Kevin T. Morris of the Brennan Center for Justice and independent scholar Ian Shapiro have written a study called “On Fertile Ground: How Racial Resentment Primes White Americans to Believe Fraud Accusations.” As the title suggests, the work looks at how conversations and convictions around voter fraud are motivated by anti-Black racism.

“White Americans face a democratic dilemma: do they remain committed to electoral democracy, beneficial as it has historically been for them? Or abandon it in the face of gains from nonwhite Americans? We argue that ‘fraud’ allows them a way out: they can reject specific democratic outcomes, while remaining committed to democracy as an ideal,” the authors write.

The authors explain that stories “that insinuate fraud was perpetrated by racial minorities are buoyed by several factors. They are consistent with racial stereotypes about criminality, appeal to those harboring racial animus, and are psychologically convenient in that they allow whites to reject short-term outcomes while maintaining confidence in a political system that has benefited them over time. By focusing accusations of fraud on Black individuals and municipalities, elites made their claims more believable to a white audience.”

The authors believed that these "racialized accusations of fraud leading up to and especially following the 2020 election provided an avenue through which white Americans could reject specific outcomes of electoral politics even as they maintain the legitimacy of the system as a whole,” and set out to test this in three studies.

They explored what kind of municipalities were mentioned on Twitter alongside voter fraud and found that, besides population, “the Black share of a city’s population was the only significant predictor of how frequently it was mentioned on Twitter alongside the phrase ‘voter fraud.’”

They used the panel structure of the 2020 Cooperative Election Study to show white respondents’ confidence deteriorated most after the election when accusations of fraud zeroed in on racialized municipalities.

Then, “After demonstrating that racially resentful white Americans were likely susceptible to these claims, we use a survey experiment to test the relationship between racialized narratives and fraud belief in a causal framework. Manipulating the majority racial group of a fictional city, and the race of the chief election official working there, we show that accusations of fraud were more credible among white Americans when they were levied against Black-led municipalities.”

And when white Americans were presented with a Black official denying electoral fraud, they actually became more concerned about election insecurity.

The authors also remind their readers of the historical and political context for their study, writing, “it is no accident that the political content of crime in the United States is singularly racialized; since at least the 1960s, conservative elites have sought to tie Blackness to criminality in the public mind to justify policies undermining their electoral power.”

Kyriakos Finas reported on Turkey — and on how, a year after devastating earthquakes quite literally shook the country, many are still struggling to put their lives back together. “More than a year later, the Hatay Province, home to the historic city of Antakya, is still the site of thousands of containers that provide shelter for some 50,000 households. The container cities, as locals call them, sit on the outskirts of cities and villages around the province,” Finas wrote. People are struggling to pull together what once was whole. As Finas described, “Many lost homes, land, and businesses. Nearly everyone lost loved ones, relatives, and friends.” As one interviewee put it, it is impossible to rebuild their lives and to overcome trauma that is still an open wound.

Norman Solomon warned about US nuclear weapons and the nuclear arms race. “In the case of budgets for nuclear arms, the huge price tags are — in the most absolute sense imaginable — markers for a sustained, systemic, headlong rush toward omnicide, the destruction of the human species,” Solomon wrote. “Meanwhile, what passes for debate on Capitol Hill is routinely an exercise in green-eyeshade discourse, assessing the most cost-effective outlays to facilitate Armageddon, rather than debating the wisdom of maintaining and escalating the nuclear arms race in the first place.” Solomon also noted the lack of muscle behind the disarmament movement in the United States.

Tibisay Zea wrote about how asylum became the main route for mass migration into the United States. “To address the labor-market shortage, the US needs more immigrants…But the economic needs don’t mesh well with immigration policies. The reality is that there aren’t a lot of options for low-skilled workers, besides seasonal visas, to come to the US legally,” Zea wrote. Asylum has become the “de-facto alternative” — but the asylum route was not designed to be the primary channel for mass migration, and that means the asylum system is overwhelmed administratively, with somewhere around 3 million applications pending, and asylum-seekers “waiting an average of four and a half years for their cases to be resolved.”

So true, Michael Caine.

In a “need to log off” era.

Last night was a movie (the movie is Office Space).

This you?

Everything that dies someday comes back.

American soft power.