Earworm of the Afternoon -- War on Drugs

 I mentioned in a post recently that I could count the number of conservative Senate Democrats that concern me on three fingers (and really, I can only think of two of them off the top of my head right  now). One of those is Joe Manchin, from West Virginia, who has been playing footsie with Trump since the election.

Now, it's understandable that in an Appalachian state like West Virginia, which has a massive opioid problem, the one of its Senators would call to do something about it. After all, it turns out that the makers of said pills have been deluging the state's population with them:

The trail of painkillers leads to West Virginia's southern coalfields, to places like Kermit, population 392. There, out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million highly addictive — and potentially lethal — hydrocodone pills over two years to a single pharmacy in the Mingo County town.

A normal outside observer would look at the problem and wonder why the drug companies are selling so many hydrocodone pills to Kermit. But Manchin can't do that, because, as Charlie Pierce (Merry, X-mas, Charlie!) notes, he's far from an outside observer:

What the senator fails to realize is that a great number of the people profiting from this drug trade, and a great number of people who have fallen into addiction, are white people, and we can't have a "war on drugs" in this country unless we can throw a disproportionate number of black and brown people into prison forever. Rounding up nice white executives, and nice white doctors, and nice white suburban children who chase their Oxy with 40s of Olde English on a Saturday night? My dear young man, it simply is not done. Of course, if the senator really wants to start a war on these particular drugs, he won't have to look far to find targets of opportunity.

Manchin's daughter, Heather Bresch, is the CEO of Mylan, which produces opioids. His campaign committee also has received about $180,000 in donations from the pharmaceuticals/health products industry between 2011-2016, according to Open Secrets, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that keeps track of money in politics.

Christmas Eve around the Manchin hearth ought to be a blast.

So what does Manchin point to instead?

"We need to declare a war on drugs," Manchin told CNN's Jake Tapper on "The Lead" when asked what President-elect Donald Trump should do to combat the situation.

"We've got some places that are really having some success rates, Jake, and most of them are run by reformed addicts," Manchin said.

As an example, the senator said children who began using recreational marijuana eventually could progress to their parents' prescriptions and then later routinely take heroin. "It's just been unbelievable," Manchin said, adding that opioid pills are prescribed "like M&M's."

Well, at least Manchin is consistent in supporting Jeffrey Beauregarde Sessions III for Attorney General:

As a U.S. Attorney in Alabama in the 1980s, Sessions said he thought the KKK "were OK until I found out they smoked pot.” In April, he said, “Good people don't smoke marijuana,” and that it was a "very real danger" that is “not the kind of thing that ought to be legalized.” Sessions, who turns 70 on Christmas Eve, has called marijuana reform a "tragic mistake" and criticized FBI Director James Comey and Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch for not vigorously enforcing a the federal prohibition that President Obama has called “untenable over the long term.” In a floor speech earlier this year, Senator Sessions said: "You can’t have the President of the United States of America talking about marijuana like it is no different than taking a drink… It is different….It is already causing a disturbance in the states that have made it legal.”

 Ready to go back to the '80s? What a great time that was.

Won't it be dull when we rid ourselves
Of all these demons haunting us
To keep us company
Won't it be odd to be happy like we
Always thought we're supposed to feel
But never seem to be
Hard to admit I fought the war on drugs
My hands were tied and the phone was bugged
Another died and the world just shrugged it off

Just a Reminder About One Thing We Can Celebrate

When Only One Side Plays By The Rules

Well, isn't this fun?

North Carolina can no longer be considered a democracy, according to a new report from the Electoral Integrity Project (EIP), which rated the state's overall electoral integrity at the same levels of those in authoritarian states and "pseudo-democracies" such as Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone.

The state scored 58 out of 100, with ratings so poor on the measures of legal framework and voter registration that it tracked closely with those in Iran and Venezuela. The state got a score of 7 out of 100 for the integrity of voting district boundaries.

According to the report, North Carolina was the worst state for unfair districting in the United States and the worst ever analyzed by the EIP in the world. These ratings mean that the state can no longer be considered a democracy.

It's pretty incredible, but that's where we are. A U.S. state is no longer considered a democracy (I bet there are more).

Ryan Cooper at the Hill believes that the Shit, I mean Tar Heel State is a testing ground for the rest of the country (bolding is mine -- it's something worth knowing if you don't already):

This sort of tyranny seems to be the Republican aim — and it's important to realize that despite the traditional bleating American chauvinism about liberty, such a quasi-tyrannical system is not remotely at odds with our history. On the contrary, a South Africa-style partial tyranny is how North Carolina has been governed for most of its history. (It's probably more accurate to call the apartheid system Jim Crow-style, since the American version was first.) Wilmington, North Carolina, rang in the worst phase of Jim Crow, when white supremacists executed a violent coup d'etat in 1898 against the duly elected local government — the product of a "fusionist" black-white populist alliance — killing dozens of people and torching many black homes and businesses. The first target and the spark for the coup was a black newspaper — freedom of the press often being the first thing to go when democracy is abrogated. After that, North Carolina (and most of the rest of the South) was a brutally repressive tyranny until 1965, when the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act were passed. Tyranny is not the exception in North Carolina. For much of America's history, it was the rule.

It's not hard to predict how Republicans will attempt to cement their control of political power during the Trump years. Indeed, the tyranny is already some distance towards completion. Part of the plan will be what they have already been doing since they won the 2010 midterms and especially since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. They'll continue gerrymandering district boundaries to make it as hard as possible for Democrats to win (indeed, the way those selfsame state legislative districts are drawn in North Carolina is already an unconstitutional abrogation of civil rights, according to a federal court). They'll enact further targeted vote suppression measures to disenfranchise as many minorities and white liberals as possible, this time at the federal level if they can manage it. And for Democrats who manage to jump through all the hoops, they'll make it as onerous as possible for them to vote by restricting polling locations and hours in Democratic-leaning locations.

Finally, as we're seeing in North Carolina, any inconveniently lost elections can be overturned so long as the GOP controls enough other chunks of government. Legislatures can core out a governor's power, or Supreme Court decisions can overturn legislation with reverse-engineered legal argle-bargle. Who knows where it will stop. And from there it's really quite a short distance to stuffing ballot boxes or rigging the election counts. It has all happened before.

These are people who will do anything to win. And when they don't win, they change the rules. And when they can't change the rules, they break them.

This is seriously asymmetric warfare. There should be a referee who stops this, but there isn't. If the Democrats keep letting Republicans get away with this stuff, it's just going to get harder and harder to make up ground. Nearly all of the real solutions are against the rules, but if the Republicans don't care about them, why should we?

I know that sounds a lot like Trump's justification for torturing ISIS members. I don't feel terribly comfortable saying it, but I really am hitting my limits as far as coming up with democratic solutions in a democratic system that's being deliberately dismantled. When will enough be enough?

Late Night Track -- The Last Mall

Roll your cart back up the aisle
Kiss the checkout girls goodbye
Ride the ramp to the freeway
Beneath the blood orange sky
It's last call
To do your shopping
At the Last Mall

The Bob and Chez Show, 12/23/2016 -- Click Farm

The boys have their final freakout for 2016 before the real fun begins...

You can listen here.

One quibble with Bob's take on "Celebrity Apprentice" voters who really don't care about anything, but just said, "what the hell?" and pulled the lever for Trump. As I posted here, even adjusted for population growth, Hillary received almost as many votes as Obama did in 2012; Trump just vastly outperformed McCain and Romney. So people didn't just walk in and pull the lever willy-nilly. A couple million people who otherwise wouldn't have turned out made a special point to turn out for Trump. I'm not sure which is scarier...

Earworm of the afternoon - Livin' on the Edge

I

Final Presidential Popular Vote Totals, 2000-2016

Updated, now that it's official, with total votes cast.

Clinton '16	Trump '16	Others '16	Total '16
65,844,694	62,979,616	7,804,203	136,628,513

Obama '12	Romney '12	Others '12	Total '12
65,915,795	60,933,504	2,236,110	129,085,409

Obama '08	McCain '08	Others '08	Total '08
69,297,997	59,597,520	1,866,981	130,762,498

Kerry '04	Bush '04	Others '04	Total '04
59,028,444	62,040,610	1,225,792	122,294,846

Gore '00	Bush '00	Others '00	Total '00
50,999,897	50,456,002	3,949,201	105,405,100

More to say over the next few days. Data is coming in.

Flipping the Switch

Last night I was concerned about the sheer authoritarianism of Trump and his followers, but we also need to remember that there are extreme policy reasons for our leadership to do something about him before his Putin-pounded butt gets into the White House.

Medicare and Medicaid getting into Paul Ryan's grubby hands:

Under Ryan’s plan, once you reach retirement, instead of being automatically enrolled in Medicare, you will be given the option to buy insurance from a number of private plans. At first glance, this might not seem like a bad idea since the option to enroll in the traditional system will remain in place. However, it is very possible — and we would argue very likely — that this measure is only the first step towards a full privatization of the program.

Assuming the GOP can pass this bill, then  Ryan’s goal of privatizing Medicare will be that much closer to reality. If they are successful then it’s possible Social Security could be next.

Paul Krugman reminds us:

Does the GOP even care about the deficit? pic.twitter.com/xcESJgXhrT

— Jeffrey Levin (@jilevin) December 22, 2016

Then, there's a nightmare bill regarding civil rights going through Congress that I wasn't aware of:

FADA would prohibit the federal government from taking "discriminatory action" against any business or person that discriminates against LGBTQ people. The act distinctly aims to protect the right of all entities to refuse service to LGBTQ people based on two sets of beliefs: "(1) marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, or (2) sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage."

Ironically, the language of the bill positions the right to discriminate against one class of Americans as a "first amendment" right, and bans the government from taking any form of action to curb such discrimination—including withholding federal funds from institutions that discriminate. FADA allows individuals and businesses to sue the federal government for interfering in their right to discriminate against LGBTQ people and would mandate the Attorney General defend the businesses.

A few months ago, we thought we were done with the gay marriage arguments.

Once again, Republicans are terrible people. And now they're going to be extremely hard to stop. I have to keep reminding myself that despite my tendency to describe the approach of the Apocalyse, I really want to highlight potential ways to mitigate as much of the harm that we can. Rude Pundit has an idea that doesn't seem so wacky:

So while we're still tilting at the burning windmills of Russian interference and possible Obama spine-stiffening on things like Merrick Garland, let's not overlook one real Hail Mary pass on confronting Donald Trump and halting his history-demolishing agenda. What about trying to turn three Republican senators into Democrats (or, at least, turn independent and then caucusing with the Democrats)? It's crazy, sure, and unlikely, in that it relies on the possibility of there existing rational Republicans, but surely there are ones who have a gut-level fear of what Trump might do.

My guess is that it can't work. Of the Senators mentioned, I think Murkowski is the only realistic flip, because she might only be in the party because of her family history. Too many give McCain, Collins, and Graham credit, and I think they sold their souls long ago and are basically with Ryan on most policy issues. However, it really is worth a shot because it could be a world-saver. I would be SO much less nervous if the Democrats had one house of Congress.

I think the Democrats would do well to hire bloggers as strategists. Not kidding.

Late Night Track -- Wanna Be Starting Something

Sorry, just had to...

Wan-Nazi Be Starting Something

OK, you come up with a better post name about Nazis and provoking fights...

I was debating whether to publicly share what I'll be sharing in a few paragraphs because it really hit me hard personally, and frankly I'm still debating whether I actually will be able to write it.

But before I give it a shot, some context.

Talking Points Memo today highlights two instances of members of the incoming Trump regime rubbing elbows with politicians who could be described as at least "Neo-Nazi-adjacent."

The first involves Mike Flynn (who else?):

We learned overnight that Trump's designated National Security Advisor Michael Flynn met secretly in Trump Tower with the chief of the Austrian Freedom Party. The Austrian Freedom Party is not just any foreign political party or even any right-wing populist party. The Freedom Party was founded in 1956 by former Nazis, though that lineage can be slightly misleading. It is not and was never simply a refounding of the Austrian Nazi party. Still, it is a far right nationalist party, made up in its early years disproportionately of former Nazis which for many of these early years was shunned in national politics but also provided a home for people who were shunned by or unwilling to join the country's big two political parties. In more recent years it has had surges of popular support as a far-right anti-immigrant party.

I actually disagree a bit with Josh Marshall here about the lineage being slightly misleading. It really isn't. Any Jewish person following trends of anti-Semitism in central Europe in the last couple of decades will remember that the Austrian Freedom Party was the party of Jorg Haider:

Haider was frequently criticized for statements in praise of Nazi policies, or considered antisemitic.[43] International reports on Haider often referred to his remark that the Nazi government had produced a "proper employment policy" as compared to the SPÖ government. He was forced to resign as governor of the Carinthia province in 1991 because of the incident. Haider years later apologized.[15] On one occasion during a parliamentary debate, Haider described World War II concentration camps as "punishment camps."[15]

On several occasions Haider made remarks about Austrian World War II veterans that were represented as broad endorsement of the war and of the Nazi SS. Speaking to a gathering of veterans from several countries in 1990, he said that the veterans were "decent people of good character" and "remain true to their convictions." Haider stated that he did not specifically address Waffen-SS veterans with his remarks.[15] On another occasion, he said, "the Waffen-SS was part of the Wehrmacht (German military) and because of that it deserves every honor and recognition."[44] In 2000, at a gathering of Wehrmacht veterans in Ulrichsberg, including Waffen-SS veterans, he said, "Those who come to Ulrichsberg are not the old Nazis. They are not neo-Nazis, they are not criminals."[45]

Haider also compared the deportation of Jews by the Nazis to the expulsion of Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia after World War II.[46] Haider's detractors also pointed to a punning reference to the leader of the Jewish community of Vienna, Ariel Muzicant; Haider indicated that he did not understand how someone named Ariel (also the name of a popular laundry detergent) could have gathered so much filth, implying the real estate agent's business methods were crooked.[47] Haider's critics characterized the remark as antisemitic.[47] Haider also maintained that Muzicant faked antisemitic hate letters to himself. He later withdrew this and other accusations, and apologized for his "derogatory remarks."[48]

Haider was closely watched by Mossad, the Israeli secret service; FPÖ secretary general Peter Sichrovsky - a Jewish-Austrian politician and formerly one of Haider's closest aides - had gathered inside information on Haider's controversial contacts with prominent "Arab dictators".[49] Due to Haider's perceived contacts to Holocaust deniers, the Israeli Foreign Ministry on 29 September 2008 declared it was heavily concerned about the 2008 Austrian elections;[50] a spokesman of the ministry said that Israeli officials were "very worried about the rise to power of people who promote hatred, Holocaust denial, and befriend Neo-Nazis. We see it as a disturbing development and are following the matter very closely".[51]

 And these were his parents:

Haider's parents had been early members of the Austrian Nazi Party (DNSAP, the Austrian affiliate of the NSDAP, the German Nazi Party). They were from different backgrounds. Haider's father, Robert Haider, was a shoemaker. His mother, Dorothea Rupp, was the daughter of a well-to-do physician and head of the gynaecology ward at the general hospital of Linz.[4]

Robert Haider joined the DNSAP in 1929 as a fifteen-year-old boy, four years before Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. He remained a member even after the Nazi Party was banned in Austria and after Engelbert Dollfuss had dissolved the Austrian parliament and established the Ständestaat, a fascist dictatorship. In 1933, Haider senior moved to Bavaria but returned to Austria the following year after the failed Nazi attempt to overthrow the Austrian government. He was arrested and chose to move back to Germany where he joined the Austrian Legion, a division of the Sturmabteilung.[5]

Haider senior completed a two-year military service in Germany and returned to Austria in 1938 after it was annexed by Nazi Germany (the Anschluss). From 1940, he fought as a junior officer on the Western and Eastern Fronts in Europe during the Second World War. Having been wounded several times, he was discharged from the Wehrmacht with the rank of lieutenant. In 1945, he married Dorothea Rupp, at that time a leader in the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM).

So, yeah, Mike Flynn welcomed a Neo-Nazi to Trump Tower (think about how surreal those last six words are!).

The second story might even be crazier:

A representative of President-elect Donald Trump's transition team was among a group of conservative lawmakers and officials from the U.S. and Europe who boycotted a meeting with Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely this week over her decision to exclude a far-right Swedish pol from the briefing, the Times of Israel reported Wednesday. A spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry told the Times that the delegation had canceled its briefing with Hotovely (pictured above) because she would not allow the attendance Swedish pol Kristina Winberg, whom the spokesperson described as "a member of a party with neo-Nazi tendencies."

A representative for the group also told the Times that the delegation was boycotting the meeting in protest of Winberg's exclusion.

Becky Norton Dunlop, deputy to the senior adviser on Trump’s transition team for policy and personnel, was among the delegation scheduled to participate in the briefing. She is in Israel for the three-day Jerusalem Leaders Summit, a gathering of conservative politicians and advocates. The meeting with Hotovely in the Knesset was canceled just hours before it was scheduled to begin Wednesday, the Times of Israel said.

Apparently, the Trump transition team chose to side with a Neo-Nazi over conservative Israelis? Not that Israel is my beat, but if you ever hear a Trump supporter talk about how Trump is "good for Israel." send them the link to that story.

Moving from Neo-Nazis to another one of Trump's Nuremberg rallies, where he's busy helping his adoring supporters transition into Brownshirts:

“You people were vicious, violent, screaming, ‘Where’s the wall? We want the wall!’ Screaming, ‘Prison! Prison! Lock her up!’ I mean, you are going crazy,” Trump said during a stop in Orlando, Florida on Friday.

“You were nasty and mean and vicious and you wanted to win, right? But now, now it’s much different. Now, you’re laid back, you’re cool, you’re mellow, right? You’re basking in the glory of victory,” Trump added.

I really don't want to share the video because I don't want his face permanently on my blog, but click through if you'd like and hear the venom in his voice as he praises these awful, awful people for being "nasty and mean and vicious." Yeah, that's gonna end well.

So, with that as background, we move to the results of the Presidential election, where the final count has Clinton winning by quite a bit:

The Democrat outpaced President-elect Donald Trump by almost 2.9 million votes, with 65,844,954 (48.2%) to his 62,979,879 (46.1%), according to revised and certified final election results from all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

That's not so much the news as how Trump stormtroopers are reacting to it. Chez Pazienza points out:

The latest Team Trump talking point is that Trump actually won the popular vote. All you have to do is remove New York and California and -- presto! -- Trump wins by three million votes. Yes, the conservative Daily Mail seems to have started this ridiculous meme and it's of course caught on like wildfire among the Trump faithful. Just pretend two entire states and the 60 million who live there don't exist and suddenly Little Donny can sleep at night without throwing a fucking tantrum because he didn't get what he wanted. By this logic, of course, we could just remove, say, Florida and Michigan, and Clinton is officially president because she'd beat Trump in the electoral college.

Or, in the same spirit in which the knock at New York and California is surely being offered, maybe we just eliminate all those flyover states and their extras-on-Hee-Haw populations and make it a rout for Clinton? See how that works? 

The fact that a lot of Trump's supporters are comfortable going to these kinds of supremely stupid lengths to prop up the unprecedentedly flimsy presidency of Jabba the Putz speaks volumes about the overall era that's now upon us. It's not just post-fact; it's the outright twisting of reality in an effort to make it fit a preconceived design, one from which its adherents absolutely refuse to deviate.

Jumping back to Nazis (I'm worried I'll be typing that often in the next few years), I didn't much like Philip Roth's The Plot Against America because I thought of it as alarmist and trying to tell us "it can happen here" when I've always insisted it couldn't. But read this and substitute "Trump" for "Charles Lindbergh," "Shmuley Boteach" for "Lionel Bengelsdorf," "Carl Icahn" for "Henry Ford," and "a treaty with fascist Russia and Vladimir Putin" for "a treaty with Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler," and squint a little.  You'll start to see it.

The novel is told from the point of view of Philip Roth as a child. It begins with aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, already criticized for his praise of Hitler's government, joining the America First party. As the party's spokesman, he speaks against American intervention in World War II, and openly criticizes the 'Jewish race' for trying to force American involvement. After making a surprise appearance on the last night of the 1940 Republican National Convention, he is nominated as the Republican Party's candidate for President. Although criticized from the left, and hated by most Jewish-Americans, Lindbergh musters a strong tide of popular support from the South and Midwest, and is endorsed by conservative rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf. Lindbergh wins the election over incumbent president Franklin D. Roosevelt in a landslide under the slogan 'Vote for Lindbergh, or vote for war.' He nominates Burton K. Wheeler as his vice president, and Henry Ford as Secretary of the Interior. With Lindbergh as president, the Roth family begin increasingly to feel like outsiders in American society.

Lindbergh's first act is to sign a treaty with Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler promising that the United States will not interfere with German expansion in Europe (known as the 'Iceland Understanding' after the place it is signed), and with Imperial Japan, promising non-interference with Japanese expansion in Asia (known as the 'Hawaii Understanding').

Trump and his people mingling with those who swing towards the swastika and praising violence to cheering crowds who deny facts....Here's where it gets personal for me.

Last night, I visited a local watering hole in Brooklyn that I tend to frequent. I was busy studying for an exam, so I pretty much had my head in a book for much of the night. However, I couldn't keep it there because there were not one, but two incidents of Trump supporters in this bar (where there were maybe 15 people) trying to provoke others.

First, a very inebriated 40-something white male stumbled into the bar and began shouting threats and racial slurs at a Latino guy and an African-American guy while praising Trump. The Latino dude actually slapped him twice, but the guy kept yelling at the other two and wouldn't leave when the bartender asked. I ended up calling the police, who escorted him out about 15 minutes later.

Shortly afterward, three military guys in their 30s, one from Tennessee and two originally from NYC, struck up a conversation with me about my studies. Right off the bat, we were in strange territory when one of the three stated that he believed that fewer people should be allowed to go to state colleges because going to college provides an unfair leg up over those who don't, and because he didn't like paying taxes toward it. Over the course of about 20 minutes, the conversation became increasingly heated as we touched on the following topics:

• How exciting it is that Trump will be President, particularly his Cabinet picks. They felt especially strongly about James Mattis as Defense Secretary, despite the fact that his selection blatantly disregards the rules about who is eligible for that position
• How climate change really isn't happening because there was once an Ice Age (huh?)
• How the media can entirely not be trusted because they only support Democrats
• How transgender people should not be allowed in the bathrooms of their choice because, "What if I said I wanted to go into the girls' room? You're OK with that? Well, how about if I went in, took a woman out to the corner, raped her, and smashed her head in?" (where the f**k do their minds even go to envision this stuff?)
• How they wished they could bring their guns into bars in NY so they could feel safe

The gun issue was where any sense of cordiality started to vanish. I shared that having a gun statistically does not make you safer. The Tennessean said "that's only because people aren't trained. I've been shootin' a gun since I was at my mama's teat!" (I'm not making that up). I tried to cite statistics on lower gun violence in countries where there is more gun control (you're 46 times more likely to be shot in the US than the UK!) -- that's apparently because of the "thugs" in "Chicago, Baltimore, and other cities" -- and then that U.S. states with less control tend to have a higher gun death rate per capita. The three of them began to get more agitated and began to ask me why I'm talking about the 30,000+ gun deaths per year when a million abortions (which are apparently murders) are performed annually or the GMOs that are giving hundreds of thousands of people heart attacks (*scratches head*). The Tennessean helpfully noted that if I wanted to ban guns, why wouldn't I want to ban barstools, since he could bash me over the head with one? I probably should've walked away there, but they continued to cite statistics about abortions and telling me that any statistics I gave them were totally false because the "liberal media" invented them. They finally got to me. I banged my fist on the bar and exclaimed, "Are you stupid? These are scientific studies! This is science! This is math! If you don't believe in science and math, you're stupid?"

The Tennessean then asked me if I knew what the "wood treatment" was. I said no, and he said, "It's when I slam your head into the bar." Despite the fact that he was much bigger than me, I thought to myself that I had a moral obligation to stand up to him. I did exactly that -- I got off my seat, and said "You think so?" and he somehow backed down, and then the three glared at me as they left without finishing their beers.

I was actually a bit embarrassed. I'm not the kind of guy who gets into physical fights. I apologized to the bartender for the situation, and he said, "No, don't apologize. I thank you, because someone needs to give actual facts and statistics to guys like that."

So, two in a night. That's actually four incidents started by rowdy Trump supporters that I've witnessed in New York, three involving me directly, since Trump was nominated back in the spring. I'd say "Maybe it's me," but I've lived in NYC for eight years before and have never come close to fighting anyone.

These guys are getting brazen, and it's dangerous. They proudly deny facts and counter them with Alex-Jones-inspired lies and threats.

When you start seeing swastikas on the Upper West Side and Trump agitators in Brooklyn, what do you imagine it's like in less progressive parts of the country? I'm really worried, if you couldn't tell. I can't believe "bystander training" is becoming part of my vocabulary.