marcotte, amanda

---

see two

origin of wikdsmt tag, done on qanon story

mebbe some neglect 321

bak

===

---

AN 6 25

During his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump not only rallied his hardcore base of 2016 and 2020 — he led a MAGA coalition that ranged from Christian nationalists to tech bros to the Manosphere. And he also reached out to independents, some of whom voted for centrist Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 but voted for Trump in 2024 because of their worries about inflation.

That game plan didn't give Trump the "landslide" victory that he claimed it did: Trump defeated Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris by roughly 1.5 percent in the popular vote, which is a narrow victory — not a landslide. But it was enough to get him past the finish line.

Four and one-half months into his second presidency, however, a MAGA feud has erupted between Trump and Tesla/SpaceX/X.com leader Elon Musk over the president's "big, beautiful bill." After Musk called the bill a "disgusting abomination," Trump attacked him during a Thursday, June 5 press conference with visiting German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

The U.S. president told reporters, "I am very disappointed in Elon. I've helped Elon a lot…. Elon and I had a great relationship. I don't know if we will anymore."

IFrame Content

In an article published the following day, Salon's Amanda Marcotte argues that the feud between Trump and Musk underscores the divisions between "techbro fascists" and other parts of the MAGA coalition.

"As (Musk) and Trump snipe at each other publicly," Marcotte writes, "the efforts to pretend this is a friendly disagreement are falling apart. Even if Musk fails in his efforts to kill Trump's bill, this battle is exposing a deeper truth that (White House adviser Stephen) Miller can't hide with his lies about Trump winning in a 'landslide': The MAGA coalition is fragile and some of the differences are starting to tear at the seams less than half a year into the second Trump term. Trump's slim win in 2024 was no doubt due in large part to Musk, and not just the eye-popping quarter-billion-plus Musk spent to push the old man's orange carcass over the finish line."

Marcotte continues, "It's because Musk and other influential figures, especially those associated with Silicon Valley or who pretend to be former liberals, were able to convince a chunk of more secular, largely male voters to throw their lot in with the Christian nationalist base that is the backbone of the MAGA movement. But while these two groups joined together based on a shared animosity towards racial minorities and women, it was always a far more uneasy alliance than Musk or Trump wanted to admit. And now, it's getting shakier as two narcissistic billionaires are at odds."

The Salon journalist emphasizes that the "trouble within fascist paradise" has been "brewing for reasons that run deeper than Musk and Trump's competing egos or Silicon Valley's dependency on government funding."

"The atheistic world of pseudo-intellectualism that Musk and his minions come from," according to Marcotte, "was always going to have friction with the Christian nationalists who actually run the MAGA-ified Republican Party…. This budget fight exposes how delusional that attitude always was. It's not about religion, per se, but the culture clash between the Musk fanboys and the Christian nationalist debate is driving much of this. Musk and his acolytes envision a technofascism that sucks all the money out of social services and puts it into the tech industry, even as it pursues goals typically disliked by the Christian right, such as clean energy production."

Marcotte continues, "Meanwhile, the Christian Right wing of the party, while happy to pass huge cuts to Medicaid and Obamacare, is largely leaving untouched Social Security or Medicare, which their working-class and aging base depends on. The tech bro fascists may hate the liberals they live next door to, but at the end of the day, they're still part of the urban, atheistic, educated class that the MAGA movement demonizes. That difference was not going to be papered over forever."

*Amanda Marcotte's full Salon article is available at this link.

===

an 3 25

Some voters who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election are now expressing buyer's remorse, including government workers who were abruptly laid off because of the mass downsizing of the federal workforce being carried out by the Trump Administration with the help of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Others are upset because they are now realizing that Trump's steep new tariffs on Canada, Mexico and other countries will hurt them financially — or because they are troubled by Musk's anti-Social Security comments.

Such voters are likely to be independents or swing voters who favored Trump in 2024 because they blamed then-President Joe Biden for inflation — even if they voted for Biden in 2020. And now, they are deciding that Trump is hurting, not helping, them economically.

But Salon's Amanda Marcotte describes a different type of 2024 Trump voter in an article published on March 21: those whose "devotion to the MAGA cult" remains strong despite the ways in which Trump is making their lives worse.

Marcotte points to Wisconsin resident Bradley Bartell as a prime example. Although his Peruvian wife, Camila Muñoz, is in danger of being deported back to Peru, he doesn't regret voting for Trump in 2024.

"Losing your wife to own the liberals: Sounds like a parody of a Donald Trump voter, but it's turning out to be the story of Bradley Bartell, a Wisconsin man whose wife, Camila Muñoz, is being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement," Marcotte explains. "Muñoz is a Peruvian immigrant who overstayed a visa, after being trapped in the country during the pandemic. She met Bartell while working illegally in the U.S., but because she married an American and is working on a green card, the couple thought it was safe to go on their honeymoon in Puerto Rico. Now, she is sitting in a Louisiana detention center, having been arrested at the airport."

Marcotte continues, "Initially, much of the reaction to this story was framed in terms of 'regret,' with some outlets claiming Bartell is 'questioning' his vote. It's an understandable error…. I took to Bluesky and warned people that there was no evidence that Bartell had learned a lesson, gently predicting he would stand by Trump. On Wednesday, (March 19), that prediction came true, with Bartell telling Newsweek, 'I don't regret the vote,' even as he asked people to donate to GoFundMe to raise cash for Muñoz's bond."

Bartell, Marcotte notes, "twisted himself in knots to argue that this wasn't Trump's fault."

"None of this is to single Bartell out," Marcotte argues. "On the contrary, the reason it was so easy to predict how he would react is that this is typical of most Trump voters, whose devotion to the MAGA cult reliably outstrips what should be more pressing concerns, such as the safety of their families. We saw this during the pandemic, as Republican voters — unable to admit liberals could be right about anything, including the germ theory of disease — refused to take precautions and even rejected the vaccines that Trump himself had authorized research funding for. The result was also predictable: death rates from COVID-19 among Republicans swiftly outpaced those of Democratic voters."

Marcotte draws a parallel between the "MAGA cult" and Scientologists. And she makes a distinction between MAGA diehards and "low-information" swing voters who favored Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024.

"The term 'Trump derangement syndrome,' applied to anyone who criticizes Trump, functions like 'suppressive persons,' the Scientologist phrase for outsiders," Marcotte writes. "It doesn't just warn members against listening to reason, but contains a threat: this is how you'll be labeled if you leave the fold…. Think of these folks like people who get audited by a Scientologist once, on a lark, but are weirded out by the process and never go back. Not everyone who encounters a cult is sucked into it forever. The key is focusing on those who never put more than a toe across the threshold, instead of those who walked all the way in and shut the door behind them."

*Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.*

---

===

an ah 1 25

During his second inauguration on Monday, January 20, President Donald Trump was surrounded by a who's-who of billionaire tech CEOs — including Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and X's Elon Musk. Zuckerberg and Bezos were critical of Trump in the past, but they made a concerted effort to reach out to him after he won the 2024 election. And Musk, now the richest man in the world, is among Trump's top allies.

Trump critics have been using the word "oligarchy" to describe Trump's alliance with top tech CEOs. But Salon's Amanda Marcotte, in a blistering article published the day after Trump's inauguration, isn't sure the word "oligarchy" applies — as the inauguration, she argues, felt more like a gathering of scammers and grifters.

"The farcical nature of the inauguration was a fitting reminder that everything about the MAGA movement is a scam," Marcotte writes. "The weekend before the inauguration, Trump cashed in on his cultists' faith with a grift so obvious it would make Jim Bakker blush: releasing meme coins named after himself and his wife. Judd Legum of Popular Info summed up the move with, 'Trump has turned the inauguration itself into a brazen grift, launching a meme coin hours before being sworn in.'"

Marcotte continues, "Big words like 'oligarchy' are being thrown around in the face of the tech billionaire's row at the inauguration, but that may be giving them too much credit. What attracts these vultures is the stench of scam that exudes from Trump. There was once a time when Silicon Valley made money by creating useful products people wanted, but that time has passed. We're now in the era where the entire internet looks like an e-mail to your grandmother from a purported Nigerian prince who will marry her in exchange for her Social Security checks."

The Salon journalist notes that the Biden Administration had a history of "waging war on corporate scammers, suing them for junk fees," but laments that "those efforts will be killed or canceled with Trump's return."

"Above all else," Marcotte warns, "Trump is here to be the handmaiden for a whole new era of scamminess. However miserable your consumer experience was before, wait until these already-wealthy vampires snake their hands further into your pockets…. There was once a time when the conservative argument behind 'capitalism works' would be something about free markets and competition creating prosperity for all."

Marcotte continues, "Now, the mask is fully off, and we see what this slogan really means: rich people get all the money, and the rest of us can suck eggs — if you can even find them anymore at the supermarket."

===

an 12 24 no pix twt

it was too laughable not to share it: On his Twitter knockoff site Truth Social, Donald Trump posted on Wednesday about a "MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT tomorrow," which included a video of him dressed as a superhero shooting lasers out of his eyes.

IFrame Content

It's what the kids online call "cringe" — and oh man, it couldn't have been more perfect for the online churn of public mockery. I'm on a Twitter diet, but I totally sent this dumb image to my friends, so we could join in the hilarity. So many questions! Is Trump really so delusional about his physical form that he thinks he looks like Superman? How can his fans not perceive that he does not, in fact, look like that? The lasers-out-of-the-eyes thing is directly out of the "Dark Brandon" meme liberals use to celebrate Joe Biden's accomplishments. Does Trump not know how desperate he looks, trying to bite Dark Brandon's style? How dumb is he anyway?

Trump has not returned to Twitter, even though Elon Musk reinstated his account and publicly begged him to come back. But he managed to dominate Twitter on Wednesday anyway, as one liberal hater after another retweeted screenshots of the superhero meme, making sure that every Beltway journalist was well aware of Thursday's "MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT." The silliness of it guaranteed much more coverage than if Trump had tweeted out a vaguely normal picture of himself.

Unsurprisingly, the actual announcement was not just underwhelming but an even higher degree of self-pantsing:

IFrame Content

But here's the part we cannot ignore: Trump is going to sell a lot of those dopey digital trading cards. As viral marketing campaigns go, this one was a solid win. Not only did all that liberal dunking garner news coverage and dramatic social media spread, but he also conveyed an important message to his supporters: Those liberal elites are laughing at you. And the way to strike back, proving that you're in on the joke and making the liberals cry, is to buy this worthless crap and send Donald Trump more of your money.

Since my book "Troll Nation: How the Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set on Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself" was published in 2018, its central thesis — that the modern right is motivated by an obsessive desire to troll the left — has become a lot more widely accepted.

Just this week, Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent pointed out that Musk has gotten into the troll business because he understands that "for large swaths of the right-wing media ecosystem, the Triggering of the Libs has become an end in itself." By tweeting repulsive things and drawing liberal outrage and condemnation, Musk can get more engagement while sucking in more fans who love how angry he makes their perceived enemies.

But what is too often overlooked in these discussions is how much this empire of trolling relies on the right's inferiority complex. At the root of the trolling mindset is defensiveness. Conservatives perceive, not always incorrectly, that liberals are laughing at them for being a bunch of tasteless rubes with boring sex lives and expanding beer guts. This perception does not motivate a desire toward self-improvement, but instead a longing for revenge, mostly in the form of imposing their grossness on the supposedly more refined existence of those they despise.

This inferiority complex is why the term "elite" has become common currency on Fox News. They don't use it accurately — say, to describe those who hold excessive wealth and power, but as a swipe at the perceived progressive values of college-educate cultural tastemakers in coastal cities. It explains how Musk, who until very recently was ranked as the richest man in the world, can get away with styling himself as a populist hero. Childish as it may be, Musk and his fanboys are still agitatedabout their perceived rejection by the Cool Kids.

The slavish fandom that people like Musk and Trump attract is generally confusing to folks on the left, because those two guys are such embarrassing losers. Trump's superhero meme has its brother in Musk's recent bout of social media thirst:

IFrame Content

It was already pathetic enough that Musk has been reduced to begging right-wing douchebags to like him. The items in that image make it worse, creating a virtual bingo card of terminal dweebness: Caffeine-Free Diet Coke. A painting of George Washington that was uncool when our grandparents were kids. A fake gun. In order to get the women of Tinder to swipe left faster, all you'd need would be a pet iguana and a decorative sword. (Arguably, the vajra on the table of a non-Buddhist counts for the latter.)

But it's a mistake to conclude that Musk's fans simply fail to understand how uncool the Tesla CEO has revealed himself to be. He's created a cult of dork solidarity around him, one committed to a "Revenge of the Nerds"-style fantasy of ruining Twitter for all those blue-checked people who make them feel bad about themselves.

That doesn't just appeal to those who already identify as conservative, either. Musk's cult is part of a larger ecosystem that seeks to redirect angry young men toward fascist politics. Musk may be running Twitter into the ground financially, but as a right-wing political project, his takeover of the company is going great: He's adding 200,000 new followers a day.

In his recent book "Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind," journalist Robert Draper explains that, in his many conversations with Trump voters, it became clear that they were not confused about the actual nature of Donald Trump's personality. In fact, he writes, "the MAGA faithful adored their emperor without clothes." As he told Salon, "everything that we would ordinarily view as a vice they found to be to be virtuous," often precisely because it pisses off liberals so much.

you see this all the time on social media, when conservatives make jokes about how liberals hate the "bad orange man." In making that joke, they're indicating that they know Trump is a weird-looking guy who wears orange makeup every day and also that, by any reasonable standard, he sucks. But none of that detracts from his allure in the slightest. He's basically a human pile of dog poop they get to rub liberal noses in, an animated and endlessly whiny punishment they can inflict on those who make them feel insecure.

Shame is an odd emotion. It can sometimes motivate a person to slow down or stop behaviors that cause it. Just as often, however, it can backfire, creating a defensive reaction that causes the person to double down. Trump's dumb superhero meme is a good example of the latter tendency in action. Liberals have mocked conservatives for years for their hero worship of Trump. But rather backing down, they just go at it harder — admittedly, with a bit of ironic distance — by churning out cartoonish images that reimagine Trump as Superman or Elvis or Rocky or some other masculine icon.

Of course these folks are still suckers. They may think they're sticking it to the liberals, but as usual Trump is just squeezing them for cash. But as long as they keep nursing their grievance over real or imagined liberal mockery, Trump fans will never quite be able to see how much the bad orange man has been using them all along.

===

an 12 24

Trump and his MAGA allies repeatedly accuse mainstream media outlets of spreading "fake news" — which, Trump critics argue, is projection in light of all the conspiracy theories that MAGA Republicans promote.

In an article published the day after Christmas, Salon's Amanda Marcotte stresses that "disinformation" and a "poor information ecosystem" played a key role in Trump's victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.

"In the face of Vice President Kamala Harris losing the presidential election to Donald Trump," Marcotte writes, "the punditry's focus has been almost exclusively on asking how the Democrats couldn't beat a relentless liar with 34 felony convictions and a previous attempted coup under his belt. Everyone has a different theory about Harris' 'messaging,' with every critic inevitably arguing that if she had just talked more about their pet issue, she would have won."

Marcotte continues, "Another option, however, is to listen to what swing voters who backed Trump said about their decision."

READ MORE:[Businesses are already 'capitulating to Trump' for fear of retribution

Many U.S. voters, Marcotte laments, are "addicted to BS." And she cites research from conservative strategist Sarah Longwell, a Never Trumper who recently interviewed 2024 Trump voters who listen to Joe Rogan's podcast.

"Rogan's audience perfectly illustrates the way the firehose of disinformation online — his conspiracy theory-hyping podcast has over 16 million followers — has pickled the brains of so many otherwise normal people," Marcotte explains. "Most of the people Longwell interviewed couldn't go two minutes without coughing up a conspiracy theory. Everything is a shadowy plot, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the guy who shot Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania."

Marcotte points to the far-right QAnon as an example of how outlandish conspiracy theories can be.

"After the insurrection of January 6," Marcotte observes, "a lot of attention was paid to the rise of QAnon, because so many rioters were adherents to this online cult that preached that Trump is a savior prophesized to stop a worldwide Satanic conspiracy. Alarming reports showed millions of Americans believed QAnon myths, such as the divinity of Trump or that Democrats drink children's blood."

Marcotte continues, "QAnon is still around, but it gets much less media coverage these days. One likely reason is what we see in these focus groups: bonkerballs levels of conspiracy belief is no longer a fringe phenomenon. QAnon-style beliefs are simply the norm in American society…. One of the best predictors, if not the best predictor, of a Trump vote is how poor a person's information ecosystem is. People who read or watch real news outlets voted overwhelmingly for Harris. People who get their political information from social media voted for Trump."

---

Kyrsten Sinema, a traitor to the cause of women's rights, loses support of feminists

Amanda Marcotte Salon

---

an 8 24

This Friday night, August 30, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump is scheduled to speak at Moms for Liberty's third national summit in Washington, D.C. The controversial far-right group has drawn widespread criticism for, critics say, an aggressive campaign to purge, from public schools, Black and gay literature that differs from its Christian nationalist agenda.

In a scathing article published the same day, Salon's Amanda Marcotte slams the Trump campaign's Moms for Liberty outreach as a "desperate" attempt to cope with Democratic rival Kamala Harris' advantage among women voters.

"Donald Trump has a woman problem — and it's not just his pending court cases regarding his sexual assault of journalist E. Jean Carroll," Marcotte argues. "Polling shows a growing divergence between male and female voters that could become the largest election gender gap in history…. It's not hard to see why most women despise Trump, a man who bragged about sexually assaulting women on tape."

Marcotte continues, "On the policy front, of course, Trump is the single person most responsible for the overturn of Roe v. Wade. The published agenda for his second term, Project 2025, includes plans for a national abortion ban and restrictions on contraception. Not only does Trump not try to hide his misogyny, but his campaign makes it a selling point in a bid to win over bitter male voters…. Trump's campaign is in danger if he can't get at least a few skeptical women to vote for him. "

But Marcotte emphasizes that Trump's Moms for Liberty outreach is unlikely to win over women voters — if anything, he risks alienating them even more.

"Moms for Liberty's fall from political grace has been as rapid as their rise to prominence," the Philadelphia-based journalist explains. "Associating with the group is more likely to hurt Trump with female voters than to help him."

Marcotte notes that although Moms for Liberty initially promoted themselves as a "parental rights" group, they were "in reality…. controlled by far-right activists with deep ties to Christian nationalism."

"When Moms for Liberty-linked school board members started taking actions like banning books and vilifying LGBTQ teachers, it provoked a nationwide backlash, with parents in affected communities coming together to kick Moms for Liberty members off their school boards," Marcotte observes. "It's safe to say the 'Moms for Liberty' brand is toxic now."

*Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.

===

an 7 24

A controversial campaign tactic is backfiring on former President Donald Trump as powerful celebrities warn of an imminent authoritarian regime that could put an end to "recreational sex" as part of a "fascistic game plan," according to a new political analysis.

Actors Taraji P. Henson and Mark Ruffalo, and Last Week Tonight host John Oliver have managed a novel political feat this summer with warnings about Trump's potential return to the

White House: they've made millions of Americans care about campaign platforms, Salon reported Friday.

"Swing voters and people who aren't sure yet if they're going to vote are starting to hear about this 'Project 2025' — and they do not like it," writes columnist Amanda Marcotte.

"Trump's campaign likely went with scary-sounding names on purpose, both to thrill their sadistic foot soldiers and to cause liberals to react fearfully. But those monikers also make them memorable enough to break into the consciousness of people who aren't paying close attention."

Project 2025— a platform crafted by the Heritage Foundation whose president this week delivered veiled threats of bloody revolution — is described by Marcotte as "a laundry list of the far-right's most politically toxic ideas" that includes a nationwide abortion ban, mass federal firings and the dismantling of the Education department.

It was unusual for Trump's campaign to come forward with so blatant a policy shift, but not that surprising, writes Marcotte. She likens MAGA to a man who pinches a woman's butt at a bar then calls her hysterical when she reacts.

"Authoritarian thought leader Christopher Rufo is the most prominent example," says Marcotte. "He frequently speaks loudly of his machinations, such as boldly announcing on Twitter that the right is trying to take away birth control, claiming women should not have 'recreational sex.'"

The benefit, Marcotte argues, is that it fires up Trump's base while making his nay-sayers sound deranged — and she points as proof to one of the former president's favorite phrases: "Trump derangement syndrome."

There's just one problem, argues, Marcotte: It only works if Americans don't pay close attention.

"However, there are promising signs that people who aren't political junkies are starting to hear about Project 2025," writes Marcotte. "Even better, those folks aren't immediately dismissing it as progressive theatrics but may be genuinely alarmed."

Marcotte credits Henson and her viral speech at the BET Awards last weekend for the sudden focus on Trump's policy promises.

"The Project 2025 plan is not a game," Henson told viewers. "Look it up!"

Ruffalo shared Henson's speech on X and added, "Project 2025 is not a game, it’s white Christian nationalism. It is the Sharia Law of the “Christian” crazy people who aren’t Christian at all but want to control every aspect of your life."

The fact-checking team Snopes reports it has received a "flood" on inquiries about Project 2025 — which has begun to surge on Google Trends.

"One of the most telling signs that this is beginning to backfire on Trump, however, is the way the MAGA forces on social media are starting to freak out," Marcotte writes. "As Democratic activist and researcher Will Stancill pointed out, the MAGA people who pretend to be leftists to sow confusion online are busy at work trying to pretend Project 2025 is, uh, a Biden thing."

The freak out stems from the fear that Project 2025 could prove fatal to Trump's campaign, Marcotte concludes.

"Trump cannot win without a large percentage of voters backing him under the false belief he's 'not so bad,'" she writes. "The more they find out about what he intends to do in office, the more will have second thoughts about risking another Trump term."

===

---

an 11 23

the security surveillance dump announced this week that many Republicans claim will show the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was a mostly peaceful affair is about to blow up in their faces, an analyst wrote Wednesday.

Writing for Salon, Amanda Marcotte says the tactic of releasing the footage as an attempt to absolve those who participated "doesn't seem like the smartest electoral strategy."

"But the GOP now is primarily composed of professional trolls who cannot turn down an opportunity to spew noxious gases online," she writes. "Sure enough, some of the most annoying people in Congress tweeted conspiracy theories about the footage in language so fevered you could practically hear them panting as they typed."

:{:{Also read:Legal expert maps out realistic ways Trump can stop all of his trials:

Marcotte also points to a tweet from Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee, in which he shared a picture of a convicted rioter who he claimed was an undercover federal agent — a claim that was easily debunked by NBC News reporter Ryan Reilly.

Marcotte also points out that Georgia GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene shared Lee's tweet, but later deleted it after it was shown to be fake. Lee, nevertheless, doubled down on the claim.

"We know Lee is lying because, while Lee may not be the smartest man, almost no one is stupid enough to believe this 'FBI did it' conspiracy theory," Marcotte writes, adding that the point of these conspiracy theories, "Is not to believe them, but to sucker liberals into go-nowhere arguments with disingenuous actors."

"The end game is to overwhelm their opposition with so many lies and bizarre digressions that people eventually just get exhausted and give up."

---

an 11 21

After the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse on Friday afternoon, right-wing trolls — many of whom are elected members of Congress — were ecstatic at this prime opportunity to trigger the liberals.Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Madison Cawthorne of North Carolina, and Paul Gosar of Arizona — all Republicans more interested in trolling than governance — made showily public offers of an internship to Rittenhouse. Cawthorne even took it to the next level, instructing his supporters to "be armed and dangerous."

Never one to be out-trolled, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia let loose with some truly unhinged tweets about "radical Marxists" who are trying to start "a race war," proclaiming that "gun rights are the only thing holding back the Communist Revolution the Democrats are waging." And on the Senate side, Ted Cruz of Texas attacked the "corrupt corporate media," skillfully targeting the very people he needs to amplify his message and get that sweet trolling attention.

Right-wing pundits joined in on all the gleeful trolling, as well.

Ann Coulter tweeted a meme equating Rittenhouse with superheroes, and Donald Trump Jr., forever trying and failing at being a Twitter wit, wrote, "The Rittenhouse jury just gave Biden his second colonoscopy of the day." Multiple right-wingers on social media wrote songs to honor Rittenhouse. On Friday, popular and t**rollish YouTuber Steven Crowdercelebrated the verdict by insisting, "it's so wrong that we teach young men that violence is immoral," and encouraged viewers to follow in Rittenhouse's lead by taking up arms against Black Lives Matter protesters. Tucker Carlson, King of the Trolls, will host Rittenhouse on his Fox News show and insisted that he's "not a racist person." This claim is impossible, of course, to square with the photos taken earlier this year in a Wisconsin bar where Rittenhouse partied with Proud Boys and flashed white supremacist signs at the camera.

All of these provocations worked as intended: They got attention and garnered liberal outrage. "Liberal tears" are the most valuable commodity in Republican circles these days, and nothing brings forth tears like senseless violence. For those who subsist on liberal outrage, the dunks were easy and plentiful, because it turns out those silly liberals really do make frowny faces over the celebration of political violence.

The right is reacting to this verdict like they're sports fans whose team just vanquished a rival team in the Superbowl. The excitement on the right was palpable, but also measurable. As an analysis from Raw Story shows, Facebook exploded with conservative celebrations of the verdict, with "18 of the top 20 most engaged page links in the world" originating with conservative American pages. And the pleasure of the moment was explicitly tied to joy over how upset liberals — or at least those perceived as liberals — were. Right-wing figurehead Dan Bongino, who is reliably one of the most popular figures on Facebook, posted a link claiming Chuck Todd "nearly cries" after the verdict. The post garnered over 3,000 shares and 68,000 reactions, the majority of which were the "laughing" emoji.

It's not just that this behavior is tasteless. It also illustrates how violence is the logical endpoint of the right-wing obsession with trolling liberals. If your goal is provoking a reaction, then violence is surely the most efficient way to do it. Unlike mean tweets and "f*ck your feelings" T-shirts, violence simply cannot be ignored. By celebrating this violence, congressional Republicans and right-wing media are openly inviting more of it, because the reward of upsetting people on the left is just so delicious. The distinction between right-wing trolling and violence is collapsing.

To be certain, the escalation of violence-as-trolling has been going on for a while now. As Eric Boehler wrote in his Press Run newsletter, "The flashpoints of Republicans and conservatives promoting political violence have become ceaseless, to the point of frightening normalization," to the point where polling data suggests "that as many as 21 million Americans think that the use of force is justifiedto restore Donald Trump to the presidency."

Much of the month has been dominated by a story about Gosar tweeting out a fan-made video that depicts him murdering President Joe Biden and Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. The Democratic-controlled House responded to this unsubtle threat by censuring Gosar and stripping him of his committee assignments, but nearly all Republicans stood by Gosar. The excuse used to defend Gosar's behavior was that he was just trolling liberals for fun. Gosar's digital director even put out a statement saying, "Everyone needs to relax. The left doesn't get meme culture. They have no joy."

However, right-wing "joy" is not mutually exclusive from violence.

Gosar's tweet wasboth trolling to get a reaction from the left and a threat of violence. Trolling is a crucial aspect to both amplifying violent threats and helping conservatives hype each other up for more violence. That's why Gosar doubled down by retweeting the video minutes after being censured for it. The message is clear: If you love outraging the left, then violence is the swiftest way to do it.

Even Rittenhouse's behavior prior to killing two people at a Kenosha, Wisconsin protest last year embodies this troll logic. As Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times observed, Rittenhouse's presence at the protest was clearly a provocation. Rittenhouse carried a showy AR-15 "in part because the rifle "looked cool," and the gun "seemed to invite conflict." Popular right-wing troll Drew Hernandez was at the protest that night, anthat, when some protesters saw Rittenhouse and other men with guns, "they immediately attempted to agitate them, to try and start some conflict with them."

In other words, Rittenhouse's AR-15 functioned both as a troll and as a deadly weapon. The distinction between trying to "trigger the liberals" and actually pulling the trigger on liberals collapsed completely the night Rittenhouse shot three people, killing two. He certainly got what every right-wing troll wants, which is an outraged and dramatic reaction from people he perceived as liberals. The result was two dead bodies — and another opportunity for GOP leaders to troll some more, further reinforcing the idea that, for those who live for triggering the liberals, nothing works better to get a reaction than actual violence.

---

11 21

After Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin won Virginia's gubernatorial race Tuesday, the GOP appears eager to take his bigotry-infused "education" strategy nationwide. "The Republican swings in Virginia and New Jersey show the efficacy of a new model of conservative politics: appealing to suburban voters by promising greater parental control of schools," the Washington Post reports Thursday morning. It's a clever strategy.

If the public knew what the GOP demands actually were — banning classic books like Toni Morrison's "Beloved" or "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood — most parents would not be on board. Few people want to be a Nazi book burner! But the GOP is repackaging this deeply fascist love of censorship in a friendlier frame of "parental rights." They got lucky that the Democratic candidate, Terry McAuliffe, blundered in the campaign's closing weeks when he said, "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach," instead of mounting a robust defense of free speech and teaching the truth about slavery and segregation in history classes.

So what, exactly, are kids learning?

Republicans use scare terms like "critical race theory," and liberals try to draw attention to the lists of books Republicans are trying to ban, mainly for suggesting racism is bad or that LGBTQ people exist. It's extremely important for the left to focus on how this supposed fight over "education" is really a proxy fight over the right's rejection of equality for LGBTQ people and people of color.

But there's another aspect to this fight that has been less discussed: How the GOP war on schools is instigated, organized, and funded by right-wing religious groups whose true agenda is opposing the rights of children.

Conservatives, especially the Christian right, have long taken a dim view of raising kids who can think for themselves. Their view is children should be "trained" to be obedient and submissive. Under the guise of "parents' rights," the Christian right is mainstreaming their hostility to the very idea that children have a right to an education. In this case, the right of a child to have a proper education that teaches critical thinking and intellectual curiosity.

As journalist Talia Lavin writes in her recent deep dive into the history of corporal punishment in evangelical circles, the movement of "biblical parenting" started in 1970, when Christian right activist James Dobson published his book "Dare to Discipline," which advanced a belief in "the enforced submission of children to absolute authority." Soon there was a cottage industry of similar books, all of which promoted "the complete subjection of the child's will," usually through relentlessly beating kids (which is minimized through the cutesy word "spanking"). Children, in the Christian right view, are not to be educated — they are to be "trained." This philosophy of child-rearing was accompanied by a movement to impose their anti-child ideology on society and government. Unfortunately, this particular political goal of the Christian right gets far less coverage than their war on reproductive rights, their anti-LGBTQ activism, or their white supremacy. This lack of attention may, in fact, be a reason they've been wildly successful. As Lavin notes, hitting children "is outlawed completely in63 countries," but "legal in all fifty states." Laws allowing parents to take kids out of school to be "home schooled" are notoriously lax, and there's been a great deal of headway in redirecting kids out of schools and into religious "charter schools" that embrace the training-not-education approach. Donald Trump's Education Secretary was Betsy DeVos, a far-right fundamentalist who has spent decades trying to destroy the public education system. It's why the U.S. is the only country in the world that hasn't ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.

It should be unsurprising, then, that the religious right groups who have long opposed children's rights are behind this newly sprung nationwide attack on public schools.

Religious right stalwarts like the Family Research Council and the Heritage Foundation have been central to planning and unhatching this scheme to use the scare term "critical race theory" to stir up outrage at schools for teaching the truth about racism in history and literature classes. Also central to the effort, as reported by NBC News, is the International Organization for the Family, which has, like the Family Research Council, been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Under its original name, the World Congress of Families, the International Organization for the Family promoted not just a deeply authoritarian and patriarchal view of the family, but also white nationalism. As explained at the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Through its ideology of the so-called "natural family,"WCF promotes a strict view of family, one based exclusively on the marriage of one heterosexual man to one heterosexual woman and their biological children, to the exclusion of many different types of families. Closely tied to this ideology is an adherence to strict binary gender roles, in which men serve as the heads of households and women as their helpmates and the bearer of children. Only this type of family, they contend, can quell the "demographic winter," the idea that European populations, especially, are in decline because of homosexuality, abortion, feminism, women in the workplace, and a variety of other things that deviate from the "natural family."

There's no way to really untangle all these different far-right views from each other. Forcing children into submission and preventing them from developing critical thinking skills is seen as crucial for raising them to be compliant adults who will unquestioningly adopt this patriarchal and racist view of family formation and purpose. One can see why schools teaching the book "Beloved" was flagged by far-right activists as a threat. Not only does the book humanize the victims of white supremacy, it also raises important questions about the rights of children and the meaning of self-determination. Indeed, even the concept of "raising questions" alarms the Christian right. In their view, children are not to think for themselves but to passively accept the instructions of elders.

Unfortunately, one reason the Christian right has a lot of success smuggling their radical views into mainstream politics is they, as happened in Virginia, often reframe it as a matter of "parental rights."

Most parents reject the religious right's extremist views on extinguishing a child's autonomy, to be clear. But most parents believe that they should have some control over their child's life, including over their education, health care, and disciplinary matters. They aren't even really wrong about this. Children's rights are always in contention with the need to keep children safe and to socialize them properly. Knowing the exact right mix of autonomy and discipline is a nuanced and tough question. The problem, however, is the reframing this as a matter of "parents' rights" distracts from the real issue, which is the war being waged on children'srights.

Children have a right to learn the truth about American history and to learn critical thinking skills. Children have a right to be exposed to great works of literature and art, and to expand their horizons. Children have a right to a robust health education, which includes information about sexuality and sexual orientation so that they can grow into healthy adults, instead of being hobbled with shame for having normal human impulses. All this chitter-chatter about "parents' rights" — by design — is hiding the fact that many of these rights of children are under very real threat right now

Failure to understand the deeply radical nature of the Christian right ideology fueling this school board movement leaves Democrats unequipped to fight back. We saw this with the McAuliffe campaign, which fumbled early on with the "parents' rights" framing, and only too late in the campaign realized they could reframe the matter — correctly, mind you — as a deeply racist attempt to censor books. Democrats need to highlight how profoundly anti-child the GOP attack on school boards is and defend both the right of children to learn and the right of educators to teach.

Most people don't want kids to grow up without learning to think for themselves. Democrats can win this fight — but first, they must understand what they're truly up against.

---

wow literally strict fr

an 11 21

after Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin won Virginia's gubernatorial race Tuesday, the GOP appears eager to take his bigotry-infused "education" strategy nationwide. "The Republican swings in Virginia and New Jersey show the efficacy of a new model of conservative politics: appealing to suburban voters by promising greater parental control of schools," the Washington Post reports Thursday morning. It's a clever strategy.

If the public knew what the GOP demands actually were — banning classic books like Toni Morrison's "Beloved" or "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood — most parents would not be on board. Few people want to be a Nazi book burner! But the GOP is repackaging this deeply fascist love of censorship in a friendlier frame of "parental rights." They got lucky that the Democratic candidate, Terry McAuliffe, blundered in the campaign's closing weeks when he said, "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach," instead of mounting a robust defense of free speech and teaching the truth about slavery and segregation in history classes.

So what, exactly, are kids learning?

Conservatives, especially the Christian right, have long taken a dim view of raising kids who can think for themselves. Their view is children should be "trained" to be obedient and submissive. Under the guise of "parents' rights," the Christian right is mainstreaming their hostility to the very idea that children have a right to an education. In this case, the right of a child to have a proper education that teaches critical thinking and intellectual curiosity.

As journalist Talia Lavin writes in her recent deep dive into the history of corporal punishment in evangelical circles, the movement of "biblical parenting" started in 1970, when Christian right activist James Dobson published his book "Dare to Discipline," which advanced a belief in "the enforced submission of children to absolute authority." Soon there was a cottage industry of similar books, all of which promoted "the complete subjection of the child's will," usually through relentlessly beating kids (which is minimized through the cutesy word "spanking"). Children, in the Christian right view, are not to be educated — they are to be "trained." This philosophy of child-rearing was accompanied by a movement to impose their anti-child ideology on society and government. Unfortunately, this particular political goal of the Christian right gets far less coverage than their war on reproductive rights, their anti-LGBTQ activism, or their white supremacy. This lack of attention may, in fact, be a reason they've been wildly successful. As Lavin notes, hitting children "is outlawed completely in63 countries," but "legal in all fifty states." Laws allowing parents to take kids out of school to be "home schooled" are notoriously lax, and there's been a great deal of headway in redirecting kids out of schools and into religious "charter schools" that embrace the training-not-education approach. Donald Trump's Education Secretary was Betsy DeVos, a far-right fundamentalist who has spent decades trying to destroy the public education system. It's why the U.S. is the only country in the world that hasn't ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.

It should be unsurprising, then, that the religious right groups who have long opposed children's rights are behind this newly sprung nationwide attack on public schools.

Through its ideology of the so-called "natural family," WCF promotes a strict view of family, one based exclusively on the marriage of one heterosexual man to one heterosexual woman and their biological children, to the exclusion of many different types of families. Closely tied to this ideology is an adherence to strict binary gender roles, in which men serve as the heads of households and women as their helpmates and the bearer of children. Only this type of family, they contend, can quell the "demographic winter," the idea that European populations, especially, are in decline because of homosexuality, abortion, feminism, women in the workplace, and a variety of other things that deviate from the "natural family."

Most people don't want kids to grow up without learning to think for themselves. Democrats can win this fight — but first, they must understand what they're truly up against.

---

11 21

...

Plugged-in voters understand that the solution to this problem is to elect more Democrats, to create majorities strong enough that the Joe Manchins and Kyrsten Sinemas of the world can't derail the agenda. But low information voters, the kind who are most likely to tune out during an off-year, only see that Democrats can't get squat done and so they see no reason to vote. As one Democratic pollster told the Washington Post, voters are saying, "It doesn't matter who we elect, it's all the same."

Also predictable: That Republicans would fire up some nutty culture war lies and start a racist panic (to be dropped the second it is no longer useful). They do this every time,as those of us who remember long-forgotten issues like "the caravan" and the "Ground Zero mosque," which were once treated by Republicans as the most pressing issues of our time. Republicans signaled for months ahead of time that they were going to make transphobic urban legends and this bullshit about "critical race theory"the center of the campaign. But instead of hitting back hard and fast, Democrats let the situation fester. It was only at the last minute that McAuliffe's campaign started pointing out that "critical race theory" is a pretext for what is outright government censorship, no different in its origins than the Nazi book burnings. By then, however, it was a matter of too little, too late — the Republican spin already dominated the narrative.

There's a tendency in both the mainstream media and the hot take industry of social media to reduce the complex math of elections to simplistic narratives about voters "switching" sides. But that's really not how these things work. A bunch of Biden voters didn't see a few school board tantrums on the local news and suddenly become Tucker Carlson fans. The people who have always been bigots were hella fired up. A huge chunk of the "everyone else" category that constitutes the Democratic base is demoralized and checked out.

Getting racists to stop being fired up by race-baiting is probably a lost cause. So Democrats have to figure out how to outnumber them — and that requires getting their own people energized. The first step is to give would-be Democratic voters something to vote for,especially when there's no cartoon villains like Trump for people to vote against.

---

an 10 21

wildest thing about Donald Trump's Big Lie is that his own supporters don't actually believe it.

Oh, they say they do to any pollster who will ask them. A recent Morning Consult poll, like so many before it, shows nearly "7 in 10 GOP voters don't believe the 2020 election was free and fair and/or have little to no trust in the U.S. election system, while 49 percent doubt that next year's midterms will be free and fair."

But when pollsters dug a little deeper, they found that Republican voters don't behavelike people who think the elections are rigged. On the contrary, Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to act like people who both believe that they will get a chance to vote and that their vote will be fairly counted.

"A full 92 percent of self-identified Republican voters said that they planned to vote in the 2022 elections, with just 4 percent saying they did not plan to," explains Meredith McGraw at Politico. "By contrast, just 70 percent of self-identified Democrats said they planned to vote, and 29 percent said they did not plan to."

People who think their vote doesn't matter don't get fired up to vote. So Democratic demoralization, for instance, is perfectly explicable in light of both widespread voter suppression and the rapidly dwindling possibility that President Joe Biden's bold economic promises will ever come to pass. Feeling like your vote never changes anything isn't unreasonable for Democratic voters, and they are accordingly less enthused about voting.

Republicans, on the other hand, are acting very much like people who believe their vote matters. Indeed, as the poll reports, GOP voters who espouse faith in the Big Lie are more likely to believe their vote has power[twt stat]

what gives? How can people both "believe" elections are rigged against them, but behave like people who have total faith in the system?

The likeliest answer is also the simplest one: They're lying.

Like their hero, Donald Trump, Trump voters know full well that the 2020 election wasn't stolen. They just repeat the lie, like a bunch of trolls. It's a useful cover for their true agenda, which is seizing power in 2022 and 2024 by any means necessary — even if doing so requires cheating.

As Greg Sargent of the Washington Postnoted on Twitter Thursday morning, "Their collective agreement to pretend the lies about 1/6 and 2020 are true is best understood as a collective unshackling of themselves from any obligation to abide by future election losses -- the precondition to overturning them by whatever means are necessary."

Sargent was responding to reports that Tucker Carlson of Fox News plans to do a "special" to amplify conspiracy theories that the January 6 insurrection was a "false flag" operation. As with the claims that the 2020 election was "rigged," it's important to understand that not only does Carlson not believe this, neither do his viewers — even as they eat up and repeat these conspiracy theories.

We know this for a very simple reason: The same people making claims that January 6 was a "false flag" will, depending on the situation, flip around and make the contradictory claim that the insurrectionists were patriots and martyrs. It's why Carlson will claim one minute that QAnon is a mythliberals made up to smear conservatives, and then the next minute defend the very real QAnon as a bunch of freethinkers resisting liberal hegemony. It's how MyPillow CEO-turned-fascist-propagandist Mike Lindell can keep moving the date for Trump's miraculous reinstallation in the White House without most of his followers starting to ask questions about why his predictions never pan out. It's why Republicans aren't rattled by the failure to turn up any real incidents of "voter fraud" for Biden. It wasn't something they ever believed to begin with.

Contradictions don't faze right-wingers for the same reason they don't change their minds in the face of facts: The truth does not matter. All that matters is power. Trolling through lies and contradictory claims is viewed as a crucial weapon in getting power.

To be certain, there is absolutely nothing new about this observation. On the contrary, it's quite clear that Trumpism is just fascism by another name, and the rhetorical game-playing of fascists is a subject that's been well-scrutinized. Semiotician Umberto Eco wrote in his 1995 analysis of fascist rhetoric, fascism is "a beehive of contradictions," because the point is to destroy rational discourse. To the fascist, Eco writes, "Thinking is a form of emasculation" and should be rejected in favor of a raw will to power. And, of course, there's the popular quote from philosopherJean-Paul Sartreabout how fascists "know that their remarks are frivolous" and they "are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words."

This is why conservatives are so impervious to facts and become more so as the GOP slides further and further down the fascist path. Facts are only persuasive to people who believe that truth and empiricism matter. For the authoritarian right, however, facts are understood as inconveniences and obstacles. In that light, it makes sense why they take so much delight in rejecting facts and driving liberals bonkers by doing so. It's a show of power, to relish how reality itself cannot defeat them.

Like many on the left, I was amused watching perennial GOP troll Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia freaking out at the possibility that her robotic repetition of the Big Lie might actually cause her followers to believe it and choose not to vote. And certainly, there are a small percentage of numpty-heads in the GOP coalition who don't realize it's all a big con and might elect to sit out elections because of it. In close elections, that extremely small percentage of Republicans who aren't in on the joke may matter. But that 92% of Republicans are feeling confident and excited about voting in future elections shows that the faith in the Big Lie is, for the vast majority of them, an act performed for the cameras and not a sincerely held belief.

Republican voters are not misled by Trump's Big Lie. They are empowered by the opportunity to join in. If there's any chance of beating back the rising fascist movement in America, it starts with understanding this crucial difference.

an 10 21

Ron Watkins, the guy most QAnon experts believe is on half of the duo — with his father Jim Watkins — to be the infamous Q of QAnon (He denies it) is now running for Congress. Watkins has relocated to Arizona from Japan, where he was believed by most QAnon researchers to have written the "Q drops" — along with his father — by pretending to be a high-placed D.C. official in the Donald Trump administration. He's planning to run as a Republican against Democratic incumbent Rep. Tom O'Halleran.

Watkins didn't pick Arizona's 1st district out of any real connection to the area, or even the state. The district has become a hot commodity because, after a robust bout of gerrymanderingby the GOP-controlled state legislature, it's believed that that the congressional seat will likely turn over to a Republican.Subsequently, the race is a magnet for a lot of Republicans with congressional dreams and a better base of donors than the denies-he-is-Q guy.

GOP political consultants are quick to downplay the possibility that Watkins could win. Arizona Republican political consultant Stan Barnes told Will Sommer of the Daily Beast that a guy "who's allegedly related to the QAnon phenomenon has no chance of winning." But as Sommer pointed out, "QAnon connections haven't proved disqualifying" for Republicans like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado.Indeed, Donald Trump incited an insurrection on the Capitol that was manned heavily by QAnoners, and he is the current favorite to win the 2024 election. Watkins is squirrelly, will likely be outspent, and his sleazy history includes giving an interview in a brothel — so I wouldn't bet in his favor. Still, he's not crazy to think that he's got a shot.

Blame gerrymandering.

Across the country, Republicans — who already control the majority of state legislatures — are working swiftly to redraw election maps to marginalize Democratic voters and create as many non-competitive Republican seats as possible. Most of the political coverage of this, for understandable reasons, is focused on how this will further enshrine the Republican power, giving them what could very well be permanent control of the federal government, despite the fact that most voters actually cast their ballots for Democrats.

But another, less intended consequence of gerrymandering is that it will speed up the Republican race to the bottom.

GOP gerrymandering empowers an ever-larger cast of idiots, conspiracy theorists, con artists, and open white nationalists to win national office. The situation is bad now, with Congress home to characters like Taylor Green, Boebert and Florida's Rep. Matt Gaetz, currently under federal investigation for sex trafficking of minors.But it's about to get much worse. Very soon the clown car will unload its passengers into primary campaigns for all of these newly safe Republican seats created by gerrymandering.

Here's how it happens: In districts with safe seats for one party or another, the election that counts is not the general, but the dominant party's primary election. This lack of general election competition creates all sorts of problems, but it's less of an issue in Democratic districts, where the diversity of the coalition at least creates real ideological debate in primaries. For Republican candidates, however, the incentives are completely skewed.

The kinds of people who vote in Republican primaries are ... well, not America's best. Without having to worry about running candidates who have to compete against Democrats for moderate voters, GOP primary voters can just go with whatever candidate excites them the most. And what speaks to Republican primary voters is sadism, racism, and a deep commitment to wild conspiracy theories. Gerrymandering makes it so that America's worst voters also happen to be the only voters who count at all in an increasing number of districts.

This is how we got Gaetz, who won with nearly 65% of the vote in his staunchly Republican district, Taylor Green, who drew nearly 75% of the vote, and Rep. Paul Gosar, who flaunts his white nationalist yearnings and got nearly 70% of the vote in his deeply conservative Arizona district. Having a heavily Republican district is an open invitation for the worst people to run, secure in the knowledge that as long as they can win over the Newsmax-addled, Facebook-meme-sharing hard right nuts that vote in GOP primaries. After that, it's a red carpet straight to national office.

Gerrymandering is not just a problem on the district level, either.

We can see from statewide offices what happens when Republicans don't feel they need to compete with Democrats in general elections. In both Florida and Texas, the incumbent Republican governors — Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbot, respectively – are running on what can be fairly described as a pro-COVID-19 platform. Both have waged all-out war on any effort to stymie the virus's ability to spread to as many bodies as possible, with a doggedness that is indistinguishable from what they'd do if they were trying to get their own constituents killed.

They aren't doing this to win any popularity contests in their states. On the contrary, polling shows repeatedlythat the majority of Americans want leaders to fight the virus, not help it spread. In fact, their actions are causing Abbott and DeSantis to see big dips in their approval numbers. But neither of them cares because both states passed draconian voter suppression laws that shield Republican politicians from having to answer to the majority of their state residents. Having secured what they likely see as an easy GOP win through voter suppression, both Abbott and DeSantis are focused instead on pleasing Republican primary voters. Doing that means maximizing the sadism and the plain old nuttiness. As Adam Serwer wrote in the Atlantic, Abbott is "too afraid of his own base to act responsibly."

Such fear-based governance will only become more and more the norm as Republicans shut Democrats out of the ability to compete in general elections, meaning that Republican primaries loom ever larger as the only elections that count. The only way to win in many Republican primaries is to show you can out-crazy the other candidate.

So it's no wonder the guy who is alleged to be Q is running for office in Arizona. When all the political incentives favor a race to the bottom, the people who are already living in the sewer have a strong advantage.

---

How Colin Powell paved the way for Trump

Amanda Marcotte Salon

October 19, 2021

On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell gave the most important speech of his life. He argued before the United Nations that the George W. Bush administration should invade Iraq based on a bunch of evidence-free...

---

no lnx many

GOP pushes strategy to prolong the pandemic

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott feels the heat: analysis

Amanda Marcotte and Salon October 12, 2021

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.)

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.

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 "bullyingmany 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.

Abbott is not standing up for businesses or the economy.

:{:{}:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

---

an 1021 no lnx

America is sleepwalking towards fascism

Amanda Marcotte and Salon October 08, 2021

AT&T and Facebook are unaccountable. Donald Trump's still free. This week saw an overwhelming number of stories all pointing to the same conclusion: American authoritarianism is on the rise, juiced and protected by some of the richest and most powerful people in the United States.

Due to a combination of whistleblowers, investigations, and, in many cases, utter shamelessness on the part of fascism enablers, this is now out in the open. And yet, despite Democrats controlling both Congress and the White House, serious action to fight back and save American democracy remains underwhelming to nonexistent.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, for instance, released a sobering report this week detailing the extent of Donald Trump's efforts to force the Department of Justice to fabricate evidence for use as a pretext to nullify the 2020 election. The report details nine separate instances of Trump pressuring acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to enact a scheme, concocted by another DOJ lawyer named Jeffrey Clark, to overturn the election. Trump was not exactly subtle about what he expected from Rosen. On January 3 — three days before Trump resorted to inciting violence in a last-ditch effort to overthrow the election — Trump called a meeting and opened it by complaining, "One thing we know is you, Rosen, aren't going to do anything to overturn the election."

As Heather "Digby" Parton writes at Salon, "The president of the United States tried for weeks to get the Attorney General to overturn the election. That is the definition of an attempted coup."

:{:{}:

Senate Republicans are defending Trump on the grounds that this effort failed, which, as I point out in today's Standing Room Only newsletter, is the equivalent of saying attempted murder isn't a real crime. And the reason they're defending him is not mysterious. He's going to run again in 2024 — and will try to steal the election again, as well — and he does so with the full support of the GOP establishment, which is manipulating state election laws to make it easier for Trump next time.

This week, as well, Reuters published a disturbing report exposing how One America News, which can aptly be described as an authoritarian propaganda channel supporting Trump's demands to be installed illegally as president, is being bankrolled by the communications giant AT&T.

OAN's founder, Robert Herring Sr., not only claims that OAN was started at the request of AT&T executives but that court records show "AT&T has been a crucial source of funds flowing into OAN, providing tens of millions of dollars in revenue." AT&T defends this by saying they offer "many news channels that offer viewpoints across the political spectrum," but of course, OAN is not "news," because they heavily supported false claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent. OAN is profiting handsomely from Trump's insurrection, as the "network's online audience soared in November after conservative mainstay and OAN competitor Fox News affirmed Joe Biden's victory."

Fascist propaganda, it turns out, is very good business indeed. This ugly reality, that there's money to be made in elevating false, authoritarian propaganda, was also highlighted in the rolling news stories this week around Facebook, stemming from the revelations offered by whistleblower Frances Haugen.

Haugen collected thousands of documents during her time working for the civic integrity department at Facebook, which she says was marginalized precisely because having civic integrity is not good for profit. Haugen's documentation demonstrated what many have long suspected based on public evidence: Facebook knows that right-wingers are using their platform to spread disinformation and undermine democracy. They just don't care because authoritarian disinformation is wildly popular and therefore good for business.

This is why the right is freaking out and spreading conspiracy theories to discredit Haugen. They depend heavily on Facebook to distribute their false, inflammatory propaganda, and without it, their efforts to undermine democracy would lose a lot of power.

These stories are all troubling. The situation is clear-cut. There's a powerful authoritarian leader gunning to destroy democracy and install himself as the nation's leader. He has not just the full support of a major political party and the political power to arrange the laws to make this happen for him, but a propaganda apparatus that touches every corner of American life. Corporate interests may front like they oppose this, but behind the scenes, they offer material support to fascists because they see doing so as profitable. None of this is a secret.

:{:{}:

And yet ... nothing substantive is being done.

:{:{}:

The Senate Judiciary released a report detailing Trump's extensive efforts to overthrow democracy, and yet there's not a whiff of a hint that there's any movement from the Department of Justice to hold him criminally accountable for his actions. On the contrary, the DOJ is helping Trump, by shielding his Justice Department appointees from being questioned by congressional investigators. The assault on free and fair elections on the state level has been thoroughly documented, but legislation that would prevent these anti-democratic actions is moribund in a Democratic-controlled Congress because a couple of Democratic senators prioritize the filibuster over democracy itself. Democrats control some of the most powerful offices in the land, and yet they act helpless to stop the ongoing coup effort being conducted by a private citizen in Florida who has a criminal rap sheet many times longer than should be necessary to put him away for years.

There curiously has also been no accountability for the corporate interests who support rising fascism because it's in their financial interests to do so.

Haugen's whistleblowing efforts focused heavily on attempts to expose Facebook's role in spreading right-wing disinformation, but when she was brought up for a Senate hearing, it was to talk about teen girls and self-esteem, a problem even the Insurrectionist Caucus is happy to pull faces and claim to be upset by. It's an important issue, to be sure, but in the face of the literal end to American democracy, it's questionable whether teen self-esteem should be the main priority for the Senate when it comes to Facebook.

There's just no way out of it. The country is sleepwalking its way into an authoritarian overthrow of democracy.

There's plenty of journalism and exposés on all of these social forces Trump is exploiting to capture the White House in 2024. Yet, despite all of the noise, there's little in the way of action to change things. But it doesn't have to be this way.

Democrats have real power, and even if a couple of no-good centrist Democrats are standing in the way of electoral reform, there are surely other actions that could be taken to stop Trump. A lack of imagination and political cowardice, however, is inducing this attitude of helplessness in Democrats. And it's one that Trump will all too easily exploit to get his way.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Here's how Facebook discovered Russian interference - Alternet.org ›

Mark Zuckerberg's plans for the future of Facebook come right out of ... ›

Why everyone is mad at Mark Zuckerberg - Alternet.org ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy ... ›

harv 2017 taLK

---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/elizabeth-warren-facebook/

no lnx tet

Elizabeth Warren was right about Facebook all along

Amanda Marcotte and Salon October 05, 2021

The timing couldn't have been more dramatic when Facebook and its other popular products, including WhatsApp and Instagram, went down for over five hours on Monday. The worldwide outage happened between Sunday's dramatic unveiling of whistleblower Frances Haugen on "60 Minutes" and Haugen's scheduled Senate testimony on Tuesday. The hearing is looking at the negative social impacts of Facebook and its other apps. The company attributed Monday's outage to technical problems. Still, the event functioned as a formidable reminder of how much power Facebook has over the lives of billions of people around the world.

"The Facebook outage on Monday was a planetary-scale demonstration of how essential the company's services have become to daily life," Raymond Zhong of the New York Times writes, adding that Facebook and its many apps "are critical platforms for doing business, arranging medical care, conducting virtual classes, carrying out political campaigns [and] responding to emergencies" around the entire planet.

The social media outage didn't just make it harder to peruse your high school sweetheart's Facebook wedding photos or linger overlong on some of the more embarrassing thirst traps you follow on Instagram. As people trying to shop online or use subscription services were reminded, a huge percentage of sites use Facebook as a login program. In some parts of the world, Facebook and WhatsApp stand in for phone service, thereby serving as the main way people communicate with family members, many social services and businesses. Some businesses, such as food vendors, do all of their sales through Facebook-owned platforms.

This illustration of Facebook's power was likely a coincidence, but it's still chilling in light of what the Washington Post reports as Facebook's changed P.R. approach, which comes in the face of Haugen dumping a ton of documents revealing that the company has been aware of how much social damage it causes, but doesn't care because it's profitable.

"Facebook is approaching its latest controversy over political polarization and the toxic effects of social media in a more aggressive and defiant way than it has previously," Post reporters Elizabeth Dwoskin and Craig Timberg write. Instead of the usual Facebook response to controversy, where CEO Mark Zuckerberg offers a hand-wringing apology and an empty promise to change, this time "the company has deployed a slate of executives to mount a public defense."

The lesson of Monday's outage is not that the world is too in the thrall of Facebook to do anything to fight back against its abuses, but the opposite. It's an illustration that Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, as usual, is right: It's time to break up Big Tech.

Warren launched her war on Facebook in the spring of 2019, during her campaign to win the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. While her proposal to take on Silicon Valley addressed other behemoths like Amazon and Google, her campaign deliberately made Facebook the face of tech's monopoly problem by running ads on Facebook calling out the company's "vast power over our economy and our democracy." It was a smart move, betting that the company would react in an infantile manner. Sure enough, Facebook took down (and then swiftly restored) the ads, giving Warren an opportunity to draw attention to "their ability to shut down a debate over whether FB has too much power."

Warren's plan to break up Big Tech was complex, involving both legislative and executive action. The former has no more chance of getting through the obstinate filibuster defense of Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona than any other meaningful legislation to save democracy. But the latter plan, to unleash federal regulators who will aggressively enforce existing antitrust laws against Big Tech companies, has gained traction, and in a surprisingly bipartisan fashion. In December, the Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general in 48 states filed suit against Facebook, accusing the company of maintaining "its monopoly position by buying up companies that present competitive threats and by imposing restrictive policies that unjustifiably hinder actual or potential rivals that Facebook does not or cannot acquire."

Looking out at the international damage done by a mere five-hour shortage of Facebook's services proves the point of the lawsuit. As the New York Times reported, some people were literally unable to communicate with health care workers and some businesses lost total contact with customers because Facebook products have so completely monopolized communications in their communities. Warren accused Big Tech of using "their resources and control over the way we use the Internet to squash small businesses and innovation," but even she probably didn't imagine that the problem is so serious that an empanada seller in Colombia would lose a day of sales without WhatsApp.

Warren responded to the Facebook controversies and the outage on Monday with concision:

But TMZ, of all outlets, got a little more out of Warren, asking her about Haugen's "60 Minutes" appearance and testimony.

"She's trying to save our democracy," Warren told the TMZ reporter, with regards to Haugen. "And she recognizes the kind of threat that Facebook poses."

Tuesday's hearing featuring Haugen is focused on the rather narrow question of the dangers that Facebook presents to kids. Haugen is the source of internal documents published by the Wall Street Journal showing that Facebook is well aware that Instagram increases depression and anxiety among teenage girls, who often obsessively compare themselves to the impossible ideals of beauty promoted on the app.

Monday's outage can hopefully help beef up the FTC case against Facebook. The original case was thrown out in June by a federal judge who argued that it wasn't strong enough. Federal regulators didn't give up, though, and are putting together a more extensive case arguing that Facebook failed "to compete with new innovators" like Instagram and WhatsApp, so instead "bought or buried them when their popularity became an existential threat."

It's suddenly a lot harder to deny the negative impacts of such anti-competitive practices. There was, quite literally, an international communications breakdown across a number of apps on Monday simply because Facebook had an outage. The situation is made worse by the fact that all these different apps are governed by the irresponsible attitudes that Haugen is now detailing publicly.

More competition won't change the market forces that drive right-wingers to spread disinformation or cause teenage girls to worry about body image, but it could make it easier to pressure companies to do better by their customers. Right now, Facebook can afford this "f*** you!" stance because, for much of the world, they're the only game in town. Until that changes, there's no hope of making Facebook act more responsibly.

---

an 1021

During the 2020 Democratic primary, Sen. Elizabeth Warren made fighting corruption her number one priority. It may not have seemed that way in the press, which tended to characterize the senior senator from Massachusetts as a female Sen. Bernie Sanders. Most coverage focused heavily on her bold economic ideas, such as a wealth tax. But when she was actually asked what her major focus in politics was, Warren never hesitated to say that fighting corruption should come first — because of her commitment to passing progressive economic policies.

"The rich and the powerful have been calling the shots in Washington forever and ever," Warren told Vox's Ezra Klein in 2019, explaining why she was intent on passing a massive anti-corruption bill meant to curtail the influence of lobbyists and influence of moneyed interests on Capitol Hill.

"Look closely, and you'll see — on issue after issue, widely popular policies are stymied because giant corporations and billionaireswho don't want to pay taxes or follow any rules use their money and influence to stand in the way of big, structural change," she wrote in her plan announcement.

Warren's view is, sadly and perhaps surprisingly, not popular. Republicans clearly don't view corruption as a bad thing these days — that's one more reason why they love Donald Trump. But even on the left, where everyone says they're against corruption and voters in particular always sign off on the idea that ending corruption is a good idea, there's a gulf between saying you're against it and actually working to eradicate it. If more agreed with Warren to make corruption a priority target, we might not be watching President Joe Biden's bold agenda slowly fall apart now.

When it comes to brass tacks, not enough people are willing to put in the effort required to make fighting corruption a real agenda item. Activists are more likely to put their time into causes like health care and climate change. Democratic politicians, when they get power, are also attracted to policy fights that offer tangible rewards, such as increased social spending, rather than the more abstract and far-flung discourse about lobbyists and corruption. And voters definitely reward politicians for these priorities, which is one reason why Warren lost handily in the primary to Sanders and Biden.

But as the current debacle playing out on Capitol Hill demonstrates, Warren was right all along. Democrats and their voters may want to pass progressive legislation that addresses wealth inequality, climate change and lack of health care. But corrupt business interests keep stopping them. It's like trying to make a dress when someone keeps stealing your sewing machine. You can have the pattern and the fabric and the vision, but if you don't have the means to put it all together, you will never get that dress made.

Biden and Sanders are learning this the hard way as their dual vision for the Build Back Better plan — an expansive set of bills meant to address climate change, reduce poverty, ensure child care, expand health care, and build up American infrastructure, among other things — teeters on the edge of collapse. After spending months carefully constructing a two-track plan where moderate Democrats would support the progressive agenda, in exchange for progressives supporting the moderate agenda, a handful of centrist Democrats in the House and Senate are about to blow the whole thing up by reneging on their end of the bargain. And while there are multiple reasons for this backstabbing behavior, it's hard not to notice that the undue influence of lobbyists.

The two biggest names in the Senate Betrayal Caucus are, of course, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Both are throwing their weight around, clearly trying to derail Biden's agenda while claiming to have no such intention. Instead, they come with an endless array of incoherent, even nonsensical, explanations as to why they can't just suck it up and vote for the two-bill track the Democratic caucus agreed to vote on. There's now an entire cottage industry built around psychoanalyzing these two: What do they want? What will get them to "yes"? Why won't they just tell us what they want, so we can give it to them? Why are they making so little sense?

Everyone has a favorite reason, but the likeliest is the boring one: They're being dodgy because they don't want to be honest about their real motives. Looking at their track records, it's hard not to notice that both deeply enjoy being wined and dined by some of the sleaziest lobbyists and fundraisers on Capitol Hill. Manchin, for instance, blew off fellow Democrats begging him to support voting rights in favor of going to a fundraiser held by oil and gas executives who have a financial interest in keeping working people from voting. Sinema is deep in cahoots with industry lobbyists who want to tank Biden's agenda, holding fundraisers with anti-Biden groups and taking money from the pharmacy industry, right before doing an about-face to block fair pricing drug policies she previously claimed to support.

It's not just those two. The price control policy for pharmaceuticals is one of the most wildly popular items in the Biden agenda — at least with voters. But a small group of Democrats in the House pulled that item out of the bill, and they're barely trying to pretend it's for any reason other than to appease pharmaceutical lobbyists. They likely know that politicians and voters may say they oppose corruption, but that actually doing something to stop it never becomes a priority.

Lobbyists have Sinema's ear, but her own party and voters do not. The Democratic party in Arizona is threatening a vote of no confidence against her, and her response was somewhere between a shrug and throwing them the finger. Activists are crowdfunding for a primary challenger against her. It is possible she is such an egomaniac that she thinks she's going to have a great re-election after teeing off her own voters, of course.But it's also hard not to wonder if she isn't influenced by the knowledge that she's all but guaranteed a well-heeled job in lobbying if she loses re-election. Notably, a lifetime ban on politicians becoming lobbyists is part of Warren's anti-corruption bill. If it was law, then Sinema might be making more pro-voter choices, rather than treating her constituents as an annoying inconvenience.

Corruption isn't a sexy issue, but focusing attention on it can pay huge dividends when it comes to advancing progressive causes. Take gun control, for instance. Decades of rational argumentation and emotional appeals did little to move the needle, policy-wise. Even in the face of children being murdered in schools repeatedly, Republican politicians have successfully blocked all bills, and Democrats didn't even bother making it a priority when they got power.Eventually, however, gun control advocates started to look away from the ideological arguments and toward the influence of the gun industry, through its main lobbying arm, the NRA.

Once they did that, real progress started to happen. Investigations revealed that the NRA was a thoroughly corrupt organization and that its leadership was on the take. Then the lawsuits started to fly. Now the organization is in very real danger of collapse — not because of its views, but because of its corruption. It might be too late, and Republicans may be too dug in on their gun mania to ever start to moderate. But without the NRA in their ear all the time, there could be a real chance to persuade even just a few Republicans to support common sense reforms that are backed by the majority of Americans. But only if the NRA is gone — and coming at them from a corruption angle was the path to this possibility.

It's admittedly a tough sell, even to Democrats. Most Democrats have been happy to back bills that tackle the issue in similar ways to what Warren proposes, and many seem to understand that they would benefit from a more level playing field, where wealthy interests have less influence over policy and politics. Still, as with most legislation that Democrats want to pass, anti-corruption bills have been torn apart on the shores of the filibuster. And the two people who are doing the most to make sure the filibuster remains and anti-corruption bills have no chance of passing? You guessed it: Manchin and Sinema. Corruption on Capitol Hill is a grotesque a house of mirrors, and until that changes, real progress will be an impossibly tall hill to climb.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/fox-news-media/

iam sorry to report I've had more than one conversation with progressives who, despite being savvy and well-read, are under the mistaken impression that Fox News has seen the light and has started to promote the COVID-19 vaccine. I've even witnessed speculation that Rupert Murdoch, who is himself vaccinated, had a come-to-Jesus meeting with the Fox News brass about the wisdom of encouraging their own audience to contract a dangerous disease. And while I always enjoy a cheeky opportunity to tell folks they should be reading my work more, overall, it's distressing to see that people are buying into the myth that Fox News has "pivoted" to being pro-vaccine.

But can you blame folks for believing this? Someone who prides themselves on a responsible, fact-based diet of mainstream media sources like CNN, NBC News and NPR likely got exposed in mid-to-late July to misleading stories hyping an out-of-context clip of Fox News host Sean Hannity saying, "I believe in the science of vaccination" and urging viewers to "take COVID seriously." The clip also got shared widely on social media.

Everyone likes a "scared straight" story, and it just felt goodto believe conservatives were on the verge of giving up this anti-vaccination nonsense. Unforutantely, the story was B.S.

As Iand reporters who cover right wing media for Media Matters and Vox pointed out at the time, Hannity's show that night was not only bookmarked by two other shows — Laura Ingraham's and Tucker Carlson's — that openly discouraged vaccination, but his supposedly "pro-vaccine" comments came in the middle of a segment that overall portrayed vaccines as dangerous and a threat to freedom. Even in the edited clip, Hannity instructed his viewers to "research like crazy," which isa common anti-vaxx rhetorical trick. As with creationists claiming they want to "teach the controversy," it's a way to seem reasonable while slyly directing people to engage conspiracy theories and suggesting those conspiracy theories are on equal footing, credibility-wise, as scientific fact. As Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times** wrote, Hannity was basically "encouraging listeners to expose themselves to the wide variety of anti-vax conspiracy mongering accessible on social media via 'research.'"

But in case there was any doubt, a perusal of Hannity's programming in the weeks since his supposed conversion shows that, actually, Hannity is still largely focused on stoking confusion, spreading misinformation, and portraying vaccination efforts as a liberal conspiracy against his audience. As Media Matters documented on Tuesday, Hannity gave an entire hour of his radio show over to two anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists — men who use phrases like "the demon needle" and "poisonous jabs." Hannity presented them falsely as medical experts to people calling in looking for advice. He also sneered at Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden's chief medical advisor, calling him "flip-flop Fauci" and declaring that his anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists were better experts. The conspiracy theorists discouraged vaccines for young people, implied that dangerous and unproven drugs are superior prevention to the vaccine, and lied about the breakthrough infection rate, implying it's high when it is not.

This in in line with the general approach to the vaccine question on Hannity's show. From the moment that his misleading "pro-vaccine" clip went viral, Hannity has aggressively downplayedthe claim that he's promoting the vaccine, declaring two days after the initial clipthat, "I'm not urging people to get the COVID-19 vaccine" and "I have never told anyone to get a vaccine." In the past few weeks, he's attacked vaccine passport programs, portrayed vaccine advocacy as "threats coming from Democrats," exaggerated the risks of breakthrough infections, and even claimed that vaccine passport programs are racist against Black people. (In reality, Black people are at a higher risk of dying of COVID-19, which is one reason why aggressive public health measures are necessary.)

A visit to Hannity's Facebook page is more of the same. It features a post mocking New York City mayor Bill De Blasio for supposedly playing doctor by instituting a vaccine passport system, Blames undocumented immigrants for the COVID-19 spread when the medical establishment is quite clear that the problem is willfully unvaccinated people, and celebrates Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is selling merchandise mocking vaccine advocates and whose state is paying the price for his idiocy with some of the highest rates of COVID-19 in the country.

Overall, Hannity viewers get a strong message that vaccines are ineffective, dangerous, and getting one is just giving into those damn Democrats. And his firehose of anti-vaccination demagoguery is in line with the rest of Fox News, which continues to take the stance that vaccines are "a menace", ineffective, and that refusing vaccination is a good way to prove one's right wing bona fides.

And yet, this notion that the network has changed its tune has become received wisdom in much of the mainstream media.

Googling "Hannity vaccines" turns up a darkly funny mix of Fox News headlines demonizing vaccination and mainstream media headlines praising Fox News for being pro-vaccination. One of those more recent ones, from Morning Consult, even announces, "Fox News Personalities Started to Promote COVID-19 Vaccines. Viewers Have Taken Notice." The article declares that "some conservative media personalities have gone all in on vaccines," falsely citing Hannity as an example. It credits this supposed shift in messaging for the fact that vaccine "reluctance fell to an all-time low this week among adults who watch Fox News: 27 percent of viewers now say they probably or definitely won't get vaccinated, down from 30 percent the week before and a high of 37 percent in mid-March." That's certainly an improvement, but hard to say if Fox News is really the cause, since their much-ballyhooed "shift" is an illusion propped up to bamboozle the mainstream media and not actually representative of the vaccine-negative messaging their audience actually gets. The comments from his fans on Facebook make quite clear what message they're getting, and it's definitely not that vaccination is good and that unvaccinated people are the cause of the current surge. Instead, it's fear-mongering about the shots, blaming immigrants and not the unvaccinated, and comparing vaccine passports and mandates to Nazi Germany.

As the New York Times reports, fears of the delta variant are also driving a lot of red state Americans to get the shot, clearly deciding that sticking it to the liberals isn't worth getting sick over. The article also points out that "employers and universities have started requiring the shots to return to work and class." Even the phrase "pandemic of the unvaccinated," which is being heavily (and accurately) promoted by the White House and the Centers for Disease Control, likely deserves credit for underscoring to the unvaccinated that it's they, not hated liberals, who are paying the price for listening to Fox News.

So this is probably not a matter of one pro-vaccine Hannity clip in a sea of anti-vaccine messaging changing minds. It's just that even the most devout death cults eventually have some members who start to question the wisdom of sacrificing themselves for some dumb ideology. Let's hope that the number of Fox News fans deciding they have their limits only continues to rise.

---

amanda m

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/gop/

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.

The GOP's pro-virus campaign has been wildly successful.

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.

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.

, 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]

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/corporations-jan-6/

amanda m

Six months ago, the insurrection Donald Trump incited at the U.S. Capitol in a last bid attempt to steal the presidential election from Joe Biden, was experienced as a cataclysmic event. Many assumed it would remake American politics permanently — so much so that dozens of major corporations rushed forwardto declare they were withdrawing all financial support from Republican politicians who aided Trump's effort by voting against certifying the results of the electoral college vote count.

In the past half-year, however, a combination of Republican intransigence and Trump's talent as escaping justice has already served to move the insurrection from the category of "unthinkable" to "mainstream GOP politics," allowing it to be viewed through the lens of partisan bickering instead of what it actually was, a violent attempted coup. In turn, a lot of the companies who swore they were cutting off the money spigot to insurrectionist Republicans have quietly turned it back on.

Judd Legum is the investigative journalistbehind Popular Information, where he keeps track of both the corporations who have reneged on their promise and the lazy excuses they produce for doing so. He spoke with Salon's Amanda Marcotte about the role corporations continue to play in normalizing the violent assault on American democracy six months after Jan. 6:

It's been six months since the insurrection at the Capitol. Nearly 200 major corporations in the immediate aftermath of the Capital riot said that they were ending donations to the insurrectionist Republicans who voted to overturn the election. My question to you is how well are they sticking with that promise?

Well, it varies by corporation.

Overall, if you look at the whole group of 200 corporations, most of them are, at least at this point, sticking to what they said around January 6th. But there are a number of corporations that have resumed giving money to the Republicans who voted to overturn the election. Corporations like Toyota, Cigna, a few others. A larger group is doing so indirectly by not giving to those individual candidates, but by giving money, for example, to the National Republican Campaign Committee, which is the fundraising arm to support the reelection of Republican members of the House. Two-thirds of that group were objecting to the electoral college. There's a group that has resumed business as usual. So far, that's the minority, but obviously, it's still significant and the size of that group could increase over time.

Toyota has gotten the most attention for reneging on their promises and why is that?

Just because they have given to the largest number of Republican objectors. The most recent count is 39 Republican objectors that they've given money to, $62,000 in total. While there's some other corporations who've given to one or two or three or four, they stick out because they've given to so many. The only companies that are kind of up there with them are some of the defense contractors like Northrop Grumman and Boeing. They've started at similar numbers.

In your reporting on this, you found that the wording that these companies use to justify the decision sounds an awful lot like the language from a memo circulated by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce earlier this year. What's going on there?

In the immediate aftermath of January 6th, the Chamber of Commerce seemed like they were taking this very seriously. They said, without getting too into specifics, that there were members of Congress who they would no longer support as a result of what happened that day. It really seemed to validate a lot of the decisions that their member corporations were making to cut off these donations. But that changed in March, when they released a memo saying that they no longer believed that it was appropriate to cut off funds just on the basis of that vote.

Then when you look at Toyota, who has been under some scrutiny since April 1st, before all of this, they use that exact same language to describe why they were donating to so many of these Republicans. It sets up this idea that there were some Republicans who did really bad things that day, but just the vote itself wasn't really that bad. But Toyota has given to, for instance, Andy Biggs, who's one of the most outspoken members of Congress on the idea that the election was stolen.

Why would anybody think that there should be a distinction between the supposedly insurrectionists Republicans, the ones that are the really bad and the ones who "merely" voted to overturn the election?

Well, I think companies are getting worried about cutting off so many, particularly of the House Republicans, because they're worried that they're going to be in power in 2022. That includes Kevin McCarthy, who would be the Speaker. It includes Steve Scalise, who's one of the biggest fundraisers for the House Republicans. They're looking to make it easier on themselves, effectively.

I hate to sound cynical, but it seems to me that these companies mostly just wanted to bet on the winner. In the days after the insurrection, companies thought that the pro-democracy side would prevail. Now they think the authoritarians are winning and they've switched sides. Is that too simplistic?

I focus on the corporations that have violated their pledge because that's the news, right? That's what people are interested in and I think that's important. Still, six months later, you have a lot of major companies who have not resumed business as normal, who normally would have given a bunch of money to the NRCC and the NRSC, and most of them still have not done that.

I think some cynicism is warranted, but I think we should temper that cynicism, because there's a possibility that, at least in some quarters, there will be lasting change. I try to keep that in perspective, although sometimes it can be hard.

That makes me feel better. It really does.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is an interesting organization. I think most Americans hear that name and they think it's like a town's local Chamber of Commerce, like a booster group that is there just to generically promote commerce and kind of that sort of thing. Why are they running defense for what can only be described as a literal fascist insurrection?

Well, I think there are habits and practices of Washington, D.C., especially as it relates to how corporations exercise power, that are very hard to let go of. Principally, it's the idea that corporations write a $5,000 check or a $10,000 check to a member of Congress. That money is not a huge amount of money, but it gets them a connection. It allows them to know who to talk to, when they want a meeting. It makes sure that they get that meeting and it smoothes the whole process for them of trying to influence key policy issues in D.C.

The Chamber of Commerce is very much in the business of having corporations exercise the maximum amount of influence over the political system. When they see corporations bowing out of this and cutting off people who if they aren't powerful today may be very powerful in 2022 or beyond, they want to figure out a way around that.

A lot of corporations give to politicians and then argue those donations as functionally apolitical because they spread money on both sides, right?

Anytime you would ask a company about a donation prior to January 6th, that's what they said in response to almost any inquiry: they give to both sides, that they don't agree with everyone. That just because say that they support LGBTQ rights, but they are supporting this person who's said all of these offensive things about trans people. They dance around that by describing these as essentially apolitical donations.

January 6th was the one time when you did have a bunch of corporations draw a line and say, this goes beyond what we're sort of willing to tolerate. What we're observing now is whether that line will hold. For some companies, it already has not held. Other companies have held the line, but I will say that just holding the line for six months really doesn't mean much because it's a two-year cycle, right? If you give the money in the beginning of 2022, instead of the beginning of 2021, that doesn't mean that much. You can only donate $5,000 per election anyway, and they'll need the money in 2022. The question will be, are there companies who are in it for the long term?

Why do you think the insurrection caused a lot of companies that otherwise try to keep their brand out of politics to publicly say that they were going to withdraw donations, whether they renege on that promise or not?

I think it was the imagery. The seriousness of what happened that day. I don't think companies wanted to be associated with, as clumsy as it was, an attempted overthrow of the government led rhetorically by Trump. Watching his supporters attack the Capitol, attack police officers with American flags: The visceral images of that day that really pushed companies.

Now, maybe there's some companies who've taken a principled stand. I know that for instance, American Express, when I was reporting on this in January, told me that they will never donate to any of these Republicans again. For some companies, it may have been a real moment of principle where they said "enough, we're not going to be doing business with these kinds of politicians anymore." Other companies, it was more about short-term public relations. There's another set of companies where it's still up in the air.

From a kind of practical standpoint, nothing has changed. Trump incited this insurrection. The people that stormed the Capitol are going to prison for their crimes. There's been no material change to justify, or somehow minimize what's happened. Why do companies, at least some of them, feel more comfortable now being like oh okay, that's in the past, it didn't matter, it wasn't that big a deal?

I think part of it is just time, right? It's not dominating the news every day as it was in the weeks immediately after January 6th. So it's less of a public relations headache for some of them. The other issue is that Trump remains such an influential part of the Republican party. Nothing's really changed, but there hasn't really been any fallout. Right after January 6th, it could have been for a hot second, it looked like, well, Trump might actually get in trouble for this. Mitch McConnell was considering supporting impeachment, whether or not you were credulous about those reports or not. The conventional wisdom was that really maybe this was going to be a real inflection point about our politics and what's within the realm of acceptable conduct and what's not.

The reality is that these folks are going to be very influential for years to come. For companies that are taking a purely practical approach, where they just want influence with whoever's in power, they're looking at these Republicans and they're saying, hey they may be in power pretty soon.

On your newsletter, Popular Info, you give people information they can use to organize pressure campaigns, to keep corporations from doing things like donating to insurrectionist Republicans. Why do you put your focus on these particular corporations? How do you think that that particular activism can be effective in stopping what is functionally a rising anti-democracy movement in the U.S.?

My role is to get the information out there. Certainly, there's a lot of folks who use that and take action, who write these companies, tweet at these companies and make their voices heard. I do think that the information is valuable. Part of the reason that corporations thought that they could just donate to who whomever they wanted, regardless of whether those politicians were in line with their state and corporate values, is because there really wasn't much attention paid to it on an ongoing basis. So if you can change that dynamic and people that you actually have people who know what's going on, that can ultimately may change behavior.

The other group of folks that I think really need access to this information is the employees themselves. It's very unlikely that some sort of consumer action is going to have a meaningful impact on Amazon's bottom line or Microsoft's bottom line. But if there's a dozen or two dozen of their engineers or other types of key employees who say, hey you were telling us how much you support democracy and now you're supporting these Republicans. Why are you doing that? That's something that they pay attention to. That played out pretty publicly with Microsoft. It was the employees who drove them to a much stronger position. They initially had said that they were just going to temporarily suspend all donations, but they eventually committed to cutting off the 147 Republican objectors for at least two years. It was really driven by the employees.

These companies are, like you said, are buying access. Will convincing them to stop donating to Republicans really change anything? Because the Republicans are acting against democracy itself for their own reasons. Do you think that this inflection point would actually change their behavior?

No, I don't think so. I think it is about the longer term. For instance, all of this corporate PAC money is only a small portion of what these companies spent on politics. Much larger amounts of money are spent on big nonprofit groups, Super PACs, independent political expenditures. Money, that for the most part, does not have to be reported publicly. But the criticism that these companies are taking over their corporate PAC expenditures is also motivating shareholders to demand more transparency from corporations about the whole scope of their political spending. A number of high profile companies, there were shareholder resolutions that passed demanding more reporting on how they're spending their money on politics.

This whole process over time can hopefully create more transparency and accountability for corporations and how they use their influence, and over time, that could have some influence over the political system overall. I don't think it's all of a sudden going to make Steve Scalise think about politics differently, but it can kind of change overall the playing field in which we decide who the political winners and losers are. So I think that's more of the way that it plays out.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/wuhan-lab-leak/

an salon

Last month, seemingly spurred on by this column from a controversial former science reporter for The New York Times, it became suddenly fashionable in some journalistic circles to scold the mainstream press for dismissing or ignoring something called the "lab leak theory" regarding the origins of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

To be sure, the possibility that the coronavirus was released in a lab accident in Wuhan, China, has never been fully discounted by the scientific establishment but long treated as less likely than that it emerged from a purely natural origin. Still, led by Matt Yglesias from his (sigh) Substack blog, a narrative started to form in May that the mainstream media was deliberately ignoring a scientifically valid hypothesis because of a, heaven help us, bias against conservatives. Otherwise reputable opinion writerslike Jonathan Chait of New York, eager to demonstrate that they are Not Biased© and Care About Hearing All Sides©, took up the mantle, scolding the mainstream press for supposedly dismissing the "lab leak hypothesis" out of hand, simply because Donald Trump and Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., were fond of it.

The scolding worked.

As Jon Allsop of Columbia Journalism Review wrote earlier this month, "we've seen a gusher of opinion essays in the same vein, indicting the mainstream press and prominent experts for characterizing a plausible hypothesis as a conspiracy theory for essentially political reasons." This, in turn, resulted in a slew "of news articles asserting that the lab-leak theory has 'gone mainstream,' and is getting a 'second look.'" Here at Salon, we addressed the sudden surge of interest in this theory by highlighting the basic reality: Scientists do not think it's likely, plus there is no new evidence that would suggest that it's become any more likely than it was before the pearl-clutching about "bias" began. Soon, however, President Joe Biden gave in to the pressure and ordered an intelligence investigation into the theory.

The problem with all this moralizing about "bias," however, is that the original reason that the media wasn't doing more to hype the "lab leak" hypothesis had little to do with politics and everything to do with science. As science educator Rebecca Watson explained in a video responding to the controversy last week, "There is currently no evidence that COVID-19 originated in a lab. None." And, as Justin Ling of Foreign Policy argued Tuesday, "Despite proclamations to the contrary, there has been scant new, hard evidence pointing to the lab leak theory," and, in fact, the hype around the idea is literally "just speculation."

Indeed, the finger-waggers had it backwards. The media isn't biased against the right but biased in favor of the right.

If it weren't for conservative pressure, there would probably be no substantive media interest the "lab leak" hypothesis. Typically, news outlets are loathed to publish speculation that emerges from fringe conspiracy theory boards that have offered little in the way of real evidence for their claims. But when the conspiracy theorists are politically motivated right-wingers, they tend to get more of a media hearing than say, Bigfoot enthusiasts.

Wednesday morning, the "why won't the media do more to indulge this evidence-free right-wing speculation" crowd got egg on their face with a new report from the Washington Postthat wreaked havoc on claims that the "lab leak hypothesis" failed to get a fair hearing. On the contrary, there has been "an ongoing, sometimes politicized and so far fruitless effort inside the U.S. government to determine whether the virus, SARS-CoV-2, could be the result of engineering or a lab leak."

The report documents an extensive hunt for evidence of the "lab leak" theory throughout the federal government. Much of it driven by Donald Trump's desire to blame someone else, ideally China, to divert attention from his own failures. But more responsible actors in the federal government, including prominent health officials like Director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins and Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci also gave the "lab leak" hypothesis a good deal of time and attention. But while the White House was heavily pressuring every bureaucrat in sight to give them something, anything, they could use to push this "lab leak" hypothesis, the evidence simply wasn't there.

The report doesn't completely rule out the possibility of a lab leak, to be clear. But it is a reminder that it was incredibly irresponsible of mainstream media to hype an unevidenced theory simply to prove they aren't "biased" towards Republican actors like Cotton, Trump, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, people who have proven time and again that they will lie through their teeth for political gain.

The people with unsavory political motivations in this situation are not journalists who hesitated to run stories about a theory that has no real evidence to support it. It's Trump and his Republican enablers who, as Lindsay Beyerstein of Alternet explains, feel that if they "can convince his supporters that COVID is China's fault, they'll forget the parts that were his fault."

Attention journalists: The way to avoid political bias in media is to, well, avoid political bias. Which means avoiding giving life to poorly evidenced ideas, simply because they're being hyped by the right. What happened instead is that the press gave into right-wing bullying. In doing so, the press ignored the usual journalistic standards for weighing facts and evidence. Now it's likely most Americans have heard more about lab leaks than they have about the far more plausible theory that the coronavirus pandemic emerged from nature.

To make it all worse, the hyping of the "lab leak" hypothesis meant politely ignoring the fact that Trump, Cotton, and Pompeo were winking at an even less plausible conspiracy theory that holds that China deliberately manufactured the coronavirus as a bioweapon. People who have heard this bioweapon conspiracy theory and see headlines or cable news chryons touting the "lab leak" theory will assume that's what is being discussed, and assume that it's now been proved. And once that kind of misinformation is out there, it's pretty hard to claw it back.

A lot of critics who accused the media of ignoring the "lab leak" hypothesis claim to be interested in putting facts before political bias. They worry that mainstream journalists are disregarding good information simply because the sources are conservative or even because they have a history of lying. (As if credibility isn't an important consideration in sourcing information!)

But what this debacle shows is that the mainstream media has the opposite problem. They all too often give in to Republican bullying and allow themselves to be used as conduits for right-wing disinformation campaigns. Yes, prioritizing truth over politics often leads to news stories that have a "liberal" feel to them. That's because the American right is wholly committed to lying and disinformation. But journalism should put reality before the tender feelings of lying right-wingers. Especially when it comes to scientific disputes where we all supposedly agree it would be better if politics were kept out of it.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/stealing-2024-election/

there's only one way to stop Republicans from stealing the 2024 election

Amanda Marcotte Salon

May 17, 2021

Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw was pretty angry with NBC's Chuck Todd on Sunday's episode of "Meet the Press." Todd was uncharacteristically determined to hold the Republican's feet to the fire, calling him out for his support of Donald Trump's Big Lie.

"Why should anybody believe a word you say if the Republican Party itself doesn't have credibility?" the host asked. When Crenshaw, clearly annoyed at being called out for his B.S., retreated by whining that "the press is largely liberal," Todd was rightly contemptuous, retorting, "There's nothing lazier than that excuse!"

At stake: Crenshaw's support for Trump's false claims that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, claims that Trump used to justify an attempted coup and to incite an insurrection on January 6. Crenshaw's main role in all of that, as Todd pointed out, was joining a lawsuit filed by Texas' Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton which leveraged false accusations of "fraud" in a failed attempt to get the Supreme Court to throw out the results of the election. During the interview, Crenshaw hid behind a line that is increasingly popular among Republicans who are trying to wave off questions about their support for Trump's attempted coup: "[I]t's time to move on."

Republicans are increasingly circling around this talking point. They insist that the coup is ancient history and that it's churlish to keep rehashing who did and did not join in efforts to overturn democracy. It's the favored justification for the ouster of Wyoming's Rep. Liz Cheney from House GOP leadership, with Republicans claiming it's not that she refuses to support Trump's election lies so much as that she just keeps going on about it. And it was the line that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., trotted out last week, while trying to wave off media inquiries about the GOP's increasingly fierce backing of Trump's Big Lie: "I don't think anyone is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election. I think that is all over with, we're sitting here with the President today."

The problem with this "water under the bridge" approach is twofold. First, it should be self-evident that seditious behavior should not be so easily forgotten or forgiven. Second, Republicans themselves have not moved on from the attempted insurrection or the lies that Trump used to justify it. On the contrary, Republican leaders have spent the past four months actively moving not just to turn Trump's Big Lie into GOP canon but to use it to justify laying the groundwork for Trump or some other GOP nominee to successfully steal the 2024 election.

"[I]f the current Republican Party controls both Houses of Congress on Jan. 6, 2025, there's no way if a Democrat is legitimately elected they will get certified as the president-elect," Erica Newland of Protect Democracy recently told Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times. As Goldberg goes on to detail, since the insurrection, Republicans "have systematically attacked the safeguards that protected the last election" — and not just with voter suppression laws, either.

Republican officials or politicians who stood against Trump's efforts to steal the election are being driven out of office and new laws are being passed to allow GOP-controlled state legislatures to invalidate the results of any election that a Democrat wins. Republicans are also passing harsh "electoral integrity" laws that are actually more about using threats of prosecution to intimidate election officials into looking the other way from GOP efforts to steal elections. And, as Goldberg writes, they are clearly lining up to justify it when a GOP-controlled House simply refuses to certify a Democratic winner of the 2024 election.

As Matt Gertz at Media Matters documented last week, the propaganda apparatus for the GOP — especially Fox News — has "responded to Donald Trump's 2020 defeat by institutionalizing his lie that the election was stolen and laying the groundwork to rig the next presidential election in favor of the GOP." Gertz writes:

Fox's propagandists are getting ready. They are cheering on the GOP's purges of officials insufficiently committed to authoritarian rule in the U.S. They are validating and valorizing the Capitol insurrectionists as patriots simply "there to support the president of the United States and defend our republic" rather than a collection of extremists. They are falsely claiming that Democratic pro-democracy legislation before Congress would "destroy the credibility of all future elections," while defending Republican efforts to restrict voting rights in the states.

In a piece at **The Bulwark last month, Jonathan Last laid out how the GOP has been busy "removing the Republican officials who were not willing to comply [with the coup] last time" and plotting out "how a Republican can win the presidency even while losing the popular vote and the Electoral College," i.e. how to steal the next election. Mona Charen,part of the small and shrinking group of Republicans who still believe in democracy, warned in another piece at The Bulwark last week that "the 2024 mantra" of the GOP "is going to be 'Steal It Back.'"

I got a taste this weekend when I tweeted out Goldberg's piece. I got a vicious reaction, as one conservative tweeter after another retorted by with variations of the argument that they are entitled to steal the 2024 election as revenge for Biden stealing the 2020 election. Of course, this is a lie — Biden won fair and square — but it was a small indicator of how "steal it back" is, indeed, becoming the Republican mantra.

This has all happening a mere four months into Biden's presidency. Republicans still have three and a half more years to keep building the political will and infrastructure necessary to steal the election in 2024, and clearly have every intention of doing so.

Democrats, meanwhile, seem wholly unable to take measures to slow down the coup train, between letting the filibuster kill any hope of passing bills to prevent these Republican manuevers and Biden's unwillingness to unleash the Justice Department to hold Trump accountable for his many crimes, which would take Trump out of the equation in 2024. The only real obstacle to the GOP successfully stealing the 2024 election is the mainstream media continuing to call out Trump's Big Lie and those Republicans who continue to support it. The public's refusal to be complacent is the main reason Trump failed to steal the 2020 election, and if there's any hope of stopping Republicans from pulling it off in 2024, the public must stay alert and ready to fight for their democracy. That's why Republicans are trying to bully journalists into shutting up about the insurrection already.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

---

republicans aren't sticking by Trump just because they want to win — it's much worse than that

Amanda Marcotte Salon May 14, 2021

After Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., was ousted from her role as third highest-ranking member of the GOP in the House on Wednesday, Republican leaders tried very hard to convince mainstream reporters it was for some other reason than what it obviously was: Cheney remains unwilling to go along with Donald Trump's Big Lie.

:{:{}:

"I don't think anyone is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election," House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., blatantly lying about Trump's claims that the election was stolen from him and that the Capitol insurrection was a good thing, told reporters Wednesday. Trump — who is clearly still the de facto leader of the GOP — also spoke out on Wednesday, raving on his blog: "If a thief robs a jewelry store of all of its diamonds (the 2020 Presidential Election), the diamonds must be returned."

:{:{}:

McCarthy's little tapdance is meant to hoodwink mainstream political reporters into believing that Republicans aren't actually an anti-democratic party lining up behind a fascist who literally tried to overthrow a democratic election. But it's a lie so hamfisted that it's not even getting by the notoriously credulous D.C. press corps. After all, everyone knows Cheney was a fierce ally of Trump's until he incited a mob to storm the Capitol, threatening the lives of her and her colleagues. Remember, it was a bridge so far that even McCarthy was angry at the time, until his ambition caused him to slither back on his belly to the man who sent a violent mob to the Capitol.

:{:{}:

But regardless of who McCarthy thinks he's fooling, the reality of where the GOP is headed was made all too clear elsewhere on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.

:{:{}:

House Republicans used a hearing about the Jan. 6 riot as an excuse to repeatedly defend the people who rioted to overthrow a legitimate election. Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., insisted that the people who stormed the Capitol and demanded to "hang Mike Pence" were merely "peaceful patriots" who are being persecuted by federal prosecutors. Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., described the attack — in which 140 police officers were injured, including one who died, one who had a heart attack, and one who had an eye gouged out — as "not an insurrection," but a "normal tourist visit". Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., threw his support to the "false flag" conspiracy theorists, saying, "I don't know who did a poll to say that they were Trump supporters."

:{:{}:

GOP thematics at Jan. 6 hearing so far: Trump did nothing wrong, Trump supporters lost lives that day, was mostly a… https://t.co/hvoEjxDtDS

— John King (@John King)1620832354.0

These claims are gaslighting, as they demand that audiences ignore the evidence of their own eyes. They're nonsense and they contradict each other. But really, the point of this exercise is not to put forth rational claims that hold up under rigorous scrutiny. The point is to signal to the GOP faithful that it's now canon that the insurrection was a good thing and that they should feel free to use whatever rhetorical gambits — no matter how trollish, dishonest, or idiotic — necessary in order to deflect criticism from the supposed patriots who tried to bring an end to democracy on Jan. 6.

:{:{}:

McCarthy's bewildering attempt to pretend the Cheney ouster is about anything but reinforcing Trump's Big Lie was an act for the mainstream media, but the Republican performance in Wednesday's hearing was all about the GOP base. These congressmen perform their antics for the camera with the knowledge that the videos will be edited and disseminated through social media outlets, where Republican voters increasingly go to get "news" from ever-shadier sources, unencumbered by inconvenient facts or reality.

:{:{}:

During his misleading remarks Wednesday, McCarthy repeatedly tried to imply that Cheney's ouster was merely an attempt to move on from the 2020 election, instead of what it actually was, a show of support for the Big Lie and a warning shot to other Republicans of the consequences for defending democracy. In reality, Republicans haven't moved on at all. On the contrary, the entire party is organizing itself around Trump's false claims that the election was "stolen," and are focusing way more on trying to manufacture evidence for his claims and pass voter suppression laws based on his lies than they are, say, arguing against Joe Biden's proposed infrastructure plan.

:{:{}:

It's not just in the House, either.

:{:{}:

On Tuesday, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., spent a hearing about voting rights floating wild-eyed conspiracy theories about voter fraud, for the obvious purpose of propping up Trump's Big Lie. He tried the "I know you are but what am I" style of argument, insisting that Democratic efforts to expand ballot access are "Jim Crow 2.0". (In reality, Jim Crow was about denying people the ballot, not expanding it.) He repeatedly insisted that automatic voter registration leads to widespread voter fraud.

:{:{}:

Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore. and Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga. got sick of it.

:{:{}:

"Do you have any studies you want to present for the record that document extensive mistakes being made, which people who are non-citizens are registered to vote?" Merkley demanded.

:{:{}:

"I'd like to offer you the opportunity in good faith, Sen. Cruz, to present any evidence for the record to this committee that in any of the states where this policy exists, if there's any widespread registration by people who should not be eligible to vote," Ossoff asked.

:{:{}:

Of course, Cruz didn't have any evidence, as no such evidence exists. He's just a big, fat liar. But, for his purposes, none of this matters. All that matters is being on camera, hyping the conspiracy theories about "fraud" and "stolen elections," which in turn will be used to justify future Republican efforts to actually steal elections.

:{:{}:

On Tuesday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., tried to defend this fealty to Trump and his Big Lie on political grounds, saying that Trump is "the most popular Republican in the country by a lot. If you try to drive him out of the Republican Party, half the people will leave."

:{:{}:

On its surface, this logic doesn't make a lot of sense. Trump lost the 2020 election, in no small part because, no matter how much the GOP base loves him, the rest of Americans hate him and will crawl over broken glass to vote against him. Trump's strengths in rallying the base are wiped out by his ability to rally the opposition.

:{:{}:

But, really, this defense of Trump and the Big Lie isn't about winning elections at all. On the contrary, Republicans are sticking by Trump because, as embarrassing and frightening as the insurrection was, it ultimately pointed to a path forward for their party to hold power without winning elections, by stealing them instead. Even if Trump was taken off the map tomorrow — say, by getting arrested for one of his many crimes — he helped advance the "why win elections when you can steal them" mentality. And that, more than out of any loyalty to Trump-the-cult-leader, is why the GOP has decided to stand behind Trump and the Big Lie.

:{:{}:

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Trump intelligence chiefs hid evidence of Russian election ... ›

Trump's election lies may cost Republicans the House in 2022 ... ›

Election doomsday 2020: Here's how scholars fear the Trump-Biden ... ›

How Trump's Presidency Is Fueling Right-Wing Nationalist & Anti ... ›

2016 Presidential Election Results – Election Results 2016 – The ... ›

Liz Cheney: Republican ousted from leadership for challenging ... ›

2016 United States presidential election - Wikipedia ›

Cheney's demand to call out Trump's election lies isn't swaying the ... ›

==

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/republicans-democracy/

It's increasingly certain that Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., is going to get the big ol' boot from her leadership positions in the House by a Republican caucus increasingly furious with her for refusing to cosign to Donald Trump's Big Lie, that he is the "real" winner of the election and that the insurrection was a good thing. No one should cry for Cheney, who is sleeping in a bed she carefully made for herself, but the whole situation is nonetheless extremely concerning. It's a sign that Republicans are going on all-in on Trump and the Big Lie, to the point where anyone who even shows signs of even feeling pangs of dissent is being subject to vicious smears and other tactics to bring them into line. To add to the concerns for democracy, the unspooling fake "audit" of votes in Arizona is continuing to feed a steady stream of pro-insurrection propaganda to the GOP base, continuing to reinforce the idea that they're entitled to steal elections because imaginary Democrats in outlandish conspiracy theories did it first.

But it's not just liberals who are worried for our democracy who are expressing concerns.

According to Allan Smith and Sahil Kapur of NBC News, many Republican political strategists are worried, too, because they see these pro-insurrection antics as alienating to some segments of voters.

"Removing Liz Cheney from leadership will give a boatload of ammunition to the GOP's critics," Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, told NBC News. Ayers' worry, Smith and Kapur wrote, is that such actions "could further antagonize suburban voters, particularly college-educated women, who ditched the party because of their opposition to Trump."

Similarly, some Republicans in Arizona are having second thoughts about the clown show that is the Maricopa County vote "audit" being conducted to please Trump and bolster right-wing conspiracy theories.

"It makes us look like idiots," Republican state Sen. Paul Boyer, who represents the kind of suburban district Ayres is afraid of losing, told the New York Times. "Looking back, I didn't think it would be this ridiculous. It's embarrassing to be a state senator at this point."

Trump and the Big Lie are both, to be clear, quite popular with the GOP base. Polling shows that70% of Republican voters still refuse to accept that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and the majority of Republican voters cling to one kind of conspiracy theory or another to justify the insurrection Trump incited on January 6.

But there's good reason to believe those voters could be persuaded to move on to some other shiny object of white grievance, if the leadership just quietly cut Trump loose to rave by himself on his fake "social media" site. These folks are addicted to grievance more than they are to Trump, and if Republicans just gave them something else to focus on — Disneyland getting rid of rape jokes or the term "birthing people" are some recent Fox News-generated contenders — they would move on surprisingly quickly.

So it's the roughly quarter of Republicans who admit Biden won the election that Republican strategists are worried about. And those are just the ones who still admit they are Republican. As post-election analysis shows, in addition to suburban women, independent voters and even some male voters are getting fed up with the Trump circus. For those people, the insurrection was another inflection point proving Trump has gone too far. Republicans increasingly siding with the insurrection yahoos over ordinary Americans is not going to improve their standing with such voters.

So why are House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and the rest of GOP leadershipgoing along with a plan to fully rebrand themselves as the party of wild-eyed conspiracy theorists?

0-It's not just fear of Tucker Carlson making gay jokes. It's that the GOP's strategy for "winning" elections is no longer the traditional democratic one of trying to attract and retain voters. Instead, the focus is shifting, quite rapidly, to making sure that Republicans "win" even when they lose. Voter suppression gets the lion's share of the attention, but as Heather "Digby" Parton noted at Salon on Monday, outright theft is now on the table for most Republicans.

"Trump made a serious run at getting the election overturned," she writes, noting that he was stopped, in part, because "local officials and judges around the country refused to cooperate." But now those folks are getting purged and Cheney is merely the most prominent example. As Parton notes, Republican leadership has set aside "misgivings" about openly trying to steal elections and next time it happens, they're fully on board.

Law professor Joshua A. Douglas concurs in a piece in the Washington Post, noting that a combination of harassment and new laws that make it easier to threaten election officials with prison are being leveraged to squeeze out those who still defend the integrity of elections on a local and state level. Next time Trump — or other Republicans running for any office — makes a run at stealing an election, they'll find a whole new cast of officials who think illegally throwing out votes or otherwise helping a fascist insurrectionist is very much to their liking.

That's why Republicans are way more focused on serving the MAGA faithful than they are serving more moderate voters who think democracy is a good thing. As the Capitol riot showed, while the red hats are a minority of Americans, they are one that's prepared to use whatever means necessary — including violence — to force their will on the rest of the country. That's a bad thing for democracy, but, as Trump believed, a good thing to have on your side if your desire is to take power by force instead of winning elections.

Which isn't to say things are hopeless.

What Republicans forget about Trump's coup is that it didn't just fail because Trump hit a firewall of election officials who still had integrity. It failed because progressives saw the coup coming, took it seriously, and fought back. After witnessing a mob literally storm the Capitol, even more moderates and liberals are ready to admit that we're in danger of a fascist takeover and will step up again to stop it.

The bad news, however, is pro-democracy forces are not finding the support they need in the Democratic Party. To be certain, both President Biden and the majority of congressional Democrats whole-heartedly support bills that would reform our electoral systems to shield them against the kinds of theft Republicans are gearing up to perform. Unfortunately, those Democrats are still stymied by a couple of blinkered, obstructionist Democrats in the Senate — namely, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — who would rather keep the filibuster in place than pass bills necessary to keep Republicans from outright stealing elections. Without that support, even the best efforts of ordinary progressives on the ground to save our democracy could very likely fail next time.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/trump-facebook/

After Donald Trump incited an insurrection on Jan. 6that led to the trashing of the U.S. Capitol, the deaths of multiple people, and the delay — though not the cancellation he sought — of the certification of Joe Biden's election as president, Facebook and Twitter finally banned Trump from their websites. Trump's vitriolic and hateful posts, which often hinted at violence, had long been in violation of the terms of service for both websites, but his status as the president, and frankly the amount of traffic he generated for both sites, was enough to shield him from being banned for years. An attempted overthrow of the government finally crossed the line. Although a cynic would also note that because Trump failed, there was good reason to think his value as a revenue-generating troll was declining anyway, making it a much easier financial decision for both organizations.

On Wednesday morning, the Facebook oversight board issued its long-awaited decision on whether or not to let Trump — who again, attempted to overthrow the U.S. government and have himself installed illegally as president — back onto the platform. In what is a sad statement on our society, there was a real question about whether or not the oversight board would give in to pressure from the Trump camp and recommend reinstating his account. But in a victory for common sense, the oversight board decided to uphold the decision to strip Trump of his ability to inject lies and incitement directly into the social media streams of the kinds of addle-brained idiots who stormed the Capitol.

Not that this was a clean win for democracy, of course. Perish the thought!

Unfortunately, the board did demand that "Facebook review this matter to determine and justify a proportionate response that is consistent with the rules that are applied to other users of its platform," giving the company 6 months to comply. Their reasoning is that, while Trump clearly violated Facebook's rules "prohibiting praise or support of people engaged in violence," the company has no policy on what constitutes a violation that results in indefinite suspension and that needs more clarity.

Long story short: We have to worry about this in another six months. The good news, however, is that's six more months for Trump to fade from relevance, hopefully to the point where the profit motive of letting him back on is not strong enough to overrule the bad press that Facebook would get for doing so.

For months, Trump has been teasing the idea that he would be launching his own social media platform in response to his banning, which his flunky, Jason Miller, told the press "will be the hottest ticket in social media, it's going to completely redefine the game." This week, with great fanfare, the project was released. It's a blog. Not "social media" at all. It's just a series of short posts from Trump, tweet-style, largely focused on his two favorite topics: his belief that he is the greatest man who ever lived and his obsessive grievances against people who criticize him.

Each post has a button so that people can share it on Facebook or Twitter, an obvious attempt to skirt Trump's ban on both platforms. But the flaw in the plan is clear. When Trump was on social media, his posts got shared widely, both by fans and enemies who were sharing in order to dunk on him. But few people are going to be interested in deliberately seeking out this separate site since monologuing from a terminal narcissist is boring. Stripped of his power to be a disruptive troll flipping over tables in mainstream spaces, Trump's dullness becomes the most remarkable thing about him. Even Republicans — 88% of whom believe Trump should be allowed back onto Facebook — are likely going to find that they never think to visit Trump's blog, even if it's just a click away from their favorite social media sites.

Trump starting this blog was a dumb move in another way: It puts to rest any notion that his "free speech" is being stripped from him in any meaningful way. Trump can clearly still express himself, insofar as whining non-stop constitutes a meaningful form of self-expression. And people can even share it! That they don't want to now becomes Trump's problem to solve, and he is incapable of saying things that are, on their own, interesting to share, outside of the threat they present to the health of the nation or international stability.

Not only is Trump's free speech still wholly intact — along with his freedom generally, another gross reminder of the injustice of our deeply unequal society — he is still managing to control the entire Republican Party, despite his social media bans. GOP leadership has largely fallen in line with the Big Liethat Biden "stole" the election, and is focused on pushing out people who speak the truth about the attempted coup.

Still, Trump is bound to be grumpy about this. His death grip on the GOP flows from the widespread perception in party leadership that their base voters are more loyal to Trump than they are to the party. Right now, that may be true, but like cult leaders Jim Jones or David Koresh, Trump understands that keeping his hold over his followers requires constant sermonizing at them. Without his rants being dumped directly in their Facebook feeds, their attention may drift and the spell may even start to break. They'll find some other demagogue to follow, one whose posts are easier to share on Facebook.

Trump loved Twitter and his use of it dominated the media because most journalists are also much more engaged on Twitter than on Facebook. But the reality is that Trump voters — who are older, whiter, and less urban— are more likely to be on Facebook, driving their kids and grandkids nuts by recklessly sharing every fake news story about MS-13 and screenshot of Candace Owens they come across. Because lies and provocations tend to perform better on Facebook than boring old truths, Trump's user engagement on that site before the ban was exponentially higher than Biden's. Facebook started slapping "fact checks" on Trump's lies, but that did nothing to slow down the engagement, as Trump fans simply dismiss facts as "fake news" and Trump's detractors feel more emboldened to share his posts because of them.

The only thing that works against the tide of incitement and lies is bans. The whole "free speech" gambit is a distraction — Trump continues to be free to lie to his heart's content on his own website. The larger issue here is protecting democracy itself, which becomes a very dicey proposition indeed in an information ecosystem where lies spread rapidly but the truth is largely ignored because it's not sexy enough. Trump has every right to spew his lies into the ether if he wants. But he has no right to commandeer the attention of the nation by exploiting algorithms designed to reward provocation over content that's better for the human spirit.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/biden-speech-gop/

President Joe Biden's plans are ambitious. I know this because every headline Thursday morning after Biden gave his first speech to a joint session of Congress said so.

"Biden Just Gave the Most Ideologically Ambitious Speech of Any Democratic President in Generations," Politico's wordy headline screamed. "Biden bets big," Axios said more succinctly. "Big Government Is Back," said the NPR headline. The Washington Post described Biden's"sweeping agenda" and the New York Times called it a "risky gamble."

Except that none of this actually feels risky. On the contrary, Biden was able to frame everything he said in convincingly reasonable tones. Put at ease by his patented "c'mon, man" approach, so far, it seems like the public can't be bamboozled into feeling angry, scared or worried about Biden's surprisingly progressive aspirations. Snap polls after the speech showed that 85% of viewers approved of Biden's speech, out of a crowd that was only 54% Democratic. This comports with previous polling that shows that,while Biden's approval numbers are stuck in the low 50s because of GOP voters who will never say they like him,an overwhelming majority like his actual policy ideas. Demonizing him as "tax-and-spend" isn't working, because voters are increasingly keen on the idea that we should be taxing corporations and wealthy people and spending it on the programs that Biden has successfully — and correctly — identified as investments in our nation's future: infrastructure, child care, jobs.

"We have to prove democracy still works," Biden said during his speech. [=] "That our government still works– and can deliver for the people."

It all feels so reasonable. Why shouldn't Americans get to have democracy and get to have a functioning government, especially since we pay for it? Why shouldn't we want, as Biden said, "the wealthiest 1% of Americans to pay their fair share"? Why shouldn't we try to eliminate child poverty, an idea that made Republicans in the chamber so salty they refused to clap for it? Why shouldn't the wealthiest country in the world be able to provide its citizens with the same standard of living so many other less wealthy countries do with ease?

The thing is, these are the same exact arguments that progressives have been making for decades, and yet Republicans — aided by a loud right-wing media, the racism of the majority of white voters, and a mainstream media addicted to false equivalencies — were successful at demonizing such reasonable points as basically communism. Why then does it seem like Republicans suddenly can't land a glove on Biden?

Part of the credit should go to Biden himself, who is rising above what doubters like myself thought of him. He was able, as John Harwood of CNN said, to speak "in plain, non-political, non-ideological language invoking the people he wants to help."

But let's face it: Republicans also did this to themselves.

For decades, Republicans have increasingly abandoned policy debate in favor of culture war antics, race-baiting and raw tribalism. From Monica Lewinsky to Barack Obama's birth certificate, the modern GOP has turned politics into conflicts about personality and identity, not policy. Even during the height of the debate over the Affordable Care Act — the biggest policy agenda Democrats had pushed since the 1960s — the Republicans were mired in culture war theatrics. Their response was to freak out about abortion and birth control, as well as the "death panels" nonsense, which was always a barely coded conspiracy theory about Democrats taking away health care from old white people so younger, more racially diverse people could have it. They created a political environment of style over substance because, of course, they know that they can't win debates about policy on the merits.

The result is a situation where voters think Biden is more moderate than Obama was, even though the reverse is true, simply because Biden looks and sounds like more people's idea of a moderate. Those stereotypes are racist, to be clear. As Paul Waldman of the Washington Post points out, Obama "was young, Black, cosmopolitan, hip and the hero of young people across the country," and Biden "has always been the establishment," a "folksy guy with a bottomless supply of bromides."

No wonder right-wing media has, in desperation, grasped for a bizarre conspiracy theory accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of being the "real" president.They don't know how to do oppositional politics that isn't about base racism and sexism. But it is also an increasingly losing proposition. The forces that allowed Obama to get elected in the first place — Americans growing more relaxed about racial diversity and more urbane in general — are only growing stronger as time goes by.

One line during Biden's speech Wednesday night really jumped out at a number of pundits: "Trickle-down economics has never worked." It was a notably explicit repudiation of Reaganism. But it's also likely that large numbers of Americans, especially younger Americans, have no idea what "trickle-down economics" even is or was supposed to be. Not just because it is a failed economic theory that was always nonsense, though it is that. The phrase is more so a relic from a time when conservatives used to pretend to have serious policy ideas.

"Trickle-down economics" never made sense, but it sounded smart and gave Republicans a thing they could say to voters to explain why cutting taxes and government investment would somehow lead to prosperity. But mostly, they've given up even that kind of argument in favor of screeching about Dr. Seuss and "cancel culture," hoping these tactics would distract voters from their more substantive concerns. Even when Republicans half-heartedly try to argue against Biden's policy ideas, it's through lame tactics like arguing over the semantics of what constitutes "infrastructure."

Of course, a big part of the reason that Republicans want to avoid talking policy is that, increasingly, voters can see what decades of doing things their way has done to this country.

Low taxes on corporations and rich people, coupled with low levels of government investment, did not, as promised, produce a robust economy where private interests pay for all that stuff people want and need. Instead, our roads and buildings are falling apart, health care is a nightmare, and childcare and education are unaffordable. Food is cheap, in part because it is one sector government quietly subsidizes. But as Biden pointed out in his speech last night, so many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck that the economic downturn meant "nice cars, lined up for miles, waiting for a box of food to be put in their trunk."

Republicans are grumpy, extremely grumpy. Republican Senators watching the speech last night collectively looked like they smelled a fart, and not just because they were wearing masks. They're mad, not just because they know he's right. They're mad because they know he's popular and what he's saying is popular. They'll block as much of his agenda as they can and hope that voter suppression and gerrymandering do the rest. But on the merits of the argument itself? They're toast.

It's not because Biden is some super-politician. It's because Republicans spent decades making politics into a reality TV show. Now that we're facing a real crisis, the public is turning its eyes towards the comfort of a real politician who wants to do real policy. And Republicans have nothing to say in response.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/republicans-fantasy/

in the real world, there are real problems that serious people are worried about: global pandemic, climate change, economic inequality, systematic racism, mass shootings, and gendered violence, just to name a few. The problem for Republicans, of course, is that they are, quite literally, on the wrong side of pretty much each of those issues, and spend their time either actively making problems worse or getting in the way of people who want to fix things. Outside of sociopaths, Fox News hosts, and people with "Pepe" memes in their Twitter profiles, however, few people want to look in the mirror and see a villain gazing back at them. So right-wing media, which has always been addicted to selling its audiences on imaginary threats and preposterous fairy tales of conservative victimhood, has only been escalating such nonsense in recent months as the Republican policy agenda has been increasingly exposed to be nonexistent.

If your "team" is on the side of the Capitol insurrectionists and Derek Chauvin, it's hard to suppress the haunting fear that you're the baddies. So Fox News is on hand to spoon out alluring fantasies that recast liberals as the bad guys and conservatives as the long-suffering heroes.Tucker Carlson — a Fox News host who clearly relishes being a cartoon villain (think: "Dan White Society") — coughed up an almost too-perfect sample of the form Monday night, when he encouraged his audience of millions to harass ordinary people minding their own business under the guise of "helping."

Using as cover the recent reports that much of outdoor masking is unnecessary to prevent the transmission of COVID-19, Carlson told his audience that people wearing masks outside are "the aggressors" and that "the next time you see someone in a mask on the sidewalk or on the bike path, do not hesitate" to get in their face and demand they remove the mask. Carlson claimed this can be done "politely but firmly," but of course, it's categorically impossible to "politely" boss other people around about choices that simply do not affect you. And no, his story about how masks "prevent intimacy and human contact" is not enough. Strangers on the street do not owe you "intimacy," despite what creeps who follow women around and demand smiles might wish to believe.

Carlson then escalated by asking his viewers to call the police when they see children wearing masks because it "should be illegal." [call cops and cps till they show] Of course, Carlson also knows full well how dangerous such nuisance calls (which are *actually* illegal) can be if the target is a person of color — and likely, he's counting on it, Derek Chauvin defender that he is.

Skipping a mask outside does, indeed, seem to be mostly harmless, which means that the common-sense response is to simply leave other people alone while you also do what you want. But conservatives want revenge because they've been made to wear masks where it is necessary. Carlson is only too happy to feed them a narrative that allows them to pretend to be heroes while continuing to be jerks for no good reason whatsoever.

Over the weekend, we saw another comically over-the-top example of right-wing fake victimhood narratives when a totally fake — and obviously fake — conspiracy theory about President Joe Biden imposing severe beef rations tore through the right-wing media and exploded on social media.

Jon Skolnik explained here at Salon how right-wing media distorted a study about reducing meat consumption to impact climate change, pretended it somehow was part of Biden's infrastructure plan and ran wild with it. But what was truly remarkable wasn't just that the folks at Fox News and other outlets deliberately misled the public with false claims that Biden planned to "limit" beef consumption to four pounds a year. It was how this lie managed to spread rapidly, infecting every corner of the country, in record time.

"It's tempting to dismiss this attack as too absurd to be believed," Dan Pfeiffer wrote in his Message Box newsletter, but warned that, "But too often, Democrats focus on the absurdity of the specifics and ignore the believability of the general impression."

Indeed, watching the "Biden's banning beef" lie spread out over social media, boosted by supposedly "apolitical" Instagram influencers and other such conduits, it was easy to see how this worked. Many people — possibly most — had wholly emotional reactions when they heard or read the lie, and were too focused on lashing out angrily to think critically about the story. So many reactions online were variations of "how dare you criticize me" and "fake meat tastes bad," instead of the more helpful "is this even true?"

The best right-wing B.S. works in this way, by activating people's pre-existing guilt and making them feel defensive. A lot of Americans, even on the right, already feel bad about how much beef they eat. It's not just because it's bad for the environment, but because they know it's bad for their health, and American discourse around food and health tends to be highly moralistic. The Biden beef lie works first by activating that sense of shame and then giving people a story that makes them feel better about themselves, about how they're actually the good guys here. They get so focused on trying to make their defensive feelings go away that they don't stop to search Snopesor Politifact and find out if it's even true.

Carlson is playing the same game with his mask nonsense.

Conservatives obviously have a lot of sublimated guilt over refusing to take the pandemic seriously and are therefore on a hair-trigger for defensive reactions. So they're ready to hear how someone else wearing a mask is a judgment on them, about how they're the "real" victims, and mask-wearers are the "real" bad guys. Truth and common sense are crowded out by these over-the-top emotional reactions, driven by their own — in many cases, completely earned — sense of shame.

As Pfeiffer notes, the only way to push back on nonsense like this is for ordinary people to confront those who are spreading it on social media. The problem is that these right-wing freakouts are fueled by conservatives feeling angry, ashamed, and judged — frankly often because they deserve to feel bad about their behavior. Unfortunately, that means that the smarter reactions are ones that turn the temperature down, not up. It can help a lot for interlocutors to focus on facts, instead of moral judgments about things like mask-wearing or beef-eating, and save the moral discussion for another time, when folks are in a less defensive mindset.

Either way, the amount of culture war debris that the right-wing media will be churning out is going to be immense over the next few years. Conservatives have a lot of guilt for their terrible behavior and beliefs, and therefore will be easy marks for any and every story that lets them believe they're the victims and not the victimizers. Right-wing media, as these examples show, is incredibly good at kicking up fake controversies that feed off those defensive feelings. Conservatives are addicted to these lies, and like most addicts, they need increasingly stronger stuff to get their fix. Be prepared.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/republicans-democracy/

Tucker Carlson recently got oodles of attention — which was what he wanted — for unleashing a *literal* neo-Nazi argument on his highly rated prime time Fox News show last week and, when called on it, doubling down Monday night. Carlson's "argument" is basicallya rehash of the same idea that drove white nationalists to riot in Charlottesville in 2017. At its core is a belief that social and demographic changes in the U.S. are due to a shadowy conspiracy of "elites" (Democrats in Carlson's telling, Jews in the more forthright white nationalist version) trying to deprive conservative Christian white people of their god-given right to control the country.

"[T]he Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World," Carlson said, eyes glinting with impish delight. He circled around again on Monday, whining, "In order to win and maintain power, Democrats plan to change the population of the country."

Carlson's arguments are, of course, utter nonsense, starting with the fact Democrats already win the majority of votes in national elections, and only lose power because votes of conservative whites are more heavily weighted in our electoral system. Here at Salon, Heather "Digby" Parton recently pointed out that it's ridiculous "to believe that immigrants are 'replacing' real Americans in a country where the only people in it who aren't the descendants of immigrants or trafficked African slaves are Native Americans."

Immigration foes have never come up with a satisfactory explanation for why it's anything but racist to argue that immigration was good in the past but is bad now.

Carlson doesn't even really try to hide his core appeal, using overtly racist terms like "Third World" and acting like feigning umbrage at the use of the word "racist" is sufficient rebuttal to the accusation. Instead of trying to actually defend his anti-democratic, racist arguments, Carlson instead chooses a much simpler tactic: Trolling.

His trolling comes in two forms, the "trigger the liberals" type and the more classic "neener neener" type. Neither really constitutes an argument in the traditional sense of the word. Both, instead, focus the attention of Carlson's audience on the emotional rewards of irritating liberals, instead of on the incoherence of what he's trying to argue.

The full quotes from Carlson's rant defending "replacement theory" really underscore how central liberal-triggering is to selling his audience on this nonsense. After offering a fake laugh, Carlson noted that he's "laughing" because "the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term 'replacement,'" and "they become hysterical because that's what's happening actually." The joke being that "replacement theory" may not make much sense, in other words, but it's guaranteed to make liberals upset. As making liberals upset is the prime directive of the modern conservative, that's a good enough reason to embrace what is literally a neo-Nazi conspiracy theory.

Carlson went on to claim that this is merely a "voting rights question," and that more voters in the system means "I become disenfranchised as a current voter." But Greg Sargent at the Washington Post did a noble job of pointing out the incongruity of "Carlson's underlying presumption that if representatives chosen by U.S. voters allow more outsiders admission to an expanded polity, this cannot be a democratic outcome by definition." Parton also took a shot at this silliness, noting "we are all going to be 'replaced' by the generations that come up behind us." Carlson, notably, isn't arguing against the practice of childbirth, which also "dilutes" his vote by adding new voters to the populace.

But Carlson isn't really trying to make sense. This is just a "neener neener" argument, drafting off the fact that liberals have been heavily focused on protecting actual voting rights against a wave of GOP voter suppression. Basically, it's Carlson saying, "You libs say you're for voting rights, but what if I said my voting rights depends on other people not getting to vote? Checkmate, libs!" It's not really an argument. It's about injecting noise into the discourse and is meant to confuse people, waste time by forcing liberals to carefully debunk it, and give his viewers something to say to rationalize their racism, even if it is literally nonsensical.

This "neener neener" type of trolling is swiftly becoming central to the entire GOP strategy around dismantling voting rights.

Republican Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri are proposing using anti-trust laws to break up Major League Baseball to punish the organization for pulling the All-Star Game out of Georgia in protest of the anti-voting law just passed there. This isn't because Cruz or Hawley believe in anti-trust laws. It's a neener-neener move of weaponizing liberals' own beliefs against them.It's part of a larger push by Republicans to parrot liberal criticism of corporate influence in politics by whining about "woke" corporations. No one actually believes Republicans have suddenly become concerned about monied power in politics. It's just a "neener neener" troll to derail debate about the actual anti-voting law, which conservatives know is indefensible.

Indeed, the efforts to roll out "checkmate, libs" deflections beat new records in idiocy this week, when not just one, but two senior writers at the National Review — which is supposed to be the home of "intellectual" conservatism — tried to "gotcha" New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait on his pro-democracy writings. They did this by arguing — wait for it — that democracy is bad because it gave us Jim Crow and slavery. Yep, you read that right.

Ah yes, the antebellum and Jim Crow South, legendary for their commitment to majoritarian democracy https://t.co/FlOj1sC4I3

— Scott Lemieux (@Scott Lemieux)..

It makes us all stupider that it has to be said, but the flaw in this argument, of course, is that enslaved people and Black people living under Jim Crow did not, in fact, have the democratic right to vote. Indeed, Jim Crow functioned just like the Georgia law that these conservative "intellectuals" are defending, which is by undermining democracy in order to preserve white supremacy. As the Atlantic's Adam Serwer and the Washington Post's David Weigel pointed out, this is the equivalent of arguing that apartheid South Africa was a "democracy" despite disallowing the majority of Black citizens from voting.

But these kinds of tactics from conservatives shouldn't be understood as arguments. Instead, it's all just flat-out trolling. None of these "arguments" are offered ingood faith. The point is, as Steve Bannon once famously said, "to flood the zone with shit,"which is to say to derail efforts to inform and engage the public by pumping out so many dumb arguments, trolling tactics, and other distractions that few people can pay attention to what really matters.

Fighting back against these tactics isn't easy. Ignoring the trolls isn't good enough. If bad arguments like Carlson's aren't rebutted, they can spread even more rapidly, as not everyone has the critical thinking skills to spot the flaws right away. But it's also important not to let trolls waste too much of liberals' time and energy debating arguments offered in bad faith. Instead, the key to fighting back is to go meta, by pointing out as often as is necessary, that conservatives resort to such sleazy strategies because they know their arguments can't stand on their own. Going meta instead of taking the bait is the only real way to beat back the trolls.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

---

Perhaps it was inevitable, but now it's certain: Three months out from the violent insurrection Donald Trump incited at the U.S. Capitol, the majority of Republican voters have settled on a story that they can use to justify supporting what Trump and the rioters did. According to a poll released this week by Reuters and Ipsos, belief in conspiracy theories about the insurrection is widespread among Republican voters, with 55% claiming to "agree" or "somewhat agree" that the rioters were really "antifa" in disguise. Another 51% of Republican respondents agree or somewhat agree that the rioters — who look to have killed one police officer, violently assaulted hundreds of others, and were chanting "hang Mike Pence" as they ransacked the Capitol — "were mostly peaceful, law-abiding Americans." And a full 60% agree or somewhat agree with Trump's utterly false claim that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election.

These numbers are, needless to say, terrifying, precisely because they capture a level of delusion that is truly hard to imagine.

It's not clear how much overlap there is among adherents to the various conspiracy theories. It could be a situation where half of Republicans have thrown in with the "antifa hoax" lie and another half with the "not that violent" lie. Or it could be that a lot of Republicans believe both at the same time, even though the conspiracy theories contradict each other, as there's no point in screaming that "antifa did it" if you're also denying the well-documented violence of the insurrection. But research has long shown that conspiracy theoristsdon't care if their theories contradict each other. For instance, people who believe Princess Diana was murdered are also more likely to believe that she's still secretly alive. Conspiracy theories are rarely about a literal, sincere understanding of the facts, but closer to religious fables or myths — comforting narratives that a person tells themselves in order to justify an underlying belief system.

In this case, the underlying belief being rationalized is the Republican turn against democracy itself. Republican voters understand their ideology and party are both unpopular. They know that maintaining power means overruling the wishes of the majority of Americans. But rather than admit out loud — or possibly even to themselves — that they would rather end American democracy, they cling to these comforting conspiracy theories that let them tell a story where they're the heroes, not the villains trying to strip rights away from other Americans.

The reaction to the poll has largely been focused on the role right-wing disinformation campaigns run by major outlets like Fox News and Breitbart play in making Republican voters so delusional.[twt]

there is no doubt that the firehose of lies coming from Trump and his media supporters matter. Still, it's important to understand that Republican voters have autonomy here. They aren't mindless ciphers, helpless to resist the allure of Fox News propaganda. They actively choose to watch Fox News and to reject truthful information. Anyone who has tried to correct a Republican friend or relative who is sharing misinformation can attest to this grim reality. They almost never thank you for setting them straight or get angry at Tucker Carlson for lying to them. They get defensive and double down on the lies. They preferlies over truth.

In a sense, then, it's questionable whether Republican voters really "believe" that Trump really won the election, or that antifa was behind the insurrection, or that the insurrection wasn't really violent. At least, they may not believe it in the usual sense that we use the word "believe" to mean a conviction that a thing is true, such as believing the sun will rise in the east or that Prince wrote "When Doves Cry" in one night. Many of them likely are asserting it more as a show of tribal loyalty and, of course, as cover for their more unspeakable but truer beliefs, like the belief that white people are the only people whose votes should really count. As David Graham argued in February at the Atlantic, "Republicans are backing Trump not in spite of the insurrection but because of it." But they know that saying out loud that they want to overthrow democracy is bad. Instead, they cling to conspiracy theories, many of which contradict each other, that are proxies for their real but unspeakable anti-democratic beliefs.

Evidence that tribal loyalty and emotional desires trump empirical evidence with Republican voters was neatly demonstrated by the reaction, in the early days of Trump's presidency, to Trump's insistence that his inauguration crowd was bigger than Barack Obama's. Anyone could see that it was only a fraction of the size, but when researchers asked Republican voters about this in the days after the inauguration, over 40% were willing to make fools of themselves to insist that Trump's crowd was bigger.

Since then, the defiance and defensiveness of Trump voters has only ratcheted up, to the point where many, if not most, will deny the sky is blue if Trump asked them to. It's not because they "believe" the lies, so much as they believe in their own hatred of liberals, and will say or do anything in order to perform a rejection of what liberals believe. That's how so many Trump voters talked themselves into treating the pandemic, which was obviously real, as a hoax. And why they can look at a howling mob of violent insurrectionists waving Trump flags, and deny the evidence of their own eyes.

Misinformation is absolutely one of the worst problems in our country. The steady stream of right-wing lies is tearing this country apart. But it's critical to understand why misinformation is so powerful. Most Republican voters believe that their rapidly shrinking tribe should hold all the power, and are willing to sacrifice democracy itself to hang onto power.

What misinformation from Fox News and other outlets does is give Republicans excuses and rationalizations for continuing to hold repulsive beliefs that they know full well can't be justified on the merits. Fox News shamelessly pumps out lies on a nightly basis, and it's a threat to our democracy. But what's even scarier is that they have an audience so hungry for the lies that they would turn on even Fox News if the network ever stopped lying.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

---

augmented what-aboutism? the left is a threat so we have to do X

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/republican-fascism/

For a brief, shining moment after Donald Trump incited an insurrection on the Capitol on January 6, it seemed that the forces of rising authoritarianism in America might be curtailed, shamed by the violence that had been unleashed by their lies and bitterness over losing the election. But nope, Republicans have quickly reverted back. After all, the fundamental problem facing the Republican party and the larger American right hasn't been resolved. They still know full well that their ideology is unpopular, their arguments are indefensible, and that the only way they can hold onto power is by gutting the ability of the voters to throw them out. And so, as the past month has shown, conservatives are not only becoming more fascistic in the aftermath of the riot but more shameless about their intentions.

The GOP war on voting has become the number one priority, with a bevy of conservative groups reorienting their organizing around keeping Americans away from ballots. Republicans are leaning into the racist signaling around the voter suppression efforts, and when confronted with it, they barely bother to defend themselves, mainly because there is no moral defense possible. There's lip-smacking from the right about "voter fraud" — which they continue to fail to show is a problem, much less one that voter suppression efforts will fix — but these excuses are pro forma, and you can tell their hearts aren't in it.

Instead of trying to sell their behavior as good and righteous, instead, conservatives are coalescing around a different excuse: The liberals are making them do it! They don't want to be fascists, you see, but gosh darn it, they have no choice!

This excuse was most clearly articulated for a large audience on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show last week. His guest, Jesse Kelly, ranted that he is "worried" — and by "worried", he means he's threatening — that the "right is going to pick a fascist" because "if we're going to be all treated like criminals and all subject to every single law, while antifa/Black Lives Matter guys go free and Hunter Biden goes free, then the right's going to take drastic measures."

Carlson, far from pushing back on this "don't make us hit you" threat, performed his idiotic mouth-open fake serious face, as if this was an intellectual discussion about something happening beyond his control. In reality, his show is a nightly blast of encouragement at his fans to embrace their more fascistic yearnings.

The more "intellectual" version of this argument was rolled out by Glenn Ellmers at the American Mind blog of the Claremont Institute,a fairly prestigious conservative think tank that is oriented around the task of putting an intellectualized gloss on the reactionary impulses of the right. In the piece, Ellmers argues openly that "most people living in the United States today" — by which he clearly and explicitly means Democratic voters — "are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term."

Defining most Americans as non-American, of course, is about justifying an all-out assault on their rights and freedoms. As progressive writer John Ganz wrote in his lengthy rebuttal to Ellmers, this is a "radically anti-democratic conceit of delegitimizing the citizenship of the majority of the country." But Ellmers, like Kelly, pretends to say this more in sorrow than anger, claiming that the left has forced this turn towards fascism (though he pretends it isn't fascism) because the liberal majority does "not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people."

In this argument, of course, only the right gets to decide what counts as a legitimate American value.It's closed-loop logic: You are technically free, but only if you live your life in a way prescribed by the religious right. You're allowed to vote, but only if you vote for Republicans.But can freedom really be freedom if it's stripped away from you the second you actually use your freedom?Of course not. This kind of illogic allows authoritarians to claim to be "pro-freedom" while refusing people real freedom.

On his recent call to Laura Ingraham's Fox News show, Trump understandably made headlines with lies about the Capitol insurrectionists, who he falsely claimed were "zero threat", even though they killed on Capitol police officer, traumatized two to the point of suicide, and left 140 injured. But equally disturbing was the way Trump justified the violence, even as he pretended not to see it.

"When I look at antifa and what they did to Washington," he whined, "and what they did to other locations, and the destruction, and frankly the killing and the beating up of people, and nothing happens to them whatsoever? Why aren't they going after antifa?"

Of course, this is more lies. Research shows that 98% of the Black Lives Matter protests were peaceful, and that police were often the instigators of the violence. But Trump's lie serves a purpose. Like Kelly and Ellmers, Trump is setting up the claim that violence and fascism are not something that conservatives are choosing willingly, but something they've been forced to embrace. You know, because "antifa" and the "beating up of people," most of which resides in the fevered conservative's imagination rather than reality.

As Adam Serwer at the Atlantic recently noted, from the very beginning of Trump's presidency, conservatives perceived him as "a punishment" and would "respond to any perceived liberal excess with a simple phrase: 'This is why Trump won.'" They knew that it was wrong to vote for Trump, that it made them bad people to do it, but insisted that they were forced into this immoral position by alleged liberal excesses, most of which were silly, made up entirely or wildly exaggerated. (Literally, conservatives justified the immoral choice to vote for Trump by citing the existence of veggie burgers, gay rights demonstrators twerking, and Disneyland removing a "humorous" display about selling women into prostitution.) Now that logic has exploded all over the right, being used to justify all their own grotesque, fascistic, or anti-democratic behavior.

In a sense, nothing is new about this.

Despite all the chest-thumping authoritarians do, they're all cowards at heart, prone to whining and playing the victim, no matter how silly the pretense. Nazis had their own version of this, with their false "stabbed in the back" narrative they used to justify their genocidal desires. From the very beginning of Trump's presidency, groups like the Proud Boys would openly trawl through liberal cities, trying to provoke a fight, so they could claim victimhood and use that as justification for violence. They can never just admit that they want to be fascists. Instead, they whine and blame someone else for their own immoral desires.

What's scary about this particular moment is that kind of illogic is starting to spread even more rapidly through conservative media. Trump's two-and-a-half-month-long coup effort may have failed to secure him a second term, but it did instill a widespread sense on the right that they were entitled to win the election. Since other voters "stole" the election by voting for Joe Biden, conservatives increasingly claim justification for ending democracy. If you reject people's right to prefer one candidate over another, however, you never believed in democracy in the first place.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

---

alt rt has afpac w/ gosar and steve king

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/cpac-fascism/

no lnx

Republicans' fascism two-step was on display at CPAC 2021

Amanda Marcotte March 01, 2021

If you want a perfect emblem of the current state of Republican politics, look to the story of how Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., spent this past weekend.

On Friday night, Gosar attended a conference for unvarnished fascists, where the main organizer gave a speech calling for America to be white nationalist country and openly celebrated the insurrection spearheaded by Donald Trump on Jan. 6. On Saturday, while speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Gosar lamely claimed to denounce "white racism," clearly feeling that those magic words erased his participation in and support for those who are organizing white racists to take over the country through force.

:{:{}:

It should be silly that Gosar believes that simply declaring "I denounce" is enough to negate all his concrete actions in favor of white nationalism, but the sad fact is that he has good reason to think it will work. After all, that's how things have been working for years in this country. Call it the fascism two-step: First, Republicans do something overtly fascist. Then they wave off concerns about their fascism by faking umbrage and relying on the widespread belief that "it can never happen here" to paint their critics as hysterical. Gosar was just a particularly blunt and obvious example, but it's the strategy that's been used throughout Trump's presidency and now is being heavily employed to minimize the attempted insurrection.

Much was written, both on social and plain old regular media, about how CPAC this year was cementing Trump's power over the GOP and turning the party into a cult of personality for their orange-hued buffoon of a leader. Indeed, it's both alarming and darkly funny, from the rapturous reception of his predictably whiny stemwinder to the ridiculous gold statue of Trump that was on display, which drew thousands of jokes about golden calves. But really, the Trump worship is only part of what is the bigger and much scarier story of CPAC.

The conference was geared around the task of completing the transformation of the Republican party into an overtly authoritarian — even fascist — party that is focused on seizing and holding power against the will of the American people. The Trump idolatry is part of that — what's a fascist party without a cult around a narcissistic leader? — but ultimately, Trump still functions as he always has, which is as a tool for his followers to get what they want, and not an ends in himself. And what they want, as CPAC made quite clear, is to make the U.S. a white nationalist country, which is always what the "MAGA" slogan stood for.

The CPAC straw poll showed only 55% of attendees endorsed Trump as their favorite for the Republican presidential nominee. However, a full 97% approved of Trump's performance in office, despite him ending his presidency by launching a coup that ended in a bloody attack on the Capitol. Trump himself they can leave or take. But the insurrection and the violent assault on American democracy? That is what the CPAC crowd is all about.

As Heather "Digby" Parton noted at Salon Monday morning, "Trump went out of his way to cancel a whole lot of Republicans he considers disloyal, promising to do everything in his power to 'get rid of 'em all,'" and then proceeded to name "every single GOP politician who voted for impeachment individually, his voice dripping with venom."

This is a result, of course, of Trump's famous narcissism and his obsessive cataloging of his enemies. But it is also, and more importantly, about something else: Purging the party of anyone who isn't on board with a fascist agenda. The targets of Trump's wrath are the only Republicans who drew the line at a violent attempt to overthrow the government. This isn't about just remaking the party in his own image, but remaking they party as one explicitly supportive of violent insurrections. Frankly, it won't be a hard task, since, as his pathetically short list showed, few Republicans were even interested in opposing his coup in the first place....

---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/qanon-party/

rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon-loving construction heiress who recently won a deep-red congressional seat in Georgia, is getting quite a bit of attention for her nutty, violent, and racist views that she has long enjoyed sharing freely on social media. There is no doubt that she's a doozy, from her 2019 video demanding that her followers "flood the Capitol" and use violence "if we have to" to her 2018 Facebook post blaming wildfires on Jews with space lasers. Democrats in Congress have been making hay over Greene's committee assignments, using the presence of someone who stalked a school shooting survivor on the House Education and Labor Committee to embarrass House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and highlight the way that extremism has been mainstreamed in the GOP.

The whole situation is apparently too much for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who started to insult Greene in public on Monday, in a belated bid to suggest that the QAnon faction is more fringe in the Republican Party than it actually is. "Loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican Party and our country," McConnell groused in a statement that did not name Greene explicitly. Sen. Todd C. Young of Indiana, a close colleague of McConnell's, picked up the baton on Tuesday, calling Greene "nutty" and "an embarrassment to our party."

It's tempting to be comforted by these words and to imagine that powerful Republicans are drawing a line in the sand when it comes to how far the party will go in catering to the extremist element. In reality, however, it's just a feint to make McConnell appear to be a reasonable person while he continues to empower and support the fascistic faction of the GOP. This is about looking good to the cable news pundits while not doing anything substantive that would actually curtail the power of the Trumpist right.

"[E]verything Greene has said, done and endorsed has been similarly said, done and endorsed by Donald Trump,"Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted, arguing that Greene is a "scape goat some Republicans are trying to push off the cliff to expiate the sins of Donald Trump, who they can never cross."

As usual, this is a situation where it's more useful to look at what Republican leadership does, rather than what they say.

What Republicans are planning to do is let Trump off the hook for inciting a violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6. Ninety percent of Senate Republicans voted against even holding a trial for Trump, using nonsense procedural objections, because they know full well that he's guilty and can't be defended on the merits.

There is no wiggle room here: Acquitting Trump is endorsing his insurrection. Trump himself made that clear by getting rid of a legal team that expressed queasiness about centering his lies about a "stolen" election. His new lawyers are more willing to make Trump's false claims about election fraud part of their defense.

Senate Republicans want to have it both ways. They want to encourage and benefit the kinds of conspiracy theorists that stormed the Capitol, because they think pandering to these people — and coddling their "god-emperor" Trump — is the way to win elections. But they also don't want to look like a bunch of loons and fascists, wanting to present themselves as eminent statesmen on the Sunday shows. That's why Senate Republicans are flipping out over the very idea that the House impeachment managers might bring forward actual evidence in Trump's impeachment trial next week. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was so freaked out at the idea of hearing testimony from victims of the Capitol riot that he made a bunch of impotent and incoherent threats that he would retaliate by having "the FBI to come in" to talk about "the security footprint at the Capitol." (Not sure why this would bother Democrats, who have also criticized Capitol security and even forced the Capitol Police chief to resign.)

It's no mystery why Graham and other Republicans don't want Democrats airing live testimony from Capitol officers and congressional staff who were assaulted and terrorized by rabid Trump fans attempting to overturn an election. The severity of the injuries and the trauma will underscore how truly depraved it is of Senate Republicans to acquit Trump of his crime.

Greene makes an easy scapegoat for Republicans. For one thing, she's a woman, and it's always easier to make a spectacle of women in power than it is to do the same to men. Note that McConnell and his buddies aren't targeting Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, even though he was filmed cheering on the insurrectionists at the Capitol, or Rep. Madison Cawthorne of North Carolina, who keeps doing uncomfortably Nazi-friendly stuff.

For another thing, Greene relishes the attention, dramatically playing the victim of "career politicians" who "murdered babies with your tax dollars." Few, if any, people have ever been so excited and eager to step into the role of the bug-eyed lunatic here to make the rest of the caucus seem saner by comparison.

But it's all a charade.

Even if Republicans toss Greene on her duff, the larger problem — that the party is catering to a radical minority who supports the insurrection and has soured on democracy itself — remains in place. We know this because Republicans are doing everything they can to shield Trump from the consequences of inciting an insurrection. If Republicans really wanted to clean house, they'd start by convicting Trump and barring him from running for president again. Their unwillingness to do this shows that the GOP really is the party of QAnon now, regardless of what happens to their most obnoxious new congresswoman.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/trump-coup-2650132275/

Last week, Donald Trump finally left the White House, after two and a half months of trying to steal the election — which culminated in Trump inciting a violent insurrection at the Capitol. Even before he sent a mob to violently interrupt the certification of Joe Biden's win on January 6, Trump's efforts to overturn the electionwere relentless to the point of being uncountable: Dozens of lawsuits (which were nearly all struck down), pressure campaigns on local election boards and state legislators, an extortion scheme against Senate Republicans, threats against state officials, demands that then-Vice President Mike Pence illegally invalidate the election, and even meetings to explore the possibility of a military coup.

In the face of all this, a narrative has shaped up: Trump's failure to pull off a coup was largely due to his own shortcomings.

It's a narrative that started early, with Max Boot of the Washington Post opining shortly after the election that he's "never been more grateful for President Trump's incompetence," because he "can't even organize a coup d'état properly." It culminated in Adam Serwer of the Atlantic arguing that Trump's "assault was most often futile, almost always buffoonish."

To be clear, no one is saying that Trump's efforts were inconsequential, just because he failed to steal the election. Even Ross Douthat, who was most devoted to the "incompetence" narrative, admitted in his New York Times column that it was bad that a violent mob had descended on the Capitol, killing a police officer and coming perilously close to getting their hands on the lawmakers they were threatening. As Ed Kilgore wrote last week at the New Yorker, the lesson we all learned is that there were "some moments of real peril," and Trump got distressingly close to pulling it off at times. Still, the focus on why Trump failed is largely on his own inadequacies and bad planning — Kilgore suggests he could have succeeded with "better timing and better lawyers" — and some lucky breaks, such as the quick thinking of some Capitol police who saved lawmakers from the insurrectionists.

Over the weekend, however, a piece by Alexander Burns of the New York Timeshighlighted how much the credit to ending Trump's coup should go to Democratic and progressive activists. Far from standing by idly while Trump bumbled his way towards failure, these groups never underestimated Trump's likelihood of winning. If not for these groups and their organized and devoted efforts, the odds are quite high that Trump could have stolen himself a second term.

Defeating Trump took a "long season of planning and coordination by progressives who anticipated Mr. Trump's postelection schemes, including his premature attempt to claim a victory he had not achieved, his pressure campaigns targeting Republican election administrators and county officials and his incitement of far-right violence," Burns writes. It took a remarkable "degree of collaboration among progressive groups that often struggle to work so closely together because of competition over political turf, funding and conflicting ideological priorities."

The Democracy Defense Coalition brought together over 200 groups, guided by the correct assumption that Trump would try to stage a coup after he lost the election. Their work was largely quiet, no doubt to keep Trump and his minions from finding out about it and interfering with it. But without this coordinated response, it's quite likely Trump would have been able to pull off at least one of his many plans to steal the election.

As I chronicled at Salon back in October, with help from activists doing this work, defeating Trump required an organized, calm, and persistent response from Democratic voters. For instance, activists recognized that Trump was going to use the partisan divergence on voting styles — coronavirus-concerned Democrats would vote by mail and COVID-denying Republicans would vote in person — as a wedge point, and try to get mail-in ballots thrown out in large numbers. The counteraction to that was to convince Democratic voters to vote as early as possible, on the theory that ballots that arrived before Election Day were easier to protect from Trump's legal assault.

The strategy was effective.

In Pennsylvania,so few mail-in ballots arrived after Election Day that even if Trump had been successful in arguing that they should be thrown out, it wouldn't have changed the outcome of the election. The result was swifter court decisions shutting down Trump's challenges, depriving him of the momentum needed for a successful coup. As Burns notes, the activists had a nearly impossible task, of striking a balance between taking the coup seriously but also projecting an air of confidence that Trump would fail. Defeating a coup is very much about convincing the public that your side will prevail. This balance was struck, but not by accident. It took lots of hard work by activists, often working quietly behind the scenes, to organize progressives in a way that showed concern-but-confidence. The result was events such as one night in Philadelphia when pro-democracy crowds ran off Rudy Giuliani and Eric Trump from the convention center, where the two men were trying to whip a right-wing crowd up to harass vote counters. After Giuliani and Trump took off, the protest broke out into a dance party.

It's important to learn from this recent history for a very simple reason: The effort to end democracy isn't over.

Trump may run again, and as he did in every election he's been in, he will cheat and encourage others to cheat on his behalf. But even if Trump doesn't run again, he's empowered a movement of anti-democracy Republicans who will look for every advantage they can to nullify the results of elections they lose. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is already doing this, with his plot to keep the Senate from even beginning business unless the Democratic majority simply relinquishes the power given to them by the voters.

To defeat the longer-term assault on democracy, it's critical for everyday voters to understand that they do have power, and that, by taking action, they can help preserve and restore democracy.

The reason why Republicans have gotten so far in their efforts to undermine democracy is that they've trained ordinary people into believing that efforts to stop them will all be in vain. The true story of how Trump was defeated, by regular people who fought for their democracy, is empowering. It can convince people to keep up the fight. So while no one should doubt Trump is an idiot,it's important to give credit where it's due for his defeat: On the progressives who fought him, every step of the way.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/trump-impeachment-2649799213/

aha fascist dictators will keep probing to find limit or workaround norms?

// howard stern provocateur beck who have to keep upping the emotion fear/anger dosage ~ tolerance (pun), but alt rt says just kidding irony owning the lib snocflakes i'm just rodeo clown

amanda sees systemic pattern

1/9

Thursday night, a clearly reluctant Donald Trump released a video, promising, "My focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power."

Of course, his focus just the day before was on stoking a violent insurrection, making any hope of an "orderly" — much less a "seamless" — transition of power impossible. It was a little like throwing someone's pet off a balcony, and then promising that, from here on out, you're going to be the most responsible of dog sitters.

Still, there is no doubt many will be tempted to believe Trump, especially as it's only 10 days until the inauguration of Joe Biden removes him from office. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has threatened to impeach trump if Vice President Mike Pence doesn't remove him through the 25th Amendment procedure. The latter is doubtful to happen, the former likely, but in either case, it takes time. The promise that Trump is done acting out and will be a good little sociopathic narcissist is appealing, because any effort to hold him accountable in this short amount of time is a logistical nightmare. That, however, is what Trump is counting on.

Trump's video, was not an earnest promise to finally behave, at this late date in his presidency, like a responsible statesman. (Also, too late!) He made no mention of the president-elect nor uttered any variant of the word concession. It was yet another manipulation from Trump, who is trying to avoid paying the piper for inciting an insurrection. This is the political equivalent of the wife-beater pleading with his battered spouse to give him another chance, and promising never to do it again. But they always do it again. And Trump cannot be trusted to keep his word about "a smooth, orderly and seamless transition of power."

There are many reasons that impeachment must go forward, of course, starting with the fact that it's important to take a stand, even if it's just symbolic, against politicians fomenting anti-democratic insurrections. The death of Brian Sicknick, a Capitol police officer who appears to have been murdered by an insurrectionist armed with a fire extinguisher, only heightens the moral necessity of impeachment.

Impeachment is also a matter of prevention.

Trump, as Pelosi said in her press conference Thursday, is "a very dangerous person" and "any day could be a horror show for America." As Biden's inauguration grows nearer and the fact that he really is going to have to leave becomes more real to Trump, he will grow more frantic. And his impulse — to lash out, to insist that he's the real winner, and to stoke more violence — will rear its head again.

We've been down this road countless times with Trump: He escalates and escalates until things get really bad enough to get politically dodgy for him. And then he pulls the wife-beater-brings-roses act, giving in to pressure from aides and other Republicans to at least pretend to be presidential and do the right thing. He then sits and stews in anger at the supposed humiliation for a few days, or even hours. Eventually, he lashes out, returning to his desire to push conspiracy theories or incite nonsense or otherwise be the same tedious asshole he was before the brief bout of acting "presidential."

How many variations on this theme did we get from the coronavirus pandemic alone? Trump would ride some hobbyhorse — suggesting it was being exaggerated to hurt him politically, denying that masks were effective, insisting that people should ignore stay-at-home recommendations, hyping hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure. Eventually, the political heat would build-up and his aides would persuade him to pay some lip service to reality, by wearing a mask in public or reading a statement asking people to follow health recommendations. But it was only ever a temporary effort to manipulate the press into giving him good coverage — he always regressed right back to where he wanted to be, raving about how it's all a hoax and masks are unmanly.

He followed this predictable pattern even when he himself got COVID-19. After a brief bout of submitting to pressure to take it seriously, Trump went right back to his denialist antics, staging a White House event meant to imply that the disease, which resulted in his hospitalization and has killed 365,000 Americans so far, is no big deal.

Trump's statement must be assumed to be more of the same: An effort to lull the press, the public, and various D.C. officials into complacency. But there is no reason to believe a word of it. For one thing, he still refuses to admit he lost the election to Biden. For another, he is refusing to take responsibility for what he did. And for yet another reason, he told likely lies in the video, such as taking credit for calling the National Guard, when reports suggest that Pence was the one who did it, against Trump's wishes.

Indeed, the first signs of the predictable Trump backslide are emerging. Twitter, in an idiotic move, let Trump have his account back and sure enough, he's already raving about how many votes he gotand how his voters "will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!"Less than 24 hours after he disingenuously acknowledged "this moment calls for healing and reconciliation," Trump tweeted that he would break with a centuries-old custom and not attend the inauguration.

Trump is, above all other things, a liar. His assurances he will oversee an orderly transition should not be believed. Indeed, when Trump says a thing, it's wise to assume that the opposite is true. He's just trying to buy time to avoid facing consequences. It's possible he's even anticipating some other stunt, even though his last one led to the deaths of five people, including a police officer guarding the Capitol. Nothing has changed. As Pelosi said on Wednesday, if Pence and Cabinet will not remove Trump, he must be impeached.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/gop-conspiracy-theories/

it's been happening for decades — but the transformation is now complete.

It started with the Whitewater investigation, went through all of the Benghazi investigations, and ramped up in recent years when Republicans turned around to falsely claim that the investigation into Donald Trump's ties with a Russian conspiracy to interfere with the 2016 election was as a "hoax," ignoring the overwhelming evidence of rampant collusion. On Wednesday, the transformation of the GOP from a real political party to a conspiracy theory cult was finally fully completed.

Wednesday was the day Senate Republicans spent hours and a hefty chunk of taxpayer money to bolster the lie that Democrats "stole" the 2020 election, with their only evidence being the say-so of a narcissistic sociopath whose only spoken language is lying. No one, especially no Republican politician, sincerely believes that Trump was the "real" winner of the 2020 election, or that there's any evidence whatsoever of voter fraud or election irregularities of any real importance. As Sen. Gary Peters, D.-Mich., the ranking member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee declared during his opening remarks, "this hearing gives a platform to conspiracy theories and lies" and " is a grave threat to the future of our democracy."

Of course, that is the point.

As the committee chair, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, and his fellow Republicans understand, their party can no longer win fair elections or campaign on ideas, since the public rejects most policies the GOP stands for. So the party's only recourse is to dish out a steady stream of conspiracy theories meant to distract from the policy debate while leveraging their power to undermine democracy.

As the mainstream news coverage of the hearing dutifully noted, no evidence of voter fraud was presented during Wednesday's hearing and Democrats on the committee repeatedly emphasized that Trump's claims of "fraud" have been presented before the courts dozens of times and thrown out for lack of evidence. Indeed, anyone who actually watched the hearing or read responsible coverage of it would walk away with the impression that the Republicans were a bunch of raving madmen and the Democrats were the only people speaking any sense.

What the Republicans running the hearing understand, however, is that their audience, the Republican base, neither watched the hearing nor consumed the mainstream media coverage of it. Instead, the purpose of the hearing is to generate footage that can be edited, often misleadingly, into clips that are fed into right-wing media sources and circulated through social media.

Evidence is not needed, nor is proof, nor convincing arguments. All that's needed are clips of the Republican senators, looking officious in the trappings of a Senate hearing, railing about "stolen" elections and defending the honor of those who purport to believe that Joe Biden stole the election. And all those poignant and convincing rebuttals from Democrats? Those can be chopped and edited to make the Democrats look "crazy" and like they're unleashing "unhinged" attacks on the noble Republicans.

None of this is about keeping Trump in office.

Senate Republicans not only understand that he lost, but that his coup efforts are failing. Their crusade now is about exploiting his lies of a "rigged" election for their own political purposes. Feeding the GOP base's victim complex and riling them up with conspiracy theories keeps them too busy obsessively hating Democrats to notice that the Republicans have run the country into the ground. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri showcased the strategy perfectly, with a maudlin speech about how actual evidence of a rigged election wasn't the point, because "the constituents back at home" told him "theyfeltthey had been disenfranchised."

"These are normal, reasonable people. These are not crazy people," he said.

For someone actually watching the hearing, this is maddening. The folks Hawley is talking about are just rabid Republicans who back Trump's coup and are willing to stand by outrageous bad faith arguments to defend their belief that certain voters — namely Black voters in big cities — simply shouldn't have the same right vote.

But when Hawley's remarks about are inevitably cut into a video that removes all this context and fed into right-wing disinformation channels, all that audiences will see is Hawley defending his voters as "normal, reasonable people" who are "not crazy". It will read as him defending the honor of conservatives against those elitist, condescending liberals who are always calling them "crazy", instead of what actually happened, which was that Hawley said conservative "feelings" about the election matter more than the fact of who actually won.

Similarly, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky declared during the hearing that the election "in many ways, was stolen." He did not offer evidence, much less proof for this claim, which was a blatant lie. But it doesn't matter. He knows that his statement will be cut into a video and disseminated. He doesn't need evidence, so much as a quick clip with him looking authoritative as he offers this lie without rebuttal.

That's what GOP politics is all about these days. It's not about making a policy case to voters, since Republican politicians know that will never fly. Instead, it's about identity politics and stirring up hate, however ridiculous, against liberals. Hawley is hoping his constituents be so angry at the alleged liberals calling them "crazy" that they focus on getting their revenge by voting Republican, rather than asking hard questions about, say, why the Republican-run Senate has abandoned them to economic devastation during this pandemic.

This is all the Republican Party is these days: A propaganda engine churning out fake "scandals" meant to send their voters down conspiracy theory rabbit holes or stir irrational right-wing grievances. Anything, really, but ever talk about actual policy or governance, which Republican politicians know is territory they will always lose on.

That's why Republicans have fully committed to Trump's lies about the 2020 election. It's not that they care one whit about Trump — I suspect many of them are glad to see him go since he's a miserable person to be around — but because this conspiracy theory is so useful. Republicans can now focus their voters, ideally for four years, on nursing a grudge over losing an election they "should" have won, if only the votes of those meanie Democrats had been thrown in the trash.

After all, what's the alternative?

Republicans know they'd lose a reasonable debate about policy differences with Democrats. So this is what they've turned themselves into: A conspiracy theory cult that is always dashing from one mad lie to another, stirring up the base with nonsense and hoping the voters will never catch onto what a con the whole thing is.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/proud-boys-2649481985/

In vino veritas,or perhaps more appropriately, in Bud Light veritas: These were the words that came to mind while I watched Saturday's Proud Boys riot in Washington, D.C.

For years, the Proud Boys have angrily resisted critics who say the group is racist, claiming instead to be for "Western chauvinism." Before the heat got to him and he quit, Proud Boys founder (and onetime Vice co-founder) Gavin McInnes described the group as being "alt-right without the racism." The Boys' insistence that they are absolutely, definitely not a bunch of racists even led to ugly infighting when a splinter group broke off over the refusal of group leaders to commit to overtly white nationalist beliefs.

But on one Saturday night in Washington, fueled by alcohol and rage over Donald Trump's electoral defeat, the pretense that "Western chauvinism" is not a racist ideology collapsed.After hours of drinking and ginning themselves up, the Proud Boys stole Black Lives Matter flags and targeted counter-protesters who were gathered in Black Lives Matter Plaza. A group of Proud Boys dramatically lit a large Black Lives Matter flag on fire, while flashing the "OK" sign, which of late has been appropriated by racists as a "white power" symbol. Vandalism at two historically Black churches, Asbury United Methodist Church and Metropolitan A.M.E. Church, is being investigated as a hate crime. Four people were stabbed in altercations between the Proud Boys and counter-protesters.

Saturday's rally was ostensibly about protesting Trump's loss and claiming that he was the victim of a "rigged" election. But with inhibitions loosened by booze, anger and literal (as well as metaphorical) darkness, the truth was illuminated: The rage about Donald Trump's electoral fate is about racism. It's a part of the growing fury taking hold of conservatives as their control over American culture slips further and further out of their grasp. Trump is just the latest vehicle for this anger, but this story is about a lot more than him. It's bigger even than electoral politics. This is about a more fundamental issue: over who gets to define America, and the widespread reactionary outrage over being outnumbered by more liberal, more diverse and more cosmopolitan Americans, and feeling unable to stop the tide of progress.

Trump was able to amass an extraordinary 74.2 million voters with a message of resentment at "political correctness" and "woke" culture, a story about how conservative white people are supposedly being victimized by a changing America. But as much as that campaign whipped up millions of Americans, at the heart of it all was a misdirection. What conservatives really want is control over the culture. That isn't something that can be won at the ballot box, and they know it.

If the actual goal of the angry right were control over governance and policy, they should be thrilled by the past year.

Despite Trump's defeat, the GOP has maintained control over the Senate (pending the results of Georgia's runoff elections next month) and gained at least 10 seats in the House, nibbling the Democratic majority down to a bare minimum. They have also packed the federal courts so thoroughly that meaningful Democratic legislation may be impossible to enact for at least a generation. Unless Democrats can pull upsets in both of the Georgia races to be decided on Jan. 5, incoming President Joe Biden will be hamstrung by all-too-familiar obstructionist Republicans.

But instead of being happy or at least begrudgingly accepting what was mostly a win for Republicans, the right has exploded in rage. That's because Donald Trump's defeat was a reminder that no matter how much Republicans maintain power through a drastically tilted electoral playing field, conservatives are still, culturally speaking, a minority — and one that's shrinking rapidly, at that.

This is why right-wingers always act like angry losers, no matter how many political wins they stack up. There's a limit to how much cultural change can be reversed at the ballot box or even in the courts. Of course, the policy fights over police reform, reproductive rights, same-sex marriage and immigration matter quite a bit to real people's lives. But even when the right wins on policy, the cultural changes — racial diversity, women's increased equality, the mainstreaming of LGBTQ people — march on. That's why Proud Boys targeted Black Lives Matter iconography instead of, say, the offices of Democratic Party leaders or progressive think tanks.

The same weekend that Proud Boys were throwing a public tantrum in Washington, Cleveland's baseball team finally gave in to longstanding pressure and announced it would drop its venerable but racist name, the "Indians." The move comes after the NFL team in D.C. dropped its former name, which was a far more vicious slur against Native Americans. Trump, unsurprisingly, whined about the Cleveland decision on Twitter, calling it "Cancel culture at work," even though the team's private owners made the decision and its players will take the field next season as usual. Even in using that term, Trump tacitly admitted that his power as president, and as massive cultural icon to the right, can do nothing to stop the anti-racist pressure campaign that caused the name change.

Trump's ultimately futile war over the military's move to ban Confederate iconography and rename bases currently named after Confederate figures is similar. That's a lost cause, and not just because Trump will soon leave office and the military will just proceed with its plans under Biden. Military leaders are making these decisions themselves, reflecting changes that have already occurring within military culture as the services have become more racially diverse and more open to women.

There are any number of other examples. Even as the right keeps on railing against these cultural changes, it can't help but reflect them. For instance, Saturday's right-wing rally featured an extremely lame hip-hop act, juxtaposing right-wing cultural appropriation with overt acts of racism. But this seeming contradiction is just SOP for Trumpers. Trump himself would dance badly to songs by the Village People at rallies where he'd promise to appoint more right-wing judges to strip LGBTQ people of their rights.

What else are conservatives supposed to do? Have crap music at their events? Even "Western chauvinists" understand that if they limit themselves to white, straight, conservative-oriented music, they're doomed to host a lame party. So they borrow very heavily from the same cultures they view as an existential threat to "America."

Again, that's why right-wingers eternally act like victims, no matter how many electoral wins they rack up. "MAGA" was a promise to restore a fantasy version of an American white-bread past. The entire Republican National Convention was a lengthy whine about "cancel culture" and "political correctness," which are right-wing scare terms to demonize shifting social mores that reject open bigotry. The implicit promise was that, by electing Trump for four more years, he would make it socially acceptable to be shitty again. That promise turned out more than 74 million people.

Make no mistake, Trump did a lot of damage in four years: He wrecked the economy, unleashed a pandemic, made the lives of immigrants miserable and rolled back environmental protections — the list goes on. But he wasn't able to do the one thing that his supporters most dearly wanted, which was to remake the culture in their image. He couldn't do that in four years, and he wasn't going to do it in eight. It's not impossible to use political power to do such a thing — the Jim Crow South and Nazi Germany being the most obvious examples — but it generally requires heavy-handed state violence and censorship crackdowns that Trump flirted with but was never remotely able to implement on the scale necessary to fulfill those MAGA desires.

None of which is to say that everything will be just dandy now that Trump is leaving office. Racism, sexism, homophobia and other bigotries continue to be a major poison. Systematic racism still creates major inequalities in health, wealth and other social markers. To say that the culture is changing isn't to say that it has changed, and the right-wing assault on human rights is causing real people real pain every day. But none of these realities placate conservatives, who are still enraged that progressives continue to push for and often gain ground, especially in the cultural sphere.

And now a neofascist movement has been unleashed in the U.S. Trump's failed coup was, for him, about ego and power. For his supporters, however, it was a symbol of their long-term hopes of managing to wrest back control over the culture despite being both outnumbered and largely incapable of generating attractive cultural touchstones to lure other Americans to their side. The right is losing the culture war, and its anger over that will continue to grow, even as Trump himself is pushed out of the spotlight.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-supporters-2649431913/

Do Republican voters really believe that Joe Biden stole the election from Donald Trump? Do they sincerely see Trump's efforts to overturn the election as the legitimate actions of a wronged man trying to defend democracy? When they declare "stop the steal," are they truly unaware that they are the ones trying to steal this election from the rightful winners?

Or are millions of Americans arguing in bad faith, merely claiming to believe Trump is the true winner? Is this all just a disingenuous song-and-dance, meant to put a morally justifiable gloss on what is actually widespread support among Trump voters for a coup? The answer to this question of "delusion or bad faith?" matters quite a bit, as Trump continues to prosecute his futile campaign to steal the 2020 election.

Polls show that a hefty majority of Republican voters — 68%, according to Reuters/Ipsos — say they believe the 2020 election was "rigged" in Biden's favor. Since the election, more than $200 million has flowed into Trump's coffers from Republican donors responding to emails promising to "stop the steal." Are these donors innocent lambs who sincerely believe that Trump is a good man done wrong? Or are they people who are actively seeking to finance a coup, employing the flimsiest of excuses?

Well, as the author of a book called "Troll Nation," it's clear where I stand: By and large, Republican voters who claim that Biden stole the election are arguing from bad faith, not delusion.

This distinction is important because it shows that the intentions of Republican voters (and too many of their elected leaders) are sinister, and need to be taken seriously as an overt assault on democracy. Understanding modern politics means understanding one crucial reality about the current landscape: Conservatives don't hold beliefs, they only have rationalizations.

Many of their long-standing beliefs don't hold up to modern moral standards or rational scrutiny. Rather than give up those beliefs, however, Republicans have developed a series of disingenuous gambits, conspiracy theories and trolling tactics to derail conversations, sow confusion and otherwise distract those who would challenge their indefensible ideology.

Of course, it's morally indefensible to come right out and say you care more about keeping your gas guzzler than protecting the planet. So, instead, conservatives claim to be "skeptical" of climate science, wasting their interlocutor's time by forcing them to prove, over and over and over and over again, that climate change is real. Similarly, open contempt for women's rights is hard to argue, so instead, conservatives will claim concern for "fetal life" to justify support for forced childbirth — even though none of their other policy preferences point to concern about the wellbeing of children, much less fetuses.

Poll numbers showing that Republican voters "believe" that Trump lost the election are more of the same.

Conservatives know better than to openly argue that Democratic votes shouldn't be counted. So instead they concoct this elaborate conspiracy theory, painting themselves as the victims of voter fraud in order to justify an illegal effort to steal the election. The current situation is similar to the last time there was a widespread conspiracy theory aimed at delegitimizing a duly elected Democratic president. During Barack Obama's presidency, polling showed that large numbers of Republicans, often a majority, expressed "skepticism" that Obama was a natural-born citizen and therefore legally eligible to be president. As is the case now, Trump was a ringleader in pushing this "birther" conspiracy theory, helping to mainstream claims that Obama's presidency was illegitimate.

But did Republican voters really believe that Obama was born in Kenya? Or was it just a cover story for their real but unspeakable racist opposition to a Black man being president?

A 2014 study by Stanford researchers suggests strongly that for most birthers the conspiracy theory was bad faith and not a sincere error. The researchers compared different polls and found that how the poll questions were worded made a huge difference in conservative adherence to birtherism. When pollsters reminded respondents that only "natural-born" citizens can become president, nearly 60% of Republican voters readily denied Obama's citizenship. But when polls framed it as a test of knowledge of facts, by asking respondents where Obama was born, only 31% of conservatives espoused birther beliefs. These findings suggest that most conservatives weren't confused about where Obama was born. The conspiracy theory was just a way to express racist beliefs about the inherent illegitimacy of Black leaders by asking "questions" about Obama's birth certificate.

Trump knows how to tickle this racist impulse in his followers and, unsurprisingly, his claims that Biden "stole" the election follow the same formula. Trump and his main henchman, Rudy Giuliani, have specifically accused Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and Atlanta — all cities where Black Americans are either a majority or a plurality of residents — of having "dumps" of illegal ballots.

The appeal of this conspiracy theory to racists isn't subtle. It's a way to deny the legitimacy of Black voters without coming right out and saying it. This isn't just a conspiracy theory about Trump's fragile ego. It speaks directly to long-standing right-wing fury at minority voting rights. Historian Jeffrey Herf notes another historical precedent at play, comparing Trump's conspiracy theory to the ones that rose up in Germany between the first and second world wars in a recent Washington Post op-ed:

[Trump's] efforts to deny the reality of defeat and threaten democracy recall the most famous comparable episode in modern European history — the claims by the German military and diplomatic establishment that Germany had not been defeated militarily in World War I. Instead, they argued, Germany had been "stabbed in the back" by liberals, socialists, communists and Jews who somehow snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

In reality, Herf points out, the war was "lost because of the superiority of the Allied military" and German hubris leading to bad battlefield decisions. But claiming to believe otherwise gave conservative Germans a chance to save face and, perhaps more important, an excuse to bash other Germans — mostly leftists and Jews — who they didn't want to acknowledge as equal citizens. Was it bad faith or misapprehension? As I note in a recent newsletter, Jean-Paul Sartre felt strongly it was the former at the time, and argued the "bad faith" case in his famous 1946 essay on anti-Semitism.

So why does it matter?

As Greg Sargent writes at the Washington Post, "What Republican voters think, or say they think, about who really won matters less than the fact that, as a consequence, they actively want their elected representatives to subvert our democracy and keep Trump in power illegitimately."

Unfortunately, the belief that these folks are sincere in their claims that the election was "stolen" puts a glow of innocence on their actions. This leads many observers underestimate the seriousness of a situation where a large percentage of Americans are actively supporting a coup. It also focuses attention away from what needs to be done to fight back. The "delusion" model of understanding Republican behavior suggests that education is the solution. That was thoroughly disproven in the Obama years, when even the release of his long-form birth certificate did little to discourage GOP voters from denying his legitimacy.

Instead, it's important to see those who support Trump's coup for who they are: People who have been radicalized, through racism hateful propaganda and a sense of perpetual grievance, against democracy. They aren't going to change their minds because of new facts, because the underlying belief — which is that they deserve to be in power, no matter what — is the problem here. It's a rising American authoritarianism, and we underestimate it at our peril.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/failed-coup-trump/

salon

Trump is still trying to steal the election from Joe Biden, and while he is still going to fail, the terrifying reality is that a few cracks in the wall protecting democracy have started to appear.

While many pundits continue to minimize this entire situation, sneering at people who use phrases like "attempted coup," the grim reality of our current moment is that Trump got far closer to succeeding than many people would like to admit. He's only stopped now by the fact that too many people voted against him in so many different parts of America. Every indication suggests that if it were up to Republicans, who still hold a disproportionate amount of power, Trump might very well have been illegally installed for a second term in office.

The Washington Post reported that Trump reached out to Bryan Cutler, speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, on Monday in an effort to get Cutler to invalidate the state's presidential election results, citing "all these issues in Philadelphia." This is the third Republican state leader Trump has reached out to with this request — he's also contacted Georgia's Gov. Brian Kemp and brought Michigan legislators to the White House — and the third strikeout.

In fact, it's arguably the fourth. Trump also called Arizona's Gov. Doug Ducey. Ducey claimed the president wasn't trying to pressure him — but c'mon, Trump's "information gathering" is just more Trumpian code for his pressure campaign.

So why isn't Trump getting what he asked for? Much of the coverage of the recalcitrant Republican leaders portrays these officials as brave defenders of democracy, or at least people who have had enough of Trump's corruption and are drawing a line.

That's nonsense.

It's evident that what's holding Republicans back is not honor or decency, but a lack of options. There simply aren't legal processes to pull off what Trump wants, no matter what Newsmax or OANN might say, and state leaders know it. They are saying no to Trump not because they want to, but because, legally, they have to. Witness, for instance, what the Pennsylvania House speaker's spokesperson told the New York Times about the discussion with Trump: "Cutler made it very clear what power the legislature has and does not have."

Missing, of course, is any mention of the importance of democracy or a robust defense of the right of Pennsylvanians to vote. Cutler sympathizes with Trump's desire to overturn a free and fair election, which is why he signed a letter to the state's congressional delegation asking them to object to the state's electoral votes. He just doesn't have the power to vacate the election results.

Georgia's Kemp issued a similar response, noting how much effort he's put into "auditing" the vote, but underlining that he's hamstrung from doing any more. Again, this is not a high-minded defense of the right of Georgians to have their votes counted. On the contrary, Kemp has a long history of being an eager vote suppressor, and that's likely why he's governor today. He's just hit the limit of his powers to deprive voters of their right to be heard. The Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has received widespread praise for his "courage" in standing up to Trump's coup effort. This is further nonsense. While Raffensperger has been more outspoken in defense of the election results than other Trump-toadying politicians, he too is acting more out of legal necessity than a desire to defend democracy.

Raffensperger has a long history of supporting voter suppression. Indeed, he's exploiting the current situation by conflating Trump's attacks on the election with the fight by former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams to *ensure*free and fair elections, on the grounds that both are losers who are critical of Georgia's election process. Of course, the two couldn't be more different, starting with the fact that Abrams is telling the truth about voter suppression and Trump is lying about voter fraud. But the larger point here is that Raffensperger's instinct is to use Trump's coup as leverage to strip away more voting rights.

Raffensperger is no hero. He's just legally constricted from being a villain in the particular case of Trump's coup.

Indeed, there was surprising enthusiasm for Trump's efforts in the days after the election from state-level Republicans, which is why 10 Republican state attorneys general filed an amicus briefon Nov. 10 demanding that the Supreme Court gut a Pennsylvania law giving mail-in ballots mailed by Election Day up to three days to arrive. What's happened since then, however, is mounting evidence that Democratic voters, egged on by the party's calls to vote early, outwitted Republican efforts to steal the election through such legal maneuvers. For instance, only 10,000 votes arrived in that three-day post-election window in Pennsylvania, so even if Trump's lawsuit had been successful, it wouldn't have changed the results of the election in that state.

Even in the face of all this, some state-level Republicans are still looking for any angle they can find to overturn the election. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit Tuesday demanding that the Supreme Court prevent state delegations from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin from voting in the Electoral College. Notably, all four states have been subject to accusations from Trump that the votes from large, racially diverse cities are specifically illegitimate.

On the federal level, the same dynamic is in play.

The Washington Post surveyed 249 Republicans in Congress about Trump's attempts to steal the election, and the numbers are disheartening, to say the least. Only 27 GOP congressional members openly opposed the coup by acknowledging that Biden had won the presidential election. Two members said publicly they believed Trump had won, and the rest — 220 duly elected Republican members of Congress — wouldn't answer the question either way.

Saying nothing is tacit support. These members would be perfectly willing to go along with Trump stealing the election if he could pull it off. They just aren't getting on board publicly because they know it won't work. Even if some congressional Republicans object to the state electors — and every sign shows that a handful will — Democrats control the House, so nothing will likely come of it. But this silence speaks volumes about who would happily collaborate with Trump's coup if they had any confidence it would work.

Of course, not all of them are silent. A group of House Republicans, led by Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mo Brooks of Alabama, are publicly calling on Trump to continue fighting even after the Electoral College legally certifies the election for Biden next week. There has been no rebuke from the Republican leadership to these extremists, not even from leaders who hail from the states where Trump is trying to have legal votes thrown out. The Republican stance, on both the state and federal level, is clear: They wish they could help Trump overturn the election, but they just don't see a path forward. They were prepared to abuse their power as far as they could to help him, and have hit the wall

Unfortunately for Trump, time has run out. Tuesday is the deadline for states to certify their results, and next Monday the Electoral College will finally make Biden's win official. The results are clear, not because Republican leaders have any integrity, but because voters showed up in large enough numbers to render all these shenanigans effectively moot. Trump will leave office on Jan. 20, and the only people who deserve credit for that are Democratic voters and organizers, who made sure Biden's win was big enough that it couldn't be stolen away.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

naked emperor has become a national laughingstock

Amanda Marcotte Salon

Donald Trump was at it again Wednesday, releasing a 46-minute video full of ridiculous lies, claiming that his loss to Joe Biden in November's presidential election was due to "corrupt forces" operating "on a scale never seen before." He called on the Supreme Court to throw out enough votes so that "I very easily win in all states."

It's the sort of thing that used to be both riveting and terrifying...

---

amanda

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-psychology/

Are we addicted to Donald Trump? It's a question that's haunting journalists and political commentators, most of whom hate Trump but cannot deny that his name drives traffic and ratings. Even though Trump lost the election and Joe Biden will be the next president, Trump continues to be the big attention draw for political websites and cable news networks.

Part of that is completely understandable. Trump is still big news. He literally spent the past few weeks attempting a coup. While he failed, that doesn't change the history-making fact that he even tried, or that he got so much support. Certainly Biden, whose main activity is finding boring-but-competent people to staff his administration, can't compete with that, and there's no real indication that he wants to. (Unlike Trump, Biden views governing as a job and not just an opportunity to get attention.)

But there is no doubt that the media remains flatly fascinated with Trump, in no small part because, as Salon's Andrew O'Hehir argued Monday, "our readers and viewers have enabled and encouraged us at every step" and stories about Trump "outperform every other category of reporting, commentary or analysis we can possibly offer."

As Philip Bump at the Washington Post documented Tuesday, since Trump first announced his run for president, he "is the political figure who garners the most search interest, cable news mentions or screen time each month since June 2015."

Because of all this, it's become quite fashionable in some circles to haughtily declare that all this interest is tawdry, and that if we simply ignored Trump, he would go away. Hardly a week goes by on social media where I don't get some reader who, sick of it all, will lash out at me personally and demand that I stop writing about, tweeting about or otherwise giving attention to Trump.

But the command to ignore him didn't make the bully disappear in junior high school and it certainly doesn't work with the president. Nor can Trump's importance in our politics be easily reduced to a pop psychology assumption that all fascination is inherently addiction and therefore bad.

The reality is that the Trump obsession isn't really about Trump himself anyway. It's about his followers.

Don't get me wrong. I confess some interest in his psychology, which our traffic shows is widely shared. But let's face it — even on the sociopath scale, Trump's not as interesting as more exotic specimens like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer. As a person, Trump is little more than the aged version of the yuppie villain in an '80s comedy, with a sweater tied around his neck and a sneer for the scruffy heroes. He only has two emotional registers, whining and bullying. He's boring.

Bump's own numbers show this. Prior to his presidential campaign, Trump wasn't an object of widespread fascination, no matter how much he hustled for attention. Ratings for his reality show were in the toilet and most people didn't think about him at all. It was only when Trump started to get support from everyday voters that he became the focal point of American politics.

The reason that Trump captures so much attention, year in and year out, is because of his followers. How did this two-bit moron who can barely read manage to attract a loyal following — one that has apparently grown from the 63 million people voted for him in 2016 to the 74 million who turned out in 2020? These people adore him, so much so that a quarter-million Americans dead and millions more unemployed only made them more determined to give it all up for the orange guy in an ill-fitting suit who wants to end democracy as we know it. It's a legitimately fascinating mystery.

The devotion of the Red Hats is, if anything, more bizarrebecauseTrump is so tiresome. Going to one of his infamous rallies, for instance, is volunteering to be tortured, like being strapped to a chair while the biggest boor in the world rants incoherently at you for over an hour. Listening to him ping-pong endlessly between whining and bragging is a form of boredom that makes solitary confinement seem pleasant by comparison.

And it's not like his rally-goers felt differently. You could see it on the faces in the crowds, as his supporters would drift away, not really listening except to perk up to applaud at the mention of buzzwords ("Crooked Hillary," "build the wall", "Hunter Biden"), but never really paying much attention to what Trump was actually saying.

They weren't there for him, after all. They were there as a show of force, to let the hated liberals know that they had the numbers and the determination — so much so that they'd sacrifice a night of their preciously short lives listening to a braggart ramble on about windmills and and lie about his own vitality for an hour. Trump will never understand this, but it was never about him. He was there for them, a vehicle for their resentments and, critically, their will to power. He was the weapon they wielded in their war to exert dominance over American politics, even as their actual numbers dwindle.

This movement is what is interesting, because it's ultimately, about the rise of American fascism. It's a real threat, as demonstrated by Biden's uncomfortably close margins in the same swing states Hillary Clinton lost in 2016. Indeed, it's arguable that these forces still won in 2020, as they (probably) kept control of the Senate, gained seats in the House and have overtaken the federal courts, kneecapping the ability of the majority of American voters, who support the Democrats, to exert their political will.

That the most powerful country in the world is being held hostage by an authoritarian, racist minority drunk on conspiracy theories is the biggest story in politics. It's part of a larger story about the entire world in the grip of rising authoritarianism. Their power will define Joe Biden's presidency. Their ability to cripple him will matter more than any of his Cabinet picks or even his executive orders.

Trump is just the shorthand for this very real and ongoing problem. The reason it feels like we can't quit Trump is that we can't quit the people who elected him. As Bob Cesca argued this week at Salon, we shouldn't pander to those people or seek to placate them, but we also can't just ignore them. Not while they still control so many levers of power.

Nowadays, most educated people reject the "great man" theory of history. We understand, intellectually at least, that even legendary villains like Hitler or heroes like FDR were a product of their time and not acting out of some cosmic destiny.

But it's still hard not to reduce politics to personality. Our brains are hardwired to focus on individuals, who have agency and psychology that we can understand, rather than the more diffuse motivations of the crowd.

But Trump could keel over tomorrow, never to tweet again, and he wouldn't go away. He might even grow in power, made into a martyr now that he can no longer embarrass his followers with his routine bouts of public idiocy, such as when he suggested people inject Lysol. Trump the symbol was always far more important than Trump the man. And no matter what happens to Trump the man, the movement he represents remains a live threat to American democracy, and to the world.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

===

---

amanda

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/ted-cruz-2649033018/

---

ted cruz

// trump claimed covid a hoax that wd disappear day after election

war on thxgiving BS

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/ted-cruz-2649019031/

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/republicans-trump-2648997598/

11/21/20

Donald Trump and his, uh,lawyer Rudy Giuliani are moving into the next phase of Trump's attempted coup, which entertainingly involves Giuliani sweating out the previous day's martinis into his hair dye while barking incomprehensible conspiracy theories at bewildered reporters.

Unfortunately, the less amusing and more worrisome aspect of the whole ordeal involves Trump's efforts to lean on Republican-run state legislatures to appoint pro-Trump electors in states where Joe Biden clearly won.

Like most people reading this, I, too, wish I had a crystal ball and could look into the future at Jan. 20, 2021, to see how this all shakes out. In the meantime, the main point of concern is that nearly all Republican politicians are, to one degree or another, supporting Trump's efforts. Some, like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, are flirting with openly seditious behavior by actively trying to get legal ballots thrown in the trash. Most, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, are playing word games to avoid saying who they think will be or should be sworn as president in two months. The only Republican senator to speak out so far is Mitt Romney of Utah, who was also the only Republican senator who voted to convict Trump after his impeachment trial earlier this year.

The common theory in the political class is that this silence is borne out of fear of Trump and his tweeting fingers. Former President Barack Obama, who has been blunt in his concerns about the threat Trump represents to our democracy, characterized the GOP's passive consent to this coup exactly this way.

"I'm more troubled that you're seeing a lot of Republican officials go along with it, not because they actually believe it, but because they feel intimidated by it,"Obama** told MSNBC's Jonathan Capehart on Thursday.

Obama is right on two out of three counts. It's true that Republican officials don't believe a word of Giuliani's sweaty conspiracy theories, which Heather Digby Parton has described as "going full Infowars." It's also true that this GOP compliance is the real problem here. As I explain in the latest Standing Room Only newsletter, successful coups rely on various bureaucrats and lower level politicians who go along. If Trump pulls this off, it will be entirely because he has the tacit support of both state and congressional Republicans all along the way.

But Obama is wrong on the third front: Republicans aren't doing this because they're scared of Trump. They're doing this because most of them, on one level or another, want him to succeed. And even if he fails, they appreciate him advancing the idea that voters in certain areas — notably, cities where Black people outnumber white people — shouldn't really have the right to vote.

Let's face it: The reason Trump has gotten this far is that he's building on decades of Republican antipathy to democracy, an antipathy borne out of resentment that people they deem as "less" American than themselves — people of color, urban people, people who know what "tempeh" is — have the right to vote at all.

For instance, look at this 2016 article from Heritage Foundation writer John Merline, who argued that Hillary Clinton's popular-vote lead in that election didn't really matter, because if "you take California out of the popular vote equation, then Trump wins the rest of the country."

Breitbart writer Joel Pollak made a similar argument regarding this year's election, claiming on Twitter, "Biden won the popular vote — unless you exclude California." He went on to say that "you shouldn't" exclude California, but implied that this alleged fact is "worth noting," which is only true if you believe California voters are somehow less American than other voters. (For the record, this isn't even true. Biden's overall popular-vote lead now exceeds his 5 million-vote lead in the Golden State.)

This belief of Republicans that some voters shouldn't really be voters is especially evident in their enthusiasm for voter suppression, which has kicked into high gear ever since 2013, when Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee, gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This kicked off a flood of GOP-sponsored efforts clearly aimed at stopping as many people of color as possible from exercising their right to vote.

While it's become routine these days for pundits to lament Giuliani's supposed fall from grace, the reality is the man was always a virulent racist. As Radley Balko reminded readers of the Washington Post in 2016, Giuliani kicked off his 1993 New York mayoral campaign by helping to incite a racist police riot aimed at denying that elected Black leaders should have any authority over the NYPD. Giuliani led the drunken and armed crowd of cops as they blocked traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, waving signs with racist cartoons of then-Mayor David Dinkins, and calling Black elected officials the n-word. The cops also physically terrorized two Black city council members.

Trump and Giuliani's official arguments for why Trump deserves to invalidate the election are a bunch of incoherent and baseless conspiracy theories. The actual argument underlying all that, however, is simple: The coalition Joe Biden built is composed of people who don't deserve the right to vote.

The reason the larger Republican Party isn't pushing back is that they largely agree with this underlying argument. Whatever personal distaste many Republicans may have for Trump's gauche behavior or the alcohol content of Giuliani's shoe polish sweat, they're inclined to see only upside for themselves in letting this play out.

Maybe Trump pulls off a miracle and succeeds in his coup, which means their party captures the White House for four years — or more.

But even in the far likelier event that the Trump coup fails, it's a win-win for most Republicans: He has done an immense amount to advance the goal of delegitimizing huge swaths of the American electorate that prefer Democrats. Besides, "establishment" Republicans don't have to go out to dinner with Trump anymore and listen to his vainglorious monologues. So of course Republicans aren't standing up to him. Why mess with a good thing?

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-michigan-2648986286/

amanda

If you want proof that Donald Trump is not an anomaly, but rather a symptom of the racism and anti-democratic yearning that define the modern Republican Party, look no further than what's going on in Wayne County, Michigan. It's the county that encompasses the majority-Black city of Detroit as well as many of its majority-white suburbs, and the normally staid process of certifying an election there has gone badly off the rails.

This situation starkly illustrates how Trump's long-shot coup attempt — which is more a money-grabbing con job at this point — relies heavily on everyday Republicans being too blinded by their own racism and hatred for democracy to really grasp the ways Trump is using them, as he uses everyone.

To recap what happened for those who didn't get embroiled in the blow-by-blow drama of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers this week: On Tuesday, the board, which certifies local election results before sending them along to the state board, held a public meeting. By any reasonable measure, this should have been a quick vote to certify the results, as usually happens after such a clean and relatively smooth election. Instead, the two Republican members of the board — who are both white — refused to certify the vote count, angering and bewildering the two Democratic members, who are both Black.

Their formal excuse for this refusal to was that the vote count apparently included a few minor mistakes and anomalies, of the sort that occur in any election, in the precinct counting reports. This would, at most, affect a few hundred votes in a county where Joe Biden won by 350,000 votes.

The real reasons, of course, were racism and a desire to steal the election for Trump. The two Republicans, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, were making a last-ditch attempt to keep the votes of Detroit, a city whose population is nearly 80% Black, out of the final Michigan vote count. It was a temper tantrum based on the longstanding, but usually better-concealed Republican belief that there's something not quite right about letting Black people have the same right to vote as white people.

After being the target of the wrath of the citizens of Wayne County for the next two hours, Palmer and Hartmann cracked and voted to certify the election. But after talking on the phone with Trump himself later on Tuesday night, the two circled around again, demanding a chance to rescind their votes. They are continuing to push baseless conspiracy theories clearly meant to imply that there's something shady about the very concept of treating Detroit's election the same way elections everywhere els are treated.

Sean Hannity, of course, protested on Fox News that it was a set of "truly vile smears" to suggest that racism was to blame for Republicans' singling out Detroit's election results for unnecessary delays. Of course, the racism here is self-evident. During deliberations, Palmer said, "I would be open to a motion to certify communities other than the city of Detroit." In case there's any lingering doubt, journalistDel Quentin Wilber was able to remove it with a cursory Facebook search[twt pix BO racist memes]

trump's efforts to steal this election are, it must be reiterated, a long shot. Democratic strategist Chris Marshall has argued otherwise here at Salon, suggesting that those of us who believe this are being too sanguine about the Republican eagerness to end democracy.

But the belief that Trump will fail is not based on any faith that Republicans will do the right thing. As this Wayne County situation shows, the entire Republican Party is rotten to the core, ready to throw out democracy rather than accept that people of color have equal rights to vote. Rather we are assuming, as has proven correct so far, that Trump and his minions are too disorganized and incompetent to pull off a coup, especially in the making-it-up-as-they-go-along fashion evident in the repeatedly failed lawsuits of the past couple of weeks.

Indeed, the weirdest aspect of Trump's ongoing litigation efforts is that the most immediate victims of his conspiracy are his fellow Republicans: They're the fools who keep responding to Trump's emails begging for cash. But the money Trump's fans donate, believing it may help Trump's electoral Hail Mary, is mostly going toward his "Save America" leadership PAC, not to his legal efforts.

These "leadership PACs" rose up after the Supreme Court forcibly deregulated campaign finance law in Citizens United vs. FEC, and they are often total scams. The people who run them often treat them like slush funds, using them to pay for personal expenses and luxury vacations, as well as lining the pockets of various consultants. For instance, former Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin started a PAC in 2009, which she promised would be dedicated to funding Republican candidates. Palin raised millions of dollars for her PAC, but only gave 5% to 8% of the money to candidates in any given election cycle. Instead, most of the of the money was spent on travel, media and mailing groups whose job was to promote Palin's brand under the umbrella of "fundraising."

Trump will almost certainly find even more creative ways to pocket the money, probably by having his PAC hold "fundraising" events at Trump properties. His team of lawyers is getting whittled down quickly to Rudy Giuliani, who is trying to wet his own beak by demanding $20,000 a day to waste the court's time with incoherent conspiracy theories.

Who is bankrolling all this chicanery? Ordinary Republican voters, who foolishly open Trump fundraising emails and keep hitting that "donate" button. And their foolishness is driven by bone-deep racism.

Trump and his allies haven't been subtle about their race-baiting, repeatedly attacking Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Atlanta, all cities where white residents are a minority. The lawsuits have targeted cities with large Black populations. These suits are failing in court, but succeeding at the main goal of stirring up racist hysterics in the GOP base and turning those hysterics into cash.

Trump's message to his voters is clear: The votes of people of color are inherently "corrupt" and shouldn't be counted. Sadly, that's a message that's causing GOP wallets across the country to fly open. Republican racism is so strong it trumps the common-sense understanding that it's unwise to hand over money to an obvious con artist like Trump.

It might be funny to watch fools parted from their money like this, except for the fact that the very fabric of our democracy is being torn asunder. Fully half of Republicans reportedly believe that Trump "rightfully" won the election, which is to say, they're embracing conspiracy theories that allow them to believe that white votes are the only legitimate votes. Trump will soon be leaving office and finding creative ways to pocket his PAC money, but the poison he's pumped into the system by telling millions of white Americans that their racism is righteous will linger on for decades.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/qanon-trump

amanda

Trump's attempts to steal the election are fruitless. His legal theater is going nowhere, and it's becoming apparent that this is more about shaking down credulous supporters for cash than about actually overturning the election results. Michigan pounded another nail in Trump's coffin Tuesday, when two Republicans who were blocking the vote certification in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, relented in the face of public outrage. It's all over but the grifting, which will likely continue as long as Trump keeps getting people to give him money for his "legal defense" — money that is being funneled through a PAC and likely straight into Trump's pocket.

Yet the Republican establishment is still tiptoeing around Trump, coddling his fragile ego by refusing to admit he lost the election. Some are going a step further, such as South Carolina's Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has been exerting pressure on state officials to toss out legally-cast ballots. Why are all these Republicans so afraid of Trump, who will no longer be president in 63 days?

The main reason appears to be that Republicans really are worried about their electoral prospects after Trump. The record Democratic turnout in the 2020 election — President-elect Joe Biden turned out 14 million more voters than Hillary Clinton in 2016 — caused many Republicans down-ballot from Trump to sweat their re-election prospects. Luckily for them, however, Trump also turned out an eye-popping 10 million new voters, which was enough to save the skins of many GOP candidates, even as Trump lost by slender margins in swing states.

Trump is a turnout machine for Republicans, who have been desperately casting around for years now for a way to save their party despite demographic changes that make the Democrats more popular among voters. The question of whether there will be Trumpism after Trump now dogs both Republicans who want to replicate their electoral successes under the reality TV president and Democrats who dearly hope this whole disaster was an anomaly.

"[S]ome conservative opinion leaders are already looking forward to a post-Trump future where the viable things about the 45th president can be neatly separated from his troublesome persona," Ed Kilgore writes for New York.

He cites "a representative fantasy" by right-wing writer Kristin Tate at The Hill, who longs for a "Republican with the political positions of Trump, but without decades of tabloid fodder," proposing that candidate might avoid "the bandwagon effect of suburban voters eager to show their public disapproval of his latest action."

Kilgore explores the various hopes that Republicans have for a "new Trump." Will it be Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, a Bible-thumper straight out of "The Handmaid's Tale" who has some crossover appeal for his occasional swipes at corporate America (though mostly for its perceived degeneracy)? Or Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who brings the racism and militant neofascism of Trump, but without the gleeful sleaze of a shameless sexual assailant?

These choices expose why Republicans fear that there may be no way to have Trumpism without Trump. Those guys and other contenders are all missing the secret sauce that helped Trump recruit so heavily among non-voters and infrequent voters. And no, it's not his so-called charisma.

What Trump really has going for him is what I call the "crackpot factor." Trump speaks to voters who share the racism and sexism of typical GOP voters, but who often don't vote because they think politics is boring and are awash in conspiracy theories about how the system is "rigged." Those voters saw a kindred spirit in Trump, a man who speaks fluent conspiracy theory and who got his start in politics by promoting claims that Barack Obama wasn't a native-born U.S. citizen.

Before the 2020 election, the team at FiveThirtyEight took a deep dive on the views of people who vote infrequently or not at all. There's a lot of reasons for non-voting, such as a belief it doesn't matter or the obstacles that make voting difficult, but one important factor was a lack of trust in the system. For some voters, especially nonwhite voters or liberal-leaning voters, this is unfortunately a realistic assessment of the situation, where social progress often feels glacial and voting doesn't seem to make much difference.

But for right-leaning voters, I suspect a lot of this distrust flows from a conspiratorial mindset, born from a steady diet of misinformation that has been made all too readily available by the internet. These are the types that populate the audience for Joe Rogan and Alex Jones. These are people who hate Democrats but also feel alienated by the religiosity and elitism of mainstream Republicans, and turn to "alternative" sources of information that are thick with paranoid conspiracy theories. Trump, who indulged the same "alternative facts" that they enjoy, stirred something in them that other Republicans simply couldn't.

In 2014, Pew Research, using extensive data, developed a political typology that sorted Americans into six groups. Two of the Republican-leaning ones are incredibly familiar to political observers, the "steadfast conservatives" and "business conservatives," or, respectively, the religious right and the rich folks who are in it for the tax cuts.

But they also detected an emerging group, which they deemed "young outsiders," who "do not have a strong allegiance to the Republican Party" and, in fact, "tend to dislike both political parties." These voters registered as "socially liberal," insofar as they don't support bans on abortion or gay marriage and, importantly, aren't especially religious.

But the "young outsiders" do share the racism of traditional conservatives. They are easily riled up by the demonization of social spending programs like Obamacare or food stamps They approve of programs, like Medicare, that are viewed as benefiting white people. They're in favor legal marijuana but oppose gun control. And they vote far less often than other conservatives.

I personally believe that the Pew research failed to capture how sexist this group is. The usual proxy questions to measure sexism, such as attitudes towards abortion, simply aren't adequate in this context. I suspect this group, while not as opposed to abortion as other conservatives, is angry about other feminist concerns such as the #MeToo movement, where men's privilege to mistreat women are being attacked.

These are, I suspect, the Gamergaters and the alt-right types who flocked to Trump in the years after this survey. They gobble down internet conspiracy theories like QAnon, which creates engagement with right-wing politics for those who aren't religious conservatives or business elites. They like to imagine that embracing more authoritarian attitudes is an "edgy" revoltagainst liberalism. They are overwhelmingly white (though 14% are Hispanic), and under 50 years old. While more than half of those defined as "strong liberals" are college graduates, three-quarters of the "young outsiders" don't have college diplomas.

Trump got a whole lot of those people who don't usually vote to do so, turning out more non-college-educated white voters in 2016, for example, than Mitt Romney did in 2012. These voters overlooked his alliance with the religious right and were instead fixated on his playboy persona, his over-the-top sexism and racism and, of course, his sweeping embrace of nutbar conspiracy theories of all kinds.

Over the past four years, everything that Trump's opponents hate about him — his grossness, his cruelty to women and people of color, his rejection of the polite norms of D.C. politics and, of course, his conspiracy theories — likely generated even more enthusiasm from this subset of voters that other Republicans have had trouble capturing or motivating.

That's why it's reasonable to be skeptical about the likely success of the current crop of wannabe Trumps. Hawley's religiosity and culture-war rigidity won't play well with these Trump Republicans who are just fine with premarital sex and legal weed, even if they're not fond of women having the right to file sexual harassment complaints. Cotton may roll out fascist fantasies that appeal to the QAnoners and the alt-right, but he's a stiff and, I suspect, won't appeal to those who enjoy Trump's wrestling-heel gift for insulting and degrading people. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who also wants to be the next Trump, has intense weenie energy that makes it hard for him to win these people over.

Trump speaks to the great American crackpot, especially the younger set that was otherwise more interested in perusing conspiracy theory websites or "pick-up artist" forums than in voting. These folks won't be moved by Hawley's promise of a handmaid in every bed or Cotton's promise of stormtroopers on the streets. In the face of the growing Democratic majority, Republicans need this subset of crank voters, who don't care about old-school culture-war fights over abortion or evolution, but sure do love QAnon. Without Trump's demented tweeting and his willingness to leave empirical reality behind, it's not clear how the GOP can keep the crank vote going.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/right-wing-politics/

amanda

the far right had a dream: That one day, people who had been exiled to the unacceptable margins of American political life could play the role of Donald Trump's brownshirts.

In the weeks leading up to the election, excitement was rising among those Americans who convinced themselves that Trump would be the glorious leader in a national purge of their perceived enemies. QAnon fans buzzed with excitement that "the storm" — their term for their belief that the entire Democratic establishment, as well as many popular celebrities, would be rounded up into prison camps — was coming soon. The Proud Boys, a neofascist group that claim to defend "Western civilization," were also riled up after Trump told them to "stand by" during a presidential debate in September. The menagerie of white supremacists and militia groups were stepping up recruitment efforts, stoked about what they believed would soon be the eruption of a new civil war.

Then came the election. Trump lost. This has been very difficult for those people to accept.

People with fanatical and delusional beliefs famously don't give them up just because they've been hit over the head with reality, of course. The various subcultures of crackpots that have sprung up under Trump are no exception.

Still, the election results have sent these groups reeling. All of them have spent the past four years growing their ranks and orbiting around Trump, convinced that he was a savior figure who would crush their perceived enemies.

For believers in QAnon, that belief manifested in a fantasy that Trump was going to round up all the members of the "deep state," their imaginary shadowy conspiracy of Democrats, Hollywood celebrities and progressive activists that they believe both secretly runs the world and is also a network of Satan-worshipping cannibal pedophiles. Trump, they told themselves, was secretly organizing "the storm" to round up and destroy this sinister global conspiracy.

But since Trump's election, Q — a user account that started on 8chan and drifted over to 8kun after 8chan was disbanded — has fallen silent. QAnon faithful believe the account is run by a current or former U.S. intelligence agent and Trump loyalist. In fact, it's probably run by the father-and-son duo Jim and Ron Watkins, who are conspiracy theorists and definitely not U.S. intelligence agents. Without Q's guidance, the QAnon cult appears to be confused and angry.

"They were not expecting him to lose, and they were not expecting Fox News to call it," Fredrick Brennan, the founder of 8chan — who has spent the past few months giving interviews accusing the Watkinses of running Q's account — told the New York Times. "It was really psychologically damaging."

Q believers haven't given up the faith yet, of course. But without guidance from its leader, the QAnon community is adrift and very likely to fracture into competing and antagonistic splinter sects, as is common in these kinds of communities.

Witness, for instance, what's happening to the Proud Boys, which started off largely as a male chauvinist group but has morphed into what looks very much like a neofascist organization that purports to defend "Western civilization." The Proud Boys had their proudest moment in September, when Trump refused to denounce them during a debate and instead told them to "stand down and stand by," clearly implying that they should be at the ready to defend his grip on the White House if he felt it was under threat.

But even though Trump is half-heartedly still trying to steal the election, he has so far disappointed the Proud Boys by not calling on them to commit violence against his enemies in a glorious coup. (Mostly, Trump is hiding from public view, tweeting out articles from fringe right-wing sites and playing golf.) So, as often happens with marginal subcultures full of deeply unpleasant people, the Proud Boys are breaking apart, torn asunder by infighting.

At heart is a fight between two figureheads, Kyle Chapman and Enrique Tarrio, over whether the Proud Boys should stick by their dubious claim that there is nothing racist about the ideology of "Western chauvinism," or should openly embrace white nationalism and anti-Semitism.Chapman is representing the blatant-racism side, declaring himself the new president of the splinter group calling themselves, no kidding, the "Proud Goys." Tarrio is insisting that Chapman is a flunkey, failing to understand that the same can be said of anyone associated with the Proud Boys.

Other right wing militia and white nationalist groups, such as the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers, spent the weeks before the election firing themselves up for what they believed was an upcoming civil war. Now that Trump's presidency is deflating like a day-after birthday balloon, they're not quite ready to give up the fantasy.

On Wednesday, Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, appeared on Infowars with Alex Jones and promised the faithful that the violence against hated liberals is still coming.

"We have men already stationed outside D.C. as a nuclear option in case they attempt to remove the president illegally, we will step in and stop it," Rhodes declared, swearing that his forces are armed and "prepared to go in, if the president calls us up."

As with most of the threats made by far-right figures, this is both a fantasy and a dangerous one. It's just plain silly to imagine that a handful of middle-aged and badly organized conspiracy theorists, no matter how many guns they have, could manage the task of seizing the federal government in a paramilitary coup.

It's dangerous, of course, because these people do have guns. Unfortunately, as we've seen with mass shootings like those in El Paso and Pittsburgh, the car attacks on Black Lives Matter protesters, and the shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, men who have been radicalized by such talk are fully capable of acts of domestic terrorism against civilians.

On Saturday, these various groups of extremists are planning to descend on Washington for a demonstration in support ofTrump's fading effort to steal the election, which they of course spin as preventing Democrats from stealing the election. (As always with right-wingers, everything is projection.) As usual, far-right figures are over-hyping their efforts, calling the supposed rally the "Million MAGA March" or the "March for Trump."

In reality, almost none of the groups who claim they plan to show up have even applied for a permit, suggesting that they know what's likely to happen: An underwhelming display by a handful of loudmouths with angry signs, whose demands are incoherent and who have no plan of action to achieve their goals anyway.

As I witnessed in Philadelphia, even when the far right had a solid target and goal — stopping election officials from counting ballots — they could barely muster up a handful of people. The ones who showed up were easily run off by a group of leftists armed with cardboard signs and a boombox.Washington, D.C., doesn't permit the open carry of weapons, taking away yet another incentive to show up for the deeply insecure men of this movement.There's nothing they can do to save Donald Trump. All they have left is impotent flailing.

None of which is to say that we can just wash our hands of the far right and never think about them again. Far from it: The right-wing fringe has been enormously successful in recruiting conservatives to their way of thinking. Surveys suggest that more than 80% of Trump voters believe Joe Biden's victory was illegitimate, and about half of all Republican voters buy into the QAnon conspiracy theories to some degree. What were once whacked-out "far-right" beliefs are now just mainstream conservatism.

The difference between the fringe and the mainstream of the Republican Party now is less about belief and more about a willingness to take action. That fringe — the ones who've actually joined far-right groups and may actually show up at Saturday's "rally" — is scrambling now. But such people never really go away. They'll find some other cause to latch onto, some other justification for their fascist impulses. Some, unfortunately, will continue to seek violence or even to commit acts of terrorism.

But for now, Trump's defeat is a mighty blow to the far right. Their dreams of crushing the people they view as "the left" and of "reclaiming" the culture of America were always ludicrous, no matter how much tear gas Trump sprayed at Black Lives Matter demonstrators. But now, with Trump on his way to Palm Beach exile, they've lost their lodestar. The process of fracture and dispersal for these self-appointed warriors of the right has begun. We must hope they don't find another figurehead to rally around anytime soon.

---

1120 an

Here's the real danger lurking in Trump's world-historical tantrum

Amanda Marcotte Salon

November 12, 2020

Over the past week, Donald Trump has successfully sent a large chunk of the 78 million-plus Americans who voted for President-elect Joe Biden — the actual winner of the actual presidential election — into an

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/psychology-of-trump-supporters/

the orange spray-tan was barely wiped off Donald Trump's inauguration Bible before the mainstream media went on Trump Voter Remorse Watch. Working off a common but incorrect understanding of human psychology — that, given evidence and time, people come to regret their worst decisions — journalists kept interviewing Trump voters over and over, in "heartland" diners and farm fields and gargantuan exurban malls, in search of evidence that doubts were starting to creep in.

I found the whole thing exhausting fairly quickly. In June 2017, I published an article in which I concluded, after interviewing psychological experts, that "the answer to the question of when Trump voters will come around is somewhere between 'a long, long time from now' and more likely 'never.'"

Here we are, three and a half years later, and things have gone even more poorly than we could have imagined. Trump was impeached for trying to extort a foreign leader into smearing a political opponent, the economy is in the toilet and getting worse, and 231,000 Americans have died in a pandemic that spiraled out of control, largely due to Trump's malicious incompetence.

And yet: Trump's approval ratings remain at a stubborn 44.6%, which is only 1.3 percentage points below the popular-vote share that was enough to snag an admittedly flukish electoral victory in 2016. His rating has slipped a few points below that level here and there, but it always bounces back. Right now, it's as robust as ever, and the vast majority of the people who voted for him in 2016 are clearly doing it again, while telling themselves a story about how this is justified because — seriously, they're telling themselves this — he's doing a good job.

Former Vice President Joe Biden leads in all national polls and most battleground states, but many Democrats are still sweating bullets in fear. That immovable approval rating shows that Trump has an electoral path to do it again, defeating a more popular opponent by appealing to conservative white voters in rural and suburban areas whose votes are hugely overvalued compared to people in big cities and major coastal states, thanks to the anachronistic and anti-democratic design of the Electoral College. That stubborn approval rating has been the stuff of nightmares for four years, the monster lurking in the closet in the horror film, ready to spring out at any moment and tear your throat out, while you scream helplessly.

That's why, I suspect, the Trump Buyer's Remorse Watch pieces in the mainstream media never really ended. Even in these last waning days of the campaign, journalists are still digging up Americans who claim to regret voting for Trump and say they'll now voting for Biden.

These articles certainly generate traffic from liberals who, fearful of what is happening to our country, cling to even the smallest shred of evidence that things may be turning around and "normalcy" may be reasserted. But these articles are mostly wishful thinking. Not that such people don't exist at all — they do! — but they're outliers, so much so that they barely register in the polls.

The real story is that Trump voters don't regret their votes. Odds are, in fact, that they are more determined than ever to back their man. Part of it is that Trump voters remain deeply committed to racist and sexist values — and deeply resentful of being called out for that.

But as I wrote in my original article, this also reflects the psychological concepts of "cognitive dissonance" and "rationalization." As psychologist Carol Tavris told me in 2017, most people want to believe, "I am a smart person." That's contraindicated by a vote for Trump, however. Instead of admitting they were wrong in the first place, many Trump voters dig themselves ever deeper into rationalizations for why they were right, and why anyone who says otherwise has nefarious intent.

That defensiveness is only heightened because the people who were right all along are liberals. The ego blow of admitting that they were wrong and the despised latte-sipping liberal "elite" was right is too much for most Trump voters. So they'll cling to anything — including completely outlandish QAnon conspiracy theories — to craft a narrative where they're actually the smart ones and the liberals are not just wrong but evil and immoral.

A third concept — the sunk cost fallacy — is also useful here. That's what happens when a person invests significant resources — often money, but it can also be time, energy and emotion — in a bad endeavor, but keeps investing more out of a reluctance to admit they made a mistake and "wasted" those resources. It's why gamblers keep betting after losing a big chunk of money, trying to win it back. It's why people stay in bad marriages, fearful that leaving means "losing" the time and energy they invested. It's why people stay in cults. Cutting bait and moving on may be more rational, but the pain of admitting you sacrificed so much for nothing is hard. People often simply can't or won't do it — and usually end up losing even more.

Trump voters dug their heels in so hard because voting for Trump was understood, from the beginning, as a more fraught choice than voting for a more standard Republican. They invested more of themselves — more of their ego, more of their reputation — in this choice, and therefore the sunk costs of admitting they were wrong are much higher.

It's one thing to admit it was wrong to vote for, say, George W. Bush, who even many liberals mistakenly viewed as relatively harmless during the 2000 campaign. But from the moment he announced his run, Trump asked a lot of his supporters: Overlooking the numerous alleged sexual assaults, denying the blatant racism, ignoring the corruption, pretending not to see he's an idiot.

Admitting at this late date that the whole Trump venture was a huge mistake feels like giving up on all that time and energy. So Trump voters double down like gambling addicts at the roulette table, pouring more emotional resources into the black hole of Trump, in hopes that eventually this will pay off.

So there's really no limit to how bad this can get.

I realized this a couple of years ago, when I was hanging out with a Trump voter in my life. During most of our time together, I held my tongue about politics, knowing that anything I said would just make her defensive and likely to dig in harder. At a certain point, two alcoholic beverages loosened my inhibitions and I reminded her of Trump's adoration for dictators like Vladimir Putin and his obvious desire to be more like them.

Sure enough, she defensively replied, "What's so wrong with Putin, anyway?"

"For one thing, he has journalists murdered," I said.

Angrily, she retorted, "Sometimes I don't see the problem with that."

I reminded her at this point thatI'm a journalist. She muttered at me angrily but, notably, did not apologize or take back what she said.

It was at that point that I saw how it happens.

I mean, I've always known it academically — many of us are familiar with Hannah Arendt's writing about authoritarian tendencies — but it's another thing entirely to look someone you know in the eye and realize they would stand by and let it happen to you.

To realize that there's no point where it gets too bad to be acceptable, where the human rights violations are so badly out of control, where democracy is taken away. We've seen kids in cages. We've seen close to a quarter-million Americans die. We've seen Trump tear-gas peaceful protesters and applaud right-wing political violence.

There is no point where they say that enough is enough. Not even if people in their lives, their friends and family, are the ones in danger.

By any rational standard, we keep telling ourselves, this election shouldn't be close. We shouldn't even have to worry that Trump, with his record of massive failure and obvious corruption, should be close enough that he could still steal this — or even, heaven forbid, win outright. But this is where we are, chewing our fingernails and praying that small shifts at the margins save us. Because 44.6% of our country would rather burn the whole thing to the ground than admit that liberals had a point.

Even if Joe Biden pulls this out, this country remains in real trouble.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trumps-limp-coup-is-falling-apart-but-right-wing-media-and-certain-gop-politicians-dont-know-when-to-cut-bait/

amanda

Most still-rational Americans, watching Donald Trump's atrocity of a press conference on Thursday night, had two simultaneous reactions: Wow, that man really is the worst living American, and also, yeah, this is all over except for the paperwork.

It was an odd mix of emotions. There was the disgust of watching the actual president of the actual United States demand that legal votes be thrown out insinuating that millions of American voters were somehow fakes. But there was also the relief of seeing Trump's facade of bravado collapsing, exposing the loser that was always hiding behind that wall of bluster. Even many Trump voters knew, at that moment, that it was over. Trump's attempted coup is collapsing under the weight of his own incompetence and laziness.

We are now at the portion of the right-wing cycle of failure where the supporters of the corrupt and failed Republican president slink away and pretend that they were never that into him in the first place. (See: Nixon, Richard M., and Bush, George W.) But for whatever reason, a decent number of rats are clinging fiercely to the side of the sinking ship, insisting, as the water starts lapping against their skinny tails, that Captain Bleach-Injector can still somehow save himself.

Thursday night, a frantic Sean Hannity was on Fox News, baselessly claiming that Philadelphia election officials counting Pennsylvania ballots are "violating the law" and suggesting, apparently not as a joke, "a do-over in that state." On his radio show, Hannity begged for state-appointed electors who'll vote for Trump, defying the actual voters of Pennsylvania. (State GOP leaders have declined.)

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy appeared on Laura Ingraham's Fox News show and falsely claimed that "Trump won this election," demanding, "Everyone who's listening, do not be quiet." He then tweeted out the video clip, in case there was any doubt he was trying to rile up Republican voters with these lies. Twitter put a content warning on the video.

Ingraham went along with McCarthy's antics, demanding that other Republican politicians "better stand and fight" for Trump and claiming that "we have huge amounts of money from Mark Zuckerberg and George Soros and others flooding" into "canvassing, you know, states like Pennsylvania." This claim is not only untrue but also nonsensical: The apparent implication is that, while Republicans are allowed to canvass and organize, Democrats have no such right.

Tucker Carlson was relatively limp, trying to boost Trump's conspiracy theories and complaining about "the media" calling the election. The latter is a particularly shameless play, as Trump's entire coup plot — which he has laid out in great detail over the past couple of months— was to seize on the appearance that he was ahead in early media reports on Tuesday night as evidence he had "won," even though all votes hadn't counted.

On Hannity's show, South Carolina's Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham let loose with baseless accusations, which carried a strong whiff of racism, that Philadelphia's elections are "crooked as a snake" while Arizona's are to be trusted. (News flash: Trump will probably lose that state too.)

Even former football coach Tommy Tuberville, having defeated Democratic Sen. Doug Jones in Alabama, decided that one of his first acts as a senator-elect was to declare that "the game is over" but "the referees are suddenly adding touchdowns to the other team's side of the scoreboard." It's a false analogy that elides the fact that votes are always counted after the polls close.

Salon's Sophia Tesfaye has an astounding list of other examples from GOP politicians, so readers can get the full scale of how bad this is.

Right-wing media whining has already drifted toward violent fantasies. Newt Gingrich, after letting loose with a racist rant about the "Philadelphia machine," the "Atlanta machine" and the "machine in Detroit," demanded on Fox News that Attorney General Bill Barr arrest election workers and menacingly declared that "federal agents can carry guns in the pursuit of people who are breaking the law."

While interviewing Rudy Giuliani on his radio show, Trumpian pseudo-fascist crackpot Sebastian Gorka declaredthat "we should just force our way in" to voting centers to keep votes from being counted. This was a bridge too far even for Giuliani, who suggested "that would require a fistfight, which I guess our people don't want to get involved in."

After falsely announcing that"Trump won an overwhelming victory" and was already "in his second term" in a Fox Business interview, disgraced former Trump adviser Steve Bannon went on his own radio show and fantasized about killing Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

"I'd put the heads on pikes," Bannon said, "as a warning to federal bureaucrats."

All of this, it should go without saying, is deeply evil. These people aren't just undermining democracy and telling outragous lies, they're often trying to incite violence against their fellow Americans. But evil is, sadly, to be expected. That's what has become of the Republican Party after decades of dehumanizing propaganda and five years of Trumpism.

But what's more puzzling is how irrational this behavior is. All these pundits and politicians are out there, flailing around and lying for Trump, and for what? He's a dead man walking, and they know it. The lawsuits Trump's team are filing are unbelievably feeble, so much so that it's clear they're less meant as a serious effort to rescue Trump from electoral defeat than to bolster his delusions that he's being unfairly victimized.

There's no point in defending Trump now, especially not in the stick-your-neck-out way we're seeing from Fox News hosts and politicians like Graham or McCarthy. It's certainly not going to make it more likely there's some miracle where Trump pulls himself out of a nosedive.

The only purpose of all this nonsense is to soothe Trump's injured ego with pretty lies about how he should have won and it's all rigged and he's the real winner here and not the massive loser he looks like to the whole world right now.

And I have to ask: To what end? It's one thing to flatter Trump when he's the president — it's gross and cynical, but entirely rational, to want the power of having a president on your side. It's another thing entirely to keep at it when he's on his way out. It's especially weird to demonstrate loyalty to Trump, a man who will never return it and would sell out all his bootlickers to black-market organ salesmen if he thought that might save his sorry ass.

I'm forced to conclude that these people merely stunned and falling back on bad habits. After four years of relentless lying and toadying to this reality-TV villain who sleazed his way into the Oval Office, the Trump apologists don't know how to quit him. Even as the building collapses around them, they're carrying on as if Trump will somehow find a way to survive this, because that's what they've been conditioned to believe.

The saddest part? Their audiences and supporters will forget all this when Trump finally leaves office. That's when the right will move seamlessly into Phase II: Forget This Ever Happened.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-did-it-again-the-same-blackmail-scheme-that-got-him-impeached/

Back thousands of years ago, in February of 2020,Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a "moderate" Republican, justified her vote to acquitDonald Trump at his impeachment trial — despite the mountains of evidence of guilt — by claiming that Trump had learned his lesson.

"I believe that the president has learned from this case," Collins told CBS news anchor Norah O'Donnell at the time. "The president has been impeached — that's a pretty big lesson."

That excuse was preposterous at the time, making it sound like Trump was a child who had his hand in the cookie jar, not a 73-year-old man caught abusing his powers of office to blackmail the Ukrainian president into propping up conspiracy theories about Joe Biden. But it was also hilariously predictable that Trump, who is incapable of learning or growing as a person, would absorb any moral lessons from being impeached.

Trump didn't learn anything. In fact, he's only escalated the very same botched conspiracy that got him impeached, only this time around he's abusing his power on the home front, instead of in a distant nation most Americans couldn't find on a map.

Truth told, Trump demonstrated his failure to learn within days of his acquittal, first by bragging about it and then pivoting to lying about the Democrats. Since then, he's gone right back to abusing his power to fabricate lies about his opponent. He and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani — along with Giuliani's buddy Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian legislator with ties to Russian intelligence — eventually returned to the very scheme that got Trump impeached in the first place: am attempt to counterfeit evidence that Hunter Biden, Joe Biden's son, had somehow dragged his father into a corrupt scheme. It's a claim with literally no evidence to support it, no matter how much Trump and Giuliani repeat the accusation.

On Wednesday evening, Devlin Barrett and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump has threatened to fire FBI Director Christopher Wray — who, lest we forget, was appointed by Trump after the firing of James Comey — unless Wray announces a phony investigation into Biden that Trump can use as last-minute ammunition in the presidential campaign.

"Trump wants official action similar to the announcement made 11 days before the last presidential election by then-FBI Director James B. Comey," Barrett and Dawsey write, referring to Comey's infamous announcement that "he had reopened an investigation into [Hillary] Clinton's use of a private email serverwhile she was secretary of state after potential new evidence had been discovered."

That investigation resulted in no damning information about Clinton, which was entirely predictable. Clinton had been thoroughly investigated for years without a speck of meaningful dirt turned up on her. But that announcement did help turn an election Clinton should have won to Trump's favor: It caused a surge of undecided votersto break for Trump at the last minute, allowing him to win several important swing states by razor-thin margins.

So there's one thing Trump was capable of learning: The value of fake scandals to distract from serious issues, such as his own corruption and incompetence. And he's hoping for a repeat, which is why he's pressuring Wray to pull a Comey against Biden.

But in doing so — and in "considering" whether to fire Wray if he doesn't — Trump is doing the exact same thing that got him impeached: Pressuring a government official to announce a phony investigation into his opponent, and threatening to use the powers of his office to punish that person if they don't comply. This time Trump is targeting a Senate-confirmed official who leads a federal law enforcement agency rather than a foreign leader.

For those who have grown hazy on the details of Trump's impeachment — which is understandable, since there have been dozens, if not hundreds, of Trump-caused crises since then — a quick recap: In the summer of 2019, Trump called the newly elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, and told him that the U.S. would withhold military aid (which had been authorized by Congress) unless Zelensky did Trump "a favor." That favor was to announce an "investigation" into Biden aimed at propping up the convoluted conspiracy theory about Hunter Biden, a Ukrainian gas company and a fired Ukrainian prosecutor that Giuliani and Trump were trying to push into the mainstream media.

Zelensky clearly felt uneasy participating in a scheme to smear an innocent man's reputation, but Ukraine desperately needed the military aid to fight Russian aggression. Luckily for Zelensky, he was spared from this blackmail scheme by a whistleblower and Trump's eventual impeachment for abusing his office.

Now Trump is doing to Wray what he did to Zelensky. The only difference is that Trump's leverage in this case is limited: He can dismiss the FBI director at any time, having already done so once, but that's about it. With Zelensky, Trump's threats carried a lot more weight.

Either way, the basic story is the same: Trump is demanding that a government official abuse his powers and launch a completely phony investigation based on made-up charges, for Trump's political benefit. In fact, Trump has reportedly made similar threats about Attorney General Bill Barr, because the Justice Department's bogus special-counsel investigation of the Russia investigation evidently hasn't turned up anything Trump can use to bolster his conspiracy theories about the Democrats. (If Barr, the most dogged and ruthless of Trump's sycophants, is in trouble, things in the White House are getting really bad.)

There's a word for all this: Blackmail.

Unfortunately, the media coverage about the attacks on Wray (and on Barr) or about the latest ridiculous wrinkles in Rudy Giuliani's harebrained schemes all too often fails to provide the necessary context. It doesn't remind readers that none of this is new, and that in fact all these developments are part of the same conspiracy that got Trump impeached. The Washington Post article on the threats against Wray fails to use the word "impeachment" or to mention that Trump is treating Wray exactly as he treated Zelensky. And although mainstream media has emphasized the most important aspects of Giuliani's efforts to smear Biden — that Giuliani is not credible and is believed by U.S. intelligence to be spreading Russian disinformation — most articles don't explain that Giuliani is still working the same plot that got his celebrity client (quite likely his only client) impeached.

It's as if G. Gordon Liddy kept burglarizing various Democratic offices after the Watergate break-in, but the reporting on his later crimes failed to mention the first one.Our national situation is an ongoing catastrophe, no doubt. But is it really too much to expect journalists to explain that Trump keeps on doing the very thing he was impeached for doing?

Either way, the situation shows that Trump, despite all his chaotic crazy-uncle ranting, doesn't actually have a lot of tricks in his bag. The only thing he knows how to do is cheat — and the only way he knows how to cheat is by threatening and blackmailing other people to do the work for him. Without that, he's got nothing.

---

an 1020

trump's latest harebrained election scheme goes up in smoke

Amanda Marcotte Salon

October 14, 2020

Despite days of a seemingly steroid-addled Donald Trump raving about alleged conspiracies against him on Twitter and to any right wing pundit who would listen, it appears Attorney General Bill Barr — usually so indulgent of Trump's various crimes and corrupt

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-new-cdc-scandal-proves-trump-cant-be-trusted-with-a-vaccine/

september has featured one scandal after another stemming from Donald Trump’s belief that the best way to handle the coronavirus pandemic is to let a bunch of people get sick and die, and then deny that it’s happening. First, journalist Bob Woodward started to releasing recordings in which Trump said he “wanted to always play it down” and admitted he had deliberately lied to the public about how serious this virus really is.

:{:{}:

Then, in a town hall for ABC News, Trump confessed that his real strategy was to let the virus run loose to create herd immunity — or rather “herd mentality” which would be “herd developed,” to quote the president accurately — even though that would literally kill millions of Americans. Then the New York Times published a new exposé revealing that Trump officials had overruled medical researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, forcing the agency to publish misleading and dangerous information designed to discourage people who have been exposed to the virus from being tested.

:{:{}:

None of this, it’s critical to underline, is good for Trump’s re-election campaign. Polling shows that only 35% of Americansapprove of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, which is the same percentage of Americans who would probably say they’d still love Trump if he nuked their hometowns. Polls also show that because of Trump’s malice and incompetence, 69% of Americans have little to no confidence in the safety or efficacy of a vaccine that he may announce. Only 9% of Americans say they have a great deal of confidence in Trump. Even his own supporters know he’s a liar and a fraud: They’ve entrusted him with the nuclear codes, but don’t trust him with a vaccine.

Yet despite all this, Trump keeps on keeping on with his “let them die and lie about it” strategy.

At a rally in Ohio Monday night, Trump leaned heavily into the “play it down” strategy, going on a rant about how young people “have a strong immune system” and the virus primarily “affects elderly people, elderly people with heart problems and other problems" "But it affects virtually nobody. It’s an amazing thing,” he continued, even though the “nobodies” he’s talking about — older people, people with health problems — are more likely to be Republican voters than Democrats, who skew younger. Trump himself is 74 years old, though he has probably deluded himself with all his “good genes” talk into believing he’s not in the high-risk category.

Trump made these “nobody” comments as the death toll from the virus approached 200,000 Americans — a benchmark we passed on Tuesday morning — and the number of people infected surpassed 6.8 million. But the circle of “nobodies” is much larger than that, since basically everyone in the country is affected by this pandemic. Either someone they love has gotten the virus or lockdowns and the severe economic downturn have negatively impacted their lives.

Trump’s efforts to weaponize the CDC haven’t slowed down either. Last Friday, a new guidance slipped onto the website that emphasized that coronavirus transmission is airborne and that indoor, crowded spaces such as fitness classes and choir practice are especially dangerous. On Monday, however, the guidance was removed and the CDC said it had been “posted in error.”

That is, of course, absolutely ridiculous. As Ben Guarino, Chris Mooney and Tim Elfrink at the Washington Post report, “Evidence that the virus floats in the air has mounted for months, with an increasingly loud chorus of aerosol biologists pointing to superspreading events in choirs, buses, bars and other poorly ventilated spaces.”

It’s possible, of course, that this is all a matter of bureaucratic mismanagement and that any moment now the CDC will post a guidance that reflects the scientific evidence that indoor airborne transmission is a serious threat. But it’s reasonable to be suspicious, especially as the guidance that was yanked down conflicts with Trump’s repeated insistence on returning Americans to a lifestyle that involves a great deal of close contact in indoor spaces such as offices, restaurants, churches, schools and — perhaps most importantly, in Trump’s eyes — political rallies.

Considering that Trump’s pandemic mismanagement has destroyed any hope of a return to normal life anytime soon, all eyes have turned toward the possibility of a vaccine as the thing that will save us from this pandemic. While there’s reason to hope that a safe and effective vaccine will be ready for distribution in the coming months, there’s also reason to be worried that Trump is going to screw the entire thing up.

Trump just keeps lying and lying about a vaccine, insisting that one is not only coming on a much quicker timeline than actual health experts believe, but even setting concrete deadlines, suggesting (of course) that a vaccine may be available before Election Day.

It’s tempting to shrug off such antics, but as with all things, Trump’s relentless lying and meddling are only making a bad situation worse. The more this pathological liar talks about a miracle vaccine that’s right around the corner, the more the public appears to be skeptical about it, on the sound grounds that it’s bad news to trust a blowhard moron who posited that bleach injections might be a useful treatment for COVID-19.

People probably shouldn’t be worried that Trump will try to force a dummy vaccine onto the market. He’s way too lazy to pull that off. What’s more likely is that he’ll find some thin pretext to host some reality TV-style October-surprise announcement of a vaccine that doesn’t actually exist yet, holding up an empty syringe and falsely claiming — as he has done for months — that the pandemic is finally over.

The real problem isn’t so much a fake vaccine as the possibility that Trump will screw up the distribution of a real one, whenever such a thing exists. Past is predictor, after all, and in the past, meddling by Trump and his administration — especially his son-in-law, Jared Kushner — has actively efforts by government officials or medical experts to control the pandemic. Kushner shut down strategies to distribute protective equipment to people in need, embracing instead a “market” strategy that drove up prices and increased shortages. Trump himself has waged a war against the widespread testingnecessary to slow down viral spread.

Trump’s instincts will always lead him to lie and cheat, and his distrust of experts makes it impossible for him to get out of the way and let competent people do their jobs. Witness how he took over the coronavirus task force briefings, interfering with the ability of public health officials to share valuable information so that he could indulge his fantasy of being the star of the show and the preeminent authority on every topic.

If Trump wins re-election (by fair means or foul), his compulsive need to interfere with everything and his paranoia about the “deep state” that’s out to get him will surely affect vaccine distribution, just as he and Kushner messed with distribution networks for protective equipment and testing.

Also, the more Trump runs his mouth about a vaccine, the more people will distrust that a vaccine is trustworthy and safe, since everyone — including his own supporters — knows he will say anything if he thinks it benefits him. If people don’t trust a vaccine, they won’t get it, no matter how many experts vouch for its safety.

The grim reality is that it won’t be enough to have a safe and effective vaccine. (Bearing in mind that we don’t quite know what “effective” will mean: Will it be more like the measles vaccine, which protects most people for their entire lives, or like the flu vaccine, which offers partial protection for a single season?) To bring an end to the pandemic and a return to something like normal life, the vaccine must be distributed widely and efficiently, and most people need to trust it enough to take it. With Trump in charge, there’s a good chance that all of that will go sideways. The only way to be certain that the coronavirus pandemic is brought to an end is for a real president to be in charge when a real vaccine is finally available.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/how-mitch-mcconnell-carried-out-his-sinister-plot-to-take-over-the-federal-courts/

amanda b rekonwith

ever since Donald Trump’s oversized suit-clad carcass first befouled the Oval Office, there’s been talk in the media about if and when he would cause a constitutional crisis. The assumption underlying this discourse is that a constitutional crisis would hit us like a thunderbolt and we would collectively realize, all at once, that the very fate of our democracy was on the line. Instead, there’s been a series of mini-constitutional crises, from Trump stomping all over our laws against foreign emoluments (an old-timey phrase for being bribed by foreign leaders), obstructing justice during Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s role in Russian election interference, blackmailing the Ukrainian president to extract dishonest election assistance and about a dozen other instances it would be tedious to list.

The result has been a steady erosion of the political norms and laws that protect our democracy, culminating in Trump’s last big push to steal or corrupt the 2020 presidential election.

If Trump successfully does that, it could well be the killing blow for our tattered democracy. But it’s important to understand that the credit for orchestrating the demise of our once-great nation should largely go to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a man possessed by the same lust for power and moral turpitude as Trump, but not hobbled by Trump’s stupidity or short-sightedness.

It was McConnell who recognized long ago that he could leverage the undemocratic power of the Senate as a weapon to invade and conquer the federal courts, and then use the latter to vacate any effort by the voters to exert real influence on how this country is governed. During Barack Obama’s presidency, McConnell deliberately slow-walked the confirmations of Obama’s nominations to the federal bench, leaving dozens of seats empty. When Trump was elected, McConnell hit the gas, packing the courts at record speed with an assembly line of nearly identical conserva-bots whose main attributes were youth and a willingness to forgo any intellectual rigor to rubber-stamp the right-wing agenda.

with the death of the Supreme Court’s liberal lion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, McConnell has a real opportunity to complete his mission of crushing democracy completely. Sure, there will still be elections and Democrats may win lots of them, especially this year with so many liberals fired up to throw Trump out of office.But with a possible 6-3 conservative majority on the court, McConnell knows that conservatives can nullify most efforts by those elected officials to pass progressive legislation. McConnell can even stop worrying about Chief Justice John Roberts, who occasionally has a bout of conscience and votes with the liberals to uphold precedent or follow constitutional law.

That commanding court majority won’t just serve as a firewall against new laws passed by a Democratic House and Senate. It will also give Republicans an opportunity to undo decades of progress in human rights. McConnell stole dozens of federal court appointments that legally belonged to Obama, but his crowning jewel, of course, was the theft of the seat left open when Justice Antonin Scalia died in early 2016. Using the laughably thin pretext that you shouldn’t seat a Supreme Court justice during an election year, McConnell refused even to hold hearings for Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland.

“The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice,” were McConnell’s exact words. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”

Right now, Democrats are understandably up in arms about McConnell inventing this “not during an election year” rule and then dropping it the second he had a chance to seat a judge during not just an election year, but right in the thick of a presidential campaign.

But in truth, McConnell’s blatant hypocrisy was visible long before that, when he first filled the seat that he stole with Trump’s nominee, Neil Gorsuch. The American people most certainly did not want Trump to fill that seat. The American people picked Barack Obama to fill that seat, when they elected him in 2012. They then chose Hillary Clinton, by a margin of nearly 3 million votes over Trump, to fill that seat.

Consider also that the American people picked Al Gore over George W. Bush in the 2000 election — by about 500,000 votes. If it were up to the American people, it’s arguable that seven of the nine current Supreme Court would be Democratic appointees.

We also know from polling that 62% of Americans believe that the person who fills Ginsburg’s seatshould be the person who wins the election.

Trump is a notorious, pathological liar, but we can’t let that get in the way of seeing that McConnell is just as rotten, and much craftier about being evil, to boot. McConnell loves to resort to high-minded rhetoric about democracy, but he’s clearly laughing up his sleeve the entire time. If Americans had a real democracy, McConnell wouldn’t even hold his leadership position: A majority of Americans have been voting for Democrats in Senate races for years, but Republicans control the upper chamber of Congress because the Constitution gives disproportionate power to rural states with small but overwhelmingly conservative populations.

Even this unfair stranglehold on power isn’t enough for McConnell, however, which is why he has lied, cheated and stolen his way to control the federal judiciary. He intends to use that same judiciary to steal even more power for Republicans at the ballot box, because conservative judges are only too happy to hand down rulings on voting rights and gerrymandering that allow Republicans to further eviscerate Americans’ ability to choose their own leaders.

The ugly, hard truth is that the constitutional crisis has been going on for years, and the architect of our demise isn’t Donald Trump. He’s just a loudmouth bully Republicans can hide behind to get what they’ve always wanted — to hold onto power without being accountable to the voters.

Sure, this presidential election is important, but getting rid of Trump isn’t enough to save us. If Democrats can pull off this election, we will need drastic reform — starting with packing the courts and major voting-rights legislation — simply to begin to undo all the damage done by McConnell and his crew. Not because that’s good for the Democrats, although that would be a likely side effect. But because our democracy is taking its last breaths, and without major intervention it will be lost to us for good.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/mourn-ruth-bader-ginsburg-but-dont-give-in-to-despair-its-time-to-fight-like-hell-instead/

friday night, when the news of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg hit, I was struck by the same wave of hopeless despair that anyone who cares about the future of this country felt. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the weight of the world rested on the shoulders of this diminutive 87-year-old woman who had been battling cancer for many years. With her death, Donald Trump and the Senate Republicans, led by the depraved liar and hypocrite Mitch McConnell, have the power to fill her seat on the Supreme Court with another right wing extremist. With a comfortable 6-3 conservative majority on the court, the Republican mission to dismantle the already battered remains of our democracy will be protected from the occasional bout of conscience from Chief Justice John Roberts.

Things are bad. Really, really bad. It would be foolish to deny it. We have a reality TV fascist in the Oval Office who has been lawsuit-happy when it comes to his efforts to steal himself a second term against the strong will of the American people, and now he’s going to get himself a third Supreme Court justice to grease the wheels. Plus, theuncorking of right wing assaults on human rights — a situation which seemed dire after Justice Brett Kavanaugh replaced the at-times-reluctant supporter of equal rights, Justice Anthony Kennedy — are going to spin wildly out of control.

Women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, voting rights, religious freedom, health care access: These are all on the chopping block now, in ways that will likely make previous assaults seem like a game of tiddlywinks.

So I forgive you (and myself) if you need to sit in the corner for a little with a bottle of whiskey, or a good red wine, as Ginsburg would have done. But once we’re done with that, it’s time to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, get back into it and fight like hell. it is, after all, what Ginsburg would have done.

Ginsburg earned a reputation for being so tough and accomplished that the hagiography started while she was still alive and able to enjoy it. So tough, in fact, when I told my friends over Zoom that she had died, they refused to believe me and demanded to know my source. (Phone alert from NPR.) Being known for such a ferocious tenacity that people can’t even believe you could die, even when you’ve been hospitalized on and off for months from cancer, is quite the quality.

It is this strength that we must channel for what is shaping up to be a fight for democracy itself.

It’s tempting to look at the situation, throw your hands up, and start looking into immigration laws for other countries. But when that urge strikes, I recommend diving into one of the many lengthy obituaries written about Ginsburg, instead of just skimming the first couple of paragraphs. Or watch one of movies about her life, if you prefer. Or read “Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” the book that kicked off all the hosannas for the still-living Ginsburg in the past few years.

What you’ll find is the story of a woman who looked at a world that seemingly had no space for her or her ideas, shrugged, and forged ahead anyway. She was one of only nine women in her class at Harvard Law. When she graduated, law firms weren’t interested in hiring women, especially if they were married mothers or Jewish, and Ginsburg was both. And yet she ended up on the Supreme Court.

But even more importantly, she won a series of victories as a feminist lawyer that frankly would seem impossible, if we didn’t live in the world she had created by doing so. In the 1970s, Ginsburg argued six — six! — cases in front of the Supreme Court, winning five.

As Ian Millhiser of Vox notes, this required arguing in front of a bunch of male judges who sprung from “a society that was so sexist that many of them had never had a female colleague.” These were men whose power and privilege rested, in large part, upon centuries of oppression of women, and like most men of the time, they were aware on some level that women’s equality meant giving up some of that power and privilege.

Convincing such men to literally vote to dismantle, bit by bit, a power structure geared to benefit them at the expense of women was a task so enormous that it’s genuinely hard to imagine, especially in the real world, where people are stubborn and blinkered and selfish, so much unlike the glossy Hollywood world where justice always prevails in the end.

But damn it, Ginsburg got her Hollywood ending in those cases. It was, as her biographer and friend Irin Carmon writes, because she embraced a worldview that “was as bold as it was optimistic.” It was not just because Ginsburg had the moral clarity to see what was wrong about sexism, but because she had the imagination to picture a better world, one where men and women are partners and friends, and everyone is more free to be themselves and not circumscribed by absurd gender roles.

It’s arguable that Ginsburg was, if anything, too tenacious. She was too stubborn to retire from the court when there was a chance Barack Obama could nominate her replacement, a decision that no one should bother to defend. But, as with most strong-willed people, her flaws flowed from the same traits that made her great. And we should embrace that pig-headed unwillingness to give up, even when it seems like giving up is the only option.

The fights ahead of us are onerous, starting with the fight to prevent Trump and McConnell from putting whatever troglodyte they have in mind on the court. These fights may seem impossible, in fact. (But nothing is impossible, including convincing Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, to save her seat by doing the right thing for once in her miserable career.) Giving into despair might seem like the only option.

But however hard it seems, it’s probably not as hard as it was for Ginsburg to stand up — all 5’1″ of her — and argue to all-male panels of judges about why the very system that gave them their power was wrong. She was forever humble about her courage, often describing herself as “lucky.” But she wasn’t lucky. She was smart, strategic and tenacious. And we have to be those things if we are to protect the legacy that she and other civil rights activists and leaders have built.

If it seems too difficult at times, just remember to ask yourself what RBG would have done. You know the answer is “keep fighting.” So that is what we will do.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-is-using-the-tricks-of-reality-tv-against-a-and-its-not-going-well/

it’s hardly new or revelatory to say this, but it’s critical to remember the role that “The Apprentice” played in turning Donald Trump, a notoriously bad businessman with a string of bankruptcies, into an American icon of capitalist success. Everything from careful editing to set designers giving the dreary Trump Organization offices a glow-up came together to create the illusion of success where only failure and mediocrity had been before.

It was an experience so profound for Trump that he did something highly unusual: He learned something. He absorbed the idea that a well-constructed illusion of competence gets you all the benefits of being accomplished, without having to do the hard work of actually achieving anything.

Unfortunately, it was a lesson we are all paying the price for now.

On Thursday evening, the New York Times published an exposé about how the Trump White House forced the CDC to publish dangerously misleading coronavirus testing recommendationson its website. the new “guidance said it was not necessary to test people without symptoms of Covid-19 even if they had been exposed to the virus,” Apoorva Mandavilli writes, noting that actual public health experts at the agency strenuously objected because the virus is often spread by asymptomatic people and vigorous testing is crucial to preventing that.

It’s not hard to see that Trump’s reality TV instincts fueled this effort to discourage coronavirus testing. Trump has made clear from the beginning of this pandemic that he would prefer to leave as many coronavirus cases on the editing-room floor as possible, and he thinks the best way to do that is to keep people from getting tested. Trump truly believes that the best way to get coronavirus numbers down is not by preventing people from getting infected in the first place, but by hiding the true number of cases and juking the stats.

Even during this week’s town hall hosted by ABC News, Trump asserted this belief, claiming that the only reason the U.S. has more 20% of the world’s coronavirus cases (despite having only 4.5% of the world’s population) is that “we do much more testing.”

Of course, the U.S. also has more than 20% of the world’s deaths, a fact that exposes that Trump’s instincts aren’t just immoral, but wrong. Those dead Americans tell the real story of what’s happening, and no amount of trying to monkey with the numbers is going to change that.

Trump is also playing the reality TV game with the vaccine. He has been dropping hints for weeks, reality TV-style, that there will be a shocking and heartwarming twist right before the election, which he clearly views as the penultimate episode of this “season,” in which he will dramatically unveil the vaccine that will save us all and also ensure his re-election. He’s even used CDC resources to prop up this insinuation that the big vaccine reveal is coming, right in the nick of time.

“You could have a very big surprise coming up,” Trump said in a press conference last week.

“We’re going to have a vaccine very soon, maybe even before a very special date. You know what date I’m talking about,” he added. Gee, I have no idea. What date could he possibly mean?

It’s doubtful that Trump cares, one way or another, that he’s making empty promises. In reality TV, it’s normal to hype some big revelation to lure in viewers for the next episode, only to produce some anticlimactic nothing-burger. All that matters is sucking people in, not delivering them what was promised.

Trump’s playing the same game here. He doesn’t care that there won’t be anything close to a readily available vaccine this year. He just wants to hype that idea long enough to somehow scrape out an election victory, legitimate or otherwise, at which point he’ll not only abandon the idea entirely, but most likely interfere with the process of getting one safely on the market.

But of course, trying to deceive people about their own health and lives isn’t just reality TV sleaze. It’s a deeply immoral gambit that appears to have given the CDC director, Dr. Robert Redfield, a minor crisis of conscience. At least Redfield he wasn’t willing to lie to Congress flat out, and told the obvious truth that even if a vaccine is approved this year, it probably won’t be widely available until the middle of 2021. He also encouraged mask-wearing, even though Trump seems to think every mask applied to a face is an eff-you personally directed at him.

Trump, as usual, reacted poorly to someone trying to pierce his poorly constructed illusion of competent leadership. He responded by claiming that Redfield had “made a mistake” and offered “incorrect information.”

This is just another example of Trump treating the leaders of important government institutions not as if they were public servants, but as if they were TV producers whose main job is to clean up Trump’s image, cover for his ignorant mistakes and odious statements, and present him to the public as the brilliant statesman he absolutely is not.

Much has been written about the hard work that it took for the team on “The Apprentice” to conceal Trump’s repugnant personality and mediocrity as a businessman.

“What we did, that was a scam,” Bill Pruitt, a former producer on “The Apprentice,” said in the Netflix documentary “The Confidence Man,” which explored how the people behind that show used TV magic to make Trump seem smart and accomplished.

“If you walked around Trump’s actual office in Trump Tower you’d see the wood’s chipped, and what’s that smell?” Pruitt added, noting, “It wasn’t the empire we were going to have to sell to people. We needed to gussy it up a bit. And we did.”

“Most of us knew he was a fake,” Jonathan Braun, another producer, told The New Yorker. “But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.”

In a 2017 essay about “The Apprentice,” New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum wrote that “the Trump of ‘The Apprentice’ receives endless praise, even behind his back. All scandal and debt are erased; Trump’s combative streak is alchemized into Daddy’s tough love.”

For Trump, being a fake success is better than being a real success. For one thing, it’s less work. For another, it feels like cheating the system, and Trump loves to believe he’s doing that. So even with the death toll from the pandemic closing in on 200,000 Americans, Trump still clings to this notion that he doesn’t need to actually do anything about it. He just wants someone to come in and edit reality to make it look like he’s doing something.

While it was undeniably hard work for the team at “The Apprentice” to present this false image of Trump-the-competent-businessman, they at least had the benefit of being able to contain the illusion within the rectangular frame of the TV screen.

The real world, it turns out, is too big to be captured and controlled in an editing bay. Trump’s increasingly futile efforts to make the pandemic disappear through reality-TV antics keep running up into the biological realities of people who get sicker and sicker, wind up in hospital ICUs and then on respirators, and then die. Trump can’t hide that his management of this crisis has been a total failure, and on some lizard brain level, he seems to understand that he’s unpopular. That’s why his next big gambit is to try to replace the real election, which he would almost certainly lose, with a fake one where he’s declared the winner.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-right-wing-plan-to-steal-the-election-is-right-in-front-of-our-noses/

no lnx

The right-wing plan to steal the election is right in front of our noses

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon September 17, 2020

There has been a ton of news about Bill Barr — official title, “Attorney General of the United States;” actual job, Donald Trump’s capo — crawling across cable news chyrons in recent days, so much so that it’s hard to keep track of it all. There’s that thing he said about quarantine restrictions being nearly as bad as slavery. And the thing where he whined about the Justice Department staffers that’s more interested in enforcing the law than protecting Trump’s political power. And where he compared such people to preschool children, for having the temerity to question his decisions.

All that is bad, but probably the worst news this week is a report from the New York Times that “Barr told federal prosecutors in a call last week that they should consider charging rioters and others who had committed violent crimes at protests in recent months with sedition.”

He also asked federal prosecutors “to explore whether they could bring criminal charges against Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle for allowing some residents to establish a police-free protest zone near the city’s downtown for weeks this summer.”

This is especially alarming in light of Barr’s assertion, in the same speech where he made offensive comments about his own staff and about slavery, that he believes he has “virtually unchecked discretion” in determining what cases to prosecute.

Barr was talking about cases stemming from the protests in various cities over the summer. Although the vast majority of those protests were peaceful, there were a few incidents of violence and looting, though absolutely no evidence of plots to overthrow the U.S. government (which is what “sedition” means). Barr’s eagerness to overreact, however, is another alarming sign that he is exploring ways to assist Trump’s public and obvious plans to do whatever he can to steal the presidential election.

Thursday morning, in the midst of one of his lengthy morning Twitter tantrums, Trump hinted yet again at his plans to use phony claims about “fraud” as cover to keep election officials from counting all the ballots after Election Day:

[twt pix]

It’s a muddled mess of a tweet, but basically, he’s using scare quotes to suggest that votes by mail, at least by Democrats, are illegitimate. He’s also, in his usual manner, accusing his opponents of doing what he’s clearly planning to do, which in this case is to keep the ballots from being accurately tallied.

This is where Barr’s dark talk of “sedition” comes in. Should the votes in swing states be close — and every indication from polling is they will be — Trump will likely try to declare victory on the night of the election. After that, there will be a massive battle, as happened under similar circumstances in 2000, over how and whether to count all those mail-in ballots. Much of that will be in the courts, but there will be a street component, as well, as pro-democracy protesters will hit the streets to demand a full vote count, and election officials could face efforts to physically stop them from counting votes.

It’s increasingly clear that putting down those anticipated protesters and stopping the vote count is a priority for Trump and his allies. So there’s increasing talk from prominent Trump allies of a possible “insurrection” by the left after Election Day, and the need to use maximum force to put it down.

Michael Caputo, a 2016 Trump campaign aide and bug-eyed right-wing conspiracy theorist who was given the job of assistant secretary for public affairs at Health and Human Services, recently made news for a truly wacky set of utterances during a recent Facebook Live event. Among other things, Caputo accused government scientists of, yep, “sedition” and accused the left of plotting an insurrection, recommending that right-wingers “buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get.”

A wave of bad press compelled Caputo to take a leave of absence from his government job, citing vague medical concerns, but what he said directly echoes the rhetoric of Roger Stone, his longtime friend and fellow Trump confidant. Stone recently saw his sentence for felonies related to his role in the Russian conspiracy to undermine the 2016 election commuted by Trump, and has been at the forefront of trying to characterize efforts to count all the votes as an “insurrection” to be suppressed with violence.

During a segment on Infowars last week, Stone suggested that Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act or declare martial law and that early voting and mail-in ballots in Nevada “should be seized by federal marshals and taken from the state” to keep them from being counted. Stone claimed such ballots were fraudulent, but of course the real concern is that they’re legitimate — and that far too many of them will be cast for Joe Biden.

On Tuesday, Mark Levin — who is currently a radio TV host, but formerly worked with Barr at the Justice Department during the Reagan/Bush years — warned that the protests from the summer will “multiply by five or 10” and that Trump should declare them insurrections because they “need to be put down.”

Levin was being vague about what he thinks might provoke such enormous protests, but it’s not hard to see what upcoming event might do such a thing: A close election that Trump will try to steal by suppressing vote-counting.

And let’s be clear that Barr himself is on board with this idea that mail-in ballots are inherently illegitimate and that fighting to keep them from being counted is therefore justified. Barr has repeatedly floated baseless claims that mail-in ballots are fraudulent or that foreign countries “could easily make counterfeit ballots.”

None of this, it cannot be stated strongly enough, is true. It’s a shameless pretext for what is likely an upcoming fight to get those ballots thrown out.

It’s tempting to see all this talk of “insurrection” and “sedition” from the right — including Trump’s own government officials — as nothing more than hyperbole from Republicans who are emotionally overwrought in the face of what looks to be a lost election. Unfortunately, as the scandal around slowdowns at the U.S. Postal Service and lawsuits over mail-in voting make clear, the Trump administration is doing more than talk. It’s actively pulling whatever levers it can to keep Democratic votes from being counted this November.

Once those ballots have been cast, the fight to make sure they’re counted is going to get rough — not just in the courts, but in the streets. Much could depend on the ability of the left to hit the streets, not just in protests to put pressure on election officials to finish the vote count, but possibly to physically protect officials who are counting votes from armed right-wingers whom Trump has whipped into a frenzy. All this chatter about “insurrection,” “riots” and “sedition” is an effort to preemptively characterize pro-democracy protesters as a threat, and to justify using violence to suppress them.

Remember, Trump was willing to use tear gas and baton assaults against peaceful protesters just to keep them from heckling him. There’s no telling how far he’ll go to keep those same peaceful protesters from messing with his efforts to steal an election.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trumps-constant-lies-reveal-a-big-truth-about-the-right-wing/

are they stupid or evil?

When I first started writing about politics, way back in the George W. Bush era, this was a legitimate question when it came to trying to understand the mindset of Republicans, especially when it came to their stubborn refusal to accept scientific truths. Republicans have denied or cast doubt on science in so many ways — denying that condoms are effective, that evolution is real, that climate change is actually happening and largely caused by human activity — and many liberals and progressives have felt legitimately confused about exactly why.

Was it that right-wingers were too ignorant or benighted to accede to scientific realities? Or was it more sinister than that: They knew full well what the science said, but were too selfish and cruel to care, and also selfish and cruel enough to lie about it to our faces?

Well, with the West Coast on fire, a pandemic spreading across the land, and a pathological liar in the White House as the Republican standard-bearer, I think we can consider that debate settled: It’s not ignorance. It’s malice.

the cruelty, as Adam Serwer of The Atlantic famously wrote, is the point.

Donald Trump is a profoundly stupid man — so stupid that he appears to have actually believed it was a stroke of genius to suggest injecting household cleaners into people’s lungs — but even he, as we now know for certain, was only pretending not to understand that the coronavirus is deadly and easily transmitted. Famed journalist Bob Woodward has been steadily releasing audio clips from the interviews he conducted with Trump over the spring for his new book, “Rage.” These recordings make clear that Trump knowingly lied about the scale and danger of the pandemic. In one, he tells Woodward, “I wanted to always play it down” and “I still like playing it down”.

New tapes released on Monday indicate that, even as Trump was publicly claiming that the virus “would soon be in full retreat” and encouraging protests against lockdown measures, he was privately admitting that “this thing is a killer” and that the virus “rips you apart” if “you’re the wrong person.”

In other words, Trump gets it but simply doesn’t care. That was confirmed again on Monday by a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, who confronted Trump about his decision to hold a packed (and largely mask-free) indoor rally in Henderson, Nevada, despite warnings from public health officials that such events easily spread the coronavirus.

“I’m on a stage and it’s very far away,” Trump told the reporter. “And so I’m not at all concerned.”

So the safety of the thousands of people who showed up to show fealty to Trump is clearly of no importance. He was far away from them! So he’s “not at all concerned.”

Trump’s odious attitudes towards the people who are being harmed by his failure to take science seriously were on display later in his trip, when he visited McClellan Park in Sacramento, California, where the skies are clogged from smoke from wildfires tearing up the West Coast.

That the frequency and severity of wildfires around the world — and currently up and down the Pacific Coast at a level never seen in human memory — is a result of climate change is beyond dispute. But when a California state official asked him about the issue, Trump simply responded, “It will start getting cooler. You just watch.”

“I don’t think science knows,” Trump insisted, while trying to pretend the problem on the West Coast is about forest management, instead of soaring summer temperatures that turn bone-dry wooded areas into kindling. (It was just nine months ago that similar summer fires in Australia reportedly killed more than a*billion* animals.)

Claiming that the science is still unclear or that the continued existence of winter proves that there’s no climate crisis are standard issue deflections from Republicans. It worked for many years, however, because the consequences of climate change weren’t readily apparent to most people, and many people didn’t grasp that snow in December doesn’t negate the problems caused by record hot summers. (In fact, one aspect of the climate crisis is more extreme weather in all directions: Record heat, epic hurricanes and sometimes powerful blizzards.)

But the “I don’t see the problem here” act is a lot harder to pull off when you literally have to walk through a cloud of smoke to get to the microphone where you deny the problem.

The term “gaslighting” —when someone pretends not to know something that both they and their target know is true — has been around in psychology for a long time and recently made the leap to politics, since it so perfectly describes the nature of Trump’s obvious lies.

That’s also what Republicans have been doing all along when it comes to denying science. Even the duller specimens within the party tend to be a little sharper than Trump, after all. So if he understands the facts and is just pretending not to, it’s safe to assume the same thing about the vast majority of Republicans whose lead he follows, and who are perhaps a bit more skillful at performing ignorance.

They aren’t ignorant. They don’t really believe the science is controversial. That’s just an act to cover for a sadistic agenda.

This was always obvious to people who were watching closely. I spent years reporting on reproductive health care, and it soon became evident that no amount of common sense or scientific evidence would overcome the insistence by many conservatives — such as Vice President Mike Pence— that condoms don’t work to prevent HIV transmission and other sexually-transmitted diseases. That wasn’t, as some headline writers seemed to believe, because Pence was too dumb to understand the science.

Pence is not the brightest bulb on the tree, but it doesn’t exactly take a doctorate in molecular biology to see how a condom prevents virus from moving from one body to another. He was just feigning ignorance to justify his hostility to policies that protect the health of people he hates, especially LGBTQ people and women who have sex lives outside of heterosexual marriage.

It was comforting to believe that incomprehension was the main reason why conservatives resist scientific information on everything from STI transmission to the climate crisis to evolutionary biology. For one thing, that problem would seem to have a ready solution: Better education and reasoned discourse. So well-meaning defenders of science would hold “debates” with climate skeptics or evolution deniers, hoping that superior evidence and eloquent arguments would cause conservatives to see the light and embrace rational policies that are better for the planet and its people.

Nah. Conservatives were just lying about this stuff the whole time. We know this, because they’ve rallied around Trump, a man who tells so many obvious lies that he clearly doesn’t care that everyone knows that he’s lying. In fact, that’s why he tells laughably obvious lies. It’s a power play — a demonstration that he can do or say whatever he wants, no matter how outrageous or offensive, and no one has the ability to stop him.

This distinction matters, because it puts the fight over these issues squarely in the realm of a moral debate, instead of a debate about facts or science. And that’s a debate conservatives don’t want to have, because they know they’ll always lose a moral debate over, say, whether it’s OK to let the entire West Coast burn every summer and fall. The gaslighting and feigned ignorance was a tactic to keep the discussion mired in a pointless debate over facts that are abundantly clear, and to avoid these larger moral questions.

Maybe now, with Trump giving the game away, we can stop letting the right waste our time with gaslight-fueled “debates” and turn to what really matters: Will our nation do the right thing, or will we continue to let a pack of bigots and sadists determine our national priorities? That fateful decision is long overdue, but with Trump in the White House trying to lie and cheat his way into a second term, we can no longer avoid it.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/herd-developed-trumps-cult-would-rather-get-19-than-admit-they-were-wrong/

an 920

Herd developed’: Trump’s death cult would rather get COVID-19 than admit they were wrong

Amanda Marcotte / SalonSeptember 16, 2020

Trump was doing spectacularly bad science again, this time during a town hall in Philadelphia hosted by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Tuesday night. The event went about as well for the president as anyone who has been awake during the past four years could have predicted, which raises the important question: Wasn’t his new campaign manager supposed to be *competent*?

When asked about an audio clip captured by journalist Bob Woodward in which Trump talks about the coronavirus pandemic and how much he “wanted to always play it down,” Trump slid right into his don’t-believe-your-lying-ears mode, claiming that he, in fact, “up-played it.” Whatever that means. Then the “very stable genius” currently squatting in the Oval Office rolled out his brilliant plan to lick the coronavirus problem (as transcribed by the invaluable Aaron Rupar of Vox):

TRUMP: It is going away.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Without a vaccine?

TRUMP: Sure. Over a period of time.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And many deaths.

TRUMP: It’s gonna be herd developed.

He also used the phrase “herd mentality.”

Trump’s English comprehension is garbled by decades of being unable to listen to anyone speaking about any topic that doesn’t directly concern his greatness or his personal finances. But he appeared to be talking about the concept of “herd immunity,” which is generally understood to require 70 to 90% of the population to be immune to a given infectious agent. This “let everyone get it” plan has been a favorite of Trump’s from the beginningof the pandemic. Recently, he has hired a borderline quack named Dr. Scott Atlas — a radiologist with no expertise in virology or epidemiology — to keep telling him it’s a good idea. But even Atlas knows this is a crackpot plan, and has so far refused to admit to reporters that he’s the source of Trump’s incoherent muttering about “herd impunity” or “herd magnanimity” or “herd it on the grapevine.” (To be clear: Kidding! He hasn’t said any of those things. At least not yet.)

right now, somewhere around 2% of Americans have tested positive for the coronavirus — which is still a whopping 6.6 million people, more than any other nation on Earth — and of that group, just over 196,000 have died as of Wednesday afternoon. I leave it to readers — who, unlike Trump, didn’t pay someone to take their SATs for them — to figure out how many more people are likely to die if we go with Trump’s brilliant plan of infecting perhaps 35 times as many people with the virus as have now tested positive.

(Or, skip the algebra and read this article from the Washington Post, which estimates that Trump’s “good brain” plan would kill nearly 3 million people}:

Here I thought that Trump had crammed thousands of his followers, without masks, into an indoor rally in Henderson, Nevada, just because he’s a terminal narcissist who prioritizes his insatiable need for applause over the lives of the very swing-state voters he would need to win the election. But hey, it might also be that he’s using the bodies of his own supporters — who tend, on average, to be older and likelier to die of COVID-19 — for his grand experiment in “herd development.”

Move over, Burning Man: It’s time for a new desert festival! Donald Trump’s Coronafest 2020: The drugs aren’t as good, and you’re way likelier to end up dead.

The wild thing is how many people turned up for the dubious pleasures of risking their lives to hear Dr. Bleach-Injector’s whiny, singsong cadence for more than an hour. *Thousands* of people showed up at the Henderson rally, putting it all on the line to show the world that they’re willing to get sick or even die rather than admit it was a bad idea to elect a racist reality-TV host with the moral compass of a serial killer to the highest office in the land.

In the first year of Trump’s presidency, I wrote a piece warning about the powers of rationalization, and suggesting how far Trump supporters would likely go rather than admit they made a mistake in voting for the man in 2016.

“[T]he answer to the question of when Trump voters will come around is somewhere between ‘a long, long time from now’ and more likely ‘never,'” I wrote in June 2017.

I quote myself only to say that, holy yikes, did I understate the case. No matter how confident I was that Trump supporters would contort themselves into ridiculous pretzels or sign onto outrageous beliefs to justify their 2016 vote, even I had no idea how wacky things could get. Here we are, three years and change later, and this is the lengths Trump voters will go to avoid having to say, “Oops!"[twt/pix/vid?]

or check out this rally in the town of St. George, Utah,which happened a few weeks ago but has now gone viral, due to the I-can’t-believe-this-isn’t-satire aspect of it all. That report doesn’t come from a progressive media outlet of any kind, just the local news station. It features a bunch of angry white people comparing having to wear a face mask to George Floyd being killed by police in Minneapolis, or claiming that “most child molesters love” masks.

No doubt it’s tempting to dismiss these examples as nut-picking, no different than when right-wingers grab the occasional anarchist-flavored vandal at a Black Lives Matter protest and use him to demonize the whole movement. But the difference is these loons don’t actually sound much different than their beloved president.

Trump has also suggested that people only wear masks to spite him. He was clearly coached by his campaign staff to sound vaguely pro-mask during the Tuesday town hall, his true feelings came out when he kept repeating variations of “a lot of people think the masks are not good.” (When Trump says “some people” or “a lot of people” are saying something, he is just stating his own opinion and, like the incorrigible coward he is, refusing to own it.) And like that “child molester” lady, who is obviously a QAnon follower, Trump loves pushing Q-friendly conspiracy theories, even retweeting a QAnon adherent who recently accused former Vice President Joe Biden of being a pedophile.

Despite all this, Trump’s approval rating sits right around 42 to 44%, and is apparently immovable. The phrase “in for a penny, in for a pound” has never been more relevant. Apparently, anything is better than admitting that the liberals were right that voting for Trump was a bad idea — even getting COVID-19 is preferable to that. That’s why the conspiracy theories must get more baroque all the time, because trying to tell a story in which Trump voters are the good guys is harder than trying to explain to the cops why you have a freezer full of human body parts.

Hell, maybe it was a smart idea for the campaign to throw Trump on TV, thereby guaranteeing that liberals would mock him and the fools who vote for him without mercy. As the past four years have demonstrated, it just makes Trump’s supporters more defensive, and more determined than ever to stick it to the libs one more time. Because heaven forbid that Trump’s 2016 voters should demonstrate a conscience by acting like realgood guys would: Sucking it up, admitting they were wrong and making better choices this November.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/why-trumps-denials-of-his-contempt-for-the-military-are-likely-just-more-lies-and-why-it-matters/

Donald Trump is likely lying, of course, in denying a new report by Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic that accuses the president of calling the fallen American soldiers of World War I “suckers” and “losers.”

We know this because of Trump’s pathological pattern of telling lies, first of all. But also because in his tweeted denials, Trump now claims he never called the Sen. John McCain a “loser” for being captured during the Vietnam War, even though there’s a recording of him doing so, in the same rant during which he declared, “I like people who weren’t captured.” Trump was so proud of this smear of the late Arizona Republican that he tweeted it out at the time.

Beyond his implausible but vehement denials, Trump’s other tell is that he falsely accuses others of doing what he himself has done. In this case, Trump has spent years bashing athletes who kneel during the national anthem, falsely accusing them of dishonoring veterans and war dead. In truth, the tradition — started by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick — was formed with input from a former Green Beretas a way to speak out against racism and police brutality while still honoring the troops.

This is the same guy who found out that Russians were offering bounties to Afghan fighters who killed American soldiers and shrugged it off. Hetold a grieving widow of a U.S. Army sergeant that “he knew what he signed up for”, and then accused her of lying when she spoke out about it. He smeared the family of Army Capt. Humayun Khan, who was killed in action in Iraq, when Khan’s parentsspoke at the Democratic National Convention. In between Trump’s badly acted efforts at pretending to care about the troops, his actual contempt has often shown itself.

all of this is why it would be unwise to hold your breath waiting for this story to put a dent in that stubborn 41 to 43% approval rating, below which Trump has rarely dipped throughout his entire presidency. Nor will Trump’s voters be fussed about the Washington Post adding to Goldberg’s reporting with a story sourced to a “former senior administration official” that Trump had “told senior advisers that he didn’t understand why the U.S. government placed such value on finding soldiers missing in action because they had performed poorly and gotten caught and deserved what they got.”

The Trump base, which is stable enough to keep Trump within stealing range of the 2020 election,loves to talk about how patriotic they are and to make a big show out of how much they supposedly love the troops. As this unquestioning loyalty to Trump makes clear, it’s all nonsense. Given a choice between white supremacy and support for the men and women of the military, Trump voters will pick racism every single time.

As with Trump, much of the flag-hugging and declarations of love for “our troops” is just an act for the conservative base. As with the showy piety of the Christian right and the outrage over imaginary pedophilia play-acted by QAnon adherents, the ostentatious “honoring” of troops is just another performance meant to put a moralistic gloss on the deeply immoral ideology of the right.

This was blatant in the way Trump and his supporters weaponized their phony love of the troops to bash Black Lives Matter protesters in pro sports.

The real reason conservatives are angry at Kaepernick, or other athletes who kneel during the national anthem — who are predominantly but not exclusively Black — is plain old racism. Conservatives are loath to admit out loud that it bugs them to see athletes show support for racial equality, since admitting that comes uncomfortably close to admitting to racist beliefs. Instead, they pretend to be outraged about the supposed insult to “the troops,” even though there has never been an insult to the troops embedded in this somber and respectful form of protest.

The very notion that there’s anything disrespectful to the troops about demanding racial equality also overlooks the long history of how people of color have served with honor in the military, while continuing to face discrimination and abuse at home. A number of civil rights activists in the 50s and 60s were World War II veterans motivated by anger over how much they had sacrificed for America, only to return home to be treated, as activist Hosea Williams once said, “like a common dog.” The Tuskegee Airmen, a predominantly Black group of fighter and bomber pilots in World War II, were as famous for the work they did to desegregate the military and fight for civil rights in civilian lifeas they were for their feats of bravery during the war.

Currently, 43% of active duty military arepeople of color. There is no conflict between the fight for racial equality and supporting the troops. Indeed, doing the latter requires the former.

Right-wing pieties about flag, troops and country have often been a bunch of hot air meant to disguise what is really forceful opposition to what are supposed to be shared American values of freedom, justice and equality. Consider how many people on the right love the Confederate battle flag, valorizing an act of rebellion in the name of racism and chattel slavery that led to the bloodiest conflict in American history. In his typical ham-fisted fashion, Donald Trump simply lays bare how much of right-wing patriotism is pageantry designed to wrap racist impulses in the flag.

As I wrote on Thursday, polling data shows that the majority of Republicans have turned their backs on American values, the ones our troops take an oath to protect, such as freedom, equality and the rule of law. If protecting white supremacy requires abandoning bedrock American values, such as the universal right to vote, so-called conservatives seem distressingly eager to do so.

There’s literally nothing Trump can say or do to insult the troops, even those who have died in service to the nation, that would cause his supporters to turn away him. What’s become clear is that they never really believed that stuff in the first place. This is and always was about their commitment to racism, a commitment they believe — reasonably enough — that Trump shares. As long as he keeps delivering on that toxic current in American history and American life, his supporters will forgive him for everything else.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trump-has-a-plan-to-steal-the-election-in-fact-he-has-at-least-5-of-them/

dirty tricks authoritarian

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/why-the-gop-is-so-susceptible-to-denialism

no lnx

Why the GOP is so susceptible to coronavirus denialism

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon September 2, 2020

Donald Trump didn’t like what the experts were telling him about the coronavirus pandemic, so he found a guy with “Dr.” in front of his name who will tell the president the bedtime stories he wants to hear. Dr. Scott Atlas isn’t an expert in infectious disease or epidemiology, as are coronavirus task force advisers Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom he has pretty much usurped. Atlas is a radiologist and, more importantly, a senior fellow at the far-right bad-idea incubator known as the Hoover Institution (previously home to the infamous prediction that the U.S. death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic would be around 5,000).

According to the New York Times and the Washington Post, Atlas — who apparently caught Trump’s eye the way so many of his advisers do, by peddling BS on Fox News — is ready and willing to say all sorts of medically unsound things that just happen to align with everything Trump wants to believe about the coronavirus. So Atlas has risen rapidly as a power player and is reportedly even getting venerable institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to echo his unscientific beliefs.

Atlas has questioned whether wearing face masks slows viral spread (it does) and pushed for the CDC to change its recommendation on coronavirus testing to cover only people with symptoms, even though the science clearly shows that asymptomatic people are spreading the disease — and may indeed be a principal vector for spread.

Perhaps most distressingly, Atlas is reportedly behind Trump’s new enthusiasm for “herd immunity,” which is the latest euphemism for a non-policy letting the coronavirus run rampant, like a nationwide chicken pox party. Actual scientific experts in disease are uniformly against this idea, because it would dramatically raise the death rate and likely wouldn’t restore the economy anytime soon, as huge percentages of the population would continue to stay home rather than be part of President Bleach-Injector’s deadly science experiment.

For pro-choice activists and reproductive health experts, Trump’s embrace of a quack in a lab coat is feeling all too familiar. This strategy of putting lies and misinformation in the mouths of people who have an “MD” after their name has been standard practice for the anti-choice movement for decades. This has allowed anti-choice activists to push for policies that harmed public health, especially women’s health, while pretending they were doing it in the name of science. The George W. Bush administration, in particular, was fond of using doctors who shamelessly used their medical authority as cover to advocate for harmful ideas with little or no scientific basis.

This strategy, as well as those employed to push misinformation about climate science, helped train Republican politicians and conservative voters in the skills being currently used to muddy the waters around the science of the coronavirus pandemic. The result is that more than 6 million Americans are infected and nearly 185,000 have died, and that number is likely to continue growing at an alarming rate, especially as Trump now has a doctor to hide behind when justifying his hostility to public health.

Bush had a nasty habit of hiring doctors who were eager to use their credentials to justify their promotion of anti-choice propaganda. One of his FDA appointees, Dr. David Hager, was a gynecologist but more importantly a Christian conservative who rarely hesitated to make false claims that depicted both abortion and contraception, which have robust safety records, as medically dangerous.Hager advocated against making emergency contraception available over the counter, falsely implying that doing so posed a threat to the health of teenage girls. Even though the majority of FDA experts disagreed with Hager, the Bush administration blocked the policy based on his opinion.

It later emerged that Hager’s ex-wife, Linda Davis, had accused him of abusive behavior during their marriage, alleging that he withheld money unless she had sex with him and giving her sleeping pills so he could sodomize her without consent. Hager is still a popular talking head on the religious right, advocating for using the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to forcibly cancel women’s abortions.

Under the Obama administration, emergency contraception became legal over the counter, without age restrictions. And there has been no measurable effect on the health of women or teenage girls, unless you count the record low rates of teen pregnancy, which are directly attributable to expanded contraception access under Obama.

Another precursor to Atlas is Dr. Eric Keroack, a Bush appointee to oversee a contraception program in Health and Human Services, who was hired because he opposed contraception use. Like Hager, Keroack was happy to leverage his medical degree to put a scientific gloss on misogynist misinformation. He went so far as to claim that women who have premarital sex become physically incapable of experiencing love and bonding in marriage.

Even Trump’s reported manipulation of CDC recommendations to reflect his hostility to virus testing has a precursor with the Bush-era war on sexual health care. Under Bush, the CDC altered information on its website about condom use to mislead readers into believing that condoms weren’t effective at preventing sexually transmitted infection transmission.

Beyond just the Bush years, the anti-choice movement in general has a long-standing habit of promoting doctors who will shamefully ignore medical science in order to present their anti-choice and anti-woman views as “science.” They even form organizations, like the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, that will use the auspices of medical science to create the illusion that there’s merit to anti-choice myths such as the claim that abortion causes breast cancer (it doesn’t), that abortion causes mental illness (it doesn’t) or that abortion is more dangerous than childbirth (it’s about 14 times safer).

Trump’s coronavirus denialism is spreading past the White House and into the Senate. Earlier this week, Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa echoed a QAnon-linked conspiracy theory accusing doctors and hospitals of exaggerating the number of coronavirus cases and deaths, claiming that clinics profit from falsifying that data.

“These health-care providers and others are reimbursed at a higher rate if COVID is tied to it, so what do you think they’re doing?” Ernst said.

In reality, medical researchers believe that coronavirus cases are being undercounted, due to lack of testing.

This conspiracy theory also has a precursor in the anti-choice movement: The false claim doctors lie about the effectiveness of contraception in order to trick women into having sex and getting pregnant, so they can get that sweet, sweet abortion money.

This conspiracy theory was endorsed by Bush’s HHS appointee Keroack, who ran a “crisis pregnancy center” that claimed birth control “actually increases (rather than decreases) out-of-wedlock pregnancy and abortion.” That myth has since become hardened into common wisdom in the anti-choice world. Abby Johnson, the anti-choice speaker at the Republican National Convention, has repeatedly claimed that contraception access increases the abortion rate by lulling women into believing we “could separate sex from procreation.”

It’s no surprise that Republican voters so readily sign onto Trump’s obvious attempts to spread misinformation about the coronavirus by dressing it up as “science.” They’ve had decades of practice of choosing to believe fake medical science, which is all too often peddled by doctors who should know better. As the Queen in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” astutely observed, the trick in learning to believing impossible things is simply practice.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/white-evangelicalism-is-in-decline-and-qanon-could-take-its-place/

Remember the “Left Behind” series, about how the Rapture would whisk away all devout right-wing Christians before Jesus Christ unleashed the apocalypse on the unbelievers? Purity rings? Jesus Camp? Breathless stories about “girls gone mild,” giving up sex and tank tops for the Lord? A federal health official who believed that women who had premarital sex couldn’t feel love? Jerry Falwell Sr. and Pat Robertson blaming 9/11 on the “pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way”?

:{:{}:

There can be no doubt that the heyday of Christian fundamentalism in America was the George W. Bush administration. Conservatives craved reassurance that they were defenders of “morality”, despite supporting an indefensible invasion of Iraq that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. These claims to moral superiority over liberals mainly came in the form of policing hymen status, harassing women at abortion clinics and claiming a right to Christian forgiveness (for yourself) whencaught with prostitutes or soliciting gay sex in public bathrooms.

White evangelicals still hold considerable political power, which is why Donald Trump occasionally tries to get photographed fondling a Bible in ways he vainly hopes are convincing. Abortion and LGBTQ rights are still under serious threat, as the Christian right has made major inroads into the federal judiciary.

Perversely, however, the cultural power of white evangelicals is clearly fading, both in terms of numbers and relevance, and that process started long before Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr.’s namewas ever associated with a “pool boy.” Bibles have been largely replaced with Pepe the Frog memes. Public prayer has given way, among right-wingers, to chants of “Lock her up.” You hardly hear anyone on Fox News these days talking up premarital abstinence anymore. They’re too busy arguing that it’s no big deal that Trump has routinely cheated on his wives, or that it’s “pearl-clutching” to be angry that he has bragged about committing sexual assault.

white evangelicalism is in decline, but another movement is rising to take its place, a movement that scratches that same right-wing itch towards false piety and elaborate tribalist mythologies that are incomprehensible to outsiders: QAnon.

Yes, QAnon, the bizarre paranoid conspiracy theory that holds (more or less) that behind the scenes of observable reality lies a shadowy worldwide pedophile ring run by Democrats and prominent celebrities, and that Trump’s bizarre and self-serving authoritarian behavior is actually an elaborate ruse to hide his secret fight to destroy this elite child-abuse conspiracy.

QAnon has grown rapidly since it first emerged in 2017, morphing from an online conspiracy theory to anexplosive political and cultural phenomenon, one that can probably be considered a cult — although it lacks leaders in any conventional sense. While there hasn’t been systematic research into how many Americans are QAnoners, an NBC News study earlier this month discovered that QAnon accounts on Facebook have more than 3 million followers.

An estimated 20 QAnon adherents are running for congressional office this year. One of them, Marjorie Taylor Greene, just won a primary race for the Republican nomination in a Georgia district that is nearly certain to go red in November, in a landslide that suggests, at the very least, that her wacky beliefs didn’t scare off Republican voters. While some Republicans have publicly expressed reservations about Greene — who has apparently made racist comments and used sexist slurs — Donald Trump just called her a “future Republican Star”.

It’s a measure of our bizarre political climate that the Trump campaign sees QAnon as the future, but it’s hardly a surprise. Trump hasn’t been shy about courting QAnon followers, frequently retweeting its adherents (while later suggesting he doesn’t know much about it). But this public endorsement of a QAnon candidate brings the public embrace of the movement to the next level. Now Trump’s campaign is publicly attacking at least one Republican congressman who committed the sin of criticizing QAnon, with Trump’s deputy communications director arguing that the “real” conspiracy theory is the Russian collusion story. (That’s actually true, even if Team Trump has the story upside down.)

As ridiculous as all of this is — in the real world, Trump has wished accused child-sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell “well,” and has shown no particular interest in the issue — the rise of QAnon as a more secular replacement for evangelical Christianity makes a lot of sense.

By claiming to pursue a crusade against the sexual abuse of children, QAnon gives its adherents a feeling of self-righteousness, one that allows them to ignore the reality that they support a deeply immoral and sociopathic president who is bragging about his efforts to steal the November election, and whose malicious mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic has destroyed our economy and led to 166,000 deaths and millions of damaged lives. It lets them construct a story where they’re the good guys who oppose sexual exploitation, when in fact they are fiercely loyal to a man who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by two dozen women.

Evangelical Christianity played the same role for conservatives in the pre-Trump years, letting them feel holy and moral despite openly backing politicians who promoted immoral policies. But it came with a bunch of downsides, like being made to feel guilty for premarital sex, divorce or even (as Falwell Jr. found out) drinking and partying. With QAnon, you get to sleep in on Sunday and have all the sex you like, without giving up that pious assertion of moral superiority or the presumption of secret knowledge.

QAnon even swipes a central tactic from the Christian right: Focusing its concern on imaginary threats to children, while ignoring the very real threat to children (and everyone else) posed by their beliefs and actions.

With the Christian right, it’s all about melodramatic appeals that abortion supposedly “kills babies,” rhetoric that allows them to feel righteous while they undermine the services — social welfare, health care, housing and education — that allow parents to raise actual living children in safe, healthy environments.

QAnon claims to be fighting for children, but the child sex-trafficking victims they speak for are exclusively in their heads. In fact, QAnoners not only ignore the real cases of sex trafficking that exist, which have nothing to do with their conspiracy theory, but get in the way of activists who fight the real problemby clogging up phone lines, confusing their fundraising efforts, and interfering with social media campaigns.And they certainly don’t give a damn about the real-life children that Donald Trump separated from their parents and stuffed in cages along the border.

Embracing ridiculous beliefs, whether in the Rapture or in Pizzagate, seems to be a part of American right-wing DNA, perhaps because wild fantasies are the only way they can distract themselves from the real evil they do in the world.In light of that, the rise of QAnon makes sense. It’s the perfect mechanism, in Trump’s America, for conservatives to tell themselves a story about how they’renoble warriors for truth and justice in the face of overwhelming evidence that they’re not. Hardly anyone likes to face the genuinely bad things they’ve done, and QAnon provides Trump-loving conservatives a fable to justify all their dreadful choices.

8/13

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trumps-campaign-is-quietly-getting-more-competent-but-its-age-old-strategy-still-seems-to-be-failing/

Mere hours after former Vice President Joe Biden made history by picking Sen. Kamala Harris of California as his running mate — making her the first Black and Asian woman on a presidential ticket — Donald Trump coughed up his response. A little after 10 p.m. on Wednesday night, Trump posted a tweet claiming that “Joe Biden has a racism problem.”

The response on Twitter was, as one can imagine, contemptuous, given that Trump is an overt racist who leans heavily on white nationalist rhetoric. His niece, psychologist Mary Trump, says she’s heard him use the N-word, an accusation that no one sincerely doubts.

“Let’s be real: Trump attacking Biden as racist after Biden nominates the first woman of color for vice president in American history is beyond idiotic,” tweeted Mark Follman, the national affairs editor at Mother Jones, in a typical response.

“Not to mention Trump’s ‘white power’ tweet, his boost for ‘very fine’ torch carrying neo-Nazis etc etc etc,” Follman added.

but this wasn’t yet another case of the president of the United States, intoxicated from Fox News, idiotically lashing out on Twitter. On the contrary, the “racism problem” tweet was a well-edited video that had clearly been put together by the Trump campaign, compiling audio clips of Biden misspeaking or saying tone-deaf things about race, including comments about his 1970s relationships with segregationist senators, for which Harris famously criticized him in a 2019 debate.

In other words, this was a strategic choice by the Trump campaign, which has quietly become more competent in recent weeks (despite having to manage an overgrown toddler as a candidate), after dumping relative newbie Brad Parscale as campaign manager in favor of the more experienced Bill Stepien. This was an example of the false-equivalence strategy, and Democrats should be on alert, since earlier versions of this same strategy were used to great effect to defeat Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Al Gore in elections Democrats expected to win.

Folks who dunk on Trump on Twitter don’t understand that this strategy isn’t meant to convince anyone that Trump isn’ta racist, which Stepien and other campaign officials know full well is an impossible task. The point is to convince potential Democratic voters that both candidates are irredeemably flawed, and they might as well sit this election out rather than sullying themselves by voting for “the lesser of two evils.”

This isn’t even really a Trump innovation, but pretty standard operating procedure in Republican politics. A GOP candidate’s team figures out the various strengths that the Democrat has over their candidate and then systematically starts trying to sow doubt about that with voters, often by projecting their own candidate’s flaws onto the Democrat.

What Republicans understand, and too many political commentators don’t, is that no election is strictly a choice between two candidates. There are always other choices: Not voting at all or throwing your vote away on a third-party candidate. Republicans know they can’t win over more voters than the ones they’ve got, so they win by poisoning the well against the Democrat.

In 2016, the Republicans were saddled with a candidate who is a pathological liar with a long history of corruption, and who doesn’t seem to be in the greatest mental or physical condition. So they turned around and falsely accused Clinton of all these things, giving her the nickname “Crooked Hillary” and claiming she had secret health problems she was hiding from the public.

It was the same story with the 2004 election, when Democrats ran Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, against George W. Bush, whose draft-dodging only made his eagerness to send other people’s kids into a quagmire of a foreign war more suspect. But the Bush campaign directly attacked Kerry’s record, falsely accusing him of embellishing his service record and implying he hadn’t earned his Purple Hearts.

Same story, again, with the 2000 election, in which the Bush campaign was successful in portraying Gore as a liar and a fabulist, and distracting from Bush’s own habit of telling lies — including the ones he unfortunately employed shortly after that, trying to justify his invasion of Iraq.

This “I know you are, but what am I” strategyonly works because the mainstream media — living in perpetual fear of conservatives accusing them of “bias” (which they’ll do no matter what) — is all too eager to play along with Republican efforts to wildly exaggerate Democratic flaws, all so journalists can crow about how they give it equally to “both sides,” and without quite noticing that they are abandoning their duty to the truth with these false equivalences.

The 2016 election offers a perfect example of how the media falls for this trick. Clinton is actually one of the most honest politicians in America, pretty much free of any proven “corruption” despite endless harassment and investigation. Nonetheless, journalists ran with every fake Clinton scandal right-wingers threw at them, from the false accusations against the Clinton Foundation to the email server debacle, because they were more motivated by the desire to look “balanced” than they were by telling the truth. (Sexist stereotypes about female mendacity also drove much of the coverage.) Kerry and Gore got similarly unfair treatment by the press in the name of “balance.”

As I warned repeatedly in 2019 — to no avail — Biden’s foot-in-mouth disease makes this an easy play for the Trump campaign. As my colleague Chauncey DeVega explained this week, Biden possesses a “sense of affinity” with Black voters that makes him too comfortable and leads him to share “impolitic observations at inappropriate times.”

In the past, that kind of nuanced explanation has too often fallen on deaf ears in a media environment more driven by the need to portray “both sides” as equivalent than to explore the truth.

That said, there’s reason this time around to be mildly optimistic that Trump’s efforts at sowing a “both sides are bad, so don’t vote” narrative might not work as well as it did for him in 2016, or as well as it did for Bush in 2000 and 2004. The media just doesn’t seem as interesting in elevating nonsense this time around.

That’s probably because the Trump presidency has been such a massive disaster that even the journalists most devoted to both-sides-ism have, however temporarily, been shocked out of their addiction to false equivalency. As the economy collapses and the U.S. succumbs to the coronavirus pandemic in a way unmatched by the rest of the world — all because of Trump’s maliciousness and recklessness, as well as Republican opposition to competent governance — it’s become impossible to keep a straight face while asserting any moral or political equivalence between Democrats and Republicans.

A similar situation happened in 2008, when the disaster of the George W. Bush presidency finally overcame the mainstream media’s desire to pretend there was no meaningful difference between Democrats and Republicans. Oh, there were efforts to scandalize Obama with nonsense, such as when right-wingers got journalists to take the bait of painting Obama’s Chicago pastor as anti-white and anti-American. But it basically never worked, because that kind of circus sideshow seemed weak in the face of the economic disaster of 2008, the failed response to Hurricane Katrina and the ill-fated invasion of Iraq.

Compared to Donald Trump, Bush is small potatoes in the failed-presidency department. The seriousness of our current crisis makes it difficult for the press to play their silly both-sides false games. So it’s not working for Trump so far.

But it’s still two and a half months until the election, and we know it will feel longer than that. The media’s desire to appear “unbiased” is strong, even in the face of an economic catastrophe and a soaring COVID-19 death rate. Trump will keep trying to make this election about bullshit, and it’s important to stay vigilant against a press that struggles to resist the siren call of false equivalency.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/the-true-face-of-white-evangelicalism-has-been-exposed

One has to imagine that for Jerry Falwell Jr., things feel very unfair right about now. For more than four years, the world of right-wing American Christianity has not only lined up behind Donald Trump — a thrice-married chronic adulterer who bragged on tape how he likes to “grab ’em by the pussy” — but has embraced him as if he were the second coming.

:{:{}:

White evangelicals’ devotion to Trump didn’t wane after he became president, even in the face of stories about Trump paying off a porn actress and a centerfold model to stay quiet about his compulsive cheating on his third wife. Nor was there any angst on the Christian right over Trump’s relentless grifting or his efforts to blackmail the Ukrainian president into bolstering lies about former Vice President Joe Biden.

On the contrary, the Christian right’s worshipful attitude toward Trump has only increased over the years, with pastors comparing Trump to Jesus himself and calling Trump “God’s chosen one.” The president’s approval with white evangelicals remains strong, at 72%, and 82% say they plan to vote for him.

With all this Christian love for a president who makes all ordinary sinners look like amateurs, it’s no wonder that Falwell — the president of Liberty University, which was founded by his dad, the legendary Southern Baptist pastor and televangelist — thought it was no big deal to unbutton his pants a little. But when Falwell posted a photo on social media of himself partying on a yacht with those literally unbuttoned pants, holding something that resembled an alcoholic beverage and with his arm around the waist of a pregnant female acquaintance with her shirt rolled up, he did not get the Trump treatment.

Instead, Falwell was asked to take an indefinite leave of absence from his job at Liberty University, the right-wing evangelical institution in Lynchburg, Virginia, that his father, Jerry Falwell Sr., founded in 1971. On Tuesday, the school announced that Jerry Prevo, chairman of its board of trustees, would replace Falwell as acting president.

the photo itself, if we’re being honest, was hardly “racy,” as some outlets called it. It looked no different from any other photo of people at a social gathering acting goofy after a few drinks. Still, this was apparently the last straw, after a year of reports that Falwell was getting up to precisely the kind of antics for which Trump apparently gets a permanent pass.

Last summer, a series of titillating stories about the Liberty president, including a report that Falwell and his wife had lavished financial favors on a “pool boy” half their age they met while partying in Florida. Falwell also reportedly emailed photos of his wife in a French maid costume to an employee, later claiming that was an accident and he’d meant to send the photos to her personal trainer. This raised more eyebrows, however, since the personal trainer is another good-looking younger man whom the Falwells have helped financially. Other photos of the Falwells partying in a Miami nightclub in 2014 were published last year.

Giving Falwell the boot only after he embarrassed the evangelical community in public only reinforces the main takeaway from this story: The supposed morality of white evangelicals is largely a facade, propped up in order to justify the Christian right’s real purpose, which is to defend white supremacy and male dominance. It’s worth asking why anyone would bother to keep up the facade, now that Trump has proved right-wing America doesn’t need to hide behind the Bible and the cross to defend its true agenda.

Before Trump, it was actually a pretty good racket that white evangelicals had going. As Robert P. Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute writes in “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,” his book on the racist history of much of American Christianity, “most white Christian churches have protected white supremacy by dressing it in theological garb, giving it a home in a respected institution, and calibrating it to local cultural sensibilities.”

Piety can give cover to racism by positioning white evangelicals as morally superior. By policing sex and prohibiting the pleasures of gambling, partying, drinking or even dancing, white evangelicals can craft a narrative where they are upright guardians of virtue, rather than mean-spirited racists who organize — in distinctly un-Christ-like fashion — to preserve their privileges at the expense of people of color. Indeed, the more white evangelicals defended a racist social order, the more effort they put into portraying themselves as “virtuous” by the way of strict rules governing individual behavior.

It’s the same story with white evangelicals and sexism. The prohibitions on premarital sex, contraception, abortion and divorce mainly serve to control girls and women, channeling them away from living independent lives and keeping them under the thumb of one man or another, first a father and then a husband, for their entire lives. Whenever feminists criticized evangelical misogyny, the Christian right defended itself by claiming that its sexist ideology flowed from “faith,” when in reality, it was the other way around: Male supremacy was the core belief, and religious faith was used to rationalize and justify it.

One of the remarkable developments in the age of Trump has the collapse of any meaningful need for all this Bible-hugging to defend bigotry against people of color, women and LGBTQ people.

Oh, Trump sometimes loves to wave a Bible around, though always with an awkwardness that suggests he’s afraid it may burn his fingers. But it’s unclear that anyone is fooled. With his ham-fisted and sloppy fake piety — and his obvious ignorance about all religious or theological questions — Trump illuminates a fundamental truth about right-wing Christianity, which is that it’s largely a cover story used to defend the otherwise indefensible.

As I argue in my book, “Troll Nation,” the true innovation of Trumpism is a kind of asshole pride, the collective conservative realization that there’s no longer any need to pretend to be moral or virtuous or even to care about other people. It’s become a time to embrace playing the role of the villain.

For the modern conservative, “triggering the liberals” by being a jerk is the highest calling, and “political correctness” is the slur directed at anyone who tries to harsh their vibe by suggesting that overt racism and sexism is uncool. Their president is a witless wannabe insult comic, and the more that Trump resorts to flinging childish insults, the more his supporters love him. Ours is an era where conservatives deliberately go to the grocery store without masks and film themselves harassing minimum-wage workers who are trying to enforce basic public health rules, so they can glory in what massive jerks they are. Their entertainment comes from crude right-wing shock jocks in the Rush Limbaugh tradition. Trolling liberals — for example, by awarding the odious Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom — has replaced pious posturing as the lingua franca of American conservatives.

In other words, the American right no longer feels any need to justify their will to power with over-the-top moralizing. Dominance has become its own justification.

So it’s not surprising that Falwell got a little lackadaisical about pretending to believe all that crap he’s been preaching about the virtues of sobriety and chastity. And more than a little dopey that the board of Liberty University is trying to act offended and going through the ritual of asking him to step aside. The notion that the religious right is motivated by “morality” and “faith” was blown to bits the second they bet their future on Donald Trump. Their massive hypocrisy has been permanently exposed, and dumping one prominent figure to save face won’t change tha

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-nation-goes-full-cuckoo-right-wing-conspiracy-theorists-get-even-more-unhinged-as-the-presidents-chances-fade/

no lnx

A pandemic is spiraling out of control and Donald Trump’s reaction is to roll his eyes and say, “It is what it is.” Unsurprisingly, polling data shows that his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, is pulling ahead, not just in national polls, but in a number of battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Florida, none of which Trump can afford to lose. After all, the incumbent has nothing real to run on. The economy is the worst it’s been since the Great Depression of the 1930s, Americans are losing health insurance by the millions, and Republicans are responding by trying to shortchange unemployment benefits for the millions of people who’ve lost their jobs.

With nothing real to hang on to, it’s no surprise that conservatives — already prone to spreading misinformation — are increasingly addicted to conspiracy theories, wallowing in paranoid fantasies to justify the ludicrous notion that there’s any reason to keep on supporting Trump and the Republican Party.

Unfortunately, this turn towards even greater conspiratorial thinking on the right is also extremely dangerous. There’s already a strong link between right-wing paranoia and right-wing violence. Add the increasing likelihood of Trump’s defeat, the rising stress from the coronavirus, and a blitz of violent propaganda, and there’s a real chance that right-wing conspiracism will lead to even more domestic terrorism, hate crimes and neofascist goons in the streets.

Alex Jones of Infowars, who still has a sizable audience despite having been de-platformed by many major social media companies, shamelessly encouraged his audience last week to lash out with murderous violence against the left.

Jones claimed to have reports that “Maoists” (which is fringe-right code for anyone to the left of Republicans) are stockpiling “explosives and weapons and trucks loaded with ammonium nitrate and chlorine gas” in the cities in preparation to wage war against all true-believing Americans. So “the best thing to do in a defensive way,” Jones said, “is kill as many of them as quickly as possible.”

Jones of course insisted that he was only talking about “defensive” tactics and warned viewers about not “jumping first,” but that rhetoric is mostly a weak attempt at ass-covering to disguise an effort to incite terrorist violence from the right.

For one thing, Jones is just making up the threat that his audience is supposed to be “defending” themselves against. No leftists are not stockpiling weapons or bomb-making materials, and there is no progressive conspiracy to wage war on right-wingers. For another thing, Jones painted a clear picture of the kinds of people he imagines killing as quickly as possible, specifically naming “the establishment perverts and pedophiles” who he believes run society, as well as people who “show up in black uniforms and burn down your local courthouse.”

The former is a reference to Democratic politicians, whom far-right conspiracy theorists have been accusing, under the banner of “Pizzagate,” of running a secret pedophile ring for at least the last four years now. The latter is a reference to Black Lives Matter protesters and anti-fascist activists, the vast majority of whom are peaceful. The right has been demonizing the as violent because of some graffiti and sporadic episodes of vandalism.Neither group is involved in a plot to kill conservatives (or anyone else), but by claiming that they, Jones is setting up a narrative clearly meant to incite or justify violent attacks.

On the Christian right side of things, similar conspiracy theories about progressives are spreading. As Right Wing Watch has documented, popular Christian right activist Scott Lively has claimed that “Democrat-controlled population centers” will soon be burned to the ground, as part of an elaborate conspiracy by liberals to get out of paying pensions to police officers.

Unfortunately, there’s good reason to fear these wild and violent theories are gaining even more traction than usual on the already paranoid far right. On Tuesday, Axios reported a massive surge in online interest in QAnon, which is basically an umbrella movement that organizes all these various right-wing conspiracy theories into one narrative that has become so elaborate and consuming for its followers that it’s almost a religion at this point.

Online searches for QAnon have reportedly exploded tenfold. Similarly, “QAnon pages and groups on Facebook had nearly 10 times more likes at the end of last month than they did last July” and there has been “a 190% increase in the daily average number of tweets with popular QAnon hashtags since March as compared to the seven months prior.”

QAnon followers believe that a shadowy “elite” — which they conflate with Democrats — runs both the country from the shadows and, oh yeah, that they also have a massive pedophilia ring, and that Trump is secretly masterminding a plot to destroy this elite cabal. (In real life, Trump’s reaction to people who run pedophile rings is to say they like “beautiful women” on “the younger side” and also to say “I wish her well.”) It’s a testament to the kinds of pretzels people will tie themselves into in order to believe that there’s anything noble or moral about Donald Trump, or some valid reason to support him.

The rise in interest in QAnon isn’t surprising, as the White House is actively encouraging their voters to get involved with this unified-field conspiracy universe. As Media Matters has reported, Trump has retweeted QAnon Twitter accounts at least 185 times, and “members of Trump’s family, his personal attorney, current and former campaign staffers, and even some current and former Trump administration officials have also repeatedly amplified QAnon supporters and their content.”

Honestly, the supposedly mainstream conservative network Fox News is just as dangerous at this point. Most Fox News hosts are careful to avoid overtly endorsing QAnon, but network content in recent weeks has been perfectly situated to validate and amplify the paranoia about Democrats and progressives who are supposedly gearing up to wage war on conservatives.

Day in and day out, Fox News has broadcast scary images of protesters fighting with police, clouds of tear gas and people running through city streets in the middle of the night, all to make rural and suburban viewers, who are even more shut-in than usual, believe that American cities are war zones right now. Fox News is also blatantly lying to its viewers, blaming “radicals” and “antifa” for the scary images, and not telling viewers that in most cases what they’re seeing is cops provoking conflict, often by chasing down, beating and tear-gassing peaceful protesters.

As those of us who actually live in American cities can attest, they don’t look like war zones, but pretty much like the same places they were before the pandemic and the protests (with a lot less traffic). Even when it comes to the protests themselves, despite some looting and vandalism back in early June, the vast majority of protests have been entirely nonviolent, at least as long as law enforcement isn’t attacking protesters without cause.

In spreading this bald-faced propaganda, Fox News — which tries to position itself as the voice of the Trump-era mainstream right — is working in tandem with cuckoo-for-Cocoa Puffs conspiracy theorists like QAnon and Alex Jones. Fox News viewers see all these misleading images and hear all this talk about “antifa” and the “radical left,” and it feels like concrete evidence that the conspiracy theorists are right and that “progressives” or “radicals” are starting a civil war. This not only reinforces conspiratorial thinking, but encourages more conservatives to seek out these outrageous theories.

Taken together, the Trump White House, the online conspiracy fringe and Fox News are enveloping Republican voters in this paranoid fantasy that they’re under violent assault from the leftists — and that they need to “defend” themselves through pre-emptive action. There’s already been a rash of violence against protesters, who have been run over with cars or shot down in the streets. Rather than toning it down, Trump and his allies in both “mainstream” and fringe right-wing media have ramped up their rhetoric, painting a lurid and entirely false picture of the supposed threat. Either implicitly, as on Fox News, or explicitly, as with Alex Jones, conservatives are being encouraged to respond to this imaginary threat with violence.

There’s no reason to expect this situation to improve as the November election nears — or after that either, quite likely. Right-wingers are sore losers on a good day, but now they’ve whipped themselves into a paranoid frenzy that is utterly detached from reality and could lead to tragic violence.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-knows-his-time-is-up-and-that-makes-him-extremely-dangerous/

One of the first things that activists and educators who work to stop domestic violence learn is this: The most dangerous time for the victim is when she tries to leave the abusive relationship. The abuser, desperate to keep his power and control over the victim, will drastically escalate the threats and violence if he senses that she’s looking for an escape route. If she does get out, the abuser will often track her down and try to force her to return through violence. This is why advocates for victims emphasize the importance of careful planning to escape an abusive relationship, since abusers rarely just let a victim walk away.

The parallels between the situation of many abuse victims and the nation’s dilemma when it comes to removing Donald Trump from power have not been lost on feminists. As sex educator Twanna Hines noted on Twitter on Friday, Trump “knows his time is up.” She predicted that he will lash out the way that abusers do “when the relationship is ending.”

We’re already seeing the evidence that Trump, terrified of being kicked out by the voters, is getting increasingly unhinged in his flailing attempts to cling to power, as evidenced by last week’s threat — disguised as a helpful suggestion — to “delay” the November election.

The good news is that — despite the GOP’s usual willingness to embrace any scheme that maximizes their power for themselves, regardless of legal or or ethical concerns — leading Republicans seem disinclined to help Trump find some excuse to nullify Congress’ power to determine the date of the election. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has already used delay tactics to steal a Supreme Court seat from a Democratic president, ruled out using a similar strategy this fall to steal the election.

as my colleague Andrew O’Hehir reassuringly wrote over the weekend, it’s also unlikely that “Trump has anywhere near the courage, the confidence or the means to pull off any version of a coup with success” if he loses in November. It’s too big a task, with too many moving parts and too little buy-in from the corporate power interests that back the GOP, he argued.

But even though we’re likely to see a situation where former Vice President Joe Biden is sworn in as president on Jan. 20, 2021, that doesn’t mean we’re in anything like a position to relax. Like the abusive husband who would rather see his wife injured or dead than let her move out in peace,Trump will, as Election Day nears, increasingly turn to schemes to keep power that will pose real threats — not just to our democracy, but to the immediate safety and well-being of Americans.

Even if Trump is successfully removed from office, the amount of damage he could well do to punish the American people for rejecting him is, frankly, terrifying.

The most obvious threat is the pseudo-military presence Trump is rapidly building up in the streets of American cities. He famously kicked this by tear-gassing peaceful protesters in Washington, and then moved the show across the country to Portland, Oregon. He’s now transitioning it to cities in swing states, including Cleveland and Milwaukee.

The presence of these federal police should make anyone uneasy. It’s becoming increasingly clear, as House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., noted on CNN on Sunday, that Trump has no “plans to leave the White House” if he loses in November.

Even if, as O’Hehir persuasively argues, Trump is eventually pushed out, the grim reality is that his near-certain refusal to concede defeat — something no losing candidate has done in the era of modern politics — will lead to all manner of chaos, and likely to violence. Earlier this summer, a bipartisan group of former government officials and political scientists gathered together for the Transition Integrity Project, which largely consisted of a series of war games to project possible outcomes if and when Trump refuses to concede.

“[I]n every scenario the answer includes street violence and political crisis,” Brian Beutler of Crooked Media explained in his weekly newsletter description of the project.

The project looked at the various political arson fires Trump will light as he desperately seeks to reject the election results, and I recommend that everyone read the Boston Globe’s coverage of these particulars. But what is most viscerally alarming, in light of the federal police buildup that’s occurred since the project, is the likelihood of street violence. Once Trump refuses to concede, there will almost certainly be widespread street protests against him. By then, Trump will have already had months under his belt of using federal police to tear gas, beat and arrest protesters. It’s unlikely that he would hesitate for a moment to use these forces to sow even more chaos and violence if Americans dare to protest his unwillingness to accept electoral defeat.

But that’s far from the only way that Trump is putting Americans in physical danger in his desperate efforts to keep power over a country that, as polling data shows, is eager to put him in the ex-president category. As the New York Times reported on Sunday, government scientists are concerned that Trump will try to force them to release something he can call a coronavirus vaccine by October — so he can claim credit for it, naturally — regardless of whether it’s been demonstrated to be safe or effective.

From the very beginning of the pandemic, Trump has made it clear that his only concern is winning re-election, and that if he has to sacrifice millions of Americans to sickness or even death to get there, he won’t think twice about it. He has defied the advice of medical scientists on enforcing lockdowns, wearing masks and expanding virus testing, mostly because he believed — however mistakenly — that efforts to fight the disease would hurt his re-election chances more than an unchecked pandemic. Now, with more than 4.6 million confirmed cases and 155,000 deaths, Trump expects the same medical scientists he’s derided for months to rush in and save his campaign — even if doing so makes the pandemic worse in the long run.

Trump’s increasingly desperate efforts to keep control aren’t just a threat to life and limb. His desire to prevent people from even being able to vote him out in November also threatens fundamental American institutions. That includes the institutions that aren’t ostensibly political at all, but exist to serve the daily needs of all Americans, such as the U.S. Postal Service.

Yep, like an abusive husband who threatens to kill the family pet if his wife leaves him, Donald Trump has declared war on the post office. Relatively quietly, he has been gutting the ability of the Postal Service to deliver mail on time, both out of Republican ideological hostility to good government and because Trump personally thought this would be useful as part of his years-long vendetta against Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

But now that it appears the election is going to be conducted in large part by mail, to allow voters to avoid exposing themselves to the coronavirus, Trump’s war on the post office has escalated. He has been demonizing mail-in ballots as fraudulent, as part of his run-up to rejecting the election results. (There is of course virtually no evidence of any voter fraud in the history of voting by mail.) Now the chips are falling into place: Trump undermines the ability of postal workers to deliver the mail on time, and then uses the fact that mail isn’t being delivered on time as an excuse to reject the results of the election.

The collateral damage of this strategy extends far beyond just electoral integrity, though certainly that would be enough reason to be freaked out. Americans rely on the mail system, now more than ever, for life necessities like paying bills or getting prescriptions filled. Trump, however, is fully prepared to demolish this critical institution in his desperate and hopefully fruitless bid to nullify an American election.

I point all this out not to alarm anyone unduly, but so we can be prepared. The success of a victim leaving an abuser depends largely on her willingness to anticipate her abuser’s violent reaction when she tries to get out. Having a clearly thought-out escape plan can be the difference between getting away successfully or getting hurt.

Similarly, Americans will need an escape plan to get away from Trump. Even if our institutions successfully hold up well enough that a new president takes office in January, the amount of damage Trump can do to the country in his scorched-earth efforts to hang onto power is terrifying to contemplate. We need to understand that he will not be held back by conscience or decency from doing physical harm to Americans or destroying even backbone institutions, and plan accordingly. This isn’t just about winning back the White House and saving democracy. It’s about minimizing the casualties along the way.

https://www.salon.com/2020/07/14/trump-is-trying-to-do-to-anthony-fauci-what-the-right-did-to-al-gore--but-its-not-working/

It s no exaggeration to say that Republicans bought themselves yearsof getting away with ignoring and denying climate science by calling former Vice President Al Gore mean names. Beginning in the '80s, Gore, with his earnestly nerdy persona, had become the face of a growing movement to raise the alarm about the rapidly warming planet and the horrors humanity would face if more wasn't done to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. To discredit the entire idea of climate change theory, the right focused not on the science, but on discrediting Gore as a messenger.

Needless to say, the efforts to demonize Gore — and, by association, climate-change theory — were a veritable dictionary of logical fallacies. One common tactic was to call Gore fat, as if there were any relationship between Gore's waistline and the accuracy of climate science. He was also painted as a hyperbolic and opportunistic liar, with conservatives insisting falsely that Gore had claimed he "invented" the internet, with the implication being he was also making up climate change.

This notion that Gore was hysterical got lodged into the public imagination, so much so that as late as 2006, "South Park" offered an episode in which Gore was presented as what my colleague Matthew Rozsa called "an attention-seeking loser who tried to convince the world of the existence of a fictional monster that was 'half man, half bear and half pig.'" The episode was an effort to discredit "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore's 2006 documentary about climate change.

"South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone finally admitted in 2018 that Gore was right and they were wrong. Too little too late: In the 12 years since, Republican hostility to doing anything about climate change has hardened into a fact of life, so immovable that few Republicans even have to bother justifying themselves by claiming to be climate-change skeptics.

Now Donald Trump is in office — elected on a wave of the same "stick it to the liberals" energy that Gore endured for decades — and there's a new inconvenient truth that bedevils Republicans and their loathing for the very idea of the government intervening on the behalf of the public good: The coronavirus pandemic.

The parameters of the current situation aren't mysterious. This virus is washing across the country, infecting millions and killing, as of Tuesday morning's data, at least 135,000 Americans and probably significantly more. Trump, out of a combination of laziness and a faith in his magical powers of gaslighting, believes that if we simply pretend the virus isn't there, kids will go back to school, people will go back to work, the economy will rebound and he'll win the election. He and his cronies are dusting off the climate denial handbook in an effort to confuse the public about science just long enough to drag Trump across the finish line in November.

Their new Al Gore is Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has served under every president since the '80s and has become a trusted figure for coronavirus information, amid the sea of denialism emanating from Trump's White House.

Trump quite clearly hopes he can do to Fauci what Republicans — and "South Park" — were able to do to Gore, in other words to paint him as a hysterical, attention-seeking busybody who can't be trusted. Along the way, of course, the president would like to cast doubts on every aspect of scientific or medical knowledge about the coronavirus that is currently killing Americans.

Over the weekend, the White House unveiled an all-hands-on-deck strategy to discredit Fauci, ironically by highlighting past statements where, working off limited information about a brand-new virus, Fauci was overly optimistic about the country's ability to stave off the coronavirus. Of course the "he was wrong then, he could be wrong now" tactic being used by the White House contradicts itself, since the premise that he must be wrong now is based on saying he was wrong then about the stuff he's right about now. He is Schrodinger's Fauci: Somehow both right and wrong, and wrong because of how right he is.

These are the same people who managed to convince huge swaths of the nation that climate change isn't real because Gore is fat. So let's just say it's reasonable to conclude that their arguments don't have to make sense to be accepted.

This time around, however, there's every reason these efforts to convince the public not to believe in the coronavirus won't work nearly as well as they did when applied to climate change.

And let's be clear about the goal of Trump and his allies: They absolutely, undeniably want to convince people to believe the coronavirus is a hoax. While putting out talking points trying to undermine Fauci's authority, Trump retweeted game-show host Chuck Woolery's claiming that "Everyone is lying" about the coronavirus to keep "the economy from coming back, which is about the election."

The implication here — don't trust a medical expert with decades worth of specialized knowledge about infectious diseases; trust a Trump-loving TV personality! — isn't exactly subtle.

Fox News, which has been amplifying and encouraging Trump in his mission to spread the belief that coronavirus is a hoax, doubled down on Monday night, with prime-time hosts telling audiences there is no need for preventive measureslike face masks and social distancing.

These tactics worked so with climate change because that's a slow-moving phenomenon, in relation to the average person's life span. When Gore first started warning the public about climate change, the concept seemed abstract and far off. It was easy enough for conservatives to point to the fact that snowstorms still happen every winter to suggest this proved that Gore's warnings were hysteria. It's just a lot harder to believe in a problem that isn't visible. In recent years, as the extreme weather events we've been warned about — shocking summer heatwaves, raging wildfires, terrible hurricanes, ice-free winters — become more common, we don't here nearly as much blithe climate-change denialism as Gore faced in the first few decades of his activism on this issue.

The coronavirus, on the other hand, is neither abstract nor far away. Pandemic news continues to be all-consuming, and not just on a national scale, but on local news stations and in social media forums, especially as the new virus hotspots are not concentrated in "coastal elite" areas but in states like Texas, Arizona and Florida. Governors in states that have failed to contain the virus, usually under pressure from Trump not to enforce any restrictions on public spaces and businesses, have seen their approval ratings plummet. It took decades before Americans started to experience the effects of climate change directly, but this virus has rampaged through our country for the last four months, and seems to be getting worse, not better.

Rather than convince the public to disbelieve Dr. Fauci, Trump's attacks on the doctor have only served as a reminder of what most Americans already know: Trump is a shameless liar who will say or do anything, no matter who it hurts, if he thinks he can gain a temporary advantage. It's not just Trump's critics who know this. Trump supporters know it as well. Mostly, they voted for him because they liked the way his trollish disregard for the truth aggravated liberals. But they also aren't going to his rallies in big numbers, because they understand, on some level, that he doesn't care about them and is willing to see them die rather than admit he's wrong about the coronavirus.

What that means for the election remains to be seen, but if Trump somehow wins in November, it will be despite his attacks on Dr. Fauci. Climate change was easy to ignore for many years, because it seemed like a future problem for future people. But the coronavirus is sweeping the country as we speak, something anyone among us could get tomorrow. When your house is on fire, no amount of "Al Gore is fat" jokes will convince you to pretend everything is actually OK.

AMANDA MARCOTTE

Amanda Marcotte is a politics writer for Salon who covers American politics, feminism and culture. Her new book, "Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself" is out now. She can be followed on Twitter @AmandaMarcotte.

MORE FROM AMANDA MARCOTTE

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/theres-a-simple-reason-why-america-was-so-vulnerable-to-coronavirus-conspiracy-theories/

The worldwide conspiracy is vast — so vast that most of the world’s scientists, journalists and political leaders are in on it. Somehow, in all this time, not a single one of the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of conspirators has grown a conscience and decided to blow the whistle on the conspiracy. Their goal? To ruin everything that right-wing America holds dear: the nuclear family, NFL football, needlessly enormous vehicles, the specials menu at Hooters.

To accomplish this dastardly goal, the conspiracy will fabricate a worldwide threat. They will falsify the data and use the power of institutions like governments and universities and scientific journals to perpetuate this hoax, tricking billions of people into believing this threat is real and needs a drastic response. The only people in the world who see through the hoax are right-wing Americans, of course, who know what lengths the “socialist left” will go to in order to destroy Mom and apple pie.

Coronavirus denialism has, in the period of a few short months, become one of the most serious political problems in our nation. It’s a major obstacle to both containing the virus and reviving the economy, which can’t happen until the virus is contained.

Coronavirus denialism isn’t just flourishing on social media, but emanating from both right-wing media and from Republican leaders, most notably Donald Trump. Over the weekend, the president declared that “99 percent” of coronavirus cases are “totally harmless,” a claim that isn’t just false but part of a larger pattern of Trump’s statements suggesting that the threat of the virus is being faked in order to harm him politically.

in other words, it’s a conspiracy theory, one that dates at least back to February, when Trump claimed that fears of the coronavirus were a “new hoax” designed by Democrats to ruin him.

The rapid spread of this conspiracy theory is puzzling, especially as it requires many leaps of faith, including the belief that literally millions of professionals who don’t know each other — scientists, journalists, government employees, health care providers and so on — are working to perpetuate this hoax.

There’s a simple reason why right-wing America was so quick to rally around a conspiracy theory that’s so utterly preposterous. They spent years training themselves by indulging in climate-change denialism.

It’s not a stretch to say that climate-change denialism and coronavirus denialism are basically the same conspiracy theory. In fact, it often seems like coronavirus denialists have simply copied and pasted their talking points about climate change and adjusted the wording a bit to be about virus spread instead of carbon emissions.

But the basic parameters are the same: a worldwide conspiracy, threats that are invented or exaggerated for supposed political gain, a sinister hidden agenda — whether that’s bringing down capitalism or ending Trump’s presidency.

The content of coronavirus denialism can be somewhat diverse. This article from the New York Times chronicling the struggles of nurses to convince family and friends that the coronavirus is a real threat gives a good overview of the range of different flavors. Some folks insist the virus isn’t real at all. Some accept that it’s real but believe the danger of death or serious injury is being wildly exaggerated. Some deny that it’s as communicable as public health officials believe. Some claim that deaths from other causes are being falsely attributed to the virus.

We see the same kind of diversity in the world of climate-change denialism. At first, conservatives flat-out denied that climate change or “global warming” was even happening. But as evidence for changing temperatures grew, the flavors of denialism did too, with some denialists claiming it was just a natural fluctuation not attributable to humans, others saying that the effects wouldn’t be so bad, and still others saying it was too late to do anything about it so we should just give up.

What holds all these flavors of denialism together is the conspiracy theory undergirding them: The people raising the alarm about this problem are in cahoots with each other, and have ulterior motives.

Climate-change denialists have long held that progressives, and the scientists and world leaders who supposedly share their radical agenda, aren’t really concerned about species loss or rising sea levels or the devastating effects on poor people or any of that. Instead, they argue, these concerns are being faked to create a justification for an all-out assault on capitalism and “freedom.”

Similarly, coronavirus denialists argue that health care workers and scientists warning about the coronavirus are insincere, but instead are part of a larger — again, worldwide! — movement to take down Trump by making him look bad.

The rhetoric between the two forms of denialism is almost comically similar.

In September, Fox News host Laura Ingraham declaredthat teenage climate-change activists were part of a sinister plot to seize control of “our economy, our way of life, our way of transport, how many children you want to have.”

In May, she made the same arguments about recommendations to wear face masks to slow the coronavirus spread, claiming it was about “control over large populations” that is “achieved through fear and intimidation and suppression of free thought.”

In case the link wasn’t obvious, Ingraham made it herself, saying, “They’ll say this whole mask thing is settled science, just like they do with climate change.”

It’s not possible that both things are just settled science, of course. It’s all just a massive conspiracy!

It’s the same story with Fox News superstar **Tucker Carlson, who arguedlast September that climate strikes are “not about the environment” but are a left-wing scam meant to create “an emergency big enough to justify grabbing more power.”

Carlson copy-pasted those same arguments to deny the dangers of the coronavirus months later, claiming that the scientific evidence that it’s dangerous and communicable is overblown, and being exaggerated by people who are hungry for “power” and want to see Americans following “orders.”

Both climate change and coronavirus denialism are given a boost by the tribalist politics of right-wing America. For decades now, one of the ways for conservatives to indicate their skepticism of climate change and fealty to the right was to buy giant, gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks, making quite clear to anyone looking that they don’t care one fig about your fears of carbon emission.

The same logic is driving the anti-mask phenomenon, where some of the most fiercely loyal Trump supporters make a big show out of refusing wear a mask, because they don’t care one fig about your fear of catching a potentially deadly virus.

It was clever of Trump and his media followers to encourage his supporters not to wear masks. That kind of showy public defiance has helped normalize coronavirus denialism, and exerted pressure on other conservatives to follow suit to show their tribal loyalties.It serves the same function as mocking people for driving fuel-efficient vehicles did, using peer pressure to get people on board with a right-wing conspiracy theory.

Unfortunately, as we’ve seen with climate-change conspiracy theories, once they take hold, it’s very hard to pry people free from their delusional beliefs. If you confront them with the evidence that the threat is real, they simply move to claiming it’s overblown. George Soros will probably be blamed. Or they’ll come up with excuses for why they personally won’t be affected and so shouldn’t care. Or they’ll just shift to casting aspersions on the motives of people who do care, whether that’s Greta Thunberg or Dr. Anthony Fauci, accusing them of being tools or power-hungry schemers. They’ll embrace any view, really, except admitting that the problem we’re all facing is real and that yes, we have to do something about it.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/how-trump-and-the-right-wing-weaponize-the-propaganda-power-of-conspiracy-theories/

while some horrible tweets from Donald Trump are surely the result of impulsive decisions made during the president’s extensive “executive time” (read: sitting on the toilet, watching Fox News), there’s sadly good reason to believe that actual deliberation went into Tuesday’s tweet in which Trump smeared Martin Gugino, a 75-year-old peace activist who received a horrible head injury as a result of being pushed by police during a protest in Buffalo, New York.

The tweet, which accuses Gugino of being “an ANTIFA provocateur” trying to “black out” police equipment and who “fell harder than was pushed,” has one of the main hallmarks of being written by someone other than Trump, such as a White House staffer: It uses, and even correctly spells, a $5 word — “provocateur” — that is outside of Trump’s extremely limited vocabulary. So while the tweet masquerades as a Trumpian outburst, allowing Republican politicians and some media figures to pretend it’s not important, odds are this was not impulsive at all, but a calculated effort to float a conspiracy theory meant to discredit not just Gugino, but the larger protest movement against police brutality and racism that’s sweeping the nation.

Trump and his advisors might not be the brightest bunch ever assembled in the White House — in fact, they’re probably the dimmest in history — but even they understand the propaganda power of conspiracy theories. When the facts are against someone’s viewpoint, conspiracy theories give them a set of “alternative facts” they can use to stick by a grotesque ideology.

That’s why it’s no surprise that conspiracy theories — both about the protesters and about the death of George Floyd, whose murder at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was the flashpoint that kicked off weeks of national and even international protests — have been spreading rapidly in right wing circles. The problem is only likely to get worse, as increasing numbers of Americans are opening their eyes to the grim realities of police brutality, especially against people of color, and conservative leaders get more desperate to keep the old systems in place.

on Tuesday, the CEO of the gym chain CrossFit, Greg Glassman, resigned after tape was released of a company meeting in which Glassman told employees, “We’re not mourning for George Floyd,” rolling out an elaborate conspiracy theory about how Floyd was supposedly murdered by Chauvin “to silence him over the counterfeit money.”

The tape was released after Glassman had already drawn criticism for throwing out a bunch of incoherent tweets that suggested he possesses a Trumpian skepticism at the sincerity of progressive concerns about police brutality and the coronavirus. Glassman then turned around and echoed a narrative similar to that pushed by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, as if there is proof that Floyd’s death had nothing to do with systemic racism or police brutality.

There is one employee at the club that employeed both Floyd and Chauvin as security who is claiming the two men had butted heads before. But, if true, it only reinforces the concerns of progressives that police are able to hide behind their badge to inflict senseless violence on civilians and get away with it, particularly as Chauvin was aided and protected during the alleged killing (Chauvin has been charged with second-degree murder) by three other officers.

Trump’s conspiracy theory about Gugino is equally incoherent, as it requires believing a 75-year-old man would deliberately crack his own skull on a sidewalk as agitprop. But conspiracy theories don’t need to be coherent. They just need to give people something to cling to in order to justify their pre-existing desire to ignore and reject the clear and obviously true claims of protesters about the racism and authoritarianism of American law enforcement. And now the number of conspiracy theories about both Floyd’s murder and the protests that have resulted are multiplying.

The White House has floated a conspiracy theory accusing Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro of secretly instigating and fueling the protests.

The Texas Tribune reports that a large number of GOP county chairs in the state have been caught spreading conspiracy theories in recent days. The conspiracy theories include claims that Floyd’s death was faked, that Jewish billionaire George Soros is secretly masterminding the protests, and that both the coronavirus and police brutality are hoaxes being concocted to hurt Trump’s re-election chances.

Former Fox News host and current head of a right wing media empire Glenn Beck also backed the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Soros is masterminding Black Lives Matter protests, and is “trying to get blacks to separate from their church."

[rww vid]

(The idea that Jews are secretly controlling civil rights movements is a conspiracy theory that dates back to at least the 1950s, and is rooted in the racist assumption that black people are incapable of organizing a movement on their own.)

Christian right minister Dave Daubenmire, who was recently tapped to be the keynote speaker at a GOP fundraiser in Ohio, also floated the idea that Floyd’s death was staged, telling viewers, “I don’t even know if he’s dead. Closed casket,” and asking, “Has anybody seen the body of George Floyd?”

But while the more fringe right wing elements — a group that apparently includes the president of the United States — are going wild, Fox News is engaging with what is perhaps the most potent conspiracy theoryof them all: the claim that the protests are being organized or escalated by a shadowy leftist Soros-funded organization called “Antifa.” Hosts and contributors have boosted narratives about how “Antifa” is forming militias to take over cities and small towns, and amplified false claims that “Antifa” is stashing bricks around cities for protesters to fling at cops.

In reality, the word “antifa” is just a catch-all term for disparate groups of activists, some organized and some not, who embrace confrontational tactics against fascists and white supremacists. They aren’t a touring militia of mobilized marauders and certainly aren’t funded by Soros. A Reuters review shows, however, that the people who have been arrested for violent actions at protests have not been connected to left wing groups, but some have been white supremacists looking to stir things up.

These conspiracy theories allow conservatives to downplay the legitimate concerns and organizing prowess of Black Lives Matter, a grassroots movement without centralized leadership. As the pressure mounts, expect to see more and more of these conspiracy theories proliferate through both right wing media and on social media platforms. It seems some conservatives would rather spend time on these conspiracy theories than talk about the larger problems being highlighted by the protests.

If you find yourself engaging with people who are citing conspiracy theories, avoid getting in a line-by-line argument with people over a narrative’s plausibility. Even getting into a fight over whether Floyd’s murder was “staged” is giving in to the desire to distract from the real issues.

Instead, the better approach is to go meta. Treat it as self-evident that the conspiracy theories are false (as they often are), and instead focus on calling out conspiracy theorists for repeating baseless claims in the service of a racist agenda.

A good model to follow is that of the person who leaked the Glassman call to Buzzfeed News. Instead of trying to argue with Glassman’s inanity, this anonymous person decided to simply expose his racist rant. The strategy succeeded, as evidenced by Glassman’s resignation.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D.-N.Y., also provides a good model on how to deal with these conspiracy theories. Instead of trying to argue with Trump’s self-evidently ridiculous theory about Gugino, Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that “everyone saw on video exactly what happened,” and so there’s no need to argue over it. Instead, she castigated Trump’s tweet as “reprehensible” and an attack on “a 75 year old man — justice loving man”.

Conspiracy theorists win if we focus too heavily on arguing the content of the theories. The key is to shift away from the “what” to the “why.” Highlighting the goals of conspiracy theorists — defending racism, spreading confusion — instead puts conspiracy theorists on the defensive. The only way to defeat them is to not play their game.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/trumps-trolling-has-turned-into-real-world-violence-what-his-voters-wanted-all-along/

Eager to get home to South Philadelphia before curfew — about an hour’s walk — I left Monday’s Black Lives Matter protest a few minutes before the police decided to tear-gas the peaceful crowd. The videos of the incident are terrifying — people desperately trying to scramble away from the painful gas, but trapped in the cloud by a fence and a hill that only a few could scramble over. It was a repeat of what is happening in city after city — most notably in Washington, where President Trump had a peaceful crowd gassed because they were getting in the way of a photo op — as police across the nation, evidently inspired by Trump’s violent and authoritarian rhetoric, have begun violently crushing nonviolent protesters.

I had been with the protest for several hours, walking miles through the streets of Philadelphia, and can attest that it was a peaceful event. I witnessed one man arrested. But while things got tense and there was some shouting, it was the protesters themselves, not the cops, who took on the task of de-escalating the situation and keeping the crowd moving.

The crowd was peaceful, but perhaps more notably, it was packed with the kinds of people who have been offered up for decades now as hate objects by Fox News and other right-wing propagandists: A racially diverse group of leftist college-age kids, middle-aged hipsters, aging hippies, and earnest, clean-cut liberals handing out water bottles, all led by a young black woman with a portable speaker calling out the usual protest chants. These are the folks dangled in front of “heartland” America, day after day and night after night, as the “politically correct” villains who are coming to cancel Mom and apple pie and your God-given right to catcall women or tell racist jokes after you’ve had a couple.

Sticking it to these folks, often reduced to “the libs,” was the main reason Republican voters elevated Trump above all other possible Republican candidates in 2016. While the GOP clown-car assemblage of that campaign — Bobby Jindal! Carly Fiorina! Ben Carson! — were, like all Republicans since the era of Nixon and Reagan, happy to engage in coded race-baiting and misogyny disguised as piety, Donald Trump had the special appeal of not even bothering to speak in code. He channeled the base’s nakedly racist loathing of Barack Obama and Black Lives Matter and brown-skinned immigrants. He didn’t pretend that his misogyny was somehow in the service of Jesus Christ, dumping the charade of the chivalrous anti-choicer by describing women as “dogs” and mocking their looks if they dared question him. He ranted about “winning” and “draining the swamp,” and however generously the press chose to interpret those words, his followers understood he was talking about crushing liberals, a poorly-defined group they’ve been trained through decades of propaganda to despise.

AD REMOVED FOR SUBSCRIBED USER

Trump’s loutishness was always sociopathic and sadistic, but it’s clear that his voters instead chose to view it as thrilling and liberating, a chance to deliver some serious pain to the hated libtards who make them feel guilty for using racial slurs or suggesting that a rape victim “asked for it.” Some Trump fans, especially in the charming neo-fascist fringe that became known as the alt-right, immediately understood that Trump really meant it when he hinted that some cleansing right-wing violence directed against his enemies would please him greatly. To be clear, I agree that many of his supporters and apologists in the media honestly believed that the violent chatter coming out of his mouth wasn’t serious. It was just, in their reading, shock-jock tactics, an effort to bait liberals and then mock them for their angry reactions. It was, in fact, just an effort to “trigger the liberals.”

Now the trigger finger is placed on real weapons, and peaceful protesters (and journalists) are in the crosshairs.

No one should be surprised. Trump’s violent racism was entirely sincere, as should have been evident from his actual policy choices. This is the man who rolled back the Obama administration’s efforts to fight police brutality and who authorized programs to separate refugee families and put children in cages to punish their parents for the dastardly crime of Immigrating While Not White. The violence was always there, as rhetoric, as potential and as reality. Now it’s in our faces even more as any number of American cities, large, small and middle-sized, watch peaceful protesters get tear-gassed and beaten with batons, for no other reason than they belong to that amorphous group deemed “liberals” that Trump and his minions despise.

In my book, “Troll Nation,” I argued that conservatism, as an ideology, has lost the intellectual arguments on every issue of substance, from economic theory to the environment to race relations and gender politics. Now all conservatives have left is spite. That’s why “owning the liberals” is the main organizing principle of modern conservatism and its why the right eagerly chose Trump, a man devoid of any intelligence or impulses outside of bullying and whining, as its leader. They can’t win with rational discourse, I argued, so they’ve turned to trolling.

But trolling only gets you so far. The prospect that Trump and his supporters would escalate to authoritarian violence was always in the cards. They can’t win an argument with logic or facts, but they can pummel your face until you give in, and so here we are.

In Philadelphia on Tuesday morning, prospective Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden stopped by City Hall to speak to a small press gaggle, limited in size due to the quarantine.

He denounced Trump for “using tear gas and flash grenades” to clear a peaceful crowd outside the White House “in order to stage a photo op at a noble church,” accusing the president of being more “interested in serving the passions of his base than the needs of the people in his care.”

Let’s be generous and say that’s all true — but it’s a dramatic understatement. Trump doesn’t even see the majority of Americans who oppose him as people, which is why he literally treated the protesters like vermin to be eliminated in order to clear a backdrop for his photo op.

Outside City Hall, while Biden spoke, downtown Philadelphia was eerily quiet, as much from the coronavirus stay-at-home orders as from the post-protest lull. But a group of National Guard troops were stationed outside, guarding a statue of Frank Rizzo, the notoriously racist mayor and police commissioner of the 1970s. It was almost too on-the-nose, as 2020 symbolism goes: Law enforcement literally protecting a monument to white supremacy while innocent protesters are being gassed, beaten and abused in the streets.

As for MAGA nation, we got an eyeful of that in Philadelphia, too, with a group of baseball bat-wielding jackasses roaming the streets, despite the curfew, in the heavily gentrified neighborhood of Fishtown, clearly looking for anti-racist protesters to beat up under the pretext of preventing looting.

“I’m ready to fuck shit up. You know, I’ve been looking for a fight for the past six months,” a producer for a local radio station heard one of them saying. When they saw the producer filming them, he says, they beat him badly, sending him to the hospital.

Trump’s provocations are a central reason for all this violence. But we must also understand that the bat-wielding Red Hats, and people like them, chose him in the first place. He became president by way of an electoral fluke, but not without deep and strong support, and not by accident. Right-wing America increasingly understands it can’t win a rational debate and increasingly can’t win a fair election. (Only once since 1988 has a Republican presidential nominee won the national popular vote.) This surge of violence, egged on by Trump, is a direct reaction to that. Trumpism is showing its true face, and it’s the face of violent authoritarian rule. Our nation’s unanswered question is whether people who oppose that will rise up against it, in numbers big enough to overwhelm the efforts of an embittered, hateful minority to enforce their will through cheating, lies and outright violence.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trump-trolls-the-libs-with-100000-dead-and-39-million-out-of-work-and-his-fanboys-love-it/

memorial Day weekend will likely be remembered by history as one marked by unimaginable tragedy. The official count of people dead from COVID-19 approached 100,000 — a milestone that will surely be passd on Tuesday or Wednesday — and the actual death toll is likely much higher. The weekend kicked off with new reports of soaring unemployment, putting the number of Americans who have filed benefit claims at 38.6 million, nearly one of every four workers in the United States.

Donald Trump, who currently occupies the White House despite losing the 2016 popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million, could not care less about all this suffering among the people he is purportedly there to serve. We know this, because he spent his weekend ranting on Twitter about pretty much anything — including obviously false conspiracy theories about MSNBC host Joe Scarborough — except the crisis he prefers to pretend isn’t happening at all.

What’s equally upsetting is the soul-deadening knowledge that Trump’s voters, who could well hand him another electoral victory even in the face of a near-certain popular vote defeat, also don’t appear to care about his sociopathic behavior. On the contrary, many of them seem to relish the fact that Trump continues to “trigger the liberals,” even as the nation falls apart around him.

Over the weekend, Trump, who isn’t exactly svelte himself,retweeted a conservative pundit mocking rising Democratic star Stacey Abrams for her weight. Trump also retweeted the same man calling Hillary Clinton a “skank” and claiming that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is ugly. Sexualized harassment of women, of course, is easy to psychoanalyze away with the entirely correct assertion that pathetic men try to cover for their own inadequacies. Trump is the supposed president of the United States, however, which puts the lie to long-standing but always untrue claims that ignoring such harassment robs it of its power.

AD REMOVED FOR SUBSCRIBED USER

Trump also spent the weekend using the power of his office to falsely accuse Scarborough of murdering a congressional staffer who worked for him when he was a Republican congressman in 2001. Lori Klausutis, in reality, died in an accident in Scarborough’s Florida office, while he was in Washington. But for weeks now, Trump has falsely suggested her death is being investigated as a “cold case,” suggesting that “Psycho Joe” murdered her instead.

Over the weekend, as the COVID-19 death toll soared and unemployment continued to rise, Trump doubled down on his effort to pump this defamatory accusation into the nation’s bloodstream, claiming there are “unanswered questions” about the case (there are not) and calling on law enforcement to harass Scarborough over this.

Eventually, Lori Klausutis’ widower, Timothy J. Klausutis, reacted by sending a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, begging Dorsey to enforce the terms of service against Trump and delete the tweets.

Twitter, which no doubt profits handsomely from the traffic generated by people gawking at the shameful display that Trump provides on its platform every day, responded with statement expressing that the company were “deeply sorry about the pain these statements” had caused. Not sorry enough, of course, to delete them, or ban the biggest troll on their platform.

Beyond blatant misogyny and making false accusations of murder, Trump also lied about the coronavirus, claiming “numbers and deaths are going down all over the Country!” (Outside of New York City, they are, at best, plateauing.) He got into an elaborate BS rationalization for why it’s was OK for him to play golf during a crisis when he publicly shamed Barack Obama for doing the same thing during non-crisis periods. (Real answer: Because golf, in Trump’s mind, is for white people.) Trump also congratulated himself for “Great reviews” of his COVID-19 response, as if this were a reality TV show instead of just, you know, reality. (Also, while most world leaders are seeing a bump in their approval ratings, Trump’s *disapproval* ratings are going up, which happens when you suggest injecting bleach into people’s lungs rather than doing something real to combat the virus.)

The cliché at this point would be to say that we’ve all become numb to this. The president of the United States is defaming people, unloading misogynist abuse, lying in his bragging, and focused on litigating the Calvinball rules that only allow white presidents to play golf — all while Americans are dying, hospitals are in distress and unemployment is at or near 25%. Yet, this reality barely causes a response beyond a shrug.

But it’s not that we’re numb, not exactly. The majority of Americans, seeing this behavior, I suspect, still feel disgust, fear and anger. The muted response, however, is a product of learned helplessness. We could express our anger, but what good will it do?

Trump’s supporters, who are disproportionately empowered due to gerrymandering and the Electoral College, don’t care that their big hero is an empathy-free monster who is more worried about who-gets-to-play-golf quarrels than he is about the collapse of the country. The numbers bear this out. Nothing — not even Trump going on TV and suggesting that doctors are too stupid to have considered simply injecting disinfectants into human bodies — will budge Trump’s approval ratings below the 41 to 43% that he has surfed on from the first day of his presidency.

Trump could go on TV and kick a puppy to death and his supporters would react by yelling “Fake news!” and gloating about how he triggered those puppy-loving liberals. We know this because what he’s doing now is worse than kicking a puppy to death. His actions are literally killing people and setting our economy up to fail even worse. He encouraged red-state governors to reopen their economies, with no indication that the coronavirus was under control. The result, as we saw over the weekend, was crowded public events and the likely rapid spread of infection. Meanwhile, the effect of so many unemployment and underemployment people isn’t fully being felt yet, but Trump is already moving to deprive people of unemployment benefits that could keep our consumer economy from collapsing completely.

None of this appears to matter. All that matters to Trump voters is he triggers the liberals and upholds the racist values of their tribe. As long as he keeps that up, they will happily walk off a cliff with him. The rest of us aren’t numb.We’re just in a hellish holding pattern, waiting until November to see if our democracy is too broken to prevent this 41 to 43% of Americans from holding the rest of the country hostage to their evil man-child cult leader.

We’re a country that has cancer, and we’re just waiting to see if the chemo is going to work. It isn’t numbness. It’s depression.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trump-knows-most-americans-dont-want-to-re-elect-him-so-hes-cheating-like-crazy/

amanda

despite his off-the-charts narcissism, Donald Trump knows on some level that the majority of Americans don’t want him to be president and he cannot win in a fair election. He didn’t beat Hillary Clinton in the popular vote in 2016 — she got nearly 3 million more votes — and only won because of the outsize influence of smaller, rural states in the Electoral College. He has only grown less popular since then and is now well behind former Vice President Joe Biden in most national polls, usually by a margin of 5 to 8 points.

But Trump has had a plan to win in 2020, ever since his re-election campaign kicked off the second he was inaugurated: Cheat like crazy.

Trying to cheat in the presidential election is, of course, what Trump was impeached for in December, which no doubt feels like ancient history, due to the rising death tolls and exploding unemployment rate over which our “very stable genius” of a president has presided since then. So here’s a refresher: Trump, anticipating (apparently correctly) that Biden would be his Democratic opponent, leveraged the power of the State Department in an effort to blackmail the Ukrainian president into publicly backing right-wing conspiracy theories about Biden, threatening to withhold military aid unless Ukrainian officials announced “investigations” into Biden. The idea was to create the 2020 version of “Clinton’s emails” by using phony investigations and innuendo to paint Biden as corrupt, even though there’s no evidence Biden did anything corrupt in his dealings with Ukraine.

Impeachment did a lot to shut down that scheme (though I have no doubt they’ll keep trying), but that doesn’t mean Trump has given up the hope that he can rig some kind of victory, even in an election when strong majorities of Americans oppose him. Since shamelessness and callousness are among Trump’s central qualities, he’s perfectly happy to exploit the coronavirus crisis to do it. Yep, that same crisis that he made exponentially worse with his negligence and open hostility to science — now he wants to use it to deprive American voters of their chance to kick him out on his keister in November.

For obvious reasons, a numerous states have decided to dramatically increase the ability of voters to vote by mail in November, especially after the Republican-controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court forced in-person voting in April, leading to a spike in coronavirus cases in the weeks afterwards. No one can assume that the virus won’t still be a threat this fall, and it’s better to prepare now for the possibility that people won’t be able to vote in person in November.

but Trump is certain — and for good reason — that if more people get to vote, he’s likely to lose. So he’s freaking out. He’s particularly sweating the possibility that voters in swing states will be able to vote by mail in large numbers, since he knows his best chance of winning those states lies in making sure that as few people vote as possible.

“Breaking: Michigan sends absentee ballots to 7.7 million people ahead of Primaries and the General Election,” Trump tweeted on Wednesday, in typical hyperventilating style. “This was done illegally and without authorization by a rogue Secretary of State. I will ask to hold up funding to Michigan if they want to go down this Voter Fraud path!”

He deleted and reposted the tweet later to reflect it was ballot applications that were sent, not ballots themselves, but kept the more disturbing false claim that it’s illegal to mail ballot applications to voters. He also threatened Nevada in similar fashion.

As Jack Holmes of Esquire pointed out, Trump is threatening two U.S. states in exactly the same way he threatened Ukraine: Claiming he will withhold funds authorized by Congress if the recipient doesn’t help him cheat in the 2020 election. This is election fraud and blackmail, but this time directed at Americans.

Not only are these tweets an effort to blackmail the states, but they are also a direct effort to scare ordinary citizens out of voting.

As political analyst Judd Legum pointed out in his newsletter, Popular Information, “Telling someone that an absentee ballot application they receive was sent to them ‘illegally’ could dissuade them from voting.”

Indeed, the tweets themselves are arguably voter intimidation, since Trump is literally trying to scare people into thinking they may be prosecuted if they fill out an application for a mail-in ballot.Voter intimidation is a federal criminal offense that could lead to jail time — except that Trump is hiding behind “executive privilege,” which has been used to argue against legal punishment for all his criminal behavior.

Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan literally warned the nation about this possibility during Trump’s impeachment hearings.

Karlan: “What would you think if, when your governor asked the federal government for the disaster assistance that Congress has provided, the President responded, ‘I would like you to do us a favor.’ I’ll... send the disaster relief once you brand my opponent a criminal."

[karlan vid]

well, the day is here and Trump isn’t even being coy about it, but belligerently trying to use the pandemic to scare people into not voting, while threatening Democratic-led states with the loss of federal funding. To justify this, Trump told more lies Wednesday afternoon, claiming that “voting is an honor” (it is in fact a right) and that “they” mail in “thousands and thousands of fake ballots,” an utterly false claim with zero evidence behind it.

What Trump is doing is illegal, and congressional Democrats know it. Sen. Kamala Harris of California noted on MSNBCthat, “it is a federal crime to withhold money from states with the purpose of interfering with people’s right to vote.”

Even threatening to do that is arguably a criminal act, especially if, as noted above, these threats are meant to scare people out of voting. Either way, it’s an abuse of power for the purpose of cheating in an election, which is precisely what Trump was impeached for last December.

I find myself physically exhausted even thinking about it, but it must be said: Democrats must consider the possibility of impeaching Trump again, and soon. What he’s doing now isn’t just as bad as what he did to Ukraine — it’s much worse, since he’s directly attacking American citizens and their constitutional right to vote. This is the Ukraine scandal on steroids. (And the Ukraine scandal was Watergate on steroids!)

It’s a terrible thing to think about, especially since Senate Republicans, who don’t care what crimes Trump commits, would just acquit Trump again. And it’s hard to imagine what another round of impeachment hearings, much less another impeachment vote, would look like in the age of the coronavirus.

Still, we know one thing about the first impeachment: It worked. It blew up Trump’s scheme to blackmail the Ukrainian president, and exposed the fraudulent nature of the conspiracy theory against Biden so thoroughly that the even Trump-curious reporters like Ken Vogel at the New York Times have been scared away from pretending there’s anything serious to these conspiracy theories about Biden.

As difficult and disheartening as another round of impeachment might be, it could be the only way to keep Trump from using the coronavirus to cheat in the 2020 election. If Democrats can impeach him for blackmailing Ukraine in this way, surely they can impeach him for blackmailing the governors of Michigan and Nevada in exactly the same way.

More important still, Trump has made no secret of his desire to cheat. He does it right out in the open, on Twitter, and will only continue to escalate these threats if there are no real consequences. A second impeachment, ugly as it will be, may be the only way to ensure a free and fair election during this pandemic.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/the-jig-is-up-the-woman-behind-roe-v-wade-became-a-hero-of-abortion-opponents-but-now-we-know-it-was-all-an-act/

an 520

how the religious right’s war against abortion is built on lies, grifting and bullying

Amanda Marcotte /

:{:{}:

Tuesday, both the pro- and anti-choice world were rocked by a revelation that undermines literal decades of religious right nonsense. Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe”of the Supreme Court case that legalized abortion nationwide in 1973, claimed before her 2017 death that her famous “conversion” to anti-abortion activism was a con job.

McCorvey told filmmaker Nick Sweeney during the taping of his new FX documentary, “AKA Jane Roe,” “I took their money, and they took me out in front of the cameras and told me what to say.”

For pro-choice activists, the revelation was less exciting than frustrating. For decades, the anti-abortion movement has held out McCorvey’s “conversion” as a morality tale about how women, deep down inside, really don’t want access to abortion, but instead are being deceived by a supposedly ruthless “abortion industry.”

McCorvey was a prop in service of this argument, which depends on sexist stereotypes painting women as too feeble-minded and gullible to be the proper stewards of their own lives. Her tale of woe, where she was fooled into thinking abortion was a right, until she was “saved” by anti-choice ministers like Flip Benham, was all about serving this narrative: Women can’t be trusted with autonomy, and need “godly” men to guide them.

(Benham, a supposedly wise and “pro-life” guidance-giver to women, has been seen in recent months violating coronavirus restrictions in order to harass patients and staff at a North Carolina clinic, even though doing so directly threatens to spread a deadly disease among the protesters, clinic staff and the pregnant people seeking care.)

Having spent years covering the pro-choice movement, I can safely say that the widespread view in pro-choice circles of McCorvey’s “conversion” was one of skepticism. Frankly, she was a sketchy character and that was no secret. She admitted to lying about being raped, even though the pro-choice lawyers who argued Roe had no interest in making the case about rape. McCorvey publicly waged war on Sarah Weddington, the pro-choice lawyer who argued the Roe case before the Supreme Court, apparently furious that Weddington didn’t try to help her get an illegal abortion during the run-up to Roe. McCorvey didn’t seem to care that if Weddington had committed a crime on her behalf, it could have ended a case that granted millions of women the right to an abortion without the threat of jail.

So yeah, pro-choicers always suspected McCorvey was getting paid off somehow, and the number that Sweeney uncovers — nearly half a million dollars over the years — sounds about right.

But the main reason pro-choicers suspected the McCorvey conversion was a sham wasn’t about McCorvey’s character, but about the dynamics of the anti-choice movement in general. It’s no exaggeration to say that the anti-choice movement, from tip to toe, is stuffed with liars and grifters. Their entire raison d’être is telling lies — often over-the-top, melodramatic lies — in service of sticking it to women, LGBT people and liberals in general for not respecting the “right” of the religious right to dominate the rest of us.

The anti-choice movement has always been run by lying trolls, and always will be. They set the template for the rest of the conservative movement, and paved the way for the rise of Donald Trump, whose presidential victory was a perfect summary of the fact that right-wing American politics has become one big, long con.

The over-the-top, theatrical lies of the anti-choice movement are so comical that the mainstream media, for decades, has shied away from covering them too closely, likely out of fear that they’re actually too ridiculous to be believed.

For instance, over the past few years anti-choice activists have begun to claim that doctors deliver viable infants alive and let them die. Trump likes to tell this story with vivid and completely made-up detailsabout swaddling a baby in blankets before murdering it. The Senate held hearings in which anti-choice activist Jill Stanek — a crazed, racist liar who also claims Chinese people think aborted fetuses are a “delicacy” — claimed, almost certainly falsely, that she once witnessed a baby being killed this way. (Stanek has also argued that contraception bans are necessary to force people to have sex only within marriage.)

To bolster this argument, the anti-choice movement also trots out a series of people who claim to have “survived” abortion. Did they? Probably not! The procedures they describe have no relationship to actual methods used to terminate pregnancies in the real world. Anti-choice “testimony” is all to often as McCorvey described it: “[T]hey took me out in front of the cameras and told me what to say.”

But this “born alive” mania has mostly been ignored by the mainstream media, except for occasional gawking at Trump’s weird rally stories. I suspect that happens because these tales are so grotesque and improbable that journalists fear their audiences will think they made it all up. Instead, anti-choice activists get a glow-up in mainstream coverage, presented as less hysterical and less prone to lies and bizarre flights of fancy than they actually are.

The “baby parts” debacle from a few years ago is another example of how the anti-choice movement is not a group sober-minded devout Christians who just love “life,” but in fact a bunch of fanatics who have contempt for the truth and think nothing of spinning wild stories and engaging in implausible thought-experiments in their efforts to smear feminists.

A series of “undercover” videos purporting to “prove” that clinics like Planned Parenthood were secretly selling “baby parts” out the back door were released by an anti-choice activist named David Daleiden in 2015. To anyone familiar with the anti-choice movement and their reliance on fantastical stories, it was obvious this would turn out to be bullshit, but too many mainstream media organizations ran credulous stories, bamboozled by their own decades of coverage falsely painting anti-choicers as serious-minded people instead of fundamentalist whackadoodles.

Sure enough, after the first round of credulous coverage, the facts started to emerge: Planned Parenthood doesn’t sell baby parts.” They donate fetal tissue to clinics that use it for medical research — research that saves far more lives than any nut waving a bloody fetus poster board has ever saved. The videos had been altered to make innocent people look guilty. Eventually, Planned Parenthood won a lawsuit against Daleiden and he was arrested for counterfeiting government documents.

This myth of the humble, righteous anti-choice activist works its way not just into the media but into Supreme Court cases, such as one in 2014 case, when anti-choice activists argued against an anti-protest buffer zone around clinicsby claiming they were merely “sidewalk counselors” trying to “help” women.

An investigation by Jill Filipovic at Cosmopolitanexposed the truth: They’re a bunch of bullies who are angry at women for having sex and show up at clinics to harass them.

“If women want careers and education and everything and they don’t want children,” one protester complained to Filipovic, “what are they doing having sex?”

Another complained that “there were no problems” back when women “had to be obedient to their husbands.”

Instead of contraception, a protester argued, “the way to control [pregnancy] is not to hop into bed with every Tom, Dick, and Harry.”

The court sided with the bullies, unsurprisingly, elevating the myth that these belligerent protesters merely wished to “counsel” women.

Anti-choicers have long pushed this myth that they’re righteous warriors going up against a sleazy “abortion industry” and trying to “save” women. This is pure projection on their part, and a complete inversion of reality.

In truth, the pro-choice movement exists to help women, and the anti-choice movement exists to strip them of their rights and subjugate them both legally and socially. The pro-choice movement stands with science and medical facts, while the anti-choice movement is rife with liars and grifters, and spews a dizzying amount of propaganda based on nothing but misogyny and lurid fantasy.

The press should stop being fooled by the way anti-choicers hide behind the Bible and the cross and see them for who they are: Bullies who are trying to take important medical care away from women at a vulnerable moment in their lives. Perhaps the revelation that anti-choicers literally bought off Norma McCorvey and paid her to lie will help open up some eyes.

But it’s also important to step back and take a look at the bigger picture. Roe v. Wade was never about Norma McCorvey. She was simply the plaintiff recruited for a case that was actually about the rights of millions of people who have faced or will face a pregnancy they don’t want or can’t bring to term, for whatever reason. By recruiting McCorvey to their side, anti-choice activists sought to erase the existence of these millions of people who have been saved by access to safe, legal abortion. It’s a shame that McCorvey betrayed all those people for so long. But at least before she died, she told the truth.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/trumps-failure-to-grapple-with-the-covid-19-problem-is-rooted-in-the-hollow-gospel-of-individualism

no lnx

Trump’s failure to grapple with the COVID-19 problem is rooted in the hollow gospel of ‘individualism’

President Donald J. Trump listens to a reporter’s question at an update briefing on testing capacity Monday, May 11, 2020, in the Rose Garden of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon May 14, 2020

During Donald Trump’s daily press conference (and, wait — wasn’t he going to quit those?) on Wednesday, the president was unable to hide his irritation at coronavirus task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci, and pooh-poohed the latter’s concerns about re-opening schools and universities.

Fauci had testified in front of the Senate on Tuesday and was asked about the possibility of educational institutions opening in the fall. He did not actually weigh in on this policy issue, but just observed, “Even at the top speed we’re going, we don’t see a vaccine playing in the ability of individuals to get to school this term.” Without rigorous testing, he said, there’s “a real risk that you will trigger an outbreak that you might not be able to control.”

Trump, who’s always furious at any hint that he actually be working at his job, and is overtly hostile to the concept of expanded testing, became visibly angry about Fauci’s comments.

“I think they should open the schools, absolutely,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday, while bathed in appropriately sinister lighting. “It’s had very little impact on young people.”

Trump reiterated the argument a few minutes later, saying this was “just not an acceptable answer” because COVID-19 “is a disease that attacks age. It attacks health.” As usual, the president was barely coherent, but it appears he meant to say that the coronavirus is more dangerous for unhealthy or elderly people.

Trump got a lot of pushback, with critics pointing out that there have in fact been numerous cases of young people dying or becoming gravely ill. But that criticism misses the point to a large extent. The principal reason for shutting down schools in the first place was less about protecting young people themselves — who do appear less likely to contract COVID-19, and generally tend to recover quickly — and more about shutting down a major vector for the coronavirus’ rapid spread. Even if not a single young person died from the disease, shutting down the schools was the right move so that kids can’t unknowingly transmit the virus to their parents and grandparents, or other high-risk people in the community.

This moment, in other words, was another reminder that Trump doesn’t even grasp the basic concept of caring about people other than yourself. In his mind, the only factor that should determine whether a student goes back to school is the personal risk to that student. It doesn’t even occur to him that students might have concerns about other people’s health — possibly even members of their own families.

But this problem extends beyond Trump. For decades, conservatism has preached a gospel of “individualism,” disdaining the idea — which is backed by considerable scientific evidence — that humans are deeply interdependent pack animals whose survival depends more on cooperation than on individual striving. That right-wing gospel is being rapidly exposed as not but silly, but meaningless and even dangerous in the age of coronavirus.

Just a few short years ago, conservatives were in an uproar because Barack Obama gave a speech arguing, “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”

(Obama, it should be noted, got the basic premise of the speech from Elizabeth Warren, then a Senate candidate, who gave a spontaneous speech at a meet-and-greet in 2011 making the same points.)

Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign seized on “you didn’t build that,” stoking anger among conservatives who love to tell themselves that their wealth is strictly a matter of their own hard work and who ignore the obvious fact that they wouldn’t have gotten far without the taxpayer-funded infrastructure Obama was talking about. This is what passed for “scandal” in 2012: A Democratic politician telling a bunch of delusional conservatives something obvious, which is that individual prosperity depends on the extensive benefits of an interconnected society.

To understand how and why the vast majority of Republicans eagerly voted for Trump, a man who literally demonstrates every symptom on the sociopathy checklist, it helps to understand how much the right has morphed into a cult of individualism.

In 1987, for instance, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a major architect of contemporary right-wing thought, famously said, “There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”

The Tea Party protests — which were largely what Obama was responding to in 2012 — were fueled by this faith that “society” is merely an illusion and that conservatives are a bunch of rugged individuals who don’t really need anyone else to survive. Certainly, in the far-right mythology, there’s no need to respect the concept of a “social contract,” or any obligations, such as paying one’s fair share of taxes, that flows from it.

I shouldn’t even have to say this, but racism has long been the not-so-secret fuel for this cult of individualism. The rise of 1964 Republican nominee Barry Goldwater, with his hostility toward federal anti-discrimination legislation and social safety-net programs, was a direct result of white people’s anger at the civil rights movement’s insistence that black people be included in the social contract as full equals. The Tea Party was full of people whose newfound loathing of taxation was directly proportional to their anger that a black man had become the face of the federal government.

Still, the media has taken this idea of “individualism” at face value for decades and dutifully reported right-wing anger at Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech as if it were legitimate disagreement, instead of the loony rantings of people whose lives would fall apart the second there was the slightest disruption to social systems that work only because of government investment.

The coronavirus has exposed this delusion of individualism for what it is. For one thing, the virus doesn’t care if you pop on a tricorner hat and declare yourself a rugged individual. It’ll infect you just as easily as it infects a person who stays home, wears a mask and pays their taxes without complaint. Individualism can’t stop the virus — only collective action can.

But on a deeper level, the virus has exposed the incoherence of the individualist ideology. Right now, the same people who fueled the Tea Party protests, including Trump himself, are out there insisting that the lockdowns end. Why? Well … because they miss the benefits of living in an interconnected society. They want their kids in school. They want to go to the mall or the gym or the hair salon. They want to use public spaces that are either directly funded by taxpayers or only possible because taxpayers pay for roads, utilities and other public infrastructure that make it possible to open stores, gyms and restaurants.

More to the point, the idiocy of this individualistic rhetoric is exactly the reason we can’t just return to normal life. The “every man for himself” philosophy is why Republicans resisted building up the public health infrastructure that could have responded to this crisis with the kind of mass testing and tracing needed to stop the spread. Even when it was clear the virus was spreading, Trump — due to laziness, but also due to his refusal to treat public health as a serious issue — didn’t do what was necessary to ramp up an emergency response.

Obama’s words about how “you didn’t build that” now feel less like an admonishment and more like a warning. Conservatives have rejected the idea that we’re all in this together. Because of the extreme social and political negligence that provoked, they’re now losing the benefits of living a society that they pretended they didn’t want and didn’t even notice. “Every man is an island” sounds like a romantic notion until you actually have to live that way, locked up in your house and unable to interact meaningfully with other people in public spaces. Too bad they had to ruin it for the rest of us, but that, of course, is just more proof that we’re all in this together.

an 5/9/20

Despite knowing full well the furor that Vice President Mike Pence raised by not wearing a mask during a Mayo Clinic visit in late April, Donald Trump refused to wear a mask when visiting Honeywell factory in Arizona earlier this week — a factory that makes masks. This wasn’t just a symbolic nose-thumbing at people’s reasonable desire to be safe. Trump and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows were putting the lives of Honeywell employees in danger.

After all, masks are not primarily meant to protect the mask-wearer, but to protect others, since there’s clear evidence that people who are infected but have no symptoms can spread the coronavirus. Trump is regularly exposed to the virus, in fact — one of his personal valets just tested positive — and is a prime candidate to be such a carrier.

Of course Trump doesn’t care about other people, only his ego and his appearance. Reporting from the Associated Press confirms this, as a Thursday article explained Trump told advisers that wearing a mask would “send the wrong message.”

“The president said doing so would make it seem like he is preoccupied with health instead of focused on reopening the nation’s economy,” the AP reporters write.

AD REMOVED FOR SUBSCRIBED USER

This is another example of Trump’s false dichotomy between saving the economy and fighting the virus. After all, the economy isn’t going to recover if millions are sick and people are afraid to leave their houses — and early evidence from the states that have tried to “reopen” their economies makes that clear. But there’s also good reason to believe that the Trump-Pence antipathy to wearing masks signals to something deeper and darker.

Even before Trump started to make a big show out of not wearing a mask, it was common, at least in my South Philadelphia neighborhood, to see MAGA-hat-clad white men walking around without masks, delivering contemptuous sneers to the rest of us suckers who are covering our noses and mouths. Fox News host Laura Ingraham, in her friendly competition with fellow host Tucker Carlson to see who can be the most obnoxious, has started to demonize mask-wearing by claiming that public health advisories are somehow a conspiracy to sow “fear and intimidation.”

(Considering that mask-wearing to protect others took off in Asia long before Trump even ran for president, Ingraham’s conspiracy theory doesn’t possess even the most remote logical consistency.)

Between Trump and Fox News, the practice of mask-wearing is swiftly becoming another culture-war flashpoint. But the question is why. After all, masks seem to make people feel more comfortable with going out in public and going to work, and those are both things Trump dearly wants Americans to return to doing.

But Trump and his most ardent supporters seem almost physically repulsed at the very idea of wearing a mask. One Republican Ohio state legislator even claimed that since “we are all created in the image and likeness of God,” covering the face with a mask is an affront to God’s creation. (Many have noted that this same argument could be made against the practice of wearing pants.)

Ultimately, the rejection of mask-wearing really goes back to the fact that Trump, Ingraham and their most faithful followers are guided by fascist impulse, even when they don’t or can’t articulate a fully fleshed-out fascist ideology. Above all other things, the fascist personality is one that rejects even the possibility of sickness. To wear a mask is to publicly admit that one’s body is suspectible to illness, which is coded as “weak” and therefore unacceptable.

Natascha Strobl, an Austrian political scientist who is an expert in far-right organizing and rhetoric, had an important English-language Twitter thread in early Aprilabout why the far right was embracing the view that the coronavirus should simply be allowed to run wild. From the beginning, this has been the view Trump clearly prefers on an emotional level and has pushed federal policy toward all along. While Strobl didn’t mention masks, her observations also help explain why these same folks are repulsed by mask-wearing.

The fascist narrative, Strobl explained, is that “men aren’t men anymore, but nervous, urban, overly intellectualized and (here it comes) sickly weaklings.

“Weakness is never worthy of protection and has to be cast out. This is fascism,” she continues. The fascist believes that those viewed as “weak” have an obligation to die “without protest for the greater good” and that if “they don’t do it, they are weak and the weak drag everyone else down and therefore must be done away with.”

To wear a mask, in other words, indicates a belief that your personal body can become infected. A fascist-minded person like Trump cannot admit such a thing, either because he genuinely believes he is too strong to be affected by the virus or because he fears looking weak in public.Just as important, wearing a mask indicates care and concern for others, especially those who are high-risk. But the fascist-minded person doesn’t want to protect those viewed as “weak” — in fact, those people are expected to die so as not to be a burden on others. As Strobl points out, the far right believes that by becoming seriously ill or dying in service to some warped conception of the greater good, the “weak” can prove themselves strong through their sacrifice.

Trump hasn’t exactly concealed his impulse to see the coronavirus as a force that culls the herd of its weakest members, or to perceive that the “weak” can be redeemed through this morbid, sadistic ritual sacrifice. This week, he repeatedly insisted that Americans should think of themselves as “warriors” who bravely go forth and face the virus for the cause of, well, his re-election, which he is convinced depends on reopening the economy without bothering with the testing protocols, contact tracing and other precautions that could make doing so both safe and feasible.

(Even if people are willing to die for a noble cause, it’s worth pausing here and observing gently that Donald Trump’s re-election campaign is not such a cause.)

Moreover, Trump has always made a point of presenting himself as the fascist version of the Übermensch, even as he is likely too dim to know that word or what it signifies. Trump is forever braggingabout his alleged “good genes,” which he often invokes as being so powerful as to render him a genius-level expert in any number of subjects, from medicine to economics to military strategy, without any need to do anything as weak and effeminate as learning stuff. Wearing a mask would go against his effort to present himself as possessing near-supernatural genetic powers to repel the sorts of viruses with which mere mortals must contend.

Of course, Trump doesn’t actually believe his own lies on this subject (nor on many others). As NBC News has reported, when Trump found out that a White House valet had the coronavirus, he became “lava level mad” at his staffand accused them of not doing enough to protect him. His public bravado is, as with all things Trump, a thin mask plastered over a deep well of insecurity. He may want you to believe his immune system is superhuman, but he knows full well that his obese and shattered 73-year-old physique puts him in the category of the high-risk people he and his fellow Republicans are treating as weaklings better off culled from the herd.

Unfortunately, because face masks have become such a potent symbol to far-right culture warriors of values they reject, such as equality and compassion, we can only expect the symbolic clash over masks to escalate. More and more conservatives, especially men, will try to prove their superior masculine strength and power by refusing to wear them. This is childish, selfish and entirely counterproductive, of course. What else can we expect from Trump and his followers, who are the real weaklings in this unhappy social equation?

amanda

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trump-desperately-tries-to-gaslight-america-as-he-faces-humiliation-from-lysol-gate/

It’s gone mainstreamin recent years, but the word “gaslighting” used to be an esoteric term from the world of psychology and domestic abuse counseling. The word refersto the 1944 film “Gaslight,” in which Ingrid Bergman plays a woman whose husband tries to drive her insane by hiding her belongings and otherwise manipulating her environment, and telling her that the changes she perceives are all in her head. Experts in domestic violence developed the term to describe the way that abusers in real life try to manipulate victims. The gaslighter works by denying reality, often when the facts are plain as day, with such conviction and repetition that the victim starts to question themselves and the evidence of their own senses.

For instance, this might take the form of the abuser denying that he hit his victim or falsely claiming that she provoked it, and then browbeating her until she accepts the lie and even starts to wonder whether she imagined the whole thing.

Under Donald Trump’s administration, however, the term has ventured into politics. It’s become a way to talk about how Trump and his defenders won’t merely tell lies, but will stand by even the dumbest and most obvious lies, holding their ground until the defenders of reality simply give up fighting. This started from the very beginning of the administration, when Trump and his administration claimed his inauguration crowd was bigger than Barack Obama’s, and insisted on repeating that lie and intimidating government agencies into backing it up. Needless to say, this has continued throughout the coronavirus pandemic, dialed up to an extreme.

One might wonder why we need a term with such a complicated back story, when the word “lying” is right there for the taking. The reason is that Trump lies so frequently and in such varying ways that it’s useful to have a taxonomy of Trump lies to understand the various ways his lies work and how best, perhaps, to resist them.

With garden-variety lying, the liar tends to assume the target doesn’t know the truth and so can be made to accept the lie as if it were truth. Gaslighting differs dramatically in that the target actually knows what’s true. They experienced it, heard it or witnessed what really happened themselves. So what the gaslighter must do is convince the target to reject the evidence of their own eyes and ears.

Gaslighting is a useful term to explain what Trump did throughout this past weekend, in response to what we at Salon are calling “Lysol-gate,” in which our president went on national television and suggested that injecting household cleaners into people’s lungs might be a clever idea to fight the coronavirus that the medical profession clearly hadn’t thought of yet.

The reason doctors haven’t considered this idea is that it will kill the patient — and, I guess, also any virus lurking in his or her lungs. Trump is literally too stupid and lazy to know that fact, which was deeply embarrassing for him and anyone who supports him.

The problem Trump faces here is that he’s right there on video, marveling about “the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute” and speculating about an “injection inside, or almost a cleaning, because, you see, it gets in the lungs,” and pompously instructing the federal officials tasked with managing this crisis to investigate this possible treatment.

In the wake of widespread outrage, mockery and, Trump turned to gaslighting. The goal is to deny the evidence of our own eyes and ears with such shamelessness and persistence that people start to question whether they heard what they heard, or at least give up trying to insist on the truth.

Trump’s first gaslighting attempt was to try to pretend he was pranking the press, telling a group of reporters the next day: “I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen.”

This is a classic example of how gaslighting differs from plain old lying. Trump is insisting here that those of us who heard him suggest injecting disinfectants in people’s lungs have broken brains — if we didn’t detect the slightest hint of sarcasm in his tone, it’s because we are defective in some way, not because he wasn’t actually being sarcastic. The point is to force people who heard him perfectly well to defend their own ability to hear and see things, knowing full well that there’s no definitive, objective way for human beings to “prove” that they know the difference between sarcasm and not-sarcasm.

But at the same time Trump was implying that only crazy people with broken brains didn’t detect his supposedly obvious sarcasm, he also suggested that only crazy people with broken brains heard him say the word “lungs.” To repeat, he suggested an “injection inside, or almost a cleaning, because, you see, it gets in the lungs.”

“I do think that disinfectant on the hands could have a very good effect,” Trump told reporters later.

This is more gaslighting. It’s about trying to make people question whether, in their eagerness to criticize Trump, they misheard or misinterpreted him. (Never mind that rubbing bleach or Lysol or other household disinfectants on your hands is also a bad idea, since they will burn your skin.) His two arguments contradict each other — he couldn’t simultaneously have been messing with reporters and making an earnest argument about hand-washing — but in a sense, that’s the point. What the gaslighter wants to do is disorient the target so they begin to question their own sense of reality. Flooding them with a bunch of confusing and logically incoherent claims suits that goal.

Since then, Trump has been ranting incessantly on Twitter, throwing out a bunch of scattershot argumentsover which government officials he addressed his disinfectant comments to, and whether or not he directly said that coronavirus was a “hoax.” He’s referring to the long-ago controversy following a rally in February where he said that fears about the coronavirus — which turned out to be fully justified — were a “hoax.” This was bizarre but entirely typical Trump hedging, indulged in precisely so he could get into quibbling arguments later about what, exactly, he had described as a hoax.

All these insignificant points of litigation — was he talking to Dr. Deborah Birx or Homeland Security Undersecretary Bill Bryan when he made his “injection” comment? Was he talking about the virus itself or merely the fear of the virus when he said “hoax”? — are also forms of gaslighting. It’s about seizing on minor but irrelevant details the target may have gotten wrong to imply that the target’s sense of reality is irrevocably damaged and therefore they can’t be trusted to understand anything at all.

An abuser in a marriage, for instance, might use the fact that his wife once forgot that his favorite shirt is purple, not red, to argue that she is too stupid and crazy to be trusted when she says that he hit her or that he won’t let her see her friends. Trump is pulling the same trick, using minor confusion over the details of that specific press conference as “evidence” that people didn’t hear him correctly when they heard him suggest injecting disinfectants into people’s lungs.

Because gaslighting works differently than garden-variety lying, it requires a different response. With garde- variety lying, it’s often just a matter of supplying a fact check. But gaslighters put the person who is being lied to on the defensive, and try to make the debate over whether the target is mentally stable enough to be trusted, not the content of the gaslighter’s lies. Trump wants the debate to be about what’s in our heads, which is ultimately insubstantial and unprovable, not what the entire world heard him saying with his own mouth.

Defeating gaslighting often requires more of a meta-response. Rolling the tape over and over to confirm that we all heard Trump say the words he actually said certainly helps, but it’s not enough. It’s important to resist getting mired in line-by-line debates over whether people who are horrified by Trump’s disinfectant comments got the color of his tie right. Instead, we should call out these kinds of diversionary tactics, which are meant to force us into a debate about whether our minds are broken and whether we can literally perceive anything at all. That’s not the issue. The issue is that our president is a lazy, arrogant moron who went on TV and spewed fatuous bullshit about how maybe doctors should look into shooting up patients with poisonous chemicals because, y’know, it’s worth a shot.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-tucker-carlson-is-crafting-a-dangerous-and-preposterous-conspiracy-theory-to-prop-up-trump/

no lnx

How Tucker Carlson is crafting a dangerous and preposterous conspiracy theory to prop up Trump

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon April 23, 2020

During the months when Donald Trump thought he could somehow defeat the novel coronavirus by lying, minimizing it and calling concerns about the coming pandemic a “hoax,” most Fox News hosts were right there with him. The one major exception, however, was popular prime time host Tucker Carlson. While Sean Hannity kept calling the coronavirus crisis a “hoax” and Laura Ingraham described people concerned about it as “panic pushers,” Carlson actually criticized Trump and his Fox colleagues for “minimizing what is clearly a very serious problem,” arguing that the virus was “a major event” that “will affect your life.” The fact Trump made a reluctant pivot and began to admit that the coronavirus was a real threat — even though he’s still trying to cover up the spread of the disease — is likely due to Carlson’s pressure.

In fact, the difference between Carlson’s approach and that of his fellow Fox News hosts, especially Hannity, was so pronounced that it likely altered the course of the disease. A new study shows that communities that favored Hannity’s show over Carlson’s show had more cases of COVID-19 and more deaths. The reason is simple: Because Hannity downplayed the seriousness of the coronavirus, his viewers were less likely to follow stay-at-home recommendations and therefore more likely spread the disease.

Don’t get too soft on Tucker, however. He wasn’t motivated by a real concern about the safety of his audience, much less about Americans at large. He simply took a more opportunistic attitude, viewing the inevitable panic and instability that would result from thepandemic as a chance to push his white nationalist views by blaming immigrants. He encouraged people to embrace racist frames that implied people of color were dirtier than white people, and encouraged Trump to use the pandemic as an excuse to shut down immigration. Trump has taken that advice, although his ban — which only affects people seeking green cards, not those seeking temporary work visas — has already been criticized by Carlson, who thinks it doesn’t go far enough.

But now even Carlson’s racism-inflected willingness to take the coronavirus seriously has abruptly ended. Starting at the beginning of April, even after his Fox News colleagues had begun to take the virus more seriously,Carlson switched gears and moved toward a denialist viewpoint. He started attacking public health officials for the stay-at-home orders and saying the economic results of the lockdown were worse than the disease.

(This argument, it should be noted, is entirely false. The notion that the economy would be doing fine with a highly contagious and often deadly disease ripping through the population is asinine. Evidence shows that the economy will not rebound, even if politicians remove the lockdown orders. And, as I’ve repeatedly argued, workers who stay home because they’re sick aren’t any more productive than workers who stay home because they’re under lockdown.)

As happened with his emerging white nationalism, Carlson’s denialist stance towards the coronavirus has only grown more extreme in the past few weeks. Last week, he praised the astroturfed protesters who swarmed state capitals, armed with rifles and Confederate flags, to portray the lockdowns as an elite conspiracy to destroy Trump.

On Wednesday night, Carlson stopped playing footsie with the conspiracy theorists and went full science denial.

“Mass quarantines, they tell us again and again, are the only way to save lives, but that’s a lie,” he said, bizarrely suggesting that quarantines have “never been done” and saying that we “have spent trillions of dollars and crushed millions of people, purely on the guess that a nationwide lockdown would save us from the coronavirus.”

Carlson is lying, which should be obvious without even doing a moment’s worth of historical research. If quarantines are a brand new thing that no one has ever considered before, why do we have a word for the practice? How is it that the word for this novel, unheard-of practice is so common that everyone knows what it means? How many other words does the English language have for things that don’t exist and no one has ever heard of?

Humans figured out quarantines worked before they even knew why they worked. The CDC website I found after a Google search for “history of quarantine” explains that the “practice of quarantine, as we know it, began during the 14th century in an effort to protect coastal cities from plague epidemics,” by holding ships at anchor for 40 days before docking. The website for PBS’ “Nova” dates the practice back to 549 A.D. Boston first instituted maritime quarantines in 1647. Federal management of quarantine orders dates back to the 19th century.

Famous works of literature — including the Bible, with its references to leper colonies — have references to the practice. “The Decameron” by Giovanni Boccaccio, one of the most famous literary works of the Renaissance, is about people telling stories to pass the time as they shelter in place to avoid the bubonic plague. “The Plague” by Albert Camus tells the story of a plague and quarantine measures in a 1940s setting. Why do Romeo and Juliet die in the famous Shakespearean play? Because a messenger with a letter outlining the plan for their survival is waylaid by a quarantine. (Those of us still awaiting Amazon packages can relate.)

Tucker claims he’s the protector of the great traditions of “Western civilization,” mind you, but when it comes to actual history, he’s decided to play ignoramus.

Of course, it’s hardly news that Carlson thinks his audience consists of illiterate morons who don’t know any history prior to 1982, but even for him this is a stretch. People know how disease spreads and why reducing exposure works. Polling shows that not only are Americans broadly supportive of the shelter-in-place orders, but that even a majority of Republicans aren’t keen on ignoring well-established germ theory just because Fox News tells them to.

Still, Carlson is doing this for a reason: He needs to give his audience some excuse to claim that none of this is Trump’s fault. (Narrator: It is Trump’s fault.) He’s offering them a conspiracy theory that these lockdowns aren’t an authentic attempt to slow the spread of a deadly disease, but an invented crisis aimed at bringing down Trump. It’s true that Carlson hasn’t come out and said that, but it’s the only real conclusion one can draw from his accusation that thousands of public health experts, bureaucrats and elected officials are working together (and none are blowing the whistle!) to crash the economy in order to grab “godlike power” for themselves.

There is no small amount of projection in his rant, in which he complains that “mediocre people” are trying to control “when people can get married, which medical procedures you are allowed to have.” The people who are actually interested in doing that are, of course, Republicans who would like to ban same-sex marriage and abortion. But of course, accusing your opponents of doing what you are actually doing is exactly what right-wing conspiracy theorists do.

Carlson’s full-blown Alex Jones-style conspiracy theories aren’t just a threat to our democracy. They’re a threat to the health of his viewers. As the study mentioned earlier in this piece has shown, many Fox News viewers are willing to break the stay-at-home orders to demonstrate their loyalty to Trump and faith in Fox News. Some have already died because of this. Tucker Carlson clearly doesn’t care how many of his own viewers get sick and die. He has a larger agenda: Create some explanation, no matter how preposterous, that deflects the blame for this national catastrophe away from Donald Trump.

420 an

Trump is frantically trying to scapegoat immigrants — but his trollish attempt is laughable on its face

Amanda Marcotte / Salon

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trumps-horrendous-last-ditch-gambit-to-win-re-election-is-scary-as-hell/

no lnx

Trump’s horrendous last-ditch gambit to win re-election is scary as hell

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon April 10, 2020

Thursday night, the access journalism team at the Washington Post published a piece declaring that Donald Trump intends to “reopen much of the U.S.” in May.

“The Trump administration is pushing to reopen much of the country next month,” Matt Zapotosky, Josh Dawsey, Jose A. Del Real and William Wan report, noting that Trump, behind “closed doors,” has “sought a strategy for resuming business activity by May 1.”

This is, needless to say, scary as hell. We’re nowhere near conquering the coronavirus epidemic and, thanks to Trump’s deliberate negligence — born from his desire to conceal the spread of the virus — we have nothing close to the testing capacity necessary to start letting people congregate safely again. Unsurprisingly, the article caused a lot of panic and anger, and reasonably so: There is nothing but downside to “reopening” the economy without a plan to control the spread of the virus.

But not to get too 11th-level chess about it, Trump — or at least his allies — probably aren’t serious about this. Instead, the chatter about “reopening” the economy is very likely more of a political gambit than a serious suggestion.

Trump and his allies know he needs to come up with some argument why the economic devastation we’re facing is not his fault. (It is his fault.) More importantly, they’ll need someone else to blame. This chatter about “reopening” is about laying the groundwork for that. Come fall, Trump will argue that he wanted to save the economy and get everybody back to work, but the “deep state” wouldn’t let him. He’ll try to use this ruined economy as evidence that he should be re-elected to take on this supposed conspiracy of embedded liberal-socialist traitors.

There are a couple of reasons to believe this is more a political gambit than a serious suggestion. For one thing, Trump doesn’t actually have the power to “reopen” the economy, as national security expert Marcy Wheeler pointed out on Twitter. State governments control those, and while at least some red states will no doubt go along with any loony plan Trump rolls out, states like New York, California, Illinois and Massachusetts — which are critical to the economic well-being of the rest of the country — will not play along with a harebrained scheme that causes the already devastating pandemic roaring back to life.

There’s also the coronavirus itself. Even if Trump could wave his magic wand and “reopen” the economy, the rapid spread of COVID-19 would probably do as much, if not more, to wreck the economy as the weeks of quarantine did. Piles of bodies and overwhelmed hospitals are not good for the economy, generally speaking! And it’s not like people will suddenly revert to their previously normal lives when a dangerous disease is still spreading all around them.

Maybe Trump is dumb enough to believe that the economy is like a light you can just switch back on, and everything will then go back to the way it was before. But there are people around him — like Attorney General Bill Barr, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. — who, evil as they may be, understand that there’s no straightforward path “back to normal.” The millions of Americans who’ve become unemployed over the last three weeks won’t magically find new jobs, and recovery from the current economic devastation will be long and difficult.

Yet Mnuchin has been backing Trump up, saying that he believes the economy can be “reopened” as soon as next month. Barr, too, recently declared that current lockdown orders are “draconian” and suggested that some modified form of “social distancing” can be accomplished without telling “people to go home and hide under their bed.”

Barr’s wild caricature of the current state of affairs — no one’s under the bed, and we’re all allowed to leave home for grocery shopping and exercise — hints at the fact that this rhetoric is more political than serious. So is his disingenuous proposal for a version of “social distancing” that is somehow different than what people are currently doing. There is, of course, no such thing and Barr is, of course, blowing piping hot air.

On the propaganda front, we also have the folks at Fox News eagerly pushing this “reopen the economy” line. Some of them, like Sean Hannity, really are diddle-brained fools who don’t realize how bad that would be. But others, like Tucker Carlson, are probably intelligent enough to grasp that such a move would ruin both the economy and public health, and so are floating this as a cynical political ploy rather than an actual policy proposal.

Indeed, there’s no way around a deeply cynical theory of what’s happening here: Trump and his allies are exploiting access journalism, which speaks to the reader’s desire to feel like they have insider knowledge, to spread a dishonest narrative.That narrative is that Trump wants to “reopen” the economy and save everyone’s jobs, even though that’s impossible. And the goal is that when the economy continues to tank, Trump can paint himself as a victim of nefarious forces who thwarted him from making America great again.

Trump wouldn’t actually benefit from “reopening” the economy, after all, and on some level he may understand that. It wouldn’t work the way he implies it would, and it would probably lead to even more economic devastation to go along with the public health catastrophe. But he certainly might benefit from sowing a narrative about how his heroic efforts to save us all were crushed by the oppressive forces of the “deep state.”

There is no evidence that anyone at the White House or in the Republican Party in Congress is even engaging with the various proposed plans out there to reopen the economy. Their lack of interest in taking this seriously is a good sign they are not taking this seriously.

Viewed in this light, it’s likely that right-wing pundits are being deliberately provocative when they say, as Bill O’Reilly recently did, that many “people who are dying [of this virus], both here and around the world, were on their last legs anyway.”

The purpose of that is, in large part, to draw the outraged reaction from liberals that can then be characterized as “political correctness.” Conservatives can then cast themselves as hard-nosed realists who are being suppressed by oversensitive liberals who are willing to tank the economy in a hapless bid to save a handful of people who were going to die anyway.

This simply can’t be stated firmly enough: That’s a horrendous lie. It’s a false dichotomy to pit saving lives against saving the economy. For one thing, you can’t do the latter without doing the former; the viral pandemic is hugely disruptive in and of itself, and not just because of the quarantine. For another, liberals appear to be the only people willing to do what it takes to save the economy, which is not some hasty “reopening,” but a major government stimulus program that pumps in as much money as needed (and then raising taxes the rich to recoup the losses).

But these provocations from O’Reilly and other conservatives who say they don’t mind letting people die to save the economy are surprisingly effective. They generate the desired outrage from liberals and, more important, they pull the focus away from the urgent discussion this country needs to have, which is about how to save lives and rebuild our economy.

This narrative about the “deep state” and “political correctness” is Donald Trump’s last-ditch re-election strategy.Perversely, his false dichotomy between saving lives and saving the economy works better if it remains hypothetical, which is to say, if the economy isn’t “reopened.” That way, Trump can spin fantasies of how great things would have been if we had just listened to him, and claim that conditions only got worse because the snowflake liberals got their way. If he actually could “reopen” the economy, the widespread devastation would speak for itself. He benefits far more from leaving that as a fantasy than from making it a reality.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/republicans-arent-just-trying-to-cheat-at-elections-its-much-worse-than-that/

voter suppress

no lnx

Republicans aren’t just trying to cheat at elections — it’s much worse than that

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon April 8, 2020

The Wisconsin Republican Party has been at the cutting edge of the efforts to make sure few, if any, Democratic voters ever make it to the polls again. Under the guidance of former Republican governor Scott Walker, a stalwart opponent of food having flavor, the state enacted a dizzying program of voter suppression, requiring people to have updated government-issued IDs while simultaneously making those IDs much harder to get, especially for people of color. They also suppressed the college student vote by banning most student IDs as a legitimate form of identification.

From the beginning of this war on voters, which has been spread out across the country, it’s been understood primarily as a partisan power grab, an attempt to keep certain constituencies from voting because they tend to vote for Democrats. Even Donald Trump, always saying the quiet parts out loud, said recently that if voting by mail becomes widespread, “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

This partisan understanding has, unfortunately, effectively muted both press coverage of this widespread voter suppression and public outrage. Covering this story necessarily requires portraying Republicans as villains and Democrats as victims, since that’s the truth. Unfortunately, mainstream journalists, always wary of being seen as “biased,” have almost universally reacted by underplaying this story, leaving it instead to left-leaning outlets like Mother Jones. Many Americans, drunk on the myth that all politicians are corrupt and always looking for an angle, tune out Democratic complaints about voter suppression as more partisan sniping.

But what’s happening in Wisconsin this week defies the usual partisan understanding of voter suppression. Wisconsin Republicans are exploiting the coronavirus to keep everyone from voting. It’s a preview not just of the way Republicans will use this crisis to shut down voting in particular instances, but an expansion of their anti-voting views in general.It’s starting to look like the Republican war on voting isn’t just about partisan gain, but even more about a deep hostility to democracy itself, and an objection to very idea of letting the people choose their leaders.

On Monday, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, signed an executive order delaying the election scheduled for April 7 until June. His reason was simple enough: People can’t maintain state-mandated social distancing and also vote. In addition, the majority of poll volunteers are over 60 and in a high-risk group and can’t come out at all. Many polling locations had already been closed due to staffing shortages, which ensures that crowds will be even thicker at the ones that remain open, leading to more danger of spreading the coronavirus.

Republicans in the state sued to end Evers’ order, and the conservative-controlled state Supreme Court sided with them, so now the election will go forward as originally scheduled. In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that absentee ballots have to be postmarked today — even though many voters haven’t even gotten their ballots yet.

This decision will “disenfranchise untold thousands of Wisconsin voters and consign an unknown number of Wisconsinites to their deaths,” Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said in a statement.

But what’s particularly strange about the Republican insistence on holding election today, in a naked bid to reduce the Badger State turnout to practically nothing, is that it’s not at all clear this will benefit Republicans in the short term.

It’s true that, typically, higher voter turnout tends to benefit Democrats over Republicans. That’s because Democratic-leaning voters significantly outnumber Republicans, but Democrats tend to be younger and less well-to-do on average, and therefore are more likely to skip voting. That’s why voter suppression techniques typically focus on making it hard for younger or poorer people to vote.

But no one can be sure that the coronavirus voter suppression will work the same way, because the people at most risk tend to be older — and therefore more likely to vote Republican. And while there are some general election races on the ballot, including important judicial contests, the most high-profile race is still the Democratic presidential primary, which could create more incentive for Democrats to risk coming out while Republicans sit at home.

That fact hasn’t slowed down Wisconsin Republicans one bit, however. It’s not hard to grasp the reason: This isn’t just about winning elections by cheating, as it’s commonly understood. It’s also about a deep loathing among conservatives for the very idea of democracy, and a compulsive need to shut as many people as possible out of the process of choosing their own leaders.

This is also true on a national scale. There’s increasing pressure, in the wake of the coronavirus, to make mail-in ballots the norm across the country, as it is in states like California and Oregon. Republicans, however, have made no bones about the fact that they will fight any and all such measures until the end of time.

That makes sense as a partisan move in normal times, because the evidence is clear that Democrats fare well in states with mail-in ballots. But in the age of the coronavirus, the most obvious beneficiaries of universal mail-in ballots would voters over 65, a demographic in which Trump won 52% of the vote in 2016. Meanwhile, the group that would feel the least fear about showing up to the polls, because they’re far less likely to face serious complications from COVID-19, is voters aged 18 to 29, most of whom voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Ultimately, it seems that taking a stand against democracy itself matters more to Republicans than worrying about how the coronavirus crisis has shifted partisan incentives.

This fits an overall pattern of Republicans instinctively choosing authoritarianism over democracy at every turn.Attorney General Bill Barr, for instance, has spent his career pushing for a virtually unlimited level of presidential power and a deep hostility toward allowing Congress to hold the president accountable — even though such unlimited powers would be held by the next Democratic president as well. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s single-minded focus on packing the judiciary with conservative judges is about his desire to monopolize power, of course, but it also bespeaks an enthusiasm for the fact that federal judges don’t have to answer to the public and can rewrite the law without fear of losing an election.

The rise of authoritarianism on the right has coincided with conservatives’ growing realization that Republicans can’t win elections fair and square anymore. But it’s also true that for the right authoritarianism is a reward in and of itself, so much so that Republicans are willing to risk short-term electoral losses for the long-term goal of whittling down democracy into nothingness.

The Republican war on voting, therefore, shouldn’t be understood purely through the lens of electoral gamemanship. That allows both journalists and ordinary voters to treat voter suppression less seriously, as another form of politics as usual. Instead, it’s important to understand that Republican politicians see fewer people voting as an important goal, in and of itself. They’ve largely focused on keeping Democrats from voting up till now, but it sure looks like they’d be just fine with a situation where barely anyone, of any party, voted at all.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/heres-why-the-tormented-conservative-mind-is-so-drawn-to-the-dangerous-allure-of-miracle-drugs/

no lnx

Here’s why the tormented conservative mind is so drawn to the dangerous allure of miracle drugs

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon April 3, 2020

In one of the oddest developments of the coronavirus crisis, there’s been a run on a pair ofantimalarial drugs, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, which are used primarily in the U.S. to treat arthritis and to prevent organ damage from lupus. The drugs are being sucked out of pharmacies at an alarming rate, thanks to Americans who have convinced themselves these drugs will save them if the develop COVID-19, and thereby leaving patients who actually need these medications in danger.

This is happening in the face of only thin evidence that these drugs work against the novel coronavirus, and plenty of evidence that they don’t work. At one Paris hospital that used the drug heavily — on the recommendation ofDidier Raoult, a climate change-denying French doctor with a shady reputation— the results suggest these drugs are not effective at all. Chinese doctors also concluded they were useless. These drugs are known to have some scary side effects, including sudden cardiac death in some patients. They are also notorious for psychological side effects, such as paranoia and nightmares. At least one person in the U.S. has died from swallowing aquarium cleaner that contains a similar chemical compound.

So why are so many people so eager to get their hands on drugs that are clearly dangerous and may do no good?

The most immediate reason is simple: The people rushing the pharmacies are Republicans, and both Donald Trump and numerous Fox News personalities have told them these drugs are a “game-changer” that can save them from the coronavirus.

But there’s a reason these false or unproven claims are resonating with the ordinary citizens of Trumpistan. The hope that there’s a hard-to-get miracle cure that will save them speaks directly to the poisonous social Darwinism that guides modern conservatism. It reflects deep hostility to the very concept of a shared public good and a fierce attachment to a racialized ideology of individualism that treats public goods such as health care as things to be hoarded by those with the privilege, money and status to do so.

Conservative ideology simply doesn’t allow for the possibility that anything, including pandemic management, is best managed with a “we’re all in this together” mentality. Instead they’re drawn to this fantasy that there’s a Platinum Member COVID-19 status that can be purchased, which will allow them to opt out of the suffering of the plebeian class that has to quarantine or risk sickness and death.

There’s no question that Trump and other right-wing figures are pushing this hydroxychloroquine angle hard. Trump has talked about these drugs several times during his daily propaganda-dump “press briefings,” as well as on Twitter.

Laura Ingraham of Fox News has been hyping this stuff heavily, hosting a doctor who misleadingly argued that “this is the beginning of the end of the pandemic” Wednesday night. She’s also had tweets removed by Twitter for promoting medical disinformation.

Sean Hannity of Fox News has been urging his millions of viewers to grab this stuff up as well, saying “I love the idea of off label use” and arguing that even if it doesn’t work, people have “right to try”— completely ignoring that these drugs are dangerous.

There are many other examples, carefully collected here by Media Matters. This kind of repetition works, and goes a long way towards explaining how enthusiastically right-wing audiences have latched onto these drugs as a possible miracle cure.

But hydroxychloroquine mania also flows from the rigidly hierarchical view conservatives hold of society, one where even basic necessities like health care should be differentiated along class and race lines. Public health measures like quarantine and vaccine are viewed suspiciously precisely because they involve everyone on an approximately equal basis. They long for a special kind of medical care, one that’s just for the people they see as better than everyone else.

This attitude has manifested in many ways before this crisis, most notably around the debate over health care policy. For progressives, the conservative resistance to a single-payer health care system is baffling, even viewed from the perspective of pure self-interest. Private insurance is expensive and unreliable, and since your plan is constantly changing, it can makes basic things like keeping a steady relationship with a doctor nearly impossible. A single plan for all Americans that covers us all in the same way would be cheaper and more efficient and take a lot of pain out of seeking medical care when you need it. That seems obvious.

But that’s just what conservatives don’t like about it: They don’t want a single plan for all Americans.The very idea of having the exact same health care plan as people they see as beneath them, especially lower-income people of color, causes an angry reaction. That’s what all the right-wing hysteria over “rationing,” in response to both Obamacare and the possibility of Medicare for All, is ultimately about.It’s not that you might have to wait in line for something like knee surgery, because that’s already happening under our patchwork private-insurance system. It’s that people you deem unworthy, due to skin color or class status, also get to wait in line and — heaven forbid — might be ahead of you.

(This attitude also explains the longstanding right-wing desire to police the food purchases of people on food stamps, to make sure they are sticking with “their” food and not buying conservatives feel are reserved for true and upstanding Americans. It also explains the often-hysterical levels of right-wing hostility to public transportation, which can be traced back to the end of the practice of sending black people to the back of the bus.)

In this worldview, certain kinds of health care are for grubby commoners, while the well-off white homeowner class should have its own elite status. This is also part of the reason that the anti-vaccination movementhas taken off in this country. Vaccinations, after all, are an unpleasant reminder that disease has no respect class or race, but sees all humans as basically equal, which very much does not fit with conservative ideology.

Unsurprisingly, then, anti-vaxxer attitudes have taken hold on the right, especially in the religious right, which has long been tightly intertwined with a hostility to the government defining and controlling public goods, and has favored widespread privatization of everything from education to welfare.

A lot of people believe that anti-vaccination attitudes are most common among New Age-style leftists, but in reality, Republicans are more likely to oppose mandatory vaccinations than Democrats. It’s largely Republican elected officials who are trying to roll back laws requiring vaccinations, and the religious right has increasingly promoted the idea that it’s better for kids to simply get diseases like the chicken pox than to vaccinate them.

It’s true that anti-vaccination ideology started off in lefty circles, but that happened largely among well-off white people who may vote Democratic but tend to live in highly segregated communities and tend to embrace reactionary ideologies like “attachment parenting” that prevent women from having employment outside of the home. Ultimately, the logic of anti-vaccination comes down to a belief that an elite lifestyle of organic foods and helicopter mothering precludes the need for sharing the same health care common people use, including universal vaccination. That this mentality would leap to Republicans, who would lean into it even harder, isn’t really a surprise.

The irony of the anti-vaccination movement is that the “elite” form of health care — organic food, a mother’s unwavering attention, chicken pox parties — is less effective than the universal policy that’s under disdain, which is vaccination. But that kind of logic, where reactionaries turn up their noses at the common good since it also benefits the proletariat, is hardly limited to health care. It’s also evident in everything from rejecting the local taco stand to thinking that hip-hop isn’t “real” music.

That tormented way of thinking is what’s driving the conservative enthusiasm for hydroxychloroquine. The drug probably doesn’t work, and the side effects are scary. But getting a prescription for it helps set one apart from ordinary working people who are doing the stuff public health officials prescribe, such as washing their hands a lot and staying home (even though, for many, it’s meant the loss of jobs and steady income).

Even if a coronavirus vaccine is developed relatively quickly, don’t be surprised if many conservatives prefer the fantasy of hydroxychloroquine over having to submit themselves to the same jab that janitors and hamburger flippers will line up for. Most working-class people can’t afford to turn their backs on effective, preventative health care when they can get it.

covid proves workers vs ceo job creator BS

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/america-is-entering-another-great-depression

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/the-christian-rights-perverse-hostility-to-science-is-definitely-going-to-get-people-killed/

no lnx

The Christian right’s perverse hostility to science is definitely going to get people killed

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon March 26, 2020

Scientists and health experts largely agree on the steps needed to fight COVID-19, the rapidly spreading new coronavirus: Widespread testing, if possible. Widespread and often stringent social distancing protocols in communities where it’s taken root, to slow the spread. Hygienic practices like frequent hand-washing and sterilizing commonly touched surfaces. Protective gear, like masks in medical settings, to keep health care professionals from catching it and spreading it.

But when it comes to conservative evangelical Christians, who are already hostile to science on many levels, advice from health experts is all too often being treated as something that can be dismissed out of hand, if it threatens the political or theological goals of their movement.

To be clear, Christian right leaders aren’t denying that coronavirus is a real problem (at least not anymore). If anything, the bevy of snake oil salesman who call themselves ministers sees the panic around the virus as a marketing opportunity to make money from selling dangerous supplements, to declare the virus can be beaten with the power of prayer and to declare that the pandemic is a divine punishment inflicted on sinners.

But Christian right leaders are also not about to let medical science supersede their authority, much less get in the way of their quest for power and cold, hard cash. Because of this, the Christian right has become a vector of bad advice, misinformation and dreadful business decisions that are directly threatening the health not just of their followers, but the public at large.

Jerry Falwell Jr., the shamelessly greedy president of Liberty University, has spent weeks downplaying the coronavirus threat, accusing the media of wildly exaggerating it to “destroy the American economy” and of course to damage Donald Trump. While nearly every university and college in the country has shut down their campuses and moved to online teaching to prevent the spread of COVID-19, Falwell seems determined to keep Liberty open.

Falwell is already allowing students back on campus, claiming it’s more imporant “to give [students] the ability to be with their friends, to continue their studies, enjoy the room and board they’ve already paid for and to not interrupt their college life.”

Roy Moore, the Christian right figurehead and twice-failed Senate candidate brought low by multiple accusations of sexual misconduct, is similarly defiant of the calls for social distancing that threaten to disrupt in-person church activities.

“I am writing a letter to pastors on the duty to continue church assemblies, even in the midst of these trying times,” Moore wrote in an open letter, adding on Twitter that “churches are closed by tyrants who pander fear in the place of faith in God.”

Moore invoked the example of Dr. Benjamin Rush, the Declaration of Independence signer who stayed in Philadelphia and caught yellow fever during an epidemic in the 1790s. Of course, Rush risked his life to save people with his medical expertise, an entirely different situation than a pastor insisting that people must come to church.

To be clear, most churches, especially mainline Protestant and Catholic churches, are prioritizing the health of members and closing their doors for the duration the crisis, often pointing believers to online services. But the pressure to keep the doors open, when it comes from someone like Moore, is no small thing. He may seem like an offensive joke to many liberals, but Moore has immense influence in the world of evangelical Christianity, which often favors megachurches that gather hundreds or even thousands of people at once, and whose pastors have been reluctant to close their doors. Reports suggest many of these churches are defiantly refusing to cancel services.

Along with pastors who want those collection plates to keep flowing, at least one wealthy and prominent Christian right family is determined to keep its business open to the public. David Green, the owner of Hobby Lobby, is keeping most of his stores open during the pandemic, except those actually forced to shut down by local governments.

His reason? His wife, Barbara Green, prayed about it and decided to focus instead on “profound words to remind us that He’s in control.” Those words were “Guide, Guard and Groom,” though the P-word, “profit,” may also play a role.

The Green family, let’s remember, was behind a recent lawsuit in which the Supreme Court granted privately held corporations the right to block their employees from using health insurance plans to pay for contraception. The case was presented by the Greens and their religious right allies as a relatively minor question of balancing reproductive rights against religious freedom. In reality, the case was about opening the door, both legally and culturally, to Christian right demands that arbitrary religious beliefs should trump human rights, public health, science and government authority.

The presumption undergirding the Hobby Lobby case — that Christian conservatives should be able to defy the laws that the rest of us are bound by — wasn’t taken seriously by many people in mainstream politics at the time, perhaps because the victims were low-income female employees who wanted access to contraception. But post-Hobby Lobby, the Christian conservative belief that they’re entitled to exempt themselves from any laws or public health regulations they disagree with is shaping the reaction to the coronavirus — and threatening the health of everyone in the country.

Ilyse Hogue of NARAL pointed this out on Twitter Wednesday night, writing that Republicans have been co-opted by “a radical right for whom fundamentalism [has] completely supplanted any rational thought or science and data-based policy approaches.”

“We’ve seen them use disinformation” to block access to contraception, suppress LGBT rights and close abortion clinics, she noted, adding that “now they’re doing it at a national scale during a global pandemic.”

Indeed, the power the religious right now wields through the White House only amplifies the dangerous impact of its anti-science views on the coronavirus response. Vice President Mike Pence — a Christian conservative with a long history of anti-science views, including both denying that condoms are safe and cigarettes are dangerous — is running the White House coronavirus task force, which is no doubt one of the big reasons the U.S. has one of the worst responses to the pandemic in the world. Pence is also wasting time on conference calls with religious right leaders who are more interested in exploiting this crisis to force women to give birth against their will than in preventing thousands or millions of people from dying.

Trump himself has surrounded himself with a phalanx of Christian right pastors who are eager to lie to their flocks about what a great leader he is and to amplify his relentless drumbeat of lies and misinformation. This includes Dave Kubal, the head of Intercessors for America, who told an audience on a prayer call last week that coronavirus “testing has limited value.” This is flat-out untrue — testing has been a critical element in every country that’s been able to get the virus under control — but it suits Trump’s approach to the disease, which has been to minimize testing access in hopes of keeping the official number of cases artificially low.

The Christian right has always been a threat to public health. They were a threat during the AIDS crisis, when they successfully exerted pressure on Republican leaders to minimize the disease, which conservative Christians saw as a punishment for sinful behavior. They have contributed to the spread of all manner of STIs, in fact, by convincing schools to replace sex education with programs meant to discourage the use of condoms. They’ve encouraged fear of vaccinations, especially the HPV vaccine that prevents cervical and other forms of cancer, for no other reason except that HPV is an STI and therefore viewed, sigh, as punishment for sinners. They’ve blocked access to contraception and abortion to punish women for having sex, even though unwanted childbirth is linked to poorer health outcomes for women and children.

But this renegade right-wing movement has been allowed to run rampant because their cruelty and hostility to science primarily affected marginalized people, especially low-income women and LGBTQ people. Now their attitudes are a threat to everyone, rich or poor, of every race or gender or faith (including no faith). But the sad truth is that as long as Christian right leaders keep on shilling for Republicans, the party will close its eyes and embrace them, no matter how many people have to die.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/how-the-coronavirus-crisis-revealed-the-danger-of-the-decades-long-conservative-movement/

no lnx

How the coronavirus crisis revealed the danger of the decades-long conservative movement

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon March 13, 2020

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell smelled an evil liberal conspiracy on Thursday, one designed to steal away his decades of tireless work to kneecap the federal government. The Democratic-majority House had passed a large emergency bill, designed to combat the coronavirus pandemic, and McConnell was absolutely certain Democrats, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were trying to pull one over on him.

“Unfortunately, it appears at this hour that the speaker and House Democrats instead chose to produce an ideological wish list that was not tailored closely to the circumstances,” McConnell said. He accused Democrats of exploiting this situation, saying the bill addresses “various areas of policy that are barely related, if at all, to the issue before us.”

There’s a lot at stake here, but apparently the big sticking point for McConnell was a provision requiring employers to offer paid sick leave to employees, which McConnell claims would “put thousands of small businesses at risk.”

In reality, of course, this is just common sense. As the New York Times editorial board noted, companies that don’t offer paid sick leave “are endangering their workers and customers.” A lot of workers with public-facing jobs — such as food service workers and retail employees — come into close contact with dozens or hundreds of people a day. But they are the people least likely to be allowed to stay home without losing their jobs, or at least losing a paycheck.

McConnell is so poisoned by his right-wing ideology that he can’t see this, or chooses not to. Instead, he’s standing firm on the long-standing Republican tendency to view employers as feudal lords who should be allowed to treat employees however they wish — even, apparently, if that means allowing a deadly disease to rip through the population, potentially killing hundreds of thousands of people if it is not checked.

So far, most of the panic over the coronavirus outbreak has been driven by the undeniable incompetence of Donald Trump. At every turn, Trump has made this situation worse — even going so far as to try to discourage testing to bamboozle the public and, I suspect, tanking the markets by screwing up an Oval Office address because he’s too vain to wear glasses so he can see well enough to read a teleprompter.

That’s all true. But it’s also important to understand that the larger Republican Party, even without Trump, is also to blame for what looks to be a serious public health crisis. Right-wing ideology, often marketed as “rugged individualism” but perhaps better understood as an aversion to the very concept of a common good, is one major reason why the U.S. government, hamstrung for decades by Republican power, isn’t better equipped to handle a crisis.

This isn’t just a Trump problem. This is a widespread Republican problem. For decades, GOP strategy has been consistent: Whenever they get power, they slash regulations and gut spending, with the goal of making government less effective. This is a deliberate strategy to make the public broadly distrustful of government, and therefore increasingly open to shifting more and more power to the wealthy individuals who control the private sector.

This ideological commitment to an every-man-for-himself ideology, which is terrible in any circumstances, is exposed as particularly dreadful in the face of a pandemic. Disease is a reminder that humans are a herd species, wholly dependent on each other for survival, and that government must be a way to formally organize that joint survival pattern. It’s not some villain in a racism-inflected right-wing morality fable about the importance of “personal responsibility.”

Simply put, we need our government to be able to protect us from disease. Republicans have spent years tearing it down, and even in a crisis are incapable of accepting that “small government” is not always a good thing.

As Max Moran at Talking Points Memo argued, the fact that Vice President Mike Pence — deemed a “normal” Republican — is in charge of the coronavirus comforts some people, because they believe he is more adult and responsible than Trump. Pence’s track record suggests otherwise. As governor of Indiana, he oversaw an HIV outbreak that led to 10% of the population people in a single county becoming infected because Pence thought preaching the value of personal responsibility was better than following the recommendations of public health experts.

“[A] Pence-led response is dangerous, not in spite of, but precisely because he is a typical Republican,” Moran writes, because normal Republicans “apply their competence and considerable resources” to the task of “protection for the powerful, callousness for the afflicted, and a special disdain for the ‘other.'”

The right-wing idiocy that is going to get people killed is all over the Republican response to this situation. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy joined McConnell in denouncing the Democratic bill, even though everything in it — including expanding food-stamp spending — will either help slow the spread of the disease or stimulate the American economy to offset the inevitable slowdown caused by this epidemic.

Instead, McCarthy is resorting to racism instead of sensible public health measures, calling the coronavirus the “Chinese coronavirus” for no apparent purpose except to feed the assumptions of the Fox News base than their whiteness and their racist attitudes will somehow protect them. (This assumption, by the way, is leading many older Americans to take serious and completely unnecessary risks with their health.)

The right-wing ideology poisoning is so bad that the coronavirus bill was held up in part because Republicans wanted to inject some anti-abortion language into it. There is absolutely no reason to believe that helping people protect themselves against a viral epidemic will lead to more abortions, but that’s the modern GOP for you: They’re always worried that somehow or other the Democrats have a sneaky agenda to “let” women have sex. (Which women will undoubtedly do, whether the Democrats authorize it or not.)

Even the so-called Republican “moderates” are to blame for this situation. For instance, Politico reporter Michael Grunwald uncovered this little tidbit about Sen. Susan Collins of Maine from his book about the Obama era.

Michael Grunwald

@MikeGrunwald

I had forgotten my own reporting that @SenatorCollins stripped $870M for pandemic preparations out of the 2009 stimulus.

Zooming out, it’s easy to see how decades of damage to our government are likely to make this epidemic worse. Republicans have been stingy about health care spending and have blocked Democratic efforts to increase access, especially when it comes to the Medicaid expansion under the Obama administration. The result is that we have fewer doctors and hospitals ready to handle what we know is coming, and we will probably have a lot of infected people who won’t get tested, either because they can’t afford it or don’t even know where to go for testing and treatment.

By all means, blame Trump for the current crisis. His incompetence is especially central to the panicked reaction of the financial markets. Even a slightly steadier president, whatever his or her party or ideology, would bolster investor confidence a whole lot more.

But this isn’t just about Trump. Republicans have a profound hostility to good government, and whatever slapdash response they may grudgingly accept in an effort to save their skins at the ballot box this November will be hamstrung by the fact that they refused, for decades, to invest in the infrastructure necessary to weather the big shock that is hitting us right now. Viruses are the ultimate reminder that humans are interconnected and need each other, and that the ideal of “rugged individualism” is childish and often racist nonsense.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/rise-of-a-shadow-political-party-how-christian-nationalists-worship-power-and-why-they-love-trump/

no lnx

Rise of a ‘shadow political party’: How Christian nationalists worship power — and why they love Trump

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon March 4, 2020

It’s one of the most enduring conundrums of the Donald Trump era: How is it that the Christian right, the self-appointed monitors of American morality, have come to so enthusiastically back a thrice-married chronic adulterer who lies as easily as he breathes?

Author Katherine Stewart has the answer: Because the true god these folks worship is power. In her book, “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism,” Stewart details how she traveled around the country, getting to know the various Christian conservative figures that are whipping support for Trump and his agenda. She deems the “Christian nationalists” and demonstrates how their supposedly Christian values always come second to their endless quest for power.

Stewart spoke with Salon about her new book. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

In the intro of the book you write that most Americans view the Christian right as a “cultural movement centered on a set of social issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage.” But in fact, it’s a political movement and its ultimate goal is power. What do you mean by that?

I think when we think of the religious right, we’re often thinking of a cultural movement or social movement that works from the bottom up, expressing the anxieties and reactions of a particular group in American society to change social realities, focused on issues like reproductive rights or same-sex marriage.But Christian nationalism really works from the top down. It actively shapes and manipulates its target population, and it often shifts its target.

When movement leaders are talking to the congregants or to pastors who speak to congregants, it’s all abortion all the time. The foot soldiers may even believe that they’re fighting for things like a ban on abortion or same-sex marriage, but the leaders have actually consciously reframed these issues in such a way that they can control the vote of a large subsection of the American public. They use that to solidify and maintain political power for themselves and their allies, to increase the flow of public and private money in their direction, and to enact economic policies that are favorable to their funders.

When you dig a little deeper into what the movement leaders talk about when they talk with one another, they actually advocate for a very wide range of policy issues that don’t just have to do with abortion or same-sex marriage. A lot of it has to do with economic policy. A lot of it has to do with foreign policy, social policy. It’s important to look at the movement in this broader fashion as a political movement that wants power.

Tell me more about that. How does someone argue that there’s something Christian about, say, low tax and low regulation?

They say that the Bible favors minimal government or no government. The Bible is against regulation, against the social safety net. Unless the social safety net is managed by the church.

Someone like Ralph Drollinger — who targets political leaders at the top levels of government — he’s got this Bible study group in the Capitol that’s been attended by at least 11 members of Trump’s cabinet, including Mike Pence. He also has Bible study groups targeting the Senate and House of Representatives, and they’re very well-attended. So he’s arguably one of the most politically influential pastors in America.

He argues that social welfare programs have no basis in Scripture. He says that the government should not directly fund needs for the poor. He says the responsibility to meet the needs of the poor lies first with a husband and a marriage, second with a family if the husband is absent, and third with the church. He says nowhere does God command the institutions of government or commerce to fully support those with genuine needs.

These policies are incredibly favorable to the plutocratic fortunes that are funding the movement. The movement wouldn’t be what it is without some subsection of very wealthy individuals and extended families that are supporting the movement financially. I’m thinking of like theDeVos, Prince families, the Green family, and so many others that I described in my book.

These families, in turn, benefit from a deregulation of lack of environmental control regulation, low taxation, and minimal workers’ rights. Drollinger himself derived a lot of his early funding from agribusiness kings, people who own large agribusiness conglomerates in Central Valley,California, and the San Joaquin Valley. So it’s a kind of economic policy that actually is favorable to many of the big-picture funders of the movement.

We also have to recognize that the role of public money is absolutely huge. A lot of the calls for “religious freedom” that characterize much of the activism of the movement today are often seen, rightly so, as a demand that conservative Christians should be able to discriminate against LGBT Americans, nonreligious women and members of the religious minority groups. But even more than that, activists have their eye on a vast potential flow of public funds in the future. This is one of the reasons why the calls for religious freedom are just like this ever-louder drum beat that we’re hearing in so many places.

This agenda has been made really explicit in the field of public educationwhere activists are determined to expand access to public funds in the form of vouchers. They’ve actually placed a key voucher case before the Supreme Court, which they hope will allow a greater funnel of funds in their direction.

The United States spends something like $700 billion a year on K-12. So Christian nationalists realize that, if they can get their hands on a small portion of that in the name of religious liberty, the money will flow without end. So when you look at the larger demands of the movement, it’s not just about these culture war issues, it’s about public policy, foreign policy, and it’s about money.

You call it a Christian nationalist movement, not a white nationalist movement, not the Christian right even. Why do you call it a Christian nationalist movement?

Christian nationalism is a political ideology. It says that what makes the United States distinctive is not our democratic system of government, or our Constitution, or our history of assimilating diverse people in a pluralist society. Instead, it insists that the foundation of legitimate government is bound up inextricably with the reactionary understanding of a particular religion. It basically says that the U.S. was founded on the Bible, and can only succeed if it stays true to that foundation.

It’s also not just an ideology, but a device for mobilizing and often manipulating large segments of the population and for concentrating power in the hands of this new elite. Vladimir Putin in Russia, or Viktor Orban in Hungary, or Erdogan in Turkey tie themselves closely to religious conservatives in their countries, to consolidate an authoritarian form of power. We’re seeing this today with Trump’s alliances, with our own religious conservatives.

You write that America’s conservative churches have been converted into “loyal cells of a shadow political party.” What do you mean by that?

Leaders of the movement have figured out that pastors drive votes, and so they organize pastors into these networks, to get them on the same page politically.They give themtools through networks of conservative churchesin order to do that, to help them turn out votes for hyper-conservative candidates.

Recently, I found myself at a small church in rural North Carolina, with dozens of evangelical pastors from the area. I was at an event sponsored by an organization called Watchmen on the Wall, which is an initiative of the Family Research Council, which is one of the largest and most powerful policy groups of the Christian right.

Watchmen on the Wall claims to have over 25,000 pastor members. They get all these pastors networked together, and they have these presentations where they tell them what issues matter and how to turn out the vote on these “biblical issues.” There wasn’t a slightest doubt about which way these pastors were expected to tell their congregations to vote.

They were instructed to form what they call culture impact teamswithin their churches. They have to figure out which members of their congregation are politically active, well-connected with other members, and motivated to get them to vote according to “biblical values.” They gave these pastors these booklets, 200 pages of material that help them form these culture impact teams.

They actually give them tools to get them out to vote. They give them tens of thousands of voter guides, and pastors were encouraged to take as many as they could use and hand out.

Your chapter on the anti-abortion movement in the book is titled “Inventing Abortion.” You write that it’s a myth that the movement was a reaction to a sincere belief in protecting fetal life. Tell me more. What is this Christian right obsession with abortion? Where does it come from? What is it actually about?

When Roe v. Wade was passed, the liberalization of abortion laws was something that many, if not most, Republican partisans supported. The early battles over abortion tended to be between Catholics and Protestants, with Protestants largely on the side of liberalization of abortion laws. Even though Catholic hierarchy is opposed to abortion, many Catholic individuals supported some form of liberalization based on sort of lived experience.

At that time that Roe v. Wade passed, the abortion law reform really conformed with the Republican party’s support for Protestant values, birth control. Billy Graham in 1968 said, “In general, I would disagree with the Catholic stance. I believe in Planned Parenthood.”

The most liberal abortion law in the country was signed in 1967 by California’s Republican governor, Ronald Reagan. Barry Goldwater, who is this great conservative hero, supported abortion law liberalization early in his career. His wife, Peggy, was a co-founder of Planned Parenthood in Arizona.

When Roe v. Wade passed, in fact, there was a wire service run by the Southern Baptist Convention. The bureau chief of the Baptist Press wrote a piece saying that religious liberty, human equality, and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court decision.

This was not an issue that united the Republican party at all, until activists from the new right got involved and were really searching for an issue that could unite the party.

At the time, they’d come together out of concern that institutions like Bob Jones University would be deprived of their lucrative tax advantage. But they knew that preserving tax advantages for racially segregated academies is not going to be an issue that could really unite the party. So they kind of looked around for an issue that could unite conservative Catholics and conservative Protestants.

Bit by bit, they settled on abortion and sort of purged the Republican party of its pro-choice representatives. They needed a single issue that they could get people to vote on, and abortion became that issue.

Let’s talk about Donald Trump. He’s obviously not a religious man. He knows little of Christian theology. He can’t even get the terminology right. He can’t really even be bothered to pretend otherwise. So how is a man like that such a hero to the Christian nationalists?

First, the movement realizes that much of their agenda is advanced through the courts and he’s delivering them everything that he promised.

I was at a Road To Majority conference, that’s Ralph Reed’s conference, right before the election. Trump held up a list of justices and he said, “I’m going to choose Supreme Court justices from this list,” and every single one of them was pro-life. Of course, the issue wasn’t just abortion, but abortion becomes code for the entire agenda.

There’s that transactional side of it. But I think that there’s another side too. Trump’s anti-democratic attributes are a vital part of his attraction for this movement.

This movement doesn’t really believe in modern representative democracy. At bottom, they sound as though they prefer autocrats. In fact, what they really want is a king. Paula White is always calling Trump a king. Ralph Drollinger is always talking about kinging and kings. Trump has been referred to as King Cyrus.

The thing about kings like Cyrus is that they don’t have to follow the rules. They are the law. Trump understands this longing for the hard hand of the despot. That is what has made him such an attractive leader to this movement.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/how-trump-has-brought-the-entire-republican-party-to-the-point-of-no-return/

no lnx

How Trump has brought the entire Republican Party to the point of no return

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon January 31, 2020

There are many theories about when it was exactly that Republicans lost their minds. Some will point out, correctly, that the strain of reality-free conspiracy-mongering that defines the Donald Trump presidency dates back at least to the era of Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society. Others will note Richard Nixon’s reliance on the “Southern strategy,” which helped remake the GOP into a white ethno-nationalist party that was capable of nominating Trump. Still others will point to the Tea Party, which was reported at the time as somehow an anti-tax movement, but now looks clearly like a panicked, racist reaction to the election of Barack Obama, and resulted in a purging of any moderate or reality-based impulses in the Republican ranks.

But whenever it started, I think it’s safe to say that the upcoming votes in the Senate impeachment trial, in which the Republican Senate majority will hold tight to prevent any witnesses from testifying and will then vote to acquit Trump, will mark a point of no return for the Republican Party.

Even considering how lost to reason and reality Republicans have been for years now, there’s something final and official about going on the record to register their collective belief that facts don’t matter and that democracy, to them, is little more than an obstacle in the way of their efforts to maintain power.

That Republicans would pull together to turn the Senate trial into a sham aimed at covering up Trump’s crimes has been regarded as a foregone conclusion from before the moment that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced the impeachment inquiry months ago. Despite this, I suspect it will be a gut punch all the same when the entire Republican Party comes together to “acquit” Trump despite the inarguable evidence that he is guilty.

They are not voting to declare the president innocent of the charges against him, since that is clearly absurd. They are voting to announce that, in their eyes, there’s no limit to what can or should be done to maintain the Republican hold on power.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., all but admitted as much Thursday, in a series of tweets acknowledging that the accusation against Trump — that he withheld military aid and political support for Ukraine in order to force that struggling nation’s president to help him cheat in the election — “has already been proven.” But Trump’s behavior, Alexander claimed, was merely “inappropriate” but “does not meet the U.S. Constitution’s high bar for an impeachable offense.”

This is, of course, nonsense. As the constitutional expert Pamela Karlan, who testified before the House in December, argued, the founders literally created the impeachment powers to mitigate “the risk that unscrupulous officials might try to rig the election process.”

Alexander openly giving his blessing to presidents using their powers of office to cheat in elections — or to Republican presidents, anyway — illustrates why the twin votes to shut down witness testimony and to acquit Trump should be understood as the consummation of the GOP’s long courtship with authoritarianism.

This will be the final note of a long process in which the Republicans allowed arguments in the Congressional Record, most notably from fabled defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz, defending a president’s “right” to cheat in elections, and then affirmed this belief with a formal vote.

Dershowitz is now running around, making incoherent claims that he wasn’t arguing what he said he was arguing, but that hardly matters. His case for presidential tyranny was made on the Senate floor, and his attempts to claw it back in the media don’t carry anywhere near the same weight.

For those of us who have watched Republicans closely throughout this process, what has been striking is the shamelessness and bad faith on display, as they have competed to be the biggest lickspittle to the wannabe fascist smearing his fake tan all over the White House.

Was it Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, openly bragging about how he was coordinating with the Trump defense team to rig this sham of a trial?

Was it Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas starting a podcast about impeachment dedicated to licking Trump’s shoes, despite the fact that Trump spent the election calling Cruz’s wife ugly and accusing Cruz’s dad of murdering JFK?

Was it Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky using the trial as an excuse to air the name of the whistleblower who first reported Trump’s bribery scheme, a move clearly meant to suggest to intimidate other federal employees out of stepping forward with information about Trump’s crimes and corruption?

Was it Sen. Susan Collins of Maine working herself into an outrage over Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., accusing Republicans of being a bunch of quislings who let Trump control them, even though the upcoming miscarriage of justice proves Schiff correct?

Perhaps trying to decide who is the worst of them is a little like trying to pick which cat turd in the litter box stinks most. It doesn’t much matter at the end of the day. What matters is that the entire basket of Republicans is thoroughly corrupt and divorced from any concern for reality or decency, and this week they’re making it official.

Why are they all so rotten to the core? The answer lies in looking at the gulf between the power Republicans have and the votes they actually get. Trump won the 2016 election because of the quirks of the Electoral College, even though Hillary Clinton got nearly 3 million more votes. In 2018, Democrats in Senate races got 12 million more votes than Republicans, yet Republicans gained seats.

Republicans have structural and geographic advantages that allow them to stave off the threat of actual democracy, but they fear that this won’t last forever. As never-Trumper Evan McMullin noted on Twitter:

Evan McMullin

@EvanMcMullin

Republican leaders in Congress believe—and privately say—that they fear the country is quickly changing in ways that may soon deprive them of power, and that they must use the power they have now to delay it as long as possible, even by harming the Republic if necessary.

Republicans in the Senate are affirming and supporting Trump’s schemes to cheat in 2020 for the simple reason that they believe they can’t win without cheating. They’ve already been using legal and quasi-legal methods to cheat — tearing apart campaign finance laws, defanging the Federal Election Commission, passing voter suppression laws, wild gerrymandering schemes — but Trump has now opened that final door to outright criminal conspiracies to cheat in elections.

In 1974, Richard Nixon resigned for doing pretty much the same thing Trump did: His goons were running an illegal scheme to help him cheat in the 1972 election, and he was engaged in the cover-up. Nixon resigned not because he wanted to but because congressional Republicans, or enough of them anyway, believed that the rule of law mattered more than maintaining their party’s political power. Republicans worked with Democrats to expose evidence that led to Nixon’s downfall.

Nowadays, the opposite is true: Republicans are working to conceal evidence, and when they can’t conceal it are arguing that it doesn’t matter what Trump does anyway. In voting to block witnesses and then to acquit a clearly corrupt and criminal president, they are making it official: Cheating in elections is no crime, so long as you’re on their side.

There is no turning back now. Republicans will, of course, continue to pretend they’re anything but the party of corruption and cheating, but the veneer of plausible deniability has been stripped away. Their party’s last vestiges legitimacy are gone, and they know it. In fact, they’re voting on it in the Senate sometime on Friday.

What this means for the rest of us is still not clear. There will be an election in November, and a newly emboldened Trump will probably concoct more criminal conspiracies to cheat in it. He may very well win. If he doesn’t win, it’s entirely likely that he’ll reject the election results and refuse to leave, launching a new and much more dangerous episode in our slow-unfolding constitutional crisis. Senate Republicans, having already signed off on his cheating, may conclude there’s no reason to stop now, and find some excuse to back his illegal rejection of the election results.

There is no longer any reason to believe Republicans will balk at anything that allows them to hold onto power. I do mean anything.

How far this goes, and whether our democracy can still be dragged out of this dark pit, is still unknown. But the history books will almost surely mark the end of this sham trial as the day that Republicans, who long ago made a mockery of their historical legacy as the party of Abraham Lincoln, reached the point of no return.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/heres-why-the-media-is-obsessed-with-seemingly-minor-culture-war-flashpoints/

no lnx

Trump’s only motivations are ego and self-interest — so how would war with Iran benefit him personally?

President Donald J. Trump steps out of the motorcade during the 58th Presidential Inauguration parade in Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2017. More than 5,000 military members from across all branches of the armed forces of the United States, including Reserve and National Guard components, provided ceremonial support and Defense Support of Civil Authorities during the inaugural period. (DoD photo by U.S. Army Spc. Abigayle Marks)

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon January 3, 2020

When my phone screen flashed Thursday night with a notification that an American air strike had killed Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, a top Iranian military leader who was running a clandestine war reaching into Iraq and Syria, I doubt I was alone in asking this question: How does Donald Trump personally benefit from this? In this case, “this” means this particular strike and, even more worryingly, could mean starting a war with Iran. Either way, the answer to the question of Trump’s perceived personal benefit is central in understanding this situation in a way it was not when it came to the saber-rattling that has defined previous Republican administrations.

One thing we know, after years of being caught up in the hellscape of Trump’s America, is that this president experiences no motivations outside of personal self-interest. This is especially true when it comes to anything related to foreign policy, where Trump’s decisions are guided strictly by his desire to bolster his own ego, make money, or obtain some political advantage. For better or worse, to understand where we’re headed after Trump’s dramatic escalation of hostilities with Iran, we have to ask and answer that initial question: What does he get out of it?

Trump’s terminal narcissism has long been the distinguishing factor between him and most of the Republican coalition he leads. However distasteful the beliefs of someone like Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is so excited at the prospect of war with Iran that it feels pornographic, there can be no doubt that Graham is motivated by a sincere belief that war is a good thing. Similarly, when George W. Bush started the war in Iraq in 2003, he may have had an eyeball toward his re-election prospects, but his main motivation did seem to be a genuine belief that the war was winnable and would benefit the United States.

Trump, however, is a man unburdened by having beliefs beyond whatever flatters his own ego or otherwise benefits him personally. Subsequently, his foreign policy has been guided by two desires: 1) Making money or gaining a political advantage or 2) His racist (not to mention hopeless) desire to prove that he is smarter than Barack Obama.

This much was made obvious during the impeachment hearings in the House, when a series of State Department witnesses painted a picture of a president whose only lens for dealing with Ukraine was an investment in the false claim that Ukrainians had conspired with Democrats to undermine him and, of course, his hope that he could strong-arm Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into fabricating evidence for a conspiracy theory about former Vice President Joe Biden.

Indeed, diplomat David Holmes testified explicitly that when he asked European Union ambassador Gordon Sondland what Trump thought of Ukraine, Sondland said Trump only cares about “big stuff.” When Holmes pointed out that Ukraine was effectively at war with Russia — the sort of thing most people think of as “big stuff” — Sondland clarified that “big stuff” only means that which Trump views as serving his own personal interests.

We’ve so far seen the same thing with Trump and Iran. Even though Trump has had a bunch of Iran hawks in his ear night and day — including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former national security adviser John Bolton — his interest in that nation has largely been limited to his goal of trying to show up Obama, because he cannot stand the idea that a black man is more skillful and intelligent than he is. That’s why Trump tanked the deal Obama made with Iran to stop that country from developing nuclear weapons. It wasn’t because Trump had given any consideration to the terms of the agreement. It was because Obama had made the deal, and Trump is mad-jealous of Obama and is a total racist. So a painstakingly negotiated international agreement had to be dumped as part of a larger mission to erase the legacy of the first black president.

This stick-it-to-Obama motivation also explains the shape of Trump’s erratic relationship with North Korea, in which he emphasizes showy photo-ops with dictator Kim Jong-un meant to make Obama look like a failure, even though, on substance, the “deals” Trump has made with Kim are useless. The profit/personal gain motive also explains Trump’s ongoing infatuation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who ordered interference in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf and is already doing the same for Trump in 2020.

So while it would be overly simplistic with any other president to assume he was foolishly trying to provoke a war out of some half-baked calculus of personal interest, it would be foolish to ascribe any other motivations to Trump.

The most obvious contender for “what Trump gets out of this” is that he has been impeached and is going into an election year with stubbornly underwater approval ratings, and sees war with Iran as a Hail Mary pass to whip Americans into a wartime fever — much as happened behind Bush in 2003 — which might be enough to drag him across the line in what will likely be a close election.

Sadly, this theory has much to recommend it. As folks on Twitter quickly discovered, Trump was flogging a conspiracy theory in 2011 and 2012 accusing Obama of doing just that — starting a war to get re-elected.

JM Rieger

@RiegerReport

Trump on Nov. 16, 2011:

“Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He's weak and he's ineffective. So the only way he figures that he's going to get reelected — and as sure as you're sitting there — is to start a war with Iran.”

Embedded video

3,912

6:48 PM - Jan 2, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

3,318 people are talking about this

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Don't let Obama play the Iran card in order to start a war in order to get elected--be careful Republicans!

One of the most predictable aspects of Trump’s narcissism is that he always projects his own flaws and evil impulses onto others. If he accused Obama of feeling an urge to start a war for political advantage, we can pretty much bet that same impulse lurks in Trump’s own heart.

Unfortunately, Trump’s favorite assessment of what’s politically popular comes from flipping on Fox News and seeing what his beloved anchors are talking about. Unsurprisingly, the folks at Fox News are just as eager to clamor for more war in the Middle East as they were during the Bush years. Worse, they’re hyping the possibility of war using rhetoric that’s tailor-made to cater to Trump’s worst impulses, including his love of conspiracy theories and his seething envy of Obama and desire to outdo him.

Bobby Lewis

@revrrlewis

Ainsley Earhardt excitedly asks if Iran used Obama's fabled 'pallets of cash' to buy IED's that killed US soldiers in Iraq.

Embedded video

5:01 AM - Jan 3, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

21 people are talking about this

In the past, Trump’s lens of pure self-interest has been, while largely a bad thing, surprisingly helpful in reducing his interest in going to war. It made him resistant to aides like Bolton who made pro-war arguments based on their theories of foreign policy, as such presentations were not about Trump himself and therefore bored him.

That may well have changed. Trump now has various reasons to think that war with Iran will help his prospects and boost his ego. He even took to Twitter on Friday morning and tried to dunk on Obama for negotiating the nuclear deal with Iran.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Iran never won a war, but never lost a negotiation!

312K

4:44 AM - Jan 3, 2020

Twitter Ads info and privacy

104K people are talking about this

Trump’s ego is involved here, as well as his plausible belief that he can leverage a war to distract the country from the impeachment process and improve his electoral prospects. Unfortunately, there is good reason to believe that under this president, the United States is about to make a dreadful foreign-policy mistake that will make the Iraq war look like a beach picnic.

ref

https://www.salon.com/2019/08/02/trumps-racist-accusations-as-usual-he-projects-his-own-sins-and-crimes-onto-others/

...Trump is projecting again.

Earlier in the week, Trump falsely claimed on Twitter that "Billions of dollars have been pumped" into Baltimore's local government and insinuated that black political leaders have stolen the money, calling out Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., by name. It may not be coincidental that Cummings chairs the House Oversight Committee, which is investigating various aspects of the president's likely criminal endeavors.

Trump continued to promote this lie at a rally in Cincinnati on Thursday night, declaring that "total one-party control of the inner cities" leads to "stolen money" and that Democratic leaders in such cities "deliver poverty for their constituents and privilege for themselves."

Racists have long trafficked in the myth that black leaders in majority-minority cities are on the take and black voters are inherently gullible. With Trump, there's an added layer at work here, because this accusation, coming from him, is pure projection.

After all, it's Trump himself who is bamboozling his followers into voting against their economic self-interest in enthusiastic support of a leader whose principal goal is to enrich himself with bribes and by redirecting public funds into his own coffers. ...It's not particularly controversial to say this: Trump pretty much flaunts how much he's on the take. He happily diverts taxpayer money directly into his own pockets by directing government agencies like the Secret Service to use Trump properties for lodging and other services. He frequently visits his own properties — as of early June, according to the Washington Post, he had spent at least 255 days at Trump-branded resorts or hotels, and played golf on 162 of those days. In doing so, he causes the federal government to spend handsomely at these places, money that goes directly to the Trump Organization (which still pays the president a substantial income).

Trump has also set up multiple channels to collect what must be understood as bribes. At both the Trump International Hotel in Washington and Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, people with both foreign and domestic business before the president can open up their wallets and pour dizzying amounts of money into Trump's corporate coffers. The number of channels for bribe-collection are so diverse that it's become impossible to track it all, but the amount collected runs well into the millions.

Trump is also using his properties to evade campaign finance law, to profit directly from both his own campaign and the Republican Party. Money donated to Trump's campaign is spent on rent and other services from Trump's private companies. Republican events are routinely held at Trump properties, so that Trump personally benefits. The Trump Organization has brought in more than $18 million off Republican campaign work alone.

So when Trump talks about politicians who bamboozle voters with racial politics and then use their power for personal profiteering, he's simply projecting his own grift and graft onto others.

Generally, anytime Trump accuses someone of doing something sleazy or underhanded or criminal, he's really talking about his own behavior. This is particularly true when it comes to Trump's racism. Whenever he launches a foul or nasty accusation against people of color, it's a sure bet that whatever he says is better applied to himself.

This goes back at least as far 1989, when Trump took out an infamous full-page ad in the New York Times calling for a return to the death penalty and basically proclaiming the guilt of the Central Park Five, the young black and Latino men who spent years in prison after being falsely convicted of rape and attempted murder.

Trump, of course, is a sexual predator who has racked up decades worth of accusations and is on tape bragging about how enjoys sexual assault. But the timing of that particular false accusation from Trump is of particular interest, since 1989 also happens to be the year that his ex-wife, Ivana Trump, said in a divorce deposition that Trump had raped her. She later retracted the word "rape," though not her account of the event, in which she described him ripping out her hair and forcing himself on her in a fit of rage.

This isn't the only rape accusation against Trump. Journalist E. Jean Carroll has said that he raped her in either 1995 or 1996. Nor is the Central Park Five ad the only time that Trump has leveled unfair allegations of rape at others. He kicked off his 2016 campaign with a speech in whichhe said that Mexico was sending "rapists" to the U.S., leaning heavily on the belief that rape is largely a crime of a stranger leaping out the bushes. (In reality, 80% of rapes — such as the ones described by Carroll and Ivana Trump — are committed by someone the victim knows.)

The same pattern of Trump's projection is evident in his long, hateful obsession with Barack Obama. While there's no reason to think that Trump faked his own birth certificate, as he repeatedly suggested the first black president did, the underlying accusation — that Obama is a phony who cheated his way to the top — is absolutely and demonstrably true of Trump.

Everything about Trump, except for his racism, has been falsified on some level. His claims to immense wealth that got him on the Forbes 400 list were quite clearly lies. (Investigative reporter David Cay Johnston has repeatedly suggested that Trump is not a billionaire and never has been.) He basically has faked success his whole life, play-acting the part of an ultra-successful business tycoon while driving his businesses into bankruptcy on multiple occasions and running nearly $1 billion in the red in the 1990s. His public image as a marketing and sales genius was shored up by "The Apprentice," a reality TV show that's just as scripted and falsified as most other reality TV shows.

On top of his birtherism, Trump also started to obsess over the idea that Obama's prestigious academic career — undergrad at Columbia, law degree from Harvard — was the result of fakery and cheating. (Which it was not.) In fact, it's Trump whose academic career bears strong indications of string-pulling: As a former admissions officer recently recounted, Trump only got into Penn's Wharton School of Business (which was not all that selective at the time) because his family exerted pressure. Unsurprisingly, Trump does not want any of his school records made public, and has shot down all attempts to reveal them.

One of Trump's favorite insults to lob at opponents, especially if they're black, is "low IQ" or other accusations of low intelligence. This is no surprise, as Trump a racist who has a lifelong obsession with eugenics. But it's almost surely also a projection of his own insecurities about his own failures and weaknesses. Whenever he is asked about books he's read, he spills so much BS as to suggest he's never actually read a whole book. There are indications that Trump, while technically literate enough to tweet and more or less follow along on a teleprompter, struggles to read at anything approaching an adult level. Multiple reports from the White House have suggested that Trump cannot be trusted to read a one-page briefing document and needs information presented to him in graphic form.

Even with his most infamous recent remarks — the claim that four congresswomen of color "originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe" — was also a form of his racist projection. As Hillary Clinton cheekily pointed out on Twitter, all four women are "from America" (three of them were born in the U.S.) and "their government is a complete and total catastrophe," because — well, look who our president is.

Psychological projection and racism have always gone hand in hand. White nationalists, for instance, constantly pretend that white people are under threat from an upside-down version of the same oppression that white people have dished out against people of color for centuries. Conservative complaints about "affirmative action" are largely a projection of guilt about the fact that white people have had enormous advantages throughout American history. Fears of violence from people of color similarly reflects guilt over the racist violence that's been used for centuries to enforce white supremacy, continuing to this day in the form of police brutality.

With Trump, the levels of racist projection reach new heights. That makes sense, since he's a narcissist who uses insults and bombast to cover up for deep insecurities. But the consistency of Trump's projection point towards a better way to understand these racist outbursts, and for journalists to cover them. Instead of focusing on the political fallout, it might be useful to respond, every single time, with clear reporting on the fact that Trump is likely guilty of the very things he accuses people of color of doing.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/hallmark-movies-are-the-most-insidious-authoritarian-propaganda-heres-how/

no lnx

Hallmark movies are the most insidious authoritarian propaganda — here’s how

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon December 26, 2019

The Hallmark Channel has been having a rough go of it in the past few weeks. The cable TV behemoth, which has been minting money with its patented holiday season schmaltz, drew widespread criticism earlier this month when it pulled ads for the wedding company Zola that featured a lesbian couple kissing at their wedding. The company’s initial excuse was that they do not allow ads that feature “overt public displays of affection,” claiming the policy is “regardless of the participants.”

This was, obviously, nonsense, as couples kissing at weddings is not only not outré, but generally seen as mandatory (and features in the channel’s numerous rom-coms). Unsurprisingly, critics quickly found plenty of examples of straight snogging on the channel that shows that sexual orientation was the sole reason for the ad pull. (That, and Hallmark was clearly responding to a right-wing pressure campaign claiming that lesbian kissing “ruined” the channel’s “family friendly” offerings.) Hallmark then flip-flopped, apologizing for pulling the ads and claiming they have been “a progressive pioneer on television for decades” and “committed to diversity and inclusion.”

Which is, of course, laughable to anyone who has even glancing knowledge of the channel’s offerings. Running down this year’s schedule of Christmas movie offerings is like a trip into an uncanny valley of shiny-teethed, blow-dried heteronormative whiteness, with only a few token movies with characters of color. It’s like watching “The Stepford Wives,” but scarier, since the evil plot to replace normal people with robots is never actually revealed.

None of this should be a surprise, because Hallmark movies, as cloying and saccharine as they are, constitute the platonic ideal of fascist propaganda.

That is probably a startling statement to some. When most of us think about fascistically propagandistic movies, we think of the grotesque grandeur of Leni Riefenstahl’s films celebrating the Third Reich — grand, but cold sweeping shots of soldiers goose-stepping and flags waving, all meant to inspire awe and terror. But the reality is, even in Nazi Germany, the majority of movies approved by the Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, were escapist and feather-light, with a Hallmark movie-style emphasis on the importance of “normality.”

There’s plenty of reason that empty-headed kitsch fits neatly in the authoritarian worldview. It’s storytelling that imitates the gestures of emotion without actually engaging with real feeling. The Hallmark movie steers clear of the real passion or deeper emotion that tends to be the engine driving more artful fiction. Characters who have real feelings, after all, can prompt empathetic reactions in the audience, and empathy for others is the greatest single threat to the authoritarian mindset. And so schmaltz walks through the paces of “love” without touching on any of the messy but compelling realities of it.

Instead of characters driven by real feelings, therefore, the guiding hand of “normalcy” pulls the characters along through narratives — and unsurprisingly, that idea of “normalcy” doesn’t have a lot of room for the true diversity of American experiences.

This much is evident in the efforts to include Jewish characters in recent Hallmark holiday movies which, by all accounts, seems like a complete disaster — in part because the rule of “normalcy” reorients everything towards a very narrow, sentimentalized version of Christmas.

“In the Hallmark-Lifetime Cinematic Universe, Hanukkah and the characters who celebrate it exist only in relation to Christmas,” Nancy Coleman of th New York Times complained, adding that the Hallmark movie “Holiday Date” could, with “remarkably little editing” turn into “a Jewish ‘Get Out.'”

Britni de la Cretaz, writing for the Washington Post, not only complained that the Jewish Hallmark movies were “Christmas movies with Jewish characters,” but also that the movies “rely on some of the oldest anti-Semitic tropes in the book,” such as painting one Jewish character as the “perpetual outsider” who is “sneaky, untrustworthy.”

“The drama hinges on Jewish characters being compelled to observe Christmas, and the tension resolves only when these outsiders learn how to participate in or appreciate the dominant religious tradition,” she adds.

Sadly, it’s hard to imagine it being any other way. The qualities that people cite when they defend Hallmark movies — comforting, formulaic, soothing — are all a result of the aggressively conformist impulse that drives them. And that impulse and fealty to the dominant culture stands in direct contrast to the values of diversity Hallmark facetiously claims to hold.

Hallmark movies, with their emphasis on returning home and the pleasures of the small, domestic life, also send a not-at-all subtle signal of disdain for cosmopolitanism and curiosity about the larger world, which is exactly the sort of attitude that helps breed the kind of defensive white nationalism that we see growing in strength in the Donald Trump era.

If you don’t believe me, listen to authoritarians themselves. At the Federalist, which is ground zero website for generating frankly fascist “culture war” arguments, Hans Fiene argues that, “culturally speaking, Hallmark Christmas movies are noticeably Christian.”

By this, Fiene isn’t talking about characters who actually go to church or pray — even self-identified conservative Christians don’t want to see that — but a set of patriarchal and authoritarian values that are more about white evangelicals defining themselves as an ethnic group, and not about a genuine feeling of spirituality.

The movies always depict a “heroine who begins the story loving her self-involved life in the city chooses family and a life of self-sacrifice in her hometown,” he writes, arguing that it’s the “last remaining hideout” for those who want a fantasy of a world where “the cynicism and immorality of modern life aren’t allowed.” By “cynicism and immmorality,” Fiene explains he’s talking about “fornication” and acceptance of “sexual deviants,” by which he means LGBTQ people.

None of this, of course, means that everyone who watches Hallmark Christmas movies is some kind of fledgling fascist. These movies are not for me, but I believe people when they say they find it relaxing to watch these predictable movies that have low stakes because none of the characters feel like real people. I’ve got my own flavors of trashy entertainment I fully enjoy without mistaking it for high art. (Baby Yoda, what’s up?)

Still, it’s critical to be mindful of the role that Hallmark movies are actually playing in our society. The very fact that they’re presented as harmless fluff makes it all the more insidious, the way they work to enforce very narrow, white, heteronormative, sexist, provincial ideas of what constitutes “normal.”

It’s easy to spot fascist propaganda when it’s goose-stepping Pepe-the-frog memes. It’s a lot harder to notice how it’s working when it’s tied up in Christmas cheer and suggesting grinchhood of anyone who questions the rigidity of its worldview.

As University of Richmond communications professor Nicole Maurantonio wrote in a recent piece exposing the sneakily racist propaganda of Confederate-themed Christmas ornaments, “seemingly apolitical objects like cookbooks, toys and Christmas ornaments commemorating Confederate history serve to normalize,” and in doing so, make white supremacy seem less harmful than it actually is.

Ultimately, there’s a reason that authoritarian religious right groups like One Million Moms and American Family Association — who made the initial demands on Hallmark to end the lesbian-inclusive ads — believe that the Hallmark Channel “belongs” to them.They may use euphemisms like “family friendly,” but as there is nothing more family friendly than light PDAs from loving couples at weddings, we can say for certain that is not what bothers them. Instead, it’s because they believe Hallmark is “safe” because it excludes people who don’t fit their extremely rigid ideas about what constitutes “normal.”

“So many people feel betrayed because this is one of the very last channels that families could go to and not be bombarded with politically correct commercials and the LGBTQ agenda,” the American Family Association griped in a press release.

Note that the language is solely that of exclusion. This isn’t about Christian conservatives wanting more Hallmark movies that show characters who actually go to church or anything like that. What makes something “family friendly” and “Christian” is who is not allowed inside the fantasy land of impossibly expensive rural houses and women who are realizing that they wanted to just get married to the boy next door all along.

Ultimately, there is probably no way to square the claim to believe in “diversity” with fascistic impulse that guides the current crop of Hallmark movies, which center always around these frankly MAGA-style ideas about what constitutes “real” America. As the Jewish movies show, the best that Hallmark can do is some token “diversity” that wipes out most of what makes people actually diverse. Their money comes from selling a vision of America that increasingly authoritarian conservatives wish to believe once existed and can be restored again — an America that excludes most of an increasingly urban, racially diverse, cosmopolitan nation. That won’t change no matter how many inclusive Zola ads the network airs.

Amanda Marcotte is a politics writer for Salon. Her new book, “Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself,” is out now. She’s on Twitter @AmandaMarcotte.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/how-democratic-women-drove-the-2018-blue-wave/

amanda m

after

Hillary Clinton lost to a talking yam with criminal tendencies in 2016, a number of people got antsy about the idea that the country was really ready yet to embrace women in politics. But a huge number of Democratic women rejected that narrative and instead decided that the solution was for more women to run for office. The result? A record-setting number of women elected to Congress and a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.

Journalist Caitlin Moscatello was on the front lines of all this, following a diverse group of female candidates throughout the 2018 campaign. The result is her new book, “See Jane Win: The Inspiring Story of the Women Changing America Politics,” in which she argues there’s no time like the present for women to take a bigger role in politics. Moscatello sat down with me recently in Salon’s New York studio to talk about her book and the lessons of 2018. ...This interview has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

Your book is about 2018, but I want to talk about 2016 first because it’s the necessary backbone here. After Hillary Clinton lost that election, I think a lot of people took away the message that women, at least Democratic women, simply can’t win, that there’s too much sexism, that we’re just not there yet. What did your research in writing this book tell you about that?

---

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/a-telling-moment-from-the-impeachment-hearing-suggests-trump-has-an-insurance-policy-on-mike-pence/

no lnx

A telling moment from the impeachment hearing suggests Trump has an insurance policy on Mike Pence

President Donald J. Trump, joined by Vice President Mike Pence, addresses his remarks Monday, August 5, 2019, in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House on the mass shootings over the weekend in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon November 14, 2019

Why don’t Republicans just give up and cut Donald Trump loose? That question has been on the minds of most political observers since the beginning of Trump’s presidency, and it’s only grown more intense in the wake of scandal after scandal after scandal, in which the lying, cheating, grifting, thieving sleazebag who bigoted his way into the White House continues to make fools of everyone who supports and defends him.

The mystery only deepened after the first day of public impeachment hearings on Wednesday, when the only answer Republicans had in the face of truly overwhelming evidence of Trump’s criminality was to issue a torrent of nihilistic nonsense that didn’t even try to make sense. While Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, seemed to be getting a Christian Bale-in-“American Psycho” sense of joy from all the lying, many other Republicans seemed confused, tired or flailing. Trump can wear out even the notoriously sturdy ability to lie that defines the modern Republican politician. It can’t feel great, constantly debasing themselves for a man who never shows gratitude but only keeps upping the ante, seeing how many more crimes he can commit that they’ll cover up.

The typical answer most pundits look to is this idea that Trump’s wild popularity with the almighty base protects him. Other elected Republicans are afraid that loyalty to Trump exceeds loyalty to the party, and they would lose any conflict between the two.

There’s reason to be skeptical of this view. As the blogger Atrios pointed out, Sarah Palin was once “treated as the most important voice in politics and now she is a trivia question,” and therefore “the GOP could drop their latest messiah and 5 minutes later no one would remember.” Truthfully, the same would happen if the Republicans decided, en masse, to kick Trump to the curb — their base would go along and many of them would probably also be quietly relieved to quit pretending that Trump is a voice worthy of respect.

But there’s a strong alternative explanation: Republicans have good reason to fear that if Trump goes down, he’s taking Vice President Mike Pence with him. If that happens, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who is third in line under the Constitution, would become president. Republicans may be genuinely worried that they can’t toss Trump to the curb without losing the White House entirely.

That might initially sound odd, since Pence’s name has come up only rarely in the discussion of the Ukraine scandal. He was barely mentioned during the many hours of testimony from Ambassador Bill Taylor and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent on Wednesday. But even though that mention of Pence was brief, if one reads between the lines a bit, it was also illuminating.

In his opening statement, Taylor said that on Sept. 1, Trump suddenly canceled a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, claiming Hurrican Dorian as an excuse. (In reality, Trump played golf.) In his stead, Trump sent Pence. Taylor, who received a readout of the meeting, says that Zelensky asked right away about the military aid that Trump was withholding — aid that Trump was clearly using as leverage to extort Zelensky to back up Trump’s conspiracy theory about his presumed Democratic 2020 opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Pence “did not respond substantively,” Taylor recounted, but did say that Trump “wanted the Ukrainians to do more to fight corruption.”

To the average observer, that language sounds bland and unimportant. But those who have been following this scandal closely know that “fighting corruption” was Trump’s code phrase for opening up phony investigations to damage his political enemies and bolster right-wing conspiracy theories.” We know Trump doesn’t actually want to fight corruption, because his actual behavior and associations in Ukraine indicates a general pro-corruption point of view — and also because of common sense. We also know that while Pence might not be the sharpest pencil in the drawer, he is probably smart enough to know that “fighting corruption” was Trumpian code for “do this corrupt thing for me, or else.”

Trump’s last-minute delegation of this task to Pence has been understood as part of his larger campaign to intimidate Zelensky into doing his bidding. But it might also have served another function: To implicate Pence in the extortion scheme against Ukraine. This was right when Trump and his co-conspirators, mainly his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, were starting to sweat about getting caught. A whistleblower complaint had been filed just a couple weeks before, and career diplomats and security officials were starting to make internal complaints about the situation. No doubt Trump’s mind was very fixated on CYA at that point.

While the average viewer might not pick up these implications, Republicans in Congress watching the proceedings certainly would. Knowing that Pence toed the Trumpian line by responding to requests for aid with coded language about “fighting corruption” — language we know Zelensky understood, at this point, to mean “spread conspiracy theories about Biden” — means that Pence is implicated.

So far, Pence has avoided much scrutiny, but as Republicans are no doubt aware, Trump has no morals, no loyalty and no limits. If he senses he’s going down, there is no reason to believe he will hesitate to expose Pence’s role in this, in hopes of taking his sanctimonious veep down the slippery slide with him. Republicans have to know there’s a not-small chance that if they admit that Trump committed an impeachable offense and remove him from office, they then might face an impeachment trial for Pence too, and the prospect of a President Pelosi. (Along with a mad scramble to find someone to nominate for the 2020 presidential election.)

So they’re stuck with the guy they’ve got, who is a cunning enough criminal to know how to protect himself with his posse of lackeys, even if he’s bad at hiding incriminating evidence. Also, standing by Trump makes clear how much Republicans are sacrificing the long-term viability of their party to protect their power in the short term.

After all, while the almighty base that supports Republicans and Trump is immovable for now — drunk on Fox News propaganda, and unwilling to engage any evidence that shakes them from their GOP faith — they are also, like all human beings, mortal. (And, on average, a lot older than other voters.) There’s little reason to believe that that thisnihilistic circus act being put on by Republicans will attract the newer, younger voters the party needs for its long-term health.

Republicans themselves see this, which is why they’ve focused so heavily on winding down the idea of democracy, by packing the courts and gerrymandering the voting map so that no matter how many more votes Democrats get, they never win full power. It may very well work. But the fact that they have completely abandoned any pretense of trying to argue their point and persuade voters, as the first day of impeachment hearings showed, is remarkable in itself. And if Republicans had any lingering hope that they could stanch the bleeding by replacing Trump with Pence, that seems to have gone up in smoke.

---

an 1119 jrnl fail msm not symmetry house approve impeach rules

"...nothing of this sort, or even close to it, is going on with the Democrats. On the contrary, the 2018 midterms, in which the newly elected Democrats who helped take the House of Representatives ran the gamut from centrists to socialists, was a reminder of how ideologically diverse the coalition is. The Democratic presidential primary, too, makes that candidates from the center, the left and everywhere in between are getting support in the polls.

The “polarization” framework is profoundly misleading because it suggests that the two parties are like magnets repelling each other with identical force and velocity. But the real story is that while Democrats have moved modestly to the left on some issues, most of the divisions in the country are the result of Republicans becoming both more fascistic and completely untethered to reality.

This isn’t about “both sides” acting in an equal manner. It’s about Republicans losing their minds and everyone else, understandably, reacting against that.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/trump-and-bill-barr-are-still-working-to-cover-up-vladimir-putins-campaign-against-democracy/

no lnx

Trump and Bill Barr are still working to cover up Vladimir Putin’s campaign against democracy

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon October 25, 2019

During his otherwise subdued testimony before Congress this summer, former special counsel Robert Mueller did turn to more dramatic language when discussing one issue: Russia’s efforts to undermine American democracy.

“Over the course of my career, I’ve seen a number of challenges to our democracy. The Russian government’s effort to interfere in our election is among the most serious,” Mueller said in his opening statement. “This deserves the attention of every American.”

Well, two Americans who have decided to give it their attention are Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr. But instead of trying to stop such efforts, their plan is quite clearly to use the power of the United States government to cover up the Russian conspiracy — and intimidate any law enforcement officials who might feel the urge to fight similar criminal conspiracies going into the 2020 elections.

As the New York Times reported late Thursday, the Justice Department, which Barr took over after Trump ran out previous Attorney General Jeff Sessions for failing to fully evacuate himself of all remaining traces of integrity, has opened a criminal investigation into the origins of the Russian investigation run by Mueller.

Remember this: Mueller uncovered a vast Russian conspiracy that pulled off something the Watergate burglars never could. Russians or their allies successfully stole information from Democratic Party officials that was used to bolster conspiracy theories that eventually cost the Democratic nominee the election. Mueller also discovered that Trump knew about this conspiracy, encouraged it publicly, and attempted to get involved but apparently failed —probably because the Russians concluded he was unreliable, and involving him was more trouble than it was worth. Mueller also discovered that Trump conducted a lengthy campaign to cover up the Russian conspiracy, resulting in a list of 10 incidents that, if Trump were not protected by his office, could result in federal charges of obstruction of justice.

Just because the Mueller investigation is over doesn’t mean Trump’s efforts to cover up for Vladimir Putin’s campaign against democracy have ended. On the contrary, the obstruction of justice campaign has expanded. Now, under the guidance of Barr, it’s being run by the Department of Justice itself.

It’s quite clear what’s going on here. Barr almost certainly doesn’t really believe that DOJ officials, under Mueller’s guidance, broke any laws in investigating the Russian criminal conspiracy or Trump’s efforts to protect it. Instead, by opening this phony investigation, he intends both to shore up Trump’s conspiracy theories claiming that the Russia scandal is all a Democratic hoax, and to use the threat of criminal charges to intimidate any government officials who might have a hankering to protect the 2020 election from any future such conspiracies, involving the Russians or anyone else.

There’s good reason to fear this phony investigation could lead to human rights abuses. Both Peter Strzok and Andrew McCabe were fired from the FBI as part of Trump’s efforts to shore up his conspiracy theories denouncing the Russia investigation. Both men are no doubt aware that Trump may seek seeking to arrest them under false pretenses, as part of his scapegoating campaign.

Another interesting point here is that Barr is doing is exactly what Trump, using the threat of withheld military aid, tried to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to do: Open up a phony investigation in order to smear Democrats and deny that the Russian government was behind the criminal attack on the 2016 election.

The difference is that Zelensky resisted, even under great pressure from the twin threats of soldiers dying and the possibility of further Russian invasion. Barr, on the other hand, is choosing to be a scumbag of his own accord, using lies and threats of imprisonment to intimidate those who would stand up for democracy.

(It’s worth noting here that Barr takes time out of his busy schedule of undermining democracy to give lectures implying that societal morality is being undermined by adults having consensual sex in the privacy of their own homes. I’d call him out regarding his hypocrisy around Trump, but it’s safe to say the president’s thing isn’t consensual sex. Sexual assault probably falls right into what Barr calls the “customs and traditions which reflect the wisdom and experience of the ages.”)

As Heather Digby Parton noted at Salon, Barr’s in this because he’s a true ideological opponent of democracy, and sees his role as continuing to promote a “long-term project to transform the U.S. into an undemocratic, quasi-authoritarian plutocracy” that goes back at least to the 1980s. In this, Barr’s views are complementary to Putin’s goal of undermining democracy around the world, in order to demoralize the hopes of Russians at home who are getting sick of living under his authoritarian rule.

Trump, on the other hand, is in this for the same reason he does anything: Pure self-interest. Why he has such unwavering enthusiasm for the authoritarian Russian government, and such eagerness to help realize Putin’s goals in the U.S., remains something of a black box. One day, perhaps, his tax returns will finally be released and shed some light on the situation. But there can be little doubt that finances have something to do with it, as Mueller’s investigation revealed. In addition, Trump clearly has the idea that discrediting the Mueller investigation, even if that means trying to prosecute former government officials under false pretenses, will help him in the 2020 election.

Ultimately, this is one more reason that Democrats should stop trying to contain the impeachment inquiry to the Ukraine scandal. After all, what Trump tried to do in Ukraine — use that government’s resources to open phony investigations of his opponents and discredit evidence of his own corruption — is the same thing he is trying to do here. The only difference is, here at home he’s succeeding. The attorney general should not be allowed to use the DOJ as a legal hit squad for the president, devoted to gutting democracy. It’s time to open an impeachment inquiry into Bill Barr, as well.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/the-end-of-the-american-myth-of-meritocracy/

...So, in a way, there is a twisted form of meritocracy in America. But it’s not the one we were all raised to believe in, the one that rewards hard work and intelligence. It’s one where the most overt sociopathy wins the day, where the person who cares least about others will come out the winner. In a country where a man with no discernible talents or redeeming qualities, whose entire personality is a disregard for others, is president, it’s hard to quarrel with the dark view of America “Succession” portrays... ===

no lnx

Here’s how techno-utopianism decayed into alt-right madness

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon October 9, 2019

New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz put his sanity on the line in order to take a deep dive into two parallel worlds: the reactionary universe of the alt-right, and the technological triumphalist paradigm of Silicon Valley. The latter is responsible for selling us a utopian vision of the internet that would (supposedly) bind humanity, yet which instead has stoked political division and created, indirectly, the alt-right. In “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation,” Marantz offers readers an explanation as to how social networks created by idealist techies were co-opted by a rat’s nest of bigots, trolls, and fascists, who exploited the supposed “neutrality” of platforms to spread hate.

Marantz spoke to Salon about his new book and how the internet is changing democracy. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

This is a book about how the advent of social media really opened up the social and political discourse in this country to the people that Hillary Clinton aptly deemed a “basket full of deplorables.”

I think the deplorable part was more apt than the basket part. But, yeah.

How much do you think tech matters in the rise of not just the alt-right, but Donald Trump?

Tech matters hugely for the rise of Trumpism and for nationalist populism around the world. That’s not to say that it’s the only source of energy for those movements, and it’s also not to say that there aren’t huge benefits to opening up discourse in all kinds of ways.

I don’t want to paint a monochromatic picture or say that tech has only led to deleterious outcomes or antisocial outcomes, but I think for too long there was this tacit assumption among tech bros, and also just among the general public, that on the whole the internet would make the world more open and connected and set us all free and make it more fair and tolerant and generally be pro-social. And I think we’ve seen pretty definitively that that hasn’t entirely been the case.

What I like about your book is you really do talk about some of the historical antecedents to the rise of social media. This is something that I’ve been boring my friends with, pointing out, you know, it’s not like the printing press didn’t lead to violence, too.

Exactly, right. In fact, it led to many of the same kinds of violence, antisemitism, bigotry, and misinformation. None of this is new. It’s just that we’ve kind of forgotten those lessons of history.

As you said, the tech industry was very idealistic, promoting the idea that social media would connect people, would help spread good ideas. The Arab Spring was a big marketing event for social media, even as it was a real thing in the real world. Why do you think there was an unwillingness to look at the possibility that it would also give rise to hate speech, violence, bigotry, things like that?

Part of it is just that it’s uncomfortable and unpleasant to think about bigotry and hate speech. So people would rather not do it.

I’ve faced that even while reporting this book. I like to think that the book is engaging and even darkly funny. But I’ve had people indicate that they are scared to read it, because they would just rather not think about this stuff.

I think that the only way out is through, which is why I used James Baldwin as an epigraph. Nothing can be changed until it’s faced.

I happen to think this stuff isn’t as depressing as people worry it’ll be, but that’s a separate topic. But yeah, it’s not fun to think about.

Also, we tend to get stuck on this dichotomy of optimism versus pessimism, and I think that’s just the wrong way of thinking about these things. A more useful frame than either optimism or pessimism is what I refer to as contingency.

Tell me more about that.

:{:{}:

I borrowed that concept from the philosopher Richard Rorty, who wrote one of my favorite books called “Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.” And contingency, boiling it down a lot, just means we don’t know what’s going to happen. We can’t have a teleological view of the future. We can’t assume that things are pre-ordained to happen in a certain way. We have to look at the facts as they are and make an informed judgment about whether we’re going to inevitably have a more perfect union and inevitably make progress.

:{:{}:

Often we just assume that those things will just happen inevitably. A more contingent view of history would suggest that they don’t happen automatically, and they don’t happen at all if you don’t work for them to happen.

In this book, you often explore your own emotions about institutions versus the “disruption” of the tech industry,and express some longing I think for some of the gatekeeping power that old institutions had before the time of social media. Having gone through the entire process of writing and publishing and now marketing this book, where do you fall on that scale right now?

I see it as a trade-off. By no means do I want to pretend that the whole gatekeeper model was perfect or even very good. It was flawed in all kinds of ways. It was run by upper middle-class white men who didn’t have a very nuanced view of the country for the most part. There were all kinds of problems with corporate control. Nothing about our past should be construed as a golden age.

It’s just that when you tear down all those structures, and don’t even try to even pretend to think about what’s going to replace them, or you replace them with something worse, then the problems don’t get better. They get worse.

Before even there was a term, the alt-right, feminists and social justice activists were observing that social media was allowing uglier forms of bigotry to flourish. A lot of the blame was kind of put on the white maleness of the tech industry, that there was a blindness of the people running it. How much do you give credence to that?

I definitely give credence to it. I think the basic critique that you can’t really readily empathize with people if you don’t have representation of all people within your company, I think is an apt critique.

But I don’t think that it would solve everything if the tech companies had diversity and inclusion statistics that accurately reflected the country. I think that would help, but I think the problems are deeper and more systemic than that.

The discourse around this particular problem has often been one of ignorance, right? There’s a sense that a lot of the white male leaders of the tech industry have progressive values.

Some of them.

On the other hand, you ran into Peter Thiel, at the DeploraBall.Do you think that’s an element of the problem right now? That we just have bad actors in tech leadership?

Well, my critique of Peter Thiel in the book was not based on his support for Trump, although I find his support for Trump extremely regrettable. My critique of him was based on the fact that I tried to engage him in a dialogue about the fundamental problems at Facebook, which arguably could not have become as successful as it is without his early investment. And instead of answering my critiques, he just left and didn’t respond to me at all. And didn’t respond to followup questions during the fact checking process.

So my critique of him is really more substantive. I mean there are lots of Trump supporters in the country, Peter Thiel being one of them. I can debate with them or decry their views, but really my issues with Thiel are that he got rich off of Facebook. I’m just curious whether he knew that there would be all these negative impacts on our society, in addition to the positive ones. And if he did know, why he didn’t do more to stop it?

Shifting over to the systematic issue, in this book you analyzed the concept ofvirality, which you frame in a Darwinian sense. Could you explain that more for some of the readers of Salon?

There’s this concept of the old gatekeeper outlets, specifically the New York Times, that they give you all the news that’s “fit to print”. It struck me that that word, “fit”, has the unintended double meaning. They mean “fit” as in what’s appropriate.

:{:{}:

But social media algorithms, for the most part, are not concerned with what’s appropriate. They’re concerned with what gets engagement. Engagement can be anything. It can be positive engagement like likes, and it can also be negative engagement like hate reads or shares for the reason of saying, take a look at this asshole. Algorithms are neutral with regards to that. Their job is to keep you hooked and keep your brainstem fired up so that you stay on the platform.

That’s what leads to this Darwinian outcome. A Darwinian system, like nature, doesn’t care whether you’re a surviving by being nice or surviving by being red in tooth and claw, as they say. All that matters is whether you pass on your genes.

The same is true in the world of memes, which is a term coined by a very prominent Darwinian biologist to explain how ideas struggle for dominance. These systems create a world in which the way that ideas struggle for dominance is pretty red in tooth and claw.

:{:{}:

On Twitter, if you write a “look at this asshole”, you get yelled at by people saying don’t give trolls attention, that it just raises their profile. The counter argument to that is, if we don’t look at it, we can’t criticize it. How do you kind of feel about the debate? Is there anything that we, as individuals, can do to change the incentive structures of the internet?

To take the first part first, there’s no good answer to the question of how to respond to noxious trolls, because if you give them attention, even negative attention, then you’re feeding them oxygen. If you ignore them, then you are risking seeming complicit. So that’s why that’s such a vexing problem because there really is no good individual answer to it.

Systemically, there are ways to tweak the systems to diminish that kind of stuff, but as a person, I don’t really see an easy way out.

I think the flippant answer that a lot of people land on is to just say, I’m just going to log off, which is really good for your mental health. And I recommend it for a lot of people in a lot of circumstances. But you don’t get to log off of the country, right? So these systems can still be affecting who your president is, and whether you get to live in a country that has environmental regulations and all the rest of it. So you can’t opt out of that.

So let’s talk about some of those trolls, because they are admittedly fun to talk about. You spend a lot of time in this book engaging them as personalities. You went to the DeploraBall. The right wing trolls, they really think of themselves as rebels. It’s both their identity and their justification. But I couldn’t help but think that their ideologies are just old-fashioned racism and sexism, their behavior is like out of a bad beer commercial and their jokes reminded me of the lame jokes from some high school locker room. How on earth are they holding themselves out as rebels?

Yeah, they’re really bad at it. Yet it’s still really effective. It reminds me of the kind of comedian who is not a good comedian but just gets laughs anyway because he or she — let’s be real, it’s usually a he — will just say whatever makes the audience uncomfortable and get those kind of uncomfortable laughs from the crowd. It’s just cheap.

A lot of this rebel attitude is so central to a lot of these people that “The Rebel” is a name of one of their big media companies. This woman, Faith Goldy, got fired from The Rebel. The line she crossed was going on a Nazi podcast during the march in Charlottesville. When she got fired for that, there were commenters online who were saying to the owners of that media company, “You guys should change your names from The Rebel Media to The Conformist Media.”

:{:{}:

And it’s like, so being a Nazi is being a rebel? That’s just a really, really shitty and unoriginal way to be rebellious, in addition to being terrifying and disgusting and all the rest of it.

:{:{}:

When I think of the Nazis, I don’t think of people that were really into rebellion as a concept.

:{:{}:

[Scoffs] Yeah, free spirits.

:{:{}:

One of the interesting paradoxes of the entire alt-right is they often get called contrarian, provocateurs, transgressive, but the values they stand up for don’t remind me of transgression at all. They just remind me of the same old sexism and racism that was socially normative when I was growing up.

Well, they’re transgressive in the sense that they’re saying things that you’re not supposed to say in polite company. That doesn’t make it interesting or cool or original. It does make it transgressive in the sense that you can offend people. You can freak them out. And then, if you created a set of norms within your own little subculture that declares that anybody who ever gets offended or freaked out is therefore triggered and whatever, then okay. By the terms of that self-sustaining logic, you can quote unquote “win”, because you triggered people. But ultimately, you’re not serving any very interesting end other than having a moment of infamy.

There’s a lot of hiding behind the term “free speech”, which is treated as a kind of empty set value, because nobody’s really taking anyone’s free speech away. Why do you think that there’s so much emphasis on topics like free speech and supposed transgression, and very little about the actual content of this “free speech”?

This is part of why I thought it was so important to actually spend hours and months and years of my life hanging out with these people. It wasn’t because I enjoyed it, or because I preferred to get dinner with Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec rather than hanging out with my wife and child. It was because the real way to understand how these people think and talk and interact with each other is just to hang around them for long enough that they forget you’re there.

The free speech thing is one example of that. They can talk about this stuff in the abstract and use language that sounds really principled, but when you hang around for long enough it becomes clear that it’s just a tool they’re using. Like anything else, it’s a weapon.

If they can use “free speech” as a talking point to advance their agenda, they’ll use that. If they can use something else, they’ll use something else.

At no point did I want to be so contrary to the contrarians that I became anti-free speech. It’s just that when you see what’s really motivating them, you can see through their game. But that only happens when you put in the time.

Having spent as much time as you did with them, do you have any advice for readers on self care and mental health management when faced with this vile stuff?

I do think it’s appropriate a lot of times to step away from it and log off. Being a keyboard warrior 24 hours a day is not healthy for anyone. But I also wouldn’t want to live in a world where social media were only inhabited by nihilists and trolls and bigots. So I don’t want all good people in the world to permanently abandon all internet spaces. But I do think it’s worth just stepping back and thinking in a slightly broader way about what is all this and what are we trying to accomplish?

The larger frame of the book is about the hijacking of a national conversation.On any given day, you can sit out all of the trending topics and not weigh in and not even know they’re happening and you will be totally fine. The world will go on without you and you won’t really miss anything.

In a larger, more sustained sense, I do think that part of the job of being a fully engaged citizen of a putative democracy is to have a stake in the national conversation. If part of that or a lot of that is happening online, then so be it. But I think it’s just worth doing with as much of a clear head and a sense of purpose as possible.

Everyone knows Trump is a racist. So why can’t the media say it?

Amanda Marcotte / Salon

marcotte

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/fox-news-has-gone-so-deep-into-white-nationalism-that-donald-trump-now-believes-its-how-hell-win-in-2020/

Trump thinks white nationalism is going to win him the 2020 election. This much is clear. Trump’s racist Twitter rant on Sunday — in which he suggested that four nonwhite congresswomen, three of whom were born in the United States, are “originally” from somewhere else and should therefore “go back” — might have seemed at first like a spontaneous eruption of racist rage from the simmering bigot in the White House.

Soon, however, it became clear that this was strategic. Trump thinks it’s a winning move to echo the claims of David Duke and other white nationalists who believe the United States is for white people. He justified his racism by saying that “many people agree with me,” and by continuing to rave on Twitter about how the real purveyors of “racist hatred” are those who look askance at his embracing the rhetoric of Stormfront and the KKK.

As Heather Digby Parton argued for Salon, this is more than an explosion of racist anger. Trump “believes that most Americans are as racist as he is and that he will be rewarded for this indecency with a second term.”

There’s good reason to think Trump and his boosters are wrong about this. As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie pointed out on Twitter, “Trump’s popularity has taken its sharpest dips whenever he goes full racist,” and that even that seemingly rock-solid level of support that sits right around 42% in opinion polls has dipped into the 30s when Trump openly aligns himself with white nationalist views. Thanks largely to his racism (as well as his stunning lack of competence), Trump has spent his entire term in office with lower overall approval ratings than any president in more than 60 years.

So where does Trump getting this idea that ever more extreme racism is the way to win over voters? One major source is likely his favorite TV network and the only source of information he tends to take seriously: Fox News.

For years now, Fox News has been mainstreaming arguments that used to be the province of fringe websites run by neo-Nazis and other groups who believe the U.S. is meant to be a country of white people and for white people — perhaps with others permitted in small numbers of they stay quiet and keep to themselves. Trump was a major factor in the early rumblings of white nationalism on the network, which gave him considerable airtime during his reality TV days to air conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Such “birther” theories rested fairly obviously, in the first place, on the belief that black people cannot be “real” Americans.

Since Trump was elected, the Fox News programming that promotes white nationalist ideas has slowly grown both in airtime and in severity. At Salon, we sounded the alarm in the early months of Trump’s presidency, when prime-time Fox News host Tucker Carlson began to experiment with segments that used euphemisms like “Western civilization” to package the idea that white people are inherently more civilized while people of color are a threat to national stability.

Since then, Carlson and many of other Fox News pundits have only grown bolder. “Replacement theory” — the white nationalist idea that has spurred multiple terrorist attacks, holding that white people will somehow be removed and “replaced” by people of color — used to be confined to fringe neo-Nazi websites with atrocious early-2000s design aesthetics. Now that’s become a regular feature of slick Fox News segments, which suggest that immigrants of color are “invading the country” and can never be “fully American,” and that demographic changes from immigration are “more change than human beings are designed to digest” and inherently a threat to “your neighborhood.”

The network also hypes the idea that nonwhite immigrants are dirty and diseased, as well as inherently criminal. (For about the 400th time: Immigrants, documented or otherwise, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens. There is no serious dispute about this.) Furthermore, because many immigrants speak languages other than English and may eat unfamiliar food or bring cultural practices that appear foreign to some, American society will soon be “tipping over a cliff.” is is the same kind of rhetoric that was used to demonize the Irish and Italian immigrants of the past, who were seen as threats to American culture due to scary foreign practices like putting garlic in food and praying with the Rosary. One hardly needs to mention the bigotry and discrimination directed at Jewish immigrants, who were barred from certain neighborhoods and many commercial establishments well into the 20th century. Unfortunately, most of the Fox News audience for this rhetoric, the president included, doesn’t know anything about that history, or care to learn.

It’s true that Fox News ratings are high, and that is incredibly meaningful to Trump, who has a long-standing obsession with TV ratings dating back to his days as host of “The Apprentice.” More important still, Trump tends to view TV ratings as the single most meaningful metric of public opinion, one that far outweighs more statistically significant measures like political polling.

In looking over Trump’s Twitter obsession with TV ratings, it’s clear that he believes — or at least pretends to believe — that ratings are tied tightly to alliance with his racist agenda. It’s not just that he routinely mocks CNN and MSNBC for supposedly having poor ratings. Any TV product that deviates too far from a racist agenda, he believes, takes a ratings hit for it. When NFL players were protesting racism, Trump gleefully declared it was hurting TV ratings. When the Oscars tried to improve racial diversity and attendees decried Trump’s bigotry, he gloated that it was the “Lowest rated Oscars in HISTORY”. He even repeatedly (and falsely) tried to argue that his inauguration ratings exceeded Barack Obama’s.

The pattern is clear: Trump believes racism is more popular than anti-racism, because, he believes, racism gets TV viewers and anti-racism doesn’t. And getting TV viewers is the only measurement he takes seriously.

By any measure of cable viewership, there is no denying that Fox News has disturbingly high ratings. Its daytime audience is 1.3 million viewers on average and the prime time shows pull 2.4 million people. That doesn’t just outdo other cable news networks, but mainstays like TNT and HGTV. Carlson gets nearly 3 million viewers a night, numbers that far exceed his rabid fan base of open white nationalists. Racism does sell, and the audience for white nationalist rhetoric is not small. Nearly 129 million Americans voted in 2016, meaning that only about 2% of the electorate is tuning into Carlson’s show on any given night. By contrast, the CBS sitcom “The Big Bang Theory” has nearly 19 million viewers. Racism sells, sure — but exponentially less well than unfunny sitcoms with aggressive laugh tracks.

Trump’s racism is wildly popular with his base, in other words, but a large majority of Americans find it repulsive. No amount of the president’s obsessive dissection of cable ratings will change that. That’s not to say Trump’s opponents should become complacent or assume that his unpopularity will automatically translate into a 2020 defeat.Unfortunately, racists are dramatically overrepresented in politics, due to the outdated mechanism of the Electoral College, which is how Trump won the 2016 election while getting nearly 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. He could certainly pull it off again.

Still, Trump’s apparently adamant belief that white nationalism will pay off in electoral terms doesn’t reflect any reputable political polling. It appears instead to be an artifact of his obsession with TV and with Fox News in particular. It’s a closed loop of awfulness: The more Trump pushes his racist agenda, the more the network amplifies his message, and the more he believes his bigotry is massively popular. Unless and until Trump takes a decisive L in 2020, he’s going to keep believing the majority of Americans are secretly on his side.