The driving force behind Jan. 6? 2045
But not everyone is pleased by the automated efforts
The violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol is now nearly two months past. Donald Trump is in his gilded Florida palace, sulking and plotting his revenge. With a steady and quiet hand, President Joe Biden is tackling the mammoth task of rebuilding the nation’s health and economy.
But the driving force behind the events of Jan. 6 — incited by and reveled in by Mr. Trump — is not going away by a long shot. It can be summed up by one number: 2045.
That is the year in which non-Hispanic whites will become a minority in this country, according to the latest U.S. Census projection.
Keep in mind, the actual year in which non-whites would predominate nationally in terms of eligible voters might not take place until a decade or more after that.
Still, the mounting prospect of that looming demographic nail in the coffin of white power already appears to have struck desperate fear in a considerable share of voters, enough at least to give rise to and sustain what is now called “Trumpism” and related malignancies.
Sure, Mr. Trump’s base of support includes rich folks and corporations wanting lower taxes, opponents of big government, right-wing judiciary advocates, the medical-pharmaceutical complex opposing universal health care, the defense industry wanting big spending, manufacturing workers looking for scapegoats for their stagnant wages, and on and on. But at its core, fear over the loss of 400 years of white privilege burns hot.
Race has been the issue in this country since the first slave ship arrived in 1619. As yearning for freedom from England rose in the 18th century colonies, so did the blatant contradictions from colonists’ enslavement of Black people — for those who chose to think about it at the time.
Our Constitution writers were flummoxed by whether to count slaves as persons, ending up with an absurd but expedient three-fifths calculation. A century later, we of course fought a series of massacres known as the Civil War over the matter of race.
In the 1930s, when Jim Crow laws still reigned in large parts of the United States and the Nazis were trying to figure out how to deal with Germany’s Jews, they studied how America treated its Black citizens and decided some aspects of that were just too harsh, Isabel Wilkerson recounted in her recent penetrating book, “Caste.” Let’s review that: America in the 1930s — too harsh for the Nazis.
And almost 100 years later we have an attack on the Capitol — an attack on the U.S. Constitution — that was a lot of things, but at its essence was a race riot by whites with searing grievances over the fading privileges of their skin color.
Oh, yes, you can analyze the Jan. 6 insurrectionists any number of ways, in terms of economic displacement, the deleterious effects of the internet, Americans’ relatively low education levels, and so on. All likely were factors. But let’s call it for what it was — a race riot — because race remains the foremost factor in American life.
Beyond the surfeit of superficial evidence — the rioters’ Confederate flags, the racist slogans on their T-shirts, their rampant use of the “N” word — this bears some deeper consideration.
As Ms. Wilkerson says, it’s not so much a matter of economics at work here but of status — or more specifically “dominant group status threat,” as it has been dubbed by political scientists.
Ms. Wilkerson cites the seminal writing of Lillian Smith, whose 1949 book about her Southern upbringing and the deep psychological underpinnings of the costs of segregation, “Killers of the Dream,” states:
“Nobody could take away from you this whiteness that made you and your way of life ‘superior.’ They could take your house, your job, your fun; they could steal your wages, keep you from acquiring knowledge … they could by arising your anxieties make you impotent, but they could not strip your white skin off of you.”
Ms. Smith concluded: “When people think more of their skin color than their souls, something has happened to them.”
Almost three-quarters of a century after she wrote this, that “something” was given vivid and terrifying expression on Jan. 6. Does anyone seriously doubt that?
Having trouble scoring a COVID-19 vaccine appointment? You’re not alone. To cope, some people are turning to bots that scan overwhelmed websites and send alerts on social media when slots open up.
They’ve provided relief to families helping older relatives find scarce appointments. But not all public health officials think they’re a good idea.
In Buckland, Massachusetts, two hours west of Boston, a vaccine clinic canceled a day of appointments after learning that out-of-towners scooped up almost all of them in minutes thanks to a Twitter alert. In parts of New Jersey, health officials added steps to block bots, which they say favor the tech-savvy.
What is a vaccine bot?
Bots — basically autonomous programs on the web — have emerged amid widespread frustration with the online world of vaccine appointments.
Though the situations vary by state, people often have to check multiple provider sites for available appointments. Weeks after the rollout began, demand for vaccines continues to outweigh supply, complicating the search even for eligible
people as they refresh appointment sites to score a slot. When a coveted opening does appear, many find it can vanish midway through the booking.
The most notable bots scan vaccine provider websites to detect changes, which could mean a clinic is adding new appointments. The bots are often overseen by humans, who then post alerts of the openings using Twitter or text notifications.
A second type that’s more worrisome to health officials are “scalper” bots that could automatically book appointments, potentially to offer them for sale. So far, there’s little evidence scalper bots are taking appointments.
Are vaccine bot alerts helping?
Yes, for the people who use them.
“THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! I GOT MY DAD AN APPOINTMENT! THANK YOU SO MUCH!” tweeted Benjamin Shover, of Stratford, New Jersey, after securing a March 3 appointment for his 70-year-old father with the help of an alert from Twitter account @nj— vaccine.
The success came a month after signing up for New Jersey’s state online vaccine registry.
The creator of the bot, software engineer Kenneth Hsu, said his original motivation was to help get an appointment for his own parents-in-law. Now he and other volunteers have set a broader mission of assisting others locked out of New Jersey’s confusing online appointment system.
“These are people who just want to know they’re on a list somewhere and they are going to be helped,” Hsu said. “We want everyone vaccinated. We want to see our grandparents.”
What do health officials think?
The bots have met resistance in some communities. A bot that recently alerted Massachusetts residents to a clinic in sparsely populated Franklin County led many people from the Boston area to sign up for the slots. Local officials canceled all of the appointments, switched to a private system and spread the word through senior centers and town officials.
“Our goal was to help our residents get their vaccination,” said Tracy Rogers, emergency preparedness manager for the Franklin Regional Council of Governments. “But 95% of the appointments we had were from outside Franklin County.”
New Jersey’s Union County put a CAPTCHA prompt in its scheduling system to confirm visitors are human, blocking efforts “to game” it with a bot, said Sebastian D’Elia, a county spokesperson.
“When you post on Twitter, only a certain segment of society is going to see that,” he said. Even if they’re trying to help someone else, D’Elia said others do not have the luxury of people who are advocating for them.
But the person who created a bot that’s now blocked in Union County, 24-year-old computer programmer Noah Marcus, said the current system isn’t fair, either.
“The system was already favoring the tech-savvy and the person who can just sit in front of their computer all day, hitting refresh,” Marcus said.
D’Elia said the county is also scheduling appointments by phone to help those who might have trouble online.
How do they work?
Marcus used the Python coding language to create a program that sifts through a vaccine clinic website, looking for certain keywords and tables that would indicate new appointments. Other bots use different techniques, depending on how the target website is built.
This kind of information gathering, known as web scraping, remains a source of rancor. Essentially, scraping is collecting information from a website that its owner doesn’t want collected, said Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Some web services have taken web scrapers to court, saying scraping techniques violate the terms and conditions for accessing their sites. One case involving bots that scraped LinkedIn profiles is before the U.S. Supreme Court.
“There’s disagreement in the courts about the legality of web-scraping,” Kerr said. “It’s a murky area. It’s probably legal but it’s not something we have certainty about.”
What about scalper bots?
The website for a mass vaccination site in Atlantic City, New Jersey, says its online queue system — which keeps people waiting on the site as slots are allotted — is designed to prevent it from crashing and to stop bots from snapping up appointments “from real people.” But is that actually happening?
Making a bot that can actually book appointments — not just detect them — would be a lot harder. And sites usually ask for information such as a person’s date of birth to make sure they are eligible.
Pharmacy giants Walgreens and CVS, which are increasingly giving people shots across the U.S., have already said they’ve been working to prevent such activity.
Walgreens said it is using cybersecurity techniques to detect and prevent bots so that “only authorized and eligible patients will have access to schedule a vaccine appointment.” CVS Health said it’s encountered various types of automated activities and has designed its appointment-making system to validate legitimate users.
Aaron Wiggins was second-guessing a routine activity.
The Maryland men’s basketball junior guard was back in Greensboro, North Carolina, in early June after the coronavirus pandemic forced the cancellation of the 2019-20 college basketball season and sent him and his teammates home. While preparing for an early-morning jog in a majority-white neighborhood, the harrowing images from recent weeks and months — viral footage of Black Americans such as George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery being killed — were still fresh in his mind.
Arbery was followed by three white men and gunned down in a South Georgia neighborhood in February 2020. Prosecutors have said Arbery was out jogging when the men charged with his murder chased him. Months later, in Minneapolis, Floyd died after a white police officer kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes.
“It was raining outside, and I was going to put my hoodie on and go for a jog around 6, 7 a.m.,”
Wiggins said in a phone interview, “but the thought ran through my mind: ‘How would I look? Would I scare people running around as a Black man with a hoodie on at 6 a.m.?’ I don’t want to raise any suspicion or have anybody question what I’m doing, even though I’ve lived in that neighborhood for my entire life.”
The high-profile deaths of Floyd
and Arbery, along with Breonna Taylor, who was fatally shot in her apartment by Louisville police in March 2020, sent shock waves through the country, and Maryland men’s basketball wasn’t insulated. In the weeks and months to come, the largest nationwide protests since the civil rights movement would emerge.
With coronavirus restrictions keeping Maryland players and coaches separated for the foreseeable future, what started as frequent check-ins turned into sometimes emotional, but necessary, dialogue on the state of affairs in the country.
’Everybody kind of poured their hearts out’
The Terps saw significant turnover in the offseason. Anthony Cowan Jr. graduated. Jalen Smith departed early for the NBA and multiple players transferred.
A summer period that would usually be a crucial time to get acclimated with several incoming freshmen and transfers — on and off the court — was lost. The team held weekly calls for everyone to stay in touch and give updates on their workouts, but coach Mark Turgeon soon opened the floor for non-basketball talk. The topic of discussion quickly shifted to the current events that were unfolding.
“We’ve been through a lot of stuff, [Freddie Gray] in Baltimore and all the things that have happened with Black lives since I’ve been at Maryland,” the 10th-year coach told The Baltimore Sun before the start of the season, referring to the death of Gray from injuries suffered in police custody in 2015. “But this was at another level.”
The team created a separate forum for its talks on the protests and racial injustice. Assistant coaches and Donnell Jones, the team’s character coach and team chaplain, were also on the call. At the suggestion of Jones, the team began reading “Why We Can’t Wait,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s novel on the nonviolent protests against racial segregation during the civil rights movement.
“Everybody kind of poured their hearts out and had their own thing that they wanted to say about it,” Wiggins said of the first meeting. “I think that really helped us chemistry-wise, to hear each other speak from the heart and feel the perspectives.”
On his own, Turgeon read, watched videos and gave updates on the team discussions
as he publicly supported the Black Lives Matter movement.
“It was cool to see him take initiative, take a stand and support us,” senior guard Darryl Morsell said.
In the months that followed, the team built off its virtual discussions. In September, it announced every member registered to vote through a player-driven effort and encouraged others to vote in the November general election.
’They can have a strong voice in their community’
In the wake of nationwide protests, the NCAA and various conferences took steps to empower student-athletes and encourage activism. It was declared that Election Day would be a day off from athletic activity to allow time to vote.
The Big Ten Conference launched its AntiHate and Anti-Racism Coalition, a group of university coaches, student-athletes and leaders who will work to help combat racism and allow student-athletes to express their rights to free speech and peaceful protest. Turgeon is one of the school’s representatives.
Even as the election brought record turnout and shifted the balance of power in the White House and Senate, efforts to combat racial injustice have continued. The NCAA recently released results from a fall survey of student-athletes, showing widespread interest and engagement in topics related to racial justice.
When images surfaced of a pro-Donald Trump mob breaching the Capitol in early January to contest the results of the election — and the juxtaposition of the police response — players were taken back to their talks of the summer protests.
Morsell was compelled to respond in some way. He spoke to his teammates about kneeling before tipoff of the Terps’ home game against Iowa. His teammates supported the idea.
Morsell then reached out to Iowa guard Jordan Bohannon to inform him of the plan and the program was on board. For several seconds after the national anthem played, players, coaches and referees all dropped to one knee.
“I do think that when my players leave Maryland,” Turgeon said, “because of what we experienced this summer, they can have a strong voice in their community down the road someday.”
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