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11 26 blu tsu
Senate Democrats are saving Trump for last
John StoehrNovember 11, 2026
Connecticut’s senior US senator made news twice this week. In the first case, he made it sound like he was open to someone new being the next Senate majority leader when said that the Democratic Party needs “new energy and ideas.” If you know Richard Blumenthal the way we Nutmeggers do, you know something was lost in translation. He’s not a boat-rocker within his party. So when he clarified, saying that no, he does support Chuck Schumer, that’s more like what we expect from our Dick.
The other news item is more important. After the Congress is seated on January 3, Blumenthal will be the head of the permanent subcommittee on investigations. He will be the hub of the Senate Democrats’ accountability agenda. In Hartford, he said investigations will begin “with urgency,” and that they will focus not only on the corruption of the president but also on the corruption around him, the implication being that the billionaires and corporations that bribed Trump are in trouble. Blumenthal listed inquiries already underway: “crypto scams and corruption,” “[Elon] Musk and Starlink,” “vanities projects” and “the pay-for-play schemes of big corporations that have donated to the East Wing ballroom boondoggle.”
More important is that Blumenthal communicated a theory of accountability. He said, “I think the votes may be there to impeach [Pete] Hegseth” in the Senate, but the votes are not yet there to impeach Trump. Then he added a little shuck and jive: “Americans voted for affordability and accountability. They want to end corruption, because corruption increases costs. Taking money from foreign governments, and the president is beholden to them, increases the costs for average everyday Americans.”
That’s shuck and jive, because if Blumenthal and Democratic investigators find that the president took bribes – and he almost certainly has, given information already available to the public – then that would be grounds for impeachment. That said, I think Blumenthal might be right when he said “impeachment might be a blind alley.” The Democrats can inflict much more damage on the Republicans, and on anyone who might run to replace Trump, by leaving Trump alone for now – by making him the last man standing after the others fall.
I don’t want to make this sound like a thoroughly considered plan of attack. I think the Democrats are figuring things out as they go, and making calculations along the way. However, I would not be surprised if the Democrats in the Congress drag out coming after Donald Trump for as long as possible, and letting investigations spill into the next election, Benghazi-style. He can’t run again. They can only affect Republicans who have a future.
Again, Bidenomics was working
Inflation rose higher than expected last month. A former Federal Reserve economist told the Associated Press that the central bank should be worried. “Using rough estimates for last October’s data, Riccardo Trezzi calculates that consumer prices rose 4 percent in October from a year ago, up from 3.7 percent in September,” the AP said. “Core prices rose 2.8 percent, he estimates, up from 2.6 percent.”
Simon Rosenberg, who writes the Hopium Chronicles, said that “inflation has more than doubled since Trump took office. The scale of the policy failure that America is experiencing right now is hard to put into words.”
So he made a graph.
A picture is worth a thousand words and every one of them says Bidenomics was working. As stubborn as it was during Joe Biden’s tenure, inflation was nonetheless falling thanks to his policies. It started rising again almost immediately after Donald Trump returned, ending Bidenomics. Add illegal war, illegal taxes (tariffs) and illegal deportations, all that pressure is pushing prices up. An AP poll of 100,000 midterm voters found that about two-thirds blamed Trump’s policies for higher costs. Ninety percent said affordability was a “crucial” or “major” factor in voting.
Don Leonard’s game
I don’t know what Don Leonard hopes to accomplish, but I do know he’s not going to get it. The representative-elect from Ohio alleged today that “senior members of the Democratic House” told him “in no uncertain terms” that if he does not support the speakership of Hakeem Jeffries, they will make his life “a living hell.” In a video, he said the conditions for his support are a constitutional amendment to end Citizens United and ending support for Israel and the Iran war. The implication is that Democratic leadership opposes both, and has therefore resorted to intimidation.
The allegations are getting a lot of attention among “progressives,” but they are almost certainly fantasy. Why? Jeffries already has the votes he needs. There are currently 214 Democrats in the House. He needs just four more to reach the threshold of 218. That’s no problem given that the caucus is going to balloon to nearly 260. Leonard might think Jeffries is thinking a lot about his vote, but fact is, Jeffries is probably not thinking much about it at all. I suppose if the margins were narrow, he might resort to intimidation. As it is, however, there’s no point.
Is Leonard lying? Maybe. I would guess charitably that he was lobbied by Jeffries’ leadership team, which is standard operating procedure in Washington, and that Leonard took normal politicking as a threat, or he decided there was an opportunity to portray it as such for his own purposes. He seems to be appealing to “progressives” who trade in the conspiracy that Jeffries is a shill for Israel. Leonard’s video was picked up by Drop Site News, which is Ryan Grim’s outfit. Grim was one of the loudest anti-Democratic voices pushing the candidacy of Graham Platner. The Tennessee Holler made the video go viral, adding “is this Trumpian politics the change people voted for?” Sarah Kendzoir, a writer with a huge following who believes the Democrats are as “Trumpian” as the GOP, expanded the video’s reach.
There are agents of chaos in this country who operate in tandem with the Democrats but who are not interested in organizing power for the purpose of bringing greater freedom, equality and justice to all. They are interested in advancing their own cynical interests. Those interests are often pursued by sowing division among the Democrats, in particular the idea that Jeffries in the House, and Chuck Schumer in the Senate, are somehow illegitimate leaders. I hope Don Leonard figures out that that’s a fool’s game. Otherwise, he’s going to be podcasting in two years.
Chuck Schumer’s future
When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said today that “there’s only one candidate in the race” to be the next speaker, I knew there wasn’t much to the idea that “progressives oppose Jeffries.” If AOC is on board, it’s a done deal.
However, here is competition in the Senate, or at least the appearance of it. Bernie Sanders said today that he does not support Chuck Schumer as leader. Chris Van Hollen said Schumer’s leadership shouldn’t be assumed. He said two new senators would not be coming in “if Schumer and the DSCC [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee] had had their way.” Like Sanders, Van Hollen is calling for an open process by which to determine the next leader.
They might get what they want, but the outcome will probably be the same. In the House, the entire body votes for speaker. In the senate, only the majority votes for majority leader. Schumer almost certainly has a majority of those votes already, despite the objections of a few.
Does that mean this is meaningless? Perhaps not. Some suggest that what we are seeing is a beginning of the end for Schumer – that he’s being nudged out of the leadership before the next session of Congress, the presumption being that there will be a Democratic president by then, at which point truly transformational legislation can take place.
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The two Republican blunders that radicalized the South and ended 50-year rule
John Stoehr November 04, 2026
Here are some takeaways from last night’s election.
First, the numbers. NBC News projects that the Democrats will take as many as 258 seats in the US House, 54 in the US Senate. Senate races in Alaska and Mississippi are still undecided. If Democrats prevail there, bring the Senate total to 56. Meanwhile, Democrats could flip as many as seven governorships, including Texas, making it 30 states that are under Democratic control. The penetration is deep, down to the local level. The state House in North Carolina flipped. So did the state House in Texas. Here in Connecticut, Democrats widened their already-wide margins in the legislature to a veto-proof majority. Across the country, every voter demographic moved left, the Times said, including the white working class, but especially youth. Men under 30 who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 moved away from him by 38 points. “Earthquake,” “wipeout,” “landslide” – all these terms apply.
How massive were the midterm results? Consider the history. The margin of victory in the House is greater than all previous midterms going back to 1976, the Times’ Peter Baker said. That was the election right after Watergate and Richard Nixon’s resignation. Baker said election results “will dwarf even the margins that the Republicans won in their two big landslide victories of modern times when they defeated congressional Democrats when Bill Clinton held the White House in 1994 and Barack Obama was president in 2010.”
The midterms mark the end of the Donald Trump era, but also suggest the beginning of a new age of possibilities. The Texas GOP appears to have broken apart under the weight of corruption and fealty to the president. James Talarico’s Senate victory was expected but few dared hope that Gina Hinojosa would sweep Republican Governor Greg Abbott out of power. All statewide offices in the Lone Star State flipped from red to blue. Even some state Supreme Court elections were lost. This does not bode well for any Republican with national ambitions, as no GOP nominee can win the White House without Texas’ 40 electoral votes.
The map has expanded – in the south. Democratic Senate candidates won in Texas and South Carolina. Mississippi’s Senate race is still being decided, but it looks good for Democrat Scott Colom. A Democrat came within an inch of winning Senate seats in Louisiana (Jamie Davis) and Florida (Angie Nixon). The region has long been neglected by the national party. The assumption has been that as long as the GOP dominates, there is no point. As the most racially diverse stretch of the country, however, some Democrats always saw the potential. “I have been telling my party now for a long time that it needs to invest in the south,” Raphael Warnock said today. “The road to a sustainable Democratic majority in the Congress goes right through the south." If there was hesitance to invest yesterday, there shouldn’t be today.
Hispanic voters and Black voters – they are why the south is suddenly competitive. The conventional wisdom is that affordability doomed Trump, but getting lost in the conversation is that Republicans turned the humanity of these Americans into a subject of national debate so their rights and freedoms were no longer guaranteed. ICE radicalized Hispanics. The Supreme Court, by gutting the Voting Rights Act, radicalized Blacks. The deal had been that the Republicans would control southern states in exchange for Hispanic and Black enfranchisement. That deal is what constituted the 21st-century version of “the Solid South.” ICE and SCOTUS broke it, however. The consequence Tuesday was both groups mobilizing to smash the Republican grip on power. They helped James Talarico in Texas and Annie Andrews in South Carolina. (Hispanic voters also supported Adam Hamilton in Kansas.)
Beware those who whitewash the Democrats. Pundits are already urging them to stay focused on affordability issues. Not only does that overlook the impact of the Republicans’ lawlessness on marginalized communities, it fails to take into account the vast complexity of Trump’s incompetence, venality and destruction. The Democrats do have a mandate – everything! For two years, Trump’s evil was everywhere. His high crimes were omni-directional. So there’s no reason for the Democrats to limit their vision to one direction only. In noting the trap some pundits are laying for Democrats, civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill said “this narrowing in the commentary is a way to make the Democrats fear acting on the full range of issues that matter.” She added that “we can do more than one thing at a time. People want an end to the madness, the excess, the lawlessness, and they want affordability.”
Democrats’ mandate messaging is mixed and that’s OK. Some are getting mad at Hakeem Jeffries for telling Joe Scarborough today that "the American people don't want us to get even; they want us to get things done on their behalf." He is right to say that given that Scarborough is a conservative talking head who does not want to see the Democrats flex their full power. However, later in the day, Jeffries also said that "I haven't had a single member of the House Democratic caucus talk to me about impeachment. We've been relentlessly focused on affordability and accountability ... [and] the type of dramatic change that the American people are clearly demanding.” If all this sounds like mixed messaging, that’s because it is, and that’s OK. Jeffries will lead a massive majority with differing priorities. Some will want to grind Trump to dust with relentless exposure. (Yesterday, Robert Garcia told administration officials to “lawyer up!) Others will want to focus on providing health care. Jeffries’ choice of language reflects this while leaving room to maneuver.
Finally, there’s Donald Trump. He seems to accept reality, for now. He said he would work with the Democrats. He conceded the war contributed to the landslide, though he refused to admit he had anything to do with it personally. “I wasn’t on the ticket,” he told the Times. At the same time, he said the war would continue and there's the rub. He may be constrained, but what does that matter to a demented narcissist with no future? The midterms were a repudiation. They mark the beginning of a transition, perhaps to a “sustainable Democratic majority in the Congress,” as Raphael Warnock said. But before the new era can rise in earnest, the old one must fully fall. As Douglas Sosnik, Bill Clinton’s political director, told the Times today: “I do think starting tomorrow, we’re in this new phase and it’s a transition phase and it will last two years. And it will be much more volatile than the last two years.”
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10 26 an
Don't let the laughs fool you: Schmitt's debacle is hiding a darker truth
(REUTERS)
John Stoehr October 01, 2026
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The staffer pulling Trump’s strings while the press just laughs
John StoehrAugust 20, 2026
The Washington press corps is Donald Trump's true constituency. He speaks for them, brings attention to them, enlarges their standing, enriches their bosses, even when, or especially when, he attacks them. They are not going to tell an "old-man narrative" about him the way they told an "old-man narrative" about Joe Biden. If they can avoid it, they will.
Yes, I know. The over-the-top backlash against Jon Ossoff has been suggestive. Mere hours after his joke, about Trump preferring "travel with Natalie" over doing the hard work of being president, there was a coordinated effort to attack the Georgia senator. The collective freak-out suggested that Trump is sensitive to the appearance of needing a full-time babysitter (from White House aide Natalie Harp). Some liberals believe the right is trying to stop old-man narratives from forming, even at the risk of bringing more attention to Trump's age. Indeed, according to Brian Stelter, "Google searches for Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp spiked by 5,000 percent. News outlets hurried to meet the demand for information."
I think they're wrong. Just because people are talking about something does not mean the press corps will talk about it, too. Remember, these "professionals" choose to be humiliated by the president on live TV. He calls them pigs. He calls them traitors. He calls them scum. Yet they don't defend themselves and they don't defend each other, because politics is just a cynical game. For them, there are no consequences. All that matters is attention, and for that reason, every deviation from the norm can be rationalized in terms of Trump being Trump.
Last month, Times podcaster Ezra Klein asked "the Trump whisperer" if she felt he has "changed with age or that age is slowing him in meaningful ways." Maggie Haberman said she "didn’t notice anything meaningfully different." But in an interview she did with the president in preparation for her book, what leaped to her attention was that Trump was "pure Trump."
He was focused on revenge and was "very obsessed with the renovation projects," she said. "It’s Day 17 of the war, and he’s telling us: Here’s my models of the ballroom," she said, adding that he "didn’t have a care in the world." She said she didn't "subscribe to this dementia conversation" but also that Trump isn't "some fundamentally different human being."
"I think he is much more himself, which is a product of age in general."
Maggie Haberman can find a thousand ways of saying "dementia" without saying it. That's why they call her the "Trump whisperer." And her word games are a reminder of the fact that the older Joe Biden got, the more justified the press corps was in telling "an old-man narrative" about him. However, the older Donald Trump gets, the more justified the press corps is in telling an "old-man narrative" about Trump becoming more purely himself.
Some believe the media might finally be turning against Trump. They point to Haberman's book, Regime Change (with Jonathan Swan). In it, they characterize Harp as Trump's nanny. She reassures the president, encourages him and comforts him. She apparently leaves him "love letters." She stands ready to present him with glowing praise that has been posted to social media whenever Trump is melting down, like a toddler. She helps write some of his Truth Social posts. During an interview, Haberman described Harp as Trump's "binky."
But "binky," or security blanket, is not a sign of a turning tide. Haberman's casual use of the word is the tell. It suggests the degree to which she and others have internalized Trump's deterioration. It's so normal as to be invisible. When it does come to the fore, as it did this week, it's set in the context of politics as usual. Short of a game-changing event, and I have no idea what that might be, the press corps won't make his age an issue. He is a Republican. The press corps is his true constituency. If he were a Democrat, that would be different.
It should be a scandal, though
From yesterday morning's Times: "She never takes a day off, not even on Sunday. She works out of the Oval Office and she’s got a regular seat on Marine One. She texts with world leaders on the president’s behalf. She stays up late with him drafting social media posts."
Here, the "she" is White House executive assistant Natalie Harp. If it's true that she's involved in drafting Trump's posts, late into the night, when no one else is around, that would make her one of the most powerful people in the world. Unelected, unvetted, unchecked.
And unhinged.
She got into a screaming match one time with the Secret Service when there was no more room in the car. So she got into the trunk. Officials from Trump's 2024 campaign tried to keep her away from the president, but she spent the summer sleeping in the women's locker room at his golf resort. She leaves him notes saying "you are all that matters to me” and “I don’t ever want to let you down” and “I want to bring you joy [and] feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’” She says Trump cured her bone cancer. (He didn't.) She quotes him like she's quoting scripture. Her brother suggested that crushing on powerful men is a habit going back to her teens when George W Bush was in office. "Since she was like 16, she's had an obsession," Preston Harp said. "Her dream came true finally."
With his social media posts, the president moves markets. He influences the global order. He negotiates terms of war and peace. He defines the national conversation. And he issues threats, as he did when he promised Iran that "a whole civilization will die tonight."
But who's writing them? Is it a deranged 35-year-old woman who bears a striking resemblance to Trump's daughter, Ivanka Trump, and who, according to the Times, "is never not there, ever-present with a wide smile and her eyes fixed on the president"? Harp shows Trump drafts for Truth Social, then logs into his account to publish them, The Guardian said. These have included AI-generated content of the Obamas as apes, of Trump as a pilot dropping shit on No Kings protesters, and of Trump as the pope and Jesus Christ.
How much is she shaping world events?
If Trump's "binky" were a scandal, we might know.
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Lately, I have been thinking about Pat Robertson. Yes, the very same. The late televangelist used to accuse America of falling away from the straight and narrow when there was a natural disaster. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods – these were God's punishment, he said. For what? Well, whatever Robertson didn't like, but gay men preoccupied his attention. I guess God wouldn't punish America if they were back in the closet. Or something like that.
I have been thinking about Robertson's style of rhetoric in light of the recent discourse over "woke 1." There appears to be an established elite consensus that Donald Trump and the politics he represents were a natural and legitimate reaction to it. Noah Berlatsky called this the "white supremacy consensus." Victor Ray put that in historical context: "The end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow depended upon the exact type of elite consensus that non-white folks had gone too far in calling for equality, that we are living through. It does not bode well for the future, even if the GOP is routed in the next couple of elections."
What does this have to do with Pat Robertson?
Consider Jamelle Bouie's contribution to the "woke 1" discourse. In a new video, the Times columnist reminded us what "woke 1" was about: "a material response to real conditions, from police violence to rampant inequality to sexual abuse and misconduct." Yes, he said, some of that was silly, but "put this in perspective and recognize that in this moment, the obsession with wokeness that seems to monopolize the thoughts of America's commentary class is utter decadence, a prime example of the total lack of moral seriousness from many of the people who presume to explain the world to ordinary Americans" (my italics).
Importantly, the evidence of decadence is the fact that the "white supremacy consensus" is based on make-believe. Bouie points to a piece by David Brooks, "an ostensibly serious and sober-minded political commentator," who asserted that "the left really did" purge universities of conservatives, elevate a "caste system that privileged the children of the affluent and screwed the working class," and create "a stifling orthodoxy that stamped out dissent." Brooks says these things really did happen when they really did not. Yet lacking an empirical basis does not matter. What matters is that such claims are shared by privileged white men like him, men for whom decadence is not a moral failing but a mark of status.
But elite decadence isn't the only thing reminding me of Pat Robertson.
So is elite impunity.
Last week, I told you about Philip Bump's reporting on the decline in the prosecution of white-collar crimes since the Financial Panic of 2007-2008. From that point onward, men like Elon Musk went from being merely rich to being very obscenely rich. Bump said his wealth grew by 60 times. Musk is symbolic. Over the last two decades, oligarchs have committed great crimes to produce great fortunes. Sixteen people in America are worth nearly $4 trillion. That has never happened before. They own our media. They own our tech platforms. They own all of one political party, some of the other. And they are trying to own our money.
Indeed, crypto currencies might be the perfect marriage of elite decadence and elite impunity. There is "no legitimate use" for them, according to Paul Krugman. "They’ve had 18 years to come up with one," he said in June. "They keep throwing things up like 'an inflation hedge' or 'source of stability.' Every one of them has turned out to be baseless. The only real use for crypto is tax evasion, money laundering and crime. It’s the preferred mechanism of choice for global terrorists, sex traffickers, and rogue nations like North Korea and Iran."
And let's not forget for the American president. For one thing, it hides bribery by elites. For another, it scams the little people. Charlie Bilello reported today that the value of Trump's meme coin is down -98 percent while his wife's is down -99 percent. “Everybody’s profiting," Trump said in July when he defended his family's $1.4 billion in crypto earnings. It's "perhaps the most blatant example of corruption in the history of American politics," Bilello said. Yet the entire "Epstein class," as Jon Ossoff might say, either approves of crypto or is silent.
Where we are right now is arguably the culmination of two decades of elite impunity and elite decadence. During that time, the very obscenely rich looted the republic, depleted our institutions and weakened our foundations, perhaps irreversibly. Musk is prone to saying that civilization is tempting suicide by allowing immigrants to take over. He's right about suicide, but wrong about immigrants. The threat is men like him who are bent on reshaping society so they never face the consequences of their choices. Their implicit goal isn't just to play God but be God, and there's no price they won't pay. But instead of bravely and humbly fighting this blasphemy, and instead of examining recent history to deduce the conditions from which it arose, the David Brookses of the world have decided to craft fables about "wokeness" that are, as Jamelle Bouie said, "made-up," "false" and "never happened."
Which brings me back to Pat Robertson. I think the late conservative Christian broadcaster and presidential candidate was wrong. Marginalized people are no sin, nor were hurricanes, tornadoes and floods the consequence of recognizing the inherent worth and dignity of all people. I say that, because I believe that's what God wants us to do. Democracy, freedom, equality, inclusion – these are the straight and narrow. All else is falling away from God.
But perhaps Pat Robertson was right, too. Our nation has lost its way. Multiracial democracy has given way to autocratic evil. Prosperity has given way to sickness, meanness, impoverishment and death. A cancer has spread through the body politic, yet we still tolerate the blasphemy of billionaires and the decadence of elite pundits who defend their obscenity.
Maybe God is punishing America.
And the worst is yet to come.
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America's point of no return: Inside Trump's irreversible damage — and what comes next
John Stoehr July 13, 2026
Don't kid yourself. The sphere of freedom is shrinking. Trans people wanted to live their lives, but the political right, in the form of Donald Trump, made them demons and the political center, in the form of respectable white people, made the right's demonization seem respectable. Kamala Harris wanted America to choose liberty. "We're not going back," she said. Many of us agreed, but we are. The pulling back of trans rights could lead to the pulling back of other rights – birth control, gay marriage, inter-racial marriage, and more.
Yet the future is unknown. People will fight. More importantly, they will find joy in the struggle. That's the spirit I found in the interview below with Evan Urquhart. After writing extensively for The Atlantic, Vanity Fair and others, he set up Assigned Media in 2022 to report on transgender news. He told me that hope can be found in the fact that for all the bigotry trans people are facing, they still face less than they used to. Moreover, there's greater awareness, which means more chances for normalizing trans life. But most of all, he said, trans people just know themselves, and "you can't put toothpaste back in the tube. We're out, we're everywhere, and even if our lives are harder, we're not going away."
Even so, things will get worse before they get better. "The presidencies of Donald Trump represent a phase shift for American democracy, one that has made it impossible to return to the way things were," Evan told me. "I think if you look at the totality of the actions of Trump himself, his administrations, and his judges, that's an inescapable conclusion. ... It's too unsettling ... so people tell themselves this is just trans issues stuff, nothing to do with them."
SCOTUS ruled that states can ban transgender athletes. The number of such athletes is vanishingly small. Yet states are targeting people without much power. What's going on?
Trans women's participation in women's sports was identified as a perfect wedge issue by conservatives, in part because the stakes feel relatively low, because playing sports isn't required for survival, and because fairly few trans people play sports.
The right has since moved on to targeting trans people in every part of our lives, from identity documents to restrooms to stripping any mention of trans women out of rape protections in federal prisons, but sports has been around the longest, which is why it had the time to make it to the Supreme Court.
As a wedge, it works to cement the idea in people's minds that trans people should be treated as members of our birth-assigned sex, in order to slowly roll up the idea that treating us equally means making room for us to live as our authentic selves.
What do you see being done about this among Dems and allies? What are the obstacles?
I think that the consensus among Democrats and allies, and even among many trans people, has been to let this one go. The majority of Americans have been convinced to see this as a common sense issue of keeping men from steamrolling women's sports, and since it really is such a tiny group of people being impacted, the thinking is to retreat and regroup.
I personally think there's a bit of a lost opportunity here, though. Because sports is lower stakes, there's actually room to get people curious about the science, about the ways hormones influence our bodies, about the vast differences between trans people and cis members of their birth sex. In all the years trans women who'd medically transitioned were allowed to participate, not one dominated a single sport. That's interesting and unintuitive for a lot of people, and I think you can activate the part of people's brains that gets curious and wants to know more about this issue, which can be useful for education. It's different with questions that are more emotional, like whether to allow your 14 year old to start a hormonal medication. On those questions, I see people's curiosity give way to fear.
On transitioning, I think what are called radical centrists are largely responsible. They pushed fear over liberty. They pretended that rightwingers are only reacting, not making the choice to punch down. What can be done? What historical models are there?
Centrists want easy answers to the challenges we're facing. They want an easy answer to the challenge of having a completely unsuitable, unethical, mendacious person attain the US presidency, and to other challenges like climate change and increasing inequality as well. They want to believe we're still living in the 1990s, an eternal 1990s where the Overton Window is extremely narrow, our political parties agree and work together on a lot of things, and voters reward them for that.
To someone with that mindset, it's very appealing to think there's a minority (one who people in their social set largely agree are a little weird) who they can just change positions on with no pain. If that's true, you can just tweak your platform at the margins and avoid the hard question: Why are Americans so desperate for change they'll vote for a fascist in one election and a socialist in the next?
But the damage is not going to be limited to one subset. Some say the trans ruling is softening the ground toward striking down gay marriage, birth control and perhaps inter-racial marriage. The sphere of freedom is shrinking. Is there enough awareness of that?
In my view, the presidencies of Donald Trump represent a phase shift for American democracy, one that has made it impossible to return to the way things were. I think if you look at the totality of the actions of Trump himself, his administrations, and his judges, that's an inescapable conclusion.
It's also a very scary conclusion, which is why people don't want to look at these precedents on trans rights and ask, if a state legislature can ban a safe and effective treatment for trans people, does that mean they can ban vaccines? Does that mean they can ban antidepressants, birth control, and ADHD medications? They want the disturbance to stay with the trans community, not necessarily because they hate us but because it's quite scary to imagine the consequences of, for example, a far-right court deciding that equal protection just doesn't apply to trans people in sports because there aren't that many trans people in sports.
Who else might they decide equal protection doesn't apply to? It's too unsettling to ask the question, so people tell themselves this is just trans issues stuff, nothing to do with them.
Here in Connecticut, the state GOP is trying to ban trans women from women's sports, but their effort is falling in deaf ears. That seems indicative of the future, where some states and regions honor and protect equality under law while others savage it. Legally speaking, the same person in Connecticut is different in Alabama. Is that our future?
Blue states have largely circled the wagons around their trans communities, in a way that's lovely to see. I think that the far right really wants to federalize fascism, and make it impossible for states to protect trans people, but that project may be more difficult than they thought.
As difficult and scary as it is to see my rights being chipped away, a lot has changed. Part of that is that more people know trans people, and even with a bit of backsliding the prejudice isn't nearly what it was when I was young. Another part is that trans people have more ways to know themselves and express themselves than they ever did. I can't predict the future, but I know you can't put toothpaste back in the tube. We're out, we're everywhere, and even if our lives are harder, we're not going away.
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GOP's sadism exposed as Republicans try to silence a Christian message
:{Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) at the 2014 Conservative Political Action
John Stoehr June 01, 2026
I have a pitcher full of ice water and I'm ready to use it on liberals and Democrats who are prematurely celebrating the Senate primary victory of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Yes, he's deeply immoral and corrupt. Yes, he's a cheat and a liar. (Liberal Currents' Alan Elrod said he's "a paragon of the Trumpian politician – a man whose fascism flows as much from his prejudices as his own adolescent, libidinal self-indulgence.") But Texas is still gonna Texas, and like Democrat Graham Platner's supporters in Maine, who are willing to overlook his Nazi tattoo in order to oust Republican Susan Collins, Paxton's supporters are willing to overlook a multitude of sins to stop Democrat James Talarico from going to the US Senate.
Within hours of Paxton's defeat of incumbent Senator John Cornyn, the right began attacking Talarico – and making it very personal. "Tala-freako is a creep and he thinks he’s a vegan," RNC chairman Joe Gruters said. "He thinks God is nonbinary. He wants to mutilate children. He wants to put boys in girls locker rooms. ... All those things and the fact that they are openly supporting communists and socialists." A GOP strategist called Talarico an "emasculated vegan dweeb." Stephen Miller said he was "first transgender Senate candidate."
The ad hominem attacks were so immediate, so intense and so insane that some observers took it as a sign of Talarico's advantage over Paxton. "Interesting, if not surprising, that rightwingers have collectively agreed that their line of attack against Talarico is that he's supposedly feminine," James Surowiecki wrote on Twitter. "Not a trace of substance, just culture war bull----. Because how, on substance, do you defend voting for Ken Paxton?"
In speculating about the reasons Talarico is suddenly and "directly confronting attacks on his masculinity," according to NOTUS, I think liberals and Democrats still give rightwingers too much credit. They are not smearing him because of his strengths (which are many) or Paxton's liabilities (also many). They are smearing him because that's what they do.
As was the case during Donald Trump's three campaigns, what matters to many voters isn't leadership or policy or character. What matters is the collective desire to punch down on people whom the mob believes are deserving of it. (In this case, Talarico is associated with LGBTQ folks.) GOP campaigns are now like Vegas: what's done there stays there. They are vacations from morality, excuses to indulge in deviance and depravity. That Texans would suffer by electing Paxton doesn't change the fact that slandering "Soy Boy" is going to be fun.
Sadism is the point. We should draw attention to that moral failing by defending Talarico, not only on ethical grounds but on unambiguously religious grounds. This is not an easy thing to ask of some of my liberal brethren, as religion to them is frequently the problem in American politics, not a solution. But if nothing else, let this convince you: the most extreme smears against Talarico are not explicitly gendered. They are explicitly religious. He represents more than a viable Senate candidate who might – might! – turn Texas purple. Talarico embodies a viable path toward breaking the right's monopoly on faith, especially the Christian faith.
On Wednesday, this is what US Senator Mike Lee posted on Twitter, quote-tweeting a post by the DNC that said: "Texas: James Talarico is the only candidate who will put you first."
To the most conservative Christian sects in the United States (Mike Lee is a Mormon), Moloch is probably second only to Satan (or maybe the Antichrist) among figures of evil in the Bible. Secular liberals see this comparison and shrug. (It's just more of the same kookiness.) Religious liberals, however, see it as bad faith designed to prevent Talarico from attacking his political opponents where it hurts most. If Talarico is allowed to explain himself and his theological views, free of the slander against him, the most conservative religious voter might come to the conclusion that despite being a Democrat, he's still a good Christian.
Hold that in your mind as I remind you of the time, three months ago, when the Trump administration threatened to punish late-night comedian Stephen Colbert for airing an interview with Talarico. (This threat came after CBS had caved to Trump's bullying and cancelled his show.) In effect, the government banned Talarico. (The interview was posted online.) But what did it ban? Two decent men discussing the corruption of faith by politics.
"For 50 years," Talarico said:
the religious right ... convinced a lot of our fellow Christians that the most important issues were abortion and gay marriage, two issues that aren’t mentioned in the Bible. Two issues that Jesus never talked about. Jesus in Matthew 25 tells us exactly how you and I and ... our fellow believers [are] going to be judged and how we’re going to be saved: by feeding the hungry, by healing the sick, by welcoming the stranger. Nothing about going to church. Nothing about voting Republican. It was all about how you treat other people.
He continued:
Don't tell me what you believe. Show me how you treat other people and I’ll tell you what you believe. And I think in our faith we’ve got to get back to those fundamentals. My granddad was a Baptist preacher in South Texas, and when I was little, he told me that Christianity is a simple religion, not an easy religion, he would always clarify, but a simple religion, because Jesus gave us two commandments: love God and love neighbor. And there was no exception of that second commandment. Love thy neighbor, regardless of race or gender or sexual orientation or immigration status or religious affiliation.
I suspect Mike Lee was reacting to Talarico's biblical defense of abortion. He said God asked Mary for consent before impregnating her. Therefore, Talarico reasoned, a mother's life has privilege over that of an unborn child. While there is indeed a history of Protestants (though not Catholics) taking that view for granted, it's beside the point, as Talarico makes plain. Abortion is a modern concern, not a fundamental one. He pushes it out of the realm of religion and into the realm of politics. That, for the religious right, is deeply threatening.
Rightwingers want the public to believe that being a liberal and being a Christian are incompatible. Yet here's a man from inside the church (Talarico is a Presbyterian) speaking for a legitimate, though often ignored, theological tradition. Not only does that frustrate efforts to maintain the view that being a good Christian requires opposition to the variations of "race or gender or sexual orientation or immigration status or religious affiliation." It suggests that the Messiah himself might have been liberal. (He was, relatively speaking.)
No wonder Lee calls him Moloch.
This is why sadism is the end, not the means. Rightwingers must smear Talarico. They must make him seem like a perversion of Christian virtues, not an evangelist for them. He must not be allowed to speak for himself, only to react to the allegations against him. And that's why liberals – even secular godless liberals – should defend him, not only on ethical grounds but on unambiguously religious grounds. You don't have to care that a mob slandered Christ, too.
But Christians should.
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AN 5 26
NO LNX
Trump doesn't have to care about your pain anymore — thanks to John Roberts
John Stoehr May 18, 2026
In the absence of fundamental change, especially among Democratic leaders, I can't say I have a lot of hope these days. That's in spite of all the polling showing that Donald Trump is the most unpopular president ever. He was unpopular the first time. That he's unpopular the second time should not be surprising. What is surprising is he was elected again despite being unpopular. More surprising is we keep believing unpopularity will doom him.
Don't get me wrong.
It could be that Trump's policies burn up so much of the American electorate that voters storm the polls in November to put Democrats back in charge of the Congress. But what if they storm the polls and nothing changes? Not because Democratic leaders are squishes, though that's true enough, but because John Robert's US Supreme Court, and now state courts, legalized cheating. We all believe in our bones that you win when you're popular, lose when you're not. But white-power gerrymandering takes that foundational belief and perverts it.
Trump admitted this week that he doesn't care about the economic effects of his war against Iran. (Inflation hit 3.8 percent. In effect, that means we all got a pay cut.) To what extent are Americans' financial situations motivating him toward a peace deal? "Not even a little bit," the president said. "The only thing that matters is ... they can't have a nuclear weapon. I don't think about Americans' financial situation. I don't think about anybody. I think about one thing. We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That's the only thing that motivates me."
That clip was shared widely by liberals and Democrats, as it seemed to be more evidence of the growing backlash against the president and his party. (Most Americans were not concerned about Iran's nuclear program before the war.) But what if it wasn't evidence so much as foreshadowing – of the kind of dystopian future we can expect to experience in which the American president has been fully liberated from the consequences of his choices, in which he can do virtually anything he wants without fear of democratic accountability.
I'm talking about immediate material stakes here, more than ideological stakes. Complaints about an executive branch acting like it's above the law are going to feel almost quaint in a context of food shortages. But the longer Trump's war goes on, the more likely we are to face such a crisis. Overseas markets have dried up. Fertilizer is scarce. The price of diesel is soaring. Crop-pickers are getting deported. And farms are going bankrupt at alarming rates. If we're lucky, saying he doesn't care will be a warning to future presidents to never, ever, ever say that. If we're unlucky, however, it won't be a warning. It will be an abomination.
Last week, Virginia's supreme court struck down a ballot measure that would have redrawn the state's congressional maps, giving Democrats an advantage. The referendum was lawful and legitimate, yet the court overturned the law in a blatant act of usurpation, following the lead of the US Supreme Court. The response by Virginia Democrats should have been a declaration of war against unelected legislators, knowing that a majority was behind them.
But instead of leading an effort to force out the judges (by lowering the retirement age) and bringing the law to a refreshed court, Virginia’s state Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell told Greg Sargent there were practical obstacles. But beyond that, Surovell said, "wiping out the entire supreme court is an incredibly extreme step to take over a decision you don’t like." He added that his party will appeal the decision to the US Supreme Court, but short of a favorable ruling there, he still expects voters to put Democrats in two of four lost seats.
In other words, don't worry.
"The people" will come through.
Praising "the people" is patriotic propaganda with a long history in America that feels good, but it's wrong, even dangerous. Joe Biden hoped the 2024 election would be a trial of sorts of a treasonous former president. He hoped that his administration would not have to take the risk of criminally prosecuting him. Look where that got us. The lesson should be to never ask "the people" to make sound moral judgments. They won't do it. Instead, they will give a traitor a second chance, then complain about the ruinous consequences of giving it to him.
Sadly, it seems some Democratic leaders still have not learned this lesson. They hope "the people" will do the work for them, saving them from the risk of doing what needs to be done. In the Virginia case, it would be good to remove anti-democratic judges anyway for the fact that they exposed themselves as anti-democratic judges. Indeed, the Virginia case is a microcosm. There no such thing as democratic progress if rogue courts go unpunished. As Jonathan Bernstein said today, even if the Democrats have a trifecta after 2028, "there’s just about nothing Congress could do to prop up healthy democracy in the US (or, for that matter, to pass any other policy agenda the Democrats might have) that is safe from the six Republicans on the Supreme Court. There’s simply no way to court-proof anything."
Like everyone else, I hope "the people" correct their error. (The Bulwark's Jonathan Last says don't worry, the "panicrats" are, well, panicking.) But despite what Democratic leaders say, electoral victory is not the same as saving the republic. That requires cold-blooded partisans using their legitimate authority to change the institutions that have corrupted democracy.
Donald Trump, the Republicans and their rightwing allies in the courts have rigged the system, through white-power gerrymandering, so that being a monumentally unpopular party might no longer be an impediment to rule. (Ordinary people could face food shortages, for God's sake, while Trump shrugs.) The Democrats cannot hope that "the people" can overcome a rigged system, because "the people" cannot overcome one. Indeed, they have proven capable of making things worse. Democrats like Virginia's Scott Surovell fear being too extreme. My hope is in Democrats who realize they haven't been extreme enough.
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AN 5 26
NO LNX
GOP's long-term vision leaves Democrats scrambling
John Stoehr May 13, 2026
American politics is full of uncertainty, but one thing that the Democrats completely trust is this – eventually, a Republican president will wreck the economy. His failure paves the way for the Democrats' return to power. This pattern has been so regular as to be predictable over the last half century. An entire generation of Democratic leadership counts on it.
These pendulum swings may seem comforting, as they suggest a kind of equilibrium at the heart of the American electorate. They should not be comforting, as they enable America's worst instincts. The Democrats don't really need to present an ideal vision of the future. They don't really need to fight for it. To win back power, all they do is wait. At some point, the Republican will blow up the economy. The outcome will be a Democratic comeback.
The Democrats have sound policies. The problem is they collectively lack is a unifying moral view. They do not ask Americans to be better. They do not invest in infrastructure that rewards public virtue. They do not go to war for the greater good. Instead, they tend to privilege the victimhood of disillusioned voters, even when they are victims of themselves.
In the run up to the midterm elections, the Democrats accuse Donald Trump of broken promises. Among other examples, they cite rates of inflation that have wiped out wage gains. But the president kept his promise. A majority of voters wanted whiteness to be dominant again. That's what he's doing. The problem is that whiteness causes ruin, even for those who vote for it. You can't have one without the other, but they didn't believe it, because, to them, whiteness is prosperity. What they're mad about now is their own desire backfiring on them.
If the Democrats win in November, which seems likely, the leadership will have incentive to control everything rank-and-file Democrats say for the purpose of seeming reasonable to these voters, therefore retaining hopefully their support in advance of the 2028 election.
The problem is there's no way to seem reasonable to Americans who desire freedom from consequences. To use the old cliche, Trump voters wanted to touch the stove. What they didn't want was the first-degree burns. Appeals to their self-interest will have limited effect if they are not accompanied by an ethical reaction. The Democrats need to get evangelical on voters, not only with a unifying moral view but an information infrastructure to transmit it.
Can the Democratic Party do that?
Yes, according to Matthew Sheffield. The holdup isn't money. There's plenty. The holdup is lack of will. "I have come to the conclusion that the current highest level Democratic leaders would rather lose than change their approach fundamentally," Matthew told me last week.
An expert of political media, especially on the right, Matthew was a source in a Post report about Ashley St. Clair, a former maga personality who recently revealed the extent to which rightwing media is directly paid for by billionaire Republicans. Matthew is also a Republican apostate (he left on moral grounds), so I asked if he thinks St. Claire is being genuine.
"She seems to," he said. "Having walked away from the easy money, I can recognize that's what she's done. I'm going to have to do a crowd-funding campaign, because there's no one willing to pay for media on the left. And the audience mostly just wants doomerism."
The left wants doomerism? I asked.
Here's his reply and the rest of our conversation.
Can you expand on that? The left wants doomerism?
I think a lot of the audience genuinely believes in some sense that Trump is inevitably going to destroy democracy. They think that there is no money available on the left, and that is why Republicans have been strong when he's on the ballot.
This seems to be an easier conclusion to believe rather than the actual facts: that Democrats at the elite level have wasted their money on poor campaign strategies, and that they are not very good at what they do.
It's very discomforting to have to face the fact that Kamala Harris was not a very good candidate, and that neither were the people who ran her campaign at the highest levels and the affiliated super PACs.
I have come to the conclusion that the current highest level Democratic leaders would rather lose than change their approach fundamentally. They are so obsessed with controlling the message at all times that they don't want to direct money or influence to people who are not under their control. But that way of doing politics doesn't work in the age of social media, because everyone can see that the messages that are pushed in this way are obviously coordinated and inauthentic.
The party leaders are thoroughly bought into neoliberalism. Rather than talk about how they're going to tear down monopolies and tax the billionaires who have destroyed our society, they talk about relaxing zoning laws and new tax credits
Is there a consensus among leaders or is there competition?
Inside DC, there seems to be a consensus. There in the thrall of amateur commentators like Matt Yglesias who have punished no serious political science work, or even a work of political theory.
But it seems that some Obama alumni have begun to realize that the Clinton way of doing things has failed. I wrote about this recently.
The problem for Democratic longterm thinking has been that Republicans destroy things invariably when they get the White House and so Democrats can win almost regardless of what they do.
So instead of building a longterm generative vision, the party is dominated by small-minded amateurs who think that recapitulating Bill Clinton in 1992 is a great idea. Never mind that Clinton himself did not get a majority that year.
Having seen the inside of both parties, there's such a dramatic contrast in terms of vision. Republicans are planning for the next five, 10, and 30 years. Democrats are only thinking about the next election.
And the media that they encourage largely reflect that. Everything is about reacting to whatever happened in the news that day, rather than developing a coherent vision of how we got here and how to fix it.
That reactivity would explain their obsession with independent voters, no? As in: let's put all our energy into appearing reasonable to people who feel alienated. That plays by the GOP's rules, rather than they own.
Yes. Republicans have a larger vision, whereas Democrats are policymakers. They don't have a vision of the future or how to get there. To the extent there is one, it's "moar capitalism," which isn't how you win as a left party.
What do you think the Democratic vision should be? And should they pay influencers to help spread word of that visions?
I think that citizens should stop paying for candidates so much, because the money is wasted on ads.
As to the vision, it's not a simple question. We need political vision, philosophical vision, and metaphysical vision. I'm working on the latter two actually with a book manuscript in outline form if you want to look at it. Here's a very compressed overview of some of the political and philosophical parts.
Pretty much all "futurism" discourse is fascistic. And it's reflected in the films that get made and the cramped vision of "global class struggle" or "bean-counting capitalism" that get advanced.
We need to openly talk about beauty, love, knowledge and freedom. The rightwing talks of these things, and gets to own that discourse because we say nothing in response. As the Book of Proverbs puts it, "Where there is no vision, the people perish."
I boil it down by saying that we need a liberalism that aims to make lives better at every level. Everyone deserves to laugh easily, think clearly and love freely.
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AN 5 26
How do I explain what the supermajority of the US Supreme Court did this week to the Voting Rights Act? I'll put it this way. Six justices decided to pretend that racism no longer exists and that the history of racial discrimination no longer bears on the present. The gravity of their ruling cannot be overstated, but the ruling itself was based on fantasy.
The point of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) was ensuring equality. Everyone involved in its passage, which arose from overwhelming support in the US Congress, knew the point was to codify the ennobling principles of the founding. And everyone involved understood the primary challenge to that goal: racial discrimination, especially in the former slaver states.
The history of slavery and Jim Crow apartheid is why the VRA's Section 2 allowed race to be a factor in drawing congressional maps. The idea was that remedies to racial discrimination should be race-conscious. After all, how do you reverse the effects of the history of slavery and apartheid, as well as make reparations to future citizens, without an awareness of race?
To rightwingers, the VRA was never the manifestation of the Declaration of Independence. It was always a weapon against "innocent" white people. For years, rightwing courts tried to gut it. Yesterday's ruling is a result of that history. Six justices pretended racism isn't real – or not real enough to justify the provision's continuation.
By make-believing, they rationalized a ruling that found that race-conscious remedies to racial discrimination are actually racist. Here's what Associate Justice Samuel Alito said in the court's majority opinion on the constitutionality of a district in Louisiana that is majority Black: "Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act … was designed to enforce the Constitution — not collide with it. Unfortunately, lower courts have sometimes applied this Court's [Section] 2 precedents in a way that forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids."
To put this another way, what Alito is saying is hooray! The VRA did it! The United States is no longer as racist as it used to be! And because the mission is accomplished, the Supreme Court cannot continue to allow race to be a factor in drawing congressional maps. If it did, that would mean a law designed to enforce the Constitution ends up colliding with it. The only constitutional way to draw congressional maps is by being completely "blind" to color.
It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Alito is gaslighting us. Plaintiffs must now show that states intentionally discriminated against minorities. That's going to be difficult to prove, however, in courts that are now constitutionally mandated to pretend to be colorblind.
In that, Alito is merely building on the original gaslighting by Chief Justice John Roberts. In 2013, in a ruling that opened the door to yesterday's, he said "it is a sordid business, this divving us up by race. ... our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions." In response, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reminded Roberts that racial prejudice is a feature requiring constant vigilance. "Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."
Of course, no one in America is blind to color! Remember the point of the Voting Rights Act: to ensure equality in the face of real racial discrimination. It didn't make bigotry disappear. By gutting this key provision, however, the Supreme Court has paved the way for its resurgence in election law, and predictably, that's what happened. Within hours of the ruling, Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana – all former slaver states – moved to redraw their maps to suppress the vote, and therefore suppress the rights and freedoms, of their minorities.
The Washington press corps almost uniformly framed news of the ruling in terms of the midterms, as in: which of the parties will have the advantage in light of the court's decision? While it's true that it supercharges a bipartisan gerrymandering effort already underway, it does much more than that. The ruling, according to Hofstra Law Professor James Sample, "is a diametrical shift in voting rights practices, a diametrical shift in the areas of race and racial discrimination and the remedies for racial discrimination." Elections are only a means. The ruling's ultimate impact will be on the ability of equal citizens to manifest their destinies.
However, the ruling's impact on elections is probably what will finally get the full attention of Democratic leaders. While the party has successfully countered GOP gerrymandering efforts in Texas, the court has dismantled some of the last remaining obstacles to restoring the legal structures of southern apartheid, thus increasing the odds of continued Republican dominance in Washington. In short, the ruling poses an existential threat to the Democratic Party's future. Perhaps that will finally force the party to regard the court as its enemy.
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an 4 26
https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/billionaire-media-trump/
Billionaires went all in on Trump — and lost big
:{John Stoehr April 08, 2026
It is not conspiratorial to suggest that the Washington press corps chose to help Donald Trump win the 2024 election by preventing most Americans from seeing the degree to which the former president had deteriorated mentally since leaving office.
Virtually all his public appearances and media interviews featured long stretches of incoherence as well as outright gibberish. That itself should have been the news, but it rarely was. Instead a gap formed between the real Trump and the Trump represented by the news media. That gap was so big it had a name: sanewashing.
We are now seeing the consequences of a cognitively impaired president – a democracy in tatters, a country at war, an economy on the brink – but that was the risk that the owners of the country’s most lucrative media properties were willing to take.
The decade leading up to the 2024 election featured social and political progress for women, Black people and people of color. The MeToo movement revealed the ugly reality of sexism. The country was rocked by a reckoning over institutional racism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a white cop. The pandemic empowered workers in ways largely unknown. Above all that was a president, Joe Biden, who put the government on the side of labor and the consumers who drive 70 percent of the economy.
These days we might call it a revolution against the Epstein class.
Which is why America’s cultural elites struck a bargain. He might be unfit mentally, and he might be dangerous politically, but it was better to have a second term for Donald Trump than a second term for a liberal administration that threatened to deepen gains made in the pursuit of liberty and justice for all.
America’s cultural elites needed a tool to smash the left.
Sure, he was deranged. Sure, he was a criminal and traitor. But the consequences of his reelection were unlikely to touch the elites while the consequences of the alternative very much would. So his liabilities were sanewashed and after he won, the press corps manufactured a consensus in which everything was going to be fine. The economy was good. Wokeism was defeated.
But here’s the odd thing. America’s cultural elites seem to actually believe their own propaganda. They seem to believe the reelection of Donald Trump was a correction, not only for America but for the media as well. They seem to believe that there really is a bias against white people and that once this bias is corrected, the news business will reap a populist windfall.
They’re wrong. There is no bias – anyway, not in the way they believe. That should be evident in the attempts to correct the “error” by the Washington Post, under the ownership of Jeff Bezos, and CBS News, under the leadership of Bari Weiss. Each has conspicuously reoriented their outfit toward the political right. The result has been a veritable bloodbath in lost profits.
That they are wrong is not evident, however, especially not to them. This alone is worth pondering. Many on the political left presume Bezos and Weiss are intentionally sabotaging the Post and CBS News. But, as Noah Berlatsky wrote recently, that’s more conspiracy than fact. They really do want to make money. Weiss in particular, Noah said, isn’t a saboteur. She’s just a losing loser.
I got in touch with Noah to talk about this and more, because I like him and because his newsletter is so insightful. It’s called Everything Is Horrible. Here’s the rest of our conversation.
You say Bezos and the Ellisons believe remaking their outlets in the mold of Fox will make them profitable. Yet they still believe that even after they have failed. In your view, why is that?
I think very wealthy people are surrounded by yes-men and are dazzled by their own success. They think they're brilliant and if their schemes go awry, it's someone else's fault or it's a sign of their willingness to think big, take risks, etc. Admitting they screwed up and are stupid would mean questioning whether they actually deserve all that power. Obviously, they can't do that.
You suggest that Weiss and the billionaires she represents think of themselves as tribunes of an authentic America. Will business failure correct that categorical error or nah?
I think that the wealthy are very reluctant to reassess their screw-ups. However, I do think that others watching them screw up are likely to become more skeptical of the idea that Trump and his billionaire cheering squad are the voice of the people.
You've already seen this I think as institutions have become more willing to fight and less willing to knuckle under, as it's become clear that Trump is not very popular. Disney and Kimmel were one example. More universities have started to push back. Democrats have become more willing to fight, etc.
What’s happening at CBS and others reflects the growing gap between media elites and normal people. It’s to the point now where Trump can claim victory in his war against Iran, and the press corps might choose to believe him, while consumers of the news watch the war burn up their wages. Will there be a correction at some point, as there would be on Wall Street?
The press has actually been pretty skeptical about the Iran war. There's some egregious cheerleading from people like New York Times columnist Bret Stephens and other neoconservative hacks, but it's nothing like with the Iraq War. I don't think the press would just shrug and go along with it if Trump declares victory.
I think this is largely because the public is so against the war. Media elites can be disconnected, but they also do react to what their audience wants, especially when there's a lot of bipartisan consensus. A significant section of the Republican Party and right wing is very angry about the war, and that means that media outlets feel empowered to criticize it – which I think they have done, which makes the war less popular, which makes the media more willing to criticize it and so on. It's a virtuous circle.
After the election, there was a media consensus that believed that Joe Biden was the aberration, not Trump, and that Trump, in coming back, was a restoration of normalcy. That consensus depended on Biden’s economy becoming Trump’s. Now that Trump’s economy is cratering, will the consensus change?
I'm not sure that I agree that the return of Trump was exactly seen as normal. Trump's often seen as an exciting deviation from the norm, and I think a lot of the excitement in elite circles was created by the sense of a definitive break with the past — Trump, they all believed, would crush the left rabble once and for all.
I think that the sense of fascist optimism among the elites has obviously soured. I don't know that it's useful to think of Trump as abnormal or an aberration exactly, though. He's dominated US politics for 11 years. He is the status quo. He's what America has decided to be. I think that we need to grapple seriously with the fact that overturning that status quo is going to require some sweeping changes. We aren't just going to snap back to normal when Trump is gone. This is normal, god help us.
Why do some on the left see conspiracy when Weiss and the oligarchs’ business failures are more easily explained by greed, cowardice, incompetence and the abuse of power?
I take it you mean. Why do some on the left (and not just the left!) believe that Weiss wants CBS to fail? That is, why do they think she's destroying it out of malice rather than incompetence?
I think there's a couple of things. One is that Weiss, Bezos and so forth really do want to kneecap the ability of journalists to criticize the regime. So reducing capacity and immiserating good reporters is a plus from their perspective. They want to destroy the old version of the Washington Post and CBS News, and doing so has been at least a partial win.
Second, I think there's always kind of an impulse to see your enemies as more organized, more effective and more competent than your side is. Republicans do this too. They're always talking about how Democrats are laser-focused and ruthless, etc. It's just one way that negative partisanship works.
Finally, I think people are sometimes afraid to hope? I often think about Bill Paxton in Aliens where he shouts, "Game over, man! Game over!" You wish for the end because then you can check out and don't have to live the painful bits of the end with the aliens catching and eating you. Which is understandable that you would rather miss that part! But of course if you check out and just assume the enemy is unbeatable, you aren't exploiting their weaknesses or doing what you can to defeat them.
So, yeah, I do not think that the struggle for media is over at all. Bezos and CBS have had very significant humiliations and losses. NOTUS is expanding its Washington newsroom with a lot of ex-Post staff; ABC News and NBC News have benefited and their ratings are up. The dream of a popular maga mainstream media bonanza is pretty dead, which I think leaves space open for other dreams and other approaches.
Obviously we're still all living in a nightmare. But Weiss and Ellison getting humiliated is good. Take the win when you can.
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AN 2 26
Here in America, before the royal formerly known as Prince Andrew was arrested in the UK, Reuters reported the results of a new public survey. Ipsos, the pollster, found nearly 70 percent of Americans believe the system is rigged, allowing elites to act with impunity.
Reuters:
*Some 69 percent of respondents in the four-day poll, which concluded on Monday, said their views were captured "very well" or "extremely well" by a statement that the Epstein files "show that powerful people in the U.S. are rarely held accountable for their actions."
Then came news this morning of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the brother of King Charles III, being arrested “on suspicion of misconduct in public office” – what American media might call insider trading.
Andrew allegedly shared “confidential trade reports” with Jeffrey Epstein in 2010 when the former prince was the UK’s special envoy for international trade. Their correspondence was part of the latest cache of Epstein-related emails released by the US Department of Justice.
The news appears to be the beginning of a kind of accountability. There’s probably enough evidence for British authorities to bring a massive sex-crimes case against Andrew. But that would be devastating to the king’s image. Better to bring Andrew up on discrete and boring white collar crimes than risk greater public scrutiny of who in the royal family knew about his reputed predilection for underaged girls.
In other words, it’s justice through the backdoor, if you can call it justice, but even that is more than anyone can say in America.
In Europe, “heads are rolling over the Jeffrey Epstein revelations,” according to Politico earlier this month. A prominent diplomat in Norway was suspended. A member of the British House of Lords was forced to resign. Andrew can no longer be called the Duke of York.
The British prime minister apologized for hiring Lord Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US after it was revealed that Mandelson, in addition to keeping up his relationship with Epstein after Epstein’s 2008 conviction, gave him “sensitive government information.”
But the fallout faced by political elites over their association with a convicted sex offender and alleged child-sex trafficker has stood in contrast to the near-total absence of accountability in America. The taint of Epstein can rock the European continent, but not American elites, especially those close to the president of the United States.
And, per Reuters, Americans are noticing the difference. We don’t agree on much of anything, but a vast majority of us agree “powerful people in the US are rarely held accountable for their actions”
Here, I want to suggest a few things.
- One, that this and other polls point to a growing awareness of the gathering unfairness that has shaped American life since at least the 2007-2008 financial crisis and proceeding Great Recession.
- Two, that this awareness has been gaining momentum over those years and has now reached a tipping point. Data journalist G Elliott Morris said the new swing voter is an “anti-system voter.” In his latest, he cites new research identifying “a key bloc of swing voters who distrust both parties, believe elites are corrupt and think the political system is rigged against people like them.”
- Third, that a majority, or a near-majority, now equates unfairness with Epstein and is opposed to a rigged system that rewards elites, including Donald Trump, while despoiling everyone else.
I don’t think voters have a full understanding of the various forces bearing down on them. But unlike when we had mostly abstractions to argue for change, we now have, for the first time in the 21st century, a human face to put on an inhuman system rigged against the people.
Here’s how US Senator Jon Ossoff put it recently:
“Now you remember, we were told that maga was for working-class Americans. But this is a government of, by and for the ultra rich. It is the wealthiest cabinet ever. This is the Epstein class” (my italics).
He went on:
They are the elites they pretend to hate. Prices are up. Jobs are going away. Medicaid and school lunches are slashed. Nursing homes are getting defunded. If you’re Steve Bannon and your pitch was Trump for “the forgotten man and woman,” how do you sell any of this?*
Trump was supposed to fight for the working class. Instead, he’s literally closing rural clinics and hospitals to cut taxes for George Soros and Elon Musk. He was supposed to end globalist world police foreign policy. Instead, we’re doing war-for-oil and nation-building again, and threatening to conquer Greenland. He was supposed to “drain the swamp.” Instead, this is the most corrupt administration of all time and everybody knows it. Everybody knows it.*
Will there be justice for Epstein’s victims? Will the elites who conspired to bring us despoliation face a jury? Frankly, I doubt it. In South Korea, justice means leaders of insurrections go to prison for life. Here, it means they get criminal immunity to continue their insurrections.
That said, there is some hope. As the Democrats prosecute their political case against the president, binding him and his allies ever more tightly to Jeffrey Epstein, they are probably going to end up grinding to dust the reputations of elites associated with his crimes.
For instance, Les Wexner. The billionaire former owner of Victoria’s Secret was named in the Epstein files as a “co-conspirator,” though he never faced criminal charges. Epstein managed his fortune until nine months before his 2008 conviction on sex-with-minors charges. This week, House Democrats deposed Wexner as part of their investigation.
This is what Robert Garcia, ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, said about Wexner: “We should be very clear that there would be no Epstein island. There would be no Epstein plane. There would be no money to traffic women and girls. Mr. Epstein would not be the wealthy man he was without the support of Les Wexner.”
With sufficient time, Les Wexner’s reputation could become collateral damage in the Democrats’ larger fight against Trump and his party.
That’s not enough justice. No one should be satisfied.
But like the white-collar charges against Andrew for giving Epstein secret trade reports, it is the beginning of a kind of accountability.
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Trump is persecuting Christians — thanks to the media
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U.S. President Donald Trump prays during a group prayer during the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 5, 2026. REUTERS/Al Drago
John Stoehr February 07, 2026
In Washington this week, at the National Prayer Breakfast, the president actually took credit for the Bible being a bestseller.
“In 2025, more copies of the Holy Bible were sold in the United States than at any time in the last 100 years,” Donald Trump said.
In and of itself, this is not amazing. I remember as a child watching a commercial on Sunday afternoon TV about how “The Good Book” sold more copies than any book in human history.
What is amazing is Trump taking credit when that credit would traditionally be given to the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, especially by the traditional folk at the National Prayer Breakfast.
It’s also amazing that someone as religious as, for instance, House Speaker Mike Johnson can tolerate blasphemy when such tolerance would be inconceivable for a Democratic president.
You would think that Don the Evangelist would understand the power and the glory of the Word, given his suggestion that his presidency is why America is returning to God. (Sources told Publisher’s Weekly “the sales boom” is attributable to “people seeking spiritual footing amid today's tensions and troubles.”)
That would be a mistake.
“Mike Johnson is a very religious person,” the president went on to say. “He does not hide it. He'll say to me sometimes at lunch, 'Sir, may we pray?' I'll say, 'Excuse me? We're having lunch.'"
I’m sorry to point out the obvious. Donald Trump claimed to be ignorant of the reason why “a very religious person” would call for the religious practice of praying before a meal at an event named after the religious practice of praying before a meal.
Even if Trump were only playing dumb, and I don’t know that he was, it’s again inconceivable that ignorance of a traditional religious practice, even in jest, would be tolerated if he were a Democrat. Yet Johnson lets it slide. The Republicans let it slide.
Indeed, if a Democratic president were to claim credit for God’s handiwork, there would be a nationwide outcry beginning with the rightwing media, spilling into the Washington press corps, before occupying highly visible pages in op-eds sections of elite papers with headlines echoing the GOP view of godless liberals not only looking down on Christians, but claiming to be God.
I think it’s worth asking why.
A typical explanation is bad faith – that the Republicans don’t mean what they say. It’s OK to blaspheme if a Republican does it. (Another explanation is power is religion to the GOP. As long as the blasphemer is powerful, his blasphemy is sanctioned by God.)
But I’m not satisfied with that answer. It fails to explain why there are so many good people of religious conviction in this country who are fighting tyranny on expressly religious grounds, but who are not getting credit for their religious expression. Pastors, ministers, rabbis, imams – there is a huge multifaith resistance taking shape, especially against Trump’s immigrant purge.
And you probably never heard of it.
That would not be the case if the roles were reversed – if, say, a “liberal” government were murdering or disappearing people and “conservatives” were protesting on expressly religious grounds. I have no doubt the narrative would be framed as good versus evil.
The entire anti-abortion movement can be described as such, with “the unborn” being those murdered or disappeared by the state, and “conservatives” being those crusading against God’s enemies. No one in America has any doubt about which side of the abortion debate claims to be on the right side of God.
While there is a smattering of news reports about Christians being divided over Trump, there is nothing like the tidal wave of coverage you would otherwise expect. Remember what it was like after September 11, 2001? The framing was, more or less, God and America against the infidels. That’s what it would be like if the roles were reversed. That’s what it should be like now.
The best explanation is often the simplest. Some religions count. Some don’t. And, of course, the difference depends on who.
If you live in a rural community in a rural state, or if you live in an area associated with white conservative politics, yours is an authentic religion entitled to national attention and respect.
If, however, you live in a city (even a small one) or in a state associated with multiracial liberal politics, your religion isn’t authentic. It might be given lip-service now and then, as is happening now, but there’s something not quite real about it. Anyway, it’s not as real as the religion of good country folk.
For their protest of crimes against immigrants, a broad spectrum of faith leaders have been intimidated, manhandled, arrested, and denied religious expression, all at the hands of the state. Their sanctuaries have been profaned, congregants terrorized. One pastor was shot in the head with pepper balls while praying.
Yet all serve “blue” communities. That’s why you don’t know about their holy rebellion. Their religion doesn’t count.
Here’s how Mike O'Malley put it, in a different context.
The reason is the “iron journalist rule.”
“Some people are authentic and some people aren’t,” the George Mason University historian wrote. “Farmers? Authentic. College professors? Not. There are around 1.9 million farms in America, and 1.5 million college teachers. Farmers aren’t authentic because there’s more of them. It's because journalists love cliches.”
These cliches, myths and tropes – Thomas Jefferson famously declared that “those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God” – mean genuine acts of religious expression by nonwhite or urban-dwelling believers won’t be represented as such by the Washington press corps. Instead, their religious expression will be downplayed and represented as political.
This tradition of privileging “authentic” Americans over everyone else among professionals tasked with representing reality favors bad actors who are bent on distorting reality to their advantage.
Consider what happened last month in the aftermath of what has been called the Minnesota church protest. On January 18, it was reported that a group of anti-ICE demonstrators “rushed” into a southern baptist congregation in St Paul during Sunday services to protest a church leader who is also a field director for ICE. Attorney General Pam Bondi swiftly vowed to prosecute those responsible for a “coordinated attack” on religious expression.
Missing, or minimized, in news reports of the protest was the religion and religious expression of those who protested. Virtually absent was the fact that one of the group’s leaders, Nekima Levy Armstrong, is herself an ordained minister.
Here’s what she told CNN.
We did not rush into that church. We actually went and sat down and participated in the service. And after the pastor prayed, that is when I stood up and asked him a question in response to his prayer. And then he responded to me. And then I proceeded to ask him about Pastor David Easterwood and how is it possible for him to serve as both a pastor and the director of ICE for Minnesota?
And instead of responding to me, as soon as I said the name David Easterwood, the pastor said, ‘shame, shame.’ And that is when I led us in chants ‘Justice for Renee Good’ and ‘Hands up, don’t shoot.’ So I want to clarify that we didn‘t rush in. We didn’t bust in. We were a part of the service until I got up and posed that question to the pastor.
Knowing this, it’s clear the framing of that story – anti-ICE protesters versus devout Christians – is problematic at best. A more accurate framing would be devout Christians versus devout Christians, with one side objecting to David Easterwood preaching “love thy neighbor” and “snatch thy neighbor” in the same breath, while the other uses the Gospels to defend ICE.
Such a framing might have invited us to see the church protest as the reason why we have the First Amendment right to religious expression, as religions can and do disagree so fiercely over matters of faith that conflicts arise. When they do, each side has certain inalienable rights that shall not be infringed by the state.
But such framing does the regime no favors, as it contravenes its preferred narrative of godless liberals not only looking down on devout Christians, but claiming themselves to be God, and on the strength of that narrative, its plan to use the power of the state to persecute religious people who are challenging the regime.
The regime wants us to believe multiracial democracy threatens religious expression when, in fact, it’s the regime that’s using a phony defense of religion to threaten all faiths everywhere.
There is, quite literally, a rebellion bubbling up from below in the name of God. The regime knows its potential. It knows it can inspire even more resistance. And it’s taking steps to crush it.
That goal might be obvious if the press corps treated everyone’s faith as equally authentic, hence equally legitimate, but it doesn’t.
It distorts reality.
And in doing so, it enables the persecution of religion.
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Americans are finally waking up to MAGA's true agenda
John Stoehr February 05, 2026
I think most liberals are probably familiar with what has become known as Wilhoit’s Law – that the true goals of the right are inequality, injustice, repression and control. This is how composer Frank Wilhoit put it in 2018:
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect,” Wilhoit wrote. “There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.”
I think liberals are probably less familiar with another part of Wilhoit’s “law” – that these goals are so indefensible in a country founded on liberty and equality that it is necessary for conservatives to cover them up with lies.
“As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly,” Frank Wilhoit wrote, “it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny.”
On the right, US citizenship has always been a matter of race and white power. The overarching objective of conservatism since the founding has been maintenance of a social order in which rich white men are on top. But that can’t be plainly said in the land of freedom and opportunity, where everyone has an equal shot at success if they work hard and play by the rules.
So the right lies. The Republicans say “illegal immigration” is a matter of law enforcement. They say “border integrity” is a matter of national security. They say liberal immigration policies that fall short of enforcing the law and securing the border debase what it means to be a law-abiding US citizen.
They make endless appeals to higher principles in order to cover up for the fact that their true goal is the abomination of those same principles.
But as the right expands its power, it sometimes requires new and better rationalizations. It occasionally finds it necessary to slough off the old lies.
Since the 1990s, for instance, nothing has been more “sacred” than the Second Amendment. We were told the freedom to bear arms “shall not be infringed.” On the strength of this apparent conviction, little if anything has been done to address the spread of shooting massacres over the last decade.
Yet when the Trump regime needed an explanation for why Border Patrol officers were forced on January 24 to kill Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis, the sacredness of the Second Amendment was easily forgotten. “You can't have guns,” the president said in the aftermath. “You can't walk in with guns. You just can't. You can't walk in with guns. You can't do that.”
Alex Pretti was legally permitted to conceal carry. (He did not brandish his weapon. CBP disarmed him before he was shot.) That, however, wasn’t enough. “You bring a gun into the District, you mark my words, you're going to jail,” said US attorney for DC, Jeanine Pirro. “I don't care if you have a license in another district and I don't care if you're a law-abiding gun owner somewhere else. You bring a gun into this District, count on going to jail.”
The right refused to act on a decades’ worth of shooting massacres because it was in the right’s interest to allow terror to spread across the land. That could never be plainly said, of course, so it covered up that objective with the Second Amendment. Once gun rights were no longer useful – terror is the intention of a paramilitary going door-to-door searching for “illegals” almost exclusively in states run by Democrats – they could be easily discarded.
There is, however, risk in throwing away the old lies. The Republican Party is the white man’s party but its viability in a multiracial democracy like ours depends on most white people not really understanding the truth. The party’s future depends on most white people continuing to believe lies about, say, immigration being about the security and integrity of US citizenship.
If a majority of white people come to believe that what the Republicans really mean by citizenship is whiteness, not legal status, the GOP could risk losing parts of its coalition in ways it can’t afford. I think the risk is especially acute if white people understand that patriotism itself is racialized – that white people who defend the American Dream are seen as traitors to their race.
I don’t want to overstate this risk. Whiteness is resilient. Even if most white people unite to punish Trump in some way, I wouldn’t expect such unity to last. Yet the more the right uses its power to achieve its goals, the more it throws away the lies that it told to gain that power. And the longer that pattern holds true, the more chances there are for the truth to be revealed.
Consider the above clip by white supremacist Nick Fuentes. He says Renee Good and Alex Pretti were “race traitors,” who were "not acting like citizens.”
Are people waking up to Wilhoit’s Law?
Alan Elrod thinks so. He’s the president and CEO of the Pulaski Institution, a think tank in Arkansas. In his latest for Liberal Currents, he looked at Fuentes’ statements, as well as those by other far-right commentators, to explain that whiteness isn’t the protection that many white Americans believe it is.
In a follow up interview with me, he explained further.
“Enemies can be excluded and treated however the state deems fit,” he told me. “This was at the heart of Nazi juridico-political theory, and I think we are seeing it play out today. I think that the murders of two white, middle class people in a Midwestern city is absolutely driving that message home.”
Here’s the rest of our conversation.
Nick Fuentes isn't the first to link whiteness with citizenship, but he might be the most honest about it. Others, like Matt Walsh and Megyn Kelly and Glenn Beck are much better at lying about their intentions. Thoughts?
I think they're more invested in layering their prejudices beneath what they see as more socially appealing calls for law and order, child safety and cultural concerns. But these are pretty recognizable tropes in racist politicking. I'd also say that Kelly and Walsh in particular are becoming less inclined to hide their bigotry. Walsh repeatedly talks about "Third World" people with total contempt on his show. Kelly has praised Fuentes. The big difference, I think, is that they still want to be seen as important, popular media figures. There's the occasional coyness you don't get with Fuentes.
When I saw Fuentes' reaction to Good's and Pretti's murders, I thought of Wilhoit's Law: inequality and injustice are the point of conservatism. That's indefensible in a country founded on freedom and equality. So conservative must lie. Are Good's and Pretti's murders opening people's eyes?
I think so. Wilhoit's Law, which I believe is derived from a blog comment by Ohioan Frank Wilhoit, is essentially a pithy distillation of Carl Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction. In this sense, the state is not obligated to extend protections or presumptions of innocence to all people, only those it considers friendly. Enemies can be excluded and treated however the state deems fit. This was at the heart of Nazi juridico-political theory, and I think we are seeing it play out today. I think that the murders of two white, middle class people in a Midwestern city is absolutely driving that message home.
It seems to me that people like Rand Paul understand the stakes much better than Trump and his gang -- that the long-term viability of a white man's party depends on most white people not really knowing that it's a white man's party. Suddenly Paul is saying the DHS can't be trusted to investigate Pretti's murder. Perhaps there's even potential for getting rid of Trump. Thoughts?
I think Paul is an outlier. He certainly appears to be genuinely committed to some of his non-interventionist and civil libertarian beliefs. But I don't think there's appetite among Republicans for getting rid of Trump. This is both because I think many Republicans are on board with him and because the remainder are too cowed by the political realities of party politics. The fact that even people like Thom Tillis, who is retiring, and Susan Collins, whose state of Maine is also being targeted by ICE at the moment, won't take any serious steps toward checking Trump is evidence of this.
I can't remember another time when rightwingers subjected white people -- or "race traitors" -- to the same kind of denigration that we saw given to Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd and dozens of other victims of state violence. Good and Pretti are getting "no angels" treatment, with the help of the press corps. I'm told "the normies" are waking up. True?
I think a lot of people who don't pay close attention to politics are repulsed by stuff like this. My friend Nicholas Grossman wrote a great piece at Liberal Currents about how the Pretti discourse is breaking through in traditionally apolitical parts of the internet. But I also think Americans have short memories, and our politics remains discouragingly thermostatic. I thought January 6 would have woken up the normies. It did for a minute, I think. But then we re-elected Trump.
Trump has done more to discredit gun rights than any president in my lifetime. He's so focused on smearing Pretti that he suggested he deserved death for carrying a gun. These lies -- in this case the inviolability of the Second Amendment -- are very important to keeping what I call respectable white people in the Republican camp. What do you make of it?
I think the hypocrisy here is pretty important. I'm from Arkansas. I grew up around gun owners, and I know plenty of gun owners today. No one with any appreciation or respect for guns and gun ownership can look at what happened in the Pretti murder and see anything other than the gross violation of someone's Second Amendment rights by impulsively violent and thuggish goons.
However, I think that the hypocrisy that's been revealed on this issue by Republican elected officials and policy groups is just one more snowflake in the blizzard. Under MAGA, this is just another application of the friend/enemy distinction. Everything is.
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NYT columnist David Brooks didn't mean any of it
New York Times columnist David Brooks sits next to Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, in this image from the U.S. Justice Department’s file of late financier Jeffrey Epstein, released by the House Oversight Committee Democrats in Washington, D.C., U.S., on December 18, 2025. House Oversight Committee Democrats/Handout
:{John Stoehr December 24, 2025
David Brooks, the conservative columnist who is beloved by liberals, wrote last month that the Democrats make too much of the Epstein story. He said they’re acting as conspiratorially as the Republicans.
Brooks said he was “especially startled” to see leading progressives characterizing all elites as part of “the Epstein class.” If he were a Democrat, he said, he’d be focused on “the truth”: “the elites didn’t betray you, but they did ignore you. They didn’t mean to harm you.”
Brooks went on to say: “If I were a Democratic politician … I’d add that America can’t get itself back on track if the culture is awash in distrust, cynicism, catastrophizing lies and conspiracymongering. No governing majority will ever form if we’re locked in a permanent class war.”
Sounds noble, but he didn’t mean any of it.
Last week, it was discovered that David Brooks had palled around with Jeffrey Epstein. Pictures of him were part of a trove released by the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. It was deduced that they were taken at a 2011 “billionaires dinner.” A 2019 report by Buzzfeed identified Brooks, among others, along with Epstein, who had pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for sex just three years prior.
Buzzfeed: “In 2011, after Epstein had been released from a Florida jail, it was an exclusive gathering, dominated by tech industry leadership. A gallery of photos taken at the event by Nathan Myhrvold, formerly Microsoft’s chief technology officer, named 20 guests, including just one media representative: New York Times columnist David Brooks.”
While defending Brooks, the Times inadvertently confirmed Epstein's presence at the dinner. “Mr. Brooks had no contact with [Epstein] before or after his single attendance at a widely-attended dinner.”
Sure, but Brooks knew Epstein was there. If he didn’t know about his crimes, which is doubtful, he still chose to write a column warning the Democrats against waging “permanent class war” without disclosing his non-trivial association with the namesake of “the Epstein class.”
It’s bad faith, up and down.
“I think that's what we get when (very) wealthy people are shaping opinion,” said Denny Carter, publisher of Bad Faith Times, a newsletter. “We can never really know the depths of their conflicts of interest, whether it's covering for a known pedophile ringleader or promoting a cause or politician or company that will benefit them financially.”
In 2023, Denny wrote a piece highlighting the importance of bad faith, which is to say, if you don’t put it at the center of your thinking about rightwing politics, you’re going to be very, very confused. He wrote:
“Republicans today support women’s sports (if it means barring trans folks from participating). They love a member of the Kennedy family. They’re skeptical of Big Pharma. They hate banks. None of it – not a single part of it – makes any sense unless you understand bad faith.”
They never mean what they say.
Denny brought my attention to that two-year-old piece by reposting it. I immediately thought of Brooks. Scolding the Democrats about demonizing “the Epstein class” while fraternizing with “the Epstein class” (it was a “billionaires dinner,” for Christ’s sake) – that’s the kind of behavior you might expect from a man who’s ready to betray you.
“You see these op-eds about supporting the fossil fuel industry and continuing to accelerate climate collapse in the guise of electoral advice for Democrats without having any idea if the writer means what they're saying or has some financial stake in promoting Big Oil and its various subsidiaries,” Denny told me in a brief interview. “You assume good faith among these writers and influencers at your own peril.”
In a 2023 piece you recently reposted, you said the world is upside down. The right loves Russia. The left hates Russia. This is confusing for those of us who remember 20 years ago. What happened?
This one, I think, is pretty straightforward. The right despised the collectivism inherent in Soviet ideology and the left was curious about how it might look in action. The fall of the USSR (eventually) led to a totalitarian fascist Russian state ruled by a vicious dictator who used religion and "traditional values" as a weapon against his many enemies, or anyone who dared promote democracy in Russia.
Listen to Putin and you'll hear a Republican babbling about “woke” this and “woke” that and positioning himself as the last barrier between so-called traditional society and some kind of far-left hellscape.
It's the same script every modern fascist leader uses, and it appeals very much to Republican lawmakers and their voters. You sometimes read stories about Americans fleeing to Russia to escape the “woke” scourge, only to deeply regret it. That's always funny or tragic, depending on how you look at it.
You say bad faith explains the upside-downness, but you also suggest the center has not held -- that social fragmentation brought us here. You even cite David Bowie. How did you come to that insight?
I've been a Bowie superfan for a while now, and like a lot of folks who spend too much time online, I've seen the viral clip of Bowie explaining the world-changing potential of the internet way back in 1999.
He was right on a few levels, but most of all he identified the internet's potential for destroying any sense of commonly held reality. Here we are today, a quarter century later, trying to operate in a political world in which there are a handful of different realities at any one time.
A traitorous right-wing mob tried to overthrow the US government in 2021. We all saw the footage. We all know what happened. Yet there are tens of millions of Americans who believe January 6 did not happen or was in fact a walking tour of the US Capitol.
We can't even agree that there was a coup attempt orchestrated by the outgoing president because social media took that event, broke it into a million pieces, and allowed bad actors to piece it back together to fit a politically convenient narrative. I wrote about it here.
You suggest that simply telling the truth won't fix things. Why?
I don't mean to sound cynical but if we've learned anything over the past decade of small-d democratic backsliding, it's that the truth doesn't mean anything anymore because of the societal fragmentation created by social media. There is no truth. We can choose our own adventure now because our phones will confirm our priors about what happened and why.
Pro-democracy folks in the US can't rely on facts and figures to win the day. They won't. The Harris campaign reached a highwater mark in August 2024 when they were ignoring facts and figures and coasting on vibes. It was a heady time because it seemed like Democrats had finally learned their lesson: good-faith “Leslie Knope” politics [facts will win the day] has no place in the modern world, if it ever did.
The right has a gigantic media complex and it's getting bigger. Twitter, CBS News and soon perhaps CNN -- all are right-coded or soon could be. Are you seeing recognition among liberals and leftists that this imbalance is unsustainable? If so, what's the plan?
Look, there are plenty of pro-democracy folks in the world with more money than they could spend in 50 lifetimes. A little bit of that money could go a long way in establishing pro-democracy media outlets that operate as propaganda outlets for the kind of liberalism that has been washed away by the right's capture of the media. Democracy needs to be sold to Americans just as fascism was sold to them, first in the seedy corners of the internet, then on Elon Musk's hub for international fascism, then in mainstream outlets run by people cooking their brains daily on Musk's site.
I'm not sure of a specific plan. I'm just a blogger. But people are awash in fascist propaganda 24 hours a day on every major social media site. It has ruined a lot of relationships and radicalized Americans who spent most of their lives ignoring politics as the domain of nerds.
There has to be a flood of pro-democracy messaging in the media and that can't happen without billions being invested in a massive network of outlets that can effectively push back on the right's unreality.
I wrote about the selling of democracy here.
The meaning of "elites" is central to the fascist project. As defined by David Brooks, they are educated liberal-ish people who drive Teslas, or used to. With an affordability crisis underway, liberals and leftists have a chance to redefine "elites" for the long haul. Thoughts?
I think engaging the right on the meaning of "elites" is probably a road to nowhere. They will label as "elite" anyone who has ever read a book or graduated from college. I would say the left can and should point out the vast gulf between real populism and fake right-wing populism. Media outlets, of course, have conflated these two because the media assumes everyone in politics is operating in pristine good faith.
But pointing out that Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are real populists while Trump and his lackeys talk a big populist game while selling the country for parts to their golf buddies and business associates could offer people real insight into what it means to be on the side of the working person. Barack Obama has toyed with the idea of rejecting Trump as a populist; I think every pro-democracy American needs to push back harder on that label because it's disingenuous and a powerful tool for fascist politicians who have nothing if they don't have at least some working-class support.
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Democrats decide to fight fire with fire in new battle against Trumpism
(REUTERS)
John Stoehr December 03, 2025
The 43-day government shutdown did not produce the outcome that the Democrats said they wanted. In fact, eight of them* caved before getting the president and the Republicans to negotiate on healthcare.
But the shutdown did demonstrate something important – that the Democrats are no longer the party of “norms and institutions.”
In October,Owas asked why his party was using the shutdown to reach a policy goal when the Democrats said in the past that doing so was in violation of “the norms of government.”
The reason, Gallego said, was Donald Trump.
Norms are “out the window.”
“You’re talking about norms in the time of Donald Trump?” Gallego said. “It’s also not normal to tear down the East Wing. … This is a man who’s extorting people. He’s literally breaking every rule. We’re not going to go back and play by the norms … I’m not going to abide by old norms, especially when you’re dealing with this presidency, this administration, and how the Republicans themselves have been acting.”
However, it’s one thing to say you’re not going to abide by old norms. It’s another to make new ones. That’s what some Democrats are doing.
Again, Gallego is representative.
He was asked what he would say to Pete Hegseth after the Defense Secretary threatened to prosecute US Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona.
“You will never ever be half the man that Senator Kelly is,” Gallego said. “You, sir, are a coward. And the fact that you are following this order from the president shows how big of a coward you are. I can't wait until you are no longer the secretary of defense” (my italics).
In the past, no Democrat would have made such a veiled threat. They would have feared the appearance of violating the norm against “weaponizing the federal government” against partisan adversaries.
But here, Gallego suggests a new set of norms:
There must be consequences for presidential-level crimes.
The Republicans can’t be trusted to hold their own accountable.
Only the Democrats can do that. They must be the consequences.
“Donald Trump is gonna be gone in a couple years,” Gallego told CNN last week. “If you're part of the military that is going after sitting members of Congress … there will be consequences without a doubt.”
He even used the word “tribunal.”
“There’s going to be a lot of officers that will be part of this tribunal, if you want to call it that,” Gallego went on. “They’re going to be looking over their shoulders, because they know that Donald Trump will be gone and they will not have that protection. They’re going to have to do the safest thing possible, which is to follow the Constitution.”
The vast scale of corruption we are witnessing, with the blessing of the Republican Party, means the terms and conditions of the old social contract are void and no longer apply. The stakes, meanwhile, are much bigger than one authoritarian president. Everyone pays for the crimes of what some are calling “the Epstein class.” Here’s the Post:
“Today is the first real reckoning for the Epstein class,” Ro Khanna said, before calling the effort to obscure Epstein’s crimes “one of the most … disgusting corruption scandals in our country’s history.” He later told us that being “America first,” parroting the messaging that elevated Trump’s political career, meant “holding the Epstein class accountable” and “lowering costs” to make “people’s lives better.”
All the above is being said in the context of Trump’s growing weakness. Poll after poll show public dissatisfaction with his job performance, even among supporters. (Henry Enten said today that, all things being equal, there is no path to holding the House majority.) The Democrats see a chance to win back power. But what will they do with that power once they get it? Will they return to the old norms or make new ones?
Is this talk of future consequences real or just talk?
For an answer, I turned to Samantha Hancox-Li. She’s an editor and podcast host for Liberal Currents. In a recent essay, she wrote about the biggest problem facing liberals and Democrats, and the reason why they have in the past clung so fiercely to “norms and institutions.”
The fear of power.
“We have built systems that are so good at preventing us from doing anything that they also prevent us from doing good things,” Samantha told me. “And in this time of crisis — housing crisis, climate crisis, among others — we desperately need to do good things and not just prevent anyone from doing anything that might be bad.”
You have said the biggest problem with liberals is our fear of power. That probably comes as a surprise to some. What do you mean?
I mean the fear of power exercised badly. For many progressives, we start with an image — maybe a corporation polluting the environment or the government bulldozing a minority neighborhood in the name of urban renewal. And then we conclude that the correct response is to put a shackle on power. We need to make sure that before we do anything it's not going to hurt anyone. Sounds good, right?
But the devil's in the details. What does "make sure" really mean? Does it mean that we need 10 years of studies, of community engagement, of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits, of even more studies, before we can implement congestion pricing in New York City? Does it mean years of process before building 20 units of housing next to a busway? Does it mean that every random NIMBY can sue to stop the construction of solar energy, transmission, battery factories, etc?
In practice, the answer is yes: we have built systems that are so good at preventing us from doing anything that they also prevent us from doing good things. And in this time of crisis — housing crisis, climate crisis, among others — we desperately need to do good things and not just prevent anyone from doing anything that might be bad.
I was trying to think of an example: Merrick Garland. Thoughts?
Absolutely. I've focused on physical objects — on climate and housing — because these are longstanding problems and our self-imposed shackles have prevented us from effectively responding to them.
But it's also clear that when we take power back from Trump II, we're going to need to do some serious housecleaning. Biden came in on the idea that "the fever would break," everything would go "back to normal," that he didn't need to upset the apple cart by prosecuting criminals in high places. Hence, Garland's shocking inaction in response to Trump's J6 attack on the capital – inaction that ultimately enabled Trump's return to power.
But if we're going to do that kind of housecleaning, we can't allow ourselves to get hung up on process. We're going to have to nuke the filibuster. We're going to have to revitalize Congress. And that means expanding the Senate and adding states. We're going to have to do serious court reform. If we allow ourselves to get hung up on norms that Republicans treat as dead letters, we're going to fail. This means that we are going to need to really exercise power — not trip ourselves up with self-imposed process.
I think if we do come back into power, there's going to be a lot of voices calling for a "return" to normalcy, for creating even more process requirements that the next Trump will simply ignore. Look around us — have process requirements stopped Trump II? No.
We need more than just vetocracy.
We need a real revitalization of effective governance in America.
I would put your argument in the norms and institutions category. There's no sense in defending them if they have become corrupt or are too weak to do what needs doing. I found this surprising, from Ruben Gallego. You might have seen this clip. A hopeful sign?
A good sign, absolutely. Gallego is not exactly some radical leftist. He's a relatively moderate Democrat from a purple state, but he rightly recognizes that with Trump II's total assault on our republic and our constitution, we have exited the era of "normal politics."
That to me is the fundamental dividing line in progressive and Democratic politics — not between "moderates" and "progressives," but between those who want to fight and those who are still in denial.
As I wrote recently, "you don't get to decide when you're in a fight." MAGA made that choice. What matters now is how many of us wake up to that fact.
In my experience, the Democratic base knows we're in a fight. The base is raging angry and wants real change, not empty words.
The divide is among elites — in the Democratic Party, in the media, in civic institutions like colleges and law firms. Some want to pretend they can extract this or that policy concession from Trump. Others recognize that Trump wants to be king, that he wants to shred our constitution in favor of a vision of a white man's republic, and that we have to throw out our old ways of thinking and embrace war mindset.
It seems to me the Democrats, if they are going to use power to do good, need to relearn how to talk about it. In an interview with me, Will Bunch drew on language from the liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s to secure more personal freedoms. Perhaps in a climate of tyranny, the Democrats can appeal to individual liberty?
I think the language of freedom and liberty is the fundamental terrain of American politics. I think a lot of leftists have been very uncomfortable with this for a long time. They don't want to talk about freedom. They don't want to talk about the Constitution. They don't want to wave the red, white and blue. They want to stand on the outside and critique all that. Personally I think these people are addicted to losing. If you want to win power in America, you do it using the language of freedom and the iconography of Americana.
So I think we as liberals need to embrace that imagery. I've seen an explosion of imagery drawing on the Revolutionary War, the Founding Fathers, and especially the Civil War and the long struggle against the slave power. I think this is great, because these are core parts of liberal history! Liberalism has always been a fighting faith. Liberalism has always been a revolution against oppression and tyranny. It's just that in the doldrums of the Long 90s, we allowed ourselves to forget that. But it's time to go back and remember what we're fighting for.
And that means insisting on democracy, insisting on inalienable rights, and insisting on the rule of law. All of these are under attack. Trump is deporting citizens, murdering random fishermen, deploying thugs and masked secret police to our cities. Maga wants a king. We must stop them and deliver on the promise of America for all Americans — a better life, hope for the future, freedom in a diverse country.
About those elites. Many inside the Democratic Party are going to lobby hard against the use of power to do good things, because those good things will help everyone, and anything that helps everyone tends to be bad for elites. What are your suggestions?
First and foremost, we gotta win some primaries. That is the single biggest lever of power we've got to change the internal makeup of the Democratic Party. Earlier, you mentioned Ruben Gallego. He's in that seat because he beat Kyrsten Sinema, a notoriously centrist politician, in a primary. But at the same time, we can't go chasing after every random newcomer who talks a big game about bringing populism to Washington — just look at what happened with John Fetterman. People liked his "sticking it to the man" vibes, and it turns out those were mostly just vibes. In practice, he's been a relatively conservative senator. So we need to actually think about good primary challengers.
Second, I think we need to win the war of ideas. Politicians mostly know politics. When it comes time to implement policy, what they do is go to "the bookshelf." This is the collection of ideas and policies and programs that intellectuals and pundits in their coalition have come up with. Why did Biden pursue a radically more aggressive stimulus than Obama? Because Democratic intellectuals had consolidated around inadequate stimulus as the cause of the Great Recession.
So we need to make sure the bookshelf is well-stuffed with workable plans that Democrats can implement. We need to demonstrate that moderation is a false light — and that a real reforging of the constitutional order is necessary. That means both high church policy and a trench fight of social media, the constant war for attention in the attention economy. The posting-to-policy pipeline is very real.
So there it is.
Win primaries and win the war of ideas.
We gotta do both.
NOTEThere were, in fact, nine. Chuck Schumer orchestrated the Senate’s surrender, though he himself voted against reopening the government.
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Trump has lived a long life believing he's the exception to every rule
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a press conference about deploying federal law enforcement agents in Washington to bolster the local police presence, in the Press Briefing Room at the White House, in Washington D.C., U.S., August 11, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
John Stoehr November 27, 2025
US Senator Mark Kelly is one of six Democrats with national security backgrounds who released a video last week reminding military personnel they are obligated by law to refuse to obey illegal orders.
The reaction by the Trump regime is a distillation of animating force that has driven America to its current crisis: the impunity of elites.
First, the president suggested that the Democrats should be executed for sedition, which is not only a lie but an incitement to violence. In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, Trump accused his enemies of domestic terrorism. But what’s good for them isn’t good for Trump.
Then, the US secretary of defense threatened to prosecute Kelly under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for the fact that he and the other Democrats quoted from the Uniform Code of Military Justice in their video urging members of the military to refuse to obey illegal orders.
The president gave Pete Hegseth an illegal order. Hegseth obeyed. And now they’re mad about Kelly and the Democrats calling them out on it.
But impunity is only half the story. The other half is contempt.
Or it should be.
That’s why I was pleased to see Mark Kelly’s appearance on Rachel Maddow’s show this week. At the end, she asked how he was doing – if the stress of the president’s threats were getting to him and his family.
Mark Kelly is a decorated combat pilot. He flew close to 40 missions during the First Gulf War. He was an astronaut. His wife survived an attempted assassination. To my ears, his reply was contemptuous – not of Maddow’s question, but of the idea that Trump can intimidate him.
“I’ve had a missile blowup next to my airplane. I’ve been nearly shot down multiple times. I’ve flown a rocket ship into space four times. … My wife, Gabby Gifford, meeting her constituents, shot in the head, six people killed around her. A horrific thing. She spent six months in the hospital. We know what political violence is and we know what causes it, too. The statements that Donald Trump has made are inciteful. He’s got millions of supporters. People listen to what he says more than anybody else in the country. He should be careful with his words.
“But I’m not gonna be silenced here. Is it stressful? I’ve been stressed by things more important than Donald Trump trying to intimidate me in shutting my mouth and not doing my job. He didn’t like what I said. I’m gonna show up for work every day, support the Constitution, do my job, hold this administration accountable – hold this president accountable when he is out of line. That’s the responsibility of every US senator and every member of Congress. He’s not gonna silence us.”
The written word can do a lot but it can’t carry the emotion in the bolded sentence above. Listen for yourself. What I hear is contempt.
That’s what this country needs to hear. That’s what this country needs to hear from men like United States Senator Mark Kelly. America needs more contempt for impunity for the law, morality and decency, and for one more thing – untouchable elites, like Trump, who never grew up.
Last week, when Trump met New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, he met a man who, like Mark Kelly, could not be intimidated. The reaction from the president, according to Bruce Fanger, was “that strange little-boy energy, the hero-worship vibe, like he’s suddenly standing in line for an autograph from someone who embodies a version of power he’ll never actually possess: calm, earned, rooted.”
You could say Trump’s behavior with Mamdani was obsequious, Fanger said, but there’s more to it. There’s “that schoolboy glow — ‘Notice me. Approve of me. Let me stand near your seriousness so I look serious too.’ It’s the emotional posture of someone who’s been trying to cosplay adulthood for 50 years and gets starstruck by the real thing” (my italics).
Trump has lived a long life believing he’s the exception to every rule – that he will never face the consequences of his choices, not even the seemingly heinous, like association with known child-sex trafficker.
Only the little people are accountable, not this One Special Boy.
That deserves contempt, or at least righteous anger, which is what D Earl Stephens heard in Kelly’s voice when I asked him. In any case, Earl said, it’s amazing that everyone isn’t feeling one of those emotions.
Earl is the former managing editor of Stars and Stripes, a newspaper covering the military and military affairs. He now publishes the newsletter Enough Already. Like me, he’s a regular contributor to Raw Story. “Either we are a law-abiding country or we aren't,” he told me.
Here’s my short interview with Earl.
Rachel Maddow asked Mark Kelly if he was stressed by the president's attempts to intimidate him. Kelly's answer dripped with contempt. Is that the spirit we need to see from the Democrats?
I didn't hear contempt. I heard righteous anger, and I just don't know how everybody isn't angry at this point right now.
Pete Hegseth talks endlessly about "warriors." Yet by his words and deeds, he's a fool. This is evident to the personnel inside of the military, isn't it? Or are there too many people willing to play along?
Sorry to say, there are far too many people willing to play along. Hegseth speaks to far too many young, immature white men, who are angry and aren't even sure why. They are led by their emotions, which is why we lean on them to do most of our fighting.
Ruben Gallego put it in terms of manliness. What's your view?
This is 100 percent correct, and goes to my earlier point of immaturity.
Am I right to say Kelly is going to get more famous thanks to Trump that Trump will look at him the way he looked at Zohran Mamdani?
You are. The more people get to know Kelly, the more they will be impressed by him. “Patriot” is a word that is tossed around too much, but Kelly fits the definition.
Is accountability the direction the Democrats need to go on? Whether it's the cabinet or ICE thugs?
I just don't see another direction. Either we are a law-abiding country or we aren't. This all should have been nipped in the bud with urgency following the attack on January 6. For whatever reason, Joe Biden and/or Merrick Garland dawdled, and allowed Trump a second wind.
We damn well better learn from that.
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an 11 25
no lnx
The straight line between 9/11 and Donald Trump
:{U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. first lady Melania Trump attend a ceremony marking the 24th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States at the Pentagon, in Washington D.C., U.S., September 11, 2025
John StoehrNovember 11, 2025
It’s Veterans Day and as I sometimes do, I’m thinking today about the memorable preface to Kurt Vonnegut’s 1973 novel, Breakfast of Champions.
This is what he said.
So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.
I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.
One day is for remembering people who served our country. The other day is for remembering that time when people “stopped butchering one another.”
To give you an idea: the Battle of the Somme saw more than 1 million men killed or injured. From July to November in 1916, 1 million men died, or their lives, and the lives of everyone they loved, were changed forever.
One million.
According to Vonnegut, Armistice Day was a reprieve. A moment of grace.
That’s something you want to remember. Do we?
Something happened to America after 9/11. The conservatives were in charge. They thought the best way to protect democracy was to militarize it. For the duration of George W Bush’s tenure, he was seen by the press corps as more commander-in-chief than president. A democracy shouldn’t do that. When it does, well, I don’t have to tell you who the current president is.
It’s not like there weren’t signs of what was to come.
In the midterms following the 2001 terrorist attack, US Senator Max Cleland, a Democrat, lost. His GOP opponent, Saxby Chambliss, questioned his patriotism, though Chambliss himself got a medical deferment (bum knee) to avoid the draft. Cleland, meanwhile, lost an arm and both legs in Khe Sanh.
John Kerry was decorated for valor in Vietnam, but later protested the war. By 2004, when he challenged Bush, the GOP acted his campaign was an insult to the divine right of commanders-in-chief. They swiftboated his patriotism.
A Black president shocked those who believe this is a white man’s country. Pre-2008: “We must support the command-in-chief!” Post-2008: “Well …”
Veterans Day should remind us what honor means to some. It doesn’t mean sacrifice in defense of American principles. It means unconditional loyalty, especially by way of militarization, first to a party, then to a single man.
Donald Trump takes a militarized attitude toward everything, such that he can designate Caribbean fishermen as “narco-terrorists” to justify murdering them. His secretary of defense talks as if preparing for civil war. Trump’s national police force, ICE, acts like American citizens are enemy combatants.
There is a straight line from 9/11 to now.
I’m not a historian, but the way I understand it, the attitude we are seeing now from the Trump regime is similar to the attitude of governments in the run up to the First World War. They all thought that they were invincible, that war would “cleanse” their people, that combat sorted the men from the boys.
On Veterans Day, we remember the people who served our country, especially in times of war, but tend to forget the consequences of war.
Vonnegut didn’t. He was a prisoner of war in Dresden during the Second World War on the night allied bombers turned that city into a storm of fire. When the bombs ceased falling, he probably felt what the old men felt when “millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another.”
That the silence was the voice of God.
The more we forget that history, the more likely we are to repeat it.
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AN 11 25
Look, Zohran Mamdani is not the future of the Democratic Party.
I know this is true, because the same was said of Eric Adams. New York City’s outgoing mayor did not live up to his billing. Its incoming mayor (presumably) is almost certainly not going to live up to his. The reason isn’t because Mamdani will become as corrupt as Adams became (though who knows?). The reason is that New York is New York.
Yes, it’s the largest urban center in the country. Yes, its influence cannot be overstated. But what’s good, or bad, for New York isn’t necessarily what’s good, or bad, for America. It may no longer be entirely true that all politics is local, but most of politics still is.
Once you accept the truth of this, all other considerations of Mamdani and the rest of the Democratic Party seem rather dull, as he becomes just another politician in a constellation of politicians who figured out how to appeal to a winning majority in their respective constituencies.
Once you accept that a city isn’t a metaphor for a country, or for a national party, the talk about how he’s dividing Democrats looks kinda stupid. Yes, he calls himself a democratic socialist. So what? Is that going to work in a place like Virginia? Maybe, but probably not. If it did, someone would have tried it. Since no one has, there’s your answer.
Think of it this way. Donald Trump is from New York. His business is based there. He represents the city’s elites. But he’s never won there. Three straight campaigns made no difference. Is anyone going to seriously suggest that, in this context, as New York goes, so goes the country (or so goes the GOP)? No, because that would be stupid.
Yet somehow, seemingly no one thinks how stupid it is to ask if Mamdani is the future of the Democrats, because only the Democrats, never the Republicans, are subjected to that kind of questioning. The reason for this is rooted in the Democratic Party itself, among certain elites who want to prevent it from becoming a fully realized people’s party. And they do this, foremost, by accepting as true the premise of the lies told about the Democrats by Trump and the Republicans.
What lies? First, remember that the number of actual democratic socialists in the Democratic Party (I’m talking about people who choose to call themselves by that name) is vanishingly small. Only two have any kind of national profile. (They are US Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Sanders doesn’t really count. He’s technically an independent.)
This stone-cold fact means nothing to Donald Trump. All Democrats, all liberals, all progressives, all leftists, and all socialists, democratic and otherwise, are the name. They are radical Marxist anarchist communists or whatever word salad pops into his soupy brain. There are no enemies to his right. There is nothing but enemies to his left. Does he respect his enemies enough to speak truthfully about them?
No, he lies.
His lies are what certain elites inside the Democratic Party are paying the most attention to. They are not celebrating Mamdani’s success. They are not defending him on the merits. They are not standing on the truth. They are not even standing in solidarity. What they are most focused on is the lies Donald Trump tells, which are magnified by the right-wing media complex, which are echoed by the press corps.
And what they see is either a fight they believe can’t be won or an opportunity to shiv a competing faction within the Democratic Party. Either way requires accepting as true the lies told about their own people, thus making it seem perfectly reasonable to wonder if winning a major election in America’s biggest city is good for the Democrats.
(The answer: don’t be stupid. Of course, it is.)
That these certain elites would rather surrender to lies than fight them tells us their beef with Mamdani isn’t about ideology. (It’s not about whether “democratic socialism,” or any other school of thought, would be appealing to voters outside New York.) It’s about how Mamdani, but specifically lies about him, complicates messaging efforts in a media landscape already heavily coded in favor of Donald Trump, especially of his view of the Democrats, which is that they’re all communists.
Those who are worried about Mamdani’s impact on the Democrats also take for granted the assertion that voters rejected Kamala Harris on ideological grounds – that her policies were out of touch with voters whose main concern was good-paying jobs and lower inflation.
They are ignoring that Harris actually campaigned on so-called working-class issues and that few voters could hear her working-class messaging over the din of Trump’s lies about her. The crisis facing the Democrats is not one of ideology. It’s a crisis of information. Certain elites are pretending otherwise, because it’s better for them if they do.
Mamdani’s victory is a local matter. That is the lesson for certain elites inside the party. It’s also a lesson for their loudest critics.
Certain progressives, let’s call them, believe that Mamdani’s popularity comes from focusing on class (the cost of living in New York). They believe that by doing so, he transcended “identity politics” to amass a following sizable enough to defeat the Democratic establishment.
This overlooks the fact that the establishment, in the form of the DNC and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, are backing him. But more important is again the question of ideology. Certain elites think his will turn off voters outside New York. Certain progressive think it will turn them on. They believe a class-based ideology is the unifying force that working people across the country have needed. They just can’t see it, they say, because the establishment gets in the way.
But race and class can’t be easily disentangled, not in America. To many Americans, the idea of government of, by and for the people is a perversion of the “natural order.” It flattens the hierarchies of and within race and class. This belief is bone deep in many of us. It prevents lots of white Americans from being in solidarity with nonwhite Americans, even if they face similar grinding hardships.
Most of all, such thinking overlooks the basics. Many New Yorkers struggle to make ends meet. Housing is too high. Healthcare is too expensive. Food is too much. I trust Mamdani when he says he’s a democratic socialist. But I also trust that he’s not fool enough to believe that struggle is the same as class consciousness. He identified the problem. He asked voters to give him the power to try to solve it.
That’s not ideology.
That’s just good politics.
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Gavin Newsom and the next political uprising
California Governor Gavin Newsom, along with local congressional representatives, state officials and supporters, speaks as he announces the redrawing of California's congressional maps, calling on voters to approve a ballot measure, in response to a similar move in Texas being supported by U.S. President Donald Trump, in Los Angeles, California, U.S., August 14, 2025. REUTERS/Mike Blake
John StoehrNovember 03, 2025
Is the No Kings movement the new Tea Party movement?
That’s certainly the opinion of some Never Trump conservatives. In the more than 7 million people who protested against the Trump regime, they see the highest ideals of the Tea Party, chief among them limited government, individual liberty and the sovereignty of the people.
But that’s the thing. Those highest ideals were darkened by the fact that the Tea Party was an artificial construct. It’s sometimes called “astroturf” to distinguish it from a real, organic grassroots movement.
The Tea Party was funded by billionaires, conspicuously by the Koch brothers. It may have had the veneer of high-mindedness, but in truth it aimed to spread fear, hate and lies about the first Black president in order to expand and consolidate the power of those self-same elites.
So no. No Kings is not the new Tea Party if we are talking about the Tea Party in terms of the noblest principles of the American republic.
Because it wasn’t. It was, however, a political movement against elites. In this, No Kings has something in common with the Tea Party.
The key difference, of course, is that No Kings has the potential to reject the legitimacy of elites generally. The Tea Party wanted us to believe that the “elites” were all those wine-and-cheese liberals on the east coast who forced “real Americans” to live under the rule of a secret Muslim and covert Marxist by the name of Barack Obama, who was himself a mere puppet of a global conspiracy against America.
The Tea Party movement was a gigantic shuck and jive – a means of distracting Americans, but especially white Americans who are (um) receptive to such messaging, while actual elites pick their pockets.
While No Kings is mainly focused on Donald Trump, it holds the promise of expanding its scope to include all those elites that the Tea Party was intended to serve. Indeed, the circumstances are changing rapidly. No Kings could evolve into a mass movement against oligarchs, which could turn into a mass movement against billionaires, which could turn into a mass movement against the monopoly control that all those billionaires now have over the institutions of democracy.
And like the Tea Party, No Kings is emerging from an economic emergency. Back then, it was a crisis of collapsing assets, mainly housing, and how that impacted jobs. The crisis now is much, much greater, as inflation and cost of living affect vastly more people than unemployment ever did. It’s so bad that retailers that manage to hold their prices down are being celebrated as champions of the people!
No Kings is already huge. Its recent one-day march was the biggest in American history. Everyone who is not capable of bribing a president is struggling to pay for the necessities of life. Many of those folks are going to be open to a movement that gives them someone to blame. A protest of seven million-plus people could double before you know it.
Donald Trump looked at the Tea Party and found ways to harness its energy. (He chose “birtherism,” because he understood what it was really about.) Ambitious Democrats are surely doing the same regarding No Kings. One of the most ambitious is Gavin Newsom.
In an interview with ABC’s Jonathan Kark, California’s governor said we ought to be standing up for the noblest principles of the American republic. “The founding fathers did not live and die to see us as cowards,” Newsom said. Then he identified the cowards, broadening the scope of the No Kings movement to include “the richest, most powerful people selling their souls and selling out this country.”
He then implied a list: the Republicans in the Congress, Wall Street and the corporate media, elite universities and elite law firms. Missing was the supermajority of the Supreme Court, but Newsom’s message was otherwise clear. Americans should be “disgusted” by the “cowards” who have monopoly control over the institutions of democracy.
Newsom borrowed from the No Kings by saying that the language of liberty is requisite to fighting for it. “It’s a revolution that’s going on in this country and I think you have to start using those words,” he said. “[Trump] is attacking every single institution of independent thinking and he’s succeeding because we’re still playing by the old set of rules.”
“The old set of rules” is hotly debated among liberal folk, but at its root, it refers to a status quo that, by dint of being a status quo, gives certain elites every advantage they could hope for in preventing the Democrats from developing into a fully realized opposition party.
It means continuing to make room for certain elites who (in good faith, let’s say) wish to stop the Democrats from becoming “too extreme,” which really means stopping them from centering the interests of the people. Once these are set aside, Newsom suggests, the Democrats can “fight fire with fire” for the purpose of establishing a new normal.
The language of revolutionary freedom in the context of old rules serving elites is important to understanding what Newsom says in the very next breath – that once order is reestablished, “we will continue to build on the legacy, I would argue, of the former president, who I think was one of the most successful presidents of the last century.”
He meant Joe Biden.
Far too few realized Biden was the bridge between the past and the future that so many Americans want to see in their president. His economic policies in particular were transformational, as they reversed the priorities of previous administrations, including Obama’s.
Biden privileged workers over “job creators.” (He was the first president to cross a picket line.) He oversaw a dramatic increase in hourly wages. (They outpaced inflation for the first time since the 1960s.) Unemployment, especially Black unemployment, had rarely been lower. By the end, inflation was returning to pre-pandemic levels.
For these reasons and more, elites hated Biden.
The hatred was especially sharp among corporate bosses. Biden championed their workers. He regulated their industries. He put the national interest above theirs. Most of all, they hated that Joe Biden threatened to stem the tide of consolidation. Capital will concentrate if left alone. Biden didn’t leave it alone. He knew that the unchecked concentration of money and power spells doom for democracy.
He was right. We know he was right. Look what’s happening now.
And that brings me back to No Kings. It has the potential to clarify history. The conventional wisdom is that Biden, through his hubris, brought himself down, paving the way for Donald Trump’s return.
With enough effort, another story can come to light – that the elites who are now lording it over us, who are now planning to pal around with a criminal president in his new gold-plated “ballroom,” conspired against a truly working-man’s president. Yes, he was old. Perhaps he overstayed his welcome. But no one can dispute the stone-cold fact that elites across the spectrum attacked him virtually from the start.
And from that betrayal of democracy and the common good arose the stirrings of an organic grassroots movement against not only despotic rule but against “the richest, most powerful people selling their souls and selling out this country” – those who made despotism possible.
Newsom didn’t bring up Biden only because he’s still popular with the Democratic base. He did so also because he knows that what the former president did is the foundation on which to build the next chapter of American history as well as the history of the Democratic Party – and whoever the base chooses to be the party’s next leader.
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You cannot debate a liar like Stephen Miller
Stephen Miller, senior advisor to President Donald J. Trump, speaks during a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, in New York, U.S., October 27, 2024. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly/File Photo
John Stoehr
October 09, 2025
Today, I have a few things to say about that putz Stephen Miller. First, he’s been on TV a lot lately, because that’s how he pours more poison onto the president’s already-poisoned brain. He doesn’t whisper lies into the ear of the old and demented sovereign the way Wormtongue does in Tolkien's epic. King Théoden didn’t have a TV. King Donald can’t stop watching his. So Stephen Miller delivers poison that way.
Over the weekend, the White House advisor wrote on Twitter there’s “a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country. It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”
In the days since, Miller has repeated a variation of that “insurrection” theme during numerous TV appearances. Last night, for instance, he told a CNN anchor that ICE protesters are “actually, as we speak, trying to overthrow the core law enforcement function of the federal government. … ICE officers have to street battle against antifa, hand-to-hand combat every night, to come and go from their building.”
Every word here, including “and” and “the,” is a lie.
But today, we saw the fruit of Miller’s labor.
“Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers,” Trump wrote on his social media site. “Governor Pritzker, too.”
I have talked a lot before about how Trump has dementia and how growing public awareness of his disease could make him vulnerable to the allegation that he’s not really in charge – that malicious and unaccountable forces are pulling his strings. But I haven’t talked about how. Well, this is how. And Stephen Miller is doing it in plain sight.
The second thing I want to say about that putz is about his personality, specifically, about the character of a man who goes on TV to goad an old, demented president into invoking the Insurrection Act to impose martial law. (Miller seems to believe if he says “insurrection” on TV enough times, something in Donald Trump’s head will finally click.)
Before they lie to anyone else, liars like Stephen Miller lie to themselves. They must, because they cannot face the truth. However, I don’t mean just any old truth. I mean capital-T truth, which is to say, the whole truth about themselves. If they had to face it, they would die. (They believe they would die, because they have no faith.)
So they lie, as if their lives depend on it.
What truth? In Stephen Miller’s case, I can’t say I know for sure, but it’s probably that he’s a mediocrity. He’s neither exceptionally intelligent nor exceptionally gifted. Let’s say he’s bland-looking. He’s short by Washington standards. (He says he’s 5 foot 10.) Of course, there are plenty of men who are born of average appearance, talent and smarts, but who accept who they are and lead decent, honorable, happy lives.
Not Stephen Miller. Why? Titanic ego. The truth shall never be true! So he lies to himself, about himself. I would surmise that from a very early age, he began living his life as if he were surviving an endless series of traumatizing events. Do this long enough and you end up not knowing who you are, what you want or what you stand for. And because the lies you tell yourself, about yourself, literally prevent you from feeling joy or satisfaction, always present in life is a desperate, junkie need.
I would suggest this junkie need is the root of hatred. Miller looks around at others who are living their best lives according to the truth about themselves. He sees you doing you better than he’s doing him – and it makes him mad. You cannot do that to him. It’s an injustice. You must be stopped. Indeed, the only way he’s going to feel better is if you are forced to accept the lies he tells himself, about himself. The Stephen Millers of the world, including the president of the United States, are not mediocrities. They are not even human. They are gods. You shall obey. And if you refuse, they will “use legitimate state power.”
I’m dwelling on this facet of Stephen Miller’s personality, as well as on the nature of the totalitarian mind, for a reason. What he’s doing – goading an old, demented president through TV appearances into imposing martial law – is scary. But manipulating the president only gets Miller and the rest of the regime so far. If they are going to take control of the republic, which is their objective (make no mistake), they must convince the American people there’s no use in fighting back – that resistance is futile. And they are going to do that by lying.
During TV appearances this week, Stephen Miller made Donald Trump seem like a sovereign lord endowed by the law and the Constitution (and perhaps by God) with the divine right (“plenary authority,” Miller told CNN) to do whatever he wants in the name of his people, and that any opposition to his divine rule is not only pointless but punishable.
Greg Sargent put it this way. Miller “believes that if he supercharges the debate over Trump's abuses of power with enough propaganda, he can polarize it and force low-info voters to embrace authoritarianism.” (Greg’s latest in The New Republic is about how Democratic Governors JB Pritzker and Gavin Newsom are taking Miller’s “theory of fascist power politics” at face value and devising a strategy to combat it.)
In other words, Miller is lying in order to get you (and “low-info voters”) to give up. And he’s doing that, because surrender is strategically vital. That is, without surrender, Miller and the rest of the regime got nothing. They lie, believing that you will believe their lies, and you end up doing their work for them – by conquering yourself.
But they can’t conquer you if you don’t believe them.
The moment you stop believing them is probably their most vulnerable moment, as we saw when Stephen Miller was asked by a Fox host to respond to comments made about him by New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In a stream for constituents, AOC discussed the critical role of ridicule in fighting fascism. For instance, she said:
“Laugh at them. Stephen Miller is a clown. I’ve never seen that guy in real life but he looks like he’s 4’ 10”. He looks like he’s angry about the fact that he’s 4’ 10”. He looks like he is so mad that he is 4’ 10” that he’s taking that anger out at any other population possible. Laugh at them.”
Fox’s Laura Ingraham played that clip, right there on live TV. The written word cannot do justice to the face Miller made while watching it. (You have to see it for yourself.) All I can say is he looked wounded, as if AOC had stabbed him, and that’s because the injury was very real.
She did the unforgivable: refused to accept the lies Stephen Miller tells himself, about himself, and she deepened that wound by daring to enjoy herself while doing it. She not only hurt him, emotionally and psychically, but she reminded him of his misery he endures daily.
I’ll close with this. You cannot debate a liar like Stephen Miller. You cannot persuade him with logic or facts. You cannot find common ground with him. There is no compromise. They are too weak to be worthy of trust, and therefore, they can only be opposed. Trump said JB Pritzker should be jailed. In reply, Pritzker said come and get me.
Low-info voters might not understand much.
But they can understand that.
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The only strategy that will destroy Trumpism — once and for all
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., February 18, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
John Stoehr
August 09, 2025
If anyone deserves to hang by the neck until dead, it’s Vance Boelter. Unfortunately, he won’t. Minnesota, the state where he assassinated a Democratic lawmaker, murdered her spouse and shot two more people, abolished capital punishment in 1911, after a botched hanging.
But state and federal prosecutors are looking at bringing him up on federal charges. Luigi Mangione, who murdered an insurance executive in Manhattan in broad daylight, faces a similar fate. Like Minnesota, New York abolished capital punishment. If Mangione is convicted on federal charges, a jury could sentence him to death.
In Boelter’s case, there is an opportunity that would be obvious to liberals if we were not so squeamish about revenge killing at the hands of the state. This opportunity would be obvious to Democrats, too, if we were not so deferential to the impartiality of the court system.
What opportunity? Make an example of Vance Boelter. Turn his story into a story in the national interest, in which the good guys beat the bad guys, clean up corruption, restore the peace and revive faith.
In that story, Boelter is the evil villain who symbolizes the waves of darkness that have rolled across America over a decade, undermining the common good, shattering values and perverting virtue. And in the telling of that story, liberals and Democrats can tell a story of hope. Donald Trump’s reign will end one day, just as Boelter’s life will end.
Justice won’t prevail on its own, though.
We have to make it happen.
A violent and evil end
What I’m suggesting is what the enemies of liberal democracy do.
Trump, his party and their allies regularly pluck some random person out of obscurity and turn him into a character in a story about the battle between good and evil. Few know who Zohran Mamdani is, but they will soon, as the rightwing media apparatus is turning the New York mayoral candidate, who has a foreign-sounding name and calls himself a democratic socialist, into the greatest perpetrator of a great evil. Today, a Fox talking head said the city is “on the verge of electing an open communist who believes in blowing up buses and cafes.”
The same could be said of child-sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Over time, he went from mere creep to monster when he became shorthand for a conspiracy theory about “the deep state” – a secret cabal of (Jewish) super-elites that controls the government, businesses and the media. The cabal is so powerful it can commit any crime, including pedophilia and even cannibalism, and get away with it, all while conspiring with allies, foreign and domestic, to bring America down.
Say what you will about QAnon (that’s the name of the conspiracy theory about “the deep state” and, indeed, we have had a lot to say about it here at the Editorial Board), but at the heart of the story is something noble, a longing for justice and the restoration of trust.
Yes, it’s a longing felt by people who believed that Donald Trump would win the election and destroy a phony conspiracy of Jewish monsters like Jeffrey Epstein, who were raping (and eating) children. (Trump has sabotaged that belief by not releasing “the Epstein files.)
But they are not wrong to long for justice, or for the restoration of trust, as there really is a conspiracy against the American people. It can be seen in the president’s bid to hide his own involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-crime syndicate, to crush the middle class, corrupt government and profane the law. And it can be seen in Vance Boelter’s assassination of a former speaker of the Minnesota House.
Trump represents the rightwing reaction against liberal democracy.
Vance Boelter took that reaction to its logical, violent and evil end.
Burn them all
Meanwhile, the forces of darkness continue to roll over America.
The Air Force announced Thursday it would “deny all transgender service members who have served between 15 and 18 years the option to retire early and would instead separate them without retirement benefits,” according to the AP. Such betrayal raises doubts about the trustworthiness of the federal government to future recruits and almost certainly ensures that those who do sign up to serve won’t give the necessary sacrifice.}:
NPR reported Thursday that a former Jan. 6 defendant who is now working as a senior adviser for the Department of Justice urged insurrectionists to “kill” Capitol police officers who repelled the attempted paramilitary takeover. In testimony, Jared Wise “acknowledged that he repeatedly yelled ‘kill 'em’ as officers were being attacked ... Wise was not convicted of any crimes related to Jan. 6, due to President Trump's order to end all Capitol riot prosecutions.” Wise was later given a job at the Justice Department. A wanna-be cop-killer is now a cop.}:
US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr announced Tuesday that he would end the government’s development of vaccines, including the kind that saved us from the covid. “Everything [Kennedy], the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are doing seems to be intended to ensure that sick people simply die off, which presumably would make those who survive healthier on average, thus achieving his ‘maha’ goal,” healthcare policy expert Charles Gaba told me.}:
These are but three examples of what seem like daily moral offenses, and as they pile up, we must consider what’s necessary in the future.
In this, I think former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is right. He told NPR recently that the Epstein scandal that’s enveloping the Trump White House speaks to a larger pattern of “breakdown in social trust.” I think he’s also right to say the Democrats can’t restore trust by restoring the status quo to where it was before Trump tore it down.
Some of the Democrats seem to get it. They are embracing the idea of creating a new social order, even if it means sacrificing some of their own. Those on the House Oversight Committee forced their GOP counterparts to subpoena records and testimony in association with the government’s investigation of Epstein. Trump is notably absent from the list, but otherwise, the panel wants to talk to Bill and Hillary Clinton, Merrick Garland, Bill Barr, Alberto Gonzales, Jeff Sessions, Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder, James Comey and Robert Mueller.
Burn them all, I say.
Lousy with criminals
I think the most ambitious Democrats are warming up to the idea, because after Trump is no longer in the White House, whenever that day comes, there must be a long period of purging in order to rid a government of, by and for the people of the stink of Trumpism.
The FBI, the US Department of Justice, the US Department of Health and Human Services and especially the US Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the regime’s project of disappearing immigrants without due process, are all lousy with criminals whose greatest loyalty is to Trump, not morality, law or the Constitution. (I name four agencies, but virtually the entire government is rotten.)
They must be purged.
If they are not, they will sabotage from the inside whatever new status quo the Democrats try to build up from the rubble Trump left behind.
To do that, however, we need to begin telling the story, right now, in order to justify any future purge, a story that’s just as powerful as the one told by the enemies of democracy, in which the good guys defeat the bad guys, clean up corruption, restore the peace and revive faith.
If sacrificing the old guard of the Democratic Party is necessary to that, so be it. If calling for the death of an assassin is needed, so be it.
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If it feels like you’re being forced to honor and respect a demagogue and liar under penalty of … some bad thing, well, you’re not wrong.
As Radley Balko said Monday, “we're witnessing the most aggressive, fanatical crackdown on free speech in my lifetime. The speed and breadth of government censorship and private sector and nonprofit capitulation has been astonishing, as has the lack of urgency [or] silence from people who've long claimed to care about this stuff.”
How is this happening? Consider the case of Stephen King.
Yes, that Stephen King.
Last week, on Twitter, the novelist quoted-tweeted remarks by Fox host Jesse Watters. “Charlie Kirk was not a ‘controversial’ or ‘polarizing’ man,” Watters said. “Charlie was a PATRIOT. THIS is a turning point and we all need to turn in the right direction. Rest in peace, my friend.”
It should be said first of all that this is a lie. Kirk was nothing but controversial and polarizing. That was his entire shtick. And that’s why Stephen King said: “He advocated for stoning gays to death. Just sayin’.”
This set off a firestorm of outrage, perhaps the loudest coming from US Senator Mike Lee of Utah: “Please share if you agree that the estate of Charlie Kirk should sue Stephen King for defamation over this heinously false accusation. He crossed a line. It will prove costly.”
Actually, it won’t. You can’t defame the dead. Defamation is about an injury to one’s reputation. You don’t have an injury, and you don’t have a reputation, when you’re dead. Once you’re dead, there’s nothing anyone can say to hurt you. Mike Lee, who is an attorney, knows that.
If litigation wasn’t Lee’s point, what was? Silencing a famous and (nominally) liberal critic of the broader totalitarian project. And he and others succeeded by forcing King to apologize. “I apologize for saying Charlie Kirk advocated stoning gays,” King said. “What he actually demonstrated was how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages.”
But King wasn’t wrong – not exactly. While it’s true that Kirk never said, “I hereby advocate for the stoning of gays to death,” he did say a Bible chapter, which calls for stoning a man who lies with another man, “affirms God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.” That might not be advocacy, in the word’s strictest sense, but close enough.
The context matters, too. Kirk was criticizing Rachel Anne Accurso, the YouTube children’s video personality who goes by Ms Rachel. In June of last year, she made a biblical case for LGBTQ-plus inclusion. According to Factcheck.org, she said: “In Matthew 22, a religious teacher asked Jesus, what’s the most important commandment? And Jesus says, to love God and to ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’
“It doesn’t say love every neighbor except,” Ms Rachel said.
That’s what Kirk was responding to. Ms Rachel made no room for exceptions to God’s greatest law. In reply, Kirk did his own cherry-picking. He reached back to the Old Testament for a chapter that “affirms God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.” Instead of including LGBTQ-plus people in God’s beloved community, as Jesus Christ might have done, he made the case for excluding them.
Ms Rachel advocated for love.
Kirk advocated for hate.
That Kirk did not explicitly advocate for the stoning of gays to death, in the strictest sense and syntax of those words, is therefore a distinction without a difference – unless, like Kirk, you’re a liar. In that case, the distinction between saying what you’re saying and not saying what you’re saying is important. If that collapses, so does your deception.
As long as the distinction between what is said and what is intended to be understood is in place, it’s possible to bully people into silence.
That’s what happened to Stephen King and others. They spoke the truth about Kirk – not the strict letter of it but the true spirit of it – but did not have the courage to stand by the truth after being accused of slander. And in the process of apologizing, they ended up affirming the lie, making it grow bigger, such that a USA Today story about King’s apology says that he “repeatedly apologized for a false accusation.” (After all, it must have been false if Stephen King apologized for it.)
I dwell on this episode, because it’s a microcosm of a much larger and more pernicious pattern in American politics in which the Republicans and their media allies (not just in the rightwing media) have taken the deceit that resides between what is said and what is intended to be understood, and have made that deceit structural, so such that telling the truth – in this case, saying plainly what Charlie Kirk meant, as opposed to what he said – is a radical act deserving of punishment.
The AP reported Monday that “after years of complaints from the right about ‘cancel culture’ from the left, some conservatives are seeking to upend the lives and careers of those who disparaged Charlie Kirk after his death. They are going after companies, educators, news outlets, political rivals and others they judge as promoting hate speech.”
Or as Radley Balko said, expanding on his first comment, “the extreme, opportunistic, completely disingenuous reaction to Kirk's murder also makes clear that if there's an Oklahoma City or 9/11-level attack in the next few years, this administration will absolutely exploit it to try to end our democracy and permanently entrench itself in power.”
I want to end with a small litmus test that can help determine what demagogues like Kirk really meant, so the courageous can fight back.
Try this: make their statements true.
Jesse Watters said Charlie Kirk was neither “controversial” nor “polarizing.” “Charlie was a PATRIOT,” the Fox host insisted. His death “is a turning point and we all need to turn in the right direction.”
Kirk was controversial. He was polarizing. As I said, that was his shtick. He advocated for the exclusion (hatred) of racial, sexual and religious minorities. What needs to happen for Watters’ words to be true?
“Patriot” needs to mean loyalty to white power and all that implies – unequal treatment, legal prejudice, exploitation, corruption, and a social order that’s rigidly hierarchical, with rich white men on top.
Only then is Charlie Kirk neither “controversial” nor “polarizing” man. Only then is it clear what Jesse Watters really meant when he said “THIS is a turning point and we all need to turn in the right direction.”
“THIS” is the end of liberty and justice for all.
And he’ll prove it by trying to silence you for saying so.
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:{John Stoehr September 09, 2025 |
If the Republicans cared about the public’s wellbeing, they wouldn’t have confirmed Robert F Kennedy Jr as head of the US Department of Health and Human Services. He had no business there, but that didn’t matter. Their top concern has been the wellbeing of Donald Trump.
Kennedy is now giving the Republicans a headache with insane talk of vaccines causing autism and how he had no choice but to fire the CDC director because, he said, she told him she was not trustworthy. But that headache isn’t borne of caring about people. It’s borne of concern that people might figure out the Republicans don’t care about them.
The secretary was under pressure before he fell to pieces last week during testimony before a Senate committee. More than a thousand former HHS workers had signed a petition calling on him to resign. The pressure only increased afterward. Kennedy’s sister and her son, who is a former congressman from Massachusetts, added their voices.
Here’s the New York Daily News’ reporting on it: “‘Robert Kennedy Jr. is a threat to the health and well-being of every American,’ Joe Kennedy wrote on X the day after the hearing. As a purveyor of misinformation and sower of confusion, RFK is not adequately ‘protecting the public health of our country and its people,’ the secretary’s nephew said. “At yesterday’s hearing, he chose to do the opposite: to dismiss science, mislead the public, sideline experts and sow confusion.’
The Daily News report added: “The essential values of ‘moral clarity, scientific expertise, and leadership rooted in fact’ required of anyone taking on current challenges to public health in the US are simply ‘not present in the Secretary’s office,’ Joe Kennedy said. ‘He must resign.’”
But even if he resigned today, the fact remains that the Republicans who confirmed him still don’t care about public health. In addition to taking away Medicaid benefits from millions of people over the next decade, there’s the immediate emergency facing anyone who buys their health insurance through state exchanges (aka “Obamacare”).
If the congressional Republicans do nothing, and no one expects them to do anything, there are about 20 million enrollees in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces who will see their monthly premiums jump by an average of 75 percent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
And that’s if they’re lucky.
Charles Gaba, a health policy expert and founder of ACAsignups.net, told me in an interview last week (see below) that some people who are currently getting expanded federal subsidies could see their monthly premiums jump by “100 percent, 200 percent, 300 percent or more.”
Charles explained “there are two main reasons for this: congressional Republicans allowing the improved tax credits which have been in place since 2021 to expire, and the Trump administration changing the underlying ACA tax credit formula to make it even less generous yet.”
The Obamacare crisis won’t happen gradually over ten years, like the Medicaid crisis will. It will happen over the next four months if congressional Republicans do not act by the end of this month.
The congressional Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to ramp up the pressure on their Republican colleagues by getting insurance providers to inform enrollees in September what’s going to happen.
In a letter, Democratic senators, including minority leader Chuck Schumer, told insurers “individuals and families need clear, direct information from their health plans as soon as possible about their rising premiums and cost-sharing requirements, and worsening coverage.” They said the info should be sent "as early and directly as possible … Under these dire circumstances, annual premium notices set to be released in October will not come soon enough."
Axios said some Republicans are open to extensions “but they're also worried about the projected $335 billion cost over 10 years.”
That, my friend, is the tell.
The Republicans took one trillion dollars away from Medicaid and food stamps to cut taxes for rich people who will never notice their taxes were cut. Before that, the Republicans confirmed a conspiracy theorist, crank and weirdo as secretary of health and human services.
Do you think they’re really concerned about the public’s concern?
“There's still a small chance of Congress extending the tax credits this month, but it's unlikely,” Charles Gaba told me, “and even if they do, I expect them to either weaken them, include a poison pill provision so they can blame a failure to extend them on Democrats, or both.”
Lots of people still don't know they are going to be facing an enormous spike in their premiums. How bad is it going to be?
Very, very bad.
As you know, I've spent the past several months shouting from the rooftops that tens of millions of Americans (around 23 million, give or take) enrolled in individual market health insurance policies are facing massive net premium increases starting January 1, 2026.
The increases will range widely depending on a variety of factors, of course, including where they live, what their household income is, how old they are and what policy they're currently enrolled in.
Overall, I estimate gross premium hikes (for those not currently receiving subsidies) will average around 23 percent, while the healthcare policy analysts at KFF estimate that net increases – that is, what the enrollees actually pay after federal tax credits are applied – will increase by an average of 75 percent nationally.
There's about 1.8 million unsubsidized enrollees on-exchange and 1-2 million off-exchange, who will be hit with the 23 percent average.
Meanwhile, there's around 21 million currently subsidized enrollees who will face the 75 percent average … and again, in many cases it will be much more than that: 100 percent, 200 percent, 300 percent or more for the same policy they're currently enrolled in.
There are two main reasons for this: congressional Republicans allowing the improved tax credits, which have been in place since 2021, to expire, and the Trump administration changing the underlying ACA tax credit formula to make it even less generous yet.
There's still a small chance of the Congress extending the tax credits this month, but it's unlikely, and even if they do, I expect them to either weaken them, include a poison pill provision so they can blame a failure to extend them on Democrats, or both.
Again, this will be happening well before the midterms, starting Jan. 1, 2026 – less than four months from now. And yes, my own family is among those facing this, as are you, as I understand it.
Kennedy testified last week. If you were a Senate Democrat, what would you have asked him about exploding insurance premiums?
To resign.
Seriously.
I thought about another long-winded answer, but there's no longer any point in arguing or debating his justifications for what he's done.
He's a eugenicist without the slightest clue about protecting the public from legitimate health crises and who, in fact, has caused and is causing more of them to happen daily. He needs to resign. Now.
He's going to try phasing out the covid vaccine. I don't know what better evidence there is that it worked than the fact that we're still alive. Yet here we are, giving this man the benefit of the doubt.
Absolutely. During the depths of the covid pandemic, conspiracy theorists were making all sorts of absurd claims that they were being "magnetized," that Bill Gates was using the vaccine to implant microchips into our bloodstreams (which is not only insane but ironic, given that Elon Musk is literally installing microchips into people's brains now via Neurolink), that it was supposedly causing Parkinson's-like shaking, etc, etc. All of this was complete garbage.
The boldest claim I heard was that everyone who took the covid vaccine would shortly be dead, and in the months and years that followed, any time a public figure passed away from any cause (old age, hit by a car, whatever), somehow that "proved" their claim, which is absurd. Over 270 million Americans have received at least one covid vaccine. Yet the vast majority of us are doing fine four years later.
It's absolute lunacy, doubly so when you consider that Operation Warp Speed – the public-private partnership by the first Trump administration to accelerate the development of the mRNA covid-19 vaccines – was a massive, legitimate success, which the Trump administration can sincerely claim bragging rights for. Yet somehow, his own base has decided that the very product of that success is some sort of liberal/Democratic conspiracy. Absolute madness.
The press corps can't be let off the hook. I can't count how many times I have read the phrase "vaccine skeptic," as if Kennedy is considerate and thoughtful, rather than liars and scammers. I don't know how to get truth-tellers to privilege facts over lies. Do you?
One of the reasons I've gained whatever respect I have for my healthcare data wonkery over the past decade-plus is that I do my best to use reliable sources. I cite those sources and when I make a mistake (which does happen from time to time), I do my best to own up to it, correct it and explain how I got it wrong.
While there are exceptions, a large portion of the press corps has allowed themselves to become bothsides stenographers who mindlessly repeat whatever drivel comes out of the mouths of Trump, Kennedy, Mehmet Oz and other charlatans in this administration. In many cases they're continuing to do this even as the Trump administration defunds, bullies and extorts their own organizations.
Unfortunately, I don't know how to get them to change their behavior; all I can control is my own, including doing the best I can to get my own data analysis and reporting right.
The erosion of science (vaccines), the erosion of health care (Obamacare), the erosion of the safety net (Medicaid). It's like the Republicans don't care about public health at all unless it affects them personally, and perhaps not even then (in the case of mass shootings). If people die, they die. Thoughts and prayers. Yet they enjoy a reputation for caring about people. How did this happen?
I don't think it was any one thing; racism and misogyny have played a major role, of course, along with decades of attacks on public education and on education in general. Regardless of what got the ball rolling, though, that it gained momentum makes perfect sense to me.
When the Republican Party started to become a slave to its most extreme elements, it started scaring away its genuinely sane, decent members, which, in turn, made those who remain more extreme and awful on average, which scares off more moderates, turning those who remain more extreme yet, and so on.
If this was the only part of the equation, it would be a recipe for the death of the party. However, the other factor is that as it's scaring off more and more moderate voices, it's also attracting more extreme members who had previously been shunned by both major parties.
Once Donald Trump came along, the floodgates were opened – he welcomed in and praised the most awful, racist, bat---- members of society. So here we are – with a Republican Party that seems to consist of almost nothing but the worst dregs of society.
NOW READ: How capitulating to Trump could your boss into legal trouble
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'Insufferable little tyrants': MAGA'S newest 'idiotic' delusion blasted by critics
John StoehrAugust 25, 2025
I was not planning to write about Cracker Barrel’s new logo. Neither was I planning to write about the voluminous rightwing backlash against it. The redesign, which does away with the old man sitting on a chair leaning against a barrel, doesn’t look “woke” to me. But change is hard for some, especially rightwingers who see dangers everywhere.
But I feel compelled to talk about it, because the official Twitter account for the Democratic Party decided to talk about it. Not only that, but the account, in a post put up yesterday evening and viewed nearly 8 million times, decided to agree with the rightwing freakout.
“We think the Cracker Barrel rebrand sucks, too,” the post says, over Norman Rockwell’s painting of a man voicing an unpopular opinion.
I don’t want to make too much of this, but this is a microcosm of a macro problem within the Democrats, in particular that faction of the party that has most of the money and most of the influence over the press corps. In short, the problem is rooted in the belief among elite Democrats that they can compromise with bad actors who in turn are motivated by compromise to be worse. Even shorter, if you accept as true the lies told by the fascists, you have two enemies: them and you.
If I must guess, I’d say the Democrats’ point is showing at least some portion of the people who are freaking out about Cracker Barrel’s redesign that the Democrats played no role in the “wokification” they see. The point might even be some sort of solidarity, as if to say the Democrats dislike “radicals” and “cancel culture” as much as you do.
To this dominant faction of the Democratic Party, I would imagine this move is reasonable, perhaps politically strategic, as it seems to create a middle ground between partisan poles. (Some wonks might call this by its old name, “triangulation.”) If that doesn’t appeal to rightwingers, per se, it might appeal to indie voters who value more than anything their reputations for being nonpartisan. I might even concede to its effectiveness if the rightwing freakout were based on something true.
There’s your problem.
It isn’t based on anything. The total substance of the allegations against Cracker Barrel is the impact of the allegations themselves. That is to say, if the allegations “work” as intended, the allegations are real.
Those allegations are themselves the consequence of a reaction to change and the search for the presumably malicious causes of it. Because these are fascists and rightwing authoritarians, those causes are always the result of some kind of conspiracy by their perceived enemies. And because perceived enemies are always seeking to destroy them, change is always some sign of imminent destruction.
From their view, Cracker Barrel’s rebrand is a declaration of war.
That’s why, from the rightwing perspective, that Nazi Christopher Rufo did not sound delusional when he said “we must break the Barrel.” He went on: “It's not about this particular restaurant chain — who cares — but about creating massive pressure against companies that are considering any move that might appear to be ‘wokification.’ The implicit promise: Go woke, watch your stock price drop 20 percent, which is exactly what is happening now. … The Barrel must be broken.”
Objectively speaking, it is delusional, and no one is entitled to a public hearing of their delusions, no matter how stentorian they may seem. As Tommy Vietor said, in reaction to Rufo: “This idiotic bull---- might have been good politics at one point, but I’m confident the pendulum has swung back and people now see these guys as insufferable little tyrants. No one cares about Cracker Barrel, you annoying dork.”
I think Vietor was on to something, briefly. After all, there’s some truth in claiming that “this idiotic bull----” has lost its populist appeal and that, as a result, the pendulum has begun swinging back so that people can now see men like Rufo as the “insufferable little tyrants” they are.
But then an official organ of the Democratic Party decided to get in the way of that pendulum swing by agreeing, and the most immediate implication is that the Democrats themselves are not nearly as liberal or democratic as they seem to be, nor are the “insufferable little tyrants” nearly as insufferable, little or tyrannical as they seem to be.
With that post, the Democrats conceded the fascists have a point.
And the Democrats should never concede anything to fascists.
Before that moment, as Vietor’s comment suggested, there was a bright moral line between the sane and the insane. There was no need to take seriously the delusions that haunt the hobgoblins of the right, and it was clear and obvious that Rufo isn’t interested in the substance of his allegations (whether they are true; whether they are based on something real), only in whether they bring him closer to his goals. And as long as liberals saw this bright moral line, there was no point in searching for good faith in the hobgoblins who have none. As Tommy Vietor said, “No one cares about Cracker Barrel, you annoying dork.”
But then the official Twitter account of the Democratic Party stepped in. It decided to see good faith where there is none. It decided to give the benefit of the doubt to malicious actors who would never give it in return. And worst of all, that decision took a simple and rational discussion, in which it was clear which side was the sane side, and made it insane. And now, instead of dismissing the hobgoblins, here I am, in today’s edition of the Editorial Board, taking them seriously.
The pattern is everywhere.
The president makes some insane allegation (crime is out of control in Washington, DC!) to advance his fascist agenda under false pretenses (the National Guard commandeered local cops in the name of public safety, despite crime rates being at historic lows). In response, a centrist Democrat who values his reputation more than his liberty decides to accept as real the insanity (well, crime really is a problem and cancel-culture can’t cancel that!), making himself complicit in advancing a fascist agenda ("Chicago is next and then we'll help with New York,” Donald Trump said), and making everyone insane.
And I don’t see this pattern changing any time soon, not until the dominant faction of the Democratic Party, the one with most of the money and most of the influence on the Washington press corps, understands the party’s majority, that faction without the money and without the influence, is no longer going to tolerate the belief among elite Democrats that it’s better to bargain with evil than to fight it.
To me, this is the true fault line – between those Democrats who look at the president and the Republicans and believe what they see, and those Democrats who look at them both and see what they want to see, because it suits their interests. The rightwing mind is not the only host of hobgoblins. The defenders of “the center” host them, too.
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The one big reason why most Republicans are acting irrationally — without consequences
Sarah Davis of Lincoln, Nebraska, shouts after asking U.S. Representative Mike Flood (R-NE) a question during a town hall in Lincoln, Nebraska, U.S., August 4, 2025. REUTERS/Scott Morgan
John Stoehr A ugust 07, 2025
If you consume mainstream news, you might think the Republicans are in trouble ahead of next year’s congressional elections. In a recent report by CNN, for instance, Republican Congressman Mike Flood of Nebraska is met with a barrage of boos and jeers at a town hall.
They should be in trouble. Though the president’s policy agenda is dramatically unpopular, Flood and the Republicans have gone along with him. Donald Trump’s net approval is now -15 percent, according to the latest numbers by The Economist, with 55 percent disapproving. Gallup’s are worse. His rating among independent voters is 29 percent.
You’d think a congressman like Mike Flood, who represents a district that’s evenly split, would at the very least pretend to be contrite, knowing that being on the good side of voters is the key to remaining in office. You’d think he would behave like he knows he’s in trouble.
But he’s not. In that CNN report, Flood gives the impression that the opinions of his constituents, whose outrage is abundantly clear, are immaterial to his goal of staying in power – which is to say, he’s behaving as if he has no fear of democracy holding him accountable.
In that, he’s following the president’s lead. In a recent CNBC interview, as Joe Walsh put it, Trump said that “won the 2020 election (he didn’t). He has a 71 percent approval rating (he doesn’t). The jobs numbers were rigged (they weren’t). I could say something funny here, but I won’t. It’s just so damn dangerous to have him in the White House.”
In the same interview, Trump said he would “probably not” run for office again, understanding full well that the Constitution limits presidents to two terms, whether or not those terms are consecutive.
Walsh is often right, but here he’s doubly so. It’s so damn dangerous when a president and his party act like democracy doesn’t matter.
In 2009, after they passed into law the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama and the Democrats faced the prospect of a wipeout in the following year’s midterms. The law started out unpopular and grew more unpopular by the day. But they didn’t try to change the rules of democracy to avoid the consequences of their choices, even though the consequences were catastrophic. The Democrats lost 63 seats in the House and six in the Senate. Obama’s presidency never recovered.
Donald Trump and the Republicans, however, are trying to change the rules of democracy to avoid the consequences of their choices. I don’t think there’s any one source of disapproval, like the ACA used to be for the Democrats. Instead, public ire seems to have multiple layers, with the deepest being the gigantic sales tax, in the form of tariffs, that the president has unilaterally imposed on everyone. And Trump knows it. That’s why, in anticipation of a wipeout, he asked legislators in Texas to redraw its congressional districts to give his party five more seats.
This should be damning. And the Republicans should be running from the idea, in the same way that some Democrats ran from Obamacare. But most are doubling down. Texas is going to try gerrymandering its districts to give Trump the advantage, as likely will any state controlled by the GOP that has at least one big blue city in it. (Perhaps this is why Mike Flood can shout down constituents with impunity. Nebraska Republicans could choose to redraw his district to ensure reelection.)
But the Republicans are doing more than changing the rules of democracy. They are creating the conditions for criminalizing it.
Democratic legislators in Texas left the state to deny a quorum for Republican efforts to redraw its congressional districts. The state’s attorney general declared the move illegal. The state’s governor ordered state law enforcement agencies to arrest and return them. Texas has no jurisdiction in Illinois, where some Texas Democrats decamped, but that didn’t stop vigilantes from issuing bomb threats.
This is in addition to the Justice Department opening an investigation into alleged tampering of the 2016 election by Barack Obama and his administration. (The allegations are completely imaginary.) There is, moreover, the fact that two Democrats have been arrested and are pending trial; two Democrats were manhandled and arrested; one Democrat was assassinated; not to mention the president ordering the (short-lived) military occupation of the city of Los Angeles. More recently, three House Democrats were “in essence, incarcerated,” after a masked ICE agent locked them in a room at a detention center.
The goal is silencing dissent, and elected Democrats are not the only targets. All of us are. Even as Trump and the GOP do things that make people angry – like taking away their food money, taking away their vaccines, taking away their jobs, all while forcing them to pay more and more for the essentials of life – people can’t vent their anger.
The heart of democracy is our ability to petition the government for a redress of grievances. But the Republicans are creating conditions nationally, after having done so locally, in which that’s not possible.
They are either gerrymandering voters out of existence, their judges are narrowing the right to vote to the point of extinction, or they are preparing to prosecute people for their opinions. At the rate we’re going, it won’t be long before being a liberal is a criminal offense.
The only Republicans acting rationally are those who represent districts in blue states. “What Texas is doing is wrong and I’m opposed to it,” New York Congressman Mike Lawler told Politico, adding that “he’s sponsoring a bill with fellow blue state Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley of California that would ban gerrymandering nationwide.”
But they are only acting rationally, because their party cannot change the rules of democracy to avoid being held accountable by their constituents for their choices. Blue states like New York and California are now considering redrawing their congressional maps in reaction to potential moves by Texas, Florida and others to do the same. In other words, blue-state Republicans have an immediate incentive to behave themselves while the rest of the GOP, including its leader, does not.
That fact alone should be damning.
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'Patterns are clear': Critics urged to plot 'an escape plan' from Trump's retribution
U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks during the opening of a temporary migrant detention center informally known as "Alligator Alcatraz" in Ochopee, Florida, U.S., July 1, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
John Stoehr July 14, 2025
Leigh McGowan, who does the Politics Girl podcast, was on CNN recently and as I watched, I found my admiration growing.
I don’t mean her politics, which I mostly share, or her skills as a communicator, which are enviable. What I admired was her courage.
She was part of a panel discussing “an aggressive new strategy” by the Justice Department to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans. McGowan is herself an immigrant. She came from Canada as a student, then spent years going through the grueling process of naturalization.
That’s admirable, but what really struck me was the context.
McGowan was criticizing the president’s anti-migrant purge on national TV just a few days after his Republicans in the Congress decided to give more money to immigration cops than any other law enforcement agency in the country. ICE and related agencies now have more funding – $170 billion on top of their regular annual budgets – than most countries in the world spend on their national defense.
She was also criticizing the president’s anti-migrant purge after ICE and other federal agencies staged what appeared to be a “massive show of force,” according to an eyewitness, in a park in Los Angeles. It looked like “a city under military occupation,” that city’s mayor said.
McGowan surely understood the context and she surely understood that the Trump regime could make an example of her – search for some pretext for why her citizenship is no longer valid, perhaps by sifting through her history of public commentary and finding any sort of opinion that the regime considers “a threat to national securty.”
This is, after all, what the regime is already doing to foreign students. They can’t go to college here if they have expressed opinions critical of Trump (or of Israel). The regime is doing this to public servants, too, forcing them to take lie detector tests in order purge anyone deemed disloyal to Trump, which is to say, anyone who thinks for himself.
Yet McGowan went on national TV anyway. My admiration grew.
So did my trepidation.
This is real, not theoretical. There are nearly 25 million Americans in this country who went through the naturalization process, which is more than half of all immigrants living in the US. All of them now face the prospect of being stripped of their earned rights and privileges based solely on whether Trump is in the mood to respect them.
It’s one thing for a naturalized citizen and public figure like McGowan to go on national TV to criticize the president before he has made an example of someone. It will be another after he has done so, and we should not be naive: eventually, he will make an example of someone.
As if on cue, Acting ICE Director Tom Homan made this statement on Fox this morning: “People need to understand ICE officers and Border Patrol don't need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them ... based on their physical appearance."
Trump and his Republicans in the Congress have now created a secret police force in the form of ICE and Border Patrol that has, unlike the US military, no alligiance higher than the president’s whims and fancies. At the rate we’re going, snatching and disappearing a critic of the regime isn’t a likelihood. It’s an eventaulity. What do we do then?
We carry on, said Jemar Tisby.
He’s a historian and professor at Simmons College of Kentucky in Louisville. He’s the author of The Color of Compromise, the award-winning How to Fight Racism and recently, The Spirit of Justice.
After the GOP passed their budget bill, Professor Tisby posted a piece called “Trump’s Personal Army,” in which he recommended an escape plan for anyone who’s “committed to truth, justice, and democracy.”
I read the piece and asked for an interview. I admit I was skeptical of the reality behind Professor Tisby’s escape plan, as you will see in the interview with him below. But then I saw McGowan on CNN. I learned that she’s a naturalized citizen. And I thought: Damn, yeah. He’s right.
“People with large public platforms who continue to be outspoken will be in far more danger than the average person,” the professor told me.
Many people have been concerned about Donald Trump's use of the US military to control the population. Sending the Marines to Los Angeles seemed to confirm that suspicion. In your recent piece, you say that that's a red herring. The real problem is ICE. Why?
The US military, for all its issues, has a higher standard for deployment and very strict rules for any domestic functions.
The Posse Comitatus Act, for instance, largely prevents the president from deploying US military for domestic operations.
ICE is different.
ICE agents do take an oath to the Constitution, but they are under the US Department of Homeland Security, and they are classified as civilian law enforcement, not military.
Not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
They are under the executive branch, which means Trump has much broader discretion to direct them.
So he can functionally use them as his personal paramilitary army. You can imagine how such force and power could be wielded by an impulsive president.
The ICE and Border Patrol's demonstration of strength in a park in Los Angeles would be a case in point, correct?
Absolutely.
There was no urgent need for a show of military force like that. In a park. In broad daylight.
The president and his officials are targeting cities like LA for shows of force.
Not unlike targeting higher education institutions like Harvard University, if they can bring ostensibly liberal bastions to heel, then it’s supposed to demonstrate no one can oppose their power and others shouldn’t even attempt to resist.
Mayor Bass said it looked like “a city under military occupation,” just the kind of thing that the founders based their revolution on. Yet "constitutional conservatives" for years said the Second Amendment was the answer to tyranny. We're seeing tryanny and no reaction from the NRA and others. I guess they never meant what they said.
The operating principle for the far right or “constitutional conservatives” is “rights for me, not for thee.”
They selectively apply civil rights and constitutional principles when it serves their purposes.
They willfully disregard them if such rights impede their pursuit of unchallenged power.
Simply look at their response to the January 6 insurrection.
A violent mob storms the US Capitol and where was the military show of force?
Instead, this president pardons those convicted of crimes that day.
But he does not hesitate to send ICE and the Marines to cities and states with no other “threat” than liberal leadership.
In your piece, you recommend an escape plan for people who are "committed to truth, justice, and democracy" because “you can’t afford to be unprepared." I feel the urgency. I could be a secret police target. But I confess I don’t feel the reality. How alarmed should I be? How hard are you going to lean into that recommendation?
Look, these preparations may sound alarmist to some, but so did Project 2025.
So did deploying ICE and the Marines to public parks.
There is simply no red line this regime will not cross. Why would the $170 billon ICE and Border Patrol forces be any different?
The patterns of authoritarian regimes are clear.
Once they have control of military-like force, they use it.
While the initial targets may be others (in this case, immigrants), the very nature of these forces is they can be turned by the leader toward virtually any perceived threat, including “dissenters.”
I don’t think they come for everyone the same way. People with large public platforms who continue to be outspoken will be in far more danger than the average person.
And there are other ways to shut down dissent: firings, freezing or confiscating assets, lawsuits.
But authoritarian regimes are always built on bloodshed.
Hope for the best. Plan for the worst.
It has been suggested that so far power has not yet been met with power. Specifically, ICE agents are not being stopped by local cops, nor have they yet been prosecuted by local district attorneys for violating state law. What's your view? Is that an answer? Or is that more escalation of a fight whose outcome we can't know?
My concern is the people will be provoked to violence.
The typical recourses to oppose injustice – courts, local law enforcement, principled leaders – are hobbled and in short supply.
They tend to work slowly. And this regime hasn’t shown any willingness abide by the law or settled norms.
We need as many officials as possible to use their positions to resist these egregious provocations.
But guns, abductions and confrontations with local residents are a volatile mix. An encounter can turn violent, even deadly, with the twitch of a finger.
That would, tragically, be a boon to this regime. They would have even more excuse to deploy military-like force.
As a people, we must remain committed to the welfare of our neighbors, the promotion of democracy, and the use of nonviolent means to protest.
Hakeem Jeffries affirmed recently his belief "in the fundamental goodness of the American people." What we're talking about here, the application of state terrorism for the purpose of controlling the citizenry, would suggest that that's naive. What do you think?
My latest book, The Spirit of Justice, speaks to the tension between the persistent presence of injustice and the necessity of hope.
In my studies as a historian, I have observed that, lamentably, evil and injustice are commonplace. Somehow, they always show up.
What is far more remarkable is the fact that there are always people willing to battle evil and injustice.
In every age and era, people have risen up, no matter the odds or opposition, to resist and reassert the dignity of all humanity.
Myrlie Evers-Williams, whose husband Medgar Evers was shot and killed in front of their home for his civil rights activism, said:
“But it’s something about the spirit of justice that raises up like a warhorse. That horse that stands with its back sunk in and hears that bell — I like to say the ‘bell of freedom.’ And all of a sudden, it becomes straight, and the back becomes stiff. And you become determined all over again.”
The spirit of justice is moving today. It is making a small but mighty group of people determined all over again.
Hope is not naive. It is the essential to taking the next step in the journey of justice.
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Over the weekend, Vox posted an interview with Vox journalist Christian Paz, who’d reported previously that the Democrats were ripe for a grassroots takeover like the alleged one that overtook the GOP. The headline claimed to explain “the Democrats’ Tea Party moment.”
But unlike the headline, in the interview Paz was more circumspect about the actual existence of a Tea Party-style movement inside the party. The best that can be said, he said, is that “the base has never really been as angry as it is right now. What we’re seeing is a combination of anti-Trump anger, wanting a change in direction, wanting a change in leadership, and also some folks who are like, maybe we should become more progressive as a party” (his stress).
What are they angry about?
To hear Paz tell it, Democratic voters are angry with party leaders for failing to concentrate on “a working-class vision for Americans. They should be more focused on kitchen table affordability issues” (his italics).
But if you listen to Democratic leaders, like Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries in the House, that’s all they talk about. They speak endlessly about the need for the parties to come together and solve economic problems that all Americans share, and to rise above the bickering and the partisanship, and find common ground.
But despite that, the Democratic base is still angry.
Why?
Brad Lander suggested it’s because the real division in the party isn’t, as Paz suggested, between “the establishment” and progressives, but between “fighters and folders.” New York City’s comptroller said that’s what voters saw in candidate Zohran Mamdani when they gave him victory over Andrew Cuomo in that city’s Democratic mayoral primary.
“People want someone to go to bat for working people, paint a real vision of a city people can afford, fight for it and get on the field,” Lander told CNN last month. “And that’s what I think Zohran did.”
I have my own theories about the Democratic leadership. You can read more about them here, here, here and especially here. Basically, it’s that leaders don’t want to fight, because fighting is risky. But I wanted to bring into the conversation someone who has deep insight into the party, and who understands its mechanics and what it takes to win.
So I got in touch with Dana Houle. He has worked in organized labor, was once a congressional chief of staff, and managed campaigns from the local to the statewide level. His Bluesky feed is indispensable.
In this first of two parts of our conversation, Dana explained the true root of the problem: defeat in November. Whenever the Democrats, or the Republicans, lose a presidential election, Dana told me, there’s always a period of anger and distrust between the base and the elites.
Dana told me that as a consequence of this fundamental, it’s tempting to look for an “insurrection” of some kind, like the one that took place in 2010, when the Tea Party destabilized the old GOP establishment.
But, as Dana told me, the Tea Party is a terrible analogy. For one thing, it was a phony “revolt.” For another, it represented a serious policy fracture between Republican elites over the issue of immigration. Dana told me that the Democrats, meanwhile, agree on virtually everything, policy-wise. What they disagree on is style and strategy. More than anything else, however, the Democrats still believe in democracy.
“I don't think anyone has a clear idea of what the base-leadership tension will create, but I don't think it will lead to nihilism, and the Tea Party definitely was part of the GOP's devolution into nihilism.”
Do the Democrats have a trust problem? The base of the party is restless and its leaders don't seem to be hearing it. I am thinking of Zohran Mamdani's victory in New York City, but not only that.
Whenever a party is locked out of power at the national level, there's a trust problem. It was different in 2021 with the Republicans, because, well, almost everything is different with Trump. But Democrats in 2017, Republicans in 2009, Democrats in 2001-2006 – people get mad at their party for losing. And obviously the stakes are much higher now.
I'm not sure Mamdani fits here. First, it's a local race, in a city that's unique and that gets far more attention than LA or Chicago or Houston or Phoenix, because that's where the national media and the financial industry are based. Second, it was a weird race; other than Jerry Brown, it's hard to think of an ex-governor who ran for mayor.
Unlike Brown, Andrew Cuomo was disgraced, and he was also widely loathed. That's how the race started. Mamdani and Brad Lander joining together on the "don't rank Cuomo" and then seeing the results shows a lot of that race was "anyone but the sex pest." That's probably one of the reasons all the big players except Tish James stayed out of it.
There is, of course, the fact that both Democratic congressional leaders are in New York, but I don't think they were factors in the race, and I don't think the mayoral race has anything to do with their challenges and what people think of their performance as leaders.
https://bsky.app/profile/kenklippenstein.bsky.social/post/3lsmxrs4z3k2w
To what extent is the Tea Party angle within the Democratic Party real or imaginary? Lander said the true fault line in the party is not between moderates and progressives, but "fighters and folders." No is really saying "tea party" because it was mostly astro-turf, but lots of people want confrontation by the Democrats, a la the tea party.
That's an important point – that the Tea Party was largely astro-turf. I think Lander is correct, but if I had to look for a recent analogy I'd go back to 2002-2005, when disgust over too many Democrats supporting the Iraq War contributed to the rise of the Netroots, propelled the campaigns of General Wesley Clark and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, and led to the election of Dean as DNC chair.
I don't think anyone has a clear idea of what the base-leadership tension will create, but I don't think it will lead to nihilism, and the Tea Party definitely was part of the GOP's devolution into nihilism.
Voxposted a headline recently thatasserted as fact the existence of a Tea Party-type movementwithin the Democratic Party. But the interview was highly informed by Bernie Sanders' rhetoric, especially understanding the problem as between progressives and "the establishment." What are the real fault lines in the party?
The Tea Party is a horrible analogy for the current Democratic Party. The Vox piece made it sound like it was a response to deficits. That was part of the astroturf messaging, but that wasn't and isn't a fault line in the Republican Party: elites and the base care about deficits when Democrats are in charge, not when Republicans are in charge.
But there was a big policy rift in the Republican Party.
Remember when George W Bush, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Sam Brownback and most of the Republican leaders tried to pass comprehensive immigration reform along the lines of what the United States Chamber of Congress had wanted? That was a policy rift.
And it remained one that Trump exploited. In that first Republican primary debate, he mentioned ending birthright citizenship and most of the other Republicans on the stage were dumbfounded.
With Democrats, there really aren't those kinds of policy rifts.
In Congress, there's wide agreement on most policy matters, from the most moderate Democrat to the Congressional Progressive Caucus. That's in part, because much of the last 15 years has been about the ruralification and dumbification of the Republican Party.
In 2010, Democrats held three of the four Senate seats and both House seats in the Dakotas. They held both Senate seats and two of three House seats in West Virginia. They held three of the four House seats in Mississippi. Their congressional majority was still, as it had been since the Civil War, rooted in the South. That's all changed.
There are hardly any Democrats representing large numbers of rural whites. Democrats are no longer split between northern/urban liberals and white rural southerners. They're now the party of cities and suburbs, with some rural Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans.
And they largely agree on policy!
There's no simmering conflict between Democratic elites and the Democratic base like there was within the GOP on immigration, which was also a class and status revolt. Democrats are mostly arguing about style, tactics, rhetoric, personalities, what issues to prioritize, our modes of communication and organizing – that kind of thing.
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'The cognitive dissonance is frightening': Inside the manipulation of Trump's supporters
John Stoehr June 29, 2025
As I was editing the following interview with Charles Gaba, founder of ACAsignups.com, I was reminded of something Will Stancil told me during my chat with him. Will said, “I think people are used to living in a relatively stable era and have come to believe that stability is normal."
Will was talking about the dominant interpretation of political history among liberals. For most of us, the battles of the past settled the biggest arguments, and from those settlements arose a period of relative peace and stability that nearly all of us take for granted.
Will said: “Liberals have trained themselves to see the world through this very particular end-of-history lens, where the ‘stuff that matters’ is inevitably wonky policy questions, the day-to-day of taxes and government, who gets subsidies, what healthcare policy looks like.
“But it’s ridiculous. History isn’t over, the future will contain events as dramatic and horrible as the events of the past, and this stuff is just what it looks like: an assault on the foundations of our government, with all the terrifying and weighty implications that it seems to have.”
Complicating this is the concept of American exceptionalism, which is to say, the idea that America is the exception to the rule of the world. In most of the nations in global history, might has made right. The law was never applied equally, or universally. It has usually been just another tool of political elites to maintain their preferred status quo.
But liberals don’t want to believe that about America, even when they acknowledge that the country often falls short of its stated ideals. We tell ourselves that whatever tyranny we face is a temporary setback to the inevitability of America's soul being revealed once and for all.
Because of this faith, most liberals, but not only liberals, can’t imagine a future in which the government is trying to hurt them. We say that that only happens in times like the early 20th century, in places like Soviet Russia or Maoist China. There are no gulags here, we say. The government can’t possibly seek to inflict mass suffering and death.
We have to change this mindset. America is just like any other country. It’s not that special. We can love it, flaws and all, even when it’s not the exception to the rule of the world. The battles of the past century have not settled the biggest arguments. Social instability arising from insane public policies will almost certainly become the new norm. And the government can, as it seems to be doing now, try to kill the sickest 5 percent of the population to create conditions for controlling the rest.
In the dark disturbing interview with healthcare policy expert Charles Gaba that follows, the specter of social Darwinism lurks in the background. The unstated belief behind every policy decided by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr is “the survival of the fittest,” in which the strong should rule and the weak should die.
“Everything [Kennedy], the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are doing seems to be intended to ensure that sick people simply die off, which presumably would make those who survive healthier on average, thus achieving his ‘MAHA’ goal,” Charles said.
Robert F Kennedy Jr wants to change the way children are given vaccines. First, is there a problem with the status quo? What are they looking for that we don't know about, if anything?
To the best of my knowledge there aren't any issues with the status quo beyond some states being far too lenient on vaccination requirements (religious objections, etc). My view is that the sole exceptions should be people who have legitimate medical conditions, which make them unable to take a particular vaccine.
The argument seems to be that children are being over-vaccinated as a way of padding drug companies pockets with unnecessary vaccinations. The claim seems to be that children are extremely unlikely to die from or to be seriously harmed by covid, for instance, and therefore, it's unnecessary to vaccinate them – except that even if true, they can still be carriers who infect higher-risk adults, and so on.
It seems like this is what happens when conspiracy theory finds traction in public health policy. Is that right and why?
Absolutely. The most recent anti-vax movement (sparked by [British fraudster] Andrew Wakefield and popularized by celebrities like Jenny McCarthy) started out as more of a left-leaning thing via "granola mom" types (I believe Marin County, California, is considered the "birthplace" of that resurgence) in the late 1990ss and early 2000s.
I think – and again, I'm not an expert on this – it began gaining major traction among Republicans during the 2016 GOP primary when Donald Trump told a vague anti-vax story about a supposedly non-autistic child who "became" autistic after getting vaccinated.
And of course this thinking went into overdrive among MAGA Republicans during the covid pandemic, even though it was the administration of their own lord & savior, Donald Trump that helped develop the very mRNA vaccines they were protesting against.
Since then it's gotten so far out of control that Republican lawmakers in several deep-red states – including Iowa, Montana and Idaho – have actually introduced legislation that would ban mRNA vaccines!
The cognitive dissonance is frightening.
So conspiracy theories are being used to rationalize political outcomes? If so, one of the outcomes is death. Getting rid of people is a rightwing goal, historically. We can say that reasonably, no?
Vaccine specialist and science communicator Edward Nirenberg put it best this morning: "If I were HHS secretary and my goal were to kill as many children as possible, it would be difficult to distinguish the actions I would take from those that Kennedy has taken."
In this particular instance he was referring to yesterday's announcement that RFK Jr is withdrawing US funding from the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), but he could be talking about any number of other policy changes RFK Jr has made already.
I don't know if it's a "rightwing" goal generally, but it sure as hell seems to be the goal of the Trump administration and MAGA Republicans.
When RFK Jr rolled out his "Make America Healthy Again" campaign, the assumption was that he intended to make existing Americans healthy. Instead, everything he, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are doing seems to be intended to ensure that sick people simply die off, which presumably would make those who survive healthier on average, thus achieving his "MAHA" goal.
Call it Operation Nietzsche, I suppose.
I've written several explainers about the goals of the Affordable Care Act and how health insurance risk pools work, which involve this concept: Generally speaking, around 5 percent of a given large population tends to eat up around 50 percent of all medical spending.
Kennedy’s and the administration’s "logic," therefore, seems to be that if you simply killed off the sickest 5 percent of the population, healthcare costs for the remaining 95 percent would be cut in half.
This is obviously immoral and appalling, but it also seems to be the driving force behind many of their decisions.
It sounds like social Darwinism has been restored in popularity. I mean, even MAGAs, who will themselves be killed by such policies, will nevertheless support them if they also kill people who are "undeserving." It's like a suicide cult that few can see.
This is a trend that folks like Jonathan Metzl (one of his books is literally titled Dying of Whiteness) have been talking about for years, and which I analyzed extensively during the covid pandemic.
I found a direct and steep correlation between Trump support and covid death rates as well as a direct inverse correlation between Trump support and vaccination rates at the county level.
Lyndon Johnson famously put it best:
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
Another goal of rightwing politics is social control. Kennedy came close to saying that when he said this week his goal is everyone wearing "wearables" in four years. How is this even debatable?
The irony goes through the roof. One of the biggest and most absurd conspiracy theories among the MAGA anti-vax crowd regarding covid vaccines was that they supposedly included tiny "microchips" that would "magnetize" you, and allow Bill Gates to track your every move etc. (Of course, the fact that everyone carrying smartphones around these days pretty much allows various companies to do exactly that already was apparently lost on them).
Yet many of the same crowd gush over Elon Musk's companies, including Neuralink, which literally implants microchips into the human brain, and Tesla, which can literally track the location of their cars (so can most other carmakers to some extent these days).
And now you have RFK Jr pushing for "everyone" to wear small devices on their bodies that allow private companies and/or potentially the federal government to track not only your every move but your most private medical and health data via biometrics, etc.
Meanwhile, Republicans in some states like Virginia have introduced bills to track women’s menstrual cycles, something which Vice President JD Vance was a proponent of as recently as 2023.
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The most dangerous man in government right now isn't Trump
John Stoehr June 17, 2025
I don’t mean to be that guy, but someone has to. Someone has to say things are not getting better, no matter how low Donald Trump’s polling numbers go, no matter how stupid his birthday parade was, no matter how many people (4-6 million) protested against him last weekend.
We want things to get better, because we want to believe America is better than this. But America really isn’t better than this. The last election proved it. The next election won’t change it. If we do not face the truth about the people, I don’t see how we can make things right.
The denial is so deep that leaders of the Democratic Party still can’t bring themselves to blame the president, even when he’s directly responsible for inspiring an assassin to murder one of their own.
But the denial goes deeper. As liberals cheer the fact that Trump’s job approval is sliding downward, even on issues that favor him, such as immigration, the president acts like there’s no such thing as polling, and like there’s no such thing as a public that he’s obliged to serve.
Instead, he comes out and says he will use federal law to punish his enemies and reward his friends, pulling back immigration enforcement in red states while ramping it up in blue ones. As anti-Trump conservative Joe Walsh said this morning, the “ugly plan” is to “incite violence in blue cities and blue states only, and then put the military on the streets in those blue cities and blue states only. Everything he does is meant to divide us. He is the absolute worst of us.”
Kevin Kruse called the chaos and violence intentional, yet from the way liberals and Democrats respond to it, you’d think there’s no harm being done that cannot be undone by the next election, namely when the Democrats take back the House next year. After all, just look at Trump’s polling, we are told by MSNBC pundits, as if any of this chaos and violence has anything to do with normal democratic politics.
If anything, the fear, ignorance and superstition that led to Trump’s second takeover of the US government is getting worse. It’s going viral. Robert F Kennedy Jr dissolved the CDC vaccine advisory committee and is now stocking it with kooks and loons. He’s turning Health and Human Services into the world's biggest disinfo organ and lots of people are going to die as a result no matter who’s elected next time.
Kennedy is probably the most dangerous man in the government right now, but don’t take my word for it. Take it from Gabrielle A. Perry, an epidemiologist, writer and philanthropist who’s been sounding the alarm on how really bad things are really going to get. She told me that anyone who thinks Trump is losing is “as delusional as his supporters are, especially when it comes to the scientific impact of this. Anyone who is truly familiar with cults understand what is happening. You can defeat a man but it is much harder to defeat an idea.”
The government is becoming the biggest disinfo machine, with Health and Human Services ordering bogus studies on the impact of vaccines on autism. What does this look like from your view?
For all the faults of our government – past, present and future – I never thought I would be alive to see the day where we as a country willfully allowed the proliferation of anti-science ideology to infiltrate real-world policy. We've always been inundated with pseudoscience. We see it in the wellness industry and the proliferation of tonics, supplements, diets and cure-alls for every ailment under the sun, from acne to cancer. People have every right to pursue their health in their own way. But to see the banning of research, the banning of scientifically backed public health measures, the criminalization of public health, the banning of mifepristone (which is used for procedures well beyond abortion) – it's to the point that now, in my work as an epidemiologist, we are having meetings to discuss ways to penetrate this cult of personality that is leading to the deaths of people, especially children, from diseases we once eliminated.
Which is proving to be an arduous task for my colleagues, as field epidemiology, case management and clinicians are seeing the rise of antagonistic feelings toward the medical and public health sphere. People seem to believe that medicine will make up for the dismantling of our public health sphere. We saw that during covid as well, with many begging for the covid vaccine (a preventative measure) after already contracting the disease and suffering adverse health ailments. Seeing the dismantling of American public health is terrifying, because we in the field know that the medicinal field cannot make up for what is to come, which is a massive strain on our healthcare infrastructure.
Tell me more about that, about what's to come. What do you see coming? How bad is healthcare in America going to get?
Despite the general public's apathy towards the dismantling of our healthcare system, even in light of covid, the lack of vaccine uptake, the lack of availability of healthcare providers – especially as there is now a 750 percent increase in doctors moving to Canada to flee the tyranny upon their field – and the dismantling of Medicaid (which is the backbone of our healthcare infrastructure), people will become sicker and sicker. This is not hard to imagine, as we are already living it. Twenty-five years ago, measles was eliminated in the United States. Now it is decimating west Texas.
And if allowed to continue on this path, especially since it causes immune amnesia, we will continue to see elevated levels of sickness and death in children. The thing people don't understand is that for every bed in a hospital given to a person suffering from an acute, preventable illness, that removes a bed for the cancer patient, the grandmother suffering from a heart attack, the kid with the dog bite, the brother needing an open operating room for surgery.
There are not only a finite number of beds, but those beds are about to shrink in number once Medicaid is cut off at the knees. Hospitals are nonprofits. Their funds come from grants from the federal government in the form of Medicaid. Those same cuts are also going to exacerbate the current physician and nurse shortage we are having nationwide, since Medicaid is the primary funder of residency programs in the nation. Combine a lack of healthcare professionals, an overloaded healthcare system, and rampant pseudoscientific beliefs, it creates a perfect storm for the collapse of this system
There are many liberals who argue that Trump is actually losing -- in the courts, in the polls, even on Wall Street. From what you're telling me, though, I gather that fear and superstition are spreading like a virus, and that talk of Trump losing is premature, to say the least.
It's delusional. They are as delusional as his supporters are, especially when it comes to the scientific impact of this. Anyone who is truly familiar with cults understands what is happening. You can defeat a man but it is much harder to defeat an idea. The president appeals to the baser instincts of a society that has already long been bred to be individualistic. And hyper-individualism is malleable. It is able to see anything happen to someone else and simply be grateful that it is not (yet) you. This man will die one day. But his ideologies will live on, because there has been no meaningful pushback. Even with the courts. If there had been, he would not even be president.
The beautiful thing about the constitution is that it is a living breathing document, but it is as useful as toilet paper in the face of tyranny. The new administration is using that document to rain down tyranny on American citizens, which should make people question the validity of the system we have and the way it operates. But that would require what many don't have: imagination. Believing beyond your current circumstances is how my ancestors and many more built the current world we live in, one they knew they would likely never see. We have long enjoyed the fruits of so many others' labor. And to get past this moment in history, it will take more than just one more vote and a general apathy. It will take imagination.
The regime appears to be setting us up for another pandemic. That's what seems like, given Kennedy's orders on the covid vaccine and most recently, a potential bird flu vaccine. How do you see it?
Well, first, the covid pandemic never ended. And second, the new administration is setting the American people up for many things. In times of panic and political instability, chaos allows tyranny to grow even more powerful. This has been studied. The Nazis used the fear and trepidation in the wake of the Spanish flu to rise to power by sowing fear, anti-immigrant sentiments, and more societally.
And when it comes to science, four years is a lifetime.
To not have true eyes on the mutations happening, to have an administration being willing to lie to the American people, to have a public willing to set the world on fire as long as the people they have been taught to hate suffer more? Give measles four years to proliferate wildly with no meaningful Epidemic Intelligence Service or public health pushback, we'll never outrun it.
NOW READ: Navy veteran fed up with the sad truth about American politics
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Expert warns 'gaslighting' Republican plan does 'much more harm' than just gutting Medicare
John Stoehr June 04, 2025
The Republican budget bill that recently passed the House adds onerous work requirements that would push millions of people off Medicaid. House Speaker Mike Johnson told “Meet the Press” over the weekend that they’d only lose their healthcare if “they choose to do so.” But that, according to Charles Gaba, is “gaslighting b-------.”
“The entire point of imposing work requirements,” Charles told me, “is to either discourage eligible people from enrolling or to make the requirements difficult to comply with, resulting in millions being kicked off the program even if they are working or volunteering.”
Charles Gaba is “the biggest powerhouse Democratic donor wrangler that nobody has ever heard of,” according toPolitico. As the editor and publisher of ACAsignups.net, he’s also one of the country’s leading authorities on Obamacare, Medicaid and healthcare policy, generally.
After the House Republicans passed their budget bill, I got in touch with Charles. I asked him straight up if the legislation guts Medicaid.
Yes, he said, but it does so much more harm than that.
If the congressional Republicans do not extend insurance subsidies passed during the pandemic, Obamacare enrollees will “face massive premium hikes – in many cases, three and four times higher than what they're paying right now,” he said. That’s impacting some 24 million Americans, most of them, Charles reminds me, residing in red states.
The following is a long interview, but vital to anyone with a stake.
Are the Republicans really going to gut Medicaid? Huge numbers of people who voted for and who support Donald Trump depend on it.
The version of the budget bill passed recently by House Republicans absolutely would, if implemented, gut Medicaid – particularly for around 20 million Americans who are currently enrolled in Medicaid via the Affordable Care Act expansion that’s in effect across 41 states.
Obviously, there will be changes made to it in the Senate, so we don't know what the final version of the bill will be, and even if it passes through both the House and Senate, and is signed into law by Trump, there will no doubt be legal challenges to some provisions within it.
But yes, the current version passed by House Republicans would be pretty devastating to both Medicaid as well as ACA exchange enrollees.
There has been less attention to those ACA exchange enrollees. What does the budget bill do to the Affordable Care Act? What do those changes say about Trump and the GOP’s plans for the safety net?
The first way the budget bill hurts the ACA is what it doesn’t include – extend the improved tax credit formula under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which is scheduled to expire at the end of this year.
If the IRA subsidies expire this year, nearly all of the around 24 million Americans enrolled in healthcare coverage via the ACA exchanges will face massive premium hikes – in many cases, three and four times higher than what they're paying right now.
Millions will be priced out of being able to afford coverage at all, while most of the rest will have to either eat the higher premiums, downgrade to a lower-quality plan with higher deductibles, higher copays, a worse provider network or all of the above. Or they'll have to move to non-ACA coverage via so-called "junk plans," which have few if any of the patient protections required by ACA plans.
That’s what the budget bill doesn’t do to the ACA. What does it do?
It makes a bunch of changes to how ACA exchange enrollment and tax credit eligibility work. Some of these get pretty wonky, and some would "just" be codifying rules that are already being put into place by the Trump Administration, but the list includes things like:
Denying tax credits via ACA exchange plans to anyone who (ironically) gets kicked off of Medicaid for failing to meet the new "work reporting requirement" provisions.
Changing the ACA's formula for determining "maximum out of pocket" costs (MOOP), so that enrollees would face hundreds of dollars in higher deductibles and copays.
Weakening the ACA "metal level" rules to let insurance carriers make plans less comprehensive (ie, silver plans are supposed to cover around 70 percent of average enrollee costs; under the GOP changes, a silver plan cold cover as little as 66 percent.)
Cutting the open enrollment period nearly in half, from the current 76 days down to 45 days.
Mandating a $5 per month premium on some low-income enrollees who are currently eligible for $0 per month premiums.
Adding a whole bunch of extra red tape to millions of enrollees for them to remain eligible for tax credits.
All of this illustrates Trump and the GOP's disdain for and hatred of the social safety net as a whole: If they can't get rid of it outright, they'll deliberately make it too cumbersome and complicated to work, thus allowing them to claim government itself doesn't work.
:{Or,:{ as PJ O'Rourke once put it: The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it}:
- YouTube
www.youtube.com
How are the Republicans going to justify taking health insurance away from people or making what they do have worse than it is?
GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson has repeatedly used the "lazy young men playing videogames" stereotype, as who he claims they want to force into "getting off the couch to get a job" etc, even though there's no evidence that a lack of healthcare coverage inspires young men to seek employment and plenty of evidence that providing healthcare coverage to people makes them more likely to get and keep a job.
They're also trying to claim that millions of undocumented immigrants are "stealing" healthcare even though federal dollars don't pay for Medicaid for any undocumented immigrants. There's a few states that pay for Medicaid for that population using 100 percent state dollars, which is entirely up to the voters of those states. Yet the House Republican bill tries to blackmail those states into not paying for Medicaid for undocumented immigrants by threatening to withhold federal dollars for US citizens and documented residents if they don't.
I'm going to be generous and say that Trump voters seem confused. A recent report by NPR suggested that they don't want Medicaid cuts for people they know, but do want cuts for some kind of makebelieve freeloader. This seems to me a recipe for continued support for Trump, even as he's hurting his own people. Thoughts?
Sadly, that sounds likely to be the case. I listened to and read the NPR piece you mentioned, and everyone who talked about "waste" or "abuse" spoke in very vague terms without ever specifying who exactly they think is "abusing" or "wasting" Medicaid dollars.
In addition, they seem to simply flat-out refuse to believe that Republicans and Trump will take away their healthcare, because "that wouldn't be right" and "I need it," regardless of what's in the bill.
I've even read other articles where Trump supporters shrugged off the potential loss of Medicaid/ACA coverage, because they figured that Democrats would stop or reverse the cuts from happening, which seems like a rather twisted sort of justification for supporting Republicans.
That seems to be happening in the interplay between the House and the Senate. Trump voters want cuts for "those people." So the House bill passed. They don't want cuts for themselves. So the bill is stalling in the Senate. I don't know what any Democrat could say to Trump voters when the point for them is theater, not solving problems.
I know that Missouri Senator Josh Hawley has been vocal about opposing any major cuts to Medicaid while Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski has openly called for the IRA subsidies to be extended.
The House GOP bill does a lot to try to punish Democrats more than Republicans, but it would still be pretty devastating for millions of Republicans no matter what, making it difficult to square the circle.
While I noted there are more Medicaid expansion enrollees in blue House districts, there are more ACA exchange enrollees in red House districts, and even within those, there's still no way of knowing for certain whether a particular enrollees is a "one of their own" or not.
NOW READ: 'Watch carefully': Marjorie Taylor Greene doubles down in new 'warning' to lawmakers
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The man-babies of MAGA never grew up because they never had to
John Stoehr April 26, 2025
Recall that the week began with news that the US secretary of defense had been involved in a second Signal chat in which he shared the same war plans he shared in the first one. This time, Pete Hegseth set up the chat himself and included his wife, his brother and his attorney. Oh, and he used his own phone, not the government’s.
Last weekend, in an opinion piece for Politico, a former Pentagon spokesman warned that “there are very likely more shoes to drop in short order, with even bigger bombshell stories coming this week.”
And lo, a voice came:
Wall Street Journal: “Polygraph Threats, Leaks and Infighting: The Chaos Inside Hegseth’s Pentagon”;
Associated Press: “Hegseth had an unsecured internet line set up in his office to connect to Signal”;
Times: “Hegseth’s Personal Phone Use Created Vulnerabilities”;
National Public Radio: “Former Pentagon official on Hegseth turmoil: ‘It looks like they actually broke the law’”;
CBS: “Hegseth orders makeup studio installed at Pentagon.”
Unfortunately, we are where we were at the beginning of the week. Hegseth isn’t going anywhere. Yes, he is “embattled,” as we say in the news, but every story about him says that Donald Trump has his back.
The closest we’ve come to accountability was in the Journal: “Trump has begun to ask people around him about Hegseth’s performance, and his advisers have closely watched his recent media appearances.”
Until he’s gone, there’s going to be lots more to say about Hegseth. I want to focus on an aspect about him and the maga movement that can be found in the opening scene from the Journal article above.
In it, he reacts after being “rattled” by the fact that someone had leaked word of his classified briefing on China with Elon Musk.
“I’ll hook you up to a f—ing polygraph!” Hegseth shouted at Adm. Christopher Grady, the then-acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to two people familiar with the exchange. Hegseth demanded proof that Grady hadn’t leaked news of the March 21 briefing.
Grady was never subjected to a polygraph, and Hegseth would go on to accuse a number of other people for the leak, including Lt. Gen. Doug Sims, the Joint Staff director, whom Hegseth also threatened with a polygraph test.
I mean, I get it.
The secretary of defense is America’s highest ranking military official. In theory, Hegseth can talk to anyone at the Pentagon in any way he wants to, no matter how accomplished they are, no matter how much older they are. But we’re not talking about what you can do. We’re talking about what you should do among men of honor and distinction.
And there’s your problem.
Admiral Grady’s resume is so deep and long, and so full of achievement and military jargon, that it would be almost discourteous of me to copy and paste excerpts of it. (You can find his bio here, courtesy of Bill Grueskin.) He has seen some things and done some things, with the ultimate cost of failure being that someone under him could have died.
Meanwhile, Hegseth’s resume for the job is nearly as thin as mine.
He’s a 44-year-old former TV personality with a drinking problem and a history of indiscretion with women, shall we say, as well as no experience running anything of size, much less the planet’s biggest bureaucracy. Since taking the job, he has compromised national security, broken dozens of laws, conduct that would get anyone else at the Pentagon court-martialed if he were not Donald Trump’s No. 1 yes-man, and on top of all this, he feels justified in throwing fit with a man who was answering the call of duty when he was still in diapers.
Again, Hegseth has the right to say what he wants to Admiral Grady. He outranks him. No doubt Grady accepts that. But no man of honor would cuss out an admiral out, question his honesty, doubt his loyalty, impugn his character – and do it in front of witnesses, for God’s sake.
But if we leave it there, we’re missing the larger picture.
Hegseth’s dishonorable conduct is shared by the whole regime, including the president. There’s an attitude that respect is owed but not in return. This is borne of the belief that they have the right to rule by race and blood – not by law, not by merit, not by anything other than the accident of their birth. Indeed, anyone who has earned his authority, as Admiral Grady has, is a natural target of their contempt.
This attitude may seem invulnerable, but it’s not. It is weakness personified. When respect is not forthcoming in the way they expect, they fall to pieces. They get emotional, perhaps hysterical. They might even start accusing everyone around them of being against them. As it happens, that describes Hegseth to a T. NBC News reported Friday that he’s growing paranoid, “erratic” and “insecure.” When you act like you’re infallible, you can’t stand it when anyone anywhere disagrees.
If this sounds childish, it is, and there’s a reason for it. It is rooted in the political tradition of venerating above all others the common folk of the American heartland, which is to say, the common white folk. Unlike multiracial populations in cities or on the coasts, people get educations, acquire skill and knowledge, and strive, these are God’s chosen. They are the most authentic, the most real of Americans.
And one way or another, they are always at the center of our time and our attention, as they are the main characters in tales of morality told about America, in which some kind of great sinner is forever trying to take advantage of them, cheat them out of their money and their hope, and these crimes against the blood and bone of the nation demand a champion to come forth and save God’s chosen from this villainy.
They are pure and innocent and just. They never do wrong, they are only wronged, because they are not asked to make choices. Choices are made for them as a consequence of being God’s chosen, which is to say, of being white in a country that was made for white people.
It should be no surprise that men like the secretary of state, or the president, who believe they have the right to rule by race and blood, not by law, not by merit, not by anything other than the accident of their birth, are also some of the most childish people. They inhibit a world in which they never had to grow up. They can be boys forever.
And when man-babies like Pete Hegseth encounter someone who did grow up, who did make something of himself through merit and hard work and determination – when they encounter men of honor like Admiral Christopher Grady – they seem to explode on contact.
For that small justice, I’m grateful.
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NO LNX
Channeling your rage at the people who brought us to this — and holding MAGA accountable
John Stoehr May 28, 2025
This week saw the five-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. It seems to have gone by without fanfare. Why? I think it’s because whatever gains were made after his death, in the name of equity, inclusion and justice, have been rolled back by the regime.
I think that’s because most Americans want it that way.
As Alma Rutgers wrote in the New Haven Register: “Now, five years later, George Floyd is all but forgotten. And the hope for change that followed his murder — the promise held by the massive rallies for justice throughout the country and in the heightened public understanding of Black Lives Matter — has been whitewashed away.”
The conventional wisdom is that the last election was decided by inflation, but I would argue it was decided by backlash. The protests that arose in the wake of Floyd’s death were some of the biggest in our country’s history. There was a feeling that something transformational was happening. Marginalized voices were suddenly getting platforms. Most important, respectable white people were taking them seriously.
But like all movements of progress in American history, it was met with reaction. No matter how criminal and constitutionally perverse Donald Trump is, it wasn’t as bad as Black and brown people – and women – getting a say in how the country is run. Sure, voters said they hated high prices. I believe them! I just don’t believe that was their reason for voting for Trump. There was something they hated more, something so normal as to be invisible. Indeed, it was hardly worth mentioning.
Because of the structural and historical power of white power, the political left in America has always been at a disadvantage, but the disadvantages seem greater these days. How do you move the country toward liberty and justice for all when a majority of Americans appears to be indifferent to justice or even hostile toward its administration?
I can’t say I know. That’s why I got in touch with Noah Berlatsky. As the publisher of Everything Is Horrible, a newsletter, Noah has what I don’t have: a sophisticated understanding of the state of the left. In the following interview, we talked about a range of issues relevant to the progressive project. How do we live in a constant state of regression?
JS: In your view, what is the left doing right? What is it doing wrong? Is Bernie Sanders the future or the past?
NB: I think there are a range of lefts doing a range of things, some of which seem like they’re working and some of which maybe less so. The Tesla takedown protests have been quite effective in making billionaire Elon Musk miserable and maybe prompting him to leave the White House, and I think a lot of people on the left have been involved in that.
Parts of the putative left I’ve been most unimpressed with is cheering on Musk for gutting the US Agency for International Development. Nature estimates that’s going to kill 25 million people. I know that Ken Klippenstein distrusts all US foreign policy, but you should get it together to oppose fascists when they set out to murder 25 million.
More broadly, I think this is an opportunity for the left, since Trump is radicalizing a lot of people and since the left is generally the group leading the demands to fight — and fighting is very popular with Democrats, and I think in general. I think AOC has capitalized on this very intelligently, and has rallied a lot of her colleagues and the public to her, even those who might have been skeptical of her in the past.
Re Sanders — I think the rallies with AOC are a way of passing the torch. Which seems like a wise move; he’s 83! He still seems quite fit, but no one lives forever.
JS: Why are some progressives hellbent on overlooking bigotry and giving white working class folk endless benefit of the doubt?
NB: I think that we live in a very racist society, and people across the political spectrum are affected by that in a range of ways. The idea that the white working class represents true authentic Americana, or true authentic class struggle, is appealing to a lot of people, whether right, left or center.
JS: It seems to me that liberals don't talk about masculinity in ways that can counter the rightwing obsession with it. You might be the only one, Noah. Why is that? What needs to be done?
NB: I don’t think I’m the only one! I’ve learned a lot from writers like Kate Manne, Julia Serano, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Adam Jones … I don’t know. Just lots of folks.
I’m not sure the issue is that liberals or the left don’t talk about these issues in the right way, so much as the fact that a lot of people (definitely on the right, but not just on the right) have a lot invested in patriarchy.
So when people talk about issues affecting men, they tend to interpret the problem as being that men aren’t living up to their roles or privileges and rights in patriarchy, rather than thinking about the ways that patriarchy is a cruel system that harms people of all genders.
Just as one example, people talk about a male loneliness epidemic. But, you know, the people who are most horrifically affected by loneliness are people who are incarcerated; we are obsessed with solitary confinement in this country, and we use it to literally drive people insane. Most of those people are men. But they’re men who patriarchy has decided are worthless or don’t matter. We’re always wondering why cishet straight white guys aren’t model patriarchs, rather than looking at who patriarchy is grinding underfoot. Why isn’t mass incarceration seen as a quintessential problem for men in these discussions? It’s pretty clear why, but there are strong cultural and financial incentives not to address it in that way.
What’s to be done is kind of a frustrating question, because there are pretty obvious ways to help men. Stop preventing trans men from getting health care; better worker safety so working class men don’t suffer horrific workplace injuries; free health care so disabled men can get care, etc. There are lots of things we could do that would improve men’s lives, but instead we’re always diverting into talking about saving patriarchy, and then the left gets shamed for not cosigning Jordan Peterson’s hateful rants. We need to stop pretending that the way to help men is more patriarchy when it’s patriarchy that harms them.
JS: There is so much cynicism about public protest, even among progressives. Why is that? And do liberals understand that we're living in the shadow of the backlash against the George Floyd protests?
NB: Public protests have always been controversial. The current attack on pro-Palestinian protest is partly a backlash to the George Floyd protests, but I think it’s also the result of decades of bipartisan bad faith about Zionism and what it actually means on the ground for Palestinian people. There are a lot of liberal Zionists — Jewish and non-Jewish — who are very invested in an idea of Israel as a great triumph of human rights, and they do not want to hear the very ugly downsides.
That’s created powerful incentives to silence people pointing out those downsides. And unfortunately, the right has very adeptly seized on this liberal bad faith to target the students, professors and institutions that should serve as a bulwark against fascism here at home.
There are some signs that some people are beginning to see the evils here, both at home and abroad; like Dick Durbin has been voting against unlimited Israel aid, which is pretty stunning given his history with AIPAC. At the same time, you know, Chuck Schumer and Jonathan Greenblatt still provide Trump rhetorical cover when he goes after Palestinian protestors. So I just don’t know. It’s pretty bleak.
JS: Someone told me recently that the story no one is telling is the one about liberal resentment, as in: I will gladly suffer to see these Trump voters suffer. What do you make of that?
I’m not sure I’m seeing a lot of that. Or, I guess people are definitely angry, and there’s a lot of rage at the people who brought us to this. But I think in terms of an actual political wish-list or political policies, there’s not a lot of enthusiasm for, like, withholding disaster relief from red states — not least because the people you’d hurt most in those cases are the marginalized people who were least likely to vote for Trump in the first place.
I think we need accountability for MAGA leaders; like, not just Trump, but corrupt judges like Clarence Thomas, corrupt media figures like Jeff Bezos, Republicans who cosigned Trump’s assault on the Constitution, from Mike Johnson on down.
What that looks like, I don’t know. But I don’t know how we move forward if these people remain in power or suffer no consequences for the hatred and misery they’ve spread.
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Home | 'Trump's tactics are in fact communist': Former Tea Party congressman busts MAGA for what it is
:{John Stoehr May 22, 2025
The last time we talked about the communist tactics of Donald Trump, it was in the context of economics. In an interview with me, Patrick W. Watson, a senior analyst for Mauldin Economics, explained how the policies we are seeing coming out of the White House are the policies that would normally be associated with command economies.
“The way business leaders are frantically begging Trump for favors and the almost openly corrupt way in which he is granting them is, in effect, government taking control of the means of production,” he said.
“Pure Marxism there.”
But those communist tactics go beyond economics. The president’s assault on free speech, a free press, the legal profession and private enterprise – put these together, as US Senator Chris Murphy has, and you have an enormous contraction of individual rights and liberty, and an enormous expansion of what conservatives used to called statism.
“If journalists are constantly looking over their shoulders and unable to report on the truth; if protest is suppressed, even moderately, at universities; if lawyers start providing cover, instead of uncovering corruption and illegality; if companies start being mouthpieces for the regime as a price of doing business – if all that happens, we are not a real democracy,” Murphy said last month. “We are a fake democracy.”
Murphy isn’t alone. His GOP colleague, US Senator Rand Paul, appears to be in the throes of recognizing what’s going on. After a tariff meeting with Donald Trump, he told NOTUS that “most of it was Republican senators congratulating him, wishing him well as the industrial czar and pleading for exemptions to the tariffs for their people.”
“It reminded me of a meeting on industrial policy in the Soviet Union, where you have to be nice to the czar, because if you are not nice to the czar, they’ll bequeath exceptions to the iron fist,” Paul said.
Making matters worse is the upside down, backwards and prolapsed nature of the president’s propaganda. Here, for instance, is that White House putz Stephen Miller, explaining why the regime must use communist tactics – enforcing correct words and correct thinking and correct values – in order to fight, wait for it, “communist ideology.”
“Children will be taught to love America,” Miller said. “Children will be taught to be patriots. Children will be taught civic values for schools that want federal taxpayer funding. So as we close the Department of Education and provide funding to states, we’re going to make sure these funds are not being used to promote communist ideology.”
Then there’s the fact that the “communist ideology” they don’t like isn’t communism at all. It is the set of values etched into the Declaration of Independence, namely that “all men are created equal.” That’s the problem for Miller. He doesn’t want the government and the law to serve everyone equally, to treat everyone equally. For him, there are in-people deserving of protection and there are out-people deserving of punishment. Any attempt to bridge the difference is “communist.”
For more, I reached out to Joe Walsh, the radio host and podcaster who is entitled to the claim of being the most anti-Trump conservative of all anti-Trump conservatives in America. He has recently gotten into the habit of sharing posts from the Editorial Board. So I got in touch and he kindly accepted an invitation to a brief interview with me.
JS: Is there a market for limited government or is that principle too old-fashioned these days? Maybe liberals should take it up again?
JW: I think there’s an opening for, and a market for, efficient government. Government that works. Philosophically, I’m a limited government guy, and I believe a smaller government is more efficient and works better, but in today’s world where both the left and now the MAGA right advocate an expansionist, activist government, I think the push should be for efficient, effective government that works.
JS: Trump called for government ownership of coal mining. If that isn’t “taking control of the means of production,” I don’t know what is.
JW: Trump represents the MAGA right view of big government. Your direct ownership of coal mining is just one example. Trump and the MAGA right want to use and expand government to achieve their aims. Which is antithetical to a libertarian like me. Heck, MAGA wants to use government to turn America formally into a Christian nationalist country. Scary stuff.
JS: Maybe the Cold War never ended?
JW: No, I think Russia lost the Cold War, then laid low for years, and waited for one of our two major political parties to become an arm of the Russian government. And because of that, because Trump is at best a useful idiot and at worst a Russian asset, Russia is ascending. The authoritarian impulse animates this Republican Party, hence a lot of Republican support for Putin.
JS: Republicans have spent 40 years using the word “communist.” Is that why no one can see that Trump’s tactics are communist?
JW: Spot on about communism. Trump’s tactics are in fact communist. Many Republican elected officials do see this but turn the other way. Because the base of the party embraces these communist tactics. Again, so much of this can be attributed to the fact that the right had always had a thing for authoritarianism.
JS: Solzhenitsyn said the lie is the pillar of the state. Sounds right to me.
JW: Completely agree with “the lie is the pillar of the state.” I’ve said for years now that Trump’s greatest legacy is the destruction of truth. We now have a situation where one of our two major political parties is completely untethered to truth. Trump succeeded. He succeeded in 2020. Even though he lost the election, he won in that he convinced the vast majority of Republicans that he won.
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Trump supporters scared into submission because their brains have been hijacked: expert
:{John Stoehr May 19, 2025
I’m going to make a confession in this introduction to my interview with Jennifer Mercieca, a professor of communication and journalism at Texas A&M. Here it is: I have lost so much trust in democracy that I don’t know how to rebuild trust in democracy. She says that “anyone who supports democracy should work to build trust between people, and between people and the government,” and I just don’t know.
I mean, I used to have faith. Since the conclusion of Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial for the crimes of mutiny and insurrection, I had felt pretty confident that in 2024 most people most of the time could tell the difference between a sandwich and a shit sandwich, and I was pretty confident they could do that, because they already had.
Now, after only months of his second presidency, polls are showing majorities of people, including those who voted for him, don’t like what he’s doing, even though he’s doing what he said he was going to do. At the same time, my liberal brethren are pointing to these same polls as a proof of the tide turning against Trump, seemingly overlooking the implication that hope for democracy rests in the hands of people for whom the future will never come and yesterday never happened.
That said, my interview with Professor Mercieca does rekindle some faith, especially by pointing out that we live in a time of information overload. Everything everywhere seems to happen all at once. In that context, Trump tells a story that “scary outsiders are doing scary things and you should be scared!” Liberals, she said, need to tell a counternarrative, one that works against the grain of that story.
That I can trust. The good work. The good people. May it be so.
JS: Trump says things to suggest he’s the Big Man in charge. Then, sometimes in the same breath, he says he’s not responsible. The Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, for instance. How does the fascist square that?
JM: This is an apparent contradiction, but is easily resolved when you understand that fascist leaders are unaccountable or “cognitively irresponsible” leaders. That means they want to rule over others without being questioned about the success or failure of their policies. They don’t want citizens or media to question their authority or their decisions. They want “because I said so” to end any conversation. So Trump represents himself as all-powerful, but also has many strategies to deflect responsibility so his decisions cannot be questioned.
JS: The electorate voted for the Big Man, but now at least one poll suggests a majority sees him as a “dangerous dictator.” All of this was obvious. Were the founders right to be skeptical of democracy?
JM: I wouldn’t conclude that Trump’s re-election tells us much about the appropriateness of democracy as a form of government or whether the founders were right. They lived in a very slow media environment and they were generally skeptical that the public could get enough information to make good decisions.
Our problem is the opposite, of course. Living in a world with too much information allows propagandists like Trump to manipulate reality. Also, it was very easy to believe that Trump wouldn’t do the things he promised he would do. When he said that he’d be a “dictator on day one,” folks either didn’t believe him, or thought someone or some institution would stop him, or wanted him to be a dictator to solve what they saw as urgent problems. Probably that last group (rightwing authoritarian voters) still support Trump and are happy with his presidency so far.
JS: I have said we’re in a transition, as we were in the 1970s. Back then, it was between the liberal consensus (New Deal, Great Society) and the conservative consensus (Ronald Reagan, neoliberalism). You have also said as much. How do you see it?
JM: Governments around the world are backsliding from stable democracies to authoritarianism. According to V-Dem data, the world is down to levels of democracy not seen since the 1980s, nearly three quarters of the world’s population now live in autocracies. So we live in an era of democratic collapse. We also live in an era of climate catastrophe. And an era of massive societal changes in migration, the economy and communication. These things are related because when things are unstable people look for stability and believe the promises of “strong leaders” who claim they will restore order. Autocrats take advantage of vulnerabilities, and right now we’re vulnerable – in the US and around the world.
JS: I think it is useful to think about Trump in terms of Big Man theory (the Leviathan, as you said recently). The crisis facing democracy seems to be that that’s what Americans want. What do liberals do in your view to fight against that?
JM: Rightwing authoritarians (RWAs) are a significant portion of the electorate (some scholars estimate 35-40 percent of people), but they’re not always “activated” – meaning they don’t always use the RWA framework to think about politics. When RWA are activated, they look to a “strong leader” who promises to restore stability and protect them. These authoritarian “strong leaders” use fear-appeals, outrage-bait and other strategies to cultivate the appearance of instability. These leaders thrive on distrust, cynicism and frustration in a political community and use strategies to try to make all of those democracy-threatening conditions worse. Anyone who supports democracy should work to build trust between people and between people and the government. That doesn’t mean denying that problems exist. It means solving problems and demonstrating trustworthiness.
One more thing. Authoritarianism works because it’s a compelling story: scary outsiders are doing scary things and you should be scared! Unfortunately, fear-appeals work. They hijack our ability to think critically and scare us into submission. Liberals and friends of democracy need to tell a different story, but one that is also compelling. That story needs to unite the nation in a common goal and affirm human dignity. I don’t think “fight fascism” or “fight Trump” are the kinds of messages that can reach tuned out Americans. They might respond to a positive story about America’s future that moves us past identity and cultural issues and talks about how to solve the big structural problems that affect us.
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Dem shows how to take a Republican smear and hit back
Photo by Dan Burton on Unsplash
John Stoehr May 01, 2025
A word about David Hogg, Reince Priebus and how to combat Republican smears. But first, here’s a video. It’s short. Watch it.
As you may know, Priebus is the former chairman of the Republican National Committee. ABC News’ Jonathan Karl’s question to him is about the apparent conflict of interest Hogg has. Hogg is the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, but he’s also involved in a progressive outfit that’s pledged to raise $20 million to primary out incumbent Democrats that it sees as too comfortable to stay.
The question is a serious one. Priebus could have landed a punch Hogg couldn’t recover from. Instead, Priebus just couldn’t help himself. He decided to smear the Democrats by way of smearing Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose deportation case has dominated headlines for weeks.
“The Democrats are a complete mess,” Priebus said. “They’ve got no message. They’ve got no movement. They’ve got no leader. It doesn’t get any worse than that. You’re defending Harvard. You’re traveling to El Salvador for MS-13 gang members” (meaning Kilmar Abrego Garcia).
Another Democrat – another older Democrat – would have done a couple things. One, ignore the lie about Abrego Garcia being a gang member. Two, accept the lie as valid in order to demonstrate some kind of bona fides. This is what U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen did when he said: “I am not defending the man. I’m defending the rights of this man to due process. And the Trump administration has admitted in court that he was wrongfully detained and wrongfully deported.”
Hogg does neither. He takes the smear head on.
“This was not an MS-13 gang member and you damn well know that,” Hogg said. “The administration admitted that it was wrong. In America, we have due process and we are a land of law and order. This administration keeps showing time and time again that they do not care what the Supreme Court says, they do not care about the rule of law and you cannot defend sending people to another country.”
There is risk in this. After all, this is America. It’s a plain reality that a lot of white people are going to look at a brown Spanish-speaking immigrant of Central American extraction as a gang member simply because they are terrible people. To them, men like Kilmar Abrego Garcia are already guilty of something on account of who they are.
But I think the tradeoff is worth it. By centering the smear, Hogg put ownership of it back on Reince Priebus’ shoulders, thus calling into question the character of a man who would stoop so low. “Oh, come on” was Priebus’ feeble retort to Hogg’s “and you damn well know that.”
The other benefit is robbing the Republicans of validation and the appearance of a consensus. It robs them of more chances to keep pushing and pushing with greater lies and smears and bad faith, until it’s impossible for the Democrats to take their own side in the fight.
Another thing that an older Democrat would have done that Hogg does not do is dismiss the lie as distraction. That word doesn’t get enough scrutiny. What it means is this: “I’m not going to bother debating racism with racists. Instead, I’m going to try appealing to their wallets.”
This thinking was evident in comments made to The Hill recently by an unnamed Democratic operative. “People can’t afford eggs, and … you’re flying to sit with someone who’s accused of being in a gang,” they said.
“Republicans have given us such an opportunity with DOGE and … with Trump tanking the economy. Obviously, you can walk and chew gum at the same time, but I don’t think we can take our eyes off the prize in terms of talking about real world impacts and how people are being hurt in their everyday lives by some of these policies.
“Democrats want to think that everyone has the same morals and values that we do, and we want to think that everyone’s outraged by the same things that we are and we want to be the ones to help people and stand up for the moral injustices. That doesn’t necessarily win elections though, and last cycle was proof positive of that. We need to step back and wait for someone to be deported who has a really compelling story that’s devastating that Average Joe’s upset about.”
Translation: when the Trump regime deports a white person, then we can talk. As long the subject is a brown Spanish-speaking immigrant of Central American extraction, all this is wasted effort and a distraction.
I posted this to Bluesky last week and said it was a textbook example of Democrat conceding to white power. A shrewd reader demurred. “That's not conceding to white power. It is agreeing with white power.”
It’s also misreading the moment. More polls are showing majorities disapproving of the president’s handling of immigration (and virtually every other major issue). I don’t think that’s because voters have suddenly rediscovered their love for the rule of law. (They elected Donald Trump, after all.) What’s happening is the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia is generating a kind of “media ambience” that people can feel without actually understanding the details of his case. A similar ambience about prices (ie, eggs) informed the last election.
There’s already “a really compelling story that’s devastating that Average Joe’s upset about.” And Democrats like Hogg are refusing to accept Republican bad faith that might dilute that story’s impact.
Also read: If you're not furious about this yet, you should be
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Why Trump voters will love him even more if he faces public protest over Social Security
Trump supporters
(Reuters)
John Stoehr April 17, 2025
In a recent edition, I wrote about how most people most of the time choose to believe in the existence of certain eternal rules that powerful figures must obey, and how they continue to believe in these rules even as powerful figures break them over and over again.
As if proving my point, a reader replied with a commonly held opinion that holds that Donald Trump’s attacks on Social Security are going to be a bridge too far for his own supporters. The cracks are showing, this reader said. If even a fraction of magaland breaks away, it’s over.
I think it’s important to challenge this conventional wisdom, because it allows people to believe that politics in America is like an act of God. With it, they can indulge the idea that outcomes are not the product of blood, sweat and tears. Instead, outcomes just … happen, as they are “supposed to” in this exceptional country, this shining city on the hill.
In the case of Social Security, what’s supposed to happen is that any attempt by a Republican to change the safety-net program will be met with instant political death. They touched the proverbial third rail.
But that’s not happening. The regime is damaging Social Security, on purpose, by cutting thousands of staffers, implementing phony “anti-fraud” measures, and by generally rendering it dysfunctional.
In time, the regime will argue that the only solution to the “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud” in Social Security, as Trump said in the State of the Union address, is to privatize it.
Former Director of the Social Security Administration Martin O’Malley said as much: “What they’re trying to do, even as they threaten to close offices, is to jam them up and give people the worst possible experience they can have. Then after wrecking it, they can rob it.”
In other words, the regime is breaking certain eternal rules that most people most of the time choose to believe will constrain powerful figures all by themselves. The political reaction is still taking shape, but whatever it is, it should not be rooted in the mistaken belief that certain eternal rules will constrain powerful figures all by themselves.
I’m going to challenge the conventional wisdom another way by saying that everyone overestimates the willingness of Americans to “rise up in protest” of the regime's attacks on Social Security. At the same time, we underestimate the willingness of Americans to just accept what's going on if it unfolds slowly enough and under cover of enough lies.
We are already seeing a preview of this with Signalgate. That’s the story about the country’s highest-level national security officials talking about war plans on an unsecure messaging platform, compromising military operations and government secrets. It wasn’t one of the most stunning breaches. It was the most stunning breach.
The public reaction was fearsome, with three quarters of Americans saying the debacle was serious and deserving of accountability. Even a majority of Republicans said as much, according to a CBS News poll.
One week later, however, and the regime is now saying “case closed.”
Classified information about airstrikes in Yemen was shared on Signal. A respected journalist was “accidentally” included. Jeffrey Goldberg published some of the texts, proving their sensitive nature.
The truth was in plain sight, but even so, no one has been held responsible and no one will be. The regime lied with so much force, consistency and ruthlessness that the press corps has dropped it, and as a consequence of that, everyone else is going to drop it, too.
You could say Signalgate and Social Security are too different to compare. One is about abstractions, like government secrets and national security. The other is about something that’s as concrete as it gets. You could say there’s no way people are going to drop it if those monthly checks don’t come on time or if elders are on the streets.
But remember the conventional wisdom: that the regime’s attacks on Social Security are going to be a bridge too far even for Trump’s supporters and that once a fraction of them break away, it’s over.
That presumes something that the liberal opposition should never presume, which is that Trump supporters will blame him. Fact is, they will blame whatever he tells them to. If those checks do not come on time, if grandma is forced to live on the streets, it’s not going to be his fault. It’s the fault of fraud or incompetence or inefficiancy – or a deep state that’s trying to stop Trump from making America great again.
Liberals presume that Trump voters will lose faith the moment they encounter hardship as a result of his actions. It will be the reverse, almost certainly. Their faith will deepen, as their suffering deepens.
And Trump voters will get behind him even more, to their own detriment, if he faces public protest over Social Security. He could crack down on demonstrators in the name of “national security” and fighting “terrorism.” He has has already said that a tell-all book written by a former administration official was “designed to sow chaos and distrust” in the government. Such crimes are now being cited as reason for deporting virtually anyone to a Salvadoran prison.
Liberals tend to put Trump voters at the center of American politics, because that’s what the Washington press corps does. But in doing so, liberals make themselves dependent on the continuation of certain eternal rules working in their favor, even when they no longer apply.
The regime is only three months old, but it is already sparking a major political reaction. Whatever it becomes, it should be on its own terms, not terms that were defined during a political age different from ours.
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Trump voters are pretending like they were duped. Don't believe it.
(Reuters)
John Stoehr April 06, 2025
The Dow dropped 1,700 points on opening this Friday morning. Thursday, it closed after falling to its worst level since the covid era. JP Morgan Chase said it was raising the odds of a recession to 60 percent.
This is all in reaction to the decision this week by the president to put an average 22 percent tax on all imports. He called it “Liberation Day.”
As I’m watching this unfold, I can’t help thinking about something that may seem unrelated to trade, economics and the harms coming our way, but in fact is central to it all. I’m talking about resentment.
Resentment is usually associated with the right. Time and again, over the last ten years, we were told that the people who voted for Donald Trump are deeply resentful about the state of the nation: about immigrants pouring over the border, about men competing in women’s sports, about the “radical woke agenda.” The list goes on and on.
It was on the strength of this resentment that voters in this country chose for president a convicted felon and failed businessman who promised to hurt everyone in the name of making America great again.
And what I want to say this:
If you thought that was resentment, just wait.
Only five months ago, the head economist for Moody’s said the economy under Joe Biden was the best he’d seen. Mark Zandi said “this is among the best performing economies in my 35-plus years as an economist.”
“Economic growth is rip-roaring, with real GDP up 3 percent over the past year. Unemployment is low, at near 4 percent, consistent with full employment.
“Inflation is fast closing in on the Fed’s 2 percent target.
“Grocery prices, rents and gas prices are flat to down over the past more than a year. Households’ financial obligations are light, and set to get lighter with the Fed cutting rates.
“House prices have never been higher, and most homeowners have more equity in their homes than ever.
“Corporate profits are robust, and the stock market is hitting a record high on a seemingly daily basis.
And now?
On March 30, before this week’s tariff news, Zandi said:
“I’m raising my odds that a recession will begin sometime this year to 40 percent, up from 15 percent at the start of the year. Last week’s economic data were disconcerting, including the slide in consumer confidence, punk consumer spending, and persistently high inflation. The intensifying trade war and DOGE cuts are behind all this and with last week’s announcement of big tariff increases on vehicle imports and the coming reciprocal tariffs, things are sure to get worse.”
How much worse?
The Financial Times: “one of the greatest acts of self-harm in American economic history. [Tariffs’ will wreak untold damage on households, businesses and financial markets around the world, upending a global economic order that America benefited from and helped create.”
The Economist: “The most profound, harmful & unnecessary economic error in the modern era. Almost everything he said — on history, economics and the technicalities of trade — was utterly deluded.”
This is where we are, but never forget: this was a choice.
It was made by people who were so resentful about something something, for now it doesn’t matter what, that they didn’t notice they’re wages were growing, their expenses were falling and they had more power in the workplace than they’d had in their whole lives.
Everything Trump claims to be doing – bringing jobs back home, supporting domestic industries, revitalizing infrastructure and investing in the future — Biden actually did. Most everyone prospered, including all those resentful people. As the former president was fond of saying, Trump talks a good game, but never built a damn thing.
But that wasn’t enough because seeing other people doing well, that is, Black and brown people doing well, hurt their feelings, like something was being taken away from them, which added to the resentment they felt about a government trying to serve everyone and not just them.
The harms coming won’t be an accident. Their cause will be easy to understand. Vice President Kamala Harris saw them. She tried to warn us. Most people didn’t listen. And because these harms were a choice, it’s entirely reasonable for those who didn’t make that choice, but who are now living with the consequences, to be resentful of those who did, especially if they didn’t understand the choice they were making.
They believed an ignorant and stupid story about ignorant and stupid Americans who were resentful of being looked down on for the fact of their ignorance and stupidity. And I’m telling you, if they keep talking about that, they’re going to learn the real meaning of resentment.
Perhaps fear of being held accountable explains why we are now seeing a slew of Trump voters who are whipping up stories about how they had absolutely no idea what he was going to do, they are victims of circumstance, totally innocent, and how they are so disappointed, not so much for themselves but for the country they claim to love.
An anonymous writer at www.betrayedbytrump.com is a case in point. “I didn’t sign up for this. I wanted reform, not cruelty. Strength, not delusion. I’ve been a lifelong Republican, and I know I’m not the only one starting to feel this way. We need to seriously ask ourselves: is this what we voted for, or just what we’ve been sold? It is hard to not feel conned. And I’m angrier than I’ve been in as long as I can remember.”
Oh, you're angry, huh?
Imagine the anger of those who didn’t choose this but are now living with it – the jobs gone, the savings gone, the future prospects gone.
Imagine the anger of those who voted in your interest in the hope of saving democracy, and protecting you from your worst self, and then hearing you moan and groan about how you’ve been done wrong.
Imagine the anger of those who tried to tell you, to reason with you, as if you were a child who doesn’t understand a goddamn thing but who might snap out of it and finally act like a responsible grown up.
Just imagine.
The worst part is there are still some Democrats who are willing to tell the rest of us that we shouldn’t look down on the ignorant and stupid, because looking down on them only makes them feel more resentful, which pushes them further and further into the arms of Trump.
Worst of all is hearing some Democrats choosing not to hold them accountable for their terrible choices in the hope they might one day vote for a Democrat, so that there’s never any downside to being ignorant and stupid, and there’s never any upside to growing up.
Resentment is usually associated with the right. If there were any justice, that would change. Trump voters would be ashamed and take responsibility for their actions. They never will, of course, meaning no one will ever take seriously the lasting resentment the rest of us feel.
NOW READ: Trump voters got exactly what they wanted — so why are people complaining?
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Now is not the time to appeal to Trump voters — you need to demoralize them
A supporter of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump rallies outside an early polling precinct as voters cast their ballots in local, state, and national elections, in Clearwater, Florida, U.S., November 3, 2024.
REUTERS/Octavio Jones
John Stoehr March 22, 2025
Last week, there was a story in USA Today about a Trump voter from Wisconsin who watched as ICE agents detained his Peruvian wife.
The story was about the widening dragnet being cast by the regime. What began as a crackdown on “criminal illegal immigrants” has expanded to people whose application for legal status is under review. “Even those married or engaged to US citizens are being detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, USA Today has learned.”
The reaction to the story was mostly of the FAFO variety.
The Wisconsin man, who is white, voted for the candidate who said he would expel all those who “poison the blood of the country.” The man told USA Today that he didn’t believe Trump meant his wife. She was different, he said. He thought Trump “would target people who snuck over the border and weren't vetted.” And now that his wife has been detained by ICE, he still can’t believe it. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Ergo, FAFO.
It may seem like this man would be receptive to a moderate position on immigration, one that allows for people who are in legal limbo, and perhaps one that proposes a pathway to citizenship for people like his wife who work hard, save up to buy a home and want to start a family.
It may seem like he would be receptive to a perspective favored by some in the Democratic Party who believe Kamala Harris erred on the side of being too progressive on immigration and other social issues, like trans rights. They believe the Democrats should move to the right, just a little, and even talk like Republicans, just a little, in order to appeal to voters, like this man, who have been burned by Trump.
Read the story carefully, however, and you will notice something that should demonstrate that we no longer live in a world of left-right, liberal-conservative politics, to wit: He does not regret his vote.
Read further and you will notice that this man is not upset by the fact that his wife was detained by ICE so much as the fact that she was not made the exception to the rule, a rule that he seems otherwise to want applied to other people whom he believes deserves it. He’s upset that the rule is being applied equally, more or less, which is to say, he’s upset, because Trump was supposed to punish enemies, not friends.
This should not be surprising.
As podcaster and CNN commentator Van Lathan, Jr, has said, Trump is “the whitest white man we’ve ever seen.” That makes him the exception to every rule, especially the rule of law. “Trump can’t say enough to be racist, can’t break enough laws to be a criminal, can’t fail enough to be a failure and can’t be stupid enough to be stupid.”
Rules, then, are for other people, and this man from Wisconsin wants some of that impunity for himself. He’s not getting it. That’s “unfair.” And there’s almost certainly nothing any Democrat can say to appeal to him rationally, as rational appeals can’t crack the surface of a man who believes, as Trump does, that everyone owes him something.
I think it’s important to bear this concept in mind – rules for thee, exceptions for me – as you read about Republican constituents who are raising hell in town halls hosted by Republican congresspeople. The assumption is their anger is an opening for moderate Democrats.
But while it’s one thing to say that some of these voters chose Trump reluctantly, or that some of them don’t like him that much, it’s another to say that they’d vote for a Democrat if they were given a chance.
In my view, they are not really mad at the regime for messing around with Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid or whatever. They are mad about being treated the same as their enemies. In their world, Republicans are deserving. Black people, for instance, are not. That there’s no legal way of splitting the difference is beside the point.
Instead of trying to attract such voters, I think the Democrats should try to repel them more. I know that sounds counterintuitive, perhaps even foolish, but it makes sense when you consider that attracting them requires them to admit to themselves that they were wrong. You would think a white man who watched his Peruvian wife being perp-walked by ICE would regret his vote. That’s not the case.
Instead, I think the Democrats should exploit conditions that are never going to change, meaning they will never vote for a Democrat. From their point of view, there are only two choices – vote for a Republican or don’t vote at all. Meanwhile, the Trump regime is consolidating power. It is creating conditions in which everyone, Democrat and Republican alike, must come to him if they want something, usually money. Powerful elites have the means of “petitioning the king,” but what about little people, like the Trump voter from Wisconsin? All he has is a broken promise of being made the exception to all the rules.
With that, the Democrats have a chance to demoralize Trump voters. Naturally, no Democrat who would admit to such a strategy. It works, though. We have seen it, in 2016, under the direction of Steve Bannon, and in 2024, under Elon Musk. He spent tens of millions spreading false information about Kamala Harris in Philadelphia for the explicit purpose of encouraging Democratic voters to give up on democracy.
Think of it as a humanitarian effort.
If the man from Wisconsin hadn’t voted, his wife would be free.
NOW READ: Dark Enlightenment: How a radical ideology is fueling the movement to gut our government
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Here's why Trump supporters can't see through his lies
Yesterday, Donald Trump signed a royal decree (ie, an executive order) claiming that the president has the legal and constitutional right to unwind and shut down the United States Department of Education.
He has no such thing, Joe Walsh reminded us. “He can’t dismantle the Department of Education,” he said. “He doesn’t have the constitutional authority to do it. Only Congress does. He’ll get sued and the courts will rule against him. This is unconstitutional. And that matters more than whatever you think about the Department of Education.”
That is true as a matter of principle, and on the strength of federal law and the separation of powers, federal judges have this week handed down a string of rulings against the administration: its shuttering of the US Agency for International Development, its ban on trans military servicemembers and its freeze on billions in climate-change grants.
But it’s less true as a matter of practice.
In the case of the Education Department, Elon Musk’s “DOGE” has already started firing half the people who work there. Trump’s executive order will be challenged and probably stopped by a court, but by then, the agency’s personnel may be so demoralized, and its infrastructure so degraded, that by all intents and purposes, Trump has shut it down, though he has no constitutional authority to do so.
This pattern is being repeated again and again.
The administration does not have the legal or constitutional authority to do a thing that it wants to do – say, for instance, arresting and detaining anyone it dislikes, and deporting them Central America. But by the time the courts catch up – for instance, by holding a hearing on the arrest, detainment and deportation of anyone the administration dislikes to Central America – the crime has already been committed, the only question then being how it’s going to cover up for the crime.
Which is to say, lie.
In case those lies don’t work, however, the administration has another strategy. According to CNN, it plans to drag its feet in response to over 160 (and counting) lawsuits against it in the hope that the rightwing supermajority of the US Supreme Court will decide in its favor. The expectation seems to be that it will reaffirm its prior ruling, which held that the president can’t commit crimes as long as he’s president.
And if that doesn’t work, Trump has another strategy, which is the same as the old strategy, which is to slander and discredit any member of the judiciary who stands in his way, thus creating conditions for picking which rulings to obey and which to disregard, even perhaps decisions made by the US Supreme Court. As one former jurist, a well-known conservative, said this week, Trump has declared war on federal law. I would add that so far, that war has been one-sided.
Even though the administration has so far disobeyed at least two federal judges, both of whom said it cannot deport people it dislikes without further review by the court, that does not constitute a state of emergency, according to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
In an interview, Schumer suggested that America has not yet reached a moment of “autocratic breakthrough,” as Rachel Maddow put it last month. That would come, he said, when Trump disobeys the Supreme Court, thus triggering “a strong and immediate reaction from one end of the country to the other in ways that we have never seen before.”
He said that if the court of law fails, the defense of democracy would move to the court of public opinion. “The people will have to rise up,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. “Our democracy will be at stake then. If the people make their voices heard, and stand up, and we join them, I believe we can try to beat that back, we can beat that back.”
Schumer expressed the basic faith in the American people, the same basic faith that lies beneath the widespread assumption (and hope among liberals) that Trump’s policies, specifically his economic policies, are going to hurt his supporters so much his poll numbers will fall, which in turn would creation conditions, as Schumer told the Times last week, for the congressional Republicans to turn on him.
However, this basic faith greatly overestimates the power of the people to determine their own economic interests and greatly understimates the power of president’s propaganda, which to say, Donald Trump’s superpower, which is to say that he lies so often, so hard and so ruthlessly, and that those lies are amplified so widely and deeply by the press corps and the rightwing media, that people who are paying an extortionate price for eggs, for instance, will believe, as one Trump official said this week, that a dozen cost “$2.50 for the whole country.”
People who believe the White House when it says the price of eggs is $2.50 a dozen, even as they are paying $7.50, are not the kind of people who are going to assign him blame for their suffering. And if they do not blame him, his polls numbers are unlikely to fall by much, which in turn would not creation conditions, as Schumer told the Times last week, for the congressional Republicans to finally turn on him.
The great evil unreality that Trump and his people have manufactured with their years of ruthless and malicious lying should give us pause whenever someone like Schumer says there’s no doubt the American people would rise up is disgust against a president who vandalizes the federal government or openly disobeys the US Supreme Court.
That would require the American people to recognize on their own, if they do not have anyone in the Democratic Party to guide them, what a crime looks like when it’s committed by a president who will lie about the crime so much and so hard that it stops looking like a crime.
Vandals also act outside the law, but in time, they are punished.
Will Trump?
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'Everyone who signs up to work for Donald Trump is signing up for one single project'
:{FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump gestures beside U.S. first lady Melania Trump as they leave the U.S. Capitol building on the inauguration day of Donald Trump's second presidential term in Washington, U.S. January 20, 2025.
John Stoehr March 11, 2025
If you’re like me, you move in liberal-ish circles online, and as a consequence, you have probably seen lots of stories about the GOP’s threat to Medicaid, food stamps and other forms of federal assistance.
The congressional Republicans want to cut taxes for billionaires and corporations (what I call the very obscenely rich), but to do that, they have to get around the filibuster, the Senate rule requiring 60 votes. To do that, their bill must be “budget-neutral” – hence, all the talk of taking lunch money from hungry kids and giving it to the .001 percent.
The threat has gotten local attention. “Opponents said those mandates mean Republicans would reduce or eliminate health coverage for more than 800,000 low-income Connecticut residents, 5,600 children in early education programs for those under five years old and nearly 400,000 SNAP recipients,” the New Haven Registerreported last week.
Emily Byrne is the director of Connecticut Voices for Children, the state’s leading advocacy group for poor kids and families. She told the newspaper: “The House budget blueprint takes us down a path of increased family economic insecurity and child poverty as well as increased costs for household basics and debt — all in service of tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy and large corporate interests … This is the wrong direction ... and antithetical to Connecticut values.”
The same thing is playing out across the country. City and state media are reporting on what happens if the GOP takes one and a half trillion dollars over ten years away from people who need it and puts it in the hands of people who want it. (What happens is real people, and real communities, suffer.) This pattern is the way it should be. Politics is not a meaningless game. Someone is doing something to someone. If the Washington press corps won’t report on it, then local news should.
As good as it is, however, it could be better, as the focus on the needs of the needy should be paired with the appetites of the greedy, which is to say, with this question: Why do people who have more money than their children’s children’s children could spend want more?
To my knowledge, no reporter or commentator has asked that question. Though I can’t say I know for sure, the reason is probably because we’re all so accustomed to billionaires perverting our politics. Or because we’re accustomed to the Republicans doing everything possible to serve their donors. Or because the rest of us are so focused on what will happen to Donald Trump’s supporters who are, after all, the majority of people enrolled in these safety-net programs.
In any case, we limit ourselves, morally. It is wrong to take assistance away from people who need it. It is wrong to want more money than you could hope to spend in one lifetime. No billionaire ever earned his billions, because no human being can work that much. Only the blessing of a government can deliver superhuman wealth like that.
But neither should we limit ourselves politically. Here, I’m thinking about one of my senators. In recent comments, Chris Murphy described the effect of “the billionaire mindset” on democracy.
YouTube}:
youtu.be
“Billionaires do not need public schools,” he said. “The billionaires that are in charge of our government right now [that is, Elon Musk] send their kids to the most elite private schools. If every public school disappeared in this country, they will still get their kids an education.”
Murphy said: “Billionaires don’t need Medicaid. To them, it doesn’t matter if Medicaid disappears and rural hospitals close and addiction treatment centers shutter their doors, because the billionaires will still get their healthcare. They talk about Social Security being a ‘Ponzi scheme.’ … They don’t need Social Security. They’re billionaires. The billionaire mindset is different from average, ordinary Americans.”
Finally: “All that matters now [to the president and the congressional Republicans] is the billionaire and corporate tax cut. All that matters now is hoarding as much money, stealing as much money, from middle class and poor families in this country, so they can pass that money to the billionaires and the millionaires and the corporations.”
Here, Murphy does not explicitly link “the billionaire mindset” to criminal conduct. (He says that the Republicans are focused on hoarding and stealing, but stops short of saying that billionaires are.)
But in remarks made last week on MSNBC, he did.
“Everyone who signs up to work for Donald Trump is signing up for one single project,” Murphy said. “That is the transition of American democracy to a kind of kleptocratic oligarchy in which the billionaires rule, in which they get to steal from regular Americans. If that’s the domestic project, then the way you normalize that kind of government is to associate with similar governments abroad, like the Kremlin.”
As it stands right now, most of us are focused on what’s going to happen to people who need Medicaid and food stamps and other programs, especially what’s going to happen to the president’s supporters. Will Trump betray his own to deliver to billionaires?
But let’s not miss the forest through the trees. Normal Americans need a safety net. They need public education. They need Medicaid and Social Security. They need the rule of law. They need democracy.
But “the billionaire mindset is different,” Murphy said.
It doesn’t need any of that.
What it needs victims for its crimes.
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The 'deep state' is real — it's just not what you think it is
U.S. President Donald Trump gives a thumbs up as he returns to the White House from National Harbor following his address to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) annual meeting, on the South Lawn in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 22, 2025.
John Stoehr, The Editorial BoardMarch 03, 2025
I think it’s time to say that the deep state is real, and that it’s trying to make us weaker, sicker, poorer, more vulnerable and easier to control.
I know what that sounds like. It sounds like a conspiracy theory. But that’s the complicated thing about the nature of conspiracy theories.
Some conspiracies are real.
I mean, what else are we to call the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency”? It’s not a government department. (Technically, it’s an advisory panel.) It has no legal authority. Even Elon Musk, the billionaire who is allegedly running it, admits as much.
Yet DOGE is exercising power no one alive has ever seen.
It is firing workers of the federal bureaucracy in huge numbers, hollowing out whole agencies and departments, seemingly without rhyme or reason, all in the name of uncovering “waste, fraud and abuse,” even things that are necessary, like the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
DOGE has infiltrated the federal government. It is dismantling services and programs that benefit everyone. No one knows exactly what it is. No one knows exactly who’s responsible. No one knows exactly why it’s doing what it’s doing. It’s secretive and shadowy. It’s undemocratic and unaccountable. And virtually everything it has done has been criminal.
On Thursday night, a federal judge issued a ruling saying, according to the Post, that mass terminations “at several agencies, including the Department of Defense, Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Science Foundation and others, were probably illegal.”
If that’s not “the deep state,” I don’t know what is.
Of course, the term “deep state” is not usually applied in the way I’m applying it, because it arises from rightwing conspiratorial thinking. In brief, it’s the idea that a clandestine cartel of (probably Jewish but certainly anti-American) conspirators are working inside the federal government to usurp the democratic sovereignty of (white) Americans.
You can see this everywhere in rightwing political thought: from allegation that Joe Biden was a “puppet president” controlled by Barack Obama or another “alien force”; to the allegation that Hillary Clinton was the leader of a ring of pedophiles who drank the blood of children; to the allegation that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.
In any case, here’s how Wikipedia defines it:
“The deep state is a type of government made up of potentially unauthorized, secret networks of power operating independently of a state's political leadership in pursuit of their own agenda and goals. In popular usage, the term carries overwhelmingly negative connotations and is often associated with conspiracy theories.”
DOGE has not found any fraud, according to Judd Legum, editor of Popular Info. “[Musk is] just cutting things he doesn’t like.” He is also cutting off funding for agencies and departments traditionally in the GOP’s crosshairs. The greatest cuts by far have been to the US Agency for International Development, which they see as too “globalist,” and the US Department of Education, which they see as too “woke.”
According to one estimate, DOGE has fired more than 200,000 people, with another 75,000 voluntarily resigning. Overwhelmingly, these people worked in agencies and departments with broad mandates, which is to say, their explicit mission is to serve everyone equally.
But the carnage is spreading beyond the usual targets of Republican animus. This week, DOGE fired about 800 people at NOAA. That’s the organization that every local weather forecaster relies on. DOGE even gutted NOAA’s two tsunami warning centers. As of Thursday, they are empty. The next round is set for the Environmental Protection Agency, which protects the country’s land, air and water. The president said that 65 percent of the EPA’s 15,000 people are going to be fired.
The carnage is spreading even to Social Security. The White House announced an “organizational restructuring” of the Social Security Administration. According to Professor Heather Cox Richardson:
It is not clear exactly how many positions will be cut; multiple outlets say half of the agency’s 57,000 employees will be let go, while an executive at the agency told Erich Wagner and Natalie Alms of Government Executive that the initial number of firings will be 7,000. At least five of the eight regional commissioners whose offices oversee and support the agency’s frontline offices across the country are leaving, and former Social Security administrator Martin O’Malley warned:
“Social Security is being driven to a total system collapse.”
Social Security, along with the other safety-net programs, Medicare and Medicaid, are seen as the “third rail” in Washington. Any attempt to change them usually results in electrocution, politically speaking.
But thanks to DOGE, the GOP is closing in on the dream of changing Social Security (to what end, I don’t know), without voting on it, without worrying about getting zapped. The Republicans have ceded their constitutional authority, the power of the purse, to a shadowy, unaccountable cabal of unelected bureaucrats to get what they want.
But they want more than your money.
They want your power, too.
So they created a deep state – a “government made up of potentially unauthorized, secret networks of power operating independently of a state's political leadership in pursuit of their own agenda and goals.”
And in the process, they are doing what they accused their enemies of: making America weaker, sicker, poorer, more vulnerable and easier to control, and usurping the democratic sovereignty of its people.
That sounds like a conspiracy theory.
But some conspiracies are real.
NOW READ: Inside Trump's bombshell meeting — and his problem with women
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The 'MAGA civil war' narrative has been greatly exaggerated
John Stoehr, The Editorial BoardFebruary 27, 2025
This week, the Republicans in the House passed a budget resolution that would, if it later becomes law, take nearly a trillion dollars away from Medicaid over 10 years to cut taxes for the very obscenely rich.
Every House Democrat voted against it. Even so, the way is clear from House leaders to begin negotiations with the Senate Republicans. They are trying to make things “revenue-neutral” to dodge the filibuster.
The move aroused the belief among liberals and Democrats that the Republicans are themselves heading for trouble with their own people, as most of the more than 80 million Americans who are on Medicaid are supporters of Donald Trump. Indeed, Medicaid recipients are more highly concentrated in red states compared to blue states. Yet every single Republican voted Tuesday night to take their healthcare away.
As evidence of the trouble ahead, liberals and Democrats cited the various town halls that have made headlines in which Trump supporters appear to take issue with the president’s assault on the federal government, including firing people who voted for him.
Liberals and Democrats also cited Steve Bannon. They quoted a segment from his February 14 podcast in which he warned the president and billionaire Elon Musk, who is spearheading the assault, that “you got to be careful, because a lot of magas [are] on Medicaid. I’m telling you, if you don’t think so, you are dead wrong. Medicaid is going to be a complicated one. Just can’t take a meat axe to it.”
This tension was reflected in a segment aired Monday in which ABC News reporter Rachel Bade accidentally told the truth. Most people think Medicaid is just for the poor, for “inner cities, more Democratic areas” – which is to say, Black – but that’s not true, she said. One in five receive assistance. Today, Hart Research released a poll showing that 71 percent of Trump voters said Medicaid cuts are unacceptable.
Because Bannon has called Musk a “phony” who is in league with the Chinese Communist Party, which is to say, not one of “the chosen people,” liberals and Democrats are taking his warning against cutting Medicaid as sign of brewing civil war inside magaworld – between white working-class people, represented by Bannon, and the very obscenely rich, represented by Musk. There’s a lot of effort right now to demonstrate that the Republicans are not the party of working class Americans. Critics say there’s no better evidence than the Republicans’ attempt to rob 80 million ordinary people and give to the .001 percent?
It’s here, however, that I think many liberals and Democrats are making a basic mistake. Donald Trump’s people don’t support him in spite of the fact that he’s a crooked billionaire. They support him because of that fact. There is no cognitive dissonance, because their bond has little or nothing to do with money. It has everything to do with prejudice against a system of government that treats everyone equally.
Billionaires have so much wealth that they can do pretty much whatever they want. Trump voters know they can’t have that kind of money. But with his support, they can have that kind of impunity.
Liberals and Democrats tend to believe that Bannon’s warning is about cutting Medicaid for everyone, but a shrewder reading of his fuller remarks shows something different – and the complexity of the challenge ahead for Democrats who are trying to mount a resistance. He does not say do not cut Medicaid, because “a lot of magas [are] on Medicaid.” He says go ahead and cut it, but not for the magas.
In that February 14 podcast, Bannon doubted that Musk was cutting spending. He said that if he is really serious about dismantling the government, he would “stop whining about entitlements. Get into that discretionary spending. Get into the Pentagon. Get into Medicaid.”
So Bannon’s warning wasn’t a warning as much as a note of caution: be careful with Trump’s people. As Bannon said: “You got to be careful because a lot of magas [are] on Medicaid. I’m telling you, if you don’t think so, you are dead wrong. Medicaid is going to be a complicated one. Just can’t take a meat axe to it, although I would love to.”
In other words, use a scalpel. Precision cuts for non-white people who are undeserving of a safety-net. No cuts for white people who are.
But even this might be too generous a reading of Bannon’s remarks.
As he said, he wouldn’t take a meat axe to Medicaid, “although I would love to.” There is a plenty of risk to cutting healthcare for Trump’s people, but there’s also plenty of room for convincing them that Trump and the Republicans are cutting it for the sake of the country. This is where liberals and Democrats make another mistake: underestimating how much suffering Trump’s voters are willing to endure in his name.
People who can be told to believe that Haitians eat dogs – or that the covid isn’t real or that Democrats drink the blood of children – can also be told to believe that losing their healthcare is a good thing. Given Trump’s hold on their minds, they might believe it. It’s unlikely that they will complain about tax cuts, or the assault on the government, even if it hurts them, not as long as he gives them someone to blame.
Liberal and Democrats find themselves in a position in which they must trust Trump voters to figure out that the president and his party are screwing them. That is misplaced trust, to say the least, because their bond isn’t about money or policy. It’s about power, namely hate.
fill in the swim pool
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Home | Trump's evil has no expiration date
Trump's evil has no expiration date
A NYPD officer stands in front of an image of Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump outside Madison Square Garden on the day of Trump's rally, in New York, U.S., October 27, 2024.
John Stoehr February 20, 2025
When Kamala Harris said “we’re not going back,” she was doing more than repeating a campaign slogan. She was tapping into a belief, widely shared among liberals and Democrats, that progress can’t be stopped.
This was a powerful and persuasive statement at the time. After the US Supreme Court struck down Roe, there seemed to be a righteous backlash against not only the court but against the former president who had stacked it enough to void the national right to an abortion.
But progress can be stopped, indeed, it can be reversed, and the process of reversal can lay waste to vulnerable and marginalized people. Liberals and Democrats should not pretend otherwise, not when the greatest mechanism for progress – the federal government – is now being used to claw back advancements made since the 1960s.
I was thinking of this while watching a Tik Tok video that claims to explain why Trump supporters are still angry despite winning everything. Made by a former TV journalist, and viewed nearly 9 million times, it borrows a term from psychology: “extinction burst.”
@ohhthatsrich
I just learned a new #psychology term that perfectly explains why #maga #republicans are still so #angry, and it has shaken my #leftist brain to its foundation. #extinctionburst #politics
According to the unidentified creator of the video, “extinction burst” is “when you have a behavior and a reward, and you withdraw the reward in order to change the behavior. When you do that, usually to change the undesirable behavior, the behavior itself increases in frequency and intensity for a short period of time till ultimately the subject changes that behavior and that behavior goes extinct.”
He went on:
“Extinction burst at the national level is much slower, but in this case we actually know what triggered it. It was Obama’s election in 2008. Sarah Palin, the tea party movement, the birther movement, and ultimately maga – it is a 10-year tsunami of rage in the face of inevitable extinction. This is why Republicans are angry. They know Trump winning can’t stop it and they know Trump in office can’t stop it. They can feel the inevitable extinction of their own terrible beliefs.”
He says that “extinction burst” explains why victory in November did not calm Trump’s supporters. The implication is that they continue to rage against the libs, because they know that even with control of all the levers of power, they can’t stop a greater power, which is the slow but inescapable flattening of America’s social hierarchies, which will result in “the inevitable extinction of their own terrible beliefs.”
The creator of the video, who goes by the handle “ohhthatsrich,” says the key to this is democratic politics. “The only thing that will stop it is if we let up. If you stop interfering with that undesirable behavior, it will go back to normal. So no you’re not crazy. Yes, you are doing the right thing. And yes, if you persevere, the extinction burst will end.”
This part, however, feels like an afterthought, as if it were something you think should be said but don’t feel it needs to be said, because, after all, maga people know the end is coming. That’s why they’re still mad. Looming over the entire argument is magical thinking about the nature of progress, as if it were an act of God, rather than what it really is: a product of blood, sweat, tears and, sometimes, death.
Demographics is not destiny, but that way of thinking, permanently emblazoned on the minds of liberals and Democrats in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s historic election, still commands their imaginations, such that they can watch Donald Trump break the law and violate the Constitution – criminal conduct that has already led to individual ruin and death – and still believe that he’ll self-destruct any minute now.
I think there are two kinds of magical thinking – that which comes from people who suffer trauma, some sort of “socially accepted sadism,” as Richard Rorty once put it, and that which comes from people who have never experienced anything comparable to that.
The first kind is understandable. These folks must hold tightly to that magical thinking as a matter of survival, to defend themselves against psychic death. The second kind, however, is not nearly so noble.
It is a means of avoidance, an escape, an expression of privilege. It’s when tyranny is so abstract, you can afford to talk about it as if it were a fever, a brief malady, a phenomenon that will burst any minute now. You don’t really need to act. It will go away soon. After all, the terrible beliefs of the Trump horde are heading for extinction. It’s inevitable.
This magical thinking will persist, no doubt, but perhaps it will weaken in useful ways as the fact of Trump’s tyranny sinks in – to the point where even the most privileged liberal understands that he’s no lame duck. Unless he dies in office, of disease or old age, he’s not leaving.
To be sure, the prevailing wisdom is that can’t possibly happen. The 22nd Amendment says no one can be elected more than twice. But such belief overlooks reality. Not only is Trump undoing progress – in terms of equity and justice, abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, climate change, the economy, everything – he’s undoing democracy, too.
The White House said today that the court orders that are blocking his illegal federal funding freeze are a “weaponization” of the justice system that’s provoking a “constitutional crisis.” That's the pretext for saying later that the only way to right such a wrong and resolve such a crisis is to ignore the courts altogether. No law will constrain him. No Congress will remove him. If he does not die in office, he will not leave.
I don’t know any more than you do about what to do about a demented criminal president. What I do know, however, is that no one can afford to believe evil has an expiration date. It is evil, because it’s evil, and all we can do with it is fight it knowing the cost will be great and dear.
NOW READ: Trump supporters are getting played — but for how long?
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Rachel Maddow is wrong
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow in 2019 (Creative Commons)
John Stoehr February 12, 2025
I think Rachel Maddow has good intentions, but those intentions are wrapped up in her employer’s need for advertisers and attention.
MSNBC is interested in ginning up fears of a future in which there is no liberal democracy left, but in the process of ginning up those fears, it papers over the fact that liberal democracy has already been lost.
In a long, too long, segment last night, Maddow explained why Donald Trump’s attacks on the federal judiciary are a harbinger of “autocratic breakthrough,” and that if he decides to ignore courts orders against him, that “puts the US on the brink of abandoning democracy.”
Maddow listed rulings by federal judges in the past week alone that block the president’s criminal and unconstitutional plans to:
cut scientific and medical funding,
“buyout” federal workers,
give Elon Musk access to classified and sensitive data,
send “illegal” immigrants to Gautanamo Bay prison,
release the names of FBI agents who investigated J6,
end birthright citizenship,
shut down the US Agency for International Development,
freeze as much as $3 trillion in loans and grants.
She said the Trump administration’s choices are illegal and harmful, but “categorically, the most important thing here is their willingness to defy the courts, because that is the ultimate autocratic breakthrough.”
A willingness to defy the courts, Maddow said, is “a declaration that the rule of law does not apply to them, that it cannot constrain anything they want to do. That is a worse than any one outcome.”
“That is a forever-decision,” Maddow said, one that’s designed to prevent the American people from having any say about anything, ever. “That means nothing anyone else wants, and no court ruling, will ever again have any impact on what our government wants to do to us.”
We are “on the precipice,” she said, “looking over the edge.”
We’re not, though. We already over the edge, and we will never find our way back to liberal democracy if we do not accept that reality.
Maddow came close.
In the segment, she noted that federal judges have already said that the Trump administration is not complying with their orders. He is already doing what she said is “the ultimate autocratic breakthrough.”
Yet by the end of the segment, she pulled back, as if to suggest that though we are facing the abyss, we haven’t fallen into it quite yet, even though we have fallen into it. We have been falling since November.
Maddow is in good company. Lots of liberals, especially the affluent white liberals who tend to watch MSNBC, don’t want to believe the electorate handed the keys to the republic to a demented criminal president. Denial is natural, but it helps no one to encourage it.
That’s what I think is happening with segments like Maddow’s. We must accept that our beloved is dead in order to ask ourselves how to move forward, but Maddow encourages us to believe the dead are not.
Again, I think she means well, but meaning well is also in line with MSNBC’s interests. It’s better to keep viewers glued to their screens with highfalutin talk of liberal democracy being “on the precipice” than tell viewers the hard truth and risk giving them a reason to tune out.
This isn’t just about Maddow. Though hardly anyone watches her or the cable news network that employs her, together they have a commanding influence over the Democrats, and on how they think.
For instance, my senator, Chris Murphy, echoed what she said:
“Pay close attention to the attacks on our court system from Trump, [Vice President JD] Vance and [Elon] Musk,” he said on Twitter. “If they decide to deliberately and brazenly ignore a court order - because the courts command no army - then there is no democracy left. It's a place America has never been before, for good reason” (my italics).
Murphy said this as if unaware of reporting from the previous day in which the president appears to have already decided to “deliberately and brazenly ignore a court order.” Though several judges have blocked his federal funding freeze, Trump keeps withholding hundreds of billions of dollars from being dispersed to states according to law.
“Agencies continue to suspend funding, despite multiple court orders blocking the federal freeze,” Pro Publica reported Monday afternoon.
Maddow and Murphy give the impression that we’re on the edge, but we are over it. What do we do now? Trump “has moved with brazen haste to dismantle the federal government’s public integrity guardrails that he frequently tested during his first term but now seems intent on removing entirely,” the AP said. In a span of hours Monday, Trump:
“forced out leaders of offices responsible for government ethics and whistleblower complaints.”
“ordered a pause on enforcement of a decades-old law that prohibits American companies from bribing foreign governments to win business.”
“All of that came on top of the earlier late-night purge of more than a dozen inspectors general who are tasked with rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse at government agencies.”
Why do liberals stop short of saying what needs saying? I can’t say I know for sure, but part of me thinks about how we think, which is to say, we think in abstractions. I mean, “autocratic breakthrough”?
I wish we’d stop with the highfalutin talk. When, for instance, Trump canceled $900 million in education research contracts that Congress approved, and that past presidents signed into law, he was not “testing the limits of the presidency.” He was not “challenging Congress’ authority.” He was not triggering a “constitutional crisis.”
He was robbing you.
Yes, you.
In broad daylight.
Whenever Trump says he can ignore the Congress and ignore the courts, he’s saying he can ignore the American people, too. There’s nothing you can say or do. He’s robbed you of your sovereignty in blatant violation of federal statute and the United States Constitution.
More than that, he’s literally taking your money.
Some Democrats get it, or at least resist the temptation to take their cues from MSNBC. I’m thinking of Illinois Congressman Sean Casten. In a thread about Musk’s “DOGE,” he said that “the way [constitutional law] is being violated exposes the true motives of the criminals.”
If we still had a liberal democracy, I might wince at that.
We don’t, though, so I don’t.
NOW READ: Is Musk taking over? Here’s how ‘state capture’ works — and why we should be worried
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It's a crime spree — not a 'constitutional crisis'
John Stoehr February 10, 2025
The Justice Department has asked a judge to stop or amend another judge’s order, issued Saturday, that blocks Elon Musk from accessing the Treasury Department’s payment systems. The DOJ’s move came after Donald Trump’s allies openly questioned the constitutional authority of independent judges.
“Officials ranging from billionaire Elon Musk to Vice President JD Vance have not only criticized a federal judge’s decision early Saturday that blocks Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing Treasury Department records, but have also attacked the legitimacy of judicial oversight, a fundamental pillar of American democracy, which is based on the separation of powers,” the Associated Press reported.
“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” Vance said.
Vance is lying, but lying is beside the point.
The point is that the Trump administration appears to be preparing to defy the courts, thus triggering what US Senator Chris Murphy called “the most serious constitutional crisis the country has faced, certainly since Watergate.” He went on: “The president is attempting to seize control of power, and for corrupt purposes … he’s trying to crush his opposition … this is a red alert moment … our democracy is at risk.”
With due respect to my senator, I think we’re passed that. Trump is already defying the courts, and as result, we are already beyond “a constitutional crisis” and in some other stage of decline and fall.
According to a motion filed Friday by 23 state attorneys general, all Democrats, the Trump administration has not complied with an order to stop a federal funding freeze that was implemented last month.
Two weeks ago, the White House Office of Management and Budget issued a memo that froze as much as $3 trillion, including Medicaid.
States sued. Some federal judges handed down injunctions, pending litigation. In response, the White House said it withdrew the memo, but according to these state AGs, the federal funding freeze didn’t stop.
In their motion, AGs allege that “despite the court’s order, defendants have failed to resume disbursing federal funds in multiple respects.” They ask that the administration be ordered “to immediately restore funds and desist from the federal funding pause until the preliminary injunction motion can be heard and decided, a process which is proceeding expeditiously in separate proceedings before this court.”
NOW READ: Trump is already out gaming America's last line of defense
According to journalist Jennifer Shutt, the AGs allege that:
the Trump administration hasn’t begun distributing billions of dollars in funding that Congress approved in the Inflation Reduction Act or the bipartisan infrastructure law.
the NIH “abruptly cancelled an advisory committee review meeting with Brown University’s School of Public Health for a $71 million grant on dementia care research, saying ‘all federal advisory committee meetings had been cancelled.’”
Head Start programs were unable to access funds.
The CDC “renewed stop work orders to a University of Washington program doing global HIV prevention work.”
Connecticut AG William Tong said in a statement that “President Trump is not complying with the court order and continues to defund states. Let’s be clear about what Donald Trump wants to do — Donald Trump wants to defund Connecticut schools. He wants to defund the police. He wants to defund Connecticut highways. He is defunding energy assistance right now in defiance of a court order when so many Connecticut families are desperate for relief. He is defunding Connecticut efforts to reduce our reliance on foreign oil and fossil fuels. He is defying the rule of law and daring courts to stop him.”
US Senator Patty Murray, of Washington, released a briefing on areas in which the administration continues to illegally withhold funding. “President Trump is continuing to block hundreds of billions of dollars in funding from making its way out to families and communities across America who are counting on investments that have been signed into law. While he withdrew his blanket funding freeze — the disastrous [Office of Management and Budget] memo — in the face of nationwide backlash, Trump has so far refused to withdraw the various executive orders he has signed that are illegally freezing enacted funding.”
Murphy said: “the president wants to be able to decide how and where money is spent so that he can reward his political friends and he can punish his political enemies. That is the evisceration of democracy. You stand that with the wholesale endorsement of political violence, with the pardons given to every single Jan. 6 rioter, including the most violence, who beat police officers over the head with baseball bats, and you can see what he’s trying to do here. He’s trying to crush his opposition by making them afraid of losing federal funding, by making them afraid of physical violence. So yes, this is a red-alert moment.”
Today, the federal judge who originally blocked Trump’s federal funding freeze sided with the Democratic state AGs, saying that there’s “evidence that some federal grants and loans are still not going out to the recipients.” He ordered that the money be released immediately.
Let’s hope he does, but don’t count it.
Donald Trump has already robbed the first branch of government of its constitutional authority – “the power of the purse.” Now he’s begun robbing the third branch, too. He isn’t leading “a constitutional crisis.”
Just four weeks in, we’re well beyond that.
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Trump poised to destroy US democracy — and only the right-wing Supreme Court can stop him
John Stoehr January 29, 2025
How things work in the American system is like this: the Congress controls the money. The president spends the money, as directed by the Congress. And the courts make sure everyone obeys the law.
Donald Trump did something this week that could upend all of that, to put it extremely mildly, turning everything that we believe to be true about how things work in the American system into irrelevancy.
The White House issued a directive this week that orders a “pause” to all grants and loans that are dispersed by the federal government.
This is as profound as it is simple. If money is the blood keeping the body politic alive, Trump tightened his grip on the heart pumping it.
According to the Post, experts say that “the memo as written was poised to bring a rapid halt to scores of federal functions,” such as:
financial aid for college students;
health grants distributed by the Centers for Disease Control;
state aid for disaster reconstruction;
grants to expand the nation’s energy supply;
and “Medicaid would see a pause in payments, which are distributed from the federal government to the states.”
NBC news reported that other frozen programs include:
school meals for low-income students;
early childhood education or Head Start;
the WIC nutrition program for pregnant women and infants;
wildfire preparedness;
Medicare enrollment assistance program;
USAID foreign assistance;
mine inspections; and
reintegration program for homeless veterans.
Reuters reported that it was unclear whether Medicaid would be affected by the order. At a cost of $618 billion, and serving 80 million Americans, it is “by far the government's largest grant program.”
But reporting by the Connecticut Post and other regional outlets confirmed that it has been. The Post reported that despite assurances by the White House, Medicaid payments have stopped in Connecticut.
Oregon’s US Senator Ron Wyden said: “My staff has confirmed reports that Medicaid portals are down in all 50 states following last night's federal funding freeze. This is a blatant attempt to rip away health care from millions of Americans overnight and will get people killed.”
The Prospect’s David Dayen went into greater detail. He said the order piggy-backed on another “Day One” executive order that ended the “disbursement of so-called ‘Green New Deal’ funding under the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law.”
That alone is hundreds of billions of dollars.
Dayen went on:
It continued with a pause on research grants at the National Institutes of Health and a pause on foreign aid, including the wildly successful bipartisan funding program treating AIDS in Africa, which has saved an estimated 25 million lives, and initiatives interdicting drugs coming in from Colombia. (Military funding for Israel and Egypt is exempted, making this a conscious choice rather than an across-the-board hiatus.) And now, as Marisa Kabas first reported, all federal grants and loans have been paused in a memo from Matthew Vaeth, the acting head of the Office of Management and Budget.
The pause would include student loan payments to universities, grants for basic research, grants to state and local governments for a wide variety of purposes, and much more. The OMB memo claims that Social Security and Medicare benefits are exempted by the order, as well as grants delivered specifically to individuals, like Pell grants or veterans’ benefits.”
Altogether, we could be talking about as much as $3 trillion.
The White House would like us to believe this move is within the realm of normal politics. All it wants to do is review grants and loans, and make sure they are in keeping with the president’s policy priorities.
The president’s policy priorities are beside the point. The point is the law. The administration is bound by federal statute, legislation and court precedent to disperse appreciations as directed by the Congress.
This is not an opinion.
“There is simply no plausible argument that the president has the constitutional authority to refuse to spend appropriated funds because he doesn’t like how the money is spent,” said Josh Chafetz, who wrote the bible on legislative authority, Congress’s Constitution. “The legality of policy impoundments is just not a close question.”
“It's hard to think of anything more destructive of our constitutional order than a claim that a president can either spend funds that have not been appropriated or refuse to spend funds that have,” he said.
Destruction to the constitutional order gets a lot of hype, but this is the real thing. Trump is trying to take away from the Congress the most important power given by the founders, “the power of the purse.”
The whole point of giving a body representing the people that sole power was to put a check on the sole power of the executive, “the power of the sword.” Separate “the purse” and “the sword,” Hamilton said, and there would be no danger of a president becoming a king.
This is why Trump’s order is potentially destructive. As Dayen said: “It is designed to pick a fight over spending, and relies on fanciful theories that would render Congress a vestigial organ in the governmental order. It means to nullify the congressional spending power by presidential fiat. And it hopes to spark litigation whereby the judiciary assents to that transfer of power, emasculating itself in the process.”
I would put this another way and take it another step.
Another way: the president wants to rob the US Congress of its authority with the blessing of five justices on the US Supreme Court.
Another step: if those five justices agree, and say that he can rob the Congress of its authority, Trump will be free to dismiss the Congress entirely. Impeach him. Put him on trial. “Remove” him. Ha!
Meanwhile, no one could ever sue the president, at least not with the expectation that he recognize any authority that’s higher than his own.
He could dismiss the states, too. Indeed, the entire concept of federalism – state sovereignty, another separation of powers – would be moot with a president who can do no wrong. He could extract wealth from blue states while starving them. To get funding, they’d have to play ball. Those are conditions in which blue states turn red.
If a president can ignore the Congress, the courts, the states and the law, what is he? Not a legitimate president, that’s for sure. If he is a president, he’s a criminal president, as he stands outside and above everything. Public opinion could turn, but it won’t matter to him. At the end of his term, he could run again, or more likely, refuse to leave.
“How things work” won’t be how things work anymore.
I don’t know where we go from here.
The Congress could reassert its authority. Under Republican control, however, that’s unlikely. All the Democrats can do is raise as much hell as possible in order to influence the thinking of the five Republican justices on the high court, which will hear a challenge at some point.
"This is a dagger at the heart of the average American family," Chuck Schumer said. He told reporters that he and his Democratic colleagues are getting a "deluge" of calls from constituents who are panicking. "This decision is lawless, dangerous, destructive, cruel. It's illegal, it's unconstitutional,” he said. “Plain and simple, this is Project 2025."
Chris Murphy, my senator, said Trump is seizing power. “This is what a king does," he said. "This is not how a democracy works. One man does not decide how taxpayers' money is spent." Dick Blumenthal, my other senator, said it was a “reckless, lawless, harmful, dictatorial order.”
But if five justices say OK, that’s the end of the republic.
Maybe I’m wrong?
NOW READ: Dirty white boys: Why the racist GOP made dismantling these initiatives their No. 1 target
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Trump's billionaires aren't 'oligarchs' — they're something else
John Stoehr January 26, 2025
Hakeem Jeffries posted an example of what I think is a problem in Democratic communications. Call it “the magic-word thing.”
The House minority leader said: “House Republicans pretended not to know about Project 2025 last year. Now they are implementing it. We will hold them accountable for lying to the American people.”
Now, given that the last election was decided by people who don’t know anything about politics, don’t want to know anything about politics, indeed revel in their ignorance of how politics works, you might think a Democratic leader would choose words more wisely.
“Project 2025” is clearly meant for liberals and Democrats, more precisely, very online liberals and Democrats, who understand that it’s shorthand for the horribles coming out of the Trump White House, including efforts to redefine “citizenship” according to whiteness.
There’s something to be said for preaching to the choir, especially now that the Democrats are out of power. But there’s also something to be said for shaping public perception of the party in power. While very online liberals and Democrats respond to the incantation of the magic words, I can’t help thinking that, for everyone else, it falls on deaf ears.
Consider what Jeffries is trying to do – suggest the House Republicans are hypocrites and that the House Democrats, with the support of the American people, will hold them accountable for their hypocrisy.
Sounds good, except the whole thing depends on knowing what the hell “Project 2025” means. I pay attention to politics, but I must admit. I only sorta kinda know what it means. If you were to ask me for a detailed explanation, I couldn’t do it. In any case, it seems that if the magic words need an NPR explainer, they can’t be that magical.
Moreover, they must compete for attention with Trump’s rhetoric, which is designed for consumption by society’s troglodytes, low-lifes and bottom-feeders, which is to say, “Project 2025” is at a disadvantage when compared to “they’re eating the dogs; they’re eating the cats.”
My friend Stephen Robinson put it this way: “There are no reasonable people. I think we just flatter ourselves with that argument. We see this a lot, like when [Democrats] talk about Project 2025, which always sounded cool to me. It was like a sci-fi series. They would say things like, ‘Oh, Trump’s going to dismantle the administrative state.’ Well, OK, but the other side is saying that you’re going to send your kid to school and [liberals] are going to change their gender” (my bold).
So the magic-word thing is really a question of reasonable magic words, which is to say that words are magical if you already know what they mean. They require insider information that comes with a level of intelligence, education and cultivation that goes with being, if not a very online liberal and Democrat, then definitely a liberal and Democrat. In that case, the magic-word thing is for club members, not those on the outside looking in, if they even bother to look in.
Does it have political value?
You would think it does, given the enormous energy that goes into forcing Democrats in Washington and the states to use magic words as signals of fidelity to specific advocacy groups that, along with others, constitute much of the base of the Democratic Party. While there’s value in being precise about words, because words matter, we should reconsider the wisdom of imbuing the magic-word thing with so much energy, because we risk talking to ourselves – or worse, sounding like words are more important than the things words represent, thus giving credence to the allegation that liberal politics is all talk.
US Senator Brian Schatz, of Hawaii, pointed out another problem with the magic-word thing. It becomes symbolic of politics but isn’t really political. “This idea that there are magic words that we must be forced to say defines progressivism and political courage by essentially saying whatever a bunch of activists want us to say, as opposed to doing the thing,” he toldPolitico. “And I think that there are a bunch of people who see what we’re doing as performative for that exact reason. But it’s also just alienating. This magic-words thing has to go away.”
The magic-word thing isn’t going away, as we can see in the way some leading liberals and Democrats are trying to define the second Trump administration as the time of “oligarchs.” President Joe Biden said in his farewell address that “today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America.”
Google searches for “oligarchy” spiked afterward, giving hope to some that the word was sticking. I don’t think it will, any more than “Project 2025” stuck, because “oligarchy,” like “Project 2025,” is too abstract and can’t compete with the rhetoric of the lowest-common denominator.
More important, I think, is that “oligarchy” and “Project 2025” are not gestures of power. It’s one thing to say, as Joe Biden did, that oligarchs threaten “our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone.” It’s another to say that oligarchs are scamming scammers trying to scam you out of your money, which is a more accurate representation of what they are going to try to do.
There was a moment, before he became the vice presidential candidate, when Minnesota Governor Tim Walz dominated the news by calling the Republicans “just weird.” It was a lightning strike, random, organic and authentic. It seemed to capture everything that was right about the Democrats and wrong about the Republicans.
Then it was gone. I don’t know where it went. But at some point, deeper into Kamala Harris’s brief campaign, someone somewhere decided to back off the weird and ramp up talk of “Project 2025.”
It was probably due to pressure that Harris felt to explain her policy positions in minute detail in comparison to Trump’s. By the end, though, voters heard more about something that sounded like “a sci-fi series” than about a demented old man who was “just weird.”
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If Democrats want to win, they need to fight like AOC
John Stoehr January 24, 2025
The thing that keeps me up at night is not totalitarian drift. It’s the lack of fighting spirit among people who say they love this country.
I mean, I get that right now the congressional Democrats don’t have any power. I get that there’s nothing they can do in the face of Donald Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional executive orders. Ditto for his disgusting pardon of traitors, liars, thieves and murderers. And I get that the Democrats are outnumbered by Senate Republicans who are bent on confirming the unworthiest administration of our lifetimes.
Powerlessness, however, isn’t the same thing as impotence. There’s a lot the Democrats can do, the most important of which is saying no to Donald Trump and telling the truth about America’s totalitarian drift.
Bill Kristol put it well when he asked: “What can [the Democrats] do now? Tell the truth — and do it clearly, and do it loudly. Tell the truth about Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel. Tell the truth about Trump’s cruel and damaging immigration policies. Tell the truth about Trump’s plutocrats and corruption and grift. Tell the truth about Trump’s assault on the rule of law. For now, the public’s wondering what to think about Trump. Explaining how damaging and dangerous Trump’s policies will be would be important. Do it forcefully. Do it often.”
Here, though, is another problem – the part about “the truth.”
That’s a complicated subject for liberal types, because we don’t agree on what it is. We don’t agree because the truth about the truth is usually tied up in who we think we are as individuals. It can get so complicated that liberals talk themselves out of a united front. That’s a problem these days – when one side seeks common ground in spite of differences while the other side seeks the other side’s annihilation.
I was thinking of this yesterday while watching a video posted by New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I’m guessing you recognize AOC as one of the most outspoken liberals and one of the best communicators in today’s Democratic Party. In the video, she responded to Elon Musk giving the Nazi salute on Inauguration Day. She responded by flipping populism around so the “us” in “us versus them” is patriotic Americans and the “them” is fascists like Musk.
“This is the United States of America,” Representative Ocasio-Cortez said. “I don’t care what Elon Musk is doing behind the presidential seal, [but] in this country, we hate Nazis. Kind of like a foundational, defining thing. Two of the foundational things about American history is that we beat the Confederates and we beat the Nazis” (my bold).
She went on:
“I don’t know what side people may be on today, but I still am not rocking with anyone sympathetic to Nazis. And I will do that until I am six feet in the ground. Kind of foundational to me as a human being.
https://bsky.app/profile/acyn.bsky.social/post/3lgcfqzjipl2a
This is the fighting spirit that we need. Tolerating the intolerant is what got us here. We now have a demented criminal president who is:
threatening to withhold federal funding from blues states;
suppressing federal research on viruses, including the covid;
using pardons to encourage murders and other criminals;
purging the government of “DEI hires,” aka non-white people;
demanding interest rates bend to his moods and whims;
redefining the meaning of citizenship in terms of whiteness;
and in general restoring the original white-power order.
It’s time to stop asking the haters to stop hating.
It’s time to hate them.
Unfortunately, some of the reaction to AOC’s commentary suggests that too many people still don’t get it. They’d rather argue about “the truth” instead of telling it. They would rather be right than fight. It seems the most important thing is not stopping evil and all those who will serve evil, but appearing virtuous in the eyes of their peers. The consequence of this is the impossibility of speaking with one voice.
I mean, with friends like these, who needs enemies?
If you are telling me that, ackshully, America has always been friendly to Nazis and to rightwing authoritarianism in general, you are not telling me anything I don’t already know. The genocide of indigenous Americans inspired Adolf Hitler – yes. The Jim Crow sadism of the former slaver states inspired Adolf Hitler – yes. Henry Ford’s antisemitism inspired Adolf Hitler – yes. All true. There is no debate. But I guess some people can’t help themselves. They gotta debate even though debating is beside the point of fighting totalitarian drift.
What I like most about AOC’s commentary is that it puts evil at the center of our attention. She doesn’t say evil is a distraction from the real issues. She doesn’t say evil prevents us from finding compromise on things that matter to all of us. She doesn’t say evil is “playing politics” while she and the Democrats are trying to get things done.
No, she’s saying evil is evil, and we should hate evil.
That’s the fighting spirit we need right now.
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Reminder: Trump is a demented criminal president
John Stoehr January 23, 2025
I just want to remind everyone that America elected a demented criminal president and as a consequence, we can no longer assume what we used to assume when it came to matters of law and politics.
I know that sounds like a sweeping generalization, but sometimes you gotta swing hard if you’re going to get people’s attention, and right now, given that liberals and Democrats got their heads in the sand, I think it’s prudent to swing hard, even if I’m proven wrong in the end.
And I know that saying something as sweeping as this can sound pessimistic, as if I’m suggesting that nothing can be done about a demented criminal president, but I don’t see it that way. I think liberals and Democrats still believe Donald Trump is going to overreach, and they still believe public opinion is going to turn, and when it does, thank God! Liberals and Democrats won’t have to fight so hard!
Again, we elected a demented criminal president.
We can no longer assume what we used to assume.
Case in point is the reaction to Donald Trump’s executive order claiming to “end birthright citizenship,” in the words of USA Today.
Liberals and Democrats were correct to point out that the president can’t do any such thing on his own, as ending the legal right to be called a US citizen due to being born on US soil would require a constitutional amendment. It was said that the order would be stopped almost immediately by the courts. Yesterday, 18 attorneys general from states run by Democrats filed suit to do just that.
While this reaction is correct as a matter of fact, it is wrong as a matter of politics. This is a demented criminal president we are talking about, and while the courts may end up stopping his order, the courts can’t stop a demented criminal president from ignoring the courts and acting, you know, like a criminal. We assume that a demented criminal president will obey the law and I don’t see why we should assume that.
Even if the president himself said OK, OK, I can’t end birthright citizenship by myself, there are plenty of people in his administration, not just political appointees, who would be happy to break the law and just pretend that the children of immigrants who are born on US soil are not citizens. They would also be happy to stop doing for them what they would do for any other (white) baby born on US soil, such as issuing Social Security cards or other important federal documents.
Even if it came to light that this rogue federal agency was responsible for infringing the rights and privilege of tens of thousands of natural-born citizens, who would prosecute the offense? The same Justice Department that is, right now, planning payback against the members of the Congress who investigated the J6 insurrection?
Even if that Justice Department actually did manage to prosecute and convict these rogue federal agents (who were only doing what Trump wanted them to do), should we assume that the same demented criminal president who pardoned virtually all the paramilitaries who sacked and looted the US Capitol would not pardon them as well.
And even if public opinion turned against Trump’s lawlessness, what reaction could we reasonably expect? The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch said the inauguration was “a dangerous display of rapid mental decline” and that the biggest takeaway was “seeing how rapidly the oldest new president in America is declining right in front of us.”
“We’ve just flipped the car keys of this 248-year-old republic to a grandpa who starts his four-year road trip already in a serious state of mental decline, with all the guardrails of yesteryear stripped away by a corrupt Supreme Court, a feckless and increasingly useless Democratic Party, and a bended-knee elite media,” he said (my italics).
Again, it bears repeating: this is a demented criminal president we are talking about. The things that would normally constrain a president – the institutions, the courts and public opinion – are probably not going to constrain this one. I would suggest that they almost certainly won’t.
And while liberals and Democrats console themselves into believing the only way to end birthright citizenship is by amending the Constitution, they’re missing the real goal, which is getting around all those quaint little rules that everyone else plays by and going straight to the US Supreme Court. Trump’s executive order really could end birthright citizenship if he can force five justices to agree with it.
Like a lot of liberals and Democrats, I don’t yet know how to resist a president who is criminal enough to ignore the courts (or turn a blind eye to crimes committed in his name) and demented enough to ignore public opinion. I don’t yet know how to think about politics as applied to a president who won’t act like any president who came before him.
What I do know is we have to try – if not for ourselves, then for our children, and for those who came before us and did figure it out.
NOW READ: Trump's MAGA America revives a Confederate nightmare
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alternet-
Trump's poorest supporters are in for a rude awakening
John Stoehr January 19, 2025
Since the election, you have probably heard a lot about FAFO (“f--- around and find out”). It’s the idea that voting is a choice and voters must face the consequences of their choices. If you are, say, a poor person, you shouldn’t have voted for Donald Trump or any Republican, because in the end, they’re going to betray you. But if you did, well, f--- around and find out.
Low-income voters did indeed vote for Trump.
According to the Post, “50 percent of voters from families with an income of less than $50,000 a year cast their ballots for Trump, according to [exit polls], compared with 48 percent for Vice President Kamala Harris. Four years ago, President Joe Biden carried those voters by 11 percentage points; Hillary Clinton won them by 12 points in 2016 and former president Barack Obama by 22 points in 2012.”
They’re anxious now, the Postsaid.
Some believed his promise to put them first, but the Republicans around him keep talking about cutting spending and slashing services.
“Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy – whom Trump has chosen to lead a new nongovernmental advisory panel, the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ – have said they want to trim $2 trillion from the government’s annual budget, a cut that some experts say could be accomplished only by slashing entitlement programs,” the Post said.
ALSO READ: We're watching the largest and most dangerous 'cult' in American history
The Post continued: “Trump’s pick for White House budget director was a key architect of Project 2025, a plan drawn up by conservatives to guide his second term that calls for steep cuts to programs such as food stamps. And GOP leaders in Congress and Trump advisers are considering significant changes to Medicaid … and other federal aid.”
Low-income supporters want him to honor his promise.
The Post report isn’t alone. Since the election, I have seen many stories about Trump voters who are now concerned about what Trump is going to do – sick people who fear the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare); Latinos who fear their families being deported; and now poor people who survive on food stamps but fear them being cut.
These stories never fail to get the attention of the FAFO crowd, which is to say, of liberals and Democrats who are still smarting from defeat.
They take some comfort in the idea that Trump voters will feel the consequences of their actions. The more literate among them might even cite HL Mencken: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
But the FAFO crowd is giving Donald Trump too much credit.
They assume that the Trump administration’s policies and programs will affect everyone equally. They do not assume, as they should, that Trump will reward his friends and punish his enemies. If he ends up in the process looking like a hypocrite, or committing a crime, so be it.
The incoming administration is going to be fantastically corrupt. It’s going to take a large, serious and sustained counteroffensive to fight against it. But we might end up underestimating the enormity of the project by continuing to focus on FAFO, as if Trump would not spare supporters from facing consequences if doing so suited his interests.
He will try if it does.
Even if that means breaking the law.
Take immigration. Trump vowed to deport millions of “illegal” workers. If successful, he’d decimate the labor supply and hurt the big farming states like Nebraska and Kansas that cannot function without “illegal” workers to pick their crops. Knowing that they voted for him anyway, by huge margins, the FAFO crowd is expecting them to find out.
They probably won’t. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will almost certainly focus on “illegal” immigrants in states like New York and California, especially in cities like New York City and Los Angeles, because they voted against Trump. Meanwhile, “illegal” immigrants in Nebraska and Kansas will be overlooked, because it’s convenient to.
Take tariffs, too. Trump vowed to impose across-the-board levies on imported goods from China and elsewhere. The impact could, in effect, be as much as a 20 percent sales tax on everything from sneakers to video games. Knowing that poor people voted for Trump, because prices are too high, the FAFO crowd is expecting them to find out.
Again, they probably won’t. First, Trump’s tariffs will be unequal. They will depend on who’s willing to bribe him and for how much. Those who won’t or can’t will face a levy. Those who can and will won’t.
And if tariffs make things more expensive for Trump voters, and they will, because they’re inflationary, there’s nothing saying Trump can’t “offer” them a “tax rebate” to offset the increase. That such a thing would be illegal and unconstitutional and impossible to implement is beside the point. The point is that Trump will be fantastically corrupt.
Same thing with entitlement programs – Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the rest. The FAFO crowd is expecting Trump supporters to suffer the consequences of their choices. If they didn’t want cuts to food stamps, for instance, they shouldn’t have voted for a Republican.
But they do want cuts, not for them but those who don’t “deserve” them, which is to say, people who are not like them. This is clear when you read the Post report carefully, especially quotes from the “longtime Democrat” who “struggled over whether to vote for Trump.” She “kept coming back to the conclusion that Trump would put Americans like her first and improve her economic prospects” (my italics).
“We helped get you in office; please take care of us,” she told the Post.
“Please don’t cut the things that help the most vulnerable.”
You’re not vulnerable if you’re not one of them.
Trump won’t help, because he never put you first.
NOW READ: It's time for liberals to abandon MSNBC's 'sweet little lies'
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It's time for liberals to abandon MSNBC's 'sweet little lies'
John Stoehr January 18, 2025
At this point, I think it needs to be said that there’s a feeling among liberals and Democrats, and I would suggest especially affluent white liberals and Democrats, that liberal democracy isn’t really dead.
I would say there’s a deep sense of denial among these folks. They tell themselves that the dearly departed is much too dear to be truly departed. I would say there’s also a good deal of magical thinking in this denial, as if the criminals who shot their beloved will come to justice, and once they do, their beloved will rise again, good as new.
I think this needs to be said because liberals and Democrats keep telling themselves that democracy itself depends on the integrity of democratic institutions and democratic norms, and that without them, the country will manifest the founding fathers’ fear of despotism.
I think this needs to be said, because the founding fathers’ fear of despotism is about to be made manifest, and that’s because the institutions and democratic norms that liberals and Democrats keep telling themselves that they hold so dear have failed absolutely.
It’s like the dead are not really dead.
Denial is natural, as is the impulse to seek comfort, and MSNBC and others outlets that are attuned to the tastes of privileged liberals are ready to capitalize on that impulse. I’m generalizing here, perhaps grossly, but even so, the tenor seems to be one of patronizing solace, as if to say: Don’t worry, the evil that’s coming won’t be too evil, and anyway, the evil that does come will be remedied by the next election.
MSNBC will offer these sweet little lies, because they know their audience, which is to say, they know that lots of liberals, especially privileged liberals, want to be told sweet little lies. These customers will demand to be treated like children, because their greatest fear is not the death of liberal democracy – it poses little danger to them and anyway, they can deny it – but instead feeling bad about themselves.
That’s why, in the coming weeks and months, we will see on MSNBC and other places a preponderance of political coverage that’s about the breathtaking hypocrisy of Donald Trump and the GOP, about broken promises and about how any minute now, the American people are going to figure it all out. We will see this, because their audiences want to see this, and they want to see this, because seeing it will prove they are better than the Republicans, which, in the end, means they win.
This may seem like victory without fighting.
In reality, it’s decadence and moral decay.
Look, I’m sorry, but lots of liberals are soft. I don’t mean reasonable. I don’t mean complicated, practical or willing to compromise. I mean soft. I mean lots of liberals are motivated by self-regard, group-esteem and pleasure-seeking more than duty, sacrifice and the common good.
We saw it last summer. After Joe Biden’s poor debate performance, the Democratic Party stabbed in the back the best and most accomplished president of our lifetimes. Liberals could have rallied to push their man through to the finish, but chose instead to second-guess themselves.
We saw it again after the Democratic National Convention. It “was a joyful, inclusive reminder of what politics is supposed to feel like,” wrote MSNBC’s Jen Psaki (my italics), as if fun were a required emotion in war by other means. I still don’t understand all the attention that was paid to “voter enthusiasm.” If liberals were not motivated by Donald Trump’s evil, I thought, nothing would motivate them. Turns out, I was right.
And we’re seeing it now. Many congressional Democrats seem to have lost the will to fight. They are not pursuing any changes to a horribly punitive new immigration law. Others are dressing up cowardice in the garb of “the people’s will.” Others still keep yak-yak-yakking about norms and institutions, as if they have not been totally corrupted. All that talk of higher-order things is looking more and more like appeasement, and that’s because, in the end, politics isn’t the point.
The point is feeling good about ourselves.
Lots of liberals are soft.
Liberals should recognize the stone-cold truth – that liberal democracy is dead. We had a chance to save it. We lost. It’s gone.
We are now entering a period in which fairness will be defined not by equity and justice but by who gets to do what to whom. Instead of being the instruments of liberty, the institutions of democracy will be the instruments of oppression. And there will likely be a new consensus in which it’s agreed: the ingroup’s rights trump the outgroups’ freedom.
Kamala Harris campaigned on a message of “we’re not going back.”
But we are.
The country is going back to a time in American history in which democracy was not only illiberal but sometimes tyrannical. The next election won’t stop that, because the problem isn’t only Trump and the Republicans. It’s a mainstream liberalism that’s so mired in decadence and moral decay that it can’t or won’t acknowledge the war against it. It prefers fun and sweet little lies to the difficulty of political combat.
Soft liberalism had its day.
Time for the hard kind.
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If only more Democrats had the guts of Michelle Obama}:
The Associated Press reported Monday that the former first lady will not attend Donald Trump’s inauguration next week. Her husband will be there, however. So will the other former presidents and their spouses. So will the current president and the current first lady.
Michelle Obama didn’t attend Jimmy Carter’s funeral, so her decision to skip Trump’s swearing-in can be interpreted as less pointed than it seems. However, I’m not buying speculation about her health. She has said on more than one occasion that Trump’s white-power rhetoric (not her words) literally puts her life and her loved one’s lives at risk.
It’s fair to say that she “just hates Trump,” as Margaret Hartmann reported, but it’s also fair to say that she hates him for a good reason. And it’s fair to say that when someone endangers your life, you’re under no obligation to be nice to him. Indeed, being nice to him might actually embolden him, compounding the danger to you and yours.
Liberals like New York magazine’s Ed Kilgore might interpret Obama’s “boycott” as a sign of weakness. Last month, he said “the peaceful transition of power is central to our traditions as a constitutional democracy, which was precisely why it was so outrageous that the 45th president tried to disrupt it four years ago. His installment as the 47th president will be the last time Democrats have to bow to Trump’s power as a properly elected chief executive, but bow they must before getting down to the hard and essential work of fighting his agenda.”
I don’t see Obama’s decision as a sign of weakness.
She knows people will fairly and unfairly compare her actions to Trump’s. There’s no doubt about that. She understands the expedience that goes into bowing down briefly before “getting down to the hard and essential work of fighting his agenda.” She knows the trade-offs.
Yet she’s choosing to play according to her own rules. She is not going to extend to someone who threatens her life and humanity the same courtesy that she would to someone who does not. That’s not a sign of weakness, because courage like that is never a sign of weakness.
Honestly, the same can’t be said of her husband.
Trump tried in his first term to not only erase Barack Obama’s record as president, including Obamacare, but also erase Barack Obama’s image. Yet, at Carter’s funeral, Barack Obama sat next to Trump. According to the AP, he even “chatted and laughed” with him, like they were “old friends,” as if declaring to the world that politicians never mean what they say, whether it’s that Obama is an evil foreign-born puppetmaster or that Trump is an existential threat to democracy.
The same can’t be said of other Democrats, too.
At least five House Democrats who boycotted Trump’s first inaugural are going to his second, per Politico. California Congressman Jared Hoffman rationalized his choice, saying, “Like it or not, this guy was just elected by the country with full disclosure of all of his ugliness.”
Another takeaway, however, is Trump’s ugliness can’t have been so ugly given that at least five Democrats have now changed their minds.
At least four Democratic governors will be attending, according to the Connecticut Post, including Connecticut’s. Ned Lamont said he was going out of respect for the presidency, even though Trump’s agents have already threatened him and other governors with arrest and prosecution “if they don't comply with Trump's actions on immigrants.” “Look,” Lamont told Dan Haar, “I’m not looking to pick fights and I’m going down there out of respect for the peaceful transition of power."
All this sounds noble, but it looks like fear.
Because it is, according to Keith Ellison. Podcaster Dean Obeidallah asked the Minnesota attorney general why leading Democrats are suddenly quiet about Trump being a fascist threat to democracy.
“I have an answer for you,” said Ellison, a Democrat. “It’s like, ‘yeah, we think he’s a fascist and now that he has power, we’re scared, and so we’re trying to keep our head down so we don’t attract the negative attention of the fascist.’ I have been in so many [cover-your-ass] conversations, Dean, I’ve stopped counting people who have said ‘I’m going to keep my head down and hope I don’t get any attention by the bad guy.’ It’s really fear. That’s what you’re seeing. Many of the louder voices are quiet, because they fear he’s going to keep his promise.”
That promise of vengeance against his enemies, through the Justice Department or some other means available to a president, should put all the happy talk about democratic norms in a less flattering light.
Was Barack Obama chatting and laughing with Trump, as if they were old friends, out of basic human decency, even though Trump has tried to erase him and his presidential record? Or was he scared? (If so, George W. Bush put him to shame by completely ignoring Trump. )
Did at least five House Democrats change their minds about attending Trump’s inaugural out of deference to the will of voters who elected him despite “full disclosure of all of his ugliness”? Or were they scared?
Are Lamont and three other Democratic governors extending a courtesy to Trump, which by the way Trump never felt obligated to extend to his Democratic successor, out of respect for norms and institutions or fear of getting negative attention “by the bad guy.”
The Democrats’ defense of norms and institutions sounded righteous before the election. Afterward, however, and in the calm before the storm, such defense increasingly has the ring of appeasement to it.
The Democrats say they don’t want to normalize Trump, yet the highest-profile among them are about to do just that. And perhaps they are going to do that, not because of some passion for principle but because they are afraid of what might happen to them if they don’t.
"It's breathtaking that in the United States of America, a powerful person tied to the incoming president, credited as the architect of Trump's immigration policy, would threaten governors with prison for their state laws protecting immigrants,” said the Connecticut Post’s Dan Haar on the threat to Lamont. “That's not the stuff of a free country.
That’s the stuff of fear.
There’s no freedom with fear like that.
If only more Democrats were as free as Michelle Obama.
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alternet
Trump reaped what he sowed
John Stoehr July 16, 2024
The Washington press and pundit corps are this week working hard to convince you that the attempted assassination of Donald Trump is the superlative example of what happens when polarization goes too far.
They are telling a story in which the leading characters are the former president and his Republicans, and Joe Biden and his Democrats. The plot is about a nation on fire, a people at war with themselves, and so forth. Some have even depicted Sunday’s prime-time address by the president as if he were “bothsidesing” the issue of political violence.
He wasn’t. Instead, Joe Biden listed examples of rightwing political violence. “Violence has never been the answer” to solving the problems of American democracy, he said, “whether it’s with members of Congress in both parties being targeted in the shot, or a violent mob attacking the Capitol on January 6th, or a brutal attack on the spouse of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, or information and intimidation on election officials, or the kidnapping plot against a sitting governor, or an attempted assassination on Donald Trump.”
That Biden listed examples of rightwing political violence seems to have gone over some heads. Ditto for the fact that he correctly included in those examples the attempted assassination of Trump. For some reason, it seems hard for members of the press and pundit corps to believe that America’s leading advocate of rightwing political violence could be a victim of it. And so dedicated are they to telling a story that blames both sides that it’s equally hard for them to believe Biden and the Democrats have nothing to do with it. There’s only one side to blame here. Trump and the GOP have reaped what they sowed.
Soon after Donald Trump was whisked off the stage in Pennsylvania, the Republicans began creating conditions in which Biden and the Democrats seem to be responsible for Trump’s assassination attempt. US Senator JD Vance, of Ohio, is representative in this. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” he said. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
No, it didn’t.
Calling out Donald Trump’s fascist tendencies is democratic politics. Characterizing him as a fraud, insurrectionist and rapist is based on fact. Saying a convicted felon shouldn’t be president is common sense.
Only Trump and the Republicans are to blame for this. They were inciting rightwing political violence before as well as after the failed paramilitary takeover of the US government on January 6. (A shooter massacred Jews in Pittsburgh in 2018, Hispanics in El Paso in 2019, and Black people in Buffalo in 2022. Each echoed Trump’s rightwing views.) Though it has now come for one of their own, they won’t do any soul-searching. They can only blame their enemies for their own transgressions. And the press and pundit corps are playing along.
I don’t know why the assassin, whom I will not name, did what he did. No one yet knows. As is the case with many or most shooters, we may never know his true motives. What we do know is he was a young, white man and a registered Republican, who was apparently steeped in a gun culture that habitually takes an insurrectionist view of the Second Amendment. Perhaps he was mentally ill. Perhaps he wanted to be infamous. Perhaps, like other rightwing shooters, he wanted to start a “race war.” Almost certain is he was a kook. Certain is he believed political violence is an acceptable alternative to democratic politics.
I also know that looking at an attempted assassination out of its proper context is a good way to misunderstand it. Its proper context is this: the United States averages about one mass shooting a day, according to the Gun Violence Archive. This year, the total is expected to surpass 500, which would be the fifth time in five years that has happened.
Such frequency is why the US surgeon general said, last month, that gun violence is a public health crisis. “People want to be able to walk through their neighborhoods and be safe,” Dr. Vivek Murthy told the Associated Press. “America should be a place where all of us can go to school, go to work, go to the supermarket, go to our house of worship, without having to worry that that’s going to put our life at risk.”
(By the way, Pennsylvania is an open-carry state, and the shooter, who was shot and killed at the scene, obtained his semiautomatic rifle legally. That puts the Secret Service in a position in which it can’t do anything until there’s gunfire. The FBI, while investigating the crime as a potential act of domestic terrorism, said the shooter acted alone.)
America should be that kind of place, but the Republicans have either stood in the way of federal gun-control legislation or they have, at the state level, expanded access to guns, even guns that are designed to kill in bulk, like the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle that killed a Trump supporter over the weekend and came close to killing Trump himself. The Democrats, meanwhile, have been united in trying to regulate access to guns and, in the process, in trying to thwart mass death.
(More background: The Capitol police investigated more than 9,600 threats against congresspeople this year. That’s 10 times higher than eight years ago. And Robert P. Jones, head of Public Religion Research Institute, said: “We have been tracking an uptick in tolerance for political violence and an uptick in violent rhetoric in our national conversations over the last few years. Self-identified Republicans are three times more likely than Democrats to say they believe true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.”)
It seems no one is talking about Trump’s attempted assassination as part of a larger trend in gun violence in America. And because it seems no one is talking about it that way, no one seems to have noticed that the Republicans are upset about one of their own being a target of attempted murder while throwing up their hands in collective helplessness in every other case. Something must be done about the Democrats’ rhetoric, I guess, but nothing needed to be done, say, after a gunman entered a primary school to shoot 20 first graders to pieces.
Given this context, it should not be surprising that Trump and the Republicans are themselves exceptionally vulnerable to rightwing political violence and threats of it. The policies they have enacted, and the anti-democratic attitudes they have popularized, have literally put them in life-threatening situations. Constantly feeling like their lives are in peril may explain why so many congressional Republicans, who had been reluctant to support Trump after the J6 insurrection, ultimately got in line. “Violence and threats against elected leaders are suppressing the emergence of a pro-democracy faction of the GOP,” wrote Rachel Kleinfeld, a political violence expert, in late 2022.
The assassination of Trump was already part of rightwing political discourse. “Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and rightwing provocateur Ivan Raiklin have speculated for months that removing Trump from the running — they speculated about assassination — would open the way for Trump’s far-right former national security advisor Michael Flynn, and appeared to be putting pressure on Trump to name Flynn as vice president,” wrote Professor Heather Cox Richardon this morning. “Yesterday, Raiklin posted on social media a ‘Trump/Flynn 2024’ graphic with the legend ‘FAFO,’ under the words ‘Assassination-Proof.’”
Biden and the Democrats, meanwhile, are the pro-democracy party. Not only are they against political violence, because it undermines and enfeebles democratic politics, but they are also not vulnerable to it like the Republicans are. As I said in February: “When a Democrat goes to a party function, they do not encounter other Democrats legally carrying semiautomatic rifles. A Republican, on the other hand, does. Someone calling you out for telling the truth about the big lie is one thing. When he’s slinging an AR-15 over his shoulder, it’s another.”
The Washington press and pundit corps are this week working hard to convince you that the attempted assassination of Donald Trump is the superlative example of what happens when polarization goes too far.
It isn’t.
It’s what happens when you unleash rightwing political violence.
Eventually, it comes for you.
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wanted: ‘a very nasty and very public civil war’ among the Democrats
Pelosi and other senior leaders can’t adapt.
I think I am done with Nancy Pelosi. I think I am done with the rest of the senior leadership of the Democratic Party, too. They had a good run. Indeed, I have called Pelosi the greatest House speaker of the 21st century. In 2022, I celebrated the transformational productivity of the so-called “gerontocracy.”
That was then, though.
This is now.
I am done.
Pelosi is no longer the speaker, but she still acts like she is. She advocated openly for Virginia Congressman Gerry Connolly, 74, to be the next ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, after Maryland’s Jamie Raskin left it. She and other “veteran lawmakers,” according to Axios, chose Connolly because he was next in line.
They could have picked New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 35, who would have come to the leadership with her “far-reaching public platform, her ability to communicate and her energetic support for colleagues in recent congressional elections,” Axios reported.
In other words, they could have chosen a Democrat capable of leading the opposition against the incoming obscenities of Donald Trump.
Instead, they chose an elderly (and sick!) Democrat who is, according to Missouri’s Emanuel Cleaver, 80, a “ranking member-in-waiting.” (Ocasio-Cortez also lost a vote to be on the Democrats’ Steering and Policy Committee, a vital arm of the party’s House leadership.)
The news is an example of the depth of institutional decay within the Democrats. They said Trump was a menace to democracy and the rule of law. They said his victory would corrupt society and profane norms.
But with this vote, they are suggesting that they didn’t really mean it. They are suggesting that the most important thing is making sure the guy who’s been waiting in line gets his turn. (They actually comforted Ocasio-Cortez, telling her don’t worry, your turn will come soon.)
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to hear this. In the teeth of what will be the most criminal and corrupt administration of our lifetimes, I don’t want to hear about how Connolly is, on the merits, the best person for the job, about his loyalty or his fundraising prowess. I don’t want to hear some bullshit about how he kept Virginia blue.
I don’t want to hear about the importance of internal group cohesion, because the Democrats lost, they lost everything, and they lost everything because they didn’t take the Republicans’ information warfare seriously enough. If there were ever a time for “Democrats in disarray,” as Stephen Robinson wrote this morning, now is that time.
This week, the Democrats had a chance to elevate one of the foremost minds in information warfare – to bring forward a practitioner who could bring them all into 21st-century communications strategy. As AOC’s ally, Vermont Congresswoman Becca Balint, told Axios: “I know Gerry will do a great job. But there's no substitute for having someone in that position that literally has millions of Americans following her.”
Indeed, there is no substitute for an institutional shake-up.
Unless you’re a “veteran lawmaker” in that institution.
In which case, the substitute is the status quo.
No one would accept this in any other field of serious competition. If the football team continued losing, game after game, no one would say the head coach should keep his job. No one would say he’s dedicated his life to the team, so firing him wouldn’t be fair. No one would accept that, because no one would put the interests of one man above victory. Somebody must be held responsible. Somebody’s head must roll.
Not so for the Democrats. There has been no accountability as far as I can tell. There has been no punishment for losing the presidency, the Senate and the House. Instead, they decided to keep New York’s Chuck Schumer, 74, as the Senate’s minority leader. They decided to let Nancy Pelosi, 84, influence their choice of who to put on the House Oversight Committee. With outcomes like this, what’s the incentive for success?
There should be, as Alternet’s Carl Gibson said recently, “a very nasty and very public civil war between the young fighters and the old and tired [Pelosi-Schumer] wing.” Carl went on to say: “They got us into this mess and it's time for them to go.” But apparently, the institution’s hierarchy is so strong it can withstand, or even suppress, an uprising.
When the former House speaker threw her weight behind Gerry Connolly, it was widely seen as a counteroffensive against a nascent “generational revolt that saw several of Democrats' septuagenarian committee leaders pushed out of their roles.” Evidently, after seeing that a rank-in-file rebellion was brewing, Pelosi moved to crush it.
(You could say accountability came for New York’s Jerry Nadler, 77. He was the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee. He stepped aside for Maryland’s Jamie Raskin, 61. While Raskin is a fighter, Connolly is replacing him on the Oversight Committee. Is that a shake-up or a reestablishment of the status quo? The latter, I think.)
News broke yesterday of House Speaker Mike Johnson being once again in the position of balancing the demands of leadership with the demands of the base. Trump, by way of Elon Musk, wants Johnson to scrap a funding bill at the risk of shutting down the government on Christmas week. While it’s fun to watch Johnson beclown himself, there’s one thing you can say. His party never lets institutional inertia get in the way of achieving its goals, however harmful they may be.
The Democrats, meanwhile, do not have anything outside the party (namely, a media apparatus of their own to match the Republicans’) that’s constantly menacing them, keeping them on their toes every day, and providing the ever-present incentive to continually innovate, even at the expense of the party. The Democrats do not have such a thing, perhaps because they do not want it. The status quo is so much easier.
Since 2016, I have defended Pelosi and the party’s senior leadership against allegations of elitism and being out of touch. I have defended them, because I believed, and still believe, that the policies offered and enacted by the Democrats, especially after Joe Biden’s election, are the best thing to have happened to ordinary Americans since the 1960s.
But given the way things are going in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory, I have to admit the allegations are not without merit. Who else but political elites are immune from the outcomes of politics? Who else but elites have no fear of being held accountable for failure? Who else but elites can play their fiddles while the rest of Rome burns?
I defended the Democrats because I believed defending them was the part I could play in the larger defense of democracy. I don’t see any point, however, in defending a party that cannot change – that didn’t really believe it when it said Donald Trump was an existential threat.
Pelosi had a good run. I honor her past achievements.
That was then, though.
I am done.
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alternet-
There's only one way left to fight the power of the right-wing media apparatus
Fox News host Bret Baier with his wife Amy pose on the red carpet at the 47th Kennedy Center Honors gala at the Kennedy Center in Washington, U.S., December 8, 2024. REUTERS/Nathan Howard
On Friday, ABC News settled a lawsuit brought by Donald Trump over statements made on air by anchor George Stephanopoulos.
These statements were true. Stephanopoulos said Trump had been found civilly liable for rape. The judge in the case said so. Trump didn’t like Stephanopoulos telling the truth. He sued him and his employer.
And they caved.
ABC News and Stephanopoulos are going to give $15 million to Trump’s presidential liberty, wherever and wherever that will be built. They also plan to issue an apology on air for speaking truthfully about Trump.
This is a BFD, though it may not seem that way.
In libel law, the truth is the best defense. You can’t defame someone, legally speaking, if what you’re saying is true. You can’t be held liable for injury to their reputation. This is not to mention the impossibility of injuring the reputation of a public figure like Trump, who just won an election. Stephanopoulos could have accused him of having unlawful carnal knowledge of pigs. It would not have injured him.
So ABC News almost certainly would have won on the merits, if the case got beyond a judge’s dismissal. But Disney, its corporate owner, apparently saw advantage for itself by giving in to Trump’s bullying.
Good news for ABC News, maybe, but not for other media groups and individuals who trade in facts. This settlement will bode poorly for reporters who displease Trump. It suggests that he will be emboldened to sue them into silence. (Indeed, Yesterday, he said he would sue Iowa pollster Ann Selzer for being wrong in her final 2024 poll. This morning he filed suit.) The ABC settlement also suggests that employers will betray reporters if betrayal is politically expedient. Stephanopoulos spoke truthfully, but his bosses now side with Trump against him.
Moreover, the settlement makes our illiberal information climate worst. The Washington press corps is already captive to the rightwing media apparatus. That is, it already outsources its agenda-setting power to it. Politics stories are now frequently framed by nonpartisan editors according to terms preferential to Trump and the GOP. You don’t need to be a rabid follower of Steve Bannon to be ignorant of the good that’s done by the Democrats. All you need to do is read Politico.
The already corrupt state of our information climate might not be so terrible if the Democratic Party had its own media apparatus with which to complete with Trump’s for the attention of voters and the press, but it does not. As Matthew Sheffield told me in the interview below, there is, as of right now, no funding for anything remotely close to the size, scope and power of the rightwing media apparatus.
Things were bad before the ABC News story broke. The Democrats have no counter to the rightwing media apparatus, and to the otherwise neutral observers in the press corps who are attuned to it.
Things are worse now. The press corps might be corrupt but at least it would report bad news about Trump. Now, with Trump in a position to litigate them into silence (or harass them with threats of criminal prosecution), the Democrats might soon not have even that.
JS: Since the election, I have been saying the true axis in politics is not liberal-conservative. It is not left-right. It is true-false. People who understood the facts tended to vote for Kamala Harris. People who believed lies tended to vote for Trump. This is due to the power of what I call the rightwing media apparatus. Am I wrong? If so, how so?
MS: I think that's correct. It didn’t start that way, that the left-right divide was predominantly about true and false, but it became that way after the Republican Party was taken over by the virulently anti-government reactionaries who voted in Barry Goldwater in 1964.
Since then, they have grown their ranks by introducing new false beliefs. It began with people who thought that the government was always evil and could never help people (Ronald Reagan's formulation that "government is the problem, not the solution"). They expanded that to the idea that biology was a lie promulgated by evil secular humanists. Then, under Trump, they expanded that to include attacks on sound public health measures, like fluoride in water and vaccines.
Oftentimes, whether someone has college education is used as an ersatz measure of how Trumpy they, but that’s not the real divide.
It's about cognition. The objective evidence is that people with lower cognitive skills tend to be socially conservative or tend to be in the unaligned middle where facts are few and far between.
Ultimately, democracy requires an informed citizenry that understands how to think properly. This is why the right attacks public education so vehemently. They need ignorance in order to win, as I discussed on a recent episode of my Theory of Changepodcast.
JS: You call it the Republican ecosystem. I think a lot of liberal-lefty types think of it as a cop out, as in: Harris lost because she was a bad candidate. Don't blame the media. But I don't think many understand how large the ecosystem is -- how it can and did make the difference in this election. Can you explain to how media trumped policy?
MS: Dedicated followers of politics, and even many who work in it, oftentimes become invested in the candidates themselves.
But ultimately, political systems matter more than candidates.
What Trump or Harris say they'll do is important, but millions of people do not pay much, if any, attention to the specific policy declarations. They may not even know who is running. Right before the election, Google searches for "did Biden drop out" spiked. Millions of Americans who were able to vote had no idea that President Biden was not even on the ballot. It's astonishingly, and depressingly, true.
Just as another example of what I'm talking about: during the 2016 race, 41 percent of adults were unable to give the names of Mike Pence and Tim Kaine as the running mates of Trump and Hillary Clinton.
This is the level of ignorance that we're up against.
And it gets worse.
According to a post-2024 election survey, 45 percent of swing voters (ie, people who were open to voting for Trump or Harris) said they got their news from social media. The number was even higher, 52 percent, among people who had voted for Trump for the first time ever. By contrast, only 39 percent of swing voters watched local news and just 15 percent said they read national newspapers like the Times.
JS: Do the Democrats take ignorance seriously enough?
MS: Ignorance is ultimately fatal to democracy, because in a democratic society, the responsibility of governance rests upon the shoulders of the public. If the public does not know the difference between what is true or false, then it will make bad decisions.
Authoritarians who want to repeal democracy and pluralism can only do so through manipulating people. For decades, people on the center-to-left have generally outsourced educating the population to K-12 schools and public universities. But learning is something that takes place throughout our lifetimes, whether we realize it or not.
And so people who want to have economic and social justice need to educate the public about our viewpoints through all kinds of media (websites, podcasts, videos, memes, etc) and also through local organizations like service clubs and unions.
Our society has lost "third spaces" where we can come together and learn from each other, and more especially to partake in our community's collective memory. Without real progressive infrastructure, we are leaving people to be manipulated by authoritarian religion and deceptive media outlets like Fox.
Research has shown that people who are most likely to get sucked into authoritarian cults like QAnon and hardcore Trumpism are alone and isolated. Many of them gravitate toward the only people who are there. The same thing often happens with young people and gangs.
JS: What are the Democrats doing wrong? It seems to me they have no answer. Just hope that Trump, now that he has power, will implode.
MS: As of this moment, there are no funded political ecosystem projects. This absolutely must change as soon as possible.
As someone who has seen both sides of the political spectrum from the inside, it was a complete shock to me when I moved leftward that there was nothing to offset the massive rightwing media machine, which I helped build (for more about why I left the right, see this link.
There have been some encouraging signs recently, however.
Greg Sargent interviewed three candidates for chair of the Democratic National Committee. Ben Wikler, who is currently chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, made a very encouraging remark: “It’s the people least likely to seek out information about either party who we lost in this election. They’re generally younger, more working class.”
For the party, Wikler said, “solving the information problem has to be a core focus,” requiring a “constant effort to get out of our heads and into the minds of the extraordinarily diverse electorate that is getting information from a dizzying array of places.”
Minnesota Chair Ken Martin and former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley also made important remarks about Democrats' ecosystem disadvantage. I encourage people to check out Sargent’s column.
Ken Martin made an especially important remark also about how Democrats have become addicted to ineffective television ads that have zero lasting impact. And they take away money from the thousands of center-left commentators who would love nothing more than to be paid to advocate against the Republican Party's extremism and for a shared future where everyone has a chance.
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People expecting Trump voters to turn on him are fooling themselves
John StoehrNovember 20, 2024
There’s an argument I want to discuss. It goes something like this: Donald Trump’s policies are going to alienate some of the people who voted for him. To be sure, many of them wanted something done about the economy. Prices were too damn high. But they didn’t sign up for tariffs, deportations and cuts to social services, like food stamps.
As a liberal pundit put it, Trump seems poised to follow through with that policy agenda, though going through with it is “political suicide.”
My question is why.
Why are we expecting so much from Trump voters? I’m not making a distinction between his base and those who chose to go along for the ride. I mean all of his supporters, and I’m asking: Why should we place our democratic faith, and the future of the republic, in their hands?
It’s not like Trump had an agenda to bring down the cost of living. All he said was “Make America Great Again.” Deport “illegals.” Suppress transgender rights. Beat down weak and marginalized folks. Voila!
His one economic plan was tariffs. A tax on imported goods from China and elsewhere will raise prices on everything, not just imports, as retailers will price-gouge under cover of inflation. They’re the opposite of what you do to reduce costs. And that’s why he lied. He said nations would pay for them, not companies bringing goods in.
His voters chose to believe him.
So let me get this straight.
People who can’t or won’t understand tariffs are going to deduce all by themselves that tariffs are the reason they’re now paying three and four times more for their sneakers, T-shirts and video-game consoles?
People who voted against their own economic interests are going to figure out on their own what exactly those interests are, but only after they’ve been screwed over by the president they voted for?
To paraphrase Mark Twain, it would be easier to continue scamming these people than convince them that they’ve been scammed.
And the scamming will continue.
The rightwing media apparatus, which is global in scale, prevented these voters from knowing what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had done for the economy, inflation, wages and the GDP, but especially for the material interests of the white working class. Biden and Harris literally ditched 40 years of supply-side consensus in favor of growing the economy, as Biden liked to say, from the bottom up and middle out. But no one who watches Fox or listens to Joe Rogan or reads The Daily Wire or sees YouTube ads for gold bullion knows any of that.
This same rightwing media apparatus, which has only grown larger since 2020, is going to prevent Trump voters from knowing who’s responsible for price hikes, job losses and soaring interest rates that will be directly attributable to deportations, tariffs and other insane policies. If there’s someone to blame, it won’t be Donald Trump. It will be RINOs or “Marxist, communist, fascist, socialists” or immigrants.
If Trump voters are not especially attuned to the rightwing media apparatus, they will nevertheless feel its ambiance, as the Washington press corps habitually launders Trump’s talking points and, as we have seen, appeases him by either self-censoring or acting as if already under threat of investigation or prosecution by his administration.
If Trump voters are able to see through the fog of the rightwing media apparatus and the Washington press corps, they still might not understand the damage done by Trump’s economic policies, as his administration will almost certainly try to corrupt government data. The jobs report, inflation index, consumer spending – there will huge incentive to fudge those after Trump commits “political suicide.”
If Trump voters are able to connect all the dots and blame him for everything he did or didn’t do, as they blamed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for everything they did and didn’t do, so what? Is Trump going to respond to the backlash as if he were a normal president?
He doesn’t care about his party. He doesn’t care about the next election (presuming he doesn’t run again). It’s hard to see any incentive outside his self-interest that would move him to back off anything.
I haven’t mentioned the fact that these voters, even the ones who chose to go along for the ride, inhabit a world of fantastical fiction, absolute trash reality, that none of us should put our hopes in.
These people believe mothers “abort” babies after they’re born or if they don’t believe it, they don’t mind people who say so. They believe a student goes to school as a girl and comes back as a boy or if they don’t believe it, they don’t mind people who say so. Even if we give them the benefit of the doubt, and treat them more like children than adults, are we going to trust them to realize Trump is bad for them?
And even if Trump voters turn against Trump, thus creating an opportunity for the Democrats to win them over, are they going to recognize what the Democrats are offering in terms of economic policy given the hold the rightwing media apparatus has on them and given their past record of voting against their own economic interests?
I’ll pass.
I’ll pass on believing these people can learn the hard way what happens when you don’t take democracy seriously, when you can’t figure out whether it’s a good idea to put a crook in the White House. They don’t take their own lives that seriously, neither their physical nor spiritual selves, much less the fate of a constitutional republic.
I’ll put my faith in good people who seek out good trouble in the name of liberty, equality and justice for all. They’re a minority these days, but that’s OK. The world never changed for the better because a majority wanted it. It changed because a righteous minority demanded it.
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Until there’s a liberal media apparatus, the Democrats will live in Trump’s America
Donald Trump gestures next to Patty Morin, whose daughter Rachel was killed in Maryland last year, during a campaign rally at Santander Arena in Reading, Pennsylvania, U.S., November 4, 2024. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
John Stoehr November 21, 2024
It takes time for things to stick properly, so please bear with me while I say again that Kamala Harris did not lose the election because of things she said. She lost because of things Donald Trump said she said.
So Democratic Party critics are basing their criticism not on what Harris said but on what Trump said she said, as they are accepting as true the allegations of the president-elect against the vice president.
By focusing on things that Trump said she said, rather than on things she said, these critics are missing the real lesson from the 2024 election – that her policies were not the determining factor in her defeat. It was the ear-splitting volume of the accusations against her and the absence of equal and opposite accusations against him.
In the final weeks of the election, the Trump campaign spent more than $29 million on television ads attacking Harris on trans rights. It was “by far, the biggest focal point when it comes to Trump’s ad spending — one of the best barometers of messaging priority there is,” wroteThe Bulwark’s Marc Caputo on October 24. “By contrast, the campaign has spent $5 million over that same time period on TV ads on the economy, making that topic their fifth-most emphasized.”
According to a new study by a Democratic pollster, Trump’s attack ads largely explain the outcome of the election. The report calculated the percentage of swing voters who voted for Trump in the belief that Harris supported federal funding of transgender surgeries on undocumented immigrants. It was a whopping 83 percent.
Conclusion:
“These voters — who remained open to persuasion until the very end — delivered not just a rejection of Harris but what they believed the Democratic Party stands for, absorbing rightwing narratives.”
Harris didn’t lose because of things she said.
She lost because of things Trump said she said.
Critics of the Democratic Party will point out that, ackshually, Harris did say she supported access to gender-transition care for undocumented immigrants. But that was once, in 2019, during her first run, and it wasn’t a campaign pledge. She wasn’t running on it. She gave an affirmative answer to an ACLU questionnaire. This year, her campaign explicitly rejected the questionnaire as having any bearing on her platform as the 2024 nominee. Indeed, she did what critics say she should do. She backed away from lefty woke things like trans rights.
And it didn’t matter.
It didn’t matter because what she said, the substance of her message wasn’t as important to the outcome of the election as the volume of it, which is to say, the substance of what she said could not be heard through the din of the rightwing media apparatus. As media expert Matthew Sheffield said today, nothing was going to get through that, not even the shared reality of the economy. “Through seven TV channels, more than 1,500 talk-radio stations, and millions of social media posts. Republicans sold a fictional narrative about the economy to unsuspecting Americans. Trump inherited a strong economy from Obama and then destroyed it. Democrats never told the story.”
They couldn’t. No one was listening, because no one could hear it. Trump’s attack ads worked in tandem with thousands of media sites, including the one formerly known as Twitter, that have been operating around the clock since 2020, often in parallel with the Washington press corps. They were able to take one small thing Harris said years ago and turn it into a caricature so ridiculous that a convicted felon like Donald Trump could look like a viable candidate by comparison.
It was so loud some voters didn’t know what the Democrats stand for.
And that includes some Democratic voters.
Harris won more votes than Trump did in 2020 (she now has 74.3 million to his 74.2), but she did not win as many as Joe Biden in 2020. (He won 81.3 million votes, the most ever, while Trump won 76.8 million this year, the second-most ever.) Where did they go?
You could say voter suppression laws, but I think a bigger source of “voter suppression” was lies and propaganda, directly or indirectly from rightwing media outlets or from anti-trans attack ads, or in the form of “false-flag efforts” funded by billionaires, including Twitter’s Elon Musk, to make Democratic voters feel like there’s no point in voting for Harris. “The entire goal of the campaign was to push her numbers down,” a top Trump adviser told the Post. Clearly, it worked.
The volume of the rightwing media apparatus, especially when it’s in sync with the Washington press corps, is so loud that it can feel like the ultimate arbiter of our political reality. As one CNN anchor put it this morning, this is Donald Trump’s America. We’re just living in it. Until there’s a liberal media apparatus, one that can meet bad info with good info, the Democrats will continue living in Trump’s America, too.
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Home | Trump voters need to be held accountable for their choice — here's why
John Stoehr November 24, 2024
For now, I’m not getting involved in the debate over what Kamala Harris did wrong. For one thing, whatever conclusions are drawn now will almost certainly be forgotten by the time of the next election. For another, the debate takes vital attention away from the choice of the majority of American voters, which is to say, their terrible choice.
Why did they break for Donald Trump? Lots of worthy people are going to spend lots of time exploring that question. I won’t, though. What I know is that Trump campaigned on easily proven lies. What I also know is his supporters chose to believe them. What I care about now are the consequences of that choice, and those consequences are going to be bad for all of us, including everyone who voted for him.
This month, the president-elect said among the first things he’s going to do is eliminate the US Department of Education. That agency not only sends federal money to local school districts, it makes sure children are treated equally. This is usually understood in terms of race, but special-education is protected too, and it needs it. There was a time in American history when special-needs kids were told to sink or swim.
My kid is one of those kids, and if the funding and protection she now has disappears, I’m going to take that personally. I’m going to blame everyone who supported Trump. I won’t care if they didn’t believe he’d follow through on his pledge. I won’t care if they didn’t know about it. I won’t care if they were lied to by the rightwing media apparatus. I won’t care if the kids of Trump voters are themselves victims of their parents’ bad choices. I’m going to blame them and I will be right to.
ALSO READ: The end of left-leaning news?
Ignorance is no defense in law.
It should be no defense in politics either.
Trump has also promised to impose punishing tariffs on imported goods from countries like China and Mexico. Tariffs are a tax and every adult knows how a tax works. Yes, some of his supporters pretended not to know that importers pass that cost on to consumers. But whether they did or didn’t is going to be irrelevant to me when I’m paying two or three times more for necessities like food and clothing.
As I’m standing in the checkout at Stop & Shop, sticker-shocked for the umpteenth time, I’m not going to be wondering what Kamala Harris could have done to persuade white working-class Americans to vote for her. I’m not going to feel sympathy for them, knowing that they decided to impoverish themselves out of spite and resentment. No, I’ll be too busy cursing them for the titanic a--holes they are.
Trump has also promised to deport millions of so-called illegal immigrants. He said he’ll only go after “the bad ones” and his supporters, even some Latinos, decided to believe a liar. But I’m not going to care how they came to that decision if the government starts snatching taxpayers out of their homes, arresting and detaining whole families, including US citizens, in the insane belief that doing so is going to make America great again. Why should I care about why they voted the way they did when the consequence of that choice brings chaos to communities, decimates the labor supply and raises prices?
Trump has denied it, but his Republicans are looking forward to taking another crack at repealing the Affordable Care Act. Tens of millions of Americans depend on Obamacare, including independent businesspeople, like me, who could not do what we do without the law. Voters who supported Trump are included in that number, but again, it does not matter to me whether they knew a vote for him was a vote for abolishing affordable insurance. I tend to lose interest in the reasons behind another person’s choices if those choices ruin me.
The conventional wisdom is that Trump inflamed resentments in order to win. What’s missing from that story is that the resentments are over race, or rather racism. Fact is, lots of white people feel like nonwhite people are taking something from them when they do better for themselves. Trump has made an art form out of getting white people to believe nonwhite people are robbing them, making them poorer, even when the economy is rapidly benefiting those same white people.
Well, when it comes to resentment, you haven’t seen anything yet.
If Trump does what he says, by the time he’s done, America is going to be poorer, sicker, weaker and more chaotic. In some cases, he will have done irreparable harm, as he did last time he was president, including to the people who supported him. And he will have done it because … well, it doesn’t matter. They made their choice and it was terrible.
And the rest of us will be right to resent it.
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Trump's Cabinet of horrors exposes his totalitarian drift
President Donald Trump and former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard embrace, joined by Tucker Carlson on stage at a campaign event sponsored by conservative group Turning Point USA, in Duluth, Georgia, U.S., October 23, 2024. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
Donald Trump nominated an alleged rapist and sex trafficker to be attorney general. He picked a Russian asset to be director of national intelligence. He chose a religious fanatic and Kremlin stooge to be secretary of defense. And for secretary of health and human resources, he selected an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who once had a literal brain worm, and who habitually takes (“legal”) steroids to maintain, at the age of 70, the appearance of a physique of a man half his age.
There are the obvious things to say about this motley crew. Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and Robert F Kennedy Jr are not qualified, respectively, to lead the agencies they have been chosen to lead. None has managed anything larger than an office. None has the expertise required. Gaetz has never worked in law enforcement, Gabbard in intelligence, Hegseth in military leadership or Kennedy in public health. Their only qualification is their loyalty to the man who picked them, and how they look to him when they are on television.
Right now, the discussion seems to be concentrated on the Senate Republicans, who will have majority control of that chamber in January. They will be responsible ultimately for vetting Trump’s cabinet picks. The question is whether they will find the courage to restrain the president-elect or roll over, either by approving them or by letting Trump have what he wants through recess appointments.
Among liberals, the discussion seems to be limited to the absurdities each of these people brings to governance as well as the dangers they pose. “Yes, shake your head at the seeming absurdity of these picks,” wrote MSNBC’s Jen Psaki. “But don’t stop there. These choices aren’t just controversial; they require us to stay vigilant about how each potential new Cabinet member could negatively affect our lives.”
But I think we’re missing the bigger picture. These nominations signal the totalitarian drift that’s coming to Washington and the country. Yes, that’s right. No, I’m not exaggerating. It’s time to start using that word.
Totalitarianism seeks dominion over the individual to the point where individuality is erased. That’s what happened to the Republican Party. Individuals have looked the same, talked the same, acted the same and thought the same for a long time. (The men sometimes literally dress the same as Donald Trump, with a blue suit, a long red tie.) After the election, however, Republican behavior has finally been totalized.
As one GOP congressman said, Trump “is the leader of our party. … His goals and objectives, whatever that is, we need to embrace it. All of it. Every single word. If Donald Trump says jump three feet high and scratch your head, we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads.”
The objective is forcing the rest of America to conform the way the Republican Party has conformed. This can be seen in the anger expressed by some magas. It wasn’t enough to win. Losers must now shut up and get in line, too. As a Trump attorney said recently: “You’ve got to own when you lose and say: this is America. We have to stand behind President Trump.” Senate Republicans are likely to approve his picks, no matter how bad, because the losers must be taught a lesson.
Totalitarianism also seeks to dominate the individual’s mind by going to war against facts, reason, science and any useful meaning of the word “proof.” In normal times, pre-Trump, we could expect in the Senate a spirited debate over a president-elect’s cabinet nominations, beginning with whether they’re qualified. Such debate is going to be impossible now, because “being qualified” is a meaningless term.
It is a stone-cold fact that Kennedy’s views on vaccines are not only insane, but in direct opposition to the moral principles of public health. But that fact won’t be accepted as fact. It will be taken as evidence of Trump’s enemies trying to sabotage his presidency. And there’s no way to break through this conspiracist mindset, as Lindsay Beyerstein calls it. It is impervious, she said. “When scientists or the government or journalists come forward with evidence that vaccines save millions of lives and prevent untold suffering, the conspiracist answer is: Well, that’s what conspirators to kill our children would say.”
Because there’s no empirical anchor to conspiratorial thinking, totalitarians can make reality into whatever they want. Up is down, left is right – or in the words of the totalitarian regime in George Orwell’s 1984: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
Therefore, the Republicans are likely to see nothing wrong with his picks. His nominee for the law is anti-law. His nominee for national intelligence is anti-intelligence. His nominee for national defense is anti-defense. His nominee for science is anti-science. But there’s no dissonance in the world of conspiratorial thinking. Up is the new down, and the only measure of morality is whether it pleases the dear leader.
The drift toward conformity and away from individualism isn’t limited to the GOP. Thanks to the rightwing media apparatus, which is global in scale, totalizing groupthink has also been growing in the culture at large. The trick is that it comes disguised as subversive individualism.
During his interview with Trump, popular podcaster Joe Rogan said “the rebels are Republicans now. They’re like, you want to be a rebel? You want to be punk rock? You want to, like, buck the system? You’re a conservative now. That's how crazy. And then the liberals are now pro-silencing criticism. They’re pro-censorship online. They’re talking about regulating free speech and regulating the First Amendment.”
If you are listening to liberals directly, you know there are no such efforts. But if you are listening the rightwing media apparatus, or if you just feel the conspiratorial ambiance that it generates, it’s possible to cast yourself as a man who’s bucking the system, as if the party of billionaires is the party of the common man, as if people who look the same, talk the same, act the same and think the same are punk rock.
But the strongest evidence of totalitarian drift is the plain awfulness of Trump’s cabinet picks. They have not earned the right to be called on. They haven’t studied or mastered their disciplines. They haven’t built reputations among leaders, peers and professionals in their fields. They haven’t overcome adversity and hardship. They haven’t reached high and achieved. They certainly haven’t followed the road toward the American dream, which asks us to work hard and play by the rules.
And that’s the point. Totalitarians fear individual excellence, first because they can’t understand it, and second because excellence threatens their goal of totalizing conformity. They are not humble enough to admit that they are mediocre people but they are arrogant enough to believe they can force the rest of us down to their level.
With this cabinet, Trump can pick up where his second campaign left off, which is movement toward “the consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity …” as Hannah Arendt once wrote.
“Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable,” she said. “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty” (my italics).
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Why Trump voters should be held accountable for their choice
John Stoehr November 13, 2024
For now, I’m not getting involved in the debate over what Kamala Harris did wrong. For one thing, whatever conclusions are drawn now will almost certainly be forgotten by the time of the next election. For another, the debate takes vital attention away from the choice of the majority of American voters, which is to say, their terrible choice.
Why did they break for Donald Trump? Lots of worthy people are going to spend lots of time exploring that question. I won’t, though. What I know is that Trump campaigned on easily proven lies. What I also know is his supporters chose to believe them. What I care about now are the consequences of that choice, and those consequences are going to be bad for all of us, including everyone who voted for him.
Yesterday, the president-elect said among the first things he’s going to do is eliminate the US Department of Education. That agency not only sends federal money to local school districts, it makes sure children are treated equally. This is usually understood in terms of race, but special-education is protected too, and it needs it. There was a time in American history when special-needs kids were told to sink or swim.
My kid is one of those kids, and if the funding and protection she now has disappears, I’m going to take that personally. I’m going to blame everyone who supported Trump. I won’t care if they didn’t believe he’d follow through on his pledge. I won’t care if they didn’t know about it. I won’t care if they were lied to by the rightwing media apparatus. I won’t care if the kids of Trump voters are themselves victims of their parents’ bad choices. I’m going to blame them and I will be right to.
Ignorance is no defense in law.
It should be no defense in politics either.
Trump has also promised to impose punishing tariffs on imported goods from countries like China and Mexico. Tariffs are a tax and every adult knows how a tax works. Yes, some of his supporters pretended not to know that importers pass that cost on to consumers. But whether they did or didn’t is going to be irrelevant to me when I’m paying two or three times more for necessities like food and clothing.
As I’m standing in the checkout at Stop & Shop, sticker-shocked for the umpteenth time, I’m not going to be wondering what Kamala Harris could have done to persuade white working-class Americans to vote for her. I’m not going to feel sympathy for them, knowing that they decided to impoverish themselves out of spite and resentment. No, I’ll be too busy cursing them for the titanic assholes they are.
Trump has also promised to deport millions of so-called illegal immigrants. He said he’ll only go after “the bad ones” and his supporters, even some Latinos, decided to believe a liar. But I’m not going to care how they came to that decision if the government starts snatching taxpayers out of their homes, arresting and detaining whole families, including US citizens, in the insane belief that doing so is going to make America great again. Why should I care about why they voted the way they did when the consequence of that choice brings chaos to communities, decimates the labor supply and raises prices?
Trump has denied it, but his Republicans are looking forward to taking another crack at repealing the Affordable Care Act. Tens of millions of Americans depend on Obamacare, including independent businesspeople, like me, who could not do what we do without the law. Voters who supported Trump are included in that number, but again, it does not matter to me whether they knew a vote for him was a vote for abolishing affordable insurance. I tend to lose interest in the reasons behind another person’s choices if those choices ruin me.
The conventional wisdom is that Trump inflamed resentments in order to win. What’s missing from that story is that the resentments are over race, or rather racism. Fact is, lots of white people feel like nonwhite people are taking something from them when they do better for themselves. Trump has made an art form out of getting white people to believe nonwhite people are robbing them, making them poorer, even when the economy is rapidly benefiting those same white people.
Well, when it comes to resentment, you haven’t seen anything yet.
If Trump does what he says, by the time he’s done, America is going to be poorer, sicker, weaker and more chaotic. In some cases, he will have done irreparable harm, as he did last time he was president, including to the people who supported him. And he will have done it because … well, it doesn’t matter. They made their choice and it was terrible.
And the rest of us will be right to resent it.
ymail 11 24
What do the Democrats do now?
Whatever they do, it better start with better information.
I was wrong about this election. Maybe I erred largely on the side of hoping too much. I hoped that most people in America understood that Donald Trump was the worst candidate of our lifetimes. And as a consequence of understanding that, I hoped that most people would make the right decision for themselves, their children and their country. How wrong I was.
I don’t blame Kamala Harris. I don’t think anyone should. The vice president ran pretty much the perfect campaign, according to people who have worked with presidential nominees. In terms of policy, in terms of messaging, in terms of get-out-the-vote – it was as good as anyone could expect from a candidate who started in July. Her campaign was “all gas, no brakes.” I think she did everything she could. So did all the pro-democracy people out there. It just wasn’t enough.
We can and will argue about why this happened. Some will say that Joe Biden should have decided sooner against running for reelection. Some say that Harris didn’t take this or that policy position to appeal to this or that voting bloc. Some say that a woman, especially a biracial woman, was never going to win anyway. Some say that the Washington press corps failed to inform the electorate properly. And so on.
While all of these complaints have merit in and of themselves, I think none of them explains what happened on their own. Bottom line: most people, which is to say, most white people in this still majority-white country, wanted what Trump was offering them, even though what he was actually offering was either little more than machismo and vengeance or policies that will hurt everyone if implemented.
Trump is, as a shrewd observer put it, the whitest white man we have ever seen. That can erase a multitude of sins. “So am I to understand that leading a coup, promoting the Big Lie, being found liable for rape and guilt of fraud, growing more extreme, threatening to be a dictator and suffering dementia actually strengthened Trump politically?” David Rothkopf said. “It does not compute.” But it kinda sorta does.
If it was hard for my liberal and Democratic brethren to hear before the election, it shouldn’t be now. Lots of Americans do not believe in democracy in any universal sense. They believe in democracy that is exclusive, indeed that is punitive. Trump has promised retribution against his enemies and lots of Americans liked the sound of that.
My hope was that there were more people who wanted our democracy to be inclusive than there were those who wanted it to be exclusive. My hope was that the story of progress in America, with expanding rights and opportunities for all, would continue the way it seemed to after Joe Biden’s election. It’s moments like this, in the aftermath of a shocking election, when I find myself second-guessing such hopes.
Some are already saying that the Democrat Party needs to soul-search. The election, said Connecticut’s Democratic Governor Ned Lamont, “was a real wake up call for Democrats. It was overwhelming. We can point to Trump’s personality, whatever you want to say, but Democrats lost a lot of the working families. We lost a lot of males — lost males of different races, color and creed. And it ought to be a wake up call, and we’ve got to be fighting for the middle class and fighting for them every day. And I think they feel like we lost sight of that.”
But I don’t think the Democrats need to change who they are and what they stand for to reach just enough white people in just enough swing states. The Biden presidency put the federal government on the side of the working and middle classes. Indeed, Biden talked endlessly about the dignity of work, a clear signal to “a lot of males.” The Harris campaign aimed to build on that by expanding Medicare, cutting taxes for families, helping small businesses grow, fighting for labor rights and so on. The Democratic Party as it stands is a multiracial party oriented economically toward everyone who works for a living.
In other words, the Democratic Party is populist in that it stands for and advances policies that are popular. The Republicans know and fear that. Otherwise, they would not have taken credit for infrastructure projects nationwide that Biden and the Democrats enacted and that nearly every congressional Republican voted against. Moreover, when pollsters ask respondents which policies they like best, majorities usually favor Democratic policies over policies that the GOP offers.
What the Democrats do not do, but that the Republicans do do, is single out to ridicule a subgroup or subculture for the purpose of making just enough white people in just enough swing states feel better about themselves. To be precise, the Democrats do not tear down immigrants or trans people or anyone to give the impression of justice being served to voters who believe that minorities are taking something from them. They do not dance around that gray area between bigotry and “the economy.” They don’t do that and never should. If they do, they will collapse, as a party, from the inside out.
But what should the Democrats do?
For now, I’ll say this: whatever they do, it had better be with the understanding that we are now living in a new age of fear, ignorance and superstition to such a staggering degree that we will go back, to paraphrase Harris, if the Democratic Party doesn’t take it seriously. Lies, propaganda and disinformation are coming from all corners of the globe, including from places like Russia, China and Iran, but the clearinghouse here is the GOP and the rightwing media apparatus.
Joe Biden and the Democrats saved the economy and made it the envy of the world. They pulled us out of a pandemic that killed a million of us. They brought prosperity back to every one of the so-called “left behind” counties. They tamed inflation post-covid without triggering a ruinous recession. But none of that mattered to swing-state voters awash in lies. The Forward’s Alex Zeldin put it this way: “If your media consumption is a Fox morning show, Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, Jordan Peterson, Prager, Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder, rightwing memes on reddit, Twitter and Instagram, and your nightly consumption is Fox, you will have no way of knowing anything good Democrats do.”
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alternet no lnx
Citizenship cannot save you from fascism
Donald J. Trump, joined by Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch and U.S. Attorney General William Barr, meets with states attorneys general on protecting consumers from social media abuse Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2020, in the Cabinet Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)
John StoehrOctober 31, 2024
The debate over Donald Trump’s fascist rally at Madison Square Garden has focused primarily on fallout from insulting Puerto Ricans with a “joke” about the US territory being an “island of garbage.”
“That is the October surprise,” GOP strategist Mike Madrid told Greg Sargent. “Surprise, Donald Trump, you blew yourself up. Yes, it could absolutely bring Pennsylvania into the win column for [Kamala] Harris."
But something’s missing from the debate.
Why did this backfire?
I mean, Trump hasn’t been campaigning for president so much as leading a vengeance movement against alleged “enemies from within” – ie, anyone who displeases him. He has vowed to purge America of “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood” of the country. Last weekend’s rally was merely a culmination of a year’s worth of prejudice porn. Speakers there assailed immigrants, Jews, Black people and more.
But somehow Trump seemed to have taken a lot of people by surprise, particularly Puerto Ricans. Puerto Rican celebrities seemed especially revolted. Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin endorsed Harris only after the “island of garbage” line blew up. Musician Nicky Jam had actually endorsed Trump, but rescinded his endorsement afterward.
“I never thought in my life that a month later a comedian would come along and criticize my country [sic], speak poorly of my country [sic], therefore I renounce any support for Donald Trump," Jam wrote.
How is this possible?
The answer might be rooted in the complicated nature of Latino identity and the hierarchies within it that have emerged in relation to white-power politics in America. Put plainly, some Puerto Ricans are white or can pass for white. Most of them speak English. Because the island is a US territory, all Puerto Ricans are US citizens who can vote.
Compared to Latinos who are not white, who do not speak English and who cannot vote, Puerto Ricans have a lot going for them in a country like ours that’s still shaped and formed largely by the cultural and political preferences of white people. Some Puerto Ricans might have even believed that no matter how bad Trump gets, it won’t affect them much. After all, they have the rights and privileges of citizenship.
I don’t want to undervalue the fact that lots of people just don’t pay attention to politics. Nicky Jam said he had endorsed Trump, because “I thought that was the best for the economy in the US, where many Latinos live, including myself, where many immigrants are suffering because of the economy, and him being a businessman I thought that was the best move." I would guess that Jam had other things to do.
But I don’t think Jam and others were shocked by “island of garbage” because they were preoccupied. I suspect they were shocked because they realized something profound – that their assumptions were wrong. They presumed that citizenship was an issue of legal status. Once a citizen, always a citizen, no matter how you look. But Trump’s hate-rally undermined that understanding. It revealed that his fascists will not honor the letter of the law, much less the spirit of it. They will target you if you’re illegal. They will target you if you “don’t look legal” – and “don’t look illegal” isn’t a matter of law. It’s a matter of whiteness.
I don’t mean to suggest Puerto Ricans don’t experience racism. That would be stupid. I do mean to suggest that some, including perhaps Nicky Jam, underestimate what it means when someone says, as Stephen Miller did, that “America is for Americans and Americans only.” It means there’s nothing legally special about being Puerto Ricans. From Miller’s view, they’re all “Mexicans” and all “Mexicans” need to go. If Trump wins, Miller would likely be in charge of executing a massive operation to arrest and detain everyone who doesn’t “look American.”
That operation is usually described as a “deportation program,” but I don’t see any reason why such an undertaking would be restricted to “illegal immigrants.” The point of the exercise is to purge the “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood” of the country. It is to “cure the disease” and eradicate “the enemies within.” Things like legal status and citizenship won’t stop fascists from pursuing those goals once they have power. Nothing will, not even another white person’s whiteness.
This is why the “island of garbage” line should be profoundly shocking to more than the Puerto Rican population of the United States. It should shake everyone to their core. Its message is as simple as it is horrifying - the rights and privileges of citizenship cannot save you.
To achieve the goal of dominance and control – of making America for Americans only – fascists in power need only define “American” according to the most restrictive terms possible. But these terms would never be static. They would change according to need.
So even if you meet the fascist definition of “American,” you might not be white enough or male enough or Christian enough. This is what happened to the GOP. No one could say Mitt Romney wasn’t a Republican, but to the fascists, he would never be Republican enough. He didn’t belong and over time, they purged him from the party.
As it stands, the debate over Trump’ fascist rally is centered on the outrage felt by Puerto Ricans who are now remembering Donald Trump’s treatment of the island after Hurricane Maria ravaged it in 2017. They are remembering that he called them dirty, that he threw paper towels at them, and that he held up scores of millions in relief until the last days of his term. The story now is about how Trump alienated voters he needs to win. The story is about PR payback.
There’s more to the story. If native-born citizens can be dehumanized as “garbage,” anyone can be. If anyone can be, no one is truly safe.
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AlternetFor Republicans — the outgroup can take care of itself — or die trying
John Stoehr October 10, 2024
During a national emergency, it’s good to say that “we’re all in this together.” Whether it’s a war, a pandemic or a hurricane, everyone is affected. Everyone has a stake in the outcome. And if we don’t believe and act like we are all in this together, the crisis will get worse.
This idea of collective fate in the face of dire threats to our lives and fortunes is conventional. So much so that it beggars belief when rightwing politicians tell us that, actually, we’re not all in this together.
It beggars belief so much that it’s just easier, mentally speaking, for ordinary people who have a sense of the national good to say that rightwingers don’t really mean it. It’s easier to believe they really do share the same core values as we do, but aren’t living up to them.
It’s easier to call them hypocrites.
In defiance of God
Rightwingers are not hypocrites, though. They believe American society is divided into ingroups and outgroups. The former is good, right and deserving. The latter is bad, wrong and undeserving. When there’s a national emergency, the federal government should help the ingroup, because it’s the only group that constitutes a “real nation.”
Meanwhile, the outgroup can take care of itself.
Or die trying.
Not only do they believe American society is divided into ingroups and outgroups, they believe it ought to be. The orders of power should be vertical and hierarchical. That is the ideal, because that is “natural.”
For this reason, liberal efforts to flatten the orders of power, so that the outgroup has as many rights and privileges as the ingroup, are seen by rightwingers as a perversion of the natural order of things.
To them, we are not all in this together, because we can’t be.
If we were, that would be in defiance of God.
Barbarism, not hypocrisy
No matter how many times rightwingers tell us what they really believe, the rest of us cling to the belief that they really don’t.
Stubbornly, we insist that they will set aside politics during a national emergency and that, in the end, they will choose nation over party.
While some of us realize that they will never set aside politics, not even during a national emergency, most of us don’t understand why.
The reason?
They already put the nation above all else. The politics that we keep expecting them to set aside are in service to the nation as they define it, and they define the nation in ways most Americans never would.
For most people, the nation is everyone. We’re all in this together.
For rightwingers, the nation is them. You’re with us or against us.
They are not hypocrites. They are the “real Americans,” God’s chosen. They are not failing to live up to their values. They are realizing them.
What the rest of us fail to understand is that those values are horrible. They are not only illiberal and anti-democratic, they are barbarous.
So barbarous that it beggars belief.
It’s easier to call them hypocrites.
You can’t shame a zealot
Barbarism, not hypocrisy, is the reason why a Florida Republican could say with a straight face that FEMA funding should come in advance of Hurricane Milton even though she voted to cut it a few weeks prior.
Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna falsely implied that Kamala Harris and the Biden administration were withholding disaster relief, even though she “voted to shut down the federal government, vetoing a measure to extend FEMA funding by $20 billion,” according to the New Republic. “Luna was among 82 House Republicans who voted against the deal and one of 11 Florida lawmakers who cast dissenting votes.”
Luna’s critics would allege that she’s saying one thing but doing another, but it’s the opposite to her. Demanding government money if it helps the ingroup is in keeping with withholding government money if it hurts the outgroup. Indeed, the concept is so natural to Luna that she’s falsely accusing the vice president of doing the very same thing.
When Republicans like Luna do this, critics often despair. They say there’s no bottom for these people. There’s no shame. They’ve abandoned their principles. They’ve followed Donald Trump too far.
Again, it’s the opposite.
They are realizing their principles.
They want a society in which the ingroup gets the blessings of freedom and democracy, and all the government assistance, while the outgroup gets whatever’s coming to it. If a hurricane plows into Florida, God’s chosen must be helped! If it plows into Puerto Rico, well, tough luck.
They want such tyranny, because they believe God wants it.
You can shame a hypocrite.
You can’t shame a zealot.
No such thing as collective fate
Barbarism, not hypocrisy, is also the reason Trump can betray America without risking his reputation among zealots for putting America first.
To them, it doesn’t matter that, as president during the pandemic, he sent Vladimir Putin covid tests for his personal use, as the country struggled with shortages. It doesn’t matter, as my senator Chris Murphy said, that “he decided to let Americans die to keep Putin alive.”
The “America” in “America first” is not America. It’s the ingroup. And the ingroup has more in common with Russia than the outgroup.
Russia is a top-down society in which the orders of power are strictly maintained. Liberal efforts to flatten those orders democratically are crushed, often violently, with every instrument of the state.
In times of national emergency, as there is with Russia’s war against Ukraine, there is no such thing as a collective fate. They don’t believe “we’re all in this together.” The weak are sacrificed by the strong.
Russia is the ideal.
It’s what the ingroup believes America should be.
And if Trump helped an ally in God’s plan, so be it.
:{:{Barbarism is bizarre}:
Joe Biden didn’t say “we’re all in this together,” but he meant that when he said there are neither blue states nor red states in the face of national emergencies like Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton.
“There’s one United States of America,” he said, “where neighbors are helping neighbors, volunteers and first-responders are risking everything, including their own lives, to help their fellow Americans.”
To meet our collective fate, we must be able to trust each other, and to do that, everyone must have good information. That’s why Trump and the Republicans are lying so much. It doesn’t matter that they’re hurting their own. What matters to them is preventing the spirit of solidarity from destabilizing rightwing forces that keep us apart.
Biden offered a liberal alternative to barbarism.
“Former President Trump has led the onslaught of lies,” Biden said. “Assertions have been made that property has been confiscated. That’s simply not true. They’re saying people impacted by these storms will receive $750 in cash and no more. That’s simply not true. They’re saying the money needed in this crisis is being diverted to migrants. What a ridiculous thing to say. It’s not true. Now the claims are getting more bizarre. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, from Georgia, is now saying the government is literally controlling the weather – controlling the weather! It’s beyond ridiculous. It’s got to stop.”
The lies and disinformation won’t stop, of course, because zealots like Greene believe they’re fighting for their country. They believe Donald Trump is their champion. They believe they are God’s chosen.
If they were hypocrites, they could be shamed into doing the right thing and acting like we really are all in this together. Hypocrisy isn’t the problem, though. Barbarism is, no matter how bizarre it seems.
alternet-no lnx
Trump reaped what he sowed
John Stoehr July 16, 2024
The Washington press and pundit corps are this week working hard to convince you that the attempted assassination of Donald Trump is the superlative example of what happens when polarization goes too far.
They are telling a story in which the leading characters are the former president and his Republicans, and Joe Biden and his Democrats. The plot is about a nation on fire, a people at war with themselves, and so forth. Some have even depicted Sunday’s prime-time address by the president as if he were “bothsidesing” the issue of political violence.
He wasn’t. Instead, Joe Biden listed examples of rightwing political violence. “Violence has never been the answer” to solving the problems of American democracy, he said, “whether it’s with members of Congress in both parties being targeted in the shot, or a violent mob attacking the Capitol on January 6th, or a brutal attack on the spouse of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, or information and intimidation on election officials, or the kidnapping plot against a sitting governor, or an attempted assassination on Donald Trump.”
That Biden listed examples of rightwing political violence seems to have gone over some heads. Ditto for the fact that he correctly included in those examples the attempted assassination of Trump. For some reason, it seems hard for members of the press and pundit corps to believe that America’s leading advocate of rightwing political violence could be a victim of it. And so dedicated are they to telling a story that blames both sides that it’s equally hard for them to believe Biden and the Democrats have nothing to do with it. There’s only one side to blame here. Trump and the GOP have reaped what they sowed.
Soon after Donald Trump was whisked off the stage in Pennsylvania, the Republicans began creating conditions in which Biden and the Democrats seem to be responsible for Trump’s assassination attempt. US Senator JD Vance, of Ohio, is representative in this. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” he said. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
No, it didn’t.
Calling out Donald Trump’s fascist tendencies is democratic politics. Characterizing him as a fraud, insurrectionist and rapist is based on fact. Saying a convicted felon shouldn’t be president is common sense.
Only Trump and the Republicans are to blame for this. They were inciting rightwing political violence before as well as after the failed paramilitary takeover of the US government on January 6. (A shooter massacred Jews in Pittsburgh in 2018, Hispanics in El Paso in 2019, and Black people in Buffalo in 2022. Each echoed Trump’s rightwing views.) Though it has now come for one of their own, they won’t do any soul-searching. They can only blame their enemies for their own transgressions. And the press and pundit corps are playing along.
I don’t know why the assassin, whom I will not name, did what he did. No one yet knows. As is the case with many or most shooters, we may never know his true motives. What we do know is he was a young, white man and a registered Republican, who was apparently steeped in a gun culture that habitually takes an insurrectionist view of the Second Amendment. Perhaps he was mentally ill. Perhaps he wanted to be infamous. Perhaps, like other rightwing shooters, he wanted to start a “race war.” Almost certain is he was a kook. Certain is he believed political violence is an acceptable alternative to democratic politics.[see polls on agree]
I also know that looking at an attempted assassination out of its proper context is a good way to misunderstand it. Its proper context is this: the United States averages about one mass shooting a day, according to the Gun Violence Archive. This year, the total is expected to surpass 500, which would be the fifth time in five years that has happened.
Such frequency is why the US surgeon general said, last month, that gun violence is a public health crisis. “People want to be able to walk through their neighborhoods and be safe,” Dr. Vivek Murthy told the Associated Press. “America should be a place where all of us can go to school, go to work, go to the supermarket, go to our house of worship, without having to worry that that’s going to put our life at risk.”
(By the way, Pennsylvania is an open-carry state, and the shooter, who was shot and killed at the scene, obtained his semiautomatic rifle legally. That puts the Secret Service in a position in which it can’t do anything until there’s gunfire. The FBI, while investigating the crime as a potential act of domestic terrorism, said the shooter acted alone.)
America should be that kind of place, but the Republicans have either stood in the way of federal gun-control legislation or they have, at the state level, expanded access to guns, even guns that are designed to kill in bulk, like the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle that killed a Trump supporter over the weekend and came close to killing Trump himself. The Democrats, meanwhile, have been united in trying to regulate access to guns and, in the process, in trying to thwart mass death.
(More background: The Capitol police investigated more than 9,600 threats against congresspeople this year. That’s 10 times higher than eight years ago. And Robert P. Jones, head of Public Religion Research Institute, said: “We have been tracking an uptick in tolerance for political violence and an uptick in violent rhetoric in our national conversations over the last few years. Self-identified Republicans are three times more likely than Democrats to say they believe true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.”)
It seems no one is talking about Trump’s attempted assassination as part of a larger trend in gun violence in America. And because it seems no one is talking about it that way, no one seems to have noticed that the Republicans are upset about one of their own being a target of attempted murder while throwing up their hands in collective helplessness in every other case. Something must be done about the Democrats’ rhetoric, I guess, but nothing needed to be done, say, after a gunman entered a primary school to shoot 20 first graders to pieces.
Given this context, it should not be surprising that Trump and the Republicans are themselves exceptionally vulnerable to rightwing political violence and threats of it. The policies they have enacted, and the anti-democratic attitudes they have popularized, have literally put them in life-threatening situations. Constantly feeling like their lives are in peril may explain why so many congressional Republicans, who had been reluctant to support Trump after the J6 insurrection, ultimately got in line. “Violence and threats against elected leaders are suppressing the emergence of a pro-democracy faction of the GOP,” wrote Rachel Kleinfeld, a political violence expert, in late 2022.
The assassination of Trump was already part of rightwing political discourse. “Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and rightwing provocateur Ivan Raiklin have speculated for months that removing Trump from the running — they speculated about assassination — would open the way for Trump’s far-right former national security advisor Michael Flynn, and appeared to be putting pressure on Trump to name Flynn as vice president,” wrote Professor Heather Cox Richardon this morning. “Yesterday, Raiklin posted on social media a ‘Trump/Flynn 2024’ graphic with the legend ‘FAFO,’ under the words ‘Assassination-Proof.’”
Biden and the Democrats, meanwhile, are the pro-democracy party. Not only are they against political violence, because it undermines and enfeebles democratic politics, but they are also not vulnerable to it like the Republicans are. As I said in February: “When a Democrat goes to a party function, they do not encounter other Democrats legally carrying semiautomatic rifles. A Republican, on the other hand, does. Someone calling you out for telling the truth about the big lie is one thing. When he’s slinging an AR-15 over his shoulder, it’s another.”
The Washington press and pundit corps are this week working hard to convince you that the attempted assassination of Donald Trump is the superlative example of what happens when polarization goes too far.
It isn’t.
It’s what happens when you unleash rightwing political violence.
Eventually, it comes for you.
an 6 24
no lnx
alternet
What’s behind the lie that Biden is on drugs?
President Joe Biden answers a question as former President Donald Trump listens during the second and final presidential debate at Belmont University on October 22, 2020 in Nashville, Tennessee. (Photo by Morry Gash-Pool/Getty Images)
John Stoehr June 27, 2024
Donald Trump has been preparing for his first debate by accusing the president of being on drugs. This is not new. He did it to Hillary Clinton in 2016. He did it to Joe Biden in 2020. The GOP leadership, including the House speaker, is backing up the lie. “Everybody wants to know,” Mike Johnson said. “Which Biden is going to show up? It doesn’t matter if he drinks a whole gallon of energy drinks. He’s not going to be able to match the acumen and the readiness of Donald Trump.”
This is being interpreted as a confession – that Republican elites are worried that, on Thursday, their nominee is going to get smoked. They should be worried. Trump’s habitual incoherence has been obvious to those of us who have been paying attention. It was abundantly clear to America’s top CEOs during a recent meeting. And it will become more obvious, as millions of people who have not been paying attention will be checking in on politics for the first time since the last election.
The hope is that by advancing the lie that the president is on drugs, whether through direct language or innuendo, the Republicans can raise the specter of cheating. That way, Biden’s aggression won’t seem like an asset, but instead a liability, as it will seem to prove the allegation. Meanwhile, Trump, who is greatly degraded, won’t seem so degraded. He’ll seem like a victim, as if he were cheated out of a chance to show his acumen and readiness, because Biden was coked.
While many people seem concerned about Biden’s age, partly on account of outlets like the Timeshaving made a fetish of it, the allegation that he’s on drugs – or “a gallon of energy drinks” – won’t convince anyone who’s not already in the tank. Whatever swing voters think, they don’t think Biden is a snowblower. That’s convincing only in the upside down, backwards and prolapsed world of rightwing politics.
It’s important to think about the intended audience for the lie that the president is on drugs (or on performance-enhancing supplements), because that tells us a lot about the election. Specifically, it tells us a lot about Trump – that there’s more going on than merely masking his cognitive decline. Lies like this tell us he can’t win if he plays by the normal rules of presidential elections. And he knows he can’t. What he can do, however, is cheat. This lie helps pave the way toward that end.
“I don’t need any votes,” Trump said last weekend at a meeting of the so-called Faith and Freedom Coalition. “We got all the votes we need. All I want to do is make sure we guard our vote. We stop the steal. I want the vote guarded. I want the steal stopped. We don’t need the votes. We have the votes. We have more votes than we need.”
That’s what you say when you refuse to respect one of the fundamentals of modern presidential politics. A successful candidate can’t win with his base alone. He must add to his base by doing something to attract the support of some of the other party’s supporters, or more accurately, some of the voters who call themselves independents but who regularly support one of the parties. (Swing voters do exist. Last time, they delivered victory to Biden.)
The president is doing that. Right or wrong, many (not just white) Americans believe the government isn’t doing enough to regulate the influx of migrants at the southern border. So Biden is implementing policies toward that end. Some are rather illiberal, but they seem to be working. “Border encounters” are reportedly down by 40 percent.
I can’t think of a policy idea that Trump has offered conservative Democrats and independent voters. (Flip-flopping on a national abortion ban doesn’t count.) I may be wrong, of course, but the only thing I see is what’s already appealing to the people whom he already has. In fact, whenever he’s given a chance to appeal to non-base supporters, as he was when asked repeatedly to set aside his thirst for revenge, he pointedly declines, choosing to say things that will rile up his base while alienating the very people he needs to beat Biden.
Indeed, you could say Trump’s campaign has devolved from one that used to at least pay lip-service to solutions – “I alone can fix it” – to one that has abandoned problem-solving altogether. (He famously killed, via Johnson, a bipartisan package that would have addressed the “border crisis,” because he wanted a live issue to campaign on.) There’s only one thing on the menu these days, and while vengeance is mine may sound good to people he already has, he needs more than that.
Trump’s thinking, if you can call it thinking, seems to be if he smears his opponent hard enough – and if he gets enough help from his party, the rightwing media apparatus, and Russian and Chinese operatives – he’ll poison the electorate and come out on top. That worked in 2016 but only because the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state gave credibility to the smear. (Without James Comey, Trump’s allegation that Clinton should be locked up for her “crimes” would have been merely that.) The only equivalent external force this time around is a press corps that’s made a fetish of the president’s age. Anyway, Trump is the criminal now.
Trump knows a lot of people who have not been paying attention to politics are going to pay attention to Thursday night’s debate. If he were behaving as if he intended to win, he would see the moment as an opportunity to expand his base, and he would offer something, really anything, to people who are not already on his side.
Instead, he’s choosing to smear Biden with lies that will, again, rile up his base while alienating people he needs. That suggests he knows he can’t win by ordinary means and that he’s not really going to try. As he did in the above clip, he’s practically admitting his path to victory is by invalidating as many of Biden’s voters as possible. He isn’t trying to win. He’s trying to cheat. We should expect that from a criminal.
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https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/decade-russian-infowar-republicans-weird/
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A decade of Russian infowar has made Republicans weird
President Donald J. Trump and President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation hold a joint press conference | July 16, 2018 (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks).
John Stoehr February 29, 2024
There’s a clip going around featuring Malcolm Trumbull, the former prime minister of Australia, describing for a home audience the few times he witnessed Donald Trump interacting with Vladimir Putin. He said: “When you see Trump with Putin, as I have on a few occasions, he’s like the 12-year-old that goes to high school and meets the captain of the football team – ‘my hero!’ It is really creepy. It’s really creepy. … It struck everybody. You could touch it. The creepiness was palpable.”
I’ll leave it to worthies steeped in international relations to discuss the ramifications of a former leader of one of America’s closest allies defenestrating Trump’s great claim that all the world respects him.
For me, I’m interested in that adjective, “creepy,” and its cognates – “strange,” “weird,” “not normal,” and so on – because I’m going to suggest two things. One, that we are hearing those words applied to Trump and the Republicans with greater frequency by Americans rooted in mainstream culture. And two, that the more their behavior is called “creepy,” “weird,” etc, the more they are going to appear, to Americans rooted in mainstream culture, to be virtually foreign.
When you think about it, that makes sense.
As I said in yesterday’s edition, the Russian government has, more or less, been waging nonstop information warfare against the United States since at least 2015. During that time, Donald Trump and the Republicans have eaten, digested and metabolized practically all of it.
Their views are nearly indistinguishable from Vladimir Putin’s. State governments run by Republicans are increasingly Russian in practice. (“They have banned books, censored speech, outlawed history, suppressed individual expression and, therefore, individual liberty,” I said. “If they have not used the power of the state to control their populations, they have empowered snitches and vigilantes to reach the same goal.”) The heart of the GOP’s impeachment inquiry is a Kremlin lie. “Basically, the Republicans have become synonymous for [the] Russians at this point,” said Texas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett.
I called this the transmogrification of the Republican Party. To see how thorough, complete and total that process has gotten, watch this clip. An MSNBC reporter asked Trump supporters for their thoughts on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s threat to democratic Eastern Europe. After watching it, you may be reminded of this piece I wrote in September summarizing the Russo-Republican perspective:
'According to the rightwing view, Ukraine is not a democracy. It is a corrupt regime undeserving of aid. Moreover, it’s an enemy. Among other things, it colluded with Democrat Hillary Clinton in a scheme to undermine US sovereignty and defraud the American people in the 2016 election. The plan was thwarted by the victory of Donald Trump.'
'The rightwing view insists, moreover, that Donald Trump, as president, attempted to expose Ukraine’s corruption in 2019 when he demanded an investigation into then-former Vice President Joe Biden. Biden, according to this view, abused his office and corrupted US foreign policy in 2016 in order to enrich himself and his son, Hunter Biden.'
That’s upside down, backward and prolapsed.
It’s also weird.
Consider that the president ordered and ate an ice cream cone recently. In response, Fox host Jesse Watters suggested not only that Biden has dementia, on account of people with dementia enjoying the taste of ice cream, but that he’s unmanly. “A grown man, especially the president, should not be licking ice cream in public.” (Watters also said a grown man should not eat soup in public. “It’s not a good look.”)
On the one hand, this was an attempt to “infantilize” the president. Jennifer Mercieca, an expert on authoritarian rhetoric, said last night it’s “another way of saying he’s weak and not a Übermensch. He’s not trying to be an overlord strongman. He’s trying to be a president. Ice cream is delicious and eating it is democratic. Fascists gonna fash.”
On the other, this is just weird. “I've said it before: rightwingers are the biggest weirdos,” one person said on Twitter. “It truly sounds awkward, like ‘decadent Westernized male degrades manhood with frozen treats,’” another quipped. James Surowiecki, formerly of The New Yorker and currently of The Yale Review, put the ice cream thing in context. “In the past four weeks, high-profile rightwingers have come out against adults eating ice cream, IVF, recreational sex, Taylor Swift, and the NFL. They're so in tune with mainstream Americans.”
Surowiecki was joking, of course. The Republicans and their media allies are not in tune with mainstream Americans. They don’t like people having abortions. They don’t like in vitro fertilization. They don’t like birth control. They don’t like a self-made female billionaires dating Super Bowl-winning football players. And they don’t like grown men eating ice cream cones in public. (Or soup). They, like Mother Russia, don’t like things that don’t fit into a human society ordered vertically – with straight white Christian men dominating the top.
These people are so far outside mainstream American culture that those on the inside might legitimately ask: “Wait, you’re not from around here, are you?” “The creepiness was palpable,” Trumbull said.
He’s right.
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an 12 23 no lnx
What Nikki Haley’s gaffe reveals about the GOP
John Stoehr
December 28, 2023
The new Nikki Haley news is that she refused to say that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. During an event in New Hampshire, she said that the bloodiest conflict on US soil was about, well, anything but slavery: “how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” she said, among other ridiculous things.
Magdi Jacobs, an Editorial Board contributor, said that “the fascinating thing about Haley's response was her discomfort. You could feel her flailing as she reached for the perfect combo of a pre-Donald Trump conservative ‘states’ rights’ answer to appeal to centrist voters, all while knowing that the insurrectionists want more racist red meat.”
“This is a balance no one can strike,” Magdi concluded. “It shows how fundamentally weak the current GOP is, even if our political media doesn't want to admit it. You can't win without Trump. I firmly believe – and I think Haley does, too – that you can't win with him either.”
More precisely (and I think Magdi would agree) is that this balance is impossible to strike because there’s nowhere to put it. There’s no such thing as a moderate position inside today’s Republican Party. There’s no foundation on which to build the broad coalition of voters that’s necessary to winning (ie, candidates need more than a base.) If such a position existed, Haley would have found it. It doesn’t, so all she can do is reach for a reason, any reason, as the true cause of the Civil War.
To her credit, Haley quickly walked back her remarks. Perhaps she sensed something was at risk in sounding so unreasonable. “Of course, the Civil War was about slavery,” she said. “We know that. That’s the easy part of it.” Then she went on to say that it was about “more than that,” citing, among other ridiculous things, “the role of government.”
That she walked back her initial remarks may seem “reasonable,” but it won’t matter. Remember, even if she wanted to strike a balance between “conservative states’ rights” and “racist red meat” – and that’s apparently what she wanted to do – there is no foundation inside the Republican Party on which to put it. There is no moderate position.
To be a moderate, you have to sound reasonable, but according to David Atkins, a frequent contributor to the Washington Monthly, the GOP base “doesn’t want even the perception of a more reasonable candidate. They want a dictator to punish their enemies.”
“Haley has zero chance of winning” the presidential election, David told me. “Even if she did win New Hampshire, it wouldn’t help her any more than it did Bernie Sanders in 2016 and Pete Buttigieg in 2020.”
There’s always makebelieve, though. Fortunately, Haley has a lot of help in that regard. The billionaire Koch brothers gave her their blessing. So did the popular governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu. They portray Haley as the champion of “conservative values,” as if “conservative values” was still shorthand for “moderate,” and as if Donald Trump’s gravity has not pulled the entire party to the far right.
While makebelieve is a powerful force in politics, it’s probably not going to be enough for Haley or any of the other GOP candidates. Oh, sure, they did OK while the neutral press was casting them as “legitimate alternatives” to Trump. But once the neutral press gets bored – and the neutral press always gets bored – whatever promise these “legitimate alternatives” once had melts into the air. It happened to Ron DeSantis. It happened to Vivek Ramaswamy. It will probably happen to Haley. Everything begins and ends with Trump. As Magdi said, the GOP can’t win with him and it can’t win without him.
In the following interview with me, David Atkins explains not only why he thinks Haley is doomed, but why, in 2024, the Republicans are, too.
JS: New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu endorsed Republican candidate Nikki Haley after the Koch network did. Could that be enough for her to win New Hampshire? And will that matter in the long run?
DA: GOP megadonors need to come to terms with the reality that their base cannot be controlled. They let the MAGA flames burn out of control and now they get to reap the whirlwind. Haley has zero chance of winning absent some issue impacting Trump’s health, because the GOP base doesn’t want even the perception of a more reasonable candidate. They want a dictator to punish their enemies.
And let’s be clear: Haley is also a radical rightwing extremist, as her embrace of a six-week abortion ban makes clear. She just doesn’t seem like she wants to destroy the entire federal bureaucracy, send Democrats to gulags, weaponize the Justice Department and the IRS against all their domestic opponents, and institute mass deportation camps of immigrants. So she’s not the candidate of the GOP base, which does want those things and wants Trump to deliver them.
The Republican Party’s base isn’t in the thrall of Trumpism; Trump is the avatar of their desires, which is why he will be the nominee. Also, even if Haley did win New Hampshire, it wouldn’t help her any more than it did Bernie Sanders in 2016 and Pete Buttigieg in 2020.
JS: You said the culture war is over. Taylor Swift won, Elon Musk lost. I have written that obituary, too, only to see myself proven wrong.
DA: The culture war is over in the sense that people under the age of 50 in the areas of the country that make up more than 80 percent of the national GDP despise the theocratic conservatism that animates Republican activists. That isn’t going to change.
This doesn’t mean that Republicans can’t win elections, and institute rearguard policy actions, like restricting abortion and LGBT rights. They can. The threat of hard-right fascist dictatorship is very real.
But most of the culture wars can be explained by the fact that the marketplace responds primarily to 18- to 45-year-old consumers in cities, while the electoral system responds primarily to 65-plus-year-olds in exurbia. The electoral system can produce a fascist takeover, but it will do so by oppressing a majority that wants nothing to do with it. Such tyrannies rarely last for long.
In the meantime, the weight of popular culture is increasingly shifting to treat cultural progressivism as normative, if for no other reason than that’s the population advertisers want to appeal to. The engines of capitalism are working against social conservatives now, which is why you see such a growing rift between the evangelical base and the urbanite business Republican crowd.
JS: You said the GOP will lose 2024. You cited the fact that they have lost every special election. Special elections attract partisans. Presidential election attracts everyone. Am I wrong in noting the difference?
DA: It’s no secret that Trump and Biden at the top of the ticket will make for an interesting dynamic in 2024, since neither are popular, at least at the moment. But in this environment, a generic Democrat is consistently beating a generic Republican. If the public’s concerns about both Trump and Biden as individuals were sidelined, and the voters were to choose a party and its policies, Democrats would be marching into a confident victory in 2024.
The key will be to remind voters of the tremendous legislative accomplishments of the Biden administration, emphasize Trump’s rampant criminality and danger to democracy, and remind people that no matter what they think of the candidates, the policy choices are very real. Republican rule would be a cruel disaster.
JS: I think the GOP is going to impeach Biden. How does that factor into your thinking, if it does, that the Republicans are going to lose 2024?
DA: Republicans want to play tit-for-tat by impeaching Biden to take some of the sting out of Trump’s double impeachments. More generally, if they can make impeachment into a routine partisan clown show, then it minimizes and defangs the one tool in the Constitution that’s designed to stop an authoritarian, criminal unitary executive.
The flip side of doing this is that any impeachment of Biden by Republicans on flimsy pretexts is likely to have as minimal an impact on voters as Trump’s impeachments apparently have.
JS: What if there's a major polling error and Trump isn't really a mile ahead of every other Republican candidate? Most of us just assume he's going to be the nominee. Iowa and New Hampshire might be stunners?
DA: What’s particularly interesting about Trump seizing the GOP nomination is the low-key panic among many Republican activists. While Trump’s indictments have so far not impacted his popularity, we are in uncharted territory. It’s impossible to predict what impact multiple public trials and possible felony convictions of the sitting GOP nominee might have on public polling and electoral outcomes.
One could speculate that the polling might be wrong, and GOP voters in Iowa and New Hampshire might choose a different nominee out of self-preservation. But Trump has developed a cult-like following, and one thing that we know about cults is that they are largely impervious to even their leaders going to jail. If anything, it makes them feel like martyrs. So I find it extremely unlikely that Iowa and New Hampshire will surprise us by selecting a Haley or Ron DeSantis.
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paste from ymail has tables
The Biden impeachment story is a Trump revenge story
It’s getting clearer and clearer.
Last week, I said that the insurgent Republicans in the US House of Representatives are probably going to impeach the president, not because Joe Biden has done anything wrong, but because Donald Trump wants them to.
The impeachment story is a revenge story.
John Bennett’s analysis is helpful in seeing this. The Roll Call columnist noted today that while the current House speaker, Mike Johnson, is about to set up a formal vote to authorize an impeachment inquiry, his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, didn’t. What changed? Bennett asked.
The “evidence” hasn’t changed. Republican investigators have been searching for a criminal link between Joe Biden to his profligate son without success. The best they have come up with is three payments Hunter Biden made to his dad to pay him back for cosigning on a truck loan. Other than that, they have innuendo and conspiracy theory.
I think the last step for members of the Washington press corps is spelling things out in plain English – that these insurgent Republicans are probably going to impeach the president because Donald Trump wants them to.
So what changed?
They have the votes!
Bennett: “Johnson has signaled through words and actions that he and other House GOP leaders were confident they would have ample Republican votes on the floor to formally authorize the inquiry.”
Or do they?
Bennett reported that Johnson isn’t the best vote-counter. Though he’s publicly “suggested he has enough moderates on board,” Bennett wrote, “his vote-counting operation has been lacking before."
“For instance," Bennett said, "he has had to pull spending bills from the floor multiple times; and he could not even push through the rules for some of those. He backed saving Santos just hours before 105 of the 217 Republicans voting joined all but two Democrats in voting to expel him.”
So you could say the vote to authorize an impeachment inquiry is a test of the new speaker’s credibility. GOP “moderates” in districts won by Joe Biden have avoided the entire subject of impeachment. If they vote against formalizing the inquiry, will that hurt Johnson’s standing?
I doubt it. Credibility has nothing to do with it. Johnson said as much, though you have to read between the lines. There’s no evidence of wrongdoing on Biden’s part. His son, maybe. (Indeed, he was indicted again last week on tax charges.) But nothing on Dad. Even so, Johnson said that the impeachment of the president is a foregone conclusion.
“The House has no choice,” Johnson said, because “this is not a political decision. This is a legal decision.” But if that were the case, there’d be something to base that legal decision on. There isn’t. It took a Republican strategist to spell out the truth in plain English.
Donald Trump's "poll numbers show he’s stronger in the [2024 GOP] primary than he was nine months or six months — or even three months — ago,” the strategist told Bennett. “Trump wants, going into 2024, Joe Biden to be tarred by impeachment like he was twice.”
The impeachment story is a revenge story.
The strategist said Hunter Biden’s legal problems, which are many, are another reason for Johnson’s move to formalize the inquiry. But that’s not a reason to vote for it. As I said, there’s no Dad-related evidence of anything. His son's legal problems do provide political cover, though.
That’s what this is. There’s no there there. It’s all makebelieve. There’s enough makebelieve, and there’s enough people who believe the makebelieve, that the insurgent Republicans are going to vote for an impeachment inquiry and, in time, the impeachment of the president.
As an astute Twitter follower told me: “There's a very real possibility that Republicans will hold a show trial for Biden in September and October while Trump manages to delay trials for 91 felony charges. It will be an extreme perversion of justice should this farce occur.”
That’s correct.
Like I said, it’s fate.
Trump isn’t campaigning for president so much as leading a movement of vengeance against his and his followers' enemies. That includes Biden and everyone in his party. The day the House Democrats impeached Trump for the first time – for extorting the leader of a foreign ally in a criminal conspiracy to smear then-candidate Joe Biden – was the day President Biden’s impeachment was set in motion.
This is why “the House has no choice.”
Insurgent Republicans have to finish what Trump started.
That’s not to say it will work. So far, the Washington press corps has done a pretty good job of saying that there’s no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe Biden and that impeachment activities are rooted in his son’s alleged crimes, for which he’s being held accountable. (The people indicting him on federal changes work for the Biden administration!)
I think the last step for members of the Washington press corps is spelling out the truth in plain English – that these insurgent Republicans are probably going to impeach the president because Trump wants them to. The impeachment story is a revenge story.
an edit bd 11 23
there exists in this country a small community of people who grew up with religious authoritarians, but no longer lives among them. As a consequence of having grown up with them, this small community knows something that the rest of the country doesn’t know – that religious authoritarians may sound like kooks, but they’re extremely dangerous.
This small community knows the kookiness is the point. If religious authoritarians can make people, especially young people, believe anything, they can control them, not just their choices, but the way they think. If they think the choice is between individual identity and group identity, they will gladly surrender their individualidentity.
This is why the small community I’m talking about no longer lives among religious authoritarians. They can’t, not without experiencing psychic death. They understand the subtle dangers of living among people who believe that everyone in the group must think and act and speak the same way, and that a difference of opinion is betrayal.
This small community I’m talking about, because they have such intimate knowledge of religious authoritarians, knows something else that the rest of the country does not know. They know the unique horror of witnessing “normal people,” which is to say, people who did not grow up among religious authoritarians, laughing at the religious authoritarians and all the unbelievably kooky things that they say.
This unique horror is not a consequence of religious insult. The small community I’m talking about started doubting everything they were taught as children a long time ago. This unique horror is a consequence of knowing what the rest of the country doesn’t know – that the kookiness is the tool by which religious authoritarians exert control. That’s not something to laugh at, then dismiss as inconsequential.
And yet that’s what the rest of the country seems to be doing when religious authoritarians, such as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, say things that are stupendously kooky. “Normal people,” which is to say, people who did not grow up among religious authoritarians, seem to think that Johnson and his comrades can’t possibly believe what they say, so what they say can be dismissed as partisan politics.
The question, for those of us who are part of the small community I’m talking about, isn’t about the dangers posed by religious
authoritarians. We already understand them. Rather, the question is about getting “normal people,” who can’t possibly understand the trauma of trying and failing to live among people who demand psychic death as the price of membership into the group, to understand the danger.
I posed that question to Matthew Sheffield. He seems to be a fellow member of the small community I’m talking about. He’s also an outcast of the rightwing media apparatus that labors to hide the dangers of religious authoritarianism. He’s now committed to pluralistic democracy, he said, as the founder of the Flux Media Network.
“The beliefs of Mike Johnson and his fellow extremist Christians are so idiotic that the natural reaction for many non-religious people is to point and laugh – not realizing that evil is usually also ridiculous.”
JS: You said: "Many people who are secular or non-fundamentalist theists don't pay attention to the disturbing worldview of people like new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson." Can you explain please?
MS: Christian fundamentalism has been a minority opinion in the United States since Biblical literalism became a movement in the early 20th century, inspired by the work of people like John Nelson Darby.
In the south, this theology was explicitly intertwined with the "Lost Cause" myth about the Confederacy's defeat in the Civil War into a regional form of Christian nationalism that began spreading into other regions at the expense of mainline and progressive Protestantism.
The eventual religious identity politics that emerged, Confederate Christianity, is not popular. Its doctrines are obscure and often devolve into picayune debates about Bible verses that most people don’t know.
The southern flavor of its sermonizing and its explicit anti-intellectualism make Confederate Christianity distasteful. A vast majority would rather have their teeth pulled than listen to obvious scammers like evangelical preacher Kenneth Copeland.
Despite its comparative obscurity, only 10 percent of Americans are committed Christian nationalists, because it is a political identity more than a religious one. Confederate Christianity punches far above its weight thanks to hundreds of national and regional groups who motivate fundamentalist citizens to vote.
Most journalists have only been trained to be interested in the activities of prominent elected officials, so more obscure figures like Mike Johnson have long managed to evade their scrutiny.
At the local level, far-right Christians often mask their rhetoric in secular language, so they are often able to pull off things like
taking over school boards without others noticing.
JS: It seems to me that the problem of explaining the dangers is sheer disbelief. How do communicators like you address that problem?
MS: The beliefs of Mike Johnson and his fellow extremist Christians are so idiotic that the natural reaction for many non-religious people is to point and laugh – not realizing that evil is usually also ridiculous.
For those who are Christian but not fundamentalist, a common reaction is to simply roll their eyes.
I get where they're coming from.
Johnson believes that Noah's ark was real and that humans lived with dinosaurs. These are asinine superstitions. But he also believes homosexuality is a Satan-inspired choice that should be illegal and that birth control should be criminalized. Voltaire's aphorism that believing in absurdities leads one to justify atrocities is absolutely true.
The vicious ignorance of Johnson and his fellow Confederate Christians presents a real conundrum for those of us who are committed to pluralistic democracy. People seem to have an easier time recognizing screaming dictator-wannabes like Donald Trump for what they are than they do with folksy authoritarians.
That realization is why I decided to launch a comedy news discussion podcast called "Doomscroll" with my friend Lisa Curry.
Ridiculing the stupid beliefs of the Christian right is an important thing to do because there are a lot of smart people who were born and raised as fundamentalists who innately know that the beliefs are false and contradictory. But the humorous jabs must always carry the larger truth that these ideas are not only foolish, they are dangerous.
JS: On the funding of truly liberal media, you said there's no shortage of money. It's just spent in ways different from rightwing
media.
MS: As my friend Anne Nelson has documented in her book, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, there is a lot of money out there for center-to-left activists and causes. Unfortunately, much of this money is not spent with an eye toward public advocacy. From the very beginning of their movement, reactionary elites realized that they were a small minority but that it didn't matter because they could use voter suppression and advocacy media to suppress their opponents' voters and whip up their own.
The other crucial advantage of funding advocacy media is that these investments are more durable and can eventually become
self-sustaining, as Fox, talk radio, and far-right podcasts have become.
There are tens of millions of people who want to hear a progressive message in the media, but Democratic donors seem to prefer wasting their money on advertising that's ineffective and short-lived.
This needs to change, especially since rightwing propaganda is beginning to fill in the gaps in local media left by the decay of
traditional media outlets. Those who control the information will control the age. People who believe in liberal values need to fund
them.
JS: You have explored "how American evangelicalism is collapsing on itself." That's a bold statement that I have to hear more about.
MS: People often perceive religion and science to be in conflict, but up until the last 100 years or so, they were the same thing. The
Bible, Quran, Vedas and other ancient scriptures were not just theological sources. They were also scientific explanations for how
things came to be and how they work. But once the disciplines of science, history and linguistics emerged, it soon became evident to educated people that these books were about as accurate as Homer's Iliad.
Unfortunately, while the academic world came to accept evolution, the pagan origins of Judaism, and a host of other discoveries, this knowledge did not filter down to religious fundamentalists. The central problem of our age is that religious fundamentalism has been utterly humiliated in the intellectual realm and that its adherents (of any faith) are only now realizing it – to their great
consternation.
JS: You said: "Hope is the belief that we're capable of something better and the determined desire to make it so." Can you go into that more?
MS: The continuously successful efforts of pro-choice advocates to protect abortion rights through ballot initiatives demonstrates that people like us are the majority, but we must use this power to usher Confederate Christianity into the dust-bin of history.
Public opinion surveys show that people born after around 1975 are dramatically less likely to believe in scriptural literalism, and that each successive generation of Americans is more supportive of racial justice, bodily autonomy and sound reasoning.
The reactionaries who took over the GOP have been aware of this. The minoritarian strategy that they were able to effect for several decades was predicated on manipulating people through religion, sexism or racism into supporting their corrupt and authoritarian candidates.
As I discussed recently on my other podcast, "So This Just Happened," the Christian right knows that its time is coming to an end.
Far-right former Senator Rick Santorum spoke for many of his compatriots this past Election Day when he lamented that it was a
"secret sauce for disaster" that young Americans are interested in supporting abortion access and decriminalization of marijuana.
It's important to celebrate victories like we experienced in 2023, but the arc of history will only bend if we make it. Demographics are not destiny. The future belongs to those who can achieve it.
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an 1 23
hy do this country’s most lucrative media properties spend so much time and so many resources covering the “dangers” of political extremism?
It’s not because of the fear of Donald Trump and his redhat fascism.
It’s not because of the fear of Bernie Sanders and his cosplay socialism.
READ MORE: Donald Trump's griping about evangelical 'disloyalty' was an order to get in line
It’s because political extremes reveal something about this country’s most lucrative media properties that they would rather not have revealed.
Their own political extremism.
None the wiser
Bullsh*t? Not when you think about it.
READ MORE: Unpublished January 6th report exposes social media platforms allowing right-wing exploitation
The difference between the country’s two major political parties is cavernous, deeper and wider than it has ever been in our lifetimes.
The Democrats, as I said last week, have grown to become under Joe Biden the party of statecraft. The Republicans have grown to become under Trump the party of stagecraft. The Democrats have ideas. The GOP has Fox.
Yet this country’s most lucrative media properties, in their coverage of the parties and in their choices in determining what’s news, treat the parties, which they take to represent one-half each of this country, as if they were equal in nature, theory and practice, though the differences are obvious.
Taking two things that are not the same in nature, theory and practice and making them appear the same is an act of democratic politics, a way of persuading an audience to believe that a particular worldview (“centrism”) is normal by comparison to parties equal in nature, theory and practice.
Taking two things that are not the same and making them appear the same is an act of political extremism, too. There is no other credible way to describe taking two things that are not the same and making them appear the same for the purpose of manufacturing, by comparison, an imaginary “center”?
How else can we describe this country’s most lucrative media properties presenting themselves as impartial arbiters of the status quo despite the fact that they go to extreme lengths to persuade their audiences that a particular worldview (theirs) is normal, moderate and “centrist.”
That’s what an act of politics looks like.
That’s what a warped reality, and our understanding of it, looks like.
This country’s most lucrative media properties do not want to appear to be political entities, but nevertheless, they are. They are invested in defining, controlling, protecting, defending and maintaining a political status quo that has made them this country’s most lucrative media properties.
So they focus on the far right.
They focus on the far left
You’re none the wiser.
“The way things are” is never natural
My point here is that “centrism” is actually a radical political ideology that often turns observable reality upside down, backward and prolapsed.
It does that by making unequal things seem equal for the purpose of appearing to be normal, moderate and “centrist.” One consequence is that the “political center” overlaps with their particular kind of extreme politics.
And “natural.”
The people who benefit most from the maintenance and advancement of “centrism” – the beneficiaries of hierarchies of political and social power that constitute a status quo – want us to believe that their radical political ideology is aproduct of nature. It’s the politics of “the way things are.”
“The way things are” is never natural.
“The way things are” is the product of history, contingency and choice. It’s the progressive accretion of decisions made for a particular time, for a particular place for reasons particular to those times and places.
The people who benefit most from the maintenance and advancement of “centrism” want us to believe “the ways things are” is natural and therefore politically neutral, as a consequence of being just “the way things are.”
But “the way things are” is never politically neutral. The proof is the insistence by the beneficiaries of a radical political ideology called “centrism” that the way things are is just “the way things are.”
Beneficial incoherence
My second point here is that an observable reality that’s been turned upside down, backward and prolapsed is beneficial to those who maintain and advance a radical political ideology that they call “the way things are.”
An incoherent status quo is a good thing.
As I said last week, in a separate context,false equivalence is the art of forcing unequal things to seem equal and making the morally better of the two seem not so good, the morally worse of the two seem not so bad.
Those people who benefit most from the status quo are most likely to insist that politics has nothing to do with their being the people who benefit most from the status quo. That, again, is a political act, a choice made among other choices that together constitute what most say is the way things are.
Apply this to Joe Biden’s documents “scandal.”
It is not equal to Donald Trump’s documents scandal.
The former lost some government secrets, found them, returned them and conceded to an official investigation to ensure everything’s above board.
The latter stole government secrets, lied about stealing them, refused to give them back after his theft was revealed, gave back a few, lied about giving back all, had to be forced to give back all, and then cried about the injustice of an official investigation to ensure everything’s above board.
Apply this to shooting massacres.
At least 10 people were shot to pieces during the Chinese Lunar holiday in a Chinese-American neighborhood in Los Angeles County. It is among many shooting massacres targeting minorities. In Charleston, it was Black people. In El Paso, it was Hispanics. In Pittsburgh, it was Jews. In Colorado, it was LGBT-plus people. The pattern is clear to anyone who’s willing to see it.
But this country’s most lucrative media properties don’t want to.
They regularly find ways to balance mass death with constitutional rights, as if one is related to the other, as if one is as important as the other, as if one balances out the other, as if this country’s most lucrative media properties are politically neutral arbiters of a status quo that is also ideally suited to rationalizing this country’s most lucrative media properties.
Mass death is not equal to constitutional rights. Only an adherent of a radical political ideology would say two unequal things are “in fact” equal.
And here we are.
Apply this to any “issue” with “two sides.”
USA Today’s Michael Collins: “Biden said he was ‘surprised’ to learn of the discovery of the records. He had branded his predecessor … ‘irresponsible’ for storing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.”
The stress is mine.
The radical political ideology, however, is theirs.
an 1 23
Everyone blames the liberals. That should be the American motto. Put it on the money. Put it on the national monuments. Everyone blames the liberals and their ideas about liberty, even other liberals.
But everyone should blame the institutions that get the liberals’ ideas wrong, and everyone should blame the illiberalsfor blaming the liberals for the institutions that get the liberals’ ideas all wrong.
Of course, everyone doesn’t.
The teacher isn’t the problem
Case in point is a controversy at Hamline University in Minnesota. An adjunct professor of art history taught a class on global religious art. She warned students in advance that, among other things, they’d be studying a canonical painting depicting the Prophet Muhammad. Total time in class focused on the painting was about 10 minutes.
At least one Muslim student was offended by it.
The administration called it Islamophobia.
The adjunct professor was fired.
According to Inside HigherEd: “The image shows Muhammad receiving instruction from the angel Gabriel. The original painting is in a collection at Edinburgh University Library in Scotland. The reaction to the lesson surprised the instructor and many others. One or more students complained about the image, believing (as many, but not all, Muslims believe) that showing the image was wrong.”
The image might be wrong, but the teacher wasn’t.
Her institution was.
But the illiberals blame the liberals for the institutions that get the liberals’ ideas all wrong. By getting the liberals’ ideas all wrong, the institutions end up affirming what the illiberals say about the liberals.
The story begins with blaming the liberals.
It ends there, too.
The institution is the problem
For most people, the story begins in the wrong place.
The real beginning was a university administration’s decision to protect the institution’s reputation against possible accusations of Islamophobia by throwing under the bus an adjunct professor who did what any professor of religious art would be expected to do.
The story really began with characterizing 10 minutes of class time discussing a canonical work of Islamic art as an act of Islamophobia. It really began with the daft claim that “respect for the observant Muslim students should have superseded academic freedom.”
But for most people, the story began with an adjunct professor’s decision to discuss a canonical work in the global history of religious art. The story began with at least one Muslim student being offended by it. For most people, the story began with questions about whether freedom of thought should bend to the dictates of religious sects.
In other words, the story began with what the enemies of liberalism said liberals say about liberal values after the institution, by protecting its interests, warped those same values of liberalism.
The result was a bunch of false binaries – defenders of free speech against defenders of religious liberty; defenders of academic freedom against defenders of “wokeness.” None had any bearing on the story.
The problem wasn’t liberalism. It wasn’t “wokeness.”
It wasn’t religious views, extreme or otherwise.
The problem was the institution using liberal values to cover its ass and in the process, impugning public trust in the liberals’ ideas, which in turn fed into the idea that college campuses are hotbeds of “wokeness,” “cancel culture” or some other totally made up thing.
The problem was the illiberals looking at an institution and seeing proof of what they already believed true to be about liberalism. The problem was the story starting there.
Aligning with the illiberals
Seeing an image of Muhammad was probably offensive. It was probably insulting. But the adjunct professor made allowances for that by warning students in advance before discussing an artifact that “depicts the beginning of Islam’s holy book and the onset of Muhammad’s divinely ordained apostleship,” said Christiane Gruber.
It was not an act of Islamophobia, the historian of Islamic art said.
It was the opposite:
The painting no doubt was produced to extol Muhammad’s prophecy and Quranic revelations, making it an Islamophilic artistic endeavor for its painter and viewers. The painting thus falls on the other side of the Islamophobia coin, in both intent and impact.
Liberalism is the force in politics and society that aims to flatten entrenched hierarchies of power in order to advance liberty, equality and justice for all, not merely the few. But liberalism gets the blame when something like this happens – when an institution claiming to embrace liberal values uses them cynically to protect its interests.
The result is not only false binaries. It’s cynicism of the liberal goal of flattening the hierarchies of power, as if the liberals don’t mean to reform the status quo, but instead usurp those who benefit from it.
That’s how the illiberals view the liberals. To them, after institutions warp and distort the liberals’ goals – making the goals seem like less a moral undertaking than a power play – that’s proof they’re right.
In effect, the institutions align with the illiberals to not only undermine trust in the liberals’ goal but also undermine freedom of thought, the education of the public and the advancement of knowledge. The illiberals stand athwart history, yelling stop. The institutions, in shirking their moral responsibilities, join them.
Getting liberal ideas wrong
This pattern repeats itself ad nauseam.
After the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer, the liberals advanced antiracism to such a degree that institutions around the country – whether universities or corporations – embraced antiracism, or at least gave the appearance of it.
But a true embrace is complicated, difficult and probably disruptive of institutional needs. In the face of internal resistance, institutions tended to go only halfway. That in turn redoubled internal resistance as well as increated public cynicism about the liberals’ real intentions, which the illiberals have already said is not a moral undertaking. It’s swapping who gets the upper hand in society.
These conditions can give rise to an upside down, backward and prolapsed view of the world in which the liberals are illiberal, because, for instance, “respect for the observant Muslim students should have superseded academic freedom,” and the illiberals are liberal, because they stand with freedom of thought and speech.
These conditions are called a backlash. They can fuel the candidacies of (Republican) illiberals as well as the political movements that bring them to power so they can stand athwart history, yelling stop.
Liberal ideas aren’t the problem.
Getting them wrong is.
READ MORE: 'Disloyalty': Trump goes after evangelicals in fiery new rant
an 1 23
In The Liberal Imagination (1950), Lionel Trilling explained why European society collapsed under the weight of fascism and “totalitarian communism.” How could a free and democratic culture destroy itself? Because, Trilling said, it was “bankrupt of ideas.”
Europe’s collapse “revealed the dangers of a society that puts limits on the free play of the intellect,” wrote Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, explaining Trilling’s views. He said that “in the modern situation,” meaning the early 20th century, “it’s just when a movement despairs of having ideas that it turns to force, which it masks in ideology.”
I applied Trilling’s concept in a recent piece to anti-trans laws and the American imagination. But it can be applied to the GOP, too.
READ MORE: 34% of America’s wealthiest corporations paid zero in income taxes, thanks to Trump
It’s not going to destroy itself the way Europe did.
But it might destroy the global economy.
“Free play of the intellect”
For years, Republican talking points were strictly enforced. New ideas were suspect. Fealty to tax cuts and deregulation was binding. Independent thinking was verboten. Modern conservatism began with a profusion of ideas. (See Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind or the journal he founded, Modern Age.) Four decades later, it has devolved into a means of rationalizing multiple cults of personality.
READ MORE: Chris Wallace blasts Republicans for double standard on Trump and Biden classified docs ordeal
Over time, there were severe limits on “the free play of the intellect” if only because expedience demanded it. Eventually, as restrictions got tighter, the GOP became “bankrupt of ideas.” The only ideas that remained were vestiges of the past and resentments of the present. The only idea appearing to gain the attention of the new House Republican majority is impeaching someone, anyone, somewhere.
While the Republicans were tightening the coils of innovation, the Democrats and their intellectuals were releasing them, churning out new and useful ideas and policies for years (in forums such as The American Prospect, Democracy and Washington Monthly). Some of them reached their zenith in the administration of Joe Biden.
Those ideas, especially the belief that spending, not tax cuts, spurs economic growth, came at just the right time. What began as “a battle for the soul of the nation” quickly turned, for Biden, into a battle against an existential threat, the covid. In short order, Biden, as president, assimilated progressivism’s most useful ideas.
History coming back around
The shift from supply-side economics, which concerns scarcity, to demand-side economics, which concerns abundance, was too historic to ignore. Bloomberg Businessweek’s Alan Crawford, in “Big Government Is Back with Massive State Interventions,” said governments the world over are stabilizing economies rocked by inflation with huge public investments or even “nationalization.”
“From Washington to Tokyo, policymakers are going above and beyond to cushion the blow from surging prices on consumers and businesses,” wrote Bloomberg Businessweek’s Alan Crawford. “Some of this is tactical — fuel subsidies and food assistance programs can win votes — but the spending is also motivated by strategic considerations about economic competitiveness.”
“Massive state intervention” is another way of saying that the US, under Biden, is re-reviving ideas about the political economy that had been revived in a previous era in our history, when progressives looked to Germany without knowing they were “reimporting the modified themes of the earlier American school of political economy,” wrote historian of economics Michael Lind in Land of Promise.
Lind said Germany of the late 19th century had modeled itself on the “American system” of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster “by creating a large internal market and using a protective tariff to promote its infant industries.” Rather than Bismarckian authoritarianism, Lind said, Germany adopted what it called “American-style democracy.”
The American progressives of the early 1900s, Lind wrote, brought those ideas back home in order “to found the institutional school of American economics, which had a profound influence on American reform in the first half of the 20th century, even though it was marginalized in the American academy after World War II by excessively abstract, unrealistic approaches to economics.”
Those “excessively abstract, unrealistic approaches to economics” prevailed for pretty much Joe Biden’s entire time in public service. He and most Democrats ran from the word “spending.” “Spending” is what they did in Soviet Russia, after all. But in the face of an existential threat like the covid, spending has taken on a new high-beam glow. In the middle of a national crisis, spending isn’t wasteful. It’s useful. It’s another way of practicing statecraft.
Statecraft and stagecraft
Some Republicans still cling to the old ways of thinking about the political economy, but most have abandoned “excessively abstract” economics – ie, “neoliberalism” – in favor of “the culture war,” “owning the libs” and any theatrical hoo-hah that wins time on Fox.
They do, however, pretend to care.
Here we find the least recognized difference between the parties.
The Democrats believe ideas are crucial to democratic politics and republican government. Under Biden, who folded into his administration, in the face of crises, the most useful of progressive ideas, the Democrats have returned to being the party of statecraft.
The Republicans, however, won’t craft anything. Taking any action would mean taking some responsibility. They can’t have that. The GOP stopped caring about republican government after the election of the first Black president. They stopped caring about democratic politics under Donald Trump. They stopped caring about ideas.
All they have left is pretending to serve the people.
All they have left is stagecraft.
“Force, which it masks in ideology”
Stagecraft, however, is hardly benign.
The “conservative movement,” another way of saying the Republicans’ four-decade-old hegemony, is like all political movements. It began with fresh ideas, a burst of intellectual energy seeking to countervail the presumptions and preconditions that shaped the status quo.
Over time, the movement’s ideas attracted attention, resources and people. Properly organized, and with enough effort, it went on to achieve its goal. The election of Ronald Reagan undid the status quo of Roosevelt. It established the Republicans’ 40-year hegemony.
But with success and power comes apathy, decadence and decline. “Excessively abstract” economics - tax cuts and deregulation – seemed fresh in the late 20th century. By the second decade of the 21st century, however, it seemed more rote than revolutionary.
Abandoned by most Republicans in favor of “the culture war” and “owning the libs,” and impotent in the face of the covid pandemic and its inflationary consequences, it was just a matter of time, as Trilling might have said, before the conservative movement despaired of having ideas and turned to “force, which it masks in ideology.”
Persuasion out, extortion in
Kevin McCarthy, the new speaker of the House, bargained away much of his power to secure the support of Republican anarchists, who want to use the debt ceiling (the cap of what the government can borrow) to extort the country into meeting their demands.
According to historian Heather Cox Richardson, McCarthy appears ready to go along. “McCarthy said he would not agree to raising the debt limit — that is, honoring the debts the country has already incurred — without ‘fiscal reforms.’ That promise seems to hold the threat of a showdown over a national default,” she wrote last night. (The debt ceiling is expected to be reached sometime this year.)
This danger, however, is usually met with shrugging indifference. The Republicans can’t possibly mean it, the thinking goes, since allowing the US to default on its debts would trigger armageddon. As I said some time ago, $15 trillion in household wealth would poofthph.
They mean it. They don’t have anything else to offer. In the absence of ideas, as Trilling said, they have turned to force, which the GOP masks in ideology. They are going to force the US, and the world, to bend to their will. Democratic persuasion is out. Extortion is in.
The Republicans are “bankrupts of ideas,” because they put “limits on the free play of the intellect,” because they don’t care about thinking as much as they care about obedience to their authority. They won’t destroy themselves the way Europe did in the Second World War.
But they might destroy other things.
READ MORE: Adam Kinzinger calls Kevin McCarthy a 'POS' who will 'say whatever he needs to say to stay in power'
11 22
The vote counting continues. The Democrats appear poised to hold on to the Senate, 50 plus one, after John Fetterman beat Mehmet Oz. The House is a toss-up, but Democratic votes usually take longer to count. (There’s more of them.) All in all, Tuesday was a good night.
These midterms signal a return to the norm.
Didn’t they defy the norm?
READ MORE: Here’s where MAGA election deniers failed and prevailed in the midterms: report
Sure – if your definition of normal goes back to 2004. That was the start of the current pattern by which the party that controls the White House loses the Congress in the president’s first term.
But if you go back farther, all the way to 1900, you can see that Tuesday’s elections didn’t defy the norm so much as affirm it.
For the entire 20th century, how many times did the Congress flip?
Six times.
Wut.
I said what I said.
Other than those half dozen, the norm was nothing changing.
Nothing changed in 1902, 1906, 1914, 1922, 1926, 1930, 1934, 1938, 1942, 1950, 1958, 1962, 1966, 1970, 1974, 1978, 1982, 1990 and 1998.
Nothing changed 76 percent of the time in 100 years.
It’s early yet. As I said, the counting continues.
But so far, there’s a good chance that the Congress doesn’t flip. In that case, the midterms would signal a departure from the new norm of the last 18 years and a return to the old norm of the prior 100.
But why were those 18 years exceptional?
Well, as I’ve been saying, those 18 years were probably a period of transition between different and opposing political gestalts – a volatile buffer zone marked by crisis and uncertainty between the old regime in which the Republicans prevailed most of the time and a new regime in which the Democrats may prevail most of the time.
The era of William McKinley gave way to the era of Franklin Roosevelt. The era of Franklin Roosevelt gave way to the era of Ronald Reagan. And Ronald Reagan’s era seems to be giving way to something new. Whether that’s Joe Biden’s is to be determined.
While the press corps is fixated on who controls the Congress, these midterms are about much, much more. They indicate larger, more important political currents in American history. It’s been said that the midterms mark Trumpism’s end. (Many of Donald Trump’s endorsements failed.) But it’s more like the end of a global order.
This is why I’ve made such a fuss over 1982. That was the last year, more or less, of the postwar liberal consensus that formed the contours of the Cold War and that fell apart in the jungles of Vietnam. 1982 was the hard open of a new gestalt, neoliberalism, the privileging of militarism over diplomacy, markets over statecraft.
(Any time you hear a Republican candidate call for cutting taxes to stimulate economic growth, that’s neoliberalism – or, asPaul Krugman calls it, “zombie economics.” Though it doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, and never has, Republicans always call for it.)
This theory of political time, one regime giving way to another, will hold true, I suspect, even if the GOP manages to squeak out a one-seat majority in the House. Why? Because the conventional wisdom, based on 18 years’ worth of electoral patterns, said the Republicans would wipe out the Democrats the way they did in 2010.
Yeah, nah.
It wasn’t a blue wave, mind you. But for reasons to be discerned (the fall of Roe, probably, and/or the J6 insurrection), the Democrats’ energy was equal to or (fingers crossed) greater than the GOP’s energy. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Neither was the president supposed to double down on democratic values and Democratic accomplishments. Biden was supposed to run away from it all.
That none of this was supposed to happen but did happen indicates something huge: a new regime in which a majority favors the ideas and policies of the Democrats over those of the Republicans.
Perhaps the biggest exponent of regime change is the Republican Party itself. It used to care about policy. It used to care about appearing to care about policy. But none of the candidates this cycle bothered much with keeping up appearances. They turned the Democrats into the enemy. Vote for us because we’re not them.
The Republicans also dropped their faith in democracy. Not long after Barack Obama’s election, it was clear the GOP could win by protecting the white-power syndicate that benefits most white people. (That’s what the so-called “Tea Party” revolt was about.)
But it wasn’t until the Supreme Court cut down parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that state legislatures enacted election laws that would in effect water down the power of Democratic (Black) voters.
Since 2013, the question hasn’t been how to bring people into the fold. The question has been how to box them out of the franchise.
All of this depended on the continued support ofrespectable white people– or swing voters reliable enough to vote Republican most of the time but fickle enough to vote for Democrats some of the time. They are for civil rights, mostly, but not Black equality and the policies that demands. Neoliberalism depended on this balance.
Then something happened.
Whatever it was (the fall of Roe, probably, and/or the J6 insurrection), it pushed 2 percent of white women, who are unaffiliated with either party, to choose Democratic candidates.
These are respectable white people. These are the Americans who determine which party establishes and maintains a political regime. The GOP has lost the support of respectable white people in a year when they would normally rely on them. If they don’t have that support now, they won’t have that support two years from now.
These midterms signal a return to the norm.
They signal a return to Democratic dominance.
READ MORE: [Here are 5 of the GOP’s biggest 2022 midterms disappointments
11 22
Perhaps the Washington press corps should embark on a pilgrimage to a desert wilderness in the Levant where they can learn to defy the temptations of “objectivity” the way Christ defied those of Satan.
Until that time, we must suffer the likes of Susan Page.
USA Today’s DC bureau chief managed to write Wednesday more than 1,000 words about last week’s congressional elections without saying who did what to whom. Her posture was the familiar “view from nowhere.” She drew straight from the lexicon of “objectivity:"
On Election Day 2022, Americans were unhappy with the present, pessimistic about the future and not fully enamored with either party. Their anxious, angry mood helps explain why campaign appeals turned mostly not on aspirational promises – on exploring space or ending poverty, say – but on ominous warnings about the dangers of supporting the other wide.
The polarization that has marked US politics for a generation has become more toxic, even more than during the era of anti-war protests and political assassinations in the 1960s. Not only do the two parties offer contrasting views on policy and conflicting visions for the country, but some candidates are even refusing to commit to accept the elections' outcomes.
If it feels like you’ve read this before, you have.
It tells you nothing.
It warps everything.
“Division” and “polarization” have been the leitmotif of the Washington press crops since at least 2008, when half the country refused to recognize the legitimacy of the first Black president. While “division” and “polarization” are strictly accurate, the way they’re used in reporting democratic politics is fantastically misleading.
READ MORE: Is this the end of our national Trump bender? Yeah, we've heard that one before
Saying that democratic politics is dividing and polarizing America is like saying water is wet. Water has been wet. It is currently wet. It will be wet. Wetness is water’s nature and history. Likewise, “division” and “polarization” are deeply rooted in America’s nature and history.
To say “deep division and politics of fear set the tone for 2024” is accurate but those qualities set the tone for every election. Water is wet. Politics divides. Accurate but doing more harm than good.
Are “division” and “polarization” self-evidently bad? Page appears to think so. But why would the Washington bureau chief of a big national newspaper believe that? “Division” and “polarization” are neither good nor bad on their own. It depends on the context.
If “division” and “polarization” are driving authoritarian politics, that’s bad. But if they are driving democratic politics, that’s good. Purveyors of “objectivity,” however, refuse to say which is which.
Presenting “division” and “polarization” as newsworthy on their own impresses on the audience, by way of merely talking about them, that “division” and “polarization” are somehow abnormal – that they are bad, wrong, extraordinary, even deviant, eliciting fear and dread.
“Division” and “polarization” seem like something out of the ordinary when they are actually in the ordinary. Such an upside down treatment of democratic politics warps our understanding of it, hindering a democratic people from seeking change democratically.
It’snews rhetoric.
It’s what?
Listen.
God did not hand down the lexicon of “objectivity” the way he handed Moses the ten commandment. The lexicon is the product of choices, which is the product of politics. That’s news rhetoric.
Because it’s arises from choices made in a political content, the lexicon of “objectivity” cannot represent the view from nowhere.
There’s a somewhere out there.
It’s the status quo.
Susan Page said the midterm campaigns were negative. They were rife with dire warnings about the dangers of voting for the other side. In a tenor of lamentation, she said candidates did not run “on aspirational promises.” She gives two examples of “aspirational promises.” They are “exploring space” and “ending poverty, say.”
These are allusions to two presidents and two major points in history that baby boomers are now remembering, in late age, as far more harmonious than they were. John Kennedy launched the so-called “space race.” Successor Lyndon Johnson initiated federal programs together were called “the Great Society” to combat social ills.
But neither Kennedy nor Johnson united Americans any more than any other president had. Sure, there were compromises, bargaining. But suggesting, as Page does, that democratic politics is more “divisive” and “polarizing” now than it used to be is just nostalgia – for that uncomplicated time when everyone seemed to get along.
Which never was.
By portraying today’s democratic politics as if it were abnormal, or bad, compared to yesterday’s, Page is defending the status quo, specifically, a status quo as understood by others in her generation – white Americans who don’t care for how these United States have changed and who’d rather things go back to the way they used to be.
By saying democratic politics is worse now than it was “during the era of anti-war protests and political assassinations” (!), Page creates a fictional standard in comparison to which democratic politics can’t help but be bad, wrong, extraordinary, dreadful, even deviant.
The politics of the status quo gave rise to Donald Trump and today’s toxic climate. Yet the press corps often suggests that we go back to that uncomplicated time when everyone seemed to get along, deploying anews rhetoricpreferred by their boomer bosses.
No, we shouldn’t go back to a time that never existed.
Neither should we hold on to a decaying status quo.
“Division” and “polarization” are how we got here.
“Division” and “polarization” are how we get out.
READ MORE: Nobody knows why the Democrats did so well because there was no one big thing
10 22
The Times is virtuosic not only for its ability to bring us news from around the world, but for its ability to talk about the politics of white power without mentioning “white,” “power,” “politics,” “the” or “of” in any combination – or those benefitting from its built-in advantages.
In the absence of a vocabulary that might otherwise accurately characterize the political landscape that we inhabit, it invented a value-free vernacular to do two things: avoid talking about the white people who are most afraid of losing their built-in advantages to the rise of liberal democracy; and two, avoid talking about, to any serious degree, the real consequences of what they will do to protect them.
Case in point is a news report published in the Sunday Times with this hed – “Their America Is Vanishing. Like Trump, They Insist They Were Cheated” – and this dek – “The white majority is fading, the economy is changing and there’s a pervasive sense of loss in districts where Republicans fought the outcome of the 2020 election.”
READ MORE: The GOP's foremost concern is the protection of white power
The content of the piece is familiar. White people feel anxiety about changes to the American national character. Those changes are rooted in demographics, economics, religion and culture. But the details of the story, which I’m not bothering to recount, are not important compared to its broad contours, which are this: white people don’t like change so they’re voting for the Republicans.
But “change” and “loss” and “the economy” – as well as “working class” and “middle American” and “non-college voter” – are words in the Times’ value-free vernacular, that others replicate, that obscures who is doing what to whom. For that, we must turn to the pull quotes, as we journalists call them. Here they are in order of appearance:
One: “In Fort Bend County, Texas, things are changing.”
Two: “Mosques and Hindu temples draw thousands, farmland is giving way to suburbs and some Republicans feel their county is becoming more like majority-minority Houston.”
READ MORE: How a radical third of the electorate dictates the terms of American democracy
Three: “Once predominantly white, Fort Bend has quickly become one of the most diverse places in the country. Its congressman is an outspoken denier of Donald J. Trump’s defeat.”
If there is a way of saying that white people in Fort Bend County, Texas, are prepared to go to war with liberal democracy in order to protect the political advantages built into the politics of white power, these three quotes, in order of appearance, are the closest we’ll get.
That is, unless an authoritative source of spells it out:
Because they are more vulnerable, disadvantaged or less educated, white voters can feel especially endangered by the trend toward a minority-majority, said Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at George Mason University who studies the attitudes of those voters.
'A lot of white Americans who are really threatened are willing to reject democratic norms,' she said, 'because they see it as a way to protect their status.'
Actually, that’s close but not close enough.
The face of liberal democracy’s enemy is white.
Perry Bacon doesn’t go that far, but the Post’s columnist has come the closest, as far as I can tell, to naming names. Most Republicans are white, he wrote recently. White people dominate the electorate. Most white people, by way of supporting the GOP’s assault on democracy, and are doing so without being held accountable by the press. Bacon:
Because white people are likely to be the majority of voters for at least two more decades, America is in trouble. Across the country, GOP officials are banning books from public libraries, making it harder for non-Republicans to vote, stripping away Black political power, aggressively gerrymandering, censoring teachers and professors and, most important, denying the results of legitimate elections. The majority of America’s white voters are enabling and encouraging the GOP’s radical, antidemocratic turn by continuing to back the party in elections.
It’s not, as much of our political discourse implies, that the Democrats have a working-class or Middle America or non-college-voter problem. The more important story is that America has a white voter problem. And there is no sign it’s going away anytime soon.
An apparent counterpoint is that white people are not afraid of losing the built-in advantages of white power so much as afraid of the rising costs of energy, groceries and so on. These are much-talked-about “kitchen table” issues that are always presented as if they have nothing to do with the political landscape that we all inhabit.
Economic issues are cited, by the far right and far left, as reason for Donald Trump’s election and the rise of redhat fascism around the country. But when you look closer, even “race-free” concepts like inflation and “being left behind” are rooted in white power politics.
Kevin Seefried and his son Hunter were sentenced to two years in federal prison Monday for their role in Donald Trump’s attempted paramilitary takeover, on January 6, 2021, of the US government. Kevin Seefried became a household name after a photo (above) circulated of him carrying a Confederate flag into the US Capitol.
Jeremi Suri recounts the moment in the introduction of his latest work of American history, Civil War by Other Means:
Like many others in the mob, Seefried brought his son, Hunter, to the insurrection. It was a proud moment for a father who had spent many of his years in and out of work, living in an economically depressed area two hours from the Capitol. He and his son were taking back their country, showing that they could make a difference, standing up for fellow working-class families who felt forgotten. They would not accept a president elected by nonwhite voters. The Confederate flag was their battle flag.
It’s here that we get to the real meat of the issue – the real reason white people are prepared to abandon liberal democracy in order to protect their precious privileges built into our political system.
It’s not that they love their country. It’s not that they love the Constitution. Their opposition to liberal democracy, and all that it costs them politically, does not rest on positive principle.
It rests on laziness.
Most white people don’t want to compete.
They don’t want to compete for jobs, for resources or for political representation in a republican government of, by and for the people. They would rather use their already existing advantages to get out of working harder in the public square, the marketplace of ideas or a truly fair and level political economy. The Republicans are saying, in effect, vote for us. We’ll save you the effort of competing with people who are putting twice the effort into participating in a democracy.
That’s what truly frightened them after 2008.
“Sussex County, Delaware, where the Seefrieds resided in a rundown house, fit the pattern,” Suri wrote in Civil War by Other Means.
This rural region of chicken farms entered a tailspin that triggered higher crime and drug dependence, lower incomes, and diminished expectations for the future. Everything seemed to be going the wrong way, and the election of the first African American president in 2008 only made things feel worse. Barack Obama symbolized an emerging country that the Seefrieds believed they could never enter. They lacked the education and pedigree to compete in a multiracial meritocracy that promised so much for some, leaving many others out. Obama’s diverse supporters were winning, while the traditional white families in Sussex and other rural counties were not. The Seefrieds felt like losers (my italics).
Liberal democracy’s white-faced enemy is lazy.
That doesn’t mean they will fail in the coming congressional elections. The white-faced enemy has many things on its side.
Even the Times.
READ MORE: Conservative columnist regrets ever supporting the GOP and blasts its 'toxic discharge of bigotry'
===
edit bd 10 22
rural trumpistas?
USA Today runs a daily poll on its frontpage. On Friday, the public survey results were on gun laws. “If it were harder to obtain guns legally, Americans think there would be __ mass shootings.”
Sixty-six percent said there would be far fewer or somewhat fewer mass shootings. Nearly 30 percent said no difference. (A smattering of cranks, 5 percent, said there would be more or somewhat more.)
I bring this to your attention not so much to bolster the prospect of tighter gun laws (though it does), but to point out a pretty common demographic pattern – that a radical third stands against the majority with respect to issues concerning us all. Whether gun control, abortion or “indoctrination” in public school, there’s always about a third of the country representing the country’s shame.
READ MORE: Dark money groups have pumped $1 billion into GOP effort to retake the Senate
This alone isn’t noteworthy. After all, every country has its yokels and yahoos. But not every country has a political setup that gives yokels and yahoos more practical power than the majority. Very few countries, if any, give voters in sparsely populated farming areas an effective veto over densely populated areas with large urban centers.
That setup – or the political advantages of it – are apparent when the Republicans slander cities, and in the slandering, they protect those same advantages. Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan said last week: “Do you feel safe in cities controlled by the Left? Cities that defunded the police? Cities that ignore police staffing issues. No. No. No.”
The dynamic of political power between urban and rural is obviously asymmetrical. That’s by design. It’s to prevent liberal democracy from flourishing fully. The thinking at the time of the founding was that a fully flourishing liberal democracy would inflict tyranny on the minority. In the case of the founders, rich white men like them.
But the problem is and has been the opposite.
A radical minority dictates the terms of American democracy.
I suspect that even people with something better to do than pay attention to politics get this. The Electoral College stands against democracy. So does the US Senate. The courts, especially the Supreme Court, do, too. We liberals say “it’s a republic, not a democracy” is wrong, but we don’t consider whether right-wingers have a point. Saying they’re wrong is more theoretical than empirical.
We should consider something else that’s more theoretical than empirical – the idea that political violence is an exception to the rule. Precisely, that political violence is random, irrational, senseless: something that deviates from the norm. It’s nothing of the sort.
Its origins have always been here.
It’s that place, demographically speaking, where the minority believes, say, that tighter gun laws will make no difference to shooting massacres, even amid mass death, even amid murder rates in Republican-controlled state outstripping those of all other states.
What respect is the truth (or anything) owed when a third controls contramajoritarian institutions built into the system by design? What respect is the political majority owed by a political minority? Why would the politically strong give respect to the politically weak?
But sometimes those contramajoritarian institutions fail (or appear to). If and when they do, this radical third of America is entitled, on account of having political advantages, to resort to violence in order to maintain those same political advantages. While democracy is the point for the political majority, with violence the exception, violence is the point for the political minority, with democracy the exception.
So when a school kid is sent a letter like the one above (regarding the child’s mother, a Loudoun County, Virginia, school board member), it should not be seen as extraordinary, because it’s actually ordinary. After all, what’s more common? People discussing hard topics like “critical race theory” in public school? Or people losing their minds over things they don’t understand and don’t want to understand?
The radical third has been living among us since the founding. They had kids. Their kids had kids had kids. This is how they think. This is what they do. The difference is of degree, not kind. As long as the contramajoritarian institutions hold, all’s well. If they don’t, well …
According to USA Today, “bomb threats at [historically Black colleges and universities] had swelled to at least 57” since February, “leaving administrators and students on edge and rekindling a history of violence aimed at Black students seeking educational advancement.”
The FBI said that it had focused on six subjects in 2021, but arrested no one, according to USA Today. In the meantime, however, “the menacing behavior continued into the next school year.”
“If we allow people to feel like they can continue to do this without being held accountable, they will always be able to be disruptive,” Walter Kimbrough told the newspaper. “We’re the only group where there have been threats, and nobody has been caught” (my italics).
If it isn’t apparent, the source of these threats is the radical third of America, where democracy is undeserving of respect and where the rule of law applies only if it maintains baked-in political advantages.
A radical third dictates the terms of American democracy.
It’s empirical, not theoretical.
READ MORE: Are SCOTUS Republicans in on a plot to end Democratic presidencies forever?
6 22
The first thing to know about today’s hearing by the J6 committee is John Eastman, the coup-memo mastermind, is in deep deep doo doo.
The former professor of law at Chapman University and fellow at the Claremont Institute apparently thought it was a good idea to explain in writing that the J6 insurrection might not have happened if not for a mulish vice president refusing to go along with a bloodless coup.
Eastman moreover had no qualms about saying in front of witnesses that it’s OK for a Republican vice president to pick and choose who’s going to be president but nuh-uh for VPs from the other side. He also said – to the president – that his attempted coup would perhaps maybe I dunno yeah definitely violate the Electoral Count Act of 1887.
Former White House counsel Eric Herschmann said he told Eastman this: “I'm going to give you the best free legal advice you're ever getting in your life: Get a great f-ing criminal defense lawyer. You're going to need it.” (Evidently counsel advised mum’s the word. In deposition, Eastman invoked his Fifth Amendment rights 100 times.)
Eastman’s hare-brained scheme came down to this: Mike Pence, in his ceremonial role as president of the Senate, in the counting of the electoral votes, could do one of two things on his own, Eastman said.
He could reject the votes, thus declaring Donald Trump the winner.
Or he could send the votes back to the five to seven states that had determined the 2020 election’s outcome. (From there, it’s hard to tell what would have happened. Either the states would resend alternate slates of electors loyal to Trump, a dubious option. Or the election would have been thrown to the House, where state legislatures controlled by one party would get one vote to settle matters.)
Either way, Pence said no.
He said no from the start, according to Greg Jacob, former counsel for the office of the vice president. Jacob was today’s star witness. Thanks to his testimony, we know that those who did not believe that Mike Pence could decide the election on his own, included, in addition to the entire White House counsel’s office, the following people:
Mark Meadows.
Rudy Giuliani.
Donald Trump.
And John Eastman himself.
Indeed, Eastman conceded numerous time and in various ways that his conspiracy would not survive legal scrutiny or the Supreme Court, Jacob said. Eastman vacillated between requesting that Pence reject the votes outright, which he deemed too aggressive an option, or suspend the vote count, which he deemed more politically palatable.
Having gotten nowhere with White House attorneys, state elections officials and his own vice president, Trump mounted a pressure campaign on Pence knowing that neither statutory law nor the Constitution gave him the authority to do what Trump demanded.
Trump did it anyway.
The J6 committee made must-see good TV by illustrating how, starting in December, the former president began pressing Pence via television remarks, Twitter and in private meetings. On the morning of January 6, 2021, Trump called to ask Pence one last time. According to witnesses, Trump called him a coward, a wimp and the p-word.
Then Trump took the stage at the Ellipse. According to lead presenter California Congressman Pete Aguilar, the first draft of his speech made no mention of Pence. Trump revised it, however. Then on stage, he ad libbed. Video footage shows that with each mention, the crowd got more jacked up before being sent down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Most dramatic, I think, was the demonstration of cause and effect regarding Trump’s tweet at 2:24 p.m. By that time, Pence had begun counting the votes. White-power terrorist group the Proud Boys had already breached security and were pouring into the building. White House staffers told J6 investigators there was general agreement that Trump ought to send out a tweet in order to calm things down.
He was told an insurgency was brewing. He wrote:
“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving states a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or incorrect ones which they were previously asked to certify. USA demands the truth!”
That, according to a witness, “was like pouring gasoline on the fire.”
Congressman Aguilar said an informant told the FBI that the Proud Boys were prepared to capture and kill House Speaker Nancy Pelosi if they found her. Same for Mike Pence. A makeshift gallows was raised on the Capitol grounds while the mob chanted “Hang Mike Pence!”
Like said, deep deep doo doo.
And John Eastman isn’t alone.
5 22
Liberals still take right-wing propaganda too literally. This is partly because we are liberal. We are often annoying pedants. If there’s an error in one’s thinking, liberals can be trusted to rush in and correct it.
That’s usually as far as it goes, alas.
Consider the reaction among liberals to the latest bit of incoherence by the Republican National Committee. It tweeted: “11,007 pounds of methamphetamine was seized at the southern border in April alone!”
It’s a variation on a familiar theme. “Joe Biden has created the WORST border crisis on record,” the account said last month. Also: “234,088 illegal immigrants were encountered crossing the border in April.”
The RNC says these facts are evidence of a “border crisis” that the president – as well as the vice president – are ignoring. We are not told, but expected to understand, that this “border crisis” is part of a leftwing “open border policy” that’s bent on “replacing Americans.”
What was the reaction among liberals?
Pretty typical.
Rightwing word-power
If immigrants are being apprehended and detained at the border, that means they didn’t get away with breaking federal immigration law.
The law is working as it’s supposed to.
Ergo, there is no border crisis.
If the border patrol is seizing drugs and contraband at the border, then law enforcement officers are doing what they should. So … what crisis?
Among liberals, the question appears to be: Why do Republican propagandists keep saying there’s a crisis at the border when the evidence they present to prove a border crisis proves the opposite?
I don’t think anyone is satisfied, because virtually no one has gone beyond the fact that claims of a border crisis are self-evidently bunk.
Worse is when liberals are content with pointing out the flaws in logic. Liberals, as is their wont, confuse liberal virtue for liberal politics.
And liberals lose.
To the rightwingers, language is about power. It’s not about meaning or coherence or sense-making or freedom of speech or thought.
Why would they use language everyone understands when such a social, democratic and equitable approach to language undermines their goal of protecting and defending the natural order of things?
Instead, they use words that everyone else thinks they understand fully but that only the natural and chosen in-group fully understands.
Liberals should presume their word-power is a fetish.
Fetish? Yes, fetish
I do not mean an obsession.
That’s a common understanding of the meaning of the word “fetish.” To be sure, a fetish can be an obsession, but it’s not only that.By “fetish,” I mean a thing that’s really a stand-in for another thing. It’s a blank line that Republican propagandists know rightwingers will gladly fill in.
I mean there’s no there there.
The principle there is the one that isn’t there.
A man with a foot fetish isn’t not aroused sexually by feet or the visual representation of feet. Feet are a stand-in for something else. Feet are a vessel into which fetishists pour associations with sexual pleasure.
Once liberals see the there that isn’t there, they can react effectively. Instead of meeting righting politics with liberal virtue, as they usually do, they can meet it with equal and opposite liberal politics.
Abortion isn’t about abortion. Immigration isn’t about immigration. Gun rights are not about guns. I have explained all this before.
What I haven’t explained is that laws at the center of these “hot button issues” is not the right-winger’s principal concern. It can’t be.
The closer you look, the clearer it is that “the law,” “lawlessness,” “law-abiding” and “the rule of law” are not what they seem to be.
The law is supposed to apply equally to a people created equally. When right-wingers say “the law,” they can’t mean equal treatment under law.
Equal treatment undermines their goal.
“The law” is, therefore, a fetish, a blank line, an empty vessel.
“The law” is a stand-in for “white power.”
Rightwing politics, liberal virtue
A Senate subcommittee held a hearing last week about a proposed federal law similar to a Connecticut statute permitting police to seize guns owned by perpetrators of domestic abuse and violence before they have a chance to murder women fleeing their abuse and violence.
US Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, is on the panel. He said:
If the objective is to stop violent crime, what is effective is targeting actual violent criminals. The approach of today’s Senate Democrats is to try to go after the firearms of law-abiding citizens instead of targeting the violent criminals that are the real threat. Firearms, yes, are used by violent criminals but they are also used over and over and over again by victims of violent crimes to defend themselves.
In response, US Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said:
Congress … should have eliminated the loopholes that leave women in the crosshairs of violent spouses and partners with guns a long time ago. What we’re talking about, I say to my colleague from Texas, is not going to take away gun rights for law-abiding citizens.
Wyden is correct. No law-abiding citizen would be affected by a federal version of Connecticut’s “Lori’s Law.” It would instead affect citizens who have committed criminal acts of domestic violence.
But Wyden did what most liberals do when confronted by statements that are not intended to make sense. He took them literally. Cruz’s words are mistaken, he said, before “correcting” Cruz’s word-power.
Wyden met rightwing politics with liberal virtue.
He failed to see the there that isn’t there.
White is the law is a gun
When Cruz talks about “law-abiding citizens,” he’s not talking about law-abiding citizens. That’s a fetish, a blank line, an empty vessel.
It’s a stand-in for white men, for white power.
White men are “the law” by dint of being white men. No one else can be the law. If nonwhite people try to enforce the law equally, white men are under no obligation to respect their effects, because the law, when it’s prosecuted by nonwhite people, isn’t legitimate. It’s lawless.
Cruz accused President Barack Obama of being “the most lawless president in the history of the United States.” He said it was because the former president refused to enforce federal immigration law.
What he really meant was that “the law” and “a Black man” are incompatible terms in America. A Black man is subject to “the law” – to white power, yes. He is not, however, enforcer of “the law” – of white power. That can’t be. That would be a perversion of the natural order.
Indeed, “the rule of law” was seen as “rule by a Black man.”
After the reelection of the first Black president, and after 20 school children were shot to pieces at Sandy Hook, the GOP made sure to right the wrong of “rule by a Black man.” They passed laws allowing white men to take “the law” into their own hands – with a gun.
Legal is white, illegal is not white
The Senate subcommittee hearing occurred the week after a law-abiding citizen legally purchased a semi-automatic rifle, drove 200 miles to the East side of Buffalo and shot to pieces 10 Black people.
The Democrats wasted a chance to see the there that’s not there – that “law-abiding” is a stand-in for white power, that it’s an empty vessel into which a white-power terrorist by the name of Payton Gendron poured meaning in order to take “the law” into his own hands.
Liberals should pay less attention to what right-wingers say and more attention to what they mean. Liberals should presume the principle there is the one that isn’t there. And they should spell it out for normal people in order to ask if this is the kind of country they want to live in.
You can’t beat right-wing politics with liberal virtue.
You can with liberal politics.
5 22
like everyone else in the House Republican conference, New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik has done her share of inciting white political violence. While the House debated recently additional aid for Ukraine, the No. 3 Republican chose during her allotted time to rail against the president for “the invasion at the southern border.”
That “invasion” plays a small role in the larger story of “the great replacement” feared by right-wingers to such a degree that one of them, Payton Gendron, took matters into his own hands last week and shot to pieces 10 Black people at a supermarket on Buffalo’s eastside.
So it’s with irony, you could say, that Stefanik stood at the podium after the massacre to “take a moment for my home state of New York:"
Our nation is heartbroken and saddened about this horrific loss of life in Buffalo. This was an act of pure evil and the criminal should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
It is not the time to politicize this.
We mourn together as a nation.
Actually, it’s gaslighting.
This is what gaslighting looks like.
The Democrats, she means to say, should not politicize white political violence by seeking political ways of preventing future acts of white political violence after the House GOP spent virtually all its time inciting white political violence, resulting in white political violence.
If they do, she means to say, how will the nation heal?
It’s perfect gaslighting. I have to say.
But don’t fall for it.
***
White-power terrorist has a point?
From NBC News:
Two days after a white gunman opened fire and killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store, teacher Elizabeth Close began her high school ethnic studies class in Austin, Texas, by reminding her students about a new state law that requires her to provide balanced perspectives on 'widely debated and currently controversial issues.'
Close told her students that under the law, one of several recently implemented across the country that limit the ways teachers can discuss racism and current events, she was obligated to inform them that there’s more than one way to view Saturday’s mass shooting.
On one hand, she explained that authorities are investigating the killings as a racially motivated hate crime carried out by an 18-year-old who reportedly wrote of his belief in a conspiracy theory that white Americans are being 'replaced' by people of color through immigration, interracial marriage and integration.
'But I’m also supposed to tell you that that’s just one perspective,' Close recalled telling her students. 'Another perspective is that this young man was out defending the world — or his kind — from being taken over.'
***
“The real issue”
When I write about religion, good or bad, someone somewhere explains “the real issue.” Get rid of religion. Get rid of the issue.
I don’t know what planet these people live on. It’s not Earth. Religion, good or bad, has been part of human affairs since humans organized themselves enough to warrant use of the term “human affairs.”
There once was a certain renegade cache, a certain poise and swagger, to being anti-religious. That fad peaked in the early aughts with the late Christopher Hitchens and his copycats. It wasn’t a set of beliefs, he said. Religion was a mental illness verging on totalitarianism. Standing against religion wasn’t offensive. Hitchens made it seem noble.
This is what people allude to when they explain “the real issue.”
Even if I agreed that religion is the problem, anti-religion isn’t going to solve it. Hitchens never spoke for a majority of people. He knew that. That fact was the reason his atheism got attention at all. It ran against the grain of the majority, especially white evangelical Protestants.
Atheism may be the opposite of theism in the abstract. Not in this world, though. The opposite of conservative religion – especially authoritarian religion, like white evangelicalism – is liberal religion.
Liberal religion makes room for all the other religions. It tolerates other traditions. It makes common cause. God contains multitudes. Liberal religion also wants a wall between church and state, because a state religion is the worst thing a liberal religion would ever face.
It’s conservative religion – especially authoritarian religion, like white evangelicalism – that longs to tear down that wall. It longs to replace moral systems competing for the attention of people who have not yet questioned authoritarian religion. It longs to replace freedom of and from religion with their own view of the “Christian moral order.”
Atheism or agnosticism or “none” can’t fight that.
Liberal religion, whatever that might be, can.
It always has.
***
“Christian moral order”
Jacky Eubanks is running for state representative in Michigan. On Facebook Thursday, she said. “I had the honor of being interviewed by Catholic journalist Michael Voris with Church Militant Church Militant/St. Michael’s Media discussing conservative Catholic values.”
Here’s an edited segment of that interview.
Bottomline: If you have premarital sex, you deserve punishment.
Voris: You're a faithful Catholic, meaning you believe everything the church teaches.
Eubanks: Yes.
Voris: You see that the use of contraception is against natural moral law? It’s destructive? It’s a doorway to abortion?
Eubanks: Yes.
Voris: The left is becoming completely uncorked, losing their minds. They're saying [post-Roe, right-wingers are] coming after your gay marriage next or coming after your birth control after that, and everything else. Well, you know what? Yeah, absolutely.
Eubanks: Yes.
We need to make a plain statement of fact, which is that the reason why the West is great is because Western civilization's underpinning is Christianity.
You cannot have a successful society outside of the Christian moral border.
Things like abortion, and things like gay marriage, are outside of the Christian moral order.
They lead to chaos and destruction and a culture of death, which is what we're seeing today.
We've abandoned the Christian moral order as a nation.
Voris: How do you answer the local press person who might be your age and just sees you as some loony that you want to take away your birth control?
Eubanks: I guess we have to ask ourselves, would that ever come to a vote in the Michigan state legislature and if it should. I guess I would have to say then that [birth control] should not be illegal.
People believe that birth control is better, because you won't get pregnant and you won't need to have an abortion.
But I think that it gives people the false sense of security in believing they can have consequence-free sex.
And that's not true and it's not correct.
Sex ought to be between one man and one woman in the confines of marriage and open to what you open to life. Absolutely.
***
“To sacrifice for us”
Republican Kandiss Taylor is running for Georgia governor:
The First Amendment, which is the right to worship Jesus freely – that’s why we have a country. That’s why we have Georgia.
Our founding fathers came here and destroyed American Indians’ homes. Their land – they took it. Look at what they went through, the Native Americans, to sacrifice for us – to have the freedom we have today.
...And finally …
IMAGE OF THAT VENOMOUS TOAD SHAPIRO
When they say that "49 Democrats voted for abortion up to and including the point of birth," they do not mean what they say.
They want you to believe they mean what they say.
What they mean, but do not say, is that “the point of birth” is the same thing as “the point of viability.” That is, the point at which the baby can survive outside its mother, which is generally about 24 months into a pregnancy, is the same thing as birth after nine months.
Let’s be clear.
No parent on this planet sees them as the same thing.
No parent thinks the point of viability is the same thing as the due date.
In other words, they are lying to you.
My hope is now you know they are lying.
Three things happened this weekend.
They are connected.
They are the GOP’s three-legged stool.
First, several high-profile Republicans, including the No. 3 House leader, accused the president of giving preferential treatment to undocumented Americans at the expense of “native” white Americans.
The administration provides baby formula to mothers detained at the US-Mexican border while they see through the deportation process. (Baby formula is scarce due to issues relating to trade, monopoly and the covid pandemic. The national shortage is reaching crisis levels.)
New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, chair of the GOP conference, alleged on Twitter that “Joe Biden continues to put America last by shipping pallets of baby formula to the southern border as American families face empty shelves. This is unacceptable. American mothers and their babies shouldn’t suffer because of the #BidenBorderCrisis.”
In September, the representative ran a series of ads on Facebook accusing “radical Democrats” of “planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION.Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants willoverthrowour current electorate andcreate a permanent liberal majority in Washington.”
The second thing that happened this weekend was tens of thousands of women, mostly white, demonstrating in Washington and other major American cities to protest the Supreme Court’s imminent ruling that will almost certainly strike down Roe. Organizers say the marches preview a “summer of rage” happening before the midterm elections.
Third was a trio of mass shootings in California, Dallas and Buffalo.
Buffalo’s is getting the most attention.
The shooter is an18-year-old white supremacist from rural New York. His semi-automatic rifle was emblazoned with the n-word as well as the names of notorious white terrorists: Anders Breivik (Norway, 2011), Dylann Roof (Charleston, 2015), Robert Bowers (Pittsburgh, 2018), Brenton Tarrant (New Zealand, 2019) and John Earnest (El Paso, 2019).
Payton Gendron went to an eastside Tops, a grocery store not far from where I lived in the 1990s. Of the 13 people he killed and injured, 11 were Black. He’s in custody. He was arraigned Saturday on a charge of first-degree murder. Hate-crime felony charges are likely forthcoming.
Two days beforehand, Gendron posted online what appears to be a manifesto. According to Ben Collins, who covers right-wing extremism for NBC News, it “laid out specific plans to attack Black people andrepeatedly cited the ‘great replacement’ theory, the false idea that a cabal is attempting to replace white Americans with nonwhite people through immigration, interracial marriage and, eventually, violence.”
Collins wrote that, “the manifesto includes dozens of pages of antisemitic and racist memes, repeatedly citing the racist ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory frequently pushed by white supremacists, which falsely claims white people are being ‘replaced’ in America as part of an elaborate Jewish conspiracy theory. Other memes use tropes and discredited data to denigrate the intelligence of nonwhite people.”
Three things happened this weekend. They are connected.
The “great replacement theory” is the link.
More precisely, democracy is.
Democracy in the 21st century isn’t yielding the results the right-wingers want. It produced the first Black president. It produced his reelection.
The rightwingers cannot trust democracy until they are certain that “demographic change,” which the Democrats love to talk about, has been stopped. They can’t trust democracy until there are enough white people around to make sure white people are still in charge.
Immigration.
Abortion.
Guns.
These are the three-legged stool of the Republican Party.
The stool animates the rightwing imagination. It animates the Republican incumbents running for reelection. It animates a third of Americans who believe “an effort is underway” by the Democratic Party “to replace U.S.-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains,” according to a recent AP poll. It animated Payton Gendron.
On immigration – stop it.
Stop all of it, even legal immigration. The more nonwhite people, Muslims and Jews in America, the more risk there is to white power.
On guns – more of them in more white hands.
Rightwingers can’t get rid of Black people and Latinos who were born here or immigrated years ago, but they can terrorize or (legally) lynch them. More guns in more white hands overlap with police officers who already serve an unspoken mandate to control nonwhite people.
On abortion – more white babies.
Most of the women who get abortions are white. By forcing them to give birth, the rightwing attempts to “repopulate” the country so that, over the years, there are more white people who can vote. Only at that point can the right-wingers' return to trusting American democracy.
Gendron’s manifesto spells it out: “If there’s one thing I want you to get from these writings, it’s that White birth rates must change. Everyday the White population is fewer in number. To maintain a population, the people must achieve a birth rate that replacement fertility levels.”
It also says “critical race theory” a rightwing talking point that has come to “encompass teaching about race in school, is part of a Jewish plot, and a reason to justify mass killings of Jews,” Collins wrote.
When Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin said “CRT, CRT, CRT,” his voters didn’t hear anything about education or even children. What they heard was that the Democrats are trying to replace them. What they heard was a plan for “PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION.”
This weekend, the three-legged stool was in full view.
Few Americans believed it beforehand.
A “white supremist killed my mother and other family members,” the Rev. Sharon Risher said Saturday. “Again, we deal with death because of hate and a gun. Thoughts and prayers won’t cut it. Something must be done! Can I count on you to help change this narrative?”
When democracy betrays you, where do you turn?
To hate and a gun.
Will more Americans believe it now?
4 22
The US isn’t one country. The more we believe it is, the less sense our politics makes. By insisting on “the truth” when the truth is diametric from “the truth,” we end up doing a helluva lot more work. We end up doing all kinds of mental acrobatics to make sure “the truth” is true.
Once we drop the idea of America being one country, things make more sense. We do less work, too, because on seeing the US isn’t one country, the source of our problems – our national problems – becomes clearer. That source is the politics of the American south.
Quarantine self isolation. Pandemic anxiety. Social distancing. Textured art portrait of bored unhappy annoyed trapped woman in black touching plastic bubble wrap wall in darkness.
There we find the reason the US isn’t one country. The states making up that region don’t want it to be. They have instead committed themselves to a wholly imagined confederacy of the mind and spirit, a fictional subnation inside a factual nation in which “real Americans” fight to restore God’s country to its rightful “constitutional” origins.
While the rest of America is animated by the principles of democracy and union, the south (and its interested and ideological allies spread around 50 states) is animated by the goals of division and control. If the south can’t control the machinery of the federal government, as it has since the beginning, the south declares itself a victim of tyranny.
I think the central tension of our history has been between Americans willing to sacrifice for the greater good and Americans eager to kill themselves to prevent sacrificing anything to anyone who’s “against them.” Democracy isn’t what we think it is. It’s not a tool of a sovereign people to effectuate self-rule. It’s a tool of the few to rule the many.
The south is the source of national division for another reason. Its loyalty to the United States as a union of states is conditional. It depends on the south maintaining its grip on the machinery of the federal government. If and when challenged, the south reserves the right to mutiny. Its social contract includes a “treason option.”
Secession before the Civil War is an obvious example. Less well known are negotiations between the Confederate States of America and foreign leaders who dithered long enough for the choice to be clear. Less understood, too, is the relationship, direct and indirect, between Russia and the Republican Party, the American south’s dominant party.
That relationship ranges in degree from passively allowing Russian operatives to sabotage a Democratic candidate for president to coordinating to spread the Big Lie (thus seeding the ground for a failed coup d’etat) to cheering in unison its invasion of democratic Ukraine.
There does exist a Trump-Putin axis in the Republican Party, as Jamie Raskin said. But obscuring that reality for most Americans, I think, is their belief in America being one country. Treason can’t be optional for some Americans. It just can’t be. That would mean “the truth” isn’t true.
The last reason the American south is why we can’t have nice things is this: the states in that region are acting like they are sovereign nations, as if reifying a wholly imagined confederacy of the mind and spirit, as if finally putting into practice the dream of restoring America’s origins.
Tennessee, Missouri and others have nullified federal gun laws. Mississippi, Florida and others have nearly totally outlawed access to abortion. Texas is now doing its own border security and immigration enforcement. Next is regulating the free movement of citizens.
Missouri and Texas are debating bills to restrict out-of-state travel of pregnant people seeking abortions in states where access is legal.
Stopping nonwhite people from crossing the border and taking up residence, terrorizing nonwhite people already here at gunpoint, forcing white women to repopulate their states and preventing white women from traveling “abroad” – altogether these are the things nations do as they’re slouching toward a totalitarian future.
Only we’re not talking about nations.
We’re talking about states within a region within a nation that are acting like nations, thus belying the belief in America as one.
That states are now attempting to put limits on the right to free movement is only the latest in a series of violations of individual liberty. The trend will no doubt continue, as a GOP supermajority of the US Supreme Court decides increasingly that the rights of states to behave like sovereign nations overrules the rights of their people.
To learn more, I talked to professor of political science and contributor to the Editorial Board Elizabeth F. Cohen. She’s the author ofIllegal: How America's Lawless Immigration Regime Threatens Us All. “If you can keep women you suspect are seeking abortions from crossing state lines,” she told me, “you can probably keep them from doing other things in public and interfere with their rights as citizens.”
Is freedom of movement as fundamental as freedom of speech?
Yes.
First, look at freedom of movement within a country. Seen that way, we find a lot of attention paid to the protection of freedom of movement. We also find that exceptions to the right to move freely are associated with other forms of political oppression.
For example, restrictions on the free movement of Black Americans was integral to Jim Crow. Sundown towns were towns in which Black people risked their lives being in public after sundown. Sharecroppers were not permitted to leave their land until debts were paid off.
In the former Soviet Union, internal restrictions on free movement were associated with attempts to centrally control the ethnic makeup of different republics making up the USSR. Needing permission to move around is a sign one has limited liberties of other sorts as well.
Also ask: Why do people move?
We’d find reasons to call the right fundamental.
They move to escape repression, to reunite with families, to exercise other rights and to sustain their and their loved one’s well-being.
It’s hard to say freedom of movement is not fundamental, even though that right is often overridden by claims of national sovereignty.
A legislator in Missouri has proposed a law forbidding pregnant people from leaving the state to get abortions. Can a state override a fundamental individual right in the interest of enforcing its laws?
At any other point in the previous, oh, say, 50 years or so, I would have said that attempts by a state government to restrict the freedom of movement rights of women who seek to engage in activities that are perfectly legal in another state would be instantly shot down.
After all, no one was blocking flights to Las Vegas to keep people from going there to gamble when gambling was largely illegal elsewhere.
We know teenagers under the legal drinking age in the US go abroad and drink alcohol. No one prevents them from leaving on this basis.
But I’m making no prediction of what any court will do in 2022.
Some say the proposed law in Missouri would encroach on the sovereignty of other states. But as you said, it's hard to predict.
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an 4 22
Whenever progressive Democrats talk about billionaires, it’s in the soft tones of fairness. Men like Warren Buffet and Elon Musk, we are told, should pay proportionally what normal non-billionaire people pay. The debate is steeped in the inoffensive language of “their fair share.”
The debate is backwards.
Instead of starting with “their fair share,” we should start with a question fundamental to every democracy that’s existed, to wit:
Should billionaires exist?
Should their influence be legal?
Billionaires are not just very obscenely rich. With their wealth comes planetary power.Their decisions affect billions and billions of people, who in turn have no say on whether those decisions should be made.
Why should a democratic republic such as America, which claims to hold power to account – which must hold power to account to survive as a democratic republic – tolerate the existence of billionaires.
We should ask.
We should also awaken to the truth.
We are accountable to them.
Billionaires tolerate the American people and their belief that they are the ultimate sovereigns. It serves their interests for the American people to believe they are more powerful than they actually are.
Are we accountable to them?
Yes.
The American tax code has long been designed to ensure that unaccountable planetary power wins when it’s heads, wins when it’s tails. A democratic republic allowing the existence of such a powerful parasitic class is a democratic republic surviving rather than thriving.
That’s why the debate is backwards.
A debate among progressive Democrats over the question of whether the very obscenely rich should pay their fair share has been settled before it started. It’s a debate the very obscenely rich already win.
We should instead recognize the very real danger billionaires pose to our republic. We should assess how much risk we’re willing to tolerate. How much should be legal, how much illegal? Only then should “their fair share” come into play. It’s fairness as a hedge against systemic risk.
It’s fairness so the people may be free.
To learn more about our tax code, and how upside down, backwards and prolapsed it is, I talked to Amy Hanauer. She’s the director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. She said that, “We do not have to accept a false message of scarcity. Billionaires and big corporations grew much more profitable even in a pandemic.
“We can pay for a better country.”
What is it that normal people should understand about the United States tax code that most normal people do not?
Taxes are essential to providing us with things we need, as families, as communities and as a planet. We can use the tax code to make sure everyone has good schools, to make sure working-class kids can afford college, to have resources to construct affordable housing.
But we can also use the tax code to have the resources necessary for the transition to a clean energy economy, to address racial and economic inequity and to make sure public employees are well-paid.
There are ways to raise revenue that raise resources from rich people and corporations. But unfortunately, the US does far too little to make sure that wealthy people and corporations pay their fair share.
My colleagues at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy did a report last year. It found that 55 profitable Fortune 500 corporations paid absolutely nothing in federal corporate income tax in 2020.
Zero.
A whole bunch of other big profitable corporations paid more than zero but less than half the corporate rate (21 percent).
The big economic legislation that passed the House last year, the Build Back Better Act, addressed this by putting in place a 15 percent minimum corporate tax for the very largest and most profitable corporations. Unfortunately, that bill is stalled in the Senate.
Letting corporations or the very wealthy pay less than their fair share is a choice. It's not a choice that most people agree with. It's also not a choice that most other wealthy democracies make.
In 2019, the most recent year for which data are available, the US collected revenue equal to 25 percent of its gross domestic product(25 percent of its total economic output). Most OECD countries collect more than 34 percent. Only a handful of OECD countries collect less revenue as a share of their economies than the United States. They are all small: Costa Rica, Turkey, Ireland, Chile, Columbia and Mexico.
What can the Treasury do about tax avoidance on its own?
First, to address the enormous problems with our tax code, we need legislation. Things the administration can do without Congress are not a substitute for passing tax reform, which Senator Manchin has said he wants to pass, which Senator Schumer wants to pass, which the House has passed, and which President Biden wants to pass. And not incidentally, which is incredibly popular with the American people.
That said, there are things that the Biden administration will have to do whether the Congress passes something or not.
The Trump administration expanded tax breaks for corporations far beyond what the 2017 law allowed. These regulatory excesses gave corporations and the rich even larger tax breaks than the law did.
Many corporations have admitted they used the expansive interpretation from the Trump Treasury to get bigger breaks.
A second big thing is that when corporations publish their financial disclosures, they are required to list tax breaks they think the IRS is likely to deny. But we found that big companies keep billions in breaks that they had admitted would not withstand scrutiny, simply since the clock runs out before the underfunded IRS has time to investigate.
The IRS should direct more resources to dealing with that.
Another important option is that we don't always know exactly how corporations are avoiding taxes. The IRS could require companies to disclose that. This would help us identify how to make the law better able to address tax avoidance.
So much of the tax code burdens people who work. Shouldn't the tax code burden the people who own and collect rents?
Yes.
One of the big problems with our tax code is that we have a special,lower rate on income from capital gains (which you get when you sell an expensive asset, like stocks or a house, at a higher price than what you paid for it.)
It doesn't make sense to tax earnings from wealth at a lower rate than earnings from work.
But even worse is that the wealthiest people can accumulate wealth without selling their assets, and then can pass that wealth onto their heirs at the new value without anyone ever paying taxes on it.
This is called "stepped-up basis.”
The Biden administration included a fix to that in the BBB plan. But after a heavy lobbying effort led by moneyed interests, the provision was removed before the House committee sent the bill to the floor.
The reforms that did pass the House would raise a lot of revenue and raise them from the wealthiest people and corporations. But long term, we should also go back and revisit these good ideas.
Can you talk about the alleged link between low tax and high growth? That was a very potent argument in the past. Now?
The United States had its strongest decades of economic growth at a time when our tax rates were much higher than today.And that's not surprising. Things that led to high growth required public spending.
In the middle of the 20th century, we put a lot of national resources into helping people become much more educated.
Rates of high school and college completion rose in part because of more spending on K-12 schools, of Pell grants that help regular people pay for college and of state funding to public universities.
We also put resources into improving our national infrastructure, like the interstate. That helped companies get products out to market.
Both of these investments made us much more productive.
Today, we have different imperatives to make our economy more productive but we have nevertheless been underinvesting.
We need to put resources into greening our economy, which would reduce the pace of climate change but also make us more resilient in the face of climate disasters, which are going to be with us.
And we have let inequality – both economic and racial – skyrocket. The result is that many working-class people of all races are left behind.
Addressing both of those things will take public resources but will make us much more economically competitive in the long term.
Did all that growth cause inflation in the 1970s?
Inflation is complicated.
But a lot of rising costs as a result of current inflation could be managed by passing BBB, which would reduce the cost of childcare and health care, two of the biggest costs families face.
Explain please.
For most people, housing, childcare and healthcare are among their biggest costs. BBB has spending that would address all of those, making them more affordable. If we could hold down costs for those items, that would do a lot to keep inflation in check.
We are a very wealthy country.
We do not have to accept a false message of scarcity. Billionaires and big corporations grew much more profitable even in a pandemic.
We can pay for a better country. We have the resources.
We can afford to make college affordable. We can invest in our little kids so their parents can work. And we can and must invest to take on climate chaos. None of us will be protected from it if we don't.
https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/groomer-speech/
edit bd
Something I’ve been meaning to tell you. My dad is a pedophile. I’m not the victim. As always, though, there’s never just one. The ties that bound my family have largely come undone. Pain is now a feature, not a bug, of our lives. It’s a story without ending, nevermind a happy one.
So you can imagine what it felt like to see Republicans in the United States Senate using the word “pedophile” (as well as “child-predator”) during the confirmation hearings of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Their use of it was loose, irrelevant, warped and worse. The purpose was advancing conspiracy theories already spreading. The goal was smearing the new Supreme Court justice with the smell of evil.
Worst of all, by overusing it, they watered down the word. They hollowed out its primary moral essence. They created conditions in which my dad and other pedophiles can now plausible say their crimes aren’t as bad as they say. Just look at what the Democrats are doing.
Child abuse, predation, child molestation and rape – these are real problems responsible citizens much find humane ways of addressing while serving the often conflicting needs for rehabilitaton and justice.
These are real social, political and criminal problems.
By belittling them, the Republicans insult us.
They piss into the wounds of real victims, too.
That’s what you’d expect from a political party operating on the edge of political violence. Justice Jackson’s confirmation hearings were a case in point, according to Gabriel Rosenberg, a professor of gender, sexuality and feminist studies at Duke. During our interview, Professor Rosenberg walked me through the four stages of “groomer speech.”
“You're seeing a way in which partisan interests are pursued through the figure of the pedophile, not because any of these people give a damn about the sexual well-being of children, but because it's an incredibly charged and politically potent thing they can hurl.”
On Twitter, you offered an analysis of the rhetoric surrounding Florida’s new Don’t Say Gay legislation. That rhetoric seems to weaponize words like “pedophile” and “child predator” and other things beyond the pale. You outlined four items. Can you explain?
The basic thesis of what I'm calling the “groomer panic,” which I think is coherently understood as a moral panic, or sex panic, is that has the capacity to be significantly more dangerous than comparable sex panics in the past in which similar sorts of rhetorical weaponization of the terms “pedophile” or “child predator” had been deployed.
It has the possibility of spilling into actual political violence.
I made four points.
First, “groomer speech” is using the metaphor of child sexual abuse to describe educational content that rightwing forces disapprove of.
This metaphor of violent physical harm is being used to describe a disagreement over educational content and the underlying speech acts constituting that content. There is a confusion about different kinds of harm and a confusion about the difference between speech and act.
Second, this confusion means concrete evidence of child sex abuse is no longer necessary. Instead, the evidence is the speech act itself.
It becomes the case then that anyone can be credibly accused of being a “groomer,” not because there's evidence of grooming, but because such person has dissented from a preferred framework among conservatives for the understanding of Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law.
“Groomer” describes dissent from conservatism writ large.
There is specificity to the claim about “pedophile” that is itself unique and dramatic. I describe it as having an eliminationist intention.
Third, “groomer speech” is distinguishable from “subjugating speech.”
“Subjugating speech” might incite violence. It's possible. It has before. But broadly, it’s intended to justify social and political inequalities.
“Pedophile” is a specific term, however. It carries, at least in rightwing communities, a claim that the individual in question is pathologically invested in harming the most vulnerable members of society.
There's no interest in governing such individuals.
It's not about establishing them as second-class citizens.
It's about putting them to death.
That separates it from a general class of what I’m calling “subjugating speech” intended to degrade or lessen a person but isn't necessarily a suggestion that they and all people like them ought to be eliminated.
Fourth, “groomer speech” is not being directed at minorities.
At various points in American history, conservatives have accused gay people and other sexual (and sometimes racial) minorities of intending to prey on kids – they behave in a predatory fashion toward children.
What's interesting about “groomer speech” and what's most alarming about its use by the right is the charge being directed at powerful people who cannot by any measure be identified with a minority.
When Marjorie Taylor Greene said Mitt Romney is “pro-pedophile,” she's talking about the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee.
When James Lindsay called Nate Hochman, a writer for National Review, a “groomer,” he's talking about a conservative in good standing, or was. He's saying this individual also wants to abuse children.
This is radically different.
It's now about disciplining ingroup versus outgroup identity within conservatism writ large. It’s about reformatting and hardening the line between people who are conservative and people who are not.
In the end, conservatives are the good ones. They're anti-pedophile. Anyone who dissents from the conservative framework is therefore pro-pedophile. They constitute individuals who must be eliminated.
Ted Cruz used to talk about “San Francisco values.” Others talked about “the gay agenda.” Those are more abstract than “pedophile.” You’re saying we’ve arrived at a new and more explicit point in the evolution of conservative rhetoric. Is that accurate?
That's generally correct.
I would add that on the right, they're open to the idea of people who prey on children deserving the most extreme forms of violence.
I don't think anybody on the far right is trying to hide that.
That’s fundamentally important.
“Groomer speech” is deployed to advance virtually anything that fits within the broader political program of the conservative movement.
Right now, it's about targeting people who dissent from a particular kind of orthodoxy around interpretation of educational content.
But then we saw it coming into play in specious arguments about Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's sentencing record – that she was “pro-pedophile.” Therefore Mitt Romney, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski [“moderate” Republican senators who voted for her confirmation to the Supreme Court] were also “pro-pedophile.”
It's spilling into confirmations of Supreme Court nominees.
That's a break from the past.
That speaks to the flexibility and centrality of the charge eventually becoming the basis of things like criminal policy, militarization, policing, tax policy and labor policy. It can become a basic rhetorical strategy the far right uses to justify whatever they want to justify.
You're with us and the children.
Or you're on the other side with the pedophiles.
I’m thinking of eugenics. The antipathy toward LGBTQ people comes from the idea that LGBTQ-ness infects white people. As a result, they don't have enough babies. With too few white babies, white people risk becoming a minority. How would you understand that?
During the early human eugenics movement, there was a great deal of enthusiasm in the United States for coercive sterilization of anyone who exhibited homosexual tendencies or who desired sex with men.
There was this idea that homosexuality constituted a dangerous social contagion that needed to be eliminated from society regardless of whether it could be passed on as a congenital defect. It was that grave.
Immediately after World War II, there was something the Lavender Scare period in which heightened concern about male homosexuality resulted in the creation of a lot of criminal psychopathology laws.
These law created legal justification for jailing and sterilizing gay people under the auspices of gay people preying on innocent children.
So the far right isn’t punching down. It's punching sideways – or even up in the case of senators. Is there a link historically between that and a leap into political violence? Do they go hand in hand?
I think Judge Jackson's confirmation hearings clearly illustrate how this works. The Republican Party did not want to see anyone vote for her. Various Republican senators fixated on a specious charge that she'd been light on sentencing people who possessed child pornography.
It was so specious that Andrew McCarthy, who is a notable and extremely right wing figure with National Review, basically labeled it “demagoguery.” He said there were better reasons to oppose her.
The right mobilized after labeling her “pro-pedophile.” From there, they disciplined GOP apostates by labeling them “pro-pedophile,” too. They wanted to show as much opposition as they could.
Actual sexual harm to children had nothing to do with it.
But once it got invoked, it became a disciplinary tool.
You're seeing a way in which partisan interests are pursued through the figure of the pedophile, not because any of these people give a damn about the sexual well-being of children, but because it's an incredibly charged and politically potent thing they can hurl.
That kind of irresponsibility, with no bottom, carries with it its own momentum. It can become more and more difficult to control.
no lnx
Defeating fascism's 'loneliness and alienation' has a simple solution: author
John Stoehr March 14, 2022
The former president held another of his tiresome rallies last night. I say “tiresome” because it was more of the same spleen and bile.
But he did say something useful to my purposes, which is talking about John Dewey in a world gripped by tyranny. Below is a long interview with Nathan Crick. He wrote Dewey and the New Age of Fascism.
Amid Donald Trump’s laundry list of grievances, including reiterations of the Big Lie, he said: “Getting critical race theory out of our schools is not just a matter of values, it’s also a matter of national survival.”
“We have no choice,” he said:
The fate of any nation depends upon the willingness of its citizens to lay down – and they must do this – lay down their very lives to defend their country. If we allow the Marxists and communists and socialists to teach our children to hate America, there will be no one left to defend our flag or to protect our great country or its freedom.
That’s boilerplate fascism.
Just ask Jason Stanley. In 2018, he told Vox:
The story is typically that a once-great society has been destroyed by liberalism or feminism or cultural Marxism or whatever, and you make the dominant group feel angry and resentful about the loss of their status and power. Almost every manifestation of fascism mirrors this general narrative.
Per usual, the crowd was so rapt with attention, so immersed in the grume and gall, you wonder if it’s possible to reason with fascists.
Yes and no.
“You can’t argue a person out of a cult by walking into it,” Nathan told me. “There is hope only when they step outside of that experience.”
One does not ‘reason’ with fascists. It is more that you get outside the fascist vocabulary and talk about something different. The hope is by connecting with ordinary experience, perhaps they find life is more valuable than Donald Trump’s talking points.
What would that “outside life” look like? For Dewey, it meant more than protecting and advancing democracy. It meant protecting and advancing the capacity all humans have to be more fully human.
But first, get them out and back into ordinary experience.
As Nathan said:
Propaganda is totalitarian when it encircles a person. It creates an entire identity for them that tolerates no gods before it. It is a lifestyle and gives you an identity that you can share with other like-minded people.
Dewey used to be central to our discourse, but his appeal has faded. What brought you to thinking he'd be worthy of a new book?
Dewey lived through two world wars. As a young man, he absorbed the spirit of the early 20th-century progressive movement. He believed in the upward ascent of society toward its ultimate end in democracy.
What he saw instead were fascism and global catastrophe.
I believed his life would be instructive for our time to prevent catastrophe from happening again. I believe there is something called wisdom about human beings we can learn. He had that wisdom.
Let's break down some of that "progressive spirit."
The foundation of Dewey’s thought was the possibility of experience to be educative. Everything he wrote revolved around that basic idea.
We were born to learn and grow. Although Dewey was a Christian in his early writings, he came to look skeptically at organized religion and adopted a more naturalistic perspective toward human experience.
He believed human beings are born to live on earth like all other organisms. We are gifted with certain powers that other organisms do not possess. It is our gift to use those powers for our own growth and the growth of our community, not for any transcendent idea or aim beyond this world. This world is our home.
So by “progressive," he meant we could always learn to grow.
I love that, but how can this view face the fascism of his day? One wants to grow. The other to destroy. They seem irreconcilable.
It’s important to see the world from the perspective of fascist anti-humanism. Fascists also wanted to grow in the 20th century. They just wanted to grow in one direction toward a fixed aim.
The anti-humanism of the fascist is not anti-growth.
It is anti-experimental.
The fascist has one idea of what it means to be human and excludes all others. Fascism’s destructive power is the annihilation of alternative visions, of difference, of diversity of views and practice, of anything that, from the fascist view, obstructs the one way vision toward utopia.
So the idea of “growth” might need to be modified. Fascists want to grow in the sense of feeling a fixed mold, like pouring water into a jug.
For Dewey, humanism meant seeing the human being as a source of potential power, diversity and creativity. Nothing inherent in us meant we’re going in one direction. This was his resistance to religious fundamentalism. He saw power as very general. It is through individual practices and cultures that we develop these powers in different ways.
So there is certainly a conflict here.
Unfortunately, there is no ultimate reconciliation of these forces.
I think trying to reconcile them at a philosophical level is somewhat futile. I think it comes down to creating the conditions of diversity to continually get in the way of a singular totalitarian mindset.
Unfortunately, technology creates the conditions for that totalitarian view by combining like-minded people into a single vision that prohibits alternative realities. When those unities become strong enough and resourced enough, one ends up in contests of force.
Dewey recognized that, although he wished it to be otherwise.
Please explain the three parts of fascist antihumanism that you talk about in your book. 1. “Ragged” individualism. 2. Animist nationalism 3. Totalitarian propaganda. Can you walk us through each?
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From my reading of Dewey, I looked through every single moment he talked about fascism and authoritarianism in the 20th century.
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I tried to reduce these characteristics to their absolute foundations. I found there were three conditions that make fascism possible: ragged individualism, animist nationalism, and totalitarian propaganda.
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Each foundation was built on top of the other, but all of them were grounded on the modern destruction of the self and community.
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By “ragged individualism,” Dewey was playing on the utopian notion of “rugged individualism.” This was the idea connected to the cowboy of the American West and the self-made man of the industrial US city.
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The rugged individual was someone who found strength in being different from other people, in being separate from and even contemptuous of society, and who through trial and error would intuitively discover the virtues and the methods for success.
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Dewey saw the opposite.
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Rugged individualism tended to celebrate primarily industrial capitalism that came about not through individual creativity but the harnessing of capital and the exploitation of weaker populations.
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Meanwhile, ragged individualism created an ethic of contempt for community. It saw that if you needed help, you were weak.
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Rugged individualism was “ragged” because it didn’t exist.
In a modern society, individuals were dependent on machines and techniques, not just for industrial production but through social organization. From birth to death, we are dependent on organized technology and automated systems to regulate mass society.
Human beings simply cannot get on in the world without being connected, in one way or another, to some kind of system. The idea that a person should “make it on their own” is virtually absurd.
That does not mean human effort is unimportant. Dewey simply says we cannot pretend, if we truly want to be individuals, that we can do all of these things on our own. We are intrinsically connected to each other. To pretend you are not is to leave you helpless and alone.
I am loving this so far. Keep going!
Worse ragged individualism creates conditions for animist nationalism.
I use the word “animist” to distinguish it from more traditional political nationalism which simply refers to any geographically organized citizenry that feels connected to a state and a common history.
Animism is when you invest a non-living entity with animal spirits. The state is that spirit. Animist nationalism speaks of the nation but it ignores the citizen and our common bond with each other.
Instead, it talks about the national spirit and the origin and destiny of the nation as if it was a kind of creature. What you get in fascist states is the mythology of, say, the “Aryan” as a complete fabrication.
But that’s a natural outcome of rugged individualism.
The more we are set apart from one another, alienated from our community and our families, organized by technology and machines in a way that loses any sort of personal relationship, the more we seek a relationship with something that is simply non-living.
We try to justify our lives by connecting to something deep inside of us and outside of us. This force of the living spirit that we can tap into that is superpersonal, somehow above and beyond everyone.
Once you get into this position, there is no more responsibility either to oneself or to other human beings. You get tied up into a vision of history totally detached from the experiences of ordinary people.
The fascist state or movement is the result.
It’s pathetic because it’s driven by a genuine desire for belonging.
Totalitarian propaganda organizes animist nationalism. I say “totalitarian” to note total absorption into a propaganda message.
Propaganda isn’t necessarily totalitarian. I teach propaganda frequently, as a college course. It can be simply a collection of methods for persuading on a larger scale than rhetorical argumentation can. We see propaganda all the time in social movements we find very noble.
Propaganda is totalitarian when it encircles a person. It creates an entire identity for them that tolerates no gods before it. It is a lifestyle and gives you an identity that you can share with other people.
Totalitarian propaganda is not specific to fascism by any means.
It can happen in any cult-like situation and is not subject matter dependent. Any idea whatsoever can be exploited by propaganda.
The key difference is totality, a vocabulary and a worldview so dependent on media the individual no longer experiences the world.
Thus, we come full circle.
Fascism is the destruction of the individual in the name of some higher ideal of personality.
What were Dewey's counterpoints? This is important, because I think most people still believe fascists can be reasoned with.
I think Dewey’s response is never about persuading fascists. You have to confront power with power. And I don’t mean force or violence.
I mean the capacity to act in concert for a common end against resistance. This is where rhetoric and communication become so valuable. One has to fight fascism by establishing a community.
By creating conditions that allow people to experience what they wish to recover. It is loneliness and alienation that sets the possibility for fascism. The way to battle that is by fighting for a community that allows self-expression and love and connection and creativity.
There is really no other option.
https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/donald-trump-john-eastman-crimes/
roger knew
2 22 rep?
On February 15, Bloomberg ran a story about the“freedom convoy” that seemed to illustrate Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity.
Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran minister who was part of the German resistance to the Nazi Party and to Adolf Hitler’s rise. His book, The Cost of Discipleship, is a meditation on “The Sermon on the Mount” in which Bonhoeffer splits the Christian concept of grace in two.
On the one hand is “cheap grace,” which is “without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
On the other hand, Bonhoeffer said, is “costly grace.” It “confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him.”
Indeed, resisting fascism by submitting “to the yoke of Christ” and following him cost him dearly. At age 39, the Nazis hanged him.
His theory of stupidity is featured in a letter written to friends a few years earlier. The letter, which is now known as “After Ten Years,” argues that evil like the Nazis isn’t the worst thing. Stupidity is.
“One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force,” he wrote. “Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.”
Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.
Bloomberg reporters Jen Skerritt and Robert Tuttle were covering protests of the Canadian government’s requirement that truck drivers delivering freight across the US-Canadian border must be vaccinated.
Protests in Alberta and Manitoba, dubbed the “freedom convoy,” took the form of blockades of bridges and trucking routes, at odds with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s declaration of emergency powers.
Skerritt and Tuttle interviewed one trucker. His name is Jake Klassen. His two campers and semi were in the blockade. He said Trudeau’s emergency powers were an attempt to “take everything from us.”
Then there is this part:
Klassen said he hasn’t been able to visit his nine-year-old daughter in months. She is receiving palliative care at St. Amant, a care residence in Winnipeg, but due to restrictions that require visitors to be fully vaccinated, Klassen and his wife can’t see her.
“Yes, that's absolutely stunning and sad,” said Victoria Barnett.
Barnett was director of programs on ethics, religion and the Holocaust at the National Holocaust Museum. She’s the author of many books on interfaith history. She edited a 2017 translation of “After Ten Years.” I asked if Jake Klassen exemplifies Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity.
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Maybe, but as part of a bigger phenomenon. “After Ten Years” was his attempt to understand the first 10 years of National Socialism and what had happened to his compatriots, his church, his country.
He's trying to figure out why most Germans caved to Nazi ideology and why they became integral to what happened. The historian Klemens von Klemperer (himself a refugee) called the Third Reich a "consensual dictatorship" -- which is a pretty good description.
Go into that a bit more please. How was it consensual?
His main point is that stupidity is a moral failure, not an intellectual one. He's reflecting on the process by which people willfully become part of a larger movement or political group, etc. As they become increasingly involved, two things tend to happen:
- They become isolated (or they isolate themselves) from those who disagree with them or challenge them (and I would say also from news sources that would challenge their worldview) and
- They get a lot of reinforcement. One of the things that happened in 1933 after Hitler came to power was that Nazi Party organizations were founded for every demographic group – teachers, housewives, kids, etc. Everyone suddenly had a badge, a uniform, meetings to go to, new friends to meet etc. — and that was a big factor in creating a new sense of a larger German community serving a "grander" purpose (in the Nazi mindset).
A big part of that, of course, was identifying enemies and those who needed to be excluded -- Jewish citizens, political opponents, critical journalists, etc. But that early formation of consensus made life much harder, even by the end of 1933, for people who didn't agree with it.
What you're describing is collectivism, no?
The self-understanding of the German Volk was a collective concept personified by the "Fuhrer.” That's a big part of authoritarian or fascist regimes. Authoritarian leaders can do things without parliamentary approval, because they represent the "true" will of "the people."
But that also created a dynamic in Nazi Germany in which there was this mass adoration – almost a mass hysteria – for the person of Adolf Hitler. There are paintings portraying him as a messianic figure.
Bonhoeffer said there is no defense against stupidity. But if it's a moral failing, wouldn't a defense be private and public morality?
Ideally, yes.
Bonhoeffer's essay is an exploration of why that didn't happen. (Elsewhere, he explores the lack of civil courage) But Nazi Germany is a disturbing case study in the failure of leaders, institutions (such as the church), etc., to stand up in an effective way to National Socialism.
The best and bravest people were either arrested early on or got out. But he's pondering (and I think this is autobiographical) the failure of good decent people critical of the regime to be more effective.
That didn't happen. (Along the way, one must acknowledge that many of them became complicit). But by staying in and working from inside the regime, they also failed to offer a clearer example of resistance.
That's why by 1942 Bonhoeffer believes (as he writes here) that "only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity."
The trucker above says he's seeking liberation, too. Liberation from responsibility. How would Bonhoeffer persuade a man that he has agency and can visit his dying daughter by making the right choice?
One thing DB ignores is the psychology of all this. (He describes stupidity as a sociological problem). In Nazi Germany, we're also looking at the pressures and dynamics within a fascist police state.
In other circumstances, however (eg, the truckers' protests), this gets back to the peer pressures within a group that’s getting its information only from certain sources, in which there is a lot of pressure to conform to the will of the group (and a reward for doing so).
I've studied this in terms of the psychology of group behavior in Nazi Germany, but the literature on personality cults, mob behavior, etc., shows that the longer and more deeply a person gets involved in something like this, the less individual agency they perceive they have.
For Bonhoeffer personally -- he wrote as a theologian and person of deep faith -- that faith has the capacity to make someone see more clearly. But “After Ten Years” is a rather bleak assessment.
I'm reminded of something Michael Josephson said in 1989:
Success can be defined so many different ways but right now it is defined in a kind of how high is your position, how many people work for you, how high is your salary. When you get into that kind of yuppie version of success, you’re going to sacrifice things along the way. There’s not enough commitment to the ground rules of civil virtue.
A society focused on "success" (greed, selfishness) is a society in which a man won't do the right thing to see his dying daughter and as a consequence, will make sacrifices he can’t reverse along the way.
He's making an important point about what we value publicly and how that affects the individual's ethics and sense of responsibility.
I've been very disturbed by some of the very callous reactions during the pandemic – eg, the minimization of the deaths in nursing homes, the rush to get back to normal when thousands of people are still getting sick and dying (and when large sectors of the population -- children under the age of 6 -- can't yet be vaccinated).
But as I saw somewhere, the scale of the callousness has been on display for some time now in how we've dealt with school shootings, the high level of violence in our society and the much higher levels of violence experienced by people of color and the poor.
A society is measured in part by what we are willing to live with and by whether we are willing to change to make life better. Bonhoeffer, in his text, addresses this when he writes about the responsibility we are willing to take upon ourselves for the sake of a different future.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems to be doing what Bonhoeffer wished more Germans had done. He called out conservatives in the Parliament for standing with the Swastika and the Confederate flag.
I interviewed a number of Germans back in the 1980s when I was working on my first book (a collection of oral histories from people who had been in the Confessing Church) and I recall Kurt Scharf (a very brave pastor, who would later became a bishop) saying that if Germans had held mass demonstrations and marched in 1933 in solidarity with German Jews, they might have changed things.
Impossible to know in retrospect, that’s what’s important here (and for understanding Bonhoeffer as well) -- taking a public position not only draws a line for what can be tolerated, but it also serves as a model to others that it is possible to speak out. That's what he was writing about in the section on the lack of civil courage among Germans.
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no lnx
The battle over who the 'real Americans' are is taking us to the brink
John Stoehr January 20, 2022
For the followers of the former president, and for the GOP leaders paving the way for his return, freedom is about power. It’s about what they can do to you without consequence and what you can’t do to them without consequence. The social contract is tantamount to tyranny. They owe nothing to you, but you owe everything to them.
They call themselves “real Americans.”
For everyone else, freedom is democracy and self-government. That requires respect for social contract, which itself requires respect for the truth, as the truth is independent from human agency. The truth not only binds equal citizens but enables compromise between them. At root is the recognition that the common interest and common good are achievable through shared purpose and sacrifice. We are all in this together. Only when we honor that can we all of us be truly free.
In my view, these are real Americans.
READ: Backlash grows against McConnell as viral video shows his racist remarks deeming Black voters not real Americans
You could call this the difference between conservative and liberal. But after January 6, 2021, and the ongoing effort to sabotage voting rights in GOP-controlled states, does that apply anymore? After all, many conservative Republicans still prefer democracy. A bright line has been drawn. The difference, to me, is now between traitor and patriot.
Fred Wellman is preoccupied by that bright line. But he sees a lot of Americans sitting on it. “Fence-sitters” he calls them. They are critical to his success as co-founder of the Beer Hall Project, a PAC focused on reminding everyone of the bright line between fascism and democracy. “If we can bring them around to the right side, we win,” he told me.
Fred is a 22-year Army veteran who served in Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom as a helicopter pilot. He then served two more tours as a spokesman and advisor to the Iraqi government.
We talked about his project, the problems of political engagement and why J6 is like the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch that led, a decade later, to the rise of Hitler and the demise of the democratic Weimar Republic.
READ: ‘I will not stand by silently’: Sotomayor blasts her conservative colleagues in Texas abortion ban dissent
Unlike other projects, yours seems intent on influencing the political culture, not just individual voters. It aims to remind Americans of the dangers we face even if they don't habitually vote. Why is that?
My cofounder, Cyrus Schick, and I felt there was a hole in the pro-democracy coalition for a group that’s laser focused on the events of January 6 and its aftermath that looks at how we can reach disaffected Americans and better reach more citizens. Most political campaigns and even PAC's don't have time to do long-term research or detailed investigations. We hope to add firepower to those efforts.
There are historic examples of events like the January 6 insurrection in the past so we are tying a direct line from them to what we face here and using modern tools to get more Americans to see that connection.
Let's talk about those examples. Why are they important to people who don't vote? I think we should presume everyone cares about democracy, but we should also realize that's probably not the case.
READ: ‘Culture war’ bills from far-right Arizona Republicans are becoming increasingly ‘extreme’: report
That's just the issue, isn't it?
I saw a focus group today that said independent voters only care about the economy. I get that. But I also know autocracy is bad for the economy. How do we get people to care about their actual freedom as much as they care about other issues? By looking to history.
Our name refers to the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. That’s when Hitler and his nascent Nazi Party attempted to take the Bavarian government and march to Berlin, as Mussolini had done in Italy months before.
He failed but learned the path to power was through manipulating the weak democratic institutions and structure of the Weimar Republic. Ten years later, he was Chancellor. In only a month, the Reichstag Fire allowed him to implement sweeping dictatorial actions that decimated German society and would eventually lead to the deaths of millions.
READ: Christian-based adoption agency refuses to assist family because they are Jewish: report
I would rather be accused of being overly reactive now than be sitting in a jail cell 10 years from now wishing I had done more.
Part of me wonders if our political culture understands fully what freedom is. I suppose you just have to scare people in the right ways.
That reminds me of a story I often tell about a time in Iraq in 2003. The local sheik I partnered with was chatting with me over lunch in his village. We had been traveling in my sector and we were taking a break to discuss the situation in the country.
He explained we have fundamental differences in understanding what "freedom" means in our countries. In America, freedom meant voting for who you wanted, traveling the country without checkpoints, educating your children and not fearing your government.
In Iraq, freedom meant, "You stole my sheep. Now I’m free to kill you!"
I think about it often and wonder how far are we sliding into that kind of society as we see the insanity at school board meetings, the attack on the Capitol and other actions by those who claim to love "liberty" and "freedom" on the right.
By focusing on J6, you are in a sense asking people, whether they are engaged or not, to look at the biggest possible picture and pick a side. Are you on the side of America, democracy and freedom? Are you on the side of mutineers trying to bring it all down in the name of "freedom." The Beer Hall Project seems intent on drawing a line that many don't see as one needing to be drawn. Thoughts?
That's precisely it. But also remember the aftermath of the Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler deployed his brownshirts (the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing) and a campaign of lies and misinformation while manipulating the democratic institutions to gain power after Munich.
We want our fellow Americans to see the thread that runs from that time to what is happening here today.
Over 500 bills have been proposed in 49 states by GOP lawmakers to roll back voting rights. They continue to believe in the Big Lie – that the election was stolen. They call anyone that opposes them communists or socialists. (The Nazis did the exact same thing.)
They are rolling back our teaching and education. They are deploying their own supporters at every level of our government and specifically targeting local school boards and election officials so they can have the keys to power in the future.
It took Hitler a decade with his tiny party. How long will it take here when the opposition is an existing major party that has control of dozens of legislatures and governorships already?
We hope to loudly and directly draw those connections in hopes of turning them back before it’s too late.
We have been singing the same tune at the Editorial Board. The chief obstacle is Americans having too much faith in democracy.
Exactly. The old "it can't happen here" challenge.
What are you proposing to overcome this?
The cornerstone of our efforts will be research. We will conduct focus groups, polling and analyze existing work to divine the common threads of messaging and how we can reach more Americans.
Second, we will produce original investigations and work that are designed to lay out these issues and draw the connections in a factual and honest way, and present them in ways that will reach people, be it traditional media or online videos.
On top of that we intend to fund efforts that truly infiltrate and undermine violent groups, misinformation networks and others who are attacking our democracy. Our intent is not to sit idly by talking about the danger but invest in active efforts to roll them back.
Let's talk about patriotism. If some people don't care about democracy, they probably care about loyalty and love of country. A lot of Trumpists believe they are the "real Americans."
That is a big part of the challenge, isn't it? How do we define these terms for ourselves?
The cops who stopped them and the insurrectionists who attacked them on January 6 thought they were "defending the Constitution.”
We have a fundamental breakdown of how we communicate in our nation after years of misinformation and disinformation, much of it fueled by malicious foreign and domestic actors.
It's no coincidence that Brian Sicknick and Ashli Babbitt were Air Force veterans and the representation of active military and veterans in the ranks of those charged is larger than their representation in society.
We have a huge swath of Americans convinced that attacking our government and the political opposition, even violently, is patriotic.
We must push back and educate. We must change the conversation and we have to start right now.
Too many people are willing to throw their hands in the air and say, “Well, what can you do?" I reply, ``How can we afford to not try?”
What drew you personally to this?
Watching the events of January 6 unfold was a gut punch. Watching the erasure of those actions and re-writing of the history by the GOP and their propagandist allies pushed me over the edge, almost.
When Cyrus approached me with his idea, I found a partner with whom I could build something unique and laser focused.
I call myself a pro-democracy advocate, which is admittedly a little cheesy, but I am at this point.
I believe in my heart I am, fundamentally, still fighting for what I swore with my first oath to support and defend from all enemies, foreign and domestic, on the Plain at West Point on July 4, 1983.
I am in some small way still fighting for our Constitution, for the Republic and for my kids to have a better life.
If that takes the form of a PAC, I will do what I can. We all have roles and I want to be part of the good guys on the right side of history.
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| For the followers of the former president, and for the GOP leaders paving the way for his return, freedom is about power. It’s about what they can do to you without consequence and what you can’t do to them without consequence. The social contract is tyranny. They owe nothing to you. You, however, owe everything to them. |
| They call themselves the “real Americans.” |
| For everyone else, freedom is democracy and self-government. That requires respect for social contract, which itself requires respect for the truth, as the truth is independent from human agency. The truth not only binds equal citizens but enables compromise between them. At root is the recognition that the common interest and common good are achievable through shared purpose and sacrifice. We are all in this together. Only when we honor that can we all of us be truly free. |
| In my view, these are the real Americans. |
| “I saw a focus group today that said independent voters only care about the economy. I get that. But I also know autocracy is bad for the economy. How do we get people to care about their actual freedom as much as they care about other issues? By looking to history.” |
| You could call this the difference between conservative and liberal. But after January 6, 2021, and the ongoing effort to sabotage voting rights in GOP-controlled states, does that apply anymore? After all, many conservative Republicans still prefer democracy. A bright line has been drawn. The difference, to me, is now between traitor and patriot. |
| Fred Wellman is preoccupied by that bright line. But he sees a lot of Americans sitting on it. “Fence-sitters” he calls them. They are critical to his success as co-founder of the Beer Hall Project, a PAC focused on reminding everyone of the bright line between fascism and democracy. “If we can bring them around to the right side, we win,” he told me. |
| Fred is a 22-year Army veteran who served in Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom as a helicopter pilot. He then served two more tours as a spokesman and advisor to the Iraqi government. |
| We talked about his project, the problems of political engagement and why the J6 is like the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch that led, a decade later, to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the demise of the Weimar Republic.... |
no lnx
'To defy Trump's wishes is to defy God's plan': The scary truth about modern right-wing misinformation
https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/right-wing-misinformation/
John Stoehr January 13, 2022
Death threats will change a person. During previous testimony before a Senate panel, the nation’s top infectious disease expert was calm and deferential. This week marked a break from the past. Enough is enough, apparently. Dr. Anthony Fauci was no longer in the mood.
Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas kept pressing the question of financial disclosures, implying that Fauci was benefiting from the effort to vaccinate the country against the covid pandemic.
Fauci, as head of the White House pandemic response, is a public servant. By law, he must disclose financial information. So of course he didn’t understand Marshall’s question, because his “financial disclosure is public knowledge” and has been for more than three decades.
Two things. Marshall knew this and was pretending not to or he didn’t know this, which should be embarrassing for a sitting senator. Either way, Marshall said his staff could not find the document. Well, it’s here. Ultimately, he was pandering to believers of rightwing misinformation.
READ: One sentence from the Supreme Court's ruling against an OSHA vaccine rule reveals its upside-down logic]
After a heated exchange in which Marshall kept insisting Fauci was hiding something and Fauci kept insisting he’s not – “all you have to do is ask” for the disclosure – Fauci said, “What a moron! Jesus Christ!” (He said this to himself, obviously, not realizing his mic was still on.)
Is Fauci showing us how to handle rightwingers? That’s what I asked Sara Aniano on Wednesday. She’s a Monmouth University graduate student studying rightwing rhetoric and conspiracy theories on social media. She co-authored a new report for the Global Network on Extremism and Technology analyzing QAnon trends a year after J6.
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She said Fauci’s pushback felt good, but in the end, it probably doesn’t help. “The reality is pretty dire,” she said. Propaganda, conspiracy theory and misinformation have “already infected the population.” It’s too late even for the Washington press corps to do much about it.
The way Anthony Fauci talked to the Republicans is how everyone should talk to rightwing extremists. Am I on to something?
READ: A right-wing talking point about Jan. 6 just completely collapsed after indictment of the Oath Keepers]
Absolutely. For a lot of people on the left, Fauci's pushback was refreshing.People are tired of the pandering, and of watching misinformation be lumped into the category of “free speech.”[ = wht priv?]
While Fauci’s “moron” comment was indeed a great moment of transparency, we should also consider his ability to humanize the situation with the anecdote about his own harassment.
The left is often considered "soft” in contrast with the alleged "hard truth" attitude of the GOP. While Fauci's position is not about partisanship, anti-vaxx movements have unfortunately aligned with the right and the far-right. So it feels like Fauci is speaking for us, even though he's really speaking on behalf of everyone.
It seems to me speaking for everyone is often interpreted as soft. In other words, acting for the benefit of the common good immediately marks you as an enemy by rightwingers.
READ: DOJ unveils explosive sedition charges against the Oath Keepers for the Jan. 6 attack]
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For a party that increasingly demonizes collectivism, it's in their best interest to continue promoting "individual responsibility,” as it works for their messaging politically. But for the extreme far-right, it's more sinister. In their minds, there is a war going on between good and evil. And if you're not on their side, their black-and-white thinking places you into the "enemy" category.
The irony is that they are actually collectivists, too, no?
I hear that a lot. In comparison to other countries, America is not a collectivist culture. In my opinion, anyone who pushes extreme nationalism here is also pushing extreme individualism.
As a leftist researcher of far-right misinformation, I admit to a certain level of bias. But January 6 marked a clear turning point in how we view partisanship, I think, and we can't discard that.
READ: Michigan Republicans who circulated fake 'Electoral College' documents are being investigated by the Jan. 6 committee: report]
Why is it a turning point? We turned from what to what?
For a lot of us studying far-right extremism and misinformation, we couldn't help but feel this collective "we told you so" when January 6 happened. For the first time, we had a visual manifestation of far-right conspiracism that wasn't limited to social media or fringe news programs. In other words, everyone saw people act on the ideologies that misinformation researchers sift through every day.
Of course, how people interpret what they saw is what's shaping their opinion now.
Which is where misinformation comes back, right?
Here's something I tweeted on the anniversary of the insurrection: “By the end of January 6, 2021, Americans were left with the most damaging relic of all: Yet another unfathomable event, born of hate and delusion, for far-right conspiracy theorists to contort into a self-serving narrative that unfairly demonizes the innocent.”
I want to cry.
A lot of us can relate to that.
To what extent is anti-vaccination about purity of blood? To what extent is anti-vaccination cover for plain old white supremacy?
It's interesting, because even if anti-vaxxers don't realize it, the "pure blood" characterization of the unvaccinated has roots to eugenics, which of course has roots to white supremacy.
But to go back to the idea of "infiltration," I think vaccine skepticism ties into that too.
Please go on.
I've been thinking about what types of infiltration the far-right finds most threatening. So far I've come up with three categories: 1) member infiltration, 2) spiritual infiltration and 3) bodily infiltration.
Member infiltration seems to stem from a fear of the "other" hiding in plain sight, trying to live among them but with heinous intentions. We see that a lot with paranoia about Antifa, the feds, Jews or journalists "posing" as patriots.
Spiritual infiltration has a lot to do with "demonic forces" among us. Satanic panic stuff. With QAnon, we see allegations of Satanic rituals in Hollywood or even reptilians wearing skinsuits to pass as humans.
Physical infiltration is a lot about co-opting "my body my choice" messaging to push back against the vaccine, which many think is the mark of the beast or a 5G transmitter or radioactive or a microchip. A lot of crossover with pseudo-science.
There is so much overlap that it's hard to make exclusive categories, but you get the idea.
We haven't talked about religion. What does your research say?
Yes, religion or spirituality is inextricable from far-right narratives overall. My thesis, currently in progress, focuses on QAnon Instagram comments in the week leading up to J6.
Rhetoric that pushes a higher power is always mixed in with far-right narratives, and overwhelmingly, that's Christianity. A lot of people who believe election fraud theories in QAnon circles genuinely think that Donald Trump was anointed by God – he is the chosen leader to usher in "the storm" and defeat the evil Democrats, once and for all.
In their minds, to defy Trump's wishes is to defy God's plan. I wouldn't say that this is ubiquitous across the right, to be clear. That's a pretty extreme version. But religion presents itself across far-right rhetoric in general, even when it doesn't involve Donald Trump.
Trump abruptly hung up on Steve Inskeep after the host of NPR’s “Morning Edition” challenged him repeatedly on the big lie? Are such challenges what a democratic republic needs?
I think Inskeep did a great job, although many were upset with NPR for bringing Trump on in the first place. Your question is a hard one. People asked the same thing during and after the 2020 election when Trump alleged fraud on TV before the ballot counting was even complete. Some networks cut his speech off, while others aired it.
Any time we platform misinformation, especially when we can see it coming, we must provide context and a good reason for showcasing it. If we can shut it down in the meantime, then yes, we should.
But if I'm being honest, I think that ship has sailed.
I don't know if it matters anymore if we cut off conspiratorial rhetoric from Trump and others when it's already infected the population.
Are you suggesting the press can’t really mitigate the spread?
Once Trump normalized discourse that was hateful, xenophobic, conspiratorial and sexist, he made it more mainstream. People who previously self-censored those thoughts felt free to not only think them, but say them – particularly on social media, where anonymity removes accountability. That hasn't really changed.
I guess my point is – the press should do what it can to mitigate misinformation, of course, but the reality is pretty dire.
There's a serious epistemological crisis going on, and that's gonna require systemic change.[// heated pod occupy sunrise guy too late to stop authoritorian, congress paralyze so only prez can at, crisis will give opening]
Again, I want to cry.
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The scary truth about the media's reaction to right-wing authoritarianism
https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/media-right-wing/
John Stoehr January 04, 2022
It’s conventional wisdom among newspaper reporters that we should let readers decide. Don’t come to moral conclusions. Just present the facts neutrally, objectively. Leave the rest to the opinion pages.
But that conventional wisdom is running into trouble, namely a period in political history in which normal isn’t normal anymore. Indeed, the more we cling to the conventional wisdom – to these normal reporting conventions – the more harm we do to the people we claim to serve.
That paradox is put into sharp relief by coverage of the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection. Its one-year anniversary is Thursday. The press corps had a year for soul-searching, but it’s still treating the event – still treating treason – as if there are two sides. The result is elevating lies to the level of truth, making everything seem as good or bad as everything else, and giving the impression that nothing matters.
I talked about this and more with Mark Jacob. He spent 41 years in the newspapers, mostly in Chicago. He’s the former Sunday editor at the Chicago Sun-Times and former metro editor at the Chicago Tribune. Since retiring, he’s reinvented himself as the sharpest press critic on social media. If anyone knows how journalism should be done, it’s Mark. I began by asking if the press corps has learned anything.
READ: 'A dangerous fascist': Critics blast Josh Hawley on the anniversary of his Fox News insurrection threat
Mark Jacob: They're learning slowly, too slowly. You see more instances of people saying flat-out that the Republican Party is an anti-democratic movement, which has been obvious for years. Of course, it's wrong to paint the Washington press corps with one brush, because some have been far better than others.
The Times editorial board likened the GOP to “authoritarian movements the world over.” Is that the progress you see?
Yes, that's a good example. But let's remember the Times was afraid to call Donald Trump a liar in 2015. There's really no question that the timidity and lack of truth-telling by major news outlets is partly responsible for the perilous state we're in today. I think many Washington journalists became very comfortable with the “stenographic school of journalism” and didn't want to give it up. If they quoted the Democrats and Republicans in equal numbers and acted like their comments were equally valid, they could stake out a comfortable position as "objective" and the small-talk at the cocktail parties would remain congenial.
Reporting both sides of cancer in other words.
READ: Report reveals new details about Liz Cheney's attempt to hold Trump accountable for Jan. 6
Yep. "Melanoma might have a point there." Even when the DC news media was fact-checking Republican lies, it would do it in a tidy and ineffective manner. Often news stories would say what Trump said and then would say what the truth was. But they wouldn't start out with a direct statement saying what the truth was and that Trump was lying about it. In effect, they were laying out the facts but requiring the readers and viewers to do the math. This was a practice that worked to the benefit of lying propagandists.
You can call it “objective.” Or you could call it “irresponsible.” Can you explain to non-news people like us why it's the latter?
First, I think the news media have been misled in a quest for some mythical version of objectivity. Deciding to conduct an interview or write a story is making a value judgment. For way too long, political journalists have thought objectivity meant letting both sides have their say, even when they knew one side was lying more than the other side. They were being "objective," but they weren't being fair to their customers, who depended on them to sort out what was true.
A lot of current political reporting is a dereliction of duty. Editors and reporters should never let a lie get into their publications without it being aggressively called out as a lie. Sad to say, a lot of American political journalism has been defensive – designed to prevent the editors and reporters from getting angry phone calls from one side or the other. But of course, John, we both know that if you don't get any angry phone calls, that's a sign that you're not doing your job.
I don't think most consumers of national political reporting know how bad it is, morally and practically, compared to their hometown papers. There are just different standards in each.
Well, local political lying is often less sophisticated than national political lying. National Republicans are masters of the lie. I think a big mistake the news media have made is giving the American people too much credit. I don't mean that as an insult. I mean it as a sad fact.
When the news media carefully avoided calling Donald Trump a liar and just laid out the facts, they were assuming, or at least hoping, that the public could weigh the evidence and figure out that Trump was lying.
But large segments of the public didn't reach that conclusion. Perhaps the most important lesson of this era is propaganda works.
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When the right wing repeats a lie enough times, many people believe it. Most of the news media and the Democratic Party think that if they say something once or twice, everybody gets it and they can move on. That's obviously wrong. It's why news media are ineffective and Democratic messaging gets mugged by Republican messaging. When you say the truth twice and someone else says a lie 1,000 times, it's just human nature to think the lie might be true.
One of the founding principles of the Editorial Board is that most people most of the time have something better to do than pay attention to politics. It's our responsibility to tell them what they need to know. That requires, even demands, that we be judicious.
I'm so glad you said that. I don't think everyone needs to be a political nerd like I am to be a good American. There's an elitism in politics and media that tends to exclude people who are too busy registering their kids for soccer to find the time to read a Washington Post op-ed.
The real challenge for people who want to prevent a radical fascist minority from taking over this country is to get people who "don't care about politics" to realize they need to take actions now — register to vote, give money and time to good candidates — if they don't want to see their kids grow up in a dictatorship.
In one of your recent posts, you address a thorny question among news people. What counts as newsworthy? Usually, it's what’s not normal. That judgment privileges the status quo, which is a problem for another day, but it also creates a rationale for ignoring lies.
When the Republicans flood the zone with lies, making them normal, they’re not news anymore. What can we in the craft? My two cents: stop troubling yourself with phony rules. But that's just me.
We definitely need new definitions of newsworthiness. We're living in unprecedented times, with a threat to our democracy that hasn't been this serious in a century and a half. Yet you hear people on cable news citing midterm election trends from decades past as if they're discussing the laws of gravity. Nothing is normal now.
What we need to do as a profession is identify the most admirable American values – opportunity, fairness, openness to new cultures, for example – and identify actions that most deviate from those values. Dramatic deviations from Americanism are newsworthy.
In your question, you're referring to something I call "ethics norming," which is the tendency to readjust the definition of normality based on recent events, even if recent events have been horrific.
This benefits people doing horrible things. I, for one, think that even if cannibals have devoured a classroom of children for three straight days, it's still news when it happens for a fourth day.
The Republicans have a right-wing media apparatus. Do the Democrats need their own? Would that benefit democracy?
The problem with Fox News and other propaganda outfits isn't that they speak from a Judeo-Christian view or oppose single-payer health care or want low taxes. The problem is they are systematically lying.
Another problem is that they are putting viewers in a cult-like cocoon from which they distrust everything. Their viewers are brainwashed.
It would be good to see more news organizations producing factual news from a variety of viewpoints, including from the left. As I said, objectivity is a myth. Journalists can lead with their values and still remain faithful to facts. A few organizations are doing that, such as Courier Newsroom. I'm on its advisory board. But they're way outnumbered and out-funded by the industry of untruth on the right.
I might agree with “leading with their values” if the press corps were not populated by the children of the children of the children of elites whose principal value is social status. Most seem indifferent to democracy's fall on account of being insulated from democracy's fall.
That's the scary thing – that some people in journalism today might be just fine under a dictatorship. You'd like to think they would be so vocal in their defense of democratic values that they'd be arrested if a totalitarian regime took over, not invited to an annual dinner.
When you talk about elitism, it reminds me that a big task for both journalists and pro-democracy advocates is to make it clear to regular citizens that their lives would be far worse under a totalitarian system -- that dictatorships are a way that the elite steals from the public.
This might be the most important message to get across -- that dictatorship will make everything worse for the overwhelming majority of Americans. Cheating and corruption are built into dictatorship. Opportunity dies for the talented but unconnected.
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i know you want to know if I know what US Senator Joe Manchin wants. I do not. I do know, however, that our national discourse over taxing and spending is so warped he opposes a so-called billionaire's tax while favoring a tax on billionaires not called a billionaire's tax. Such word games conceal the truth.
Taxes pay for a full and equal democracy.
This is not how the GOP would prefer we talk about taxes. They would prefer a national debate centering on individuals living an atomized existence, separate from and unequal to others, while encouraging individuals to think of themselves as "taxpayers" who are "liberated" from the moral obligations of fellowship, community and citizenship.
There was a time when this perspective was thought radical — either it was a cover-up for greed or for something more sinister. That's why Ronald Reagan, before he was president, cited a widely admired transcendentalist writer to make that view seem respectable. In 1964, while stumping for conservative Barry Goldwater, Reagan said: "Henry David Thoreau was right: that government is best which governs least."
Thoreau was right, but Reagan was wrong. That line comes from "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" (1849), in which Thoreau famously developed the principle of moral conscience superseding the citizen's uncritical adherence to law. The occasion was Thoreau's refusal to pay taxes he believed the government was using to fund imperial expansion, on the one hand, and advancing slavery, on the other.
So the government that Thoreau said would be better if it governed least was, to his way of thinking, an anti-democratic government — a government that, before Abraham Lincoln became president, was not of, by and for the people but instead of, by and for the interests of proto-fascist slavers in the American south. That's why Thoreau accepted prison time for failing to pay his taxes. He refused to be morally complicit in his government's crimes against humanity.
By the time Reagan stumped for Goldwater, the government had become of, by and for the people more completely than any time in the country's history. By then, President Lyndon Johnson had signed into law the 1964 Civil Rights Act, followed by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, together representing American democracy in its fullest flower yet. This is the proper context for knowing what you need to know about anti-tax rhetoric, which struggled in the 1960s but has dominated our national discourse from the time of Reagan's election through today. What you need to know is this: anti-tax is anti-democracy.
With the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it began illegal for the United States government to do what it had been doing since the American founding — treating non-white people, but especially Black people, as if they were not equal citizens fully and morally entitled to the same rights and privileges as their white counterparts. Of course, an equal democratic union did not sit well with some white people.
Before 1964, anti-tax rhetoric was, to them, rich people bitching about paying their fair share. After 1964, it sounded different. It sounded, to them, like the very obscenely rich defending their "freedoms" and their "rights." With enough time and effort, the anti-tax rhetoric of the very obscenely rich was no longer thought to cover up for greed or something sinister. It was thought downright principled. By standing against the government, and standing up for "taxpayers," the GOP seemed to have a noble lineage going back to Henry David Thoreau.
Beneath the rhetoric was a belief long-standing and deeply rooted in the blood and soil of America — that nonwhite people, but especially Black people, don't count in this experiment in self-rule. "The people" doesn't include them. "The people" is us.["real am"] A government treating them as equals to us, therefore, is not a government that "sovereign citizens" can support with their tax dollars in good conscience. The whole of the "conservative movement" in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, was a movement to defund a government that would not, because it could not, treat Black people like second-class citizens. A democratic government governing the least became the best of all governments.
That Joe Manchin is trying to have it both ways is, in a sense, not surprising. He has one foot in two worlds. A world that Reagan built, in which billionaires are "job creators" who should not be "punished" for being successful. And a world being built right now, I think, on the ashes of Reagan's in which billionaires are increasingly seen, for all the right reasons, as abominations offensive to all lovers of democracy.
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no lnx
Trump's latest statement may show the authoritarian Republicans have lost their last best hope for power
John Stoehr October 14, 2021
I want to share a thought with you. It may sound strange. It's that the 2020 presidential election may have been the Republican Party's best and last shot of an authoritarian takeover of the country. Now that it has failed, now that a majority of the American people understands what's going on and what's at stake, everything we are seeing now, no matter how scary it is, is a slow unwinding of an all-but-spent threat.
I'm getting ahead of myself, I know. We don't know what we can't know until the time has come in which knowing is possible. So I might be right about this, but I don't know if I am, because I can't know if I am until months or years from now. But there are small things suggesting to me, yeah, I could be right. What happened yesterday, for instance.
A judge in Georgia dismissed an attempt by the former president's supporters to review absentee ballots from last year's election. The ruling came a day after investigators found no counterfeits. According to the AJC: "Superior Court Judge Brian Amero's ruling ended the last remaining major lawsuit over Georgia's 2020 election and prevented an outside review of Fulton County's 147,000 original absentee ballots."
In short order, the former president's office said this: "If we don't solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020 (which we have thoroughly and conclusively documented), Republicans will not be voting in '22 and '24. It is the single most important thing for Republicans to do."
What does this have to do with the idea that 2020 was the best and last shot at an authoritarian takeover? The answer is rooted in the political psychology of authoritarianism. Specifically, humiliation.
Humiliation drives everything. It's what they fear most. (Regular EB readers are familiar with this.) Humiliation is what happens when they are knocked out of their place in "the natural order of things": God over Mankind, men over women, white people over everyone else. The authoritarian collective that now constitutes the foundation of the GOP would rather give up on democracy than share political power with people who refuse to stay in their place in "the natural order."
When Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he didn't lose. It is impossible for the leader of the authoritarian collective to lose on account of his being the leader of the authoritarian collective. If he were to concede defeat, he would be humiliated. That's unthinkable.
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So he and his Republican confederates are going around the country creating conditions in which the leader really can't lose. In order to defeat a system threatening to humiliate them with defeat, they are trying to rig the system so that Trump's humiliation can't happen.
This is what Trump means when he says the Republicans must "solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020." The fraud isn't fraud in any normal sense. The "fraud" is that he lost, something that's not possible on account of his being the leader. (He's correct, by the way. President Biden's victory has been "thoroughly and conclusively documented.")
So far, I have been arguing against my idea. So far, I have suggested that 2020 is the beginning of an authoritarian takeover, not the best and last shot. But again, you have to think like an authoritarian.
You already believe the system is rigged against the leader (and, therefore, against you). A political system, like a democratic republic, that gives power to his and your perceived enemies (think: Barack Obama in 2008) is a tyrannical system that can't be trusted until it's prevented from further empowering his and your perceived enemies.
If it isn't prevented from "oppressing" your "rights" and "freedoms," then you and the authoritarian collective you belong to might not vote. After all, why risk being humiliated again by the fact that the fix is in. This is why the former president's statement said "Republicans will not be voting in '22 and '24" if the "Presidential Election Fraud of 2020" is not "solved." They refuse to enable tyrants in their own oppression.
The same problem exists, however, if the "fraud" problem is "solved." Again, think like an authoritarian. If the leader says it's solved — meaning, that elections are now rigged to ensure the leader's victory in order to prevent something that can't happen, which is his and your humiliation — you, first of all, believe him. The leader is infallible. Second of all, you might not have the motivation to vote, because the chief motivation for doing anything, the thing that drives everything about being an authoritarian, is the prevention of humiliation. If the leader says "fraud" has been "solved," well, there's no reason to vote.
The conditions that led to this damned if you do, damned if you don't situation did not exist prior to the 2020 election. To the extent that they did exist, they had been waning in potency since the 2016 election when the country really was blind-sided by a shameless candidate who conspired with a foreign power to sabotage his opponent. Since then, however, we have learned, especially about how authoritarians think.
Again, I don't know if I'm right. I can't know. The moment in which knowing is possible has not come. However, I want to believe it's true that the majority of the American people, however slim, never looked back. I want to believe a union of Americans filled with the spirit of democracy overwhelmed the GOP confederates in 2022 and 2024. They had their best, last shot. They blew it. They won't get another.
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Yesterday, I described a situation in which local boards of education are being squeezed between two separate but related forces. On the one hand are shadowy nonprofit organizations funded by the very obscenely rich that are staging "protests" against masks, vaccines, the teaching of anti-racism and other things they don't. I call them the death-threat squads. They harass, intimidate and threaten board members in such numbers as to trigger waves of resignations. Their goal isn't changing minds. It's silencing enemies. The tactic works.
But it only works due to the help of a tandem force in question. On the other hand are local law enforcement officers, even whole police and sheriffs' departments, who do not or will not enforce the law in order prevent such crimes from being committed. Why? Because they are sympathetic to the interests of those who are committing the crimes. For this reason, a national school board group called on the president to help. The US attorney general is now taking steps to investigate.
I'm summarizing yesterday's column, because I want to stress this pattern — the squeeze play — that's between active agents of the very obscenely rich and passive agents of the state. I want you to be aware of how these lawless forces work in tandem, though not necessarily in explicit coordination, to shape not only our views of politics but our understanding of freedom, too. I want you to see more fully that what they are doing now is how they want America to be, a nation in which the in-group can harass, intimidate and threaten the out-group, and the out-group is legally and constitutionally bound to put up with it.
Consider an upcoming case to be heard before the United States Supreme Court. It's the biggest case on Second Amendment rights since Heller in 2008. Heller established the right to self-defense. The state is forbidden to outlaw guns for personal use and safety. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, plaintiffs hope to take Heller a step further to establish the right to conceal one's weapon.
It's important to understand the context of Bruen. Heller was decided before America elected its first Black president. After the election, the "gun-rights" movement sprang into action. I said this yesterday, but didn't say why. It's because democracy "unexpectedly" empowered non-white people. For many white people, empowered non-white people, especially Black people, means disempowered white people.
Something had to be done. Since American democracy could no longer be trusted, they turned to their guns. They turned to tactics to fight the feeling of being "enslaved." Thanks to Heller, they could legally carry their guns in public, in places where they'd never need a gun, like the library. They said they were exercising their rights. They were lying. They were doing exactly what the school board death-threat squads are doing now. (Local law enforcement officers said then as now that nothing can be done.) They were harassing, intimidating and threatening people they don't like. They were doing that because harassing, intimidating and threatening people makes them feel free.
The need among some white people to feel "free" in the face of a treacherous democracy that empowered non-white people — thus robbing white people of their freedoms — was so fierce that a day that might otherwise have triggered a national reckoning on gun violence was barely noticed. While most Americans saw the slaughter of 20 innocents at Sandy Hook as an overwhelming reason to increase gun regulation, the "gun-rights" movement was focused on something else: the 2012 reelection of Black president and chief avatar of tyranny.
I used to say the Republican reaction to the Sandy Hook massacre was the rapid expansion of laws deregulating access to firearms and their use. I was wrong. Those laws, including concealed carry laws, were a reaction to Barack Obama's reelection. They were a reaction to American democracy betraying white people for a second time. (The good guy with a gun is not just a good guy who shoots back. He's a white guy who's "free" to shoot whomever he pleases. That's what makes him good.) It is the expansion of these laws, and all they symbolize, that's set to be heard by the Supreme Court. I don't have reason to doubt this court will establish a concealed carry right. Once that happens, the right to military weapons might not be far behind.
Thus the high court will do its part in squeezing freedom out of Americans. On the one hand, the in-group gets to harass, intimidate and threaten the out-group with guns, concealed and/or open. One the other, local law enforcement gets to shrug, pointing helplessly to the Supreme Court and its interpretation of the Constitution. The out-group does indeed have the right to equal protection. What we're seeing, in stages, is a slow-motion conspiracy to pretend otherwise.
Which is the point. Freedom for the out-group is equal to tyranny for the in-group. More accurately, freedom for the in-group is dependent on the out-group living in fear of the in-group. Without that fear, the in-group just doesn't feel free enough. That's why freedom isn't and can't only be doing whatever you want. Freedom must mean harassing, intimidating and threatening the out-group while enacting laws and interpreting the Constitution so the out-group can't fight back.
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Far-right extremism, or white supremacy, is the fastest growing ideology in the United States. The impact of white supremacists terrorizing Black communities has led to calls for serious action, even an anti-lynching bill. This alone reflects how dangerous they are.
Add to that the January 6 insurrection and the evidenced involvement of the Proud Boys, and other groups, leading to the FBI describing the attack on the United States Capitol as an act of domestic terror.
A mountain of evidence suggests that, just as Canada did (and as I've written previously for the Editorial Board), the United States should follow suit and list the Proud Boys (and others) as domestic terror groups, as part of its initiative to tackle white supremacy.
But that hasn't happened. Failure means the problem persists with the potential to worsen. The safety of Black people and people of color, and the internal security of the United States, depends on such a bold move happening. The failure to treat the Proud Boys as they should be by the federal authorities is continuing to have consequences.
Indeed, a couple of things have taken place recently that have once again brought this worrying reality into sharp focus. First, the clashes several weeks back between the Proud Boys and anti-fascists.
The scenes in Portland, Oregon, turned ugly, but thankfully nobody was killed. Here's the thing that's alarming. Prior to the Proud Boy protest and the counter demonstration, Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell publicly announced that officers would not intervene. The Proud Boys are a threat, but here they were treated with kid gloves.
The lack of policing means that an approach of doubling down will be needed the next time the Proud Boys appear. Because the calculated failure to leave them to their own devices in the streets is akin to Trump's message. It's extremely dangerous, and dare I suggest, not how millions of Americans want their tax dollars spent with policing. Surely, those Proud Boys who watched events unfold in Portland at home on the TV will be salivating at the prospect of the next protest.
The plot thickens even further.
Just days ago, a judge ruled that prosecutors in the murder trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, the Kenosha shooter who shot three people at a protest against police brutality in 2020, will notbe able to play for jurors a video of Rittenhouse allegedly stating his desire to shoot people — while agreeing with the Proud Boys' tactics. The news is another example of how dangerous the Proud Boys and their ilk have become.
They can terrorize the Capitol, greenlighted by the former president, and, others would argue, in the streets, allowed to do so by a police chief in Portland. Apparently the Proud Boys were allowed to post banners around the city before the violence took place.
Their white supremacist ideology is something the likes of Kyle Rittenhouse was sympathetic to. How many more like Rittenhouse are on the sideline, "standing by" for their chance, brainwashed by the nonsense of the Proud Boys? It doesn't bear thinking about.
In recent day, the Times reported that a member of the Proud Boys who was present and took part in the insurrection was also an FBI informant and was texting his contact throughout the day.
That the FBI remained in contact suggests that law enforcement were more informed about imminent violence than previously suggested. One thing is clear by now. Law enforcement have more than enough evidence and knowledge, and means, as do the FBI, to halt the Proud Boys in their tracks beforethey carry out further serious crimes.
Trump was a dream come true for the Proud Boys. God only knows what messaging he might have continued giving to white supremacist groups had he secured another term. Biden needs to now break up the dangerous groundwork that was laid for groups like them. And ordinary Americans need to push him. The safety of tax-paying Americans, and American democracy itself, is depending on it.
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The real reason abortion opponents also hate mask and vaccine mandates
The real reason abortion opponents also hate mask and vaccine mandates
President Donald J. Trump delivers remarks at the 47th Annual March for Life gathering Friday, Jan. 24, 2020, at the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
(Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)
John Stoehr September 01, 2021
This article was paid for by AlterNet subscribers. Not a subscriber? Try us and go ad-free for $1. Prefer to give a one-time tip? Click here.
I received this morning a message via Twitter from a very well-known television news host. It seemed to be regarding yesterday's column about what I think is the proper place of abortion in American politics. It isn't a fight for the sanctity of life or "life" or what have you, I said. It is a fight against democratic modernity itself. Here is their response:
Focus on this: when does a "person" begin? That is the question. We have no consensus. We evolved on the question of when life ends that fostered much of the law around demise … That's the real issue here. And Roe was never the best-reasoned decision.
This response suggests that this very well-known television news host did not get the gist of my piece. Or perhaps they did not want to. In any case, if I were to believe that the question of life's beginning is the "real question" and the "real issue," I'd be restricting myself from considering a whole range of knowledge, history and argument, including the fact that few but Catholics cared about abortion for most of American history. It did not become a political issue until Americans organized themselves to force it to become a political issue. Why would I or anyone ignore that in favor of a carefully designed and narrow question the answer to which privileges anti-abortionists?
When you expand the question — from one of "morality" (and I'll get to why I put that word on quotes in a moment) to one of politics — you can make enough room to see that the question of consensus is a question built on sand. There may be no consensus about when "life" begins, but there's damn well consensus about individual liberty. Most Americans are for it. There may be no consensus about when a person becomes a person, but there's damn well consensus about forcing individuals to subordinate themselves (or their bodies, in the case of abortion) to an authoritarian collective. Most Americans are against it. Imagine a political debate over abortion that's actually political.
Restricting politics to one of "morality" makes pro-choice Americans seem immoral, even downright evil. That's the point! And that's why I put "morality" in quotes. In yesterday's column, I tried to make clear that while anti-abortionists say they believe in the sanctity of life, or say they believe an embryo is a person, they do not really believe this. How do I know? If individuals mattered as much as they say they matter, a half-century-old anti-abortion movement would not exist. As I said: "The authoritarian collective that comprises it requires that the needs of individuals be expendable compared to the interests and needs of the collective. If the authoritarian collective really believed in the sanctity of the individual's life, such respect would threaten the integrity of the hierarchies of power that literally define the anti-abortionist's life. Such respect would mean psychic death."
Yes, it's authoritarian. Yes, it's a collective. (I explain why in yesterday's column.) And yes, individuals are expendable. That individuals are indeed expendable means anti-abortionists don't mean what they say. (It also means the very well-known television news host who asked me to focus on the "real question" is a dupe or a patsy or both.) Even as they say life is precious, life is expendable, even disposable. This fact is abundantly clear in all kinds of ways when you expand the frame of the debate over abortion. The poor are disposable. Racial and sexual minorities are disposable. Of course, in the case of abortion, women are disposable. (Though, to be sure, abortion will be accessible to any woman of means.) Even the authoritarian men and women who make up the authoritarian collective are disposable. I don't think anything illustrates that better than the GOP response to the covid pandemic.
You'll have noticed by now that anti-vax Republicans are dying in droves. That's OK from the point of view of the authoritarian collective. If sacrificing a few of their number ends up sabotaging the president's effort to bring the country out of the pandemic — if it makes room for the new delta variant to mutate and spread — then such sacrifice is worth it. It could create conditions by which a majority of the American people blame Joe Biden and his party, and return the Republicans to power in the 2022 midterms. Why do many of the same people who desire bans on abortion also desire bans on vaccine and mask mandates? The link isn't "freedom." That's the lie they tell themselves and everyone. The link is the preservation and expansion of the authoritarian collective at the expense of individuals. They accuse pro-choice Americans of being evil as means of covering up the barbarous flesh-eating reality of their larger political project.
As for the very well-known television news host, I'm not naming them for their sake. I don't think they're biased in any ideological way (though I should make room for that being the case if so). The reason I mention them at all is because their response to me is example of the tight framing of the abortion debate among members of the Washington press corps that in effect favors the anti-abortionists and covers up the Republican Party's gothic politics. As I said, there's plenty of consensus in this country if you know how to find it.
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the real reason unvaccinated Americans are dying in hospital beds and claiming they love 'freedom'
John Stoehr August 25, 2021
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a new report showing the dominant delta variant of the coronavirus is now making vaccines against catching it less effective. Before delta, they were 91 percent effective. After delta, they are 66 percent effective. The United Kingdom and Israel have reported similar findings. Vaccines are still preventative, the CDC said, and booster shots were already in the works. The Food and Drug Administration is preparing to sign off on a booster campaign set to begin Sept. 20, according to Bloomberg.
The spread of the delta variant is why the nation's top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, went on CNN to say getting the covid pandemic under control might not happen until spring of next year. "As we get into the spring, we could start getting back to a degree of normality, namely resuming the things that we were hoping we could do — restaurants, theaters, that kind of thing," he said. This news, according to CNN's Stephen Collinson, came as a "severe jolt to a weary nation" that elected Joe Biden to take care of this problem.
Collinson's argument is that the delta variant poses a great danger to the president's domestic agenda, but especially his party's majorities in the United States Congress. "The pandemic that he was elected to end could drag on deep into a midterm election year, with all the political and economic destruction that could bring." Collinson added that Fauci's statement "meant that Biden's best-laid plans of triumphing over the pandemic and riding an economic wave into the campaign for congressional election results in November next year now look at risk."
I'll get back to Collinson's piece and the delta variant in a moment. But first I want to bring in a theme I've been writing about this week: bad faith. In a nutshell, the Washington press corps is not biased in the ways that the Republicans Party says it is. It is not liberal. It does not have an agenda (other than the normal ones, like informing the citizenry or turning a profit). But the Republicans are right in one very important way. It is biased to the extent that it tolerates endless bad faith. Moreover, it tolerates bullshit knowing it's bullshit. On the infrequent occasion when reporters do demonstrate "liberal bias," it's when they demonstrate unwillingness to tolerate Republican bad faith.
What does this have to do with the delta variant? First, it's the reason the pandemic isn't over yet. And the reason for delta's dominance is pretty clear. As Collinson himself says: "The latest surge of the virus, powered by the more infectious Delta variant, was able to take hold because Americans in more conservative, southern states — deeply skeptical of government advice and science — declined in larger numbers than their more liberal compatriots to get vaccinated. If such skepticism, fanned by conservative political leaders and conspiracy fueled right-wing media, were to ultimately boost Republicans in next year's congressional polls it would be a bitter irony for the President."
So when it comes to the question of why the president hasn't done what he said he was going to do, we have to take into account, if we're being honest with ourselves and others, that Biden isn't alone here. There are 50 states in the union, each with their own leaders who make choices they think are best for their constituents. Moreover, you could say, again in all honesty, that the president's plan to get the country back on its feet depended on "more conservative, southern states" doing their part in what is and must be a united effort to overcome a disease that will kill a million Americans before it's over.
Again, honestly, they failed to do their part. Those of us who did are going to suffer. Delta's spread means vaccines are now less effective. As I said last week, this minority is stealing the majority's freedom.
Even this might not be so bad if not for the suggestion, illustrated by Collinson's piece, that voters might punish Biden for failing to control the pandemic while at the same time saying in plain English that the reason it's not under control is because "conservative, southern states — deeply skeptical of government advice and science" have put that objective even farther out of reach. A moral press would make it clear to the citizenry who's to blame. An anti-moral press, one that's hostile toward the obligations of the truth, will make-believe it's hard to say.
I said the press corps often tolerates bullshit knowing it's bullshit, but it often does not. Collinson isn't alone in this. He said southern states are "deeply skeptical of government advice and science." Another variation of this that's echoed by the press corps is that residents of southern states fear losing their freedoms. Residents fear it so much they're willing to put their lives on the line. They'll refuse to get vaccinated. They'll refuse to wear masks. They'll defy "government tyranny." This is the conclusion drawn by the Times' Alexander Stockton and Lucy King in a searing new video op-ed. They went to the Ozarks to better understand anti-vaxers. Over and over, they were told they don't want to be told what to do. Living in America means living free! What Stockton and King don't know is it's all bad faith.
The people Stockton and King interview, including the white men literally dying in hospital beds, do not fear losing their freedoms. That it is a put-on. They're hiding what they truly fear, which is humiliation. Authoritarian-minded people — which is to say, those who determine politics in southern states — live in daily fear of being humiliated. By what? You name it. Living in a diverse, democratic and capitalist republic offers opportunities aplenty to be humiliated for those who identify strongly with top-down social control. Anything threatening that threatens them. Since the pandemic started as "a hoax," it is a hoax. Buh Gawd, they'll die before being wrong. And they do.
Stockton and King don't have the insight necessary for seeing what they truly fear, but they do something I haven't seen from other members of the pundit corps. They take "fearing the loss of their freedoms" and superimpose the claims over images of imminent death, as if to suggest that freedom to die from the covid is no freedom at all. At one point the narrator says: "This is what freedom looks like in America today." I have never seen a simpler and more powerful way of rejecting GOP bad faith. It's something we all of us need to see more.
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wiked? smot
to understand the American authoritarian mind, look to evangelical Christianity
no lnx
John Stoehr July 21, 2021
Michelle Goldberg is a superlative Times columnist. To my way of thinking, she's a quintessential liberal. I mean that in ways positive and negative. Positive in that she's a warrior for liberty, morality and self-government. Negative in that Goldberg does not, and probably cannot, understand the authoritarian mind, nor its perennial threat to us. Liberals are right to have sympathy for the devil. But there's such a thing as too much.
In her newest column, Goldberg talked about her experience reading Michael Bender's book about the 2020 presidential election, Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost. Bender, who's a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, recounts not only "White House disarray and Trump's terrifying impulses," Goldberg writes, but "the people who followed Trump from rally to rally like authoritarian Deadheads."
Bender's description of these Trump superfans, who called themselves the "front-row Joes," is sympathetic but not sentimental. Above all, he captures their pre-Trump loneliness. … There are many causes for the overlapping dysfunctions that make contemporary American life feel so dystopian, but loneliness is a big one.
Goldberg suggests strongly that loneliness might be the cause of the current drift in the United States toward authoritarianism. She quotes The Week's Damon Linker, who cites Hannah Arendt: "Lonely people are drawn to totalitarian ideologies." "'The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships,' Arendt said in The Origins of Totalitarianism, describing those who gave themselves over to all-encompassing mass movements."
I love Arendt, but she's wrong here. She has things in reverse. I don't know if the chief characteristic of the mass man is brutality and backwardness, but I do know that loneliness is the result of brutality and backwardness. In other words, authoritarianism causes alienation, not the other way around. Democracy does not, and cannot, constitute "normal social relationships" to the authoritarian way of thinking, because democracy, to the authoritarian way of thinking, is a moral perversion of the natural order of things, which is to say, "normal social relationships": God over Man, men over women, black over white, etc. Democracy always runs against the grain of "God's law." The authoritarian is always already alienated—from her nation but mostly from herself.
Goldberg cites the American Enterprise Institute's Daniel Cox, who found a link between loneliness and support for the disgraced former president. The "share of Americans who are more socially disconnected from society is on the rise," Cox said. "And these voters disproportionately support Trump." His survey found that "17 percent of Americans said they had not a single person in their 'core social network.'" He added that these "socially disconnected voters were far more likely to view Trump positively and support his re-election than those with more robust personal networks."
Like I said, Michelle Goldberg is a quintessential liberal. She's reading Cox's findings as loneliness causing authoritarianism. It's the reverse, though. How can I be so sure? If loneliness causes authoritarianism, what are potential solutions? Among them would be more social networks, more community, more human bonding, and so on, right?
Guess what? White evangelical Protestants are very social, very communal and very bonded by religion and conviction. God over Man, men over women, black over white, etc.—God's law is the basis for their "normal social relationships." White evangelical Protestants are, moreover, united by their collective authoritarian belief that they have been chosen by God to rule America in God's name for the purpose of hastening the End Times, so that anything is justified as long as it serves Him. Put more plainly, nothing matters but authority and power. There are plenty of lonely people in this world, but making them less lonely isn't going to make many of them less fascist.
How can the authoritarian be alienated from her nation but especially herself while at the same time appear to find connection in communities like white evangelical Protestants? That's a very good question! It gets to the heart of the real problem. The authoritarian mind is taught to never ever ever come to its own conclusions about the world. Truth is whatever Dear Leader says, not what your eyes and ears tell you. This "education" begins before birth and lasts a lifetime. As a consequence, there's no such thing as independent thinking. There's no such thing as freedom of choice. In the collective, there's no such thing as you. As a result, you will always be lonely. Big rallies might seem communal, but they're illusory. You're filling a hole that can't be filled.
Goldberg again cited Hannah Arendt who "described people shaken loose from any definite place in the world as being at once deeply selfish and indifferent to their own well-being: 'Self-centeredness, therefore, went hand in hand with a decisive weakening of the instinct for self-preservation.'" Goldberg said the pandemic did that. It shook people loose from "any definite place in the world." No, it didn't. The covid, the lockdowns, the isolation—these did affect authoritarian minds like they did all other minds. The difference, however, is that the authoritarian mind was already shaken loose from its definite place. And their always already-present anxiety rose to ever more feverish pitches the more democracy prepared to overthrow their fuhrer. We should not ease this mind with sympathy. We should break it with more democracy.
Again, it's the reverse. Being "shaken loose from any definite place in the world" does not necessarily make you "deeply selfish and indifferent to their own well-being." Not if you're already there. If so, already being "deeply selfish and indifferent to their own well-being" is what shakes you loose "from any definite place in the world." Indeed, you aren't selfish so much as selfless in the most literal sense, as in there's no daylight between you and the collective. You have no sense of self-preservation because you never developed a self to preserve. This makes it very easy for authoritarian people to throw their lives away for the leader. And that's what Michael Bender's reporting shows.
"Toward the end of Bender's book, Saundra reappears," writes Goldberg, referring to a Trump supporter mentioned earlier. "She'd just been at the Capitol for the Jan. 6 insurrection and seemed ready for more. 'Tell us where we need to be, and we just drop everything and we go,' she says. 'Nobody cares about if they have to work. Nobody cares about anything.'1 If you give people's life meaning, they'll give you everything." I don't know why we should read this in any way that's not literal. Saundra says she doesn't care about anything, because she doesn't. Sympathy won't change that.
The thing about quintessential liberals like Michelle Goldberg is they don't imagine, probably because they can't imagine, human relationships completely devoid of the principle of political equality between and among individuals. They can't imagine being uncertain of who they are in the absence of authority. When you don't or can't imagine such a life, the authoritarian mind can seem so confounding that you search for some concrete reason for its suicidal behavior. To the liberal, loneliness seems to be rational cause for authoritarianism. The truth, however, is far uglier, scarier and more dangerous to democracy than most people, not just liberals, seem to know. Nothing causes authoritarianism. It has always been here. It always will be here.==
https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/wannabe-aristocrats/
Yesterday, I left you thinking about centibillionaire Warren Buffett's contempt for democratic morality. The sixth-richest person in the world paid 0.10 percent in federal income taxes over the course of four years, according to an analysis by ProPublica. The nonprofit news group obtained 15 years' world of tax returns for thousands of the country's richest people, including the top 25, which includes the Sage of Omaha. He said it's OK for him to pay virtually nothing, because he's giving his fortune away.
That's contempt. In saying philanthropy is better than paying a fair share for a national government of, by and for the American people, Warren Buffett is saying, though of course without saying it out loud, that he's separate from and unequal to American citizenry—on account of normal people paying more than their fair share for a government serving him more than it does them. But there's another layer of contempt I want to draw your attention to today. That's the contempt for work.
The Republicans Party has for decades been successful at portraying the poor (read: nonwhite people) as those who do not work. Because they do not work, the poor look to the government for things they won't provide for themselves. Republican-controlled states still use work as a requisite for the accessing of relief. This requisite amounts to proving one is a worthy enough American citizen. If you can work, you can get help. If you don't work, you don't get help, because only worthy Americans are deserving of help. Anyone who is not worthy of citizenship is someone who is worthy of contempt.
The thing about being poor, however, is that it's work. Hard work. This is so plainly true, I'm not going to bother proving it. The poor are rarely idle, because to be idle is to flirt with death. (That's how close to the bone a chronically impoverished existence is.) Obviously, the poor do not earn incomes with the nonstop labor that comes with being poor, but let's not confuse earning an income with work. If we accept the Republican view that working is a requisite for being a worthy citizen, the poor are the worthiest of all. The poor are deserving of state relief by simple dint of being poor.
But we shouldn't accept the Republican view, because it does not apply equitably or universally. The very obscenely rich are exempted. Always. Yet they are idle. Yet they are unproductive. Yet they sure as hell take more than they give. As the ProPublica expose revealed, the income of the 25 wealthiest people is not derived from labor but from "the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property." The Republicans Party idolizes them as models for us to emulate. Tyler Cowen said that taxing capital gains (the stuff making the very obscenely rich so very obscenely rich) would be un-American. He said that instead we "should prioritize" the "valorization of wealth."
No, the US should prioritize the valorization of work. (In this I mean any kind of work, whether it's compensated or not.) And taxing capital gains is totally American. To be clear, being wealthy isn't the problem. The problem is political. The very obscenely rich of the 21st century are the wannabe aristocrats that Americans feared in the early 19th century. As aristocracy threatened everyone's liberty back then, the wannabes threaten everyone's liberty now. But before we get to the point of using government policy to break their choke-hold, we must demonstrate a depth of contempt for the very obscenely rich that's at least as robust and enduring as their contempt for us.
Again, it's not because the very obscenely rich are so very obscenely rich.
Judith N. Shklar, author of American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion explained Andrew Jackson's view of an aristocracy as
...any group that by its use of its wealth "exercises more than its just proportion of influence in political affairs." It was not wealth as such that was reprehensibly aristocratic, but wealth either gained through governmental favor or used to buy political power and influence. All monopolists and holders of license and charters were aristocrats because they owed their wealth to government grant, and had not earned it by their own efforts. They enjoyed unearned advantages. [my italics]
The aristocrat is not only a political monopolist, he is a moral and cultural threat to the republic as well. The aristocrat is idle and shows contempt for work. The merely rich were unobjectionable, but the "idle rich" were intolerable. The great division among men in society was not between poor and rich, but between "do-somethings" and "do-nothings." Failure to work was not merely immoral in and of itself, it also expressed a social ideology, the contempt for labor. Jacksonian democrats were acutely aware of the traditions that treated work as defiling. That is why so many insisted that by "we the people, we mean emphatically the class which labors."
ProPublica revealed that the very obscenely rich are so very obscenely rich because most of their money is not taxed. It is not taxed because the government does not see "the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property" as income. They use this wealth to maintain their advantages politically. In other words, they "owed their wealth to government grant, and had not earned it by their own efforts. They enjoyed unearned advantages." They should be, therefore, seen as "reprehensibly aristocratic."
The Jacksonian democrats did not view the poor the way I do. Even so, they are useful in that they give us a history and heritage to draw from. The Republicans and their ideological comrades (think libertarian economist Tyler Cowen) want us to believe that taxing the very obscenely rich is un-American. That's a lie. It's the most American thing of all. The point of using the government to break their power isn't about envy or revenge. It's about the duty of the government to protect the citizenry from tyranny.
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ProPublica is doing the Lord's work. Specifically, investigative reporters Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen and Paul Kiel are doing it. Two weeks ago, the nonprofit news group published the first in a planned series of pieces revealing, in exquisite detail, the moral character of the very obscenely rich. The series will be based on "a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation's wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years." It's a goddamn truth-bomb:
It demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most. The IRS records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.
Their first report, published on June 8, exposed the very obscenely rich as the greatest tax dodgers of them all. But before I get into it, let me say two things. One, Eisinger et al. do more than reveal the truth. They reveal the extent to which the very obscenely rich go to hide it. Two, the very obscenely rich keep lying as the truth is being revealed. I don't see how one can avoid coming to the conclusion that the tax system not only privileges the very obscenely rich. It gives them incentive to lie about their privilege. There's so much lying, in fact, you wonder if being a billionaire means being a liar.
To normal people (that's you), the money that comes in is income. Importantly, income is what you earn with your labor. Sure, you might have some investments here and there yielding a few dividends. Your net worth probably includes the (hopefully increasing) value of your house. But otherwise, by and large, the vast bulk of the money coming into your household is earned, and the word you use to describe that is income. Nearly all the money coming into your household is subject to tax by the US government.
The very obscenely rich are not normal people. To be sure, they have "income" but the vast bulk of the money coming into their households "derives from the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property," Eisinger et al. wrote. Importantly, "those gains are not defined by US laws as taxable income unless and until the billionaires sell." So they rarely sell. They hold onto their assets and they do "labor" for them. Unlike normal people, whose income is what they earn with their labor, the very obscenely rich's "income" is what their assets earn with their asset's "labor." The moral difference between income and "income," and the moral difference between earning and "earning," is the moral difference between normal people and the very obscenely rich.
None of this would be a BFD if the very obscenely rich paid their fair share. They do not. Yes, they pay income tax on income. But, again, the vast bulk of the money coming into their households is not taxable. So the vast bulk of their money is not taxed. In fact, it's impossible to know their real share. Eisinger et al. had to get creative. "To capture the financial reality of the richest Americans, ProPublica undertook an analysis that has never been done before. We compared how much in taxes the 25 richest Americans paid each year to how much Forbes estimated their wealth grew in that same time period," they reported. "We're going to call this their true tax rate." While the median household ($70,000 a year) paid 14 percent, and while couples earning more than $628,300 are going to pay this year the highest rate of 37 percent, the 25 richest paid a total of $13.6 billion in income taxes or "a true tax rate of only 3.4 percent."
To put this in perspective, you have to keep in mind what "earning" means. By the end of 2018, Eisinger et al. wrote, the richest 25 Americans "were worth $1.1 trillion." It would take "14.3 million ordinary American wage earners put together" to earn that much money. In other words, it would take nearly 14 and a half million normal people to work normal hours to earn with their labor what 25 people "earn" not with their labor but with the money they already have. And instead of paying $1.9 billion in income taxes (at the rate the very obscenely rich enjoy) normal people would have to pay $143 billion. Unsaid in the ProPublica report, but worth saying clearly, repeatedly and loudly, is that the US tax system encourages idleness while discouraging actual work. I'm sure Jeff Bezos works very hard but it's not humanly possible to earn with one's labor what Bezos is reportedly worth. To the very obscenely rich, "earning" is meaningless.
It encourages lying, too. Warren Buffett is the sixth-richest person in the world. He's usually seen as an enlightened centibillionaire. Yet the ProPublica report, specifically his reaction to it, shows the Sage of Omaha isn't wise so much as fraudulent. Even as he publicly supported tax reform so that people like his secretary don't pay more in income tax than he does, Buffett was privately hiding his "true tax rate," as determined by ProPublica. It is 0.10 percent. This is possible, because Buffett owns so much of the stock of his company, Berkshire Hathaway, and his company doesn't pay dividends.
Buffett tried justifying that he pays almost nothing in federal income tax by saying he has paid what he legally owed and saying he's going to give away his fortune. "I believe the money will be of more use to society if disbursed philanthropically than if it is used to slightly reduce an ever-increasing US debt," he wrote to ProPublica.
This is adding insult to injury. First, because Buffett knows full well that raising the income tax on the very obscenely rich, a move he has advocated, would mean squat when the very obscenely rich don't earn incomes with labor, but instead with their assets, which are untaxed as long as they are not sold. If he wanted to reform the tax code, he'd advocate taxing capital gains (the very obscenely rich's assets). But then he'd lose a lot of money. Being a reformer is one thing. Pretending to be is more lucrative.
Buffett's response to the ProPublica report adds insult to injury in a second way—by expressing contempt for democratic accountability. I have no doubt he thinks philanthropy serves society better than government redistribution does, but it's really not up to him. It's up to the will of the American people and their representatives in the government. Like other very obscenely rich people, Buffett is saying without saying that he's separate from and unequal to the rest of us, an attitude coming from the world's sixth-richest person that a free republic should hold in equal contempt.
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/crt/
I think it's good that people who know what they are talking about when they talk about critical race theory (CRT) are coming forward to talk about it publicly. If MSNBC's Joy Reid wants to put a CRT expert on every night, more power to her. It's good for the health of the public square for knowledgeable people to speak about ideas and topics they are authorities in for the benefit of democracy and the common good.
But a republic that depends, for its future viability and therefore its freedom, on the quality of information available in the public square, there are limits to this behavior. The American public square does not privilege knowledge. It does not give the benefit of the doubt to truth-tellers. It takes pleasure in heat more than light, conflict more than understanding, and gross characterizations more than explicit fact. So when it comes to critical race theory, we need to do more than explain what it is and is not.
We need to go on the offensive.
Before I go on, let me remind you what all this anti-CRT stuff is about. First, it's not about CRT. Its critics, who include Republicans but also white anti-left liberals like Jonathan Chait (and, I suppose, Andrew Sullivan), don't care what critical race theory is. They don't care what anti-racism or wokeness or whatever is. All they "know" is that they already "know" everything they need to know, which is that CRT is either anti-white, from the perspective of GOP fascists, or that it's anti-liberal, from the perspective of white anti-left liberals who insist the politics of the 2020s is the same as the politics of the 1990s and who are otherwise drifting toward political irrelevance.
This anti-CRT stuff is a reaction to a breathtaking confluence of forces no one had witnessed before. I mean the merging of anti-fascists (anti-Trumpists) with reformers like advocates for Black Lives Matter in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder by white cop. Not only did those energies become the greatest voting coalition ever seen—one that defeated an incumbent president, something that has rarely happened in our history—but the merging of these political energies sparked a much-needed and healthy reckoning over the country's history of anti-Black racism. What happened last year (and during and after the election) was an amazing leap forward for this country. Whenever that happens in American history, there's usually a white backlash, though.
And that's what all this anti-CRT stuff is.
But it's more than that. The tell is what's happening in places like Texas and Florida and Georgia and others. In those states, Republican lawmakers are exploiting the former president's supporters, who say they believe he is still the rightful and legitimate president, to enact an agenda they wanted to enact but did not have the opportunity to enact it until the former president lost in what appeared to be, to the former president's supporters, a democracy escaping their ability to control it.
That antifascists (anti-Trumpists) merged with reformers like advocates for Black Lives Matter last spring and last fall to defeat an incumbent president, something that rarely happens in our history, is proof, to the former president's supporters, that election itself was illegitimate. Why? Because, to them, the Black Americans who constitute the foundation of the current president's base of power are illegitimate.
So when state Republican lawmakers (and the useful idiots among white anti-left liberals) allege that critical race theory is running amok in our public schools, colleges and universities—when they accuse institutions of learning of "indoctrinating" children, or even "brainwashing" them into hating white people—what they are really doing is fighting the great leap forward that we all witnessed last spring and last fall when white voters allied with Black voters to save the republic, an event that sparked a last-ditch attempt to cancel the will of the American people by way of insurrection.
This isn't how we go on the offensive though. We go on the offensive by accusing the Republicans of what is plain to see but many won't see because the former president is no longer on the scene, which is fascism. For some reason, Donald Trump's absence has meant all talk of GOP fascism is now déclassé, leaving white anti-left liberals like Chait, Sullivan and others enough room to continue their years' long crusade against anti-racism on college campuses, giving ideological cover to the full-on fascists in state governments who are now policing free speech, free thought and free inquiry.
That's the conclusion we must draw from Republican state laws written to "ban" critical race theory from classrooms and schools but written so vaguely as to cover virtually anything related to race, racism, whiteness, white supremacy, the history of slavery or even unkind interpretations of American history. In a very real sense, we are just a few small steps from "banning" ideas to burning books. It's not enough to just explain what critical race theory is, because while we're doing all this explaining, the republic's enemies are in the early stages of forming state and local thought police.
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an 621
"The culture war" is so familiar I don't need to explain what it is. It has been part of the Republican Party's rhetorical repertoire since at least Robert Taft's time. What most people do not understand, however, is nearly every moment in which "the culture war" flares up—over abortion, guns, sexuality, etc.—is rooted in a lie. If more people understood the centrality of lying to "the culture war," more might understand the goal of the GOP's "cultural war" repertoire is making some Americans seem illegitimate.
Consider the case of Mara Gay, a member of the Times' editorial board.1 She was on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" Tuesday. The subject of table discussion was Max Boot's new op-ed in the Post on how too many people in this country are still underestimating the dire threat posed by the Republican Party to democracy and the American union.
Joe Scarborough, the co-host, said there's a need to stop being surprised by the GOP's anti-democratic posturing. Gay agreed. "We need to start taking it seriously," she said. When it comes to creating an independent bipartisan body to investigate the sacking and looting of the United States Capitol on January 6, she said the Democrats in the United States Congress should stop asking for the GOP's permission and act alone.
"The reality is that we have a large percentage of Americans … who continue to believe their rights as citizens are under threat by the simple virtue of having to share democracy with others," Mara Gay said. "I think that as long as they see Americanness as the same, as one, with whiteness, this is going to continue. We have to figure out how to get every American a place at the table … [and] separate Americanness—America—from whiteness. Until we can confront that, this is really going to continue."
Gay illustrated her point with an anecdote: "I was on Long Island this weekend," she said, "and I was really disturbed. I saw, you know, dozens and dozens of pickup trucks with explicatives [sic] against Joe Biden on the back of them, Trump flags, and in some cases just dozens of American flags, which is also just disturbing … Essentially the message was clear: This is my country. This is not your country. I own this."
It was this anecdote that made news, not the context the anecdote was attempting to illustrate. More accurately, it was the lie about the anecdote that made news. And it's such lies, I contend, that constitute the foundation for virtually all "culture war" discourse, whether about "political correctness," "cancel culture," "wokeness" or anti-racism. With rare exception, all national debate over topics of interest to the liberal cause rest on countless small sedimentary layers of falsehood. Making it much worse, in my view, is a Washington press corps knowing the truth, but not speaking it.
Here's what made the news Tuesday, all day. Headline: "NYT, MSNBC's Mara Gay: 'Disturbing' to see 'dozens of American flags' on trucks in Long Island. Subheadline: "New York Times board member: There needs to be conversation about 'Whiteness'." The media source was Fox. Fox's headline was repeated by expected outlets, such as the New York Post and National Review, but also surprising outlets, like Yahoo News and RealClearPolitics. And, of course, Breitbart: "Times columnist Mara Gay said Tuesday that she noticed trucks with American flags and was 'disturbed' by what she saw."
The key here isn't just repeating the lie. It's getting a response to the lie, as a result of the repetition, and then getting a third-party to respond to the response. (Again, Fox: "NYT panned for Mara Gay defense following her 'disturbing' American flag remarks: 'Every word here is a lie'." Who accused the Times of lying? A senior editor at The Federalist who was, you know, lying.) Once this pattern has been established, there exists a legitimate controversy worthy of the press corps' attention as well as of public debate between opposing views from across the spectrum. All that might appear to be natural, normal and healthy except for this fact: The entire discourse is based on a lie.
This pattern is everywhere once you see it. It's present even in matters of more complexity than what a Times editorial board member did or did not say. Since Joe Biden took office, we have seen numberless attempts to examine "cancel culture," "wokeness" or anti-racism. Most have been from the point of view of their critics, not their practitioners, or worse—they are predicated on the small sedimentary layers of misrepresentation, distortion and lies about them. The takeaway: So much of what counts as "debate" begins and ends with what liberalism's enemies say liberals say.
Lying is a bug, though. Ideology is the feature. Liberals like Mara Gay can't be right about America, but critics can't turn to history to prove it, because history points in the direction of Mara Gay being absolutely right. So they lie about what she said, thus detaching the issue from shared reality, thus making her seem to confirm what they already believe to be true without bothering to prove it, which is she hates America.
Yet Gay's comments, more than anything else, were grounded in love of country. The anti-democratic forces threatening us are the same ones that sacked and looted the United States Capitol, and as long as being white is seen as the same thing as being a legitimate American—as long as being non-white is seen as the same thing as being an illegitimate American—our democratic union will always face threats from the inside.
Gay never said she was disturbed by flags. She said she was disturbed by the historical fact, symbolized to her by the side-by-side flying of Trump flags and American flags, that "a large percentage" of white Americans continue to look at her Black and wise and beautiful face and refuse to see her as a legitimate American. That Fox and others lied about what she said is a continuation of the history that disturbs Mara Gay, and while that's bad enough, she said, there's something else even more concerning.
"I think there is a large percentage of my colleagues in journalism who are invested in some way in pretending that this isn't the threat that it is," Gay went on to say. "That is a real concern. The Trump voters are not going to get on board with democracy, but they're a minority. You can marginalize them long term. But if [her colleagues in journalism] don't take this threat seriously, we're all going to be in bad shape."
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says less about his popularity/power than power of of soc med monolopies?!
https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/trump-blog/?rs=182
edit bd
The former president deleted his blog Wednesday. The reason, according to the Times, was humiliation. After being banned from Twitter and Facebook, a spokesman said Donald Trump would return with "his own platform" that would be the "the hottest ticket in social media" and that would "completely redefine the game."
Turns out it was a blog. It got less attention, according to a Post analysis, "than the pet-adoption service Petfinder and the recipe site Delish. The blog's prospects hadn't improved since, even though Trump had taken to writing on it more." The Times said the former president became "frustrated after hearing from friends that the site was getting little traffic and making him look small and irrelevant." After less than a month online (29 days), "From the Desk of Donald J. Trump" has vanished from the internet.
What can we glean from this? For one thing, Trump seems to need the public square more than the public square needs Trump. Matter of fact, as the philosopher Karl Popper once predicted, the public square is in better health now that it has become intolerant of the highest-profile representative of intolerance. Some warned "de-platforming" a former president would make him stronger. It would seem to prove accusations of being a victim of mainstream censorship. But that's being disproved in real-time. His puny blog isn't why he "looks small and irrelevant." Politics is why.
More specifically, legitimacy is why. Trump doesn't have any, not anymore, and he didn't have much to begin with. He lost the popular vote in 2016. During his entire tenure, his job approval rating never crested 50 percent. (I'm talking about the polling aggregate.) On Jan. 5, 2021, he stood at 42.6 percent approval. By the time he left office, which was after the sacking and looting of the United States Capitol, an insurrection in his name, he stood at 38.6 percent. (Both per FiveThirtyEight.) NBC News ran a poll in late April. It found he had an approval rating of 32 percent. This man may have a grip on the base of the GOP, but he no longer has a grip on the popular imagination.
The Washington press corps brayed and mewled over four years about Trump going to war with it, but make no mistake. There was no better way to sell its wares than for a sitting president to make everyone aware of them. Normal people don't work that way, though. Normal people don't pay attention to things they don't want to pay attention to. (Reporters and producers, however, do.) Once Trump made it clear he stood against democracy itself, a popular view that galvanized at some point between Election Day and Insurrection Day and Inauguration Day, normal people no longer wanted to pay attention. When you stand against democracy, what more do you need to know?
That's my take. To pay attention to Donald Trump again, to the degree we were all paying attention to him, is to recognize his political legitimacy, which most normal people most of the time, if current polling is any indication, are just not willing to do—not after burning up every habit and norm, not after being impeached twice, not after betraying the country. Some of the Republicans are now saying Trump would be the next presidential nominee, easy-peasy. That's plausible. Winning, however, is something else. They appear to seriously underestimate what it would take for most normal people. They appear to seriously underestimate, moreover, the potential for backlash that comes after asking normal people to pay attention to Trump again.
my friend and mentor Walter Shapiro is a confessed optimist. In his latest for Roll Call, the dean of American politics said despite everything, he has faith in the people to choose democracy over tyranny. "I cling to the stubborn belief that American democracy will be saved by an outpouring of voters, in 2022 and beyond, who understand that the nation's freedoms are on the ballot," Mr. Shapiro wrote.
It was this part of his column, however, that really struck me: "In an ideal world, Never Trump Republicans will vote Democratic in the short run because preserving democracy is infinitely more important than honest differences over taxes, government regulation and foreign policy. In an ideal world, GOP efforts to restrict the franchise will inspire record turnout from Black and other minority voters."
In this, I confess to have faith, too, in the American people. Most of them most of the time are now intolerant of the highest-profile representative of intolerance. Most of them most of the time are not going to change their minds about him. This, to me, is the anchor of a paradigm shift, the thing around which future politics will revolve. To pay attention is to recognize as good something unthinkable to most normal people. The more the Republicans lean into Trump, the more they lean into the whirlwind.
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==
One hundred political scientists who study an array of topics, including the back-sliding of democracies into autocracies, co-signed a letter Tuesday urging the United States Congress to pass legislation protecting and expanding access to the franchise. The joint letter came as the president called for the same thing during a speech commemorating the 1921 Tulsa Massacre. It came as conservative Democrats in the Senate are wrestling with ways to pass such legislation, and even if they should.
The letter was in reaction to myriad efforts by lawmakers in GOP-controlled states to continue efforts begun in 2013 to shrink their electorates to sizes prejudicial to the Republicans. Those efforts were supercharged in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. The former president keeps lying about losing due to voter fraud. State-level Republicans are using the lie to suppress voting in the name of "election integrity."
"The most effective remedy for these anti-democratic laws at the state level is federal action to protect equal access of all citizens to the ballot and to guarantee free and fair elections," said the letter, posted by New America, a think-tank. "Just as it ultimately took federal voting rights law to put an end to state-led voter suppression laws throughout the South, so federal law must once again ensure that American citizens' voting rights do not depend on which party or faction happens to be dominant in their state legislature, and that votes are cast and counted equally, regardless of the state or jurisdiction in which a citizen happens to live. This is widely recognized as a fundamental principle of electoral integrity in democracies around the world."
This letter is good in and of itself, and I trust the Democratic leadership is taking notes. What I find most interesting, though, is its effort to define democracy morally. The Republicans "are seeking to restrict access to the ballot, the most basic principle underlying the right of all adult American citizens to participate in our democracy."1 If you're not looking for it, you might miss it. What this does is place equality at the heart of democracy. Vitally, without equality, a democracy can't be free, fair or full. This is what's at stake. This is what pro-democracy activists are fighting to preserve.
Of course, democracy is at the heart of our national myth. But anyone with any sense of our history knows democracy really was not at the heart of the founding. Many of the framers likened democracy to anarchy and violence. A republic was the preserve of those who had the capacity to participate in it, which was to say, enough invested in the established order to fight efforts to blow it up. The "men" in "all men are created equal" was meant to convey equality among equals, which, to the founders, obviously didn't include property-less men, non-white men and sure-as-hell not women.
So what we're really talking about when we talk about democracy is the slow, crawling expansion of the democratic franchise since the founding. First, political participation was restricted to property-owning white men. Then it was expanded to all white men. Then all men, white and non-white (after the Civil War and the ratification of the 14th Amendment). Then all women. With each expansion, the franchise became more equal but not fully equal. That didn't happen until the civil-rights era of the last century.
The 100-year reign of Jim Crow in the American South (but by no means restricted to the American South) was back-sliding of the kind we are now being warned about. After all, the Reconstruction amendments (the 13th, 14th and 15th) granted equal rights and protection to former slaves. But just as Republican-controlled states are now shrinking electorates down to prejudicial sizes, Democrat-controlled states back then did, too. District-by-district, state-by-state, they whittled at equal rights and protection until white people were, in effect, feudal lords. It took federal law and federal power (the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act) to smash these autocracies. It took federal law and power to make American democracy liberal.2
So when 100 political scientists call on Congress to protect democracy, what they are really calling for is the protection of all the gains made in our history, and that reversing them not only offends democracy but morality, too. This is important to keep in mind. The Republicans in Georgia, Florida, Texas and other states, most of them in the American South, deny allegations of voter suppression. They say they are defending democracy. That can be true only if democracy is defined by the mere possibility of voting. It cannot be true when democracy is defined morally. Without a commitment to a moral principle — equality — a democracy can't be free, fair or full.
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United States is at the mercy of those who think they're God's elect
John Stoehr
I'm going to try connecting things that don't at first seem related. They are the fight over a commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection; the disproportional number of covid...
Donie O'Sullivan is a reporter for CNN. His beat appears to be American conspiracy theories. He was on Anderson Cooper's show last night with reporting on a QAnon conference last weekend during which former Donald Trump adviser and pardoned traitor Michael Flynn said a Myanmar-style military coup "should happen" in America.
That some people in this country long for purifying violence to "reinstate" Donald Trump to his "rightful place" is not what got my attention, though. What did was Donie O'Sullivan's editorial remark at the end of his report. This is what he said:
I spend a lot of time reading these pro-Trump forums, reading these QAnon forums online, and speaking to Trump supporters, and I will say of all the conspiracy theories we hear, this talk from Americans about a coup, cheering a coup, and hoping for a coup, in the United States is one of the most chilling things I hear.
Before I go on, I should say O'Sullivan appears to be an immigrant. (I think he's Irish, given his accent.) As such, I don't expect him to be as attuned to American political culture as I'd expect a native-born American to be. Indeed, as a non-native, I'd expect him to be more attuned to the American civic religion than native-born Americans generally are, because fealty to the civic religion is so often demanded of immigrants.
This civic religion believes military coups and their consequent dictatorships cannot happen in the United States. Ordinary Americans do not want them, moreover, because it would be against their civic religion. You can't quite tell from the written version of his remark, but when you watch the clip, you can hear O'Sullivan put a little more stress on "American" when he says he's chilled to hear Americans, of all people on this earth, talking "about a coup, cheering a coup, and hoping for a coup, in the United States." Implicit point: this is what Trump has done to the globe's oldest democracy.
I suspect some of O'Sullivan's remark was showmanship. (He does work for CNN, after all.) But I think some of it, maybe most of it, reflects the conventional wisdom in Washington—that it's shocking to hear Americans talk this way. It's not shocking, though. It's familiar and quite normal when you know where to look. Fact is, lots of Americans believe they are God's chosen people. They believe the end of the world is coming, according to God's divine plan. They believe the US Constitution is a covenant with them only, and that a genocidal purge will preface Christ's return.
This is the End Times I'm talking about, a story about global events culminating ic that "reinstates" the King of Kings to his rightful place. It's a story millions of Americans tell themselves and their children. It's a story in which the messy and hard-to-understand world around us is no such thing. Instead, it is polarized as conflict between God's friends and God's enemies. The only difficulty is decoding the signs and symbols God lays out. Reality isn't real. Reality is a sinful illusion. What's real is the trail of secrets leading the chosen safely to The End. Argument, language, reasoning—they don't matter. Only they can know The Truth.
The conventional wisdom in Washington is that religion is off-limits. Therefore, the conventional wisdom in Washington does not see, because it will not see, that tens of millions of Americans already believe democracy is getting in the way of God's plan, that democracy is—and I mean this seriously—desecrating the sacredness of the US Constitution. As one critic put it, the Venn diagram showing the overlap of QAnon believers and white evangelical Protestants (and related groups) is actually a circle. When you stand with God against His enemies, you have God's permission to hate.
That's their religion. No, it's not a cult. It's more than that. It's deeper than that. The hate felt by the former president's supporters during four years' worth of political rallies is the same hate for America as it stands, not as they desire it to stand, that right-wing religious radicals have felt since post-Civil War America. That's when Charles Darwin's theories and what they determined about humanity's place in God's divine scheme first gained traction in the United States. Every single intellectual development—from evolution then to Critical Race Theory now—has been met with such hate. I don't understand why the conventional wisdom looks away from history.
Because it's easier, I guess. It's easier to maintain the myth of the civic religion; to be shocked by Americans talking about a military coup; to blame the former president for imperiling the world's oldest democracy. It's easier to respect religion without scrutinizing it too much, and risk discovering it's steeped in hate, which might force the conventional wisdom in Washington to take responsibility. On this one-year anniversary since Trump gassed Americans out of the way for a photo-op of him holding a Bible in front of a church, we need the truth. And that's never been easy.
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Journalist John Harwood had a piece in CNN Sunday reflecting on an essay published in 2012 that accurately predicted the coming of today's GOP. "Let's just say it: the Republicans are the problem" was written by Thomas Mann, who was at the time with the Brookings Institution, along with Norm Ornstein, who is still with the American Enterprise Institute. The Republicans, they said, had become "ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition." Sound familiar?
I have been teaching a class for a few years, on and off, at Yale and Wesleyan on how to understand American politics. I assign Mann and Ornstein's essay every time. But I didn't know some important context Harwood provides, meaning that the essay landed with a thud nine years ago, even among what are now called anti-GOP conservatives.
Hardwood calls on Charlie Dent to comment. He's a former Republican moderate from Pennsylvania, who is now a talking head for CNN. He told Harwood that, "I thought they overstated things." He added: "I don't like where we're heading, but don't think it's inevitable that we get to that terrible place." William Kristol pooh-poohed Mann and Ornstein's essay, too. He told Harwood of his feelings at the time. "People like me were thinking, 'Yeah, there are some kooky people around, but c'mon.'" That was before Donald Trump's ascent and the consequent demise of his magazine, The Weekly Standard. (Kristol later joined other anti-GOP conservatives to found The Bulwark.)
Harwood's piece is good. I encourage you to read it. But I want to make the case for a more prescient essay. It was published in 2004 in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq by The Chronicle Review, an obscure monthly supplement to The Chronicle of Higher Education, itself obscure. I assign it alongside Mann and Ornstein's essay. But if theirs had little impact, Alan Wolfe's had none at all. (No one in the United States Congress or the Washington press corps is being asked how they feel about it now.) With all due respect to Mann and Ornstein, I think Wolfe's is more important, because it gives a name to "where we're heading," a name that even John Harwood seems to avoid.
Alan Wolfe is a political scientist and sociologist at Boston College. He is or was the director of its Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life. In 2004, he was searching for ways to explain Republican behavior after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the launch of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was, in other words, doing what Harwood did, but instead of looking to pundits like Mann and Ornstein, Wolfe looked way, way back to scholars like himself, this time to Carl Schmitt, who was briefly the leading exponent of fascist political thought. Fascism is "where we're heading" now, but Wolfe saw the first stirrings of it over 17 years ago.
Using Schmitt's The Concept of the Political as a lens through which to see the politics of the early 2000s, Wolfe wrote that "the most important lesson Schmitt teaches is that the differences between liberals and conservatives are not just over the policies they advocate but also over the meaning of politics itself." Wolfe goes on to explain that:
Liberals think of politics as a means; conservatives as an end. Politics, for liberals, stops at the water's edge; for conservatives, politics never stops. Liberals think of conservatives as potential future allies; conservatives treat liberals as unworthy of recognition. Liberals believe policies ought to be judged against an independent ideal such as human welfare or the greatest good for the greatest number; conservatives evaluate policies by whether they advance their conservative causes.
Liberals instinctively want to dampen passions; conservatives are bent on inflaming them. Liberals think there is a third way between liberalism and conservatism; conservatives believe that anyone who is not a conservative is a liberal. Liberals want to put boundaries on the political by claiming that individuals have certain rights that no government can take away; conservatives argue that in cases of emergency … the reach and capacity of the state cannot be challenged.1
I think Alan Wolfe used the word "conservative" for a couple of reasons. One, because he didn't feeling like being charitable that day. Two, more likely, because "fascist" was not available to him in 2004. I like to think if he were to rewrite this essay, he'd make room for conservatives like Norm Ornstein, or Liz Cheney for that matter, in order to establish the boundaries of acceptable behavior in a liberal democracy in which some things really are above politics, such as the political legitimacy of a rival faction.
"Fascist," however, continues to get side-eye from mainstream commentators like John Harwood, I think because it so easily evokes images of gas chambers. But as Wolfe makes clear, it doesn't take genocide to make a fascist. What it takes a particular and particularly coherent worldview in which everyone outside one's group is the enemy. As Harwood said, Mann and Ornstein were right. Their diagnosis of the GOP is undeniable. But Alan Wolfe was more right. What's more, he gave us a vocabulary.
We should use it.
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==
521
Editorial Board, as I hope you have noticed, is not in the business of making arguments for the sake of argumentation. It does not invest time in fights over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. (The Editorial Board, for this reason, will never see The Big Money. It's too shrewd.) It works hard to read politics critically and come to concrete conclusions for the sake of normal people and the common good.
There's a reason I say this. Sometimes the Editorial Board is ahead of the conventional wisdom in Washington such that when the conventional wisdom in Washington eventually catches up, there's a feeling of whiplash. Before this past week, I'd been arguing for a year or so that the nightmare will not be over after Donald Trump's presidency comes to an end. (There are reasons aplenty, but primarily no matter the crime, obscenity or moral outrage, about 40 percent of the electorate approved of Trump during his term.) Then this week, the conventional wisdom in Washington appeared to awaken to oh my God the nightmare isn't over how could this happen! I scrambled for a day to find out what I missed. Turns out I didn't miss anything.
Something triggered the prevailing discourse, though. I'm not sure what. Perhaps it was the Republicans in the United States House of Representatives knocking Wyoming Congressman Liz Cheney from the leadership. Perhaps it was the Republicans at the state level passing laws to suppress voting. Perhaps it was the Republicans in both chambers of the Congress opposing a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 sacking and looting of the United States Capitol. Perhaps it was the GOP doing the most unbecoming thing of all in Washington: sticking with the loser. Whatever the reason, this week's punditry seems to finally recognize the nightmare for what it is.
Here's Paul Waldman, a columnist at the Post: "Because his party has so aggressively worked to twist and corrupt the US electoral system, [Donald Trump] could clearly lose both the popular and electoral votes and still become president again." Here's Perry Bacon Jr., also a columnist at the Post: "Presented with a clear chance to move on from Trumpism after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the GOP has instead continued its drift toward anti-democratic action and white grievance. The future looks scary."
This part, from Bacon, is the scariest to me: "If Republicans win the governorships of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin next year, taking total control in those key swing states, they could impose all kinds of electoral barriers for the next presidential election. The Republicans are laying the groundwork to refuse to certify a 2024 Democratic presidential victory should the GOP hold a House majority."
There are many examples of the conventional wisdom in Washington getting triggered now for some reason instead of, I dunno, after an attempted coup d'etat. All of them, however, focus on the United States Senate, especially Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat from West Virginia, who is key to passing a major democracy reform bill, the one thing that will do the most to prevent the country from sliding into autocracy. I wrote about Manchin Tuesday. I suggested there's hope for passage. But even as I was writing the piece, something was happening to give us even more hope. The fact that nearly everyone missed it seems to illustrate the conventional wisdom's myopia.
And when I say nearly everyone missed it, I mean nearly everyone missed it. The only two people to report on what Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday were Ryan Grim and Sara Sirota from The Intercept, and since I don't trust anything from The Intercept, I tracked down what Schumer said myself, and whaddayaknow? Schumer said what he's been saying for months, which is the filibuster is not going to get in the way of democracy, because democracy is too important. Here's the quote1:
The letter that Senators Murkowski and Manchin talked about, which was the Voting Rights Act, is actually authorized through 2032. So, their letter to us saying authorize it, well, it's pretty much done for—we'll all be in the Senate here in 2032, and I think we look forward to voting on it. Look, the bottom line, as I said, S.1 is very, very important to our democracy. You cannot let millions of people's rights be taken away. Senator [Gary] Peters [of Michigan] gave a little presentation also on how it would affect elections in key states and how it would have changed things dramatically. One of the things that stuck out in my mind was that … in Wisconsin, the vote in the House of Representatives, 53 percent of the vote was Democratic, but the Republicans had some huge percentage of the seats. I think it was two-thirds. These kinds of things just are abhorrent to our democracy and we must change them, and we will. And as I've said before, failure is not an option and everything will be on the table. We're continuing [to] have the discussions within the whole caucus.2
It baffles me why this was not more widely reported. I mean, here's a Democrat saying another Democrat is wrong. Isn't there a law requiring journalists to report "Dems in disarray"? It didn't get play in the Post, the Times, the AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, USA Today, none of them. Only The Intercept, which deserves credit for reporting that Manchin's and Murkowski's proposal to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act made no sense whatever given that it's already been reauthorized. I did not know that, but I'm also not a member of the Washington press corps, people you'd expect to know that.
Importantly, Schumer said failure is not an option and everything will be on the table. That suggests that nixing the filibuster is 1) optional and 2) increasingly optional in the face of things that are abhorrent to our democracy. Schumer added that we must change them, and we will, which suggests when not if. The question, therefore, is timing. And timing is going to be determined primarily by how the Republicans are willing to behave.
I think it comes down to this. Are the Republicans going to act less fascist than they have been since January 6? If the answer is yes, then the Democrats are in a pickle. They won't feel the pressure necessary for enacting sweeping democracy reforms. If the answer is no, then the Democrats are going to be in a position in which they are forced to act in ways that would ordinarily seem nakedly partisan. To build the pressure necessary to nix the filibuster, though, they are going to need the conventional wisdom in Washington to be on their side, which is to say, conventional wisdom saying that it's OK to act nakedly partisan. I think this past week saw the beginning of that process.
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521
The Republicans in the United States House of Representatives voted this morning to install New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik as chairwoman of the House GOP conference, replacing Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney. As you know, Cheney kept telling the truth about the former president, meaning he's a treasonous loser, while Stefanik kept winking at the lie that Donald Trump is the legitimate president.
I've talked this week about what all this means. The Republicans are now officially an anti-democracy party. They are also an anti-policy party. They can get almost nothing done, because their leaders are 100 percent focused on stopping nearly everything from getting done. All of this is obvious. It's exhausting having to point out the truth to those unwilling to see it. (Not you!) But since it's the end of the week, and I'm tired anyway, I may as well go the distance. The Republicans are now a pro-terrorism party.
The seeds were planted on January 6. They have been watered every day since by nearly all the Republicans in the United States Congress who failed to indict the former president, who have failed to convict the former president, and who have otherwise minimized, overlooked, or defended the sacking and looting of the United States Capitol, an attempt to overthrow our republic worse than the September 11 terrorist attacks. Insurgencies are attempts to use violence for political ends when normal channels stop producing desirable results. In other words, the January 6 insurrection was terrorism. Anyone siding with it, even in the least, is complicit.
Getting rid of a truth-teller like Liz Cheney, and replacing her with a bootlicker like Elise Stefanik, is not something ideologues do out of fear or cowardice. It is a rational process by which they follow what appear to be rational but amoral incentives. This morning, after the House GOP voted, Stefanik said, "Voters determine the leader of the Republican Party, and President Trump is the leader that they look to. He is an important voice in the Republican Party and we look forward to working with him."
This might sound insane, but only if one persists in believing that Republicans are dedicated to the union of the United States. Once you drop that idea, everything makes sense. When a party clings to a loser, it has decided the entire principle of winning and losing, fair and square, is no longer a principle worthy of respect. It has decided the Democrats are no longer opponents—they are enemies. It has decided losing to the enemy is a crime deserving revenge. It has decided loyalty to the union of the United States has become an obstacle to obeying the will of God. When the US Constitution is a "covenant" between God and His chosen, nothing matters and anything's possible.
Marjorie Taylor Greene follows the same rational but amoral incentives. The Georgia Congresswoman made news yesterday. She accosted New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, accusing her of being in league with terrorists.1 Greene is perhaps the most vocal defender of the former president. She is perhaps the most vocal apologist for the January 6 insurrection. At the very least, she tolerates using violence or threats of violence as means of achieving political ends, which is to say, tolerates terrorism.2 But there's more here than Marjorie Taylor Greene's obscene hypocrisy.
Greene is making a bet. She's betting there are more (white) Americans than not who have lost faith in American democracy and the union of the United States. Because they have given up on America as a good and noble covenant between and among individuals and communities, for the betterment of all, they will, according to Greene's logic, find security and future hope only after making a choice: Which terrorism is better? The one serving God's (white) chosen people or the one serving His enemies.
God isn't on their side, but racism is. And when racism is on your side, you have the advantage. I don't mean there are more people who openly demonstrate hostility toward non-white people. I mean there are more people in this country who will not believe Marjorie Taylor Greene would murder a member of the Congress if the rational but amoral incentives pointed in that direction. They won't believe it, because white people tend to give other white people endless sums of benefit of the doubt. Racism is blinding lots of (white) Americans to the dangers of a party that's now pro-terrorism.
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// antifa concept?
https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/republicans-fact-free/
The right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, has lately been making a fetish of something called "critical race theory" (CRT). This has prompted academics to defend it. It's not a radical political ideology, they say. It's merely a form of critical inquiry. It is not the boogeyman it's being made out to be. There's nothing to fear.
I understand the need to defend critical race theory. Colleges and universities are beset on one hand by Republican fascists accusing scholars of indoctrinating students, on the other by anti-left liberals accusing the same of hostility toward freedom of speech. Meanwhile, administrations act more like corporations that privilege efficiency over research and teaching. It's enough to think CRT is an appropriate hill to die on.
This, however, overlooks the larger dynamic at work. The more you defend CRT as an ideologically neutral mode of seeing and thinking about the world, the more the propagandists are going to do what they do best, which is terrifying the ignorant. More importantly, CRT defenders are not seeing the true nature of their opponents. From the authoritarian perspective, modes of seeing and thinking about the world are never ideologically neutral because once you learn to see and think about the world on your own, you don't need authoritarian leaders to tell you what to see and think.
I risk making them seem like cartoons. I risk making people who treasure "traditional" and "conservative" and "Judeo-Christian" values look like they yippy-skippied over the Enlightenment on their way from the Spanish Inquisition to the 21st-century America. But it's worth the risk given that most respectable white people, in my opinion, tend to overestimate the societal effects of liberal arts education. Critical thinking is so uncontroversial among respectable white people as to be barely worth mentioning. The authoritarians, however, see it quite clearly for what it is—an existential threat.
This is why the particulars of critical race theory don't matter.1 (You don't care about the particulars when you're fighting for survival!) This is also why explaining those particulars to people who seem to fear them won't change their minds if you don't also take into account that explaining the particulars of critical race theory can itself be seen as intolerable aggression. What most of them fear is loss of social control. What most fear is loss of authority. Where you see an individual merely muddling through life the best she can, coming to the best conclusions she can, most of them see an individual whose ideological aggression is so monstrous as to justify any response.
Respectable white people look at the right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, and marvel at the fact that Americans consuming its propaganda inhabit a fact-free world. I think what they misunderstand is lying isn't a bug. It's a feature. Facts are available to individuals to see and think about on their own, free and independent of authorities licensed to say what individuals see and think. Facts, therefore, are aligned politically with perceived enemies. A rational response to facts is nonstop lying. So "alternate facts" are not a result of authoritarian politics. They are a first principle.
Critical race theory is not a political ideology, but it may as well be to the world of the right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale. It might as well be because anything that teaches individuals to see and think about facts independent and free of groupthink compromises the integrity of the authoritarian's grip on the group. Case in point is Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney. The Republican believes the former president tried bringing down the republic. She is factually correct. For the "crime" of seeing and thinking about the world on her own, she's now being punished. The House Republicans are poised to purge her from the House conference leadership. The Republicans are not individualists. They are collectivists enforcing groupthink.
Respectable white people marvel at the fact that Americans consuming right-wing propaganda inhabit a fact-free world. As a consequence, they do not take it seriously. People who insist on inhabiting a fact-free world are not just ignorant—not when democracy depends on the ability of individuals to associate and organize themselves for the purpose of self-rule. When huge numbers of people inhabit a fact-free world, and collectivist leaders police the integrity of that groupthink, they threaten not only democracy's ability to function minimally, but its survival. Liz Cheney is now being reassimilated into the collective. Democracy itself faces the very same fate. Do not marvel at these people and their fact-free world. Regard them as the danger they are.
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/american-dynasties/?rs=182
i follow the thinking of a handful of conservative-but-honest writers. Nearly all think infrastructure investments are wise. That would be good for business. Whatever's good for business is ipso facto good. What they quibble with is cost. How on earth is the president going to pay for the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan? We're talking about upwards of $5 trillion! You can't just soak the rich to pay for it!
You don't need to. At a public event Tuesday, United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said something that had a lot of us nodding our heads. Yep, there's always been plenty of money. What has been missing is the political will to collect it. "It's really shocking and distressing to see estimates suggesting that the gap between what we're collecting in taxes on current tax and what we should be collecting—if everybody were paying for taxes that are due—that amounts to over $7 trillion over a decade," she said.
Joe Biden has proposed raising the effective rates on large corporations, many of which pay zip in federal levies, as well as very obscenely rich individuals. That, he said during last week's State of the Union address, is how the government would pay for public investments for the purpose of competing with autocracies around the globe.
If Yellen is correct, however, Biden's proposals could be funded merely by enforcing existing law. What we're talking about isn't just a lot of money. What we're talking about is transformative societal change. We're talking about, therefore, the power of the very obscenely rich to overrule transformative societal change as a result of being so very obscenely rich they can dodge paying their fair share. We're talking about the government's ugly complicity in serving these monied interests by not enforcing existing law and its dereliction of duty to serve the people and the common good.
Correction. We should be talking about these things. So far, we're only talking about what we want to spend and where the money's coming from. The stakes, however, is so much higher than jobs and childcare (and even defeating global autocracy). Supposed we achieved these things, what then? We'd still be here, which is to say still beholden to unelected (white) men with more money and power than the world has ever known.
Consider this. There are now in existence eight centibillionaires. Seven of them are American. These (white) men combined are worth more than the annual budgets of most sovereign nations. Our discourse focuses on America being a free country where the plucky and smart can get rich. We envy those who succeed. Our discourse does not, however, focus on this: no unelected person should have that much power.
Before you say there's a difference between being rich and being powerful, let me say I wasn't born yesterday. Money equals political power. More money equals more power. Centibillions equal centibillionaire power. You, me and everyone we know can call the White House to leave a message. I'm pretty sure Joe Biden takes Warren Buffett's call, though. Lived everyday experience speaks truthfully. This is why accusations of socialism every time liberals suggest raising taxes are ridiculous. This isn't about confiscating private property in the name of magical utopia. It's about restraining democratically the unlimited power of men politically unaccountable to the people.
in my opinion, inherited power—which is to say, inherited wealth—is problematic, but tolerable under certain levels. Everything above a said amount, however, should be taxed maximally. What should a threshold and tax rate be? That's for democracy to decide. (I'd say 100 percent on estates worth over $10 million.) What I do know is that inherited power should be as offensive to civic morality and the democratic faith as the hereditary right of monarchs (and white supremacists) to rule. Judging by our discourse, though, it isn't offensive. Being born so rich as to be aristocratic is enviable. If we're going to change things, start there — by evoking the old contempt for nobility.
We shouldn't, for instance, just grin and bear a plan to close a tax loophole affecting the scions of centibillionaires. We should cheer it on with patriotic fervor. I won't get into the numbers, but this from Bloomberg gets to the gist. "Ending that practice and raising the rate would amount to the biggest curb on dynastic wealth in decades, altering an American economic landscape dominated by a few wealthy families" (my italics).
These same wealthy families, the sons and daughters of rich (white) men long dead, have dominated the "American economic landscape" for going on half a century. And they have continued to dominate not because they made more and better widgets, like their patres familias did, but because they are so very obscenely rich they can pay armies of tax attorneys to find more and better ways to dodge paying their fair share. Or they can fund the campaigns of Republicans who will do everyone in their name. The result has been $7 trillion left uncollected. Does that sound worthy of contempt?
It should.
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/republicans-insane/
Forgive me for repeating myself. The right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, is so powerful it can bend political reality. The latest evidence comes from James Carville, whom I'd normally recommend ignoring with prejudice. The former adviser to Bill Clinton and cable-news talking head said recently the Democrats should put the kibosh on talking about "wokeness." Normal people just don't talk like that.1
Carville hasn't been right about much in quite some time. (He thought United States Senator Michael Bennett should have been the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential nominee.) Moreover, political rhetoric of any kind being used now by the left or the right is almost certainly going to mean zip by 2022, by which time about 22 billion news cycles will have churned.2 Swing voters who make the difference will be thinking about pretty anything other than the boutique anxieties of out-of-touch consultants.
James Carville is right about one thing, though. The right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, is making a fetish of "wokeness." That fetish gets the attention of out-of-touch but still-influential consultants like Carville, who in turn urge the Democrats to act more like Republicans, even though the party has unified control of Washington. Importantly, "moderate" Democrats seem to agree.3 Behold the right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale! This is the power to bend political reality!
In fairness, I agree that normal people don't talk about "wokeness." In fairness, most normal people don't care. If "wokeness" is the word Democratic Party insiders and social-justice activists prefer in talking about the struggle for freedom and equality, more power to them. But if we're going to talk about what most normal people want from the Democrats, let's not forget their bias for reason, peace and prosperity. Above all, the truth. James Carville, in urging the Democrats to make like Republicans, is defeating his purpose. To make like a Republican is to make everyone feel crazy.
I mean "crazy" in the sense Harry Frankfurt intended. In 2006's On Truth, the moral philosopher described the ethical effect of lies. They are not just deceptions. They are not just duplicity. They are injuries. "Lies are designed to damage our grasp of reality," he wrote. "So they are intended, in a very real sense, to make us crazy." But more than that, they are authoritarian injuries. "The most irreducibly bad thing about lies is that they contrive to interfere with, and to impair, our natural effort to apprehend the real state of affairs," Frankfurt wrote. "They are designed to prevent us from being in touch with what is really going on. In telling his lie, the liar tries to mislead us into believing that the facts are other than they actually are. He tries to impose his will on us."4
The right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, told normal people over the weekend the Biden administration planned to limit meat-eating as part of its policies to combat climate change policies. The news ping-ponged across the apparatus until esteemed members of the Republican Party at the state and national levels denounced the plan as tyrannical. Thing is, it was "completely imaginary," wrote CNN's peerless Daniel Dale. "1) The Daily Mail ran an article that dishonestly connected Biden's climate plan with a not-at-all-about-Biden study. 2) Others on the right just ran with this." In typically methodical and painstaking fashion, he laid out what happened, how and why. Dale's job is chasing down serious public lies. Dale's job is keeping him busy.
But fact-checking serious public lies won't stop them. There are two reasons. One, the Republicans inhabit an almost purely fictional view of American politics. Two, neutral observers, like the Washington press corps and, to an extent, political consultants like James Carville, keep honoring that almost purely fictional view of American politics by taking it seriously. By honoring it by taking it seriously, the rest of us end up giving this almost purely fictional view of American politics enough leverage to bend reality and make everyone free crazy. It's plausible to say the Democrats should emulate the Republicans in order to win the congressional elections. As plausible, however, is to say that emulating them will chase swing voters by making them all feel crazy.
How do we stop it? I think by seeing through the lie to what's genuinely intended, which is to say, through the lie toward a conscious authoritarian intent to injure our democratic republic. Lying about the Biden administration's "war on meat" is by itself silly, but in context, a grotesque attempt to dominate not only a gullible television audience but hard-nosed empiricists like Daniel Dale whose life is almost totally consumed by fact-checking, which in turn consumes the energies of many more of us, which consumes the attention spans of people who want to talk about something else.
This kind of dominance is ideal for a party that has not only run out of ideas, but is hostile toward the idea of ideas. Ideas and a commitment to seeing them through require recognizing the legitimacy of those of a political opposition, which is impossible. Ideas and a commitment to seeing them through demand grounding in facts that the other side can debate with equal veracity. The Republican don't want that, because the Republicans can't win that way. So they have constructed a right-wing media apparatus, which is global in scale, in order to skip factual debate. With it, they can foment enough instability, chaos and, yes, insanity to create a desire among normal people for a strongman to come and fix things.5 They are, as Harry Frankfurt intimated, setting the groundwork for a fuhrer-king "to impose his will on us." The last thing the Democrats should be is complicit in the Republicans' descent to hell.
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/supreme-court-conservative/
js edit bd
In Friday's column, I said the Republicans seem to have frightened David Brooks, which suggests the party has frightened respectable white people, too. I consider the Times columnist to be representative of the conventional wisdom of that great globular middle of American politics. The more these people fear the Republicans, the better.
Today, I want to take this a step further. If I'm right in thinking that respectable white people are less willing to give the Republicans the benefit of the doubt, on account of most of them being okie-dokie with Donald Trump's attempt to overturn a free and fair presidential election, this is an ideal time to push them, by way of persuasion, to an important conclusion, to wit: conservatism has become a byword for barbarism.
Consider a recent decision by the United States Supreme Court. In Jones v. Mississippi, the court ruled a person convicted of murder while a minor does not have to be shown to be "permanently incorrigible" to be imprisoned for life without parole. In a 6-3 decision, the court's six conservative justices reversed years of progress in the courts to show mercy toward juveniles who had committed heinous crimes. The AP: "Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the majority, said previous decisions only require a judge to consider 'an offender's youth and attendant characteristics' before imposing a sentence of life without parole. Kavanaugh rejected a more demanding standard."
In fact, Miller and Montgomery held that life without parole for juveniles was justifiable only in the worst of the worst cases—if the convicted person cannot be rehabilitated or, in other words, is "permanently incorrigible." Kavanaugh said his opinion was in keeping with those previous rulings, but it was a departure from them. He said Miller and Montgomery didn't require a more demanding standard, but, um, they did. Only Justice Clarence Thomas was honest. He said the old decisions were wrong anyway.
All this is made worse by the facts of the case. According to Slate's Mark Joseph Stern, quoting Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissenting opinion, Brett "Jones was 'the victim of violence and neglect that he was too young to escape.' His biological father was an alcoholic who physically abused his mother, who had severe mental health problems. His stepfather abused him, too, using 'belts, switches, and a paddle.' He openly expressed his hatred for Jones. When Jones moved to Mississippi to live with his grandparents, he abruptly lost access to medication he took for mental health issues, including hallucinations and self-harm. Jones' grandfather beat him, as well." Twenty-three days after his 15th birthday, young Brett Jones stabbed his grandpa to death.
Jones was convicted after confessing to the murder. He became a model prisoner. His grandmother, the victim's widow, asked for his release. Jones met the criteria required by Miller and Montgomery. He had demonstrated corrigibility. So the court didn't only make a return to free and open society impossible for Jones. It handed judgment down on the idea of reform, to wit: that reform, however much a free and open society depends on it, is a delusion. No amount of rehabilitation will change bad people. Brett Jones' fate was sealed the moment he was born. That he was born into violence and suffering merely means he deserved it. As for jailing him for life, the court is just furthering a process begun by God, the only true source of goodness and mercy. If all that doesn't sound conservative so much as barbarous, that's because you're right.
That Kavanaugh, and presumably the rest of the conservative justices, were dishonest about whether or not Jones was in keeping with Miller and Montgomery suggests they know a ruling allowing juveniles to be put away for life without any chance of getting out is indefensible. They know Jones is going to get flak from legal activists on the right and the left, people who won Miller and Montgomery thanks to former Justice Anthony Kennedy. They know Jones moves in the opposite direction of democracy, but they are going to move that way nonetheless. Why? They can. They have the power. Because they have the power, they must be good. Otherwise, they wouldn't have it.
The Republicans benefit greatly from the word "conservatism." It sounds like just another school of political thought in free and fair competition with others. It sounds like a way of thinking about the world seeking to conserve the collective knowledge and traditional values of humanity for the sake of our progeny. But that's not the case. The Republicans abandoned democracy after the twin shocks of 2008, Barack Obama's election and the financial panic. Inside a democratic context, conservatism can be healthy. On the outside, it's not. Outside the rule of the majority, it becomes barbarism.
The Republicans used to worry about their national reputation for cruelty. That's why the campaign of George W. Bush invented out of thin air the popular concept of "compassionate conservatism." His politics would be more palatable to respectable white people who did not want to be seen supporting a candidate who'd punch down as president. Punching down, and enjoying it, has become the point of conservatism. This is what we need to press respectable white people into understanding clearly.
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/republicans-corporations/
why did the Republicans enact laws suppressing the vote in Georgia? Because the former president made a big stink about "voter fraud" being the reason he lost. Why did the former president make a big stink? Well, for one thing, because Donald Trump is a sadist and fool. For another, because the Republicans in Georgia and other (mostly southern) states had been making a big stink about "voter fraud" since 2013. They had worked very hard to convince state residents that the problem was real. Given such a context had already been established, Trump's false allegations seemed almost true.
Why did this start in 2013? That's when the United States Supreme Court gutted part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It had required "pre-clearance" with federal authorities any time state and local legislators, especially in the South, changed their election laws. With that out of the way, Republicans in the South, worried that democracy was getting out of their control, decided to limit maximally but legally who can participate. Ergo, they invented a problem—voter fraud—the solution to which was voter ID laws.
So what's happening in Georgia is like a scene in a bit of absurdist theater in which cause-and-effect are not really cause-and-effect. It's more like effect-and-effect. Less than a decade ago, Peach State Republicans decided what laws they wanted to enact, but at the same time knew the real reason for enacting those laws, voter suppression, would not be tolerable to a majority of people in their state, even other Republicans.
So they fabricated an end to justify the means of getting there. (Just to be clear, voter fraud does not exist anywhere in any widespread and, therefore, worrisome way.) But imagine their surprise when a fascist president used the same fake reasons to bring hell and fury down on them for the fact that he lost Georgia. Now, post-election, in order to appease his supporters, who stand ready to oust them from power for their "betrayal," they have to double down on the big lies they've been telling all along.
This time is different. Before 2020, the big lie seemed like a legitimate cause requiring a legitimate effect. (Voter fraud caused restrictive voting laws.) After 2020, the big lie just looks like a big lie. There is no real and legitimate cause to justify enacting even more suppressive voter-suppression laws. There is only effect. Thanks to a fascist president who used those fake reasons to bring hell and fury down on Georgia, it's clear the problem for these Republicans was never voter fraud. It was democracy.
If it were only the Democrats raising awareness of the big lies, the Republicans in Georgia and in the United States Congress could let it roll off their backs. But it's no longer just the Democrats. Now, Republicans everywhere must contend with large corporations that can no longer afford to participate, even tacitly, in the bits of absurdist theater that have brought us all to this point. Even as they benefit from Republican policies—i.e., tax cuts and deregulation—they suffer from even the appearance of alignment with a political party at war with democracy. The CEO of Atlanta-based Delta Airlines is representative: "The entire rationale for this bill was based on a lie: that there was widespread voter fraud in Georgia in the 2020 elections. This is simply not true. Unfortunately, that excuse is being used in states across the nation that are attempting to pass similar legislation to restrict voting rights."
The Republicans, especially Mitch McConnell, understand what it means when huge non-political entities like Delta, Coke, American Airlines, Major League Baseball and others take a stand in favor of full and fair democracy. It suggests to a vast array of people who buy their products and use their services that the Republicans might not be on the same side. Once such a perspective takes root in the public imagination, it will be difficult for the Republicans to uproot. Perhaps they don't have the will or the capacity to. Once a majority suspects that you might stand against them, your side has incentive to treat that side like The Enemy. And that, I think, is what's happening.
Again and again, whenever non-political entities have (even mildly) criticized the Republicans—sports teams, the military, the press, universities, churches and now mass-market firms—the Republicans, following Donald Trump's lead, have reacted by accusing them of being in league with the Democrats. Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador, said recently that "Big corporations are the new liberal mob. First, they came after Georgia; now, they're coming after Texas.2 We can fight back with the power of our voices—and our wallets—to show them we mean business." Many big corporations pay virtually nothing in federal income taxes thanks to years of GOP effort. The Republicans bailed out the airlines repeatedly during the covid pandemic. Accusing Delta of participating in the "new liberal mob" isn't just ridiculous. It demonstrates the fear among Republicans that they are on the outside looking in.
Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that corporations should stay out of politics. He didn't mean it, though. In the next breath, he said he wasn't talking about political donations. What he wants is for Delta, Coke, the MLB and others to stop talking about democracy in ways that make it appear to a majority of Americans that the Republican Party stands on the other side of it. What he wants is for these non-political entities to stop making it harder for the Republican Party to pursue its anti-democracy agenda. The corporations have, however, endorsed the whole truth, and there's no going back. They have become a political rock against which the Republicans will break themselves.
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==
more cancel ~ fascist
https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/political-discourse/
https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/cancel-culture/
In discussing the truth about "cancel culture," I'm going to ask you to act for a moment like a journalist. Journalists are concerned, or should be concerned, with gathering relevant facts, crafting stories using relevant facts, clarifying ambiguities and identifying as much as possible who is doing what to whom, when, where, why and how. As applied to "cancel culture," this means who is using the term, in what context are they using it, why are they using it, and whom are they applying it to.
When you look at "cancel culture" from the point of view of a journalist, you can see that the people most likely to use "cancel culture" are most likely critical of the maddeningly muddled liberalization of American society in which people historically on the margins of respectability and power are slowly taking their equally entitled place at their center. Most critics are conservative. Some are liberal in that they worry about freedoms lost as freedoms are won. Others are merely and transparently fascist.
The context in which critics use "cancel culture" is naturally related to language. I say "naturally," because the words we use to engage the political reality we all inhabit is naturally as important as the reality itself. Indeed, the words we use can create their own fictional reality, one that ends up competing with, or even replacing, political reality. Because of the link between language and power, forces of liberalization are naturally interested in reshaping the language we all use in the interest of expanding the rights, liberties and blessings of the franchise. Forces against liberalization are naturally resistant to tampering with the language et al. And as these polar forces collide, there might arise legitimate constitutional questions of freedoms and rights.
But this binary I have established—advocates for and critics against the reshaping of the language that we use in order to engage the reality we inhabit—is mostly false. It's distorting, because it suggests an equal moral footing. Fact is, critics of "cancel culture" are not being honest with you. Advocates are not trying to cancel anyone. They are trying to change the political culture for the purpose of improving as many lives as possible. Critics understand that. That's why they invented a term of art in order to malign advocates—"cancel culture" is an inchoate threat we must face before it's too late. Critics of "cancel culture" are doing the same thing critics of liberalism have done since forever. While liberals complain about problems, critics complain about liberals. And they go to great lengths to get the liberals to shut the hell up.
While "cancel culture" is a fiction invented by critics of liberalization for the purpose of attacking liberals, there is such a thing as cancel culture. We just don't call it that, because real cancel culture has plagued human relations since the dawn of human history—it's when the politically powerful stomp the politically weak. Maltreatment on such a vast and historical scale is so normal, pervasive and ubiquitous that it's almost entirely invisible to those of us lucky enough to have been born on the giving end of it. Those of us unlucky enough to have been born on the receiving end of it, however, can see real cancel culture quite clearly. Again, the difference should be a familiar one. Those with the power to name, name. Those without the power to name, don't name. Those with the power call it "cancel culture." Those without the power sit in silence.
Power is, in fact, how you tell the difference between cancel culture and "cancel culture." It's the best way, to my way of thinking, to make sense of stuff that just doesn't make sense. For instance, the Times reported the story of a Black student at Smith College who claimed being targeted for discrimination by the school's white staffers. The claim wasn't true, turns out, but Smith College's president continued to take the student's side for reasons related to systemic racism. Critics of "cancel culture" howled. This was proof of wokeness run amok! Stop it before it's too late!
This wasn't "cancel culture," though. It was real cancel culture. A privileged Black student at one of the elite institutions of higher education in the United States chose for her own bad reasons to stomp some white working-class stiffs with the full faith and approval of her elite institution, an injustice as old as the history of the country. The problem for critics of "cancel culture" was not, however, the abuse of power. It was not that Smith College took the side of a student in abusing her power. It was the abuse of power by a Black person who isn't supposed to have any power to abuse.
Critics of "cancel culture" would rather not talk about the old hierarchies of power, however, because talking about the old hierarchies of power makes things that don't make sense make sense. The question is almost never about language and freedom of speech. The question is almost always about who is doing what to whom, when, where, why and how. Critics prefer we debate unclear and unresolvable abstractions. But you can free yourself from propaganda by acting, for a moment, as a journalist should.
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don jr at cpac Tpac fail, PO'd at mccarthy
https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/trump-evangelicals/
https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/journalism-lies/
On Sunday, NBC's "Meet the Press" interviewed United States Senator Ron Johnson. ABC's "This Week" interviewed House Minority Whip Steve Scalise. CBS's "Face the Nation" interviewed United States Senator Lindsey Graham. "Fox News Sunday" interviewed United States Senator Rand Paul. They're Republicans and they had a message for a combined television audience of millions: Donald Trump won.
Not in those exact words, but that was the clear implication. This thing or that thing—it didn't really matter what thing—meant in their "view" that the former president was robbed and the legitimacy of the current president, Joe Biden, is somehow suspect.
I bring this up not because yesterday was a disaster for journalism and the integrity of the public square (though it was that). I bring this up because it seems to me an answer to the question that haunts democratic discourse: How does a republic deal with parties that lie so intensely, so voluminously and so shamelessly? Some say we should afford them the same respect we ourselves would expect. If we call them liars, that might encourage them to lie more given the outrage of being called liars. Better to check their facts, state the truth and move on in hopes that they behave in kind.
This was certainly the thinking behind Frank Bruni's latest, titled "Must We Dance on Rush Limbaugh Grave?" The Times columnist said Sunday that while the radio broadcaster, who died last week, was a white-power racist, sexist, fear-mongering, homophobic crank (not his words), it's crude and rough and, worse of all, "screechy" to say as much about a man recently killed off by the cancer. It's one thing to speak ill of the dead, Bruni wrote, "but the pitch of that ill-speak needn't be screechy. The manner of it needn't be savage. It has more credibility—and I think, more impact—when it's neither of these things. And we preserve some crucial measure of civility and grace."
For four decades, Rush Limbaugh had the biggest media megaphone through which he spit poison every day straight into the ears of 20 million Americans. He lied and lied, and he lied and lied. If there were no Limbaugh, there would be no President Trump, who himself told more than 30,500 lies, falsehoods and misleading claims during four years. Their canon of lies included lies about the covid pandemic, culminating in a death toll now exceeding half a million. Their repertoire of lies included lies about the election, culminating in the worst attack on our government since September 11, 2001. Their stockpile of lies included The Big One repeated Sunday by three GOP senators and one GOP House leader to the detriment of millions of television viewers. How does a republic deal with parties that lie nonstop? There's never been an easy answer. Whatever it is, it's not "civility and grace" alone, because they alone do not work.
It's not that I think Bruni is wrong to remind people to follow the Golden Rule. He's correct, in a purely abstract sense, to say that, "If you're going to fling your opinions at the world, you must be braced for the world to fling its reaction back at you. Those are the terms of the contract." But we are not talking about public morality in the abstract. We are talking about public morality in this place and in this time and in the spirit of defending our republic from ghouls conspiring, and still conspiring, to bring it down. Moreover, a Golden Rule that's wholly decontextualized and dehistoricized can be a gag preventing us from speaking the truth and silencing all but the most powerful.
You know who Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is. During last week's deep freeze in Texas, she started a fundraiser that has raised, as of this writing, more than $4 million to alleviate hunger and suffering in the Lone Star State. She was doing for Texans what you'd think Texans would do for her (and other New Yorkers). But instead of gratitude, the Texas Republican Party answered generosity with slander: "The gesture is appreciated, but it doesn't remove the fact that her Green New Deal philosophy failed Texans," wrote Chairman Allen West. Fact No. 1: The Green New Deal is Ocasio-Cortez's policy idea. It's not anything more yet. Fact No. 2: Texas has nothing to do with her policy idea. Fact No. 3: Wind power accounts for 10 percent of energy use in Texas. Conclusion: West is smearing Ocasio-Cortez even as she's trying to help.
This is clear later when he writes that Ocasio-Cortez's charity is not charity. What appears to be the Golden Rule is actually something sinister. West wrote: "What Texans found out this week is that wind energy, and solar, are not reliable, dependable, and available energy resources. Therefore, ma'am [Ocasio-Cortez], you're not going to buy off Texans for your green new deal energy pipe dream for $2 million" (my italics). Ocasio-Cortez did not blame Texas politicians for the straits they're in. Her pitch has not been "screechy," as Frank Bruni wrote. Her manner has not been "savage." She has been living up to the Golden Rule according to Bruni's advice. But what does she get in return? Lies, slander, contempt, and rancid accusations of trying to "buy off Texans."
Ocasio-Cortez (as well as Beto O'Rourke, who's also raised impressive sums) is modeling what Texans could expect from a government of, by and for the people. That's a threat to corrupt parties like the Texas GOP. It's therefore in the interest of people like West to run Ocasio-Cortez down, even if he comes off as gauche in the process. Fact is, coming off as gauche might be a good thing, as a lack of manners and etiquette and decorum tends to look like authentic strength, and when that's set side-by-side with kindness, authentic strength usually wins though it's a lie. The real problem, West might as well said, isn't that Texas is corrupt. The real problem isn't that the state's government failed its people. The real problem is carpetbaggers and their "New York values" coming down here, making us look bad. That's not nice.
As I said, Bruni isn't wrong in terms of substance. He's wrong in terms of engagement. He's so aloof as to be extraterrestrial. This is the world we live in. This is the world we struggle to change. It's not going to change if truth stops at the border of politeness.
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/fascists-democracy/
There's a plausible argument in wide circulation that says that daily newspaper editorials no longer matter. I say "plausible," because most daily newspaper of size and significance endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016. You know how that went. But while the newspaper business continues to founder, I think its unsigned editorials remain important, because they reflect the views of respectable white people, the views of white people invested in their reputations as respectable among other white people.
The opinions of respectable white people are important to keep tabs on, as we move out of the age of Trumpism, which is to say (as Michael Gerson did), out of the age of American fascism. Respectable white people did not suffer under Donald Trump. They probably did fine or better than fine. The temptation among respectable white people, in the face of a politics that punches down, not up, is to be indifferent, which is bad, or complicit, which is worse, or cooperative, which is the end of freedom. Fox, Newsmax and others are pushing Republican voters deeper into fascism, but respectable white people, as represented by editorials and the Republican publishers who write or sign off on them, continue to be receptive to arguments that are moral, decent and patriotic.
If respectable white people are mostly immune to a politics in never-ending search of enemies to punish, how do they recognize the danger? When the fascists betray democracy.
Remember that newspaper editorials do not feature bylines, because they speak for the newspaper as a public institution yoked inexorably to the collective fate of the paper's community. Newspaper publishers are almost always Republicans, people with deep knowledge and preferential concern for their business communities. The incentive to reflect the interests of Republicans, instead of the interests of everyone else, is very strong. So when a newspaper like the Kansas City Star accuses its readership's GOP senators of emboldening sedition against the American republic, that's a BFD.
All four senators from our region—Roy Blunt and Josh Hawley of Missouri, Jerry Moran and Roger Marshall of Kansas—voted Saturday to acquit Donald Trump of the impeachment charge against him. Their votes were fundamentally wrong.
Hawley and Marshall were never going to judge allegations against Trump with an open mind, the editorial said. Blunt and Moran, however, should have known better. Their votes to acquit Trump "seem somehow more disturbing. Their long service gave us reason to hope both would put their country over their party. They failed the test."
Both [Missouri's Roy Blunt and Kansas's Jerry Moran] must face voters in two years, and are favorites to win. Perhaps they voted to acquit because they fear primary challenges from the Trumpistas in their party. If so, their votes are not only wrong, but also display a troubling political cowardice we should never forget.
The editorial did not buy their phony excuses. It saw arguments in favor of Trump's conviction and disqualification as compelling and true. It cast their votes, moreover, in terms of patriotism. The republic faced "an unrelenting assault" seeking "to overthrow a free and fair election." There will be a next time, it said. "The votes of Hawley, Moran, Blunt, Marshall and their cowardly colleagues ensure it. … When the next riot comes, who will stand for democracy? Not the senators from Missouri and Kansas."
Remember that the incentive for newspaper publishers to favor GOP politicians is very strong. The Star endorsed Blunt and Moran in 2016. It endorsed Hawley in 2018. (It endorsed Marshall's Democratic opponent in 2018.) For allegiances to break utterly like this, something has to give, and that something seems to have been their vote to betray democracy. Partisans can tolerate a lot. They demand a lot. But partisanship that evolves into treachery is "political cowardice we should never forget." "The stain of their votes must remain affixed to their names as long as the republic survives."
The thing about the idea that fascism can't happen in the United States—an idea often called American exceptionalism—is that it presumes Americans believe in democracy by dint of Americans being American. What's forgotten is democracy itself gives Americans the freedom to be fascist if that's what they want to be. Moreover, being a fascist can seem legitimate when one's fascism is derived from the democratic process. That's the case for Hawley and Marshall. That appears to be increasingly the case for Blunt and Moran. And because that's the case, being a fascist might not seem all that bad, especially to respectable white people who are mostly immune to fascist politics.
If respectable white people are mostly immune to a politics in never-ending search of enemies to punish, how do respectable white people recognize the danger? When the fascists betray democracy. When the fascists make themselves the republic's enemy. When newspaper editorials say their cowardly votes are stain on their names. But especially when the fascists make it abundantly clear that being white is not the same thing as being safe, as being democratic, as being legitimate, as being patriotic.
Fascists like Hawley and Marshall, and latent fascists like Blunt and Moran, are forcing respectable white people of the kind whose interests are represented in the Kansas City Star's editorial pages to consider other white people without the benefit of the doubt normally afforded immediately to other white people. The fascists are forcing respectable white people to think more like non-white Americans who have always recognized that being American does not necessarily mean believing in democracy. The long-term outcome, I hope, is respectable white people finding common cause with non-white Americans against the enemies of the republic.
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This afternoon will see the first leg of Donald Trump's impeachment trial in the United States Senate. The whole journey will last about a week or so. (Roll Call has an excellent item explaining the ins and outs of the proceedings.) The House Democrats will try to prove the former president's guilt in leading an attempt to overthrow the republic. The Senate Republicans will pretend they can't sit in judgment, because sitting in judgement of a former president, they have said, is unconstitutional.
Let me put this as plainly as I can. The very fact that Donald Trump's impeachment trial is happening at all, and that it will be happening over the next seven to 10 days, means it's constitutional. Full stop. The United States Congress is the first branch of the United States government. (Its constitution, after all, is Article I of the United States Constitution.) There is no higher authority. No, the United States Supreme Court is not a higher authority, not when it comes to impeachments and trials.
The very fact that Donald Trump's impeachment trial in the Senate is happening, and that it will be happening over the next seven to 10 days, means it's constitutional. Full stop.
Quite literally, the Senate Republicans are saying it's unconstitutional to prosecute a former (Republican) president, because they want it to be unconstitutional to prosecute a former (Republican) president. But the fact that a former (Republican) president is being prosecuted—starting today—invalidates the premise of their constitutional argument. Indeed, it wasn't an argument. The truth is in plain sight. When it came to a Democratic president who lied to a grand jury, the authority of the Congress would not be denied! When it comes to a (former) Republican president involved in the attempted murder of his enemies, that authority is a bit much, don't you think?
Gerald Ford, when he was the House minority leader during the Watergate era, famously said "high crimes and misdemeanors" are "whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers them to be at a moment in history." Same thing for the question of whether it's constitutional to prosecute a former president. If a majority of the United States Senate (or rather a two-thirds supermajority of the Senate in the case of conviction) says it's constitutional, it's constitutional ipso facto. So, again, with feeling: Donald Trump's impeachment trial in the Senate begins today. That it's happening at all, and that it could lead to conviction, means it's constitutional.
With there being zero chance of the United States Supreme Court getting involved in a dispute between the branches of the United States Congress, the question is settled. It's over. Indeed, there never was a question. (The truth has been in plain sight.) Because there never was a question, we should ask ourselves: why are the Republicans pretending there's a question when there's no question? Once you start asking yourself that question, the trial's outcome, which is not in doubt, starts to be less important than the reason the Senate Republicans are asking the question in the first place.
The reason the Senate Republicans are questioning a certainty (i.e., Jesus God, yes, it's constitutional to prosecute a former president, will you please knock it off already?) is the same reason all Republicans are so often certain about things that might actually be in question. The truth is always a threat. Deference to truth is always tyranny. What's important is authority. Their authority. Their authority over you and everyone you love. And once you start seeing the deep authoritarianism of most of the Republicans in the Congress, once you start seeing the deep authoritarianism of millions of your fellow Americans, you also start seeing lying isn't something they do merely to get what they want. Lying is something they do, because lying is the point.
Remember that Rand Paul and other Senate Republicans have something you don't. They have a global right-wing media apparatus to not only amplify their lies, but bend perception away from political reality and toward a favorable fictional one. To lie at this grand a scale is to create a world in which morality is perverted, politics is barbarous, and whole populations can be pushed around and told what to believe, and not only that: they want to believe, because the lies have become so totalizing that everything being upside down, backwards and prolapsed seems normal, rational and worthy of defended in the name of muh freedom. When everyone says the sky is green when the truth is in plain sight, everyone is not merely trying to deceive you. Everyone is maintaining a perversion in which speaking truthfully could inspire your murder.
The House Democratic impeachment managers are going to push through the Republicans' lies in order to reveal the whole truth to the American people about their former president, which is this: Donald Trump committed a heinous presidential crime worthy, at the very least, of being disqualified for life from holding public office. This is as it should be, but let's not forget what the lies themselves reveal.
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/leaving-qanon/
I don't believe Ashley Vanderbilt escaped QAnon. Yes, I know that's what she told CNN's Donie O'Sullivan, and that's what Donie O'Sullivan told the rest of us on Wednesday. But trust me when I say there's no way someone indoctrinated into believing up is down, left is right, and wrong is right snaps out of it in a matter of weeks. People like Vanderbilt are primed to believe anything, and will keep being primed to believe anything. O'Sullivan's reporting suggests the danger is fading. The danger is not, and O'Sullivan's reporting goes a way toward obscuring that reality.
Who is Ashley Vanderbilt? She's a married white 27-year-old mother of a young child living in South Carolina. She lost her job last April as a result of the covid pandemic. Though neither she nor O'Sullivan say what kind of Christian she is, the fact she does not say suggests she's with a nondenominational evangelical congregation, I'd guess a megachurch, which would put her squarely among Donald Trump's loyalest of loyal supporters, the people most likely to believe the former president was sent by God. As such, she's probably gotten very adept at envisioning her life not as one she has control over, but one she must suffer through as the price for entering the Kingdom of Heaven.
When she said, "I've always been someone that you just tell me what to do and I do it," I knew she and I come from similar religious backgrounds in which morality is obedience.
O'Sullivan said that after Joe Biden won the election, Vanderbilt "spent days on TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube becoming indoctrinated into the world of QAnon." (That's the conspiracy theory holding that the Democrats are in league with a global—read: Jewish—cabal of satanists who fornicate with children before eating them.) "By inauguration day," O'Sullivan said, Vanderbilt "was convinced that if then President-elect Joe Biden took office the United States would literally turn into a communist country. She was terrified that she would have to go into hiding with her daughter."
Vanderbilt said she was spending a lot of time by herself after losing her job. She was depressed. She was cranky. She too often snapped at her daughter. As a result, she said, she probably lost touch with reality. "I wasn't one hundred percent there like I should have been," she said. Folks, I'm here to tell you someone who believed that the "deep state" was having sex with children before eating them, that the former president would declare martial law, and that the military would round up his enemies before publicly executing them in cold blood is not someone who needs to lose her job, go into a depression or snap at her child to be not quite "one hundred percent there."
She was already there. How do I know? From experience. I've mentioned before I grew up on the margins of a closed protestant sect called the Christians Gathered Unto the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ. (They are better known as the Plymouth Brethren.) Strict obedience to authority, which is to say, strict obedience to the father of the family, which is to say strict obedience to God, was morality. When Vanderbilt said, "I've always been someone that you just tell me what to do and I do it," I knew she and I come from similar backgrounds. We were taught Hell is really real, and God really will send you there if you do not do what He tells you to. We were taught a God who threatens eternal pain and suffering is a loving God. We were taught to believe up is down, left is right, wrong is right, but especially don't think just do as you're told.
So I know she was already there. She didn't need TikTok to fall down "the QAnon rabbit hole." If it wasn't TikTok, Facebook or whatever, it would have been something else, most likely ordinary word of mouth. QAnon does not demand of believers any more than Vanderbilt's white evangelical church does. She seems to have sensed the connection between them. O'Sullivan said, "while she was deep in the conspiracy theory, she said Trump was becoming an almost messianic figure for her who could do no wrong. She recalls once asking herself, 'Am I putting even Trump above God?'" She doesn't read, she said, and she doesn't pay attention to the legitimate press. All she needs to do is what she's told to do, which is follow the leader don't ask questions.
Which is why her explanation of how she "escaped" doesn't hold up. "Some QAnon adherents concocted a new conspiracy theory in the hours after inauguration," O'Sullivan said. "Biden's inauguration itself was a key part of the plan, the new theory held, and Trump would return as President in the coming few weeks. Then, certainly, all the deep-state arrests would happen. That was a step too far for Vanderbilt." Wut!
She was convinced Joe Biden's inauguration would transform the country into a Communist state. She believed she'd have to go into hiding with her daughter. She believed the Democrats and the Jews and "the Globalists" are cannibals. And she was disappointed when the military did not publicly execute Der Führer's enemies in cold blood. But wait whoa—a conspiracy theory adapting to reality? That's a step too far!?
Look, I don't understand why Vanderbilt thinks she escaped QAnon. I do know, using my intuition, that she does not understand why either. In not understanding why, she's vulnerable to the influence of a CNN journalist reporting a national story about a QAnon believer who escaped. Vanderbilt, in being someone who always did what was asked of her, continued being someone who did what was asked of her, in this case, giving O'Sullivan a story he was asking for, however tacitly. And in the process of telling that story, he obscured a terrible conclusion about Vanderbilt. That she felt fooled into believing there would be blood does not change the fact she wanted blood.
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/marjorie-taylor-greene-2650333948/
Last night, nearly a dozen Republicans joined all the Democrats in the House to strip Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Donald Trump protégé from Georgia, of her committee appointments — in particular, her place on the powerful House Budget Committee. This was in response to her incendiary speech and fear-mongering before taking office. In effect, they neutralized her, as it were. If you don't have a seat at the table, especially the big government money table, you don't have much in the way of leverage or bargaining.
You could say, however, this was her second neutralizing. The first one she did herself. As Jonathan Bernstein noted this morning, it's not like Greene went to Washington to govern. Her role is demagogic. Leverage and bargaining, bills and laws—these are beside the point. The main point is creating conditions in which she can appear to be in a near-total state of persecution to speak for Americans who feel the same way.
Marjorie Taylor Greene did not go to Washington to represent the will of the people, because, to God's chosen people, representing the will of "the people" is an abomination.
Constituents from Georgia's most conservative corner didn't send her to the United States Congress to represent them, to fight for their interests or their share of the big government money, to "bring home the bacon." They sent her to Capitol Hill to die on that hill, like Jesus Christ on the Cross at Calvary, in order to reenact the suffering of God's chosen at the hands of His enemies. Her job is to manufacture crisis in the absence of one. "The whole point of evangelicalism is that you get to constantly be persecuted," said Chrissy Stroop, "and you enjoy moral superiority from that."
A worldview in which you're always persecuted is a worldview in which you're never responsible, because being responsible would mean you're possibly to blame, which is impossible, because the persecuted are always blameless. Acting out some measure of contrition, when absolutely forced to, is an opportunity to show why you're always persecuted. Before the vote last night, Greene said she was being wrongfully accused, and because of that, the Democrats should be apologizing to her, not the other way around, which totally makes sense given they're the enemies of God's chosen people. [TURMP ALSO AGENT OF CHAOS, B/C GOV'T IS ALWAYS ALREADY BROKEN CORRUPT, PARALYSIS IS GOOD DEFENSE; ALSO // HE HAS 2 MODES, I AM A WINNER OR I AM THE VICTIM B/C THEY KEPT ME FROM WINNING FOR YOU [WHICH DOES NOT NEC MEAN ENACT BILL THAT WILL MAKE YOUR LIFE BETTER B/C SEE ABOVE, BUT BEAT UP OUR ENEMIES DEMS POC]
"I was allowed to believe things that weren't true,[HUH? PASSIVE, BY WHOM?] and I would ask questions about them and talk about them, and that is absolutely what I regret," Greene said. "Because if it weren't for the Facebook posts and comments that I liked in 2018, I wouldn't be standing here today, and you couldn't point a finger and accuse me of anything wrong." [SO SHE WAS THE BRAVE SEEKER OF TRUTH, BUT HER ERROR WAS WRITING IT DOWN SO SHE CAN'T DENY IT NOW? //~ CHENEY NOTE STRATEGY]
A worldview in which you're accountable to God only, rather than to people of equal worth and dignity with whom you share responsibility in human affairs, is a worldview inherently hostile to a free republic. It will not tolerate diverse interests, nor will it tolerate a republic's tendency to flatten hierarchies of power and privilege. But "demographic change," as the thinking goes, is not the only reason for this hostility.
Marjorie Taylor Greene did not go to Washington to represent the will of the people, because, to God's chosen, representing the will of "the people" is an abomination. Authority does not arise from below, from the consent of the governed. It comes from above, from God. It doesn't matter to Greene that she was removed from committees—that the tools of lawful democratic engagement with other human beings worthy of dignity and respect were taken away—because democracy is the problem. To engage democratically in a republic of equals is to make common cause with the enemy.
Jim Jordan, the House Republican, made a lot of noise the day before Thursday's vote. On Fox, he portrayed accountability for Greene as a "slippery slope." "Who's next?" he said. If the Democrats "keep attacking people, their First Amendment free speech rights, where does it end? … It won't stop with Republicans. It'll go to all of us. If we don't stop it now, every single American is at risk. And that's what concerns me."
Jordan, Greene and most of the rest of the Republicans do fear a slippery slope, but it's not a slippery slope into tyranny. It's a slippery slope into freedom—for all. What they aim to preserve is a social hierarchy that protects but does not bind the privileged few while it binds but does not protect the unprivileged many. What they want is a state in which the small in-group and the huge out-group are separate and unequal. What they fear is a slippery slope threatening to bring liberty and justice to everyone else.
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/leaving-qanon/
stoehr
https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/economy-republicans/
stoehr edit bd
I trust the New York Times' David Leonhardt knows what he's talking about when it comes to economics and economic policy. But I feel I have something to contribute to the question he posed Tuesday. Why are Republican presidents so bad for the economy? In addition to considering the Gross Domestic Product and other empirical factors, we ought to consider a moral one, to wit: the reason the United States fails to thrive under GOP presidents is because they so often seek out more and better ways to lie to us.
These lies are intentional. They are ubiquitous. They are huge. And the bigger they are, the more pain they cause, over years and over decades. If the lies are not directly related to the economy, they are certainly related indirectly, as most of them are conceived and motivated by the desire for riches, with the net effect being the crowding out of the many from the center of American democracy for the benefit of the few.
Fortunately, truth now has more in its favor than good people doing what they think is right. It has partisanship on its side.
A very, very short list: Tax decreases pay for themselves. Tax increases hurt job-creators. Regulations hurt business. The minimum wage hurts workers. Redistribution is theft. Welfare is addiction. Abortion is murder. Feminism is reverse sexism. Equality is reverse racism. Iraq had WMDs. Obama wasn't an American. Voter fraud is rampant. All/Blue Lives Matter. Political correctness. Cancel culture. Trump won.
There are more, but let's not forget the most obvious and deadly lie in recent years, to our bodies and our republic—that the covid pandemic is nothing much to worry about, indeed worrying about it means you're on the other side of a president trying to root out a conspiracy against "the people" by Democrats in league with a global (Jewish) cabal of satanists who fornicate with children before eating them, a conspiracy so evil the Democrats in the Congress deserve nothing less than capture and assassination.
Donald Trump was the most conspicuous of all the liars, it goes without saying, but Republican presidents going back to my childhood lied with such frequency, felicity and nuance the inevitable result was four years of hourly nonstop fire-hose lying. The outcome of that has been half a million deaths by the covid by the end of this month, and a national economy that hasn't been this bad since 1946. Leonhardt and others are correct, of course, in looking at interest rates, the unemployment rate, GDP and other empirical factors in order to answer the question of why Republicans fail so badly. But let's not forget that lying causes pain and that suffering often comes in economic form.
The bigger the lie, the bigger the pain inflicted on everyone until the lie and the pain are so nearly total that the distinction between believing and not believing the lie is a distinction without a moral difference. The Post reported Tuesday that Ginni Thomas, wife of US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, apologized to her husband's former clerks for her role in supporting the January 6 protest-turned-insurrection. What's astounding isn't that Ginni Thomas admitted obliquely to having some responsibility for the republic's near-death. What's astounding is she seems to continue to believe the lie—Trump won—even after that near-death experience.
Clarence Thomas' former clerks constitute a "blue-ribbon membership," according to the Post, with major influence inside and outside the courts. Yet some of its members appear to believe what Ginni Thomas believes. "Many of my friends and I had been praying our knees off that January 6 would see light and truth being shed on what we believe in our hearts was likely a stolen election," wrote Wendy Stone Long, and that eventually "President Trump would be determined to be the legitimate winner."
What does it mean when a society's cream of the crop continues to believe lies so big they nearly bring down a republic? It means the rest of us, who have nothing like the influence these people have, must spend valuable time and energy sorting through the lies, organizing ourselves and convincing as many people as possible, but especially those at the very top, that lies they espouse or spread or both are causing pain not just to the common people, but to the nation as a whole, including them. In the process, this drains the economy of resources that could be used for something more productive.....
https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/mcconnell-treason/
Despite being polarized, Americans really do agree on the fundamentals. Is the president above the law? No. Does every citizen have a right to vote? Yes. Should powers be separated? Yes. Are checks and balances good? Yes. Should people be free to worship as they wish? Yes. Are the people the ultimate sovereign? Yes. And so on.
Theory isn't the same as practice, obviously, but even so, there's only one correct answer to fundamental political questions. If there were other correct answers—if these questions hinged on differences of opinion—we would not be members of a political community whose outlines were established long ago. We would be part of another kind of political community, one none of us would recognize as familiar, legitimate or good. Our nation would be something else. It would not be America.
These fundamentals and the outlines of our political community that were derived from them constitute a contract among and between citizens and noncitizens. We agree to them, consciously or subliminally, because if we did not, we wouldn't participate in the union we all actually participate in. We'd be in something else that does not exist.
In the run-up to Election Day, CNN's Jake Tapper urged counting of every vote. He was not violating the norms of journalism. He was not taking a position. With respect to voting, there's no position to take. Counting every vote is what we do. If we do not count every vote, we are not America. Very few things in this country are either-or, right or wrong, but fundamental questions are. They are, because they must be. They must be, because we want them to be. We want them to be, because we are America.
The president and the Republican leaders are failing the test of fundamentals. Should they recognize as legitimate the outcome of a lawful democratic process? The only answer is yes. That's the only correct answer, because either the American people are sovereign or they are not. If they are not, we do not live in a representative democracy. Anything less than yes indicates unwillingness to participate in the union as it stands. Anything less than an immediate yes indicates a certain softness of dedication to the US Constitution and the republic. Yet Donald Trump, and now Mitch McConnell and the rest of the Republican Party, are refusing to recognize Joe Biden's victory.
I'm told this is theater. I'm told this is about fundraising. Campaign debts must be paid, after all. I trust some of this is true. I also trust history, though. No president has ever denied the reality of his defeat. (Biden has now eclipsed Ronald Reagan's share of the popular vote, 50.8 percent to 50.7. It is the highest for a challenger since Franklin Roosevelt beat Herbert Hoover in 1932. And the counting continues.) No president has ever refused to concede in the face of a mathematical certainty. To my knowledge, no political party has ever gotten behind an incumbent's effort to steal an election.
That effort will fail. (I say "will" but honestly I'm as full of dread as you are.) The president's legal scheme has so far floundered. Every one of his suits has been thrown out, because there's no evidence of voter fraud on the scale he's alleging. On the off-chance of one of these lawsuits getting to the US Supreme Court, I'm guessing the conservative justices there will buy themselves legitimacy by dismissing the case outright. Accusations can work in politics, less in court. As GOP Sen. John Cornyn said: "In the end, they're going to have to come up with some facts and evidence."
But even in failure, the president and the Republicans will have accomplished something. (It will benefit the GOP, of course, not the president; Trump will face legal scrutiny the minute he's out of office.) They will have succeeded in three things. One, establishing doubt in Biden's legitimacy. Two, establishing the groundwork for obstructing his agenda. More important, though, is three. They will have deepened an assumption already at work in the background of Republican discourse. Democrats don't count. Anything they do, whether criticizing Republicans or beating them by a landslide in national elections, deserves any reaction up to and including murder.
In a very real sense, the Republicans are constituting a nation inside this nation, a confederacy of the mind and spirit to be made real so "real Americans" chosen by God can dominate the whole in God's name. They are constituting a separate and unequal system inside the one everyone else recognizes as legitimate, in which a small minority is privileged over a majority bound by law but not protected by it. They are, ultimately, on the path toward suicide. When parasites kill their hosts, they kill themselves, too.
The most extreme view among pundits is that the Republicans won't recognize Joe Biden's legitimacy. That's not extreme enough. They are creating a beachhead inside the United States from which to continue covert civil warfare against the United States. The Republicans are committing treason literally, yet they're being afforded respect, as if accepting the outcome of a lawful democratic process were a matter of opinion. Wrong. There's only one correct answer to that fundamental question. Anything less than fully accepting the people's will is desiring an America that will never exist.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-and-white-evangelical-christians-are-bonded-by-sadism/
john s eb
there’s still too much confusion over the president’s bond with white evangelical Protestants (WEPs). I suppose there will always be as long as outsiders presume that Donald Trump’s strongest supporters believe in loving thy neighbor as thyself. Once you see that WEPs do not apply the Golden Rule universally and unconditionally, things become clearer. Once this Christian concept is removed from the discussion, “paradoxes” melt into the air. What’s left is a natural alignment of political interests.
How do I know WEPs don’t truly believe in the Golden Rule? From life experience. I know what I’m talking about. All you have to do is listen carefully, however, and know what to listen for. Elizabeth Dias wrote a big piece in the Times last week trying to clear up the “contradiction” of WEPs standing by Trump “when he shut out Muslim refugees. When he separated children from their parents at the border. When he issued brash insults over social media. When he uttered falsehoods as if they were true. When he was impeached.” A source explains helpfully that there’s no contradiction at all.
“The years of the Obama presidency were confusing to her,” Dias wrote of her source. “She said she heard talk of giving freedoms to gay people and members of minority groups. But to her it felt like her freedoms were being taken away. And that she was turning into the minority.” The source: “I do not love Trump. I think Trump is good for America as a country. I think Trump is going to restore our freedoms, where we spent eight years, if not more, with our freedoms slowly being taken away under the guise of giving freedoms to all. Caucasian-Americans are becoming a minority. Rapidly.”
This makes no sense to outsiders. Freedom for “gay people and members of minority groups” is not taking anything away from anybody. This makes no sense, because outsiders do not generally accept a worldview in which power is ordered. First God, then man, then woman, then child. White over nonwhite. Heterosexual over LGBTQ. Christian over non-Christian. When you believe with your whole being that power is ordered according to God’s will, “giving freedoms to gay people and members of minority groups” is not political equality, as outsiders would often see it. It’s knocking you out of the order of power. It’s taking something away. Equality is literally theft
when political equality is theft, you cannot apply the Golden Rule universally and unconditionally. If you did, you’d be complicit in a crime. The Golden Rule demands white people share power with nonwhite people. It demands husbands share power with their wives. Neither can ever be done. A wife, according to the same source in Dias’ reporting, must “submit” to her husband in accordance with God’s law. If she does not, she’s trying “to rule over him.” Same for whites and nonwhites. If white people are not at the top of the order, they are being ruled over. This is why Dias’ source says that, “Caucasian-Americans are becoming a minority. Rapidly.” The more for “them,” the less for “us.” They believe Trump prevents that from happening.
They believe Trump is “restoring their freedom.” Utter nonsense. What they are really saying is that the president will prevent people lower down the order of power from achieving more freedom and equality, “violating” their “freedom.” He must do that by any means, even if he confiscates kids from their mothers, bans a world religion, or commits treason. None of that matters as much as maintaining the supremacy of a religious identity built on sand. And make no mistake: this is a religious identity. These are very real anti-democratic Christians hostile to critical thinking, modernity, pluralism, and all forms of equality. “It’s almost like it is a reverse intolerance,” a WEP source told Dias. “If you have somebody that’s maybe on the liberal side, they say that we are intolerant of them. But it is inverse intolerant if we can’t live out our faith.”[ // reverse disvrimination]
If WEPs believed in the Golden Rule, they’d never tolerate other people’s pain. They do tolerate it, however. Indeed, they like it. It feels good to see the president “restoring their freedom.” When WEPs say they want to “live out our faith,” what they mean is sadism is and should be a natural consequence of the natural order of things in which God’s people are chosen to rule in God’s name. “Evangelicals did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is,” Dias wrote. “They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are.” That’s correct, but take that to its logical conclusion. His enemies are their enemies. His pleasures, their pleasures. Their bond is far from a contradiction. It’s an alignment of political interests in which sadism is the point.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/must-we-continue-to-respect-stupidity/
Wall Street Journal ran an item this morning touching on something I have been thinking about lately: the role of stupidity in our national discourse, and the apparent requirement that the citizenry respect stupidity no matter how dangerous it is.
As Bonhoeffer said in an age similar to ours: “Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.”
The subject of the piece was face masks, and why some Americans refuse to wear one. It is beyond dispute that wearing a mask in public is the simplest, cheapest, and easiest means of preventing the coronavirus from spreading. The virus is airborne, meaning it survives in droplets of water so small they float in the air. Sneezing, laughing or just talking loudly, especially indoors with inadequate ventilation—that’s how the novel virus goes from one person to another. If we’d all been wearing one since March, we might not see over 150,000 deaths and over 4 million infections. Wearing a mask should be a no-brainer. As Jennifer Calfas’s reporting shows us, however, it is not.
It’s a joke,” said Joseph Lee, a 62-year-old in White Bear Lake, Minn. who wore a mask once to comply with rules to get a haircut. “All [mask wearing] does, I think, is give people a false sense of hope.”
Aside from being wrong, if we’re all gonna die, let’s all die with our eyes open?
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When asked if the president’s recommendation last week to wear a mask had any impact, Cody Adams, “a 34-year-old pipe welder based in Arkansas,” said no can do.
“It hasn’t swayed my opinion.”
The dumbest reason comes from Peggy Hall. The Orange County, California, resident “who has decried face mask requirements there and elsewhere” actually said out loud:
“The beautiful thing about our country is freedom does come first, and public health comes a distant, distant second, third, fourth, maybe 20th.”
To be sure, as Calfas reports, this is a minority. A recent poll by the Journal and NBC News found that most Americans most of the time wear a mask in public no matter their political affiliation, suggesting that good sense can still trump nonsense. Only about 11 percent “rarely or never wear” one, which might be comforting in any social context other than public health. If I’m not mistaken, even a small minority refusing to wear a mask could mean the pandemic won’t end for years until there’s a vaccine. Meanwhile, more people die, more get sick, and mass disruption continues apace.
It’s for this reason we need to talk about the role of stupidity in our national discourse. We should not aim to insult, demean or marginalize anyone. Stupid people are human beings deserving of equal rights and equal justice. We should, however, redefine and reestablish the boundaries of acceptable public opinion. Stupid people deserve equal treatment, but it’s deadly—literally—to give stupid ideas equal respect. (Stupidity, moreover, is not in the eye of the beholder when the medical, scientific and good-government consensus is that wearing masks is good, not wearing masks is bad.)
Of course, redefining and reestablishing the boundaries of acceptable public discourse is at the heart of the controversy over so-called cancel culture. In truth, no one is getting canceled (anyway, not in the way “cancel culture” critics claim). And in truth, the people most likely to complain about getting “canceled” often have access to public platforms so gigantic as to undermine the very premise of their arguments.
Take John Kass, for instance. A columnist for the Chicago Tribune, he wrote recently a piece about George Soros and “lawlessness” in cities run by Democrats. Soros is a frequent subject of anti-Jewish conspiracy theory. Outraged by its antisemitism, some said the column is a firing offense. This week, Kass defended himself against “the angry left-handed broom of America’s cultural revolution [using] fear to sweep through our civic, corporate and personal life.” A column about being a victim of censorship becomes incoherent the moment it’s published. Yet we accept this stupidity, give it respect, and encourage it though it can and does poison discourse and enable evil.
As I noted recently, “cancel culture” critics aren’t defending speech. They are instead blurring lines. They make it appear as if demands for redefining and reestablishing the boundaries of acceptable public opinion seem as authoritarian as the authoritarian president who really is dispatching his paramilitaries to harass and intimidate social reformers in cities nationwide under the guise of “protecting” federal property. Voters who don’t want to vote for a fascist president might vote for him anyway to “protect” against “the angry left-handed broom of America’s cultural revolution.” Stupidity, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.”
Bonhoeffer really did get canceled. A Lutheran minister in Germany, he opposed Hitler’s rise and the eventual attempt to exterminate Jews from Europe. The Nazi regime accused him of conspiring to assassinate Hitler, and hanged him just before the war’s end. This is what he said from his prison cell about stupidity. (Here I want to thank Editorial Board subscriber Jim Prevatt for bringing this to my attention):
“One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.
“Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.
“For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
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