HCR Richardson, Heather Cox
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https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/
ltr from am
SEE EMERGENCY BS XO
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channel 
alt link:
A 17-part series on the history of the Republican Party
am paradox nine-part series examines the major themes from my book, How the South Won the Civil War.
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HILLARY EPSTEIN DEPOS ASKED ABOUT UFO AND PIZZAGATE
CALLS VILE; her written st rips new one; comer told up front this will not go well, we are better at it; see hcr 
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American Conversations: Jeff Clements on Citizens United and Campaign Spending Reform
Streamed live on Jan 28, 2026
Jeff Clements is a former Assistant Attorney General of Massachusetts and the co-founder and CEO of American Promise, a nonprofit advancing a constitutional amendment to restore lawmakers’ authority to set the rules for money in politics. He’s also the author of "Corporations Are Not People."
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416,282 views Jan 12, 2026 The Best People with Nicolle Wallace
Against the backdrop of the shocking U.S. capture of President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, renowned historian and Substack superstar Heather Cox Richardson is back with Nicolle on “The Best People” bringing her unique capacity to explain our current state of play through a historically tinted lens. As Trump’s actions abroad rattle the post-World War II international order, Heather warns of a political era that adheres more to the strongman politics of autocratic leaders like Vladimir Putin than it ever has before. Together, Cox Richardson and Nicolle trace an evolving list of national concerns: a president in clear decline, a Congress unwilling to act, and a Republican Party abandoning its core principles in real time.
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anti-American intervention to pro-American intervention? And that really comes down, I think, to the way
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that you see the world. And you and I are engaged in the enterprise of trying to
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make sure people have accurate information. Because unless you have accurate information, you cannot make
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good decisions about your life. I find it fascinating that the American radical
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right, because that's what they are, consistently simply lie to their viewers.
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And I find it interesting that people are willing to be lied to.
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That itself I think is an investigation of human nature. But in the larger societal sense, when I look at the place
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that you change the American story, it is always in the
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people like you and me, but many of us, who are trying to
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hold on to the truth, trying to make sure that people see the truth. Because the whole premise of American democracy is
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that if people do have access to good information, most of them will make good decisions.
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For all of them, but most of them will make good decisions. That's why we have a postal service.
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That's why that's in the Constitution, is because people were supposed to have access to newspapers
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and to speeches from their congress critters so they would be able to understand what was happening in the government.
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So I look around us now and I look at, yes, people fall for this. There's increasing crap on social media.
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But how do we make sure people have access to what's really happening?
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And you can see that that war is being played out right now with the new attempt to control CNN, with the purchase that has
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not gone through, but with the attacks on CBS, with the Fox News channel, with social media, which is being flooded
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again with bots and trolls. You watch this and we really do seem to be at war for
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democracy, but this war is one that is being waged intellectually, if you will.
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And that one is proving less bloody than when people shot
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at each other with artillery. But it is no less a war for control of the world, I think.
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HCR 1 12? 26
...The Senate advanced a bill to stop the Trump administration from additional attacks on Venezuela without congressional approval. And, just two days after Trump had reversed the victims and offenders in the January 6, 2021, insurrection, suggesting that Capitol Police officers had been among the offenders, the Senate unanimously agreed to hang a plaque honoring the police who protected the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Congress passed a law in March 2022 mandating that the plaque be hung, but Republicans until now had prevented its installation.
Friday was a busy day at the White House.
On Friday, Trump threatened Greenland, saying that he was “going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not.”
Trump’s threat against a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally has had American lawmakers and foreign allies scrambling ever since. In a joint statement, the leaders of Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom said that “Greenland belongs to its people.” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) released a video explaining that “what you are essentially talking about here is the United States going to war with NATO, the United States going to war with Europe. You’re talking about the U.S. and France being at war with each other over Greenland.”
Trump’s threats against Greenland came at a meeting with oil executives. When he attacked Venezuela to capture Maduro, Trump told reporters that United States oil companies would spend billions of dollars to fix the badly broken infrastructure of oil extraction in that country. But apparently the oil companies had not gotten the memo. They have said that they are not currently interested in investing in Venezuela because they have no idea how badly oil infrastructure there has degraded and no sense of who will run the country in the future.
What oil executives did suggest to Trump on Friday was that they would quite like to be repaid for their losses from the 2007 nationalization of their companies from the sale of Venezuelan oil Trump has promised to control. ConocoPhillips, for example, claims it is owed about $12 billion. “We’re not going to look at what people lost in the past, because that was their fault,” Trump told them. “That was a different president. You’re going to make a lot of money, but we’re not going to go back.”
Yesterday the government made public an executive order President Donald J. Trump signed on Friday, declaring yet another national emergency—his tenth in this term, by my count—and saying that any use of the revenue from the sale of Venezuelan oil to repay the billions of dollars owed to oil companies “will materially harm the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
Specifically, the executive order says, such repayment would “interfere with our critical efforts to ensure economic and political stability in Venezuela” and, by extension, jeopardize U.S. foreign policy objectives including “ending the dangerous influx of illegal immigrants and the flood of illicit narcotics;…protecting American interests against malign actors such as Iran and Hezbollah; and bringing peace, prosperity, and stability to the Venezuelan people and to the Western Hemisphere more generally.” So, it appears, Trump wants to retain control of the money from the sale of Venezuelan oil.
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january 6, 2026 7?
“They say that when you win the presidency you lose the midterm,” President Donald J. Trump said today to House Republicans. “I wish you could explain to me what the hell is going on with the mind of the public because we have the right policy. They don’t. They have a horrible policy. They do stick together. They’re violent, they’re vicious, you know. They’re vicious people.”
“They had the worst policy. How we have to even run against these people—I won’t say cancel the election, they should cancel the election, because the fake news will say, ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator. Nobody is worse than Obama. And the people that surrounded Biden.”
And there you have it: in a rambling speech in which he jumped from topic to topic, danced, and appeared to mimic someone doing something either stupid or obscene, Trump explained the ideology behind his actions. He and MAGA Republicans have absorbed the last 40 years of Republican rhetoric to believe that Democratic policies are “horrible” and that only Republicans “have the right policy.” If that’s the case, why should Republicans even have to “run against these people?” Why even have elections? When voters choose Democrats, there’s something wrong with them, so why let them have a say? Their choice is bad by definition. Anything that they do, or have done, must be erased.
That is the ideology behind MAGA, amped up by the racism and sexism that identifies MAGA’s opponents as women, Black Americans, and people of color. In their telling, the world Americans constructed after World War II—and particularly after the 1965 Voting Rights Act protected Black and Brown voting—has destroyed the liberty of wealthy men to act without restraint. Free them, the logic goes, and they will Make America Great Again.
As tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel wrote in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He continued: “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
“Because there are no truly free places left in our world,” he wrote, Thiel called for escaping into cyberspace, outer space, or seasteading.
While tech leaders are focusing on escaping established governments, Trump’s solution to an expanded democracy appears to be to silence the voters and lawmakers who support the “liberal consensus”—the once-bipartisan idea that the government should enable individuals to reach their greatest potential by protecting them from corporate power, poverty, lack of access to modern infrastructure, and discrimination—and to erase the policies of that consensus.
Nowhere does Trump’s conviction that he, and he alone, has the right to run the United States show more clearly than in the White House’s rewriting of the history of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol were Trump supporters determined to overthrow the free and fair election of Democrat Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes in 2020, replacing him with Trump by virtue of their belief that no Democrat could be fairly elected.
But the official White House website reversed that reality today, claiming that the insurrectionists who beat and wounded at least 140 police officers, smeared feces on the walls of the Capitol building, and called for the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence were “peaceful patriotic protesters.” The real villains, the White House wrote in bold type, were “the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters.”
In reality, modern Republican policies have rarely served everyday people, while the policies enacted by Democratic president Joe Biden demonstrably did. Biden rejected the ideology that called for cutting taxes, regulations, and social services in the name of liberty. Instead, he urged Congress to invest in public infrastructure, creating jobs, and he shored up the social safety net.
As Biden prepared to leave office in January 2025, Trump claimed that the U.S. was in freefall, “a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!” But Peter Baker reported in the New York Times that the opposite was true: Biden and his administration were leaving behind a country that was in the best shape it had been since at least 2000.
There were no U.S. troops fighting in foreign wars, murders had plummeted, deaths from drug overdoses had dropped sharply, undocumented immigration was below where it was when Trump left office in 2021, stocks had just had their best two years since the last century. The economy was growing, real wages were rising, inflation had fallen to close to its normal range, unemployment was at near-historic lows, and energy production was at historic highs. The economy had added more than 700,000 manufacturing jobs among the 16 million total created since 2020.
Baker quoted chief economist of Moody’s Analytics Mark Zandi, who said: “President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets.”
Once in office, Trump set about dismantling the policies that had achieved those results. And now, after destabilizing the country at home, he is working to destroy the rules-based international order that has stabilized the world since World War II. In addition to an illegal attack on Venezuela to extract Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, Trump is threatening Colombian president Gustavo Petro, saying “Cuba is ready to fall,” and warning Mexico to “get their act together.”
Although his sights are primarily on countries in the Western Hemisphere, Trump has also warned that if Iran starts “killing people like they have in the past, I think they’re going to get hit very hard by the United States.”
Trump has also threatened Greenland, which is a self-governing island that is part of Denmark, an ally in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. As NATO allies, Greenland and the U.S. have cooperated on defense for decades, so Trump’s declaration that the U.S. needs Greenland for national defense makes no sense.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said in a statement Sunday: “The Kingdom of Denmark—and thus Greenland—is part of NATO and is therefore covered by the alliance’s security guarantee. We already have a defense agreement between the Kingdom and the United States today, which gives the United States wide access to Greenland. I would therefore strongly urge the United States to stop the threats against a historically close ally and against another country and another people who have said very clearly that they are not for sale,” she said.
On Monday, Fredriksen said: “If the United States chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops. That is, including our NATO and thus the security that has been provided since the end of the Second World War.” Today, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Denmark issued a statement of support for Greenland, Denmark, and NATO....
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VENEZ GRAB 1 26
DISRUPTER TRANSACTION MAFIA DON TOSS POST-WAR ORDER,
HCR? SAYS BIG DOG GRAB OK: CHINA TAIWAN, PUTIN UKRAINE ~ UN
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YT 12 25 HCR TOTAL # EMERG DECL/LAWS INVOKED 19?
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The Politics Behind the Wounded Knee Massacre
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hcr kpfa wk
sherman 1662 RR charter, john ohio bro of gen wm sherman
1864 abe signed
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JUL 2 1864 ABe SIGNS BILL gen cass takes over from gov ref nyt
ai
On July 2, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act of 1864, a critical amendment doubling the land grants for the Transcontinental Railroad, boosting funding for the Union Pacific and Central Pacific companies, allowing them to sell their own bonds, and setting the stage for connecting the nation by rail. This act built on the 1862 law, providing crucial government land and loans to accelerate construction and encourage settlement, even authorizing a northern route with the Northern Pacific Railroad charter.
Key Aspects of the 1864 Act:
- Expanded Land Grants: Doubled the acreage given to railroads for every mile of track laid, creating checkerboard patterns of public and railroad land.
- Financial Aid: Allowed companies to issue their own bonds, supplementing federal loans, and reduced the government's share of earnings for services.
- Northern Route: Also chartered the Northern Pacific Railroad, linking the Great Lakes to the Pacific, further expanding the national rail network.
- Purpose: To connect the country, facilitate westward expansion, and strengthen national unity during the Civil War.
This legislation was a massive federal investment, offering land and loans to spur private enterprise and ultimately create the first transcontinental railroad, a monumental achievement completed in 1869.
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87 views Feb 14, 2025 KPFA - Letters and Politics
Guest: Heather Cox Richardson is Professor of History at Boston College and author of Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre
rebrdcast feb 2025
review
...In this evocative study, Heather Cox Richardson, Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts—Amherst, places partisan politics of the Benjamin Harrison administration at the heart of "the road to an American massacre." Richardson traces the origins of the massacre to Republican Party machinations—a political machine that served the big business interests that supported them and led by man who believed that God had given him the presidency. "The Harrison administration," Richardson explains, "has wrongly been buried in obscurity, for its effects were far-reaching. Its aggressive use of rhetoric, disseminated by its own media, had frightening repercussions" (308). Their partisan magazine, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, served as the mouthpiece of the party, disseminating only the party line to its readers. By the 1880s "it seemed that nothing now stood in the way of the triumph of the Republican economic system" that embraced the new industrial economy (77).
The administration needed western voters to retain its hegemony, and Republicans hoped that supporting statehood for the western Territories would create voter loyalty there. Republicans envisioned a West that embraced the new economic order. Harrison opened the Dakota reservations for white settlements in early 1890 and settlers and railwaymen flooded in. The Sioux were to Harrison "obstacles to be brushed out of the path of economic growth" (116). As Democrats and Republicans argued over their visions of the West, and with major Democratic wins in the midterm elections of 1890, Republicans needed to prove their control of the Territories. Thus Republican yes-man Royer's cry for military assistance against the rising Ghost Dance movement set in motion the immediate events that would lead to the deaths at Wounded Knee. In the aftermath the massacre, Republican politicians attempted to clean up their mess. Through portraying the massacre as a "battle," exonerating Colonel Forsyth from wrongdoing, and awarding twenty of the soldiers with the Medal of Honor, the events at Wound Knee were covered with a heavy coat of whitewash.
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2025
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-26-2025
Today Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that twenty men who were awarded the Medal of Honor for their participation in the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre would keep their medals, despite more than a century of controversy over them. The defense secretary who preceded Hegseth, General Lloyd Austin, had ordered a review of the awarding of those medals to “ensure no awardees were recognized for conduct inconsistent with the nation’s highest military honor.” Hegseth today called the men “brave soldiers” and said: “We’re making it clear that [the soldiers] deserve those medals.”
It’s fitting that Hegseth, a political appointee whose tenure has been marked by incompetence, would defend the awarding of those particular Medals of Honor, because they were awarded to cover up the incompetence of political appointees that led to the deaths of at least 230 peaceful Lakotas, as well as about twenty-five soldiers who were caught in their own crossfire.
The road to Wounded Knee started in 1884, when voters angry that the Republicans had sold out to big business elected Democrat Grover Cleveland to the presidency. The first Democrat to occupy the White House since before the Civil War, he promised to lower the tariffs that squeezed ordinary Americans in order to protect big business. Horrified at the growing opposition to a government that worked for those industrialists who would soon be called “robber barons,” Republicans began to circulate pamphlets as soon as Cleveland was elected, claiming that lowering the tariff would destroy the economy and warning that voters must return Republicans to power or face economic ruin.
In 1888, Cleveland nonetheless won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes, but after an extraordinarily corrupt campaign, Republican candidate Benjamin Harrison won in the Electoral College. This is “A BUSINESS MAN’S ADMINISTRATION,” the editors of a pro-Harrison newspaper boasted. They predicted that “business men will be thoroughly well content with it.”
Knowing that the popular mood had turned against tariffs and the party that protected them, Harrison Republicans looked for ways to cement their control over the government.
Adding to the Union new states they believed would vote Republican would give them two more seats per state in the Senate, as well as a seat per state in the House of Representatives, and thus three more electors in the Electoral College, for each state has a number of electors equal to the number of senators and representatives combined. Between November 1889 and July 1890 the Republicans added five new states to the Union. They added Washington, Idaho, and Montana. They also divided the huge Dakota Territory in two, creating North Dakota and South Dakota. The new states should give the Republicans ten new seats in the Senate, Harrison’s men noted happily.
But the western half of what was supposed to become South Dakota belonged to the Lakotas. In 1889 the government forced the Lakotas to sign treaties agreeing to sell about half of their land and to move closer to six agencies on smaller reservations in what would soon be a new state. The government promised rations, health, care, education, and help with transitioning to a farming economy in exchange for the land, but that plan ran afoul of politics almost immediately.
The War Department and the Department of the Interior had fought over management of the Indigenous peoples in the U.S. for decades. Reservations were overseen by an “Indian agent,” who was in sole charge of spending the tens of thousands of dollars Congress appropriated to fund the various treaties the government had negotiated with different tribes. From that money, the agent was supposed to contract for food, clothing, tools, and supplies, as well as for the building of schools, mills, warehouses, and so on. Until 1883 this had been a plum political position, awarded to a political loyalist with the expectation that providing promised rations to Indigenous Americans was the least of his concerns: he was expected to spread that money to political allies to shore up their support.
The Army hated this system. If political appointees mismanaged their work, it was Army officers and their men who had the dangerous job of fighting angry warriors. Politicians noted that the Army all too often killed indiscriminately, and they refused to give up their power. But military men resented that political mistakes could cost soldiers their lives.
In 1883, after a disappointed office seeker assassinated President James A. Garfield, Congress had passed the Civil Service Act that was supposed to do away with awarding government jobs based on political patronage. Cleveland had taken that charge seriously and had installed agents instructed to fulfill their job description. Harrison’s men, though, knew they needed western votes to hold control of the newly admitted states, and they spun the system back to one based on patronage.
Their most unfortunate appointment was that of Daniel Royer to the Pine Ridge Reservation. Royer was a staunch Republican, but he was also a failed medical man with a budding drug addiction and little knowledge of Lakotas. After he arrived in October 1890, the Lakotas named him “Young-Man-Afraid-of-Indians.”
Since being corralled on the six smaller reservations the previous year, the Lakotas had endured a deadly influenza epidemic that swept the U.S. and much of Europe and killed a number of Lakotas who were already weak from respiratory viruses. Then, hot winds in summer 1890 had burned dry first the Lakotas’ vegetable gardens, then their crops, and finally, the native hay crop.
White settlers suffering in the same drought abandoned their new homesteads and went back east. Hungry and desolate, Lakotas had to stay. Then a new census count came in lower than expected, and government officials cut their rations. Destitute and in real danger of starvation, some Lakotas turned to a new religious movement, the Ghost Dance, that promised to bring back the world of game and plenty that had been theirs before the coming of easterners.
The Ghost Dancers never hurt their non-Indigenous neighbors or threatened their property, and few settlers paid them much attention. But Royer interpreted the religious enthusiasm as a sign of an approaching war. Less than a week after arriving at Pine Ridge, Royer warned his superiors in the Interior Department in Washington, D.C., that he might need troops to keep order.
General Nelson Miles of the U.S. Army, who commanded the Division of the Missouri that included Pine Ridge, went to the reservation, where the Lakotas explained their crushing circumstances and suggested that neither Royer nor his predecessor had been much help. Miles brushed off Royer’s panic and told the Lakotas they could dance as they wished. When Royer told the Lakotas the next day that they must stop participating in the Ghost Dance, they laughed at him.
Back East, President Harrison and his men were focused on the 1890 midterms. Despite popular demand for a lower tariff, in a raucous session in October, Republicans in Congress actually raised tariff rates, promising voters that the higher rates of the McKinley Tariff would finally make the country boom.
A month later, angry voters took away the Republicans’ slim majority in the House and handed the Democrats a majority of more than two to one. Republicans hung onto power only through their lock on the Senate. There, the admission of the new states made up for losses elsewhere, and the Republicans had four more senators than their opponents did.
But of those four, three had voted against the McKinley Tariff. So the survival of the tariff hung on just one vote: that of a senator from South Dakota. In the nineteenth century, senators were chosen by the state legislature, and it looked at first as if the Republicans had won South Dakota’s. But then news broke that ballot boxes had been tampered with. Suddenly, the legislature was in play for all parties. Whoever won would control South Dakota’s Senate seat and the fate of the McKinley Tariff.
The Ghost Dance had continued to spread across the South Dakota reservations, and Royer was growing increasingly frightened. Some of the other agents were also agitated, sending back to their superiors letters full of exaggerated rumors. But Miles and officers stationed at the forts in South Dakota, all of whom had first-hand experience with the Lakotas, denied that the Lakotas were planning a war. Instead, the officers blamed the Lakotas’ anger on the mismanagement of food and supplies by the political appointees at the Interior Department. As soon as the agents addressed the Lakotas’ very real suffering, they said, the Ghost Dance movement would fade.
But with control of the South Dakota legislature hanging in the balance, Harrison was leaning toward sending in troops. Settlers liked the military, which brought contracts and government money into the chronically poor West. On November 20, 1890, troops marched into Pine Ridge.
Alarmed, Ghost Dancers rushed to the Badlands, where they could defend themselves.
For the next month, Army officers worked to bring them back to Pine Ridge. Then, on December 15, just as it seemed they had convinced them to return, a police officer murdered the famous leader Sitting Bull at Standing Rock Reservation on the northern edge of the state, and his panicked kinfolk fled south to Pine Ridge to take shelter with the renowned negotiator Red Cloud. Army officers were afraid the band would take news of Sitting Bull’s death to the Lakotas in the Badlands, derailing the negotiations, and set out to intercept them.
On December 28, on the southern side of the state, two members of the Lakota band overtook two Army scouts watering their horses and told the scouts they were on their way to Pine Ridge. The scouts informed their commander, who intercepted the Lakotas with guns and demanded an unconditional surrender. After the Lakotas agreed, the troops and the tired and hungry Lakotas set off for Pine Ridge. That night, they camped inside the reservation at Wounded Knee Creek.
During the night, a new commander, James Forsyth, took over. Dead set on a show of force, he insisted on disarming the Lakotas before they set off for the agency. Many of the young men refused to give up their guns, which were the only way they could feed their families through the winter. As soldiers tried to wrench a gun from a man’s hands, it went off into the sky. “Fire! Fire on them!” Forsyth screamed.
The soldiers did. The first volley brought down the men who were being disarmed, as well as about twenty-five of the soldiers themselves, who had moved into a circle around the Lakota men and boys during the course of the morning. In the haze from the gun smoke, Lakota men grabbed weapons from nearby soldiers and dove for the dry creek bed that ran behind the camp, hoping to hike along it and escape. The women and children had been separated from the Indian men during the morning. When the firing began, women ran for the wagons and horses.
But they could not escape. Over the next two hours, frenzied soldiers hunted down and killed every Lakota they could find. Soldiers trained artillery on the fleeing wagons as troops on horseback combed the hills for fugitives. Some of the escaping women were ridden down three miles from the encampment. When the wagons stopped moving, the soldiers moved the guns to the creek bed and shot everyone who moved. Within a few hours, at least 230 Lakotas, mostly women and children, were dead.
The outcry against this butchery started in the Army itself. Miles was incensed that the simple surrender of a peaceful band of Lakotas had become what he called a “criminal military blunder and a horrible massacre of women and children.” He demanded an inquiry into Forsyth’s actions. Miles’s report was so damning his own secretary asked him to soften it.
But President Harrison’s administration was in terrible electoral trouble, and his men wanted no part of an attack on soldiers that would imply that Harrison’s agents had first created a war and then mismanaged it. They dismissed Miles’s report with their own, which blamed the Lakotas for the massacre and concluded that the soldiers had acted the part of heroes. In spring 1891, President Harrison awarded the first of twenty Medals of Honor that would go to soldiers for their actions at Wounded Knee.
In the end, though, all of the political maneuvering by Harrison’s men came to naught. After weeks of squabbling, the South Dakota legislature rejected the Republican candidate and named an Independent senator who caucused with the Democrats. And in 1892, Harrison lost the presidency to Grover Cleveland, who promised lower tariffs and a return to civil service reform.
Notes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/26/pete-hegseth-wounded-knee-massacre-medals-of-honor
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https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-28-2024}:
December 28, 2024
Dec 28, 2024
On the clear, cold morning of December 29, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, three U.S. soldiers tried to wrench a valuable Winchester away from a young Lakota man. He refused to give up his hunting weapon. It was the only thing standing between his family and starvation, and he had no faith it would be returned to him as the officer promised: he had watched as soldiers had marked other confiscated valuable weapons for themselves.
As the men struggled, the gun fired into the sky.
Before the echoes died, troops fired a volley that brought down half of the Lakota men and boys the soldiers had captured the night before, as well as a number of soldiers surrounding the Lakotas. The uninjured Lakota men attacked the soldiers with knives, guns they snatched from wounded soldiers, and their fists.
As the men fought hand to hand, the Lakota women who had been hitching their horses to wagons for the day’s travel tried to flee along the nearby road or up a dry ravine behind the camp. Stationed on a slight rise above the camp, soldiers turned rapid-fire mountain guns on them. Then, over the next two hours, troops on horseback hunted down and slaughtered all the Lakotas they could find: about 250 men, women, and children.
Fifteen years ago, I wrote a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, and what I learned still keeps me up at night. But it is not December 29 that haunts me.
What haunts me is the night of December 28.
On December 28 there was still time to avert the massacre.
In the early afternoon, the Lakota leader Sitanka had urged his people to surrender to the soldiers looking for them. Sitanka was desperately ill with pneumonia, and the people in his band were hungry, underdressed, and exhausted. They were making their way south across South Dakota from their own reservation in the northern part of the state to the Pine Ridge Reservation. There they planned to take shelter with another famous Lakota chief, Red Cloud. His people had done as Sitanka asked, and the soldiers escorted the Lakotas to a camp on South Dakota's Wounded Knee Creek, inside the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation.
For the soldiers, the surrender of Sitanka's band marked the end of what they called the Ghost Dance Uprising. It had been a tense month. Troops had pushed into the South Dakota reservations in November, prompting a band of terrified men who had embraced the Ghost Dance religion to gather their wives and children and ride out to the Badlands. But at long last, army officers and negotiators had convinced those Ghost Dancers to go back to Pine Ridge and turn themselves in to authorities before winter hit in earnest.
Sitanka’s people were not part of the Badlands group and, for the most part, were not Ghost Dancers. They had fled from their own northern reservation two weeks before when they learned that officers had murdered the great leader Sitting Bull in his own home. Army officers were anxious to find and corral Sitanka’s missing Lakotas before they carried the news that Sitting Bull had been killed to those who had taken refuge in the Badlands. Army leaders were certain the information would spook the Ghost Dancers and send them flying back to the Badlands. They were determined to make sure the two bands did not meet.
But South Dakota is a big state, and it was not until late in the afternoon of December 28 that the soldiers finally made contact with Sitanka's band. The encounter didn’t go quite as the officers planned: a group of soldiers were watering their horses in a stream when some of the traveling Lakotas surprised them. The Lakotas let the soldiers go, and the men promptly reported to their officers, who marched on the Lakotas as if they were going to war. Sitanka, who had always gotten along well with army officers, assured the commander that the band was on its way to Pine Ridge and asked his men to surrender unconditionally. They did.
By this time, Sitanka was so ill he couldn't sit up and his nose was dripping blood. Soldiers lifted him into an army ambulance—an old wagon—for the trip to the Wounded Knee camp. His ragtag band followed behind. Once there, the soldiers gave the Lakotas an evening ration and lent army tents to those who wanted them. Then the soldiers settled into guarding the camp.
And the soldiers celebrated, for they saw themselves as heroes of a great war, and it had been bloodless, and now, with the Lakotas’ surrender, they would be demobilized back to their home bases before the South Dakota winter closed in. As they celebrated, more and more troops poured in. It had been a long hunt across South Dakota for Sitanka and his band, and officers were determined the group would not escape them again.
In came the Seventh Cavalry, whose men had not forgotten that their former leader George Armstrong Custer had been killed by a band of Lakota in 1876. In came three mountain guns, which the soldiers trained on the Indian encampment from a slight rise above the camp.
For their part, the Lakotas were frightened. If their surrender was welcome and they were going to go with the soldiers to Red Cloud at Pine Ridge, as they had planned all along, why were there so many soldiers, with so many guns?
On this day and hour in 1890, in the cold and dark of a South Dakota December night, there were soldiers drinking, singing, and visiting with each other, and anxious Lakotas either talking to each other in low voices or trying to sleep. No one knew what the next day would bring, but no one expected what was going to happen.
One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability.
But it is never too late to change the future.
Note:
Every year on this date, I post the story of the Wounded Knee Massacre.
My book about that event was so hard to write I had to take a long break in the middle of it. When you write a book, you get to know your characters as if they were family. Sometimes you love them and sometimes you don’t, but they become part of you. As the massacre drew inexorably closer, I wrote about the scenery, plant life, and animals of the Plains as a distraction from what I knew was coming.
But it came anyway. Even after all these years, I still have a hard time on the date of the massacre.
In an interview this year, someone asked me why I write as if I am running out of time, and it hit me that I write these letters because no matter how hard I tried, I could not stop the Wounded Knee Massacre.
But maybe I can help to stop the next one.
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explainers only on FB?
Short Explainer: Thinking About the U.S. Economy new deal invest in ppl, social safety net, regulate biz, provide infra --> grow economy; tax brackets; reverse 1981 waste of money, more effic for rich ppl to guide economy, trickle down; gop said 1981 to 2021, but moved 50 trillion from bottom 90% to top 1%; Biden reverse bc ppl do not believe in democ; am rescue plan saved small biz; infrastructure, support labor, CHIPS sci act; bot 80% workers wages grew faster than inflation; trump had to lie about economy to reverse biden reversal; musk 330 B superpac neg ads, neoliberal supply side on steroids; goes after VA benefits; overtime pay 35 to 50k trump appt judge
?mibextid=rS40aB7S9Ucbxw6v&ref=watch_permalink&v=8412125038916668 11 min
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And because of that, that makes us. The beneficiaries of an extraordinary moment that looks much like the moment of the creation of the United States of America. You know, if you think about the framers of the Constitution, and certainly of the founders who wrote the Declaration of Independence.
Heather Cox Richardson
16:24:32
They are always talking about the fact they get to write the future. Thomas Paine said, I wrote this down.
Heather Cox Richardson
We have it in our power to begin the world over again.
And that joy in the creation, not in the having, but in the doing.
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GOP book What I’m Reading: An interview with Historian Heather Cox Richardson
What is your favorite history book?
I like history that pushes in new directions. I still have a very soft spot for Walter Prescott Webb’s The Great Plains (1931), which made a sweeping argument about the way the environment changed American history. Similarly, Charles Beard’s The Economic Origins of the American Constitution (1913) blew me away; his argument that political leaders acted from motives other than ideology was revolutionary in its era (even though his research was abysmal). The modern day work that still astonishes me for the sheer beauty of its imaginative scope is Richard White’s The Middle Ground (1991). For the pleasure of the words, I still read Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as Stage and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Crisis of the Old Order almost every year. But for fun, I will read anything at all written in the nineteenth century about America: everything from agricultural reports to trashy novels. And political speeches.
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Yesterday, November 5, 2024, Americans reelected former president Donald Trump, a Republican, to the presidency over Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris. As of Wednesday night, Trump is projected to get at least 295 electoral votes to Harris’s 226, with two Republican-leaning states still not called. The popular vote count is still underway.
Republicans also retook control of the Senate, where Democrats were defending far more seats than Republicans. Control of the House is not yet clear.
These results were a surprise to everyone. Trump is a 78-year-old convicted felon who has been found liable for sexual assault and is currently under indictment in a number of jurisdictions. He refused to leave office peacefully when voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020, instead launching an unprecedented attack on the U.S. Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes, and said during his campaign that he would be a “dictator” on his first day in office.
Pollsters thought the race would be very close but showed increasing momentum for Harris, and Harris’s team expressed confidence during the day. By posting on social media—with no evidence—that the voting in Pennsylvania was rigged, Trump himself suggested he expected he would lose the popular vote, at least, as he did in 2016 and 2020.
But in 2024, it appears a majority of American voters chose to put Trump back into office.
Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, offered a message of unity, the expansion of the economic policies that have made the U.S. economy the strongest in the world in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, and the creation of an “opportunity economy” that echoed many of the policies Republicans used to embrace. Trump vowed to take revenge on his enemies and to return the country to the neoliberal policies President Joe Biden had rejected in favor of investing in the middle class.
When he took office, Biden acknowledged that democracy was in danger around the globe, as authoritarians like Russian president Vladimir Putin and China’s president Xi Jinping maintained that democracy was obsolete and must be replaced by autocracies. Russia set out to undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that enforced the rules-based international order that stood against Russian expansion.
Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who overturned democracy in his own country, explained that the historical liberal democracy of the United States weakens a nation because the equality it champions means treating immigrants, LGBTQ+ individuals, and women as equal to men, thus ending traditionally patriarchal society.
In place of democracy, Orbán champions “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” This form of government holds nominal elections, although their outcome is preordained because the government controls all the media and has silenced opposition. Orbán’s model of minority rule promises a return to a white-dominated, religiously based society, and he has pushed his vision by eliminating the independent press, cracking down on political opposition, getting rid of the rule of law, and dominating the economy with a group of crony oligarchs.
In order to strengthen democracy at home and abroad, Biden worked to show that it delivered for ordinary Americans. He and the Democrats passed groundbreaking legislation to invest in rebuilding roads and bridges and build new factories to usher in green energy. They defended unions and used the Federal Trade Commission to break up monopolies and return more economic power to consumers.
Their system worked. It created record low unemployment rates, lifted wages for the bottom 80% of Americans, and built the strongest economy in the world in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, setting multiple stock market records. But that success turned out not to be enough to protect democracy.
In contrast, Trump promised he would return to the ideology of the era before 2021, when leaders believed in relying on markets to order the economy with the idea that wealthy individuals would invest more efficiently than if the government regulated business or skewed markets with targeted investment (in green energy, for example). Trump vowed to cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations and to make up lost revenue through tariffs, which he incorrectly insists are paid by foreign countries; tariffs are paid by U.S. consumers.
For policies, Trump’s campaign embraced the Project 2025 agenda led by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which has close ties to Orbán. That plan calls for getting rid of the nonpartisan civil service the U.S. has had since 1883 and for making both the Department of Justice and the military partisan instruments of a strong president, much as Orbán did in Hungary. It also calls for instituting religious rule, including an end to abortion rights, across the U.S. Part of the idea of “purifying” the country is the deportation of undocumented immigrants: Trump promised to deport 20 million people at an estimated cost of $88 billion to $315 billion a year.
That is what voters chose.
Pundits today have spent time dissecting the election results, many trying to find the one tweak that would have changed the outcome, and suggesting sweeping solutions to the Democrats’ obvious inability to attract voters. There is no doubt that a key factor in voters’ swing to Trump is that they associated the inflation of the post-pandemic months with Biden and turned the incumbents out, a phenomenon seen all over the world.
There is also no doubt that both racism and sexism played an important role in Harris’s defeat.
But my own conclusion is that both of those things were amplified by the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now. Russian political theorists called the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media “political technology.” They developed several techniques in this approach to politics, but the key was creating a false narrative in order to control public debate. These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
In the U.S., pervasive right-wing media, from the Fox News Channel through right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels run by influencers, have permitted Trump and right-wing influencers to portray the booming economy as “failing” and to run away from the hugely unpopular Project 2025. They allowed MAGA Republicans to portray a dramatically falling crime rate as a crime wave and immigration as an invasion. They also shielded its audience from the many statements of Trump’s former staff that he is unfit for office, and even that his chief of staff General John Kelly considers him a fascist and noted that he admires German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
As actor Walter Masterson posted: “I tried to educate people about tariffs, I tried to explain that undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes and are the foundation of this country. I explained Project 2025, I interviewed to show that they supported it. I can not compete against the propaganda machines of Twitter, Fox News, [Joe Rogan Experience], and NY Post. These spaces will continue to create reality unless we create a more effective way of reaching people.”
X users noted a dramatic drop in their followers today, likely as bots, no longer necessary, disengaged.
Many voters who were using their vote to make an economic statement are likely going to be surprised to discover what they have actually voted for. In his victory speech, Trump said the American people had given him an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.”
White nationalist Nick Fuentes posted, “Your body, my choice. Forever,” and gloated that men will now legally control women’s bodies. His post got at least 22,000 “likes.” Right-wing influencer Benny Johnson, previously funded by Russia, posted: “It is my honor to inform you that Project 2025 was real the whole time.”
Today, Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump would launch the “largest mass deportation operation” of undocumented immigrants, and the stock in private prison companies GEO Group and CoreCivic jumped 41% and 29%, respectively. Those jumps were part of a bigger overall jump: the Dow Jones Industrial Average moved up 1,508 points in what Washington Post economic columnist Heather Long said was the largest post-election jump in more than 100 years.
As for the lower prices Trump voters wanted, Kate Gibson of CBS today noted that on Monday, the National Retail Federation said that Trump’s proposed tariffs will cost American consumers between $46 billion and $78 billion a year as clothing, toys, furniture, appliances, and footwear all become more expensive. A $50 pair of running shoes, Gibson said, would retail for $59 to $64 under the new tariffs.
U.S. retailers are already preparing to raise prices of items from foreign suppliers, passing to consumers the cost of any future tariffs.
Trump’s election will also mean he will no longer have to answer to the law for his federal indictments: special counsel Jack Smith is winding them down ahead of Trump’s inauguration. So he will not be tried for retaining classified documents or attempting to overthrow the U.S. government when he lost in 2020.
This evening, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán posted on social media that he had just spoken with Trump, and said: “We have big plans for the future!”
This afternoon, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at her alma mater, Howard University, to concede the election to Trump.
She thanked her supporters, her family, the Bidens, the Walz family, and her campaign staff and volunteers. She reiterated that she believes Americans have far more in common than separating us.
In what appeared to be a message to Trump, she noted: “A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results. That principle as much as any other distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny, and anyone who seeks the public trust must honor it. At the same time in our nation, we owe loyalty not to a president or a party, but to the Constitution of the United States, and loyalty to our conscience and to our God.
“My allegiance to all three is why I am here to say, while I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fuels this campaign, the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness and the dignity of all people, a fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation, the ideals that reflect America at our best. That is a fight I will never give up.”
Harris urged people “to organize, to mobilize and to stay engaged for the sake of freedom and justice and the future that we all know we can build together.” She told those feeling as if the world is dark indeed these days, to “fill the sky with the light of a billion brilliant stars, the light of optimism, of faith, of truth and service,” and to let “that work guide us, even in the face of setbacks, toward the extraordinary promise of the United States of America.”
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Notes:
https://www.vox.com/2024-elections/383208/donald-trump-victory-kamala-harris-global-trend-incumbents
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/virtual-politics-and-the-corruption-post-soviet-democracy
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-victory-china-tariffs-taxes-inflation/
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-day-one-election-victory-karoline-leavitt-1981319
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-mass-deportation-program-cost/story?id=115318034
https://19thnews.org/2024/11/kamala-harris-full-concession-speech/
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4953059-trump-john-kelly-fascist/
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https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-28-2024?r=9x6mm&triedRedirect=true
Just a week ago, it seems, a new America began. I’ve struggled ever since to figure out what the apparent sudden revolution in our politics means.
I keep coming back to the Ernest Hemingway quote about how bankruptcy happens. He said it happens in two stages, first gradually and then suddenly.
That’s how scholars say fascism happens, too—first slowly and then all at once—and that’s what has been keeping us up at night.
But the more I think about it, the more I think maybe democracy happens the same way, too: slowly, and then all at once.
At this country’s most important revolutionary moments, it has seemed as if the country turned on a dime.
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12,598 views Oct 31, 2023
During the impeachment crisis of 2019, Heather Cox Richardson, Ph.D., professor of history at Boston College, launched a daily Facebook essay providing the historical background of the daily torrent of news. It soon turned into a popular Substack newsletter, Letters from an American, and its subscriber base ballooned to more than two million dedicated readers who rely on her plainspoken and informed take on the present and past in America.
In Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, Prof. Richardson crafts a compelling and original narrative, explaining how, over the decades, a small group of wealthy people have made war on American ideals. By weaponizing language and promoting false history they have led us into authoritarianism -- creating a disaffected population and then promising to recreate an imagined past where those people could feel important again. She argues that taking our country back starts by remembering the elements of the nation’s true history that marginalized Americans have always upheld. Their dedication to the principles on which this nation was founded has enabled us to renew and expand our commitment to democracy in the past....
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...NEW GILDED AGE
...This is the America Republicans want to return us to today. This is how, they assert, the Constitution wants us to live. The way things used to be.
In the decades immediately following the Civil War, American government was fundamentally altered. The process was sped up with the 16th Amendment, authorizing the income tax, and the 19th Amendment that allowed women to vote. Along with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, these changes provided the basis for the US government to intervene in the “free market” and create America’s first broad middle class.
FDR imposed a top income tax rate of 90 percent on the morbidly rich, 50% on corporate profits, and passed legislation giving average people the right to unionize, balancing the power equation between management and labor.
The result was that by 1980 well over 60 percent of Americans were in the middle class, the majority with a single household income.
This is the series of events to which Republicans object when they say they want to either “return America to constitutional principles” or enter into a “post-constitutional” era, depending on who’s speaking.
Libertarian billionaires consider any interference in the “magical free market” to be a violation of some sort of natural law that creates Dickensonian societies with massive concentrations of wealth at the top, widespread poverty among the working class at the bottom, and a small middle class made up almost entirely of entrepreneurs and professional people like doctors and lawyers.
This is why Republican intellectuals like former OMB Director Russell Vought, a major advisor to Trump andProject 2025, are, as Heather Cox Richardson noted in her brilliant Substack newsletter:
“[C]alling for draconian cuts to government agencies, student loans, and housing, health care, and food assistance. [Vought] called for $2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over ten years, more than $600 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act, more than $400 billion in cuts to food assistance, and so on.”
Its why Republicans are working so hard to disempower women in the workplace, starting with eliminating their control over their own reproductive capacity (which is what drove the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s post-Roe v Wade).
It’s also why they’re doing everything they can to shut down corporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs nationwide; the majority of the hiring and increased pay benefits coming from corporate, government, and academic DEI programs go to women, a situation Republican men find intolerable.
Republicans want to either “return” to a pre-Civil War understanding of the Constitution (as advocated by Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito) or a “post-constitutional” order in which the last century’s “innovations” (including the income tax, women’s suffrage, “welfare” programs, entitlements, and even free public school and college) are ended.
We see this in the ways Republicans on the Supreme Court have gutted both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, how they’ve stripped most of the teeth out of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, and how they’re working to castrate most regulatory agencies including the EPA, FTC, and even the IRS.
Some of it is simple greed: as the middle class shrinks and poverty grows, the cash stash at the very top of the American economic pyramid grows exponentially. Other American oligarchs follow the teachings of Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, and Ronald Reagan who all argued that a larger-than-50% middle class is a threat to the stability of the nation.
When the 1960s happened and workers, women, draft-age young men, Blacks, Hispanics, and gays were all simultaneously demanding equal rights and protection from exploitation, conservatives in the GOP believed they were seeing the actual, disastrous unraveling of America.
They argued that transferring even part of the wealth of rich people to help build a middle class is the first step in a socialist agenda that must ultimately end with torches, pitchforks, and rich people facing the guillotine in a full-blown communist takeover of America.
As Richardson notes:
“Vought argues that the United States is in a ‘post constitutional moment’ that ‘pays only lip service to the old Constitution.’ He attributes that crisis to ‘the Left,’ which he says ‘quietly adopted a strategy of institutional change,’ by which he appears to mean the growth of the federal government to protect individual Americans. He attributes that change to the presidency of President Woodrow Wilson beginning in 1913. Vought calls for what he calls ‘Radical Constitutionalism’ to destroy the power of the modern administrative state and instead elevate the president to supreme authority.”
These are the real stakes in this fall’s election:
— Democratic President Joe Biden believes that government intervening in the marketplace to build and sustain a broad and diverse middle class is good for all Americans. He holds up the success of the New Deal and the Great Society as exemplars, justification for programs holding corporate America to account and empowering women, minorities, and workers generally.
— Republican Donald Trump and his fellow billionaires in the GOP believe the middle class is still too large at today’s 49 percent and needs to be cut further down to size to take America back to the pre-1913 “constitutional” era when there was no income tax; women couldn’t vote, work, or have a checking account; there was no minimum wage or unemployment insurance; no Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid; and police routinely collaborated with employers to murder union organizers.
Republicans are dead serious about this. Your vote, and those of your friends and acquaintances, will determine which of these two dueling narratives about the future of the American middle class will win.
Choose wisely.
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Out of the top 10 posts with the most interactions that Media Matters analyzed, 6 were from right-leaning Facebook pages
- These 6 posts were from Newsmax, Ben Shapiro, Sean Hannity, Mike Huckabee, and Fox News, which had 2 posts. Out of these 6 posts, half contained industry talking points or attacked the administrative state and federal agencies that the right has villainized for enforcing lockdowns and vaccine mandates. These reactions and the sources cited in them further demonstrated the decision as a victory for the fossil fuel industry and its conservative allies which helped orchestrate this result to line their pockets and hinder progress on climate action.
Among the top examples from right-leaning pages that contained misinformation was a post from Ben Shapiro with nearly 22,000 interactions that linked to an article from the Daily Wire. The article quoted Heritage Foundation research fellow Daren Bakst, who claimed that the court had rightfully blocked the EPA from overstepping its boundaries and that only Congress can make certain regulatory decisions under the Constitution.
The Heritage Foundation has received millions of dollars in funding from Koch-connected organizations, as well as considerable funding from the fossil fuel industry, while outwardly denying the scientific consensus on climate change. The foundation has also played a major role in moving courts to the right, and even created a secretly financed program to train law clerks to elevate its views. According to The New York Times, Heritage helped the Federalist Society compile the lists of potential Supreme Court nominees from which President Donald Trump chose to appoint Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Both justices voted to stifle the EPA. However, the Daily Wire article ignored these connections between the conservative think tank, its financial backers in the fossil fuel industry, and the court’s ruling.
The article also quoted Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who baselessly claimed that the Clean Power Plan would “lead to higher utility bills, job loss and overall increased energy prices.” While these regulations were never implemented, the plan was predicted to have cut electricity bills by 7% and deliver up to $34 billion in health benefits.
- [twt ben shapiro]
- Many of the top 10 posts, particularly those from right-leaning pages, framed the decision primarily as a victory against the EPA’s ability to enforce regulations – or what Mike Huckabee referred to, in a post that received more than 11,000 interactions, as “the reign of tyranny by unaccountable bureaucrats.” A post from Sean Hannity that garnered 14,000 interactions also linked to an article on his website describing the decision as a “blow to climate extremists” and calling to “unleash American energy.”[twt]
- The top left-leaning post, which was from historian Heather Cox Richardson and had over 61,000 interactions, provided an overview of several recent and upcoming Supreme Court decisions and pointed out that the court set a precedent in West Virginia v. EPA using legal reasoning that was even rejected by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia in 2001. She also highlighted excerpts from Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent pointing out that Congress already delegates power to federal agencies to address issues where it does not have expertise.
Another popular left-leaning post about the case from former President Barack Obama,which had over 55,000 interactions, mentioned climate impacts on vulnerable populations and urged Congress to “pass President Biden’s climate and clean energy investments.” Though right-leaning posts received more engagement overall, Richardson and Obama’s posts each had twice as many interactions as the top right-wing misinformation posts.
- the top Facebook posts about the ruling from left-leaning pages, which accounted for 3 of the top 10 posts, criticized the decision while highlighting various grievances with how the court came to its decision and what impact the ruling will have on the communities being affected by the climate crisis. [twt]
- The only post about the case from an ideologically nonaligned Facebook page in the top 10 came from CNN. It received just over 12,000 interactions and linked to a fairly detailed article putting the decision in the context of urgent calls from scientists to cut emissions and transition away from fossil fuels, and citing the 2021 report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which called the climate crisis a “code red” for humanity.
Although left-leaning and nonaligned pages were vocal about the gravity of the Supreme Court’s decision, the right was was still able to co-opt much of the conversation on Facebook, shifting attention and blame away from the small group of right-wing figures and industry executives who benefit from the ruling to hamstring environmental protections in the face of the worsening climate crisis, leaving the rest of us to grapple with an uncertain future.
- none of the top 10 posts outlined how, as The New York Times puts it, the case “is the product of a coordinated, multi-year strategy by Republican attorneys general, conservative legal activists and their funders, several with ties to the oil and coal industries.” Some only mentioned the court case in passing – for example, a popular post with more than 16,000 interactions from controversial documentarian Michael Moore referenced the case once among a host of other political grievances in a “declaration.”
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