George Floyd Protests (2020)

Subterms

    Latest story

    138 Shares97 Views

    How the 2020 George Floyd Protests Are Haunting Democrats in 2025

    by

    No longer demanding cuts to police budgets or straining to show solidarity with protesters, Democrats are taking a far more cautious approach.Five years ago, as grief and anger over George Floyd’s murder ignited national protests, top Democrats joined the demonstrations, called for cutting police budgets and, in a ham-fisted effort at solidarity, even knelt in kente cloth at the Capitol.Now, as President Trump spoils for a fight by sending unwanted troops to Los Angeles to stamp out protests and help with immigration raids, Democrats scarred by recent elections have a starkly different message for demonstrators:Don’t play into his hands.Five years after the 2020 racial justice movement prompted a wave of cultural changes and then an enduring political backlash, many Democrats are signaling that they now recognize how skillful Republicans can be in using scenes of unrest — whether limited or widespread, accurate or not — to cast liberal lawmakers as tolerant of lawlessness.Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi lead fellow Democrats in moment of silence for George Floyd in 2020.Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times“Many of the 2020 protests played out in ways that Democrats did not see and they did not foresee,” said former Senator Doug Jones of Alabama, a Democrat who lost his re-election bid that year. At the time, he said, some did not grasp that “once you got to a certain critical mass of protesters, that some bad things were going to happen.”“I think they do now,” said Mr. Jones, who stressed that Mr. Trump was needlessly escalating tensions. “I also think that they appreciate the fact that any violence is one, is uncalled-for, it needs to be prosecuted. But it’s also playing into the narrative of Donald Trump.”So far, the demonstrations now — relatively small, scattered and generally peaceful — bear little resemblance to the mass protests of 2020, which in some cases devolved into destructive riots.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      D.C.’s Planned Removal of Black Lives Matter Mural Reflects Mayor’s Delicate Position

      by

      Mayor Muriel Bowser’s decision comes amid calls by the president and other Republicans for more federal control of the city.On Wednesday morning in downtown Washington, D.C., Keyonna Jones stood on her artwork and remembered the time when she and six other artists were summoned by the mayor’s office to paint a mural in the middle of the night.“BLACK LIVES MATTER,” the mural read in bright yellow letters on a street running two city blocks, blaring the message at the White House sitting just across Lafayette Square. In June 2020, when Ms. Jones helped paint the mural, demonstrations were breaking out in cities nationwide in protest of George Floyd’s murder. The creation of Black Lives Matter Plaza was a statement of defiance from D.C.’s mayor, Muriel E. Bowser, who had clashed with President Trump, then in his first term, over the presence of federal troops in the streets of her city.But on Tuesday evening, the mayor announced the mural was going away.Ms. Jones said the news upset her. But, she added of the mayor in an interview, “I get where she is coming from.”The city of Washington is in an extraordinarily vulnerable place these days. Republicans in Congress have introduced legislation that would end D.C.’s already limited power to govern itself, stripping residents of the ability to elect a mayor and city council. Mr. Trump himself has said that he supports a federal takeover of Washington, insisting to reporters that the federal government would “run it strong, run it with law and order, make it absolutely, flawlessly beautiful.” In recent days, the administration has been considering executive orders in pursuit of his vision for the city.Potential laws and orders aside, the administration has already fired thousands of federal workers, leaving residents throughout the city without livelihoods and, according to the city’s official estimate, potentially costing Washington around $1 billion in lost revenue over the next three years.Given all this, Ms. Bowser, a Democrat, described her decision about Black Lives Matter Plaza as a pragmatic calculation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Why Botham Jean’s Family Won’t Get $100 Million Awarded by Jury

      by

      Cities have paid out billions of dollars in police misconduct cases, but depending on the case, families may not receive any money at all. A recent $100 million penalty for a police shooting case in Dallas may never lead to a payout.The family of George Floyd received $27 million after he was killed by police officers in Minneapolis. The family of Breonna Taylor got $12 million. Richard Cox, who was paralyzed after a ride in a police van in New Haven, Conn., got $46 million.But the family of Botham Shem Jean, who was killed by an off-duty officer, Amber R. Guyger, as he watched television in his apartment in Dallas in 2018, may never see a penny.That is not because the courts did not value his life. On Tuesday, a jury awarded his family almost $100 million. The difference lies, rather, in who was held responsible for his death.How do police violence cases usually work?In many high-profile cases of police violence, the city or county where the misconduct occurred is responsible for any payout connected to wrongful death or injury. Those taxpayer-funded payouts have amounted to billions of dollars: In 2023, New York City paid nearly $115 million in police misconduct settlements, according to an analysis by the Legal Aid Society.Awards to victims or their families can vary greatly, depending on factors such as the projected earnings over a victim’s lifetime, the sympathies of juries in a given jurisdiction and the amount of publicity generated by the case. Some families win money in civil rights claims even when the officers involved are not criminally charged or disciplined.But in order to have a successful case, plaintiffs must surmount at least two significant legal obstacles. First, officers are granted qualified immunity from lawsuits if victims cannot show that the officers have violated their “clearly established” rights. Second, municipalities can be held responsible only if the plaintiff’s rights were violated because of a negligent policy or practice — for example, if the police department had ignored previous bad behavior on the part of an officer or had failed to properly train its officers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Republicans Will Regret a Second Trump Term

      by

      Now is the summer of Republican content.The G.O.P. is confident and unified. Donald Trump has held a consistent and widening lead over President Biden in all the battleground states. Never Trumpers have been exiled, purged or converted. The Supreme Court has eased many of Trump’s legal travails while his felony convictions in New York seem to have inflicted only minimal political damage — if they didn’t actually help him.Best of all for Republicans, a diminished Joe Biden seems determined to stay in the race, leading a dispirited and divided party that thinks of its presumptive nominee as one might think of a colonoscopy: an unpleasant reminder of age. Even if Biden can be cajoled into quitting, his likeliest replacement is Vice President Kamala Harris, whose 37 percent approval rating is just around that of her boss. Do Democrats really think they can run on her non-handling of the border crisis, her reputation for managerial incompetence or her verbal gaffes?In short, Republicans have good reason to think they’ll be back in the White House next January. Only then will the regrets set in.Three in particular: First, Trump won’t slay the left; instead, he will re-energize and radicalize it. Second, Trump will be a down-ballot loser, leading to divided and paralyzed government. Third, Trump’s second-term personnel won’t be like the ones in his first. Instead, he will appoint his Trumpiest people and pursue his Trumpiest instincts. The results won’t be ones old-school Republicans want or expect.Begin with the left.Talk to most conservatives and even a few liberals, and they’ll tell you that Peak Woke — that is, the worst excesses of far-left activism and cancel culture — happened around 2020. In fact, Peak Woke, from the campus witch hunts to “abolish the police” and the “mostly peaceful” protests in cities like Portland, Ore., and Minneapolis that followed George Floyd’s murder, really coincided with the entirety of Trump’s presidency, then abated after Biden’s election.That’s no accident. What used to be called political correctness has been with us for a long time. But it grew to a fever pitch under Trump, most of all because he was precisely the kind of bigoted vulgarian and aspiring strongman that liberals always feared might come to power, and which they felt duty bound to “resist.” With his every tweet, Trump’s presidency felt like a diesel engine blowing black soot in the face of the country. That’s also surely how Trump wanted it, since it delighted his base, goaded his critics and left everyone else in a kind of blind stupor.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      This Minnesota Race Will Show the Potency of Crime vs. Abortion

      by

      Keith Ellison, the state’s progressive attorney general, faces a Republican challenger who is looking to harness public unease since George Floyd’s murder.WAYZATA, Minn. — Here in light-blue Minnesota, where I’m traveling this week, there’s a race that offers a pure test of which issue is likely to be more politically decisive: abortion rights or crime.Keith Ellison, the incumbent attorney general and a Democrat, insists that his bid for re-election will hinge on abortion, which remains legal in Minnesota.But his Republican challenger, Jim Schultz, says the contest is about public safety and what he argues are “extreme” policies that Ellison endorsed after the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis — the aftermath of which Minnesota is still wrestling with.Schultz, a lawyer and first-time candidate, said in an interview that watching Floyd’s death under the knee of Derek Chauvin, a police officer who was later convicted of murder, had made him “physically ill.” He added that Ellison’s prosecution of Chauvin was “appropriate” and that he supported banning the use of chokeholds and what he called “warrior-style police training.”But Schultz, a 36-year-old graduate of Harvard Law School who has worked most recently as the in-house counsel for an investment firm, was scathing in his assessment of Ellison, presenting himself as the common-sense opponent of what he characterized as a “crazy anti-police ideology.”He decided to run against Ellison, he said, because he thought it was “immoral to embrace policies that led to an increase in crime in at-risk communities.”Ellison fired right back, accusing Schultz of misrepresenting the job of attorney general, which has traditionally focused on protecting consumers. County prosecutors, he said in an interview, were the ones primarily responsible for crime under Minnesota law — but he noted that his office had prosecuted nearly 50 people of violent crimes and had always helped counties when asked.“He’s trying to demagogue crime, Willie Horton-style,” Ellison said, referring to a Black man who was used in a notorious attack ad in the 1988 presidential election that was widely seen as racist fearmongering. Schultz’s plans, he warned, would “demolish” the attorney general’s office and undermine its work on “corporate accountability.”“He’s never tried a case or stepped in a courtroom in his life,” Ellison added.An upset victory by Schultz would reverberate: He would be the first Republican to win statewide office since Tim Pawlenty was re-elected as governor in 2006.Ellison, 59, served six terms in Congress and rose to become a deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee. Before leaving Washington and winning his current office in 2018 — by only four percentage points — he was a rising star of the party’s progressive wing.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsBoth parties are making their final pitches ahead of the Nov. 8 election.Where the Election Stands: As Republicans appear to be gaining an edge with swing voters in the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress, here’s a look at the state of the races for the House and Senate.Biden’s Low Profile: President Biden’s decision not to attend big campaign rallies reflects a low approval rating that makes him unwelcome in some congressional districts and states.What Young Voters Think: Twelve Americans under 30, all living in swing states, told The Times about their political priorities, ranging from the highly personal to the universal.Debates Dwindle: Direct political engagement with voters is waning as candidates surround themselves with their supporters. Nowhere is the trend clearer than on the shrinking debate stage.As one of the most prominent Democratic attorneys general of the Trump era, he has sued oil companies for what he called a “a campaign of deception” on climate change and has gone after pharmaceutical companies for promoting opioids.But the politics of crime and criminal justice have shifted since Floyd’s killing, and not necessarily to Ellison’s advantage. In a recent poll of Minnesota voters, 20 percent listed crime as the most important issue facing the state, above even inflation.Maneuvering on abortion rightsDemocrats would prefer to talk about Schultz’s view on abortion. They point to his former position on the board of the Human Life Alliance, a conservative group that opposes abortion rights and falsely suggests that abortion can increase the risk of breast cancer, as evidence that his real agenda is “an attempt to chip away at abortion access until it can be banned outright,” as Ken Martin, the chair of the Minnesota Democratic Party, put it. Democratic operatives told me that in their door-knocking forays, abortion was the topic most on voters’ minds — even among independents and moderate voters.So Ellison has been talking up his plans to defend abortion rights and warning that Schultz would do the opposite.“We will fight extradition if they come from another state, and we’ll go to court to fight for people’s right to travel and to do what is legal to do in the state of Minnesota,” Ellison said at a recent campaign stop. Schultz, he argued, “will use the office to interfere and undermine people’s right to make their own choices about reproductive health.”Schultz denies having an aggressive anti-abortion agenda. Although he said he was “pro-life” and described himself as a “person of faith” — he is a practicing Catholic — he told me he “hadn’t gotten into this to drive abortion policy.” Abortion, he said, was a “peripheral issue” to the attorney general’s office he hopes to lead, and he pointed out that the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled the practice legal in 1995.Historically, the attorney general’s office in Minnesota has focused on protecting consumers, leaving most criminal cases to local or federal prosecutors.But none of that, Schultz insisted, is “written in stone.” The uptick in crime in Minneapolis, he said, was a “man-made disaster” that could be reversed with the right policies.Ellison countered that Schultz “doesn’t know what he’s talking about” and cited four statutes that would have to be changed to shift the focus of the attorney general’s office from consumer protection to crime.Schultz acknowledged his lack of courtroom experience but said he would hire aggressive criminal prosecutors if he won. He is promising to beef up the attorney general’s criminal division from its current staff of three lawyers to as many as three dozen and to use organized crime statutes to pursue “carjacking gangs.”He’s been endorsed by sheriffs and police unions from across the state, many of whom are critical of Ellison’s embrace of a proposed overhaul of the Minneapolis Police Department, which fell apart in acrimony. Had it passed, the city would have renamed the police the Department of Public Safety and reallocated some of its budget to other uses.Ellison, who lives in Minneapolis and whose son is a progressive member of the City Council, seems to recognize his political danger. But what he called Schultz’s “obsessive” focus on crime clearly frustrates him.“He doesn’t really care about crime,” Ellison said at one point.He also defended his support for the police overhaul in Minneapolis as necessary to create some space for meaningful change and challenged me to find an example of his having called to “defund the police” — “there isn’t one,” he said. And he noted that he had supported the governor’s budget, which included additional money for police departments.In George Floyd Square in Minneapolis, iron sculptures in the shape of fists mark the four entrances to the intersection, which shows lingering signs of the anger that followed Floyd’s murder.Stephen Maturen/Getty ImagesWhere it all beganDemocrats in Minnesota insist that the crime issue is overblown — and murders, robberies, sex offenses and gun violence are down since last year. But according to the City of Minneapolis’s official numbers, other crimes are up: assault, burglaries, vandalism, car thefts and carjacking.And it’s hard, traveling around the area where Floyd’s murder took place, to avoid the impression that Minneapolis is still reeling from the 2020 unrest. But there’s little agreement on who is to blame.Boarded-up storefronts dot Uptown, a retail area where shopkeepers told me that the combination of the pandemic and the 2020 riots, which reached the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare of Hennepin Avenue, had driven customers away.A couple of miles away, on a frigid Tuesday morning, I visited George Floyd Square, as the corner where he was killed is known. Iron sculptures in the shape of fists mark the four entrances to the intersection, which is covered in street art and shows lingering signs of the eruption of anger that followed Floyd’s murder.A burned-out and graffitied former Speedway gas station now hosts a lengthy list of community demands, including the end of qualified immunity for police officers, which Schultz opposes. In an independent coffee shop on the adjoining corner, the proprietor showed me a photograph he had taken with Ellison — the lone Democratic politician, he said, to visit in recent months.I was intercepted at the square by Marquise Bowie, a former felon and community activist who has become its self-appointed tour guide. Bowie runs a group called the George Floyd Global Memorial, and he invited me on a solemn “pilgrimage” of the site — stopping by murals depicting civil rights heroes of the past, the hallowed spot of asphalt where Floyd took his last breath and a nearby field of mock gravestones bearing the names of victims of police violence.Bowie, who said he didn’t support defunding the police, complained that law enforcement agencies had abandoned the community. Little had changed since Floyd’s death, he said. And he confessed to wondering, as he intercepted two women who were visiting from Chicago, why so many people wanted to see the site but offer little in return.“What good does taking a selfie at a place where a man died do?” he asked me. “This community is struggling with addiction, homelessness, poverty. They need help.”What to read tonightHerschel Walker, the embattled Republican nominee for Senate in Georgia, often says he has overcome mental illness in his past. But experts say that assertion is simplistic at best, Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports.As we wrote yesterday, swing voters appear to be tilting increasingly toward Republicans. On The Daily, our chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, breaks down why.Oil and gas industry lobbyists are already preparing for a Republican-controlled House, Eric Lipton writes from Washington.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

    • 163 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Policing Divide Hurt Rep. Ilhan Omar, Who Edged Out a Narrow Primary Win

      by

      Two years ago, Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota easily survived her Democratic primary by beating back a fellow progressive. Even though she had become a national lightning rod for attacks from the right and faced staunch opposition from pro-Israel groups that spent millions of dollars in hopes of defeating her, she won her 2020 race by more than 35,000 votes.But on Tuesday, Ms. Omar edged out only a narrow primary victory against a centrist Democrat, coming within 2,500 votes of losing her seat. “Tonight’s victory is a testament to how much our district believes in the collective values we are fighting for and how much they’re willing to do to help us overcome defeat,” Ms. Omar posted on Twitter. To her supporters and her critics, the tight race was a sign that her strong support of a progressive push to overhaul the Minneapolis Police Department had cost her votes. That push, which took the shape of a ballot measure last year, followed the 2020 killing of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis, which set off protests and nationwide calls for racial justice and police reform. More than two years later, the issue of policing and accountability continues to deeply divide Democrats.“Most voters, when they call 9-11, they want the police to come right away,” said Michael Meehan, a Democratic strategist, adding that Ms. Omar’s narrow win showed the “punitive power” of the backlash against calls to “defund the police” across the country.For many in Minneapolis, the clashes over policing between Ms. Omar and her main Democratic rival in the primary, Don Samuels, a former Minneapolis city councilman and school board member, were a continuation of last year’s battle over the ballot measure to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a new Department of Public Safety.Ms. Omar supported the measure, which grew out of the outrage over Mr. Floyd’s murder, when Minneapolis became the center of a push to defund or abolish the police. But moderate Democrats, including Mayor Jacob Frey, called for improving the current department, as an increase in homicides sparked concern.In the end, Minneapolis voters struck the amendment down. Mr. Samuels, who campaigned to defeat the ballot measure and who had the backing of Mr. Frey in the primary, had criticized Ms. Omar for her support of the “defund police” movement. After he conceded his race, Mr. Samuels contended that his opponent was beatable. “If this was the general election, no doubt that we would have won this race,” he said.This time, pro-Israel groups declined to get involved. The political action committee affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee did not respond to requests for comment. They and other groups have opposed Ms. Omar in the past after she made comments about the influence of pro-Israel donors on lawmakers. Her fierce and persistent criticism of Israel has exposed broader tensions between younger Democrats who accuse the Jewish state of human rights abuses and older Democrats who stand behind it.On Wednesday, Ms. Omar’s progressive supporters were feeling relieved, yet also dispirited. “I feel like it shouldn’t have been that close,” said D.A. Bullock, a filmmaker and Minneapolis community activist who supported her campaign. “It was almost like trying to bring her to heel rather than push for better policy.”Sabrina Mauritz, a field director with TakeAction Minnesota, said Ms. Omar won despite the broader backlash because she has been an effective local leader. “The constant fear mongering — it is meant to scare people,” Ms. Mauritz said, referring to the attacks on Ms. Omar and efforts at police reform. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Our Racial Reckoning Could Have Come Sooner. What Made 2020 Different?

      by

      Why was there an all-encompassing racial reckoning in this country starting in the spring of 2020? And why then? Examining that question reminds us that history is driven — by general trends classifiable as progress or decline — but also just happens. Specifically, chance factors, what historians sometimes call “contingency,” have greater effects than we are always inclined to notice.As the physicist Cameron Gibelyou and the historian Douglas Northrop note in their useful “Big Ideas: A Guide to the History of Everything,” “To state that an event was contingent in general, without further qualification, means that the event would not have been possible without a certain sequence of previous events or actions being taken by particular actors, that it did not have to happen the way it did.”Ancient examples include the Ming dynasty’s decision not to pursue imperial goals across the sea after 1433. Otherwise, China might have established worldwide colonies in advance of Europeans, and the trajectory of world history would be quite different. The Battle of Salamis in 480 B.C.E. held the Persians off from Greece, after which Greek culture flowered in ways that helped forge the intellectual and artistic culture of Europe. It is interesting to imagine the different cultural developments that might have ensued if Persia had conquered and maintained dominion over Greece and then beyond.Contingency matters in our times as well. We might propose, for example, that the murder of George Floyd set off a reckoning on race in America. However, that is more a description than an explanation.There have been other relatively recent cases of gruesome and unjustifiable killings of Black people by the police that have become national touchstones and yet did not result in racial reckonings of the kind we’ve seen since 2020: When, in 1999, the police gunned down Amadou Diallo in the vestibule of a New York City apartment building as he was reaching for his wallet, the media coverage was intense and sustained. The Rev. Al Sharpton, in a role now quite familiar, served as a kind of spokesman for Diallo’s family.Yet there was nothing we would describe as a racial reckoning in the wake of Diallo’s death, nor did the initiative on race that President Bill Clinton started in 1997 result in anything like the intensity of discussion, or changes in language and norms, that our current reckoning has.We might suppose that social media needed to emerge before such a thing could happen. But then social media was largely the reason the shooting deaths of Trayvon Martin (though not by a police officer) and Michael Brown became national causes célèbres in 2012 and 2014. Yet while these cases did intensify national awareness of the generally uneasy and often perilous relationship between Black people and law enforcement in this country, they didn’t occasion a comprehensive reassessment of racism, its nature and its role in creating today’s inequalities in the way Floyd’s murder did.One might propose that what happened in 2020 happened because Black America was by then especially fed up — weary and disgusted with the nation’s refusal to more seriously address police violence. I imagine that analysis when I recall historian and former assistant attorney general Roger Wilkins in 2005 describing some Watts rioters of 1965 as “fed up” with the bleak circumstances of many citizens in Watts and South Central Los Angeles at the time. He was responding to my query about why it was in the late 1960s — after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — that the nation experienced 1967’s “long, hot summer” riots and, in 1968, more riots in Black neighborhoods in various parts of the country, including Washington, D.C. (in response, in part, to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.). Those riots were initiated by Black people in protest, rather than, as I wrote, earlier race riots in American cities that “involved white bigots storming into Black neighborhoods and terrorizing residents.”Today, I cannot help wondering whether we can really say that Black people in the late ’60s were more fed up than at times past. And I similarly wonder if there is reason to suppose that Black Americans were less fed up post-2005, after Hurricane Katrina, the miserable government response to it and the nationwide discussion of what that signaled about racism — inspiring Spike Lee’s documentary “When the Levees Broke” and David Simon’s succès d’estime, “Treme” — than we were in 2020.I would suggest that what conditioned the racial reckoning of 2020 was partly contingency. To wit, I think the pandemic was the determining factor.Tragically, hideously, Americans learn of Black people dying under appalling circumstances, involving police officers, quite often. Think of Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner — whether these circumstances lead to criminal convictions, or charges, which they often don’t. Few of us, especially those of us who live in New York City, will ever forget Garner’s words, “I can’t breathe,” though even his death wasn’t a fulcrum in quite the way Floyd’s was. In May 2020, there was something besides the injustice and brutality of Floyd’s murder that motivated the surge of nationwide demonstrations: the fact that we had been in pandemic isolation for two months and that around that same time it was becoming clear that conditions were not going to change anytime soon.I don’t mean to imply that this outcry was insincere or cynical. But I suspect that what helped make the difference was the pandemic lockdown. At that unusual and challenging time, for many people, being outdoors and connecting with other people was understandably a uniquely powerful temptation. The lockdown also gave a broader range of people — beyond those already committed to activism — the time to reflect, and to devote their energies to things beyond themselves, something they may not have done under normal circumstances.As such, it could be that if there had not been a lockdown, the Floyd protests would have been smaller in scale and shorter in duration. Further, one could surmise that if the sequence of events had taken place a few months earlier, with the lockdown beginning in the fall and Floyd’s murder happening in the colder months of January or February, this, too, would have, hypothetically, made protests smaller, less likely or shorter-term in many locations. And this probably would have decreased the chances that the protests stimulated a think-in about racism that would still be going strong two years later.There’s a case that the pandemic shaped the racial reckoning in another way. A controversial aspect of the reckoning has been the examples of workplace disciplinary actions that have become commonplace in its wake, out of a general sense of these actions as inherent to the mission of reconsidering racism. (In this newsletter, I’ve written about more than one.) That a number of these instances involve social media should come as no surprise: These platforms place a kind of scrim curtain between people that can lessen our sense of dehumanization as unnatural.It’s not unlike what can happen to us on video chat applications such as Zoom or messaging programs such as Slack. Contempt and condemnation can come more easily to us when directed to a static avatar on Twitter or someone in a box on a screen than to a person we are in the same room with. Chat features and direct-message side exchanges also allow factions to build up opposition as a general meeting runs, in a way that passing notes and sharing dismissive facial expressions cannot. The way we’ve learned to communicate in the past few years, sometimes normalizing real-time shaming and dismissing, has set new norms that now feel like the default, even as live meetings become routine again.In short, I think that without a pandemic, and an ensuing year-plus when a good deal of our interactions were virtual, America would not have entered an extended racial reckoning. It wasn’t that Black Americans were, two years ago, at some unique tipping point, nor was it that white Americans opened in an unprecedented way to hearing out Black America’s concerns from the sheer goodness of their hearts.It was the confluence of a pandemic, a grievous murder and the time of year in which these occurred, with the magnitude and tone determined partly by the fact that all of this happened when handy group communication technologies had become widely established and were available to spend workdays on.History is like this, including that of race and racism. On race, contingency should be included in how we chronicle it, and not only now but in the past and the future. The civil rights victories of the 1950s and 1960s were related, in part, to the novelty of television. Future progress on race will almost certainly be driven by factors beyond protest and critique, in ways no one could have predicted beforehand.Have feedback? Send a note to McWhorter-newsletter@nytimes.com.John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He hosts the podcast “Lexicon Valley” and is the author, most recently, of “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Proposed Launching Missiles Into Mexico to ‘Destroy the Drug Labs,’ Esper Says

      by

      It is one of the moments in his upcoming memoir that the former defense secretary described as leaving him all but speechless.President Donald J. Trump in 2020 asked Mark T. Esper, his defense secretary, about the possibility of launching missiles into Mexico to “destroy the drug labs” and wipe out the cartels, maintaining that the United States’ involvement in a strike against its southern neighbor could be kept secret, Mr. Esper recounts in his upcoming memoir.Those remarkable discussions were among several moments that Mr. Esper described in the book, “A Sacred Oath,” as leaving him all but speechless when he served the 45th president.Mr. Esper, the last Senate-confirmed defense secretary under Mr. Trump, also had concerns about speculation that the president might misuse the military around Election Day by, for instance, having soldiers seize ballot boxes. He warned subordinates to be on alert for unusual calls from the White House in the lead-up to the election.The book, to be published on Tuesday, offers a stunningly candid perspective from a former defense secretary, and it illuminates key episodes from the Trump presidency, including some that were unknown or underexplored.“I felt like I was writing for history and for the American people,” said Mr. Esper, who underwent the standard Pentagon security clearance process to check for classified information. He also sent his writing to more than two dozen four-star generals, some cabinet members and others to weigh in on accuracy and fairness.Pressed on his view of Mr. Trump, Mr. Esper — who strained throughout the book to be fair to the man who fired him while also calling out his increasingly erratic behavior after his first impeachment trial ended in February 2020 — said carefully but bluntly, “He is an unprincipled person who, given his self-interest, should not be in the position of public service.”A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Esper describes an administration completely overtaken by concerns about Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, with every decision tethered to that objective. He writes that he could have resigned, and weighed the idea several times, but that he believed the president was surrounded by so many yes-men and people whispering dangerous ideas to him that a loyalist would have been put in Mr. Esper’s place. The real act of service, he decided, was staying in his post to ensure that such things did not come to pass.One such idea emerged from Mr. Trump, who was unhappy about the constant flow of drugs across the southern border, during the summer of 2020. Mr. Trump asked Mr. Esper at least twice if the military could “shoot missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs.”“They don’t have control of their own country,” Mr. Esper recounts Mr. Trump saying.When Mr. Esper raised various objections, Mr. Trump said that “we could just shoot some Patriot missiles and take out the labs, quietly,” adding that “no one would know it was us.” Mr. Trump said he would just say that the United States had not conducted the strike, Mr. Esper recounts, writing that he would have thought it was a joke had he not been staring Mr. Trump in the face.In Mr. Esper’s telling, Mr. Trump seemed more emboldened, and more erratic, after he was acquitted in his first impeachment trial. Mr. Esper writes that personnel choices reflected that reality, as Mr. Trump tried to tighten his grip on the executive branch with demands of personal loyalty.Among Mr. Trump’s desires was to put 10,000 active-duty troops on the streets of Washington on June 1, 2020, after large protests against police brutality erupted following the police killing of George Floyd. Mr. Trump asked Mr. Esper about the demonstrators, “Can’t you just shoot them?”Mr. Esper describes one episode nearly a month earlier during which Mr. Trump, whose re-election prospects were reshaped by his repeated bungling of the response to the coronavirus pandemic, behaved so erratically at a May 9 meeting about China with the Joint Chiefs of Staff that one officer grew alarmed. The unidentified officer confided to Mr. Esper months later that the meeting led him to research the 25th Amendment, under which the vice president and members of the cabinet can remove a president from office, to see what was required and under what circumstances it might be used.Mr. Esper writes that he never believed Mr. Trump’s conduct rose to the level of needing to invoke the 25th Amendment. He also strains to give Mr. Trump credit where he thinks he deserves it. Nonetheless, Mr. Esper paints a portrait of someone not in control of his emotions or his thought process throughout 2020.Mr. Esper singles out officials whom he considered erratic or dangerous influences on Mr. Trump, with the policy adviser Stephen Miller near the top of the list. He recounts that Mr. Miller proposed sending 250,000 troops to the southern border, claiming that a large caravan of migrants was en route. “The U.S. armed forces don’t have 250,000 troops to send to the border for such nonsense,” Mr. Esper writes that he responded.In October 2019, after members of the national security team assembled in the Situation Room to watch a feed of the raid that killed the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Mr. Miller proposed securing Mr. al-Baghdadi’s head, dipping it in pig’s blood and parading it around to warn other terrorists, Mr. Esper writes. That would be a “war crime,” Mr. Esper shot back.Mr. Miller flatly denied the episode and called Mr. Esper “a moron.”Mr. Esper also viewed Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s final White House chief of staff, as a huge problem for the administration and the national security team in particular. Mr. Meadows often threw the president’s name around when barking orders, but Mr. Esper makes clear that he often was not certain whether Mr. Meadows was communicating what Mr. Trump wanted or what Mr. Meadows wanted.He also writes about repeated clashes with Robert C. O’Brien, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser in the final year, describing Mr. O’Brien as advocating a bellicose approach to Iran without considering the potential fallout.Mr. O’Brien said he was “surprised and disappointed” by Mr. Esper’s comments. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      The Law of Unintended Political Consequences Strikes Again

      by

      The killing of George Floyd and the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests that followed drove an exceptionally large increase in foundation grants and pledges to criminal and racial justice reform groups and other causes, ranging from the United Negro College Fund to the Center for Antiracist Research and from the National Museum of African American History to the Yes 4 Minneapolis campaign to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department.Candid — a website that connects “people who want to change the world with the resources they need to do it” — published “What does Candid’s grants data say about funding for racial equity in the United States?” by Anna Koob on July 24, 2020.Koob wrote:In the months since George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police, we witnessed a surge in attention to longstanding anti-Black racism in the United States. Although racial inequality is hardly a new phenomenon, the public reaction to these events does feel bigger and more broad based, a trend that’s reflected in the well-documented rapid increase in related philanthropic giving to racial equity in a matter of weeks.Before Floyd’s death, Candid found that philanthropies provided “$3.3 billion in racial equity funding” for the nine years from 2011 to 2019. Since then, Candid calculations revealed much higher totals for both 2020 and 2021: “50,887 grants valued at $12.7 billion” and “177 pledges valued at $11.6 billion.”Among the top funders, according to Candid’s calculations, are the Ford Foundation, at $3 billion; Mackenzie Scott, at $2.9 billion; JPMorgan Chase & Co. Contributions Program, at $2.1 billion; W.K. Kellogg Foundation, $1.2 billion; Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, $1.1 billion; Silicon Valley Community Foundation, $1 billion; Walton Family Foundation, $689 million; The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, $438 million; and the Foundation to Promote Open Society, $350.5 million.There are Democratic strategists who worry about unintended political consequences that could flow from this surge in philanthropic giving. Rob Stein, one of the founders of the Democracy Alliance, an organization of major donors on the left, argued in a phone interview that while most foundation spending is on programs that have widespread support, “when progressive philanthropists fund groups that promote extreme views like ‘defunding the police’ or that sanction ‘cancel culture,’ they are exacerbating intraparty conflict and stoking interparty backlash.” The danger, according to Stein, is that “some progressive politicians and funders are contributing to divisiveness within their ranks and giving fodder to the right.”Matt Bennett, senior vice president of Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, argued in an email:Whether inadvertent or not, some progressive foundations are funding work that is shortsighted and harmful to the long-term progress they hope to achieve. We recognize that every successful movement has people and institutions playing a variety of roles. There are folks whose job it is to push the envelope and others whose job it is to work within the system to make change. Some need to push the envelope and some need to assemble the compromise that can pass. That’s all part of the process.However, Bennett continued, “It’s crystal clear that some ideas being pushed by activists and funded by lefty foundations go beyond that paradigm, treading into territory that is flat-out politically toxic and that undermine our collective goals.”Bennett cited a post-2020 election study commissioned by Third Way and other groups that “found that Republicans used ‘Defund the Police’ as a cudgel against moderate Democrats, and it played a major role in the loss of more than a dozen House seats. These losses brought us to the brink of handing an insurrectionist the Speaker’s gavel.”“It’s also clear,” in Bennett’s view,that this work has led to a backlash, and it’s not confined to white voters. In Minneapolis, where a Defund the Police ballot initiative failed by a wide margin in November, it performed worst in the two districts with the heaviest Black populations. You have probably seen the Pew Research from October that showed declining support across the board for less funding for police. What’s even more striking is that on the question of whether police budgets should grow or shrink, Black and Hispanic Democrats are more in favor of higher police budgets than white Democrats. None of that is the fault of the foundations, but it is vital for them to fully appreciate the political context for their funding.Any foundation, Bennett declared,that completely ignores the political impact of their advocacy is violating the Hippocratic oath. They can and must keep their eye on the politics of the movements they advance. And they must balance shifting the long-term narrative of causes they support with the near-term political consequences of their actions. If they don’t, they may inadvertently provide potent political fodder to the illiberal, antidemocratic Trumpian G.O.P., and thereby endanger our republic.Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic, wrote at the end of November, “It’s an undeniable fact that Democratic Party elites, progressive activists, foundation and think-tank officials, and most opinion journalists are well to the left of the party’s rank and file.”It’s possible, Tomasky continued, “that certain issues, or ways of talking about certain issues, will be established as litmus tests within the party that could be quite problematic for Democrats trying to run in purple districts.”Tom Perriello, a former congressman from Virginia who is now executive director of George Soros’s Open Society-U.S., strongly defends the role of foundations. Leading up to the 2020 election, foundations invested “$700 million in voter protection that probably held democracy together,” he said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “Philanthropy saved the day.”Critics who focus on the small set of controversial foundation programs that may be used by Republicans against Democrats, Perriello said, fail to recognize that “what is hurting Democrats is that there is not a core economic message and that allows Republicans to set these (cultural and racial) issues as a priority.”Perriello cited same-sex marriage as an example of philanthropy initially “pushing the Overton window” farther than the electorate was willing to go, but, over time, “now it’s a winning issue.”Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, argued in a phone interview that no consideration is — or can be — given to partisan political consequences:We make no calculations about how our grantees give credibility or not to the Democratic Party. That is of no concern to the Ford Foundation, or to me personally.Walker continued: “We support organizations that are working toward more justice and more inclusion in America, but we have no interest in the Democratic Party’s strengths or weaknesses.”I asked Walker about the concerns raised by Stein and Bennett. “We support issues that are about progress and inclusion and justice, but the chips fall where they fall,” Walker said.I also asked Walker about a subject that became a central issue in the 2021 Virginia governor’s race: “critical race theory.” Walker said that the foundation supports proponents of the theory “because we believe there is value in understanding how race is a factor in our legal system,” adding that the foundation does not support the views of its grantees “100 percent of the time, but at the end of the day we believe in certain ideas of justice and fairness in our society.”Kristen Mack, a managing director at the MacArthur Foundation, replied by email to my inquiry about foundation spending:Our grantmaking is intended to further our programmatic strategies, each of which is based on a theory of change and clear set of goals. We are aware of the larger context in the fields in which we work and recognize that our goals may be perceived by some as leaning toward a political point of view or party. Our overarching mission, however, is to create a more just, verdant and peaceful world, which is in our view a result that would be welcomed by people across the political spectrum. We are careful not to involve ourselves in, or to make decisions based on, strengthening or opposing any political party.The Nov. 2 Minneapolis election provided a case study of the complex politics of the defund-the-police movement. Voters in Minneapolis rejected — by 56 percent to 44 percent — an amendment to the city charter that would have dismantled the police department and replaced it with a department of public safety.All three wards with majorities or pluralities of Black voters — wards 4, 5 and 6 — voted against the amendment by margins larger than the citywide average, at 61.2 percent to 38.8 percent. Voters in three other of the city’s 13 wards — 8, 9 and 10 — strongly supported the amendment to disband the police department, 57 percent to 43 percent. Voters in wards 8, 9 and 10 are majority or plurality white, with whites making up 54.1 percent of the population of the three wards taken together, according to data provided to The Times by Jeff Matson of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota.The battle over the amendment reverberated into the races for City Council, resulting in the defeat of some incumbents who supported dismantling the police department.Esme Murphy of Minneapolis television station WCCO interviewed several of the victors:“Emily Koski, a mother of two in south Minneapolis, defeated Ward 11 incumbent Jeremy Schroeder, one of the strongest voices who in June of 2020 called for defunding the Minneapolis police.”Koski told Murphy, “I felt this was the time to step up and make sure that we are actually listening to all of our community members and I feel like they felt they had been shut out.”Similarly, in northern Minneapolis, Murphy reported: “LaTrisha Vetaw beat incumbent Phillipe Cunningham. He too was a strong supporter of replacing the police. ‘I ran because I love this community and we deserve so much better in this community than what we were getting.’”The single largest contribution, $650,000, to the Yes 4 Minneapolis PAC, the leading group seeking approval of the charter amendment to dismantle the police department, was from Soros’s Open Society Policy Center.Some philanthropies, in the view of Larry Kramer, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, have inadvertently become trapped in the politics of polarization. In a phone interview, Kramer contended:Too many — on both left and right — believe they are just one punch away from knocking the other side out. The problem, they say, is that we haven’t gone far enough, the reason we haven’t crushed the other side is because we are trimming our sails. I don’t think they see how they are widening the divide and making the fundamental problem worse.This set of beliefs in particularly problematic at this juncture, Kramer continued, because “the public has lost faith in all our institutions. Neoliberalism is dead, but in the absence of something better, people are drifting toward ethnonationalism as a way to explain what seems wrong about the world to them.”Instead of looking for a knockout punch, Kramer argued, “with neoliberalism dead, something will replace it. The challenge is to find something better than ethnonationalism — a way to think about the relationship of government and markets to people that is better suited to a 21st-century economy and society.”Jonathan Chait, a columnist for New York magazine, wrote an essay in late November on the dilemmas of the Biden presidency, “Joe Biden’s Big Squeeze,” in which he argued that progressive foundationshave churned out studies and deployed activists to bring left-wing ideas into the political debate. At this they have enjoyed overwhelming success. In recent years, a host of new slogans and plans — the Green New Deal, “Defund the police,” “Abolish ICE,” and so on — have leaped from the world of nonprofit activism onto the chyrons of MSNBC and Fox News. Obviously, the conservative media have played an important role in publicizing (and often distorting) the most radical ideas from the activist left. But the right didn’t invent these edgy slogans; the left did, injecting them into the national bloodstream.Nonprofits on the left, Chait argued, “set out to build a new Democratic majority. When the underpinnings of its theory collapsed, the movement it built simply continued onward, having persuaded itself that its ideas constituted an absolute moral imperative.”Chait went on:The grim irony is that, in attempting to court nonwhite voters, Democrats ended up turning them off. It was not only that they got the data wrong — they were also courting these “marginalized communities” in ways that didn’t appeal to them. For the reality is that the Democratic Party’s most moderate voters are disproportionately Latino and Black.The defeat of Democratic candidates up and down the ticket in the 2021 Virginia election renewed the intraparty debate.ALG Research, the major polling firm in the Joe Biden campaign, conducted, along with Third Way, a postelection study of the 2021 Virginia governor’s race, in which Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, defeated Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee. The ALG study of swing voters, which I have reported on in past columns, found, for example, that Republican highlighting of critical race theory had a subtle effect on voters:CRT in schools is not an issue in and of itself, but it taps into these voters’ frustrations. Voters were nearly unanimous in describing the country as divided and feeling that politics is unavoidably in their faces.While the voters ALG studied knew that critical race theory had not been formally adopted as part of Virginia’s curriculum, the report continued,they felt like racial and social justice issues were overtaking math, history, and other things. They absolutely want their kids to hear the good and the bad of American history, at the same time they are worried that racial and cultural issues are taking over the state’s curricula. We should expect this backlash to continue, especially as it plays into another way where parents and communities feel like they are losing control over their schools in addition to the basics of even being able to decide if they’re open or not.As my colleague Jeremy W. Peters wrote in a postelection analysis last year, criticshave argued that Democrats are trying to explain major issues — such as inflation, crime and school curriculum — with answers that satisfy the party’s progressive base but are unpersuasive and off-putting to most other voters. The clearest example is in Virginia, where the Democratic candidate for governor, Terry McAuliffe, lost his election after spending weeks trying to minimize and discredit his opponent’s criticisms of public school education, particularly the way that racism is talked about. Mr. McAuliffe accused the Republican, Glenn Youngkin, of campaigning on a “made-up” issue and of blowing a “racist dog whistle.”But, Peters continued:About a quarter of Virginia voters said that the debate over teaching critical race theory, a graduate-level academic framework that has become a stand-in for a debate over what to teach about race and racism in schools, was the most important factor in their decision, and 72 percent of those voters cast ballots for Mr. Youngkin, according to a survey of more than 2,500 voters conducted for The Associated Press by NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan research organization.For leaders of the Democratic Party, these developments pose a particularly frustrating problem because they pay an electoral price for policy proposals and rhetoric that are outside party control.Some might argue that Republicans have the same problem in reverse, but that is not the case. The Republican Party cannot rein in its radical wing and has shown no real inclination to do so. Worse, to succeed in 2022 and 2024, it may not need to.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More