Maps, Part Two

Ukraine is at the latitude of Minnesota.

Ukraine has four seasons. It gets rain during the summer growing season. It has deep, rich soils. It is a breadbasket region, like the American Midwest.

World food growing regions

In most of the world, people live where they can grow food. Note the population density map. There is dense population in eastern China, in India, in Europe, and along the Niger River in Africa. 

Few people live where they cannot grow food: Deserts, the northern forests of Siberia and Canada, high altitude Tibet, the Arctic and Antarctic. There are anomalies. Ukraine is one of them, as is the American Upper Midwest and northward into Canada. They contain productive farmland with relatively low population density. Modern industrial agriculture requires less labor. Those areas export food.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports current information on the temperatures, rainfall, and growing conditions of farm regions of the world, including Ukraine.

 The USDA gets down to granular detail linking specific Ukraine regions to their share of the country’s production of specific exportable commodities. Ukraine is a major wheat exporter. China grows 94 Kg. of wheat per person. The U.S. grows 192 Kg. Ukraine grows 618 Kg. of wheat per person.

Sunflower oil is a significant vegetable oil export commodity and Ukraine is in sunflower production zone. Note that they calculate both overall tonnage and production per person. The purpose is to assist farmers and exporters in anticipating market conditions in a world market. 

Sunflowers

Sunflower oil may not be high in the consciousness of American readers, but it is a significant import product for India. Ukraine is their major supplier. India's English language financial journal, The Economic Times, headlines:

And this:

The Ukraine conflict is deeply consequential in ways that Americans think about and those we don't. The invasion is connected to everything on earth.

I will close with a final map. There is one exception to the Ukraine-as-Minnesota climate parallel: Crimea.  It dangles into the Black Sea and has a quasi-Mediterranean climate, not a continental one. Crimea is the most "Russian" part of Ukraine, a part whose population appeared willingly to rejoin Russia. It is linked to the rest of Ukraine by roads and a water pipeline. It wasn't physically connected to Russia at all until recently, when Russia built a bridge at Kerch. This map colors Crimea in brown. Those are fighting words. Maybe it should be colored beige. It is a sticking point in the conflict. The fate of the world may ride on whether Ukraine and Russia can work that out.

Maps: Ukraine is caught in the middle.

Let's look at Ukraine.

There it is, in the center of this map. 

North of the Black Sea, west of Russia, east of Central European countries of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania.

Ukraine is part of the greater Russian/Slavic world. Ukraine was sometimes part of Russia, sometimes part of Poland, sometimes part of the Polish-Lithuanian empire, briefly part of German occupied territory, during WWII. For most of the past century it was part of the Russian empire. Currently, it is independent.

Ukraine has 40 or 44 million people. Russia has about 140 million. Ukraine is either a big part of Russia, or a big re-acquisition for it. Here is how Stalin would have seen the population distribution. Ukraine is the densely populated dark area in the southwest.

USSR, 1920. Population map.

The pattern persisted:

Moscow, with ten million people, is visible northeast of Ukraine. (Remember, Ukraine sits atop the Black Sea.) Kiev with 2.6 million people is visible in north central Ukraine. Ukraine's second city, Kharkiv, with 1.5 million people is visible near the Russian border, north of the Black Sea.

Ukraine, Belarus, and the three Baltic states were fully part of the USSR. Another tier of countries, including Poland and East Germany, south to Bulgaria, were part of the "Russian Block" of quasi independent Russian-controlled countries.

That penetration west is not new. Here is Russia in 1914:

Russia has two fundamental strategic problems. The first that it is landlocked during a time of war. Its exits to the world's oceans are easily blocked by foreign rivals. Turkey, and before that the Ottoman Empire, has been a traditional southern rival of Russia, contesting control and influence in the Balkans and Russia's Black Sea and Caspian Sea regions. Turkey's great threat is Russia, which would like to control the Bosphorus. Turkey aligned with NATO, the worst of outcomes for Russia. Russia's second problem is its vulnerability to attacks from land armies coming from the west across the broad northern European plain. NATO expansion to Poland and the Baltic States put NATO troops within 100 miles of Russia's second city, St. Petersburg. Russia lost the strategic depth that protected itagainst Napoleon and Hitler.

Choke points

NATO

There is an ongoing imperative for Russia to address those strategic vulnerabilities. That imperative conflicts with a contrary one. European powers over the centuries work to suppress any European power from becoming too strong. Sometimes that power has been France, with Britain and Europe united against it. After Germany unified under Prussian leadership France and Britain aligned with Russia/USSR to confound Germany. More recently they align with Germany to confound Russia/USSR.  Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine were and remain the victims to be saved, abandoned to their fate, or devoured.

Russia has a large military, nuclear weapons, and the tool of its oil. It wants to change the equilibrium. Another tool for Russia is the fact that the borders and ethnicities of the battleground areas have never been settled, and they sometimes conflict with an ethic of self-determination. 

The fight over Ukraine is another iteration of European great power politics. Russia wants something. The West doesn't want Russia to have it. It wants Russia fenced in and unthreatening. The West wants the strategic depth for itself.

So we fight on, endlessly.

Tomorrow:  More maps. Ukraine is a breadbasket and food exporter.

"Vagrancy" perpetuated slavery

Labor bondage in America persisted long past the Emancipation Proclamation.

Vagrancy laws and discretionary policing allowed police in the American South to create convict work crews. They could be rented out to fund the government. Vagrancy laws were an instrument of a larger culture of racial hierarchy and social control of Black Americans.

Herb Rothschild was born and raised in Louisiana. After studying at Yale and Harvard he returned to Louisiana to teach at LSU and assist the ACLU with the unfinished work of the Civil Rights era. He recounts his experiences in the just-published book, The Bad Old Days, A Decade of Struggling for Justice in Louisiana. This wasn't the distant past. This was my young adulthood. I had only the vaguest of notions of this circumstance and practice.

Guest Post by Herb Rothschild


In Chapter 8 of the book, I recount our ultimately successful efforts to invalidate the unconstitutional provisions of the Louisiana and the New Orleans vagrancy statutes. This excerpt from the opening of that section, plus the footnote in which I provide the facts upon which the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in this area of law was based, illustrate one way that Whites continued to oppress Blacks from the end of the Civil War well into the 1970s.

From the book:

Amazon

In Europe, vagrancy statutes were enacted after the enormous death toll of the 1348-49 bubonic plague created a labor shortage. They were intended to prevent serfs previously bound to a single master’s land from seeking work on better terms elsewhere. So, too, vagrancy statutes were updated by states of the former Confederacy immediately after the Civil War to regain control of emancipated Black labor. Even the Freedmen's Bureau, which had a mandate to protect Blacks from a hostile Southern environment, cooperated with Southern authorities in rounding up black "vagrants" and placing them in contract work to revive production on the plantations. 

Eight of the nine states that used vagrancy laws in this way also instituted convict leasing—the hiring out of convict labor for work on plantations or public works projects. This created a financial incentive for the states to arrest and convict Black men. In 1898, some 73% of Alabama's annual state revenue came from convict leasing. So, using their vagrancy statutes, states like Louisiana were able to reintroduce slavery on a smaller scale. . . .

A legacy of those benighted times was that the vagrancy statutes, which remained on the books, usually were written with a breadth and vagueness intended to give police a pretext to haul into the station anyone they viewed as suspicious. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated a Jacksonville, Florida statute—and by extension all such statutes—"for vagueness, in that it ‘fails to give a person of ordinary intelligence fair notice that his contemplated conduct is forbidden by the statute’, it encourages arbitrary and erratic arrests and convictions, it makes criminal activities that, by modern standards, are normally innocent, and it places almost unfettered discretion in the hands of the police.”  [See footnote below.]

For civil libertarians, the vagueness of vagrancy laws was one reason they were defective and unjust. A second reason was that some of their provisions criminalized status rather than behavior, that is, for being something (e.g. unemployed or without a valid address) rather than doing something. As such, they were most often used to harass the poor. . . .

It seemed to us that the Louisiana statute should be declared unconstitutional on both counts—vagueness and wrongly criminalizing status. Regarding the former, among those it deemed vagrant are “Persons who loaf the streets habitually or who frequent the streets habitually at late or unusual hours of the night." Regarding the latter, among the vagrant are “Able-bodied persons without lawful means of support who do not seek employment and take employment when it is available to them." 

Footnote: Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156 (1972). Papachristou consolidated the appeals of eight convictions stemming from five separate actions by Jacksonville police. A portion of the facts presented to the court are worth citing to illustrate the ways vagrancy statutes habitually were used. 

Margaret Papachristou and Betty Calloway were white females. Eugene Eddie Melton and Leonard Johnson were black males. Papachristou was enrolled in a job-training program sponsored by the State Employment Service at Florida Junior College in Jacksonville. Calloway was a typing and shorthand teacher at a state mental institution located near Jacksonville. She was the owner of the automobile in which the four defendants were arrested. Melton was a Vietnam war veteran who had been released from the Navy after nine months in a veterans' hospital. On the date of his arrest he was a part-time computer helper while attending college as a full-time student in Jacksonville. Johnson was a tow-motor operator in a grocery chain warehouse and was a lifelong resident of Jacksonville.

At the time of their arrest the four of them were riding in Calloway's car on the main thoroughfare in Jacksonville. They had left a restaurant owned by Johnson's uncle where they had eaten and were on their way to a nightclub. The arresting officers denied that the racial mixture in the car played any part in the decision to make the arrest. The arrest, they said, was made because the defendants had stopped near a used-car lot which had been broken into several times. There was, however, no evidence of any breaking and entering on the night in question. Of these four charged with "prowling by auto" none had been previously arrested except Papachristou, who had once been convicted of a municipal offense.

Jimmy Lee Smith and Milton Henry were arrested between 9 and 10 a.m. on a weekday in downtown Jacksonville while waiting for a friend who was to lend them a car so they could apply for a job at a produce company. Smith was a part-time produce worker and part-time organizer for a Negro political group. He had a common-law wife and three children supported by him and his wife. He had been arrested several times but convicted only once. Henry was an 18-year-old high school student with no previous record of arrest. That morning was cold, and Smith had no jacket, so they went briefly into a dry cleaning shop to wait, but left when requested to do so. They thereafter walked back and forth two or three times over a two-block stretch looking for their friend. The store owners, who apparently were wary of Smith and his companion, summoned two police officers who searched the men and found neither had a weapon. But they were arrested because the officers said they had no identification and because the officers did not believe their story.

Volodymyr Zelensky and Elizabeth Cheney

Heroes show courage and fortitude against their own apparent self-interest, on behalf of something good and important.

Heroes have honor.

West Point's Cadet Honor Code: "A Cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do."

In the days after 911 we heard the comment about fire-fighters: "They ran toward the burning buildings." They were heroes.

The occupants of the World Trade Towers were frightened crowds, exiting the building, escaping. The firefighters moving up the stairs were doing the hard thing, trying to save lives. They honored their duty. We honor them for that.

Elizabeth Cheney--Liz--repositioned herself out of a GOP scrum of ambitious politically predictable conservatives. She is now in a position of national leadership. She stands out because she stands for something bigger than herself, and she is doing it under fire, against her apparent self-interest. She is condemned for it, but doing it anyway. It is politically dangerous for her. That is what makes her heroic.

Few readers of this blog will think that I share Liz Cheney's overall politics. I mostly do not. She was a steadfast hawkish conservative, a fossil-fuel state GOP loyalist. She is political "royalty," with a family-name brand. She elevated quickly to the number-three position in the House GOP.  She had a future as a GOP loyalist. She was not noticeably different from any other camera-seeking ambitious GOP politician, each more concerned with team spirit than with any higher principle.

We were wrong about Liz Cheney. She has principles. Something was more important to her than her re-election and continued popularity among Republicans. American democracy itself. She was an eye-witness to an effort to overturn an election. 

She could have mumbled and equivocated. It is what other "good Republicans" are doing. They say they don't completely agree with Trump's tweets and methods, maybe, but they certainly agree that a Democrat in the White House is a disaster. She could say the Trump effort to overturn the election got out of hand. It was an unfortunate misunderstanding. She could have finessed this.  

Honor sets a higher standard. "A Cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do."

Trump was dishonest. His actions were wrong and dangerous. She would not stand for it, nor tolerate people who do. Obeying the will of the people, expressed in elections, is the centerpiece of democratic government. She supports democracy. Period. She stands for something and won't tolerate lying about it. 

A cynic might observe that this is actually a well-disguised act of political self-interest, with Cheney playing the long game.  Perhaps she was betting Trump-worship within the GOP will exhaust itself. Possibly a tape-recording of the Zelensky-Trump phone call will emerge, and it will be obvious that Trump didn't just ask for a "favor, though," but that he really put the screws to Zelensky. Possibly Mike Pence, Pence's aides, or a legal counsel will reveal smoking-gun evidence that turns the tide of opinion. But probably not. People are "taking the Fifth" and GOP voters prefer Trump stick to his story. She was thrown out of the House leadership. She is widely, thoroughly condemned by the people who control her political future. It looks unequivocal: She is running toward the danger to American democracy. She had honor. She is a hero.

Speaking to Congress

Volodymyr Zelensky burst onto the international stage as a hero because the words attributed to him were, "I need ammunition, not a ride." He was staying, not running. The Russians were coming for him. The easy, smart thing to do would be to set up a government in exile. He would be escaping danger. His job was to be there, in danger, symbolizing the principle of Ukrainian democracy. He had honor. He is a hero

Zelensky and Cheney. Heroes.

Amid all the cynicism about politics, humans seek out authenticity and heroism. Sometimes we see it among people we agree with, sometimes with people we do not. But we recognize it and admire it. 

Force Majeure.

Sometimes bank borrowers default.

    "Today Russia is once again at the heart of financial market instability."

The financial crisis of 2008-2009 toughened up the American banking system. Banks needed to pass hypothetical "stress tests." Russian default is not hypothetical. They announced they are repaying sovereign debt with worthless rubles. Loans to Russian businesses may not be repaid, either. A financial system is an interlocking set of risks offset by balances from counterparties. The failure of a major player affects everyone else. 

New York Post

College classmate Sandford Borins is an emeritus professor at the University of Toronto, where he taught public management. Today's Guest Post is an excerpt from the recent post at his website www.sandfordborins.com. In retirement he makes frequent comments on politics, economics, and culture.  Readers can subscribe at his site.

I consider Borins' post an early warning. While we are thinking about inflation, supply chain disruptions, COVID returning, ongoing war, refugees, and the potential of escalation, there is something else to consider. Russian defaults endanger a financial system.

Watch the banks.

Guest Post by Sandford Borins

Sandford Borins

Twenty-five years ago, the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) was using the ideas of two Nobel Prize-winning economists, Myron Scholes and Merton Miller, to speculate on bond prices. In 1998, these boffins predicted that spreads between certain bonds would revert to their historical averages. They were spectacularly wrong when Russia defaulted. LTCM was so highly leveraged that its imminent bankruptcy would have led to unsustainable losses for the financial institutions that lent it money. To avoid systemic failure, the Federal Reserve had to bail out and wind down LTCM. (At least Scholes and Miller lost all their equity in the firm.) 

To Russia with Risk

Today Russia is once again at the heart of financial market instability. A second-order consequence of the economic sanctions being levied against Russia is that Russian assets are being sharply devalued or rendered worthless. The holders of these assets outside Russia are incurring losses and may indeed be forced to write them off completely.

Fortune Magazine

 Most Russian commercial aircraft are owned by overseas aircraft leasing firms. The Russian airlines will fail to make their payments and the lenders will try, likely unsuccessfully, to recover planes that are parked on Russian tarmacs. The Russian Government may then seize the planes, nationalize the airlines, and try to continue operating them as long as it can find replacement parts.

The Russian Government has stated that it will make interest payments on its sovereign debt in non-convertible rubles, which is tantamount to a default. Russia has $150 billion US in sovereign debt, which is apparently widely held by western banks and pension funds. They will likely have to write off their Russian debt. Hopefully, no overseas investor will have gone so heavily into Russian debt that its losses would be unmanageable.

Western firms that are leaving Russia are running the risk that their assets may be seized by the Russian government and nationalized. These firms too would have to write off their investments in Russia.

The one major financial institution that has not withdrawn from Russia is Deutsche Bank, which suggests that it is deeply involved in the Russian economy. Deutsche Bank has shown itself to be accident-prone in recent years (and decades), so that would not be surprising.

My overall point is that the sanctions against Russia will create pain for overseas investors in Russian debt and business in Russia. Hopefully, the aggregate size of the investments is small enough (a mere $150 billion in sovereign debt) and the investments are spread widely enough that the situation will not create systemic failures in the global financial system. This is not an argument against the sanctions, but rather a call for bank regulators and finance ministries to anticipate and respond to the second-order effects.

Rebuilding Ukraine and Suing Russia

Ukraine is also suffering financial devastation, but that is a result of Russian military action. Destroying housing will likely impose losses on Ukrainians themselves rather than foreign investors. We can expect that when the war is over its allies as well as the Ukrainian diaspora will provide financial support to rebuild Ukrainian infrastructure.

When the war is over, many Russian assets may have changed hands and the new owners will attempt to make money employing assets they purchased at fire-sale prices. Purchasers of defaulted sovereign debt will sue the Russian government to repay the debt at prices below face value but nevertheless highly profitable (a strategy that worked in recent years for speculators in defaulted Argentinian sovereign debt). Perhaps Russian oligarchs will buy up Russian businesses and commercial assets, hoping that Putin or his successor will allow them to operate profitably. Or, if the Russian Government nationalizes assets now, it may have to return them as the price of rejoining the global economy.

As Keynes well knew, wars have economic consequences.

Buy American.

Buy Charmin toilet paper.

It is superior toilet paper. It's made by Procter & Gamble in Mehoopany, Pennsylvania

American consumers can apply economic sanctions of our own.

Maybe Americans are ready to pay attention to who makes things they buy, and where they are made. If we did, maybe China would refuse to help Russia. It wouldn't be government sanctions that worried them. It would be consumers exercising their power in a capitalist marketplace. If Americans started demanding Made in U.S.A labels on products, businesses would adjust their supply chains. I can imagine American customers preferring I-phones clearly marked as being assembled in San Antonio or Cleveland to ones built in China. War changes attitudes. Patriotic feelings are aroused. People want to do something. We can. What was impossible two months ago might be possible now. 

There are choices we can make domestically, too. I am a fan of Charmin toilet paper. In the ads, a blue cartoon mama bear describes Charmin's features--softness, strength. A toddler bear shakes his butt at us. We get it. A bear. The woods. 

Charmin is a little more expensive than competitor brands, but it a better product, and it isn't made by the Koch Brothers. I don't buy Koch Brothers' products when I can identify them. They own Georgia Pacific, and it makes a competitor brand, Angel Soft and Quilted Northern. The Koch Brothers put hundreds of millions of dollars into campaigns of candidates who support and enable Trump in his effort to overthrow the 2020 election. Koch Brothers don't buy my melons or buy ads on my blog. I don't owe them my business. Besides Charmin is soft and strong, like their ads say, and it is made in Pennsylvania by a company I am comfortable with, Procter & Gamble.

I have an alternative to Koch paper towels, too. I buy Bounty. Not Brawny. Brawny is the Koch one. The names are similar and easy to confuse. Imagine the brawny guy on the Brawny package to be a Koch Brothers congressman cheering the insurrection on January 6. He is the bad guy. Bounty is the good guy.

Kimberly-Clark's Kleenex suite of products used to be another alternative to Koch. I have owned stock in Kimberly-Clark for a decade. Although Charmin is the superior product, I have been tempted to support my investment "home team." Kimberly-Clark makes Huggies diapers, Kleenex for nose blowing, and Cottonelle toilet paper.

Kimberly-Clark is off my shopping list. They are one of the companies that announced they are continuing to stay in Russia and do business. They made their choice. They thought American consumers wouldn't notice or care. I noticed and care.

I will also sell my Kimberly-Clark stock. My selling doesn't change the balance of ownership. My tiny power is as a consumer, although I will write Kimberly-Clark and tell them I am disappointed in them. Someone in marketing there will notice and tally my letter. They will be alert to see if I am alone or part of a groundswell.

The brand names have come quickly, so let's review the "good guys," at least in my view. 

Charmin

Bounty

Puffs

I have evolved in my thinking about global trade. I thought the efficiencies would make a tide that would raise all ships. Global trade turns out to help some and hurt some. It raised a half billion Chinese peasants out of poverty, a good thing. It also bred a sense of hopelessness and frustration in the minds of workers here in the developed world, as value-added manufacturing moved offshore. Their distress is threatening our democracy. College-educated owners and managers in America were doing just fine in a globalized economy so they thought the system was working. They didn't notice or care what was happening to the people in America who were being displaced. The frustration of lower-skilled, lower-paid workers created an ethno-nationalistic populist revolt.

The war in Ukraine may have a positive purpose, if we survive it. Americans who want to "do something" may start shopping their values and their patriotism. Government can help here, with tariffs and with labeling laws that require prominent display of U.S. content of the things people buy.  

Maybe consumers in America will start buying American. Indeed, maybe they will insist on it. That would change history.

Taxonomy of political partisans

Taxonomy: 

The science of naming, describing, and classifying. 

How do you understand and interpret the American electorate?

A survey I posted last November sorted people into nine sub-groups, based on answers people submitted in a Pew organization survey. "Establishment liberal" and "Faith and Flag Right" are examples of their categories.

Here is how Pew says the public sorts itself:

I learned my readers skew about 70-30% Democratic. My blog post describing the results from my readers is here.  To go directly to the Pew survey itself, go here.  Those two links will give readers a thorough description of each category. 

The survey and classifications elicited complaints from readers saying the categories were wrong. 

This week "Susan" sent me her own interpretation of the American electorate. It is simpler than the Pew one. It made intuitive sense to me. Its broader brush meant it aggregated the fine-point categories that drew complaints from readers about the Pew survey. At election time, people usually make a binary choice of the most acceptable candidate, so fine distinctions get ignored. And maybe the fine point between "Democratic Mainstay" and "Establishment Liberals" was phony. If you were "Clean for Gene" in 1968, and still vote Democratic, you are are a single category, regardless of your opinion today on charter schools. Maybe simpler is better and more accurate.

Susan recently retired after 38 years as an elementary school teacher in Portland. She is a Baby Boomer, a type-2 Democrat in her own classification system, and a former member of the OEA union. She asks to be anonymous because she never wanted to disclose her politics in her work, lest it create frictions with parents. She still doesn't.  

I invite other readers to send me their own taxonomy of the American electorate.

Susan's taxonomy: 

1. The New Left. These are mostly younger, well-educated, good with social media.(e.g. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.) They have read Ibram X. Kendi, the anti-racism author. They automatically end their emails with their pronouns. They change their social media photos constantly to show their support of Ukraine, of Colin Kaepernick, of BLM. I agree with their causes but not their self-righteousness.

2. The Old Left. These are mostly Baby Boomers, including some former hippies, plus middle class, pro-union, pro-environment, pro-civil rights people (e.g. Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley and U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio) Some are well-educated; some are blue collar. They love Martin Luther King. Being gay is fine with them. They’ll use the correct pronoun but only to make people happy, because they are puzzled by all this fuss.

3. The Old Right. These are mostly Baby Boomers again, but these are people whose issues and focus are to be against deficits, against Communists, and for a smaller government. They are mostly pre-Newt Gingrich Republicans who admire Barry Goldwater, Bob Dole, and John McCain (currently, e.g. Mitt Romney, Bill Kristol, David Brooks.) Some of them might even support abortion in some cases. They liked the NRA until the NRA went crazy. Some are Christian, but not the fundamentalist nut-job sort. They have actual issues they would like to work on in Congress, but the New Right stops them. They would work on bipartisan bills, but the new Republicans would crucify them for it, and they submit to that pressure. 

4. The New Right: These are mostly younger people, with some exceptions. Some are well-educated, Ivy League elites, but they pretend not to be (e.g. Tom Cotton, Kristi Noem, Nikki Haley.) They NEVER compromise. They worship guns. They support Israel, mostly for the campaign contributions from AIPAC and the signal it sends to Christian groups who believe in the Rapture and the End Times, which have been imminent since 30 CE. They really don’t have issues. They are just against things—except private schools, guns, and ending all abortions. Those they like. 

5. ????????? This is the questioning, drifting, lost group of public intellectuals, and their fans. This group includes Jordan Peterson, Liel Leibovitz, Bari Weiss, Bill Maher. This group has a wide range of ages. They are very highly educated and mostly elite academics or writers. They are very angry with the elitist Democrats for cancel culture and woke culture. Some were Democrats and left the party. They mostly write brilliant essays about how destructive wokeness is, and rarely speak of any other issues. As far as I can tell they are Group 3 Republicans now, but the Group 4 and 6 Republicans are so embarrassing that Group 5 won’t admit it.

6. MAGAs, (e.g. Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, Ben Shapiro, Tomi Lahren, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Paul Gosar, Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott etc) These are Looney Tunes people all trying to out-Trump each other. Again, they have no real issues or solutions—they just do symbolic posturing for their voting base. They advocate slogans and thoughtless bumper-strip ideals, e.g. don't-say-gay, arrest parents of transgendered children, put cameras on teachers, "Build the Wall," "Stop the Steal." Q Anon is an even crazier subset of MAGAs. A lot of rank-and-file Republicans thrill to this group and send them money. Group 3 and 4 are afraid of them.