I’ve been making my way through your emails about this morning’s post on language. I’ll likely be publishing some of them later. One was from longtime TPM Reader NG who writes: “I am wondering if TPM could do a piece on the African-American use of the term “woke,” which has been appropriated and turned into a culture war cliche that ridicules black history/struggles and either self-victimizes or self-aggrandizes the person who bandies the term about.”

If you’ve watched even short clips of the Fox News host’s nightly show, you know the look.

I started the day thinking about two very disparate topics that intersect at a point that has been on my mind a lot recently. If you can indulge me for a moment I’ll try to explain how they connect and the larger point.

Remember Shelby Foote?

I was reminded of him recently because I was reading a couple things about the novelist Walker Percy. And it turns out the two of them had a lifelong literary friendship going all the way back to middle school. Foote, a Mississippian, wrote a bunch of novels and histories about the Civil War. I only know about him because he was a central figure in Ken Burns pathbreaking documentary The Civil War, which came out about 30 years ago and created the model for all the other documentaries he’s done since. Many of Burns’ core techniques seem obvious now. The visual idioms seem like they’re part of the cinematic argot of our culture. But they were actually quite new. It was remarkable at the time how he managed to bring to life a period which had only a limited photographic record, no video and no audio.

In any case, back to Shelby Foote, who died in 2005 at the age of 88.

From TPM Reader ED …

I was ten when we landed in the US and I’m 60 now. I’ve been a citizen for 40 years and had a great life and career here. All along, I loved and trusted the goodness and fairness of this country in a way that a US born citizen probably can’t relate to. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best in the world, and I felt lucky and privileged to live and retire here. Like Colonel Vindman exemplified in his testimony, “Here, right matters”. After Trump, I’ll never see the country or its people in the same light again. I’ve been disappointed and disillusioned in US institutions and frankly it’s people. So many voted for him twice! (I blame Fox for that, but that’s another subject)

That’s how House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) colleagues are describing him these days, as he fields the whims of a mercurial former president who he’s determined he needs in order to keep his political ambitions alive.

From TPM Reader BS …

For two reasons I am most struck by how difficult it is to make sense of the Post Trump era, and this makes me very fearful.

From TPM Reader EA …

I wanted to inject more of a sense of hope into our reflections on the Post-Trump era. I am a professor at a large public midwestern university. I am inspired by college students today. When I started teaching, in the 1980s, my students’ major ambition was to make a lot of money. My students today are concerned about careers of course, but they aspire to more than that. I see a rising political consciousness in widespread concern about climate change, global justice, racism, misogyny, LGBTQ rights, and much more, which has been building for about 10 years. They are incredibly talented, energetic, thoughtful, and ready to pour themselves into projects to make the world better.

We start with the fact that the right to individual gun ownership, enshrined by the Supreme Court since 2008, is a novel manufacture, not something any court or reasonable person thought existed prior to NRA activism of recent decades. Now the Supreme Court has chosen to hear a case which could manufacture an individual right to carry weapons outside the home in every state in the country. In other words, national and automatic ‘concealed carry’.

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Remember Cleta Mitchell?

If you’ve been following our voting rights, voter suppression, ‘vote fraud’ bamboozlement coverage over the last couple decades you likely do. But even if not, you don’t have to back that far. She was the President’s legal advisor on that notorious January 2nd call with Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which the soon-to-be ex-President demanded Raffensperger “find” the votes he needed to change the result in Georgia. Mitchell’s participation in that call and the subsequent insurrection, which constituted the last gasp of the President’s efforts, led to what was presumably Mitchell’s forced resignation from the law firm Foley & Lardner. She also appears to be under scrutiny in the Fulton County DA’s investigation into the aforementioned call and potential solicitation of election fraud.

But things are looking up for Mitchell!

As usual, you really came through, sending me to a host of links, studies and datasets which look at the interaction between rates of vaccination and impact on COVID spread. For now I’m going to mainly pass on to you what’s been shared with me. That makes more sense than waiting on me to digest and make sense of it all.

On the core question, Israel seems to have reached a tipping point when just under 60% of the total population had received at least one shot of the Pfizer vaccine. Case counts have continued to plummet since then, even in the face of aggressive reopening. If we combine vaccination-immunity with a substantial portion of the population having infection-acquired immunity, that could push the level of population immunity up toward or over 70%. That gets into the range epidemiologists consider necessary for herd immunity. Since that phrase has become so contested, perhaps it’s better to say simply that at that level Israel continues to see rapid declines in case loads even in the face of widespread reopening of normal social life/activity. Thursday was the first day in the country with zero COVID fatalities since June.