David Kurtz
On Riots And Race
Yielding the floor to TPM Reader BK:
I am a longtime reader and Prime Member and I consider your work to be invaluable. To put it in fast food industry terms I am a heavy user, checking your site literally dozens of times a day and night.
Like many Americans, I watched the events in Washington DC unfolding just a couple of miles from my home where we were under curfew.
However, unlike the breathless TV pundits, my reaction wasn’t one of “shock,” or “disbelief.” No, my reaction: I was enraged at what I watched. But none of this was shocking or unreal: it was entirely and utterly predictable.
I’ll write more on that at another time, but this morning I want to address one particular aspect of this story that very few want to talk about: race and white privilege.
And frankly, as much as I adore TPM, in my opinion, this is one area where you have a blind spot, or a lack on interest. I am not sure why, but it is one area where TPM is just like every other new organization/talking head on TV. There is simply no way to cover Trump, his mob, and what happened yesterday without talking about the racism flowing through our society and the racism that has been mainstreamed into our media.
Hard, Difficult, Urgent Questions 
We’ll be picking apart the events of yesterday for the rest of our lives for meaning and understanding, but it’s imperative that we find out here and now what happened exactly and why. I know it seems simple: a mob breached the Capitol for a few hours. But the ticktock on the whole event is critical to understanding it, piecing together the colossal security failures, and sharpening the way we talk about these dreadful events.
Longtime TPM Reader DC:
A few thoughts on what we witnessed today from an institutional perspective.
For almost 20 years, I’ve taught a course called Res Publica: A History of Representative Government. It tries to pin down, historically and philosophically, the kinds of questions we should think about when we call our system of government a “republic” or a ‘democracy” or, most properly, a democratic republic.
The single most important story we’re covering right now? No national plan and no national strategy for distributing the COVID-19 vaccine.
For several weeks now evidence has been accumulating that the COVID-19 vaccine won’t be widely available until significantly later in 2021 than the Trump administration is publicly claiming. Here’s some of the best evidence yet, picked up today by our Josh Kovensky in little-noticed remarks from some of the lead officials on the Pentagon’s Operation Warp Speed.
So the Trump DOJ had an active criminal investigation going against Hunter Biden while Trump was being impeached for extorting Ukraine for dirt on … Hunter Biden?
Something or other caught my eye this morning and reminded me that impeachment was this year. It took me a minute to regain my bearings. Such has been the torrent of news, history and calamity in 2020.
It got me to reflecting a bit, scanning back over my calendar, pinpointing those critical days in February-March when the Before Time came to an end.
Now’s your chance to sit back and absorb Josh Kovensky’s deeply reported piece on the Falwells and Giancarlo Granda. Caught with only a short break between Zoom calls? Here’s a condensed version of the main takeaways.