There’s a new PRRI study looking at American identity and probably the big takeaway is how much anti-democratic beliefs and openness to political violence have taken root in the GOP. I’m going to list here some of the findings. These are ones that stand out to me. Definitely worth reviewing the whole thing.

62% of Republicans believe being born in America is something that makes you truly American. 43% for Democrats. 63% say being a Christian is something that makes you “truly American”; 35% for Democrats.

Most discussions of Florida’s decision to forbid professors at state universities from serving as expert witnesses in cases challenging its voter suppression laws have focused on it as a question of free speech versus the state. And it is certainly that. In every legal sense it is that. It’s an almost comical abuse of power. But I want to highlight a distinction which may seem semantic but I think is more than that.

The danger is less the state than a certain type of political party, the Trumpite GOP.

As I have noted in other recent posts, much of the recent ‘news’ about the insurrection has not been terribly new. It’s repackaged versions of things we knew or additional evidence and detail. This story published last night in the Post is one of the biggest revelations I’ve seen to date. John Eastman is the Federalist Society right wing law professor who wrote up the legal gloss for the President’s coup plot. It created the connective tissue joining the coup plot within the government with the paramilitary violence that broke out on Capitol Hill on January 6th.

The Post has emails – presumably emerging out of the committee investigation – of what happened during the insurrection. As the insurrectionists were storming the Capitol and Pence was holed up in a secure location as they hunted for him and members of Congress, Eastman emailed Pence and his top aide saying that the insurrection was Pence’s fault for not going through with the coup plot. With the President’s supporters ransacking the Capitol Eastman demanded Pence shift course and do the right thing.

On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the way in which Texas’ draconian new abortion law, SB-8, is enforced. This morning, read Kate Riga on the impact that law is having on neighboring states.

We do political news not tech news. So I don’t want to do too many posts about Facebook and its travails. But as we’ve seen in the first decades of this century the tech behemoths, by their scale, economic heft and integration into our lives are very much part of our politics. So I wanted to share a few thoughts on Facebook’s pivot to the “metaverse” and rebranding as “meta”.

What on earth is the “metaverse”? Basically it’s just virtual reality, VR. Take a bunch of the things you now do in your daily life – talk to friends, play a game, watch a movie, have a work meeting – and you’ll do them in a VR headset in a digital ecosystem controlled by Facebook. Sounds great, right? Honestly, it’s hard for me to imagine anything more dystopian since the defining feature of Facebook is its indifference to “externalities”, the downside impacts of what it is and what it does.