#Brennan Center For Justice

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich

* * * *

In Donald J Trump's CPAC speech, the United States is a dark and menacing place: violent crime is rampant, the economy is in free fall, people are starving in the street, and our military has collapsed in corruption and mismanagement. We are ripe for conquest by Vladimir Putin, who does everything right. But every factual claim Trump made isn't a fact; indeed, the situation is the diametric opposite of the one that Trump claims.

Here are the facts on crime. Starting in the early 1990s, crime dropped rapidly in the United States. The causes were complex — owing much to improving economic conditions and innovations in policing strategy. Following a decades-long decline, violent crime rose during the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2020, President Trump’s last year in office, murder rates climbed by nearly 30 percent and assault rates by more than 10 percent.

Here, too, the reasons are complex, but may have much to do with the pandemic. Covid-19 proved to be a generational disruptor in America, instigating social and economic hardships at all levels of society. For example, the country saw an economic decline and increases in unemployment due to businesses that were negatively impacted by shutdowns. We saw a surge in firearm ownership and shooting incidents, at least in the cities that track this data. It was also a period of tremendous isolation. After-school programs and other critical services and interventions that cities relied on to confront violence were shut down.

But since 2021, violent crime has started to fall. According to the FBI, as of 2022 violent crime rates had fallen by 4 percent and murder rates by roughly 7 percent since 2020. Preliminary data suggests those declines accelerated in 2023. In his Saturday speech to conservatives, Trump also spoke a good deal about an immigration crisis in America, making misleading statements about what he referred to as migrant crime and noting it will be “far more deadly than anyone thought.” Here, again, the former president was not truthful. There is no evidence of a migrant crime wave, including in New York City, which the former president referred to in his remarks today. To the contrary, statistics indicate that there has been no surge in crime since April 2022, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began bussing migrants to New York. Additionally, research reveals that undocumented immigration is associated with a decrease in property crime and additional research finds that Fentanyl is primarily trafficked by U.S. citizens.

Although violent crime appears to be receding across the nation, the American public is not fully aware of this trend. Most Americans believe that crime is rising, including 78 percent of independent voters. This gap between crime and perceptions of crime is not new — it’s a decades-long trend. Gallup routinely asks voters whether they believe crime is higher or lower than the previous year. Even in the midst of the decades-long decline in crime, between 1990 and the mid-2010s, Gallup records only two years when a majority of voters did not believe crime had risen. Although the reasons why crime increases and decreases are complicated, we know that various social, economic, and environmental factors, such as growth in income and an aging population, are significant drivers of crime rates. We also know that investing in our communities through funding after school programming, anti-violence initiatives, and safe “third places” — like parks and community centers — helps build long-term safety.

Creating thriving and safe communities are goals we can all embrace. But misleading the American public about the truth and distorting reality is not the way to deliver public safety.

[Brennan Center For Justice]

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Misleading statements about crime and public safety are already proliferating in this election cycle. As November draws closer, misinformation is likely to intensify. That makes it even more important to take a close look at what the best and most recent crime data tells us. One major trend is becoming clear: violent crime dropped in 2021 and 2022 — and then declined again, significantly, in 2023. We’ll have to wait until the fall for final government data to confirm this trend. Until then, here’s what we know, how we know it, and what it means — drawing on both city data and the most recent information from the FBI.

CITY-LEVEL DATA SHOWS DECLINES IN VIOLENT CRIME

City-level crime reports are the best places to look for up-to-the-minute crime data. Combining enough city-level crime data can, in turn, approximate national trends. Two research teams have used this approach to give a sense of crime in 2023. Both show sharp declines in violent crime.

• Drawing on data from 38 cities across the country, the Council on Criminal Justice reported that homicide declined by 10% in 2023. It also noted declines in assaults, gun assaults, burglary, and larceny, but a sharp spike in motor vehicle thefts.

• Similarly, Jeff Asher, a researcher and expert in data on crime and public safety, studied murder data from 175 cities and found a 7% decline in murders through December 7, 2023, compared to 2022. These cities are from across the country and include jurisdictions led by Republicans and Democrats alike.

A murder decline of this magnitude would be historic; the sharpest one-year drop on record occurred in 1996 when the number of murders nationwide fell by a little more than 9% compared to 1995.

Crime trends in the largest cities tend to grab headlines and help shape our understanding of national developments. That makes careful examination of data from these cities especially important. Broadly, the news about murder trends from 2022 to 2023 is encouraging. There were 100 fewer murders in Philadelphia in 2023 compared to 2022, a decline of roughly 20%. In Baltimore, murders also declined by roughly 20%, falling below 300 for the first time since 2014. Similarly, New York City saw nearly 50 fewer homicides, a drop of roughly 11%.

Notable on their own, these declines also undercut politicized claims that crime is rising in “blue cities.” On the contrary, the data demonstrates that Democratic-led cities, which also happen to be some of the nation’s most populous, follow and in some cases lead the national trend toward decreasing violence.

Of course, this overall trend is not universal, and causes for concern remain. Just as all available police data points to a decline in murders, those same sources also indicate an increase in motor vehicle thefts. Some cities, like Washington, DC, also saw violence continue to surge in 2023. Last, but of vital importance, even with these declines, murder rates likely remain above 2019 levels nationally and in most cities.

PRELIMINARY NATIONAL DATA FROM THE FBI CONFIRMS FALLING VIOLENT CRIME

On March 18, the FBI released preliminary quarterly crime data for 2023. Intended to supplement the FBI’s annual fall report on nationwide crime trends, these quarterly reports offer an early but incomplete look at crime data from a smaller group of police agencies than represented in final annual reports. The latest release covers more than 80% of the population — a very robust sample, even if there are errors in the city-level data that should be corrected before the FBI releases final year-end data in the fall.

The broad trend matches what researchers have observed in collections of city data about crime trends between 2022 and 2023. Specifically, the FBI’s report shows remarkable declines in murder (down 13.2%), violent crime (down 5.7%), and property crime (down 4.3%). Of the seven major offenses tracked by the FBI, the report shows an increase only in motor vehicle theft (up 10.7%).

UNDERSTANDING COMMON CRITICISMS OF CRIME DATA

The available data indicates that violence, especially lethal violence, dropped in 2023. Skeptics might still point to reasons to question the apparent decline in crime. For one, crime data generally includes only offenses reported to police. Could crime reporting have dropped, and crime itself remained static? One problem with this theory is immediately evident. Murder is almost always reported to the police. And it appears to have fallen at a rapid, potentially record-setting pace in 2023.

As for crimes other than murder, we’ll have to wait until fall to test the possibility of underreporting. That’s when the National Criminal Victimization Survey (NCVS), an analysis by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics that studies people’s experiences with nonlethal crime, will release its 2023 data. Unfortunately, data quality issues make it difficult to draw firm conclusions from the NCVS’s most recent releases.

Last, skeptics might point to the FBI’s recent transition to a new crime reporting system, which led to relatively few police agencies providing data for the bureau’s 2021 crime report, as another weak spot in recent crime data. But agency reporting has improved since 2021, and the FBI took other steps to ensure a more complete report in 2022. The next report, covering 2023, will likely mark another improvement.

• • •

Crime data is far from perfect. But the FBI’s data is improving in both quality and frequency of reporting, and independent research allows us to double-check the bureau’s work as that process continues. Putting the two pieces together, a clear picture is emerging, one that shows significant decreases in violent crime in recent years.

Rapidly changing crime trends underscore the value of having crime data that is timely and reliable. Policymakers and leaders in civil society should continue to work toward realizing that goal.

[kp777]

The state legislative push to restrict voting and undermine faith in elections has moved at a near-record pace this year, driven by a still-active election denier movement. At the same time, the pro-democracy movement has continued to press for legislation to boost voting access.

Thus far, more expansive laws have passed than restrictive and election interference laws. The geographical divide of previous years persists, with expansive legislation tending to pass in some states while restrictive legislation tends to pass in other states.

Just under a third of state legislatures are still in session this year. Between January 1 and May 29, 2023, the following voting legislation has passed:

At least 11 states enacted 13 restrictive laws. footnote1_gj5e00w 1  Two more restrictive bills in two states were passed by both chambers of the legislature and are awaiting the governors’ approval. footnote2_5wjnmt8 2  Legislation is categorized as restrictive if it contains one or more provisions that would make it harder for eligible Americans to register, stay on the voter rolls, or cast a ballot as compared to existing state law.

At least four states enacted five election interference laws. footnote3_zqajouc 3  An additional bill in Texas was passed by the legislature and is awaiting the governor’s signature. footnote4_1wcsal7 4  Legislation is categorized as election interference if it either threatens the people and processes that make elections work or increases opportunities for partisan interference in election administration or outcomes.

At least 13 states enacted 19 expansive laws. footnote5_dpwt617 5  An additional four bills in two states were passed by the legislature and are awaiting the governors’ approval. footnote6_bosjdlx 6  Legislation is categorized as expansive if it contains one or more provisions that would make it easier for eligible Americans to register, stay on the rolls, or cast a ballot as compared to existing state law.

One troubling development: lawmakers have begun to target direct democracy, aiming to limit ways that voters can pass ballot measures. Another notable trend in voting legislation this year is a continued push to criminalize election-related activities. And in Texas, the legislature has considered multiple bills that would hamper election administration in Harris County, a trend that is unusual in its targeting of one particular county.

Meanwhile, several states have taken steps to provide legal protections for election workers as they face increased threats to their safety.

See the laws that have been enacted to suppress the vote.

[fatehbaz]

Today, as you read this [...], there are almost 2 million people locked away in one of the more than 5,000 prisons or jails that dot the American landscape. While they are behind bars, these incarcerated people can be found standing in line at their prison’s commissary waiting to buy some extra food or cleaning supplies that are often marked up to prices higher than what one would pay outside of those prison walls. [...] If they want to call a friend or family member, they need to pay for that as well. And almost everyone who works at a job while incarcerated, often for less than a dollar an hour, will find that the prison has taken a portion of their salary to pay for their cost of incarceration. [...] These policymakers and government officials also know that this captive population has no choice but to foot the bill [...] and that if they can’t be made to pay, their families can. In fact, a 2015 report led by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Forward Together, and Research Action Design found that in 63 percent of cases, family members on the outside were primarily responsible for court-related costs [...].

Rutgers sociology professor Brittany Friedman has written extensively on what is called “pay-to-stay” fees in American correctional institutions. In her 2020 article titled, “Unveiling the Necrocapitalist Dimensions of the Shadow Carceral State: On Pay-to-Stay to Recoup the Cost of Incarceration,” Friedman divides these fees into two categories: (1) room and board and (2) service-specific costs. Fees for room and board -- yes, literally for a thin mattress or even a plastic “boat” bed in a hallway, a toilet that may not flush, and scant, awful tasting food -- are typically charged at a “per diem rate for the length of incarceration.” It is not uncommon for these fees to reach $20 to $80 a day for the entire period of incarceration. The second category, what Friedman refers to as “service-specific costs,” includes fees for basic charges such as copays or other costs for seeing a doctor or nurse, programming fees, email and telephone calls, and commissary items. 

In 2014, the Brennan Center for Justice documented that at least 43 states authorize charging incarcerated people for the cost of their own imprisonment, and at least 35 states authorize charging them for some medical expenses. More recent research from the Prison Policy Institute found that 40 states and the federal prison system charge incarcerated people medical copays. 

It’s also critical to understand how little incarcerated people are paid for their labor in addition to the significant cut of their paltry hourly wages that corrections agencies take from their earnings. Nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of incarcerated people work behind bars. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, those who work regular jobs in prisons such as maintaining the grounds, working in the kitchen, and painting the walls of the facilities earn on average between $0.14 and $0.63 an hour. [...] Arkansas and Texas don’t pay incarcerated workers at all, while Alabama only pays incarcerated workers employed by the state’s correctional industry. [...]

For example, if someone sends an incarcerated person in Florida $20 online, they will end up paying $24.95. [...]

Dallas County charges incarcerated people a $10 medical care fee for each medical request they submit. In Texas prisons, those behind bars pay $13.55 per medical visit, despite the fact that Texas doesn’t pay incarcerated workers anything. Texas is one of a handful of states that doesn’t pay incarcerated people for their labor. 

In Kentucky’s McCracken County Jail in Paducah, it costs $0.40 a minute for a video call; this translates into $8.00 for each 20-minute video call. [...] For those who need to use email, JPay charges $2.35 for five emails for people in the Texas prison system ($0.47 an email). [...]

People in Florida prisons pay $1.70 for a packet of four extra-strength Tylenol and $4.02 for four tampons. And with inflation, commissary items are priced higher than ever. For example, according to the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, incarcerated people in Kentucky experienced a 7.2 percent rise in already-high commissary prices in July 2022. Researchers noted that a 4.6-ounce tube of Crest toothpaste, which costs $1.38 at the local Walmart, is $3.77 at the prison commissary. [...]

In Gaston County, North Carolina, incarcerated individuals who participate in state work release may make more than the state’s $0.38 an hour maximum pay, but they pay the jail a daily rate based on their yearly income of at least $18 per day and up to $36 per day. In fact, Brennan Center research indicates that almost every state takes a portion of the salary that incarcerated workers earn to compensate the corrections agency [...].

These room and board fees are found throughout the nation’s jails and prisons. Michigan laws allow any county to seek reimbursement for expenses incurred in relation to a charge for which a person was sentenced to county jail time -- up to $60 a day. Winnebago County, Wisconsin, charges $26 a day to those staying in its county jail.

---

Text by: Lauren-Brooke Eisen. “America’s Dystopian Incarceration System of Pay to Stay Behind Bars.” Brennan Center for Justice. 19 April 2023. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[wilwheaton]

The harm to the institution is entirely self-inflicted by Roberts and his ethically challenged majority. The court continues to take on flawed cases that have no business being heard, and making arbitrary rulings based on their political whims, dressed up in originalist fantasies. It has to be stopped That could include enforcing a code of ethics, legislation the Senate Judiciary Committee is going to take up after the July recess, and measures recommended by the Brennan Center, such as limiting justices’ terms to 18 years and ensuring that each president gets two appointments to the court per presidential term. It would create a revolving core of justices, giving those whose terms were up the chance to take senior status and still participate as needed either on the Supreme Court or on a lower court. All of that would be great, but what the country urgently requires is an expansion of the court to block this six-member wrecking ball.

The Supreme Court is out of control and must be reformed

[probablyasocialecologist]

According to documents obtained by Grist and Type Investigations through a Freedom of Information Act request, the FBI’s Minneapolis office opened a counterterrorism assessment in February 2012, focusing on actions in South Dakota, that continued for at least a year and may have led to the opening of additional investigations. These documents reveal that the FBI was monitoring activists involved in the Keystone XL campaign about a year earlier than previously known.  Their contents suggest that, long before the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines became national flashpoints, the federal government was already developing a sweeping law enforcement strategy to counter any acts of civil disobedience aimed at preventing fossil fuel extraction. And young, Native activists were among its first targets. “The threat emerging … is evolving into one based on opposition to energy exploration related to any extractions from the earth, rather than merely targeting one project and/or one company,” the FBI noted in its description of the Wanblee blockade. The 15-page file, which is heavily redacted, also describes Native American groups as a potentially dangerous threat and likens them to “environmental extremists” whose actions, according to the FBI, could lead to violence. The FBI acknowledged that Native American groups were engaging in constitutionally protected activity, including attending public hearings, but emphasized that this sort of civic participation might spawn criminal activity.  To back up its claims, the FBI cited a 2011 State Department hearing on the pipeline in Pierre, South Dakota, attended by a small group of Native activists. The FBI said the individuals were dressed in camouflage and had covered their faces with red bandanas, “train robber style.” According to the report, they were also carrying walking sticks and shaking sage, claiming to be “Wounded Knee Security of/for Mother Earth.” “The Bureau is uncertain how the NA group(s) will act initially or subsequently if the project is approved,” the agency wrote.  The FBI also singled out the “Native Youth Movement,” which it described as a mix between a “radical militia and a survivalist group.” In doing so, it appeared to conflate a specific activist group originally founded in Canada in the 1990s with the broader array of young Native activists who opposed the pipeline decades later. Young activists would play an important role in the Keystone XL campaign and later on during protests against the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock, but the movement had little in common with militias or survivalists, terms typically used to describe far-right groups or those seeking to disengage from society.  The FBI declined to respond to questions for this story. In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the Minneapolis field office said the agency does not typically comment on FOIA releases and “lets the information contained in the files speak for itself.”

[...]

Environmental activists and attorneys who reviewed the new documents told Grist and Type Investigations that law enforcement’s approach to the Keystone XL campaign looked like a template for the increasingly militarized response to subsequent environmental and social justice campaigns — from efforts to block the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock to the ongoing protests against the police training center dubbed “Cop City” in Atlanta, Georgia, which would require razing at least 85 acres of urban forest.  The FBI’s working thesis, outlined in the new documents, that “most environmental extremist groups” have historically moved from peaceful protest to violence has served as the basis for subsequent investigations. “It’s astonishing to me how such a broad concept basically paints every activist and protester as a future terrorist,” said Mike German, a former FBI special agent who is now a fellow at the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice.

[murcielagatito]

spiderverse fans read this before you talk about hobie brown and miles morales

concequences when african american teenage boys are seen as older -npr

black boys viewed as older, less innocent than whites - american psychological association

treating all kids as kids - brennan center for justice

[the-greatest-magic-of-all]

I know it's been months since you posted about it but. I want to hear about the Bad Moms.

No worries! I'm always happy to chat, no matter the time! This one's gonna be a long one though, so strap in!

First things first, all of the Bad Moms are at least 15th-level adventurers, if not higher. All of them, excluding Sklonda, have canonically either adventured or did something like it. And Sklonda is high-level because she's just that badass.

In order of first appearance, we'll start off with the imposing Hallariel Seacaster, who, side note, I truly believe is almost seven feet tall. Just a tower of a bored housewife who used to be the best swordswoman in Spyre (Think Morticia Addams but slightly less goth). This leads me to believe that she'd be a straight Fighter (all of the Seacasters are) with the Samurai subclass. A heavy hitter who just won't drop yet still smoothly transitions into being an elegant courtier when need be. Oh, and I'd love for them to bring back the sober trigger mechanic from Unsleeping City S2 for her! It'd also be a treat to watch her deal with other Elves who make pointed backhanded comments about her finally settling down with another Elf and how it's good to see that she's done playing house with that human husband and half-human son of hers.

Next up is Wilma Thistlespring! My most precious Artificer Bard! With the subclasses Battle Smith and College of Creation, respectively. Battle Smith because in "Family in Flames", while Digby had a Tesla-coil laser canon (a hallmark of an Artilerist), Wilma had a fleet of spinning gyros instead. It'd probably take a little reflavouring but I think she could have her Steel Defender be this swarm of bird-like constructs that fuck a bitch up. And for the College of Creation part, I mean... It's the Bard subclass all about having a Song in your heart and that Song being one of the most ancient and powerful magic of all. If that's not Wilma Thistlespring to a T then I don't know what is. Also, btw, I'd love for her to be played by Elaine Lee because, if I remember correctly, Brennan took inspiration for the Thistlesprings from his parents!

Next is Mom of the Year, Sklonda Gukgak, who is obviously a straight-up Inquisitive Rogue, just like her son! This one is one of the more obvious picks for her and one of the only ones really. None of the other Rogue subclasses fit quite right while still making sense for her character. Like, maaaybe she could be a Mastermind Rogue, but I think it's a stretch. And it's the only subclass that she could conceivably get to a high enough level without her being a straight-up adventurer. I honestly think it'd be so funny to watch her get pulled into an adventure. Because I think she's a lot like Carameldina and Steel in the way of absolutely hating that they live in a DnD world, but instead of being utterly baffled by why her son is acting like an adventurer, she knows. She knows she lives in a world where adventures happen and the Call to Adventurer is a real phenomenon that wraps people up with Quest Fever. She's been trying to keep Riz from it ever since Pok died. So getting to watch her finally get the Call herself would be fantastic.

Sandra Lynn Faeth, the messiest bench ever, is next up and she's pretty straightforward, just like Sklonda. She's a Beast Master Ranger and that's all she wrote! Obviously, most of the fun of watching Sandra Lynn take center stage would be in witnessing her past come back to haunt her and seeing how she deals with it. The most glaring plot hook for a Bad Moms season (as long as they don't do it in Junior Year) would be her serving justice to the older adventurer creep who got her blacklisted from adventuring! I want her to kick ass, take names, and call Jawbone whenever she wants to make out with someone because she's still too anxious to do it impromptu even though they've talked about it!

Second to last, we've got Cathilda Ceili!!! Fight me if you think she doesn't count as a Bad Mom!!! She does!! She and Roz are picking up the slack that fucking Arianwen and Donna are dropping, okay? Okay. Now, while her being a Swashbuckler Rogue is a given. What else was she going to be? I'm also kinda leaning towards her multiclassing into Banneret Fighter, is that crazy? It's just that it feels that she'd also have some support mechanics in her roster (like Rallying Cry) and having Action Surge and Second Wind could tie why her work ethic is so tireless. Plus, as a Fighter, she'd fit in with the rest of the Seacasters! Listen, i want to see Cathilda let loose for once. And I feel like the other Bad Moms could get her there.

Finally! Roslyn "Roz" Fukumoto! She's such a wild card because we literally know nothing about her, but I think it'd be fun to include her in a Bad Moms season. Getting to know another Aguefort Alumni like Sandra Lynn and learning about what life is like outside of Elmville in another small town in Solace. I don't know if there'd be any tension between her and Wilma, (mostly because Wilma's such a sweetie) but getting to see their dynamic would be a treat. Now, for what class she could be. Another spellcaster would round out the party nicely, leaning more toward like a Warlock or even a half-caster, like a Paladin. But if she'd had to be a martial, a Fantasy High hasn't had a Monk PC yet and they are always a joy to watch.

Whew! That's about it for the Bad Moms class wise. It's such a pipe dream but it'd be such a joy to watch a group of older women play DnD as this badass team of Moms. I hope this satisfies your curiosity, @deconstructthesoup!!

[mariacallous]

As the most consequential presidential election in a generation looms in the United States, get-out-the-vote efforts across the country are more important than ever. But multiple far-right activist groups with ties to former president Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee are mobilizing their supporters in earnest, drawing on one baseline belief: Elections in the US are rigged, and citizens need to do something about it.

All the evidence states otherwise. But in recent weeks, these groups have held training sessions about how to organize on a hyperlocal level to monitor polling places and drop boxes, challenge voter registrations en masse, and intimidate and harass voters and election officials. And some are preparing to roll out new technology to fast-track all of these efforts: One of the groups claims they’re launching a new platform for checking voter rolls that contains billions of “data elements” on every single US citizen.

These groups could have a major impact on the 2024 election. In addition to disenfranchising voters and putting additional pressure on already overstretched election offices, they could convince more and more people that US elections are fraudulent.

Catherine Engelbrecht and her organization True the Vote have effectively tried to disenfranchise voters for more than a decade by claiming that voter rolls are filled with phony voter registrations. Engelbrecht’s rhetoric was given an unprecedented boost in the wake of 2020, when Trump and other elected officials mainstreamed conspiracies that the elections had been rigged in favor of Democrats. Hundreds of national and local election denial groups were formed, and many of them amassed huge followings on social media platforms like Telegram. As the 2024 presidential election looms, they are ramping up efforts to do it again.

“It could be exponentially worse than what we saw in 2020, but we're going to be awake, we're going to be engaged, we are going to understand the process, and we're going to have options to continue to hold to those truths,” Engelbrecht said during a March webinar titled “Election Integrity Team Building 101.” “We're not going to back down. There's too much to lose.”

The hour-long presentation was delivered from a hotel room in Denver, with Engelbrecht laying out what could sound like a relatively benign plan to monitor elections and check voter rolls. “Keep a soft heart, keep a kind word in your mouth, approach people irrespective of party with love. You will find that things will be much better if that is the approach that is taken,” Engelbrecht said. The session, she said, was overbooked.

Engelbrecht then began speaking about elections being “perilously close to cracking in half,” and her presentation became a highlight reel of election conspiracies, references to crystals, Christian nationalist rhetoric, and militaristic jargon. “If this republic’s to be saved, it's because [of] people like all of you that are on this webinar right now. There are some bad actors out there and we live in particularly chaotic and caustic times,” said Engelbrecht. “If we wait on somebody to do something, we will watch freedom slip away on our watch. That's how close we are.”

“These groups are trying to lay the groundwork to potentially make later claims about the election that very well may be false. But the more chaos that can be caused along the way will give more fodder to that disinformation,” Andrew Garber, an expert at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, tells WIRED. “It's not just bad if there's a mass voter challenge because people might get kicked off the rolls. It's also bad if people then take that challenge and say, ‘See, look at all these ineligible voters,’ when in fact that's not the case.”

Engelbrecht founded True the Vote in 2010, when she was an activist for the right-wing populist Tea Party movement. After the 2020 election, Engelbrecht and her collaborator Gregg Phillips became central figures in the Stop the Steal movement, and starred in the widely-debunked election conspiracy film 2000 Mules. They were also arrested for contempt of court after refusing to identify their source behind allegations that the Chinese government had accessed US election data. True the Vote also made wild allegations of widespread ballot stuffing in Georgia during the 2020 vote and a subsequent runoff in 2021. Earlier this year, True the Vote was forced to admit in court that the group had no evidence to back up its claims.

In 2022, the group rolled out a slick new software tool known as IV3, based on technology developed by Phillips, that compared names on voter rolls to a database maintained by the US Postal Service, allowing anyone to challenge voter registrations across the country if they spotted a discrepancy. A WIRED investigation, however, revealed that the information used to challenge the registration of hundreds of thousands of people was based on unreliable data.

Undeterred, True the Vote announced last week that it was relaunching IV3. Phillips claims that the software’s database now has close to “100 billion data elements about every single voter in the United States.” WIRED has not seen proof of this claim. The new IV3 system will soon be available in all 50 states, the organization said. On Thursday, the group held a webinar to train local activists on how to use it. The new system also relies on data from the US Postal Service, but Engelbrecht claimed during the presentation that Phillips and his team had “normalized” the data from all 50 states to ensure the system would not produce inaccurate results. She also said that thousands of people across the country were already registered, and that they had a long waiting list.

Additionally, she said that another software tool developed by Phillips’ team, called Ground Fusion, would be released soon; it is aimed at organizations and PACs looking to identify voting irregularities across larger geographic regions.

Engelbrecht declined to comment, claiming without evidence that WIRED had “written unfairly about True the Vote and IV3 in the past.”

True the Vote is not the only group seeking to leverage technology to supercharge the spread of election conspiracies. A secretive Georgia-based firm called EagleAI NETwork has developed a voter information database to fast-track the deletion of ineligible voters from the system. Voter rights groups have advised against its use, as insignificant errors—such as a missing comma before the suffix “Jr.”—have led to eligible names being removed. Still, at least one county in Georgia has agreed to use EagleAI to review voter challenges and conduct list maintenance activities.

One of EagleAI’s key backers is former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell, who in the past two years has become central to the push to spread election conspiracies on a national level through her well-funded Election Integrity Network.

The group has held in-person training seminars in recent years, with session topics including how to protect “Vulnerable Voters from Leftist Activists” and “Monitoring Voting Equipment and Systems.” More recently, the group has made its training sessions available online, and is now once again ramping up its efforts ahead of the 2024 election with an initiative called Soles to the Rolls, aimed at boosting challenges to voter registration.

Mitchell, EagleAI, and the Election Integrity Network did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

Another training webinar called “We the People” was also hosted last month by the America Project and its offshoot, Vote Your Vision. Broadcasted online to hundreds of attendees, the webinar featured a lineup of election conspiracists, Republican lawmakers, a guy who wrote a book about fifth-generation warfare, and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

The webinar, the group’s website said, was designed to give people “the secrets to reclaiming our power and reshaping history” by using “state-of-the-art election tools,” including those involving artificial intelligence technology. While the details of exactly what these tools will look like and how they will be used are unclear, the America Project has already scheduled more training sessions in the coming weeks to give supporters more information. The group also did not reply to requests for comment.

The America Project was cofounded by disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO and conspiracist Patrick Byrne, who also funds part of the organization. Both Flynn and Byrne reportedly attended a White House meeting in late 2020 to urge Trump to essentially declare martial law and seize voting machines.

While Flynn didn’t speak during last month’s webinar, he has arguably done more than anyone since 2020 to push the notion that America’s elections are fundamentally fraudulent, appearing at conferences, in podcasts, and on right-wing news shows on a near-daily basis. Trump has also indicated that Flynn will be brought back into his administration should he win.

These efforts have been given the seal of approval by the Republican National Committee, which was recently restructured by Trump to include election deniers and family members in top positions while cutting minority outreach efforts. One of those election deniers is Christina Bobb, who will be running the “election integrity unit.” A former Trump lawyer and TV presenter on far-right channel One America News, Bobb is a major promoter of the myth that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The RNC’s election-related priorities, according to an internal memo recently obtained by NPR, include “a broader effort over the coming months to [legally] challenge voter identification and signature verification rules which were put into place for the 2020 election.”

During the America Project webinar last month, one of the hosts apologized to listeners for being unable to get Bobb to join the call that day, but promised that she would join a future session—highlighting just how closely these conspiracy-focused groups work with the mainstream GOP apparatus.

“These groups have a playbook nationally that they tend to deploy locally,” says Garber. “Some of these playbooks that have an intended national reach are then deployed through local activists, and it's concerning because it's the voters at the local level who suffer the effects. It's the election officials at the local level trying to keep order at the polls, trying to make sure their voter rolls are up to date, who have to deal with this stuff.”

One of Flynn’s core messages over the past four years has been that “local action equals national impact” —an expression that revolves around a concept called “precinct strategy,” which aims to get people into key positions on local committees in order to push their narratives at the local level. In 2024, that strategy has been primed and polished.

“This concept of precinct strategy was actually endorsed by President Trump in the last election cycle,” Yehuda Miller, a Republican county committee member in New Jersey, said during the America Project seminar. “We want to take the strategy to the next level. We want to get more organized, we want to start organizing across multiple counties in a state, we want to start organizing across multiple states. We have the power to direct our elected officials.”

[realjaysumlin]

The History of Mass Incarceration | Brennan Center for Justice

The way in which individuals identify themselves is often overlooked, leading to a misleading system that fails to recognize the equality of all human beings. This flawed system has been perpetuated since Bacon's Rebellion, when the concept of whiteness was used to create divisions in colonial America. The ruling elite, driven by a fear of rebellion, exploited this idea of whiteness to pit poor people against each other and maintain their power.

For the first time in American history, whiteness was used as a tool to unite individuals against those who did not fit into the white narrative, reinforcing a false sense of superiority. It is disheartening to see that even those who are marginalized by this system often internalize and perpetuate these harmful beliefs.

Racism and colorism continue to plague societies around the world, rooted in the false construct of whiteness. In order to address these issues, we must dismantle the notion of whiteness and strive towards true equality for all individuals.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

In the new, post-Roe v. Wade world, for some anti-abortion forces, it is not enough to remove constitutional protection for abortion. They want to make criminals of women who seek abortions.

As if that weren’t enough, Republican legislators in four Southern states have proposed legislation that would make abortion a capital offense. Were such legislation to be passed, it would mark an unprecedented escalation of the right wing’s war on women.

As is true throughout America’s death penalty system, race and class will play a large role in who would be prosecuted, sentenced, and executed for getting an abortion.

National Public Radio quotes Dana Sussman, acting executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, as saying that criminalization of abortion already falls disproportionately on “‘poor people, people of color, young people. Anyone who is experiencing a mental health crisis, anyone who has a substance-use disorder, those are the people that are gonna be most vulnerable to suspicion and the specter of law enforcement when they experience a pregnancy loss.”

The dangerous extremism of the death-penalty-for-abortion proposals is reflected in the fact that in at least one state’s bill there is no exception for rape or incest. Welcome to the world that some radical conservatives want to create.

At a time when the death penalty is under intense scrutiny for its injustice, unreliability, and cruelty, they want to double down on it. In their dystopian vision, women who once had a constitutional right to abortion would now be put to death for exercising that right.

To cite one example, Arkansas House Bill 1174 says that “all unborn children should be protected under the state homicide laws as all other persons.” In addition to the woman who aborts a fetus, friends, partners, medical providers, and anyone else who helped her decide to end a pregnancy would be liable for the death penalty as accomplices under the Arkansas bill.

The anti-abortion movement has never had a plausible claim to being “pro-life,” but the Republican legislators who are pushing death penalty plans are stretching hypocrisy to withering heights.

Make no mistake about the danger ahead. This is an organized effort.

Though none of these bills seem likely to pass in the near term, they are part of an effort to normalize the idea that a fetus is a person protected by state homicide laws so that, sometime in the future, women who exercise their right to make their own family decisions might find themselves on murder dockets.

It’s the boiling frog theory. Gradually raise the heat on the pot and the amphibian won’t jump out before the water’s bubbling and it’s too late. Those who believe in reproductive freedom need to jump on this latest escalating attack on it.

Like the Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. Wade last June, the death penalty-for-abortion legislators are bucking strong international trends. Even Catholic South American countries like Colombia and Mexico have decriminalized abortion. Over the last three decades, close to 60 nations have liberalized their abortion laws. Only one of the world’s 195 countries, El Salvador, treats abortion as murder.

Bad company to keep. Anti-women, anti-reproductive rights legislators in southern states seem to be feeding their religious frenzy and desire for vengeance against those who believe differently.

Of course there’s that old “eye for an eye” concept that originated in Babylon about proportional justice. Let’s put aside the fact that these elected officials are not advocating an embryo for an embryo. They purport to embrace the Judeo-Christian tradition, but its truer form is about tolerance, not revenge.

Politicians loudly proclaiming their Christianity with legislation proposing death for mothers having abortions seem to have forgotten that Jesus renounced Babylonian justice: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you . . . [if] anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.”

Perhaps it’s too much to expect politicians seeking to stir up their base to follow the Bible. Pragmatically, however, they might want to notice that last June’s Supreme Court decision in Dobbs was the “driving force” that energized majorities of young people, women, and men who believe in reproductive freedom to cast their votes against Republicans in 2022.

Even in red states like Kansas and Kentucky, and in states like Michigan that went for Trump in 2016, post-Dobbs ballot measures that protected abortion won, and ballot measures meant to end it lost.

Maybe that wouldn’t be so in Arkansas, Texas, Kentucky, and South Carolina, the states where these new death-penalty-for-abortion bills have been introduced. But their proponents don’t seem to care about the 2024 political energy they may be handing Democrats in other parts of the country.

Such blindness to national political implications is also suggested by the extreme measures in Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas: The bills there also explicitly include abortion by medication. (A pill for a pill?) More than half the abortions nationwide occur by pharmaceuticals—at least pending the ruling in a fraught Texas case where right-wing groups have asked an anti-abortionist federal judge to invalidate a 22-year-old FDA decision that the pill is safe.

If that happens, the threat of legislation to make swallowing a pill murder may accelerate Democratic voters’ run to the polls nationwide in 2024. It may lead independents to steer clear of the fanatics for whom the end of Roe was just the beginning of the next stage of the anti-abortion crusade.

These Southern state legislators may think that imposing the death penalty will deter abortions. Think again. Legal restrictions on abortions don’t stop them but only multiply the numbers of unsafe, back-alley endings to pregnancy for women who can’t afford a baby or aren’t ready to have one.

Moreover, there is no reliable evidence in the familiar context of one person killing another that the death penalty really is a deterrent. Nearly two of three Americans doubt that it is.

In the end, as the Brennan Center for Justice rightly notes, “Criminalizing abortion and pregnancy upends lives, breaks up families, and disrupts entire communities.” And the idea of piling a possible death sentence on top of the painful choice to end a pregnancy is not just hypocritical and destructive, it is as cruel as it is unusual.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Wisconsin voters on Tuesday will cast their primary ballots in what's turned into an expensive and high-stakes battle for control of the state Supreme Court in a key political battleground where power is divided between a Democratic Governor and a Republican-controlled legislature.

Voters will narrow the field of candidates down to two, who will then advance to April's general election for a seat on a court where conservatives currently hold a 4-3 majority. Although the election is technically nonpartisan -- there are no party labels on the ballot -- interest groups align, party operations mobilize and money flows into races for its seats as if they were partisan contests.

The departure of a conservative justice, Patience Roggensack, has given liberals an opportunity to seize the majority on a court that could decide on issues such as abortion, redistricting, and voting rights ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

Conservatives have controlled the state's high court for 14 years -- a span in which the court has sided with Republicans' union-busting efforts and affirmed voting restrictions, including ID requirements and a ban on ballot drop boxes.

"This seat is crucial to the balance of the court, and the court is crucial to the balance of the state," said Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of its Elections Research Center.

The candidates hoping to advance to the April general election are liberals Janet Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee County circuit court judge, and Everett Mitchell, a circuit judge in Dane County; and conservatives Daniel Kelly, a former state Supreme Court justice, and Jennifer Dorow, a judge perhaps best known for presiding over the trial of a man convicted of killing six and injuring scores more in a 2021 attack on a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

Outside money has flooded the race, surpassing candidate spending. As of Thursday afternoon, orders for TV and radio ads focused on the race had hit $7 million, according to advertising tracked by Kantar Media/CMAG for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's law school. Experts say the spending on the race could smash the previous record -- $15.2 million spent on a 2004 Illinois Supreme Court race, according to the liberal-leaning Brennan Center -- for the most expensive campaign for a single state Supreme Court seat.

The court could become the final arbiter on a host of critical issues in Wisconsin in the coming years -- including the fate of the state's 1849 law prohibiting abortion in nearly all cases. The US Supreme Court's decision last summer ending federal legal protections for the procedure has super-charged the rhetoric -- and spending -- around abortion in the Wisconsin race.

The state Supreme Court could also play a crucial role in the 2024 election. Wisconsin was a key location of former President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn his 2020 loss, and the refusal of a conservative justice on the state Supreme Court to go along with an effort that year to toss out ballots in two heavily Democratic counties looms large in the rivalry between the two right-leaning candidates in this year's race.

[thoughtportal]

This week, Congressional leaders are again trying to quietly and quickly get Congress to approve unconstitutional, warrantless mass surveillance.1

Rather than allowing debate on major privacy protections, some members are trying to jam an extension of a controversial warrantless surveillance power — Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — into a “must-pass” defense authorization bill.1

Section 702 has been abused in ways that violate Americans’ fundamental civil liberties and civil rights. FBI agents have used 702 to search through troves of warrantlessly acquired communications for conversations with tens of thousands of protestors, racial justice activists, journalists, donors to a Congressional campaign, and countless others.2

We must fight for privacy protections and stop Congress from sneaking 702’s extension into “must-pass” legislation!

Warrantless government surveillance of Americans under Section 702 is out of control, and particularly hurts marginalized communities. The large number of documented abuses by agencies like the NSA, CIA, and FBI include searches for: 141 racial justice protestors, two men “of Middle Eastern descent” who were handling cleaning supplies, mosques that were intentionally mislabeled to prevent oversight, and a state court judge who reported civil rights violations to the FBI.2

Even though the Fourth Amendment protects our right to keep our information private, the government is collecting troves of our data without a warrant.

Any extension of Section 702 would allow the government to obtain new year-long Section 702 certifications at the beginning of the year — allowing this unaccountable, abusive government spying to continue into 2025.

Congressional leaders know that mass surveillance is unpopular, which is why they want to quietly slip it into the defensive authorization bill. We need to let them know that we’re watching and won’t let it happen.

Sources:

Brennan Center, "Coalition Letter Urges Congressional Leaders to Keep Reauthorization of Section 702 Out of NDAA," November 21, 2023.

Brennan Center, “FISA Section 702: Civil Rights Abuses,” November 27, 2023.

Click here to sign

[naturalrights-retard]

“Buried in the House intelligence committee’s Section 702 ‘reform’ bill, which is scheduled for a floor vote as soon as tomorrow (12/12/23), is the biggest expansion of surveillance inside the United States since the Patriot Act,” warned Elizabeth Goitein in a viral and disturbing X thread.

Elizabeth Goitein is a prominent legal expert specializing in national security, privacy, and constitutional issues. She serves as the co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan law and policy institute. Goitein is known for her expertise in areas such as government surveillance, privacy rights, and the balance between national security and civil liberties. She frequently writes and speaks on these topics, offering critical insights and advocating for the protection of individual rights in the context of national security.Elizabeth Goitein

The House Intelligence Committee’s FISA “Reform” Bill, known as the FRRA, is set to significantly expand the scope of entities required to assist in FISA 702 surveillance. This expansion is due to a change in the definition of “electronic communication service providers” (ECSPs), potentially implicating a wider range of businesses and individuals in surveillance activities. Critically, the bill could allow the government warrantless access to nearly any communication system in America.

Gotein stated that under the proposed bill, entities with access to communication-transmitting equipment, like Wi-Fi routers in “hotels, libraries, coffee shops,” could be “forced to serve as surrogate spies.” She stated that this is not a theoretical concern but a significant issue, as even FISA Court amici have publicly cautioned against this provision.

[plethoraworldatlas]

A federal appeals court shocked voting rights groups on Monday with a ruling that only the US government, not outside groups or citizens, could sue to enforce the Voting Rights Act’s provisions.

The civil rights law, which outlaws racial discrimination as it relates to voting, has typically been enforced by lawsuits from these groups, not by the government itself. Now that the Republican-appointed eighth circuit court of appeals has made the ruling by 2-1, this “private right of action” to enforce Section 2 of the law is called into question.

...

The ruling is not simply an esoteric question of law: it would dismantle the primary mechanism voting rights groups use to protect against racial discrimination in voting, often in the form of lawsuits challenging electoral maps.

Voting rights groups expect the ruling will be appealed to the US supreme court. The eighth circuit ruling applies to the states the circuit court covers: Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Wendy Weiser, the vice-president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, called the decision “radical” and wrote on X that it was “deeply wrong, and it goes against decades of precedent and practice”.