Richard Wolffe on why the walking comb-over will never take action against the gun lobby.

Instead, we’ll have to settle for a tweet. Because when we need leadership the most, there’s no point in raising your hopes with the man who watches Fox News all day inside the White House.

If this was the eighth terrorist attack of 2018, don’t you think every member of Congress – not just Democrats – would bleat on about taking urgent action? If Isis-inspired gunmen had just mown down 17 high school students in their classrooms, how long would it take before our president spoke in front of the nation’s TV cameras?

Not only is Fox News the media circuit of the NRA, you can bet that 99.9 percent of the 8 million-plus AR-15s that have been sold in this country are in the hands of Fox viewers, who will argue all day and night that a military murder machine is essential for “home defense.” So it’s unlikely that Trump will hear anything but kill, kill, kill when it comes to the advice of his Friend’s on the couch.

He must have forgotten to mention school shootings with assault weapons, like the AR-15 used at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida. It was the same assault weapon used at the Sutherland Springs church in Texas in November. It was the same assault weapon used in the Las Vegas massacre the month before that.

It’s so heartwarming to hear this from the man who promised to end “this American carnage” in his inaugural address. Of course, at the time he was talking about gang murders, just as he did in his State of the Union address last month.

Trump isn’t going to hear anything against these weapons in his other source of vital, and frequently repeated, information — his unscheduled calls with Vladimir Putin. Which are a real thing.

Kathleen Parker helps repeat the word of a shooting survivor.

When Hogg later appeared on camera, he spoke like a seasoned combat correspondent. Seemingly mature beyond his years, he looked straight into the camera and, speaking concisely, he addressed the sad reality of our nation’s failure to put an end to gun violence.

David Hogg was a standout that day. A 17-year-old senior and school news director, Hogg happened to have been among the few dozen students stowed in the dark classroom earlier mentioned. And somehow, he detached himself from the ongoing mayhem long enough to interview and record his fellow students about what they were experiencing and, in a scene worthy of a future teen cult movie, record their thoughts about gun policy.

And in a awful, twisted version of one of those “high schoolers today have never seen a telephone with a dial” trivia games …

Hogg could be the change agent many in the reform movement have been waiting for. He may represent a generational, evolutionary reflex to the paralysis that began nearly 19 years ago when two shooters killed 13 people at Columbine High School. Hogg and his contemporaries have never known a world in which students, even first-graders, weren’t slaughtered at their desks. Sooner or later, someone was going to rise up as counterpoint to such evil.

Think about that. These kids were born into a world where people walk into schools and mow down kids wholesale. They’ve watched it marching toward them every year, and seen every adult in their lives do not a damn thing to stop it.

Anne Applebaum on the NRA’s biggest supporters.

On the morning after the tragedy, the Russia-linked accounts were commenting fiercely, pushing the “crazy lone killer” explanation for the shooting and mocking advocates of gun control. … By Friday morning, some of the same accounts were also pushing something slightly different: the hashtag #falseflag. That’s a reference to the conspiracy theory, already widespread 48 hours later, that the shooting never happened, that the attack is a “false flag” operation staged by the U.S. government as a prelude to the seizure of guns.

For most Americans, the Parkland shooting was a terrible tragedy. But for social media accounts that promote the interests of Russia in the United States, it was a fantastic opportunity.

There is nothing that says how sick many people in this country are, than the willingness to believe that they would rather believe in an all encompassing conspiracy that fakes the death of children, than consider that maybe, just maybe, turning the nation into an armed camp was a bad idea.

And this is just the beginning. Over the next few days, many of these same kinds of accounts will invent a whole range of conspiracy theories about the shooting. If the past repeats itself, pro-Russian, alt-right, white-supremacist and pro-gun social media accounts will promote the same hashtags and indulge in the same conspiracy theories. Each group has its own interests in pushing #falseflag, but the Russian interest is clear. They do it because it helps undermine trust in institutions — the police, the FBI, the media — as well as in the government itself. They also do it because it helps to amplify extremist views that will deepen polarization in U.S. political life and create ever angrier, ever more partisan divides.

Russia’s interest in pushing conspiracies around guns isn’t a separate story from their actions in undermining the election. It’s all part of the same action, the same attack, the same war that they are waging against us using the tools we handed over for that purpose.

Colbert King on the most effective action every American can take against gun violence in 2018.

What thoughts? What prayers? Are we replaying in our minds the sheer horror that gripped the victims and their families? Thinking about the pain of loss and shattering of dreams? Could it happen here? Are those among our thoughts? What are we praying for? The dead and grieving families? Swift passage of pain and suffering? For this madness to go away? Or simply homage to the murdered in the simplest way possible? “Thoughts and prayers” is a stock platitude that many resort to, as if its invocation is a suitable substitute for action. Are those words enough?

Those words aren’t meant to comfort the grieving. They’re meant to excuse the uncaring.

As long as Trump has a grip on Congress and the NRA has his back, the AR-15 — the weapon used by the Parkland shooter — is safe. The American people can loosen that grip, and can also stand down the NRA. We have an opportunity and the means by way of the voting booth. Goodness knows, we have the motive.

If we want people to stop pulling the trigger, we need to pull the lever.

Suzanne Schneider on how Republicans try to pin violence on immigrants.

While we are used to approaching America’s gun culture as a singular phenomenon, it is worth considering how it relates to those other headlines about immigration. The latter debate often links borders to questions of safety and security — from President Trump’s assertion that Mexican immigrants are rapists to the language of the original travel ban, which targeted Muslim-majority countries and was titled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.” Despite evidence to the contrary (the incarceration rate for native-born Americans is nearly twice that of undocumented immigrants and nearly three times that of legal immigrants), a powerful narrative persists that immigrants are preternaturally violent and that our safety is best guaranteed by closing our doors to anyone with brown skin. Witness the Justice Department’s recent slanted study of immigrant crime or the president’s eagerness to wrongly attribute violence to immigrants, including in the death of a Border Patrol officer in November. (An FBI report this month found no signs of an attack in that incident.) As Trump said in his State of the Union address, “Open borders . . . have caused the loss of many innocent lives.” He cited two teenage girls killed in New York by members of the MS-13 gang, which often recruits immigrant minors; he omitted the victims of the 346 mass shootings that occurred in 2017.

This is a good piece, and worth reading in full. Because the issue of guns in America can not be separated from the issue of racism and the fear of the ‘other.’

Yet while one hand draws up plans for border walls, the other doles out AR-15s to white, male, homegrown terrorists: Between 54 and 63 percent of the mass shootings since 1982 were committed by white men. A hypothetical outside threat is seen as far more deadly than a very real internal one. How do we account for these seemingly contradictory impulses?

The narratives that Schneider describes are exactly those that need to be overcome to deal with this issue — and perhaps the obvious delusion of this narrative is why the new generation of teenagers seems ready to not buy into this old story.

James Burnett and Elizabeth Van Brocklin on the monotony of regular mass murder.

We will see a building in the frame, at first eerily still. Then pours forth a line of shaken workers or moviegoers or shoppers or small children, marched single-file, hands held high or on the shoulders of the person in front of them, scared to death but at this moment focused on showing they are not the gunman who has just opened fire inside. Such a scene is particularly familiar to us: We work for a nonprofit news organization that should not need to exist, one whose sole job is to report on guns and gun violence in the United States. Early on — around the seventh of the 25 major active shooter incidents that our site, the Trace, has covered during its two and a half years in operation — it struck us that the events have an almost formal visual language.

Jack the Ripper killed somewhere between five and eleven victims, depending on which expert you consult. But even if he took down that top number, if he did so in a school today, he’d be considered barely a middleweight in the game of slaughter.

Lisa Hamp speaks from the place of a survivor.

If you survive a mass shooting, life changes quickly. For me, at Virginia Tech almost 11 years ago, it changed the instant I heard the gunshots. … There have been hundreds of other mass shootings since that one. The physically uninjured survivors are often considered the lucky ones. And we are lucky. But that doesn’t mean that life after a shooting is easy or normal. It’s not. We have struggles and a recovery journey that can’t be seen, only felt.

Imagine something unlikely. Impossible. Say … a grizzly bear came into your workplace, killing your coworkers and maybe giving you a passing, painful swat before leaving. Then imagine that every day, every time you turned on the television, or radio, or twitter, the first thing you saw was “Bear!”

And then imagine no one every did a damn thing about it.

Trump / Russia

Randall Eliason on why Trump supporters should find nothing hopeful in Mueller’s indictments.

Friday’s indictment of 13 Russian nationals and three organizations answers some of the bigger outstanding legal and factual questions surrounding Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election. But a number remain unanswered, including the most obvious: Were Trump campaign officials involved, or Donald Trump himself? The indictment does not answer that question. ... Although there is no crime called collusion, in criminal law, working with others toward an unlawful end is known as conspiracy. And conspiracies to defraud the United States under 18 U.S.C. 371 include those that impair, obstruct, or impede lawful government functions such as carrying out a federal election. That is the legal theory that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has used to charge the Russian defendants. Although this indictment charges only Russians with taking part in that conspiracy, the same charge would potentially apply to any American co-conspirators.

The fact that Mueller indicted the Russians on the basis of election fraud ought to be very scary to everyone out there who, say … helped those Russians understand how to use voter models to better interfere with the election, as a Republican consultant in Florida did. It should also be concerning to everyone along a long chain of events that goes from 1) The Russians say they have information that will help us, 2) let’s meet with the Russians to see what they have, 3) Let’s figure out how we can get this out there without having our fingerprints all over it, 4) “I love Wikileaks!”

If the investigation into election meddling remains ongoing, then a superseding indictment could later add additional co-conspirators and charges. On that point, it is interesting to note the indictment’s allegation that the defendants conspired not only with each other , but also with “others known and unknown to the Grand Jury.” This could just be boilerplate language — or it could be a signal about things to come.

The indictments that Mueller issued on Friday, detailed as they are, are just one slice of the Russian effort, and just one point of possible collusion. They don’t include any of the players involved in promising information to the Trump campaign, any of those involved in the Trump Tower meeting, or any of those who are known to have meet with Papadopoulos, Page, or others. Also, none of these indictments is based on information garnered from the plea deal with either Papadopoulos or Flynn.

There number of shoes remaining to drop … is going to take at least two more Infrastructure Weeks.

David Von Drehle looks at how America is getting sucker-punched in social media.

In his paper, “Commanding the Trend: Social Media as Information Warfare,” Lt. Col. Jarred Prier examines strategies and tactics used by both the Islamic State and the Russian government to seize command of trending topics on Twitter and, to a lesser degree, Facebook. By hijacking these algorithms, enemy agents and their armies of bots inflame tension and erode trust across American society. A striking example, which Prier documents in detail, came during the November 2015 protests at the University of Missouri. A dispute over benefits for graduate teaching assistants had escalated into broad allegations of racism on campus. Spotting the trending hashtag #PrayforMizzou, a Russia-linked Twitter account, @Fanfan1911, tweeted a photo of a bruised African American youth that was lifted from an unrelated story. “The cops are marching with the KKK!” the tweet declared. “They beat up my little brother! Watch out!” This untrue message, signed “Jermaine,” was retweeted hundreds of times by Russian bots — enough to unleash it as a viral contagion among duped Americans, including Missouri’s student body president.

Racism. Immigration. Guns. Religion. These are the places that Russia has singled out as America’s weaknesses. And the greatest of these is … racism. And they’ll keep using it against us, until we finally do something about it.

Quinta Jurecic reminds the country of something Masha Gessen taught us a year ago.

Trump critics took it as a sign that Kelly was on their side when he seemed to hang his head as the president defended white-nationalist protesters in August. And yet six months later, Kelly’s future in the White House is highly uncertain, his reputation is greatly diminished and the vision of Trump constrained by military officers acting as “adults” has evaporated. Kelly’s public descent into ugliness began with an October news conference in which he defended Trump’s insensitive call to a soldier’s widow by attacking a Democratic congresswoman who is a friend of that family. Amid the fight over immigration, he accused eligible young people who didn’t sign up for deportation protections of being “too lazy to get off their asses.” And he spoke of White House staff secretary Rob Porter as “a man of true integrity and honor,” despite knowing that domestic violence accusations had cost Porter a full security clearance.

Which is a reminder of two things. First, Trump isn’t going to put restraints on himself, so the idea that he’s hiring someone to “be the adult” is ridiculous. Second, those willing to work for Trump … are willing to work for Trump. Which is all you need to know about them.

Trump critics would do well to reflect on this moment. Because it’s not just Kelly and the other generals in the Trump administration whom they’ve claimed as part of the resistance. It’s judges, civil servants and newspaper reporters. It’s special counsel Robert Mueller and the FBI. Americans are rallying around institutions as a means of opposing the president — but also out of a desperate desire for truth and accountability as correctives to the constant chaos of Trump. Yet these institutions can’t provide the salvation people seek.

It’s worth reading this in full for a refresher on what’s going on beyond the top lines.

Black Panther

Yes, it gets its own special section this morning.

Leonard Pitts on why even people who have never cared about a superhero movie, care about this one.

The reason it’s on everyone’s lips, the reason people who don’t care about superheroes suddenly care about superheroes, the reason you are reading these words, is that this movie is a moment, a watershed in the cultural history of African-American people. It’s not that there have never been must-see black movies before, or even black movies that shook the Zeitgeist like a tree. In 1967, African Americans crowded into theaters to watch Sidney Poitier, as Det. Virgil Tibbs, slap a racist white Southern cotton planter who had slapped him first. In 1971, they turned out big to see Richard Roundtree as John Shaft redefine black movie masculinity, strolling through Times Square in a brown leather coat as the wah-wah guitars of that Isaac Hayes theme buzz-sawed behind him. But no one ever bought out a movie theater to make sure little black kids saw Poitier’s “In The Heat of the Night.” Actress Octavia Spencer is doing just that in Mississippi; Detroit Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley and ESPN’s Jemele Hill are doing it in Motown; businessman Rodger Jackson is doing it in Chicago; and other philanthropists, churches, businesses and civic groups are doing it around the country.

Kenan Malik is one of the few who seems to think the film is less than what’s promised.

It was inevitable ... that when I saw Black Panther, the superhero blockbuster widely acclaimed as a cultural turning point in its portrayal of black identity, I was drawn not to T’Challa, the handsome hero king, or to Shuri, his techno-genius sister, but to Erik Killmonger, the would-be usurper of the throne.

I’m going to skip the rest of the discussion, not because it’s not good, but because it’s pretty spoiler-landen to hand out this early in the film’s run. Let me just that that the idea that Killmonger has a point in his arguments doesn’t invalidate the film — far from it. The best villains are always at least fifty percent right. The appeal of Killmonger is obvious, and powerful … and pretty much the point of the film.

On a related point, it kind of bugs me that only a character who is conflicted gets credit for having depth. How about a character that’s just deeply good?

Khanya Khondlo Mtshali has a more upbeat take on the film, but a similar take on what to take away.

In the weeks leading up to the Marvel film Black Panther, much has been made about the film’s revolutionary themes in the context of our current political moment. In a cover story for Time, Jamil Smith that for a culture that faces growing threats from white ethnocentric movements, “the very existence of Black Panther feels like resistance”. On the BBC’s website, the film critic Nicholas Barber argued that the presence of an African king as a main character in the film “would make Black Panther as revolutionary as the organization with which it shares its name”.

Okay … whoa. Yes, I will agree that this is getting into territory that would embarrass even the filmmakers. In more realistic terms …

There’s no denying how necessary Black Panther is for representation. In a world where diversity is so often treated as an act of charity instead of a reality, this film challenges the pervasive idea that our heroes can only be white and male. It provides generations of dark-skinned girls and women with heroes who share the same features which society ridicules them for. But as people descend upon their local cinemas to see what’s been touted as an excellent film, let’s remember watching a film is not a brave act of resistance. There’s plenty more work for us to do.

Black Panther may be the title character, but it’s the women in the film who really come off as powerful, smart, thoughtful … and the heart of the movie in all the right ways.

Donald Trump and Infidelity

Dana Milbank on why Republicans don’t care about Trump stepping out with a porn star.

Trump in an adulterous affair? With a porn star? And hush money? You couldn’t invent a scandal better than this. Whatevs. Stormy Daniels just couldn’t compete with Stormy Porter. Even the Trumpophilic Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said he was launching an investigation into why White House staff secretary Rob Porter was allowed to stay on the job despite credible allegations of wife beating. Leaked White House documents showed that as of November, Porter was but one of more than 130 political appointees in the Executive Office of the President who didn’t have permanent security clearances — including the White House counsel and press secretary.

Actually, Gowdy has become at least 63 percent less Gowdy-ish … since decided he wasn’t running for reelection. Leaving Congress — it’s the miracle drug that heals Republican spines. But in any case, Milbank contends there are just too many storms going on to leave Daniels room to develop into a hurricane.

All those storms, in turn, are but upper-level disturbances compared with the tidal surge now washing over the White House from Stormy Mueller’s probe, which has secured two guilty pleas from Trump campaign officials and indictments of two more, as well as 13 people allegedly involved in a Russian “troll farm.” The Post reported this week about still more Trump tampering with the probe: Trump asked White House Counsel Donald McGahn to get then-FBI Director James B. Comey to say publicly that Trump wasn’t under investigation.

Personally, I’m still laying 50-50 odds that when Trump leaves office, it will be not because of anything Mueller does, but because of revelations from one of the women he assaulted.

Leonard Pitts has a way that Donald Trump actually can make many, many Americans rich.

Dear Michael D. Cohen, Esq.: According to The New York Times, you claim to have forked over $130,000 during the 2016 campaign to Stephanie Clifford, a pornographic film “actress” who performs under that nom de coitus, in exchange for her promise not to talk about having sex with Donald Trump shortly after his wife gave birth to his youngest son. You say — and Clifford’s attorney backs you up — that you did this out of your own pocket. … “Just because something isn’t true,” you told CNN, “doesn’t mean that it can’t cause you harm or damage. I will always protect Mr. Trump.” So just to make sure I’m clear on this: It doesn’t matter whether or not the claim is true? If it could damage your client, you stand ready to write a six-figure check? Dude, me and Donald had so much sex.

Sexual Assult

Joe Biden wants less shaming, more trials.

Every day, the American public hears new stories of sexual assault and other forms of violence against women, some detailing decades of threats and abuse. How many more women must come forward before this country gets serious about this problem? Things can be different. I have seen the possibilities. More than 25 years ago, I wrote a bill called the Violence Against Women Act. The law accomplished many good things: a national hotline for battered women; money for local shelters; new programs on campus assault; temporary housing for survivors; more education for victim advocates, judges and prosecutors. Remedies created by the Violence Against Women Act have saved lives and saved billions of taxpayer dollars. It helped to change America. But often people forget that the law originally included more: a revolutionary civil rights remedy that gave victims the power, on their own, to sue wrongdoers for violations of the act.

That portion of the bill didn’t end up dying on the floor in an effort to attract more votes. It passed Congress. It was signed. It was in there. Only …

Six years later, the Supreme Court killed it. In a 5-to-4 vote, the court struck down the civil rights remedy on the basis of the strange argument that adding a federal option usurped the role of the states. Then-Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who wrote the opinion, had lobbied against the law in Congress, demeaned it in speeches as a pointless “symbolic” effort, and implied that women would use the new law to extort money in divorces. Think about that: The idea was that women would make up stories about being violated to fatten their bank accounts.

We can get back Congress this fall. We can unseat Trump, or Trump’s successor, in 2020. But the courts are going to be a long term fight.