gop4bak

7/20 4 mos from election, trump utter fail on covid

see LIE CHEAT POWER WIN

see trumpista qanon

see fail 3 covid

html landslide

rosenberg

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/autocratization/

as the Jan. 6 insurrection recedes in time, media attention is beginning to focus on potential 2024 Republican presidential candidates, including "new faces" like Kristi Noem and Josh Hawley, old also-ran Ted Cruz and others and, of course, Donald Trump. In a representative democracy, it's only natural that elected leaders — or credible potential ones — should be a significant focus of attention.

But there's an air of unreality hovering over all such portrait-mode coverage when a broader landscape view shows that the very survival of democracy is up for grabs — not just in the U.S., where GOP House members are in deep denial about the Jan. 6 insurrection while Republican legislators have introduced voter suppression bills in 47 states, but around the world. The Swedish-based V-Dem Institute's 2021 annual report notes that "the global decline in liberal democracy has been steep during the past 10 years and continues in 2020" and concludes that the "level of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen in 2020" has fallen "to levels last found around 1990." At that time there was a jubilant buzz about the "End of History." Now there's an undertone of dread that we could "meanly lose, the last best hope of earth," as Abraham Lincoln warned.

Talk of as many as 24 potential GOP candidates in the next cycle recalls pre-2016 talk about the GOP's "deep bench," which, as I noted at the time, was a media-hyped myth. Those andidates fell into three groups: governors with horrible to mediocre job-creation records plus some ex-governors who hadn't run in a while, first-term senators with paper-thin résumés in a particularly dysfunctional Congress, and assorted wild cards, including Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, as well as a certain New York real estate developer turned reality-TV star. I focused primarily on the shared failure of GOP economics, the party's purported strong suit. "The degree to which key articles of GOP economic faith clash with overwhelming expert judgment is staggering — and there's nary a hint of it in most of the media," I wrote. "It's a disconnect reminiscent of global warming, but much less widely recognized."

The problem goes much deeper now, to the shared failure of Republican patriotism, as their party has turned against democracy. While media awareness may be better, without grounding coverage in a "landscape view" of the problem journalists are fumbling the biggest story of our time — the global threat to democracy, and the enormous potential for a renewal that could finally realize democracy's full promise for all.

America's place in a landscape of democratic decay

What's known as the "_{third wave of autocratization}_" — characterized by creeping democratic erosion rather than violent coups — continues to spread: V-Dem's report notes that "25 countries, home to 34% of the world's population (2.6 billion people), are in democratic decline by 2020." One especially disturbing highlight "is that India — formerly the world's largest democracy with 1.37 billion inhabitants — turned into an electoral autocracy," meaning a system in which elections continue to be held but the chance of power changing hands is virtually nil. Prior to Jan. 6, the U.S. seemed far from being in a similar situation, but that is effectively what the new wave of GOP voter suppression laws could accomplish, especially with _{added provisions that jeopardize the post-election process}_.

America is still a long way from becoming India — but things can change quickly. The U.S. score on V-Dems "Liberal Democracy Index" or LDI is 0.73 (out of a possible 1) while India is less than half that, at 0.34, a precipitous decline since 2010 that places it among the planet's top 10 major "autocratizers." While the U.S. doesn't make that ignominious list, it's marked in red to "signify cases of significant and substantial autocratization." In 2010, the U.S. was among the highest-ranked nations, and is now no longer in the top 30, falling below Chile and Greece, countries with recent histories of military rule.

"The U.S. is somewhat unusual among the decliners," a trio of V-Dem researchers — _{Anna Lührmann}_, _{Dan Pemstein}_ and _{Juraj Medzihorsky}_ — told Salon via email. "Most of the decliners are reasonably young democracies," they wrote, adding that the U.S. has had a high and stable LDI in their rankings since the civil rights era. "The U.S. is a very different case than India or Brazil and also the various Eastern European countries [which] have much shorter democratic histories, despite being at similar levels in 2010."

The American case, they note, "shows that it is possible for this illiberal playbook, which we're seeing play out in diverse places ranging from Brazil to India, Hungary and Poland, to gain traction even in consolidated liberal democracies."

The party landscape: Even starker

Things look even more perilous from two other landscape views: the landscape of parties across the world, and the landscape of state-level government. A V-Dem _{briefing paper}_ and its followup, entitled "_{Walking the Talk: How to Identify Anti-Pluralist Parties}_," found that the Republican Party has shifted dramatically in recent decades, from being in the same ideological territory as the British Conservative Party in 2000 to the neighborhood of India's Hindu nationalist BJP now, while the Democratic Party has barely moved at all.

"In 2000 the GOP was a party that was clearly committed to democratic standards as listed in the paper," the V-Dem scholars wrote. "In 2018 (the last point of measurement), this commitment was not clearly visible." They continued:

The data shows that the Republican Party in 2018 was far more illiberal (that is anti-pluralist) than almost all other governing parties in democracies. Only very few governing parties in democracies in this millennium (15%) were considered more illiberal than the Republican Party in the U.S. Conversely, the Democratic Party was rated slightly less illiberal than the typical party in democracies. In 2018, the Republican Party scores much higher than almost all parties in democracies on almost all of these indicators.

The shifts they observed were especially dramatic in two of four areas: "demonizes opponents" and "encourages violence."

Given the asymmetric change between the two major American parties, I asked if there were other countries that could shed light on what might happen next, or whether we were in uncharted territory?

"We did not see any sufficiently similar examples that we could bring up," Medzihorsky responded. "Given the information that we have, we refrained from speculation."

The red-state landscape of democratic decay

Another landscape perspective that can shed some light is that of state-level government, explored by University of Washington political scientist Jacob M. Grumbach in a paper called "_{Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding.}_" Inspired by the V-Dem model, Grumbach developed a measure of subnational democratic performance called the State Democracy Index. He tested a range of different theories about what might contribute to democratic erosion over the period from 2000 to 2018, "based in party competition, polarization, demographic change, and the group interests of national party coalitions." Strikingly, he found "a minimal role for all factors except Republican control of state government, which dramatically reduces states' democratic performance during this period."...

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/intellectual-conservatives-seem-to-be-redefining-conservatism-for-make-believe-republicans/

sprigman

If you're like most people, you haven't followed the twists and turns of conservative intellectual efforts to gin up a new account of American conservatism distinguishing it from Trumpism. But if the past is any guide, don't worry. You're not missing much.

Conservatism since Reagan has been about interests, not ideas. The Reagan coalition united economic conservatives focused on "smaller government"—i.e., lower taxes and regulations—and religious conservatives intent on preserving traditional morality, which boiled down mostly to sex they don't like. The economic conservatives were the dominant partner. When the Reagan-era conservative movement deployed ideas, it was usually as a fig leaf to cover the nakedness of the dominant partner's interest.

The conservative movement that lasted from the late-1970s until 2016 looks positively egg-headed compared to today's Trumpist party. Trump's intuitive genius was to understand the standard account of the Republican coalition was incomplete. A big slice of the "smaller government" crowd, Trump understood, wasn't motivated by economicinterest at all. Rather, for a lot of exurban and rural Republicans, small government was not about reducing taxes but a way of starving the government of resources that benefit people they didn't like—namely, people who aren't white.

No amount of conservative intellectualizing is going to put a fig leaf over that. And so if conservative intellectuals are going to have any relevance, they will have to reshape American conservatism rather than simply providing ideas that cover for it.

So far the effort to do that has yielded very little. Even before Trump, the so-called "Reformicons," a circle of conservative intellectuals centered around National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru and National Affairs's Yuval Levin, argued that conservative economic policies should be reoriented away from the Reagan-era catechism and toward support of the working class—in particular, toward a set of policies aiming to strengthen the economic position of ordinary families and to restore social mobility.

Trump's ascent initially made the Reformicons look prophetic. But "reform conservatism" sputtered out in part because it was, well, still conservative. It was still burdened by the conservative reflex to devolve responsibility for reforms to state and local governments and to private charities—none of which were remotely up to the task. More to the point, the Reformicons weren't meeting the GOP's working-class voters where they were. They were trying to marry traditional conservatism to class-consciousness. But the GOP's working-class voters were far more focused on race.

Next came "Common Good Conservatism," even less likely to appeal to Trump's GOP. The main text is Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed, a 2017 polemic arguing that virtually all of our society's pathologies can be laid at the feet of liberalism's identification of individual autonomy as the principal good.

Deneen's book has had more influence than it deserves. His idée fixe is too simple—he reduces liberalism to a sort of soft libertarianism. Deneen's response is essentially rehashed Reformiconism, but without the engagement with practical politics that made the Reformicons' ideas minimally credible. Deneen argues for more localism, more communitarianism, but he does little to explain practically what kind of political movement would be needed to get us there or how it could be put together.

The surest sign "Common Good Conservatism" is going nowhere is its hijacking by a band of well-credentialed kooks operating under the banner of Catholic "integralism."Advocated most loudly by Harvard Law professor and recent Catholic convert Adrian Vermeule, integralism understands the "common good" as equivalent to (less liberal) pre-Vatican II Catholic doctrine (as Vermeule and his collaborators misunderstand it).

To give you a sense of Vermeule's program, here's his argument for prioritizing immigration for "confirmed Catholics" ("confirmed" meaning Catholics who have completed the sacrament of confirmation in their early teens, thereby signaling to Vermeule that they are "real" Catholics rather than merely baptized non-believers):

The principle is to give lexical priority to confirmed Catholics, all of whom will jump immediately to the head of the queue. Yes, some will convert in order to gain admission; this is a feature, not a bug. This principle will disproportionately favor immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. (Note here that the priority is for actual Catholics, not for applicants from "historically Catholic countries"; relatively few Western Europeans will pass through the eye of the needle, and the Irish will be almost totally excluded). It will disproportionately favor the poor, and will draw no distinction between those seeking asylum based on a fear of persecution, and those fleeing "mere" economic hardship. It will in effect require opening the southern border of the United States, although immigration from Canada will rightly become a rare and difficult event, at least if we do not count a small subset of Quebecois.1

It's difficult for me, as a Catholic who grew up worshipping in a working- and middle-class parish (unlike Vermeule, who was raised Episcopalian in Cambridge, Mass., by well-off academics) to explain how absurd integralism is as an account of Catholicism as it exists in America. The mass of American Catholics would have no truck with Vermeule's ideas—indeed, they are far more likely to view them as confirming the worst prejudices that non-Catholics hold about Catholics and their supposed authoritarian bent (see, e.g., the speech Senator John Kennedy was forced to give to dispel the fear that as president he would be taking orders from the Pope).

Integralism as a political program, is, if possible, more preposterous. Vermeule said opposition to his immigration proposal "almost necessarily defends some alternative principle of immigration priority that allocates fewer spots to non-whites and to the poor, and is thus a troubling indicator of racism and classism infesting whoever voices that opposition." Um, yeah. And that's exactly the reef on which integralism, if it didn't already have about a thousand other disabling features, would ground. There is no constituency in the GOP for a race-neutral immigration policy. It's the opposite.

So what's the future of conservative ideas? It's hard to count intellectuals out entirely; the movement will continue to maintain the "ideas infrastructure" (which doesn't cost much) if, for nothing else, to support useful apparatchiks. That said, if intellectuals continue to produce ideas that would only work if we replaced the current conservative base with some better set of voters, the auguries aren't good. It may be at some point that it's the conservative intellectuals who get replaced—that is, we may see the current bunch pushed aside by new entrants who attempt to prettify white racial authoritarianism. Those ideas would be terrible. But at least they'd be relevant.

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/republican-frat-boy/

no lnx

The frat boy politics of the Republican Party may end in unseemly collapse — or national disaster

Michael Winship and Common Dreams April 15, 2021

Joe Biden is thinking about the complexities of racial and social justice in America, vaccinating the population against COVID-19, combatting domestic terrorism, rebuilding the country's infrastructure, bringing back jobs and climate change. Donald Trump is thinking about money and revenge—and maybe about why his pal Vladimir Putin has all the luck.

Can you imagine how the Former Guy felt when he heard last week's news that his man-crush, Russian President Putin, just signed a law allowing him to run for two additional terms? Given the largely meaningless nature of elections over there, the legislation could keep Vlad in office until 2036, when he'll be 83.

Boy, Trump may have thought, how come he gets to do that and not me? I constantly have to lie about the election results, keep bellyaching that I won, and foment an attempted coup d'etat at the US Capitol. None of which worked. Let me tell you, it's exhausting! Now watch this putt...

Nonetheless, based on his great election fraud lie, all that prevarication does keep the Trump coffers filled with campaign dollars -- cash that's still being collected by the hour from the readily bamboozled.There's some $85 million in his Save America PAC, according to one of his advisors. Legally, much of it can be used for whatever Ol' Punkinhead feels like.

That's a good thing for Trump, because his much-vaunted business acumen continues to come back to nip him in the butt. Not only are his taxes and most of his other corporate records being ever more closely scrutinized for criminal activity by New York State Attorney General Tish James and Manhattan DA Cy Vance, but Dan Alexander at Forbes magazine reports, "From the time he entered the White House in January 2017 to his departure a few months ago, Donald Trump's fortune fell by nearly a third, from $3.5 billion to $2.4 billion. The S&P 500, meanwhile, increased 70%." You'll recall that he refused to divest his portfolio when he became president. As a result, "Trump bogged down his presidency with ethics issues for years, while also missing a chance to cash in on a market boom he helped propel.

If he had sold everything on Day 1, paid the maximum capital-gains taxes on the sales, then put the proceeds into a conflict-free fund tracking the S&P 500, Trump would have ended his presidency an estimated $1.6 billion richer than he is today.

The man's a financial genius. Just ask him. Or better yet, ask what remains of the Republican Party which, as per veteran GOP fundraiser Fred Zeidman, is being roiled by "a tremendous complication" – the controlling influence of Trump and his demand to continue leading the Republicans. "He's already proven that he wants to have a major say or keep control of the party," Zeidman told The New York Times, "and he's already shown every sign that he's going to primary everybody that has not been supportive of him. He complicates everything so much."

Saturday night, Trump went off his prepared remarks for a Republican National Committee donor dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort and delivered one of his notorious rants, still insisting he won the November election and profanely going after everyone from Biden and "Barack Hussein Obama," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Dr. Anthony Fauci to his supposed allies former Vice President Mike Pence, Georgia governor Brian Kemp, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell – "a dumb son of a bitch" -- and McConnell's wife, Trump's former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. Trump claimed that her appointment was a quid pro quo, a favor to insure Mitch's loyalty. Perhaps it was the most honest thing he said all night.

The man's crazier than a junkyard rat and yet the faithful still kneel before him. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that 60 percent of Republicans continue to believe that Trump won the election – and 50 percent of them believe Trump's new big lie that the January 6 insurrection was actually a peaceful demonstration of love and respect, spoiled only when some nasty antifa infiltrators turned it violent.

Oh, for a simpler, saner time – and I don't mean that white American idyll that never was, a rightwing fever dream in which all is falsely remembered as sunshine, jellybeans and petroleum products burnt without a care. Rather, as columnist Frida Ghitis notes, "It wasn't very long ago that the country had two reality-based, generally centrist parties. Democrats and Republicans, with different philosophies, debated the merits of their ideas, in search of a workable compromise.

But then, bit by bit, the GOP started veering in a different direction. By the time Trump became president, the maximalist, nativist, conspiracy-driven, scandal-manufacturing, hate-stoking wing was already ascendant, propelled by the engines of Fox News and other far-right provocateurs. Trump's victory was the coup that toppled the old GOP and turned it into the extremist MAGA machine.

And now, what's left? A handful of old-fashioned, conservative Republicans in Congress and their supporters who apparently still believe in some semblance of democracy and the republic that gave their party its name. But they're overwhelmed by a crowd of fanatics and sycophants: men and women, in Frida Ghitis' words, busily "promoting the delegitimization of America's duly elected president, people who are endorsing or refusing to rectify dangerous lies."

You know who they are: Cruz, Hawley, Graham, Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, et al. They include, of course, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, "rewarded by recklessness," to use campaign strategist Rick Wilson's phrase, and as of this moment still standing, despite more and more evidence of his misogyny and possible abusive behavior, sexual and otherwise.

Like so many among these ranks, Trump fanboy Gaetz is one of the smarmy, privileged, attenuated frat boys who refuse to believe that rules and norms apply to them – much like the man who was their president and would be forever more if the rest of us become indifferent and lower our guard. Gaetz cares about his job title only as far as it gets him booked on talk shows and the lecture circuit – so far, he has failed to sponsor a single piece of significant legislation.

In his new memoir, former Republican House Speaker John Boehner describes these types of Republican rabblerousers as "the chaos caucus," not caring about the country but only about their power base and appearances on Fox News and right wing talk radio: "They didn't really want legislative victories," Boehner writes. "They wanted wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades."

Not that Boehner is blameless. He and so many Republican colleagues let themselves be bullied, then acquiesced to our current dilemma, yielding to those pledged to lunacy and a lemming-like fealty to a president as bereft of thought and feeling as they are. You see the results: a shattered party not of ideas and programs, but only insults and bogus intrigues. No wonder the Biden infrastructure proposals infuriate them; they have nothing to offer in return.(Remember Trump's Infrastructure Week, always imminent but never occurring over the whole four years of his presidency?)

They fear any and all success during Biden's first term. Think back to 1993, when now anti-Trumpist conservative Bill Kristol advised Republicans to shun any healthcare plan from Bill and Hillary Clinton. In a memo—Kristol was then head of the Project for the Republican Future—he warned his colleagues, "It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government."

Substitute the name Biden for Clinton and any of Biden's proposals for Clinton's failed healthcare plan and you see what today's GOP strategy is—a replay of Kristol's fears now made deeper and more paranoiac by the lowest common denominators who have taken control of the party. Their anger at Biden's early successes and their fury at the popularity of his proposed programs—even among many self-described Republican voters – have sent them 'round the bend.

Instead of opposition that in past years may sometimes have been based on actual conservative principles, all that really matters to them now is the personal power and campaign money that come from "winning." Mitch McConnell's risible warning to corporations last week that they should "stay out of politics" was a demonstration of just how frantic their party has become.

(McConnell, who relies on corporate dollars, backed away from his statement the very next day.It's worth noting that he made it in reaction to the opposition of many businesses—including Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola—to Georgia's new voter suppression laws. Pained by the increasing voting power of Black, indigenous and people of color, rather than strategize as to how to win them over with ideas, the GOP has determined to stamp out their voices wherever possible, thus acknowledging just how feeble their party's ideology has become.)

Add to this mix a steady drumbeat of rabid, often ad hominem attacks on Democrats and those of different races, genders and creeds, characterized by a mad inclination toward nihilism and anarchy, that encourages such rightwing violence as January 6. Counterterrorism experts warn that this could bring the country down. A recent report from the Director of National Intelligence finds that domestic violent extremist (DVEs) "pose an elevated threat." Daniel Block, executive editor of The Washington Monthly, notes, "Unlike in the 1990s, when right-wing extremism was overwhelmingly disavowed by national Republicans, the modern GOP actively courts the far right."

Ever confrontational, with their rank brand of child-like bullying, a bad habit made worse by the words and deeds of their ex-president, in the end, Republicans are flailing and lashing out. At this point in time, West Virginia's Democratic Senator Joe Manchin is only fooling himself if he truly believes bipartisanship within this Congress is possible.

He makes a mistake in thinking these men and women are redeemable. They're not. But we can build and strengthen support from others with constructive change like much of what the Biden administration is proposing. We can end the filibuster to pass a program of legislation unlike anything since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and FDR's New Deal.

We've seen there is danger in the GOP's flailing; a lot of collateral, fatal damage can result. The party may be about to die like a harpooned whale, lashing out and dragging too many beneath the waves with it.

As the saying goes, when you stand for nothing, you'll fall for anything.Republican leadership still clings to their #1 False Prophet, living in fear that Trump and his followers might turn on them and support opponents that he'll endorse if incumbents fail to toe the increasingly thin line that bends toward bloodshed and despair.

In November, we voted him out, kept control of the House and now hold a narrow lead in the Senate. But it was too close a call. To return him to the top office, Republicans will do anything—anything except come up with good, constructive ideas. Don't drop your guard: we cannot let him and his cult back in.

Michael Winship is the Schumann Senior Writing Fellow for Common Dreams. Previously, he was the Emmy Award-winning senior writer for Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com, a past senior writing fellow at the policy and advocacy group Demos, and former president of the Writers Guild of America East. Follow him on Twitter: @MichaelWinship

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/republican-lesson/

no lnx twet

Republicans learned an extremely dangerous lesson from the 2020 election

Alex Henderson April 13, 2021

When candidates lose a presidential election, their party typically performs an "autopsy" and tries to figure out exactly where they went wrong. President Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, for example, was arguably the result of three "autopsies" — as Democrats had lost three presidential elections in a row during the 1980s. But Never Trump conservative Jonathan V. Last, in a column for The Bulwark published this week, argues that the Republican response to former President Donald Trump's loss to now-President Joe Biden in the 2020 election was to double down on Trumpism.

"In the days after Democrats unseated an incumbent president and won unified control of Congress," Last writes, "the victorious party went through a round of self-analysis and recriminations. The Republicans, who managed a trifecta of losing that hadn't been accomplished since Herbert Hoover, doubled down. Then they backed up their bets, split 4s, and doubled down again."

Last adds that with the GOP having doubled down on Trumpism following Trump's loss, one of the talking points of "Conservatism Inc." is "how beside-the-point 'democracy' is, anyhow." And Last points to a recent tweet in which conservative writer David Harsanyi wrote, "I'm not pro-democracy, I am pro-freedom. If democracy erodes freedom, (then) it's not something to celebrate."

The conservative Bulwark columnist argues that the GOP, with its post-election "autopsy," isn't trying to figure out how to appeal to a wider range of voters, but trying to discourage voting.

"When Republicans conducted their autopsy," Last writes, "they skipped 'How to Win: Option 1' and went straight to Options 2 and 3 — leapfrogging the question of how to get more votes and focusing on how to use institutional leverage to take power even while losing popular majorities. Option 2 — the path of least resistance — is for Republicans to change voting rules at the state level in the hopes that they can drive down the number of Democratic votes cast and win the Electoral College despite being a persistent minority. A lot has been written about these various initiatives, some of which are more grotesque than others."

With biting sarcasm, Last adds, "But the real cutting-edge work being done as a result of the GOP autopsy concerns Option 3: figuring out how a Republican can win the presidency even while losing the popular vote and the Electoral College."

After the 2020 presidential election, Last writes, some Republicans in the state governments in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia had enough integrity to resist Trump allies who wanted them to defy the Electoral College results. But with Option 3, according to Last, the GOP could try to purge state governments of Republicans who will accept Electoral College results even if they don't like an election's outcome.

"So, the key parts of the Republican autopsy have been: (1) building the political will to use raw power next time, and (2) removing the Republican officials who were not willing to comply last time," Last explains. "That's why Republican state parties have censured nearly every Republican who did not participate in Trump's attempted coup."

Last continues, "That's why (Secretary of State) Brad Raffensperger is the target of a primary challenge in Georgia…. That's why Nevada Republicans are attacking Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, the only Republican to have won state-wide office in 2018. Even though she is a Republican, Cegavske refused to go along with the attempt to overturn Nevada's result."

As much sarcasm and scathing humor as Last uses in his column, the Never Trumper concludes it by making a disturbing point and stressing that many Republicans have become overtly "authoritarian" and are undermining checks and balances.

Last writes, "This is how authoritarianism starts. A society goes from the rule of law, to rule by law — where the minority gets just enough power to change the laws so that they can amass more power. And here is a serious question: If Republicans managed enough votes to sustain an objection to counting electoral votes, what would our recourse be? Crossing our fingers and hoping that the Supreme Court steps in?.... The time to fight against authoritarianism isn't December 2024. It's now."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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// koch res conserv like HR1

gOP memo urges 'rebrand' as 'the working class party' — by embracing 'Donald Trump’s gift'

an 321

===

300 bills in GOP states to elim non-exist voter fraud?

sued same day? says can't count on ct, must have reform [hr 1?]

AA Dem woman jaile for dr knock presser; 2 pp bill --> 100 signed next day?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/georgia-voter-id-law

Georgia, State Rep. Donna McLeod was among the Democrats who fought hard against the voter suppression bill that Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law on Thursday, March 25 — and the next morning, McLeod did not mince words when she slammed the law as "White supremacy" and "Jim Crow 2.0" during an appearance on CNN's "New Day."

McLeod, who was first elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 2016, told CNN hosts Alisyn Camerota and John Berman, "I live in Gwinnett County. We have endured lines every single election. This is just going to create more lines because you're not giving people more options to vote. And with longer lines, that means you're going to have people that will probably not want to vote anymore."

Georgia's new law goes out of its way to make voting more difficult in the Peach State, from limiting early voting to making absentee voting more complicated to reducing the number of ballot drop boxes. And the law is so draconian that it even makes it a crime to give food or water to someone who is waiting in line to vote.

"To actually say to people you can't give food or water, that's just cruel," McLeod told Camerota and Berman.

“Jim Crow 2.0 is represented in that picture,” Georgia state Rep. Donna McLeod says about the group of white men su… https://t.co/L68IvIar2q

— New Day (@New Day)1616758431.0

The 53-year-old McLeod is originally from Kingston, Jamaica, and she told the "New Day" hosts that as someone who worked hard to become a United States citizen, she is appalled that Georgia Republicans are going out of their way to make voting more difficult in her state — especially in heavily Black areas.

McLeod urged Democrats at the federal level to do away with the filibuster in the U.S. Senate and pass House Resolution 1, a.k.a. the For the People Act — a comprehensive voting rights bill that she said would, if passed, protect voters from the type of abuses in Georgia's "disgusting" new voter suppression law.

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Some GOP state lawmakers help spread COVID-19 misinformation ›

Some GOP state lawmakers help spread COVID-19 misinformation ... ›

Biden and GOP senators offer competing COVID-19 relief plans ›

WSJ columnist encourages college students to come to Florida for Spring Break despite COVID

Matthew Chapman Raw Story March 15, 2021

On Monday, writing for The Wall Street Journal opinion page, Dave Seminara urged college students to "come back to Florida" and flout COVID-19 safety recommendations.

"Much of the spring-break travel scare revolves around the effort to discredit Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose less restrictive approach to the pandemic has worked, infuriating Democrats," wrote Seminara. "Perhaps some of his critics perversely hope that a calamitous outbreak here will give them a chance to blame Florida, the state progressives love to loathe."

Cases in Florida are falling as vaccination rates climb, although DeSantis has come under fire as vaccines have been distributed to communities with his donors.

"Shutting down tourism, as [CDC Director Rochelle] Walensky would prefer, would be disastrous for many states, especially Florida," wrote Seminara. "Tourism generated $13.3 billion in federal tax revenue and $11.4 billion in state and local tax revenue in 2017, according to Rockport Analytics, and the industry supports more than 1.5 million jobs in the state ... Some students will behave irresponsibly on spring break. But the answer isn't to punish everyone. Heavy-handed efforts to limit personal freedom based on the assumption that too many people are ignorant is elitist."

Seminara's plea comes after 120 unruly spring breakers were arrested in Miami Beach, after partiers turned on police in a clash that uncovered guns and drugs. It also comes as the UK COVID-19 variant spreads across Florida — something experts aren't entirely sure our current vaccines will be able to contain, although so far they appear to be effective.

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GOP chair tweets proof that Biden was right about Trump's COVID lies 8 months ago

News Corpse Daily Kos March 14, 2021

The Republican Party has devolved into nothing more than a culture war slogan dispenser, spending all of its time and energy contriving faux outrage and divisiveness. They have no discernible policies to

321 gop kia covid

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

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/republicans/

no lnx

Republicans who keep a finger on reality are discovering that their voters have gone off the deep end

David Neiwert and Daily Kos February 02, 2021

It's becoming much clearer why Republicans in Congress are so reluctant to acknowledge factual reality—such as that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential fairly, or that Donald Trump incited a mob that attacked the Congress and ransacked the U.S. Capitol—and have doubled down on their embrace of anti-democratic disinformation that fueled the insurrection: If they dare admit any of it, they risk the insane wrath of the millions of GOP voters out there who have wholly swallowed all that false Trumpian propaganda.

That's become especially self-evident among Republicans at the state and local levels throughout the country in the weeks since the January 6 riot. As Hunter recently explained, the GOP at the ground level not only has fully embraced the conspiracist rot that Trump promoted after he lost, but it also has become even more openly extreme than it was before the election. Liz Cheney is finding that out.

Whenever Republicans have made any gestures toward acknowledging either Biden's win or Trump's seditionist behavior, as the Guardian recently reported, voters at the state and local level have responded with outrage and threats.

"The evidence is overwhelming that local parties across the country, in blue states and red states, are radicalized and support extremely far outside the mainstream positions like, for example, ending our democratic experiment to install Donald Trump as president over the will of the people," Tim Miller, former political director of Republican Voters Against Trump, told the Guardian.

"They believe in insane COVID denialism and QAnon and all these other conspiracies. It's endemic, not just a couple of state parties. It's the vast majority of state parties throughout the country."

The list is long and worrisome:

Arizona: The state Republican party last weekend re-elected Kelli Ward, a conspiracy-theory-promoting "Trump Republican" who unabashedly promoted the "election fraud" disinformation. Party officials also voted to censure Governor Doug Ducey for certifying Trump's loss in Arizona, along with Cindy McCain, the widow of Senator John McCain, and former Senator Jeff Flake, both for having supported Biden in the election.

Texas: The state Republican Party encouraged its members to follow them on Gab, the favorite social-media platform of white nationalists, with a pro-QAnon conspiracy trope: "We Are the Storm." Even after Biden's inauguration, the party insisted that he had won fraudulently: "It took a global pandemic, a thoroughly corrupt media, and massive election irregularities for President Trump to be removed from office," the GOP said in a statement on its website.

Hawaii:The Hawaii Republican Party's official account published a thread of tweets sympathizing with supporters of QAnon—dismissing cult's conspiracy theories that Democrats and media figures are secretly operating as global pedophilia ring, but arguing that adherents nonetheless were engaged in a form of patriotism. The same account also praised the "generally high quality" work of a Holicaust-denying YouTuber named Tarl Warwick, saying: "It is good to periodically step outside the 'bubble' of corporate commentators for additional perspective." The party deleted and condemned the tweets; the communications official who sent them resigned.

Oregon:The state's Republican Party issued a lengthy statement stuffed full of conspiracy theories and disinformation condemning the 10 Republican members of Congress who voted to impeach Trump after the insurrection. It claimed "there is growing evidence that the violence at the Capitol was a 'false flag' operation designed to discredit President Trump and his supporters." Some 23 Republican members of the state House repudiated the statement, noting that "there is no credible evidence to support false flag claims," adding that such rumormongering had become a distraction.

Wyoming: State activists opened up a campaign to "recall" Congressman Liz Cheney after she joined the Republicans voting to impeach Trump, and have collected over 55,000 signatures. Ten county-level parties in the state voted to censure Cheney. A state senator named Anthony Bouchard announced a 2022 campaign against the congresswoman. The Wyoming Republican state party said "there has not been a time during our tenure when we have seen this type of an outcry from our fellow Republicans, with the anger and frustration being palpable in the comments we have received."

Pro-Trump Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida even traveled to the state to lead a rally attacking Cheney. "We are in a battle for the soul of the Republican party, and I intend to win it," Gaetz told the rally.

The sentiments in Wyoming were deep and widespread. A Gillette woman named Shelley Horn started the Cheney recall petition, and told CNN: "You just can't go, 'Oh well, I need to vote with my conscience.' No! Vote for what your people put you in there to do. You're a Republican, you're supposed to back your party regardless."

Trump supporter Taylor Haynes told CNN, "In my view, she's done in Wyoming." A poll commissioned by the Trump political operation purportedly showed the impeachment vote had hurt her popularity. "Liz Cheney's favorables there are only slightly worse than her father's shooting skills," quipped Donald Trump Jr.

Other polls, however, supported the claim. A January 27 McLaughlin poll that showed 70% of Wyoming voters believe the impeachment trial was unconstitutional; more than two-third disapprove of Cheney's vote, and 63% say they are unlikely to vote for Cheney again.

Some longtime GOP figures defended her. Gale Geringer, a veteran Republican strategist, told CNN that Cheney showed "courage" in casting the Trump impeachment vote: "I don't underestimate the anger people are feeling right now. It's huge. And Liz Cheney has become the target of that anger, but I don't think she's really the cause of it. I think it's fear of what the Biden administration is going to do to Wyoming. We're petrified. Our entire economy, all of our jobs, our tax base has been threatened. And there's nothing we can do about Joe Biden for four years. But we can take that fear and anger out on Liz Cheney."

But Politico reporter Tara Palmieri tagged along with the CNN crew, and found it nearly impossible to find anyone in the state who wasn't angry with their Congressman. Her impression was that Cheney is in serious political trouble.

Honestly, it was hard to find anyone who would defend Cheney — and I really tried to talk to as many people as I could not at the rally. I stopped at a biker bar, a gun shop, a vape shop, a hardware store, a steakhouse, a diner, a dentist's office and a pawn shop …

— At Harbor Freight Tools, when I uttered the name "Liz Cheney," an employee behind the cash register hurled a threatening epithet. Then a beefy and tattooed supervisor, Torrey Price, 48, came over mad as hell. His mask hung below his nose when he told me, "I don't think she spoke for Wyoming."

Price never votes in primaries but said he will in August 2022 — to oust Cheney. He shared more of his thoughts: the election was stolen, the U.S. Capitol raid was staged, and the number of Covid deaths were grossly inflated. He and his colleague Joe agreed on all of these points, adding that they would not be getting the vaccine.

— At the Outlaw Saloon, I envied the way a recently vaccinated NYT reporter sauntered into the biker bar maskless, when earlier, a middle-aged DJ in a cowboy hat asked me for my credentials. Likely because there were only two masks in the bar — the one on my face and another on a table, with the words "political prisoner" printed in red. The guy who threw down that mask predicted the size of the rally against Cheney, telling me the night before, "I guarantee you there will be 600 people there." I didn't believe him.

— At the steakhouse, our comely waitress said "a lot of people are fired up" about Cheney. As a lifelong native of Wyoming, she said Cheney made a grave mistake by not representing the people of her state.

Palmieri concluded: "If there was any doubt this is still Trump's Republican Party, my time in Cheyenne dispelled it."

The push to embrace Trumpism is roiling other state Republican parties. In Wisconsin, where 15 Republican lawmakers signed a letter to Vice President Mike Pence the day before the D.C. riot urging him to postpone the certification, and two Republican congressmen, Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Tiffany, objected to the electoral votes, the party is divided into two camps: in several states that Biden won.

"The Republican Party right now is relatively divided, but it's not the traditional ideological divisions that used to be in place, as much as it's between the sane and insane wings of the party," RightWisconsin editor James Wigderson told the Madison Capital Times. "I think that there's a chance of a real fracture coming."

Establishment Republicans such as former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, however, defended the Trumpists for their paranoia and embrace of partisan disinformation: "That is the perspective they have, that is the view that they have and it's valid; you can't say someone's opinion of a subjective matter is invalid," she said. "I mean, what gives us the right to judge someone's opinion like that?"

In Michigan, where Republicans also embraced the "Stop the Steal" campaign prior to the insurrection, the impulse to maintain their embrace of Trumpism remains largely undiminished. The Allegan County Republican party censured Congressman Fred Upton because he voted to impeach Trump.

"Not a lot appears to be changing. We have former Ambassador Ron Weiser (expected to be the new Michigan GOP chair) and Meshawn Maddock (expected to be Weiser's co-chair)," WKAR politics reporter Abigail Censky observed. "(Maddock) led 'Stop the Steal' efforts in the state and was a key part of the kind of infrastructure to overturn the state's election results, which we know from bipartisan clerks and expert testimony was a fair and safe and secure election. It's interesting to see that that's kind of beyond reproach still, and that, that leadership is still going to go into place."

And in Georgia, Republican Party officials are grimacing at the wounds being inflicted on their voter-appeal operations by the presence of QAnon-loving Congressman Majorie Taylor Greene in the state's delegation, as well as in the media as her multiple conspiracist pronouncements—such as her approval of lynching House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—have come increasingly to light.

"If you have any common sense, you know she's an anchor on the party. She is weighing us down," said Gabriel Sterling, a Georgia Republican election administrator who criticized the baseless election conspiracy theories espoused by Trump and his supporters.

"Some people are saying maybe Nancy Pelosi will throw her out" of Congress, Sterling said. "The Democrats would never throw her out. They want her to be the definition of what a Republican is. They're gonna give her every opportunity to speak and be heard and look crazy — like what came out Wednesday, the Jewish space laser to start fires. I mean, I don't know how far down the rabbit hole you go."

The unhinged behavior and conspiracism is widespread. The Oregon GOP's statement was rife with conspiracy theories, including a passage explaining why they viewed the January 6 insurrection as a "false flag" operation:

Whereas this false flag will support Joe Biden plans to introducing new domestic terrorism legislation likely placing more emphasis on themes from post-9/11 Patriot Act such as allowing those charged with terrorism to be automatically detained before trial, outlawing donations to government-designated terrorist groups, allowing electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists, letting the government use secret sources in those trials, and perhaps new provisions such as codifying putting conservatives on a secret no-fly list without recourse to due process and restricting free speech, similar to the Sedition Act of 1798, which criminalized making "false statements" critical of the Federal government.

The peculiar combination of self-righteousness, persecution complex, and projection endemic to extremist conspiracism were omnipresent. Shelley Horn, the Wyoming petitioner, blamed Cheney's impeachment vote for dividing the nation: "It's just sows more hate and division," Horn told the Cowboy State Daily, "and people are tired of it. Our country can't stand much more."

As Zack Beauchamp observed at Vox:

It's obvious that some of the party's national leaders, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, don't actually believe in these conspiracy theories. But for too long, the party has been comfortable letting their rank-and-file supporters believe them because it's politically advantageous. Now, true believers are rising up and capturing the leadership of state parties and local activist groups — putting pressure on national politicians to conform to extreme ideas or risk a serious primary threat.

This makes the GOP's post-Trump trajectory look even scarier. No one person or organization is in charge of the party, in a position to fix the root causes of its continuing turn toward extremism. Reforming the party requires a fight on multiple levels and in multiple arenas: reforms to the local and national party, transformations of both the party and adjacent institutions like Fox News.

This what Barack Obama adroitly describes as America's "epistemological crisis." It will not stop happening as long as there are news organs that traffic in falsehoods as a profit model, and who devote 24 hours a day, seven days a week of broadcast time using those lies to coach half of the nation how and why to hate the other half—and politicians who gleefully profit from it as well.

an 221

Although Texas can be very Democratic in its large urban centers — from Houston to Dallas to El Paso to Austin — Republicans have maintained control of the state government. And many of them are the type of far-right Republicans who push Culture War themes and use dumb phrases like "owning the liberals." But San Antonio-based journalist Adam Serwer, in an article published by The Atlantic on February 22, argues that fighting the Culture War didn't prevent Texans from freezing in their homes without electricity, heat and running water during a recent cold snap.

Texas recently suffered snowy, icy winter weather and freezing temperatures that are more typical of Pittsburgh or Boston than Houston, Austin or San Antonio. Tragically, Texas' power grid couldn't handle the increased demand for electricity, and millions of Texans lost power and were unable to heat their homes during the frigid weather.

"Many Texans were without power, water, or both for days, left to choose between the risk of contracting COVID-19 at a shelter and the danger of freezing in their home," Serwer explains. "I consider us fortunate….. Our roof did not collapse. Our home did not catch fire and burn down, as nearby firefighters struggled with empty fire hydrants. We did not run out of food. We were lucky."

twt]

serwer goes on to say that all the misery in Texas could have been avoided if Republicans in the state government had spent more time worrying about good governance and less time obsessing over the Culture War.

"The crisis in Texas was preceded by more than a decade of Republican control of state government, as politicians focused on Culture War grievances rather than the nuts and bolts of governance," Serwer argues. "After the near collapse of the power grid exposed its failures, the state's political leadership attempted to cover for those failures by doubling down on those same grievances."

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Fox News' Tucker Carlson and others on the far right have been claiming that green energy is responsible for Texas' electricity woes, which is total nonsense. Carlson made the idiotic claim that in Texas, wind turbines were too delicate to handle severe cold. First, Texas is much more reliant on fossil fuels than wind turbines. Second, European countries like Denmark and Sweden — which are known for cold, snowy winters — do fine with green energy in January and February because their systems are adequately winterized. Texas Republicans failed to winterize, and its power grid suffered an across-the-board failure.

Serwer writes, "I doubt that 'We'd freeze to death to own the libs' is a popular sentiment in Texas, but drawing that impression is easy if you're outside the state, listening to its Republican officials. As the journalist Brian Kahn noted on Twitter, when California was struggling with much smaller blackouts in late 2020, ambitious Texas Republicans were sneering at the state on social media…. Texas politicians were so interested in California's struggles last year because California is an easy conservative shorthand for liberalism, and what ambitious Republicans have discerned from the success of Donald Trump is that the best way to attract conservative support is to show that they, too, enjoy it when liberals suffer."

But during the recent cold snap, Serwer adds, Texans have been the ones suffering.

"Texas has trended blue in recent years, but the Texas GOP remains ruthlessly competent at the work of winning elections even as it fails at governing," Serwer explains. "That absence of political competition breeds complacency….. In the contemporary Republican Party, governance has taken a back seat to waging the Culture War. Whether you are a competent public official who serves your constituents well matters less than your ability to illustrate your contempt for the rival party's constituency in word and deed."

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OMFG

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/trump-supporters-2650525904/

Former President Donald Trump's base may remember his legacy as one to be honored and praised in the history books but news outlets and historians likely will not agree.

Although Democratic lawmakers have presented a solid case to prove that Trump did, indeed, incite the deadly insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, it does not appear enough Senate Republicans will hold him accountable for his actions which could lead to an upsetting acquittal.

Now, a new report published by The New York Times poses a serious question: "Does this unprecedented moment in American history mark the beginning of the end of a particularly violent era? Or the end of the beginning?"

Despite arguments that could be made by Trump's Republican loyalists, the NY Times argues: "Whether or not Mr. Trump is convicted, the extremism that flourished under his administration has embedded itself in our politics."

Outlining a number of previous violent incidents connected to Trump's legacy, the publication noted House Democrats' remarks about the disturbing unrest that erupted in Charlottesville, Va., back in 2017. Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) noted how the Charlottesville incident served as a precursor to the deadly insurrection at the Capitol and how both will forever be associated with Trump's presidency.

"In 2017, it was unfathomable to many of us to think that Charlottesville could happen," DeGette said, adding, remnants of Trump's rhetoric and influence. "Frankly, what unfathomable horrors could await us if we do not stand up and say, 'No, this is not America'?"

Robert Pape, a specialist at the University of Chicago who studies political violence, explained how the Capitol riots shed light on the disturbing side of American politics. In an op-ed published by The Atlantic, Pape explained why and how Capitol rioters are different from other extremists.

"The Capitol riot revealed a new force in American politics — not merely a mix of right-wing organizations, but a broader mass political movement that has violence at its core and draws strength even from places where Trump supporters are in the minority," he wrote in the piece.

The NYTimes argues that the force Pape speaks of shows "little sign of backing down." It also highlighted the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's latest terrorism alert which warned that "violent extremists were emboldened by the attack and motivated by 'the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.'"

There is some indication that such violent acts have support among some Americans, particularly within the Republican Party. A survey conducted by the American Enterprise Institute this week found that 55 percent of Republicans back the use of force as a way to "arrest the decline of the traditional American way of life," as compared with 35 percent of independents and 22 percent of Democrats.

If the Senate does not hold Trump accountable for his actions, the type of extremist violence his base has adopted will likely continue for years to come.

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beware cherry pick/anec

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/ex-republican/

In 2020, conservative columnist Mona Charen did something that would have shocked her readers back in the 1980s, 1990s or 2000s: she voted for a Democratic presidential nominee. Charen is among the veteran conservatives who — like Washington Post columnists George Will and Max Boot, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and The Bulwark's Bill Kristol — was a blistering critic of Donald Trump's presidency. And in an op-ed published by Haaretz on February 8, the former Nancy Reagan speechwriter lays out some of the reasons why she is glad to see President Joe Biden in the White House and considers pro-Trump Republicans enemies of democracy.

"Like progressives, conservatives believe in reform, but are more likely to stress gradualism, small-scale experimentation and prudence," Charen, now 63, explains in her op-ed. "From the very outset of his run for the presidency, Donald Trump smashed those understandings of what conservatism was. His lies alone were enough to signal his unfitness. Flagrant lying is a key feature of authoritarianism."

Charen, contrary to what many Trumpistas claim, hasn't turned into a liberal or a progressive — her views are still decidedly right-wing. But Charen views Trumpism as a radical departure from the Reagan conservatism she embraced during the 1980s and 1990s. And although Charen has some policy differences with Biden, she applauds him for believing in the rule of law.

The word "conservative," Charen laments, has come to be "associated with White/Christian identity movements, hostility to immigrants, a personality cult, and openness to conspiracies."

"Since the attempted coup of January 6, many conservatives, along with high percentages of Republicans, have shown themselves to be enemies of the American constitutional order," Charen warns. "In opposing Trump and working for a Biden victory, many of us in the Never Trump camp have been happy to make alliances with progressives and others who are committed to decency and the rule of law."...

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/voter-suppression

comm dr

since former President Donald Trump failed to reverse the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, Republicans in more than two dozen states have introduced over 100 bills to restrict voting access, an alarming development that voting rights advocates have pointed to as yet another reason for Democrats to abolish the filibuster, an anti-democratic tool currently allowing the GOP minority to block the enactment of a suite of popular pro-democracy reforms.

Mother Jones journalist Ari Berman on Thursdayreported on the GOP's ongoing nationwide push to make voting more difficult—particularly for communities of color and other Democratic-leaning constituencies—and in some cases to empower state legislatures to overturn election results. He called state-level Republicans' efforts "a huge scandal that should be getting as much attention as Trump's plot to overturn the election."

Republicans across the country, Berman said, are "weaponizing Trump's lies" about fraud in an attempt to roll back voting rights after last year's historic turnout and expansion of mail-in ballots.

"Democrats have a clear choice," Berman continued. "They can get rid of the filibuster to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the For the People Act to stop GOP voter suppression, or they can allow the GOP to undermine democracy for the next decade."

"The stakes," Berman added, "couldn't be higher." That's because, according to an analysis conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice in late January, Republicans at the state level have introduced three times as many bills to chip away at voting rights compared to the same point last year.

Already this year, 106 bills have been introduced in 28 states—including 17 under complete GOP control, where passage is more likely—to undermine access to the franchise. According to the Brennan Center's report, "These proposals primarily seek to: (1) limit mail voting access; (2) impose stricter voter ID requirements; (3) limit successful pro-voter registration policies; and (4) enable more aggressive voter roll purges."

"These bills," the report argues, "are an unmistakable response to the unfounded and dangerous lies about fraud that followed the 2020 election."

106 bills introduced in 28 states already this year to restrict voting access finds @BrennanCenter That's 3x as h… https://t.co/o69lHRGgsd

— Ari Berman (@Ari Berman)1612459832.0

And this week, as CNN reported on Friday, "lawmakers in the Republican-controlled Georgia Senate added more. They include proposals that would eliminate no-excuse absentee voting for many state residents and end automatic voter registration when obtaining a driver's license."

According to Berman, the nine bills that Georgia Republicans introduced on February 1 would amount to "one of the worst voter suppression laws ever passed."

On first day of Black History Month Georgia Republicans introduced NINE bills to make it harder to vote, including… https://t.co/qwLmKWq6o7

— Ari Berman (@Ari Berman)1612458849.0

Not to be outdone, Arizona Republicans have since the start of 2021 introduced 34 bills to make voting harder, including reducing the number of polling places in Maricopa County from 100 to 15.

Arizona Republicans have introduced 34 BILLS to make it harder to vote, including ending mail voting, purging list… https://t.co/4kXh0wNIMT

— Ari Berman (@Ari Berman)1612459235.0

Georgia and Arizona are not alone; similar reactionary proposals are being pushed by Republicans in more than two dozen additional states.

The spike in anti-democracy bills represents an intensification of an existingtrend rather than a new development. As Common Dreamsreported last November, Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) admitted shortly after the election that making voting more accessible hurts the GOP's electoral prospects.

"If we don't do something about voting by mail, we're going to lose the ability to elect a Republican in this country," Graham told Fox News host Sean Hannity.

The GOP has been trying to undercut efforts to expand voting access for years. "A decade ago," Bermanwrote, "Republicans passed new voter ID laws and other efforts to curtail voting rights when they took power in the states following [former President] Barack Obama's election."

But now, he added, "Republicans are taking their assault on voting rights to the next level." Like the Brennan Center, Berman attributed the surge in anti-democracy legislation to Trump's failed bid to subvert the will of the people in last year's election.

According toBerman, the GOP is "trying to accomplish through legislation what Trump couldn't with litigation. All in all, these efforts amount to the most concerted attempts to roll back voting rights since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965."

...

no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/trump-supporters/

salon

the persistent Trump "base" and the Republican members of Congress who maintain fealty to Donald Trump do so for a variety of reasons. They are not a monolithic body but a loosely associated conglomeration of supporters with their own individual or group reasons for remaining loyal to the twice-impeached ex-President.

"Membership" in the Trump base may include entry into one or more of the following categories.

"All-in" isolationists, ultra-nationalists, white supremacists, racists and insurrectionistsArguably all those who marched in Charlottesville in summer 2017 and many of those stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 are openly racist, and have felt liberated by the rhetoric and policies of the Trump era. For them, Trumpism represented an enticing outlet for perceived slights or a platform upon which to boost their identity, sense of meaning or being, and self-importance.

Opportunists and political chameleonsThose who fall into this category recognized that the Trump train presented itself as a vehicle by which one could achieve fame, success, ambition and political or personal gain. Those with political ambition watched Trump's tactics, saw its success and made the decision to be a Trump sycophant and copycat. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, mediocre members of society who had the financial means to run for Congress, are noted Trump exampled who will ride this train until it throws them off (and even then will continue to chase it). Fox News talking heads fall into this category as well. Following opportunity often requires suppressing any logic, rational thought or independent notions. This is a key factor behind the flip-flopping of politicians like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (who has vacillated in his defense and indictment of Trump and his insurrection), Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio (two former Republican rivals to Trump who were mercilessly dragged by him only to become full-throated supporters), and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, for whom every Trump-related decision comes with an eye on the next election cycle. These are the political chameleons who will change as needed to survive.

Narrow-minded, limited information input and vulnerable to cultism This group of followers is either actively or passively limited in the information that they receive through on-air and online media outlets. As a result of their "soda straw" approach to Republicanism, conservatism or Trumpism, they are simply not exposed to the damning evidence that exists to show Trump and the GOP's unethical, immoral and likely criminal behavior. This is the consumer of a steady diet of right-wing sources such as Fox News, OANN and Newsmax. One cannot discuss this group without referring to the concept of shared omnipotence, a cult leader tactic by which followers are repeatedly told that the leader will take them to a "promised land" (e.g., a place of increased wealth, no immigrants or people of color, world superiority or dominance, protection from death) and if they don't follow, the result is certain doom.

Voting with their pocketbook Members of this group are totally focused on individual and family wealth. They voted for Trump twice because of his tax breaks for wealthier Americans. They may be repulsed by Trump the man, but they feel compelled to vote for him because they are profiting from his policies. They are one-issue voters and they will not be deterred by any of Trump's antics, lies or dishonesty.

Hold your nose and vote RepublicanThese group members are cousins of the previous group. This faction is diehard conservative Republicans who are unwavering in their support of the GOP based on years of support and the hope that this period is an aberration that will correct itself soon. Sen. Mitt Romney is one of the remaining stalwarts of this group.

But he and I are Christians! In many ways an outgrowth of the latter group, these followers maintain their identity and faith as evangelical Christians. They have consistently voted Republican for a widely varying set of reasons, the abortion issue first and foremost among them. Now, electing and supporting Donald Trump, who is arguably the embodiment of sin, requires resolution of a huge case of cognitive dissonance. To accept Trump and Trumpism requires that a "true" Christian must fit this obviously square block into a circular halo. Attempts to reconcile this dissonance include pairing Trump with known Christian leaders and evangelicals, citing scripture that appears to validate this choice, or projecting Christian values on to Trump and Trumpists.

Not all Trump supporters are alike. It is inaccurate and wrong to lump them together. It misses the point and undermines any chance for reaching out to supporters in order to reinvent a Republican Party that is reasonable, more moderate and hinged to our American democracy.

Short of convicting and repudiating Trump at his upcoming impeachment trial — which appears highly unlikely — we will be left with the task of disambiguating and understanding his followers and what motivates them, and connecting with as many of them as possible. The future of our two-party democracy, and our entire country, will hang in the balance.

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===

POST TRUMP GOP CIVIL WAR:

chris h msnbc says CoC gop have no msg (that will win trumpistas or anyone else?)

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/john-danforth/

is gaetz pro greene or just ~ Liz C?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/marjorie-taylor-greene-2650284645

no lnx twt

members of the House Republican caucus gave Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) a standing ovation Wednesday evening after the QAnon Congresswoman gave a short speech defending herself. About an hour earlier Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced his support of Greene and refused to strip her of her committee assignments.

NBC News and MSNBC political analyst Jake Sherman, a cofounder of Punchbowl News, tweeted that "roughly 30 more members of the House Republican Conference are waiting to speak tonight about @Liz_Cheney and her future." Cheney faces losing her leadership position in the GOP House caucus for voting to impeach President Donald Trump.

Sherman later added:

...

Vice News senior political reporter Cameron Joseph confirms, saying the number of Republicans giving a standing ovation to Greene is about half.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene: Most House Republicans silent over viole

Hours after President Biden declared that "democracy has prevailed" during his inaugural address, longtime Republican strategist Karl Rove urged Republicans to pressure GOP election officials and legislators to create "a model election code" to reconsider the laws surrounding 2020's two voting options that lead to the presidential election's record turnout.

"Republicans should also encourage GOP secretaries of state and state lawmakers to develop a model election code," Rove wrote in a January 20 commentary for the Wall Street Journal entitled, "The Republican Future Starts Now."

"The job of proposing electoral reforms shouldn't be based on the unsupported claims of widespread fraud peddled by Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell," Rove continued. "Instead, the goal should be to suggest measures that restore public confidence in our democracy. How do states with extensive mail-in and early voting like Florida and Texas get it right?"

Rove's commentary comes as Republican-majority legislatures in battleground states such as Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona have proposed bills or convened hearings to review the laws that allowed people to vote with mailed-out ballots or early in-person in 2020.

"Whenever Karl Rove writes a piece in the Wall Street Journal, the history of it suggests that Democrats should pay careful attention," said David Daley, author of *Unrigged: How Americans are Battling Back to Save Democracy*. "Because the Wall Street Journal is where Republicans can signal to their donor class their key projects."

In March 2010, Rove penned a Wall Street Journal commentary openly discussing the GOP's REDMAP project,which targeted 107 state legislative seats that "would give them control of drawing district lines for nearly 190 congressional seats." REDMAP succeeded, creating GOP majority legislatures and congressional delegations in the otherwise purple states of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Alabama.

The website of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which drafts model bills for social conservatives and economic libertarians, did not yet promote election reforms on its website. However, it linked to theConservative Action project,which posted a defense of the GOP lawmakers who opposed certifying the Electoral College slates from Arizona and Pennsylvania. The expanded use of voting via mailed-out ballots and early voting must be examined, it said.

"The 2020 election was conducted in an unprecedented manner: largely by mail, and in a way that overwhelmed the capacities of many states. It is not at all unreasonable to review the manner in which votes were counted," said the Conservative Action Project memo, which was signed by more than 100 activists and organizations. "Indeed, if the goal is to restore faith in future elections, then a comprehensive review and analysis to determine what went wrong, what went right, and what is in need of reform should be a critical next step."

1/25/21 an

Before he became a Never Trump conservative, Christian Vanderbrouk spent eight years in the George W. Bush Administration. Vanderbrouk analyzes the state of the Republican Party in an article published by The Bulwark on January 25, concluding that in light of the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol Building and widespread efforts to overthrow the 2020 election results, the GOP is "too compromised by extremists to be trusted with political power" at this point.

On January 6, Vanderbrouk notes, a "rampaging and murderous mob of pro-Trump insurrectionists…. ransacked the U.S. Capitol to disrupt (then-) President-elect Joe Biden's transition to power, murdering officer Brian Sicknick and shouting 'kill him with his own gun' at officer Michael Fanone while they tased him to the point of causing a heart attack." Such extremism, Vanderbrouk argues, now enjoys widespread support among former President Donald Trump's loyalists in the GOP.

Vanderbrouk explains that after the 2020 election, "Pro-Trump conservatives and elected Republicans echoed and amplified such menacing calls over the next eight weeks, with a particular focus on legislators, state government officials, and judges who refused to help the president remain in power. Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani endorsed threats against lawmakers who refused to help overturn the election results. 'Sometimes, it even requires being threatened,' Giuliani said about pressuring Michigan state lawmakers. Freshman Congressman Madison Cawthorn urged attendees at Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA to threaten their representatives as well."

According to Vanderbrouk, "Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn attracted widespread condemnation for advocating that Trump invoke the Insurrection Act in the weeks following the election and demanding a 're-vote' under military supervision. Fewer people noticed that Flynn also encouraged his followers on social media to donate to a group called the '1st Amendment Praetorian,' which describes itself as a 'volunteer force of military, law enforcement & intel agency community professionals standing up to protect the 1st Amendment and those who use it.'"

Vanderbrouk wraps up his article by stressing that traditional conservatives should not ally themselves with a party that has been overrun by secessionists and violent insurgents.

"For those of us who still consider ourselves conservative, we cannot yet return to a Republican Party that, at best, maintains strategic silence in the face of violent or secessionist agitation — and at worst, is egging it on from the fancy sinecures of Conservatism Inc.," Vanderbrouk warns. "A cancer of complicity afflicts nearly the entire movement, and while there are decent leaders who deserve support — particularly from far-right primary challengers — the GOP is too compromised by extremists to be trusted with political power anytime soon."

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/republican-party-trump-2649945082/

sonali overview post insurrection

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/trump-nixon/

an 121 salon

Americans were shocked to watch as American stormtroopers assaulted the U. S. capitol building, smashing windows, roaming through the building and the floors of both Senate and House, including sitting in the seat of the Senate's presiding officer, leaving incendiary devices nearby, etc.).

This was more than a whiff of fascism. This is what fascism looks like.

So, we have to ask: beyond the lying, insurrection-instigating, so-called President, how did we get here?

The story actually goes a long way back.

First, the more obvious Republican side of the story:

Although his administration did eventually oversee some environmental protections, President Richard Nixon gained the White House via a law and order campaign in 1968, appealing to the so-called "silent majority" who were frightened, if not alienated, by the images of antiwar protesters, inner-city "rioters," and counterculture "freaks" during the 1960s.

The mass media, of course, fed this dynamic by refusing to take seriously the actual claims of Black, antiwar, and feminist activists; instead, making sure the public saw the most inflammatory examples of their behaviors and appearances. That's a story I have documented elsewhere.

Nixon's election and his "Southern Strategy" set in stone the future of the Republican party, although it remained for Ronald Reagan to seal the deal. Reagan's rhetoric about basic "decency" and "family values," fed the grievances of those who felt left out of, or alienated by, the '60s. But crucially, Reagan's actual policies focused on eliminating ways the government addresses public needs, instead cutting taxes on the wealthy, rebuilding a huge military complex and aggressive foreign policy, and deregulating the economy.

However, the people drawn to so-called conservative rhetoric — whether religious traditionalists, rural folks or members of the white working class — were not the actual winners under Reagan. Instead, they lost more and more ground economically. They basically got symbolic gratification. Their attention was instead diverted to the Democrats, liberals and "Eastern elites" who "caused" their problems.

That's the path that leads directly to Trump and his True Believers.

What, then, of the Democratic Party?

That, too, is a long story. In the midst of the Reagan years, smarting from Nixon's humiliating victory in 1972 and Reagan's in 1984, Democratic centrists — names like Dick Gephardt, Sam Nunn, Bill Clinton [TONY COELHO]— took steps to move the party away from its more liberal wing and into the corporate-dependent center. In its more liberal moments the Democratic Party typically expressed hopeful rhetoric about defending the rights of minorities, women and LGBTQ people, defending the environment, etc. The reality consistently fell far short of the rhetoric.

So, in our two-party system, Republicans have been all about give-aways to the rich while manipulating the emotions of less well-off white Americans. Democrats have essentially ignored the latter populations, becoming increasingly dependent on corporate money while also manipulating the aspirations of marginalized communities.

Neither party speaks a word against a capitalist system that feeds inequality, threatens the planet's ability to sustain life, and generates a foreign policy marked by militarism and war. The "problem" is always the "other party."

In their more liberal moments, Democrats embrace what is often called "identity politics" — race, gender, and sexuality in particular. This rhetorical embrace is used by Republicans to feed the emotional attachment of their rank and file supporters. Democrats gain support when Republican rhetoric becomes outrageous. Clearly, the political center, with all its sanctimonious rhetoric, is reinforced when something like the Capitol assault occurs.

Yet the country remains stuck in this see-saw battle that goes nowhere. Beholden to corporate wealth, neither party dares to confront class inequality. Yet, unlike identity concerns about discrimination, hate speech, and oppression — all serious problems — class analysis reveals the systemic forces that lie behind these and keep both parties' rank-and-file in their place at the margins of American politics.

Ultimately, the only way out of this will occur when enough people becomeaware, not only of the seriousness of the hazards facing us, but of the need to come together in a well-mobilized mass movement addressing systemic concerns.We already see where we're heading if we don't do this.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/republican-policy-positions/

Some progressive Democrats have argued that if GOP voters knew more about their party's positions, they wouldn't be voting Republican. Of course, many GOP voters know exactly what they're voting for, but others don't — and Ethan Winter, an analyst for Data for Progress, takes a look at the more uninformed Republican voters in an article published on New Year's Eve Day.

"As part of a Data for Progress survey fielded in mid-November 2020," Winter explains, "I posed five questions to voters where I asked them to assign policy positions to each of their major parties. To do this, I employed an A/B split, where half the sample was asked if the Democrats supported a policy and the other half of the sample was asked if the Republicans supported that policy."

Winter adds that the issues he "tested" included: "(1) protecting the ability of those with preexisting conditions to get health insurance, (2) expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, (3) raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and (4) allowing companies to dump mining debris into mountain streams."

The Data for Progress analyst found that a shocking amount of Republicans are voting for positions they disagree with — and they don't even know it. For example, Winter found that many GOP voters who oppose overturning the ACA and ending its protections for preexisting health conditions don't realize that the Republicans they are voting for don't share that position.

"While 78% of likely voters know, correctly, that Democrats support protections for those with preexisting conditions, a plurality, 45, of likely voters, incorrectly, think that Republicans do as well," Winter observes. "Among voters that self-identify as Republican, 76% think that their party supports these protections."

Winter adds, "Likely voters do a slightly better job assigning policy positions when it comes to Medicaid expansion; 72% percent of voters know that Democrats support its expansion. Still, a quarter, 25%, of likely voters think that Republicans support this policy. Among Republicans, this number sits at 38%."

Winter also found that "almost a third, 30%, of Republicans think that their party supports increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour."

In February 2017 — President Donald Trump's first full month in office — a Morning Consult poll showed just how uninformed some Republican voters are. According to Morning Consult, 72% of Republicans surveyed realized that Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act of 2010 were the same thing — which means that 28% didn't. That poll explains why, in 2017, there were Republican voters who didn't realize they were contradicting themselves by saying that they supported Trump's desire to end Obamacare but were opposed to repealing the Affordable Care Act.

That same month, the Los Angeles Times' Noam M. Levy profiled a Florida resident named Kathy Watson — who, at the time, was a 55-year-old cancer survivor and a diabetic who, Levy reported, "credits Obamacare with saving her life." Yet she voted for Trump in 2016.

Winter concludes his article by saying that reporters, going forward, will need to do better job laying out the positions of the political parties they are reporting on.

"For politics to rebalance at a healthier outcome where voters are actually able to assign the correct positions to the parties," Winter writes, "we will need a new kind of reporting — one that doesn't flinch from assigning policy views to the parties or drawing out the implications of these ideas in clear and materially-grounded terms. Without that, our politics will continue to march on in a fog of confusion."

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state gop wacko in az and texas?

an 1220

arizona Supreme Court delivers major blow to GOP chair Kelli Ward

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-coup-2649651949/

kos

when Texas sued to overturn four other states' election results in the hopes of installing illegitimate, two-time popular vote loser, and white supremacist mediocrity Donald Trump into a second presidential term, they exposed how many elected officials are straight-up wannabe oligarchs. The fact that even in the upside-down world we are living in, with the hijacked ultra conservative Supreme Court in place, most everybody knew there was little chance of the Supreme Court stepping in and hearing the case, which should tip one off to how far afield this maneuver is. It's the kind of thing that most people would rather not put their name on since it is the sort of thing people should go to jail for—if laws concerning sedition and treason are real laws.

Many of the people on this list came into office during the tea party wave of 2010. If you don't remember what the tea party is, it's sort of like if you looked at the American Revolution for independence and democracy and your takeaway was … being a racist asshole. Another way to look at it is if you looked at the Civil War in the United States and boiled it down to … being a racist asshole. Let's make sure we remember the 126 fascists who signed on for this attack on American democracy, and maybe even learn a smidgen more about them and their histories of being terrible people.

A tip of the hat goes to community members republicinsanity and Carmeninvermont—republicinsanity for theCrazy/Stupid Republican of the Dayseries that is frequently sourced here, and Carmeninvermont for the easy-to-read and understand list of GOP anti-democracy Republicans who want to overthrow our elections process in order to hoist up the most mediocre man in American history.

Here is a nice list of the 126 Republican officials who whether charged with sedition and treason or not, are guilty of trying to, at the very least, thwart the will of the American people and overturn our democratically elected president:

Mike Johnson of Louisiana's 4th Congressional District made small headlines this past summer when his attempts to "gotcha" assistant U.S. attorney in Maryland Aaron Zelinsky for not appearing in person during a pandemic blew up in his face. Zelinsky, who had a newborn at home, explained that he had spoken with his family's doctor and they thought potentially exposing the newborn to a pandemic wasn't a good move.

Gary Palmer of Alabama's 6th Congressional District is one of those conservative think tankers whose big ideas include:attacking same sex marriage and nonbinary public restrooms. Big thinker.

Steve Scalise of Louisiana's 1st Congressional District is a storied hypocrite and swamp creature of epic proportions.

Jim Jordan of Ohio's 4th Congressional District is a person, so cowardly and so craven, he has built a career on his ability to ignore some of the most heinous crimes happening under his watch. Jordan's act of sedition comes down lower on his list of sins than most others on this list.

Ralph Abraham of Louisiana's 5th Congressional District is a shoot from the hip bigotwith ideas that were last considered fresh in 1770.

Rick W. Allen of Georgia's 12th Congressional District has one truly great claim to fame, he "disgusted" some Republicans once upon a time by reading anti-LGBTQ passages from the Bible. Different times. Different times.

James R. Baird of Indiana's 4th Congressional District was attacked with an insensitive and offensive mailer, by an out of state conservative super PAC in 2018, during his Republican primary. He seemed pretty offended at the time, but I guess he's decided to let all of that go in order to overthrow the government.

Jim Banks of Indiana's 3rd Congressional District spent the early weeks of the global pandemic to help pen a nonbonding resolution blaming China for COVID-19. That's what he did to help Americans.

Jack Bergman of Michigan's 1st Congressional District blamed the press for the domestic terrorist shooting that injured Rep. Steve Scalise.

Andy Biggs of Arizona's 5th Congressional District didn't go so far as to call Democrats who didn't applaud during Donald Trump's State of the Union "treasonous" but did believe they were "disrespectful" and that they might have to answer to God. He's also had to leave public events after being booed offstage for saying that climate change wasn't settled science.

Gus Bilirakisof Florida's 12th Congressional District came into the office he sort of inherited from his father. He's been a good anti-women's rights Republican since 2006 and pretty much does what he's told to do. And he's in Florida where Republicans tell you to do the real bottom of the barrel stuff.

Dan Bishop of North Carolina's 9th Congressional District came into office after *actual* election fraudster Republican Mark Harris had to step away due to controversy over … election fraud. Bishop is best known for writing North Carolina's anti-trans "bathroom bill."

Mike Bost of Illinois's 12th Congressional District is famously prone to outrageous outbursts. He's also known for cowering away from constituents when asked about his attempts to rip away millions of people's health insurance.

Kevin Brady of Texas's 8th Congressional District was that diminutive bald white guy that got a nice grin going in the Rose garden for when the Republican Party gave away billions to the rich in their tax scam. That's his great achievement.

Mo Brooks of Alabama's 5th Congressional District read Adolf Hitler's *Mein Kampf*on the floor of the House in a twisted attempt to skewer the Democratic officials over their pursuit of an investigation into Trump's campaign ties to Russia. He did this on the heels of calling for the National Guard to "be allowed to use whatever force is necessary to secure that border."

Ken Buck of Colorado's 4th Congressional District has faced questions over whether he pressured another party official to submit incorrect election results and then blew through some RNC money to make that fraud work. To call Buck a scumbag is offensive to bags filled with scum.

Ted Budd of North Carolina's 13th Congressional District is one of the Republicans who signed on to this bit of treason while in quarantine, after announcing he had tested positive for COVID-19.

Tim Burchett of Tennessee's 2nd Congressional District believes in Bigfoot and eating roadkill instead of providing better social services.

Michael C. Burgess of Texas's 26th Congressional District is the kind of guy that called for President Barack Obama to be impeached over Benghazi and then became suspiciously silent when Donald Trump was impeached for his law breaking and corruption-filled campaign.

Bradley Byrne of Alabama's 1st Congressional District took time away from releasing racist attack ads to sign on for fascism!

Ken Calvertof California's 42nd Congressional District is a famous "family values" hypocrite (see busted with pants around his ankles, with a sex worker who was not his wife).

Earl L. "Buddy" Carter of Georgia's 1st Congressional District. I couldn't find much on Buddy, but I do know that he doesn't believe in democracy.

Ben Cline of Virginia's 6th Congressional District was one of the dozen security threats with feet that breached national security for a hack partisan performance piece, led by Florida man Matt Gaetz.

Michael Cloud of Texas's 27th Congressional District owes his seat to the fact that repeatedly disgraceful Blake Farenthold had to leave office, and Republicans have successfully repressed the vote in his district.

Mike Conaway of Texas's 11th Congressional District knows a ton about stealing elections as he famously said, in 2017, that Democratic Sen. Harry Reid and other Democrats had enlisted "Mexican soap opera stars, singers and entertainers who had immense influence in those communities into Las Vegas, to entertain, get out the vote and so forth. Those are foreign actors, foreign people, influencing the vote in Nevada."

Rick Crawford of Arkansas's 1st Congressional District is maybe best known for his opposition to taking down Confederate monuments saying it was akin to Holocaust denialism and would lead to the closure of Holocaust museums. There's not much else to say about that.

Dan Crenshaw of Texas's 2nd Congressional District is a dirtbag who lies and pretends he isn't just a groveling McConnell follower.

Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida's 25th Congressional District has the distinction of being the first member of Congress to test positive for COVID-19. He will also be remembered as one of those Republicans who refused to speak to Donald Trump's describing countries as "shitholes." Courage is something these men do not have.

Jeff Duncan of South Carolina's 3rd Congressional District has enjoyed trying, and failing, to do away with important census data,by attempting to have it legislated out of being collected. Too much thinking for Mr. Duncan, I guess.

Neal P. Dunn of Florida's 2nd Congressional District has made sure to tell news outlets how worried he was and is for children separated from their loved ones due to Trump and the Republican Party's zero tolerance immigration policies. Not surprisingly, he's done absolutely nothing to fix this inhumane practice.

Tom Emmer of Minnesota's 6th Congressional District has complained about constituents wanting stuff like healthcare protections and he's tried in vain to weaken the Endangered Species Act. He's never been particularly interested in a Democracy and doesn't plan on starting now.

Ron Estes of Kansas's 4th Congressional Districtliterally walked in a swamp in the hopes of riding his way through a tight election. Sadly, Estes never left that swamp, he seems to have just grown gills.

Drew Ferguson of Georgia's 3rd Congressional District has a social media team that can't tell the difference between World War II American soldiers and Nazis. True story!

Chuck Fleischmann of Tennessee's 3rd Congressional District is the kind of guy that takes a question about the many outrageous attacks made publicly by Donald Trump and answers it by blaming Nancy Pelosi for being mean. But in Fleischmann's defense, he's been peddling the election fraud fantasy publicly, with zero evidence, since his lord and liege Trump told him to.

Bill Floresof Texas's 17th Congressional District has made sure to point out that he would ignore the calls from his constituents in regards to Trump's problematic relationship with Russia and instead make claims that same sex marriage led to civil unrest in Baltimore. The civil unrest in Baltimore connected to the death of Freddie Gray in police custody and the lack of justice he ultimately received.

Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska's 1st Congressional District got off his high horse to finally openly expose himself as the right-wing, batshit bananas hack that he's always been and pretended not to be.

Virginia Foxx of North Carolina's 5th Congressional District took time away fromanalogizing the regulation of for-profit colleges with the Holocaustto practice some good old Nazi fascism and overthrow our Democracy. She also once tried to argue that the murder of Matthew Shepard was not a hate crime. In fact, she said the premise was a "hoax."

Russ Fulcherof Idaho's 1st Congressional District is a climate denier … as of 2018. He also claims that God wants Idahoians to mine the ground and log away the trees in the state.

Matt Gaetzof Florida's 1st Congressional District is this guy. What can be said about Matt Gaetz that hasn't been written in excrement on the soles of Donald Trump and Sean Hannity's tiny shoes?

Greg Gianforte, governor-elect of Montana, assaulted a reporter for asking tough questions and then lied about it to police.

Bob Gibbs of Ohio's 7th Congressional District is the classic overly emotional conservative white male politician that uses hyperbole but demands that people take that incongruous hyperbole as fact.

Louie Gohmert of Texas's 1st Congressional District is an unintelligent person but he is also a relatively powerful and disturbingly racist and unintelligent person.

Lance Goodenof Texas's 5th Congressional District has been in the pocket of a Texas hotelier for years and owes most of his financial support to him. In fact, Gooden is in business with millionaire Monty Bennett and it seems that Bennett is the only person in the state of Texas that Gooden feels he needs to answer to. Gooden's one claim to fame over the past couple of years was coming up with a plan to DNA test all new immigrants at the border, something that is problematic for about 1 million reasons.

Sam Graves of Missouri's 6th Congressional District is the kind of guy thatruns on homophobia.

Mark Greenof Tennessee's 7th Congressional District is also a homophobe with a history of trying to create laws that would allow for the wholesale discrimination of LGBTQ folks in businesses throughout the Volunteer State.

Michael Guest of Mississippi's 3rd Congressional District is on the House Committee on Ethics. Drink that in: a guy that signed on for a coup d'etat represents Republican ethics in the House. Guest is also a supporter of Confederate fashion-lover and general old-timey racist Cindy Hyde-Smith.

Andy Harris of Maryland's 1st Congressional District is a person who ran on a campaign against the Affordable Healthcare Act and then demanded to know why his government-sponsored healthcare didn't take effect until after one month in office. And his dad was a Nazi-supporter—not like a neo-Nazi supporter, but an actual Germany during World War II Nazi supporter. Hubris is too nice a word for what Andy Harris is about.

Vicky Hartzler of Missouri's 4th Congressional District is really most famous for being an anti-gay activist. Imagine if that was your claim to fame?

Kevin Hernof Oklahoma's 1st Congressional District is directly connected to arguably the single most corrupt official in recent Oklahoma history, Scott Pruitt. He's also been a big promoter of superspreader COVID-19 events.

Clay Higgins of Louisiana's 3rd Congressional District is a former Louisiana police officer who lost his job for what would be considered criminal behavior if he hadn't been on the unjust side of the thin blue line. He's also a scary racist fascist who believes in authoritarian rule.

Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana's 9th Congressional District believes that the hundreds of thousands of Americans dead from COVID-19 are the "lesser of these two evils." The other evil in that sentence is "our way of life as Americans."

Richard Hudson of North Carolina's 8th Congressional District is your run-of-the-mill, anti-women's rights, Obama birther conspiracy theorist, demands drug testing in exchange for food assistance Republican.

Bill Huizenga of Michigan's 2nd Congressional District has been investigated for corruptionand has gone so far as to try and get rid of corruption laws that might conflict with his … corruption.

Bill Johnson of Ohio's 6th Congressional District is abig Islamophobe GOP official. That seems to be his main strength. Like many of the people on this list, Johnson came into office on the ultra-conservative tea party wave of 2010.

John Joyce of Pennsylvania's 13th Congressional District is new to the scene, but we now know one thing about his political ideology.

Fred Keller of Pennsylvania's 12th Congressional Districtbarely understands his own elections, let alone national ones.

Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania's 16th Congressional District has been on board this election fraud train since suing to have Black people's votes in Pennsylvania nullified.

Trent Kellyof Mississippi's 1st Congressional District gave his in-person seal of approval on the Trump administration's family separation practices.

Steve Kingof Iowa's 4th Congressional District is a lame duck racist who would sign anything so long as the devil told him to.

David Kustoff of Tennessee's 8th Congressional District's biggest claim to fame is being a sort of poor man's Tom Cotton.

Darin LaHood of Illinois's 18th Congressional District took time away from trying to govern women's bodies with his Bibleto sign off on treason!

Doug LaMalfa of California's 1st Congressional District has been promoting doubt about the Democratic process, with zero evidence, since the beginning of November. LaMalfa is a mixture of painfully pathetic xenophobia along with quoting the bible to deny climate science.

Doug Lamborn of Colorado's 5th Congressional District is the guy that continued to force his staff to work in the close proximity of his office during the current pandemic, and then reportedlytold his staff not to tell their roommates about COVID-19 symptoms they were having after coming into contact with someone with COVID-19. Think about that.

Robert E. Latta of Ohio's 5th Congressional District has magically increased his wealth while in Washington by a reported 238%, and while he isn't the wealthiest Ohio Republican, he's made the biggest jump in wealth since entering office. Strange!

Debbie Lesko of Arizona's 8th Congressional District once said that the dozens of sexual assaults alleged against Donald Trump should be investigated and then promptly forgot all about that as she co-sponsored a billthat would require women to prove to their employers that they took birth control for reasons other than … birth control.

Blaine Luetkemeyer of Missouri's 3rd Congressional District's main function in the Republican Party is to figure out ways to allow payday lenders to launder their money.

Kenny Marchant of Texas's 24th Congressional District is retiring and throwing democracy under the bus as he walks out the door.

Roger Marshall of Kansas's 1st Congressional District is the kind of guy that runs away from answering questions and participating in debates while also plagiarizing other people's campaigns, because he has no ethical standards.

Tom McClintockof California's 4th Congressional District is the kind of guy that was still hanging out with right-wing criminal and strange lying machine Dinesh D'Souza. D'Souza is one of those guys that almost makes you feel bad for being a human being.

Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington's 5th Congressional District is a person that literally said she had made "protecting those with pre-existing conditions" a "priority" during her time in office. She voted to repeal those very protections nine times—as in one less than 10 times.

Dan Meuserof Pennsylvania's 9th Congressional District has called the Postal Service's dismantling by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy a "fabricated problem being pushed by Democrats."

Carol D. Miller of West Virginia's 3rd Congressional District has the distinction of being the only new woman Republican congressional member in the 2018 blue wave election cycle. Miller wants to make sure the other fascists in her party know that she, too, can be a fascist!

John Moolenaar of Michigan's 4th Congressional District's only claim to fame has been to vote against calling Donald Trump's racist statement against "the Squad" racist. This makes John Moolenaar a racist.

Alex X. Mooney of West Virginia's 2nd Congressional District was one of the dunderheaded crew of Matt Gaetz-led legislators breaking the law and threatening the country's national security in the hopes of being on camera

Markwayne Mullinof Oklahoma's 2nd Congressional District doesn't know how many branches of government there are, nor does he understand how government works. He's clearly not alone in this.

Gregory Murphy of North Carolina's 3rd Congressional District told the public that the only reason Sen. Kamala Harris was chosen to be Joe Biden's running mate was because of "her color and her race." He finished that thought by wondering aloud if this was "how we pick our leaders now in America??" I guess Murphy is hoping that we just pick a white pseudo-billionaire to make important decisions for a majority of people that do not want him to?

Dan Newhouse of Washington's 4th Congressional District is one of the many Republican officials that recently contracted COVID-19.

Ralph Norman of South Carolina's 5th Congressional District brandished a loaded weapon during a constituent breakfast and placed it on the table in front of people discussing gun safety.

Scott Perryof Pennsylvania's 10th Congressional District once argued that God, as in the Judeo-Christian deity of the Bible, was an environmental polluter like, say, Duke Energy.

Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania's 14th Congressional District believes that the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police means that taxpayers should invest more money into police departments. He's also a guy that wrote a forward for an incredibly hate-filled book, and then said he hadn't read the book, even though his forward was about reading the writer's hate-filled work. U-S-A!

Tom Rice of South Carolina's 7th Congressional District spent weeks in the state legislature refusing to wear a mask indoors and then announced that he and his wife and his son had all tested positive for COVID-19.

John Rose of Tennessee's 6th Congressional District's big claim to fame was being one of the many Republicans, at different times, to block disaster relief help for Puerto Rico.

David Rouzer of North Carolina's 7th Congressional District is a Trump defender with all of the general Republican bonafides we have come to expect: tax breaks for the rich, voting against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, and being a part of the Gaetz impeachment crash party.

John Rutherford of Florida's 4th Congressional District has frequently been dragged on Twitter for the most racist and idiotic attacks on Democratic women of color.

Austin Scott of Georgia's 8th Congressional District recently tested positive for COVID-19.

Mike Simpson of Idaho's 2nd Congressional Districttook his head from out of his own ass long enough to sign on for fascism.

Adrian Smith of Nebraska's 3rd Congressional Districtsort of disappeared on his constituents, just like the rest of the Republican Party during this year's pandemic.

Jason Smith of Missouri's 8th Congressional District's great moment of cleverness was when he attacked the ACA for taxing tanning salons, saying Democrats might as well "tax the sun." He also spun it as a tax on women. Of course, Smith had a long history of attacking women in the legislature by trying to defund Planned Parenthood, as well as attacking children by voting against Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program funds.

Ross Spano of Florida's 15th Congressional District took time away from his campaign finance scandal, and losing his primary, to support another one-term corrupt politician.

Elise Stefanik of New York's 21st Congressional District is something of an easily verifiable liar. Let's all look forward to the day, likely a few weeks from now, when Stefanik tells a local news reporter that she never supported the wholesale destruction of the democratic process.

Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania's 15th Congressional District is a big Second Amendment fella who has said things in the past like "You know, the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting. It's about safety. If someone is coming into my house in the middle of the night to hurt my family, I want as many bullets as possible." I guess he needs all the bullets to shoot holes in Democratically casted votes?

Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin's 7th Congressional District knows lots about election fraud and election law violations as he has been tied to all kinds of under-the-table, dirty, and likely illegal tricks to win his position in Wisconsin's legislature.

William Timmonsof South Carolina's 4th Congressional District is most recently remembered for defending Trump's racism by saying everybody is being called racist and so nobody is racist. Trying to get rid of Black Americans' votes wholesale is a great example of an attempt at systemizing racism. Just a thought.

Ann Wagner of Missouri's 2nd Congressional District is one of the legislators in Congress with the least amount of votes on actual legislation. I guess she's lazy? She was one of the first Republican officials to stand in front of microphones and tell Americans that based on her high level of knowledge, from "multiple, multiple briefings at the federal level," she knew—as of March 7—that the United States was at a very "low risk" of having a COVID-19 pandemic. Ann Wagner should be disqualified from doing anything but eating oatmeal.

Tim Walberg of Michigan's 7th Congressional District is one of those "family values" Republicans who wants to take away everyone else's rights using the federal government.

Michael Waltz of Florida's 6th Congressional District is already having newspapers who endorsed him apologize for supporting sedition. This is one of those "never Trumpers" who very quickly began licking the boots of Donald Trump the moment Trump came into power.

Randy Weber of Texas's 14th Congressional District replaced Ron Paul in Congress.There's not much more that needs to be said. A second-rate version of Ron Paul, while better than the fifth-rate version of Paul that is Rand, is still worse than having an old can of Tab sitting in a seat and being your representative.

Daniel Webster of Florida's 11th Congressional District is … so much Florida!

Brad Wenstrup of Ohio's 2nd Congressional District just followed in the footsteps of Jim "I-turn-the-other-way-when-being-told-about-the-wholesale-molestation-of-young-people-I'm-supposed-to-be-in-charge-of" Jordan.

Bruce Westerman of Arkansas's 4th Congressional District has sat on top of a pile of logging industry money for years and shockingly (read: "not shockingly") has been a lead sponsor on some super anti-climate, pro-logging bits of legislation that attempt to hand our trees over to private industry for profit.

Roger Williams of Texas' 25th Congressional District is the guy that tried to pressure a bank to help out his flailing oil investor donor. Swamp stuff.

Joe Wilson of South Carolina's 2nd Congressional District loves to vote for American wars but not for healthcare funding for American veterans of said wars. He's almost a perfect Republican! He's also in a district that's drawn deeply red and acts like the petty little emperor he wants to be.

Rob Wittman of Virginia's 1st Congressional District was able to fly mostly under the radar for his attempts at profiteering off of the COVID-19 pandemic when he bought into a pharmaceutical company which was producing an antiviral drug that hoped to help with COVID-19 treatments, and at the exact same time emailing his constituents that there was no coronavirus pandemic in the United States, and you didn't need to worry about it. You know, like a real piece of shit.

Ron Wright of Texas's 6th Congressional District is a relatively new congressman, whose views on school mass shootingsinclude calling for public hangings as a solution. Not working on the gun thing, just hanging people.

Ted S. Yoho of Florida's 3rd Congressional District is the soon-to-be retiring congressman from Florida who famously "didn't attend one single deposition" as a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee when Congress was investigating Trump's Ukrainian bribery. He's also the sweetie pie who, in a confrontation with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez resorted to calling her a "fucking bitch," because his ability to debate matches the size of his courage.

Lee Zeldin of New York's 1st Congressional District is best known for his intense Islamophobia and his unerring and idiotic support of the Trump administration from Day One.

Remember these (mostly white) men (and a couple of white women). They are the people who hope to be a middle-management fascistic vanguard in an oligarchy for the rich. Share your own stories about any of the people listed above down below in the comments.

Happy New Year!

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an 1220 no lnx twt

How a post-election GOP 'civil war' could 'tear the party apart': reporter

Photo via Gage Skidmore.

Alex Henderson December 21, 2020

President Ronald Reagan, in the 1980s, famously said that he considered someone who agreed with him 70% of the time to be a 70% ally rather than a 30% enemy. But among President Donald Trump's diehard devotees, anything less than 100% agreement with the president is a sacrilege. And journalist Sasha Abramsky, in an article published by The Nation on December 18, examines post-election tensions between Republicans who are acknowledging Joe Biden as president-elect and Republicans who are encouraging Trump to keep fighting the election results.

With the Trump campaign's legal challenges to the election results having been rejected by one court after another and the Electoral College having certified Biden's victory, even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and outgoing Attorney General William Barr have said that they consider Biden president-elect. Some Trump devotees are now slamming McConnell and Barr as RINOs: Republicans in Name Only, which is ironic in light of how aggressive a defender of Trump Barr and McConnell have been. Now, even McConnell and Barr aren't MAGA enough.

"A civil war is now percolating within the Republican Party," Abramsky explains. "The Electoral College has met and confirmed Joe Biden's victory, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has finally agreed to call Biden the president-elect, Russian President Vladimir Putin has congratulated Biden on his victory — and yet, stateside, the Trump cultists continue to scheme and foment ever-more-fantastical assaults on democracy."

McConnell, journalist Jonathan Easley notes in an article for The Hill, is hoping to avoid a battle on the Senate floor on January 3, when Congress will vote to certify the Electoral College votes of December 14. The Senate majority leader has asked GOP senators not to join Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama in resisting the election results, but Sen.-elect Tommy Tuberville is siding with Brooks rather than McConnell.

The "Trump cultists" Abramsky cites as especially unhinged include attorney Sidney Powell and long-time Trump loyalist Stephen Miller, who has declared that the campaign must keep fighting the election results right up until January 20, 2021.

"Not to be outdone in the crazy sweepstakes, Sidney Powell, the Trump campaign's recently departed attorney, retweeted a racist diatribe against McConnell's Taiwanese American wife," Abramsky notes.

According to Abramsky, "It's tempting to dismiss all of this as simply the noisy, irrational coda to a brutal election season. But it's more complex than that. Trump is desperately fighting for his personal survival, but McConnell has abandoned him; ergo, Trump must now turn his rhetorical guns against the Senate leader. For his part, McConnell has clearly concluded that it's in his political interest to cut his losses now and endure Trump's rants and his supporters' threats for the next few weeks, in order to maintain his political power into the Biden presidency."

Abramsky concludes the article by stressing that a post-election "civil war" among Republicans could inflict major damage on the GOP.

"Given Trump's despotic ambitions and his clear intent to maintain an iron grip on the GOP and its base in the coming years — and given the moral black hole so many GOP elected officials have managed to sink themselves into over the past four years — it's hard to see how this confrontation doesn't end up tearing the party apart," Abramsky writes. "I had hoped Trump's candidacy in 2016 would perform that vital role — that it would break a rotten party wide open for all to see the vacuum at its core. It didn't happen then. In these final weeks of 2020 and of Trump's rancid regime, it seems to be happening now."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Longtime GOP consultant: This election 'is the most dangerous ... ›

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the GOP's soft Civil War ... ›

The Mason-Dixon line is psychological this time in the GOP's new ... ›

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A GOP civil war rattles Georgia Republicans at inconvenient time ›

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1220 an new report on voodoo trickle fail

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/republican-party-funding/

must kill // noam most dang org ever

Moyers & co. break down the 3 reasons GOP leaders are letting Trump 'poison the political process'

Bill Moyers

**ANNOUNCER:** Welcome to Moyers on Democracy. The Supreme Court needed only one sentence this week to reject Republican efforts to overturn Joe Biden's victory in Pennsylvania. It was a resounding rebuke of President...

an 1220

state level gop wacko also tx

Arizona — one of the states that President-elect Joe Biden won — Republican Gov. Ducey is being slammed as a RINO by far-right Trump supporters for certifying the state's 2020 election results and acknowledging Biden, not President Donald Trump, as the winner. Some Arizona Republicans are continuing to claim, without evidence, that Trump was robbed of a victory in that state by widespread voter fraud. And one source of pro-Trump conspiracy theories in Arizona, BuzzFeed reporter Paul McLeod notes, is the Arizona GOP's Twitter account — where extremists are saying that they're willing to die for Trump if necessary....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So why does it matter?

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

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

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

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/george-w-bush/

mike loefgran common dr

My friend and former colleague Bruce Bartlett has done a service by reminding us that after four years of the non-stop catastrophe that was the Trump administration, we should not lull ourselves with the illusion that the 45th president was some aberration that fell out of the sky.

His flamboyant criminality and relentlessly malignant personality may exert the same sick fascination as watching a grisly car crash, but in terms of creating disasters, Trump has nothing on George W. Bush.

As Bartlett points out, Bush's presidency was filled with the same hubris, incomprehension of rational policy, and disdain for any government employee who told the president other than what he wanted to hear. There was much the same contempt for expertise ("I don't do nuance."). But understandably, Bartlett focuses on his own area of expertise, economics. National security gets only brief mention.

As one who spent a career in the national security field, I believe that's where the real demons lay. It constitutes Bush's true legacy.

The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 marked the rest of Bush's presidency, gave him a convenient boost in popularity, and probably were responsible for getting him a second term. Yet he ignored so many indications of an impending attack that even the 9/11 Commission, replete as it was with equivocation, coverups, and pussyfooting generally, proclaimed that "the system was blinking red."

Yet Bush preferred to spend that summer playing golf, telling the CIA briefer who informed him of the threat, "All right. You've covered your ass, now." That behavior strangely foreshadowed Trump's dismissal of medical experts warning him of the coronavirus. Like Bush, he had better things to do—such as protecting Wall Street.

The almost incomprehensible ease with which the terrorists succeeded was such that a large portion of the American people simply could not believe it wasn't a false flag operation. This paranoia was reinforced by the speed with which Bush and his cronies exploited the attack both for crass political gain, and (even worse) to provide a flimsy excuse to invade a country which had nothing to do with the attackers—but whose leader was a bête noir of the Bush family.

The bald facts of Bush's incompetent negligence were bad enough and should have gotten him impeached. But his brazen use of the tragedy as an excuse to invade the wrong country gave impetus to a plague of conspiratorial thinking that now pervades and suffocates political thought. The bogus "technical" arguments of conspiracy buffs about the melting point of steel in the twin towers were merely the precursors of far-fetched theories about coronavirus being a hoax, and the victims being crisis actors. America's mental hygiene has never been the same since that day in September.

The crippling human and material cost of Afghanistan and Iraq set our country on a downward spiral that continues to this day.

Future historians may view 9/11's effect on the United States as spookily paralleling the 1914 terrorist incident in Sarajevo for its impact on the Habsburg Empire and the igniting of World War I. For us—although in a more protracted manner – 9/11 may have spelled the beginning of the end, just as Sarajevo did with the Habsburgs.

Initially, the government in Vienna thought the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at the hands of a Serbian gunman to be a tragedy, but by no means an existential crisis for the monarchy. But soon enough, the militant faction, led by Foreign Minister Berchtold and General Hötzendorf exploited it as a means to rid Austria of the Serbian "menace" once and for all. They contrived to send an ultimatum of demands to Serbia that no self-respecting nation could possibly accept. They succeeded in getting their war.

That eerily foretells how Bush administration gunslingers like Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld resolved to exploit 9/11. Rumsfeld jotted down in his notes,"Near term target needs—go massive—sweep it all up, things related and not." Empowering the CIA or Special Forces to locate and neutralize the 9/11 plotters wasn't enough. Bush and his paladins gave Afghanistan's Taliban regime an ultimatum they could not accept, and, for good measure, proceeded to give Iraq the same treatment. We know the rest.

The crippling human and material cost of Afghanistan and Iraq set our country on a downward spiral that continues to this day. Those hideous misadventures spawned the Department of Homeland Security, the agency with the Orwellian name whose menacing potential is held in check mainly by incompetence. Former employees tell me it is far less than the sum of the agencies that were folded into it.

Yet, even as the twin disaster of Iraq and Afghanistan became evident to any thinking person, the combination of fear, vengeance, hatred, and hubris that the Republican propaganda machine whipped up got the public into lather. Foreign policy could no longer be viewed with detachment as an issue of national interests, cost, and risk. It became one more weapon in the culture wars arsenal. The 2004 was a referendum on Iraq, and, significantly, it remains the only time since 1988 that a Republican presidential candidate won the popular vote.

Congress entered a steep decline, sinking to the level of Franco's cortes or the central committee under Stalin. Before the Iraq invasion, I conveyed my strategic concerns to a couple of congressmen. One of them slapped his forehead with the heel of his hand and said in mock regret, "Mike, I wish you hadn't told me that!" But I didn't change anyone's vote (after all, I wasn't a lobbyist with a checkbook). This, too, presages the behavior of Republican legislators toward Trump. Off the record, they are alarmed by him and disdainful. In public, they are as grovelingly adoring of him as Kim Jong Un's subordinates are to the Dear Leader.

Bush's disasters reverberate to this day. Our foreign policy establishment evidently feels toward Afghanistan as a man who has a wolf by the ears. He knows he can't hold on forever, but he dares not let go. Iraq, where al Qaeda did not exist, spawned al Qaeda in Iraq, which begat ISIS, which then spread to Syria.

It is doubtful a president with the wisdom of Solomon could solve the Middle East problems that Bush created. And, as if to magnify the errors of his Republican predecessor, Trump abrogated the nuclear agreement with Iran, one of the few positive steps the United States has taken in that region in recent decades (and an agreement that Iran was complying with). For good measure, he gave a hearty thumbs up to the Saudi monarchy's murderous bombing of Yemeni civilians.

In any case, time is not on our side. For a decade or more, liberals have congratulated themselves on projected demographic changes in the country that would mean a more diverse, better educated electorate. That change simply has not happened in an electorally beneficial manner, and is unlikely to do so in the medium term.

Indeed, because of our absurdly archaic electoral system, demographic sorting by region may actually exacerbate the inability to produce an electorate that will vote for moderate – let alone progressive—foreign and domestic policies that will not replicate the disasters I have described. And it could lead to an even more authoritarian GOP; the party that already produced Bush and Trump could stumble upon a Führer who was actually competent, and the game will be over.

Just as Austria's cumbersome dual monarchy was not up to the challenges of the 20th century, so it is in the 21st century with America's antique political system (there is only one example of an institution comparable to our own electoral college: the electors of the Holy Roman Empire, a state which ceased to exist in 1806). The very structure of our system, combined with an increasingly paranoid and disinformed electorate, means the likelihood of producing a dud occupying the Oval Office is roughly 50/50.

Austria, though, in its twilight at least produced Gustav Mahler, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Karl Popper. We seem to be stuck with Ted Nugent and Kanye West.

Mike Lofgren is a former congressional staff member who served on both the House and Senate budget committees. His books include: "The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government" (2016) and "The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted" (2013).

11/5/20 mcconn already working to undermine pres biden

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/the-gop-should-learn-from-trumps-defeat-but-here-is-why-they-wont/

Based on the current state of election results, there is a real chance that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden could be elected the 46th President of the United States — which would be a damning defeat for President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. But despite the possibility of defeat, Frank Rich explains why Republicans still will not get the bigger picture.

In an op-ed published by New York magazine, Rich noted that the great divide in the United States signals a deeper problem that the country will have to reckon with.

"There is a Blue America and there is a Red America, but there is no United States of America," Rich wrote. "A Biden victory cannot mask the fact that this country is divided, 55-45 in raw numbers but 50-50 for all practical intents and purposes, regardless of the Democratic margin in the presidential popular vote."

Rich added, "The fundamental schisms pitting American tribes against each other would remain intact even in the fantastical event that the Electoral College were by some political miracle abolished in the interest of democratizing what we are overly fond of calling the world's greatest democracy."

He went on to explain what this election actually reveals about the country's voting system. Even if Biden withstands the Republican Party's legal efforts to discredit his victory, Trump's dismantling and discrediting of American voting practices exposed many flaws in the United States' systems.

"If Biden survives the GOP's legal and extra-legal efforts to rob him of votes in the determinative battleground states and is sworn in as president, let's skip the sanctimony about how "the system worked." The system is teetering. Trump — in what may be his signal accomplishment — has exposed every weakness in its structure. It turns out that a president can even monkey around with the Postal Service to manipulate election results. He can lie, steal, self-deal, corrupt the legal system, coddle dictators, alienate allies, violate all the internal safeguards intended to prevent executive malfeasance, mismanage a public-health catastrophe that kills his own voters, and get away with it for four long years.

Rich also noted that Trump's loyal followers will continue to hang on to his words regardless of whether his remarks are true or not. Because of that, nothing will be learned from Trump's defeat. Instead of viewing the 2020 election as an opportunity to usher in change and reshape the Republican Party for the future, there will be efforts to justify Trump's defeat and classify it as robbery.

an 1020 one might think low density pop rural red states do best, but ND worst?

eight of the 10 states with the highest rates have Republican governors. Kansas and Nevada, which come in eighth and ninth, both have Democratic governors.[[1]](https://www.cepr.net/red-state-governors-still-flunk-testing/#_ftn1) While Democrats also control the legislature in Nevada, the legislature in Kansas is overwhelmingly Republican.

The story is more mixed among the states with the lowest positive rates, with five having Democratic governors and five having Republican governors. However, it is worth noting that all five of the states with Republican governors have legislatures that are controlled by Democrats.

In short, by this measure of efforts at getting the pandemic under control, Democrats seem far more serious than Republicans.

aha see when i called it party of trump; now qanon // darwin herd immunity, death cult?

10/20/20 an rats from ship, ram thru dereg]

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/half-of-trump-supporters-believe-qanons-unhinged-conspiracy-theories-poll/

alex h

As outlandish as QAnon's beliefs are, the conspiracy cult has been gaining ground in the Republican Party. A Yahoo News/YouGov poll finds that roughly 50% of President Donald Trump's supporters now embrace at least some of QAnon's claims.

QAnon believes that the United States' federal government has been infiltrated by an international cabal of pedophiles, Satanists and cannibals and that Trump was put in the White House to lead the fight against the cabal. According to the fictional belief set, an anonymous figure named Q is providing updates on Trump's battle. And one of QAnon's beliefs is that R&B superstar Beyoncé isn't really African-American but rather, is really an Italian woman named Ann Marie Latrassi who is passing herself off as Black as part of the conspiracy.

The Yahoo/YouGov poll, conducted October 16-18, asked participants, "Do you believe that top Democrats are involved in elite child sex trafficking rings?" — and 50% of Trump supporters said "yes" compared to only 5% of former Vice President Joe Biden's supporters.

The poll also asked, "Do you believe that President Trump is working to dismantle an elite child sex trafficking ring involving top Democrats?" — to which 52% of Trump supporters responded "yes," while only 4% of Biden supporters said "yes."

Yahoo News reporters Andrew Romano and Caitlin Dickson note that only 16% of Trump supporters who were familiar were QAnon were willing to dismiss the entire movement as conspiracy nonsense that has no basis in fact.

The inroads that QAnon has made in the GOP were evident when, in August, QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene won a Republican congressional primary in Georgia. Because her district is overwhelmingly Republican, Greene will likely win the general election on November 3 and be sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives in January 2021.

Well-known Republicans who have made donations to Green's campaign include Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. And after her primary win, Trump congratulated Greene on Twitter and exalted her as a "future Republican star."

Nina Jankowicz of the nonpartisan Wilson Center told Yahoo News that it's "really crazy" that "such a high number" of Trump supporters embrace QAnon's conspiracy theory.

Jankowicz explained, "It seems, increasingly, like we're dealing with two different sets of facts in this country, sometimes more. The fact is that QAnon is a movement, a conspiracy that has been cited by the FBI as potentially inciting terrorist and other violent extremist acts in this country. It shouldn't be something that we're this split (on) along partisan lines."

During a recent town hall event hosted by NBC News, moderator Savannah Guthrie grilled Trump about QAnon — and he maintained, "I know nothing about QAnon." But Trump added that from what he has heard, "They are very strongly against pedophilia, and I agree with that."

Jankowicz told Yahoo News, "The fact that we have so many political candidates who are public adherents of QAnon and a president who himself has refused to disavow the theory (amounts to) a tacit endorsement of a different set of facts. That's what's really worrisome about it."

an 1020 alex h

bunch of grifters’: Ronald Reagan’s son slams modern GOP for ‘degrading’ the values it once espoused

animated bar graphs blue states almost gone vs trump says faul but btw reopen

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/19-graph-douses-cold-water-on-trumps-claim-that-blue-states-are-ravished-with

920 sev articles on all gop pretense now over, lie cheat to win, power at any cost

definitive moral betrayal? LDS on abortion?

[[https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/romney-makes-up-new-precedent-to-say-hell-vote-on-a-trump-supreme-court-nominee/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/weak-and-spineless-mitt-romney-hit-with-twitter-firestorm-over-support-for-gop-supreme-court-vote/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/mitt-romney-slams-gop-investigation-of-hunter-biden-as-a-waste-of-taxpayers-money-not-the-legitimate-role-of-government/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/romney-joins-growing-protests-as-more-prominent-republicans-disavow-trump/]]

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/republicans-are-waging-all-out-war-on-democracy-and-now-theyre-openly-admitting-it/

no lnx

Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah sparked a backlash this week when made an undercurrent of the modern conservative movement and the driving ideology of the Republican Party explicit.

"We're not a democracy," Lee tweeted on Oct. 7.

Twitter's not exactly known for the capacity to have in-depth discussions on political philosophy, but Lee hadn't even come close to using up his 280 characters. After significant outrage stirred by his first tweet, Lee expanded on the idea the following day with a slightly longer message.

"Democracy isn't the objective; liberty, peace, and [prosperity] are," he wrote. "We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that."

Again, it was a striking sentiment, and it inflamed critics who have accused the Lee and the GOP of systematically trying to disenfranchise constituencies they believe won't vote for Republicans. But Lee didn't back down. He went to the conservative outlet the Washington Examiner, which essentially transcribed his own defense of his claims with little analysis or reflection. He shared a piece from DeseretNews, which offered a more balanced take on the controversy. And Conn Carroll, a spokesperson for Lee, provided a statement to Vox further defending the comments:

"At a time when Democrats want to pack the Court, eliminate the Electoral College, and turn the Senate into the House, it is very good that Americans are re-reading The Federalist Papers to rediscover why the founders put these specific republican checks on democratic passion into the Constitution.

But none of the defenses could shield from the fact that the senator's sentiments reflect a growing and dangerous anti-democratic element on the modern right-wing. The instinct has always been there, in some form or another, but you would nevertheless hear Republicans pay lip-service to the idea of democracy. Cynically, though, they began pushing extremely anti-democratic policies, such as restrictive voter ID laws and racial gerrymandering meant to dilute the votes of minorities and Democrats. They offered pro-forma excuses for these policies, such as voting the virtually non-existent problem of voter fraud, but many surely knew that they were just taking whatever advantage they could to keep power.

Lee's remarks, however, show how those cynical power grabs can merge with an ideology that is intrinsically elitist and whose adherents know it's deeply unpopular. This creates a strong incentive to rationalize opposition to democracy and justify restricting the influence of ordinary citizens on the government. The Utah senator's willingness to be openly dismissive of democracy may signal that his party will be increasingly willing to not even espouse traditional democratic values. This isn't likely to be a popular stance, but if they get their way, that won't matter.

Republicans, after all, already know they need to distort the playing field win and rule. That's why they concoct bizarre and ad hoc excuses for preserving the Electoral College, despite the fact that it was a ham-fisted compromise at the country's founding that has served to put the more unpopular candidate in the White House twice in living memory. That's why they're thrilled to appoint conservative Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, breaking the countless promises they made to leave seats open during a presidential campaign and rushing the process in the weeks before an election. They want their 6-3 conservative court, which can theoretically stand in the way of Democratic majorities in Congress and a Democratic president from enacting a popular agenda.

Loren Culp, Republican candidate for Washington Governor, articulated the objection to democracy in a recent video:

GOP nominee @LorenCulp to @KATUNews: “The problem with Democracy — you can look at quotes from famous Chinese lea… https://t.co/aOO0QfBxn6

— James Singer (@James Singer)1601749258.0

This is exactly the point. Republicans fear that, if the people are adequately represented in government, the government will have to do things they like, such as providing for basic needs like health care and housing. They deride providing such services as "socialism," which the Republican mind cannot abide.

In a recent column, the New York Times' Jamelle Bouie dispelled the frequently touted nonsense that the United States isn't a "democracy" but a "republic":

'For the founders, "democracy" did not mean majority rule in a system of representation. The men who led the revolution and devised the Constitution were immersed in classical literature and political theory. Ancient Greece, in particular, was a cautionary tale. When James Madison critiqued "democracy" in Federalist No. 10, he meant the Athenian sort: "a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person." This he contrasted with a "republic" or "a government in which the scheme of representation takes place." Likewise, in a 1788 speech to the New York ratification convention, Alexander Hamilton disavowed "the ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated." They "never possessed one good feature of government," he said. "Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity."

In more modern terms, the founders feared "direct democracy" and accounted for its dangers with a system of "representative democracy." Yes, this "republic" had counter-majoritarian aspects, like equal representation of states in the Senate, the presidential veto and the Supreme Court. But it was not designed for minority rule.

...

If there's substance behind "We're a republic, not a democracy," it's not as a description of American government. There's really no difference, in the present, between a "republic" and a "democracy": Both connote systems of representation in which sovereignty and authority derive from the public at large.

The point of the slogan isn't to describe who we are, but to claim and co-opt the founding for right-wing politics — to naturalize political inequality and make it the proper order of things. What lies behind that quip, in other words, is an impulse against democratic representation. It is part and parcel of the drive to make American government a closed domain for a select, privileged few.

The anti-democratic impulse is commonplace on the right. GOP Chair Ronna McDaniel, for example, celebrated on Thursday a series of court rulings that make it harder for the American people to vote:

In the last two weeks alone, Republicans have won cases in: ? ARIZONA ? IOWA ? NEW HAMPSHIRE ? OHIO ? SOUTH CAROL… https://t.co/TgO6RXYBqS

— Ronna McDaniel (@Ronna McDaniel)1602191313.0

Meanwhile, Trump has explicitly said he thinks he needs Barrett to be approved by the Senate because he expects the Supreme Court to determine the result of the November election. He's not satisfied with simply competing in the Electoral College which, at least in 2016, was tilted in his favor. He's run a months-long disinformation campaign attacking mail-in voting, claiming the election will be rigged, and demanding that his supporters become poll-watchers — likely as an attempt to intimidate Democrats who want to cast ballots. He wants chaos, and then he wants his hand-picked justices to hand him the election, regardless of the will of the people.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Trump sycophant, seems to agree.

"Now, we may have litigation about who won the election, but the court will decide," he said last month. "And, if the Republicans lose, we will accept that result. But we need a full court, and I think that's possible before the election."

So it should be clear that it's not just a Trump phenomenon. Republicans are committed to limiting the power of the voters to keep their hold on power. And in turn, the fact that Republicans need to persuade a minority of the country to win allows them to become more radicalized, thus pushing them to dilute voters' power even more.

And since gutting the Voting Rights Act, the conservative-dominated Supreme Court has repeatedly declined to act to preserve voting rights or increase access to the ballot. With Barrett on the bench, that attitude is almost certain to be further entrenched.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/submissive-fearful-and-l/

Trump has tapped into a wellspring of authoritarianism running beneath the American electorate, according to a new book, and those voters aren't going away if he loses.

Psychology professor Bob Altemeyer and former Nixon White House lawyer John Dean explore that anti-democratic dynamic in their new book, "Authoritarian Nightmare," and found that many Republican voters prefer strong authoritarian leadership, reported the *Washington Post*.

"[Many Trump supporters] are submissive, fearful, and longing for a mighty leader who will protect them from life's threats," the authors write. "They divide the world into friend and foe, with the latter greatly outnumbering the former."

The authors measure authoritarianism using the right-wing authoritarian (RWA) scale Altemeyer developed in the early 1980s, which identifies authoritarian tendencies on a sliding scale, and surveyed 990 American voters in fall 2019 with help from the Monmouth University Polling Institute.

"They found a striking linear relationship between support for Trump and an authoritarian mind-set,"the Post reported. "The stronger a person supported Trump, the higher he or she scored on the RWA scale. People saying they strongly disapproved of Trump, for instance, had an average RWA score of 54. Those indicating complete support of the president, on the other hand, had an average score of 119, more than twice as authoritarian as Trump opponents."

Many experts from a variety of fields agree that Trump displays authoritarian tendencies and poses a threat to U.S. democracy, but he needs his supporters to impose his will on American institutions and traditions.

"Even if Donald Trump disappeared tomorrow," Altemeyer and Dean write, "the millions of people who made him president would be ready to make someone else similar president instead."

// booktv 1020 https://www.c-span.org/video/?475520-1/liars-circus embed trumpistas; Journalist Carl Hoffmanreported on the impact of the Trump campaign rallies

but more to pt: steve benen:

REPUBLICANOPPOSITION TO A LARGE FEDERALGOVERNMENT ISNOTNEW.ANDTHEJOKEAND I AM HERETOHELP. SO WHENWE LOOK BACK AT THEREAGANERA TOBE AGOVERNINGBODY:{:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-variant-numeric:inherit;font-variant-east-asian:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;display:inline"):}:AND WHEN THEY TACKLE TAXREFORMIN 1986 AND THEY TOOK THE PROCESSSERIOUSLY WITH INTENSE SCRUTINYLASTING WEEKS AND MONTHS FORNEARLY AYEARAND TOOK THE PROCESS SERIOUSLYBECAUSE OF THE DETAILS. DESPITETHEFACTA CONSERVATIVE PARTYAGAINST GOVERNING ORGOVERNMENT ANDCOULD TAKE THE PROCESS SERIOUSLYENOUGH TO PURSUESOMETHINGWORTHWHILE.IT'S ADIFFERENTPARTY BUT TO BE SKEPTICALIS NOT IN ANDOFITSELF IT DOESN'THAVE TO BE OPPOSEDPOLICYPARTY OF WHERE IT IS SKEPTICALOF BIGGOVERNMENTITSELF THEY USED TO BE ABLETO BUT NOW THEYARENOT.

no lnx wapo

Trump’s GOP: a “post-policy party”

As a candidate in 2016, Donald Trump “didn’t know or care about public policy,” writes Steve Benen, who sees Trump as the culmination of a years-long trend within the Republican Party: the abandonment of substantive governing in favor of political point-scoring.]

By Benjamin C. Waterhouse

Benjamin C. Waterhouse is associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of "Lobbying America: The Politics of Business from Nixon to NAFTA" and "The Land of Enterprise: A Business History of the United States."

June 26, 2020

For the past 3 1 / 2 years, the United States has been conducting a troubling experiment. Despite presiding over a government rooted, by design, in a powerful executive, the current occupant of the White House has steadfastly refused to exercise presidential leadership. Yes, he wields power — for its own sake and for his own sake. But he does not comfort the afflicted, inspire us to national purpose or summon the better angels of our nature. On key matters of policy, the head of the Republican Party evidently does not read or think deeply. In a word, he does not lead. As the writer and popular historian Jon Meacham observed in January 2018: “This is what government would look like without a president.”

That America should lurch along as though it has no president is disconcerting in good times; it is disastrous in a period of pandemic, police violence and public rebellion. Yet as Steve Benen argues in his new book, our current leaderlessness is no momentary aberration, the temporary consequence of an unexpected election result and a uniquely unqualified and incompetent president. Instead,Benen suggests, President Trump is the logical and perhaps inevitable culmination of more than a decade of atrophy within the party he leads.

“The Impostors: How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics” lays out Benen’s indictment that today’s Republicans are a “post-policy party.” The argument builds on, yet departs from, the political science concept of asymmetric polarization — the claim that the GOP has become more extremely conservative than the Democratic Party has become extremely progressive. Less concerned about ideological sorting, Benen shifts the focus to consider the parties’ approaches to policy and governance itself. Since the first decade of this century, he charges, the GOP has become indifferent to “the substance of governing.” On issue after issue, Republican leaders have abandoned policy details for campaign rhetoric, dismissed scientific evidence, eschewed substantive analysis and placed political point-scoring above leadership.

Despite its obvious partisan bent, “The Impostors” seeks to do more than ridicule, shame and condemn. At its heart, the book is a plea for saner heads to rescue the Republican Party from its current morass. Most American voters, Benen argues, “have some expectations that the nation’s two major parties will at least try to work cooperatively and with a sense of shared purpose.” If GOP officials can “recognize their post-policy shortcomings and take steps to correct them,” they can deliver on that wish for functional bipartisan governance.

At the same time, the book is clearly designed to enrage sympathetic readers. As a producer on “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC, Benen has a knack for comprehensive — if at times excessive — policy detail and a keen eye for intrigue and choice quotes. He has culled years of reporting to present a greatest-hits-style review of Republican intransigence, dissembling and willful ignorance. In eight policy-centered case studies, he painstakingly reconstructs the past 12 to 15 years of American political history on issues from health care and immigration to budgets and taxes, from Iran and North Korea to guns, abortion and civil rights.

Indeed, the chapters quickly fall into a predictable pattern. In the first half, during Barack Obama’s presidency, post-policy Republicans approach the chosen policy issue in bad faith. They demonstrate both factual ignorance (as when Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma threw a snowball on the Senate floor to try to disprove climate change) and rabid, knee-jerk opposition to Obama (like scheduling dozens of votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act without offering any replacement). And then, just when it seems that it can’t get any worse, the 2016 election happens and Trump deploys a combination of hatred, bravado and incoherence to make an already dysfunctional state of affairs immeasurably worse.

Adhering to standard journalistic practices, Benen refrains from stating that the president of the United States is objectively unintelligent. He nevertheless strongly implies it. On issue after issue, Benen cites Trump’s tweets, off-the-cuff remarks and interview transcripts that highlight contradictions, incongruities and other head-scratchers. In a typical example from 2016, then-candidate Trump appeared to simultaneously praise Obama’s record on deportation and promise to enforce the laws “perhaps with a lot more energy.” As Benen sums up: “Trump didn’t know or care about public policy. .?.?. He couldn’t answer questions about basic substantive details because he’d evidently given them very little thought.”

Through countless ripped-from-the-headlines examples, “The Impostors” paints a grim picture of a political party in which the kids have taken over the grown-up table and the responsible adults are nowhere to be seen. While Benen makes a strong case that the Republicans have become a post-policy party, he comes up short in offering a compelling explanation for why this occurred. Perhaps it is self-evident that political leaders reared on the anti-statist rhetoric of modern conservatism would take seriously tax reformer Grover Norquist’s famous wish to shrink government so much that he could “drown it in the bathtub.” Yet understanding this journey from slogans to a willful refusal to engage in the policy process is a crucial question of our time.

The modern conservative movement emerged in opposition to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal but split, merged and expanded in the decades since. Cold War geopolitics and the civil rights movement, and more recently the neoliberal turn and the rise of working-class populism, have all created opportunities and challenges for organized conservatives. And in the past two generations, as the ideological sorting of American politics reached its culmination, conservatism found a firm institutional home in the Republican Party.

For generations, historians and political scientists have argued over how to explain conservatism and the modern GOP. Important debates surround conservatives’ intellectual roots, their most effective mobilizing strategies, and the respective roles of ideology, class, racial status and material self-interest within conservative politics.

All these scholarly discussions, however contentious, start from one key assumption: that a clear set of traditions, values or priorities sits at the core of Republican politics. While scholars may disagree about the relative importance of the populists, the plutocrats, the racists and the moralists, they assume that the party’s actions can be explained by the interplay among them. This is precisely the presumption Benen challenges. Searching for an internal coherence, grand strategy or intellectual project is a fool’s errand, he concludes. When it comes to a post-policy party, there is no there there.

The Impostors:

How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics

By Steve Benen

William Morrow 374 pp.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/theres-only-one-political-party-in-the-us-the-other-one-has-descended-into-madness/

dave m salon

There is only one political party in the United States.

The _{first presidential debate}_ between Joe Biden and Donald Trump demonstrated with hideous clarity that the Democratic Party is currently running against not a conservative public policy agenda or a coherent philosophy of governance, but a _{collective psychotic episode}_, channeled through an authoritarian demagogue who is equally propelled and crippled by his own neuroses.Gore Vidal, one of America's best chroniclers of empire, once provided instruction to a British interviewer expressing confusion over the radical hostility Republicans showed toward Barack Obama, and the former president's inability to react with equal aggression: "Obama believes the Republican Party is a political party when in fact it's a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word 'conservative' you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They're not, they're fascists."

That mindset is now threatening to devour everything in its path, while its current figurehead, Donald Trump, _{provides encouragement}_ to violent extremists, giving the _{Proud Boys}_ — a militant far-right organization whose members have committed hate crimes — the chilling order, "Stand back and stand by."

The president's refusal to reject white supremacist movements elicited almost no clear condemnation from Republican commentators in the immediate aftermath of the debate. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Black Republican in the Senate (and one of only two in Congress), pathetically speculated that Trump "misspoke," and the few Republican members of Congress who spoke out against Trump's dangerous remarks equivocated by drawing comparisons to antifa, the right wing's favorite phantom hallucination.

Observers of political debate can now expect journalists and analysts to fall into the familiar pattern of throwing their arms in the air, articulating incredulity at Trump's malevolence and the Republican refusal to object, and conclude they are merely making a "political calculation," proceeding with caution so as not to alienate Trump's rabid base.

This is wrong.

It's certainly true that Republican officials are afraid of the bloodlust of the Trump cult. But it is also true, and more important to recognize, that Trump's hatred for democracy — which critics and commentators view as a liability is largely an asset for his supporters. Many of those who hold office at the national level, as evident from theghoulish statements of Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and others, along with the voters who applaud Trump's every act of cruelty, are glad to see him waging war on a system designed to give representation and power to a diverse group of citizens.

If Trump, Attorney General Bill Barr, and their enablers in Congress can succeed in subverting the presidential election, and "making America great again" by enshrining the minority rule of white Christians, the average Republican will celebrate. There is no other reasonable conclusion to draw from the fact that between 80 and 90 percent of Republicans approve of Trump's performance in office.

Among Democrats, there is an ongoing, interesting and important argument between moderate figures like Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, and progressives like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez regarding the expansion of the social welfare state, federal regulation of economic activity and the extent of measures necessary to curb inequality and climate change.

The Republican Party offers nothing to the American people. They have no policy agenda. Despite Trump's meaningless and inane boasting of nonexistent "plans," they articulate no agenda to address the converging crises of American life.

An American without health insurance, or who pays a high monthly premium for inadequate coverage, can expect nothing from the Republican Party. Working parents who cannot afford child care and have no disposable income after paying each month's bills can expect nothing from the Republican Party. A young college graduate unable to qualify for a mortgage because he has tens of thousands of dollars in student debt can expect nothing from the Republican Party. Poor children suffering through hunger and struggling to learn basic skills in a dysfunctional school can expect nothing from the Republican Party.

Finally, no one on planet Earth can expect anything from a Republican Party that is still in denial about climate change, even as it threatens to end all livable ecology within the next hundred years.

The Republican Party is actively anti-human. It does not qualify as a political party according to any definition of politics, no matter how elementary or esoteric.

In ancient Greece, politics roughly translated into "matters pertaining to the city." Aristotle wrote about the city as synonymous with "community," and posited that all communities are established for the sake of the good life. The ultimate end and ambition of the community is for happiness. It was this Aristotelian conception of politics that influenced the American founders to write the words "the pursuit of happiness," in the Declaration of Independence.

Absent from the Republican National Convention was any mention of anything — save for occasional references to the mysterious issue conservatives call "school choice" — that might remotely assist people to live happier or better lives. To the contrary, much of the Republican agenda is the obliteration of potential for happiness and the imposition of suffering on masses of immigrants, the poor, the sick, the disabled and anyone in a position outside the ownership class.

Even to the overwhelming majority of white Americans, the Republican Party offers nothing with the sole exception of rhetorical massages for their atrophied egos — the ignorant insistence that they are the "real Americans." Only white Republicans are satisfied with this sad recognition in place of an actual politics that might actually give them more opportunities for security, prosperity and dignity. Beyond the myth of white supremacy, Republican politicians on the national level give America various keys in which toscream the word "freedom," and instructions on how to fit as many flags as possible on one small stage.

The Democratic Party should accelerate its drive toward progressive policies, and champion candidates and officials who are fighting to pull their country into the more humane and civilized world, alongside the countries of Western Europe, Canada, Japan and other social democracies, which for all of their current struggles with xenophobia, escalating inequality and populist revolt still provide their citizens with basic social services. Even the moderates, while too meek in their advocacy for fairness and equality, and too cozy with multinational corporations, offer a political program responsive to the problems of ordinary citizens. The Affordable Care Act, as an example, provided 18 million Americans with health coverage for the first time, and protects anyone with a pre-existing condition.

For all their disappointments, the moderates in the Democratic Party are committed to the laws and norms of the democratic system of governance.Studies show that the Republican Party, on the other hand, is far off the spectrum of mainstream conservative parties in comparable countries. The Trump and McConnell-led GOP is more extreme, more authoritarian and more hostile toward democracy than _{any right-leaning party with significant power}_ in other free societies, even as anti-immigrant nationalist parties gain popularity in Italy, France and other European countries.[all immigr shut down us? ct?]

It isn't as if there are no longer competing ideologies of governance. One could easily imagine George Will debating an advocate of progressive economics. It is that national Republicans have abandoned any connection to previous notions of "conservative" politics, as Will himself has argued in recent columns.

Trump was unable to debate Joe Biden, and could only interrupt, mock and descend into a tantrum familiar to anyone with teaching experience at a middle school, because the Republicans have nothing to debate.Through their multi-decade commitment to shrinking government down so small that it can "drown in a bathtub," to use the words of Grover Norquist, what was once a reasonably coherent pro-business conservative party has arrived at its logical endpoint — a fascist power grab under the guise of an incoherent personality cult.

The late Stanley Crouch warned Republicans of their trouble in the late 1990s, explaining to Charlie Rose that you "cannot assemble a group of lunatics" to follow you without eventually following them into lunacy.

Welcome to America in 2020.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/they-just-want-to-watch-the-world-burn-psychological-analysis-reveals-the-14-key-traits-that-explain-trump-supporters/

as he himself said even before he won the presidential election in 2016, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Unfortunately for the American people, this wild-sounding claim appears to be truer than not, at least for the majority of his supporters, and that is something that should disturb us. It should also motivate us to explore the science underlying such peculiar human behavior, so we can learn from it, and potentially inoculate against it.

In all fairness, we should recognize that lying is sadly not uncommon for politicians on both sides of the political aisle, but the frequency and magnitude of the current president’s lies should have us all wondering why they haven’t destroyed his political career, and instead perhaps strengthened it. Similarly, we should be asking why his inflammatory rhetoric and numerous scandals haven’t sunk him. We are talking about a man who was caught on tape saying, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy.” Politically surviving that video is not normal, or anything close to it, and we can be sure that such a revelation would have been the end of Barack Obama or George Bush had it surfaced weeks before the election.

While dozens of psychologists have analyzed Trump, to explain the man’s political invincibility, it is more important to understand the minds of his staunch supporters. While there have been various popular articles that have illuminated a multitude of reasons for his unwavering support, there appears to be no comprehensive analysis that contains all of them. Since there seems to be a real demand for this information, I have tried to provide that analysis below.

Some of the explanations come from a 2017 review paperpublished in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology by the psychologist and UC Santa Cruz professor Thomas Pettigrew. Others have been put forth as far back as 2016 by myself, a cognitive neuroscience and psychology researcher, in various articles and blog posts for publications like Psychology Today. A number of these were inspired by insights from psychologists like Sheldon Solomon, who laid the groundwork for the influential Terror Management Theory, and David Dunning, who did the same for the Dunning-Kruger effect.

this list will begin with the more benign reasons for Trump’s intransigent support, and as the list goes on, the explanations become increasingly worrisome, and toward the end, border on the pathological. It should be strongly emphasized that not all Trump supporters are racist, mentally vulnerable, or fundamentally bad people. It can be detrimental to society when those with degrees and platforms try to demonize their political opponents or paint them as mentally ill when they are not. That being said, it is just as harmful to pretend that there are not clear psychological and neural factors that underlie much of Trump supporters’ unbridled allegiance.

The psychological phenomena described below mostly pertain to those supporters who would follow Trump off a cliff. These are the people who will stand by his side no matter what scandals come to light, or what sort of evidence for immoral and illegal behavior surfaces.

Practicality Trumps Morality

For some wealthy people, it’s simply a financial matter. Trump offers tax cuts for the rich and wants to do away with government regulation that gets in the way of businessmen making money, even when that regulation exists for the purpose of protecting the environment. Others, like blue-collared workers, like the fact that the president is trying to bring jobs back to America from places like China. Some people who genuinely are not racist (those who are will be discussed later) simply want stronger immigration laws because they know that a country with open borders is not sustainable. These people have put their practical concerns above their moral ones. To them, it does not matter if he’s a vagina-grabber, or if his campaign team colluded with Russia to help him defeat his political opponent. It is unknown whether these people are eternally bound to Trump in the way others are, but we may soon find out if the Mueller investigation is allowed to come to completion.

The Brain’s Attention System Is More Strongly Engaged by Trump

According to a study that monitored brain activity while participants watched 40 minutes of political ads and debate clips from the presidential candidates, Donald Trump is unique in his ability to keep the brain engaged. While Hillary Clinton could only hold attention for so long, Trump kept both attention and emotional arousal high throughout the viewing session. This pattern of activity was seen even when Trump made remarks that individuals didn’t necessarily agree with. His showmanship and simple language clearly resonate with some at a visceral level.

America’s Obsession with Entertainment and Celebrities

Essentially, the loyalty of Trump supporters may in part be explained by America’s addiction with entertainment and reality TV. To some, it doesn’t matter what Trump actually says because he’s so amusing to watch. With the Donald, you are always left wondering what outrageous thing he is going to say or do next. He keeps us on the edge of our seat, and for that reason, some Trump supporters will forgive anything he says. They are happy as long as they are kept entertained.

“Some Men Just Want to Watch the World Burn.”

Some intelligent people who know better are supporting Trump simply to be rebellious or to introduce chaos into the political system. They may have such distaste for the establishment and democrats like Hillary Clinton that their support for Trump is a symbolic middle finger directed at Washington. These people do not have their priorities straight, and perhaps have other issues, like an innate desire to troll others, or a deranged obsession with schadenfreude.

The Fear-Factor: Conservatives Are More Sensitive to Threat

Science has unequivocally shown that the conservative brain has an exaggerated fear response when faced with stimuli that may be perceived as threatening. A 2008 study in the journal Science found that conservatives have a stronger physiological reaction to startling noises and graphic images compared to liberals. A brain-imaging study published in Current Biology revealed that those who lean right politically tend to have a larger amygdala — a structure that is electrically active during states of fear and anxiety. And a 2014 fMRI study found that it is possible to predict whether someone is a liberal or conservative simply by looking at their brain activity while they view threatening or disgusting images, such as mutilated bodies. Specifically, the brains of self-identified conservatives generated more activity overall in response to the disturbing images.

These brain responses are automatic, and not influenced by logic or reason. As long as Trump continues his fear mongering by constantly portraying Muslims and Hispanic immigrants as imminent dangers, many conservative brains will involuntarily light up like light bulbs being controlled by a switch. Fear keeps his followers energized and focused on safety. And when you think you’ve found your protector, you become less concerned with offensive and divisive remarks.

The Power of Mortality Reminders and Perceived Existential Threat

A well-supported theory from social psychology, known as Terror Management Theory, explains why Trump’s fear mongering is doubly effective. The theory is based on the fact that humans have a unique awareness of their own mortality. The inevitably of one’s death creates existential terror and anxietythat is always residing below the surface. In order to manage this terror, humans adopt cultural worldviews — like religions, political ideologies, and national identities — that act as a buffer by instilling life with meaning and value.

Terror Management Theory predicts that when people are reminded of their own mortality, which happens with fear mongering, they will more strongly defend those who share their worldviews and national or ethnic identity, and act out more aggressively towards those who do not. Hundreds of studies have confirmed this hypothesis, and some have specifically shown that triggering thoughts of death tends to shift people towards the right.

Not only do death reminders increase nationalism, they influence actual voting habits in favor of more conservative presidential candidates. And more disturbingly, in a study with American students, scientists found that making mortality salient increased support for extreme military interventions by American forcesthat could kill thousands of civilians overseas. Interestingly, the effect was present only in conservatives, which can likely be attributed to their heightened fear response.

By constantly emphasizing existential threat, Trump creates a psychological condition that makes the brain respond positively rather than negatively to bigoted statements and divisive rhetoric. Liberals and Independents who have been puzzled over why Trump hasn’t lost supporters after such highly offensive comments need look no further than Terror Management Theory.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Humans Often Overestimate Their Political Expertise

Some support Donald Trump do so out of ignorance — basically they are under-informed or misinformed about the issues at hand. When Trump tells them that crimeis skyrocketing in the United States, or that the economy is the worst it’s ever been, they simply take his word for it.

The Dunning-Kruger effect explains that the problem isn’t just that they are misinformed; it’s that they are completely unaware that they are misinformed, which creates a double burden.

Studies have shown that people who lack expertise in some area of knowledge often have a cognitive bias that prevents them from realizing that they lack expertise. As psychologist David Dunning puts it in an op-ed for Politico, “The knowledge and intelligence that are required to be good at a task are often the same qualities needed to recognize that one is not good at that task — and if one lacks such knowledge and intelligence, one remains ignorant that one is not good at the task. This includes political judgment.” These people cannot be reached because they mistakenly believe they are the ones who should be reaching others.

Relative Deprivation — A Misguided Sense of Entitlement

Relative deprivation refers to the experience of being deprived of something to which one believes they are entitled. It is the discontent felt when one compares their position in life to others who they feel are equal or inferior but have unfairly had more success than them.

Common explanations for Trump’s popularity among non-bigoted voters involve economics. There is no doubt that some Trump supporters are simply angry that American jobs are being lost to Mexico and China, which is certainly understandable, although these loyalists often ignore the fact that some of these careers are actually being lost due to the accelerating pace of automation.

These Trump supporters are experiencing relative deprivation, and are common among the swing states like Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. This kind of deprivation is specifically referred to as “relative,” as opposed to “absolute,” because the feeling is often based on a skewed perception of what one is entitled to.

Lack of Exposure to Dissimilar Others

Intergroup contact refers to contact with members of groups that are outside one’s own, which has been experimentally shown to reduce prejudice. As such, it’s important to note that there is growing evidence that Trump’s white supporters have experienced significantly less contact with minorities than other Americans. For example, a 2016 study found that “…the racial and ethnic isolation of Whites at the zip-code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.” This correlation persisted while controlling for dozens of other variables. In agreement with this finding, the same researchers found that support for Trump increased with the voters’ physical distance from the Mexican border. These racial biases might be more implicit than explicit, the latter which is addressed in #14.

Trump’s Conspiracy Theories Target the Mentally Vulnerable

While the conspiracy theory crowd — who predominantly support Donald Trump and crackpot allies like Alex Jones and the shadowy QAnon — may appear to just be an odd quirk of modern society, the truth is that many of them suffer from psychological illnesses that involve paranoia and delusions, such as schizophrenia, or are at least vulnerable to them, like those with schizotypy personalities.

The link between schizotypy and belief in conspiracy theories is well-established, and a recent study published in the journal Psychiatry Research has demonstrated that it is still very prevalent in the population. The researchers found that those who were more likely to believe in outlandish conspiracy theories, such as the idea that the U.S. government created the AIDs epidemic, consistently scored high on measures of “odd beliefs and magical thinking.” One feature of magical thinking is a tendency to make connections between things that are actually unrelated in reality.

Donald Trump and his media allies target these people directly. All one has to do is visit alt-right websites and discussion boards to see the evidence for such manipulation.

Trump Taps into the Nation’s Collective Narcissism

Collective narcissism is an unrealistic shared belief in the greatness of one’s national group. It often occurs when a group who believes it represents the ‘true identity’ of a nation — the ‘ingroup,’ in this case White Americans — perceives itself as being disadvantaged compared to outgroups who are getting ahead of them ‘unrightfully.’ This psychological phenomenon is related to relative deprivation (#6).

A study published last year in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science found a direct link between national collective narcissism and support for Donald Trump. This correlation was discovered by researchers at the University of Warsaw, who surveyed over 400 Americans with a series of questionnaires about political and social beliefs. Where individual narcissism causes aggressiveness toward other individuals, collective narcissism involves negative attitudes and aggression toward ‘outsider’ groups (outgroups), who are perceived as threats.

Trump Taps into the Nation’s Collective Narcissism

Donald Trump exacerbates collective narcissism with his anti-immigrant, anti-elitist, and strongly nationalistic rhetoric. By referring to his supporters, an overwhelmingly white group, as being “true patriots” or “real Americans,” he promotes a brand of populism that is the epitome of “identity politics,” a term that is usually associated with the political left. Left-wing identity politics, as misguided as they may sometimes be, are generally aimed at achieving equality, while the right-wing brand is based on a belief that one nationality and race is superior or entitled to success and wealth for no other reason than identity.

The Desire to Want to Dominate Others

Social dominance orientation (SDO) — which is distinct but related to authoritarian personality syndrome (#13) — refers to people who have a preference for the societal hierarchy of groups, specifically with a structure in which the high-status groups have dominance over the low-status ones. Those with SDO are typically dominant, tough-minded, and driven by self-interest.

In Trump’s speeches, he appeals to those with SDO by repeatedly making a clear distinction between groups that have a generally higher status in society (White), and those groups that are typically thought of as belonging to a lower status (immigrants and minorities). A 2016 survey study of 406 American adults published last year in the journal Personality and Individual Differences found that those who scored high on both SDO and authoritarianism were those who intended to vote for Trump in the election.

Authoritarian Personality Syndrome

Authoritarianism refers to the advocacy or enforcement of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom, and is commonly associated with a lack of concern for the opinions or needs of others. Authoritarian personality syndrome — a well-studied and globally-prevalent condition — is a state of mind that is characterized by belief in total and complete obedience to one’s authority. Those with the syndrome often display aggression toward outgroup members, submissiveness to authority, resistance to new experiences, and a rigid hierarchical view of society. The syndrome is often triggered by fear, making it easy for leaders who exaggerate threat or fear monger to gain their allegiance.

Although authoritarian personality is found among liberals, it is more common among the right-wingaround the world.President Trump’s speeches, which are laced with absolutist terms like “losers” and “complete disasters,” are naturally appealing to those with the syndrome.

While research showed that Republican voters in the U.S. scored higher than Democrats on measures of authoritarianism before Trump emerged on the political scene, a 2016 Politico survey found that high authoritarians greatly favored then-candidate Trump, which led to a correct prediction that he would win the election, despite the polls saying otherwise

Racism and Bigotry

It would be grossly unfair and inaccurate to say that every one of Trump’s supporters have prejudice against ethnic and religious minorities, but it would be equally inaccurate to say that many do not. It is a well-known fact that the Republican party, going at least as far back to Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” used tactics that appealed to bigotry, such as lacing speeches with “dog whistles” — code words that signaled prejudice toward minorities that were designed to be heard by racists but no one else.

While the dog whistles of the past were subtler, Trump’s signaling is sometimes shockingly direct. There’s no denying that he routinely appeals to racist and bigoted supporters when he calls Muslims “dangerous” and Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “murderers,” often in a blanketed fashion. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a recent study has shown that support for Trump is correlated with a standard scale of modern racism.

Bobby Azarian is a neuroscientist affiliated with George Mason University and a freelance journalist. His research has been published in journals such as Cognition & Emotion and Human Brain Mapping, and he has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Psychology Today, and Scientific American. Follow him on Twitter @BobbyAzarian.

unprecedented no platform = whatever trump wants? --> ?

house GOP unveils flimsy, single-paged ‘Commitment to America’ that proves party’s unofficial slogan is ‘fiscal responsibility be damned’

Kerry Eleveld / Daily Kos September 16, 2020

You can’t make this stuff up: After the Republican National Committee entirely skipped over passing a party platform this year at its convention, House Republicans have followed up with a flimsy one-page…

wi scotus, roger coup

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-gop-is-staging-chaos-on-the-way-to-a-coup/

d a wamo

Two news stories story that almost speak for themselves without the need for commentary.

First, the 4-3 conservative majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court has made a bizarre, nonsensical ruling that will throw Wisconsin’s entire election into disarray for no good reason.

Then the Wisconsin Supreme Court stepped in. On Thursday afternoon, by a 4–3 vote divided along partisan lines, the court issued a strange, cryptic order that could throw the election into chaos. The conservative majority directed the Wisconsin Elections Commission to turn over a massive amount of information it did not actually have. These justices then halted the mailing of more absentee ballots while they consider nullifying every ballot that has been printed or mailed and forcing the state to start over. Their stunning eleventh-hour intervention could force election officials into an impossible position: either comply with the court’s order or violate both state and federal law.

Essentially, the Green Party failed to submit proper documents in Wisconsin. They refused to state reasons, or to seek redress in a timely manner. Then they asked the state at the last minute to place the Green Party on the ballot, anyway, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of ballots had already gone out to voters.

A responsible court would have rejected this challenge for two reasons: Hawkins and Walker waited an unreasonably long time to bring it, and it has no plausible legal basis.But instead of dismissing the case, the infamously irresponsible court ordered the commission to reveal who has requested absentee ballots, who has been mailed a ballot already, and when these ballots were mailed. It also demanded to know who requested the ballots to be printed, implying the existence of some conspiracy to rush them out. In the meantime, the conservative majority effectively shut down the state’s election machinery, suspending the printing of more absentee ballots. Its order suggests that four justices are seriously considering a decision in favor of the Green Party.Such a ruling would compel the state to throw out every existing ballot and begin the entire, grueling, monthslong process anew.

There is no plausible rationale for the decision, and no way to implement it in a manner that won’t throw the election into chaos. The Wisconsin Supreme Court was made very well aware of this, and the conservative Koch-purchased majority choose this course of action, anyway. Nor was the cynical Green Party acting alone:

Hawkins suggested in an interview that Trump supporters had helped the Green Party ticket with its legal claim before the state Supreme Court. The party’s petition was filed by attorneys from the Milwaukee-based von Briesen & Roper law firm, which has a history of representing Wisconsin Republicans.

“You get help where you can find it,” Hawkins told The Washington Post when asked whether Republicans had financed the legal action. “They have their reasons and we have ours.”

If the presidential election is at all close, everything may hinge on the outcome in Wisconsin. And if Wisconsin is beset by legal challenges from thousands of voters casting legally received ballots prior to a court order demanding that different ballots be sent, even if those ballots go out later than the legally mandated deadline, you have a recipe for a chaos of litigation that will ultimately only be resolved by Justice Roberts of the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s pardoned felonious close advisor and Russia-Wikileaks conduit Roger Stone just told Alex Jones that Trump should seize total power in a coup should he lose the election:

Roger Stone is making baseless accusations of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and is urging Donald Trump to consider several draconian measures to stay in power, including having federal authorities seize ballots in Nevada, having FBI agents and Republican state officials “physically” block voting under the pretext of preventing voter fraud, using martial law or the Insurrection Act to carry out widespread arrests, and nationalizing state police forces.

We know that Trump listens to Stone as the closest person he still has in his orbit to his beloved Roy Cohn, and cares enough about him to have sprung him out of jail. And he’s recommending this course of action:

Beyond Nevada, Stone recommended that Trump consider several actions to retain his power. Stone recommended that Trump appoint former Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA) as a special counsel “with the specific task of forming an Election Day operation using the FBI, federal marshals, and Republican state officials across the country to be prepared to file legal objections and if necessary to physically stand in the way of criminal activity.”

Stone also urged Trump to consider declaring “martial law” or invoking the Insurrection Act and then using his powers to arrest Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, “the Clintons” and “anybody else who can be proven to be involved in illegal activity.”

Even if Trump doesn’t actively take any of these measures–and there is a great deal of evidence that he might–right-wing groups may well take some of these matters into their own hands.

The context for all of this upheaval is that conservatives know they have lost the argument and the culture. The nation’s greatest problems, from police racism to inequality to climate change to the pandemic itself, simply do not lend themselves to conservative “solutions.” Conservatism itself would have to change to adapt to the moment, and it is unwilling to do so.

Meanwhile, the Right is losing the culture wars, evangelicals are declining as a percentage of the population, and older social conservatives are aging out of the electorate, replaced by young progressives. White supremacists know that whites are declining as a percentage of the population, Black Lives Matter is broadly popular, and the country is also slowly coming to grips with some of the consequences of toxic masculinity. Universal healthcare, taxing the rich and even previously radical solutions like an income floor funded by taxes on Wall Street speculation are increasingly mainstream.

And finally, they know that the consequence of McConnell’s brinksmanship and Trump’s norm destruction is that Democrats are increasingly unafraid to actually wield power and govern in a way that finally maximizes majoritarian power: eliminating the filibuster, adding states to the union, bypassing the Electoral College, changing the composition and size of the courts, enacting broad voter rights and gerrymandering reforms, and much else. If they do, the conservative movement as it currently exists may not be able to hold national power again–not because the Democrats staged a coup, but rather because they simply undercut the apartheid structures that prevented the voice of the majority from being heard and implemented into law.

The conservative response to all this is to create as much chaos as possible, with a view toward seizing power in a coup–thereby short-circuiting the consequences of failing to secure the legitimacy of popular will.

The Republican Party has become the Chaos Party. And it will take all citizen hands on deck to resist them, overwhelm them at the ballot box, and move the country forward in a stable and more progressive direction.

libtard reductionism:

north Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis — viewed as one of the most vulnerable GOP senators in 2020 — has found himself in an uncomfortable situation after a staffer’s excessively honest comments to a constituent were caught on tape.

As first reported by WRAL, Bev Veals of Carolina Beach, a three-time cancer survivor, called her senator out of fear that her health insurance was at risk. She has previously faced medical bankruptcy and difficulty accessing care, WRAL said, andher husband was furloughed because of the pandemic. She wanted assurance that she’d have coverage if she lost her health insurance.

But Tillis’s office wasn’t helpful. While speaking to a dismissive staffer, Veals began to record their conversation, which was provided to WRAL and can be viewed above.

“You’re saying that, if you can’t afford it, you don’t get to have it?” she asked. “That includes health care?'

"Yeah, just like if I want to go to the store and buy a new dress shirt. If I can’t afford that dress shirt, I don’t get to get it,” the staffer explained.

“But health care is something that people need!” Veals said, clearly alarmed. “Especially if they have cancer.”

“Well, you got to find a way to get it,” the staffer said.

“So what do I do in the meantime, sir?” she asked, not hiding the irritation in her voice.

The response was snide: “Sounds like something you’re going to have to figure it out.”

Tillis’s office has apologized after Veals came forward about the exchange: “The way Mrs. Veals was talked to by a staff assistant in our Washington office was completely inappropriate and violates the code of conduct Senator Tillis has for his staff, which is why immediate disciplinary action has been taken.”

But the truth is that, insensitive and rude as the staffer’s comments to Veals were, they were simply a much more honest reflection of the Republican Party’s policies on health care than officials typically admit. But the truth isn’t hard to see. The Trump administration is currently arguing that the Supreme Court should overturn all of Obamacare, throwing millions of people off their insurance and invalidating protections for pre-existing conditions, along with other provisions that protect patients.

The unofficial Republican Party policy, though, is to lie about this fact. Trump is constantly telling voters that he protected pre-existing conditions — even though he has done nothing to ensure they’re covered — and that he’ll continue to keep these protections in place, even though he’s trying to destroy them.

The Tillis staffer, apparently, didn’t get the message. He has imbibed the attitude at the heart of the GOP’s policy preferences. His mistake was being honest with a member of the public about the policy.

Veals, for one, doesn’t seem deceived by the office’s apology. And that’s because she still hasn’t gotten the original answer to the question she called about.

“We need our legislators to listen to us and help us solve this problem because it’s not just my problem – not being able to afford health care,” she told WRAL. “It’s the problem of hundreds and thousands of North Carolinians.”

North Carolina is one of 12 states in the U.S. that has not adopted Medicaid expansion, a policy that would help cover people like Veals if they lost their insurance. Tillis opposes Medicaid expansion.

In a statement to WRAL, Tillis dishonestly defended his position:

“When he was Speaker of the House [in North Carolina],” the statement continues, “Senator Tillis inherited a Medicaid program that was mismanaged and plagued with overspending and inefficiency. Expanding Medicaid at the time would have been a promise that the state wouldn’t have been able to keep, requiring cuts to the program that would have harmed patients that states like New York and California have already been forced to make. Instead, Senator Tillis worked to strengthen the state’s Medicaid program to deliver quality health care to patients, and the reason the North Carolina is in a position to discuss expansion is because of Senator Tillis’ leadership.”

These claims are in spectacularly bad faith. Medicaid expansion has been wildly successful across the United States — it can even save states money. And claiming to be concerned about “cuts to the program” that harm patients is absurd when patients like Veals can be left with no coverage at all. It’s even more pernicious, though, because the recent stressed on state budgets in the wake of the pandemic come from the Senate Republicans’ refusal to provide recovery funds to state and local governments, as Democrats have sought to do.

It’s these comments — far more than a staffer’s rudeness — that should be the real scandal.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/beware-republicans-bearing-gifts-heres-why-this-gop-must-be-destroyed-yes-even-the-never-trumpers

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/why-trumps-denials-of-his-contempt-for-the-military-are-likely-just-more-lies-and-why-it-matters/

Donald Trump is likely lying, of course, in denying a new report by Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic that accuses the president of calling the fallen American soldiers of World War I “suckers” and “losers.”

We know this because of Trump’s pathological pattern of telling lies, first of all. But also because in his tweeted denials, Trump now claims he never called the Sen. John McCain a “loser” for being captured during the Vietnam War, even though there’s a recording of him doing so, in the same rant during which he declared, “I like people who weren’t captured.” Trump was so proud of this smear of the late Arizona Republican that he tweeted it out at the time.

Beyond his implausible but vehement denials, Trump’s other tell is that he falsely accuses others of doing what he himself has done. In this case, Trump has spent years bashing athletes who kneel during the national anthem, falsely accusing them of dishonoring veterans and war dead. In truth, the tradition — started by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin **Kaepernick**— was formed with input from a former Green Beretas a way to speak out against racism and police brutality while still honoring the troops.

This is the same guy who found out that Russians were offering bounties to Afghan fighters who killed American soldiers and shrugged it off. Hetold a grieving widow of a U.S. Army sergeant that “he knew what he signed up for”, and then accused her of lying when she spoke out about it. He smeared the family of Army Capt. Humayun Khan, who was killed in action in Iraq, when Khan’s parentsspoke at the Democratic National Convention. In between Trump’s badly acted efforts at pretending to care about the troops, his actual contempt has often shown itself.

all of this is why it would be unwise to hold your breath waiting for this story to put a dent in that stubborn 41 to 43% approval rating, below which Trump has rarely dipped throughout his entire presidency. Nor will Trump’s voters be fussed about the Washington Post adding to Goldberg’s reporting with a story sourced to a “former senior administration official” that Trump had “told senior advisers that he didn’t understand why the U.S. government placed such value on finding soldiers missing in action because they had performed poorly and gotten caught and deserved what they got.”

The Trump base, which is stable enough to keep Trump within stealing range of the 2020 election,loves to talk about how patriotic they are and to make a big show out of how much they supposedly love the troops. As this unquestioning loyalty to Trump makes clear, it’s all nonsense.Given a choice between white supremacy and support for the men and women of the military, Trump voters will pick racism every single time.

As with Trump, much of the flag-hugging and declarations of love for “our troops” is just an act for the conservative base. As with the showy piety of the Christian right and the outrage over imaginary pedophilia play-acted by QAnon adherents, the ostentatious “honoring” of troops is just another performance meant to put a moralistic gloss on the deeply immoral ideology of the right.

This was blatant in the way Trump and his supporters weaponized their phony love of the troops to bash Black Lives Matter protesters in pro sports.

The real reason conservatives are angry at Kaepernick, or other athletes who kneel during the national anthem — who are predominantly but not exclusively Black — is plain old racism. Conservatives are loath to admit out loud that it bugs them to see athletes show support for racial equality, since admitting that comes uncomfortably close to admitting to racist beliefs. Instead, they pretend to be outraged about the supposed insult to “the troops,” even though there has never been an insult to the troops embedded in this somber and respectful form of protest.

The very notion that there’s anything disrespectful to the troops about demanding racial equality also overlooks the long history of how people of color have served with honor in the military, while continuing to face discrimination and abuse at home. A number of civil rights activists in the 50s and 60s were World War II veterans motivated by anger over how much they had sacrificed for America, only to return home to be treated, as activist Hosea Williams once said, “like a common dog.” The Tuskegee Airmen, a predominantly Black group of fighter and bomber pilots in World War II, were as famous for the work they did to desegregate the military and fight for civil rights in civilian lifeas they were for their feats of bravery during the war.

Currently, 43% of active duty military arepeople of color. There is no conflict between the fight for racial equality and supporting the troops. Indeed, doing the latter requires the former.

Right-wing pieties about flag, troops and country have often been a bunch of hot air meant to disguise what is really forceful opposition to what are supposed to be shared American values of freedom, justice and equality. Consider how many people on the right love the Confederate battle flag, valorizing an act of rebellion in the name of racism and chattel slavery that led to the bloodiest conflict in American history. In his typical ham-fisted fashion, Donald Trump simply lays bare how much of right-wing patriotism is pageantry designed to wrap racist impulses in the flag.

As I wrote on Thursday, polling data shows that the majority of Republicans have turned their backs on American values, the ones our troops take an oath to protect, such as freedom, equality and the rule of law. If protecting white supremacy requires abandoning bedrock American values, such as the universal right to vote, so-called conservatives seem distressingly eager to do so.

There’s literally nothing Trump can say or do to insult the troops, even those who have died in service to the nation, that would cause his supporters to turn away him. What’s become clear is that they never really believed that stuff in the first place. This is and always was about their commitment to racism, a commitment they believe — reasonably enough — that Trump shares. As long as he keeps delivering on that toxic current in American history and American life, his supporters will forgive him for everything else.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/trumps-church-of-white-masculinity/

the week before last, we watched Americans respond to the altar call at the church of white masculinity. During the Republican National Convention, speakers humbly prostrated themselves at the foot of white masculinity, arguing that the rejection of a white male savior would be our ruin. The disciples of white masculinity preached that feminists were coming for the unborn, the LBGTQIA community was coming for our children and racial minorities were coming for the rest of us. Furthermore, the RNC paraded women and speakers of color to state that President Trump was not racist, he was right —and those who refused to convert were deviants seeking the destruction of the nation.

This altar call is not much different from Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” or D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” which both portrayed white men as the saviors of civilization. Today it manifests itself in the sanctification of white men who embrace their privilege with religious zeal. In Rep. Ted Yoho’s flaccid apology for verbally abusing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, he cloaked his attack in holiness, stating, “I cannot apologize for my passion, or for loving my God, my family and my country.”

The disciples harken back to a perceived golden age of America, when the racial and gender power structure were correctly set, before the chaos caused by the recognition of the rights of racial minorities, women and the LBGTQIA community. This threat to white masculinity has intensified with the election of the nation’s first Black president, a female speaker of the House, a Latina on the Supreme Court, marriage equality, the MeToo movement, and the possibility of a female president. The alt-right and neo-Nazis embody these fears, arguing that white America is losing to immigrants and racial minorities and questioning the manhood of any white people who criticize them.

A 2016 PRRI/Atlantic survey finds a quarter of whites (24.9%) believe that diversity has come at their expense and that society has become too soft and feminine.Further, 93.1% of whites who agree with both of those statements reported voting for Trump. More than a third of white evangelicals (35.6%) agreed with both statements, followed by less than a quarter of white Catholics (23.7%) and mainline Protestants (23.1%).

when examined along gender lines, the data show white evangelical men (45.1%) are significantly more likely to agree with these statements than their female counterparts (24.5%). Among women, however, white evangelical women are significantly more likely to agree with these statements than white mainline Protestant women (19.8%) and white Catholic women (12.1%).

As Kristin Kobes Du Mez argues in her recent book, “Jesus and John Wayne,” white evangelical culture has focused on the declining sanctity of white manhood. This is why Donald Trump captured 78% of the white evangelical vote in the face of numerous claims of sexual misconduct and racism. And, in the 2017 Alabama Senate race, former judge Roy Moore, who had also been accused of sexual misconduct, received 80% of the white evangelical vote.

As ordained bishop of the church of white masculinity, President Trump has attempted to impose his masculinity by questioning the masculinity of his male opponents and showing disgust for his female adversaries. In the face of a call for social justice, the president has sacrificed free speech at the altar by dispatching federal officers and troops to stop peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park for a photo-op in front of St. John’s Church. He proclaimed the sanctity of his white masculinity by rebuking the suggestions of scientists and downplaying the harm of the COVID-19 virus. He resisted wearing a mask to show the world his strength. In suit his followers have harassed protesters and questioned the masculinity of those who take precautions against the virus.

The actions of Trump and his worshippers, among most other Americans, are considered deplorable. At the church of white masculinity, these behaviors are saintly.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/scientists-explain-why-the-wealthy-struggle-with-empathy/

matt r salon

a new study reveals that people from higher income backgrounds struggle with certain aspects of empathy when compared to individuals who have lower incomes, who are better at reading people’s emotions.

The research paper, which was published in the “Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,” asked individuals from different class backgrounds to infer others’ emotional states by looking at images of their eyes and to attempt to assume the visual perspective of other people.

The findings suggest that our socioeconomic status may affect the way we see and interact with other people.

Researchers know that there are many things can make it difficult for one person to effectively empathize with another, including neurological conditions like autism and psychological illnesses like schizophrenia. In their study, researchers Pia Dietze of the University of California, Irvine and Eric D. Knowles of New York University attempted to better understand how social class specifically influences Theory of Mind.

"[Theory of Mind] encompasses a range of competencies that together enable people to solve problems in a world full of other minds,” the authors explain. “Examples of ToM include our ability to infer people’s emotions, understand others’ visual perspectives, trace behavior to actors’ underlying intentions and desires, and grasp the fact that others’ beliefs might misportray reality. We focus on two facets of [Theory of Mind] in this work: emotion perception and visual perspective taking.”

The authors concluded, both from their research and by analyzing previous research (some of which they felt was unreliable), that “higher social class is associated with attenuated [theory of mind] performance,” with individuals from higher income backgrounds struggling more to ascertain the emotions and empathize with the visual points of view of other people. One possible explanation for this is that “lower-class individuals—owing to their greater levels of cultural interdependence—may appraise other human beings as more relevant to their goals and well-being than do higher-class individuals.”This would also help people from lower classes to “spontaneously calculate other people’s perspectives.”

Dietze and Knowles also point out that their conclusion “stands in clear contrast to the common discourse concerning neurocognitive deficits among the lower classes.” They also note that “decades of research documents that lower-class individuals are more likely to exhibit attentional deficits and display impaired working-memory performance. The evidence provided here suggests that these deficits may be domain-specific. Indeed, we show that lower-class performance outcomes are reversed in the social realm.” The term “domain-specific” refers to the theory of learning which holds that there are multiple forms of intelligence rather than a single way to assess where one has cognitive strengths and/or weaknesses.

This is not the only new research which sheds light on how being wealthy can lead to harmful psychological behaviors and personal habits. In July a different study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that individuals from affluent backgrounds would often deny their class privilege by “increasing their claims of personal hardships and hard work, to cover [their] privilege in a veneer of meritocracy.”

“Flying in the face of meritocratic prescriptions, evidence of privilege threatens recipients’ self-regard by calling into question whether they deserve their successes,” the authors wrote in their study. “Evidence of class privilege demonstrates that many life outcomes are determined by factors not attributable to individuals’ efforts alone, but are caused in part by systemic inequities that privilege some over others.”

Another study, this one published in June in the journal Nature Communications, argued that the consumption patterns of the affluent are so egregiously unsustainable from an ecological standpoint that only a concerted effort by the wealthy to consume less can prevent catastrophes like global warming, pollution and biodiversity loss.

“The affluent citizens of the world are responsible for most environmental impacts and are central to any future prospect of retreating to safer environmental conditions,” the authors wrote, adding that “existing societies, economies and cultures incite consumption expansion and the structural imperative for growth in competitive market economies inhibits necessary societal change.” They advocated “a global and rapid decoupling of detrimental impacts from economic activity,” pointing out that “theworld’s top 10% of income earners are responsible for between 25 and 43% of environmental impact” while “the world’s bottom 10% income earners exert only around 3–5% of environmental impact.”

one upon a time, LBJ was able to harness the pressure of CRM, and maybe 60's ctr-culture, and perhaps the martyrdom of JFK, MLK and RFK to jam thru civil rights and voter rights acts, as well the the Great Society, oft wrongly seen as a failure; it did affirmative/ active programs that gave poor ppl money, education, job training...[RR cut housing 80? rick p WITH pod 920)

Later affirm action lost in ct? Bakke? UC? 187? RR attack mythical welfare queen, so direct assistance became taboo [BC did welfare reform, 3 strikes superpredators?]

But must at least be seen to do something for inner city POC, so we get opportunity/empowerment zone, tax breaks for real estate dev in crappy parts of town;

so not giving cash to poor ppl, but only a tax/break incentive to competent rich white guys, then the benefits will tricke down on poor ppl. // urban renewal? gentrification? sports stadiums?

NOW 920 Wheeler needs cover because the massive EPA rollback on regs clearly hurt POC, especially kids, so extends paul driessen Green blk death energy poverty BS or maybe more generally and slightly less cynically, cut red tape will allow economy to thrive, blk ppl will get some of that $, and can then afford to move away from toxins?

...“Communities that deal with the worst pollution in this country—and tend to be low-income and minority—face multiple environmental problems that need solving,” Wheeler said. He suggested President Donald Trump’s “opportunity zones” plan—recognized by expertsas a giveaway to the rich—as a remedy to environmental injustice....

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/slow-motion-mass-hysteria-at-the-republican-convention-as-trump-senses-doom/

convention unhinged from reality, WH backdrop then fireworks

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/republicans-are-running-on-a-big-lie-and-its-getting-people-ed/

Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in a modest influx of New Yorkers to my town, which is located about 90 miles Northwest of the city. My new next-door neighbors just moved up from Brooklyn this month. As one of them told me the other day, they made the move because they are now able to work remotely, and it made sense to get out of the city because they could rent an entire three-bedroom house for less than they had been paying for a cramped two-bedroom apartment.

Speaking over the fence that separates our backyards, my new neighbor explained that because of the outbreak, she and her partner weren’t comfortable enjoying the city’s restaurants, nightlife and cultural attractions–those that remain open–and said, “there’s no point paying a fortune in rent to sit at home and watch Netflix.” They’re now considering getting a dog.

Crime didn’t enter the picture, and with good reason. According to NYPD data, there were 1,021 fewer major crimes in the city in June and July than there were during the same period in 2019. It’s true that there were 29 more murders, in a city of 8 million people, during those two months than there were last year–a figure promoted relentlessly by the conservative media–but there were also 39 fewer rapes, 107 fewer assaults and 284 fewer robberies.

Despite the uptick in homicides, likely a result of months of quarantine, the city is on pace to have 400 murders this year, which would be 270 fewer than New York experienced in the final year of Rudy Giuliani’s term as Mayor. Yet during the Republican National Convention, Giuliani claimed that “murders, shootings, and violent crime are increasing at percentages unheard of in the past."

having failed to contain a historic public health crisis and ensuing economic downturn, the Republican Party is running on a big lie, claiming against all evidence that “Democrat-led” cities are rife with crime and rioting and chaos, with fearful (white) residents fleeing in droves to safer locales in the suburbs. Every aspect of this storyline is completely divorced from reality.

America’s cities, like its suburbs and small towns, are struggling with the impact of the pandemic and are struggling with a severe loss of tax revenues resulting from lockdowns and from people not feeling safe going to bars and restaurants and shopping when their economies did reopen. Many residents of big cities, like those in suburbs and small towns, are struggling economically. These are real problems that are absent from the conservative discourse at present.

While the right mocks the very idea of peaceful protests, riots have in fact been scattered, localized and in many cases caused by overly aggressive policing, as you can see from videos collected by *The New York Times*. People are angry about racially discriminatory policing, but in many communities, it’s pretty clear that the cops are even angrier about being held accountable. Almost all of the turmoil in Portland has occurred in a small area around the federal courthouse after dark. The city isn’t on fire, and most Portland residents are living their lives unaffected by the protests. The dynamic has been similar in Seattle and other big cities.

Let’s also point out that most big-city governments are controlled by Democrats. That’s true of the safest and the most dangerous cities, the ones with the best and the worst finances and those with the most and least tension between cops and the communities they police–they’re almost all “Democrat-run.” Big cities are diverse, and Republicans rarely win elections in localities with significant non-white populations.

Also keep in mind that violent crime in the United States has seen a long and steep decline over the past 25 or so years. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, violent crime dropped by 71 percent between 1993 and 2018. Property crimes also fell by 69 percent over that same period. This is vital context for any short-term uptick in crime that some communities may be experiencing as we reopen our economies.

But this narrative that American cities are smoking ruins or are being destroyed by criminals and looters has become Trump’s–and the GOP’s–central argument for 2020, with Fox News playing clips of trash fires and windows being broken on a loop and the Republican National Convention lauding the heroism of a terrified white couple who waved guns at peaceful protesters.

We expect the parties to exaggerate and at times lie during campaigns,but at least in the modern era, no major party has run a campaign that is entirely divorced from any objective reality. In most cases, Republicans aren’t even bothering to offer any real arguments. During the convention, there was a throw-away line or two about Biden raising taxes, but that’s been pretty much been it.

And this relentless propaganda campaign is getting people killed. Hopped up on the belief that they’re saving the country from violent anarchists, the far-right has unleashed an enormous amount of violence and intimidation on Black Lives Matter protesters. The Huffington Postreports that “white vigilantes and far-right actors have shown up to oppose Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S. at least 497 times this year, according to data collected by Alexander Reid Ross, a doctoral fellow at the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right.”

The dataset, which Ross shared with HuffPost, documents a staggering amount of violence directed at protesters by the far-right, including 64 cases of simple assault, 38 incidents of vigilantes driving cars into demonstrators, and nine times shots were fired at protesters.

All told, six protesters were hit by vigilante bullets in this summer’s violence. Three died from their wounds.

Ross’ dataset also includes 387 incidents of intimidation, such as people using racist slurs, making threats and brandishing firearms.

“There just isn’t really anything to compare it to,” Ross told HuffPost. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”

Such incidents are so common that they often don’t make national news. Last week, a Pennsylvania man shot and wounded a member of a group of people marching to Washington to protest without any preamble–there was no confrontation preceding the attack.And yet the incident didn’t make a ripple in the national news. And after the RNC celebrated the McCloskeys’ armed defense of private property, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse traveled to Kenosha multiple times, ostensibly to protect a gas station, and committed violence against that city’s residents, culminating in the alleged murders of two of them.

And making matters worse is that Trump refuses to condemn the violence from the far-right because doing so would undermine his mendacious claim that leftists are responsible for a lion’s share of the mayhem. As Lilliana Mason, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, pointed out, research “exposing subjects to quotes from Trump or Biden explicitly rejecting violence” has found that “when leaders reject violence, partisans reject violence. When leaders say nothing, partisans endorse violence.”

Donald Trump doesn’t have much to run on. His desperate attempt to shift the national conversation from the Covid-19 crisis and resulting recession to widespread chaos in American cities is a Hail Mary pass that’s getting people killed.

720 secret police oregon no gop crit? romney?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/new-study-finds-republican-policies-lead-to-shorter-lives/

the United States trails many other developed countries when it comes to life expectancy, but how long one lives can have a lot to do with where that person lives in the U.S. and how conservative its policies are. And Michael Hobbes, in an article for HuffPost, discusses the connection between GOP policies and shorter life expectancy and a new study showing how destructive those policies can be.

“In 2014,” Hobbes notes, “American life expectancy fell backward for the first time in 21 years. U.S. lifespans slid lower for another three years straight before barely ticking upward in 2018.”

This month, the Milbank Quarterly published a study that breaks down the connection between where Americans live and how long they live.

“Conservative policies, the researchers found, are the driving force behind America’s declining lifespans,” Hobbes observes.

according to Jennifer Karas Montez, a sociologist at Syracuse University and the study’s lead author, “Across a huge range of issues, the more liberal version of state policies predicts longer life expectancy, and the conservative version predicts shorter life expectancy.”

Hobbes explains that the study published in Milbank Quarterly “illuminates the choice before Americans in the 2020 election. While the Republican Party has declined to release a national policy platform for the next four years, the GOP currently holds 29 state legislatures and 26 governorships and has spent decades enacting its preferred policies in conservative states. Over the last decade, a growing body of research has found that these policies are negatively affecting the health of constituents.”

cruz PO'd at lack of vovid bill 3 fail?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/republicans-are-at-each-others-throats-as-they-veer-toward-electoral-self-sabotage/

no lnx twt

every day, new polls come out that show Republicans in dire straits for the 2020 election. And it’s no surprise — the economy is collapsing and the country is ravaged by a devastating pandemic, events that President Donald Trump is in no small part to blame for.

But the stress of impending doom isn’t focusing GOP minds or encouraging them to band together. Instead, the pressure seems to be tearing them apart. And in their dysfunction, they may be ready to thwart the country’s best chances of muddling through the present devastation further undermining their own electoral standing heading into November.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) has been the subject of much internal scrutiny and discord, as multiple reports and public comments have revealed. Though at times she has sought the president’s favor, she broken with him at key points recently — inspiring the wrath of his fierce congressional defenders.

CNN reported that she became a target at Tuesday’s Republican conference:

Several House Republicans attacked House GOP Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming during a conference meeting Tuesday morning for supporting Dr. Anthony Fauci and splitting with President Donald Trump on a variety of issues over the past few months, three sources who were in the room told CNN.

Members including Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Chip Roy of Texas, Andy Biggs of Arizona, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Ralph Norman of South Carolina all chimed in to air grievances against Cheney.

…

During the conference meeting, Gaetz and Massie complained about Cheney supporting a primary challenge to Massie, the sources said. Jordan, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, listed areas where Cheney has publicly disagreed with the President, pointing to her resistance to Trump’s plan to pull back troops in Germany and Afghanistan.

Roy hit Cheney for supporting Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, and complained that his Democratic opponent has retweeted some of Cheney’s tweets.

But the acrimony also spilled over into public:

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), too, let loose on Cheney to the media.

“I mean she tries to sabotage everything he tries to do in foreign policy, so I don’t know whether she’s a good advocate for the President or not,” he told CNN.

He also said: “I don’t think she’s good for the country.”

Meanwhile, rifts are forming over what to do with the next coronavirus relief bill. On that matter, Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Tom Cotton (R-AR) have found themselves on opposite sides.

The Washington Post’s James Hohmann reported that Cruz fumed at Cotton’s advocacy for more spending at a recent meeting, exclaiming: “What in the hell are we doing?”

According to Axios, the primary rift falls between Senate Republicans and the Trump White House.

“The Senate Republican lunch descended into chaos, several GOP lawmakers said, revealing that the White House and Republican senators remain far apart on key priorities in the next economic package,” reported Alayna Treene. “The White House officials did little talking, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told reporters. Instead, senators used the time to air their disagreements. ‘There’s a robust difference of opinion,’ Hawley said.”

Once again, Paul aired his frustrations publicly:

Democrats, on the other hand, remain united. The House passed a $3 trillion spending bill in May that the Senate and the White House have refused to move on.

“Republicans are in complete disarray,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), according to the Washington Post. “Totally incompetent. Totally in disarray. Totally at war with one another.”

CNBC reported Wednesday afternoon that the GOP is drifting toward potentially passing a bill that would extend the expanded unemployment insurance in the country after it is supposed to expire this week — but at a drastically reduced rate:

Republicans are considering extending the enhanced unemployment insurance benefit at a dramatically reduced level of $400 per month, or $100 a week, through the rest of the year, sources told CNBC.

Congress passed a $600 per week, or $2,400 a month, boost to jobless benefits in March to deal with a wave of unemployment unseen in decades as states shut down their economies to combat the coronavirus pandemic. The policy expires at the end of July as the U.S. unemployment rate stands above 11%, despite two strong months of job growth.

The GOP, which has not made a final decision on how it will craft unemployment insurance in a bill set to be released this week, previously discussed extending the benefit at an additional $200 per week instead of $600. Democrats want to make the $600 per week sum available at least until next year.

This plan, it should be clear, would be disastrous. There are still many millions of people unemployed because of the initial downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Many are desperate and only scraping by as is. Slashing their benefits by $2,000 a month, with the virus resurgent and the economy at risk of getting worse, would be a brutal blow.

Even if Republicans were to eventually agree with Democrats and extend the $600 a week expanded unemployment (an unlikely scenario), observers expect the program will still lapse before it is renewed. This means recipients would face a gap in the payments they’ve been receiving, which could itself cause a major shock to the economy.

And all this rancor, dithering, and lack of urgency are likely to be electoral poison for the GOP. With a devastated economy and an out-of-control virus, the ruling party is likely to lose the White House and congressional seats no matter what it does. But guaranteeing economic distress and continued uncertainty for millions of families while the country is trying to recover from financial collapse would be a spectacular form of Republican self-sabotage.

watkins KS

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/a-republican-congressman-just-got-charged-with-3-felonies-including-voter-fraud

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/how-a-spiral-of-silence-gives-trump-power-and-why-it-may-start-to-crumble

nancy let wa mo

according to Jonathan Martin, Republican leaders who don’t support Trump’s reelection have chosen one of three different paths.

State publicly that they won’t vote for him and plan to vote for Biden (Colin Powell and Carly Fiorina).
State publicly that they won’t vote for him, but won’t vote for Biden (Mitt Romney and John Bolton).
Stay silent (George W. Bush, Paul Ryan, and John Boehner).

There’s one thing that all of those Republicans except Romney have in common: none of them currently hold elective office. What is even more interesting is what Martin heard about those who do.

“I’ve had five conversations with senators who tell me they are really struggling with supporting Trump,” said [Democratic Senator Chris] Coons, who declined to give names.

Indeed, one Republican senator, who is publicly supporting the president, said in an interview that he might prefer a Biden victory if the G.O.P. managed to preserve its Senate majority. This lawmaker, like a number of Republicans, is uneasy with Mr. Trump’s behavior and weary from the near-weekly barrage of questions from reporters about the latest presidential eruption.

As former Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, a moderate Democrat who was friends with a number of her former Republican colleagues, put it: “It’s easier to count the ones who are definitely voting for Trump.”

That demonstrates the kind of political cowardice that has plagued Republicans ever since Trump was elected. But in talking to GOP campaign consultants, Tim Miller explains the dilemma faced by those up for reelection in 2020, like Senator John Cornyn of Texas.

[R]ather than addressing this by creating some strategic separation from Trump to solidify the historically conservative Dallas and Houston suburbs where Trump is bleeding out, Cornyn has become a Mr. Trump fan girl, echoing his virus denial and defending the attack on nonviolent protestors in Lafayette Square.

Why? According to one: “You have 25% of the state is rural and Trump gets like Saddam Hussein level numbers here. 87% in 25% of the state… Cornyn gets 69. And so Cornyn can’t find a place to break from because he could really put that in jeopardy.”

And thus the polarizing nature of Trump makes it impossible for Cornyn to make a move that helps him in the swingy suburbs without risking the floor falling out from under him in West Texas.

That is why I find the number of Republican groups forming to defeat Trump extremely significant. The ranks include the Lincoln Project, Right Side PAC, 43 Alumni for Biden, and Republican Voters Against Trump. The proliferation of these groups strikes me as unprecedented in modern political history, so it deserves our attention. Here is something Republican strategist John Weaver said about the goal of the Lincoln Project.

“Republicans are hierarchical,” Weaver said. “So what’s not getting a lot of attention right now is the structure we are building — the permission ramp for Republicans so that they will have some comfort that they are not alone in doing the right thing.”

The fact that Republicans are hierarchical is an astute observation. But that’s not the only reason why building a permission ramp is important. As Andrew Levison wrote, conservatives have actually built a three-level ideological cocoon that these kinds of efforts could puncture. The first level is a national media structure headlined by Fox News. Behind that are local news sources such as Sinclair TV stations and talk radio. A permission ramp is more likely to affect the third level, which Levison describes as the most significant.

Finally, and most importantly, it is the network of personal relationships between neighbors and friends that works to validate and confirm the broader messages. Casual conversations with friends, Facebook messages and e-mails from relatives, and jokes passed among co-workers all reinforce the sense that Democrats are the “other” and lead people who once supported Democrats to mute their views, creating what sociologists call a “spiral of silence.” The result makes support for the Republican Party seem not just dominant but unanimous.

This last, most intimate level of influence is the most important because it validates and provides the “proof” that what the conservative national and local media are saying is actually right. In this environment, political life ceases to be a debate or dialog between candidates or parties. Instead people come to accept that you would have to be completely out of your mind to ever vote for a Democrat.

As an example of how to puncture that “spiral of silence,” this is the kind of video from Republican Voters Against Trump that might break through to some white evangelical Christians—even in Texas.[vid]

notice how Tommy says that he reluctantly voted for Trump in 2016 because the “at least he’s not Hillary Clinton” rallying cry was strong in his part of the country. That is a perfect example of how the “spiral of silence” works. Now Tommy is part of building a permission structure to give others an option that he didn’t take advantage of four years ago.

It is a fact that there are some Trump supporters who will hang on until the bitter end. But the reason a possible landslide for Biden is even being discussed is that there are Republicans out there who are beginning to see that “dark path” that Tommy says Trump’s reelection would take us down. The seeds of doubt are being planted.