denies us the ability to truly reckon with and put an end to the organized treachery.
Doug Mastriano provides a perfect example of this hardly remarked upon hypocrisy. A new investigation into the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania reveals that the fanatical Christian nationalist actually prayed for the success of the Trump-loving zealots that stormed the Capitol on January 6th. His disdain for free democracy is palpable, and he’d welcome a theocratic autocracy in its place, even one installed through violent means.
When President Biden had the audacity to label these violent, anti-democratic MAGA Republicans as “semi-fascists,” the response from the media — pearl-clutching over the term and speech’s setting — was a myopic embarrassment that failed to meet the historic moment. And now a week later, Republicans are deep into the mechanizations of stealing this fall’s elections, as this new report outlines.
We’re taught that Americans are fundamentally decent and that this country exists as a permanent bulwark against the evil that festers elsewhere around the globe. It’s a nice story and a high ideal, but it also fosters an arrogance that obscures the extent of the threats from within. If we cannot properly recognize and label our problems, overcoming them becomes infinitely more difficult.
There are people doing the hard work to overcome this disinformation and turn out voters that may be intimidated by the growing threats coming from the right. New organizations in Pennsylvania, for instance, are seeking to vanquish Mastriano and radical legislative candidates with grassroots organizing in all parts of the state. We’ll continue to highlight these efforts at Progress Report, because we’re facing a growing wave of terrorism. There’s no other way to say it.
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While the GOP and its insanity about election fraud continues, many of those people are correct about the fraudulence of the covid pandemic. The left has been bought hook line and sinker on the narrative designed to scare the public into submission to a totalitarian program. It was this that has killed many people. The treatment mandated by the CDC and Centrist Dem policies is what is criminal. Based on no science with barely tested experimental drugs, falsely sold as vaccines, many people were killed and maimed for life. If you actually did due diligence in researching your information you would be reading the medical researchers and practitioners who dare to speak out, or try to speak out on the science that actually exists. You would be studying the CDC's VAERS data base, a grossly underreporting system that reflects the many 1000's of adverse reactions. You would pay attention to the insurance industries data, worldwide, that reveals the excess all cause mortality rates after these covid drugs were imposed on the public. And you would be thinking clearly about why a drug purporting to create immunity is not able to do so, allows transmission of a toxic spike protein, and causes illness in those who were drugged. You would also dig deeper into the reality of who winds up in the hospitals--the 'vaccinated!' The terrorists are wrongly named: they are the government and big pharma industry that has profited by $$$billions with these highly toxic drugs that are worse than useless. And you would be asking what is behind this terrorizing practice of fear mongering over a fabricated disease paid by in big part by the US govt. I believe it would take you directly to the corporate elite of the US and the world WEF Great Reset program to create totalitarian control of the world. Such a serious inquisition would take you into the study of propaganda and how it is being used to move the public into a place of impoverishment as small and local businesses and farms are forced out of existence. Just check out the frightening policies and practices being forced on small farmers in the Netherlands, a country that is one of the biggest producers of meat in Europe and then connect some dots to the Bill Gates goal of doing away with all real food and creating fake foods with patents to foist on the world. The list of dots goes on but my point has been made.