Chris Sununu

Dear Commons Community,

New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu (R) on Thursday denounced bizarre and false anti-vaccine claims made by members of his own party in the state legislature, saying, “I’ve got a lot on my plate. I don’t need crazy getting in the way.”

Speaking to CNN’s Erin Burnett, Sununu was asked how he pushes the lifesaving coronavirus vaccine when there are elected officials peddling conspiracy theories about them.

Burnett cited comments from state Rep. Al Baldasaro, who said he refused to “play Russian roulette” with his health by getting the COVID-19 vaccine, and state Rep. Ken Weyler, who shared a so-called “vaccine death report” that included claims the vaccine contained tentacled creatures.

“Look, Erin, when crazy comes knocking at the door, you’ve got to slam it shut. That’s all there is to it. I don’t care what party you’re from,” Sununu answered.

He said New Hampshire had been successful at managing the pandemic because his administration relied on transparency and data. The state has fully vaccinated 71% of people older than 12, with 83% having received one dose, according to the New York Times tracker.

“I stood up there in front of the New Hampshire citizens every single day, answering every question we could, showing the data, the trends. And that’s the public trust that has to be built with that transparency,” he said. “So there’s just absolutely no place for the misinformation, the crazy conspiracy theories, all that kind of nonsense.”

He said he would continue to push back on misinformation “every time because we still have a big job to do.”

“COVID is going to get worse as we hit this fall and now winter surge, there’s no doubt about it. We need folks to get vaccinated, we need them to get their boosters, we need to make testing available. I’ve got a lot on my plate. I don’t need crazy getting in the way.”

 Earlier in the segment, Sununu discussed his opposition to President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates for workplaces.

He plans to join other states in taking legal action against federal vaccine mandates and has described them as government overreach.

However, he disagreed with GOP counterparts in other states, most notably Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who have worked to prohibit businesses from enacting vaccine and mask mandates.

“I think some other governors are kind of getting caught up in the moment,” Sununu said.

“If a business wants to mandate the vaccine, that’s their right,” he said. “If they don’t want to mandate the vaccine, that’s their right.”

Sununu needs to get more of the crazies on board with vaccines!

Tony

Lev Parnas and Rudy Giuliani

Dear Commons Community,

A New York jury convicted Lev Parnas, a former associate of Rudy Giuliani, yesterday of charges that he made illegal campaign contributions to influence U.S. politicians and advance his business interests.

The verdict was returned in Manhattan federal court, where Parnas was on trial for more than two weeks as prosecutors accused him of using other people’s money to pose as a powerful political broker and cozy up to some of the nation’s star Republican political figures.

One part of the case alleged that Parnas and an associate made illegal donations through a corporate entity to Republican political committees in 2018, including a $325,000 donation to America First Action, a super PAC supporting former President Donald Trump.

Another part said he used the wealth of a Russian financier, Andrey Muraviev, to make donations to U.S. politicians, ostensibly in support of an effort to launch a legal, recreational marijuana business.

Parnas, 49, was convicted on all counts after about five hours of jury deliberations.  As reported by the Associated Press.

The Soviet-born Florida businessman had insisted through his lawyer that he never used the Russian’s money for political donations. He briefly closed his eyes and shook his head as the verdict was read.

Outside the courtroom after the verdict, Parnas said, “I’ve never hid from nobody. I’ve always stood to tell the truth.”

A co-defendant, Ukraine-born investor Andrey Kukushkin, was convicted of being part of the effort to use Muraviev’s money for political contributions. He had also denied any wrongdoing.

The case had drawn interest because of the deep involvement of Parnas and a former co-defendant, Igor Fruman, in Giuliani’s efforts to get Ukrainian officials to investigate Joe Biden’s son during Biden’s campaign for president.

Giuliani’s company and attorney didn’t immediately respond to emails seeking comment on the verdict.

Giuliani remains under criminal investigation as authorities decide whether his interactions with Ukraine officials required him to register as a foreign agent, but he wasn’t alleged to have been involved in illegal campaign contributions and wasn’t part of the New York trial.

The case did, though, give an up-close look at how Parnas entered Republican circles in 2018 with a pattern of campaign donations big enough to get him meetings with the party’s stars.

“In order to gain influence with American politicians and candidates, they illegally funneled foreign money into the 2018 midterm elections with an eye toward making huge profits in the cannabis business,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement following the verdict. “Campaign finance laws are designed to protect the integrity of our free and fair elections – unencumbered by foreign interests or influence – and safeguarding those laws is essential to preserving the freedoms that Americans hold sacred.”

In addition to the $325,000 donation to America First Action, made through an energy company, prosecutors said Parnas and Fruman orchestrated donations to U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions, of Texas, and to other committees supporting House Republicans.

Giuliani and Trump were sparsely mentioned during the trial, although a photograph featuring Parnas with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, was one of the first exhibits shown to jurors during closing arguments and a video of Giuliani with Parnas was among exhibits jurors could view during deliberations.

DeSantis was among those who received campaign contributions that prosecutors said were traced to $1 million that Parnas and Fruman received from Muraviev, who has been involved in several U.S. cannabis ventures.

About $100,000 of Muraviev’s money went toward campaign contributions in what Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagan Scotten called a conspiracy to secretly bring his “wealth and corruption into American politics” in violation of laws barring foreign donations to U.S. political candidates.

“The voters would never know whose money was pouring into our elections,” Scotten said.

Former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt, now a candidate for U.S. Senate, testified during the trial that a blustering Parnas suggested he could raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for him in 2018. He eventually came through only with a $10,000 check that Laxalt’s lawyers told him to reject.

Joseph Bondy, a lawyer for Parnas, had called the allegations against his client “absurd.”

He insisted in his closing argument that Muraviev’s money went toward supporting legal marijuana businesses looking to expand.

Kukushkin’s lawyer, Gerald Lefcourt, sought to portray his client as an unknowing dupe in the scheme, who was mocked behind his back by other participants as mentally challenged.

Following the verdict, prosecutors asked for immediate incarceration of Parnas and Kukushkin, citing a risk of flight, but the judge allowed them to remain free on bail while awaiting sentencing.

The charges against Parnas collectively carry the potential for decades behind bars, but any prison sentence would likely be measured in years, rather than decades.

Fruman pleaded guilty earlier this year to a single count of solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national. He awaits sentencing.

Another co-defendant, David Correia, also pleaded guilty and has been sentenced to a year in prison for crimes including defrauding investors in an insurance company that had paid Giuliani a $500,000 consulting fee.

Parnas awaits a second trial in connection with that scheme.

Giuliani has insisted that he knew nothing about potentially illegal campaign contributions by either Parnas or Fruman. The former mayor says everything he did in Ukraine was done on Trump’s behalf and there is no reason he would have had to register as a foreign agent.

It figures that this slimy operator would be an associate of Giuliani!

Tony

Robert Nisbet

Dear Commons Community,

In 1971, Robert Nisbet predicted that “managerialism” and vying for resources would change the American university and not for the better.  In its striving for funding, Nisbet posited that the American university was selling its soul to academic capitalism.  Ethan Schrum, has an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, revisiting Nisbet’s position.  Portions of the essay are adapted from his book,The Instrumental University: Education in Service of the National Agenda after World War II, published by Cornell University Press.

Schrum comments:

“According to Nisbet, it is not even inevitable that the university will continue to exist — at least a university conceived as he wished, ‘as a dispassionate center for the study of nature, society, and man.’  Even if society continued to have technical needs, other institutions could develop to meet them. The ‘course of history’ will not save the university, any more than it had saved aristocracy or guilds. As Nisbet wrote in 1971, human action would be necessary to make the university ‘once more an intellectual community, built around the learned disciplines and professions,’ instead of a ‘mere microcosm of society.’ Such action remains necessary today.”

The essay below is worth a read.

Tony

——————————————————————–

 The Chronicle of Higher Education

“The Prophet of Academic Doom”

By Ethan Schrum

October 19, 2021

The Degradation of the Academic Dogma should be remembered for its title alone. But Robert Nisbet’s 1971 classic, in its 50th anniversary year, has much to teach us about the plight of the contemporary American university. Nisbet (1913-1996), who was a prominent communitarian social theorist, helps us see that our quandaries about issues such as funding, bureaucracy, social activism, and faculty workload often have much deeper sources in the university’s social structure, in its role in history, and in longstanding confusions about its purpose. He shows us that we need to think fundamentally about the university as an institution in order to address our specific concerns most fruitfully.

Nisbet argued that what he called “academic capitalism” — the systemwide ramifications of the university’s sprawling new focus on externally funded organized research — had degraded the university after World War II. “For the first time in Western history,” he wrote, “professors and scholars” became “entrepreneurs in incessant search for new sources of capital.”

This was a pioneering claim. Today, Nisbet looks like a seer — many of the trends he described have only intensified. Public trust in universities has declined; the ranks of administrators have swelled; the pressure on individual professors to win external grants has risen. Decades before the advent of on-campus lazy rivers, Nisbet wrote that one outgrowth of academic capitalism was that “dormitories not seldom resembled luxury hotels.” He even predicted a “taxpayers, tuition-payers’ revolt.”

Nisbet published Degradation after spending some 40 years at the University of California during the period of its extraordinary growth into the nine-campus system often seen as a model by educators around the world. (Merced was added later.) A native Californian, he earned all his degrees at UC Berkeley and then served on its faculty in social institutions and sociology before becoming the founding dean of the College of Letters and Science at the new UC campus in Riverside in the early 1950s. He held that position for a decade, then spent another nine years on the Riverside faculty.

For Nisbet, capitalism was not defined by a quest for personal profit. Drawing on Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means’s The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Nisbet argued that status and power were major motivators of capitalists, whether businessmen or “the research titan[s] who began in the late 1940s to govern the American university campus.” These titans flouted traditional university standards of community and authority by setting up their own research shops and raising money to run them without reference to other elements of the university.

The most unfortunate consequence of organized research, in Nisbet’s view, was that it separated research from teaching, thus tearing asunder what he conceived as the integral fabric of academic practice. As organized research became a path to prestige and power, many came to view teaching as a lower-status activity. To counteract this trend, Nisbet wanted professors in research universities to teach three courses per semester.

The punchy title of Nisbet’s book (a nod to Henry Adams, another great critic of American modernity) obscures one of his major points. To be sure, Nisbet argued that academic capitalism had degraded the academic dogma — “the ideal of dispassionate reason, of knowledge for the sake of knowledge.” But Nisbet, recognized as a leading communitarian theorist since publishing The Quest for Community in 1953, was equally concerned with how academic capitalism had degraded academic community — a community of “teachers and scholars,” as he described it in the title of a later book, a memoir of Berkeley in the 1930s.

One way academic capitalism damaged academic community was by spurring a new managerialism. Scholars became managers, since organized research units had “managerial demands” and many employees. A new, more managerially oriented sector of university administration dedicated to sponsored research disrupted the university’s social structure. As a result, “the business and the managerial mind became increasingly vital.” Moreover, presidents, deans, and department chairs were chosen for their managerial and marketing skills rather than their academic vision or curricular expertise. The corrosion of academic community and its informal procedures generated even more managerialism, as bureaucratic methods overseen by additional administrators filled the void. Once in office, these new administrators sought to create more duties for themselves. The result was that “staffs and retinues of secretaries, technicians, clerks, specialists of all kinds enlarged constantly.” Nisbet’s analysis anticipated arguments that came decades later in books such as Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie’s Academic Capitalism, Gaye Tuchman’s Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University, and Benjamin Ginsberg’s The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters.

Nisbet’s diagnosis of the source of moralistic activism on campus is particularly relevant today. The traditional “social contract” between universities and society allowed professors to seek and teach knowledge for its own sake in exchange for staying “out of the areas of society where partisan feelings are endemic, where passionate moralism is of the essence.” Under that contract, “it would never have occurred to even the most radical (or conservative) [professor] to seek to convert the university into a kind of political engine. Or, for that matter, an economic engine.” But the rise of organized research had shattered this social contract, thus turning the university into an “engine” for political and economic projects.

Universities best served society, Nisbet believed, if they adhered to an essential distinction: Universities should meet society’s needs indirectly by preparing students, but pursuing direct service degraded the academic dogma. The postwar university’s “plunge into direct service” — what Nisbet referred to, contemptuously, as a “deluge of humanitarianism” — was one of its worst features. Nisbet feared that, in trying to solve numerous social problems directly, the university would be overwhelmed. The failure to deliver solutions would diminish its overall prestige, thus undermining public trust in its capability to carry out its core mission of teaching and scholarship.

Furthermore, since “some ascendant political interest” typically motivated “the university’s venture into a new humanitarian sphere,” direct attention to social problems put universities “at the mercy of the politician and the interest group with political pressure,” which was sure to change frequently. The university risked losing control of its own agenda.

Finally, each interest group’s particular problem, when taken up by the university, left a “bureaucratic framework” difficult to adapt to the next big issue. The resulting pileup of these frameworks encumbered the university more greatly with the passage of time.

Were specific individuals to blame for this degraded state of the university? Nisbet did not name names, but his arguments implicate Clark Kerr, his old friend from the Berkeley faculty, who became the era’s most influential voice on American higher education. As chancellor at Berkeley and then as president of the UC system, Kerr was one of the leading advocates of the organized research that Nisbet believed had done so much to degrade the academy. In his memoir, Kerr wrote that he shared Nisbet’s nostalgia for an academic community built around “close-knit friends engaged in collegiate activities.” But, he insisted, that model of the university was no longer viable — and such nostalgia was useless “for those navigating the swift-flowing currents of life.”

Kerr’s concept of the university was grounded in a progressive theory of history. Chad Wellmon has shown how Kerr expounded this view in his inaugural address as chancellor at Berkeley, “The University in a Progressive Society.” By the time he became UC president in 1958, Kerr stated that a necessary path of social development, “the logic of industrialism,” guided the university’s course. In his most famous work, The Uses of the University (1963), Kerr argued that the university “has a reality rooted in the logic of history. It is an imperative rather than a reasoned choice.” When Kerr asked himself “what is the justification of the modern American multiversity?” he replied, “History is one answer.”

Kerr’s understanding of the university through the interpretive lens of a progressive theory of history struck Nisbet as wrongheaded. Nisbet argued that “the most fundamental” step in the rehabilitation of the university was the “repudiation of historicism.” Here he drew on Karl Popper’s notion of historicism as “some imagined trajectory of development.” Nisbet asserted that the greatest danger facing the university was its leaders’ assumption “that planning for the university must” align with this trajectory. Such “preposterous” thinking, he said, downplayed traditional practices and labeled new university activities widely considered good as “inevitable or modern.” A true appreciation of history, Nisbet insisted, enabled one to recognize that the belief that history proceeded along a single track led to “follies and knaveries.” After Nisbet’s chastisement, Kerr doubled down: The phrase “higher education cannot escape history” became the title of a 1990 article and a 1994 book.

Nisbet’s disagreement with Kerr over the character of the American university perhaps had deeper, more personal sources in the early history of UC Riverside. There, Nisbet and the founding provost Gordon Watkins created a liberal-arts college with an enrollment around 1,100 — a place some called “the Amherst of the West.”

“For the first time in Western history, professors and scholars” became “entrepreneurs in incessant search for new sources of capital.”

Nisbet recruited scholars to the faculty like “moths … drawn to the flame of his mind.” He called the UC Riverside founding an “epochal … event in American higher education.” He believed it showed that UC had addressed undergraduate education more “fundamentally” than the nation’s most famous private universities, many of which had produced reports and reformed curricula in the preceding decade. Such a public liberal-arts college was necessary, Nisbet argued, because the problems of citizenship had become “so heavy” and “moral, not technical.”

When Watkins retired in 1956, the faculty submitted only one name as his successor: Nisbet, who also enjoyed strong student support. But UC President Robert G. Sproul tapped another UCR administrator. Nisbet claimed to be relieved that Sproul chose an insider, so UCR could continue on the course Watkins had set. But it was not to be. In the fall of 1957, the UC Regents announced that Kerr would succeed Sproul as system president the following summer. Nisbet wrote him a glowing congratulatory letter, praising his work as chancellor at Berkeley.

After Kerr assumed the presidency, however, he led UC Riverside away from the liberal-arts college model to become what the UC system called a general campus, offering a wide array of degree programs in the arts, sciences, and professions. The Regents’ order explicitly stated that “organized research” would be included at UCR. A college of agriculture and graduate programs quickly appeared. This action, on the eve of Kerr brokering California’s Master Plan for Higher Education, swept Riverside into the homogeneity of the UC system, reducing the pluralism that Nisbet so cherished. Nisbet began developing his ideas for Degradation during the final years of his deanship, and it seems likely that his being passed over for provost and the subsequent demise of the liberal-arts college model for UCR motivated some of the book.

Why did California end up without a public liberal-arts college? Other states, such as Missouri (Truman State University) and New Jersey (The College of New Jersey) have created enduring institutions of this type. One crucial factor is that these institutions have independent governing boards. In California, the notion of a UC “system” that Kerr advanced proved to hinder the perpetuation of a campus focused on undergraduate liberal education.

The story of Nisbet’s liberal-arts college at Riverside being eaten up by a general campus under Kerr’s supervision resonates with one of Nisbet’s central points in Degradation: the need for a university to have a limited but clear and distinctive function. This prescription moved in the opposite direction from Kerr’s multiversity. “Our major weakness in the university at the moment,” Nisbet wrote, “is the nearly total lack of a sense of what the business of the university is, what its mission should be, what its distinctive contribution is to society.” What is a university for? What is its purpose? These are the questions we must ask today more insistently than ever, with the dizzying array of expectations that press on American universities.

As we consider those expectations, we should heed Nisbet’s warning against fantasies about the inevitable course of history. We hear many such appeals to inevitability today. Some want institutions to change because of the looming demographic cliff, while others insist that certain high-profile campuses must expand their enrollment because of the direction history is moving. Instead of assuming an inevitable course, we should study the history of higher education to learn about the possibilities for agency and the consequences of decisions made by past academic leaders.

According to Nisbet, it is not even inevitable that the university will continue to exist — at least a university conceived as he wished, “as a dispassionate center for the study of nature, society, and man.” Even if society continued to have technical needs, other institutions could develop to meet them. The “course of history” will not save the university, any more than it had saved aristocracy or guilds. As Nisbet wrote in 1971, human action would be necessary to make the university “once more an intellectual community, built around the learned disciplines and professions,” instead of a “mere microcosm of society.” Such action remains necessary today.

Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, 229 members of the House of Representative voted to hold Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress while 202 opposed the resolution.  The vote was generally along party lines, however, nine Republicans voted for the resolution.  As reported by Yahoo News.

“Prior to the vote, four Republicans were considered a lock to approve the criminal referral, according to Capitol Hill sources: Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Fred Upton of Michigan and Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio.

Cheney and Kinzinger are on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and have for months stood alone as the only two House Republicans willing to speak out against former President Donald Trump’s continued lies about the 2020 election. They were the only two House Republicans to vote for the formation of the select committee on June 30.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi formed the select committee after Republicans rejected a bipartisan commission that would have been evenly split between five Democrats and five Republicans. Only 35 Republicans voted for that measure when it passed the House of Representatives, and it was defeated by a GOP filibuster in the Senate.

Upton has served in the House for more than three decades, since 1987, and will face a primary challenge next year because of his willingness to stand up to Trump.

Gonzalez is retiring from Congress next year, after only four years in the House. “While my desire to build a fuller family life is at the heart of my decision, it is also true that the current state of our politics, especially many of the toxic dynamics inside our own party, is a significant factor in my decision,” Gonzalez said in September when he announced he would not seek another term.

The remaining five Republicans included three who voted for impeachment — Peter Meijer of Michigan, John Katko of New York and Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington — and two House Republicans who did not vote to impeach Trump: Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania.

Only 10 House Republicans voted to impeach Trump in January, a week after he spoke to a crowd in front of the White House on Jan. 6, and instructed them to march to the U.S. Capitol and “fight like hell.” It was the second time Trump was impeached by the House, the first time any president in American history had been impeached twice.

The three House Republicans who had voted to impeach Trump but voted against holding Bannon in contempt on Thursday were Dan Newhouse of Washington, Tom Rice of South Carolina and David Valadao of California.

There was one House Republican who did not vote at all on Thursday: Greg Pence of Indiana, the elder brother of former Vice President Mike Pence, who was hunted by insurrectionists as they stalked through the hallways of the U.S. Capitol, egged on by inflammatory tweets from Trump himself, who blamed Pence for refusing to overturn the election. Greg Pence had voted against impeachment, against the bipartisan commission to investigate Jan. 6 and against the creation of the select committee.

Mace, who represents a moderate coastal district in South Carolina, said that she had voted for holding Bannon in contempt even though she had voted against forming the select committee because it is now a “duly formed” body. “I’m going to fight for subpoena powers … no matter who’s in power, because we’ve got to have the opportunity and the ability to investigate,” she told a Politico reporter.

Fitzpatrick represents the Philadelphia suburbs, a moderate district, and has tried to fashion a bipartisan voting record.”

A small crack in the Republican Party line.

Tony

David Brock

Dear Commons Community,

David Brock has a guest essay in today’s New York Times entitled, I was wrong about Donald Trump.  Mr. Brock led one of the largest Democratic super PACs dedicated to defeating Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Before he became a Democrat, he worked for The Washington Times and the conservative Heritage Foundation.  His essay is a warning for Democrats not to take Trump for granted.  If they do, the country’s will revert back to what it was during the Trump presidency.  Here is an excerpt.

“… the last election settled very little — Mr. Trump not only appears to be preparing for a presidential campaign in 2024, he is whipping up his supporters before the 2022 midterms. And if Democrats ignore the threat he and his allies pose to democracy, their candidates will suffer next fall, imperiling any chance of meaningful reform in Congress.

Going forward, we can expect bogus claims of voter fraud, and equally bogus challenges to legitimate vote counts, to become a permanent feature of Republican political strategy. Every election Republicans lose will be contested with lies, every Democratic win delegitimized. This is poison in a democracy.

As of late September, 19 states had enacted 33 laws that will make it harder for their citizens to vote. The Republican National Committee “election integrity director” says the party will file lawsuits earlier and more aggressively than they did in 2020. Trump wannabe candidates like Glenn Youngkin, running for Virginia governor, are currying favor with the Republican base by promoting conspiracy theories suggesting that Virginia’s election may be rigged.

More alarmingly, Republicans in swing states are purging election officials, allowing pro-Trump partisans to sabotage vote counts. In January, an Arizona lawmaker introduced a bill that would permit Republican legislators to overrule the certification of elections that don’t go their way. In Georgia, the legislature has given partisan election boards the power to “slow down or block” election certifications. Why bother with elections?

Democrats now face an opposition that is not a normal political party, but rather a party that is willing to sacrifice democratic institutions and norms to take power.”

Democrats and voters who rejected Trump and his dreadful presidency should heed Brock’s advice. The entire guest essay is below.

Tony

———————————————————————

The New York Times

I Was Wrong About Donald Trump

Oct. 21, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET

By David Brock

Like most Democrats, I initially underestimated Donald Trump. In 2015, I founded a super PAC dedicated to electing Hillary Clinton. Through all the ups and downs of the campaign, I didn’t once imagine that Americans would vote Mr. Trump in.

He was an obvious pig (see the “Access Hollywood” tapes), a fraud (multiple failed businesses and bankruptcies) and a cheat (stiffing mom-and-pop vendors). Not to mention the blatant racism and misogyny. About the outcome, I was spectacularly wrong.

Once he was in office, I misread Mr. Trump again. Having worked inside the conservative movement for many years, I found his policies familiar: same judges, same tax policy, same deregulation of big business, same pandering to the religious right, same denial of science. Of course, there were the loopy tweets, but still I regarded Mr. Trump as only a difference of degree from what I had seen from prior Republican presidents and candidates, not a difference of kind.

When a raft of books and articles appeared warning that the United States was headed toward autocracy, I dismissed them as hyperbolic. I just didn’t see it. Under Mr. Trump, the sky didn’t fall.

My view of Mr. Trump began to shift soon after the November election, when he falsely claimed the election was rigged and refused to concede. In doing so, Mr. Trump showed himself willing to undermine confidence in the democratic process, and in time he managed to convince nearly three-quarters of his supporters that the loser was actually the winner.

Then came the Capitol Hill insurrection, and, later, proof that Mr. Trump incited it, even hiring a lawyer, John Eastman, who wrote a detailed memo that can only be described as a road map for a coup. A recent Senate investigation documented frantic efforts by Mr. Trump to bully government officials to overturn the election. And yet I worry that many Americans are still blind, as I once was, to the authoritarian impulses that now grip Mr. Trump’s party. Democrats need to step up to thwart them.

Are Democrats up for such a tough (and expensive) fight? Many liberal voters have taken a step back from politics, convinced that Mr. Trump is no longer a threat. According to research conducted for our super PAC, almost half of women in battleground states are now paying less attention to the political news.

But in reality, the last election settled very little — Mr. Trump not only appears to be preparing for a presidential campaign in 2024, he is whipping up his supporters before the 2022 midterms. And if Democrats ignore the threat he and his allies pose to democracy, their candidates will suffer next fall, imperiling any chance of meaningful reform in Congress.

Going forward, we can expect bogus claims of voter fraud, and equally bogus challenges to legitimate vote counts, to become a permanent feature of Republican political strategy. Every election Republicans lose will be contested with lies, every Democratic win delegitimized. This is poison in a democracy.

As of late September, 19 states had enacted 33 laws that will make it harder for their citizens to vote. The Republican National Committee “election integrity director” says the party will file lawsuits earlier and more aggressively than they did in 2020. Trump wannabe candidates like Glenn Youngkin, running for Virginia governor, are currying favor with the Republican base by promoting conspiracy theories suggesting that Virginia’s election may be rigged.

More alarmingly, Republicans in swing states are purging election officials, allowing pro-Trump partisans to sabotage vote counts. In January, an Arizona lawmaker introduced a bill that would permit Republican legislators to overrule the certification of elections that don’t go their way. In Georgia, the legislature has given partisan election boards the power to “slow down or block” election certifications. Why bother with elections?

Democrats now face an opposition that is not a normal political party, but rather a party that is willing to sacrifice democratic institutions and norms to take power.

The legislation Democrats introduced in Congress to protect our democracy against such assaults would have taken an important step toward meeting these challenges. But on Wednesday, Republicans blocked the latest version of the legislation, and given the lack of unanimity among Democrats on the filibuster, they may well have succeeded in killing the last hope for any federal voting rights legislation during this session of Congress.

Having underestimated Mr. Trump in the first place, Democrats shouldn’t underestimate what it will take to counter his malign influence now. They need a bigger, bolder campaign blueprint to save democracy that doesn’t hinge on the whims of Congress.

We should hear more directly from the White House bully pulpit about these dire threats. The Jan. 6 investigators should mount a full-court press to get the truth out. Funding voting rights litigation should be a top priority.

Where possible, Democrats should sponsor plebiscites to overturn anti-democratic laws passed by Republicans in states. They should underwrite super PACs to protect incumbent election officials being challenged by Trump loyalists, even if it means supporting reasonable Republicans. Donations should flow into key governors and secretary of state races, positions critical to election certification.

In localities, Democrats should organize poll watching. Lawyers who make phony voting claims in court should face disciplinary action in state bar associations. The financiers of the voting rights assault must be exposed and publicly shamed.

The good news is that liberals do not have to copy what the right is doing with its media apparatus — the font of falsehoods about voter fraud and a stolen election — to win over voters. Democrats can leapfrog the right with significant investments in streaming video, podcasting, newsletters and innovative content producers on growing platforms like TikTok, whose audiences dwarf those of cable news networks like Fox News.

Issues like racial justice, the environment and immigration are already resonating online with audiences Democrats need to win over, such as young people, women and people of color. Democratic donors have long overlooked efforts to fund the media, but with so much of our politics playing out on that battlefield, they can no longer afford to.

Dear Commons Community,

During their first debate (see video above for highlights), the two men running to become New York City’s next mayor offered starkly different visions last night about how to lead the Big Apple out of the pandemic, improve public safety and gird the city of 8.8 million people for more powerful storms driven by climate change.

Democrat Eric Adams and Republican Curtis Sliwa also sparred over personal and character issues, with Adams lambasting Sliwa for having admitted in the past to making up crimes and for “buffoonery.”

Sliwa, the founder of the 1970s-era Guardian Angels anti-crime patrol, insisted he’s the candidate more in-touch with regular New Yorkers. He said he feels they accept his apology for having falsely claimed he was kidnapped decades ago and boasting of faked exploits from his unarmed patrols.

Adams, the Brooklyn Borough president and a former New York City police captain, is widely expected to win the Nov. 2 election.

He’s the Democratic candidate in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans 7-to-1, having campaigned as a moderate choice in a crowded primary field. Adams would be the city’s second Black mayor and as a candidate, he has spoken personally about policing through the lens of having been a cop, a critic of his own department and a young Black man who experienced police brutality.

Sliwa has been a longtime media fixture in New York, first from his days as the founder of the red-beret wearing Guardian Angels and later as a radio commenter with a penchant for attracting news cameras and staging stunts. As a mayoral candidate, he latched on to reports questioning whether Adams really lives at his Brooklyn brownstone and walked around New York with a milk carton featuring a picture of “missing” Adams.

Adams has repeatedly dismissed Sliwa during the campaign and continued to do so during the debate, refusing the opportunity to respond to an extended, rapid-fire critique from his opponent.

“I’m speaking to New Yorkers. I’m not speaking to buffoonery,” he said.

Sliwa sought to portray Adams as an out-of-touch elitist for having reportedly vacationed in Monaco and meeting with donors in elite enclaves like the Hamptons.

“Just follow me in the streets and subways. I’m there. I’m the people’s choice. Eric Adams is with the elites in the suites,” Sliwa said. “Come on, Eric. Come back. Come back to the streets and the subways. Be with the real peeps.”

Adams said he agreed with outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio’s decision announced Wednesday to mandate COVID-19 vaccines for all city workers, including police officers. Sliwa said he opposed the mandate, saying the city doesn’t have enough police officers as is and can’t afford to lose more to a vaccine mandate.

To revive the city’s empty commercial office space after the pandemic drove workers to stay home, Adams said he’d seek to make the city more business-friendly and mold it into a destination for industries like cybersecurity, biotechnology and drone development.

Sliwa said many people will never come back to in-person work and the city should instead convert empty offices and commercial real estate into affordable housing.

Adams said he’d allow restaurants to keep their pop-up structures on the city’s streets and sidewalks that have served as outdoor dining rooms during the pandemic. Sliwa said the structures are taking up space needed for bicyclists, pedestrians and cars and need to be scaled back.

Sliwa and Adams have both spoken on the campaign trail about combatting violent crime and clashed Wednesday over how to address it. Sliwa called for hiring 3,000 police officers and claimed Adams had shown no interest in using federal resources to put more cops on the streets. He also called for ending the city’s status as a “sanctuary city,” where local law enforcement does not cooperate with stepped-up immigration enforcement from federal officials.

Adams said he would continue the city’s so-called sanctuary status and knocked Sliwa for fabricating crimes and “playing cop” while Adams was in uniform on the police force.

Both candidates were asked how they’d prepare for bigger and more devastating storms fueled by climate change after Hurricane Ida dropped a deadly deluge of rain on the city in September, killing 13 New York City residents.

Adams called for a three-step forecast system warning residents and city agencies of the threat and a plan to more quickly warn those living in flood-prone basement apartments, particularly illegal cellar apartments without ample exits.

Sliwa called for building seawalls to prevent against coastal flooding as seen after Superstorm Sandy nearly a decade ago, along with better cleaning of drains and basins.

Tuesday’s hourlong debate was the first of two face-to-face meetings before the Nov. 2 election. The second debate will be Oct. 26.

This election will be no contest with Eric Adams easily winning the mayor’s job.

Tony

Dr. Rachel Levine sworn in by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Reuters

Dear Commons Community,

Dr. Rachel Levine was sworn in earlier this week as the nation’s first openly transgender four-star officer.

Levine was appointed to full admiral on Tuesday and sworn in as the first-ever female four-star admiral to oversee the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. She is also now the first openly transgender four-star officer across any of the eight uniformed services.

Levine, who will lead 6,000 Public Health Service officers, became the first openly transgender federal official confirmed by the Senate back in March when she was appointed as assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services. Prior to this, she served as Pennsylvania’s secretary of health and as a pediatrician.

Levine, speaking at her swearing-in ceremony on Tuesday, called her appointment “an extraordinary honor and profound responsibility” and vowed to help the nation “continue to move the bar forward for diversity.”

“May this appointment today be the first of many more to come as we create a diverse and more inclusive future,” she said.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra called Levine’s appointment “a giant step forward towards equality as a nation.”

“This is a proud moment for us at HHS. Admiral Levine — a highly accomplished pediatrician who helps drive our agency’s agenda to boost health access and equity and to strengthen behavioral health — is a cherished and critical partner in our work to build a healthier America,” he said in a statement.

Congratulations Admiral Levine!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto has COVID-19 and is urging people to get vaccinated.

“Had I not been vaccinated, and with all my medical issues, this would be a far more dire situation,” Cavuto said in a statement from Fox News Media. “It’s not, because I did and I’m surviving this because I did.”  As reported in The New York Times.

The veteran anchor has multiple sclerosis, survived cancer and lives with a heart condition.

Mr. Cavuto, who is vaccinated against Covid, said he learned about the tests results Monday after his show, “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” and was not on the air Tuesday.

Mr. Cavuto has been very public with his health issues throughout the years. He was treated for cancer in the 1980s and had open-heart surgery in 2016. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1997.

Mr. Cavuto’s announcement came on the same day that CNN anchor John King disclosed on air that he has multiple sclerosis. Mr. King brought up his diagnosis while discussing the death of former Secretary of State Colin Powell on Monday of complications from Covid-19.

We wish Mr. Cavuto and Mr. King well!

Tony

Fox News' Peter Doocy asks if the White House is concerned about police leaving the force over vaccine mandates:

Press Sec. Jen Psaki: "What was the #1 cause of death among police officers last year? Do you know?"

Doocy: *silence*

Psaki: "COVID-19." pic.twitter.com/Y1SM4B64lj

— The Recount (@therecount) October 19, 2021

Dear Commons Community,

Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy seems to pride himself on asking hard-hitting questions of White House press secretary Jen Psaki.

However, yesterday, Psaki was the one who asked a question that left Doocy momentarily speechless.

Dear Commons Community,

The news broke yesterday that former Secretary of State Colin Powell died at 84 from complications related to COVID-19.   The military leader had been fully vaccinated, but like millions of Americans, Powell suffered from a medical condition that increased his risk of severe illness from COVID-19. Powell had previously been diagnosed and treated for multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer that impacts the body’s ability to fight infections.  The following was published by The Huffington Post based on information provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Powell’s death has reignited an ongoing issue with how we think and talk about COVID-19. Since the start of the pandemic, the virus has often been painted as a disease that spares the healthy and targets the vulnerable.

While it’s true that the infection often takes a more severe course in older adults and people who are immunocompromised, the public dialogue has left many disabled people feeling as though they’re disposable. The reality is that a large portion of Americans have a medical condition that puts them at risk for COVID-19, and about 40% have at least two chronic health conditions. Even if you personally don’t have a preexisting condition, there’s a pretty solid chance you know or care about someone who does.

If we’ve learned anything from COVID-19, it’s that we are all extremely interconnected and the choices and precautions we take can and will directly impact those around us. Getting vaccinated and protecting yourself against COVID-19 will automatically protect people around you who could very well be more at risk for experiencing complications from the illness.

According to Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an infectious disease expert, though the vaccines continue to be great at protecting most people against serious illness, hospitalization and death, there does appear to be some erosion in the shot’s long-term ability to protect certain people, including those over 65 and people who are immunosuppressed.

People who are immunocompromised — such as those with cancer, like Powell, and people being treated with chemotherapy — may not respond as well to the standard two-dose vaccine regimen of the messenger RNA vaccines. Adalja said this is why boosters are being made available to certain groups who may have waning protection against severe disease.

“The vaccines are not perfect but nor is human physiology, and so we’ve always known that the vaccines don’t prevent death 100% of the time and there is a certain percentage of people who are at higher risk,” added Lucy McBride, a practicing internal medicine physician in Washington, D.C.

McBride said it’s important to identify who is most at risk to better understand the disease and help mitigate the risk factors and improve the outcomes for any and all who contract the coronavirus.

“We need to respect, not dismiss, people with underlying health conditions,” McBride said.

Powell’s death absolutely does not mean that the COVID-19 vaccines do not work. If anything, it’s a sign that we need to do a better job at protecting people who are vulnerable. The No. 1 way to protect at-risk people in your community is to get vaccinated yourself.

“That will decrease the chance you could spread this virus to somebody who might be immunocompromised,” Adalja said.

If you spend time around older adults or people who are immunocompromised, you’ll want to remain vigilant with other health and safety measures as well. Wear a mask when you’re around at-risk friends and family members and stay home if you’re sick.

For anyone who is eligible to get a booster — which includes people over the age of 65, individuals with certain chronic health conditions that may impact their immune functioning, and those who work in high-risk settings — it’s important to get the booster dose as soon a possible, Adalja said.

McBride’s advice: Get vaccinated, get the booster shot if you’re eligible, practice reasonable precautions, and most importantly, take care of your underlying health.

“Caring for underlying health is essential as is preventing COVID-19 through vaccination,” McBride said.

Listen to the experts!

Tony