Friday Round Up! 10/27/23

Why it was so hard to choose a new Speaker, our failing gun laws, and more guilty pleas.

I’m going to combine this week’s round up with the follow up to our Zoom office hours, which I had yesterday. I had some questions about the office hours schedule — please remember to scroll down to the bottom of the weekly round up to see the dates and times of upcoming events. (I have an exciting new holiday addition on the itinerary!)

We had a great discussion about political polarization and its manifestation in the dysfunction over choosing a House Speaker. One thing that often gets overlooked/underdiscussed is that the polarization in the U.S. is asymmetrical — as illustrated by the following diagram from this interesting New York Times opinion piece from 2019 (I suspect that the Republican Party would be plotted farther to the right today.)

Failing to acknowledge this asymmetry allows the media to ignore that the Republican Party, in particular, is engaged in what scholars call “constitutional hardball” — a willingness to push accepted democratic norms, and break them, even if it means moving into unchartered constitutional territory. I’ve included more on asymmetrical polarization in the follow up resources for our Zoom office hours below.

We also discussed some of the challenges of monitoring domestic extremists in the U.S., a topic that intersects with the inconsistency of our nation’s gun laws, which once again has become a salient issue in light of the tragic shooting in Lisbon, Maine, last week. I wrote about how these threads all come together in this Substack piece from last spring, which I hope you will read. The latest news on this front is that the shooter has been found dead, likely from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, underscoring once again that relying merely on criminal liability as a deterrent for these kinds of heinous acts is not a reasonable preventive strategy — most people who reach a point where they will shoot innocent people are not thinking about what is going to happen to them after, and are in fact highly likely to end their own life. We need to do better.

Finally, we discussed what D.A. Fani Willis’ strategy might be in striking plea deals with Kenneth Cheseboro and Sydney Powell. Renato and I delved into that topic more deeply in this week’s podcast:

Follow up resources from Zoom office hours:

It’s worth getting up to speed on the Fulton County RICO case subplot that involved hacking into the voting machines in Coffee County, GA, since we may see more dominoes falling among those defendants in the coming weeks in light of Powell’s guilty plea. I strongly recommend this excellent backgrounder by Anna Bower for Lawfare.

I also referenced the following articles and books in our discussion:

• “Confronting Asymmetrical Polarization,” Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Solutions to Political Polarization in America, Ch. 3

• Let Them Eat Tweets: how the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality, Jacob Hacker & Paul Pierson

• How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

• Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, Jeffrey Toobin

• Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, Kathleen Belew

• Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, David Grann

Also, I am considering doing a special guest speaker to help people understand what the debate over Section 702 of FISA (which will currently expire on December 2023 if it is not reauthorized) is about…take the poll below and let me know if that is something you’d be interested in!

Upcoming events:

• November 14, 2 p.m. EST: Class guest speaker Colin Clarke, Director of Research for The Soufan Group. I thought of Colin as I was writing my last post on Yevgeny Prigozhin, as he has followed and written about Prigozhin’s The Wagner Group over the last several years. He will offer some great insight connecting what we are covering in class with the war in Ukraine and Russia’s global operations. Zoom link will be sent to paid subscribers at 11 a.m.

• December, date/time TBA: Freedom Academy Book Club with by Scott Shapiro, author of Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks

• NEW! Wine & Fries Club, December, date/time TBA: I am SO excited that I will be hosting a holiday Wine & Fries happy hour with Mary L Trump , author of the The Good in Us by Mary L. Trump Substack and the amazing Backstory Serial ! I always love talking to Mary and getting her thoughts on the Donald and everything else going on in the world. I hope you can join us!

Have a great weekend and until next week!