Prince Andrew’s Very Bad Week - A ruling in a New York legal case, in which Andrew is accused of sexual abuse, led to the Duke of York being stripped of his military titles. - link
The Supreme Court’s Vexing Mixed Message on Vaccine Mandates - Two rulings reveal just how hard-conservative the core of the Court is. - link
The Latinx Community and COVID-Disinformation Campaigns - Researchers debate how best to counter false narratives—and racial stereotypes. - link
Sunday Reading: Honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. - From the magazine’s archive: a selection of pieces about the significance of Dr. King’s extraordinary work and devotion to principle. - link
The Rival Shows of “Yellowjackets” - On watching girls—and genres—devour one another. - link
</figure>Succession, Yellowjackets, and other critically acclaimed shows are leaving the mystery box behind. That’s a good thing.
Somewhere in the middle of “Doomcoming,” the penultimate episode of Yellowjackets’ first season, I had the pleasantly discombobulating feeling of realizing I wasn’t watching the TV show I thought I was.
The buzzy (haha) Showtime series about a soccer team of teenage girls struggling to survive in the wilderness, contrasted with their adult selves 25 years later, has drawn comparisons to Lost from many, including me. Both shows, after all, feature dueling timelines, an eerie wilderness that might be supernatural in nature, and a plane crash.
I also drew Lost comparisons, though, because I thought Yellowjackets was what is typically known as a mystery-box show. On a mystery-box show, big questions unfurl into smaller questions, which unfurl into even smaller questions, which often loop back to the bigger questions. Ideally, those questions lead into each other. For instance, on Lost, the question of, “What’s in this mysterious hatch we found on the island?” had an answer (“some guy named Desmond”) that led into a host of other questions. (“Who does he work for?” “How did he wind up on the Island?” “How do the people he works for know about the island?”)
And Yellowjackets certainly has elements of the mystery-box show in its DNA. Core to the show is the question of how its main characters escaped the wilderness to begin with. Since we’re also seeing those characters as adults, we know they escaped after 19 months in the middle of nowhere and that the show will inevitably have to explain how that happened. But crucially, this is a question the audience has that the characters don’t. The adult versions of these women know how they got home. We’re the ones who don’t.
The longer you watch Yellowjackets, the more you realize that’s true of most of its mysteries. A character in the show usually knows the answer, and even if we don’t, what happened to them is informing how they act. Almost all of the mysteries established by the show’s pilot, mysteries I thought would last for several seasons, are largely answered by the end of the first season.
Who was the mysterious Antler Queen, the head of the cannibal society briefly teased in the show’s pilot? At the end of the finale, we more or less know. What happened to team captain Jackie out in the woods? We know that too. Could the show swerve away from these reveals? Sure. But why would it? Dealing with what happened next is so much more compelling than trying to somehow outsmart an audience that is literally crowdsourcing answers to your mysteries on Twitter and Reddit.
It’s a different rhythm than TV fans are currently used to, but it’s part of a larger trend within TV drama at the moment, one where living with the implications of an answer bears richer drama than wrestling with the thorniness of a question.
As an example of Yellowjackets’ interest in subverting your mystery- box expectations, look at a mystery within the show that turned out to be exactly what it seemed to be. Early in the season, the adult Shauna (one of the crash survivors, played by Melanie Lynskey) rear-ends a hot guy named Adam (Peter Gadiot). The two spark with each other and start sleeping together. But who is Adam?
The obvious answer here is: Adam is a man Shauna just happened to be in a car accident with. Because she’s the one who rear-ended him, rather than the other way around, it would strain credulity for him to be anything other than who he says he is. But the series’ fandom spent much of the season obsessing over who Adam might be. Was he one of the other crash survivors? Was he working on a scam to get Shauna to tell all? Was he (my favorite goofy theory) a trans man who was also Shauna’s former best friend?
The show did lean in the general direction of the speculation about Adam’s identity. Shauna’s daughter (who learned of her mother’s affair) was unable to find an online presence for the guy, which felt suspicious considering he was an artist, and Shauna caught him in a lie about his past.
But in the end, Adam was … some guy Shauna rear-ended whom she sparked with. The show got its audience to so successfully internalize Shauna’s paranoia, driven by her past, that it became easy to miss how unlikely it was that he would be anybody but who he said he was.
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Kailey Schwerman/Showtime
The rise of TV discussion online closely paralleled the rise of the mystery-box show. One of the earliest shows to inspire wide conversation and debate online was The X-Files, which ran (in its initial incarnation) from 1993 to 2002. That show’s massive alien conspiracy plotline all but begged audience members to sit down and try to connect the dots among its many elements.
And the ultimate resolution of that conspiracy led to a common pattern for mystery-box shows: If you really want to do the work, you can figure out exactly what the conspiracy was up to, but it’s so complicated and obscured that you’re unlikely to do the work. I’ve watched The X-Files many times (I literally wrote a book on it), and I can more or less tell you what the conspiracy was up to. But if I did this, I guarantee you your eyes would glaze over. It’s so needlessly complicated that you’ll simply bounce off it at some point.
But The X-Files’ popularity on the internet established a rough pattern for how we talk about TV online: We try to guess what the show is up to, even if the show isn’t being particularly unclear. And the closer that show gets to fantasy, sci-fi, or horror, the more we’ll keep trying to guess. Yellowjackets, as a horror show where certain elements are kept hidden from the audience, knows exactly what TV traditions it’s playing in. It uses those traditions to subvert our expectations in interesting ways.
An alien conspiracy isn’t a prerequisite for this kind of argument, though; even series grounded in reality attract this kind of thinking. Succession, for instance, has proved across three seasons that it doesn’t do big twists or surprising reveals, yet it continues to be talked about as though it does. Time after time, the show will present something that is more or less straightforward on a storytelling level, but its audience will argue about it endlessly, as though some big reveal is right around the corner. It’s what we’ve been trained to do, and Succession knows that.
The mystery-box tradition is simply a heightened version of something in TV discussion that predates the internet. The secret sauce of a big and buzzy TV show since the late 1970s has often been giving the audience something to speculate and argue about from week to week, and internet discussion turns that up to a fever pitch. If Dallas’s famed “Who shot J.R.?” mystery from 1980 had aired in 2022, we would have worked ourselves into a collective tizzy on Twitter arguing over it.
But with this much online speculation, these mysteries are inevitably solved by the audience before the show can reveal what’s up. So when Yellowstone season three ended with most of the major characters in peril, season four started by revealing across its first two episodes that, nah, everybody was fine without a ton of unnecessary drama. Audiences already knew to expect that, because Yellowstone is not a show that kills off major characters (it’s had ample opportunity to do so and has never taken the bait), but the show seemed to almost deliberately subvert expectations anyway.
Streaming shows that drop all at once can sometimes get away with leaning into the mystery box of it all, but even there, things are changing slowly but surely. The first season of Netflix’s The Witcher offered up a complicated tripartite timeline that viewers had to puzzle out, but its second season was much more straightforward. Granted, that series is based on books, and the second season seemed to inspire a lot less online chatter than the first, but it still played into this larger trend.
Similarly, HBO Max’s Station Eleven (also based on a book) teased out several things that felt like mysteries but which had mostly clear answers that audiences could figure out ahead of time. The drama didn’t come from the answers being provided but from watching the characters wrestle with what those answers meant for their lives. A lesser show would have kept the secret history of the show’s main villain from the audience until the end of the season. Station Eleven told us pretty much right after we met him.
As audiences in 2022, we’re burnt out on the mystery box. Too many shows with mystery-box elements ended up with the X-Files problem: The amount of dedication you had to have to unpeel all of their elements was simply too heavy a lift for many viewers. I love Lost’s finale and its gutsy choice to accept that any answer to “What is this mysterious island?” was bound to disappoint. But I understand why many found that enervating.
What’s more, we live in a reality where too many people try to turn the world into an elaborate conspiracy-driven hellhole, where everybody is trying to keep the truth from you and the villains are hidden in shadow. And that mentality cuts against something we know to be true, which is mostly that the villains are right out there in the open. Conspiracy theories in the real world have too often become a coping mechanism for those who feel powerless in the face of problems that seem insurmountable. If the truth is hidden in shadow, that’s an easier reality to approach than one where you know the truth but can’t do anything about it.
When I wrote my X-Files book (yes I’m going to link to it again), creator Chris Carter was most obviously troubled in my interviews with him by the show’s legacy as ground zero for a lot of conspiratorial thinking in the American subconscious. The X-Files laundered conspiracy theories in some ways. It made them sexy and fun, and it pushed them into the mainstream. That choice was great for storytelling in the 1990s, but when the show came back for two revival seasons in the 2010s, it spent a lot of time worrying about figures like Alex Jones and Donald Trump, whose conspiratorial ramblings didn’t sound all that dissimilar from various X-Files characters.
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So what’s the other option here? Well, the other option is a show where what’s happening is clear and where the show tells you, multiple times, what’s up, and then the most obvious answer is the one that ultimately pays off. Sometimes, the hunk you rear-end with your car is just a hot guy, not part of a massive conspiracy.
I was struck by this recent quote from Station Eleven showrunner Patrick Somerville’s interview with Rolling Stone’s Alan Sepinwall. In it, Somerville recounts a piece of advice he got from Damon Lindelof, who happens to be the co-creator of famed mystery-box show Lost.
People don’t want twists. What they want is to be told four times that it’s coming, and then for it to come. Because then different kinds of watchers are prepped. Some people can get out ahead of it and know it’s coming. Some are still surprised, but subconsciously, it’s a warmer embrace of a turn. It’s not quite a surprise, but it’s a hope that you are falling towards, just like water over a waterfall.
Not every show has you falling toward hope. Succession has you falling toward the inevitability of destruction, while Yellowstone has you falling toward the inevitability of the status quo. And Yellowjackets keeps you plummeting toward the terrifying dread of those girls in the woods starting to cannibalize each other. All of these shows tell you where they’re going, again and again, and dare you to say otherwise.
The problems we have to face in 2022 are not hidden from us, and the people keeping us from fixing them aren’t either. Income inequality continues to spiral out of control, and Covid-19 exposed endless faults in various governmental structures the world over. America is gripped by political dysfunction. And I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the climate is kind of a mess right now.
To pretend that we don’t know what needs fixing is to willfully ignore what we know about the world. The shadows mostly hide faces and problems we already know well. Maybe that’s why so many of our best TV shows right now feature something we know is just around the corner. We’re powerless to stop it from coming, but we’re not yet powerless to stop it entirely.
</figure>Decades after Martin Luther King Jr.’s fight, American cities still segregate communities by race and class.
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968, helped usher in the passage of the Fair Housing Act (FHA), a law that promised to not only stop unjust discrimination but also reverse decades of government-created segregation.
The FHA, which made discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability illegal in the process of buying and selling homes, had already failed to pass Congress in two earlier versions. As Michelle Adams wrote for the New Yorker, the 1968 version would likely have met the same end if not for the political impact of the assassination.
But just a few months after the act’s passage, Richard Nixon was elected, and, as Nikole Hannah-Jones explained, the federal government’s “betrayal” of the FHA’s promise began. Nixon’s Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary George Romney did attempt to use the FHA to meet its goal and actually desegregate white communities, telling “HUD officials to reject applications for water, sewer, and highway projects from cities and states where local policies fostered segregated housing.” But Nixon put a quick stop to this policy. And as Hannah-Jones documents, he wasn’t the last; since then, “a succession of presidents — Democrat and Republican alike — followed Nixon’s lead.”
In the 21st century, segregated communities are kept that way not through laws that explicitly attempt to keep certain areas white but through a more insidious method — exclusionary zoning and land-use regulations that make it illegal to build affordable types of housing, laws that allow wealthy Americans to block things from being built, and a failure to consistently use federal civil rights laws to desegregate.
All of this has resulted in the prices of housing and rent skyrocketing. Over the last year, diminished supply as a result of these laws has pushed the cost of shelter higher than ever, straining the pockets of working-class, middle-class, and even some high-income Americans.
To attack these regulations with the FHA, plaintiffs would have to prove that these laws have a “disparate impact” on a protected group — for instance, proving that a community blocking 300 units of moderately priced housing was discriminating on race, national origin, or family status.
But Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and a leading thinker on economic integration, has an idea: Amend the Fair Housing Act to include economic discrimination as a legally prohibited form of discrimination.
No longer would litigators have to jump through hoops to prove that banning new affordable housing construction hurts people of color disproportionately. Instead, plaintiffs would just have to show that towns that blocked these developments were discriminating against poor people — regardless of their race, national origin, or family status.
“It’s immoral for governments to erect barriers that exclude and discriminate based on income and, as a matter of basic human dignity, economic discrimination belongs in the Fair Housing Act,” Kahlenberg explained.
While Democrats have often talked eloquently about the importance of fair housing, they have never seriously attempted to take on exclusionary zoning at the federal level. Left in limbo is George Romney’s idea that the federal government should withhold funds from localities still actively engaged in exclusionary zoning practices and thereby undermining the economic wellbeing of the entire country. Even now, as billions of infrastructure dollars are heading to states and local governments, it’s barely up for discussion.
(Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that economically segregationist communities are often ones led by Democrats — in wealthy cities and suburbs, economic discrimination is a normal facet of life.)
Enacting an Economic Fair Housing Act wouldn’t be as sweeping as Romney’s idea from the 1970s, and any new protections would still need to be enforced. Kahlenberg has been advising Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) as the latter has begun drafting a bill to amend the FHA to include economic discrimination in the housing market.
“I think one of the greatest tributes that we can make to Dr. King’s legacy is for us, this year, to pass an Economic Fair Housing Act,” Cleaver told me over the phone.
I spoke with Kahlenberg about the potential for an Economic Fair Housing Act and whether this would really push the ball on increasing affordable housing. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve written a lot about exclusionary zoning built explicitly on the attempt to segregate based on race. Has that all morphed into economic discrimination?
In certain communities, there is still an intent to segregate by race, so I don’t want to downplay that, but having said that, there’s certainly evidence that the issue of exclusionary zoning is not only about race.
We know in predominantly white communities that wealthy whites will use zoning to exclude lower-income whites. We also know, for example, in Prince George’s County, Maryland, a predominantly Black community, that there are efforts by wealthier Black people to exclude lower-income Black people through exclusionary zoning.
In some white, liberal communities, you will hear people say they are delighted to have a Black doctor or lawyer move in next door. And so they feel virtuous for no longer excluding directly based on race, without acknowledging that they’d be highly uncomfortable with working-class Black people or white people moving into the neighborhood.
So I think it’s important that we recognize that there’s exclusion going on by both race and class, which is why we need some new tools to beef up the existing laws.
I think one of the most interesting parts of when you look at Supreme Court history in this space is the entrenching of the idea that apartments and multi-family housing are inherently a nuisance. In Euclid v. Ambler (1926) the Court wrote:
“depriving children of the privilege of quiet and open spaces for play, enjoyed by those in more favored localities — until, finally, the residential character of the neighborhood and its desirability as a place of detached residences are utterly destroyed. Under these circumstances, apartment houses … come very near to being nuisances.”
And in the American context, thinking of multi-family housing as inherently a nuisance is pretty normalized. Can you talk a little bit about how this idea has played an important role in perpetuating economic segregation?
The Euclid decision that you mentioned is fascinating because while the Supreme Court ultimately upheld economically discriminatory zoning, citing this idea that apartments are a nuisance, the lower court recognized that this is clear class discrimination.
And that is what’s going on — the notion that an apartment is a nuisance is a class-laden concept connected to the idea that there is a negative effect on wealthier people when lower-income people are in proximity.
So what is your solution here? You’re proposing an Economic Fair Housing Act, what is that?
So the idea of the Economic Fair Housing Act would extend the 1968 Fair Housing Act protection against racial discrimination to include protection against income discrimination by the government.
When local governments adopt “snob zoning” laws, they’re effectively saying we don’t want lower- income people in our community, and that’s a form of economic discrimination. The Economic Fair Housing Act would allow plaintiffs who are harmed by government-sponsored income discrimination to sue in federal court the way one currently can under the Fair Housing Act for racial discrimination.
The new law would draw upon the concept of “disparate impact,” which is used in the Fair Housing Act. So a plaintiff wouldn’t have to show that the government’s intent is to discriminate based on income, but only that exclusionary zoning has the effect of discriminating based on income. As with racial disparate impact suits, the burden would shift to the local government to prove that its policy is necessary to achieve a valid interest.
There are a lot of judges who might say that there is a valid interest in upholding exclusionary zoning, building on the established idea that apartments — and by extension working-class and middle-class people — are nuisances.
I think many judges will see through the pretexts offered by local governments. If, say, governments indicate they want to minimize traffic and parking congestion, a reasonable court is likely to press them: Is it really “necessary” to ban all duplexes and triplexes?
But to guard against conservative judges watering down the standard, it would be possible to include some process-oriented and results-oriented guardrails in the legislation. In this report, I suggested a ban on duplexes and triplexes could make a zoning policy presumptively illegitimate as a matter of process, and zoning policies in a community that had a very small share of affordable housing might be presumptively illegitimate as a matter of outcomes.
My understanding with the Fair Housing Act is that the difficulty of enforcement happens in a couple of places.
One is that the “disparate impact” standard is actually quite difficult to reach, and there are many judges that are hostile to that analysis. And secondly that it requires just a ton of resources to suss out the disparate impact.
You often have to determine the counterfactual of what would have happened if a different legal system existed or what type of people would have lived in a development if it had not been blocked. It sometimes requires a mix of statisticians, economists, and sociologists in addition to lawyers to do that analysis.
So, how does adding economic discrimination help solve that core issue?
I think it would make a big dent. The criticisms you cite of the Fair Housing Act are legitimate. Having said that, when the law was passed in 1968, I think it had two big impacts.
One is the impact on culture. If you go back to polling in the 1960s, a majority of white people said that whites should have the right to keep Black people out of neighborhoods. Today, virtually no one would say that, and so having a law on the books can change culture and delegitimize discrimination. I think it did a good job of delegitimizing racial discrimination, and the aim is that the Economic Fair Housing Act would play a similar role.
In terms of the consequences, if we look at levels of racial segregation in this country, they remain far too high, but they have declined about 30 percent since 1970.
Black-white segregation is often measured with a dissimilarity index, and it stood at 79 in 1970, and it’s at 55 in 2020. Meanwhile, income segregation has been headed in the opposite direction. It’s basically doubled since 1970. And so, while the Fair Housing Act is imperfect, it has had a positive impact on issues of racial discrimination in housing. And I think an Economic Fair Housing Act could have similar effects.
In terms of the statistical analysis required, one of the arguments for an Economic Fair Housing Act is that it would be easier to show that exclusionary zoning policies have a disparate economic impact.
Oh, interesting. Why is that?
Well, right now it’s a bit of a bank shot. These laws are effectively aimed at excluding based on income and then you have to show how race and income interact. So it just removes one step in the process.
When the federal government has attempted to impose desegregation on communities, particularly with school desegregation, we see a ton of backlash, much of which is successful at maintaining segregation.
Are you worried that legislation like this will just result in states and localities getting more wily at getting around this new law and not solve the underlying problems in the long run?
So I would say a couple of things.
One, if you look at the history of school desegregation, there was enormous backlash to federal efforts to desegregate. But, at the end of the day, school desegregation in the South worked. That is to say, although there was political resistance, over time the South went from being the most segregated part of the country in terms of their schools, to the most integrated part of the country, and we saw the achievement gap between Black and white students fall considerably during the era of desegregation.
So, although it took a long time — there was enormous inaction between Brown in 1954 and when federal government efforts to desegregate actually took off in the late 1960s — it was enormously effective for an important group of students who benefited from the policy.
More to the point, the Fair Housing Act was very controversial at the time. There were US senators who lost their jobs over supporting [fair housing]. But today, the concept is broadly accepted, and you wouldn’t gain political traction from saying you want to repeal the federal Fair Housing Act.
Contrasting this with other attempts by the federal government to address this problem — for instance, the grants the White House has proposed to provide planning and technical grants for localities that want to willingly re-zone — it seems like the winds are turning toward offering carrots (and very small carrots at that) rather than engaging in anything that could appear punitive.
Do you think the political winds are shifting away from being able to enact policies like the Economic Fair Housing Act?
Well, let me answer that in a couple of ways. I’m very supportive of efforts to either essentially bribe localities into doing the right thing through a Race to the Top program if you don’t reduce exclusionary zoning. I think that’s a good effort, but I think that the Economic Fair Housing Act offers something both substantively and politically that’s better.
I think part of the problem with the existing federal proposals is that they suggest that exclusionary zoning is bad policy because it blocks opportunity and makes housing less affordable and damages the planet. All of those things are true, but what I think the Economic Fair Housing Act tries to do is say it’s not just bad policy, it’s immoral for governments to erect barriers that exclude and discriminate based on income … because it’s shameful what’s going on.
I also think the Economic Fair Housing Act framing will do a better job of raising awareness of the issue. I’m working on a book now called The Walls We Don’t See because people’s eyes glaze over when you talk about zoning.
People understand that when white people were throwing rocks at buses carrying Black children to school in order to desegregate, that’s wrong. It’s dramatic. The Economic Fair Housing Act does a better job than those other efforts to make people see what’s going on. It’s also more comprehensive than Build Back Better’s Unlocking Possibilities Program, which would reach a small number of places that are incentivized to make reforms. But this is comprehensive, it’s everywhere.
So, I think this would be more effective than all those other approaches. But going back to the point I was making earlier, I think the economic framing is absolutely essential. I’ve been reading Heather McGhee’s book, The Sum of Us, which I think is just brilliant.
One of her points is that if you want to make progress in society, you have to show white people how racism hurts them, and this is a classic example of where zoning began as racial in character and shifted to economic in order to exclude by race and ended up pulling in a lot of working-class whites as well.
Can you speak more to the political coalition- building benefits of the economic framing approach?
If you look at what drove Donald Trump, a lot of it was what Michael Sandel called the politics of humiliation. And it is humiliating for working-class white people with less education to feel as though cultural elites are looking down on them — as they do.
I would never say it’s as bad as racism, but there is a way that economic framing helps unite these two groups that have been at war with each other for decades — working-class white people and people of color. In a common sense, they are being looked down upon for different reasons by well-to-do white people. So I think the politics are powerful here.
We’ve seen that in Oregon and California where there are these fascinating political coalitions of conservative rural white legislators and urban liberal legislators of color who, not always, but in large measure have come together to defeat wealthier white suburban legislative interests in making the case for reform.
The Economic Fair Housing Act which you have been fighting for for years is now getting legislative attention.
I’m excited that there’s interest on Capitol Hill and that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, who is chair of the subcommittee on housing in the House, is working on draft legislation to create an Economic Fair Housing Act.
He held hearings back in October on exclusionary zoning, and there’s a comment that he made at the beginning of the hearing which I found to be very profound. He said he was in Kansas City, he worked on zoning matters as a local official, and he said you just learn a lot about human nature and what people are really like when issues of zoning come up.
I think someone like him, who understands the importance of zoning and the way it affects disadvantaged people, working- class people, middle-class people who are excluded from higher-opportunity neighborhoods — I’m excited that someone like him is interested in moving forward with this type of legislation.
Stewart Rhodes is facing the most serious charges yet in connection with January 6.
On Thursday, federal prosecutors charged Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and 10 others with seditious conspiracy for their role in the January 6 attacks on the US Capitol.
That charge — the most serious yet to come out of the investigation — is one of several in the indictment unsealed Thursday, which alleges Rhodes and his co-defendants brought small arms to the Washington, DC, area; engaged in combat training to prepare for the attacks; and made plans to stage quick-reaction forces to support insurrectionists.
Rhodes was taken into custody Thursday in Texas and is among the highest-profile arrests made in the investigation into last year’s attacks on the Capitol, although more than 700 people have thus far been arrested and charged in connection with January 6.
Rhodes’s group, the Oath Keepers, is “one of the largest far-right antigovernment groups in the US today,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Founded in 2009, the group’s members have a history of attending protests while heavily armed, clashing with law enforcement, and supporting former President Donald Trump’s baseless election fraud claims.
Thursday’s indictments are also the first seditious conspiracy charges in the investigation so far, and the first the Justice Department has brought in more than a decade. Seditious conspiracy isn’t the same as treason, but it’s also not terribly far off; as former federal prosecutor Laurence Tribe wrote for NBC News on Saturday, the “crime is, in effect, treason’s sibling.”
Specifically, seditious conspiracy occurs when two or more people work together to plan to overthrow the government or prevent the execution of its laws.
In the case against Rhodes and his alleged co- conspirators, the government presented evidence in the charging documents that shortly after the November 3, 2020, election Rhodes told his followers to, “Prepare your mind, body, and spirit” because, “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war.” In December, Rhodes promised a “bloody, massively bloody revolution” should a peaceful transfer of power occur, and in the lead-up to the attacks purchased thousands of dollars’ worth of weapons, ammunition, and related tactical gear.
Other defendants in the case are alleged to have set up paramilitary training groups, and created private Signal groups to discuss their operations, including procuring weapons and establishing a quick reaction force outside the DC area to bring in additional insurrectionists and weapons.
Reading this Oath Keepers indictment.
— Ben Collins
These posts on TheDonald from January 5th make a lot more sense now.
The plan was to go all night and transport in the guns later, once they felt they had control over the Capitol. pic.twitter.com/5Nq2tXHm8j
The new indictments are a significant step up from previous charges in the case, which range in seriousness from disorderly conduct to obstructing an official proceeding before Congress, and have so far resulted in sentences up to 41 months in prison. In comparison, seditious conspiracy carries a potential sentence of 20 years in prison.
The indictment is “major news in [the] effort to hold extremists accountable for their role in #Jan6 insurrection,” the Southern Poverty Law Center’s anti-government desk told Vox via email. “January 6th was a culmination of years of poor behavior on Rhodes [sic] part. It felt like this was always where he and Oath Keepers were headed, but many of us had hoped that we could have prevented it.”
The new charges also refute the argument that narratives about the January 6 attack are overblown because no participants had yet been charged with sedition. As the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake pointed out on Thursday, Fox News’ Brit Hume had tweeted just hours before Rhodes’s arrest, “Let’s base our view on whether 1/6 was an ‘insurrection’ on whether those arrested are charged with insurrection. So far, none has been.”
Here’s a thought. Let’s base our view on whether 1/6 was an “insurrection” on whether those arrested are charged with insurrection. So far, none has been. https://t.co/szsAGU3bz0
— Brit Hume (@brithume) January 13, 2022
Hume’s tweet echoes months of Fox News hosts’ and guests’ attempts, along with other conservatives, to downplay the idea that the attacks on January 6 rise to the level of insurrection.
Seditious conspiracy charges are rare — so rare that, as the SPLC points out, this is just the fourth time in the past 80 years that the statute has been used against right-wing extremists in the US.
Previously, in 2010, members of a small Christian militia group in Michigan called the Hutaree were indicted on seditious conspiracy charges, and before that, in the late 1980s, white supremacist militia members in Arkansas were charged with the same crime. In both cases, they were acquitted.
That means the stakes for the Justice Department’s prosecution of Rhodes and his cohort are high, even as lawmakers in Congress continue to seek accountability for January 6 along different avenues. “It’s that significant of a moment,” the SPLC told Vox.
According to a 1993 case, United States v. Lee, proof of a conspiracy rests on establishing that everyone in the conspiracy shares “a ‘unity of purpose,’ the intent to achieve a common goal, and an agreement to work toward that goal”; previous seditious conspiracy cases have failed in part because the government failed to prove that unity, or to establish exactly what defendants were planning to do.
Even when cases are more clear- cut, there are barriers; as historian Kathleen Belew described on Twitter Thursday, cultural and circumstantial factors may have contributed to the 1988 acquittal of the extremists in Arkansas, despite a surfeit of apparent evidence.
“Seditious conspiracy charges against Oath Keepers will seek to show that Jan 6 was not just a ‘protest’ … but an organized and pre-planned [attack] on American democracy,” Belew tweeted. “The stakes are high, but there are a lot more tools today than existed in 1987-88: an FBI aware of and willing to confront white power and militant right violence; a DOD aware of the problem and taking action; hundreds of journalists telling better and more complete stories.”
The stakes are high, but there are a lot more tools today than existed in 1987-88: an FBI aware of and willing to confront white power and militant right violence; a DOD aware of the problem and taking action; hundreds of journalists telling better and more complete stories (20)
— Kathleen Belew (@kathleen_belew) January 13, 2022
In fact — and perhaps in foreshadowing of Thursday’s indictments — the DOJ announced last week it was establishing a unit dedicated to investigating and prosecuting domestic terrorism, shortly after the one-year anniversary of the January 6 attack.
“We have seen a growing threat from those who are motivated by racial animus, as well as those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen told lawmakers.
Thursday’s indictment, however, could help combat that threat. Jonathon Moseley, an attorney for Stewart Rhodes and his co-defendant Kelly Meggs, told Vox in a phone interview that “the Oath Keepers in general have been pretty much stalled in any of their operations during this whole year.”
“So a lot is going to depend on how the trial goes, what the outcome is. If they’re found guilty, they’re going to be sort of a pariah … so I think a lot is at stake in terms of the viability of the organization and its movement,” Moseley said.
The indictment could also affect the ability of extremist groups to plan attacks like the one on January 6, Michael Edison Hayden, a SPLC spokesperson and senior investigative reporter, told Vox.
“Extremists are also paying close attention to the use of Signal” — an encrypted messaging app — “in making this arrest,” Hayden said. “So many far-right figures are perpetually chasing an online space to plan in secret and Signal’s presence in Rhodes’ indictment is a very clear warning sign that they don’t have any great options left. It’s an arrest that will likely inspire quite a bit of paranoia.”
Rhodes himself maintained his innocence during an interview with the FBI last year and in a subsequent appearance in Texas early last year, the Guardian reports. “I may go to jail soon, not for anything I actually did, but for made-up crimes,” Rhodes said at the time.
Rhodes has denied in FBI interviews that he ordered members of his group to breach the Capitol building, saying that anyone who did went in only to give medical aid after they heard someone had been shot, and he did not personally breach the Capitol.
Even beyond the futures of Rhodes and the Oath Keepers, the implications for Thursday’s indictments could be far-reaching. More than a year after January 6, 2021, both the DOJ and Congress continue to probe the attack, but the DOJ has far more staying power: If Republicans win back the House in the midterm elections, DOJ’s seditious conspiracy case will continue, but the same can’t be said for the January 6 select committee, which could be hamstrung or dismantled if the balance of power changes in the House next year.
Despite the improved resources and focus on domestic extremism in 2022, the government’s case isn’t necessarily a slam-dunk. It’s still momentous, however: As Belew tweeted, “the outcome of this prosecution will be enormously important if we hope to curb further violent attacks on people, institutions, and democracy itself.”
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A guy walked into a bar with a monkey.
The monkey grabbed some olives off the bar and ate them.
Then he grabbed some sliced limes and ate them. He then jumped onto the pool table and grabbed one of the balls.
To everyone’s amazement, he stuck it in his mouth and somehow swallowed it whole.
The bartender looked at the guy and said, “Did you see what your monkey just did?”
“No, what?”
“He just ate the cue ball off my pool table – whole!”
“Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me,” replied the guy, “he eats everything in sight, don’t worry, I’ll pay for the cue ball.”
The guy finished his drink, paid his bill, paid for the stuff the monkey ate and left.
Two weeks later the guy came back and had his monkey with him.
He ordered a drink and the monkey started running around the bar.
The monkey found a cherry on the bar.
He grabbed it, stuck it up his butt, pulled it out and then ate it.
Then the monkey found a peanut and again stuck it up his butt, pulled it out and ate it.
The bartender asked, “Did you see what that filthy ape just did?”
“No, what?” asked the man.
“Well, he stuck both a cherry and a peanut up his arse, then he pulled them out and ate them.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me,” replied the guy.
“He’ll eat anything, but ever since he had to sh!t out that cue ball, he measures everything first.”
submitted by /u/WorldlyReplacement63
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Because they’re really good at it.
Why do elephants paint their balls red?
So they can hide in cherry trees.
What is the loudest sound in the jungle?
Giraffes eating cherries.
submitted by /u/hot_duk
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He pulls over and informs the vendor that it is fraud and false advertising to make absurd claims like this.
“No, no, no,” the vendor tells the cop, “my apples are a special variety. A scientific miracle. Buy just one seed, eat it, and you will notice an increase in intelligence. If not, I promise to refund your 20 dollars.”
“Alright,” says the cop. “But, if this doesn’t work, I’m shutting your operation down.” He hands over a 20 dollar bill, takes the seed, chews it up, and waits for it to kick in.
After a few moments, he says, “You know, even if you’re not lying, I could have bought a whole bag of your apples and had enough seeds to last me months.”
“Ah, yes!” says the vendor. “It’s working already!”
submitted by /u/PlayFree_Bird
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He sees a car puttering along at 10 km/hr and thinks “this car is almost as dangerous as a speeder” and pulls them over.
As he walks up to the car and little of lady driving rolls down the window and asks “is there something wrong officer?”
“Well, yes” says the cop “why are you driving so slowly?”"
“I’m going the limit” says the little old lady, very confused “the sign back there says 10.”
“You’re mistaken ma’am, that sign was to tell you that this is route 10, the limit here 60.”
“Oh, my” says the woman very embarrassed, “I am so sorry, I will pay closer attention to the signs.”
At this point the police officer notices the other passengers in the car: three more elderly women, all very pale and wide-eyed, clutching the armrests with white-knucked hands.
“Ma’am” he asks “are your passengers alright? They look quite shaken.”
“Oh, they’ll be fine, dear” says the elderly woman “we just turned off of route 250.”
submitted by /u/Nervous_Chipmunk7002
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The doctor says: Come back tomorrow with two bananas and a Snickers bar. The patient is confused but does as he’s told.
The next day he shows up with two bananas and a Snickers bar. The doctor proceeds to insert both bananas and the Snickers bar up the man’s ass.
The doctor then says to him: Come back tomorrow with two bananas and a Snickers bar. The man is very confused but does as he’s told.
The patient and the doctor repeat this process for 5 days. On the sixth day, the doctor tells the patient: Tomorrow bring two bananas but instead of a Snickers bar, bring a mallet. The patient is again confused but does as he’s told.
The next day the doctor inserts both bananas up the guy’s butt and quickly grabs the mallet and waits.
All of the sudden, the tapeworm pops out saying : Hey! Where’s my Snickers bar?
WHAM!!!!
submitted by /u/xerxes_dandy
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