GOP5 bak

also in 6<div>
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</div><div>SEE GOP6&nbsp; troll auth, post kyle</div><div>
</div><div>6/21 belated/ redumb?</div><div>includes psych but see psychology node</div><div>
</div><div>see bannon and esp tucker maintrEAM rw bs --> RADICALIZATION/ FREEDUMB, VAXX BIG STEAL ETC</div><div>
</div><div>prolly some neglect interwebs down</div><div>
</div><div>HTML maralag</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>i've neglected rumors of legal, tho swalwell 2nd to sue under KKK law?</div><div>=</div><div></div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/republicans-vigilante/</div><div>
</div><div>thom h IMU</div><div>
</div><div>The Rittenhouse verdict sent a shudder through America as terrorists and vigilantes celebrated: one right-winger called for wholesale slaughter of Democrats saying on Telegram, "The left won't stop until their bodies get stacked up like cord wood."</div><div>On Facebook, right-wing sites celebrating the verdict were the most popular nationwide by a factor of 9 to 1.</div><div>
</div><div>The parents of Anthony Huber, who Rittenhouse killed as Huber tried to disarm him, put out a public statement that said, in part:</div><div>
</div><div>Today's verdict means there is no accountability for the person who murdered our son. It sends the unacceptable message that armed civilians can show up in any town, incite violence, and then use the danger they have created to justify shooting people in the street.</div><div>A right-wing militia group in New York celebrated in the streets and then put a punctuation mark on their disdain for the law and simple rules of a civil society by entering the NY subway system through the emergency exit, bypassing the toll booths. "Rules don't apply to us!" they seemed to be shouting, along with, "You can't stop us!"</div><div>
</div><div>Trump wannabees in public office who are still trying to capture the white supremacist and white nationhood vote have doubled down on his strategy of fear, hate, and vigilantism.</div><div>
</div><div>Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for example, recently signed into law legislation that gives legal protections to people who drive their cars into protesters in the street and defines everybody in any protest as a criminal felon if anybody in that protest breaks a window or engages in other illegal activity.</div><div>
</div><div>With DeSantis and other Republican governors pre-exonerating people like the driver who viciously killed Heather Heyer and vigilante protest shooters like Rittenhouse, many are worried that we're entering a new era where vigilante shooters and drivers-into-crowds will become as normalized and accepted as Amy Vanderpool documents how normalized daily mass shootings have become in America.</div><div>
</div><div>Laws similar to Florida's have been passed or are pending in numerous Republican-controlled states, presumably in anticipation of citizen protests when those states use their newly passed laws to overturn the will of voters in the 2022 and 2024 elections. Object to your politicians handing an election they lost to themselves? You go straight from the streets to the jail, just like in tinhorn dictatorships.</div><div>
</div><div>There's always been a fringe movement of violent white supremacist vigilantes in America, particularly since the end of the Civil War, but they've never before been embraced by or succeeded in capturing a political party. Today, astonishingly, that's the case in our country.</div><div>
</div><div>So, what's motivating today's vigilantes and the police who often aid and support them, as in the Rittenhouse case?</div><div>
</div><div>Centuries ago, as white people fanned out across this continent to occupy land stolen from Native Americans, it usually took years or decades for stable government institutions to be created, including local police forces. Therefore, communities would organize their own forces, called "vigilance committees" whose job was to be "vigilant" to protect their own homes and communities.</div><div>
</div><div>That sort of "classic vigilantism" pretty much completely disappeared in the US after the Civil War, however, when the southern-state slave patrols were merged into those states' militias (what we call the National Guard) and professional police forces, state and local, took over.</div><div>
</div><div>Modern post-Civil War violent vigilantism, therefore, doesn't usually emerge because the government is failing to protect citizens, and communities field their own equivalent of police forces.</div><div>
</div><div>Instead, these days it's almost always a conservative response to cultural change that creates a vigilante backlash.</div><div>
</div><div>Virtually the dictionary definition of "conservative" is "opposed to rapid change in society." That's why, as America becomes more diverse and states like Texas have become less than 50% white, racist "conservative" factions that have had a home in the GOP since 1968 are turning to violence to try to maintain the absolute dominance of straight white men in American society.</div><div>
</div><div>When the US Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, for example, those who were opposed to that change in our society, symbolized by the Roe v Wade decision, organized vigilante groups that threatened women outside abortion clinics, followed and harassed women getting healthcare and people who worked in the clinics, and murdered multiple doctors and bombed multiple clinics across the nation.</div><div>
</div><div>In the 1980s, conservative billionaires who supported Reagan helped impose neoliberal austerity on America, so for forty years the country has been on a steady decline as jobs went overseas, wages fell so badly the middle class sagged below 50% of Americans by 2015, and a general rage began to build across the country.</div><div>
</div><div>Much of that rage was channeled into "anti-government" movements that were encouraged by Reagan, who told us that government was the problem and not the solution. Neoliberal billionaires backed Republican politicians who kept their taxes low while openly and proudly obstructing any government efforts to help working class people.</div><div>
</div><div>The GOP also revived Nixon's "Southern Strategy" in 1980 using open appeals to racism with Reagan warning about "strapping young bucks" and Black "welfare queens" taking white people's tax dollars. George HW Bush put it on steroids in 1992 with his "Willie Horton" television advertisements against Michael Dukakis, charging the Democrat wasn't doing enough to protect Massachusetts from violent Black criminals.</div><div>
</div><div>By this time the GOP had totally embraced neoliberalism and stopped proposing any sort of policies that would lift up America. Instead, their efforts went to subsidizing billionaires with tax cuts, and increasing profits for polluting industries via deregulation.</div><div>
</div><div>Working class white people continued to fall behind, particularly in rural areas, as wealthy CEOs and trust-fund billionaires made out like bandits, pouring their surplus cash into the campaigns of politicians because five rightwingers on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery with Citizens United in 2010.</div><div>
</div><div>The Republican answer to the growing white angst in the country was to start a movement against affirmative action in the 1980s and 1990s, calling it "reverse racism," reviving the old saw from the 1950s that "Black people want to take your job!"</div><div>
</div><div>Women, since the 1970s, have also been successfully competing for jobs formerly held by white men, building misogynous frustration and rage among lower-income and lower-education white men, and turning incels murderous.</div><div>
</div><div>Much of this white male rage was channeled in the 1990s into the fringe "white nationalist" movement, which got their martyrs with Ruby Ridge (1992) and Waco (1993), where heavily armed white supremacists shot it out with the feds and lost terribly.</div><div>
</div><div>That provoked Tim McVeigh to follow The Turner Diaries "create a race-based civil war by provoking the government to seize guns so we can fight back" script and blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City on the anniversary of Waco in 1995, killing 168 and injuring 860.</div><div>
</div><div>He, however, was condemned by both political parties and ultimately put to death by a Republican president. The GOP had not yet fully turned toward embracing fascists, vigilantes and terrorists in the 1990s.</div><div>
</div><div>Modern race-based vigilantism with the support of the GOP took a big step forward after 9/11, when multiple Republican leaders used that crime as an excuse to vilify Muslims specifically and brown-skinned Arabs more generally. Most famously, Donald Trump perpetrated the lie that Muslims in New Jersey were celebrating in the streets the afternoon of 9/11.</div><div>
</div><div>George W. Bush took that anti-Muslim energy and amplified it as he pushed a revenge-based war against Afghanistan and Iraq, another Muslim country that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.</div><div>
</div><div>Following Bush's presidency, a Black man whose middle name was Hussein became our president, creating a frenzy of bizarre conspiracy theories on the Fox Propaganda Channel and across right-wing internet and social media outlets.</div><div>
</div><div>Was Obama a "real" American? Was he really a secret Kenyan Muslim sleeper agent? Was he trying to flip America communist with his radical Obamacare program? Trump and Republicans were asserting that those were all true claims.</div><div>
</div><div>With the hard right now empowered by these conspiracy theories on Fox and talk radio, in 2014 Cliven Bundy challenged the authority of the Obama administration to restrict him from grazing his cows on public federal land without paying a grazing fee; Obama flinched and backed down, giving Bundy and armed, anti-government white men a huge national PR victory (as well as getting his cows back).</div><div>
</div><div>Two years later his son, Ammon Bundy, attacked and occupied another federal facility, this time the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon near the Idaho border. His armed vigilantes pointed their weapons at federal officers on live television, and, again, the Obama administration backed down.</div><div>
</div><div>Bundy's 2016 "victory" animated white supremacist vigilantes across the nation and made him enough of a media figure that he's now running in the GOP primary for governor of Idaho.</div><div>
</div><div>Things really stepped up throughout the Trump administration when the new president openly welcomed white nationhood militias and neo-Nazis into the GOP and praised them from the presidential pulpit, something no president had done since Woodrow Wilson hosted the debut of the Klan recruiting film Birth of a Nation at the White House in 1915.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump invited vigilantes to the southern border to "help" with the problem of brown-skinned refugees trying to enter the country, and sucked up to police, encouraging them to be even more brutal with (presumably minority) criminal suspects.</div><div>
</div><div>His presidency marked a turning point for American politics, with the GOP abandoning any pretense of caring about policy debates to full-on embrace fear and hate of racial, religious, and gender minorities as their core political position and strategy going forward.</div><div>
</div><div>As a result, NBC News chronicles, threats against federal officials reported to Capitol Police have about tripled since Trump's first year in office, reaching over 9,000 incidents so far this year.</div><div>
</div><div>When we've seen these kinds of things happen in other countries, we've historically called them out as naked assaults on democracy; now Trump and his armed Republican faction have turned America's moral and political standing in the world on its head.</div><div>
</div><div>International observers have issued repeated alarms about the state of democracy in America since Trump's 2016 election. In 2017, we were downgraded by The Economist magazine's Intelligence Unit: instead of being a "full democracy," we are now a "flawed democracy." The international think tank IDEA just reported that we're now a "backsliding democracy."</div><div>
</div><div>Today, while the Democratic Party is working hard to secure benefits to all Americans, the Republicans have only two responses: block legislation and support armed white nationhood vigilantes.</div><div>
</div><div>All the Republican Party has left, now that they've abandoned any pretense over the past 40 years of supporting working people or even rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, is hate, fear and death.</div><div>
</div><div>As Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his 1933 inaugural address about an earlier generation of Republican obstructionists: "They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish."</div><div>
</div><div>And if we don't return to sanity, our democracy could perish as well.</div><div>
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</div><div>=</div><div>=</div><div>// me vs we, macho, freedumb, anger, victim</div><div>
</div><div>11 21</div><div>...Another one of her cartoons, called "Avatar: The Last Airbender," speaks to our current social and political crisis, which I think of as a crisis of humility.</div><div>Meaning, there's not enough of it on account of there being not enough demand. That might be a consequence of history. When I was my daughter's age, in 1984, American culture was very worried about children and their feelings of shame. (To a degree, it still is.) The culture asked parents to encourage in their kids a pride of self. Healthy self-directing egos were thought to mean healthy self-directing children, which meant a society of healthy self-directing individuals.</div><div>
</div><div>But Uncle Iroh, one of the characters in "Avatar," knows better. For reasons I won't go into, Iroh is something of a pariah by the time we meet him. He has fallen from a great height. As such, he's come to understand the real link between pride and shame. As he tells his young nephew, who insists on being proud: "Pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source. True humility is the only antidote to shame."</div><div>
</div><div>READ: Former Trump aide who was 'Anonymous': Why he stayed, why he left and how the GOP became more dangerous than ISIS]</div><div>
</div><div>Our culture still seems to think the answer to feelings of shame and insecurity is feelings of pride and self-confidence. You often see this after some kind of disaster, like a shooting massacre. We are frequently told suspects felt shame so they lashed out violently. If they had a more robust inner life, a more secure sense of self, perhaps the violence could have been averted. But as Uncle Iroh understood, high self-esteem is not the answer to low self-esteem. The ego is the source of rage, hate and violence. Humility is where one finds peace.</div><div>
</div><div>This has some empirical basis. In the 1990s, social psychologist Roy Baumeister led a team of researchers in finding that threats to the ego can disrupt a person's ability to self-regulate emotions. This can and does result in hate, which, in turn, can and does lead to violence. Baumeister does not address humility specifically, but he does imply it as he points to the problem of being proud instead of being humble.</div><div>
</div><div>"The new cultural demands on selfhood make it into a burdensome concern that can produce frequent stress," he wrote in The Self and Society in 1997. "People feel they must maintain a highly positive image of self that requires constant vigilance against dangers and threats. Even if they do not experience major experiences of humiliation or disgrace, the ongoing threat and resulting demand for vigilance may become tiresome and draining. Awareness of self may often be tinged with worry or stress and hence may take on an aversive aspect."</div><div>
</div><div>You can imagine how this plays out politically. Since 2008, the political right has stood against democracy on account of democracy electing a Black president. To these bigots and ghouls, America is a white man's country given to them by God to rule with impunity. Every time the outgroup wins a little freedom, the ingroup feels less free. Democracy, moreover, leads to equality. The political right hates that. Equality means bigots and ghouls aren't as super-duper as they believe they are. Equality means they just might have to go out and kill somebody.</div><div>
</div><div>You could say the election of Donald Trump, the anti-democratic turn we have seen from the GOP and all the shooting massacres we've seen since the reelection of a Black president altogether constitute one giant wounded ego. The result has been one giant lashing out against democracy the way mass shooters lash out against schools. As Baumeister said, in a different but relevant context: "Cultural prescriptions can exert considerable influence by telling people at what point it is appropriate to turn violent, ranging from 'only when someone is attacking you in a life-threatening fashion' to 'when the person implies disrespect toward you by making eye contact.'"</div><div>
</div><div>Ego, pride, shame, hate, rage, violence, fascism. These all have a common source in the human mind. The irony is our culture believes the antidote is more of the same. USA Today's Marco della Cava wrote today that the path toward national political healing this Thanksgiving holiday might be "practicing gratitude." As one of his sources told him: "We learn to appreciate things when we lose them, unfortunately."</div><div>
</div><div>How about we appreciate losing them? To be sure, you should have what you need. If that's not enough, rethink your needs. Desire, said Epicurus centuries ago, is what causes so much pain. To minimize pain, and maximize pleasure, you should minimize desire. "Practicing gratitude" can easily slip back to the original problem -- to an ego that can't be satisfied no matter how much self-confidence it has, an ego that can't tolerate the "disrespect of eye contact," and an ego that manifests itself politically as a Republican Party turned fascist.</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/gop-southern-strategy/</div><div>
</div><div>thom h</div><div>
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</div><div>on Wednesday, all but two Republicans in the House of Representatives went on record saying it's okay to openly encourage the assassination of one of their own, a person of color and elected Member of the House.</div><div>
</div><div>That part about Representative Ocasio-Cortez not being white was no coincidence, by the way. It was really at the core of the issue: Republicans now openly refer to her and the women of color who call themselves "the Squad" as the "Jihad caucus." As in "Muslim terrorists," as in "the Other."</div><div>
</div><div>Earlier in the day, known antisemite and racist Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called for her followers to prepare for war because "Joe Biden didn't win the 2020 election" and "the only way you get freedom back after you've lost it is with the price of blood."</div><div>
</div><div>We heard this rhetoric, too, many years ago when a much earlier generation of white supremacists tried to gin up bloodshed in America.</div><div>
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</div><div>gop civil war // liz c?</div><div>
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</div><div>Christie torched for his disastrous Trump prediction as he tries to rehabilitate his image</div><div>Alex Henderson November 16, 2021</div><div>In recent weeks, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie — once an outspoken Donald Trump supporter — has been promoting himself as someone who has a conservative post-Trump vision for the Republican...[he has clever-ish name for it?]</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>=</div><div>"a threat to democracy’: Survey finds 30% of Republicans think they may need violence to ‘save our country’</div><div>Alex Henderson November 01, 2021</div><div>The term "fragile democracy" has often been used by political science experts in connection with developing countries, but following the United States' 2020 election, former President Donald Trump's attempted...</div><div>
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</div><div>11 21 an</div><div>
</div><div>CNN's Jake Tapper on Monday expressed astonishment at a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) that found most Republican voters believe the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.</div><div>
</div><div>While discussing the report, Tapper brought on PRRI CEO Robert P. Jones and asked him to comment on why white evangelical Christians are the only major religious group in the country that believes Trump actually won the election.</div><div>
</div><div>"They're all in for Trump," he said. "They believe this... this is a religion that not that long ago talked about itself as the moral values of the country, that kind of, 'turn the other cheek,' and all that stuff. And yet here we are, a major mainstream religion that's been all in for Trump, and we have among those who believe the election was stolen, which is most of them, nearly 4 in 10 saying they can imagine it being justified to resort to violence."</div><div>
</div><div>Tapper then turned to some of the even wilder conspiracy theories that a significant minority of Americans believe.</div><div>
</div><div>"One in six believe that the U.S. government is controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles running a global child sex-trafficking operation," Tapper said. "I mean, what?"</div><div>
</div><div>"I know," Jones replied. "Let me tell you, as a social scientist, I never thought I'd be in a position of actually writing that question."</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>=</div><div>kos an 11 21</div><div>
</div><div>As Donald Trump has consolidated power in the Republican Party this year, his slow-but-steady takeover has sometimes masked the overwhelming creep of extremism into every corner of the Republican Party.</div><div>
</div><div>Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's embrace of Herschel Walker this week as the establishment pick to win back Georgia's Senate seat is a perfect example.</div><div>
</div><div>On the one hand, McConnell's cowardly cave to Trump's chosen candidate is such a laughable outcome for a guy who's hailed as a "master tactician" and repeatedly told reporters that his only red line for candidates was electability. While Walker is potentially electable in today's Republican Party, his open struggle with mental illness and alleged history of abusing women makes him a wounded candidate right out the gate. Whatever Walker's upsides might be, he isn't who you pick if ensuring electoral success is truly your North Star.</div><div>
</div><div>Lurking just one layer beneath McConnell's acquiescence to Trump's demands is the unmistakable surrender of the establishment wing of the GOP to Trump. He is 100% calling the shots now about the Grand Old Party's future, and there's no pretending otherwise.</div><div>
</div><div>And as the Republican establishment bows to Trump, his manifest dominance of the party has also convinced candidates running for critical seats that no amount of personal baggage is prohibitive. In fact, men with violent histories are flocking to Republican primaries, often earning Trump's endorsement. That is the case not only for Walker, but also Sean Parnell, an Army veteran running for Pennsylvania's open Senate seat. Parnell, who won Trump's early backing partly by pushing a fraudit of the Keystone State's 2020 election results, is in the middle of a contentious divorce and custody battle over his three children. Parnell's estranged wife once called 911 during a domestic dispute, and also secured two temporary protective orders against him as their marriage crumbled. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, temporary orders only require a hearing with the accuser; making them permanent would have required a judge to hear from both parties, which never happened.</div><div>
</div><div>But now Senate Republicans are in the position of potentially fielding two Trump acolytes, each with a mountain of personal baggage that hasn't even been fully mined, in two seats that will surely play a role in deciding the fate of the upper chamber.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump also might play an outsized role in mucking up the reelection of a man he despises: Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp. This week, we learned that former GOP Sen. David Perdue, who Trump campaigned for in the run up to the state's January runoffs, might mount a primary challenge to Kemp. Trump would love nothing more than to knock off Kemp, who he blames for not overturning the state's 2020 election results.</div><div>
</div><div>Perdue's potential entrance is already radicalizing the race on the Republican side and will surely continue to do so. On Friday, Kemp announced that Georgia was suing President Joe Biden over his vaccine mandate for federal contractors. It's a clear bid to cater to Trump's fringe anti-mitigation, pro-pandemic base—setting up a telling trajectory for a Kemp-Purdue primary that could hamstring Republicans in the general election. On top of that, if Perdue does enter the gubernatorial race, he will lean heavily on the support of Trump, who will spend his every waking breath grousing about 2020 and the supposedly stolen election in Georgia. The net effect would be months of Trump constantly reminding his voters that Georgia elections aren't secure, and that their vote may not even matter in the end. That's on top of the fact that Trump voters already decided to stay home the last time Perdue was on the ballot.</div><div>
</div><div>Beyond Trump's impact at the federal and state level, his toxicity is also permeating local elections. Buzzfeed News reports that at least a dozen Republicans who attended Trump's Jan. 6 festivities at the Capitol are on the ballot for next week's elections. They include incumbent state lawmakers, first-time candidates for statehouses, and local officials—mostly running in New Jersey and Virginia, which have off-year elections. But that also suggests that the number of Jan. 6 participants running for office this year might just be the tip of the iceberg.</div><div>
</div><div>All of this information is just more evidence pointing to the fact that, whether or not Republicans take over congressional majorities next year, the party itself will be uniquely radicalized with an even more profound Trump bent following the midterms.</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/the-qanon-movement-was-always-based-on-neo-nazi-conspiracies-now-the-mask-is-slipping/</div><div>
</div><div>hunter kos</div><div>We have noted in the past that the "QAnon" movement is not a set of new conspiracy theories, but a recasting of some of the most popular neo-Nazi, white supremacist, antisemitic themes of the last century for broader conspiracy consumption. Nazi-era antisemitic conspiracy theories declared that "Jews" were secretly controlling the world, that they were working to undermine governments and cultures, and that they drank the blood of children in secret rituals.</div><div>
</div><div>QAnon's version is identical: A shadowy cabal of "globalists" is secretly controlling the world, is working to undermine governments and cultures (for example, through a "great replacement" of Americans with new nonwhite immigrants, as supposedly funded by wealthy Jewish American George Soros), and is secretly trafficking children to harvest compounds from their blood. The most bizarre of Nazi and neo-Nazi themes have found eager new homes in the brains of supposed "real" Americans who have invariably settled on the same targets and solutions as their neo-Nazi enablers: Round up the "globalists"—meaning liberals, socialists, Democrats, those who fight for LGBT rights, those who treat immigrants with decency—and jail them. "Lock them up." Purge them.</div><div>
</div><div>The "everyday" Americans who have adopted QAnon beliefs as their own, insisting that the "child trafficking" or blood "harvesting" or something-something George Soros conspiracies are real, are Good Nazis. They are the sort of citizens who made Nazi Germany tick. They are sweet, patriotic parents of somebody, or children of somebody, and all they know in life is that their enemies must be defeated, even if defeating them means toppling democracy and/or supporting the most incompetent of tax-dodging lying rapist perverts.</div><div>
</div><div>Whether they can be reformed once they've gone down that rabbit hole is a subject for others to engage. Myself, I expect not. Human beings do not accidentally fall into believing their not-white or not-Christian or not-Republican neighbors are barely human saboteurs plotting behind the scenes to do whatever evil you might imagine. They started out that way, then fell into conspiracy holes that were pleasing because they ticked off all the boxes their previous paranoias needed to tick off.</div><div>
</div><div>The movement itself, however, has been drifting back to the rawer antisemitism that first crafted it.</div><div>
</div><div>VICE News reports that John Sabal, the influential QAnon promoter who will this week host a major QAnon conference at which four aspiring Republican lawmakers are scheduled to speak recommended on Sunday to his followers a notorious neo-Nazi conspiracy film blaming Jews as the architects of communism, World Wars I and II, and the sabotage of Naziism. "The most important historical film of all time," Sabal touted.</div><div>
</div><div>The posts were removed after they were "highlighted by extremist researchers," reports VICE—and Sabal claims through his partner that he never actually watched the film or knew that it was antisemitic. And yes, this is the "QAnon" provocateur with enough clout to collect Republican candidates from across the nation.</div><div>
</div><div>This isn't an isolated incident. VICE reports that other QAnon figures have similarly embraced the film, though none as prominent as Sabal has been. The "Q" movement is also attracting much attention and support among German neo-Nazis, who after all have a closer connection to many of the Q-adopted tropes now being exported by American conspiracists.</div><div>
</div><div>It hasn't stopped national Republicans from courting conspiracy leaders and allied militias, either.</div><div>
</div><div>QAnon may have taken some of its heaviest hits from being uniformly and absurdly wrong in all its preelection and post-election predictions about, well, everything, and from its top founder and likely Q pretender Ron Watkins, who distanced himself slightly after Trump's loss. (He's now running for Congress himself—in Arizona, of course.) That doesn't mean it's dead.</div><div>
</div><div>It's unclear, however, if QAnon believers are becoming more enamored with antisemitism than they once were or if the movement is sloughing off now-bored, less-radical Americans, leaving behind a more radical, neo-Nazi-adjacent core. Conservatism in general is increasingly flirting with antisemitic speech and candidates: In Idaho, a Republican with a long history of antisemitic speech, one who claims "all Jews are dangerous," is enjoying his local party's support for joining the local school board.</div><div>
</div><div>Extremist rhetoric in general is being rewarded rather than scorned by Republican voters. It's probably not surprising that the Republican slide into fascism could not help but stoke the same antisemitic sentiments that past versions have relied on. The QAnon, Trump, and Republican movements are all coalescing into one ball of hate and hoaxes; in the House and Senate, party leaders are at worst helping to promote the conspiracies, and at best remaining silent in efforts to ride the hate to new election victories.</div><div>
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</div><div>=</div><div>ref vice&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>no lnx pix&nbsp;</div><div>QAnon Is Becoming Even More Antisemitic</div><div>One of the movement’s biggest influencers just encouraged his followers to watch a 10-part neo-Nazi film.</div><div>
</div><div>By David Gilbert</div><div>October 18, 2021,</div><div>
</div><div>[A man wearing a 'Defund the Media' QAnon shirt is seen at a "Stop the Steal" rally against the results of the U.S. Presidential election outside the Georgia State Capitol on November 18, 2020 in Atlanta, Georgia. ]</div><div>
</div><div>[Disinfo Dispatch Padding</div><div>Unraveling viral disinformation and explaining where it came from, the harm it's causing, and what we should do about it.]</div><div>
</div><div>The organizer of a major QAnon conference in Las Vegas later this week, where at least four sitting GOP lawmakers speak on stage, shared a neo-Nazi film with his 70,000 followers on Sunday evening.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>John Sabal, who’s known online as QAnon John, is preparing for Thursday’s “For God and Country: Patriot Double Down” conference, but on Sunday night he took time out of his busy schedule to share a post about people who had praised “Europa – the Last Battle.” It’s a 10-part film that claims Jews created Communism and deliberately started both world wars as part of a plot to found Israel by provoking the innocent Nazis, who were only defending themselves.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>“If you want to know the truth, well look no further. Here it is, escape the matrix and watch it today,” the post Sabal shared said.</div><div>
</div><div>Moments later, Sabal shared a direct link to allow his followers to watch the film on the alternative video-sharing site Rumble.</div><div>
</div><div>While this film has been shared by some of QAnon’s more fringe and extremist figures, the fact Sabal feels emboldened to share it so publicly is a testament to how antisemitic thinking has become normalized within the movement.</div><div>
</div><div>This was reflected in the comments under the posts from Sabal’s followers who offered no pushback against his support of such antisemitic content.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>When one follower did attempt to criticize Sabal for posting the link, other members of the channel quickly attacked that user, claiming they were some sort of undercover agent of the “deep state.”</div><div>
</div><div>Others credulously claimed the user criticizing Sabal had misunderstood the film: “I'm sorry that's what you took away from our neo-Nazi film. It's really about how killing the Jews is necessary and good because they're not real Jews,” one of Sabal’s followers wrote.[CUFI red calf bs?]</div><div>
</div><div>After Sabal’s comments were highlighted by extremist researchers on Twitter, the posts mysteriously disappeared from his channel.</div><div>
</div><div>The video series is very well-known in extremist circles, yet apparently Sabal shared it completely innocently with his tens of thousands of followers.</div><div>
</div><div>“He had no idea that there was any anti-Semitism connected to that film,” Sabal’s partner Amy told VICE News in a message. “He has never even watched the movie. It was referred to him by a supposed ‘trusted’ source.”</div><div>
</div><div>Later this week, Sabal will host a raft of GOP lawmakers, including sitting Arizona Reps. Wendy Rogers and Sonny Borrelli. Also scheduled to speak are multiple Republican candidates running for secretary of state, including candidates in the swing states of Michigan KEVARO SP?, Arizona FINCHEM, and Nevada. CA HAMM AND MARCHANT</div><div>
</div><div>Despite calling himself “QAnon John,” and even though many of the movement’s biggest influencers will be sharing speaking time with members of the Republican Party, Sabal has in the past claimed this is not a QAnon conference. Among them will be Ron Watkins, who facilitated the rise of QAnon and who last week announced his plan to run for Congress.</div><div>=</div><div>=</div><div>an 10 21</div><div>why a second high-profile Republican in Oklahoma just left the GOP</div><div>Jon Skolnik Salon</div><div>A second Oklahoma GOP gubernatorial candidate has switched party affiliations over the GOP's opposition to COVID-19 health precautions, inviting other "like-minded...</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/trumpists/</div><div>
</div><div>no lnx</div><div>
</div><div>Black flag: Understanding the Trumpists' latest threatening symbol</div><div>
</div><div>Chauncey DeVega and Salon October 12, 2021</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp;</div><div>It's an old truism that the "real bad men" (and bad women) "move in silence and violence." That's certainly true for the most dangerous and most effective of Donald Trump's allies, henchmen, henchwomen, and other followers. But for Donald Trump himself, and most of his political cult, that rule does not apply.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump and his followers were loud, exuberant and enthusiastic on Jan. 6. The lethal attack on the Capitol had been publicly announced weeks in advance, and should have come as no surprise. Trump's rallies and gatherings continue to celebrate violence and the prospect of revenge — and specifically of "getting even" with Trump's "enemies."</div><div>
</div><div>Steve Bannon, Trump's former campaign chairman and White House strategist, has now threatened to recruit Republican-fascist "shock troops" with the apparent goal of undermining the U.S. government, and by implication multiracial democracy, if and when Trump and the Republicans regain control of both Congress and the White House.</div><div>
</div><div>On a daily basis Fox News and other elements of the right-wing disinformation propaganda machine use stochastic terrorism and other techniques to radicalize their audience into committing acts of political violence. To this point, the Democratic Party and the political and news media class in general have remained in denial, and largely passive in response.</div><div>
</div><div>In one troubling new development, Trump supporters have begun flying all-black American flags, in an implicit threat to harm or kill their opponents — meaning nonwhite people, "socialist liberals," Muslims, vaccinated people and others deemed to be "enemies" of "real America." As media critic Eric Boehlert recently noted, the liberal opinion site Living Blue in Texas is sounding the alarm about the specific meaning of the black flag and the Republican-fascists support for terrorism and other political violence. That post, "Are Your Republican Neighbors Planning on Killing You?", merits lengthy quotation:</div><div>
</div><div>It didn't take long to find hundreds of videos where these Trumpers and so-called patriots were hanging black American flags. ...</div><div>
</div><div>Black American flags are the flags that mean "no quarter shall be given." They are the opposite of the white flag of surrender.</div><div>
</div><div>According to the people on TikTok and the Sun (British tabloid), the black American flag originated in the civil war and was flown by the Confederates.</div><div>
</div><div>It means that they will not surrender, will not take prisoners, and are willing to die for their cause. It means they will execute their enemies.</div><div>
</div><div>Who are their enemies? Pretty much any non-Conservative. You know, Democrats, Liberals, LGBTQ, BIPOC, and the vaccinated. ...</div><div>
</div><div>So, we're the enemy, and they're openly professing to want to execute us. … So, why are they doing this</div><div>Covid vaccinations, mostly. They believe that Joe Biden has declared a civil war on them by mandating that employers with over 100 employees and the military have vaccinations.</div><div>
</div><div>Yes, they say civil war, and they say it's already started. But, unfortunately, many of them also live in states where masks and vaccines are required by state governments, healthcare, and law enforcement.</div><div>
</div><div>An alarming number of military members have been making Tik Toks talking about how they are being discharged because they refuse the vaccine. It's alarming because there is probably an equal number of guys on there talking about the civil war plans and actively using Tik Tok to recruit these military and ex-military members.</div><div>
</div><div>The biggest message they have been sending out is, "it's time" or "the time is now." ...</div><div>
</div><div>Although showing guns on Tik Tok is supposed to be against community guidelines, they show lots of videos of their guns, shooting them, wearing them, or sitting on their bed.</div><div>
</div><div>They primarily use Tik Tok as a recruiting tool and let others know their willingness to commit violence. Then they tell people to message them or where to find them on Telegram.</div><div>
</div><div>However you interpret these videos posted by Trump followers and other neofascists — which could be mainly performative — it is clearly true that the American right is increasingly willing to accept or condone violence as a means of expanding and protecting their social and political power. (Salon did not find licensed news photographs of these flags, and has made the editorial decision not to reproduce the images mentioned above, which are easy to find on social media.)</div><div>
</div><div>Public opinion polls and other research have repeatedly shown that millions of Republican voters and Trump followers would support the use of violence to remove Joe Biden from office because of the "Big Lie" and their belief that that he is not a legitimate president. Similarly, a large proportion of Republicans believe that the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were "patriots" whose use of violence was justified.</div><div>
</div><div>And a new poll from the University of Virginia's Center for Politics even suggests that more than 50 percent of Trump supporters want "red states" to secede from the Union. Republican elected officials and other right-wing opinion leaders have continued to escalate their threats of political violence against Democrats and other targeted groups.</div><div>
</div><div>In a recent speech to the North Carolina Faith and Freedom Coalition's "Salt & Light" conference, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., issued what sounded like a declaration of war:</div><div>
</div><div>It is time for the American Christian church to come out of the shadows to say, "No longer are we going to allow our culture to be determined by people who hate the things that we believe in…. We are going to stand valiantly for God's incredible inherent truths that predate any version of government. Because, my friends, if we lose this country today, if we bend the knee to the Democrats today, our country will be lost forever, our children will never know what freedom is. It's our duty to stand up, Let us stand united as men and women of faith to fight for our country.</div><div>
</div><div>During an interview with MSNBC's Joy Reid, terrorism and national security expert Malcolm Nance said that Cawthorn's video "picks up on the themes that are not just coming from the Steve Bannon level and Donald Trump level, they are coming from the Republican street — and that Republican street is armed. They're angry. They have been fed an entire line which makes them believe that America is no longer America and that they no longer want the America that the rest of us, the 60 percent of the country, live in. And they`re willing to take up arms for it."</div><div>
</div><div>Nance also noted that Cawthorn's propaganda video is thematically similar to the type of propaganda used by Islamic terrorist groups such as ISIS and al-Qaida to radicalize and recruit members.</div><div>
</div><div>During an interview with Scientific American magazine, Dr. Bandy Lee, the principal editor of the 2017 bestseller "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump," explained how a mentally pathological leader can "infect" his followers and perhaps even an entire nation:</div><div>
</div><div>I have outlined two major emotional drives: narcissistic symbiosis and shared psychosis. Narcissistic symbiosis refers to the developmental wounds that make the leader-follower relationship magnetically attractive. The leader, hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence — while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury, yearn for a parental figure. When such wounded individuals are given positions of power, they arouse similar pathology in the population that creates a "lock and key" relationship….</div><div>
</div><div>"Shared psychosis" — which is also called "folie à millions" ["madness for millions"] when occurring at the national level or "induced delusions" — refers to the infectiousness of severe symptoms that goes beyond ordinary group psychology. When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person's symptoms can spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia and propensity for violence — even in previously healthy individuals. The treatment is removal of exposure.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump and his regime gave permission and encouragement to his followers and other supporters to engage in antisocial and other anti-human behavior on a national scale. Once such a process has begun, and those forces are unleashed, it is not easy to stop. Fascism is not a simple machine with an on-and-off switch. In practice, fascism is given life and takes corporeal form through its followers, with each one being a potential carrier of the pathology.</div><div>
</div><div>As Hussein Ibish warned in a recent article in the Atlantic, "The cancer of political violence is not an endemic American disease. At the moment, it is a Republican disease. No one but Republicans themselves can cure it. Until they do, the violence of the right is only going to keep swelling and crashing. From a Middle Eastern perspective, this is all appallingly familiar."</div><div>
</div><div>Fascism is a highly virulent social disease that usually destroys the host body – but not before spreading the disease to many other people. In fact, if the original host dies, he or she can be elevated to the status of martyr for "the cause," serving to inspire existing followers and lure in new ones.</div><div>
</div><div>Ultimately, Donald Trump, like other fascist and authoritarian leaders, is the symptom of a sick society. Trumpism is not actually the core disease. For America to counteract the deep underlying illness that has made Trumpism possible will require a long-term cultural and moral reckoning. Anything less, and the disease of American fascism will only go dormant until it is resurrected again — perhaps in a more dangerous and virulent form.</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>no lnx many</div><div>
</div><div>GOP pushes strategy to prolong the pandemic</div><div>Texas Gov. Greg Abbott feels the heat: analysis</div><div>
</div><div>Amanda Marcotte and Salon October 12, 2021</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp;</div><div>Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, has once again proven his stalwart commitment to aiding the virus that causes COVID-19 in its goal of spreading as far as possible. Late Monday, the Republican state leader issued an executive order banning all entities in the state — including private businesses — from requiring employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19. (All other vaccine requirements remain untouched, because the "principled opposition" to vaccine mandates is an inch deep.)</div><div>
</div><div>As many folks who wish hypocrisy still mattered have pointed out, Abbott's ban violates his party's supposed commitment to a low regulatory environment for businesses by interfering with private businesses who wish to institute vaccine requirements. When it comes to the conflict between being pro-business and pro-virus, however, it was never any contest with Republicans. All other GOP principles fall before the newfound Republican commitment to making sure COVID-19 infects as many human bodies as it can.</div><div>
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</div><div>Abbott, of course, did not admit that he was preventing businesses from enacting basic health and safety standards. Instead, he presented the ban as a defense of business, accusing President Joe Biden of "bullying many private entities into imposing COVID-19 vaccine mandates, causing workforce disruptions that threaten Texas's continued recovery." That's is just a small taste of the doublespeak that the entire executive order is written in.</div><div>
</div><div>Abbott is not standing up for businesses or the economy.</div><div>
</div><div>Biden's vaccine mandate was quietly welcomed by many businesses who want to have normalcy-returning mandates but want someone else to blame when Trumper employees whine about it. And their worry about worker shortages was unfounded, as most vaccine resistant workers will get the shot rather than lose their job. Abbott's claims about economic recovery are also hot air. The sluggish recovery is due to the ongoing pandemic and will only bounce back if more people get vaccinated.</div><div>
</div><div>No, it's quite clear what's going on and has been going on with Republicans fighting every effort to get the pandemic under control: The GOP wants to prolong the pandemic because they think doing so will help them in the 2022 midterms.</div><div>
</div><div>Abbott himself is up for reelection in 2022, and, at first blush, it might seem a weird strategy to practically make the virus his running mate. (Though the coronavirus has tough competition in an "ew, gross" contest with Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.) But Abbott is making a smart, if deeply evil and downright murderous, bet. Voters, especially fairweather voters, tend to blame everything on the party that controls the White House, even if the blame for any problem actually falls on the opposition. If the pandemic is still a problem in November 2022, then there's a very real chance that large numbers of Democratic voters, already demoralized by the lack of legislative progress on other fronts, simply won't show up to vote. That will make it easier for Republicans to sweep the midterms.</div><div>
</div><div>A new Axios-Ipsos poll demonstrates that the "prolong the pandemic" strategy is working for Republicans. Trust in Biden on the pandemic has fallen to 42%, down 10 points from where it was 6 months ago. Most of the trust has slipped with Democrats and independent voters. Americans are also getting depressed, with 30% saying it will be more than a year before life returns to normal, which is triple what the number from June.</div><div>
</div><div>The COVID-19 culture war isn't just demoralizing Democratic and potential Democratic voters. It appears GOP leadership sees this issue as a way to invigorate their own base, whose entire political reason for existing is increasingly just to "own the liberals."</div><div>
</div><div>Anti-vaccine and anti-mask protests, which are getting rowdy and even violent, started off as a classic right-wing Astroturfed phenomenon, but it's since gained a lot of traction among ordinary conservatives who aren't getting paid to throw tantrums at perplexed school board members. Culture war provocations over Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head floated earlier this year by Fox News weren't getting the job done — but freaking out over masks and shots really gets the juices going for the worst Americans, i.e. the people the GOP needs to turn out at the polls.</div><div>
</div><div>Vaccine mandates are a threat to the "victory through infecting our own voters with COVID-19" strategy for Republicans, for one simple reason: They work. As a White House report released last week details, "organizations with vaccination requirements have seen their vaccination rates increase by more than 20 percentage points and have routinely seen their share of fully vaccinated workers rise above 90%." Despite conservatives floating threats of mass walkouts, the paper-thin "principled" opposition to vaccines disappears the second that conservatives face an actual consequence for refusing to vaccinate.</div><div>
</div><div>The Biden administration has fallen far short of where it should be in terms of vaccine mandates, both slow-walking the employer mandates and completely sidestepping the possibility of banning the unvaccinated from planes before the holidays. Still, even the threat of vaccine mandates is starting to have an impact. As the report notes, the rate of unvaccinated Americans has been cut by one-third since Biden first started issuing mandates.</div><div>
</div><div>Republicans are in a race against time in their efforts to reduce vaccination rates to the point where the pandemic is still a live issue next November. COVID-19 rates are falling, down 24% in the past 14 days nationally and down 39% in Abbott's home state, which continues to have one of the highest COVID death rates in the nation. This is mostly because of vaccination, but also because so many Americans have been infected that it's adding to herd immunity. It's still unclear if there will be another winter surge or if the virus is finally running out of the unimmunized bodies it needs to remain a serious threat. There is a strong possibility that the end of the pandemic is closer than many Americans think.</div><div>
</div><div>So by making it as hard for Biden to get shots into arms faster, Republicans are keeping COVID-19 cases high to keep Biden's approval ratings low.</div><div>
</div><div>If that doesn't change — or if it gets worse with another surge — there's a very real chance that this pandemic makes the already dim prospects for Democrats in 2022 even worse. And that, in turn, sets the stage for Donald Trump to cheat his way back into the White House in 2024. So it's no wonder that power-hungry Republicans are betting big on their prolong the pandemic strategy, even if it comes at the cost of killing their own voters. Big risks lead to big rewards. For the Republicans, setting themselves up for permanent one-party minority rule is the biggest prize.</div><div>=</div><div>=</div><div>an ah 1021</div><div>
</div><div>former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is among the Republicans who has been subpoenaed to testify before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's select committee on the January 6 insurrection, but former President Donald Trump has urged him to refuse. Meadows discussed the committee Tuesday night during an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, and liberal Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent slammed his comments as exemplifying the anti-democracy mindset that is so common in today's Republican Party.</div><div>Sargent, this week in his column, explains, "Meadows…. dismissed the January 6 committee's core mission…. Republicans have broadly renounced any obligation of any kind to hold actors on their side accountable for the effort to overturn U.S. democracy, first through corrupt and possibly illegal procedural means and then through mob violence."</div><div>
</div><div>During the interview, Sargent notes, Meadows and Ingraham "sneered at" the idea that extremists on the far right pose a "threat to democracy."</div><div>
</div><div>"Just look at that sneering at the very idea that Trumpists would undermine faith in our elections," Sargent observes. "How preposterous! Except just this weekend, Trump reiterated his stolen election lie, and the No. 2 House Republican [scalise?] refused to say the 2020 outcome was legitimate."</div><div>
</div><div>Sargent adds, "We just learned that a Trump lawyer authored a coup memo urging Vice President Mike Pence to ignore federal law to throw the election to Trump, and that Pence actually did entertain that scheme. Yet for Meadows, none of this is worth learning more about."</div><div>
</div><div>The fact that Meadows doesn't see the need for Pelosi's committee on January 6, Sargent stresses, shows how little Republicans care about the wellbeing of democracy in the United States.</div><div>
</div><div>"Meadows, apparently, doesn't want us to learn more about the full insurrectionist intentions of Trump and other co-conspirators — which likely include Republican lawmakers — or about the degree to which Meadows himself might have been one of those co-conspirators," Sargent writes. "Needless to say, a party this deeply committed to the absolute exoneration of Trump by definition does not see this effort to overthrow U.S. democracy as worthy of any national reckoning."</div><div>
</div><div>He concluded: "Meadows inadvertently captured an essential truth: The notion that a sustained effort to overthrow U.S. democracy requires a real reckoning and response has indeed become exclusively the Democratic Party position. But what does that say about the GOP?"</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>1021 ah</div><div>
</div><div>As much as there is to criticize about Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the right-wing Republican senator made perfect sense when he recommended getting vaccinated for COVID-19 during a recent speech at a GOP event in his state. But anti-vaxxers in the crowd responded by booing, jeering and heckling him, and liberal Washington Post opinion writer Eugene Robinson — discussing that embarrassing incident in his October 8 column — poses the question, "How dumb can a nation get and still survive?"</div><div>
</div><div>It's a perfectly legitimate question in light of the fact that Graham, in August, was infected with COVID-19 — which, according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has killed more than 4.8 million people worldwide, including over 710,000 in the United States. Graham had been fully vaccinated for COVID-19 but was infected anyway; he was an example of what medical experts call a "breakthrough" case. However, it wasn't a really serious or life-threatening infection; the senator didn't need to be hospitalized and was never on a ventilator — and during his speech in South Carolina, he attributed the vaccine to the fact that his case of COVID-19 wasn't more serious.</div><div>
</div><div>But anti-vaxxer wingnuts didn't want to hear that, and they responded by booing him loudly.</div><div>
</div><div>Robinson writes, "COVID-19 is a highly infectious disease that has killed more than 700,000 Americans over the past 20 months. The Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines all but guarantee that recipients will not die from COVID. I have, or had, an acquaintance who refused to get vaccinated, despite pleas from his adult children to protect himself. He got COVID-19, and it killed him. Most of the deaths the nation has suffered during the current Delta variant wave of the disease — deaths of the unvaccinated — have been similarly needless and senseless."</div><div>
</div><div>The Post columnist points out that Graham, unlike his unvaccinated acquaintance, is still very much alive — and he slams the booing of Graham by anti-vaxxer Republicans as "just plain stupid."</div><div>
</div><div>Robinson writes, "How did we become, in such alarming measure, so dumb? Why is the news dominated by ridiculous controversies that should not be controversial at all? When did so many of our fellow citizens become full-blown nihilists who deny even the concept of objective reality? And how must this look to the rest of the world?"</div><div>
</div><div>The booing of Graham isn't the only example of "droolingly stupid" behavior by Republicans that Robinson calls out in his column — he also slams Republicans who play "frequent games of chicken" with the United States' debt ceiling, obsess over Critical Race Theory and promote the Big Lie.</div><div>
</div><div>"Conservatives in state legislatures across the country are pushing legislation to halt the teaching of 'Critical Race Theory' in public schools," Robinson explains. "I put the term in quotes because genuine Critical Race Theory, a dry and esoteric set of ideas debated in obscure academic journals, is not actually being taught in those schools at all. What's being taught instead — and squelched — is American history, which happens to include slavery, Jim Crow repression and structural racism."</div><div>
</div><div>Robinson adds, "I get it. The GOP has become the party of white racial grievance, and this battle against an imaginary enemy stirs the base. But the whole charade involves Republican officials — many of them educated at the nation's top schools — betting that their constituents are too dumb to know they're being lied to. So far, the bet is paying off. And then, of course, there's the whole 'stolen election' farce, which led to the tragedy of January 6."</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/right-wing-science-denial</div><div>
</div><div>no lnx grafx</div><div>
</div><div>The psychology behind right-wing authoritarians' denial of science</div><div>
</div><div>The Conversation September 17, 2021</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp;</div><div>by Adrian Bardon, Wake Forest University</div><div>
</div><div>Vaccine refusal is a major reason COVID-19 infections continue to surge in the U.S. Safe and effective vaccines have been available for months, but as of mid-September 2021, only 65% of eligible American adults are fully vaccinated. In many areas, a majority of eligible adults haven't taken advantage of the opportunity to get vaccinated.</div><div>
</div><div>In the U.S., polling on intent to get vaccinated shows a massive political divide. Counties that went for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election show higher vaccination rates than counties that went for Donald Trump. Attendees at the Conservative Political Action Committee's summer meeting cheered the fact that the U.S. didn't meet Biden's July 4 vaccination goals for the country.</div><div>
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</div><div>Politically motivated denial of COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness tracks with a dramatic politicization of trust in science itself. In a survey conducted in June and July, Gallup found that the percentage of Republicans expressing a “great deal" or “quite a lot of" trust in science is down, shockingly, from 72% in 1975 to only 45% today. Over the same period, confidence in science among Democrats is up from 67% to 79%.</div><div>
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</div><div>Scientific institutions have never been perfect, but overall they have a tremendous track record of success – both in basic research and in applied sciences like epidemiology and immunology. The vast majority of expert opinion on, say, antibiotics, radio waves, orbital mechanics or electrical conductivity is accepted without complaint by the general public. Evidently people are satisfied with applied science in almost all walks of life.</div><div>
</div><div>So why is confidence in science so malleable, and what does a person's political orientation have to do with it?</div><div>
</div><div>The rejection of scientific expertise with regard to COVID-19 vaccines appears to be standing in for something else. As a philosopher who has studied science denial, I suggest that this “something else" includes factors like distrust in public institutions and perceived threats to one's cultural identity.</div><div>
</div><div>Ideologies that mesh with science denial</div><div>
</div><div>Identifying as a Republican is very strongly associated with embracing central tenets of conservative ideology. A 2021 public opinion study confirms that endorsement of conservative political ideology is currently the dominant predictor of anti-science attitudes.</div><div>
</div><div>Another recent study of anti-science attitudes identifies several tendencies particularly associated with conservative ideology. People who hold anti-science beliefs tend to be sympathetic toward right-wing authoritarianism – that is to say, they are conformists who defer to selected authority figures and who are willing to act aggressively in the name of those figures.</div><div>
</div><div>They also tend to support group-based hierarchy, with “superior" groups dominating “inferior" groups. Political psychologists call this “social dominance orientation" and see it in, for example, attitudes about racial or gender equality.</div><div>
</div><div>Indeed, social scientists looking at the causes of science denial have increasingly narrowed in on two contributing causes. Certain personality traits, including comfort with existing social and cultural hierarchies and a predilection for authoritarianism, go along with a skepticism for science. So do closely related aspects of identity, such as identification with a dominant social group like white evangelical Christians.</div><div>
</div><div>Conservative traditionalists from the historically dominant white Christian demographic in the U.S. have had the most reason to feel threatened by science. Evolution by natural selection is threatening to many doctrinal religious traditionalists. Climate science threatens the economic status quo that conservatives seek to conserve. The whole concept of a public health mandate runs counter to the “small government" individualism of political conservatives.</div><div>
</div><div>Further, because COVID-19 has been starkly politicized since the beginning of the pandemic, public health measures have become directly associated with the political left. Rejection of such measures has consequently become a signal of political and cultural identity.</div><div>
</div><div>Other recent studies on science denial have shown that people who don't have a lot of confidence in the honesty and reliability of others, as well as in social institutions like government, academia and media, tend to deny the dangers of COVID-19. Low social trust tends to track with conservative political orientation – in particular, with support for Trump. His supporters are much more likely to say that scientific inquiry is driven by political considerations.</div><div>
</div><div>Grasping for a sense of control</div><div>Increasing economic inequality and racial and ethnic diversification are also part of the science denialism mix.</div><div>
</div><div>One school of thought in psychology, called compensatory control theory, holds that many social phenomena – including ideological science denial – stem from the basic human need for a sense of control over one's environment and life outcomes. According to this theory, perceived threats to one's sense of personal control can motivate denial of scientific consensus. [koch afp grn police ad]The idea is that due to a combination of economic insecurity, demographic changes and the perceived erosion of cultural norms favoring whites, some people feel an existential threat to the white supremacy they've long benefited from – which in turn spurs them to deny government warnings about the dangers of COVID-19.</div><div>
</div><div>I believe this compulsive defensiveness plays a big part in the phenomenon of science denial, once trusted elites like politicians or news media hosts trigger the inclination to oppose some particular science-based public policy. You can't control the coronavirus – or inequality, or a changing culture – but you can control whether you take the vaccine or wear a mask. This sense of control is implicitly but powerfully attractive on a deep, emotional level.</div><div>
</div><div>The need for control may also explain an attraction to politicians or media figures who promise to give you your power back by endorsing unproven, alternative home remedies.[horse rx v big pharma?]</div><div>
</div><div>Denial feeds on political polarization</div><div>
</div><div>As I discuss in my book, “The Truth About Denial," I think that science denial, including COVID-19 vaccine denial, is probably best seen as the result of vicious feedback loops. Factors like economic pain, white Christian identity and low social trust play off one another in populations experiencing relative social and informational isolation. This denialism can take hold more easily in people who have chosen to limit their experiences to relatively homogeneous geographic areas, social contexts and news media environments.</div><div>
</div><div>In the short run, the failure of a society to vaccinate enough people to get COVID-19 under control will dramatically change life for everyone for years to come. The larger issue is the way science itself has become politicized in ways never seen before. This development endangers the ability of organized society to respond effectively to pandemics and other existential threats, including climate change.</div><div>
</div><div>Is there any hope of depolarizing the issue of COVID-19 vaccination, or trust in science itself? I'd say probably not until leaders in conservative politics, media and religion exert a concerted effort to change the narrative.</div><div>=</div><div>mirror BS deflection an 921</div><div>
</div><div>Donald Trump, Jr. is falsely claiming President Joe Biden is responsible for the impending deaths of Americans sick with COVID-19 after the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services bought an additional 1.4 million doses of Regeneron's monoclonal antibody treatments. After discovering that 70% of all monoclonal antibody treatment doses were being ordered by just seven states, HHS announced it is taking over distribution of the life-saving drug.</div><div>
</div><div>Florida, Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana – states that have some of the highest per-capita cases of COVID-19 and some of the lowest vaccination rates, have been limiting the supply of monoclonal antibody treatments to the rest of the nation, CNN reports.</div><div>
</div><div>"Given this reality, we must work to ensure our supply of these life-saving therapies remains available for all states and territories, not just some," an HHS spokesperson said.</div><div>
</div><div>"HHS will determine the amount of product each state and territory receives on a weekly basis. State and territorial health departments will subsequently identify sites that will receive product and how much," the spokesperson said. "This system will help maintain equitable distribution, both geographically and temporally, across the country – providing states and territories with consistent, fairly-distributed supply over the coming weeks."</div><div>
</div><div>"HHS will determine the amount of product each state and territory receives on a weekly basis. State and territorial health departments will subsequently identify sites that will receive product and how much," the spokesperson said. "This system will help maintain equitable distribution, both geographically and temporally, across the country – providing states and territories with consistent, fairly-distributed supply over the coming weeks."</div><div>
</div><div>That's akin to killing people, Donald Trump, Jr. is suggesting.</div><div>
</div><div>"Americans will die because of Biden's despicable decision to punish his political enemies in red states by restricting their ability to secure life-saving monoclonal antibody treatments for all that need them," the former president's son, who is not a medical expert, declared on social media. "Their blood is directly on Joe's hands," he added, disrespectfully refusing to address President Joe Biden by his elected position.</div><div>
</div><div>When his father was president Donald Trump, Jr. repeatedly praised the coronavirus vaccine and the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed. But after Joe Biden became President Trump Jr. switched tactics, repeatedly attacking any efforts to promote vaccination or help keep Americans safe through social distancing measures including masks. At least 17 times since Biden was elected Trump Jr. has railed against "vaccine passports" and other methods of protecting Americans' health from the coronavirus that has already killed over 650,000 people in the U.S.</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>=</div><div>gOP Rep. Elise Stefanik gets slammed for ‘vile’ and ‘xenophobic’ anti-immigrant ads</div><div>Alex Henderson&nbsp; September 16, 2021</div><div>In the past, Rep. Elise Stefanik of Upstate New York had a reputation for being a moderate Republican and was critical of Donald Trump's far-right hyper-nationalist agenda. But Stefanik has since flip-flopped and gone</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>=</div><div>921 amanda</div><div>The stakes of the California recall election of Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom couldn't be higher. Voting, either by mail or in person, ends Tuesday, and if Newsom is recalled, the bluest state in the country will not just have a Republican governor, but Larry Elder, a right-wing talk radio host who is a loon even by the standards of the party that elected Donald Trump.</div><div>
</div><div>If Elder wins, he threatens California's fragile recovery from the pandemic, since, like most Republicans these days, he's running interference for the virus. Plus, he would have the power to replace Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who is literally 88 years old, if she were to leave office — and one name that's being floated is Elder's protege and white nationalist former Trump advisor Stephen Miller.</div><div>
</div><div>In a normal circumstance, someone like Elder — he suggested Women's March participants are too ugly to rape and argued that it's the descendants of slave owners and not slaves that deserve reparations — would never have a chance of winning the governorship of a deep blue state like California. Unable to win in a free and fair election, however, Republicans in the state have turned to dirty tricks and shenanigans. The entire Republican strategy is built around suppressing voter turnout through confusing and demoralizing the public. The recall ballots are confusing, and may lead voters to not understand that voting yes on recalling Newsom automatically means voting yes on his replacement being a Republican. Republicans are also counting on pandemic-induced disillusionment to keep Democratic voters from bothering to mail in ballots at all.</div><div>
</div><div>In other words, the California recall is a microcosm of what has become the GOP's national strategy.</div><div>
</div><div>Republicans have given up entirely on the basic premise of democracy. They no longer think that politicians should try to appeal to a majority of citizens to win power. Instead, their focus is entirely on finding ways to circumvent public will and gain power anyway. In some states, this manifests as gerrymandering, outright voter suppression and even a new slate of laws meant to allow Republican officials to simply vacate the results of elections they don't like. In California, it's about forcing an off-year election in the most confusing way possible, hoping to hoodwink voters into accidentally giving themselves a Republican governor.</div><div>
</div><div>Regardless of the state-specific method, what holds all of this together is a widespread rejection within the Republican Party of the right of the people to choose their own leaders. Republicans feel entitled to rule, no matter what, and therefore feel entitled to lie, cheat, and steal their way to power. The technical legality of the California recall election doesn't change this reality. The spirit of the whole enterprise is driven by a willingness of Republicans to find some backhanded way to force a governor on the state that they know very well the majority of Californians do not want.</div><div>
</div><div>Ultimately, it comes down to the increasingly rigid Republican belief that most Americans are not legitimate citizens and therefore have no right to vote Republicans are bound to respect. This belief manifests most commonly in the Big Lie, which is metastasizing beyond Trump's false claims that he lost the 2020 election due to "fraud". Already, right-wing pundits and Republican politicians are prepping their followers for the possibility that Newsom survives the recall with an updated version of the Big Lie, claiming the election is "rigged" and that Newsom will only win through "voter fraud."</div><div>
</div><div>No real evidence of actual fraud that could swing an election is ever produced with these relentless Big Lie claims, but then again, it doesn't need to be.</div><div>
</div><div>"Voter fraud" is not really a literal belief among Republicans, but more a code phrase to convey the larger belief that most legal voters shouldn't have the right to vote at all. To call these legal voters "frauds" is to contest the legitimacy of their citizenship. It functions in the same way as conspiracy theories about Barack Obama's birth certificate did, as a way for conservatives to signal to each other a belief that the first Black president is not a "real" American. With the Big Lie, the group of people who conservatives refuse to admit are legitimate citizens has grown to encompass pretty much anyone who votes for the Democrats.</div><div>
</div><div>This notion that most Americans aren't "real" Americans and therefore are "fraud" voters has become a majority belief among Republican voters. A recent CNN poll, which found that 6 in 10 Republican voters said that affirming the Big Lie — which again, is code for the belief that Democratic votes are inherently illegitimate — is an important part of being a Republican. We see this in the support for the January 6 insurrection that has been quietly solidifying among the GOP base. It all goes back to a belief that if Republicans can't win a fair election, they should be able to cheat their way into power — or, if that fails, use violent force.</div><div>
</div><div>As Igor Derysh reported last week for Salon, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is facing down a similarly sleazy power grab by Republicans in Michigan. Republicans in the state legislature are trying to pass an anti-voting bill to keep those voters they see as illegitimate — particularly urban residents and Black voters — from casting ballots. To get around Whitmer's veto, they're using the same tactic that California Republicans used to force a recall, exploiting an ill-advised loophole that allows a shockingly small number of petitioners to force the issue. In this case, it's not a recall, but even worse, the ability simply overrule the decision of a duly elected governor. Democrats in the state are accusing Republicans of using a "playbook of losing, lying, and attempting to cheat their way into office."</div><div>
</div><div>It's not just a fair accusation, but such an obvious observation that it's verging on banal. It's the playbook that fueled Trump's failed coup and is currently fueling Elder's attempt to seize the California governor's office through the back door. Elections are increasingly not going to be contests of two candidates trying to appeal to voters, but a Democratic candidate appealing to voters while a Republican candidate tries to find some way to get around that pesky "democracy" problem. Newsom will probably survive this recall effort, but the country is going to have a much harder time surviving the relentless GOP assault on democracy.</div><div>=</div><div></div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/steve-bannon/</div><div>
</div><div>dart kos</div><div>
</div><div>on Wednesday evening Rachel Maddow made an excellent point: While Democrats and the Biden administration focus on the mundane aspects of trying to do what's best for the American people—passing infrastructure legislation, preserving and protecting the right to vote against GOP measures to suppress it, combating the causes and effects of climate change, and trying to ensure that women retain autonomy over their own bodies, for example—for Republicans, even addressing or staking out a position on these issues has become, at most, a peripheral concern.[wedge issue cult war, own the libs]</div><div>You would expect a party that professes some legitimate relationship to the American people to at least set forth its policy views on these matters. But, as Maddow noted on Wednesday, that is not what Republicans are talking about. In reality, the Republicans have only one focus now: the negation of fair and lawful elections that don't go their way. That has been the crux of their entire collective effort since Trump lost the election last November. It is the focus in California, where the racist Fox News crackpot Larry Elder apparently received unpleasant news from his internal polling and is now playing the "fraud" card, in the apparent expectation that he will lose that state's recall election against Gavin Newsom. It is happening in Nevada, where Trump-endorsed candidate Adam Laxalt has preemptively suggested that if he fails to unseat Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto in 2022, it will only be due to some unspecified "fraud."</div><div>
</div><div>The "stolen election/voter fraud" theme is now the official GOP talking point. As Maddow observed, Republicans everywhere are now using it and will continue to use it in 2022 and beyond. The tactic is being chiefly promoted and driven by Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's former chief of staff, and reinforced through his daily podcasts, which, like NBC News, ProPublica and others have pointed out, are now virtually required listening for most Republican officials, whether elected or intent on being elected. This is where their marching orders are coming from.</div><div>
</div><div>While Bannon's podcasts touch obliquely on current events (the latest fixation of their contrived outrage is Afghanistan, for example), the overwhelming emphasis is on conjuring up and amplifying the phony threat of "election fraud," urging on the nationwide bogus, partisan audits and investigations, and providing preordained conclusions to those investigations. As Pro Publica reported in their analysis of Bannon's efforts, this nationalization of Trump's Big Lie has been extraordinarily successful up to this point, prompting a massive surge in local election precinct membership among Trump's most delusional, violent, and white nationalist base of support:</div><div>
</div><div>The new movement is built entirely around Trump's insistence that the electoral system failed in 2020 and that Republicans can't let it happen again. The result is a nationwide groundswell of party activists whose central goal is not merely to win elections but to reshape their machinery.</div><div>Bannon's podcast is a disinformation megaphone the likes of which Josef Goebbels could have only dreamed of, and it is incredibly corrosive to this country's democratic institutions. It is the cynical product of a man who has exercised (or attempted to exercise) an insidious influence not only on far-right, proto-fascist movements and political parties in Europe but now apparently in Brazil as well, on behalf of would-be dictator Jair Bolsonaro. And the fact that the entire GOP is currently operating in lockstep with—and at the bidding of—such a person tells you everything you need to know about how the 2022 election will be framed: Every contest in which a Republican loses will now be susceptible to an ongoing, malicious attack on that election's integrity, bar none.</div><div>
</div><div>And Democrats have every reason to be appalled by this Bannon takeover of the Republican party. (In reality, all Americans should be appalled, but as the listless reaction by the GOP faithful to the terrorist assault of Jan. 6 showed, we cannot expect any fealty to democracy from the vast majority of Republicans.) But there is a silver lining to this seditious perfidy by Bannon and others: it serves to make all forthcoming elections a referendum on Donald Trump, to the exclusion of all else.</div><div>
</div><div>Bannon himself has created this effect by tying his entire effort to the 2020 election. (In his podcasts, rather than refer to it directly, he calls it "3 November," as if the bare mention of the date has a mobilizing resonance similar to Jan. 6 or Sept. 11.) All of the invented, phony, and racially tinged rhetoric about voter fraud hawked in his podcasts stem from the given assumption that Trump was wrongfully denied reelection. And Trump himself has been more than eager to support it, as he showed this week by injecting his assessment of the California recall election as tainted, even before any votes were tallied. Trump's anointed candidates, such as Laxalt and the countless others who will follow him, have all irrevocably signed onto this playbook. That is their sole roadmap.</div><div>
</div><div>So be it. Just a few weeks ago, plenty of political prognosticators were gleefully downplaying Democrats' chances in California (and, by implication, the 2022 midterms), touting the fact that Trump was no longer on the ballot. Republicans, by leaping onto the Bannon bandwagon, have now made it essential that he be implicitly on the ballot, even as they resolve to delegitimize any Democratic wins as the product of fraud. Seen in this perspective, every election from this point forward is a referendum on Trump and Trump-ism. Fascist-admirers like Bannon believe that this is a winning strategy, but to an electorate that has already rendered a decidedly negative verdict on Joe Biden's predecessor—a judgment which was amply reinforced by the horrific attacks by Trump supporters on Jan. 6—he may have inadvertently provided the single strongest motivation for Democrats to vote.</div><div>
</div><div>When Georgia held its special election on Jan. 5, pitting Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff against two GOP incumbents, it was in the wake of weeks of rhetoric from Trump attempting to delegitimize the electoral process. At that time, Trump's mob of white supremacist terrorists had yet to demonstrate their violent and utter contempt for our institutions by assaulting the Capitol. Many political observers concluded that Trump's efforts sabotaged the GOP's chances by depressing and demotivating the vote. But the converse effect, the concerted mobilization of the Black vote by Stacey Abrams and others, was perhaps less remarked upon. Far from having its desired effect, the tactic of falsely crying voter fraud hurt GOP turnout.</div><div>
</div><div>The entire underlying premise of Bannon's podcast is the illegitimacy of the Democratic voter. But as the elections of Sens. Warnock and Ossoff showed, people react very negatively to attempts to delegitimize them. For many, it simply increases their resolve to vote. While every district is certainly different, if Republicans expect the tactic to work as a national strategy, they have to resign themselves to the fact that the election thereby becomes all about Trump, everything that Trump did in office and has done in the wake of his defeat. Gov. Terry McAuliffe, for example, is doing just that in Virginia right now.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump is the most polarizing figure in American politics, and by and large, all Democrats viscerally despise him. By overtly basing their entire strategy on the petulant lies of a failed president, Republicans who choose to follow down the primrose path Bannon has laid for them may well be giving the Democrats a midterm opportunity of a lifetime.</div><div>
</div><div>Democrats should embrace that opportunity: make every election a referendum on Donald Trump, tying every Republican to his attempts to overturn the election. And pull out all the stops to get our voters to the polls.</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/election-deniers/</div><div>
</div><div>no lnx</div><div>
</div><div>Election deniers organize to seize control of the GOP — and reshape America’s elections</div><div>
</div><div>Steve Bannon speaking at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, Gage Skidmore]</div><div>&nbsp;ProPublica September 05, 2021</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>by Isaac Arnsdorf, Doug Bock Clark, Alexandra Berzon and Anjeanette Damon</div><div>
</div><div>ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.&nbsp;</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>One of the loudest voices urging Donald Trump's supporters to push for overturning the presidential election results was Steve Bannon. “We're on the point of attack," Bannon, a former Trump adviser and far-right nationalist, pledged on his popular podcast on Jan. 5. “All hell will break loose tomorrow." The next morning, as thousands massed on the National Mall for a rally that turned into an attack on the Capitol, Bannon fired up his listeners: “It's them against us. Who can impose their will on the other side?"</div><div>
</div><div>When the insurrection failed, Bannon continued his campaign for his former boss by other means. On his “War Room" podcast, which has tens of millions of downloads, Bannon said President Trump lost because the Republican Party sold him out. “This is your call to action," Bannon said in February, a few weeks after Trump had pardoned him of federal fraud charges.</div><div>
</div><div>The solution, Bannon announced, was to seize control of the GOP from the bottom up. Listeners should flood into the lowest rung of the party structure: the precincts. “It's going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don't have an option," Bannon said on his show in May. “We're going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct."</div><div>
</div><div>Precinct officers are the worker bees of political parties, typically responsible for routine tasks like making phone calls or knocking on doors. But collectively, they can influence how elections are run. In some states, they have a say in choosing poll workers, and in others they help pick members of boards that oversee elections.</div><div>
</div><div>After Bannon's endorsement, the “precinct strategy" rocketed across far-right media. Viral posts promoting the plan racked up millions of views on pro-Trump websites, talk radio, fringe social networks and message boards, and programs aligned with the QAnon conspiracy theory.</div><div>
</div><div>Suddenly, people who had never before showed interest in party politics started calling the local GOP headquarters or crowding into county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers. They showed up in states Trump won and in states he lost, in deep-red rural areas, in swing-voting suburbs and in populous cities.</div><div>
</div><div>In Wisconsin, for instance, new GOP recruits are becoming poll workers. County clerks who run elections in the state are required to hire parties' nominees. The parties once passed on suggesting names, but now hardline Republican county chairs are moving to use those powers.</div><div>
</div><div>“We're signing up election inspectors like crazy right now," said Outagamie County party chair Matt Albert, using the state's formal term for poll workers. Albert, who held a “Stop the Steal" rally during Wisconsin's November recount, said Bannon's podcast had played a role in the burst of enthusiasm.</div><div>
</div><div>ProPublica contacted GOP leaders in 65 key counties, and 41 reported an unusual increase in signups since Bannon's campaign began. At least 8,500 new Republican precinct officers (or equivalent lowest-level officials) joined those county parties. We also looked at equivalent Democratic posts and found no similar surge.</div><div>
</div><div>“I've never seen anything like this, people are coming out of the woodwork," said J.C. Martin, the GOP chairman in Polk County, Florida, who has added 50 new committee members since January. Martin had wanted congressional Republicans to overturn the election on Jan. 6, and he welcomed this wave of like-minded newcomers. “The most recent time we saw this type of thing was the tea party, and this is way beyond it."</div><div>
</div><div>Bannon, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.</div><div>
</div><div>While party officials largely credited Bannon's podcast with driving the surge of new precinct officers, it's impossible to know the motivations of each new recruit. Precinct officers are not centrally tracked anywhere, and it was not possible to examine all 3,000 counties nationwide. ProPublica focused on politically competitive places that were discussed as targets in far-right media.</div><div>
</div><div>The tea party backlash to former President Barack Obama's election foreshadowed Republican gains in the 2010 midterm. Presidential losses often energize party activists, and it would not be the first time that a candidate's faction tried to consolidate control over the party apparatus with the aim of winning the next election.</div><div>
</div><div>What's different this time is an uncompromising focus on elections themselves. The new movement is built entirely around Trump's insistence that the electoral system failed in 2020 and that Republicans can't let it happen again. The result is a nationwide groundswell of party activists whose central goal is not merely to win elections but to reshape their machinery.</div><div>
</div><div>“They feel President Trump was rightfully elected president and it was taken from him," said Michael Barnett, the GOP chairman in Palm Beach County, Florida, who has enthusiastically added 90 executive committee members this year. “They feel their involvement in upcoming elections will prevent something like that from happening again."</div><div>
</div><div>It has only been a few months — too soon to say whether the wave of newcomers will ultimately succeed in reshaping the GOP or how they will affect Republican prospects in upcoming elections. But what's already clear is that these up-and-coming party officers have notched early wins.</div><div>
</div><div>In Michigan, one of the main organizers recruiting new precinct officers pushed for the ouster of the state party's executive director, who contradicted Trump's claim that the election was stolen and who later resigned. In Las Vegas, a handful of Proud Boys, part of the extremist group whose members have been charged in attacking the Capitol, supported a bid to topple moderates controlling the county party — a dispute that's now in court.</div><div>
</div><div>In Phoenix, new precinct officers petitioned to unseat county officials who refused to cooperate with the state Senate Republicans' “forensic audit" of 2020 ballots. Similar audits are now being pursued by new precinct officers in Michigan and the Carolinas. Outside Atlanta, new local party leaders helped elect a state lawmaker who championed Georgia's sweeping new voting restrictions.</div><div>
</div><div>And precinct organizers are hoping to advance candidates such as Matthew DePerno, a Michigan attorney general hopeful who Republican state senators said in a report had spread “misleading and irresponsible" misinformation about the election, and Mark Finchem, a member of the Oath Keepers militia who marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6 and is now running to be Arizona's top elections official. DePerno did not respond to requests for comment, and Finchem asked for questions to be sent by email and then did not respond. Finchem has said he did not enter the Capitol or have anything to do with the violence. He has also said the Oath Keepers are not anti-government.</div><div>
</div><div>When Bannon interviewed Finchem on an April podcast, he wrapped up a segment about Arizona Republicans' efforts to reexamine the 2020 results by asking Finchem how listeners could help. Finchem answered by promoting the precinct strategy. “The only way you're going to see to it this doesn't happen again is if you get involved," Finchem said. “Become a precinct committeeman."</div><div>
</div><div>Some of the new precinct officers were in the crowd that marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6, according to interviews and social media posts; one Texas precinct chair was arrested for assaulting police in Washington. He pleaded not guilty. Many of the new activists have said publicly that they support QAnon, the online conspiracy theory that believes Trump was working to root out a global child sex trafficking ring. Organizers of the movement have encouraged supporters to bring weapons to demonstrations. In Las Vegas and Savannah, Georgia, newcomers were so disruptive that they shut down leadership elections.</div><div>
</div><div>“They're not going to be welcomed with open arms," Bannon said, addressing the altercations on an April podcast. “But hey, was it nasty at Lexington?" he said, citing the opening battle of the American Revolution. “Was it nasty at Concord? Was it nasty at Bunker Hill?"</div><div>
</div><div>Bannon plucked the precinct strategy out of obscurity. For more than a decade, a little-known Arizona tea party activist named Daniel J. Schultz has been preaching the plan. Schultz failed to gain traction, despite winning a $5,000 prize from conservative direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie in 2013 and making a 2015 pitch on Bannon's far-right website, Breitbart. Schultz did not respond to repeated requests for comment.</div><div>
</div><div>In December, Schultz appeared on Bannon's podcast to argue that Republican-controlled state legislatures should nullify the election results and throw their state's Electoral College votes to Trump. If lawmakers failed to do that, Bannon asked, would it be the end of the Republican Party? Not if Trump supporters took over the party by seizing precinct posts, Schultz answered, beginning to explain his plan. Bannon cut him off, offering to return to the idea another time.</div><div>
</div><div>That time came in February. Schultz returned to Bannon's podcast, immediately preceding Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who spouts baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.</div><div>
</div><div>“We can take over the party if we invade it," Schultz said. “I can't guarantee you that we'll save the republic, but I can guarantee you this: We'll lose it if we conservatives don't take over the Republican Party."</div><div>
</div><div>Bannon endorsed Schultz's plan, telling “all the unwashed masses in the MAGA movement, the deplorables" to take up this cause. Bannon said he had more than 400,000 listeners, a count that could not be independently verified.</div><div>
</div><div>Bannon brought Schultz back on the show at least eight more times, alongside guests such as embattled Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, a leading defender of people jailed on Capitol riot charges.</div><div>
</div><div>The exposure launched Schultz into a full-blown far-right media tour. In February, Schultz spoke on a podcast with Tracy “Beanz" Diaz, a leading popularizer of QAnon. In an episode titled “THIS Is How We Win," Diaz said of Schultz, “I was waiting, I was wishing and hoping for the universe to deliver someone like him."</div><div>
</div><div>Schultz himself calls QAnon “a joke." Nevertheless, he promoted his precinct strategy on at least three more QAnon programs in recent months, according to Media Matters, a Democratic-aligned group tracking right-wing content. “I want to see many of you going and doing this," host Zak Paine said on one of the shows in May.</div><div>
</div><div>Schultz's strategy also got a boost from another prominent QAnon promoter: former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who urged Trump to impose martial law and “rerun" the election. On a May online talk show, Flynn told listeners to fill “thousands of positions that are vacant at the local level."</div><div>
</div><div>Precinct recruitment is now “the forefront of our mission" for Turning Point Action, according to the right-wing organization's website. The group's parent organization bussed Trump supporters to Washington for Jan. 6, including at least one person who was later charged with assaulting police. He pleaded not guilty. In July, Turning Point brought Trump to speak in Phoenix, where he called the 2020 election “the greatest crime in history." Outside, red-capped volunteers signed people up to become precinct chairs.</div><div>
</div><div>Organizers from around the country started huddling with Schultz for weekly Zoom meetings. The meetings' host, far-right blogger Jim Condit Jr. of Cincinnati, kicked off a July call by describing the precinct strategy as the last alternative to violence. “It's the only idea," Condit said, “unless you want to pick up guns like the Founding Fathers did in 1776 and start to try to take back our country by the Second Amendment, which none of us want to do."</div><div>
</div><div>By the next week, though, Schultz suggested the new precinct officials might not stay peaceful. Schultz belonged to a mailing list for a group of military, law enforcement and intelligence veterans called the “1st Amendment Praetorian" that organizes security for Flynn and other pro-Trump figures. Back in the 1990s, Schultz wrote an article defending armed anti-government militias like those involved in that decade's deadly clashes with federal agents in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas.</div><div>
</div><div>“Make sure everybody's got a baseball bat," Schultz said on the July strategy conference call, which was posted on YouTube. “I'm serious about this. Make sure you've got people who are armed."</div><div>
</div><div>The sudden demand for low-profile precinct positions baffled some party leaders. In Fort Worth, county chair Rick Barnes said numerous callers asked about becoming a “precinct committeeman," quoting the term used on Bannon's podcast. That suggested that out-of-state encouragement played a role in prompting the calls, since Texas's term for the position is “precinct chair." Tarrant County has added 61 precinct chairs this year, about a 24% increase since February. “Those podcasts actually paid off," Barnes said.</div><div>
</div><div>For weeks, about five people a day called to become precinct chairs in Outagamie County, Wisconsin, southwest of Green Bay. Albert, the county party chair, said he would explain that Wisconsin has no precinct chairs, but newcomers could join the county party — and then become poll workers. “We're trying to make sure that our voice is now being reinserted into the process," Albert said.</div><div>
</div><div>Similarly, the GOP in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, is fielding a surge of volunteers for precinct committee members, but also for election judges or inspectors, which are party-affiliated elected positions in that state. “Who knows what happened on Election Day for real," county chair Lou Capozzi said in an interview. The county GOP sent two busloads of people to Washington for Jan. 6 and Capozzi said they stayed peaceful. “People want to make sure elections remain honest."</div><div>
</div><div>Elsewhere, activists inspired by the precinct strategy have targeted local election boards. In DeKalb County, east of Atlanta, the GOP censured a long-serving Republican board member who rejected claims of widespread fraud in 2020. To replace him, new party chair Marci McCarthy tapped a far-right activist known for false, offensive statements. The party nominees to the election board have to be approved by a judge, and the judge in this case rejected McCarthy's pick, citing an “extraordinary" public outcry. McCarthy defended her choice but ultimately settled for someone less controversial.</div><div>
</div><div>In Raleigh, North Carolina, more than 1,000 people attended the county GOP convention in March, up from the typical 300 to 400. The chair they elected, Alan Swain, swiftly formed an “election integrity committee" that's lobbying lawmakers to restrict voting and audit the 2020 results. “We're all about voter and election integrity," Swain said in an interview.</div><div>
</div><div>In the rural western part of the state, too, a wave of people who heard Bannon's podcast or were furious about perceived election fraud swept into county parties, according to the new district chair, Michele Woodhouse. The district's member of Congress, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, addressed a crowd at one county headquarters on Aug. 29, at an event that included a raffle for a shotgun.</div><div>
</div><div>“If our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, it's going to lead to one place, and it's bloodshed," Cawthorn said, in remarks livestreamed on Facebook, shortly after holding the prize shotgun, which he autographed. “That's right," the audience cheered. Cawthorn went on, “As much as I'm willing to defend our liberty at all costs, there's nothing that I would dread doing more than having to pick up arms against a fellow American, and the way we can have recourse against that is if we all passionately demand that we have election security in all 50 states."</div><div>
</div><div>After Cawthorn referred to people arrested on Jan. 6 charges as “political hostages," someone asked, “When are you going to call us to Washington again?" The crowd laughed and clapped as Cawthorn answered, “We are actively working on that one."</div><div>
</div><div>Schultz has offered his own state of Arizona as a proof of concept for how precinct officers can reshape the party. The result, Schultz has said, is actions like the state Senate Republicans' “forensic audit" of Maricopa County's 2020 ballots. The “audit," conducted by a private firm with no experience in elections and whose CEO has spread conspiracy theories, has included efforts to identify fraudulent ballots from Asia by searching for traces of bamboo. Schultz has urged activists demanding similar audits in other states to start by becoming precinct officers.</div><div>
</div><div>“Because we've got the audit, there's very heightened and intense public interest in the last campaign, and of course making sure election laws are tightened," said Sandra Dowling, a district chair in northwest Maricopa and northern Yuma County whose precinct roster grew by 63% in less than six months. Though Dowling says some other district chairs screen their applicants, she doesn't. “I don't care," she said.</div><div>
</div><div>One chair who does screen applicants is Kathy Petsas, a lifelong Republican whose district spans Phoenix and Paradise Valley. She also saw applications explode earlier this year. Many told her that Schultz had recruited them, and some said they believed in QAnon. “Being motivated by conspiracy theories is no way to go through life, and no way for us to build a high-functioning party," Petsas said. “That attitude can't prevail."</div><div>
</div><div>As waves of new precinct officers flooded into the county party, Petsas was dismayed to see some petitioning to recall their own Republican county supervisors for refusing to cooperate with the Senate GOP's audit.</div><div>
</div><div>“It is not helpful to our democracy when you have people who stand up and do the right thing and are honest communicators about what's going on, and they get lambasted by our own party," Petsas said. “That's a problem."</div><div>
</div><div>This spring, a team of disaffected Republican operatives put Schultz's precinct strategy into action in South Carolina, a state that plays an outsize role in choosing presidents because of its early primaries. The operatives' goal was to secure enough delegates to the party's state convention to elect a new chair: far-right celebrity lawyer Lin Wood.</div><div>
</div><div>Wood was involved with some of the lawsuits to overturn the presidential election that courts repeatedly ruled meritless, or even sanctionable. After the election, Wood said on Bannon's podcast, “I think the audience has to do what the people that were our Founding Fathers did in 1776." On Twitter, Wood called for executing Vice President Mike Pence by firing squad. Wood later said it was “rhetorical hyperbole," but that and other incendiary language got him banned from mainstream social media. He switched to Telegram, an encrypted messaging app favored by deplatformed right-wing influencers, amassing roughly 830,000 followers while repeatedly promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory.</div><div>
</div><div>Asked for comment about his political efforts, Wood responded, “Most of your 'facts' are either false or misrepresent the truth." He declined to cite specifics.</div><div>
</div><div>Typically, precinct meetings were “a yawner," according to Mike Connett, a longtime party member in Horry County, best known for its popular beach towns. But in April, Connett and other establishment Republicans were caught off guard when 369 people, many of them newcomers, showed up for the county convention in North Myrtle Beach. Connett lost a race for a leadership role to Diaz, the prominent QAnon supporter, and Wood's faction captured the county's other executive positions plus 35 of 48 delegate slots, enabling them to cast most of the county's votes for Wood at the state convention. “It seemed like a pretty clean takeover," Connett told ProPublica.</div><div>
</div><div>In Greenville, the state's most populous county, Wood campaign organizers Jeff Davis and Pressley Stutts mobilized a surge of supporters at the county convention — about 1,400 delegates, up from roughly 550 in 2019 — and swept almost all of the 79 delegate positions. That gave Wood's faction the vast majority of the votes in two of South Carolina's biggest delegations.</div><div>
</div><div>Across the state, the precinct strategy was contributing to an unprecedented surge in local party participation, according to data provided by a state GOP spokeswoman. In 2019, 4,296 people participated. This year, 8,524 did.</div><div>
</div><div>“It's a prairie fire down there in Greenville, South Carolina, brought on by the MAGA posse," Bannon said on his podcast.</div><div>
</div><div>Establishment party leaders realized they had to take Wood's challenge seriously. The incumbent chair, Drew McKissick, had Trump's endorsement three times over — including twice after Wood entered the race. But Wood fought back by repeatedly implying that McKissick and other prominent state Republicans were corrupt and involved in various conspiracies that seemed related to QAnon. The race became heated enough that after one event, Wood and McKissick exchanged angry words face-to-face.</div><div>
</div><div>Wood's rallies were raucous affairs packed with hundreds of people, energized by right-wing celebrities like Flynn and Lindell. In interviews, many attendees described the events as their first foray into politics, sometimes referencing Schultz and always citing Trump's stolen election myth. Some said they'd resort to violence if they felt an election was stolen again.</div><div>
</div><div>Wood's campaign wobbled in counties that the precinct strategy had not yet reached. At the state convention in May, Wood won about 30% of the delegates, commanding Horry, Greenville and some surrounding counties, but faltering elsewhere. A triumphant McKissick called Wood's supporters “a fringe, rogue group" and vowed to turn them into a “leper colony" by building parallel Republican organizations in their territory.</div><div>
</div><div>But Wood and his partisans did not act defeated. The chairmanship election, they argued, was as rigged as the 2020 presidential race. Wood threw a lavish party at his roughly 2,000-acre low-country estate, secured by armed guards and surveillance cameras. From a stage fit for a rock concert on the lawn of one of his three mansions, Wood promised the fight would continue.</div><div>
</div><div>Diaz and her allies in Horry County voted to censure McKissick. The county's longtime Republicans tried, but failed, to oust Diaz and her cohort after one of the people involved in drafting Wood tackled a protester at a Flynn speech in Greenville. (This incident, the details of which are disputed, prompted Schultz to encourage precinct strategy activists to arm themselves.) Wood continued promoting the precinct strategy to his Telegram followers, and scores replied that they were signing up.</div><div>
</div><div>In late July, Stutts and Davis forced out Greenville County GOP's few remaining establishment leaders, claiming that they had cheated in the first election. Then Stutts, Davis and an ally won a new election to fill those vacant seats. “They sound like Democrats, right?" Bannon asked Stutts in a podcast interview. Stutts replied, “They taught the Democrats how to cheat, Steve."</div><div>
</div><div>Stutts' group quickly pushed for an investigation of the 2020 presidential election, planning a rally featuring Davis and Wood at the end of August, and began campaigning against vaccine and school mask mandates. “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery," Stutts had previously posted on Facebook, quoting Thomas Jefferson. Stutts continued posting messages skeptical of vaccine and mask mandates even after he entered the hospital with a severe case of COVID-19. He died on Aug. 19.</div><div>
</div><div>The hubbub got so loud inside the Cobb County, Georgia, Republican headquarters that it took several shouts and whistles to get everyone's attention. It was a full house for Salleigh Grubbs' first meeting as the county's party chair. Grubbs ran on a vow to “clean house" in the election system, highlighting her December testimony to state lawmakers in which she raised unsubstantiated fraud allegations. Supporters praised Grubbs' courage for following a truck she suspected of being used in a plot to shred evidence. She attended Trump's Jan. 6 rally as a VIP. She won the chairmanship decisively at an April county convention packed with an estimated 50% first-time participants.</div><div>
</div><div>In May, Grubbs opened her first meeting by asking everyone munching on bacon and eggs to listen to her recite the Gettysburg Address. “Think of the battle for freedom that Americans have before them today," Grubbs said. “Those people fought and died so that you could be the precinct chair." After the reading, first-time precinct officers stood for applause and cheers.</div><div>
</div><div>Their work would start right away: putting up signs, making calls and knocking on doors for a special election for the state House. The district had long leaned Republican, but after the GOP's devastating losses up and down the ballot in 2020, they didn't know what to expect.</div><div>
</div><div>“There's so many people out there that are scared, they feel like their vote doesn't count," Cooper Guyon, a 17-year-old right-wing podcaster from the Atlanta area who speaks to county parties around the state, told the Cobb Republicans in July. The activists, he said, need to “get out in these communities and tell them that we are fighting to make your vote count by passing the Senate bill, the election-reform bills that are saving our elections in Georgia."</div><div>
</div><div>Of the field's two Republicans, Devan Seabaugh took the strongest stance in favor of Georgia's new law restricting ways to vote and giving the Republican-controlled Legislature more power over running elections. “The only people who may be inconvenienced by Senate Bill 202 are those intent on committing fraud," he wrote in response to a local newspaper's candidate questionnaire.</div><div>
</div><div>Seabaugh led the June special election and won a July runoff. Grubbs cheered the win as a turning point. “We are awake. We are preparing," she wrote on Facebook. “The conservative citizens of Cobb County are ready to defend our ballots and our county."</div><div>
</div><div>Newcomers did not meet such quick success everywhere. In Savannah, a faction crashed the Chatham County convention with their own microphone, inspired by Bannon's podcast to try to depose the incumbent party leaders who they accused of betraying Trump. Party officers blocked the newcomers' candidacies, saying they weren't officially nominated. Shouting erupted, and the meeting adjourned without a vote. Then the party canceled its districtwide convention.</div><div>
</div><div>The state party ultimately sided with the incumbent leaders. District chair Carl Smith said the uprising is bound to fail because the insurgents are mistaken in believing that he and other local leaders didn't fight hard enough for Trump.</div><div>
</div><div>“You can't build a movement on a lie," Smith said.</div><div>
</div><div>In Michigan, activists who identify with a larger movement working against Republicans willing to accept Trump's loss have captured the party leadership in about a dozen counties. They're directly challenging state party leaders, who are trying to harness the grassroots energy without indulging demands to keep fighting over the last election.</div><div>
</div><div>Some of the takeovers happened before the rise of the precinct strategy. But the activists are now organizing under the banner “Precinct First" and holding regular events, complete with notaries, to sign people up to run for precinct delegate positions.</div><div>
</div><div>“We are reclaiming our party," Debra Ell, one of the organizers, told ProPublica. “We're building an 'America First' army."</div><div>
</div><div>Under normal rules, the wave of new precinct delegates could force the party to nominate far-right candidates for key state offices. That's because in Michigan, party nominees for attorney general, secretary of state and lieutenant governor are chosen directly by party delegates rather than in public primaries. But the state party recently voted to hold a special convention earlier next year, which should effectively lock in candidates before the new, more radical delegates are seated.</div><div>
</div><div>Activist-led county parties including rural Hillsdale and Detroit-area Macomb are also censuring Republican state legislators for issuing a June report on the 2020 election that found no evidence of systemic fraud and no need for a reexamination of the results like the one in Arizona. (The censures have no enforceable impact beyond being a public rebuke of the politicians.) At the same time, county party leaders in Hillsdale and elsewhere are working on a ballot initiative to force an Arizona-style election review.</div><div>
</div><div>Establishment Republicans have their own idea for a ballot initiative — one that could tighten rules for voter ID and provisional ballots while sidestepping the Democratic governor's veto. If the initiative collects hundreds of thousands of valid signatures, it would be put to a vote by the Republican-controlled state Legislature. Under a provision of the state constitution, the state Legislature can adopt the measure and it can't be vetoed.</div><div>
</div><div>State party leaders recently reached out to the activists rallying around the rejection of the presidential election results, including Hillsdale Republican Party Secretary Jon Smith, for help. Smith, Ell and others agreed to join the effort, the two activists said.</div><div>
</div><div>“This empowers them," Jason Roe, the state party executive director whose ouster the activists demanded because he said Trump was responsible for his own loss, told ProPublica. Roe resigned in July, citing unrelated reasons. “It's important to get them focused on change that can actually impact" future elections, he said, “instead of keeping their feet mired in the conspiracy theories of 2020."</div><div>
</div><div>Jesse Law, who ran the Trump campaign's Election Day operations in Nevada, sued the Democratic electors, seeking to declare Trump the winner or annul the results. The judge threw out the case, saying Law's evidence did not meet “any standard of proof," and the Nevada Supreme Court agreed. When the Electoral College met in December, Law stood outside the state capitol to publicly cast mock votes for Trump.</div><div>
</div><div>This year, Law set his sights on taking over the Republican Party in the state's largest county, Clark, which encompasses Las Vegas. He campaigned on the precinct strategy, promising 1,000 new recruits. His path to winning the county chairmanship — just like Stutts' team in South Carolina, and Grubbs in Cobb County, Georgia — relied on turning out droves of newcomers to flood the county party and vote for him.</div><div>
</div><div>In Law's case, many of those newcomers came through the Proud Boys, the all-male gang affiliated with more than two dozen people charged in the Capitol riot. The Las Vegas chapter boasted about signing up 500 new party members (not all of them belonging to the Proud Boys) to ensure their takeover of the county party. After briefly advancing their own slate of candidates to lead the Clark GOP, the Proud Boys threw their support to Law. They also helped lead a state party censure of Nevada's Republican secretary of state, who rejected the Trump campaign's baseless claims of fraudulent ballots.</div><div>
</div><div>Law, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment, has declined to distance himself from the Las Vegas Proud Boys, citing Trump's “stand back and stand by" remark at the September 2020 presidential debate. “When the president was asked if he would disavow, he said no," Law told an independent Nevada journalist in July. “If the president is OK with that, I'm going to take the presidential stance."</div><div>
</div><div>The outgoing county chair, David Sajdak, canceled the first planned vote for his successor. He said he was worried the Proud Boys would resort to violence if their newly recruited members, who Sajdak considered illegitimate, weren't allowed to vote.</div><div>
</div><div>Sajdak tried again to hold a leadership vote in July, with a meeting in a Las Vegas high school theater, secured by police. But the crowd inside descended into shouting, while more people tried to storm past the cops guarding the back entrance, leading to scuffles. “Let us in! Let us in!" some chanted. Riling them up was at least one Proud Boy, according to multiple videos of the meeting.</div><div>
</div><div>At the microphone, Sajdak was running out of patience. “I'm done covering for you awful people," he bellowed. Unable to restore order, Sajdak ended the meeting without a vote and resigned a few hours later. He'd had enough.</div><div>
</div><div>“They want to create mayhem," Sajdak said.</div><div>
</div><div>Soon after, Law's faction held their own meeting at a hotel-casino and overwhelmingly voted for Law as county chairman. Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald, a longtime ally of Law who helped lead Trump's futile effort to overturn the Nevada results, recognized Law as the new county chair and promoted a fundraiser to celebrate. The existing county leaders sued, seeking a court order to block Law's “fraudulent, rogue election." The judge preliminarily sided with the moderates, but told them to hold off on their own election until a court hearing in September.</div><div>
</div><div>To Sajdak, agonizing over 2020 is pointless because “there's no mechanism for overturning an election." Asked if Law's allies are determined to create one, Sajdak said: “It's a scary thought, isn't it."</div><div>
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</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>=</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/far-right/</div><div>bobby Azarian and Raw Story August 05, 2021</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Do not be alarmed, but consider this article a prediction and a warning. Actually, it's okay to be a little alarmed, because recent events—like the storming of the Capitol—are certainly cause for concern. Let's call it what it is; Donald Trump has created a cult and radicalized its members. QAnon also shares a large part of the responsibility, whoever they are. We may not be able to see it because Trump has been banned from Twitter and Q conversation cleaned from social media, but behind the scenes, this cult is being transformed into an army of soldiers.</div><div>
</div><div>How do we know that it is as serious as I say; that this is not just more fear mongering? Well, for one, people have died. Heather Heyer, a counterprotester protesting the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, was run over by a white supremacist, and 19 others were injured. Last year a man drew a hunting bow on protestors in Salt Lake City before being taken out by the crowd, a chilling moment that was captured on video. On the day of the Capitol riot, a pipe bomb was found a few blocks from the Capitol building. In addition to these troubling events, many others who will go unnamed have been the victims of hate crimes that can be traced to the alt-Right, pro-Trump movement.</div><div>
</div><div>But the causalities have not only been on one side. Capitol rioter Ashli Babbitt was fatally wounded by a cop as the mob tried to breach a door, another frightening moment caught on video. The point I'm making has nothing to do with whether or not the shooting was justified—though saying that level of force was necessary strikes me as uncomfortably close to Right-wing apologists who defend cops that shoot unarmed black men. The point is that the violence is escalating, and there's every reason to believe that escalation will continue. To use Newton's third law as a metaphor—for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So, what does this mean for the future of America?</div><div>
</div><div>Since aggression provokes fear, and fear promotes aggression, a dangerous feedback loop has been established, dividing the nation to such a degree that something like civil war seems imminent. It may be a "cold civil war," but there will still be violence, destruction, and death. There will also be more gridlock in Washington, which makes any kind of progress impossible. It is hard to calculate the suffering that could have been avoided with a functional Congress, but we can be sure it is substantial. And if the division gets too severe, which is where we are headed, there will be a point of no return. Social chaos and economic collapse will follow, the United States will lose its status as a superpower, and life as we know it, will cease. If the pandemic showed us anything, it is that despite how advanced we are technologically, we are not protected from disaster, and our way of life can change overnight.</div><div>
</div><div>The good news is that this gloomy future is only inevitable should we choose not to intervene. But we do have to make a conscious effort to avoid catastrophe if we want any chance of being successful. I'm not talking about compromising, or forgiving, or forgetting—because we should do none of those things. I'm proposing something altogether new, something radical to stop Right-wing radicalism. But to understand the solution, and why it is necessary, we first have to get a clearer understanding of the problem, and of the predictive power of science.</div><div>
</div><div>The Predictive Power of Terror Management Theory... [long]</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/the-right-wing/</div><div>
</div><div>1 in 3 microchip</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/watch-republicans-exposed-for-flip-flopping-on-vaccines-as-soon-as-trump-left-office/</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>=</div><div>amanda m</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/gop/</div><div>
</div><div>After months of sliding downwards, COVID-19 transmission rates are now beginning to creep back up. The reasons for the backslide given in the media are often biological — lots of talk about how the delta variant is more contagious, for instance — but this surge was much more political. From the moment that President Joe Biden stepped into the White House, Republican leaders have understood that he will be blamed if the pandemic isn't brought under control. And so they've set out to sabotage his efforts by encouraging their followers to risk their own health and reject getting vaccines in an effort to get the COVID-19 numbers up.</div><div>
</div><div>The GOP's pro-virus campaign has been wildly successful.</div><div>
</div><div>While 86% of Democrats have been vaccinated, only 45% of Republicans have gotten a shot. Nearly all of the currently unvaccinated Republicans flat-out refuse to do it ever. So COVID-19 is quickly becoming a regional disease, with hotspots concentrated in deeply Republican areas of the country. And while the delta variant is more contagious, the main reason it's spreading is because of low vaccination rates, as 99.7% of new cases have been among the unvaccinated.</div><div>
</div><div>I've been writing about this Republican scheming to use the bodies of their own people as disease vectors for months, but only in recent days has the mainstream media started to wake up to this grim reality.</div><div>
</div><div>On CNN on Wednesday, Erin Burnett played a supercut featuring Republican leaders like Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado screeching "don't come knocking on my door with your Fauci ouchie" and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin falsely suggeting the shot kills people. On the same day, another CNN anchor, Chris Cuomo, got angry with Republican Rep. Michael Burgess of Texas for being "OK with this kind of jackassery that has absolutely led to a deficiency among Republican people in this country taking the vaccine." There's been a lot of attention paid to Republicans shutting down vaccine outreach to young people in Tennessee. The Washington Post released a video showing that Republicans who supported the vaccine while Donald Trump was in office immediately switched to dissing the shot the second the president was a Democrat: [vid]</div><div>
</div><div>why did it take so long for the mainstream media to admit that Republican leaders are intentionally encouraging infection? As has happened repeatedly in the past, it comes back to a reluctance to accept that Republicans really are as bad as they seem. It was just plain easier to imagine that those who said that Republicans were pro-virus are merely #resistance hysterics until the numbers made the truth undeniable.</div><div>
</div><div>But that Republicans really are terrible enough to spread disease for political gain is unsurprising to those who have been paying attention to the sexual health wars. For decades, Republicans have done everything they can to discourage preventive sexual health care, including cutting off access to birth control and condoms and lying about the usefulness of various methods. The claim was that this was all justified to promote "abstinence," but the result, time and again, was just more disease and unwanted child-bearing.</div><div>
</div><div>Megan Carpentier at Dame Magazine took a deep dive on Wednesday on the Republican war on a vaccine for HPV, a sexually transmitted virus that causes many kinds of cancer, most notably cervical cancer. Pressuring parents to forgo this vaccine for their kids has been wildly successful at keeping preventable cancer rates high, Carpentier writes, as "the American Cancer Society predicts that 14,480 people will be diagnosed with invasive cervical cancer in 2021" and "more than 4,000 people will die from cervical cancer this year."</div><div>
</div><div>Republicans happily promote policies to kill these people because they think it serves their political interests. Spinning their followers up about the supposed evils of women's sexual freedom has been the bread and butter of right-wing politics for decades: These women's lives are being sacrificed for conservative propaganda.</div><div>
</div><div>It's the same story with all other sexually transmitted infections, especially HIV, which conservatives have long exploited to stigmatize LGBTQ people. And the same story with unwanted pregnancy and childbirth, which is useful to conservatives who want to demagogue about how girls today are a bunch of sluts and feminism is the reason. They need people to get sick and get pregnant against their will, so, with great deliberation, Republicans embraced policies and rhetoric designed to get people to forgo simple prevention measures. They slash funding for sexual health care every chance they get, often redirecting it to groups that will lie to people about the efficacy of contraception. In public schools, health classes across the country have long been forced to distribute anti-contraception propaganda. When the Affordable Care Act included copay-free coverage for contraception — a measure that, as predicted, reduced unintended pregnancy and abortion rates — Republicans lost their minds with rage. And they will lie and lie and lie about the supposed dangers of contraception and other preventive care.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump's vice president, Mike Pence, was deeply invested in the spread-disease-and-despair agenda, back when the targets were mostly women and LGBTQ people. In 2002, as a congressman from Indiana, Pence gave an interview where he falsely claimed that "condoms are a very, very poor protection against sexually transmitted diseases." Later, when Pence was governor of Indiana, he gutted the HIV prevention systems in the state. When this predictably led to a surge in HIV transmissions, Pence fought against every effort to curb the infection rate, ensuring that the virus spread for months before he reluctantly did anything about it.</div><div>
</div><div>Republicans justify this anti-prevention stance by claiming they promote sexual abstinence. The goal itself is unworthy — the government should not be in the business of pushing anti-sex religious dogma on the public — but, as Pence's experience in Indiana shows, it doesn't even work. All anti-prevention policies do is lead people to have unprotected sex. Abstinence-only programs in high schools are linked with higher teen pregnancy rates. Cutting contraception funding doesn't lead to women forgoing sex, but it does lead to a surge in unintended childbirth. And, as Carpentier's piece shows, replacing life-saving prevention tools like condoms and HPV vaccines with a "just say no" lecture leads to people dying.</div><div>
</div><div>Republicans know this. They have seen the studies. They, like Pence, watched over and over as undermining prevention measures just leads to more disease and unwanted pregnancy. They just keep doing it anyway. After a certain point, it becomes hard to deny that they simply don't care if people are suffering. On the contrary, sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies serve the GOP agenda, because all that misery can be exploited for propaganda about the supposed evils of modernity, feminism, and gay rights. Republicans have a long history of hurting people's health to serve a larger political agenda. So of course they were well-prepared to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic and encourage disease transmission for political gain. Anyone who watched Republican responses to sexually transmitted infections and unplanned pregnancy knows this playbook well. The only thing that's changed now is that they're doing it to their own people.</div><div>
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</div><div>thom h</div><div>
</div><div>Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a CNN Medical Analyst, said last week, "A surprising amount of death will occur soon..." But why, when the deadly Delta variant is sweeping the world, are Republicans and their media warning people not to get vaccinated?</div><div>
</div><div>There's always a reason. People don't do things — particularly things involving a lot of effort and a need for consistency — without a reason. It just doesn't happen. No matter how bizarre, twisted or dysfunctional the reason may be, there's always a reason.</div><div>Dr. Anthony Fauci told Jake Tapper on CNN last Sunday, "I don't have a really good reason why this [unwillingness to get vaccinated] is happening."</div><div>
</div><div>But even if he can't think of a reason why Republicans would trash talk vaccination and people would believe them, it's definitely there.</div><div>
</div><div>Which is why it's important to ask a couple of simple questions that all point to the actual reason why Republicans and their media are discouraging people from getting vaccinated:</div><div>
</div><div>1. Why did Trump get vaccinated in secret after Joe Biden won the election and his January 6th coup attempt failed?</div><div>
</div><div>2. Why are Fox "News" personalities discouraging people from getting vaccinated while refusing to say if they and the people they work with have been protected by vaccination?</div><div>
</div><div>3. Why was one of the biggest applause lines at CPAC: "They were hoping — the government was hoping — that they could sort of sucker 90% of the population into getting vaccinated and it isn't happening!"</div><div>
</div><div>4. Why are Republican legislators in states around the country pushing laws that would "ban" private businesses from asking to see proof of vaccination status (they call it "banning vaccine passports")?</div><div>
</div><div>5. Why, when President Biden suggested sending volunteers door-to-door into low-vaccination communities to let people know how and where they could get vaccinated, did rightwing media go nuts about "government thugs" coming to your door to "force" vaccines on you?</div><div>
</div><div>6. Why are about half of all the Republicans in Congress refusing to say if they've gotten a vaccine or not? For that matter, why do the CPAC speakers who are trashing vaccines refuse to say if they're vaccinated or not?</div><div>
</div><div>7. Why would a Newsmax host trash-talk vaccines saying, "I feel like a vaccination in a weird way is just generally kind of going against nature"?</div><div>
</div><div>8. Why did Republican Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota downplay the dangers of Covid last week by bragging that she never shut her state down (and Ron DeSantis did) when SD has 230 Covid deaths per 100,000 people while similar low-population states like Vermont and Oregon are at 41 and 66 deaths per 100,000 respectively?</div><div>
</div><div>I hope I'm proven wrong on this, but the only possible explanation I can see for all this activity that seems so well-coordinated and largely consistent is that they all think there's something in it for them. And what might that be?</div><div>
</div><div>Political power. And, of course, the eventual wealth that often comes with political power, particularly corrupt power. Retired Republicans make a lot of money.</div><div>
</div><div>Put simply, I believe these Republicans are trying to promote outbreaks of Covid in America to soften or damage Joe Biden's red-hot economy on the assumption that if the economy tanks then people will vote out Democrats and vote in Republicans in 2022 and 2024.</div><div>
</div><div>As Pat Buchanan wrote today: "Are the Democrats headed for their Little Bighorn, with President Joe Biden as Col. Custer? The wish, you suggest, is father to the thought."</div><div>
</div><div>They're not just willing to let tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans die just to win the next two elections, they're actively encouraging that outcome.</div><div>
</div><div>Death is their electoral strategy.</div><div>
</div><div>Is there any other possible explanation?</div><div>
</div><div>They're not stupid (although they're banking on their audience being, at least, poorly informed) and most have college degrees (and Lauren Boebert finally got her GED). Even if a few of them fell down the Facebook or YouTube rabbit hole into anti-vaxxer territories, they still have no shortage of actual medical experts and staffers who know how to use Google available to them.</div><div>
</div><div>It's remotely possible they just hate and want to damage the US, and a few who are pushing vaccine "hesitancy" like Ron Johnson and John Kennedy recently celebrated the 4th of July in Moscow, but it's unlikely that they'd take the chance of coordinating with a foreign power to kill Americans (even if much of the foreign troll activity on social media is also trashing vaccines to American social media users).</div><div>
</div><div>A bizarre faux masculinity could be behind it, the way Trump tried to promote the idea that only wimps wear masks, but, seriously, do you really think these folks are taking fashion/appearance tips from an obese geriatric guy with a huge comb-over who wears absurd amounts of makeup, contacts, men's diapers and false teeth? And what's "masculine" about slowly dying by drowning in your own snot? Or becoming unable to get an erection, as happens to a significant number of men who get Covid?</div><div>
</div><div>It's certainly not fear of, or concern about, the vaccine itself; whether they'll admit it or not, virtually all of these Republicans and media stars telling people to be afraid of getting a shot have been secretly vaccinated themselves, just like Trump and his family were in January. As CNN Medical Analyst, Dr. Jonathan Reiner, said, "Over 100 members of Congress, all of them GOP members, refuse to tell their constituents whether they have been vaccinated. They've all been vaccinated, every single one of those characters have been vaccinated."</div><div>
</div><div>This also has nothing to do with "conservative" ideology. Vaccination has been a part of the American landscape since George Washington ordered his troops inoculated against smallpox during the Revolutionary war, and Republican President Dwight Eisenhower (and his VP, Richard Nixon) had schoolchildren across the nation get the polio vaccine in the 1950s (I was one of them who lined up in school to get it and remember it well).</div><div>
</div><div>As California governor, Ronald Reagan oversaw a public school system that required vaccination for admission and conservatives like Bill Kristol and George W. Bush are proudly vaccinated against Covid. Mitch McConnell, who had polio as a child, said, "As a victim of polio myself, I'm a big fan of vaccinations, and if I were a parent who had a child … being subject to getting any particular disease, I would come down on the side of vaccinations." This is not about fearing or not understanding vaccines.</div><div>
</div><div>They're certainly not being paid by "big Pharma" to trash vaccines, and you can bet your last dollar that the billionaires who pay for big Republican events are not only themselves vaccinated but have made sure the entire staff of their multiple mansions, from the cooks to the pool boys to the masseuses and the live-in chefs are all vaccinated.</div><div>
</div><div>So, what's left?</div><div>
</div><div>Politics, and the power and money that derive from it.</div><div>
</div><div>The reason why Donald Trump spent much of 2020 desperately encouraging people to keep shopping and working was because he knew that when an economy collapses in the 18 months before an election, the party in power always loses.</div><div>
</div><div>In his desperation to get the economy back in shape, Trump even issued an executive order forcing mostly Black and Hispanic meat-packing and slaughterhouse employees back to work under threat of imprisonment.</div><div>
</div><div>But, sure enough, the economy tanked anyway and Democrats now control the White House, Senate and House of Representatives.</div><div>
</div><div>Thus, it appears that today's entire GOP strategy of encouraging "vaccine hesitancy" is to try to replicate that dynamic, to tank the economy, only this time in a way that works in favor of Republicans.</div><div>
</div><div>Encouraging Americans to die so they can win elections. That's how low today's GOP has sunk.</div><div>
</div><div>---</div><div>721 noem&nbsp; brag on covid fail</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/19-republicans/</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/how-trumpists-contradict-themselves-by-preaching-unapologetic-love-of-america-while-hating-half-of-its-population-conservative-historian/</div><div>
</div><div>ah</div><div>Historian Joshua Tait is known for focusing on the history of conservatism in the United States. Ask Tait about the influence of the late William F. Buckley or the platform of President Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign, and he can recite chapter and verse. But Tait has major issues with Trumpism, and in an article published by The Bulwark on July 6, he addresses one of Trumpism's glaring contradictions: claiming to have an "unapologetic" love of the United States while expressing an intense hatred of half of its population.</div><div>
</div><div>"How is it that we hear the loudest jingoistic yelps from dismal patriots who cannot stand the state of the nation and half the people in it?," Tait argues. "Traditionally, the conservative right has prided itself on its heightened patriotism in contrast to the 'cosmopolitan' left…. An influential set of Trumpist intellectuals shows such disdain for progressives and 'elites,' and the country they supposedly corrupted, that their grandiose professions of love for country ring hollow."</div><div>
</div><div>In his article, Tait uses the term "post-conservative" to describe these liberal-hating Trumpistas — implying that they fall outside of traditional conservatism by failing to recognize Americans they disagree with as the loyal opposition.</div><div>
</div><div>"In a shift from earlier conservatives, key writers and publications from the pro-Trump and self-professedly post-conservative right have begun to see the United States not just at a critical point in its history, but in many ways, as past the point of no return," Tait explains. "They envisage America as under assault by disciplined and united leftists."</div><div>
</div><div>Tait cites Michael Anton and Glenn Ellmers, both with the Clairemont Institute, as examples of Trumpistas who view liberals and progressives not as the loyal opposition, but as haters of the United States. Anton, Tait notes, has said, "One side loves America, the other hates it — or can tolerate it only for what it might someday become." And in an article published by American Mind on March 24, Ellmers wrote, "Most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term…. (They) may technically be citizens of the United States but are no longer, if they ever were, Americans."</div><div>
</div><div>Tait points out while it is nothing new for conservatives to argue that liberal and progressive ideas have been bad for the United States, the "post-conservative" Trump supporters go way beyond that.</div><div>
</div><div>"The narratives of decline identify various points at which the fatal misstep was taken — where everything started to go wrong," Tait explains. "Sometimes, it's (President Abraham) Lincoln, sometimes (President Woodrow) Wilson — often FDR or the 1960s. What's unusual about the Trumpist right is the extent to which they think that America is not just on the brink of collapse, but that it has already toppled. This may just be post-electoral defeat malaise, but increasingly, these American-greatness patriots appear to actively hate America and their fellow citizens."</div><div>
</div><div>President Joe Biden has emphasized that he considers himself president of all 50 states, including all the red states that Trump won in 2020. But Trump obviously doesn't see blue states as anything other than his enemies.</div><div>
</div><div>"In his public addresses," Tait observes, "President Biden has made a conscious effort to speak to all Americans. Donald Trump, by contrast, typically reverts to the language of us-versus-them — his people, the ones who want to make America great again, against their various enemies."</div><div>
</div><div>Trumpistas like to think that they represent "the real America," but Tait concludes his article by stressing that their "post-conservative" view is decidedly unamerican.</div><div>
</div><div>"Fundamentally at odds with modernity, the Trumpist intellectuals are at odds with the real America, but remain committed to the rhetoric of patriotism," Tait notes. "They are strangers in their own country, all the while professing to love it."</div><div>
</div><div>FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><div>Why the Southern Baptist Convention finally rejected Trumpism ... ›</div><div>Trump's suburban outreach is simply naked racism -- right out of the ... ›</div><div>The rise of the 'New Right intellectuals': Political theorist explains ... ›</div><div>RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</div><div>Trump Lost. But Racism Will Probably Win Again. – Mother Jones ›</div><div>Republicans embrace Trump, tolerate racism and give up on Black ... ›</div><div>Trumpism is built on racism | The Week ›</div><div>=</div><div>=</div><div>authoritarian</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/conservative/</div><div>=</div><div>facebk dark posts ~ bidim bernier, aoc, socialism...</div><div></div><div>
</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/trumpworld-is-attempting-to-capitalize-on-the-war-against-critical-race-theory/</div><div>
</div><div>ME</div><div>
</div><div>Allies and former aides of President Donald Trump have joined the war on critical race theory.</div><div>
</div><div>According to Politico, devout members of Trumpworld have dumped a substantial amount of money into the effort as they believe it could cause enough backlash to help them regain control of Congress.</div><div>
</div><div>In addition to the financial contributions, they have also began working with Congressional members to block the military from moving forward with plans for diversity training. Efforts are also being made to withhold federal funding for schools that choose to incorporate education on race theory.</div><div>
</div><div>In a recent interview, Trump's former adviser Steve Bannon discussed the fight against critical race theory and how he believes it could be beneficial for their party.</div><div>
</div><div>"This is the Tea Party to the 10th power," Bannon said. "This isn't Q, this is mainstream suburban moms — and a lot of these people aren't Trump voters."</div><div>
</div><div>Bannon went on to express confidence about critical race theory being a political driving force for Republicans in 2022.</div><div>
</div><div>"I look at this and say, 'Hey, this is how we are going to win.' I see 50 [House Republican] seats in 2022. Keep this up," Bannon said. "I think you're going to see a lot more emphasis from Trump on it and DeSantis and others. People who are serious in 2024 and beyond are going to focus on it."</div><div>
</div><div>FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><div>The threat of violence from Trumpworld is still urgent — but people ... ›</div><div>Mike Pence's whining about 'cancel culture' leads to epic blowback ... ›</div><div>Does Trump really believe he will be 'reinstated' in August ... ›</div><div>RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</div><div>What Matters: The President might want Trump World, but he needs ... ›</div><div>Infamous 'Hoax' Artist Behind Trumpworld's New Voter Fraud Claim ›</div><div>The Trump regime defends racism: At least they're being honest for ... ›</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>trad DTricks is used in election to get pwr, now used to hold onto power, using tools of state = fascism [tho nixon]</div><div>
</div><div>aha: // mlk on switch out modifier: good trouble,&nbsp; gang of 5 we are the new/true radicals; appropriation/inversion/perversion of lefty god term [at the same time attacking woke, new PC]; for left/reality racial diversity does being intellecti\ial diversity dofferent POV; builds on Lichter? Horo BS of how lefty commie profs discriminate ~ conservatives; gop is in death spiral, at least demographically so must cheat to preserve minority power[states rights BS ~ HR1 ~ voter suppress, gerry, dark corp $); GOP can't win in mktplace of ideas[libtard bankrunpted by covid fail; must explain away fail by saying media, soc media and univ ~ them</div><div>
</div><div>msnbc moral panic: you raise kids w/ right values/american and univ makes them into liberals[and/or gay?]</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/ron-desantis-2653505905/</div><div>Florida goes full fascist': Ron DeSantis sparks furious backlash with ‘authoritarian’ campus political surveys</div><div>
</div><div>Raw Story June 23, 2021</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp;</div><div>Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation requiring Florida students, faculty, and staff to register their political views in surveys in an effort to promote "intellectual diversity" at colleges and universities, and the measure set off backlash across social media.</div><div>
</div><div>Critics decried the law, which DeSantis claims will promote freedom of speech, as a "thoroughly Orwellian" attempt to gain control over academic debate at institutions of higher learning.</div><div>
</div><div>Well, this is thoroughly Orwellian. ?? Faculty and students of Florida, you know what to do! Freep Mini-Trump's stup… https://t.co/N2nEE5UzuM</div><div>— Betty Cracker ?? (@Betty Cracker ??)1624454881.0</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Well that's got to be unconstitutional: Florida students required to register political views with the state to pro… https://t.co/b1Bh8p98uN</div><div>— David Rothkopf (@David Rothkopf)1624455537.0</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>DeSantis wants to survey university students and staff, with the threat of budget cuts if he doesn't get his way???… https://t.co/IWfcM8nGhI</div><div>— Witty Librarian In a Mask (@Witty Librarian In a Mask)1624455089.0</div><div>=</div><div>=</div><div>an 621</div><div>w</div><div>hen a grifter gets swindled: Former GOP chairman accused of stealing from Paul Manafort's PAC</div><div>Zachary Petrizzo Salon&nbsp; June 19, 2021</div><div>Former Colorado Republican Party chairman Ryan Call allegedly stole nearly $280,000 from a pro-Trump super PAC over the course of three years while he was the committee's treasurer, according to a newly filed...</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>mma621</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/qanon-influencers-want-their-followers-infiltrate-republican-precinct</div><div>=</div><div>=</div><div>florida man?</div><div>an 621</div><div>
</div><div>republican candidate in secret recording says he has access to Russian hit squad and would 'end' opponent's life</div><div>=</div><div>=</div><div>an kos 621</div><div>Senate Republicans desperately want to tee up some policy-focused jabs at the Biden agenda that can resonate with their base and independents alike ahead of next year's midterms.</div><div>
</div><div>But every time they appear in the conservative right-wing echo chamber, hosts quickly redirect the conversation back to some sensational culture war issue to keep their viewers hopped up on rage.</div><div>
</div><div>Take Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, who recently went on Newsmax to stoke consternation over President Joe Biden's energy policy, including cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, job losses, and rising gas prices.</div><div>
</div><div>But according to the Washington Post, within minutes of the 8-minute appearance, Newsmax hosts steered Cramer to more incendiary territory—whether Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was incorporating critical race theory into military training.</div><div>
</div><div>Cramer admitted to the Post that Republicans were failing to engage their voters with policy discussions that once resonated and even inflamed their base, like the runaway deficit charge that became a flashpoint for the Tea Party movement. But he also insisted that a discussion around inflation could break through if Americans continued to be impacted by things like rising gas prices at the pumps.</div><div>
</div><div>"If there's anything to worry about, it's this sense that something has to happen instantly for it to be effective," Cramer said. "I reject that."</div><div>
</div><div>But the problem for Republicans is twofold. First, for four years, Trump juiced up GOP voters on a steady diet of sugary sodas and pop rocks. But now that congressional Republicans are back to pretending to care about substantive policy again, their voters are too addicted to the sugar highs to give a damn about last decade's red meat.</div><div>
</div><div>Second, almost all of Biden's agenda is exceedingly more popular than Republicans or, for that matter, the policy they're trying to sell. For instance, a month after Biden signed the American Rescue Plan into law, a Washington Post-ABC poll found that 65% of Americans still supported the $1.9 trillion relief package, while just 31% opposed it.</div><div>
</div><div>Biden's American Jobs Plan typically hasn't drawn quite as much support as the relief plan in polling, but in poll after poll people still favor it far more than they oppose it, and the more voters hear about it the more they like it. An April Navigator Research poll of the jobs plan, for instance, found baseline support of 53% for the $2.3 trillion jobs and infrastructure proposal but just 23% opposition to it. And after the plan was described in greater detail to respondents, support shot up to 70%.</div><div>
</div><div>As for Republicans, they're a wildly unpopular party pushing wildly unpopular policies to defend their wildly unpopular 2017 tax giveaway to the rich.</div><div>
</div><div>Senate Republicans also appear to be a bit out of practice after holding the majority since 2014. Even they eventually came around to the realization that their efforts to combat Biden's coronavirus relief plan was a 100% flop.</div><div>
</div><div>Now it's occurring to them that focusing their message 100% on Dr. Seuss and the great Potato Head controversy without incorporating any crossover appeal whatsoever for independent voters isn't exactly a winning strategy for the midterms, particularly in the Senate.</div><div>
</div><div>So for now, Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the Senate GOP's No. 3, will keep hosting press conferences with the caucus every Wednesday and Thursday in an effort to drive messages that occasionally manage to veer into policy territory.</div><div>
</div><div>McConnell will keep appearing on Fox News to slam Biden's "radical left-wing proposals" only to end up talking about that latest tweets of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.</div><div>
</div><div>And all Republicans will appeal to the heavens to give them some policy gift such as sustained soaring inflation that might allow them to ween their voters off Trump's steady junk food diet.</div><div>
</div><div>FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><div>Trump's trial defense strategy comes at a high price for Senate ... ›</div><div>Senate Republicans make Joe Manchin look like a gullible chump ... ›</div><div>Senate Republicans use filibuster to kill bill that would ensure ... ›</div><div>RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</div><div>Biden ends infrastructure talks with Senate GOP, starts engaging ... ›</div><div>Senate GOP proposes police changes, less sweeping than Dems' ›</div><div>AP FACT CHECK: Senate GOP misrepresents Jan. 6 riot panel ›</div><div>=</div><div>an 621</div><div>Following the Trump era, Democrats control the White House and both branches of Congress — where they have a narrow majority in the U.S. Senate and a majority that shrunk in the U.S. House of Representatives following the 2020 election. However, many state governments are still controlled by Republicans. And journalist Joan E. Greve, in an article published by The Guardian on June 15, examines the type of damage Republicans are inflicting at the state level.</div><div>
</div><div>"In 23 U.S. states, Republicans hold the governorship and the legislature, giving the party near total control to advance its policies," Greve explains. "This year, Republicans have used that power to aggressively push their conservative social agenda — taking aim at abortion access, transgender rights and gun safety, as well as voting laws."</div><div>
</div><div>Much has been written about all the voter suppression bills coming from Republicans in state legislatures, but voting rights aren't the only thing far-right Republicans have been going after with a vengeance. Greve notes that in Texas, South Carolina, Idaho and Oklahoma — all red states — Republicans have passed severe anti-abortion bills. The one in Texas bans abortion after about six weeks into a pregnancy.</div><div>
</div><div>Greve explains, "This trend of states approving increasingly extreme laws on issues like abortion and trans rights is alarming Democrats, who accuse Republicans of using their legislative power to target vulnerable communities…. Republican legislators' focus on social issues marks a shift from previous decades, when the party was more concentrated on economic priorities like small government and fiscal responsibility."</div><div>
</div><div>Under the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, states cannot legally have an outright abortion ban — and the Republican strategy has been to restrict abortion as much as possible at the state level. But with the High Court having moved more and more to the right, it is entirely possible that Roe v. Wade will be overturned. If Roe is overturned, many red states would no doubt pass statewide abortion bans — creating, for example, a scenario in which abortion might be illegal throughout Texas but legal across the state line in New Mexico, or legal in Illinois but illegal in neighboring Indiana.</div><div>
</div><div>One of the things that is encouraging Republicans to move even more to the right, Greve notes, is the fear of primary challenges. Greve points out that far-right Allen West has threatened a Republican gubernatorial primary challenge to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who is up for reelection in 2022.</div><div>
</div><div>Shannon Watts, founder of the gun control group Moms Demand Action, told The Guardian, "We know that the GOP is scared of primaries from fringe gun extremists. We're watching the politics play out as opposed to true policy beliefs."</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><div>Trump may be gone — but state GOP lawmakers are still doing his ... ›</div><div>'Shameful power grab': Pennsylvania GOP state senators slammed ... ›</div><div>Idaho paper slams GOP state lawmakers for failing to take COVID ... ›</div><div>RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</div><div>State Republicans Weigh New Laws Making It Harder To Vote : NPR ›</div><div>GOP state legislators backed Trump in Capitol attack. It's on them to ... ›</div><div>How GOP State Legislatures Are Remaking the Country - The Atlantic ›</div><div>=</div><div>tom b raw an 621</div><div>
</div><div>According to a report from the Guardian's Sam Levine, Republicans who have always dabbled in playing to the red meat crowd are now ramping up their efforts to use that voting bloc to remain in power by disrupting and questioning election results.</div><div>
</div><div>Faced with changing demographics and states -- - notably Arizona and Georgia --- that were once reliably Republican but are now sending Democrats to Congress, Republicans are looking for ways to stop the bleeding as their power melts away.</div><div>
</div><div>According to Levine, Donald Trump just gave them the roadmap by blatantly saying the election was stolen from him -- which has been well-received by more than just conservative extremists.</div><div>
</div><div>As his Guardian report notes, "... fanned repeatedly by Donald Trump throughout 2020, the myth of a stolen American election has shifted from a fringe idea to one being embraced by the Republican party. The so-called big lie – the idea that the election was stolen from Trump - has transformed from a tactical strategy to a guiding ideology."</div><div>
</div><div>According to UC Irvine law professor Richard Hasen, Republicans embracing Trump's "Big Lie" is a sign of an emerging trend that doesn't bode well for future elections.</div><div>
</div><div>"Voter suppression is not new, the battle lines have been drawn over that for quite some time. But this new concern about election subversion is really worrisome," he explained.</div><div>
</div><div>Edward Foley, a law professor at the Ohio State University, concurred, adding, "I do think it's a relatively new phenomenon, unfortunately, and disturbing. We've had disputed elections in the past, but we've never had the denial of the basic mathematical reality of counting votes."</div><div>
</div><div>With the Guardian's Levine noting polls show that a majority of Republicans still believe that Trump is the "true president," he spoke with a former GOP operative from Florida who made a very candid admission that Republicans are seeing their position of power wither away and are being forced to embrace Trump's tactics .</div><div>
</div><div>"In the past, party elders, party leaders … exploited the crazies in order to win elections and then largely ignored them after the elections," explained Mac Stipanovich. "What has happened since then is that Trump opened Pandora's box and let them out. He not only let them out, he affirmed them and provoked them. And so now they're running wild and they are legitimatizing these delusions."</div><div>
</div><div>You can read more here.</div><div>
</div><div>FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><div>Conservative slams 'propaganda princess' Maria Bartiromo for ... ›</div><div>Trump's election lies may cost Republicans the House in 2022 ... ›</div><div>How Trump's Presidency Is Fueling Right-Wing Nationalist & Anti ... ›</div><div>RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</div><div>Republicans who embraced Trump's big lie run to become election ... ›</div><div>US Supreme Court rejects Trump-backed bid to overturn election ... ›</div><div>U.S. Supreme Court dumps last of Trump's election appeals | Reuters ›</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/trump-gop-2653364196/</div><div>
</div><div>kos</div><div>
</div><div>When Donald Trump reentered the public spotlight last weekend at the North Carolina Republican Party Convention, the first thing he did was upend the GOP primary for the state's open Senate seat. Trump welcomed far-right Rep. Ted Budd to the stage and promptly gave him a surprise endorsement, leaving two other top Republican contenders to pick up the pieces.</div><div>
</div><div>One of them, former Gov. Pat McCrory, held an impromptu news conference in which he tried to convince reporters that Trump's endorsement fell "flat" with the room of attendees, according to The Washington Post.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump ally and former Rep. Mark Walker was also likely caught off guard by his change of fortunes, since he had just won the straw poll—an informal gauge of who attendees hope will prevail in the GOP primary.</div><div>
</div><div>Get ready to see a lot more mayhem in critical battleground states as Trump ramps up his rallies this summer. The truth is, even as I continue to be alarmed by the fascist turn of the Republican Party and its voter suppression efforts, I am simultaneously impressed with how much havoc Trump is already wreaking on GOP officials at both the state and federal level.</div><div>
</div><div>Minority Leader Mitch McConnell effectively admitted this week that Trump is on his own mission and it doesn't align with the Republican Party. Asked by Fox News hosts if he would welcome Trump's involvement in the midterms, McConnell offered, "Well, he has his own agenda," before pivoting to his own message for 2022. That's a pretty telling statement from the highest ranking Republican in the country.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump's agenda, naturally, is self-aggrandizing Trump, and the Republican Party is merely a means to that end. Numerous outlets have now reported that Trump is obsessed with the GOP-led and QAnon-funded sham audit in Arizona, which he views as a leverage point for potentially invalidating the election and ultimately being "reinstated" as commander-in-chief.</div><div>
</div><div>In fact, one could view Arizona as ground zero for a lot GOP headaches to come. Inside the state, the Republican-led board of supervisors for Maricopa County, where the Senate GOP-inspired audit is taking place, has called the project a "sham" and a "con." Republican state officials who defended the election results and could make solid statewide candidates are also struggling to navigate Trump, including state Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who's running for Senate. Gov. Doug Ducey is term-limited out of running again in 2022, but he chairs the Republican Governors Association. He isn't even on speaking terms with Trump, despite the fact that he's in charge of defending GOP-controlled governorships nationwide. Trump will also be a dominant presence in the Republican scrum to replace Ducey, which could yield a candidate who isn't ideally positioned to win statewide.</div><div>
</div><div>But the Arizona audit is also having nationwide ramifications, as Trump-aligned GOP lawmakers make pilgrimages to observe the effort in a bid to launch their own fraudits back home. Three Pennsylvania GOP lawmakers kicked off the frenzy, Georgia Republicans weren't far behind, and now Republicans from Colorado, Nevada, Alaska, Virginia, and Wisconsin all want in on the action.</div><div>
</div><div>But the places where fraudit efforts are roiling the Republican Party most is in states like Arizona, where GOP officials ultimately certified the election and are now getting eaten by their own. When it comes to midterm battleground states, nowhere is that toxic dynamic more pronounced than in Georgia. As I reported this week, the Peach State GOP is being torn apart at the seams as Republican state lawmakers absolutely vilify all the GOP executive officials who certified and defended the vote. Gov. Brian Kemp was booed at the same party convention last week where two state lawmakers were presented with "Warrior Awards" for their work to overturn the election. Both of those lawmakers made the trek to observe Arizona's audit, as did Kemp primary challenger Vernon Jones, a former Democrat-turned-Trumper. At the same time, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger continues to be pilloried by Trumpers and tragically, his family continues to receive death threats more than half a year after the state's results were certified. Attorney General Chris Carr is also fighting for his political life as he takes to the campaign trail for 2022.</div><div>
</div><div>What I think the national media is missing here, as Republicans and Democrats in Washington resume a predictably contentious fight over President Joe Biden's agenda, is just how corrosive Trump's effect is on Republican politics at the state level. Even in Ohio, which Trump won pretty handily, a Trumper has launched a primary challenge to Gov. Mike DeWine. And in Florida, where the election results were never really in question, GOP state lawmakers responded to Trump's Big Lie by making it more difficult to vote by mail there, tearing apart a decades-old Republican playbook in the Sunshine State that has proven pretty effective.</div><div>
</div><div>In states like Pennsylvania, where Republicans don't control the governor's mansion and a coveted open Senate seat is up for grabs, two Trump-aligned candidates recently announced their bids for governor and Senate—Lou Barletta and Sean Parnell, respectively. Trump's stamp of approval in a swing state like Pennsylvania could help cement victories for both men.</div><div>
</div><div>Jim Lee, president of Susquehanna Polling and Research, conducts voter surveys for Republican candidates and says Trump's hold on GOP voters in the state continues to be strong. But he also described opposition to pro-Trump candidates among independent voters as a "brick wall with a couple layers of thickness to it."</div><div>
</div><div>"What's an asset in a primary could potentially be a liability in the fall," Lee told the Associated Press.</div><div>
</div><div>The picture that's developing is one in which Trump and Trumpism is upending the Republican Party in all different types of states—states like Georgia and Arizona, which could be in the throes of a political tipping point; states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina, where Trump could play kingmaker in the primary only to doom Republicans in the general election; and even states like Ohio and Florida, where Trumpism might actually upend a political landscape that has provided pretty solid footing for the Republican Party in the recent past.</div><div>
</div><div>The other X factor in all this is the white-hot intensity of the Republican divisions in states such as Georgia and Arizona, where base turnout will almost surely prove decisive in several critical races that determine the state's leadership, along with its representation in the U.S. Senate. Whichever faction of the GOP prevails in these statewide primaries will almost surely suppress at least some base enthusiasm for the general election. There's nothing normal here about the political wrangling over the direction of the party. Rather the battles have such an existential feel to them that they could leave one side or the other completely disillusioned and unenthusiastic about the general election push.</div><div>
</div><div>Once again, the country and the Republican Party, in particular, are in completely uncharted territory. The fact of the matter is that a lot of GOP voters in these battleground states voted against Trump at the top of the ticket, and then for Republican candidates down-ballot. Republican Party leadership then took that information and decided to double down on Trumpism even as Trump himself faded from political view for a handful of months after leaving office. That decision was almost unprecedented in modern political history: Parties simply don't double down on the persona and agenda of presidential losers immediately after they have lost an election.</div><div>
</div><div>None of this to say that Republicans are doomed next year, or that they couldn't cheat their way out of election losses. But it is to say that the deep rifts currently roiling the party cannot possibly be maximizing their turnout potential at the ballot box next year.</div><div>
</div><div>FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><div>It Won't Be Easy as the GOP Hoped to Hijack Democracy in ... ›</div><div>October surprise! A wave of panic overtakes Trump and the GOP ... ›</div><div>Paul Krugman: Republicans' Poisonous Policies Are Finally ... ›</div><div>RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</div><div>How Trump's Influence On Republicans May Affect Ohio In 2022 : NPR ›</div><div>GOP blocks Capitol riot probe, displaying loyalty to Trump ›</div><div>How a Defeated Trump Is Making a Muddle of the G.O.P. - The New ... ›</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>no lnx&nbsp; https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/republicans-trump-reinstated/</div><div>
</div><div>A disturbing number of Republicans actually think Trump will likely be 'reinstated' soon: poll</div><div>New analysis finds Trump’s support among white voters is slipping</div><div>
</div><div>Aldous J. Pennyfarthing</div><div>and Daily Kos</div><div>June 10, 2021</div><div>
</div><div>I'll never understand why anyone listens to Donald Trump on any subject. He wanted to nuke hurricanes. He wanted to put alligator-filled moats along the southern border. He thinks windmills cause cancer, asbestos is swell, and exercise is bad for you. He seriously suggested pumping our bodies full of UV light and disinfectant. He thinks we have planes that are literally invisible, for God's sake!</div><div>
</div><div>Nevertheless, millions of Trump fans have bent their brains into pretzels trying to make his doofus proclamations sound presidential—or even marginally nonsimian (see also: hydroxychloroquine).</div><div>
</div><div>We've pretty well established that Trump's brain is, at best, masticated circus peanut and, at worst, Lucifer's molten boom-booms, and yet when he dry-heaves utter batshit nonsense, plenty of his fans seem all too ready to lick it up like feral purse poodles.</div><div>
</div><div>Case in point: Fully 29% of Republicans think Donald Trump is returning before the year is out—possibly riding in on a cloud or a flaming chariot or (more likely) a golf cart with a cupholder and custom-installed deep fryer.</div><div>
</div><div>A new Politico/Morning Consult poll asked survey respondents this straightforward question: "How likely do you think it is that former President Donald Trump will be reinstated as U.S. President this year, if at all?" The question was no doubt included in the poll because Trump himself has been telling insiders that he thinks he'll be back in office by August. (Narrator: He won't.)</div><div>
</div><div>The results? (You still have time to bail if you've had your yearly quota of frothing insanity. You're still here? Okay, gird your loins.)</div><div>
</div><div>Among Republicans surveyed, 17% think it's "very likely" that Trump will return to the White House this year, 12% think it's "somewhat likely," and 10% don't know or have no opinion. Taken together, this shows that two-fifths of Republicans have not yet accepted that Joe Biden won the presidency.</div><div>
</div><div>Of course, that wasn't the only eye-opening result. Asked whether things are going in the right direction in the U.S. or on the wrong track, only 15% of Republicans thought things were going in a positive direction, while 85% said we're veering off course. Guess 85% of Republicans prefer raging pandemics and collapsing economies to Democratic presidents.</div><div>
</div><div>Is this what it's like to lick hallucinogenic toads for breakfast in lieu of frosted Pop-Tarts? At some point, do you just surrender to the unreality of your environment?</div><div>
</div><div>Over at Civiqs, even more Republicans report they're worried; a stunning 93% of card-carrying GOPers think we're all gonna die.</div><div>
</div><div>If you enjoy watching Donald Trump eat the Republican Party from within, like a genetically modified tropical eyeball worm, you'll be happy to know that the Politico/Morning Consult poll found that 80% of Republicans want to stick around so they can see him play either a major (59%) or a minor role (21%) in the party going forward. If you'd prefer he stay in Florida chucking oyster shells at flamingos from his balcony, you'll likely be disappointed by the 13% of Republicans who want him to slink away.</div><div>
</div><div>There's also some good news, of course. President Biden's approval rating is at 53% among all registered voters, with 28% of respondents "strongly" approving of the job he's doing, 25% "somewhat" approving, 43% disapproving, and the rest offering no opinion.</div><div>
</div><div>Meanwhile, 66% of registered voters want Congress to pass an infrastructure bill—so maybe we should get that done, huh?</div><div>
</div><div>There's still some sanity left in the world, so long as you look in the right place. And that right place is clearly nowhere in the vicinity of the right wing. I invite Republicans to hurry on back to planet Earth. The water's fine. At least it is for now—unfortunately, only 12% of Republicans consider passing a bill to address climate change a "top priority."</div><div>
</div><div>Go figure.</div><div>From Your Site Articles</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/06/donald-trumps-parting-gift-to-washington-was-a-party-of-shitposters/</div><div>
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</div><div>rkj</div><div>
</div><div>i've&nbsp; seen many things at the Conservative Political Action Conference over the years, including many things I wish I hadn’t. But until Ted Cruz spoke to a ballroom of activists from the main stage in Orlando in February, I had never seen an elected official interrupt his own speech to promote a podcast.</div><div>
</div><div>“Please go subscribe,” barked the Texas Republican, sounding more like a street performer with a SoundCloud than a second-term senator. “Verdict With Ted Cruz! Verdict With Ted Cruz! Click on ‘subscribe.’ Five stars, please!”</div><div>
</div><div>One week earlier, Cruz had left his constituents and his poodle behind to wait out his state’s deadly grid failure at the Ritz-Carlton in Cancun. It was the sort of PR disaster that would leave many politicians reeling. Cruz tried to monetize the controversy instead, printing a line of Barstool Sports–chic “spring break” tank tops with a caricature of his nascent mullet. He may never lead the Republican Party, but Cruz always knows its temperature, and in the space of a few minutes in Orlando, between jokes about his ill-advised Mexican vacation and plugs for his side project, he managed to distill this conservative moment to its essence. Increasingly, as world-­historical crises unfurl all around them—often exacerbated by their own policies and actions—the GOP’s most ambitious officials view their primary responsibility less as public servants than as content creators, churning out an endless stream of takes, memes, stunts, and podcasts. So many podcasts.</div><div>
</div><div>The Republican Party has long been infused with an irrepressible hustle, what the historian Rick Perlstein calls “mail-order conservatism.” Talk radio and direct mail were not only effective at peddling reactionary politics to voters; they were also perfect vehicles to sell products, such as gold and home-­security systems. For decades these conjoined strains of politics, entertainment, and marketing have eroded trust in public institutions and the media and provided a template for self-aggrandizement and enrichment. There is nothing really like this on the left; Infowars and Goop sell the same pills, but Gwyneth Paltrow is not fomenting rebellion.</div><div>
</div><div>The way conservatism manifested itself over the airwaves has shaped what rank-and-file conservatives expect to be told and how they expect to feel about it. The late Rush Limbaugh’s listeners called themselves “dittoheads,” eager to nod along with everything. Newt Gingrich used to distribute tapes of himself talking so that candidates could emulate his language. In the 1980s, he weaponized C-SPAN’s new House cameras—where members previously addressed each other, Gingrich and his allies began speaking past them. They turned the Capitol into a studio and made politics into a product. Donald Trump easily won the Republican base because it had been primed for someone who could provide both the programming and the commercial breaks, sometimes all at once; in conservative politics, after all, you’re always being asked to buy something.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Trump’s presidency blew past the old frontiers: The performance of politics became the purpose of it.</div><div>
</div><div>But Trump’s presidency blew past the old frontiers: The performance of politics became the purpose of it, and the grind of governance became secondary to the responsibilities of posting.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>It was as if, after years of awkward but largely profitable power-sharing between conservative politicians and conservative media, the Republican Party at last stumbled upon the ultimate efficiency: What if both roles could be played by the same person? Trump once dreamed of spinning a losing presidential bid into his own media entity.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>During the pandemic, in lieu of crisis management, he turned briefings into a variety show, assembling a rotating cast of characters, and plugging an array of sponsors—MyPillow, Carnival, Pernod Ricard. You would not necessarily get good medical advice, but you would learn that Hanes is a “great consumer cotton products company” that’s being recognized more and more.</div><div>
</div><div>no lnx</div><div>
</div><div>There was no issue grave enough to take seriously and no controversy too petty to weigh in on. Anything could be resolved via tweet, precisely because nothing really can; the ephemerality was the point. And a rising generation of politicians learned an important lesson about what conservative voters wanted. If Limbaugh taught them all how to talk, Trump taught them how to govern. His enduring gift was a caucus of content creators.</div><div>
</div><div>Just consider the Republican congressional class of 2021—the new arrivals to Washington who modeled themselves most directly after Trump. They seem almost blissfully detached from the work of Congress. There is 25-year-old Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, who was elected on the strength of a largely invented personal story amplified with loads of influencer-style Instagram posts. He recently posted a 19-second video of himself punching the bark off a tree. Cawthorn boasted to his colleagues that he had built his staff “around comms rather than legislation.” He was in Washington, in other words, mostly just to post.</div><div>
</div><div>Cawthorn boasted to his colleagues that he had built his staff “around comms rather than legislation.”</div><div>
</div><div>When Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon representative from Georgia, was stripped of her committee assignments in February by colleagues upset that she had harassed fellow members of Congress and blamed forest fires on the Rothschilds, she greeted the news with relief. “If I was on a committee, I would be wasting my time,” she said. Now she was more free to share videos of her CrossFit workouts with the hashtag #FireFauci. Not that showing up for committee hearings necessarily means you’re there to work. Colorado’s Lauren Boebert, who like Cawthorn and Greene spent her first weeks on the job scaring the shit out of her co-workers, recently hijacked a virtual committee hearing by posing like John Wick in front of a shrine of firearms in her living room. (“Who says this is storage?” she responded to critics. “These are ready for use.”)&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Cawthorn, Greene, and Boebert were all members of the National Republican Campaign Committee’s “Young Guns” program, which takes its name from an earlier trio of House Republicans—one of whom, Paul Ryan, went on to become a vice presidential nominee and speaker of the House and unite the party behind a vision of budget austerity. There is surely some sort of ideology at work here, too, but it’s more Jake Paul than Paul Ryan; they are treating the Capitol like their own hype house, using the stature of their office for clout.</div><div>
</div><div>R. Kikuo Johnson</div><div>
</div><div>These younger, gunnier guns are taking cues from their elders. Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a content farm of a congressman who has filmed not one but two Avengers-style videos in which the ex–Navy SEAL parachutes out of airplanes to fight Democrats, also hosts a podcast. So does Devin Nunes. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz has a podcast called Hot Takes. Before he became publicly embroiled in a federal sex-trafficking investigation (“If you aren’t making news, you aren’t governing,” Gaetz once said), he was considering retiring to take a job at the conservative cable channel Newsmax. In February, more than a dozen House Republicans—including Gaetz and Nunes—skipped work to speak at CPAC with Cruz. They took advantage of a covid-era policy that let members vote by proxy in medical emergencies; to them, promoting their brands is the job.</div><div>
</div><div>After watching Cruz’s speech I took his advice and checked out Verdict, which he co-hosts with Michael Knowles, who rose to prominence after publishing an entirely blank book called Reasons to Vote for Democrats. Cruz recorded the first episode at 2:40 a.m. after the opening day of Trump’s Ukraine impeachment trial—hence the name of the show—and returned to the studio every night of the proceedings. Within days of its debut, Verdict had passed Joe Rogan on the iTunes charts. At CPAC, Cruz announced it had been downloaded 25 million times. It is almost certainly the most popular thing he has ever done.</div><div>
</div><div>From the start, there were gestures that this was all “for work”; while Cruz plugs his book with regularity, he does not hawk brain pills or sell ads. In the premiere episode, Cruz solicited listener questions he could ask during the impeachment. When Knowles asked him why he was doing the show, Cruz replied with two words: “Substance. Matters.”</div><div>
</div><div>This is true in a technical way: Cruz talks on his show about many of the things he and his Republican colleagues talk about in the Capitol. But that Washington conversation is increasingly just an extension of what they talk about on their podcasts. The biggest crises in America right now, according to Cruz, CPAC, and Trump, are the interlocking threats of Big Tech and “cancel culture.” Hearings with tech executives have become a must-watch for conservatives. Cruz advertised his hearing-room clash with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey last summer with a Christopher Nolan–ish movie trailer and a poster reminiscent of welterweight boxing—“The Free Speech Champion vs. the Czar of Censorship.” There are substantive things to say about corporate power, but this brand of conservative opportunism zips past what’s real to fixate on what isn’t. Twitter moderators, or someone being “canceled,” is not something Congress is really positioned to do much about. They are just creating content about content creation; this is the uroboros of mail-order conservatism.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Twitter moderators, or someone being “canceled,” is not something Congress is really positioned to do much about. They are just creating content about content creation.</div><div>
</div><div>Big Tech and “cancel culture” have emerged as key villains for the new right, not just because of how neatly they fit into long-standing tropes about “cosmopolitan elites,” but because so much of modern conservatism lives online. Offline, there are issues that warrant serious attention from one of the nation’s two governing parties—cities without water, cities soon to be underwater, whole states without power, and a world still suffering from a deadly virus. But with a nudge from Trump, the right has become ever more dissociated from reality, channeling its energy into an endless series of fights over “deplatforming” and who’s triggering whom. During the Obama years, a Breitbart provocateur interrupted a White House press conference to complain about losing his Twitter verification badge. Then, it was a sideshow; now, it’s the whole point. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a likely presidential candidate, recently signed a law prohibiting social media companies from banning public officials.</div><div>
</div><div>The rise of politics as content creation is hardly the sole domain of the right. After his 2016 presidential campaign ended, Bernie Sanders kept his media imprint running. He organized town halls on Facebook Live and recorded a regular podcast. Sanders, who has made no secret of his distaste for corporate-owned media, hoped to build out his own information stream for his supporters. So did Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York representative whose prolific posting has gotten her in trouble with other members of her caucus. (Her arrival in Washington precipitated a closed-door meeting in which a colleague pleaded, “Everyone stop tweeting!”)</div><div>
</div><div>The content creators of both the left and the right pose some of the same big-picture challenges—the rise of politicians as independent news sources, of politics as stan culture, and the acceleration of the permanent campaign. A Pew analysis found that the outgoing 116th Congress was one of the least productive of the last half-century, but the most prolific ever when it came to posting. Members sent 50 percent more tweets than they did two terms ago; they were still talking—just not to each other. The more politicians function as affinity brands peddling a product to be consumed, the more “politics,” the entertainment vehicle, becomes dissociated from politics, the distributor of power. Barack and Michelle Obama run a media company now and each hosts podcasts, too; the ease with which political figures can rebrand themselves as entertainers speaks to the two spheres’ increasing coziness. This is not what “seizing the means of production” was supposed to mean.</div><div>
</div><div>But the way this dynamic is unfolding on the left and the right is asymmetrical. Though you would not necessarily know it from listening to Gaetz, Obama is not in office. Sanders and Ocasio-­Cortez are not angling for TV gigs; nor are they reducing the world of lawmaking to the kind of retrograde distractions that get you booked on Tucker. They use their enormous social media platforms for civics lessons, offering behind-the-scenes glimpses of the legislative process and the work of movement building, in an effort to get more people invested in both. You can buy the “Tax the Rich” sweatshirt Ocasio-Cortez wears when she holds court on policy and procedure on Instagram Live, but it is not the only thing she is selling. She and Sanders are trying to make the online world more engaged with the real world, rather than the other way around, to advance an ambitious governing program. It is a theory of change, of which clout and performance are merely a means, not the endpoint, of politics. That is the opposite of the reductive nihilism of Cawthorn or Boebert, or the eternal stagecraft of Cruz.</div><div>
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</div><div>In the first few months of the Biden administration, the world of Twitter and real life have become increasingly estranged. In a paradoxical way, the transformation of a major political party into a meme factory has even eased some of Washington’s dysfunction. While Republicans were pitching their podcasts and talking about Dr. Seuss and his imaginary canceling—Cruz began selling copies of Green Eggs and Ham, signed by himself—Democrats pushed through a $1.9 trillion covid relief and stimulus package with little dissent.</div><div>
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</div><div>In March, Trump, banned from Facebook and Twitter, announced that he was considering launching his own social media network. “I’m doing things having to do with putting our own platform out there,” he promised. “You’ll be hearing about [it] soon.” The website he unveiled didn’t amount to much, but that’s what made it so perfectly Trump—there’s not supposed to be a there there. Meanwhile, younger Republicans aiming to take his place continued their auditions. In April, Marco Rubio called on the government to treat companies that pollute “our culture” just as harshly as it treats companies that pollute our water—sort of like an Environmental Protection Agency for tweets. Cruz, himself accused of poisoning the discourse by John Boehner, polled his hive on whether he should shoot the former speaker of the House’s new book with a machine gun.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>But none of the Republicans vying for Trump’s role have embraced the new posting reality as fluidly as DeSantis. In May, not long after guaranteeing Florida politicians the right to shitpost, DeSantis scored his biggest coup yet: passage of a bill to roll back voting access in the state, fueled by Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. When it came time to sign it, local reporters were stopped at the door—only a crew from Fox and Friends got in. DeSantis had turned an attack on fundamental rights into a live television event. Supporters of the ex-president stood behind him, cheering on cue, as the governor bantered with the hosts via satellite. Then he picked up a blue Sharpie, scrawled his name, and held up the embossed legislation for the cameras.</div><div>
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</div><div>Trump may be gone, but the show never ends.</div><div>
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</div><div>=</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/conservative-mind/</div><div>
</div><div>cody f</div><div>observers of the Republican Party and the American right wing have noticed a perplexing pattern of beliefs about the COVID vaccines. While many in conservative media are critical or skeptical of the vaccines, highlighting supposed dangers while also downplaying the risk from the virus itself, many have also insisted that former President Donald Trump deserves much more credit for the vaccine than he's getting.</div><div>It creates something of a paradox in the conservative mind: The vaccines are dangerous and overhyped, but also they're something Trump deserves endless praise for having helped create. These ideas do not easily fit together. It's not exactly clear how many people are making these exact claims in parallel, seemingly contradicting themselves, but there's no question that both strands of thought exist comfortably in right-wing discourse without appearing to come into conflict. And there's no real sign of major right-wing figures resolving the contradiction by saying: "The vaccines are bad, and Trump is bad for having had a hand in their creation." Such a thought is anathema.</div><div>
</div><div>There have been some conservative figures, such as Fox News' Geraldo Rivera, who have fought against the anti-vax strains in their movement while praising Trump for his administration's role overseeing the development. This is a more consistent view, but it's more marginal in right-wing circles, which tends to be welcoming of anti-vax sentiment, like Fox News prime time host Tucker Carlson.</div><div>
</div><div>When it comes to the attack on Jan. 6, a similar paradox emerges. Much of the right wing has come around to the idea that the insurrection at the Capitol was no big deal — indeed, the Trumpy outlet "American Greatness" recently even argued that the rioters themselves should be elected to Congress. This reaction, and the fear that Democrats were making too big a deal out of the attack, was a large part of why Republicans in Congress blocked the formation of a bipartisan commission to study it.</div><div>
</div><div>But since the day of the attack, there's been an alternative view on the right. In reality, some claim, it wasn't Trump supporters who violently stormed the Capitol, but leftists and Antifa. This idea came up even this Thursday when "Women for Trump" co-founder Amy Kremer claimed that video of a Trump supporter at the Capitol riot didn't actually show a Trump supporter[kremer twt pix]</div><div>
</div><div>if this were really true, that the left was responsible for the violence at the Capitol, then surely Republicans would be demanding an investigation that would expose this reality. Of course, it's not true — the U.S. Justice Department has arrested hundreds of right-wing Trump supporters involved in the attack with ample evidence of their identities and beliefs.</div><div>
</div><div>There's been some internal pushback among those on the right who suggested Antifa was responsible for the attack — including from many of the right-wing rioters themselves. Still, somehow these narratives — the insurrection was no big deal, and also it was infiltrated by violent leftists who framed Trump supporters — somehow manage to exist peaceably within right-wing discourse.</div><div>
</div><div>But there's a unifying explanation for both of these contradictions. They derive from the principle that, in the parlance of the internet, the thing that matters the most is "owning the libs."</div><div>
</div><div>This simple phrase has somehow become the dominant motivational force for conservatives. It, of course, explains the success of the uber-troll Donald Trump. The right-wing movement and the Republican Party are defined so much more by their opposition to their perceived enemies than any other coherent principles. That's why they can claim to be defenders of the U.S. Constitution while also arguing it should be ripped up if it will keep Trump in power.</div><div>
</div><div>When it comes to vaccines, it's clear the libs love them, which immediately makes them suspicious to many conservative thinkers. And even if the conservative is personally willing to take the vaccine, the liberals' insistence that vaccines should be widely encouraged, is anathema, so they're willing to tolerate and accommodate the anti-vaxxers. But liberals also hate Trump, so it's just as appealing to the conservative mind to demand that Trump get credit for the vaccines that the liberals love so much. Whether this all makes sense is less important than if it can make liberals feel bad.</div><div>
</div><div>The same goes for Jan. 6. Obviously, the liberals are concerned about the attack, so dismissing it is one way to "own the libs." But if you can also somehow blame the attack on the libs — all the better.</div><div>
</div><div>There's another similar paradoxical thought process I found vexing at the start of the pandemic. At the time, many conservatives, following Trump's lead, dismissed the seriousness of the virus. But they also sought to blame the virus on the Chinese government, often insinuating that it was an intentional attack. These ideas didn't make much sense together. If the virus is no big deal, how is it plausible that it's a bioweapon?</div><div>
</div><div>Again, though, it didn't have to make sense. This time, it wasn't all about owning the libs. But it was still about knowing who the enemy was. And the Democrats, the public health establishment, and those taking the virus were clearly the enemy. And so was China (even though just weeks before Trump had been praising Chinese President Xi Jinping). This view didn't provide for a coherent response to the virus, but it triggered the emotions conservative figures and their audiences want to feel. And that's much more important than a little cognitive dissonance.</div><div>
</div><div>FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><div>They 'just want to watch the world burn': Psychological analysis ... ›</div><div>Conservatives lose it after the guilty verdict for the murder of George ... ›</div><div>How these 2 witnesses could change Republican senators' minds ... ›</div><div>RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</div><div>The conservative mind has become diseased - The Washington Post ›</div><div>The Conservative Mind ›</div><div>Opinion | The Conservative Mind - The New York Times ›</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>comm dr</div><div>Liz Cheney's removal from House GOP leadership over her rejection of Trump's election lies and Republican senators' blocking of a bipartisan proposal to create an independent panel that would investigate the Capitol siege reveal in stark terms at least two things: (a) that Republicans have built a cult of personality around Trump, and (b) that they are now at the mercy of the proto-fascist mob that their Dear Leader energized and nurtured during his four-year tenure in the White House.</div><div>
</div><div>Either way, the fact of the matter is that, for purposes of political expediency, the GOP has opted to become a dark political force, relying almost entirely on lies and deception—while at the same time waging a coordinated onslaught on voting rights—as its governing techniques. As such, it represents a real threat to the stability of the republic.</div><div>
</div><div>Following Trump's defeat, the strategic objective of the Republican Party is not simply to engage in obstructionism, but to continue dividing the nation and radicalizing the American public against the democratic system. This is the only way that the Republican Party can hope to stay in the game in the political, economic, social, and cultural landscape that defines 21st century America.</div><div>
</div><div>Always the party of Big Business and the rich, the Republican Party has oscillated from conservatism to reactionism pretty much throughout the twentieth century and the early part of the twenty-first centuries, but today's GOP has gone so far toward abandoning basic democratic norms that it now belongs firmly in the political universe of parties and movements that make up the far-right. In fact, it is considered to be more extreme that Le Pen's National Rally, according to findings based on data collected from the Manifesto Project.</div><div>
</div><div>The political identity of today's GOP reflects a decades-long transformation. It begins to take form sometimes during the early 2010s, a decade that historian Andrew Bacevich characterized as an era of "venomous division." Driven primarily by fear of losing power in an increasingly diverse United States, the GOP made a dramatic shift towards extremism as a way of mobilizing white working-class voters, who experienced income stagnation and felt deep economic insecurity thanks to 40 years of brutal neoliberal capitalist policies, and scaring the hell out of the petty bourgeoisie with visions of chaos and disorder brought about by radical forces bent on destroying America and its traditional values and way of life.</div><div>
</div><div>Indeed, well before Trump threw his hat in the ring for Presidency, a 2013 survey of local party leaders found that, in contrast to Democrats who preferred more extreme candidates to more moderate candidates by a 2-to-1 margin, Republicans did so by 10-to-1.</div><div>
</div><div>Of course, it is Trump himself who solidifies the shift towards extremism. Fully cognizant of the mood both inside the Republican Party and the country as a whole, especially with a large segment of disenchanted and angry white voters seeing equal opportunity as a zero-sum game for them, Trump embarks on the complete transformation of the GOP into an extremist political party by lurching towards reactionary nationalism and diving deeply into nativism with his MAGA campaign slogan and inflammatory rhetoric about immigrants, Muslims, and African-Americans, respectively.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump also breaks with elite bipartisan consensus on a broad range of other issues, including trade and foreign policy, in order to secure his image as a unique figure in American politics, while falsehoods and outright lies become indispensable weapons on his performative proto-fascist march towards power.</div><div>
</div><div>To be sure, this was a bid for power with a strong resemblance to the political strategy that authoritarian parties have long adopted in many parts of the world, including that of the Nazi Party between 1919-1933. An unmistakable sign of Trump's "performative proto-fascism" was also his dalliance with armed militias—undoubtedly as grave a threat to democracy as were Hitler's brown shirts.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump's tenure in office ended on the same note as his rise to power—namely, with another act of "performative proto-fascism." His rejection of the 2020 election as "the big lie" was intended to cement in the minds of his fanatical base the idea of a "deep state" conspiracy and, subsequently, undermine democratic procedures. A movement built on lies, deception, and sheer propaganda can only be maintained by the very same tactics that energized it. There is no other way around it.</div><div>
</div><div>The reason that Republicans have opted to continue down the path charted by Trump is because this is now the only way to maintain the support of the proto-fascist base. Without that support, the GOP will have to reinvent its political identity—no small task for a party that has made a remarkable transition from conservatism to reactionism and finally to neoliberal proto-fascism—or cease to exist.</div><div>
</div><div>However, the paradox that Republicans face in the post-Trump era is that they cannot sustain a movement built around the cult of personality without the presence of a charismatic leader in its midst. In this sense, the Republicans can continue with Trumpist shenanigans as long as Trump is still around and politically active, but sooner or later they would have to look for an appropriate replacement—and perhaps an authentic fascist—otherwise the proto-fascist base may gradually begin to wither away.</div><div>
</div><div>What the future holds for the American republic is impossible to predict. However, what is abundantly clear right now is that with its delusional attachment to Trump, the GOP is methodically dragging the country into the abyss of instability, chaos, and proto-fascism.</div><div>
</div><div>C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. He has published scores of books and his articles have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers, and popular news websites. His latest books are Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change, an anthology of interviews with Chomsky originally published at Truthout and collected by Haymarket Books; Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors); and The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change, an anthology of interviews with Chomsky originally published at Truthout and collected by Haymarket Books (scheduled for publication in June 2021).</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>ultimate betrayal of oaths sworn': Michigan GOP congressman slams 'treacherous snakes' who 'salivate for civil war'</div><div>Meaghan Ellis&nbsp; June 01, 2021</div><div>Rep. Pete Meijer (R-Mich.) is fed up with the pro-Trump conservative Republicans whom he describes as "treacherous snakes." On Monday, May 31, Meijer, a military veteran, took to Twitter with a post in</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>gop civil war</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/gop-congressman-peter-meijer/</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/peter-meijer/</div><div>~ trump civil war lunacy</div><div></div><div>
</div><div>// milleninalist, just recalculATE WHEN DATE Passes?</div><div>jenna attacked for saying trump can't be re-install in aug b/c you know lAW/REALITY?</div><div>621&nbsp; MAGA heads go berserk over 'incompetent failure' Jenna Ellis after ... ›</div><div>=</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/trump-reinstated/</div><div>
</div><div>NO LNX TWT</div><div>
</div><div>On June 1, the New York Times' Maggie Haberman reported, on Twitter, that former President Donald Trump still believes that the 2020 election results will be overturned and that he will be "reinstated" to the White House by August. Haberman discussed her reporting during a June 2 appearance on CNN's "New Day," stressing to hosts John Berman and Brianna Keilar that Trump is "echoing" the false claims he is hearing from attorney Sidney Powell and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.</div><div>
</div><div>"There is no mechanism by which this can happen," Haberman said of Trump's delusional claim that he will be returning to the Oval Office by August. But Trump's delusions, Haberman added, are being encouraged by Powell and Lindell — and he is "regurgitating" their bogus claims.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August (no… https://t.co/0gUGozPQQR</div><div>— Maggie Haberman (@Maggie Haberman) 1622551318.0</div><div>
</div><div>Haberman told Berman and Keilar, "What he's doing is echoing things that are being said by Sidney Powell, who was his lawyer — although he distanced himself from her at certain points over the final months of the administration. But she was helping advise him on these efforts to overturn the election last year. This is being said my Michael Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow — who has been pushing this for some time. (Trump) is echoing what they're saying. The difference between them saying it and Donald Trump saying it is that one is the former president — one is a possible future (Republican) Party nominee…. There are people telling him things are possible that are not possible."</div><div>
</div><div>Powell and Lindell have been relentless far-right promoters of the Big Lie, falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump — who, Haberman said, has been "so laser-focused" on the recent election "audits" taking place in Arizona and other states because he "thinks they are going to overturn" the 2020 election results.</div><div>
</div><div>JUST NOW: "“There is a dangerous component about this conversation that's going on.” @maggieNYT on her reporting t… https://t.co/u3fuzgsHhr</div><div>— John Berman (@John Berman) 1622632941.0</div><div>
</div><div>Trump, Haberman warned, is trying to use the "conservative media ecosystem" to promote his fantasies of being "reinstated" to the White House this summer.</div><div>
</div><div>"People are in their own media ecosystems," Haberman observed.</div><div>Berman pointed out that some Trump opponents are upset with Haberman for tweeting about the former president's delusions, and the Times reporter responded that "ignoring" Trump will not make him go away in 2021 any more than it did in 2015 and 2016.</div><div>
</div><div>Haberman told Berman and Keilar that Trump "is in control of the Republican Party, to a big extent…. Ignoring him was not the answer in 2015."</div><div>
</div><div>FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><div>MAGA heads go berserk over 'incompetent failure' Jenna Ellis after ... ›</div><div>'A new inauguration date is set': Inside the latest QAnon conspiracy ... ›</div><div>Trump tells followers he 'expects to be reinstated' in August as ... ›</div><div>RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</div><div>Trump's Facebook account should never be reinstated because we ... ›</div><div>Today Is The Day QAnon Believes Donald Trump Will Be Reinstated ... ›</div><div>QAnon Believes Donald Trump Will Be Reinstated As President ... ›</div><div>=</div><div>=</div><div>twt maricopa voter db DELETED</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>cody f</div><div>while the criminal investigations of former President Donald Trump often make the news with fresh developments, many of these revelations don't truly amount to much. On Tuesday, though, there was a significant exception to this pattern when multiple reports found that New York DA Cy Vance, who is working with the state's Attorney General Letitia James, has impaneled a special grand jury of his investigation of Trump and the Trump Organization. This suggests that serious charges may be on the horizon.</div><div>
</div><div>After the news broke, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, a longtime close observer of the president, explained how he will fight back against the investigations as it threatens to ensnare him or his interests.</div><div>
</div><div>"Trump is going to use talk of running again as a way to tar the Vance/James probes," she wrote on Twitter. "From his latest statement in response to the grand jury being empaneled: 'Interesting that today a poll came out indicating I'm far in the lead for the Republican Presidential Primary…'"</div><div>
</div><div>He has already suggested that he intends to run for president again in 2024 (even as he insists that he really won in 2020 and thus should be president now.) It's one way he can maintain power in the Republican Party and at least some level of attention from the media.</div><div>
</div><div>But Haberman is right that dangling a run — genuine or not — can be helpful in his effort to tar the investigations that target him. As long as he remains a potential candidate, he can say that criminal charges are just an effort to keep him out of power by his political enemies. Of course, that won't make an indictment go away — but it will likely be a potent message for his fans.</div><div>
</div><div>Since many are already primed to believe the 2020 election was stolen from him, it's not hard to imagine the prospect of his facing serious criminal charges could inspire more dangerous and lawless actions from his supporters like those seen on Jan. 6.</div><div>
</div><div>In the case of Letitia James, the criticism that she's a political enemy of his does have some genuine force. She explicitly campaigned in 2018 on investigating Trump, and she has used her investigation of him to elevate her profile. Vance is a more complicated story though. A ProPublica report actually found that Vance went easy on the Trump family as his office prepared to indict two of Trump's children in 2012. After Trump's lawyer Marc Kasowitz donated $25,000 to Vance, he reportedly overruled his own prosecutors and declined to bring the charges.</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>at least they recycle grift</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/newt-gingrich-trump/</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>ah</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>In&nbsp; 1994, when President Bill Clinton was serving his first term, then-House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich unveiled his Contract With America — a hard-right Republican legislative agenda that Gingrich's critics slammed as the Contract On America. Republicans recaptured the House in the 1994 midterms, and Gingrich became House speaker in January 1995. Now, in the Biden era, Gingrich is a major ally of former President Donald Trump — and according to Politico reporter Meridith McGraw, Gingrich and Trump are joining forces for a new version of the Contract With America for the 2022 midterms. But the 2022 version, McGraw reports, will have a much more Trumpian focus.</div><div>
</div><div>"With an eye toward winning back the House and Senate in the 2022 midterm elections, former President Donald Trump has begun crafting a policy agenda outlining a MAGA doctrine for the party," McGraw reports. "His template is the 1994 'Contract With America,' a legislative agenda released ahead of the midterm elections in the middle of President Bill Clinton's first term. And as a cherry on top, he's teaming up with its main architect — Gingrich — to do it."</div><div>
</div><div>McGraw adds that according to a Politico source, Trump recently met with Gingrich, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in South Florida to "begin crafting the document." twt]</div><div>
</div><div>"The group is still just beginning to hammer out the details of what a Trumpified Contract might look like," McGraw explains. "But it is likely to take an 'America first' policy approach on everything from trade to immigration. The source described it as 'a policy priority for 2022 and beyond.' Its construction has been teased and talked about for weeks, but the fact that the principals are beginning to put it together underscores Trump's continued interest in trying to shape the Republican Party."</div><div>
</div><div>The 77-year-old Gingrich, however, told Politico that he doesn't expect the 2022 plan to be finalized "anytime soon." When Politico asked him to outline some policy priorities that it may include, the former House speaker responded, "It should be positive. School choice, teaching American history for real, abolishing the '1619 Project,' eliminating critical race theory and what the Texas legislature is doing. We should say, 'Bring it on.'"</div><div>
</div><div>Like Barack Obama, Clinton went down in history as a president who was decisively reelected but suffered a major setback at the midterms. 1996 was a great year for Clinton, who was reelected with 379 electoral votes compared to only 159 for Republican nominee Bob Dole. But Democrats suffered a major pounding in the 1994 midterms.</div><div>
</div><div>"The original 'Contract with America' was credited with helping Republicans gain their first majority in four decades after the party picked up 52 seats in 1994 in the House and nine seats in the Senate," McGraw recalls. "Republicans have used it as a template in elections since."</div><div>
</div><div>The Politico reporter continues, "In 2010, the so-called Republican 'Young Guns,' led by Reps. Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy, introduced a much longer version of Gingrich's contract with a 224-page publication outlining policy goals ahead of the midterm elections. And Graham, who was one of the Contract's signatories when he first ran for a House seat in 1994, has frequently advocated for Republicans to adopt Contract-style declarations to unify the party during election years."</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/end-of-enlightenment/</div><div>
</div><div>common dr robt freeman</div><div>
</div><div>The Enlightenment was a time of intellectual ferment in the Western world following the Middle Ages. Its ideas gave birth to the modern world.</div><div>
</div><div>We know the Enlightenment from the names of its most brilliant expositors: Francis Bacon, John Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, and others. We know its ideas as the foundation of our social world: the social contract, the rule of reason, the rule of law, consent of the governed, natural rights, constitutionalism, separation of powers, checks and balances, and others.</div><div>
</div><div>The Republican agenda is a direct assault on all of that. It literally aims to return America to the pre-modern, pre-Enlightened darkness of the Middle Ages. If it succeeds, it will reverse more than three hundred years of human progress.</div><div>
</div><div>The most egregious of Republican assaults on the modern world is its rejection of Reason. Reason is the way we know what we know. It is not through revelations from God, or the pronouncements of priests or monarchs as had been the case before the Enlightenment.</div><div>
</div><div>Reason as a process for discovering Truth started in the Scientific Revolution around 1550. It was so powerful a way of knowing the physical world, the philosophers of the Enlightenment adopted it for knowing—and improving—the social world. It became the foundation of all subsequent Enlightenment thought, and all modern institutions.</div><div>
</div><div>The Republican broadside against Reason was on display in the first days of the Trump administration when Trump asserted that his inauguration crowd size was the largest in history. Presented with facts to the contrary, in photographic evidence, his assistant, Kellyanne Conway, proclaimed the existence of "alternative facts." It's been downhill since.</div><div>
</div><div>Republican discourse is a never-ending torrent of lies, idiocies, and absurdities—the very antithesis of Reason. The Muslim invasion. The caravan bringing murderers, rapists, drugs, and disease. Democrats eating babies. A satanic cult of pedophiles running the "Deep State." A pandemic that would "disappear, like a miracle." The greatest economy in the history of the world. Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head being canceled. Biden's hamburger ban. A rigged election. Massive voter fraud. Terrorists who were really just tourists handing out hugs and kisses. It never ends.</div><div>
</div><div>The Republican assault on Reason is an attack not just on truth itself, but on our very capacity to think at all. With their base, Republicans address not the neo-cortex—the thinking part of the brain—but the amygdala—the lizard-brain seat of fight-or-flight. The amygdala subordinates logic, facts, reason, and deliberation to deceit, conspiracy, hysteria, and fear.</div><div>
</div><div>It's easier to trigger hatred and fear than thinking and logic. That's why Republicans do it. That's why their base—and increasingly, their "leaders"—sound like zombies, like robots, like members of a cult when they're interviewed for the evening news. They are. They've been programmed to fear and hate and blame, and the reinforcement is unending, [feedback? amplif?] because, to work, it has to be. Otherwise, they become unprogrammed.</div><div>
</div><div>It doesn't matter that none of the endless effusion of lies ever turn out to be true or that they are routinely, repeatedly abandoned in favor of newer lies for the next news cycle. What matters is that the lies incite indignation, and that the dopamine high that follows gets its constant, programmed, ever-increasing reinforcement.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump's 35,000 documented lies are the embodiment of it all. It is a leprous, insidious disease, an inability to deal with reality, but literally the one by which Republicans define themselves. Glandular excretions are the Republican formula for generating voter turnout: inciting Pavlovian rage based on a torrential fantasmia of lurid lies. It works, but it is the living, suppurating antithesis of Reason.</div><div>
</div><div>Another Republican assault on the legacy of the Enlightenment is the attack on Democracy. It was John Locke who, in 1689, wrote that people who were able to think could not be bullied like ignorant people could. If government wanted thinking people's cooperation it could no longer rely on the medieval divine right of kings. It needed to obtain "the consent of the governed." This, of course, became a sacrament of the American political order.</div><div>
</div><div>The opening words of the Constitution are, "We the people of the United States…" That is not a paean to monarchy, or to dictatorship. It is a statement that the consent of the people—and only that consent—provides a government its legitimacy. But Republicans are working feverishly to overturn the consent of the governed, to destroy Democracy.</div><div>
</div><div>Their assault on the Capitol on January 6th was the most conspicuous effort to overthrow the legitimately elected government of the United States but it was not the first and will certainly not be the last. Republicans insist that their reason-denying mobs, their goons, their Brownshirts will tell the rest of us how we will be governed. No consent involved, only submission: ours. You can see this in their fevered efforts at voter suppression, explicitly preventing majority rule and the consent of the governed.</div><div>
</div><div>Republicans cannot win power on the strength of their ideas and policies. They lost the presidency, the Senate, and the House. Large majorities favor policies backed by Democrats. So, they need to destroy Democracy itself to gain power. To do that, they need to destroy Reason as the way we know what we know. That is the core, the essence, the modus operandi of the Republican enterprise.</div><div>
</div><div>Constitutionalism is a third Enlightenment ideal that Republicans are intent on destroying. A constitution defines how a country is to be governed. Before constitutions, it was autocracy that called the shots. Think of Louis XIV's notorious declaration: "I am the state." Decisions were made by caprice, by the rich and powerful, in their own interests, everyone else be damned. Constitutionalism embeds the Rule of Law—another Enlightenment ideal—into a society, making "equal treatment under the law" a modern treasure, however badly it may be realized.</div><div>
</div><div>Besides losing all of the branches of the federal government, Republicans failed over and over and over to persuade the judicial branch to sanction their usurpation of the Constitution. So, they resort to performative charades like the farcical ballot laundering farrago in Arizona to try to undo the Constitutionally-ordained process for the peaceful transfer of power. Now, they're taking it to other states. It will not end.</div><div>
</div><div>We could go on. Republicans want to destroy the social contract—another Enlightenment ideal—that says you get ahead on the basis of hard work. They insist, instead, that privilege should be based on race, with the best spots reserved for whites. This violates the Enlightenment ideal of equality for all.</div><div>
</div><div>Remember the opening words of the Declaration of Independence? "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Pure Enlightenment. In the Republican world, however, like in Orwell's Animal Farm which was an allegory of the degradation of Soviet totalitarianism, all men are created equal, but some—whites—are more equal than others.</div><div>
</div><div>We should be clear. This is not about peripheral protests over policy preferences. It is a broadside against the foundation, the institutional undergirding of our civilization. It is an attempt to destroy the conceptual milieu that has survived for centuries and that, however flawed it may be, has delivered the greatest freedom, expansion of rights, material progress, and human opportunity the world has ever known.</div><div>
</div><div>The measure of our alarm should be that Republicans, with the help of a complicit media, have managed to normalize rampant public lying, the unrestrained desecration of Reason, are carrying out an open, unabashed attack on our democracy, are carrying out notorious, savage assaults on Constitutionalism, the Rule of Law, Equality, and more. Our nation is literally under attack by anti-Enlightenment zealots determined to tear it down and it's not at all clear that they will not succeed.</div><div>
</div><div>It is indicative that the Republican party's highest priest is a thrice-married pathological liar, an admitted sexual assaulter, a draft dodger, a six-time filer for bankruptcy, a man who inflicted hundreds of thousands of excess deaths on the country, was twice impeached, who lost two successive popular vote counts, and who then attempted to overthrow the government. Read that sentence again and think about its implication.</div><div>
</div><div>The Republican hero, the man they model themselves on, the one they want us to bow down to, is a failed business man, a failed reality TV star, a failed president, a career con man who is the most corrupt, certainly the most craven and creepy individual ever known to American politics. This is the best Republicans have to offer. That is who they are, and what they insist on inflicting on all the rest of us, our consent be damned.</div><div>
</div><div>The Enlightenment helped the world replace monarchy with republicanism, a world ruled by theology with a world of science, autocracy with the rule of law, aristocratic privilege with the equality of all men, and feudalism with capitalism. No matter how imperfectly it may have been realized, it was as noble a vision as human beings have ever devised. The two worlds are the difference between the "Dark Ages" that went before and the modern world. That is the Republicans' promise to America.</div><div>
</div><div>More regression. More destruction of beautiful ideals and noble institutions. More degradation of deserving people. More humiliation of undignified people, themselves being the examples. More carnage. More chaos. More slime spewed on everyone.</div><div>
</div><div>There's not a syllable of inspiring vision in anything they have to say, not a word of uplifting ideals in any of it. It is all pathetic self-victimization and a lust for vengeance against those who refuse to respect them. We must all be dragged into the sewer that spawned, that is, and that sustains Donald Trump. That is his and Republicans' retaliation against a people who once had the temerity to believe in majestic ideals, the audacity to strive for them, and who once imagined that they might even be worthy of them.</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>an 521</div><div>
</div><div>Weak or stupid': Trump lashes out at Republican officials — even as they continue to defend him</div><div>
</div><div>Bob Brigham Raw Story&nbsp; May 21, 2021</div><div>
</div><div>Donald Trump lashed out at Republicans for not further embracing his debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump was interviewed by Chanel Rion on OAN on Thursday.</div><div>
</div><div>"We don't have a free and fair press any more media anymore," Trump said on the far-right network. "This is not free and you know, you look at communist countries. That's what happens, nobody can talk, and when you can't talk, there's nothing to discuss."</div><div>
</div><div>He then pushed his conspiracy theories about the election, which he decisively lost to President Joe Biden....</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>here are the ‘classic signs of authoritarianism’ the Trumpified GOP now exhibits: conservative</div><div>Alex Henderson&nbsp; May 17, 2021</div><div>The Joe Biden coalition of 2020 was shockingly diverse, with everyone from self-described "democratic socialists" like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to hardcore conservatives such as...</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>=</div><div>why did Trump issue this bizarre military memo in the final days of his presidency?</div><div>Travis Gettys Raw Story&nbsp; May 17, 2021</div><div>Former president Donald Trump issued a bizarre memo days after he lost the election that his interim defense secretary ignored.</div><div>
</div><div>The ousted president signed a one-page memo without the knowledge of White House counsel Pat Cipollone or national security adviser Robert O'Brien directing then-Defense secretary Christopher Miller to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, Africa, Germany, Iraq and Syria, reported Axios.</div><div>
</div><div>"This is what the president wants you to do," said trusted aide John McEntee to retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, who was offered a post as senior adviser to Miller.</div><div>
</div><div>Macgregor told McEntee, who was head of the presidential personnel office, that he doubted all of those things could be accomplished by Jan. 20.</div><div>
</div><div>"Then do as much as you can," McEntee told him.</div><div>
</div><div>Miller himself was astonished when the memo landed on his desk two days later, on Nov. 11, and top military brass were appalled when news of the order traveled through the Pentagon, as Trump worked to overturn his election loss to Joe Biden.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump was ultimately talked out of the unilateral order by Pentagon officials who told him the Taliban could take Kabul in the waning days of his presidency.</div><div>
</div><div>Biden in April announced the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11.</div><div>
</div><div>FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><div>Proud Boys leader accuses Trump of leaving group 'on the battle ... ›</div><div>Trump officials used secret terrorism unit to question lawyers at the ... ›</div><div>Trump's New Drug Pricing Plan is Just Another 'Nonsensical' Scam ... ›</div><div>=</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/new-gop/</div><div>
</div><div>ME</div><div>Confederates may have lost the Civil War back in the 1800s but, according to a new Daily Beast editorial, it appears they are on the road to victory when it comes to the present-day, intraparty war with the Republican Party. The piece highlights the evolution of a new disturbing breed of lawmakers and politicians within the Republican Party.</div><div>
</div><div>Describing the Republican Party's rising "heroes" as "killers, kooks, and creeps," Wajahat Ali, Beast editor and Senior Fellow at The Western States Center, details the blind support of former President Donald Trump's Big Lie and how it may not only impact the political party but U.S. government in its entirety.</div><div>
</div><div>According to Ali, "we are witnessing the end of a long molting process as the GOP slithers into its final form: a counter-majoritarian, fascist entity."</div><div>
</div><div>Those who were once silently supportive of far-right ideologies are now "shedding their masks and hoods, spitting out their dog whistles" as the party's Trumpists, racists, conspiracy theorists, and violent insurrectionists are increasingly gaining representation in Congress.</div><div>
</div><div>While Trump may no longer be walking the halls of the White House, that has not stopped his agenda as many an overwhelming number of Republican leaders and lawmakers are still out to do his dirty work. The former disgraced president's influence, alone, is enough for his supporters to continue down the path he paved.</div><div>
</div><div>"Trump was not a cancerous growth but the end product of the party's decades-long molting process. He's the beating heart. He's Republicans' orange avatar, their unrestrained ID, their boiling, festering rage that quenches its appetites while securing power and wealth by any means necessary," he wrote, later adding, "Just because Trump is golfing in Mar-a-Lago instead of rage-tweeting from the White House, doesn't mean the threat has been removed. His tactics and tantrums have merely been picked up and copied by Republicans desperate to ride the same strategy to power in 2022 and 2024, perhaps with less sensationalism and fanfare."</div><div>
</div><div>With the path Republicans are embarking on, the party appears to be in what is described as "the final molting stage," which consists of "an increasingly radicalized, weaponized, and fascist entity."</div><div>
</div><div>FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><div>A new GOP 'big lie' plot is in the works - Alternet.org ›</div><div>The 'lost' political party: New report reveals why thousands are ... ›</div><div>The GOP's attacks on voting rights have a new enemy in Florida ... ›</div><div>Trump spawned a new group of mega-donors who now hold sway ... ›</div><div>RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</div><div>Georgia's new GOP election law draws criticism, lawsuits ›</div><div>Texas House Approves Voting Restrictions Bill : NPR ›</div><div>Over 100 Republicans, Including Former Officials, Threaten to Split ... ›</div><div>=</div><div></div><div>dirty dregs of dixie: rino&nbsp; purge</div><div>publication reports that a local South Carolina Tea Party leader named Pressley Stutts is at the center of the political shakeup. While he admitted that he is aware of the stark changes, he claims there is a reason for it. Trump had a request and he and others feel obligated to fulfill his request.</div><div>
</div><div>"There are a lot of good people that did lose their positions. Some are my friends," Stutts admitted during a recent chat with The Daily Beast on Tuesday. "Some people say, Pressley, what have you done?"...</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/trump-gop/</div><div>
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</div><div></div><div></div><div>gop meets maralag? firm denial gaetz // mbz, vlad</div><div>==</div></div>