Dennis King is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1965). He has lived in New York City for over 50 years. He is the author of Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism (1989) and Get the Facts on Anyone (three editions, last in 1999). A specialist on political cults and the far right, he has written widely for national and local publications and on the web.
The Green Party is once again running a spoiler candidate, this time in the very close race for the U.S. Senate in North Carolina. Green candidate Matthew Hoh, an author, peace activist, and disabled former U.S. Marine, may divert enough votes from Democratic candidate Cheri Beasley to guarantee that the GOP wins the seat, thus possibly giving the GOP control of the Senate on top of the House, which the Trump party is already expected to win.
Since the GOP has now unmistakably morphed into a white supremacist, anti-Semitic and violently authoritarian party, a turnover of control of the Senate thanks to a few thousand spoiler votes in North Carolina could spell the beginning of the end for democracy in our country.
But what do the leaders of the Greens care? They are the same sect that didn’t even blink an eye when Jill Stein, their candidate for President in 2016, provided Trump’s margin of victory in four key battleground states (thanks in part to a Moscow social media blitz to get progressive Democrats and independents to vote for her instead of Hillary Clinton). https://www.nbcnews.com/…/russians-launched-pro-jill…). The Greens thus played a major role in unleashing our ongoing national nightmare.
In 2018 an unhinged Green convention virtually declared war on the Democrats, not Trump. They were already in the process of selecting 10 spoiler candidates for potentially close House, Senate and gubernatorial races from Arizona to upstate New York, with the aim of preventing Democratic victories. Luckily none succeeded. https://socialistcurrents.org/?p=3160
The Greens were, in 2016 and 2018, and still are today–even after January 6–motivated by a fanatical hatred of the Democrats. But they see little political difference between the two major parties except that the Democrats are the ones they hope to replace.
Stein has certainly not changed her tune. Since 2016 she has refused to reveal who paid for her trip to Moscow in Dec. 2015 to participate in a round-table dinner with mass murderer and Crimea occupier Vladimir Putin, former U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency chief Mike Flynn, and several other individuals. Also, Stein has not revealed any private discussions she might have held with Russian officials during her trip, in spite of the support her campaign subsequently received from the Russians.
Now Stein is back in the picture, strongly supporting Mr. Hoh, whose views on Putin’s aggression in Ukraine have been, at best, ambiguous. Among other efforts, Stein strongly supported Hoh in a Zoom fireside chat with him on Oct. 5.
If Putin was delighted to make the Greens his puppets in 2016, he must be equally delighted at the prospect of an increasingly pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine GOP winning control of the Senate.
Here are excerpts from a memorandum to President Biden signed by Hoh and other members of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) last May, when Putin’s horrifying ruthlessness in Ukraine was already becoming clear.
The memo began: “Mainstream media have marinated the minds of most Americans in a witches’ brew of misleading information on Ukraine…” And then, in one of their summary points, the signers appeared to accept Putin’s view of the nature of the Ukraine government:
“Nazi sympathizers in Ukraine will not escape attention on May 9, as Russia celebrates the 77th anniversary of the victory by the Allies over Nazi Germany. Every Russian knows that more than 26 million Soviets died during that war…Denazification of Ukraine is one of the key factors accounting for Putin’s approval level of above 80 percent….”
In their most cynical paragraph, the signers even tried to blame failure to make progress on global warming on the U.S. decision to help Ukraine fend off invasion: “In last year’s ‘Threat Assessment’, National Intelligence Director Avril Haines identified climate change as a major national security and ‘human security’ challenge that can only be met by nations working together. War in Ukraine is already diverting much needed attention from this impending threat to coming generations.”
Many of the predictions put forward in the memo have subsequently been shown to be wrong. And factually, the “Nazi” nature of the Ukrainian government was already known to be false (the country’s president is Jewish and it was Putin who was bankrolling neo-nazi, neo-fascist and Christian nationalist groups in both Western and Eastern Europe).
Overall, the memo puts the blame for the crisis on the West (“the U.S. and NATO”), not on Putin, although it was his regime that invaded a sovereign nation on trumped-up charges and was already committing horrific war crimes. The memo signers seem unaware that if the U.S. and NATO had not taken action to arm Ukraine, the invasion would have succeeded–and NATO, already weakened by the machinations of former President Trump (clearly a Putin admirer and hostile to NATO), would have become an empty shell.
American progressives who are alarmed by the spread of authoritarianism/fascism in our own country and around the world should stop ignoring the U.S. Green sect’s self-serving addiction to spoiler races that always help the Right and, in recent years, the farthest Right. The Green sect (the national leadership and some of the state parties) are not part of the progressive movement. They are a malignant faction with no sense of the danger of fascism that is looming in our country, only a concentration on their own political fantasies. This faction should be boycotted by progressives, and its attempts to make alliances on the liberal-left should be rebuffed in no uncertain language. When possible, state and local Green organizations that truly operate in a decentralized fashion and try to avoid helping the GOP should be encouraged to publicly acknowledge the destructiveness of the national leadership’s spoiler tactics.
The trickery of the Greens in North Carolina this year may not work; Beasley may win anyway or she may lose by a margin far beyond what the Greens took away. But the Green spoiler in 2024 when Trump or one of his clones is on the ballot may do better, especially if Democrats are demoralized by increased political polarization. Activists and campaign teams should be prepared to warn the public against the Greens’ favorite political tactic in a more aggressive manner than anyone has attempted before now.
Wikipedia has a detailed account (see “Battle of al-Hasakah”) of the Kurdish victory last month, with U.S. help, that Biden didn’t even bother to refer to in his Feb. 3 announcement of the U.S. attack on the compound of ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi. Fortunately, no Americans were killed in taking out the ISIS leader, but the Kurdish SDF suffered over 100 deaths (far less than those of the ISIS fighters) in their desperate battle at al-Hasakah to minimize the number of ISIS militants escaping from the prison in that city and to drive off the ISIS attackers.
Biden didn’t acknowledge the SDF deaths in his announcement. One would think he should have a new ending for any future speech or announcement about the struggle against Isis: “God protect our troops and the troops of our Kurdish allies.” Why is he so nervous about offending Turkish dictator Erdogan, ferocious enemy of the SDF? Erdogan’s cynical manipulation of Trump in 2019, causing Trump to betray the Kurds, was a direct assault on the U.S. national interest and the honor of the U.S. armed forces for which Erdogan has yet to pay any price.
Please note that the Wikipedia description of the battle in its first paragraph as a “partial strategic victory and major propaganda victory” for ISIS is not properly cited and is contradicted by the account that follows, including of the very large number of ISIS deaths, casualties and recaptures. According to Voice of America, the battle was characterized by Brigadier General Isaac Peltier, commander of Special Operations Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve, as a “huge ISIS failure.”
And would the battle have ever occurred if Donald Trump had not slashed U.S. support for the fight against Isis in Syria and thus failed to build a hardened prison for captured ISIS fighters?
President Biden announced this morning how a raid by U.S. troops against ISIS in northern Syria resulted in the death of ISIS’s new leader. Unfortunately, there was not any emphasis on the heroic Kurds in northern Syria, who, in late January, fought for over a week, with some air and armored vehicle support from the U.S., to prevent ISIS from breaking into a prison in al-Hasakah and releasing thousands of ISIS members detained there. The successful raid against the ISIS leader was almost certainly connected to the battle in al-Hasakah that resulted in defeat for ISIS.
It is not known by many Americans how the Kurds continued the battle against ISIS after Donald Trump betrayed them in October 2019 to Turkish dictator Erdogan in apparent hope of getting a Trump Tower in Istanbul. Nor do many Americans know just how many Kurdish women, including Kurdish women fighters, were raped and killed when the U.S. allowed the Turks to come over the border and seize Kurdish territory–the territory of our ALLIES, the ones who had done most of the successful ground fighting against ISIS in northern Syria since 2014 (with robust U.S. air support) that contributed so much to the defeat of ISIS in Iraq as well as Syria.
This may have been the greatest betrayal of an ally in U.S. history and one that Biden has been silent about, as has too much of the U.S. military leadership both at the time of the betrayal and ever since. Former Marine general James Mattis, Trump’s defense secretary, resigned over an earlier Trump decision in Dec. 2018 to pull out of Syria. Mattis’s resignation may have been caused by his recognition of an impending and profound matter of honor as well as by his alarm over the strategic implications. In The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg quoted Admiral Michael Mullen, former head of the Joint Chiefs, as saying, based on a conversation with Mattis the day before his friend’s resignation: “He’s not going to leave friends and allies on the battlefield.” The friends and allies who would be abandoned on the battlefield the following year were the Kurds.
Oh, and when will the U.S. Justice Department begin to investigate Trump’s (and possibly Jared Kushner’s and West Point graduate Mike Pompeo’s) role in the betrayal. Certainly Trump deserves to spend the rest of his life in jail for the rapes and murders that resulted, although I know the chances of that are almost non-existent.
A good beginning at some measure of justice would be for MSNBC to start interviewing Erdogan’s Kurdish victims and the U.S. troops who served with the Kurds until Trump told them, in effect, to “stand by.” And then let’s pressure Biden, his Secretary of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs to break their silence on Trump’s orchestration of one of the most dishonorable events in the history of our military.
One step might be to reach out to the families of the Kurdish fighters killed in the battle that helped to stave off a disaster of the first order at al-Hasakah last month. The U.S. should offer burial of these heroes at Arlington National Cemetery or, if the families prefer, erection at the cemetery of a memorial to the fallen. I know this is an unusual idea, but what Trump did was far more than unusual; he implicated our nation and military in a high crime and cynical betrayal that requires something more than an “oh yeah, sorry, I forgot about the Kurds” mumble from Biden.
And maybe, while he’s at it, our current President could give the Kurds sufficiently advanced weapons to make Erdogan think three times before launching any more campaigns of murder, rape and land seizure against Kurdish territory in Syria.
The Senate Republicans are all scoundrels. Some support Trump in their fanatical hearts, others know he’s a menace but are too cowardly to speak out. They have all violated their oaths to uphold the Constitution.
Compare them to Winston Churchill, who spoke repeatedly, as a Conservative MP in the British Parliament, against Chamberlain’s 1938 Munich Agreement with Hitler. Unlike the ilk of Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell, Churchill and his small following (precursors of the Lincoln Project) stood tall against the danger to democracy. Here’s an excerpt from a March 1939 Churchill speech:
“[W]ho are these people who go about saying that even if it were true [that Munich was a disaster], why state the facts? I reply, why mislead the nation? What is the use of Parliament if it is not the place where true statements can be brought before the people? What is the use of sending Members to the House of Commons who just say the popular things of the moment, and merely endeavor to give satisfaction to the Government Whips by cheering loudly every Ministerial platitude, and by walking through the Lobbies oblivious of the criticisms they hear? People talk about our Parliamentary institutions and Parliamentary democracy; but if these are to survive, it will not be because the Constituencies return tame, docile, subservient Members, and try to stamp out every form of independent judgment.”—Churchill, “The Fruits of Munich,” from Blood, Sweat, and Tears, 1941.
1. Why couldn’t Judge Amy Coney Barrett understand that the Rose Garden on Sept. 26 would be an unsafe place for parading around her children without face masks?
President Trump presented Judge Barrett as his nominee for the Supreme Court at an outdoor Rose Garden ceremony on Sept. 26 attended by more than 200 people. Few wore facemasks and there was no social distancing—the chairs and rows were crammed close together.
Showing off the kids, all without masks.
Judge Barrett and her husband, Jesse, brought their seven children: one daughter 19, two daughters 16, three sons
between 8 and 13, and a 9-year old daughter. None of them wore masks at the
event.
According to the Washington Post (Oct. 2), Judge Barrett had tested positive for the Covid-19 virus during the summer and had experienced mild symptoms. CNN reported that her husband had also tested positive but had been asymptomatic. No evidence has emerged that any of their children had tested positive during the summer, but given the parents’ experiences alone, it is certainly odd that the family would disregard normal safety precautions.
Videos from C-SPAN and the Washington Post show President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump, both mask-free, escorting the Barrett family–to the tune of “Hail to the Chief”–out of the White House and down the steps to the podium facing the Rose Garden audience. The family poses briefly with the President, and the First Lady then leads Mr. Barrett and the children around to the far end of the front row which they proceed to fill. (The presence of all seven on that row is confirmed by a New York Times photo in which the First Lady is shown seated beside the central aisle with three of the younger children to her left, followed by their father, the three older girls, the special-needs youngest child, and a babysitter.)
President Trump announced on Oct. 2 that both he and the First Lady had tested positive for Covid-19. Later that day, former Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, who had been seated directly behind the First Lady at the Rose Garden event and thus in close proximity to three of the youngest Barrett children, would confirm that she too had tested positive.
The NYT photo identifies more attendees on the same side of the aisle as the children, and on rows very close to them, who tested positive. These include Riverside, CA pastor Greg Laurie and Notre Dame University president John I. Jenkins (both two rows behind the children) and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie (three rows behind).
Seated on the second row
directly behind the Barrett family was Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia and his
wife Patricia; the Labor Department would announce on Oct. 12 that Patricia (first seat to Ms. Conway’s left) had tested positive for the virus. (Her husband tested negative but announced he would be working from home.) Since the White House blocked contact tracing of the Rose Garden event and the Administration has been less than forthcoming about the timing of relevant positive and
negative tests (including whether or not the President tested positive before his first debate with Joe Biden on Sept. 29), it is unclear if Patricia Scalia’s positive test is related to the Rose Garden event.
In the seating area across the aisle (to the First Lady’s right) the soon-to-be positives included Senator Mike Lee (UT) (seated in the second row aisle seat directly across from Ms. Conway, with his wife Sharon beside him), and Senator Thom Tillis (NC) (in the middle of the second row across from Ms. Conway and four seats to the right of Senator Lee). Also on that side was another positive, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, in the fourth row aisle seat. Two McEnany aides, who would also test positive, were much farther back in the audience.
Five adults (four without masks) who would soon test positive can be seen in this picture along with three of the youngest of the Barrett children}.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top authority on infectious disease, would describe the Rose Garden ceremony as a Covid-19 “super spreader event” and the number of infected at the White House would rise to almost three dozen with at least 11 linked to the ceremony, which was basically a Trump campaign event using Barrett and her family as the pretext.
After the ceremony the children were escorted back to the podium, close to the President; then, the President and the First Lady escorted the family back inside the White House.
Thus we can see from the videos that the Barrett children were inside the toxic White House environment before the event and again afterwards. Did any of them wear masks inside? How long were they there, both before and after? Did anyone else wear masks inside? Who did the children interact with inside? How close did they get to the President and First Lady while inside? Did any of them interact with Barron Trump, the 14-year-old son of the Trumps, who testified positive for the virus at about the same time as his parents but whose condition was not reported to the public until Oct. 14?
And what was going through the head of Judge Barrett while this was going on? Apparently she was not thinking much about the risk that would have been obvious to any parent who accepted the consensus of the world scientific community about the virus. Indeed, from the viewpoint of infectious disease and public health experts, her decisions about the events of Sept. 26—both in the Rose Garden and inside the White House—can only be described as reckless.
According to CNN on Oct. 4, a reception was held after the Rose Garden Event in the Diplomatic Reception Room “and the adjoining hallway” and included “dozens” of ceremony attendees without masks or social distancing.
The New York Times had photographers at the reception and participating in the Oval Office photo op. The NYT article accompanying the pictures stated:
Experts say the more risky time spent that day was at a reception inside the White House, where President Trump met with a smaller group of guests.
There, Mr. Trump mingled with Judge Barrett, her family and prominent Republicans in the Oval Office and in the Diplomatic Room. Research has shown that transmission of the virus tends to happen indoors, and gatherings where guests are maskless and in tight quarters can be a recipe for “super spreader” events.
In the photos described below, no one is wearing a mask. The identification of individuals as “P” designates that they would test positive for the virus later. There is no evidence at this point that any of them knew they were positive at the time of the Rose Garden event, although they should have known that their behavior carried risks for themselves and others.
One photo shows the Barrett couple’s nine-year-old daughter standing about two feet away from Trump, who is apparently introducing her to several women, including Patricia Scalia (P), who is shown in Rose Garden photos as sitting next to Ms. Conway (P) and thus in very close proximity to three younger Barrett children seated between the First Lady (P) and their father Jesse.
A second photo shows Judge Barrett and her 11-year-old boy talking to Chris Christie (P), who was very close to them.
A third photo shows her eleven year old sitting beside Senator Tillis (P) with about a foot separating their faces. Although Tillis had worn a mask at the outdoor event, he did not do so when photographed at the reception. He would later acknowledge in an interview with WRAL-TV that this had been a mistake: “I let my guard down because we’d all been tested two hours before the event. It’s just another experience that tells me, even when you think you’re in a safe setting, you should always wear a mask.”
A fourth photo shows Judge Barrett, with her eleven year old beside her, talking with Alex Azar, Secretary of Health and Human Services. Azar, supposedly a major figures in fighting against the pandemic, is not wearing a mask and his distance from the boy is much less than the CDC guideline of six feet. Attorney General Bill Barr is also part of the maskless conversation. Barr had earlier spent several minutes talking up close with Ms. Conway (P) in the Rose Garden.
A fifth photo shows Judge Barrett talking with Senator Tillis without any of her children in the picture. Standing near them and apparently following their conversation, is Maureen Scalia, widow of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Ms. Scalia, who appears to be close to or in her eighties, is not wearing a mask. It is universally known that seniors are at special risk—even Trump doesn’t dispute that. So why didn’t Barrett, who makes so much of her background as a law clerk for Justice Scalia, do something? Why did Maureen Scalia’s son, Secretary Scalia, with whom she sat in the Rose Garden, allow her to stroll into this indoor event without a mask? Why didn’t her daughter-in-law, Patricia, also in the room (in the blue dress), take action? Why didn’t Tillis or anyone else in the room do anything? Nothing could better show the collective psychosis in the circles around Donald Trump. No wonder that Barrett wasn’t doing more to protect her children.
A sixth photo shows Senator Lee (P) and Sharon Lee talking with Judge Barrett but without any of the Barrett children in the picture. The photo suggests that Sen. Lee was getting too close and making Barrett uncomfortable.
CNN and others posted pictures taken at the Oval Office photo op session, also mask free, where the President and First Lady posed with six of Barrett’s seven children as well as the parents. In the most formal picture posted, the nine-year-old daughter is positioned in front of her mother and directly beside Trump. At the end of the row on Trump’s right are White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, who are both in constant close contact with the President. Pictures were taken from different angles as the President chatted with the children.
The White House blocked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from doing contact tracing after the Sept. 26 events, putting the White House Medical Unit in charge although it has neither the expertise nor the resources to perform this task. The unit, which has been evasive about the President’s medical condition ever since he took office (and most recently about his Covid-19 status), made no attempt to do contact tracing about the White House events of that day. We have only limited information, largely that gathered by the media, about the number of people infected, especially the invitees from outside the DC area who flew home immediately afterwards.
2. Does Judge Barrett support Trump’s ignorant, irrational and totally unscientific approach to the pandemic?
Trump’s viewpoint, discredited by experts on the pandemic throughout the world, is that the virus is not all that dangerous (except to elderly persons with special conditions), that face masks
and social distancing are not necessary, that mass testing and contact tracing are a waste of time, that children don’t get the virus, and that letting the virus run its course without countermeasures will create “herd immunity” over time.
Some of the most extreme of Trump’s views come from Dr. Scott Atlas, a physician with no background in infectious disease or public health. Atlas appears on Fox News as an opponent of the Affordable Care Act. In August, Trump appointed Atlas as his new Covid-19 advisor; the result was an increase in White House censorship of the CDC and new efforts to keep Dr. Fauci out of the loop.
Trump’s crank views on the virus, as translated into official government policy and carried out in Red states by governors loyal to the President, have resulted in over 220,000 deaths in the U.S., the worse record in the world. And experts with decades of experience in immunology, infectious disease and public health have pointed out again and again:
Children do get the virus (almost 700,000 in the U.S., although the number of deaths has been small so far).
Although “herd” immunity can be achieved through vaccination, there are no cases in which in which it has been achieved by allowing natural infection with a novel virus to simply run its course; attempts to use this passive strategy would lead to catastrophic loss of life (millions of Americans) with no guarantee of any success. In addition, there is very scary evidence that people who have recovered from the virus can get re-infected.
Facemasks, social distancing, bans on large public gatherings, mass testing and contact tracing have been proven worldwide to be our best weapons against the virus until a vaccine is developed—and premature abandonment of these measures has only caused new outbreaks.
It may be difficult to believe that Judge Barrett would bring her children unprotected into a Trump event organized on a no-protection-needed basis unless she believed Trump’s claims, including his assurances that children are immune to the virus. If she does believe him, we must conclude that she has little respect for science, and that this will affect her future decisions relating to government policy on pandemics—and also on decisions about global warming and the need for environmental regulations to halt the use of cancer-causing chemicals. An anti-science bias so extreme that it is displayed even in regard to the safety of one’s own children should disqualify any nominee from appointment to the Supreme Court.
3. Did Judge Barrett bring her children to the outdoor and indoor White House events of Sept. 26 with the knowledge or strong suspicion that it was not safe to do so?
It would appear that Trump was doing what he usually does—offer someone a job that comes with a catch: they must show their loyalty to him by doing something that deeply compromises them. Just consider the many White House employees and cabinet members who, since the pandemic began, have knowingly put themselves, and their loved ones at home, in peril by not wearing masks in crowded White House offices and conference rooms because to wear a mask would (a) offend Trump, (b) call into question Trump’s infallibility, (c) result in ridicule of the mask wearer by Trump and his toadies, and (d) reduce the mask wearer’s chance of any promotion because of suspicions about his or her loyalty.
Did Judge Barrett decide that putting her children at risk (no masks, no social distancing, seats on the front row to give Trump a stage prop) was necessary to show gratitude to him and to assure him that she would remain loyal when and if legal challenges to the outcome of the November election are heard by the Supreme Court?
Showing one’s children to the public is something that any candidate for high appointment or election to public office might justifiably do, but under pandemic circumstances Barrett should have found a safe way to do it. That she didn’t, suggests she knew that any hesitation in accepting the family-as-performing-seals celebration in the manner Trump needed for his own virus-defying macho campaign purposes might have become a deal breaker on her nomination, and that she put her children in jeopardy in order to reassure Trump as to her pliability and loyalty. Does
anyone think that if she’d said, “no, sir, I will not bring my children to this event unless it mandates facemasks and social distancing for all participants, including yourself,” Trump would not have withdrawn her nomination and found another candidate?
Barrett’s acquiescence in putting her children, especially her four underage children, in a crowded and mostly mask-free gathering of over 200 adults (an event that any real expert on infectious disease would describe as bonkers) and into an even more dangerous indoor event can’t be explained away. If not simply a matter of scientific ignorance (itself a cause for rejection of a nomination), it reveals a lack of moral judgment that would prevent her from ruling on the side of science whenever it clashes with corporate or Republican Party interests—yet another reason for the U.S. Senate to vote her down.
He puts some kids in cages; others, he uses for photo ops to show how child-friendly he is.
On the first day of Barrett’s confirmation hearing on Oct. 12, her husband and six out of seven of their children were present. In the wake of the Rose Garden debacle they were predictably wearing masks. The positive-testing Senator Lee was present in person. He praised the judge for having a large family but then chose a less than respectful attitude toward the family by addressing the committee without his mask and also by his provocatively inconsistent wearing of it otherwise (even committee chair Lindsey Graham was seen to whip out a mask defensively when Lee came near). Meanwhile, Senator Joni Ernst (IA) waxed eloquent about Judge Barrett’s “precious family” but did not see fit to tell Senator Lee to drop his stupid posturing.
Judge Barrett herself could have insisted that Lee keep his mask on while speaking in the presence of her children, and also could have stated that she and her children would leave the room unless he either did what she requested or agreed to participate electronically from outside the room. Lee would have had to comply, especially since Sen. Ted Cruz was participating electronically that day while in self-isolation because of his own contacts with Lee. But Judge Barrett didn’t do what would have been so easy; she chose to let Lee, who had pranced around the Rose Garden after the Sept. 26 ceremony trying to hug and kiss people, use the hearing to show his ongoing Trumpian disdain for masks and for the safety of both children and adults.
Conclusion:
I find it both bizarre and sinister that Barrett, presented by Trump and the Republicans as an all-American poster mom, has been so willing—in the midst of the worst pandemic in U.S. history—to let her children be used as pawns of a cynical campaign to put her on the Supreme Court so she can vote to take away health care from millions of other people’s children.
