Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Queen Melania’s PR person is furious about reporting on the queen’s lavish way of spending our money.

First lady Melania Trump racked up an astonishing $95,000 tab at a Cairo hotel at the end of her African goodwill tour last month, according to federal records.

That was more than the taxpayer bill for President Donald Trump for a two-day stay with his entourage in Scotland after a visit this summer to England, noted Quartz, which was the first to report the first lady’s Cairo tab.

The first lady’s spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, was furious that the initial report — later picked up by The Hill — said Melania Trump spent the night at the Semiramis Intercontinental Cairo. In fact, she spent only six hours there, Grisham told both Quartz and The Hill in angry Twitter posts.

Freedom From Religion Foundation:

Washington State Rep. Matt Shea recently released a video admitting that he distributed an openly violent screed titled “Biblical Basis for War.” The Freedom From Religion Foundation condemns the document as dangerous and staggeringly hypocritical.

The “Biblical Basis for War” begins with a list of “4 Ways to know its [sic] time to fight,” all of which amount to an unjustified belief that God is on one’s side. Sections such as “Organizational Structure for War” leave no doubt that this is meant to be a guide to literal, not figurative, war.

The document specifically contemplates overthrowing “tyranny,” but it quickly defines a “tyrant” as “someone who rules without God.” Thus, it appears to call for violence against any political leader who does not share Shea’s personal religious views. By Shea’s definition, the United States, a secular democracy founded on a godless constitution[,] is tyrannical and meant to be overthrown. As a state legislator, Shea swore an oath to uphold that godless Constitution, whose only references to religion are exclusionary, including a prohibition against religious tests for public office in Article VI.

Most alarming of all, it lists four “options” for “biblically dealing with tyranny,” one of which is “Assassination & Sabotage.” It explains that “Assassination to remove tyrants is just, not murder,” citing a biblical verse that praises “treason,” by name, in overthrowing a non- theocratic government.

And that’s along with saying that tyranny=someone who rules without God, so he’s recommending assassination of anyone in government who doesn’t share his religious belief. That’s quite something.

Rep. Shea, who reportedly wrote and distributed the manifesto for Christian sharia, defended it in a recent video. With a stunning lack of self-awareness, Shea condemned “Islamists,” apparently unaware that his written plan for a theocratic armed rebellion is identical to the goals of radicalized Islamists, only based on a different book.

Well yeah. My holy war not your holy war. Team me not Team you. Our tribe not your tribe. My book not your book. My prophet not your prophet. The Team is All.

Shea’s document promises that martyrs will be rewarded in the afterlife, citing the Old Testament. It also instructs holy warriors to “Make an offer of Peace before declaring war,” demanding total submission to biblical law. If this is refused, the instruction is to “kill all males.” It lists a “Law of Booty” that requires that plunder be given to the “Church & Ministry,” not to the government.

Adding another layer of hypocrisy, the document is openly anti-democratic, stating that “God doesn’t use majorities. The majority is usually wrong.”

FFRF urges Rep. Shea to re-read the Constitution that he swore to uphold when he took office.

Continue reading

H/t Carrie Chapman

Don’t forget: Trump is the choice of the working stiff, the coal miners and Walmart clerks, the single mothers and displaced factory workers.

Suuure he is.

In the final months of the Obama administration, Walmart was under pressure from federal officials to pay nearly $1 billion and accept a guilty plea to resolve a foreign bribery investigation.

Barclays faced demands that it pay nearly $7 billion to settle civil claims that it had sold toxic mortgage investments that helped fuel the 2008 financial crisis, and the Royal Bank of Scotland was ensnared in a criminal investigation over its role in the crisis.

They were saying no, we won’t – and along came Trump to say there there, you don’t have to.

Federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission have yet to charge Walmart, and the Justice Department reached a much lower settlement agreement with Barclays in March, for $2 billion. R.B.S. paid a civil penalty, but escaped criminal charges altogether.

Across the corporate landscape, the Trump administration has presided over a sharp decline in financial penalties against banks and big companies accused of malfeasance, according to analyses of government data and interviews with more than 60 former and current federal officials. The approach mirrors the administration’s aggressive deregulatory agenda throughout the federal government.

The New York Times and outside experts tallied enforcement activity at the S.E.C. and the Justice Department, the two most powerful agencies policing the corporate and financial sectors. Comparing cases filed during the first 20 months of the Trump presidency with the final 20 months of the Obama administration, the review found:

• A 62 percent drop in penalties imposed and illicit profits ordered returned by the S.E.C., to $1.9 billion under the Trump administration from $5 billion under the Obama administration;

• A 72 percent decline in corporate penalties from the Justice Department’s criminal prosecutions, to $3.93 billion from $14.15 billion, and a similar percent drop in civil penalties against financial institutions, to $7.4 billion;

• A lighter touch toward the banking industry, with the S.E.C. ordering banks to pay $1.7 billion during the Obama period, nearly four times as much as in the Trump era, and Mr. Trump’s Justice Department bringing 17 such cases, compared with 71.

Not just letting them get away with bad practice, but also throwing away all those billions.

Everyday Screaming:

Houston mother’s drive to vote at the polls Thursday was interrupted by a man’s racist road rage rant about President Donald Trump deporting her “illegal cousins.”

Janet Sabriu recorded video showing the enraged stranger’s bigoted remarks directed at her while her 2-year-old daughter watched from the backseat. Sabriu, who has been a U.S. citizen and Houston resident for nine years, was on her way to early voting Thursday afternoon along Wirt Road when she crossed paths with the man identified on social media as Charles Geier. The man’s rant repeatedly refers to Sabriu as a “bitch” as he demands that she leave “his country.”

“You’re driving in two lanes, you stupid bitch.” Geier can be heard screaming out of his driver’s side window. “That’s not how we drive in America. Trump’s deporting your illegal cousins today. Bitch.”

It’s funny how Newsweek doesn’t think to call the road rage rant sexist or misogynist, even though the target is a woman, and the screamer calls her “biiitch” over and over again, and her small daughter is in the back seat.

Anyway. It’s ugly. Ugly America.

https://youtu.be/BHLOzjcb_UA

The military doesn’t share Trump’s pretend-panic about The CaRaVan.

Military planners anticipate that only a small percentage of Central American migrants traveling in the caravans President Trump characterizes as “an invasion” will reach the U.S. border, even as a force of more than 7,000 active-duty troops mobilizes to prevent them from entering the United States.

According to military planning documents, about 20 percent of the roughly 7,000 migrants traveling through Mexico are likely to complete the journey.

…

The assessment also indicates military planners are concerned about the presence of “unregulated armed militia” groups showing up at the border in areas where U.S. troops will operate.

As in, you know, random civilians showing up to play soldier, in a situation that the president has called an invasion. What could possibly go wrong?

Seizing on immigration as his main campaign theme ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections, Trump has depicted the caravans — at least four have formed, though they remain hundreds of miles away — as a grave danger to U.S. national security, claiming they are composed of “unknown Middle Easterners,” hardened criminals and “very tough fighters.” He also insists the number of migrants heading north is much larger than estimates put forward by U.S. and Mexican government officials.

In other words it’s shit he just made up, in hopes of making Americans even more racist and xenophobic and stupid than we already are. Not something a normal president would ever do.

The Times (the NY one) has a big piece by Janet Reitman on the way federal law enforcement has ignored the danger of racist groups for decades, and how that has (surprise!!) allowed them to flourish like the green bay tree.

White supremacists and other far-right extremists have killed far more people since Sept. 11, 2001, than any other category of domestic extremist. The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism has reported that 71 percent of the extremist-related fatalities in the United States between 2008 and 2017 were committed by members of the far right or white-supremacist movements. Islamic extremists were responsible for just 26 percent.

(Sorry to interrupt but “Islamic extremists” are members of the far right, albeit a rival far right. They’re definitely not left.)

 Data compiled by the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database shows that the number of terror-related incidents has more than tripled in the United States since 2013, and the number of those killed has quadrupled. In 2017, there were 65 incidents totaling 95 deaths. In a recent analysis of the data by the news site Quartz, roughly 60 percent of those incidents were driven by racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, antigovernment or other right-wing ideologies. Left-wing ideologies, like radical environmentalism, were responsible for 11 attacks. Muslim extremists committed just seven attacks.

(That at least acknowledges that Muslim extremists don’t belong in the left-wing column.)

These statistics belie the strident rhetoric around “foreign-born” terrorists that the Trump administration has used to drive its anti-immigration agenda. They also raise questions about the United States’ counterterrorism strategy, which for nearly two decades has been focused almost exclusively on American and foreign-born jihadists, overshadowing right-wing extremism as a legitimate national-security threat. According to a recent report by the nonpartisan Stimson Center, between 2002 and 2017, the United States spent $2.8 trillion — 16 percent of the overall federal budget — on counterterrorism. Terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists killed 100 people in the United States during that time. Between 2008 and 2017, domestic extremists killed 387 in the United States, according to the 2018 Anti-Defamation League report.

Ok but starting the count the year before 2002 would have changed the numbers sharply. 2001 was an outlier but no one knew that at the time.

“We’re actually seeing all the same phenomena of what was happening with groups like ISIS, same tactics, but no one talks about it because it’s far-right extremism,” says the national-security strategist P. W. Singer, a senior fellow at the New America think tank. During the first year of the Trump administration, Singer and several other analysts met with a group of senior administration officials about building a counterterrorism strategy that encompassed a wider range of threats. “They only wanted to talk about Muslim extremism,” he says. But even before the Trump administration, he says, “we willingly turned the other way on white supremacy because there were real political costs to talking about white supremacy.”

Because…? Because there are still so many ardent white racists in the US? And they vote?

Well, yes, duh. Silly question.

During the first year after Donald Trump’s election, protests and riots erupted across the country, often involving men with criminal histories who, by definition, were on the law-enforcement radar. During the so-called Battle of Berkeley in March 2017, for instance, a far-right agitator named Kyle Chapman became a hero to the alt-right after he reportedly pummeled an anti-fascist counterprotester with a billy club. Chapman was a 41-year-old who had two previous felony convictions. He proceeded to travel around the country, engaging in violence at other protests, now under the online moniker Based Stickman — a cheerful reference to the Berkeley attacks.

Chapman was one of a number of known white supremacists to align with the Proud Boys, a nationalist men’s movement founded in 2016 by the anti-immigrant “Western chauvinist” Gavin McInnes, a founder of Vice Media. There was also the Rise Above Movement (RAM), an alt-right group composed largely of ex-cons, many with ties to Southern California’s racist skinhead movement. Over the past two years, each group engaged in violent confrontations with their ideological enemies — a lengthy list including African-Americans, Jews, Muslims, nonwhite immigrants, members of the L.G.B.T. community and the progressive left — and generally escaped punishment.

The DHS put out an intelligence report on the rise of far-right extremism in April 2009, and it was jumped on by online warriors and by…Republicans in Congress.

Congressional Republicans, answering to a nascent Tea Party movement and the American Legion, soon took issue with the label “right-wing extremism,” which John Boehner, then minority leader of the House, charged was being used by the Department of Homeland Security “to describe American citizens who disagree with the direction Washington Democrats are taking our nation.” Boehner was particularly bothered by the report’s mention of veterans. “To characterize men and women returning home after defending our country as potential terrorists is offensive and unacceptable,” he said in a statement. Several G.O.P. lawmakers called for Napolitano’s resignation, as well as that of Johnson, who, in their view, equated conservatives with terrorists.

Johnson was appalled. “I never anticipated such an aggressive, vile backlash,” he told me recently. It was puzzling: Just a few months before his April 2009 report was published, the department released an assessment of the cyber threat posed by “left-wing extremists,” like the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front. Legislators, the media and the public at large — including progressives — had no objection to that terminology. But the political firestorm over “right-wing extremism” had caused such an uproar that the Department of Homeland Security ultimately avoided using ideological terminology like “right-wing.” A few weeks after the report was released, Napolitano formally apologized to veterans, and after intense pressure from veterans’ groups, the department withdrew the report.

It’s the basket of deplorables all over again. It’s the reaction after every mass shooting all over again. “How dare you say we are a threat, do it again and we’ll kill you.”

And now here we are.

Evil Monster Junior Twitter-complains that CNN refused to run Evil Monster Senior’s disgusting racist campaign ad. CNN explains why.

CNN has made it abundantly clear in its editorial coverage that this ad is racist. When presented with an opportunity to be paid to take a version of this ad, we declined. Those are the facts. 🍎

— CNN Communications (@CNNPR) November 3, 2018

Make Murka Grate Again.

Incorporating Donald Trump’s border wall into a Halloween costume is questionable at best — especially if you’re an elementary school teacher.

That’s exactly what a group of staff members discovered at an elementary school in Middleton, Idaho.

Pictures, which were posted on the Middleton School District Facebook page but have since been deleted, showed the group dressed up as a wall with the phrase “Make America Great Again” on it. Another group in a second picture was dressed up with sombreros, carrying maracas and wearing fake black mustaches, which some parents called racist.

Not to mention dumb, ignorant, patronizing, clueless, so last century, mean, childish…

The district superintendent apologized.

Beth Almanza, an immigrant rights advocate with the Idaho DACA Students group called the photos “extremely disheartening” and “heartbreaking.”

“Imagine how some of the students felt when they walked into their classrooms on Halloween and saw their teachers (people they look up to) dressed like this?” she posted. “Students deserve better.”

According to data compiled by Idaho Ed Trends, almost 13% of the school’s population is Hispanic.

Originally a comment by latsot in Miscellany Room.

There’s a new £50 note being issued soon. One of those new plastic ones that spring clean out of your hand and away on the breeze if you try to fold them. Anyway, the Bank of England is accepting nominations for who should be featured on the note. It has to be a British scientist.

You know what’s going to happen here. The nominations are going to be Dawkins, Hawking, Cox (Cox has already nominated and argued for Hawking) with the more historically minded going for the likes of Crick, Darwin, of course (deserving but has already been on a note), Faraday, Halley, Higgs, Jenner, Dirac…. Well you get the idea. Deserving scientists all (although note that I didn’t say deserving of what) but obvious choices for an obvious reason.

If you feel like voting, you can pick my personal favourite, Mary Anning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Anning

Or you could choose, say,

Harriette Chick

Eva Crane

Deborah Doniach

Rosalind Franklin

Monica Grady

Helen Gwynne-Vaughan

Wendy Hall

Anita Harding

Joanne Johnson

Ada Lovelace

Elsie Widdowson

Florence Nightingale

And thousands of other people guilty of doing science while female.

I’ve only met one of those on this list (guess who and no even I’m not *that* old) and I’d love to see her on a note. Also, some of these people (including her) are alive and therefore not eligible but fuck it: a) a lot of people are marauding around on places like Twitter nominating people who are alive and b) it’s worth finding out about all the people on that list regardless, if you don’t already know about them.

But if you do one thing I instruct you to this year, vote for someone who is not an obvious suspect and preferably not a man. You don’t even have to be British, any bugger can vote. If your browser tells you you can’t… see me.

Also, as a personal favour to me, whatever you do, don’t pick Tim Berners-Lee. We…. have some history. I would hate to have to punch holes in any £50 note I inexplicably managed to get hold of. Especially not these new ones, they are quite hard to kill.

And anyway, just vote for Mary Anning. Particularly if you have ever been to the Natural History Museum in London.

McKay Coppins in the Atlantic on how Newt Gingrich made Trump possible.

[F]ew figures in modern history have done more than Gingrich to lay the groundwork for Trump’s rise. During his two decades in Congress, he pioneered a style of partisan combat—replete with name-calling, conspiracy theories, and strategic obstructionism—that poisoned America’s political culture and plunged Washington into permanent dysfunction. Gingrich’s career can perhaps be best understood as a grand exercise in devolution—an effort to strip American politics of the civilizing traits it had developed over time and return it to its most primal essence.

In June 1978, age 35, he gave a talk to some college Republicans.

“One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he told the group. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics.”

For their party to succeed, Gingrich went on, the next generation of Republicans would have to learn to “raise hell,” to stop being so “nice,” to realize that politics was, above all, a cutthroat “war for power”—and to start acting like it.

A few months later he got elected to Congress and put that idea into effect.

Gingrich had a plan. The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along. His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself.

Deliberately smash it for the sake of winning – in other words, do great damage to the country as a whole, meaning great damage to the people of the country, in order to win. Not to win to do good, but just to win. He’s all about the winning.

Gingrich and his cohort showed little interest in legislating, a task that had heretofore been seen as the primary responsibility of elected legislators. Bob Livingston, a Louisiana Republican who had been elected to Congress a year before Gingrich, marveled at the way the hard-charging Georgian rose to prominence by ignoring the traditional path taken by new lawmakers. “My idea was to work within the committee structure, take care of my district, and just pay attention to the legislative process,” Livingston told me. “But Newt came in as a revolutionary.”

For revolutionary purposes, the House of Representatives was less a governing body than an arena for conflict and drama. And Gingrich found ways to put on a show. He recognized an opportunity in the newly installed C-span cameras, and began delivering tirades against Democrats to an empty chamber, knowing that his remarks would be beamed to viewers across the country.

Again: it’s not about doing anything useful, it’s just about winning. It’s Trump in a nutshell.

Gingrich hustled to keep his cause—and himself—in the press. “If you’re not in The Washington Post every day, you might as well not exist,” he told one reporter. His secret to capturing headlines was simple, he explained to supporters: “The No. 1 fact about the news media is they love fights … When you give them confrontations, you get attention; when you get attention, you can educate.”

Effective as these tactics were in the short term, they had a corrosive effect on the way Congress operated. “Gradually, it went from legislating, to the weaponization of legislating, to the permanent campaign, to the permanent war,” Mann says. “It’s like he took a wrecking ball to the most powerful and influential legislature in the world.”

But Gingrich looks back with pride on the transformations he set in motion. “Noise became a proxy for status,” he tells me. And no one was noisier than Newt.

Until Trump. Gingrich looks back with pride on this hell he worked to create.

Marina Hyde is merciless to Jordan Peterson.

Peterson is also a leading member of the arseoisie, or the “intellectual dark web”, as they prefer it. Again, are you familiar with the “intellectual dark web”? I do hope not. It’s a self-styling by a loose group of soi-disant intellectuals you’d cross continents to avoid having a pint with (although they didn’t go with that tagline in the end). There isn’t space for a full passenger manifest, but they include Peterson, talkshow host Dave Rubin, Newsweek columnist and perma-pundit Ben Shapiro and a bunch of other people bizarrely obsessed with what students do, even though we’ve known since time immemorial that students often act like idiots, and mostly grow out of it unless they’re Hamlet or whatever. Think of the intellectual dark web as a very whiny superhero team. Marvel’s A-Whingers. Guardians of the Galaxy Brains. The League of Extraordinarily Fragile Gentlemen.

…

If you need a further Peterson catch-up, can I recommend a video posted by GQ magazine this week, in which Jordan is interviewed by the New Statesman’s Helen Lewis. It’s hard to pick my favourite moment from the nearly two-hour-long encounter, but I very much enjoyed the bit where Lewis reasons: “Lobsters don’t get depressed. I think you’re anthropomorphising to a ridiculous degree. These are creatures that urinate out of their faces.”

Then again, it must be said that Peterson spends most of the interview looking like he’s about to urinate out of his face. In the entire exchange, he smiles about once, at some perceived irony in something wistfully arch that he has just said. One’s primary takeout is not: here is a man who can laugh at himself. Which is such a missed opportunity. I am reminded of the time when Jeffrey Archer told Dame Edna Everage that “the most important thing is to be able to laugh at yourself”. “You’d have to do that,” came the deathlessly sympathetic reply, “otherwise you’d be missing the joke of the century.”

Other takeouts from the GQ interview? Peterson dresses and looks like the third Gruber brother from the Die Hard franchise. As all world cinema fans will know, the first brother to lose to Bruce Willis’s grubby-vested cop was played by the late great Alan Rickman in Die Hard, while the second was played by Jeremy Irons (himself blue-vested) in Die Hard With a Vengeance. Peterson very much presents as the third sibling that Mother Gruber kept at home because he was “chesty” – though without the self-knowledge to accept he is a character actor rather than a leading man.

Perhaps it might be kinder if his agent or publicist helped him to come to terms with this? As things stand, each of the several times Peterson intones “life is suffering”, all I could think about was how very much hotter it was in The Princess Bride, when Cary Elwes’s character Westley goes to Robin Wright: “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” I mean … I’ll take that sort of line off Westley all day long. But this guy? This 56-year-old adult in the steampunk-lite outfit who cries on stage at his own rightness? I am – how to put this tactfully? – not feeling it in quite the same way.

That was fun!

It is outrageous what the Democrats are doing to our Country. Vote Republican now! https://t.co/0pWiwCHGbh pic.twitter.com/2crea9HF7G

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 31, 2018

It is outrageous what the Democrats are doing to our Country. Vote Republican now! https://t.co/0pWiwCHGbh pic.twitter.com/2crea9HF7G

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 31, 2018

That lawsuit against North Dakota’s voter identification law? The judge ruled against a stay.

A federal judge in North Dakota on Wednesday declined to grant emergency relief to a Native American tribe and voters who said they are being disenfranchised by North Dakota’s voter identification law.

U.S. District Judge Daniel Hovland ruled that granting an injunction days before the election “will create as much confusion as it will alleviate.”

But Hovland said the allegations contained in the lawsuit, filed Tuesday, “give this Court great cause for concern. The allegations will require a detailed response from the Secretary of State as this case proceeds.”

…

Versions of North Dakota’s voter identification law have been the subject of litigation for the past few years. Earlier this year, Hovland found the requirements, including identification carrying a residential street address, disproportionately burdened Native American voters.

He also found that thousands of Native Americans were less likely to possess identification that met the requirements or the documentation required to obtain identification.

A federal appeals court in September lifted the stay that prevented the residential street address requirement from being enforced. The majority opinion noted that “if any resident of North Dakota lacks a current residential street address and is denied an opportunity to vote on that basis, the courthouse doors remain open” — a line the plaintiff cited in the opening of a filing in the lawsuit filed this week.

In October, the Supreme Court declined to stay the appeals court ruling, allowing the street address requirement to go into effect for the November election. In a dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the “risk of disenfranchisement is large.”

It’s as if we’ve been returned to 1950, without even an overnight bag.

Voter suppression in Georgia, chapter 47.

[Brian] Kemp’s attempts to prevent people from voting exemplify the familiar ways in which access to the ballot has been restricted for people of color across the United States. But voter suppression also happens in ways that aren’t as well-known, and are even more insidious. In particular, local prosecutors have increasingly brought criminal charges against black voters and community activists for small technical infractions. They’re sending the frightening message that casting a ballot is risky — a message that resonates even when the charges turn out to be baseless and the people charged are acquitted.

In a particularly disturbing case, Olivia Pearson, a grandmother and lifelong resident of Coffee County, Ga., found herself on trial this year on charges of felony voter fraud. It began six years ago, on the first day of early voting in Georgia, when a black woman named Diewanna Robinson went to cast her ballot. Ms. Robinson, then 21, had never voted before and didn’t know how to operate the electronic voting machine, reported Buzzfeed. She asked Ms. Pearson, more than 30 years her senior, for help. Ms. Robinson would later testify that Ms. Pearson informed her where the card went in the machine and told her to “just go through and make my own selections on who I wanted to vote for.” Ms. Pearson walked away before Ms. Robinson started voting.

Almost four years later, Ms. Pearson received a letter from District Attorney George Barnhill’s office, informing her that she was facing felony charges for improperly assisting Ms. Robinson. The city councilwoman and community leader was arrested and booked. She had never been in trouble with the law, but now she found herself facing up to 15 years in prison.

Ms. Pearson was not accused of telling Ms. Robinson whom to vote for. She didn’t help her cast her ballot or even touch her machine. Prosecutors did not allege that the brief interaction between the two women impacted Robinson’s decisions in the voter booth. Rather, they insisted that because Ms. Robinson was not illiterate or disabled, she had not been entitled to even minimal verbal assistance.

One stares at the screen in horror and disbelief.

Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said prosecutors are increasingly preying on “respected community leaders” in rural areas where they “anticipate people will not be able to shine a bright spotlight on what’s happened.”

When residents in Quitman County, Ga., elected a majority-black school board for the first time in 2010, Mr. Kemp’s office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation sent armed investigators to interrogate residents about voter fraud and ultimately charged 12 organizers. One Quitman resident, Debra Dennard, was charged with two felonies for helping her partly blind father fill out his absentee ballot. Lula Smart was accused of assisting voters by carrying their sealed absentee ballots to the mailbox. She was charged with 32 felony counts. If convicted, she faced over 100 years in prison.

Georgia.

It’s not hard to conclude that what Mr. Trump, Mr. Kemp and their ilk are worried about is not voter fraud but access to the ballot for minorities and Democrats. This attitude helps explain why Ms. Pearson was apparently the first person ever tried for “improper assistance in casting a ballot,” phrasing that does not even appear in Georgia’s criminal statutes. (Prosecutors eventually dropped that charge, after the defense said that the state had “attempted to fashion a criminal offense by cobbling together parts of four statutes.”) Over the next two years, Ms. Pearson navigated two trials, two defense counsels, three dropped charges and one hung jury. Finally, in late February, after a 20-minute jury deliberation, she was acquitted of all charges. Six years after her brief interaction with Ms. Robinson, she was finally free.

“This was without a doubt a racially motivated targeted prosecution of a woman who was exercising her right to get out the vote in her community,” said Sarah Geraghty, managing attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights and one of Ms. Pearson’s lawyers.

“I was tried because I’m black and outspoken,” Ms. Pearson told me.

The acquittal was a victory for Ms. Pearson. But it was also a victory for voter suppression. As Election Day approaches, it’s essential to remember that consequences of prosecutions like hers radiate far beyond the defendant, making entire communities question whether it’s worth the risk to engage in one of the most sacred rights in a democratic society.