Feeling The Heat, Todd?

Can you stand one more post about Indiana’s infantile Attorney General? (I wouldn’t keep commenting if he didn’t keep pooping in his mess-kit…)

A lawyer friend sent me a copy of Rokita’s latest filing in the ongoing soap-opera tracing responses to his ethical lapses and his fury about those responses. After reading that pleading with some amazement, I have to agree with the Indianapolis Business Journal’s characterization of it as “bombastic.” (And then some…)

According to the IBJ:

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita submitted a new and bombastic filing on Wednesday accusing the Indiana Supreme Court Disciplinary Commission of caving to outside pressure in a “political melee,” saying it could no longer give him fair treatment.

“The Commission needs to be disentangled from ongoing politics driven by political commentators. If the Commission is not cordoned-off from the political stage, then its meetings need to be made fully public…” the filing read.

As my lawyer friend noted, the pleading was Trump-like, with Rokita lashing out at those he clearly perceives as his enemies : an amorphous “Left” and liberals in general, of course,  but also “the establishment,” a nefarious Disciplinary Commission and its staff, a former Dean of IU’s Maurer School of Law, a reporter for the Indiana Lawyer, and others who have ever dared to suggest that he was in the wrong.

Clearly, they’re all out to get him, and it isn’t fair!

Many of the filings and decisions of the commission are private, unless the Indiana Supreme Court decides it would be in the public interest to publicize them — which the commission petitioned for in his disciplinary case. Rokita said he doesn’t oppose a motion to unseal the conditional agreement, so long as all of the deliberations and meetings related to him fall under the same “extraordinary circumstances.”

In his conclusion, Rokita said that his “style and content” were not grounds for the Commission to discipline him as a lawyer.

An excellent example of that “style and content” followed. Here is Rokita’s concluding paragraph (in which he continued to refer to himself in third person).

Respondent is vocal, aggressive, and successful regarding policies important to Hoosiers. He speaks in a manner that the ‘Establishment’ abhors. The content of his conservative message offends the Left, if not Liberals,” the filing continued. “… His press release (in November) made clear those facts in his combative style, but nothing written rendered his Affidavit false or defied the Supreme Court.”

His “combative style” reminds me of a couple of my kids when they were three-year-olds…

For those who’ve (mercifully) missed the preceding tantrums, the IBJ offered a helpful backgrounder:

In a November split decision and public reprimand, the Indiana Supreme Court found he had violated two of the Rules of Professional Conduct for lawyers:

They said Rokita’s comments constituted an “extrajudicial statement” that he knew — or reasonably should’ve known — would be publicly disseminated and would prejudice related legal proceedings.

They also said his statements had “no substantial purpose” other than to embarrass or burden Dr. Caitlin Bernard. The misconduct stems from his televised comments about Bernard, an OB-GYN who performed an abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio and was later disciplined before the Medical Licensing Board for discussing the procedure publicly.

In an interview with Fox News commentator Jesse Watters, Rokita called Bernard an “activist acting as a doctor” and said his office would be investigating her conduct.

However, both Chief Justice Loretta Rush and Justice Christopher Goff dissented in a 3-2 split ruling, saying Rokita’s punishment — which included $250 in court costs — was too lenient.

Following the reprimand, Rokita shared a lengthy and unrepentant statement defending his “true” remarks in which he attacked the news media, medical field and “cancel culture.”

Shortly after, the disciplinary commission filed to unseal Rokita’s conditional agreement, saying, “Respondent’s actions flouted the authority of the Court, called into question the sincerity of Respondent’s assertions to the Court in his Conditional Agreement and affidavit, and caused damage to the public’s perception of the integrity and justness of the attorney discipline system…”

In his response, Rokita actually accused the Disciplinary Commission of knuckling under to “political pressure.” After all, it couldn’t possibly be the case that Todd Rokita had stepped over a line.

There’s more, of course, all along the lines of “how dare the Indiana Supreme Court and  Disciplinary Commission respond publicly to my ethical lapses? How dare a commission set up for the sole purpose of sanctioning unethical lawyer behavior sanction me? Don’t they understand how important I am?”

I think the word is “self-important,” and I think our pompous and delusional Attorney General is beginning to feel the heat.

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The Way We Never Were

One of my all-time favorite non-fiction books is Stephanie Coontz’ The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. In it, Coontz debunks several of the persistent myths that continue to distort contemporary politics. (I think my favorite chapter is the one titled “We always stood on our own two feet,” in which she details several early important government programs that “small government conservatives” conveniently ignore.)

I thought about “The Way We Never Were” when I read a recent column by Jennifer Rubin, addressing the notion that today’s divisions are deeper than they’ve been–that the times we occupy are worse than those of the past. She titled her essay, “Get real and read some history. The past was worse.”

Nostalgia is a powerful political tool. Wielding nostalgia for a bygone era — one that is invariably mischaracterized — is a favorite weapon for fascist movements (Make America Great Again), harking back to a time before their nation was “polluted” by malign forces. In the United States, such nostalgia none-too-subtlety appeals to white Christian nationalism. Even in a more benign form (e.g., “Politics didn’t used to be so mean,” “Remember the days of bipartisanship?”) plays on faulty memories. If you really go back to study U.S. history, you would find two things: The past was worse, and conflict has always been the norm.

Economically, Americans were a lot poorer, even as late as 1960, when there were roughly 400 vehicles per 1,000 Americans, about half of today’s car ownership rate.

Tom Nichols has written extensively on the politics of false memory. “Times are always bad. Nothing gets better. And the past 50 years have not been a temporary economic purgatory but a permanent hell, if only the elites would be brave enough to peer through the gloom and see it all for what it is,” he wrote. “This obsession with decline is one of the myths surrounding postindustrial democracy that will not die.”

Given all the hand-wringing about crime and crime rates, for example, it is bracing to look at the actual data: It turns out that crime was considerably higher in the 1970s. Not only crime rates, but “poverty, child mortality, deaths from virtually any major disease, workplace injuries, high school dropout rates, etc., were all much worse in the 1950s. Also, kids got polio, Jim Crow was in full swing, gays had to be in the closet and no one had cellphones, home computers or microwave ovens. Very few people had air conditioning or could afford to fly.”

Troubling as the gap between the rich and the rest is and remains, income inequality has been on the decline since 2007. Rubin traces America’s history since the 1930s and The Great Depression–through World War, McCarthyism, the Cold War, the riots of the 1960s, the political assassinations, the Vietnam War….

You get the point. Though those who rail against modernity, urbanity, pluralism, tolerance and personal freedom in service of an authoritarian perch would like to turn back the clock, a perusal of history suggests now is the best time to be alive.

And what about the myth of America’s former bipartisanship? She reminds us that– “from the get-go”– politics in America was vicious. Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams, et al all assumed the worst of one another:

Jefferson, watching the government amass power and assume state debt, concluded that Hamilton’s Federalists were royalists and corrupt financiers who had been plotting ‘to betray the people’ since independence.” In turn, “Federalists, conversely, thought Republicans ideologically deranged to the point of near-treason. Blind infatuation with a hostile (and anarchic) France, faith in state sovereignty, Luddite opinions on public debt — all of these seemed like symptoms of a deeper mania among Jefferson’s followers.”

The founding era was followed by slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, and racial segregation.

You can flip through the history of presidential insults, devastating feuds and congressional violence. None of this suggests we ever enjoyed a sustained halcyon period of unity. To be certain, we had brief interludes when World War II united the country and when the ideological gaps between the parties were not as vast. However, we “got things done” mostly when one party (in modern times, usually Republicans) got wiped out in elections, leaving Democrats to construct the New Deal and the Great Society. Republicans vilified Democrats every step of the way (even testing out a coup against Franklin D. Roosevelt).

What we have not had before is a president who rejected democracy, attempted to retain power by force and wound up indicted on 91 criminal counts. So yes, four-times-indicted Donald Trump was worse than every president who preceded him.

As both Coontz and Rubin remind us: Nostalgia– especially nostalgia for a time that never was–is the stuff of snake-oil salesmen.

That said, we need to protect that progress–and democracy–this November.

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News Supply And Demand

The faster our country spins out of control–the weirder the behavior of the clowns who (usually thanks to gerrymandering) have been elected to Congress–the more convinced I become that a majority of our  national dysfunctions are a result of our Wild West “information” environment.

No matter how crazy your preferred belief, you can find support for it online. I used to tell the students in my Media and Public Affairs classes that if they really believed that aliens had landed in Roswell, I could find them five Internet sites with pictures of the aliens’ bodies. (I never actually tested that thesis, but I firmly believe those sites are out there.)

The problem–as most of us have long realized–is that free speech on the web far too often means speech (and with AI, pictures) that are free of even the slightest contact with reality.

As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote awhile back, with the help of the Internet, the Republican Party has constructed a “walled fortress of alternative facts.”

Beginning in the hours after the elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Tex., right-wing social media churned out every manner of conspiracy theory: The shooter was an illegal immigrant! No, he was transgender! Or maybe the massacre was a false-flag operation perpetrated by the anti-gun left! And the grieving families are paid crisis actors!

The disinformation then followed the usual paths, finding its way to Alex Jones’s Infowars (the shooting had “very suspicious timing,” coming days before the National Rifle Association’s convention) and right into the claims of Republican members of Congress.

Rep. Paul Gosar (Ariz.), who has repeatedly tied himself to white nationalists, tweeted that the gunman was “a transsexual leftist illegal alien” — and let that multi-headed falsehood stand for two hours before deleting it.

It wasn’t just Gosar, who is such an embarrassing nutcase that six of his siblings took out television ads asking people not to vote for him. Milbank reported on equally idiotic statements issued by other “usual suspects”–Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and the ever-goofy Marjorie Taylor Green.

At the NRA convention, some of the most prominent Republican officials posited yet another conspiracy theory: that for political figures calling for sensible gun control, “their real goal is disarming America,” as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) put it in a speech stocked with falsehoods. Former president Donald Trump falsely told the group that the Biden administration reportedly “is considering putting U.N. bureaucrats in charge of your Second Amendment rights.”

As Milbank says, purposeful disinformation, aimed at those who desperately want to believe “alternative facts” is why we can’t have a rational discussion or a common-sense compromise about gun violence–or anything else.

Academic studies have found that Republicans share between “200 percent and 500 percent more fake news (fabrications published by sites masquerading as news outlets) than Democrats.” A research team led by scholars from MIT wanted to determine why. “Were they less able to distinguish fact from fiction? More psychologically predisposed to political bias?”

In part, yes. But the researchers found that “the issue primarily seems to be a supply issue,” Guay told me. “There’s just way more fake news on the right than the left.” In experiments giving Democrats and Republicans equal amounts of fake news that confirmed their world views, Republicans were more likely to share the falsehoods — but only 1.6 times more likely. This suggests that Republicans don’t have some “overreaching hunger” to traffic in untruths; they simply can’t avoid it because they’re so immersed in the stuff.

Guay’s is the latest of many studies identifying the disinformation “asymmetry” afflicting the right in the Trump era. In lay terms: Garbage in, garbage out. Republican voters hear lies by the thousand from Trump and imitators such as Johnson and Cruz….It’s hardly surprising that, thus exposed, they become more toxic in their language, more extreme in their ideology and more outraged.

If you saw “evidence” everywhere you turned, from people you trusted, that the country is being run by socialist pedophiles bent on disarming the populace, extinguishing your race and destroying the United States, you’d probably be outraged, too. At the very least, you might not be in the best frame of mind for a constructive conversation about ending gun violence.

I haven’t the slightest idea how rational folks combat this “supply problem.” Real news–actual journalism, even at its most slapdash–requires time and effort to produce. The creation of propaganda doesn’t.

It’s hard enough to tell the difference for those of us who want to separate the wheat from the chaff–but fake news is welcomed and distributed by those who desperately want to believe it.

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Chasing Those ‘Elitists” Away

Even policies that are adopted after extensive research and thoughtful debate often generate unanticipated consequences, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that a policy based on rejection of relevant evidence and refusal to engage in debate is rapidly degrading access to medical care in Red states.

I’m referring, obviously, to the abortion bans that were enacted (or triggered) immediately after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade.

In November, Timothy Noah reported that warnings of an eventual “brain drain” caused by those bans had the timing wrong: it wasn’t “eventual”–it was already occurring. Red state culture wars aren’t only creating medical care “deserts,” they’re driving other college-educated workers— teachers, professors, and more—out as well.

Noah began his article by telling the story of a married same-sex couple, both Ob-Gyns practicing in Oklahoma. They now live in Washington, D.C.–a move that doubled their housing costs and reduced their pay. (It turns out that Red states, which have fewer Ob-Gyns, pay doctors significantly higher wages than states where there are ample practitioners.)

Kate Arnold and Caroline Flint are two bright, energetic, professionally trained, and public-spirited women whom Washington is happy to welcome—they both quickly found jobs—even though it doesn’t particularly need them. The places that need Kate and Caroline are Oklahoma and Mississippi and Idaho and various other conservative states where similar stories are playing out daily. These two fortyish doctors have joined an out-migration of young professionals—accelerated by the culture wars of recent years and pushed to warp speed by Dobbs—that’s known as the Red State Brain Drain.

Abortion restrictions have turbocharged that brain drain, but state laws restricting “everything from academic tenure to transgender health care to the teaching of ‘divisive concepts’ about race” are making these states uncongenial to other knowledge workers.

The number of applications for OB-GYN residencies is down more than 10 percent in states that have banned abortion since Dobbs. Forty-eight teachers in Hernando County, Florida, fed up with “Don’t Say Gay” and other new laws restricting what they can teach, resigned or retired at the end of the last school year. A North Carolina law confining transgender people to bathrooms in accordance with what it said on their birth certificate was projected, before it was repealed, to cost that state $3.76 billion in business investment, including the loss of a planned global operations center for PayPal in Charlotte. A survey of college faculty in four red states (Texas, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina) about political interference in higher education found a falloff in the number of job candidates for faculty positions, and 67 percent of the respondents said they would not recommend their state to colleagues as a place to work. Indeed, nearly one-third said they were actively considering employment elsewhere.

Here in Indiana, school corporations are experiencing dramatically higher teacher vacancies, and like other Red states, Hoosier rural residents struggle to find medical care–and not just prenatal care. It seems it isn’t just Ob-Gyn practitioners who are abandoning Red states.

Family doctors are also “reassessing” their options–and training availability.

Researchers from the Person-Centered Reproductive Health Program at the University of California San Francisco have found there is reason to be concerned about training for family physicians in ban states as well.

A study published in the November-December issue of the Annals of Family Medicine found that 29% or 201 of 693 accredited family medicine residency programs in the U.S., are in states with abortion bans or significant restrictions on abortion access. The study used publicly available data from the American Medical Association to conduct the analysis, and found 3,930 residents out of 13,541 were in states where abortion is banned or heavily restricted.

For practitioners who remain in those states, the training they are now able to receive deprives them of the skills they need to deal with miscarriages and various problems in pregnancy. Residents in those states no longer have access to comprehensive reproductive health training because they’re not experiencing it within their state context. As the lead researcher explains, “they cannot see abortions, cannot perform them, cannot learn how to care for patients after abortions in the same way they would be able to if they were working in a state where abortion was unrestricted.” As she points out, early pregnancy loss is very common, and the skill set for caring for that and first trimester abortion are very similar.

It bears repeating that the exodus of educated citizens isn’t limited to medical professionals. (MAGA Republicans are actually applauding the exit of the teachers and professors they distrust.) Ironically, the rural folks these MAGA lawmakers disproportionately represent are the ones first experiencing the “unintended consequences” of their misogyny–the absence of teachers and doctors.

It will only get worse…..

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Is Shamelessness The Answer?

In these daily musings and rants, I’ve frequently noted my inability to understand why anyone would look at Donald Trump–as he parades his monumental ignorance, his bile and his obvious mental illness–and say, “Yep. That’s the guy I want to trust with the nuclear codes.” I simply haven’t been able to get my head around it.

But over the holidays, I read a review in the Guardian of a book offering a plausible explanation. Let me share a (relatively lengthy) quote that describes the author’s theory:

Imagine a white, working-class American, most likely a man, from Louisiana or Alabama, perhaps, standing in a long line that represents his life’s journey. The man has been sold the American “bootstrap myth”, which states that his great country is a place where anyone can rise from the humblest of origins to become a billionaire or a president, and at the end of the line he expects to find a little part of that dividend for himself. But things aren’t panning out as he had hoped. For a start, the line stretches to the horizon, and even as he stands in it, he suffers: his pay packet is shrinking, the industry he works in is moving overseas, and the cost of everything from food to gas to healthcare is through the roof. Worse still, he can see people cutting into the line ahead, beneficiaries of “affirmative action” – black people, women, immigrants. He doesn’t think he’s racist or misogynist, but that’s what they call him when he objects. He is doubly shamed: privately, by his failure to live up to the myth; publicly, by liberal society.

This is the so-called deep story of the American right. We don’t have to accept the man’s worldview, just believe that this might be how he perceives it.

 Now a new figure enters the scenario, an orange-haired tycoon: we’ll call him Donald. Donald seems instinctively to understand the man’s shame. In fact, he’s a shame expert. He has a long history of transgression, and people have been trying to shame him for much of his life. But Donald has found a way around it: he has become shame-less. He demonstrates his shamelessness almost daily by producing a stream of shameful remarks – about Mexicans, say, or Muslims, or the sitting president, who happens to be black. Although people shout “Shame!” at him, each condemnation inflates Donald a little more in the eyes of his tribe, including the man in the line, who holds him up as a sort of shame messiah. By refusing his own shame, Donald absolves them, too.

The author of the book being reviewed, one David Keen, observes that the words “shame” and “shameless” are currently in greater use than at any time since the mid-19th century.

I have often theorized that the far Right is populated by people who are deeply unhappy with their lives–people who are looking for someone or some group to blame for their failure to achieve their goals. Keen’s analysis is consistent with that thesis, but adds another layer to it–the fact that failure to meet one’s own expectations (or those of the culture into which one has been socialized) will inevitably involve some measure of self-incrimination, or shame.

When you think about it, when people feel they’ve screwed up–when they fail at something they wanted or expected to accomplish–that failure is typically accompanied by feelings of unworthiness/shame, prompting a pretty human desire to find a scapegoat to whom they can “hand off” responsibility for the failure. Well-balanced adults can resist that urge, recognizing it for what it is, but a lot of people cannot–hence racism, misogyny, antisemitism.

The review made me wonder whether different cultural expectations might not ease those feelings of shame. What if we Americans didn’t “monetize” the concept of success? What if our expectations of other adults focused more on behaviors like loving-kindness or generosity or other markers of commendable adult behavior and less on career or money or fame?

What if we didn’t tell American children they could “grow up to be President”–didn’t burden them with expectations of professional or financial success, however we define that–but instead just told little boys and girls “when you grow up, I want you to be a good person–a mensch.”

What if we raised people who could be trusted with the nuclear codes?

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