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much less freq an 2024?

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AN 5 26

President Donald Trump has a long history of promoting conspiracy theories, from the racist "birther" theory aimed at former President Barack Obama to falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Trump's conspiracy theories have been repeatedly debunked: Obama's birth certificate clearly show that he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4, 1961 — not in Kenya, as Trump claimed — and one vote recount after another confirmed that Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square.

Regardless, Trump often doubles down on conspiracy theories despite evidence contradicting them. And according to Salon's Amanda Marcotte, his "addiction to conspiracy theories" keeps coming back to haunt him.

Trump himself has been the subject of conspiracy theories, including claims that the three assassination attempts he survived were staged. Marcotte stresses that while "there is no evidence" that Trump "staged" any of those "high-profile attempts on his life," he has contributed to an environment in which more people are likely to believe bogus conspiracy theories involving him.

"A new survey from NewsGuard shows that 54 percent of Americans are open to the theory that at least one of the attacks was staged, with only 38 percent saying definitively they believe all three were real," Marcotte explains in Salon. "When asked about each separate assault — the 2024 shooting that grazed Trump's ear at a Pennsylvania campaign stop, the arrest of the armed man at the president's West Palm Beach golf course later that year and the recent incident at the White House Correspondents' Dinner — fewer than half said these events were authentic. No one deserves more blame for this state of affairs than Trump himself, and not just because he's spent a decade lying and sowing his own conspiracy theories, giving permission to both his allies and his opponents to take a looser approach to the truth."

Marcotte adds, "Once in a while, a conspiracy theory may be wrong but still manages to channel authentic frustrations. This particular one is false, but its underlying assumptions about the president — that he's a liar, and that he's manipulative, corrupt and politically desperate — are all too real."

Marcotte argues that Trump's "reaction to" the third assassination attempt against him "likely made his political situation worse."

:{:{"He immediately tried to exploit the shooting to tout the need for his garish White House ballroom, an indulgence Americans already disapprove by a two-to-one margin, according to a Washington Post poll," the Salon journalist observes. "Trump's self-indulgence will only look worse as gas and grocery prices continue to soar for everyday Americans.}:

Republican demands that Americans foot a $1 billion bill for Trump's tacky ballroom have only made it easier for voters to channel their frustrations into this shooting conspiracy theory…. Trump's addiction to conspiracy theories gave him a way to connect with voters who shared similar paranoia and hostility to the reality-based world. But the same mindset is now giving a small but significant number the story they need to turn their backs on the president."}:

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AN 5 26

President Donald Trump’s political brand is based on convincing unexceptional people that they are better than they actually are, but one critic says he's doing so at the expense of exceptional people who happen to belong to marginalized communities.

“Donald Trump is literally hypnotizing mediocre people into thinking that they are meritocratic geniuses, while telling highly accomplished Black, Brown, and Asian people that they are nothing — that everything they have was given to them by those same mediocre people,” liberal commentator Joy-Ann Reid said on Tuesday in an episode of “The Left Hook with Wajahat Ali and Joy-Ann Reid.” The pundit elaborated that Trump and his administration promote the idea that white men do not need to prove their merit because, by virtue of being white men, they are already exceptional.

“They're literally seeing a deficit of white men even trying to go to college now, because they're being told: you don't have to do anything, you just have to be,” Reid said. “You just have to exist as a white man and you're qualified to do anything. You can be a neurosurgeon — just walk in there, use your brilliant European brain, and start operating on people. You're fine. You don't need to know anything. But Black people, according to the late Charlie Kirk, can't even be a pilot — even after going to school to become one. If they're sitting behind the wheel of a Cessna, the claim is they don't know how to do it, that they were just pulled off the street and thrown into the chair.”

Not only do these arguments hurt ordinary people by encouraging discrimination, Reid argued; they also hurt the American economy and do damage to the government when second-rate leaders inevitably stumble at their jobs.

“So they're telling women and people of color: you're not qualified to do anything. But white men are being told: you're qualified to do everything," Reid said. "So you're having people walk into positions they're not ready for. This is Donald Trump doing exactly what they claimed affirmative action did to Black students — setting them up to fail by placing unqualified people in positions beyond their preparation. That was their theory. And that's literally what's happening to these mediocre white guys now.”

Reid offered up the Trump administration as the clearest example.

“RFK Jr. cannot help but fail because he's not qualified for the job,” Reid said. “Pete Hegseth cannot do anything but look like an idiot because he's not qualified for the job. When you're not seeking the most qualified people, you're setting all of these men up to fail — including the President of the United States.”

Reid is not alone among liberal pundits who argue that Trump’s appeal relies in part on elevating mediocre men into believing they are great. Salon writer Amanda Marcotte made a similar point in July on “The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent.”

“So much of the MAGA movement really is driven by this jealousy that they can’t admit to themselves,” Marcotte said. “…I think you see that come up again and again with these fascist movements, right? They are full of mediocre people who are burning with resentment and grievance toward people that they call ‘the elites,’ who are often just people that are more excellent than they are, who are better at stuff than they are. They hate them and they just want to punish them.”

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AN 4 26

When U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to destroy "a whole civilization" in Iran in an April 7 post on his Truth Social platform, the comment drew scathing condemnation not only from countless liberals, progressives and centrist Democrats, but also, from many Never Trump conservatives and libertarians. Even some far-right MAGA influencers, including Infowars' Alex Jones, former Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), are calling Trump out.

Yet in far-right white evangelical circles, Trump still has plenty of loyal supporters.

In a biting article published on April 10, Salon's Amanda Marcotte argues that white evangelicals' feelings of "persecution" are helping fuel a "disastrous" war.

"For over a decade now, the Christian Right has deflected criticism of Trump's immorality and sadism by insisting they are facing persecution for their religious beliefs," Marcotte explains. "In their minds, they are the real victims of a culture gone to hell, and they see the president as their only hope to beat back these imaginary forces of oppression. Nothing, it seems, can shatter this persecution complex. As the Iran war continues to become an ever-bigger disaster, evangelicals are clinging harder than ever to the notion that because they need to defeat their fictional persecutors, Trump's myriad flaws are excusable and forgivable."

Far-right white evangelicals' "paranoid anger," Marcotte argues, is so extreme that they even view "devout Catholics" like Pope Leo XIV as persecutors.

"Regardless of what is being said in private to Catholic leaders," Marcotte observes, "it's clear that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his allies are furious at the pontiff for undermining their efforts to frame this war as a Christian enterprise — and are suggesting that those who oppose it are the equivalent of Christ's persecutors…. (Pastor) Doug Wilson, who heads the denomination Hegseth belongs to, demonstrated how valuable the phony Christian persecution narrative is for conservatives who need an excuse to stick by the (Trump) Administration amid the Iran debacle…. In the real world, Hegseth is a belligerent official who relishes threatening Iranians with 'death and destruction from above.' But in Wilson’s telling, the defense secretary is a humble servant of God, besieged on all sides by the faithless in their ongoing war against Christ's followers."

Marcotte adds, " As the administration's skirmish with Pope Leo shows, though, it's getting harder for the Christian Right to package the Iran war as a product of God's love — even to followers who have a long history of swallowing all sorts of cruelty in the name of Christ…. Some who have been among the president's loudest supporters in the past, like former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and podcaster Tucker Carlson, are now proclaiming that this war goes against everything Christians should stand for. In an effort to bring critics like these back in line, many evangelical leaders are clinging to false narratives of religious persecution."

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an 2 26

MAGA loses the culture war — and Trump loses the plot

On Sunday, February 8, Kid Rock headlined Turning Point USA's All-American Super Bowl Halftime Show — a MAGA alternative to the actual 2026 Super Bowl Halftime Show, which featured Puerto Rican reggaetón star Bad Bunny. MAGA Republicans were furious because Bunny, an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump's immigration policies, performed en español at the event. But Bunny attracted a lot more viewers: CBS News reported that 135 million people watched Bad Bunny, while the El Paso Times reported that that 6.1 million people watched Turning Point's event.

In other words, Bad Bunny attracted roughly 22 times as many viewers.

In a biting article published on February 9, Salon's Amanda Marcotte describes Kid Rock's Turning Point USA show as a sad example of MAGA's "bid for cultural relevance."

"Perhaps it's a sign that I am an empathy-poisoned liberal," Marcotte argues, "but it was hard to choke back the pity watching the alternative halftime show aired by Turning Point USA during Sunday's Super Bowl game. Despite having months to book and organize an event that was supposed to draw millions away from the real deal, TPUSA couldn't even pack the small space for audience members on the soundstage — not a stadium, arena, theater or even a club — they rented for the occasion. The promise of seeing the washed-up Kid Rock in an intimate setting appears to thrill no one."

Marcotte continues, "Organizers declared that huge numbers of Americans would prefer this to the actual halftime show, but the anemic audience present for the taping suggested they couldn't get anyone who isn't a paid TPUSA staff member…. Unfortunately for them, the live chat on YouTube suggested the fans weren't tuning in for the music, but out of a sense of duty to their MAGA tribe. Commenters referenced Jesus, TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk, the American flag and hating Bad Bunny — but no one seemed to have much to say about the music or the performances."

The Salon journalist argues that while Rock's TPUSA performance was "boring," Bunny's "electric performance" was "sheer joy — a celebration of Latino culture and American values."

"TPUSA's night was doomed from the get-go," Marcotte writes. "Beyond snagging Kid Rock as a last-minute salvation, the show had no marketing aside from 'Watch this to trigger the liberals'…. In the end, Kid Rock wasn't really the star of the 'All-American Halftime Show.' No, it was the ghost of Charlie Kirk…. No doubt it was good at getting their aging audience to open up their wallets, after asking their grandkids how to use the 'superchat' donate function on YouTube. But as a bid for cultural relevance — well, let's just say Bad Bunny has nothing to worry about."

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AN 1 26

Roughly two and one-half weeks after the fatal January 7 shooting of motorist Renee Nicole Good by a U.S. Immigration and Enforcement (ICE) agent, yet another Minneapolis resident was fatally shot during a protest in the city: 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti, who worked in an internal care unit in a Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House adviser Stephen Miller are claiming that Pretti was shot by U.S. Border Patrol agents in self-defense, noting that he was carrying a concealed weapon. But critics of President Donald Trump's ICE raids in Minneapolis are countering Pretti never pointed the gun at Border Patrol agents and that he was shot after being forced onto the ground and disarmed.

In an article published on Monday, January 26 — two days after Pretti's death — Salon's Amanda Marcotte offers a blistering critique of the response that far-right white evangelicals have had to the unrest in Minneapolis.

"The Christian Right will never turn down an opportunity to make false accusations of religious persecution," Marcotte argues. "These days, they're especially eager to play the victim. Doing so allows them to distract from the ugly reality that they, in voting for Donald Trump, have helped to unleash in Minnesota: A woman killed in front of her wife, children ripped from their parents, a baby nearly killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents firing tear gas at a family driving home from a basketball game. On Saturday, there was another unjustifiable shooting. Video appears to show 37-year-old Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an intensive-care unit nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital, helping a woman to her feet when Border Patrol agents swarm and pepper-spray him — and then shoot him in the head."

Marcotte adds, "All this, though, apparently pales in comparison to a more serious form of oppression: right-wing Christians being told it's immoral to support a brutal, racist assault on their neighbors."

The Salon journalist is referring to a Sunday, January 18 protest in which activists disrupted a service at the evangelical Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota because one of the pastors, David Easterwood, is an ICE field director in the area. MAGA Republicans, from Noem to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, described that disruption as an attack on religious freedom — an argument Marcotte considers disingenuous.

Tim Whitaker, a former Christian nationalist, told Salon, "Cities Church is part of the Southern Baptist Convention, which was founded in 1845 over the right to own slaves. This church should be disrupted. As far as I'm concerned, Jesus would've been right with those protesters…. (Cities Church) is home to a pastor that works for a federal agency kidnapping brown-skinned immigrants and killing unarmed citizens."

Marcotte notes that one of the protesters arrested during the January 18 protest at Cities Church is herself an ordained Christian minister.

"Unfortunately, the right's histrionic language about 'religious freedom' has cowed many centrists and even liberals into thinking the protesters who interrupted a single church service are in the wrong," Marcotte writes. "Instead, they should be applauded as following the tradition of Jesus himself confronting the moneychangers in the temple."

Religious freedom means the right to worship as you see fit. By the same token, it also allows everyone else the right to question what churches are teaching — especially when they impact people and communities outside the church doors."

Marcotte adds, "In an era when Christian churches are condoning outright evil actions such as ICE’s deadly rampage through Minnesota, it’s more important than ever to not allow this dishonest definition of 'religious freedom' browbeat the rest of us into silence over spiritual oppression."

:{Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.}

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an 1 26

MAGA influencer and conspiracy theorist Nick Shirley, in one of his YouTube videos, claimed that a Somali-operated day care center in Minneapolis was committing fraud by not having any real children on the premises. The 23-year-old Shirley defended his work on the "PBD Podcast," arguing that being celibate demonstrated his credibility.

Shirley said, "I'm a virgin. I don't have sex with random girls. You're not gonna catch me on those sexual allegation charges."

In a scathing article published on January 5, Salon's Amanda Marcotte emphasizes that Shirley's day car center claims are easily debunked — and that his "odd" and "irrational" defense of his work reflects a "longstanding fear" among MAGA Republicans.

"Shirley stands accused of lying for racist reasons, so his 'but I'm a virgin' defense is irrational — at least on the surface," Marcotte explains. "But it makes more sense, in a psychosexual way, in light of the right's longstanding fear and loathing of day cares."

Shirley's false claims about a Somali-opera day care center, Marcotte argues, not only underscore "conservative audiences" having a racist need to "hear Black people are committing crimes" — they also show the far right's disdain for day care centers in general.

"These businesses were picked almost certainly because Shirley and his colleagues have tapped into the longstanding tendency of paranoid reactionaries to make day cares the subject of conspiracy theories," Marcotte writes. "Along with birth control and abortion — whose providers are also smeared constantly with right-wing lies — day care is loathed on the right for allowing women to work instead of being financially dependent on a husband. In the 1980s, day care workers were accused of being Satanists. Now, during the MAGA era, the scapegoat for men's fears of female independence has shifted from imaginary devil-worshippers to real immigrants."

Marcotte continues, "White women are implicitly accused of using immigrant labor as a cheat to avoid their God-given duty to quit work to stay home and raise babies. Vice President JD Vance has been especially loud with his belief that day care is pushing women away from their supposedly inherent desire to be housewives…. The Manosphere isn’t just deeply misogynist; it's also incredibly racist."

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

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sorta // mike j daily show supercut

an 12 25

When Donald Trump realized that Project 2025 was a liability for his 2024 presidential campaign, he claimed to not know anything about it. Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and others aggressively campaigned against Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's blueprint for a second Trump presidency. Trump, however, distanced himself from it during his campaign, although Russell Vought — a key Project 2025 architect — is now director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB)

In an article published on December 22, Salon's Amanda Marcotte stresses that President Trump is using the words "I don't know" a lot these days. And she argues that Trump's "deflection" could hurt the MAGA movement at some point.

"Trump loves to brag about how he passed — or so he says — the test doctors use to screen for dementia," Marcotte explains. "But when he is asked about anything harder and more politically fraught than 'can you draw a clock?' or 'is this a picture of a duck?,' the president is always quick with his favorite go-to answer: 'I don't know.' When asked why he pardoned a January 6 rioter who attacked a police officer with a stun gun, Trump replied, 'I don't know, was it a pardon?' It was, which is why the reporter asked."

Marcotte continues, "When asked why he got an MRI and what part of the body they scanned, he responded: 'No idea.' When asked about a recently released batch of photos showing him partying with Jeffrey Epstein — who called Trump 'my closest friend for 10 years' and referred to himself as 'Don's best friend' — the president said, 'I know nothing about it.' Variations of 'I don't know' — including 'I don't understand' and 'I don't know anything' — have become Trump's favorite response throughout the year when asked about the deceased sex offender, who spoke to him multiple times a week, the New York Times reported."

The "purpose" of Trump's "gambit," according to Marcotte, is "to deflect accountability for his growing pile of failures, corruption and scandals." But that approach, the Salon journalist says, could be problematic for MAGA in the long run.

"It's frustrating that he gets away with this," the Salon journalist writes, "but there's a silver lining. Even Trump himself seems to be getting tired of his own tactics. He can't manage to work up the energy for a more convincing deflection. He's bored and tired, his polls are falling and, with three years left, his second term already feels like it's running on fumes."

Marcotte adds, "'I don't know' is the deflection of a man who has run out of more interesting lies to tell. It's a small thing, but one of the many green shoots suggesting that, while this is not the end of MAGA, it may very well be the end's beginning."

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

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AN 12 25

After Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk was fatally shot on September 10, his widow, Erika Kirk, became the organization's new leader. Many MAGA Republicans were quick to blame liberals, progressives and Democrats for the murder — even though countless Democrats, from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) to former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, wholeheartedly condemned it. But MAGA figures also attacked each other.

In an article published on December 15, Salon's Amanda Marcotte examines the feud between Erika Kirk and far-right MAGA podcaster Candace Owens.

"The swift anointing of Charlie Kirk's widow Erika as the new head of TPUSA did nothing to prevent the explosion of infighting that has been rapidly consuming the world of online MAGA media in the months since her husband's killing," Marcotte explains. "If anything, it's backfired. As I predicted, (Erika) Kirk is turning out to be a weak and ineffectual leader, persuading even more people in the very online right that now is their moment to get ahead in a crowded field. The rhetorical slugfest is growing increasingly ugly to watch. But in the process, MAGA is revealing what is likely the movement's biggest weakness: It's dominated by hustlers who are more interested in making money and growing their brand than they are in MAGA as a political project."

Owens is a major conspiracy theorist, and Marcotte notes that she has been "generating a seemingly endless number of conspiracy theories" about Kirk's death.

"Owens' rhetoric about Erika Kirk has grown increasingly personal," the Salon journalist observes. "Most shockingly, she keeps implying Kirk was involved in her husband's murder, and accusing her of defrauding TPUSA donors. Last week, Owens released a video saying Kirk doesn't have the strength to lead TPUSA, which follows pointed comments she made in early December about how 'in love' Charlie Kirk had been with a woman she says he dated before meeting his wife. The success Owens is having with this behavior is causing a lot of rifts."

Marcotte continues, "Tucker Carlson, who has long believed the future of MAGA is in getting ever-nuttier, has sided with Owens, going on the popular show hosted by Theo Von to insinuate the FBI is lying about who killed Charlie Kirk…. Right-wing podcaster Tim Pool, who typically loves spreading disinformation, turned on Owens, calling her a 'degenerate C-word' and an 'evil scumbag.' Even white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who hated Kirk when he was alive, has claimed he wants to 'expose' Owens, and has unleashed racist and misogynist abuse at her."

Marcotte argues that the "blizzard of conspiracy theories pushed by Owens and Carlson" has "destroyed the ability of GOP leaders to exploit Kirk's death in the manner they had intended."

"Owens is a classic case of a Frankenstein's monster, turning on the very people who created her," Marcotte writes. "Although it's a shame to see so many Americans continue to follow her down the rabbit hole, if it's causing the MAGA movement to turn on each other, then that’s a result all democracy-lovers can cheer."

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

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an 10 25

Veteran Washington Post columnist George Will is among the Never Trump conservatives who believes that if far-right Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton defeats incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in the state's 2026 GOP U.S. Senate primary, a Democrat could win a statewide race in the Lone Star State for the first time in many years.

Cornyn, the 84-year-old Will argues, would be extremely difficult for a Democrat to beat if he's the nominee. But according to Will, Paxton has so much baggage that former Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas) might be able to go the distance in the general election if he's up against Paxton.

The Texas attorney general is competitive in GOP primary polls, but one thing he doesn't have is an endorsement from President Donald Trump.

In a blistering article published on October 29, Salon's Amanda Marcotte stresses that Paxton is going to embarrassing extremes in the hope of getting Trump's endorsement — including a frivolous anti-Tylenol lawsuit.

"In an unbelievably crowded field," Marcotte argues, "the title of 'Most Wretched Republican Bootlicker' is ultimately impossible to determine. But on Tuesday morning, (October 28), Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton made a strong case for himself when he filed a nuisance lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson and Kenvue, falsely accusing the companies of concealing a link between Tylenol and autism. The word 'baseless' doesn't begin to describe the value of the lawsuit. Both the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and American Academy of Pediatrics have affirmed there is no significant link between using this common painkiller during pregnancy and having an autistic child. On the contrary, there could be significant risks if women were to forgo a doctor's advice to use the drug for pain or fever."

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Marcotte continues, "MAGA Republicans, especially Paxton, have a long history of loathing both science and women, so they have no conscientious objections to a lawsuit that hurts women in the name of lying about medicine. Still, at first glance, Paxton's move is surprising as political strategy."

The Salon journalist notes that when Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. "blamed autism on pregnant women who take Tylenol," the "backlash" was "fierce."

"Even by MAGA standards," Marcotte writes, "Paxton has high levels of radiant misogyny, but it's confusing why he would want to touch this hot stove. The likeliest answer is also the most painfully stupid one: Paxton is beclowning himself in hopes of wooing Trump to endorse his primary challenge against incumbent GOP Sen. John Cornyn…. Many in the (Republican) Party have worried that if Paxton secures the nomination, he will lose to a Democrat. In response, Paxton has become comically thirsty for Trump's endorsement, signaling there's no limit to how low he will debase himself to get that tiny thumbs up."

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

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AN AH 7 25

ALTHO... es Gunn's new "Superman" movie is performing well at the box office, many right-wing media outlets are attacking it as "woke." The film touches on immigration, much to the chagrin of Fox News and others.

In an biting article published on July 21, Salon's Amanda Marcotte argues that right-wing media attacks on Gunn's film aren't just silly, but underscore their troubling view of the world.

"Every time there's a pop cultural phenomenon — a blockbuster movie, a chart-topping single, a hot new fashion trend — conservative media and MAGA influencers rush to denounce it as anti-American, anti-family or even demonic," Marcotte observes. "Labubu dolls are Satanic. The 'Barbie' movie is anti-male. Conservative men are being traumatized by rap songs informing them that women can experience sexual arousal — not that said conservative men are willing to believe it."

Marcotte continues, "The reasons right-wing pundits engage in this are transparent. The biggest is simple attention economics. Glomming onto popular topics is a good way to attract new audiences, especially those who may not be that political, and lure them into engaging with reactionary content. It also helps feed the paranoia that fuels the right, by propping up the narrative that all of pop culture is out to destroy them and their way of life."

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The "MAGA talking heads" attacking Gunn and his "Superman" film, Marcotte observes, are "mad" because "Superman is an immigrant" in the movie.

"My initial reaction when I saw right-wing media conduct its all-too-predictable tantrum over the new 'Superman' movie was that it’s just more of the same: Claim it’s 'woke' propaganda, work the audience into a tizzy of boycott threats and reap the reward of alienating their base further from the rest of society so that the MAGA cult is all they have left," Marcotte explains. "Which, to be fair, is bad enough. But the actual content of the complaints made this whole exercise even more sinister."

The Salon journalist continues, "The attacks on 'Superman' are part of a larger effort by the right to completely rewrite history, so they can pretend that being a patriotic American means embracing authoritarian values…. Immigrants and kindness are both canceled in Donald Trump’s America, so the right was outraged. Jesse Watters of Fox News 'joked' that Superman should have 'MS-13' on his cape…. There have been a lot of dutiful, fact-check-style responses pointing out that Superman is an immigrant and the character was always 'woke,' in that he has a history of fighting fascists and KKK members. But in a sense, that was unnecessary, because everyone already knows this. That's where this Fox News gambit goes from being stupid to deeply sinister: They are asking their audience to deny not just the facts, but a fact we all grew up with, something woven into the DNA of our American identity."

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

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AN SALON 7 25

Following the deadly flooding that areas of Central Texas suffered over the 4th of July Weekend, President Donald Trump seems to be backing down from his proposal to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) — at least for the time being.

But Salon's Amanda Marcotte, in an article published on July 14, emphasizes that hatred of FEMA runs deep on the far right. And she cites Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as a prime example.

"Noem isn't giving up the dream of ending the federal agency," Marcotte warns. "Sending innocent people to wither away in foreign gulags has been Noem's top priority at DHS, but she seems to be nearly as excited about cutting off aid to Americans who are suffering from natural disasters. In February, she declared her intent to 'get rid of FEMA the way it exists today.' In March, Politico reported that Noem plans to subject FEMA to the 'chopping block.'"

The Salon journalist continues, "Those plans haven't changed. This week, she reiterated that FEMA 'fundamentally needs to go away as it exists' and called for it to be 'eliminated as it exists today.' The 'as it exists today' caveat is put there to give Noem and Trump wiggle room, but make no mistake: Their goal is to destroy the system of disaster relief that Americans depend on, especially as climate change worsens."

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Marcotte observes that "white supremacist conspiracy theories" over FEMA existed long before today's "paranoid MAGA conspiracist bubble."

"The history of conspiracy theories about FEMA goes back to the agency's founding under President Jimmy Carter in 1979," Marcotte explains. "Far-right groups immediately started circulating rumors that FEMA's disaster relief mission was a cover story for the true goal: Rounding up white Christians into concentration camps, so the 'globalists' — read: Jews, people of color, feminists, queer people — could impose the 'New World Order.' As usual with racist conspiracists, the psychological motivation is a combination of sublimated shame and defensiveness, manifesting in a victim complex. In the imagination of right-wingers, the 'real' victims are white Christians, and it's the people who were once subjected to slavery, concentration camps and genocide who are the oppressors."

Marcotte continues, "At the center of the conspiracy theory is this concept of 'FEMA camps.' The claim is that FEMA will pretend to be setting up emergency relief stations, but really, they're laying groundwork for prison camps for white Christians."

Marcotte cautions against believing that Trump is really giving up on abolishing FEMA.

"First things first: Mainstream media reports that Donald Trump has 'backed away' or 'scrapped' plans to destroy the Federal Emergency Management Agency are greatly exaggerated," Marcotte laments. "Trump is just doing what he always does when faced with intense public scrutiny of his unpopular positions: Lying. As usual, he will go right back to doing the bad thing as soon as the news cycle moves on to something else."

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

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AN 6 25

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

aha? trollery contagious? she is mocking the IDEA of APOLOGY?

she caved on principles with hegs rape? BBB is all that matters?

an 6 25

Salon columnist Amanda Marcotte derided U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) for adopting a “favorite lady MAGA trick” for dealing with uncomfortable situations: “pretending to be stupid.”

On Friday, Ernst infuriated constituents at a town hallin Butler County, Iowa, with her “bizarre defense of taking away people's medical care to pay for tax cuts for billionaires,” according to Marcotte. The tactic appeared to involve steering into the realm of the philosophical: "Well, we’re all going to die," she told the crowd, which elicited a volley of boos.

But Ernst had “absorbed Donald Trump's philosophy of always doubling down,” says Marcotte.

“I made an incorrect assumption THAT IS THEY ARE STUPID CHILDISH that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth,’ she said while walking in a cemetery. “So, I apologize, and I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well.”

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“Ernst may play the mean bimbo for the camera, but she is aware that people aren't asking to live forever,” Marcotte confided. “They just don't want to die decades before their time, due to a lack of basic health care.”

But while the media focuses on her act, Marcotte says Ernst’s follow-up spin was, “if anything, even more callous. She invoked Jesus Christ as the reason it's okay to let people die from easily preventable causes.”

"But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ," Ernst declared in her video, with what Marcotte describes as smugness.

“To those whose understanding of Christianity is based on compassion and love, this comment was jarring. But Ernst understands the second rule of MAGA: their version of Christian ‘love’ is cruelty,” said Marcotte, adding that when a CBS News reporter asked Ernst for follow-up Ernst barked "I'm very compassionate," while running for an elevator.

The coldness is a “deliberate choice,” says Marcotte, which falls in line with a larger trend in white evangelical circles to redefine empathy as a “sin" according to a recent slate of books. These include ‘Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion,’ published last year by right-wing podcaster, Allie Beth Stuckey, as well as right-wing theologian Joe Rigney’s best-selling ‘The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits.’

“This is how the conservative Christian convinces himself it's ‘love’ to deny LGBTQ people their freedom, because compelling heterosexuality will get them into heaven,” Marcotte says. “… These are the rationalizations of people who want to hate while denying they are hateful.”

The good news to this, according to Marcotte, is Ernst's “shut-up-and-die ideology is not popular, even with a lot of people who consider themselves conservative Christians,” as suggested by Democratic state Rep. J.D. Scholten recent announcement that he's running against Ernst in the 2026 election.

See the full Salon report at this link.

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an 5 25

Salon Reporter Amanda Marcotte says director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard is knowingly cultivating violence from supporters of President Donald Trump by inflating the facts of a federal memo on the role COVID-19 disinformation played in domestic terrorism.

Marcotte says Gabbard declassified the memo and took it to the right-wing punditry circuit, pushing the “flat-out lie” that President Joe Biden was labeling Americans as "terrorists" because they opposed COVID-19 mitigation measures like masks and vaccines. The memo does not say this, and Biden did no such thing, says Marcotte, but by pushing this lie, Gabbard is encouraging the kind of radicalization “that does lead to domestic terrorism.”

“For those who bother to read the 2021 memo, the report isn't surprising, but simply stating the obvious fact that far-right extremists ‘threatened or plotted violence against the healthcare sector and state and local government officials’ in 2020,” Marcotte writes.

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The memo anticipated there could be a secondary round of threats in 2021 in response to the COVID-19 vaccine, but it did not equate the U.S. anti-vaccine movement with terrorism. Rather, the memo was careful to identify members of organized militias and white supremacist groups as using anti-vaccine sentiment as an excuse to foment violent threats.

“The average anti-vaccination MAGA rube is not part of this memo,” Marcotte said. “They may be disease vectors, but no, the FBI did not think they were terrorists.”

But that did not stop Gabbard from appearing on Fox News last week and for "using their First Amendment rights" and to label them a "domestic terror threat."

A footnote on Page 4 of the memo declared, "The mere advocacy of political or social positions, political activism, use of strong rhetoric, or generalized philosophical embrace of violent tactics may not constitute violent extremism and are constitutionally protected." Yet Gabbard “keeps shamelessly lying about this,” says Marcotte.

“She retweeted right-wing pundit Michael Shellenberger'sdeclaration that "the Biden administration viewed millions of Americans as a terrorist threat." She also retweeted Cain insisting that the Biden administration labeled ‘some COVID-19 opponents 'domestic violent extremists,' as if it was their views on COVID-19 alone that drew the label.

Marcotte argues the jingoistic wordplay gives cover to an administration declaring its own war on free speech as Trump moves “to arrest people who have broken no laws, simply because they voice opinions he doesn't like.” She is also encouraging more violent extremism by creating a victim narrative in the MAGA community “that extremists can use to justify violence.”

“Her story is that they are innocent people unjustly targeted by the nefarious Biden administration. Having been recast as victims, any violence they commit now can be narrated as 'self-defense' against the imaginary Democrats coming for their free speech rights,” Marcotte said.

Read the full Salon report here.

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AN 5 25

Salon Senior writer Amanda Marcotte says President Donald Trump's Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement adores a “bimbo."

“In the world of MAGA, stupidity is a badge of honor for both sexes, but the heads of women need to be thoroughly empty,” Marcotte writes. “Book learning, in MAGA-land, is for lesbians and cat ladies. Intelligence gets in the way of the true duties of MAGA womanhood: keeping up your highly artificial appearance and, crucially, defending the man you serve with your whole heart and soul.”

As example, Marcotte said look to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem proudly proclaiming ignorance of the meaning behind habeas corpus. “‘Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their right to,’ Noem said through her unnervingly Botox-inflated lips.”

Was Noem, who got a college degree through online courses, has taken the “role of the proud MAGA bimbo, in the grand tradition of figures like Sarah Palin," Marcotte writes. "The MAGA bimbo isn't just ignorant. She's contemptuous of people who actually know what they're talking about, especially if those facts-laden human beings are fellow women.”

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Where the 20th-century version of the "bimbo" is a dim and mostly good-hearted woman, the MAGA movement makes the bimbo a nasty figure, “as cruel as she is dumb.” The modern right-wing man wants an attack dog, “someone who will charge in to fight your battles, unconstrained by intellectual concerns.”

“Ignorance is bliss,” said Marcotte, “at least for bigots.”

The origins of this bimbo devolution lies in reality TV like ‘The Apprentice,’ and ‘Real Housewives’, “where petty and cruel behavior is rewarded over human decency.”

Noem shapes herself around the stereotype of the wine-throwing real housewife, pairing “expensive clothes and plastic surgery with displays of breathtaking sadism, all performed as if she is literally too stupid to know better.”

“That's how we get pictures of Noem in full makeup with a $60,000 Rolex parading around in front of half-naked men in a torture prison, like she's a real-life "Ilsa, She Wolf of the S.S." Or wearing various uniforms with full makeup and a blowout to conduct raids, earning the nickname 'ICE Barbie.'"

“The bimbo can only act on impulse, never information. In this MAGA narrative, it's liberals who are the meanies for asking more of a woman viewed as mentally incapable of handling it,” Marcotte wrote.

Read the full Salon analysis here.

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an 5 25

Right-wing media pundit Ben Shapiro is very much an example of what writers at The Bulwark (a website run by Never Trump conservatives) call an "anti-anti-Trumper."

Shapiro isn't ultra-MAGA in his views like "War Room" host Steve Bannon or the staff at Breitbart Media, but he isn't in the Never Trump camp either. Never Trumpers, in 2024, argued that while they had some policy disagreements with then-President Joe Biden and then-Vice President Kamala Harris, they considered them far preferable to Trump; "anti-anti-Trumpers" like Shapiro, in contrast, weren't MAGA but considered Trump preferable to Democrats.

Yet some of Trump's policies — steep tariffs, a fondness for Russian President Vladimir Putin, protectionism, isolationism — fly in the face of what pre-MAGA conservatives preached for decades.

In an article published on May 14, Salon's Amanda Marcotte stresses that Shapiro finds himself in a difficult position: He's under pressure to shill for Trump even when it comes to positions he strongly disagrees with.

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"No one was more relieved than Daily Wire commentator Ben Shapiro when Donald Trump announced a 90-day 'pause' on Chinese tariffs," Marcotte explains. "Scare quotes around 'pause,' because there will still be a 30 percent tariff on Chinese goods, which economist Paul Krugman characterized as 'really, really high.' But Shapiro has been getting a lot of grief in recent days from his audience for ever-so-slightly acknowledging a reality everyone outside the MAGA bubble can see: Trump's tariff impulses — which hardly rise to the level of 'policy' — are both stupid and dangerous."

Shapiro, Marcotte notes, awkwardly tries to defend Trump's worst positions by blaming other MAGA Republicans.

"The first rule of MAGA is, 'Trump is never, ever wrong,'" Marcotte observes. "Understanding this, Shapiro tried to avoid blaming the president for his own decisions, instead focusing his ire on White House advisor Peter Navarro…. Shapiro is smart enough to know that a 30 percent tariff is still wildly inflationary, but he caved to pressure to return to the North Korea-style praise of Trump as the ultimate genius."

Marcotte points out that Shapiro is hardly the only right-wing media pundit who finds himself in this position.

"Shapiro is one of the most prominent and frankly hilarious examples," Marcotte writes, "but his dilemma is felt throughout the massive world of professional Trump apologists. Even for people who have years of practice declaring Trump a 'genius' while he prattles on about bleach injections or pet-eating immigrants, it's getting harder to feign ignorance about basic realities…. Shapiro's dilemma reflects a tension that is increasingly untenable for much of the right-wing media, including Fox News."

Marcotte adds, "They make a handsome living by telling Trump voters soothing lies, about how they were always right and the liberals were always wrong and Trump is actually a genius."

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

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AN 525 VID]

When President Donald Trump a day after he crossed the 100-day mark of his time in office last month, members of the cabinet took turns to praise the president.

Although everyone offered glowing reviews, Attorney General Pam Bondi stood out by telling Trump that he was genuinely the best president of all time.

"President, your first 100 days has far exceeded that of any other presidency in this country. Ever. Ever. Never seen anything like it. Thank you," she said during the Cabinet meeting.

In a podcast for The New Republic discussing Trump's need for constant approval, journalists Greg Sargent and Amanda Marcotte described the "over-the-top" praise he receives from his aides as feeding into his "narcissism.""Every emotion is exaggerated to the maximum. They pretend to be angry at the loudest volume. They pretend to be sad with the biggest droopy faces and wailing tears. Everything’s loud and garish and schmaltzy," Marcotte said.

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"Most of us would be embarrassed to have somebody praise us like that because we know it’s not true... But he just needs it to just be constantly coming into his ears. And it’s getting worse as he ages, for various reasons. Any psychologist will also tell you that when narcissists are feeling insulted or they’re feeling their insecurity rise up, often because their approval ratings are coming down or they’re otherwise failing, their need to be told they’re the greatest just continues to go up."

Sargent and Marcotte also analyzed White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt's description of the president, calling it "cultlike."

"She routinely fluffs Trump with astonishingly cultlike descriptions of him to reporters—ones that portray him as powerful, calm, and completely in command of events. But then, left to his own devices on Truth Social, Trump presents the opposite picture, erupting regularly in wild meltdowns and uncontrollable hissy fits over the tiniest of slights," Sargent said.

According to Marcotte,"the over-the-top nature of it does affect certain people by convincing them—I don’t think Trump’s voters, even his biggest fans, think he’s the greatest president ever; the person with the most integrity via all time; no person has ever been anything more thing than Donald Trump ever has."

She added that repeated claims such as, "He’s the greatest businessman of all time," unintentionally reinforce the notion that he was at least a successful businessman, which is actually false. "He was a failure. He bankrupted his company over and over and over again," Marcotte said during the podcast.

The speakers also discussed "AI-generated and real photographic imagery of over-the-top abuse" of migrants detained by the administration "and functionally kidnapped and renditioned to a foreign prison."

"And they shaved their heads. They made sure to like make their tattoos as garish as possible. They had videos of them bent over in these torture positions. And you see the effect that it has on the audiences at Trump’s 100-day rally. The crowd went absolutely nuts," she said.

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AN 4 25

Discussing the history of conservatism in the United States, veteran Washington Post columnist George Will used the word "bookish" to describe Republicans of the past. And Will, who is very much a Never Trump conservative, meant that in a good way.

Will was applauding those conservatives of yesterday for, as he saw it, their detailed focus on policy. And he is no fan of the performative theatrics of the MAGA movement.

Salon's Amanda Marcotte cites three recent examples of such theatrics in an article published on April 28, calling out "performative temper tantrums" by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-Georgia), Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Trump White House adviser Stephen Miller.

"If there were an Oscar for the category 'hard to watch,'" Marcotte argues, "I'd have to nominate the video of Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., barking expletives at a constituent after he asked her if she would have a town hall soon. It's produced in a beauty supply store instead of a movie studio, but in a brief minute and 42 seconds, the video finds its place in the canon of horror films shot from the villain's perspective…. Most adults who act like Mace in public immediately wish to disappear off the face of the Earth in shame. But not our Nancy! No, she's the one who posted this video online, proud of her emotional incontinence."

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Marcotte adds, "She even offered a homophobic gay panic defense, by describing the man as 'wearing daisy dukes, at a makeup store'….. To people outside the MAGA bubble, it's a baffling choice. She's not even a fun villain."

Marcotte laments that "what most adults find embarrassing, the MAGA base will eat right up."

"Despite this effort, Mace didn't even come close to nabbing last week's gold star for the most histrionic MAGA performance," Marcotte observes. "She was outdone by Stephen Miller, whose usual register on TV is 'verge of a nervous breakdown,' but got so shrill on Fox News Tuesday that Lauren Tousignant at Jezebel worried she'd soon have to 'look at Stephen Miller's face as he pops a dozen blood vessels as his brain explodes'…. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth turned in two performances that would cause Al Pacino to tell him to settle down."

Marcotte adds, "While carping about "the fake news media" during the White House Easter egg roll, Hegseth's whining got so pitched his voice started to crack, while his children stood behind him, embarrassed at the spectacle….. All this yelling and bellyaching serves a pragmatic purpose: to distract from how what they're saying makes no sense.

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

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AN 4 25

On Wednesday, April 2 in a Dallas suburb, 17-year-old high school student Austin Metcalf was fatally stabbed at a track meet by Karmelo Anthony, also 17. Anthony, who admitted to fatally stabbing Metcalf, is facing murder charges but says he acted in self-defense when they got into a fight.

In an article published on April 25, Salon's Amanda Marcotte details the ways in which Jake Lang — who was among the January 6 Capitol riot defendants and is now running for the U.S. Senate in Florida — and right-wing media outlets are exploiting the case and turning it into a racial issue.

"Metcalf was white. Anthony is Black," Marcotte explains. "Lang saw an opportunity and leapt into action. After circulating a flyer with Metcalf's face labeled 'Protect White Americans,' Lang descended on this Texas suburb to lead a rally painting Black Americans as a near-existential threat to white Americans. When Jeff Metcalf, the victim's father, called Lang during the rally, the former inmate now running for State Secretary Marco Rubio's Florida Senate seat, got visibly excited."

According to Marcotte, Austin Metcalf's father, Jeff Metcalf, was not impressed by Lang's "racist stunt" and asked him to stop using photos of his son.

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"Lang is a clown, but he is not an outlier," Marcotte laments. "The whole of right-wing media, including Fox News, has decided to make a spectacle of this case, with endless, breathless coverage painting this single situation as symbolic of what they view as a racist war on white people. It's useful agitprop for MAGA, which desperately needs a distraction from (President Donald) Trump's failures and falling approval ratings."

Marcotte continues, "It's gross, and it's coming at a high cost for the families involved and the larger community, ratcheting up racial tensions and sowing paranoia, all over a case that is already heart-wrenching enough…. Tellingly, the right-wing noise machine can't even articulate the injustice that needs to be remedied here. Anthony was arrested and is being held accountable. There is not a smidgen of evidence that police and prosecutors aren't taking this case seriously…. The deafening outrage is about shutting off the brains of the audience, keeping MAGA audiences in a state of racist paranoia, so they don't think about how Donald Trump's incompetence is hurting the economy and national security."

Lang, according to Marcotte, "did not react well to Jeff Metcalf telling him to step off."

"After the grieving father embarrassed Lang in front of reporters," Marcotte observes, "Lang posted on X that Metcalf is an example of 'White Weakness & Submission' and that Metcalf would 'hand his daughter over to be raped.'"

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

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an 4 25

Critics of President Donald Trump often describe the MAGA movement as a "cult," arguing that Trump supporters behave like cult members when they express their relentless devotion to him and explode in anger at even subtle criticism.

But Salon's Amanda Marcotte takes the MAGA/cult analogy a step further in an article published on April 10, comparing the GOP of 2025 to a suicide cult in which Republicans avoid criticism of Trump no matter how bad his "idiocy" becomes.

"History's most famous cults are known primarily for their final suicidal acts: the mass poisoning at Jonestown, the self-immolation of the Branch Davidians, the self-asphyxiations of Heaven's Gate," Marcotte explains. "We know these things happen, but it's still a mystery to most of us how cult members get to this point. Why didn't they hit the eject button sooner, as their leader descended further into his incoherent megalomania? Why did they stick by him, even as it became increasingly clear he was putting the whole community on a pathway to self-destruction? Why didn't more people voice doubts or even confront the cult leader before things got this bad?"

Marcotte continues, "We're getting a compelling illustration on the national stage of how a cult leader can induce his followers to stick by him, even as he loses his mind and his behavior becomes too erratic and dangerous to defend. Almost every Republican on Capitol Hill knows that Donald Trump's tariff plan is political suicide, but few are willing to admit that Dear Leader fully intends to see this idiocy to the very end. Instead, most resemble the residents of Jonestown, many who hoped Jim Jones was testing their faith with all this poison-Kool-Aid talk, which allowed them to play along until it was too late to save themselves."

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Some right-wing conservatives and libertarians aren't shy about offering scathing condemnation of Trump's policies, from tariffs to his obsession with the U.S. acquiring Greenland. But those on the right who bash Trump frequently are likely to be MSNBC or CNN pundits or writers for The Bulwark — and they have long since been banished from Fox News, Fox Business and the Republican National Committee (RNC).

Nonetheless, Marcotte notes that there is a caveat with Trump's "Jim Jones fantasies": Some of his supporters are expressing their frustration with tariffs, including GOP Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and John Kennedy of Louisiana — albeit in a "passive" way. And Republicans in Congress, according to Marcotte, have a "collective action problem" when it comes to Trump policies that trouble them.

"Few are willing to be the one seen questioning the infinite wisdom of Dear Leader, lest they draw his ire and be singled out for punishment," Marcotte observes. "Instead, they resort to passive language, in hopes they can convey their concerns without daring to question whether the MAGA prophet is not the wisest man who ever lived…. What ties all this together is a fear of criticizing Trump directly, and instead hoping that all this gentle hand-holding and blame-shifting will give their leader the space he needs to stop the madness."

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an 4 25

A rising group of conservatives is increasingly challenging conventional ideas about empathy, often calling it "sinful."

Amanda Marcotte, a senior writer at Slate, wrote in an articlepublished Friday that the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement considers empathy to be a weakness and that sentiment is what makes them support President Donald Trump, who she referred to as "incapable of empathy."

She referred to the transition of Albert Mohler, the head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, from denouncing Trump as a "predator" in 2016 to being one of his "loudest Christian right defenders." In a recent interview, Mohler said he now condemns empathy, calling it "an artificial virtue" and "destructive."

ALSO READ:We’re talking to our neighbors about the MAGA rampage — and people are listening

Marcotte noted in the article that the right-wing figures who openly deride empathy follow Trump so much that many high-profile psychologists have argued that he should be considered a sociopath, "despite not consenting to a formal diagnosis."

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"The political impetus behind this overt assault on what was once considered a baseline virtue is obvious enough," she said.

She added, "Trump has eclipsed Jesus himself as the object of worship on the Christian right, as evidenced by the hosts of "Girls Gone Bible" invoking Trump's name as if he were God in their rewrite of the Lord's Prayer. At his inauguration ball, a 'worship painter" even replicated Trump's image while the crowd sang 'amen' over and over, underscoring this shift in the de facto theology of these 'Christians.'"

The author further said Trump's "sociopathy" has now surpassed the empathy of Jesus in MAGA eyes. She added that the MAGA movement has an "unhinged obsession with gender and escalating hatred of women," which is why they see empathy as "feminine."

ALSO READ:'The arc of concentration camps is twofold': Experts detail the 'logical endpoint' of MAGA’s rhetoric

"Both firmly agree that femininity is the root of all evil. One doesn't have to speculate, either, to see this aspect of the war on empathy. Plenty of MAGA leaders will say the misogynist part out loud," she wrote.

Many commentators described misogyny as a reason why former Vice President Kamala Harris, who would have been the first female president of the United States had she won the 2024 election, lost to Trump.

In December last year, just days after the election, a panel of Black female experts argued that "misogynoir, the intersection of racism and sexism," was the main factor in Harris's loss.

“Racism is designed in such a way to make you question your humanity, but sexism is also. Sexism is really a power move,” LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund said at the time. “When you combine those two things together, I think that that best explains what [Harris] experienced.”

ALSO READ:'Powerful motivator': Sociologist explains ways 'fear-based messaging' keeps GOP in power

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an 4 25

On Friday, April 4, British comedian/actor Russell Brand was charged with multiple counts of sexual assault by the UK Metropolitan Police. Brand, despite these charges, continues to proclaim his devotion to Christianity. And he is still bonding with the MAGA movement in the United States.

In a biting article published on April 5, Salon's Amanda Marcotte argues that the MAGA movement and far-right evangelicals are oblivious to the "disturbing" allegations Brand is facing.

"A collaboration between The Times, The Sunday Times, and Channel 4, conducted over years, produced exhaustively documented allegations of rape and other sexual abuses," Marcotte explains. "They spoke with hundreds of sources, including four accusers. They collected medical records, texts, e-mails, and internal documents from employers, all showing a pattern of alleged sexual abuse that is often frightening in its violence. The report came out in September 2023."

Marcotte continues, "Shortly thereafter, Brand was kicked off YouTube. He then swiftly joined the MAGA-affiliated Rumble network. In the next few months, he moved to the U.S. and got baptized, fully rebranding himself as a right-wing Christian influencer. This timeline doesn't seem to have given Brand's new MAGA audience a single moment's doubt that he might have ulterior motives. On the contrary, his fans encouraged the conspiracy theory that paints him as a political prisoner and the charges as 'a political prosecution,' as Charlie Kirk complained."

Brand, according to Marcotte, underscores the dangers of "MAGA Christianity" and shows "the willingness, in the era of Donald Trump, of right-wing Christians to scrape the absolute bottom of the barrel."

"Christianity emphasizes redemption, making it an attractive framework for a celebrity needing to rehab a bad image," Marcotte observes. "In theory, however, there is supposed to be repentance before redemption. But this is the era of Trumpian Christianity, so skipping the part where you say you're sorry is optional."

Marcotte adds, "After all, Trump is treated not just as a fellow Christian, but something closer to a savior figure by the Religious Right…. Being a bully is admired in the MAGA movement. In MAGA Christianity, actual repentance would be dismissed as 'woke.' No wonder it was the perfect landing spot for Russell Brand."

*Read Politico's full article at this link.

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an 3 25

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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During the 2024 presidential race, progressive filmmaker/activist Michael Moore predicted that female voters — furious over draconian anti-abortion laws and the MAGA movement's overt misogyny — would give Democratic nominee Kamala Harris a decisive victory. But Donald Trump defeated Harris by roughly 1.5 percent in the popular vote (according to the Cook Political Report), and receiving 53 percent of the female vote wasn't enough to get Harris past the finish line.

Salon's Amanda Marcotte, over the years, has often stressed that when GOP women cater to "misogyny," that doesn't mean that GOP men will respect them. And in an article published on February 26, she argues that this disrespect is evident during Trump's second presidency.

"Forty-five percent of female voters backed Trump in 2024, despite his overt misogyny," Marcotte explains. "Most, no doubt, believed that complicity would protect them and that the attacks would be centered on other women. But while the GOP certainly wants to strip liberal and feminist women of their rights, male MAGA leaders are showing increasing interest in bringing Republican women to heel, both culturally and through the force of law. After all, they are more likely to live and work with Republican women. If they want to feel the full flowering of male domination, it's Republican women they need to see submitting."

Marcotte cites specific examples, noting that Christian nationalists, including Pastor Joel Webbon, are pushing to oust right-wing activist Kristan Hawkins as head of a student anti-abortion group.

"It started after she objected to Republican legislators introducing bills to charge women who get abortions with murder — an extreme move she fears will backfire on the movement," Marcotte observes. "But mostly, it was about growing male anger on the Christian Right that women are allowed leadership positions at all."

Webbon and the TheoBros movement, Marcotte adds, are "clamoring more loudly, in recent months, about their wish to strip women, especially their own wives, of the right to vote." And according to The New Republic's Sarah Stankorb, more and more Christian nationalists are calling for the repeal of the U.S. Constitution's 19th Amendment.

"This isn't mere idle chatter, either," Marcotte warns. "House Republicans passed a bill, which stalled in the Senate, this session to require citizens to have a passport or birth certificate matching their name to vote. This would be a back-door ban on voting for any woman who took her husband's last name and doesn't have a passport — an estimated 69 million women. It would also disproportionately affect Republican women, who are more likely to be married, more likely to have changed their name and less likely to have a passport."

Marcotte continues, "Similarly, there's been a slowly rising volume on the right of talk about banning no-fault divorce, fueled by Republicans like Vice President JD Vance saying it's too easy for women — even those in abusive marriages — to leave their marriages."

The Salon journalist argues that "Republican women are fools" if they believe that an "increasingly misogynist MAGA movement" will spare them.

"On the contrary, because Republican women tend to be in closer proximity to Republican men," Marcotte warns, "they're far more likely to be on the receiving end of anger over talkback or other perceived insubordination."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The political media fascination with Rep. George Santos, the New York Republican who appears to have faked approximately 95% of his life, is such that it was inevitable that it would draw a "savvy" backlash piece scolding the press about their priorities. The wannabe party pooper finally emerged last week at the Washington Post in an opinion column headlined, "Real people don't care about George Santos." In it, self-assigned buzzkill David Byler argued "America doesn't seem to care" about Santos, which he can tell based on Google search traffic.

Our nation was founded by puritans, so as soon as people had a laugh over Santos, inevitably someone would shake their finger disapprovingly. But there were some flaws in Byler's argument, starting with his assumption that Santos' own embarrassed constituents are not "real" people. There's also the fact that Google Trends isn't a very exacting measure of interest in a subject, as it only measures if people are searching out information. It doesn't capture people who read articles they saw on social media or directly on a news website. Traffic to stories about Santos is plenty healthy on that front.

But perhaps most importantly, this narrow-minded focus on search traffic ignores what a lot of the sneered-at political observers saw coming a mile away: The imminent George Santos makeover into MAGA's Next Top Superstar.

Santos may not matter to "average" Americans, but his story is being leveraged directly into the right-wing propaganda machine that currently controls the Republican Party. On Thursday night, for instance, Santos was sanctified into the echelon of MAGA saints by the Pope of neo-fascism himself, Tucker Carlson. In a typically dishonest segment on his wildly popular Fox News show, Carlson painted Santos as a hapless victim of the bigoted news media by pretending that the only thing Santos lied about was his volleyball career. (Which is one of the more minor fake careers and hobbies Santos has claimed on his resume.) Media Matters has a sample of the extremely silly diatribe:

It was a tissue of lies constructed to deceive the American people. There was no volleyball scholarship. There was not a single dollar of volleyball scholarship. George Santos made it all up out of whole cloth, out of thin air. George Santos is an ersatz volleyball player. A fraud, a ghoul. People voted for this man believing he had played collegiate volleyball on a scholarship and he hadn't.

And yet tonight ladies and gentlemen, this thief of volleyball glory strides the halls of the United States Congress unimpeded by law enforcement. It's like another insurrection.

Carlson doesn't really have arguments or evidence, but he does do a bang-up impression of someone sarcastically brushing aside nonsense. Except what he's brushing away is usually pretty serious stuff, such as fascist attacks on democracy, attempts to save lives during a pandemic, or, in this case, unbelievable amounts of fraud that look potentially criminal in many cases. With Santos, the number of lies Carlson is ignoring is truly staggering. Santos lied about his resume, his religion, his marriage, his family history, and claimed connections he doesn't have to the Holocaust, 9/11, the Pulse nightclub shooting, and an assassination attempt that appears fictional. It is really no exaggeration to say it's easier to list the things he hasn't lied about (his age and his birthplace in Queens).

But just as Catholic saints get their status through martyrdom, the saints of MAGAdom must get theirs through falsified tales of victimhood at the hands of "woke mobs" or the "fake news media."

People right-wingers hate are alarmed at Santos and his staggering trail of fraud. So if the "libs" have a negative reaction to Santos, in the troll-based logic that drives the modern GOP, that must mean he's their newest champion. And let's just state for the record that, while Byler may not see left-leaning news consumers as "real people," he probably wouldn't say the same about the millions of Trump voters whose entire worldview is shaped by the crap that Fox News pours into their heads every day.

Carlson didn't reach the conclusion that Santos is the latest MAGA idol all on his own. Practically from the moment that Santos's deceit was exposed by the New York Times, Steve Bannon, the Joseph Goebbels-wannabe who frequently sets the GOP agenda with his popular "War Room" podcast, was championing the pathological liar. Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia have also rallied to Santos' side, claiming he's only a target because he's a "fighter." It's unclear who he has ever "fought" for besides himself, but then again, the same could be said of most MAGA figures, from Donald Trump on down.

It's not a mystery why these leaders think the right-wing audience is ready to accept Santos as the next MAGA savior. All that matters to the modern right is "owning the liberals," and who better to do that than someone who lies constantly for no apparent reason other than the sheer thrill of it?

Certainly, Santos seems to grasp that the move that will take him from a low-level con man to the ranks of the richest MAGA grifters is to lean into trolling. So he's been rolling out the standard issue liberal-owning stunts for weeks now: Flashing the white supremacist-aligned "OK" hand signal during a House vote. (He even knew how to do it so it was clear enough to photograph but so quick he could pretend later it wasn't intentional.) Wearing an assault rifle pin while playing dumb about why it offends people to celebrate the preferred weapons of mass shooters. Feeding the press donuts and actinglike they had somehow become complicit in the evil by eating them. Getting into Twitter fights with drag queens, who are the favorite punching bag of the authoritarian right. (Santos seems to have a past as a drag queen, as well, but this is just part of a favorite right-wing trolling tactic, to recruit members of a hated minority to speak out against their own.) Dunking on former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., for criticizing him by tweeting "cry about it."

Reports suggest Santos is delighted by all the negative attention he's getting in the press. An exceptionally short-lived aide recorded a conversation in which Santos was dressing him down, and right in the middle of it, Santos suddenly exclaims, "Don Lemon just texted me — I'm sorry, I'm listening to you — Don Lemon just texted me!" Getting his name on CNN, even during a story on how he is the worst, was just that thrilling to Santos.

Santos even hired former Steve Bannon employee and professional troll, Vish Burra, as a top aide. Burra's defense of Santos is cynical and self-congratulatory: The lying is a form of "shitposting," which is internet speak for saying outlandish things to draw outrage and attention. For the Trumpist right, aggressive trolling is what politics is all about.

Imagining that they're outraging the left is what the GOP audience gets out of this. (No one tell them that the left's reaction to Santos is more amusement than genuine fury.) But there's an even darker reason that Carlson, Bannon, Taylor Greene, etc. have decided to rally round Santos: He's very useful as a weapon in their larger war on truth.

As with Trump, it's overly simplistic to look at these people, with their non-stop disinformation, as mere liars. Liars are people who are sincerely trying to deceive people. In many cases, it's not at all evident that right-wing audiences actually believe the asinine B.S. that is rolled out by the likes of Carlson and Bannon. For instance, the "outrage" over M&M spokescandy shoe choices is less sincere anger than it is a collective bit of performance art. Both Carlson and his audience merely pretend to be mad as a way to keep ironic distance from their own weird sexual hang-ups. Similarly, conspiracy theories like Trump's Big Lie are often less about true belief and more about displaying fealty to their tribe.

There's a point to right-wingers constantly saying and "believing" things they know not to be true. It's about devaluing empirical reality. Fascists want "truth" to flow from what the right-wing authority figures say is "true," not from lived experience or verifiable facts.They are trying to construct a world where facts don't matter, and only power does. The first step is getting their tribal community to agree collectively to stop distinguishing between true and false and to only claim to believe what is convenient for their leaders or their cause.

For that goal, Santos is useful. He is living the fascist dream of a man whose entire existence seems unmoored from the power of facts. If the MAGA leaders can turn him into a hero, he'd be a living exemplar of their post-truth yearnings: "Truth" can be whatever you want it to be. After all, right-wingers already hate the way facts — Trump lost the election, COVID-19 is real, LGBTQ people exist — get in the way of their desires. They just need permission to let go of that last tendril of reality and start living purely in their authoritarian fantasy world. Santos shows the way. It's unlikely he will be going away any time soon.

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If there was one inescapable takeaway from the midterm elections, it was this: Abortion is a losing issue for Republicans.

Despite reams of historical evidence suggesting November 2022 was going to produce a "red wave," Democrats racked up dramatic wins, seizing state and federal offices and retaining control of the Senate. Much of the post-election data on why was messy— except when it came to abortion. On that issue, study after study showed that support for abortion rights after the overturn of Roe v. Wade in June was a major — and often deciding— factor. The implicit political advice to Republicans couldn't be clearer: Back off the draconian abortion restrictions. They've done no such thing, however.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) passed a resolution on Monday calling for more attacks on reproductive rights, arguing that the reason Republicans lost so many races in November was that the party wasn't anti-abortion enough. "Instead of fighting back and exposing Democratic extremism on abortion, many Republican candidates failed to remind Americans of our proud heritage of challenging slavery, segregation, and the forces eroding the family and the sanctity of human life," read the resolution. To fix the problem, the RNC argued, Republicans need to pass even harsher anti-abortion laws, such as banning first trimester abortions. This resolution was one of the first orders of business after Ronna McDaniel won a fourth term as chair of the RNC, showcasing how serious GOP leadership is about doubling down on anti-choice politics.

Why Republicans would want to go harder on an issue that most data shows hurts them at the polls is puzzling, initially. But a new study from PerryUndem, which specializes in crafting nuanced polls that dig into the deeper motivations of American voters, suggests why that might be. Their numbers show that, even as the country has grown more progressive on gender and sexuality, sexist views among Republican voters have only grown more entrenched. In addition, the data makes it clear that the driving force behind anti-abortion policies is a belief that women are not smart or moral enough to be allowed control over their own bodies.

"The research tells us that anti-abortion attitudes" have little to do with "babies or when life begins," Tresa Undem, the co-founder of PerryUndem, told Salon. Instead, "views are about one's fundamental beliefs toward women." When it comes to Republicans, "they hold the most hostile sexist views."

In other words, to keep the GOP base motivated to donate, volunteer, and vote in elections, the Republican party needs to appeal to sexist attitudes. The most effective way to win over misogynist voters is to attack reproductive rights.

As the study shows, the single best predictor of whether someone opposes abortion rights is if they subscribe to negative stereotypes about women and/or are committed to "traditional" gender roles. It's not just that anti-choice respondents were far more likely than pro-choice respondents to believe that "women are too easily offended" or "white men are the most attacked group in the country right now." Abortion opponents were also more likely to deny that it's rape if a man forces himself on his wife. A majority of anti-abortion respondents also believed men understand the biology of abortion better than women do. Over two-thirds of people who support abortion bans agreed "it bothers me when a guy acts like a girl," while only 28% of pro-choice people disliked men they perceive as effeminate.

Feminist writer Jill Filipovic summarized the findings by arguing that Republicans are "almost comically insecure when it comes to gender and gender roles," and tend to view women as "overly-sensitive, irresponsible and immoral, ruining the natural order of things, and in need of male authority."

Undem singled out one poll question in particular, which asked if "there are many irresponsible women who will decide to have an abortion up until the moment of birth." The factually correct answer to this question is "no." As family practitioner Dr. Meera Shah told Salon after failed Republican Senate candidate Mehmet Oz invoked this myth during a debate, "That's just not something that happens," and it "doesn't even make sense," because you can't "abort" a pregnancy that is full-term. You just deliver the baby.

"It's absurd," Undem said, "to believe that one woman, let alone 'many,' will decide to have an elective abortion, at say 39 weeks carrying around an 8-pound baby, out of irresponsibility." And yet their polling data shows that nearly 8 out of 10 people who oppose abortion rights believe a sexist myth that defies not just medical science, but common sense.

The PerryUndem research comports with another study published in Political Psychology in November, which examines the attitudes about abortion among self-described libertarians, who mostly tend to vote Republican. Researchers found that this group opposed reproductive rights, but only for women.They supported laws giving men veto power over women's abortions, as well as "financial abortion" laws that allow a man to opt out of financially supporting a child if a woman refuses to abort a pregnancy.Libertarians, researchers found, have "support for men's and not women's reproductive autonomy."

These findings help explain why Republican candidate for Georgia's Senate seat, Herschel Walker, lost very little Republican support during the 2022 election, despite widespread reports that he had demanded that two ex-girlfriends get abortions. The issue isn't abortion, but women's autonomy. If the perception is that a man made the abortion choice for a woman, most Republican voters will not hold it against him at the polls.

Sexist stereotypes about things other than abortion often get attached to bills restricting reproductive rights. In Tennessee, for instance, a bill allowing rape victims to get abortions comes with a poison pill provision that will likely prevent most, if not all, requests for the exception: If a patient makes a "false report or statement," they can go to prison for a minimum of three years. But, as journalist Jessica Valenti points out, "women across the country have been accused—and arrested!—for making false reports for reasons as simple as a police officer didn't believe them." So-called "false" allegations are often quite true, but victims get snared by the myth that women make up rape accusations to get revenge or conceal their own sexual activity. In reality, false rape reports are estimated to be about .5% of overall rape numbers. Lying about rape to the authorities is vanishingly rare. Fear of being accused of lying, however, will likely prevent women from seeking help.

\u201cThe anti-choice movement draws from the same logic as rape: it presumes that women can be compelled into a gendered role, including through the violent and forcible commandeering of their insides.\u201d

— Moira Donegan (@Moira Donegan) 1675268482

On January 15, a Planned Parenthood in Peoria, Illinois was set on fire, causing what the clinic says is over a million dollars in damages. Soon authorities arrested a 32-year-old man named Tyler Massengill who admitted to the arson after initially denying the charges. The reason for the attack he gave? He was still bitter over an ex-girlfriend getting an abortion a full three years ago. Sure enough, reporters soon dug up Massengill's extensive arrest record, which included two charges of domestic battery. Massengill took his behavior to the next level, but, as the PerryUndem data shows, this controlling attitude towards women is all too common, especially among Republican voters.

These sexist views are "why Republicans can succeed using the rhetoric they do," Undem told Salon. Republicans know that there's no substantive voting constituency for their economic policies. Tapping into this anger over women's economic and social gains allows the party to reach voters who would not be motivated by spending cuts to Social Security or tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. So while most Americans may reject the misogyny that underpins abortion bans, the anti-choice message is tapping a larger group of voters than Republicans could otherwise access. If they give up sexism now, they risk losing their core voters without necessarily getting new ones to replace them. Misogyny has been central to the Republican brand for too long, it turns out, for them to risk changing course now.

https://www.alternet.org/musk-trump/

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

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

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

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

Since my book "Troll Nation: How the Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set on Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself" was published in 2018, its central thesis — that the modern right is motivated by an obsessive desire to troll the left — has become a lot more widely accepted. Just this week, Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent pointed out that Musk has gotten into the troll business because he understands that "for large swaths of the right-wing media ecosystem, the Triggering of the Libs has become an end in itself." By tweeting repulsive things and drawing liberal outrage and condemnation, Musk can get more engagement while sucking in more fans who love how angry he makes their perceived enemies.

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

But it's a mistake to conclude that Musk's fans simply fail to understand how uncool the Tesla CEO has revealed himself to be. He's created a cult of dork solidarity around him, one committed to a "Revenge of the Nerds"-style fantasy of ruining Twitter for all those blue-checked people who make them feel bad about themselves. That doesn't just appeal to those who already identify as conservative, either. Musk's cult is part of a larger ecosystem that seeks to redirect angry young men toward fascist politics. Musk may be running Twitter into the ground financially, but as a right-wing political project, his takeover of the company is going great: He's adding 200,000 new followers a day.

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

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

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

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It has long been evident that Elon Musk is a moron, at least to those willing to see it. Well before the Tesla CEO overpaid for Twitter in the throes of a tantrum, there was a chorus of mostly-ignored people pointing out, repeatedly, that Musk's mental maturity appeared to have stagnated around the sixth grade. There was the time he rolled out a"ingenious" idea for tunnel-based transportation, only to have people point out that the subway has been around for over a century.Or the time he tried to push a useless and overly complicated plan to rescue a group of Thai children trapped in a cave. Or the time shortly after that when, still angry at being dismissed, he falsely accused the man who actually did save the children of being a pedophile. Or the time he acted like such an idiot on Joe Rogan's podcast that Tesla stock took a dive. Or the time he named his actual child X Æ A-12.

There are infinitely more examples. (His childish feud with rapper Azealia Banks is a personal favorite.) Yet somehow, no matter how often Musk has shown his ass in public, the damage to his reputation was fleeting. The business and tech press would be startled at his dumb behavior, but within 48 to 72 hours, it was all forgotten and Musk went back to being covered as if he were a genius, if perhaps an eccentric one.

Such is the power of the American mythology of the billionaire. The infatuation with our richest capitalists is related to, but in many ways goes even beyond, the illusion that the U.S. is a meritocracy. The notion that to be very rich must also mean you're brilliant permeates our society, justifying both ridiculously low taxes on the wealthiest Americans and the undue influence they exert over our political system. It's a social fiction that dates back to the Gilded Age and has covered up the intellectual deficits of many famous Americans. (Henry Ford comes to mind.) But it's gotten a lot more juice in the past few decades, as the new class of tech billionaires, starting with Bill Gates of Microsoft and Steve Jobs of Apple, forged the image of the singular mastermind who, with little education and limited resources, remakes the world through the sheer power of their intelligence.

This presumption that wealth equals brains has so permeated our society that it's sometimes hard to see how pervasive it is. But the past couple of years — and indeed, just the past couple of months — have really done a number on the belief that having a fat bank account somehow inoculates one from being a dumbass. Watching Musk lay waste to Twitter, for no discernible reason beyond his desire to impress the biggest losers on the internet, has been a wake-up call. It's hard to imagine there will be the same mass forgetting of who Musk really is that we saw after all his previous public face-plants.

But it's not just Musk. The same process is unfolding for the single person who has benefited more than any other from the myth that money means you're smart: Donald Trump.

For those of us who always thought Trump was a dingleberry, it may not seem readily apparent how much he's really gotten a boost from the widespread assumption that wealth comes attached to inherent smarts. Trump coasted on this for decades. The entire premise of his reality show, "The Apprentice," was that he was some kind of business savant. As with Musk, Trump's gross and idiotic behavior — such as pushing the "birther" conspiracy theory about Barack Obama — was largely shrugged off as quirkiness instead of idiocy.

In 2016, a distressingly large number of people were able to tell themselves that it was OK to vote for Trump because his wealth must mean he's smarter than he seems. When I went to the Republican National Convention in 2016, one delegate after another insisted to me that there must be an ocean of intelligence under that dimwitted exterior, and pointed to his real estate empire as proof. Years later, it became clear that his wealth had been handed to him by others, and his principal accomplishment was to piss most of it away.

That was on top of a record of public tomfoolery that reached its zenith when he publicly suggested that doctors had overlooked the possibility that injecting bleach into the human body might cure COVID-19. In true Dunning-Kruger fashion, Trump then congratulated himself on knowing more than the entire medical establishment, due to this insight.

Trump lost the 2020 election for a number of reasons, but we can't overlook the strong possibility that four years of his outbursts disabused some number of his 2016 voters of the claims about his supposedly superior mental acumen. Yet the notion that Trump is a political sage underneath the braying boob exterior continues to have a remarkable hold on the GOP imagination. The expectation that the 2022 midterms would be a "red tsunami" was based in large part on the confidence that the gallery of QAnoners, snake oil salesmen and bumbleheads endorsed by Trump had also been anointed with some secret sauce that only he, in his infinite wisdom, could perceive or understand. Those candidates ended up losing by an average of about five percentage points more than other Republicans not cursed with Trump's blessing. Now the GOP establishment is struggling with the same doubts creeping into the tech press around Musk: Is it possible this guy's success was more about luck and privilege than savvy?

(To be clear, I don't think Trump's a total imbecile. He's a skillful criminal with a certain low cunning. He's just bad at all the things his defenders wanted to believe he was good at: Business, governance, literacy.)

Two examples, even as big as these, do not a trend make. But there's another big sign that the American faith in the galaxy-level intelligence of our wealthiest people is being rattled: the dawning realization that many people have exploited this mythology for the purposes of plain old fraud.

Just this past couple of weeks, we've seen both former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison and the total career implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried, former CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. In both cases, it should have been obvious that what they were selling to investors was pure nonsense. Holmes' alleged blood-test technology showed multiple signs of being a smoke-and-mirrors job, and numerous sensible people have been calling cryptocurrency a scam from the very beginning. However you slice it, a heavy dose of skepticism was warranted in both cases.

But both Holmes and Bankman-Fried managed to quash other people's doubts by leveraging the cult of the billionaire genius. Both expertly played to stereotypes to bamboozle investors. Holmes literally modeled her look and demeanor after Steve Jobs, which was such a weird thing to do that it only reinforced her image as a quirky brainiac. Bankman-Fried hyped himself as a relentless workaholic who slept at the office. Both images are meant to suggest a person too focused on changing the world to care about personal appearance. In reality, these personas were as carefully cultivated as Kim Kardashian's, and they were highly effective in convincing gullible people to part with their money.

Now that these two have been exposed, however, a lot more people are asking hard questions about whether the "grind culture" of Silicon Valley is a farce, akin to the illusion of Trump's business acuity built in the editing bay of "The Apprentice." Holmes and Bankman-Fried might have be written off as outliers a few years ago. But right now there's a growing sense that so much of self-congratulatory tech culture is just a digital version of the Wizard of Oz, especially as another crypto crash seems to happen every couple of weekw. Even Gates and Jobs, who were unquestionably brilliant at developing and marketing innovative computer technology, have lost a little of their luster.Jobs, of course, died of cancer after convincing himself that he knew better than doctors how to treat it.Gates, meanwhile, blew up his marriage by acting like a garden variety jackass. Even genuinely smart people can be stupid sometimes. More importantly, a bunch of people who have tricked everyone into thinking that they're geniuses are finally being revealed as the imposters they always were.

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"He really is the living embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect," a friend responded in a group text over the weekend. We had been sharing stories about the bouts of dumbassery on display, as Elon Musk starts his ill-advised reign of Twitter.And hoo boy, there was plenty to share. Did you see the one about Musk telling software engineers to print out 30 days of code, only to tell them to shred it when he likely realized this exposed how he doesn't know what he's doing? Or how he plans to take a bazooka to the content moderation team, even though doing so will likely send advertisers packing? Or how he thought carrying a sink around was a hilarious joke? Or how he tweeted an asinine conspiracy theory about the Paul Pelosi attack, only to delete it hours later?

None of this should be surprising. From day one, this entire saga has been a story of a man with far more money than brains. After all, this all started when Musk stupidly offered to buy Twitter at a price way over its valuation, for no other reason than a fit of trollish pique. It was only after he realized what a foolish idea it was to set $44 billion on fire that he started coming up with disingenuous excuses to escape the deal, only to discover that it was too late, legally, to back out.

Yet, somehow, much of this still feels surprising. The idea that Musk is "smart" has persisted through years of very public evidence to the contrary. Even now, many of his critics offer pre-emptive caveats that they don't think he's stupid, before explaining why the latest of his endless string of idiotic choices is a bad one. This notion of Musk's intelligence clings to the discourse around him for one simple reason: He is very, very rich.

The myth of the American meritocracy is a stubborn one. Americans can't help but believe that someone as rich as Musk must have something going on for him beyond dumb luck. To imagine otherwise is too unsettling. So many people block out what should be an obvious truth: You probably would have never heard of Elon Musk if he wasn't a white man from a wealthy family that literally owned an emerald mine in South Africa.

To be fair, it's entirely possible that, at one point, Musk wasn't a total birdbrain. His resume suggests there was a time when he was relatively competent at computer science, though there's no reason to think that such skills mean fluency in any other higher-functioning tasks. But regardless of what some IQ test from back in the day might have said about Musk, it's clear that in the past couple of decades, his brain has turned to total mush.

The irony is that the very wealth and privilege that tricks people into thinking he must be a genius likely contributed to the current state of affairs. Being surrounded by nothing but flattery makes it hard to distinguish between thoughts you have that are smart and useful and thoughts you have (such as right-wing conspiracy theories) that are idiotic. Either way, the people in your life — and for Musk, his legions of fanboys on Twitter — are swooning over what a super genius you are. The lack of meaningful feedback would damage most people's capacity for critical thinking. Musk's narcissism renders the diagnosis of his rational capacity terminal.

One can only hope the daily updates on Musk's antics will put some dent into the American myth of meritocracy. But then again, having to endure four years of a Donald Trump presidency didn't seem to make much difference, even as he shared moments of Trumpian wisdom like telling people to inject bleach into their lungs to cure COVID-19 and trying to "correct" a weather map drawn by actual meteorologists because he felt it would better serve his ego for a hurricane to make landfall in Alabama. Trump was elected in no small part because he had convinced large numbers of Americans that he was a successful businessman and therefore smart. In reality, he was a historically terrible businessman whose wealth exists because other rich white guys spent decades bailing him out of his self-inflicted financial woes.

The insidious nature of the meritocratic myth is on full display this week, as the Supreme Court heard arguments in a lawsuit over affirmative action at Harvard University. Unfortunately, polling shows that 63% of Americans oppose universities considering race in their admissions process, naively believing that ending affirmative action means some objective measure of "merit" will be used instead. In reality, the opposite is true: Far from being meritocratic institutions, Ivy League schools are largely devoted to elevating rich white kids at the expense of people who have more talent. As Mark Joseph Stern at Slate explains, "Harvard has a preference for four specific groups of applicants known as ALDC: athletes, legacies, those on the dean's list (frequently because of family donations), and the children of faculty." He continues:

In theory, ALDC preferences are colorblind. In practice, they operate as a massive affirmative action program for white applicants. Over a recent six-year period, 2,200 out of 4,993 admitted white students were ALDC—a figure significantly higher than the overall number of admitted students who are Black (1,392) and Hispanic (1,283). White ALDC students are not overrepresented because they happen to be more qualified; to the contrary, about three-fourths of them would have been rejected without the ALDC boost.

The existing race-based affirmative action program is mostly an attempt to make up for the diversity that is lost giving such a massive advantage to white applicants. And yet, somehow, you hear no complaints from most conservatives about the ALDC preferences. That's because they don't actually want a meritocracy. They want a system where white people can get twice as far while being half as talented. Or where the richest man in the world keeps getting called a genius, even as we can all see — if we're willing to look — that he's just another privilege-addled idiot who lost his capacity for critical thinking many billions of dollars ago.

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i have been ignoring pa primary?

Donald Trump is not happy about the shape of the Republican Senate primary in Pennsylvania. His fame and celebrity thirst led him to endorse TV star Dr. Mehmet Oz, an accomplished surgeon who gave it all up for the easy cash of peddling snake oil. But now it looks like Oz may lose his primary, dealing an embarrassing blow to Trump's fragile ego.

Worse, Oz may not even lose to the generic Republican candidate, David McCormick, a walking MAGA-hat whose bland white guy looks can pass as "normal" to low-info swing voters. (I like to call this "pulling a Glenn Youngkin.") No, the surging candidate is Kathy Barnette, a hard-right commentator and crank in the style of Christine O'Donnell or Todd Akin— in other words, weird enough to pull in national attention, but with extreme views that could sink her in a general election race.

"Kathy Barnette will never be able to win the General Election against the Radical Left Democrats," Trump ranted in a statement released Thursday. He complained that she "has many things in her past which have not been properly explained or vetted," and argued that "Oz is the only one who will be able to easily defeat the Crazed, Lunatic Democrat in Pennsylvania."

Politico describes Barnette's poll surge as "somewhat puzzling." It's not, however, if one has been carefully following how much the backlash to the #MeToo movement and rising anger at feminism has been fueling Trumpism. Trump won in 2016 thanks to a widespread sexist tantrum over a woman, Hillary Clinton, winning the Democratic nomination for president. Trump reinforced the misogyny message throughout his campaign, starting with mocking a female journalist for menstruating and ending with an absurdly insincere apology for the "Access Hollywood" tape in which he can be heard boasting about sexual assault.

Barnette's entry into the Misogyny Olympics is outrageous even by MAGA's low standards. She's been circulating a video and a story about how her motherwas raped at 11 years old in 1971. While the subsequent birth of Barnette is treated like a beautiful sacrifice on her mother's part, it is worth noting that she didn't exactly have many choices as a Black child in Alabama before Roe v. Wade.

As feminist writer Jessica Valenti noted in a recent newsletter, "people talk about abortion as if something is ending," but in reality, access to abortion secures opportunities for women. Citing how her abortion made possible her marriage, daughter and career, Valenti wrote, "Anti-choicers like to pose hypotheticals about the remarkable baby a woman could have if she just didn't get an abortion: What if they cured cancer? None ask if that woman herself might change the world." When we're talking about rape victims who are literal children, it's even more stark; their entire futures can depend on having access to abortion.

Barnette calls the rape "horrible" in the video, but — by the anti-choice logic she's appealing to with her messaging — if forced childbirth is a beautiful thing because it results in "life," wouldn't that make forced impregnation beautiful as well? Indeed, MAGA circles went nuts last week over an event at St. Patrick's Old Cathedral, where one speaker declared, "Not your body, your choice. Your body is mine and you're having my baby." It's why the anti-choice movement also opposes birth control. People who are compelled by the idea that a person wouldn't be here if a woman had ended a pregnancy will likely find other potential roadblocks to giving birth, including preventing pregnancy via contraception or a woman's right to refuse sex, suspicious as well.

Barnette's appeal to the MAGA base isn't exactly mysterious. The anti-choice crowd has always romanticized stories of women submitting to extreme levels of oppression. It puts an ennobling gloss on what is actually a deeply sadistic attitude towards women.

As much as he may loathe admitting it, Trump's objections to Barnette echo concerns that have already been expressed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. In April, McConnell gave a speech noting that Republicansare in a good position for the midterms unless they "screw this up" by running "unacceptable" candidates. As Russell Berman noted in the Atlantic later that month, McConnell is likely thinking of "the GOP's missed chances in 2010 and 2012," where lunatic candidates lost races they could have otherwise won. In at least two cases, it was because of "defending their opposition to abortion even in cases of rape."

Well, Barnette isn't just opposed to abortion rights for rape victims. She's built her entire campaign around it. Anti-choicers like to leverage stories by people who claim they are products of rape because they know it shuts down some arguments. That doesn't mean those stories win people over, though. "Being forced to give birth to a rapist's baby in junior high is good, actually" is a bad campaign slogan, no matter how many personal testimonies you put behind it. Republican strategists desperately want the campaign to be about *anything* but forced childbirth, but Barnette may make that impossible in Pennsylvania.

Plus, that's just one of her many truly fringe positions. Reporters haven't even really started digging and the research on her bigoted statements has started to pour out in volumes, documented at length on her own radio program. She compared being Muslim to "Hitler's Nazi Germany view of the world." She compared same-sex marriage to marriage between "one older man and a 12-year-old child." (Which is notably similar to the configuration that led to the forced childbirth she celebrates.) "Two men sleeping together, two men holding hands, two men caressing, that is not normal," she claimed. She bemoaned LGBTQ rights as a "barrage to normalize sexual perversion."

It's a race that's expected to get a lot of national attention because Pennsylvania is a swing state. Barnette sticks out from a crowded field of MAGA-heads because of her race and gender, but also because, as Trump suggests, there's a great deal not known about her yet. That opens the door to investigations into her background. Clearly, the GOP powers-that-be are worried about Barnette, because they're placing opposition research about her in the right-wing press not unlike the ongoing campaign to destroy Madison Cawthorn, the extremist MAGA congressman from North Carolina. Unlike states where the local media has been thoroughly destroyed, Pennsylvania still has some popular local newspapers like the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Philadelphia Inquirer, which make it harder for shady politicians to avoid press scrutiny.

It's a tough year for Democrats, who are taking the blame for inflation and general American malaise, but the public is starting to get quite angry about issues like the upcoming overturn of Roe v. Wade. All this makes her a very bad candidate for the GOP in this race.

But if Barnette is a bridge too far, as Trump fears, he only has himself to blame. His electoral success in 2016 — even though he never once won the popular vote — emboldened the GOP base to believe they could win elections by running any troll they want. Trump hasn't exactly done much work to discourage this idea. He's backed Herschel Walker in Georgia, who lied about graduating college and is accused of threatening to kill his ex-wife. He's backed a Nebraska gubernatorial candidate with eight sexual assault allegations. Prior to endorsing Oz, Trump's man in the Pennsylvania senate race was Sean Parnell,whose wife accused him of beating her and punching a door into a child's face. Trump has no discernible objection to candidates with ugly attitudes about violence towards women. His cold feet around Barnette might change a few minds. But in a GOP primary system that is mostly a race to the bottom, it's not a surprise someone like her is pulling ahead.

180 pp gt replace manifesto, dad bought him one of the guns?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/matt-gaetz/

amanda

in the 16 months since Jan. 6, 2021, Donald Trump and the hosts Fox News hosts — especially its top-rated personality, Tucker Carlson — haven't exactly been subtle in approving of what happened and longing to see more right-wing violence. Trump has publicly mused about issuing pardons to the Capitol insurrectionists if he wins back — or rather steals back — the White House in 2024. Like many of the far-right Republicans in Congress, Trump has also made a martyr out of Ashli Babbitt, the QAnon believer who was shotduring the Capitol riot when she tried to break into a secure area and quite likely attack members of Congress. Carlson, meanwhile, has been at the forefront of popularizing various often contradictory conspiracy theories, mostly intended to portray the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as noble patriots and lambaste any Republican who dares say otherwise. While these GOP leaders and media personalities are generally careful to avoid direct calls for violence, their overall message of sympathy and support for right-wing terrorism is undeniable.

So Saturday's mass shooting in Buffalo, while horrifying, is really no surprise.

The alleged shooter who killed 10 people and injured three others in a Buffalo supermarket is 18-year-old Payton Gendron, who appears to have target a busy location in a predominantly Black neighborhood. As has become far too common with these kinds of mass murders, Gendron reportedly live-streamed the massacre on video, and apparently also published a manifesto that echoes many of the paranoid right-wing talking points one can hear every day streaming from the mouths of Fox News hosts and Republican politicians: a series of scurrilous lies about "critical race theory," George Soros and the "great replacement."

Now a familiar refrain will commence. No doubt we will be hear a great deal of umbrage in the coming days from Republican leaders and right-wing pundits. "How dare you blame us?" they will proclaim, in almost hysterical terms, acting shocked, shocked, that anyone would suggest that their words have had horrible consequences. The point of this fake outrage will be to make it too emotionally exhausting to hold them accountable, and to reinforce the ridiculous victim complex that fuels the American right as it increasingly slides into fascism. But let's not mince words: These folks share the blame. They have been encouraging violence, and violence is what they got.

The "great replacement" theory has been a favorite of Carlson's for some time now. This particular paranoid hypothesis is deeply rooted in neo-Nazi and other white nationalist circles. A cabal of rich Jewish people, the theory holds, has conspired to "replace" white Christian Americans with other races and ethnic groups in order to gain political and social control.Carlson doesn't actually say "Jews," and generally blames the sinister plan on Democrats, socialists or unspecified "elites," but otherwise has kept the conspiracy theory intact. (Antisemitism remains the mix by singling out individual Jewish people especially Soros, as the alleged ringleaders.) It's not like Carlson only invokes this narrative on occasion. As Media Matters researcher Nikki McCann Ramirez has documented, Carlson is obsessed with this idea that the people he calls"legacy Americans" — a not-so-veiled euphemism for white Christians of European ancestry — are under siege from shadowy forces flying the banner of diversity. He uses anodyne terms like "demographic change" to make the point, but has gotten bolder more recently, using the word "replacement" to make it even clearer that he's borrowing his ideas from the white-supremacist fringe.

Carlson has also explicitly linked this conspiracy theory to the threat of violence, repeatedly "warning" that America faces a new civil war unless these fictional conspirators stop trying to "replace" his cherished "legacy Americans." The GOP base has been getting the message. A poll conducted in December showed that nearly half of Republican respondents buy into the idea that there's a conspiracy to "replace" white Christians with different racial and ethnic groups. That proportion has probably risen since then, as Carlson's deluge has further mainstreamed this delusional and dangerous notion. Unsurprisingly, there has been a concurrent rise in hate crimes, of which this Buffalo shooting is merely the most dramatic recent example.

When called out for stoking a conspiracy theory that is likely to inspire violence, Carlson inevitably plays the victim, accusing liberals of being "hysterical" and characterizing these criticisms as "cancel culture." This only encourage his viewers to embrace the conspiracy theory even more, telling themselves that they (and he) are bold truth-tellers fighting against the forces of liberal oppression.That's why the how-dare-they posturing we will almost certainly see from Carlson and other right-wing pundits in coming days so predictable. This article, for instance, will quite likely be characterized as hysterical name-calling or an attempt to censor bold political speech. But let's understand this feigned outrage for what it is: an attempt to leverage an act of terrorism in a way that leads people to accept it or even condone it.

The "great replacement" theory fits in with the larger pattern of right-wing Republicans (especially our former president and his allies) and Fox News pundits encouraging not just right-wing paranoia, but the inevitable acts of violence that flow from it. The most straightforward example of this, of course, is the relentless rewriting of the history of Jan. 6, which began in the immediate aftermath and continues to this day. Republican leaders in Congress voted down Trump's impeachment only weeks after the riot and have tried to block congressional efforts to uncover exactly how the attempted coup went down.

Over this past winter, Fox News, Trump and other GOP leaders made another big push towards political violence, hyping outrageous conspiracy theories about COVID vaccines and encouraging their audiences toward aggressive acts of so-called resistance. As with Carlson, these threats are often packaged as "warnings," as when Trump declared on Fox News in February, "You can push people so far and our country is a tinderbox too, don't kid yourself." Around the same time, Carlson, Sean Hannity, Carlson and Glenn Beck all started pushed the idea that anti-vaccination fanatics were potentially justified in using violence as "self-defense."

Indeed, as the shooting was unfolding in Buffalo, there was an overt call for right-wing violence at Trump's rally in Austin, Texas, where oock geezer turned gun advocate Ted Nugent told the crowd of 8,000 that he'd "love" it if they all "went out and just went berserk on the skulls of the Democrats and the Marxists and the communists." In his speech afterward, Trump praised Republican politicians in Texas, including Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, who have slavishly proven their loyalty to him.

Many of the people arrested for their actions on Jan. 6 , 2021, have stopped being apologetic about what they did, and are now portraying themselves as martyrs and heroes. Last week, one of the most prominent ringleaders on the insurrection,Tim "Baked Alaska" Gionet, a troll to the very end, dramatically declared at a hearing that he was changing his plea. He had agreed to plead guilty to a lesser offense, but now wants to plead not guilty, even though he filming himself inside the Capitol during the riot and put the evidence online. Other Jan. 6 defendants have also become more confrontational, including pulling a gun on probation officers, acquiring new guns in defiance of a court order, or claiming that their actions on that dayamounted to "self-defense." In fairness, why shouldn't they feel emboldened? Most Republican voters, along with the party's leadership, are more interested in making excuses for Trump's coup than holding anyone accountable for it.

And all of the above doesn't even touch on the way Republican politicians and right-wing media have mainstreamed the QAnon conspiracy theory by regularly slurring Democrats, LGBTQ folks and their allies as "groomers." Demonizing political opponents with false allegations of pedophilia is unbelievably slimy, even by Republican standards. It also serves to inspire or encourage potential acts of violence, by dehumanizing their targets and creating a delusional narrative that makes such attacks seem justified.

Perhaps the horror unleashed in Buffalo on Saturday will cause Carlson and his allies to rethink their paranoid, racist and inflammatory rhetoric. That is doubtful, however. After all, this is just the latest in a series of mass shootings inspired by the "great replacement" theory, including the

Just this week, the conspiracy theory got another round of hype as Republican pundits and politicians pretended to believe that President Biden was stealing baby formula from Americans to feed "illegals," their slur for refugees applying for asylum. Those who would support deliberately starving babies for racist and xenophobic reasons aren't likely to feel any real empathy for the victims and their families in Buffalo. We cannot legitimately hope that they will be chastened by this latest round of violence, but we can make clear that their hateful rhetoric helped to unleash it.

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in the weeks after the January 6 insurrection, the Washington Post published a disturbing piece that hinted at how everyday Republicans had come to embrace the politics of terrorism. In Oklahoma City, the Post noted, the memory of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing has become a flashpoint, as both Republican politicians and ordinary citizens bully anyone who tries to draw a line between Timothy McVeigh's crime and Donald Trump-incited storming of the Capitol. The link is obvious, however. Both crimes were committed by white nationalists who refuse to accept a multiracial democracy — but woe on those who say as much in Oklahoma. When Oklahoma's Department of Education shared information from the bombing memorial linking McVeigh's attack with the domestic terror attack on the Capitol, their Facebook page was flooded with vitriol.

"How in the world is this even remotely the same as the Oklahoma bombing??!!!" one teacher wrote. Another derided the education department as the "Oklahoma Dept of Socialist Indoctrination." An angry dad clashed with other parents who argued that McVeigh's radicalism and the anti-government rhetoric at the Capitol were "the very definition of the same context."

One angry Oklahoman even shared the right-wing slogan about the "tree of liberty" needing to be "refreshed" with "blood" in the comments, seemingly unaware that the same phrase was on the T-shirt that McVeigh wore the day he murdered 168 people.

This incoherent insistence on treating McVeigh's insurrectionist violence as somehow different than the Capitol rioters illustrates an ugly shift that's happened in Republican politics since 1995. Back then, most Republicans rejected the view that a white nationalist is entitled to commit violence to protest democratic outcomes he doesn't like. Now, McVeigh's ideology is the mainstream view in GOP politics. Sure, they rarely come right out and say it. But this insistence on minimizing the Capitol riot and continuing support for the man who instigated it — Donald Trump — speaks loudly enough. And ugliness in Oklahoma City in the days after the 2021 insurrection demonstrated that this pro-insurrection view was fixed on the right within days, if not hours, of the event itself.

We see this, as well, in the celebratory attitude that right-wing media — especially Fox News — is taking towards the Ottawa trucker blockade.

As Zack Beauchamp of Vox notes, the uprising that brought that part of the Canada-U.S. border to a standstill and has terrorized the city of Ottawa "is on the fringe, including among Canadian truckers — some 90 percent of whom are vaccinated." It's a group of right-wingers who "are angry because they have lost" and are trying to gain by force what they cannot through democratic means. And yet, it's become a cause célèbre on Fox News, causing comically overwrought claims like it's "the single most successful human rights protest in a generation."

Fox News doesn't like the blockade despite its widespread unpopularity — they support it because it's unpopular.

As with the January 6 insurrection, the trucker tantrum is viewed by right-wing media asa model for how the embittered white conservative majority can impose its will without getting public support. Both the insurrection and the trucker tantrum are a far-right minority expressing a belief that they entitled to rule, no matter what. And while the Ottawa demonstration has so far not been as violent as the January 6 insurrection, it is still about using force — by taking the economy hostage and intimidating the residents with the threat of violence — to obtain what conservatives cannot gain fairly.

This shift from being anti- to pro-terrorism among Republicans can really be traced back to Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy's 2014 standoff with the Bureau of Land Management(BLM) and his sons' subsequent 2016occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. That's when a group of far-right extremists, led by brothers Ryan and Ammon Bundy, seized control of a visitor's center at an Oregon national wildlife refuge, spouting a bunch of incoherent demands that amounted to a belief that a democratically elected government had no right to pass laws restricting the right of white men to wreak as much environmental damage as they damn well pleased. The fight quite literally started because the occupiers didn't believe the government had a right to convict two men who had set fire to federal lands to protest not being allowed to graze their cattle there.

The occupiers were domestic terrorists, trying to obtain through violence what they couldn't through fair engagement in politics. But while Republicans formally condemned the violence, they were also tripping over each other to validate the asinine complaints of the occupiers. Multiple GOP congressmen even drew on arguments that came from fringe authoritarian writers who believe in things like turning the U.S. into a Christian theocracy. Even more troublingly, the occupiers were found "not guilty" at their trial, suggesting that by October of 2016, enough Republicans were pro-terrorism enough to make it impossible to put together a jury to convict in a case that should have been a slam dunk. So that Trump was able to cobble together enough votes the next month to win the electoral college should not, in retrospect, have been a surprise.

The Department of Justice under Barack Obama had been slow and cautious in its response to the occupation, fearing another debacle like the Branch Davidian fire in Waco, TX in 1993. Instead of storming in, they let the occupiers feel safe enough to actually leave the property for a media event, where they were then easily captured on an open highway. It was a decision heavily criticized at the time, with lots of people rightfully pointing out that people of color who commit acts of terrorism don't get the kid glove treatment. Others, including myself, defended the feds, arguing that the fact that only one person died in the process justified the strategy. Now I'm beginning to doubt that view.

It may be that Democrats just need to get stiffer spines when dealing with right-wing bullies and terrorists, even when doing so means the right will react with violence. As :{Brian Beutler of :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{Crooked Media argued :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:in his newsletter last week, it's reasonable to worry that the utter failure of the Department of Justice to arrest Trump or his allies for their many crimes "is driven by fear" of a violent backlash. Certainly, Trump has been using intimidation recently, promising pardons for people who commit violence for him and demanding ugly reactions from his followers if he does face a consequence.

But this failure of nerve on the part of Democratic leadership is going to screw us all over in the long run. As Beutler argues, the system "can't function if one side gets a hostage-taker's veto over the rules of fair play," and without imposing real consequences for crime and violence, "he public will just grow desensitized to right-wing tactics or, worse," even start to sympathize with the hostage-takers and violent terrorists.

We see this in the shift in GOP circles from 1995, when McVeigh's villainy was indisputable, to our modern time, when people who share McVeigh's views and stormed the Capitol are described by the Republican National Committee as merely engaging in "legitimate political discourse." The RNC did walk that lie back a little bit, but notably only for the people who got arrested. That only underscores the validity of Beutler's argument: Consequences matter when it comes to public opinion.

The ongoing failure of Democrats to bring the hammer down on the ringleaders of the coup signals strongly to the public that the coup was no big deal — and indeed, opens the door to arguing that the coup was justified. Republicans are walking right through that door right now.

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two stories straight out of Alabama this week really encapsulate how the panic over "critical race theory," the war on schools and the war on democracy itself are all a piece of a singular racist right wing movement. Last week, AL.com reported that school officials across the state say parents are freaking out over the very existence of Black History Month, accusing schools of promoting "critical race theory" by mentioning it or honoring it in any way.

And on Monday, the Supreme Court declined to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Actin response to a plainly racist gerrymander in Alabama, on the grounds that doing so would interfere with the state's control of their elections systems. Yes, even though federal oversight of state election systems is literally what the Voting Rights Act was designed to do.

It's been 13 months since Donald Trump incited an insurrection on the Capitol, one that was clearly driven by white supremacy and the belief that the votes of Black Americans simply shouldn't count as much as those of white people. There continues to be a struggle between various factions of the GOP over how to portray the violent insurrection itself — to call it a glorious MAGA revolution or pretend it was a random event unconnected to the larger party — but these two stories show the sentiment that drove it has now taken root in every corner of the GOP. From the school board to the Supreme Court, Republicans are determined to stomp out anything that stands in the way of white supremacy, from history to the law to democracy itself.

The Supreme Court's Monday decision is rife with confusing legalese, and will likely be mostly overlooked by both the media and the public because of it. But it's important. As with the court's recent approach to the Texas abortion ban, it showcases how the three Trump appointees to the court have transformed SCOTUS into an authoritarian body that will throw out the rule of law to enforce a far-right agenda.

In a 5-4 decision, the conservative justices stayed a lower court's ruling that a new Alabama gerrymander disenfranchised Black voters, in a clear violation of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In his defense of the decision, Trump appointee Brett Kavanaugh didn't even bother to argue that the gerrymander was legal, but instead insisted that enforcing federal election law nine months out from an election would "lead to disruption" and that it was "unanticipated and unfair" to expect Alabama to obey a law passed 57 years ago.

"It is hard to overstate how lawless the Supreme Court's order is," wrote Mark Joseph Stern, who covers courts and law for Slate, on Twitter. "The five ultraconservative justices broke the court's own rules to intervene with an unreasoned shadow docket decision that effectively nullifies a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. It's profoundly alarming."[twt]

the refusal of the court to enforce the plain letter text of the law is so egregious that even Chief Justice John Roberts — a man who has made it his life's work to gut the Voting Rights Act — voted with the liberal justices. Roberts may share the racist goals of the other conservative judges, but even he clearly feels uneasy with the court simply rejecting the duty to enforce the law simply because they disagree with its aims.

By issuing this decision, the conservative judges are throwing their lot in with Trump and the Capitol insurrectionists — if the law will not uphold white supremacy, the law itself is invalid.

It's the same impulse underpinning the panic over "critical race theory," a cover story for white conservatives trying to stomp out acknowledgment of the country's racist history and contributions made by Black Americans. Republicans spent months gaslighting the public about this, insisting the attacks on school boards and bans on "critical race theory" were about stopping supposedly "divisive" teachings and "anti-white" racism. But their actions speak otherwise, from these complaints about Black History Month to efforts to ban books about Martin Luther King Jr. The goal is erasing history, literature and even facts that conflict with a white supremacist ideology.

What was remarkable about the Capitol insurrection is that it was both an assault on rule of law and on reality itself. The rioters rejected the basic fact that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. They also rejected the basic law that asserts that the winner of the election has the right to take power. The belief that they and people like them — white conservatives — have a "right" to rule overrules everything else.

The insurrection clearly didn't end on January 6, just because the rioters failed to overturn the election and enshrine the Big Lie. On the contrary, the insurrection has mutated and metastasized within the GOP. It has infused the whole party, from the ordinary voters freaking out at school boards to the highest court in the land. There might be a few Republican holdouts — like Roberts or former vice president Mike Pence — who still think things like "rule of law" and "basic facts" matter. But they have clearly lost the battle with the rest of the party, as this 5-4 Supreme Court decision shows. There is no law or fact Republicans feel bound to respect. Anything that stands in the way of the white conservative will to power is expected to give way.

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Midterms are coming. In case that phrase doesn't already inspire enough dread, it looks like this particular round will be defined by an escalation of the already gross "woke wars" going on in the Democratic ranks.

A chorus of increasingly loud voices in the Democratic Party aren't focused on the threat of gerrymandering, voter suppression, or that whole thing where Republicans plan to simply void elections when they don't like the results. Dealing with that problem is hard and requires serious actions like ending the Senate filibuster. So instead, the ire is being turned on a soft and easy target to blame: the small number of people in the Democratic caucus who use politically correct terms like "Latinx" and "pregnant people."

In a recent piece for the Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein writes about centrist critics who argue that "Democrats have steered off track on cultural issues because the party is unduly influenced by the preferences of well-educated white liberals." (Its an argument that ignores that Black Lives Matter, the movement that most angers the cultural right, is spearheaded not by white liberals, but Black activists.) In a similar piece in the New York Times, Thomas Edsall notes the evidence that "working-class defections from the Democratic Party are driven more by cultural, racial and gender issues than by economics," and that many political strategists believe "Democrats should stand down on some of the more divisive cultural issues."

A particularly humorous example of the genre arrived this week from writer Zaid Jilani's newsletter, in which he chastised the AFL-CIO for sending out a tweet celebrating International Pronouns Day. "Most Americans are probably wondering what in the world International Pronoun Day has to do with wages, benefits, or conditions," he griped.

Most Americans?

The tweet in question, as of this writing, has 32 retweets on it and 35 likes. And that really underscores the major flaw of this argument: It presumes that right-wing anger at the left is an authentic and unmediated direct reaction to anything real-life Democrats are saying and doing in the world. And the evidence for that presumption is weak indeed.

None of this is to deny that the majority of white Americans, especially non-college-educated white Americans, are in a constant fit of outrage over "wokeness." I, too, have Facebook and two working eyeballs and can see that is true. But they're mostly not reacting to anything the Democrats are actually doing. No, mostly what gets white America going is bullshit, and lots and lots of it, being heaped out at an astounding rate from a well-funded GOP propaganda machine whose reach dramatically eclipses even the fondest dreams of any Democratic communications specialist. And that bullshit-generating engine doesn't need progressives to say a single, solitary word to keep their bullshit generation systems going. All progressives could shut up forever, and the right-wing noise machine wouldn't skip a beat.

Look, for instance, at what the two biggest news stories the shameless hucksters at Fox News are hyping right now: The Jussie Smollettguilty verdict and the arson of the Fox News Christmas tree. I would absolutely bet my life savings that both stories have a lot more Americans talking than the AFL-CIO's opinion on pronouns. And both are being hung by the propagandists around the necks of Democrats, even though Democrats have literally nothing to do with either crime.

Fox News is running with a bunch of "gotcha" attacks on prominent Democrats, such as Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who initially supported Smollett in the days after he claimed, falsely, to be the victim of a hate crime. Thebad faith of this is extreme, of course. Those folks are more properly understood as Smollett's victims because he took advantage of their generosity in order to perpetuate this hoax. But it doesn't matter to the liars of Fox News, because this one random man's bad actions are useful for perpetuating a hoax of their own: The claim that racism isn't real, and that it's just something Democrats make up to score political points.

The umbrage over Smollett's fake hate crime is particularly hypocritical, as Fox News is currently in the process of also falsifying a hate crime against themselves. The Christmas tree burning did happen, to be clear. But it is not a "hate crime," as multiple pundits at the network falsely claimed. (Which is a designation they refused to acknowledge for the Charleston church shooting.) And it certainly isn't comparable to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, as one Fox News yapper dramatically declared. It appears it was committed by a mentally ill homeless man who blamed the arson on "mothers who rape their daughters." But that didn't slow down the faux outrage or efforts to pin the blame on Democrats.

No doubt the right-wing propaganda machine went out of their way to make progressive Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota national figures, but it's naive to think that it's really due to anything either of those women say or do. It's because both are good-looking young women of color, and because Omar wears a head covering. Just the look of them sets off all sorts of ugly instincts in some white men, instincts that are tied up with, let's face it, a gross mix of racism and sexual desire that produces some really nasty emotional reactions. That stuff is way more powerful than words can ever be, and the GOP propaganda machine shamelessly exploits that.

The bleeding of white working-class voters from the Democratic Party has been going on for a long time — indeed, the decline started before Ocasio-Cortez and Omar were literally born — and unsurprisingly, the loss of those voters correlates strongly with the rise of right-wing media empires.

Which isn't to say that the audiences for the AM talkers and Fox News, much less the people who breathlessly share every bit of fake news generated by Russian bots they find on Facebook, are merely empty ciphers for this crap. There are very real changes going on in the United States. People of color are an ever-larger share of the population. Kids really are moving away from small towns and suburbs for college and never coming home. There's nothing that Democrats can or should do about that.

But the real problem here is a huge, well-funded machine on hand to tell aging white voters in rural and suburban areas that their resentment of these changes is justified, they are the real victims here, and they are right to be hiding in their homes, too afraid of the larger world to bother to get to know it.

Democrats can try to run away from the culture war all they like, but it won't work. It won't stop the two changes driving all of this white resentment. More importantly, it certainly won't stop the relentless churn of lies generated by Republican propagandists feeding people's worst instincts. Unfortunately, the only real way to deal with this culture war is to win it. Only by making a forceful case for progressive values and taking right-wing nonsense head-on is there any hope of defanging it.

We saw this most recently in Virginia, where a GOP hoax about "critical race theory" took over the gubernatorial race, helping GOP candidate Glenn Youngkin defeat McAuliffe. "Critical race theory," at least how Republicans use it, is just a nonsense scare term. But with only a little digging, it was easy to discover that the right-wing agenda underneath all the hype — removing all negative portrayals of slavery and Jim Crow from public schools — is utterly indefensible. Sure enough, once liberals in the state finally started to push back against the book burning posse, the right lost the argument and the left won. But by then, it was too late to save McAuliffe's campaign.

Looking further back, we saw the same thing with the debate over same-sex marriage. Republicans leveraged lies about "threats to traditional marriage" for years as a wedge issue against Democrats. But when Democrats stopped running from the issue and instead decided to fight back — and win — they defanged it completely. Now most Americans support same-sex marriage and Republicans basically gave up talking about it.

Bashing progressives and telling them to shut up is always a temptation, not because it works, but because it feels easy. It's certainly easier to tell progressives to shut up than, say, pass the Build Back Better plan so Democrats have something to run on, other than a bipartisan roads-and-bridges bill that Republicans can also take credit for. And it's a whole lot easier to tell progressives to shut up than it is to build up the kind of media empire that could compete effectively with right-wing propaganda.

But just because it's easy doesn't mean it's effective. Time spent on pursuing easy-but-useless strategies instead of rolling up sleeves and starting in on the harder-but-more-effective solutions is just time wasted.

washington Post columnist Megan McArdle is a classic anti-feminist hypocrite in the Phyllis Schafly mold. She is a woman who used all the benefits of feminism to secure a high-powered career for herself but now uses her power to attack the hopes and dreams of other women, whether by snarling at the #MeToo movement or scolding women to stay in unhappy marriages for the sake of "the kids." Unsurprisingly, this supposed "libertarian" is down on a woman's liberty to control her own reproductive capacity. In her entirely predictable pre-emptive defense of the Supreme Court's expected Roe v. Wade overturn next summer, McArdle claimed it doesn't matter, because Americans don't really care about the issue:

But it's also possible that if the Supreme Court overturns Roe, and throws the issue back to the states, the subsequent legislative wrangling will reveal that the answers to those questions rest less on gender than values — or lifestyle. Are you a college-educated professional who must time pregnancies exquisitely to optimize a career, or are you a low-wage hourly worker for whom other considerations matter more?

The invocation of the "college-educated professional who must time pregnancies exquisitely to optimize a career" (a category that McArdle herself belongs to) is a masterpiece of misogynist agitprop. It's a stereotype that Washington Post readers across all sorts of demographics and voting habits come together to hate, from aging Trump voters, mad that their daughters moved to the big city instead of marrying the boy next door, and young male Republicans, annoyed that their hot girl dating pool is so constricted to Lefty bros who pretend sexist slurs about "girl boss" and "vagina voters" are a searing critique of capitalist power that is, in reality, still mostly held by men. And even those who identify as feminists are being guilt-tripped by McArdle's implication that they care more about the cosseted women of the upper class than about working-class women.

But it is all based on a lie.

We're meant to picture abortion as a service that a sea of Elle Woods knock-offs schedule between high-powered business meetings and wine-soaked afternoon pedicures. In reality, however, the typical abortion patient is a low-income mother, disproportionately likely to be a woman of color. The Guttmacher Institute statistics on this fact are unequivocal: Three-quarters of abortion patients are classified as "poor" or "low income." Six out of 10 patients have given birth before. White women are only 39% of abortion patients in a country where 60% of the overall population is white. The reason for such disparities isn't mysterious.

Contraception is the best and, realistically, the only way to truly reduce the abortion rate. The better off you are, financially, the more likely you are to have easy and affordable access to contraception. The Elle Woods who haunt McArdle's imagination don't have as many abortions, because they got the IUD years ago. It's women who don't have that access who end up with unwanted pregnancies.

Unfortunately, McArdle has good reason to believe her ugly rhetoric will work: Most Americans are incredibly ignorant about abortion.

Like McArdle, their opinions on the issue are shaped not by facts, but by sexism and a prudish unwillingness to talk frankly about sex. They may be tacitly pro-choice, but they don't put much of a priority on the issue. Way too many people think abortion isn't about them, but about other people — people who are often stereotyped, as McArdle did, in derogatory ways that give voters permission to ignore the issue entirely. New polling from Politico and Morning Consult shows this. On one hand, voters mostly support abortion rights and "want the Supreme Court to leave Roe v. Wade in place." On the other hand, most aren't paying attention, as "nearly two-thirds either said they didn't know how likely the court was to overturn Roe or said the court isn't likely to overturn the precedent." (Most court observers are dead certain, however, a Roe overturn is coming in June.) Subsequently, only 32% of voters said that the issue will guide who they vote for.

This is in line with pretty much all previous abortion polling, which tends to describe Americans gently as "conflicted" about abortion, but in actuality shows that they just don't know jack about the issue. As Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux wrote in a refreshingly honest piecefor FiveThirtyEight last week, "many Americans just don't like talking or thinking about abortion," they "don't know a lot about the procedure or restrictions around it," and "they want the country to find a quiet middle ground" — even though they have no idea what the hell a "middle ground" would even look like on the black-and-white issue of whether childbirth is forced or voluntary.

This incoherent mix of opinions on abortion reflects the larger incoherent mix of opinions on women's equality generally.

On one hand, Americans celebrate "girl power" and claim they want women to have equal access to jobs and education. On the other hand, a lot of Americans still put a lot of sexist expectations on women to be submissive and self-effacing. American society is, in fact, incredibly dependent on women's inequality, as the pandemic exposed. Without women doing unpaid domestic work, our society would fall apart. Instead of changing that fact, we instead have a weird mix of feminism and sexism. Girls are told they can be whatever they want, but women find they're still expected to take a backseat in both the workplace and the home. Add to that the fact that many Americans are still uncomfortable with the idea that women have sex for pleasure, which makes talking about abortion all that much harder. Even pro-choice Democrats always frame abortion as a "difficult" choice, reinforcing false assumptions that women either constantly long for maternity or feel bad about having had sex in the first place.

When people say they want a "middle ground" on abortion, I suspect most are picturing a situation where women who have abortions for the "right" reasons will get them — and "bad" women will not. But what makes someone "good" or "bad" is impossible to define, much less impossible to legislate. Everyone thinks their abortion is a righteous one, but many imagine those "other" women who get abortions are sluts and bimbos.

Republicans have taken advantage of this jumble of ignorance to bring us to this moment in time, when Roe is really, truly about to be nuked.

The Supreme Court justices lied their way onto the court, exploiting the fact that most Americans don't think anyone "seriously" wants to ban abortion. And they used people's ignorance about how common abortion is to convince Americans that it's someone else's problem. Worse, they leaned on sexist stereotypes to convince Americans that the "someone else" who needs abortion isn't someone they need to care about.

Once Roe is gone and abortion is banned across more than half the country, perhaps people will wake up. Maybe then it will be clear that the 1-in-4 women who has had an abortion in her life isn't some Karen who needs to be taken down a peg or a dumb slut who has it coming. People who have abortions are full humans with complex and empathetic lives. Indeed, someone you know and love has probably had one. But by the time Americans figure this out, it will likely be too late.