U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

I'm not sure you can argue they're bad actors when the clear and obvious reasoning for those measures across the country are to limit the spread of a deadly pandemic.

It seems to me like the poll watcher is the person with standing? They could bring the exact same case a second time, that they were not able to watch. that comes against another legal doctrine now that the elections have been certified -- it's a moot point

The lack of standing is pretty obvious for the supreme Court isn't it? Texas has no say in how Pennsylvania votes. There's other things that are ridiculous about that case, like wanting throw out unrelated Texan votes.

I find it strange that that they weren't also suing to Wisconsin for the same thing and want to throw out Texan republican votes equal to the number of Wisconsin votes counted in this manner they don't like?

A woman participating in the insurrection at the US Capitol has died following being shot.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

I think you're confusing cause and effect. The problem is that people don't trust the same "professionals" to "filter" their news. People trusted Cronkite. There wasn't a huge market for "here's the news Cronkite won't tell you." Even when the country got super divided during Vietnam.

Now, I don't know why people have lost faith in professionals. I have my theory, which is that there has been a really significant ideological divergence between the professional class and ordinary people.

Let me give you an example. I don't want to litigate the specific example, but I'm just using it to illustrate. I read a lot of Matt Yglesias. He's very smart. But as far as I can tell, he doesn't believe in culture. Like, he doesn't believe it exists. He doesn't understand why people are attached to theirs. So when he talks about immigration, he draws these dichotomies "well there is the economic aspect of the immigration debate, then the xenophobia aspect."

I come from a country where a bunch of brown Muslims declared independence from other brown Muslims over the particular Indo-Aryan language they spoke. Bangladeshis would flip out if, for example, a quarter of the country was suddenly Pakistani. Not because they dislike Pakistanis. (I.e. Xenophobia.) But they are very attached to their own culture and don't want anyone to come and change it. One of the most powerful forces in the world is peoples' attachment to soil, language, religion, and shared food, history, art, customs, etc. Yglesias boils all of that down to "xenophobia."

Now, I'm quite the opposite. I get sad I'm going to die 10,000 miles away from where my ancestors are buried. I'm a bit jealous that my wife's family all lives within 2 hours of where they came over to Oregon on the wagon trains 170 years ago, while mine is scattered around the world in a diaspora. So when I listen to Yglesias, I cringe at some of his takes. I trust him because I've read a lot of his work, but I don't think he understands me or people like me. I can just imagine someone who don't want to put in the effort tuning him out.

The professional class is increasingly full of people like Matt Yglesias. Not just "liberal" in terms of supporting this healthcare policy or that one. Or in thinking the Vietnam was was a bad idea. But "liberal" in terms of not sharing a lot of basic premises with ordinary people, like “is it legitimate to be concerned about culture changing in your community.” It’s very hard for people who don’t share those views on basic things like that to talk to each other productively. I think that's a huge part of eroding trust in professionals.

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