#how this is trump’s country and he’s a class act

[ceruleangold]

Constantly fascinated by the brain-eating bacteria infesting Republicans in this country. The fact that they’re this dumb and gullible never ceases to astound me.

#make no mistake there’s dumb democrats too #but not in the same way for sure #T**mp bought pizza for a Florida police department that then published it in Facebook and people are raving over it #talking about how he’s blessed by god and how he should have been in White House #how this is trump’s country and he’s a class act #that he does things ‘the common man does’ #(police departments should not be allowed to post this partisan shit to begin with) #did you have a scrumptious boot for lunch because wtf are you talking about #it’s not surprising how many younger people step away from Christianity when this is how disingenuous it is #gives me scabies how deluded these people are

[qqueenofhades]

Do you have any idea why people are so fixated on Biden’s age but not Trumps? I know he’s 81, but Trump isn’t exactly far behind at 77: in fact he’s the second oldest. This keeps stumping me: it’s not a big gap in age

There are a few reasons for this, yes. As you might imagine, all of them are very stupid.

First and most critically is the way Trump's violent extremism has been completely neutered, mainlined, and normalized by the mainstream media. That's why we still have said media largely treating this as a normal presidential election, instead of that of a successful incumbent against literally the most deranged, unfit, treasonous, criminally and civilly liable, already-led-an-attempted-coup, deep-in-hock-to-Russia, adjudicated rapist, 91-felony-counts-indicted career cheater, grifter, and failed businessman who nonetheless appeals to the still-very-powerful isolationist, racist, white supremacist, and Christian nationalist elements in this country. Crucially, he also appeals to the billionaire class that owns the media and who will benefit from Trumpian tax, economic, and labor policies (especially now that Biden used the SOTU to once more call for a minimum 25% corporate/billionaire tax rate). The media also openly wants Trump back in office, as all the shitass insane things he did (and will do) are good for ratings, and allows them to act like the Principled Truth Tellers, instead of shilling so hard for a greasy orange fascist that we may well lose our 250+ year old democratic republic if he, God forbid, is elected again. Profit is more, well, profitable than truthful reporting, so the media has been completely disincentivized to cover this in any accurate way. We presume they will all wake up with shocked Pikachu faces when Trump packs them off to concentration camps with everyone else he hates, as he has openly promised to do.

Because we're also starting from an underlying premise that everything is the Democrats' fault, this means the party should be blamed for running said successful incumbent for reelection, even if he has low poll numbers which have in fact largely been produced by the media's relentlessly stupid and dishonest coverage. I was reading an article in the AP today about how 15 major student/youth groups have endorsed Biden and plan to work for his reelection; even so, the author could.not.stop going on and on about how Zomgz Old Biden was and how supposedly most Americans thought he was mentally unfit for the job (which is a straight-up lie produced by the endless "Zomgz Biden Old!!!!" handwringing have been subjected to without end. Weird how that works). That is also why we have all those idiotic "Biden should step down!!!" opinion pieces by Very Smart Pundits, notwithstanding the fact that a) it would be completely insane, b) it would be completely insane, and c) somehow nobody seems to think that hey, maybe the Republicans shouldn't nominate an openly seditionist generally god-awful fascist shitweasel who has already been the worst thing to happen to American politics in the twenty-first century (I'd say also the twentieth century, but unfortunately that was when we had Reagan).

In other words, Trump is just taken as a given, while the media spends all its time attacking Biden, calling on Biden to step down, amplifying "concerns" about Biden's age, producing idiotic narratives about Biden, distorting or ignoring the things Biden has done, and then writing concern-troll navel-gazing pieces earnestly wondering why people don't like Biden. (Apparently people's opinion of Biden drastically improves when they learn what he's actually accomplished, but the relentless parade of lies somehow makes it difficult for them to learn what those actually are. Again, weird.) Likewise the endless coverage we get of Biden's smallest slips or stumbles, while the media resolutely ignores Trump's full-on recent descent into absolute raving dementia. Hello, double standards!

This is also fueled by a heaping helping of racism and misogyny, because if God forbid Biden does die in office, what happens? The vice president takes over! We have a clear and constitutionally established precedent for this that has happened many times before! Except, oh no scary!!!, Biden's vice president is a brown woman, and that means SHE WOULD BE IN CHARGE!!!! TERRIFYING!!! So all the scaremongering around Biden's age, aside from being generally dishonest and stupid, has as its implicit message that sure, maybe you're fine voting for an old white man, but are you really comfortable doing that if it means a brown woman might also have the chance to be president?? I DON'T THINK YOU SHOULD BE!!!!!

Anyway, yes. It's a complete straw man argument, it's fueled by bad faith and stupidity, and as with most things in the current American media environment, it's geared toward helping Trump win. Because you know. Something something BUT HER EEEEEEEEEEEEMAILS BUT BIDEN WAS OOOOOOOOOOOOLD.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts

[littleseasalt]

The political/cultural context behind Forever's campaign slogan

This is a post I've been meaning to do for a long time now, since I had a talk with Kia a few weeks ago about the automated translations and Forever.

We were talking about how out of the Brazilians, Forever is the one who the translations are always off even when he sets them right. And the reason for that is very simple, of course. The automated translations are not suited to be able to get the different dialects Brazil has, neither to understand slangs. Specially Brazilian slangs, which are rooted directly to the culture and history of the country, the addiction of the dialect aspect worsening the situation.

That's when I realized, our speech is so rooted in our culture that even Forever's "Do the F" is something that is rooted to the politics/culture of the country. And none of the gringos even know that.

"Do the F" would be the translation for "Faz/faça o F", which is a parody of the political slogan "Faz/faça o L"

The slogan itself gained more force during the Brazilian 2022 elections, but the act itself- doing the letter "L" with your right hand- was something that already happened before. The "L" stands for "Lula", which was the main opposition to Bolsonaro in the elections.

I don't want to go to deep into Brazilian politics, but Bolsonaro was basically Brazilian trump. He's an alt right politician. Between 2016-2022, the working class in Brazil was severely demobilized. The last hope against him in the power was Lula, and even then, he was considered elected with 50,83% of the votes, compared to Bolsonaro's 49,12%

The slogan became a meme, which worked in favor of the campaign, mostly. It's something catchy, it's something that it's easy to promote- you just need to take a picture of yourself doing the L.

Then, when Lula won, Bolsonaro supporters tried to use the meme in their favor. They would say stuff like "Then, when the country goes broke, then you do the L". That. Actually backfired terribly, because people turned it against them and started mocking them back in the same way.

When Forever became the president, people started jokingly saying "Forever pay for the server". And now, whenever Forever crashes, his chat gets filled with "Now you do the F". Not in a supportive way, and not in a way that it's against Forever (like the Bolsonaro supporters use the "do the L"). They say "Now you do the F" as a way to both have fun and mock the people who unironically say "Now you do the L" after something bad happens.

It's sort of funny to see how much context there is behind his slogan, and that no one outside Brazil has any idea of how deep it goes (I can only imagine how weird it must be to see a character complaining about a presidential decision forever has, and see Brazilians doing the "now you do the F" joke. it must sound so rude lmao but generally they don't mean any harm or bad implications but are simply having fun with it).

#qsmp #qsmp forever #can you guys guess i study linguistics at college? :) #wont be tagging it as qsmp p*litics because honestly it isnt #im just giving cultural context for the slogan after realizing that even the slogan is something that despite translated #doesnt has the same impact for non brazilians

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Here are just two of the corporate giveaways hidden in the rushed, must-pass, end-of-year budget bill

Yesterday, Congress finally voted through the must-pass, end-of-year budget bill. As has become routine, this bill was stalled right until the final moment, so that Congressjerks could cram the 4,000-page, $1.7 trillion package with special favors for their donors, at the expense of the rest of the country.

This year’s budget package included a couple of especially egregious doozies, which were reported out for The American Prospect by Lee Harris (who covered a grotesque retirement giveaway for the ultra-rich) and Doraj Facundo (who covered a safety giveaway to Boeing and its lethal fleet of 737 Max airplanes).

Let’s start with the retirement scam. The budget bill includes Rep Richie Neal’s [DINO-MA] SECURE Act 2.0, which gives savers with retirement funds until age 75 to cash out their retirement savings — netting an extra three years of tax-free growth for the lucky, tiny minority with substantial retirement savings. This follows on Neal’s SECURE Act 1.0 of 2019, when the age was raised from 70.5 to 72.

The tax-exempt retirement savings account is a Carter-era bargain that replaced real pensions — ones that guaranteed that you wouldn’t starve or freeze to death when you retired — with accounts that let people gamble on the stock market, to be the suckers at Wall Street’s poker table:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

The market-based gambler’s pension is a catastrophic failure. Half of Americans have no retirement savings. Of the half that have any savings, the vast majority have almost nothing saved:

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart/#series:Retirement_Accounts;demographic:all;population:all;units:have

All in all, America has a $7 trillion retirement savings shortfall:

https://crr.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/IB_19-16.pdf

But for a tiny minority of the ultra-rich, tax-free savings accounts like ROTH IRAs are a means of avoiding even the paltry capital gains tax that you have to pay if you own things for a living, rather than doing things for a living. Propublica’s IRS Files revealed how ghouls like Peter Thiel avoided tax on billions in “passive income” by abusing tax-free savings accounts that were supposed to benefit the “middle class”:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/26/wax-rothful/#thiels-gambit

Meanwhile, Social Security is crumbling, thanks to a sustained attack on it by the business lobby and its friends in both parties. Progressive Dems had sought to amend SECURE Act 2.0 by inserting some clauses to shore up Social Security, and none of these were included in the final bill.

One of the fixes that died was the Savings Penalty Elimination Act, introduced by Senators Sherrod Brown [D-OH] and Rob Portman [R-OH]. This act would have tweaked the means-testing for Supplemental Security Income, which supports 8m low-income disabled adults and kids. Right now, you can’t collect SSI if you have $2k in the bank, a limit that hasn’t been adjusted for inflation since the 1980s (adjusted for inflation, $2k in 1980 is $7226.00 in 2022).

The $2k savings cap means that you have to be substantially below the poverty level to receive $585/month in SSI assistance — this being the only source of income for the majority of SSI recipients. Means-testing is a self-immolating fetish for corporate Dems and in retrospect, this betrayal seems inevitable:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/03/utopia-of-rules/#in-triplicate

(Notice how no one proposes means-testing billionaires when they get PPP loans or hundreds of millions in IRS “refunds” — like Trump, who paid substantially less tax than you did:)

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/21/trump-income-tax-returns-detailed-in-new-report-.html

And it was a betrayal: progressive Dems bargained with Neal and co not to publicly condemn SECURE Act 2.0 if they could get some concessions for the 8 million poorest disabled people in America. In the end, Neal rug-pulled them. Of course he did! This is Richie Fucking Neal, the best friend the Trump tax giveaway ever had:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/13/youre-still-the-product/#richie-neal

As with everything Neal touches, this screws poor people in multiple ways. First, it leaves the SSI cap intact. But it also creates a giant unfunded liability in the federal budget. Technically, there’s no reason this should lead to cuts. The US Treasury can’t run out of dollars, and giveaways to the rich are only mildly inflationary, since rich people put their money in the bank and mostly spend it on buying politicians, not goods.

But because of the delusion that currency producers like the US Treasury have the same constraints as currency users like you and me, Congress will need to come up with “Pay Fors” in future budgets to “make up for” the money they’re giving to rich people with SECURE Act 2.0. Dollars to toenail clippings, they’ll do that by hacking away at the tattered remains of the US social safety net.

Fear not, you don’t need to be a desperately poor disabled person or child to get fucked over by late additions to a 4,000 page must-pass bill! If you can afford to get on an airplane, Congress has something for you, too!

Remember when Boeing (the monopoly US airplane manufacturer that squandered $43b on stock buybacks and had to borrow $14b from the US public to survive the pandemic) told the FAA that it could self-certify its 737 Max airplanes, and then killed hundreds and hundreds of people with its defective planes?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/12/boeing-crashes/#boeing

The 737 Max was unsafe for many reasons, but one glaring factor was the fact that Boeing sold some of its core safety as “extras” — like they were downloadable content for your Fortnite character — leading to multiple crashes in which all lives were lost:

https://apnews.com/article/ethiopia-indonesia-accidents-ap-top-news-international-news-140576a8e9d4449eae646c8c479fdc3a

Boeing was forced to take the 737 Max out of service, but it eventually brought the plane back, “fixing” the problems by renaming the “737 Max” to the “737 8”:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/20/dubious-quantitative-residue/#737-8

Supposedly, Boeing has been diligently working on fixing the problems with its defective jets that can’t be addressed by a rebranding campaign. This wasn’t voluntary: the 2020 Aircraft Certification, Safety, and Accountability Act required Boeing — and every other manufacturer whose aircraft were certified by the FAA — to meet new minimum safety standards by December 27, 2022.

Every manufacturer met that deadline, except Boeing, and someone amended the budget bill to give the company three more years to meet these security standards. Critically, the new security measures, when they come, will be certified by an FAA that Republicans will control, thanks to the House changing hands.

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/government-spending-bill-waives-aircraft-safety-deadline/

Boeing is slated to ship 1,000 new 737 Maxes, which will fetch $50b for the company. Many of these planes will fly directly over my house, which is on the approach path for Burbank airport. Southwest Air flies dozens of 737 Maxes right over my roof every single day.

As Facundo points out, the FAA can ill afford any more hits to its credibility. It was once the case that if the FAA certified an aircraft, every other country in the world would waive any further certification, so trusting were they of the FAA’s judgment. That is no longer the case: today, the European Aviation Safety Agency does its own aircraft testing, holding jets that enter EU airspace to a higher standard than the FAA does for US planes.

It’s just another reminder that the US doesn’t have “corporate criminals” because the US doesn’t have any meaningful enforcement for corporate crimes. In America, we love our companies like we love our billionaires: too big to fail and too big to jail:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/12/no-criminals-no-crimes/#get-out-of-jail-free-card

Image: Ryan Lee (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/190784293@N05/50862532686

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Henry Wadey (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flames_%2858765896%29.jpeg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A living room scene, featuring a sofa in the background and a sofa in the foreground. A man's hand reaches into the frame to lift up the corner of the sofa. A broom enters the frame to sweep a pile of dirt under the rug. Mixed in with the dirt are a crashed WWI biplane with Southwest Airlines livery, and an old lady in a rocking chair.]

#pluralistic #secure 2.0 #ssi #means testing #irsleaks #fidelity #vanguard #regulatory capture #faa #retirement crisis #retirement #finance #social security #pensions #corruption #congress #aviation #boeing #737 max #must-pass #irs files

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

NOV 20, 2023

Yesterday, David Roberts of the energy and politics newsletter Volts noted that a Washington Post article illustrated how right-wing extremism is accomplishing its goal of destroying faith in democracy. Examining how “in a swing Wisconsin county, everyone is tired of politics,” the article revealed how right-wing extremism has sucked up so much media oxygen that people have tuned out, making them unaware that Biden and the Democrats are doing their best to deliver precisely what those in the article claim to want: compromise, access to abortion, affordable health care, and gun safety. 

One person interviewed said, “I can’t really speak to anything [Biden] has done because I’ve tuned it out, like a lot of people have. We’re so tired of the us-against-them politics.” Roberts points out that “both sides” are not extremists, but many Americans have no idea that the Democrats are actually trying to govern, including by reaching across the aisle. Roberts notes that the media focus on the right wing enables the right wing to define our politics. That, in turn, serves the radical right by destroying Americans’ faith in our democratic government. 

Former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele echoed that observation this morning when he wrote, “We need to stop the false equivalency BS between Biden and Trump. Only one acts with the intention to do real harm.”

Indeed, as David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo puts it, “the gathering storm of Trump 2.0 is upon us,” and Trump and his people are telling us exactly what a second Trump term would look like. Yesterday, Trump echoed his “vermin” post of the other day, saying: “2024 is our final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our Country, we will rout the Fake News Media, we will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will FINISH THE JOB ONCE AND FOR ALL!”   

Trump’s open swing toward authoritarianism should be disqualifying even for Republicans—can you imagine Ronald Reagan talking this way?—but MAGA Republicans are lining up behind him. Last week the Texas legislature passed a bill to seize immigration authority from the federal government in what is a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution, and yesterday, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced that he was “proud to endorse” Trump for president because of his proposed border policies (which include the deportation of 10 million people).

House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has also endorsed Trump, and on Friday he announced he was ordering the release of more than 40,000 hours of tapes from the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, answering the demands of far-right congress members who insist the tapes will prove there was no such attack despite the conclusion of the House committee investigating the attack that Trump criminally conspired to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election and refused to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol. 

Trump loyalist Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) promptly spread a debunked conspiracy theory that one of the attackers shown in the tapes, Kevin Lyons, was actually a law enforcement officer hiding a badge. Lyons—who was not, in fact, a police officer—was carrying a vape and a photo he stole from then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and is now serving a 51-month prison sentence. (Former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) tweeted: “Hey [Mike Lee]—heads up. A nutball conspiracy theorist appears to be posting from your account.”)

Both E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted yesterday that MAGA Republicans have no policies for addressing inflation or relations with China or gun safety; instead, they have coalesced only around the belief that officials in “the administrative state” thwarted Trump in his first term and that a second term will be about revenge on his enemies and smashing American liberalism. 

MIke Davis, one of the men under consideration for attorney general, told a podcast host in September that he would “unleash hell on Washington, D.C.,” getting rid of career politicians, indicting President Joe Biden “and every other scumball, sleazeball Biden,” and helping pardon those found guilty of crimes associated with the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. “We’re gonna deport a lot of people, 10 million people and growing—anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents,” Davis said. “We’re gonna put kids in cages. It’s gonna be glorious. We’re gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo.”

In the Washington Post, Josh Dawsey talked to former Trump officials who do not believe Trump should be anywhere near the presidency, and yet they either fear for their safety if they oppose him or despair that nothing they say seems to matter. John F. Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, told Dawsey that it is beyond his comprehension that Trump has the support he does. 

“I came out and told people the awful things he said about wounded soldiers, and it didn’t have half a day’s bounce. You had his attorney general Bill Barr come out, and not a half a day’s bounce. If anything, his numbers go up. It might even move the needle in the wrong direction. I think we’re in a dangerous zone in our country,” Kelly said.  

Part of the attraction of right-wing figures is they offer easy solutions to the complicated issues of the modern world. Argentina has inflation over 140%, and 40% of its people live in poverty. Yesterday, voters elected as president far-right libertarian Javier Milei, who is known as “El Loco” (The Madman). Milei wants to legalize the sale of organs, denies climate change, and wielded a chainsaw on the campaign trail to show he would cut down the state and “exterminate” inflation. Both Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, two far-right former presidents who launched attacks against their own governments, congratulated him. 

In 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower took on the question of authoritarianism. Robert J. Biggs, a terminally ill World War II veteran, wrote to Eisenhower, asking him to cut through the confusion of the postwar years. “We wait for someone to speak for us and back him completely if the statement is made in truth,” Biggs wrote. Eisenhower responded at length. While unity was imperative in the military, he said, “in a democracy debate is the breath of life. This is to me what Lincoln meant by government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’” 

Dictators, Eisenhower wrote, “make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems—freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions.” 

Once again, liberal democracy is under attack, but it is notable—to me, anyway, as I watch to see how the public conversation is changing—that more and more people are stepping up to defend it. In the New York Times today, legal scholar Cass Sunstein warned that “[o]n the left, some people insist that liberalism is exhausted and dying, and unable to handle the problems posed by entrenched inequalities, corporate power and environmental degradation. On the right, some people think that liberalism is responsible for the collapse of traditional values, rampant criminality, disrespect for authority and widespread immorality.”

Sunstein went on to defend liberalism in a 34-point description, but his first point was the most important: “Liberals believe in six things,” he wrote: “freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy,” including fact-based debate and accountability of elected officials to the people.

Finally, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, who was a staunch advocate for the health and empowerment of marginalized people—and who embodied the principles Sunstein listed, though that’s not why I’m mentioning her—died yesterday at 96. “Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” former President Jimmy Carter said in a statement. 

More to the point, perhaps, considering the Carters’ profound humanity, is that when journalist Katie Couric once asked President Carter whether winning a Nobel Peace Prize or being elected president of the United States was the most exciting thing that ever happened to him, Carter answered: “When Rosalynn said she’d marry me—I think that’s the most exciting thing.”

—

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#horse race #political Cartoons #Mike Luckovich #democracy #voting rights #human rights #the rule of law #right wing extremism

[theculturedmarxist]

hi! i’m 18 and just got my state ID and registered to vote! i’d like to hear your thoughts on biden’s potential second term - i think he’s incompetent but it feels like i have to vote for him bc it would be worse if trump won. kind of a “the lesser of two evils” situation

Apologies for taking so long to answer this. It's a question that's been coming up a lot lately and I wanted to try and answer it thoroughly.

In my opinion, Biden being "the lesser of two evils" is I think pretty hard liberal cope. It's a line designed to prey on people like you that might not have the experience of knowledge to assess the political situation in this country or the dynamics at play.

So you're 18. That means you were born, what, around 2005? So you wouldn't really remember Bush II, would probably have just started being aware of things during Obama's presidency, becoming a teenager during Trump's first term, and turning 18 during Biden's. A pretty eventful youth so far.

The Democrats have been "the lesser evil" for a while now, but what does that mean exactly?

Things would start to change significantly after World War 2, and especially with the death of FDR.

The Democrat's platform starts at the 10:50 mark.

The "New Deal" Democrats would last until Jimmy Carter, but 12 years of Reaganomics would pretty much kill it. It might have been 16 if not for Ross Perot in the 92 election. For that and various other reasons, like the fall/dismantling of the Soviet Union, Clinton won.

The Reagan era significantly changed the Democratic Party, but it wasn't Reagan alone that's responsible. Reagan was the product of bourgeois reaction to the New Deal. The Powell Memo is often pointed to as the beginning of this reactionary period where the bourgeoisie started to claw back the gains the working class had made via the New Deal and LBJ's Great Society. In short, the wealthy and wealth-aspirant thought that the working class was too comfortable, too educated, and too politically active for its own good, and that would have to change.

1991 saw the dissolution of the Soviet Union, one of the greatest disasters of the 20th century. For all its faults, the shadow of the Soviet Union presented a very real threat to the bourgeoisie—the wealthy class of capitalists that own businesses big and small. As long as the USSR existed, there was a viable alternative and counterweight to the USA and everything it represented. Once the USSR was gone and the threat of revolutionary communism with it, the capitalists no longer felt they had any need to compromise with the working class.

So going into the 90s, the Democrats abandoned blue collar laborers to instead start pursuing the conservative, educated, moderately wealthy "middle class," actually the same demographics that the Republicans traditionally attracted. To appeal to them (and to satisfy their corporate backers), the Democrats started a number of reactionary measures. "Welfare reform" was one, basically cutting down New Deal programs and restricting how much they provided, to whom, and for how long. Ultimately they'd gut labor power with programs like NAFTA, and send millions to jail with the "Crime Reform Bill."

Without the Soviet Union, the 90s would also see the beginning of virtually unrestrained American military intervention. Iraq was first, but Yugoslavia would be destroyed by NATO not long after.

In short, Bill Clinton and the Democrats continued what Ronald Reagan started. This stage would culminate with the 2000 presidential elections, where Al Gore capitulated to George Bush by refusing to contest the intervention of the Supreme Court in order to not upset Republicans.

George Bush becomes president, 9-11 happens, and it's 8 years of The War On Terror. The Patriot Act is passed. The Department of Homeland Security is created. First Afghanistan is invaded, and then two years later Iraq. The US is transformed into a surveillance state, and the changes that Clinton had inaugurated continued under Bush. The Democrats made a lot of noise, but they still worked with Bush virtually every step of the way, funding his wars, confirming his judges, renewed and expanded the Patriot Act, etc.

Things just kept getting worse, right up to the economic crisis of 2007. I really can't overstate how bad this was. If China hadn't stepped in and extended the US a line of credit, there was the very real danger of the entire global economy collapsing in on itself.

People had had enough. Obama was virtually carried into office on the people's shoulders after a historic turnout. Democrats weren't the "lesser evil." They were good guys, and for once, finally, the good guys had won! We'd won! No more world policing. No more terror. No more tyranny. Everything was going to change!

Everything came to a stop as a massive spontaneous party broke out. And why not? We were finally going to get publicly funded healthcare. The Patriot Act was going to be undone. We were going to end the Iraq War. Guantanamo would be closed and the use of torture ended for good. Immigrants would get a path to citizenship. The right to abortion would finally be a legal guarantee. Wall Street would be punished for putting hundreds of thousands of people out of work and costing And there was nothing the Republicans could do to stop it, with an unstoppable Democrat majority in the Senate and the House.

So imagine our surprise when none of that happened.

Instead of punishing Wall Street, they picked Obama's cabinet while millions of people lost their homes. In spite of not having to give one single shit about what the Republicans thought, Obama bent over backwards to appease them, but also to protect the private insurance industry. Abortion rights were neglected as not a priority in order to, once again, appease Republicans. The wars no only continued, but expanded. Wanton murder was employed around the globe by the relentless use of drones. Promise after promise was broken, and the Republicans made gains in congress.

Things would only continue to get worse. Libya was destroyed. ISIS was created by funneling weapons looted from Libya to rebels in Syria. Syria would be spared the same fate by giving up its chemical weapons to avoid Obama's "red line" threat.

Occupy Wall Street would emerge as a global phenomenon in response to the failure to provide the aid the working class was promised. Obama would oversee a coordinated national police crackdown, fully employing the police state that the Bush administration and their Democrat collaborators had built.

What I want you to understand is that Trump didn't come out of nowhere. 24 years of Republican and Democrat collaboration went into the groundwork for his election campaign.

And of course, it was the Democrats and Hillary Clinton's campaign that worked to elevate him to prominence. The Democrats further helped by running the most unpopular candidate in history against him and sabotaging the at the time most popular politician in the country (but it's okay, the courts say they had the right to do it anyway).

I don't know how well you remember the Trump years. They certainly weren't great, but for all the Liberal screaming about him, he wasn't all that different than every other president we had. He did some good things, and a lot of bad things. The only real difference was that all the awful things he did, Democrats and their supporting institutions pretended to give a shit about. Like Frankenstein, they went insane because of the monster they created. Instead of owning up to the fact that decades of misrule had made them unpopular, no one liked the candidate that they'd forced down everyone's throats, their arrogance alienated the electorate even further, and that 8 years of remorselessly broken promises and oppression at home and abroad had everyone completely fed up, they instead came up with an elaborate conspiracy theory about Russian subversion to explain why Hillary Clinton lost to a fucking reality TV gameshow host that they themselves had pit against her.

And now he's back! Again! And why? Because, once again, in spite of all their promises and bullshit, Biden was more of the fucking same—only somehow worse.

It's really astonishing how badly the Democrats managed to fuck things up. For all the bitching about Trump's covid response, it managed to accomplish a lot. The eviction moratorium and, ugh, "stimulus checks," kept millions of people from losing their homes. The expanded child tax credit lifted millions more out of poverty. Medicare expansions provided millions of people with healthcare and would keep them from getting kicked off it for the duration of the emergency. Student loan payments were stopped. For the first fucking time in American history people were able to get medical care at the point of service without having to deal with private insurance bullshit and at no cost to themselves! There was government mandated, paid sick leave! And we can't forget Operation Warp Speed, which provided the vaccines that Biden would eventually take credit for and cut all our throats with.

And Biden basically killed all of that. He declared Covid over and ended the state of emergency, which brought an end to all these programs. Millions lost healthcare and dropped back into poverty. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed because Biden lied about the vaccines protecting from infection, and thousands continue to die every week, even now.

The children Biden promised to free remained caged. Roe V Wade was struck down and absolutely nothing was done to prevent it in spite of knowing about it weeks in advance. Restrictions on abortion and laws punishing abortion seekers were passed and nothing was done. Laws persecuting trans people have proliferated and no one was punished. The Biden administration abandoned Afghanistan to the Taliban in order to recklessly start a war in Ukraine using a neo-Nazi run government. Now they're openly, knowingly, and willfully aiding and abetting a full scale genocide in Palestine, and threatening to rain more destruction on Yemen, another state in which it participated in genocide, another "bipartisan presidential effort, covering both the Obama and Trump administrations."

I've covered a lot here, but this isn't even exhaustive. There's more, so much more. The point though, at long last, is that the Democrats are not "the lesser evil." They are actively, eagerly complicit in every bit of evil that they blame on the Republicans. They blame, and complain, and bemoan, and then the Republicans get what they want anyway. The Democrats act upset about it, and promise to "fight for" access, or reforms, or whatever, and then it never happens. They make up some excuse like "the senate parliamentarian told us no." Or some bullshit about how the filibuster won't let them do what they really want to do. Or some dogshit about bipartisanship. Or some other fucking stupid crap, when really they have all the power they need. They just don't want to. They bitch and moan, but they actually love the Republicans and desperately need them around.

It goes back to abandoning the New Deal and waging class war against the working class. The Democrats represent certain sections of the petite and major bourgeoisie, and their interests are totally, fundamentally opposed to the working classes. They have nothing they can realistically offer us because doing so would improve our lot at the expense of their PMC servants and capitalist masters. Their power relies on our weakness.

The reason why the Republicans, who the Democrats decry as fascists, as threats to "our democracy," continue to be a thing at all is because their objectives and the Democrats are actually one and the same. The Democrats make a big show of opposition, talk loudly about their principles and "fighting for" what they think is right, and then they go ahead and give the evil fascist Trump an entirely new fucking military for his trouble.

The Democrats aren't, and have never been "the lesser evil." They're an essential component in perpetuating evil. They always have been, and always will be, and you shouldn't let anyone deceive you into thinking otherwise.

#democrats #lesser evil #2024 elections #2024 us presidential election #donald trump #joe biden

[mariacallous]

The literally unprecedented indictment against Donald Trump marks an outright dangerous—and politically fraught—moment for the United States and serves as a reminder of the unparalleled level of criminality and conspiracy that surrounded the 2016 election.

It’s easy to look back at the 2016 election as though its outcome was inevitable—that Hillary Clinton was too weak of a candidate, one whose years of high-priced speeches had made her lose touch with the working-class voters of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania; that “but her emails” and Jim Comey’s repeated, inappropriate, and misguided meddling in the election turned the tide. But the new indictment of Trump is an important historical corrective, a moment that makes clear how the US, as a country, must reckon with the fact that Trump’s surprise victory was aided by not one but two separate criminal conspiracies.

In the 2016 race’s final push, in an election that came down to incredibly narrow victories in just three states—10,704 voters in Michigan, 46,765 in Pennsylvania, and 22,177 in Wisconsin—and where Trump lost the overall popular vote by some 3 million votes, he was helped along by a massive and wide-ranging official Russian government operation. That effort was funded in part by oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is now behind the brutal combat of his Wagner Group mercenary army in Ukraine, which targeted US social media companies and activists on the ground. According to the US Department of Justice’s exhaustive report, in the second arm of the Russian operation, the military intelligence service GRU hacked top Democratic officials, leaked their emails, and shifted the national narrative around Clinton and other Democrats. (Not to mention that this gave rise to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and, arguably, QAnon.) 

Then there was the separate criminal conspiracy that was the subject of today’s new indictment in New York: the plot in the final weeks of the 2016 election by Trump’s campaign, Trump family fixer Michael Cohen, and the National Enquirer to pay hush money to bury stories of two of the candidate’s affairs, including infamously one with porn star Stormy Daniels. 

While it may seem like news of such an affair would have ended up being a nothingburger amid the campaign’s final weeks, it’s worth remembering the specific context that Cohen and the Trump orbit faced in those finals hours of the campaign. They were performing a fraught and knife’s-edge balancing act to hold onto support from conservatives and evangelicals in the wake of the devastating Access Hollywood tape, a moment where vice presidential nominee Mike Pence seriously considered throwing in the towel himself. The follow-on of more non-family-values-friendly stories might well have begun an unrecoverable spiral. (It’s also worth remembering the still-suspicious interplay of these two threads: how, on a single Friday in October 2016, US intelligence leaders announced publicly for the first time that Russia was behind the election meddling, the Washington Post scooped the existence of the lewd Access Hollywood tape, and then, hours later, Wikileaks began dumping a fresh set of stolen emails from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta.)

The new criminal case related to that second Stormy Daniels conspiracy, brought by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, also is a reminder of the historic mistake by the US Justice Department to not pursue its own charges against Trump in the same matter. This was a mind-boggling abdication of responsibility given that the Justice Department—in the midst of Donald Trump’s own presidency, no less!—prosecuted Cohen for the same conspiracy, naming Trump in the charges against Cohen as “Individual 1” and, according to a new book by Elie Honig, outlined in a draft indictment Trump’s personal direction and involvement in the case.

According to the book by Honig, himself a former prosecutor, the Southern District of New York ultimately decided to drop any case against Trump after the president left office in January 2021 because, in part, they figured that bigger, more serious investigations were ahead stemming from the January 6 insurrection, which “made the campaign finance violations seem somehow trivial and outdated by comparison.” It was then, and stands now, a serious miscalculation, one that will currently contribute to the democratically untenable “Ford Principle” that presidents stand outside the law both while in office and after. 

Of course, it’s here that we come to what a fraught moment, politically and for American democracy, the historically novel indictment of a former president presents for us in the weeks and months ahead: The true test for Donald Trump and our country is not this particular case but whatever might come next. The New York charges might be the start of multiple criminal cases that would burden Trump even as he begins his phoenix-like presidential reelection bid.

There are signs that Georgia’s Fulton County district attorney is weighing “imminent” charges against Trump, potentially as part of a larger conspiracy, for his well-documented efforts to overturn the state’s election results in 2020. Meanwhile, Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith is zeroing in on potential charges surrounding Trump’s involvement in the January 6 insurrection and related election-meddling schemes, as well as Trump’s attempts to purloin and retain classified documents in Mar-a-Lago after his presidency. Just in recent days, in the classified documents case, a federal judge ruled that there was evidence of a crime that would allow Smith to pierce normal attorney-client privilege and force one of Trump’s lawyers to testify amid evidence that the lawyer participated in that potential crime.

The specter of these indictments has made Trump fire up his always-overheated rhetoric, threatening “death and destruction” if he’s indicted, posting a photo of Bragg and Trump holding a baseball bat, and generally sashaying around the country like a mafioso saying, “Nice country you have here, shame if something happened to it.” His opening campaign rally last weekend came in Waco, Texas, amid the 30th anniversary of a 51-day federal siege of a religious cult after the largest shoot-out in US law enforcement history—one that left four ATF agents dead and, following the horrific fiery end of the siege, more than 80 members of the Branch Davidian sect dead too. The event helped inspire the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City just two days later by a white supremacist, far-right extremist. 

It’s hard not to read Trump’s rally as anything less than a call to arms for his supporters amid the government’s moves against him.

For now, though, the country will wait—and wonder whether the next shoe to drop is more criminal charges or the beginnings of more Trump-inspired violence.

[absolxguardian]

A reply on this post

@crypticdoe Legal weed being technically unconstitutional has nothing to do with drug legislation itself. Rather it has to do with the Supremacy Clause of the constitution. If something is a valid federal law- not violating the constitution and given federal jurisdiction either through being an enumerated power or an implied power (the Wikipedia article on the Commerce Clause explains it pretty well, and specifically includes the justification for drug laws)- federal law preempts state law. Weed is still federally illegal, so the state laws legalizing weed are unconstitutional.

The executive branch of the federal government is currently executing prosecutorial/administrative discretion by not having the FBI/DEA arrest everyone involved in legal weed across the country. That's the same as a state prosecutor choosing not to press charges. They can change the situation at any moment if they wished. Congress probably also has the power to pass a 'actually do your job' law, but that's the kind of thing where it has to actually happen and have the constitutionality decided to be able to say if it would be valid.

I learned this from my AP Gov class, so here's what the textbook said:

The 1970 Controlled Substances Act remains federal law. What happens, then, when a state legalizes marijuana while the drug remains illegal at the national level? The answer depends on whom you ask, which level and branch of government are being asked, and the political mood of the nation and states. As the legalization movement was under way, but before it had crossed a tipping point, federal authorities in Republican President George W. Bush’s administration began a crackdown on marijuana growing operations and medical marijuana dispensaries in California. Legalization advocates and patients sued the federal government, arguing that states had the authority under the Tenth Amendment and the police powers doctrine to determine the status of the drug’s legality. However, on appeal, in Gonzales v. Raich (2005), the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution’s commerce clause entitles Congress to determine what may be bought and sold. Thus, federal marijuana crimes were upheld.

Though that precedent still stands, the Justice Department under Democratic President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder took a different approach. Through his eight years as president, eight states—those laboratories of democracy—legalized recreational marijuana. In 2014, the attorney general announced the Obama administration’s revised approach to enforcing marijuana violations. In doing so, he did not rewrite the law. Holder did, however, declare that the Justice Department would not use federal resources to crack down on selling or using the drug in states where voters had democratically deemed marijuana legal. Ultimately, federal arrests for marijuana became nearly nonexistent.

Until recently, Democrats and Independents supported legalization more than Republicans. However, as Gallup reports, most Republicans now support legalizing marijuana. The policy debate on legalization and how federal law would be enforced surfaced in the 2016 primary and general elections for president with a variety of responses from candidates in both parties. After Donald Trump took office and Attorney General Jeff Sessions—an anti-drug conservative—was sworn in, pot users and medical marijuana proponents watched closely. During the Trump administration, the Department of Justice under Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared that local U.S. attorneys—those presidentially appointed prosecutors who bring federal crime cases to court in their districts across the country shall be the local determiners of how federal marijuana policy is handled. In fact, the Justice Department attorneys and the FBI deal with a variety of federal crimes on a daily basis and decide whether to prosecute and which crimes are higher on their priority list. This inconsistency from administration to administration may be confusing and destabilizing to some, but it is an inevitable element of administrative discretion.

#us law

[distilled-prose]

More Republican Politicians have gotten rich in office than Democrats. Trump never gave his salary to charity while in office in fact, he made money off of the American taxpayers because he golfed 298 times at his properties and charged the taxpayers for his Secret Service Detail. When he owned the D.C. Hotel, taxpayers paid for Foreign Dignitaries' stays at that Hotel. Mitch McConnel's wife was the Transportation Secretary and she owns a Shipping Company that has Government Contracts. When the pandemic hit she applied for a PPP loan and got a million dollars. She had that loan forgiven. More Republicans had their PPP loans forgiven that any Democrat Politician. Now tell me who is more corrupt. Republicans or Democrats.

Dear Anonymous,

First, thank you very much for being polite in your recent question/comment. I don't know why some folks feel the need to act like jerks when posting questions. Second, I apologize for the delay in responding. My work schedule has been a tad hectic lately. Third, I wish there was some way for Tumblr to indicate what post or comment prompted the question/comment. Not knowing what led you to ask the question leaves me at a bit of a disadvantage. Anyway, you may be correct in your assumption. I've not seen statistics broken down by party. However, did you know the AVERAGE senator and congressman's stock portfolio has consistently beat the S&P 500 every year for the past (something like) 20 years? (The top 20 performers seem equally split between the parties.) Do you know professional money managers can't come even close to that kind of record? That should tell you something. If you believe one party is worse than the other, statistically, you are likely correct. The odds of it being a tie are pretty small. But I wouldn't bet on one or the other being better because they are both so terrible. If you think one party is much better or worse than the other, you've been played. Our country's political class (Republicans, Democrats, Independents) exhibit an entitlement mentality. I believe they get accustomed to dealing with such large dollar sums of money, they lose their perspective. How can they reasonably focus on the needs of their constituents when the lobbyists hand them over such large sums of money? (for their re-election wink wink of course) I personally know only one career politician that I believe is an honorable person. That person is a state senator. The rest, ALL the rest, I have doubts about. My suggestion is that you should be skeptical of all of them as well. But, that's just my opinion.

[ausetkmt]

Donald Trump is a very violent man. He is the leader of an increasingly violent political movement.

Last week, Trump threatened Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley with death. Trump's death threat is part of a much larger pattern where he has made similar threats, directly or implied, against President Biden, Hillary Clinton, Attorney General Merrick Garland, Special Counsel Jack Smith, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and his other "enemies."

Trump's MAGA cultists have been radicalized by him. Several MAGA people have gone so far as to have attempted or publicly threatened to assassinate President Obama and President Biden, respectively. And of course, Trump's followers launched a lethal attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 as part of the ex-president and dictator in waiting's coup attempt.

Trump and his allies and other spokespeople and influentials in the Republican fascist party and larger neofascist movement and white right are at the epicenter of a social environment in America were hate crimes and other political violence against Black and brown people, the LGBTQI community, Muslims, Jews, and other targeted groups is at historic levels.

New research by Rachel Kleinfeld, who is Senior Fellow, Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, provides much-needed insight(s) into the growing danger(s) that political violence and polarization poses to American democracy and the future of the country. In this conversation, Kleinfeld provides context for the relationship between extremism, polarization and violence in America. She also explains why right-wing political violence is a much greater threat to the country than political violence by "the left". Kleinfeld highlights the news media's continued failure(s) to understand the realities of the country's democracy crisis in the Age of Trump.

At the end of this conversation, Kleinfeld warns that whatever the outcome of the 2024 Election, that America's democracy crisis is likely to get worse not better.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

How are you feeling given the state of American politics and society and the country's democracy crisis and other great troubles?

I'm feeling sad. I want to give my daughters – and other kids – a better country than the one I grew up in. I don't feel like we are doing that, and I want all of us adults to start acting like adults and to do better.

What are you "seeing" as you survey American politics and society right now? What gives you the most concern?

Americans remain rhetorically attached to democracy, but when you ask them what they mean, large majorities are quick to give up basic rights, oversight, and even non-violence when their side holds power. And the idea of a loyal opposition is disintegrating. I'm deeply concerned by that impulse towards unchecked majoritarianism, and also worried about hypocritical alterations of those feelings when the other side is in power.

What are some of the blind spots, misconceptions, and outright ignorance that the mainstream media, the political class, and everyday Americans have about the realities of political violence in this country?  

People seem to underestimate how much political violence has risen, and how lopsided it is. There are vastly more incidents on the right, and they are targeting people. That is the major political violence problem faced by the country. That said, on the left, too many partisans are loathe to acknowledge that their side's violence, though largely against property, has also doubled since 2016. It has just grown from a much lower point.

I get constant calls from reporters asking if Donald Trump is going to start another January 6 style riot – and when I speak about political violence, my mail fills with people asking why I don't speak more about the overwhelmingly (but not entirely) peaceful Black Lives Matter protests.

But Trump is not currently able to draw out large crowds – his followers are afraid of the FBI and believe people who goad them to violence on list serves are false flag operations. Instead, we are seeing people kill neighbors over politics or murder business owners who display a pride flag. In other countries, when someone runs a car into a peaceful crowd, it's almost always a rare international terrorist event. In America, that has happened over 150 times since Heather Heyer was killed at the Unite the Right rally. Political violence and credible threats have become small scale, hyperlocal, across the nation, and extremely frequent

Premeditated political violence against people has skyrocketed on the right, and premeditated political violence on the left has also grown - though from a much lower point, and more often targeting property. Hate crimes are at their highest point in the 21st century, even higher than the spike after 9/11. Local officials who were barely targeted before are now receiving significant numbers of threats – in San Diego, 75% of county officials report threats or harassment, for instance. Threats against Members of Congress rose tenfold from 2016 to 2021, though they fell slightly last year.  In the 1960s and 1970s we faced high levels of political violence, but it was largely against property, or involved foreign terrorists. We haven't seen Americans targeting other Americans politically like this since Confederates reversed Reconstruction and used violence and threats to return to power after the Civil War.

The news media and the political class tend to have a crisis frame that is very immediate and focused on the now. What would the news media – and by extension the political class and public — better understand and see in terms of political polarization and violence if they had a longer view and more time to digest what is happening or not?

America has faced political violence at many points in its history. It is usually used as a method alongside elections to try to win power by intimidating people. That is how it was used by the Know Nothing Party in the early 1800s, by Confederates after Reconstruction, and by Southern Democrats under Jim Crow to maintain single party dominance in eleven Southern States.

Right now, the threat of violence is being used to destroy pro-democracy Republicans and allow a non-majority faction to take over the Republican Party. While there are more threats overall against Democratic constituencies, women, and minorities, those threats are a spill-over from attempts to build Republican base intensity through highlighting a white Christian male dominant identity. The targeted threats are occurring largely to win power and are often targeted very intentionally – against certain election officials who will matter in swing states, or against the judges and DAs involved in cases against former President Trump. 

The spike in violence is helping an anti-democratic faction of the Republican Party overcome a pro-democratic faction. The media framing violence as largely about Republicans versus Democrats misses that crucial part of the story.

What does the actual data tell us about political violence and extremism in the Age of Trump and where we are potentially going as a country?

Political violence and criminal violence are highly connected.

The best study of murder in America back to our Revolution found that the strongest variables predicting a rise in the murder rate was trust in fellow Americans and trust in government – especially among young men (the demographic that commits most violence everywhere). In the 1960s when political violence rose, America also saw a doubling of the murder rate, and homicide kept rising until the 1990s. When people normalize violence and lesser forms of anti-social behavior, such as Lauren Boebert's obnoxious vaping and groping at a theater, oafishness on airplanes, or "rolling coal" – blowing car exhaust in the faces of bicyclists – it reduces the sense of social propriety and impulse control. Society and civilization are actually very fragile things – as anti-social behavior gets normalized and people "let it all hang out", as it were, all forms of violence tend to rise. We are probably on the verge of that again, and this MAGA political faction and left-wing illiberalism pushing people towards it will be to blame for the deaths and dystopian cities we are going to have for the next few decades.

When I write articles or interview experts who are trying to sound the alarm about right-wing political violence by Trump followers and other such malign actors, one of the common responses in emails and comments is that this is all so much hysterics. The MAGA movement threat is exaggerated. These right-wing extremists and others who are violent are being put in jail. The danger is also so much talk as there won't be a second civil war, etc. How would you intervene and push back?

I just provide the numbers. It's not that these levels of political violence are unprecedented – America is an unusually violent democracy compared to countries with similar levels of wealth and democratic history. The United States has seen violence at these levels before. But New York in the 1970s, or the post-Reconstruction South which had a lynching every 36 hours at its height, would not be the periods of our past I most want our country to revisit.

Is the American public "polarized" or are they "sorted"? That distinction is very important.

American politicians are highly ideologically polarized – members of Congress now hold virtually no policy beliefs in common across the aisle. Regular Americans, on the other hand, are not very ideologically polarized – they hold a lot of policy beliefs in common, although Republicans and Democrats care more intensely about different issues. But regular Americans do really dislike partisans from the other party – which is known as affective, or emotional, polarization. That level of affective polarization is likely to be caused, at least partially, because we are highly sorted as a country. When multiple identity characteristics, such as religiosity, geography, gender, and race, are the same for members of the same party, it is easier to feel that any of one's many identities are threatened by members of the other party, and when people are geographically separated so that they don't socialize, those misunderstandings get even larger. However, sorting alone just sets the kindling - politicians are lighting the flames by using that latent affective polarization to further inflame sentiment, in order to use that voter intensity to win power. So, it is unlikely to be possible to reduce Americans' polarization until we change the incentives that are allowing politicians to win seats by furthering polarization.

Most journalists and reporters assume that the public follows politics closely, is ideological, and has a real understanding of the details and facts. Decades of political science research shows that mostly to not be true. Unfortunately, the mainstream media, for a variety of reasons including intellectual laziness and careerism, is clinging desperately onto those fictions of folk democracy even when the evidence is abundant and obvious to the contrary. This translates into a news media that still does not fully appreciate — and is in willful denial about — the realities and the depths of the country's democracy crisis in this moment of ascendant neofascism and illiberalism.

Americans share a large number of policy beliefs in common. But they also, by and large, really, really don't care about politics. They don't want to think about politics, they don't want to talk about politics, they want it all to go away. That means that Americans also hold a very tenuous understanding of the basics of what it takes to maintain a democracy – such as the importance of a free press, or the role of a civil service. In America, as in many countries where democracy has slipped away in recent years, we see significant pluralities willing to support anti-democratic behavior when their party is in power. Fear of the other side doing just that is one of the main forces that empowers a party to act first to undermine democracy in order to, in their minds, prevent the other side from doing it first.

Is "consensus" and "bipartisanship" across lines of political difference just a type of fetish for the political class and news media? The public generally does not care.

I have my own strong policy beliefs – but I understand that as a country, we have about half the voting population who are conservative, and about half who are more liberal. Both sides need politicians who can represent them in a pro-democratic way, where we disagree on policy, not on whether we will allow the system of peacefully settling our disputes to disintegrate. Liberals need to give some support to pro-democracy Republicans or both will be overrun by the anti-democracy faction that is gaining control over that party. Liberals should also pay more attention to how their own illiberal wing in cultural and academic institutions is driving more conservatives, independents, and minorities to support their own anti-democratic faction. The problem in the political realm is clearly a faction of the Republican Party – but it has not grown on its own, there is a call and response with cultural forces on the left.

What are some interventions that can be made to make the country's political institutions and culture more durable and healthier in the face of the type of extreme polarization – which is asymmetrical and more on the right— that we are now seeing in the Age of Trump and the decades that got us to this crisis?

America should give serious thought to voting reforms that would allow the anti-democratic faction to have representation without letting them take over one of our two major parties. Proportional representation is the best way to achieve that, though ranked choice voting and primary reform might be less radical and cause fewer governing headaches. Both would likely allow MAGA Republicans to have control in some states and localities (which, of course, they do now), while still allowing the majority of Republicans to support a pro-democracy party. Campaign finance reforms that empower small dollar donors also empower extremists, who are better at raising anger that gets those small dollar donations flowing. Big money in politics is also problematic, of course, but the problem of small dollar donors pushing our politics towards extremes has not been recognized or discussed. Finally, we need better anti-trust enforcement to break business monopolies. Part of the distrust in America since 2008 has as much to do with the way elites keep making money, and is economic as much as political in origin. There is a reason Aristotle and Jefferson both recognized the dangers to democracy of large concentrations of wealth.

As Trump's criminal trials and the 2024 Election approach, how do you think that will impact the dynamics of violence and polarization?

There is no good way out of the 2024 Election. No matter how the election turns out, it will harm faith in democracy – but the worst future damage is likely to be inflicted if Trump wins and takes power, given the signals he has already given about how he will misuse his department of justice against his enemies, attack the civil service, and otherwise damage the institutions that keep our democracy tethered to the rule of law.

#“Highly connected”: How the right's political violence relates to a rise in criminal violence #white nationalism #white supremacy #white hate #american hate #homegrown terrorism #maga #trumpers

[qqueenofhades]

Can you please explain how the myth that "CoNsErVaTivEs ArE gOoD fOr TeH EcOnOmY!" Came to be? I know it's propaganda but just don't get how it's stuck around.

Several reasons:

1) Ronald Fucking Reagan. (I mean, when in doubt, blame Reagan and you have a 95% chance of being correct.) In the late 1970s, America (along with the rest of the world) was in a profound economic crisis. This wasn't necessarily the fault of Democratic president Jimmy Carter, but as the incumbent usually does, he took all the blame for it, and was generally perceived as responding inadequately to the energy woes as well as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran hostage crisis. Reagan, running on the slogan -- you guessed it -- "Make America Great Again" -- won in a landslide in 1980 and immediately instituted what has been known ever after as "trickle-down" or "supply-side" economics, which started the tradition of Republican fiscal "policy" as it is as today. Aka, giant tax cuts for rich people and big corporations, and the business end of the free-market fuckstick for everyone else. Despite massively running up the deficit and hiking taxes on working- and middle-class people no less than twelve times during his eight years as president, Reagan left office with the laurels of a Great Economic Reformer and every president since has been pressured to follow his lead to some extent. Biden is the first ever post-Reagan president to explicitly denounce Reagonomics as what it is. To wit, a get-richer-at-the-expense-of-everyone-else massive scam that has been sold as the height of Responsible Economics for decades, because capitalism!

2) Every Republican president ever since has tried to do the same thing, with the result that... welp, they crash the economy. We all remember what happened in 2008 as the result of Dubya Economics, right? Or the Trump tax cuts that added literal trillions to the deficit, while Biden has reduced it by $1.4 trillion in his first year alone. The Republicans act like cutting government spending alone is responsible economics, and a compliant corporate media owned by ultra-rich oligarchs who personally benefit from GOP policies is often only too happy to play along. So we are made to exist in this fantasy land where cutting massive amounts of revenue and forcing working-class people to carry the tax burden for the super-rich, aside from being morally reprehensible, somehow has a) no effect on the budget, and b) doesn't actually and massively affect the quality of life and smooth functioning of the entire country in generational and long-lasting ways. You would think that for people who profess to be such big fans of capitalism, they would know that it takes money to run a country effectively, and investment in critical public, health, and infrastructure services. But all they want to do is get richer for themselves, not help people, so lololol.

3) As discussed, the Democrats (despite being by any reasonable metric the more fiscally responsible party) have been labeled Big Spenders, because -- gasp -- they dare to expand government spending and social programs, rather than just slashing everything they can get their hands on. Yet again, because of forty Fucking years of Reagonomics and its successors, any spending at all is viewed as "irresponsible" and "too ambitious," while creating giant black holes in the budget to the tune of trillions of dollars is the Party of Fiscal Responsibility! It's like a kindergartner's idea of responsibility, where you just throw out everything. An adult would recognise that "responsibility" encompasses many different areas and goals, but good luck with that.

4) Every Democratic president that has come into office after a Republican has inherited an ungodly economic mess that they then get blamed for not fixing fast enough. The Republicans like to blow it all up and then fundraise and campaign on Democrats Being Bad For The Economy (That We Broke In the First Place, But Shh).

5) As I also said in the previous post: It's The Racism, Stupid. Democrats' social programs and government spending is designed to help people of color along with white people, and that is unacceptable to the white people who would otherwise benefit from these policies, but refuse to support them out of white grievance and racial resentment. As noted, the media is often more than happy to push the Democrats Bad For The Economy narrative, because all the companies and super-rich people who control and set this narrative don't want Democratic policies to ever be widespread or popular or authentically supported. Because then they themselves might be impacted, and might make less money or pay a lot more in taxes. Horrors.

Anyway, yes. There you have it. It is deeply stupid on many levels. Alas.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts #ronald reagan burn in hell

[vague-humanoid]

On Friday, The Atlantic published a massive profile of Chris Licht, the man who took over as the CEO of CNN about a year ago, written by Tim Alberta. The author tries really hard to be fair, and Alberta is not particularly unsympathetic towards Licht and the challenges he has faced at CNN. And yet, the profile amounts to a devastating indictment of Licht – and of a worldview that is widely held among those who dominate the civic institutions of American life.

I have already written two long pieces on how justifications for CNN’s disastrous Trump town hall reveal the deeper pathologies and fallacies that have characterized the Trump discourse since 2016. The Atlantic profile provides plenty more evidence of how much Licht’s political diagnosis is shaped by myths of liberal “echo chambers” and the idea that Trump speaks for an “authentic” America that is rightfully aggrieved – how much he wants all of us to buy into those chimeras.

It's really worth digging into Licht’s case one more time, however, because what stands out from this profile is the combination of naivety and arrogance – all coming on top of an ideological status-quo fundamentalism that stands in marked contrast to Licht’s self-perception as a reasonable actor untarnished by the “irrationalities” that supposedly plague everyone who disagrees with him. This peculiar mindset is pervasive among not just the highest ranks of media executives, but also among the country’s elite echelons in politics, society, and culture more generally.

Chris Licht has it all figured out. Or so he believes. The profile opens with Licht telling us he doesn’t spend much time thinking about how the media should adequately cover Donald Trump, because “It’s very simple.” Simplistic is a better word to characterize the answer CNN’s new-ish boss has to offer: “You cover him like any other candidate.” To be fair, those statements were made before the Trump town hall proved yet again how foolish such an approach is. But Licht is unlikely to learn the appropriate lessons from the debacle for which he is chiefly responsible.

In Licht, we encounter a particular kind of arrogance. He seems obsessed with the “truth” – “there’s only one truth,” he solemnly declares, and under his leadership, Licht vows, CNN will have “no agenda other than the truth,” it will be “a source of absolute truth” via “sober, fact-driven coverage” unaffected by ideology and subjective beliefs. Unfortunately, this kind of (willfully?) naïve performative neutrality is very characteristic of a media system that incentivizes constant demonstrations of “nonpartisanship.”

We would be in a much better place if the people in positions of influence and power were to let go of such simplistic notions of objectivity. At some point, Alberta asks Licht if he is a conservative. Licht’s answer is revealing: “I would never put myself into a category.” He has no problem putting his critics into ideological categories, however, of accusing them to be incapable of acting as anything but “members of their tribe”; but such categories are not for him, for he operates on facts and reason alone.

The political discourse is significantly shaped by a whole industry of people – most of them white men – who believe themselves to be beyond ideology, whose self-perception and claim to relevance is built around the idea that they are arbiters of pure reason. We find them as prominent members of the pundit class, as leading “objective” data journalism gurus, as media executives with an outsized influence on the public conversation. These self-proclaimed Arbiters of Reason operate from the conviction that they are capable of superior judgment across a wide variety of fields. They owe much of their prominent status to the idea that they are unbiased, dispassionate truthtellers, all about data and facts, brave enough to give us the unvarnished truth in a heroic effort against conventional wisdom and the dark forces of subjectivity. They feel capable and entitled to offer a firm assessment of *anything* – yet all too often just end up judging the world by whether or not it’s in line with their sensibilities.

Licht is adamant he’s just “asking the tough questions” – that’s the framework he and his “reasonable” brethren like to employ in order to present their endeavor as a brave mission of fact-finding and truth-telling: “Just asking questions.” It’s remarkable how reliably that gets them to accept rightwing grievances and perpetuate the language of reactionary moral panics. All he wants, Licht assures us, is “to have difficult conversations without being demonized” – but instead, he’s being “shouted down for having the temerity to even ask.” Even the CEO of CNN has to live in fear of being canceled – is there no more free speech in this country? In general, Licht reveals a disposition to welcome all the usual rightwing talking points: He rails against “virtue signaling” and laments to be living in a world where “some people” (but who?) are forced (by whom?) to “tune out” (from what?) because they have to hear things like “person capable of giving birth” all the time (citation very much needed).

It’s quite striking how much of their energy self-proclaimed centrist/moderate/reasonable people focus on the threat from the Left – and how seamlessly that concern degenerates fully into anti-“wokeism.” To nobody’s surprise, Licht has a problem with the emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Not simply the way DEI is being implemented in potentially unhelpful ways or co-opted by corporate interests; his skepticism is more profound. In the profile, Licht rather proudly explains how in his opinion, “A Black person, a brown person, and an Asian woman that all graduated the same year from Harvard is not diversity.” It’s important to grapple with the role of elite institutions of higher education in the constant reproduction of inequality; but here, that is weaponized to obscure and deny race as a central organizing principle in American life. Acknowledging the centrality of racial and gender identities, of how intersecting identities shape the individual’s status in society and perspective on the world, would undermine the core claim on which Licht’s self-perception of non-ideological reason is predicated. As the most fundamental critique of white male “objectivity” comes from leftwing identity politics, from exactly those “woke” radicals who are supposedly unserious and irrational, this is where the Arbiters of Reason tend to direct their ire.

It’s a recurring theme in how the “centrist” white male elites describe the world: an obsession with pointing out the supposed fallacies of leftwing “activism” or “advocacy,” a term Licht seems to use a lot. Their entire mystique is built on offering better judgment than those “biased” activists. This puts them on a steady rightward trajectory. The fact that their own supposedly superior political judgment is being questioned so vehemently by current events – by a town hall that eviscerates the “just the facts” approach to Trumpism, perhaps – does not change that.

Instead of engaging in critical introspection, they double down: Keep ridiculing the leftwing critique as irrational identity politics, keep downplaying the warnings about the dangers of rightwing extremism as hysterical, keep playing up the threat of “woke” radicalism and the “illiberal Left.” In his own tale, Licht, the powerful executive who was installed by mighty corporate interests, is David; his Goliath the “certain segment of society (the “woke” Libs) that has had an unfettered megaphone” from which he is bravely trying to regain control. And what does he get in return? He’s being called “a fascist right-winger” when all he wants to be is “an unbiased source of truth.” How unfair.

Isn’t the answer here that Chris Licht simply is a conservative? I believe the story is a little more interesting than that. Remember, he would never put himself into that category – and while we shouldn’t just take that at face value, it still matters. The fact that he has always considered himself to be if not liberal, then moderate, is important because it informs his assessment of what is happening on the “Left.” This is a dynamic that characterizes much of the self-proclaimed “reasonable centrist” industrial complex: If you are convinced to be just the right kind of reasonable/liberal/moderate, then experiencing reactionary impulses creates a kind of intellectual and emotional dissonance that is often resolved by declaring that which makes you uncomfortable “radical” and “extreme.” “I’m a true liberal – these people are radical, woke activists” feels a lot better than “I always thought I was pretty liberal, but I must say I’m feeling uncomfortable about these calls for equality and respect, especially when they question my superior judgment and societal status.” It’s a combination of performative and reactionary centrism, and no matter the exact mix between strategic, ideological, and psychological elements, the result is the same: An increasingly aggressive stance against the “woke” Left, ever more in line with reactionary politics.

It might be impossible to discern the exact extent to which someone like Licht realizes how much he is furthering the interests of the corporate overlords who tower over him, and how much his actions are in line with the interests of traditional elites more broadly. Licht’s perspective on the world always naturalizes existing power relations and only accepts the status quo as reasonable. To be fair, from an elite perspective – and that of a white male elite, in particular – this kind of status-quo fundamentalism is indeed rational and it makes sense to regard the “Left” as the bigger immediate status threat. It is true that an agenda seeking to move America from being a restricted, white men’s democracy that left existing hierarchies largely intact to a functioning multiracial, pluralistic, social democracy is a losing proposition for people who have traditionally been at the top.

For many of the status-quo moderates, this change has already gone too far. They want to turn the clock back a little bit, to a time before what they see as the current excesses of “wokeism” – to when the privileged position of wealthy elites was a little more secure. So, while I don’t think Chris Licht is a MAGA Republican, his perspective on American politics is shaped by an underlying ideology that makes it just much more plausible to see the Right as not that big of a threat – and the Left as radical, unreasonable, and acutely dangerous. We could have a much more fruitful political discussion if Licht and others like him could just acknowledge that – and spare us all the grandiose nonsense about “saving journalism” and defending “the truth” itself.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The numerous catastrophes of the Age of Trump could all have been averted, or greatly mitigated. But too many Americans, including at the highest levels of government and society, instead chose to remain silent about the nature of the emergency, or to normalize Trump and the Republican-fascist movement as a slightly exaggerated version of "politics as usual."

Those who did speak out were frequently dismissed and mocked as alarmists by the mainstream media, while also being personally targeted for harassment, abuse and political revenge by Trump and his acolytes. That has been especially true of former Republicans and conservatives who spoke out against Trump, and were then branded as traitors and heretics by his followers and the right-wing rage machine.

Cheri Jacobus can claim to be one of the first Republican "Never Trumpers." A former media spokesperson at the Republican National Committee, she has years of experience as a conservative political strategist, communications expert and commentator. Jacobus is founder and president of the political consulting and PR firm Capitol Strategies PR, and has appeared on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, PBS and ABC and other outlets. Her opinion essays have been featured in USA Today, The Guardian, The Hill, The Daily Beast, The Daily News and elsewhere.

In 2016, Jacobus unsuccessfully sued Donald Trump for defamation, claiming that his public attacks on her had resulted in millions of dollars in losses to her professional reputation and other harm. In this conversation, she discusses how the American news media and the rest of the country's political class normalized Trump and boosted his candidacy, in search of ratings, money, access and power. She also explains why so many leading Republicans and right-wing elites ultimately supported Trump even when they knew that he and his followers represented an extreme danger to the country.

Jacobus reflects on questions of accountability and penance for conservatives who betrayed their supposed principles and enabled Trumpism, and argues that many of the Republicans who have testified before the Jan. 6 Committee — and are now being celebrated as patriotic heroes — are actually self-interested actors who should not be trusted. At the end of this conversation, Jacobus cautions that the Republican Party cannot be redeemed or rehabilitated and that Democrats and the public must act accordingly if American democracy is to survive.

Given all that is happening from the Jan. 6 hearings, the escalating assault on democracy by Trump and his allies, and what feels like a never-ending torrent of other troubles, how are you feeling? How do you make sense of it all?

I've been in this fight for seven years. I'm an original "Never Trumper." Donald Trump came after me and got me kicked off Fox News in October of 2015, because I publicly confirmed a Washington Post report that he had a super PAC. Ever since then, I became a target. Of course this was mainly Fox News, but also CNN. There are a lot of guilty parties. This was very distressing to me, as someone who's been a part of the American news media for many decades. You know, I have a healthy cynicism about politics and political media. You know they're in it for the ratings. You know people aren't going to be perfect. But you still expect some basic level of decency and ethics. I was shaken to my core real early on with how the news media normalized and amplified Donald Trump. All these years later, to see it's still going on — that is immensely disappointing. Donald Trump and these right-wing extremist Republicans and the bad guys more generally are winning, and have already won bigger than I ever could have feared.

What are your feelings about the House Jan. 6 hearings?

The hearings have been blockbusters. They exposed the breadth and depth of the effort to overturn an election, overtake our government by force and impose a type of government never seen or experienced in America. It should not have taken a year and half for us to get this information. We came close to losing our democracy and we are still in peril. But the hearing witnesses were credible, had a wealth of valuable information and were almost exclusively Republicans, so it's impossible to blame it all on the Democrats.

What about the Republicans who testified and the media narrative that presents them as heroes? I see few if any heroes there. They were coerced, or otherwise testified out of self-interest — including Cassidy Hutchinson. They have almost to a person said they were proud of having worked with the Trump regime and would vote for him and other Republicans in the future.

The witnesses are not heroes. They were under oath and had no choice. If they were heroes, they would have come forward 12 to 18 months ago. Cassidy Hutchinson even tried to go work for Trump at Mar-a-Lago after Jan. 6. If the coup had succeeded and Trump had forced his way back into office, these people would all still be with him. They were saving themselves with their testimony.

Do you still believe that Trump and his confederates will never be properly punished for their obvious crimes? We have this narrative that "the walls are closing in" everywhere. I remain very suspicious of that, and will not be satisfied until Trump is in prison for a long time.

Merrick Garland allowed Trump to keep those documents at Mar-a-Lago for a year and a half. He did not initiate the FBI raid — he merely gave his OK. He has harmed our democracy by not acting on the Jan. 6-related Trump crimes, the obstruction outlined in the Mueller report and other Trump crimes. I do believe that public pressure and the excellent work of the Jan. 6 Committee is effectively pushing him into action, even though it's tardy. As well, Trump forced his hand by ignoring a subpoena to return the stolen documents, and now we know they were highly sensitive documents about nuclear weapons. It's almost as if Trump wanted this drama and showdown.

How do you explain the level of denial from people in the mainstream media, the political class and other professional smart people about Trump and his fascist movement? They are stuck on this hamster wheel of supposed shock and surprise. To me, it's sickening to watch.

Everybody in the American political establishment and those circles in Washington knew what Trump was. That includes the Republicans and the media. They just didn't think he was going to win. They thought they were going to have their fun. I left the Republican Party the day after they nominated Trump. People kept asking me, "Why are you doing that? He's going to lose. We're all going to pull back together." I didn't want to sit at that table. I couldn't imagine being in strategy meetings with people who had ever been fine or accepting of Trump. When he won, I was already well along in my decision to leave the Republican Party. I didn't need to wait to be convinced. I already knew how bad it was. I try to call out corruption on both sides of the aisle. There are Never Trumpers who I believe are frauds. Maybe they started out doing the right thing but along the way turned it into a grift. I welcome everybody. That includes people who worked for Trump and changed their minds. Or maybe they just, for the sake of history, wanted to end up on the right side. I also don't trust the people who have always been very successful in politics and media, and who flip-flopped back and forth and claimed that they didn't know how bad Trump really was. They knew how bad he was. They were just trying to get something out of Trump. When it didn't work out, they backed off.

The professional centrist types and the Beltway careerists are some of the worst offenders in terms of being in perpetual denial about Trumpism and what that man and his movement did to the country. They truly believe that a return to "normal" is possible.

They're not in denial. They all know, and have always known, what Trump is. They put their finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing. You would not believe all the messages I have from people who work professionally in politics and media who never thought he could win and who opposed him. But then those same people turned around and got in line. They wanted to keep their TV contracts and their lobbying gigs. They wanted to keep their place as a cog in the wheel. Where else were they going to go? They saw what happened to me. The professional politics and media types don't want to take the risk of being retaliated against and punished.

What do you say to those in the media and political classes, or among the public, who argue that the best way to defeat Trump and his fascist movement is to ignore him — that taking away the attention will weaken him?

You can't ignore Donald Trump. He is too dangerous. One of the main problems now is that Trump has successfully said to his followers, "Only pay attention to Fox or Breitbart or Newsmax. Everybody else is fake news. They're all lying to you." Once you put those tens of millions of people in an information vacuum with their blinders on, we are in very dangerous territory as a society. The Trumpists and Republicans and others who follow him don't care about democracy and a good society. It is tribalism. All they care about is their side winning. They like the white supremacy. They like the misogyny. They like the fighting and chaos. They like the idea of beating up on people they view as being below them or too different from them. His followers also like the feeling of belonging, the feeling that they are part of something bigger than themselves. It makes them feel smart and strong. In their minds, being MAGA and in TrumpWorld gives them a sense of importance and an identity they may have never felt before in their entire lives. There are other people, however, who, if they had accurate information about reality, the news and politics more generally, might change their minds about Trump. Those people are in information silos. The Republicans and other members of the right know that once you put people in these information silos, blocking them off from accurate information, you control them. You control what they know. They think they're informed because they spend a lot of time in these spaces consuming information. Some of these persuadable voters can be pulled away from the Republican Party and Trump. Close elections are won or lost on these margins.

As someone who was a Republican insider, how do you explain this version of the Republican Party? How did it come into existence?

When I first started out in politics, I was working for Bob Michel. He was House Republican leader at the time. There was this weird right-wing fringe element here and there in the party and conservative movement, but they were nowhere near as prevalent as they would become years later. When the Republicans took over Congress in the mid '90s, these fringe elements got more power. They were part of a coalition, and they were going to get something as part of that bargain with the Republican leadership. That fringe became stronger until it was able to bully and drown out the more reasonable voices in the Republican Party and conservative movement. The extremists are not interested in compromise with the Democrats to advance legislation that would be in everyone's interest. They just want to win at any cost.

Did Trump transform the Republican Party, or did he just give them permission to be their true selves?

Trump boiled the frog slowly. There are Republicans who say and believe things and tolerate behavior now because of Trump that they would not have 10 years ago. More generally, Trump and his allies were able to move Republican voters to become more extreme. What they did is really a type of brainwashing, for lack of a better word. The news media is also to blame for this discord and extremism. When I started out in politics, 80% of Americans were more or less in the center or slightly to the left or right of it. But the news media got to a point where they only wanted to highlight the conflict between the extremes on either side. They want drama. They want fights. I used to be on TV all the time. But what happened is that Fox would want me to come on only if I stuck to certain talking points and had a far right-wing perspective on a given topic. Fox usually wanted catfights. They actually used that language. Fox wanted that drama. And if I was not sufficiently right-wing or if I wasn't going to say the thing that would cause fireworks and draw eyeballs and create drama and controversy, they weren't interested. A reasonable moderate that actually knows her stuff, especially if she's a woman, was not something Fox wanted. So they started dumbing down the entire political debate. The cable networks more generally do that now. The result is that the public is done a disservice and are not in a position to really learn what is going on in politics and the world from the 24/7 news cycle.

What about your Republican colleagues who made the bargain with Trumpism? What was their calculus? Was it just power and money? Was it ideology? Something else? You know many of these people personally.

Some of them reasoned that Trump was going to be nominated, so let's back him. Others didn't jump on board with Trump until he won. Others backed Trump because they wanted to fit in and still be able to go to their monthly Republican Women's Club meeting. Those higher up in the food chain wanted to keep their lobbying and TV jobs.

What does Donald Trump represent to you?

He's absolutely a corrupt crook. I wouldn't be surprised if we find out that he is owned by Russia and Putin. Trump is an unbelievably evil human being. I believe that he is one of the most evil people that we've ever seen in American public life. He brings out the worst in people. Once Trump is emboldened a little bit, he doesn't stop, he keeps going. The biggest mistake Democrats made was not impeaching Trump for obstruction of justice as proven in the Mueller report. Once he knew they were going to back down, he felt he could do whatever he wanted, and he has. The world is paying a price. And then to see all the people who follow him and deny what he is, or think it doesn't matter. It's disheartening. And I do not believe that the United States is going to recover from Donald Trump and what he did in my lifetime. We defeated him. Democrats were given the majority. One of the main reasons the Democrats were put in power is because the American people wanted accountability and justice. We don't have it yet. If Donald Trump is not punished for his crimes, then this country is done for.

It should be easy to attack and defeat Trump and the Republicans, based on the literal harm and death their policies have caused and continue to cause. Their actual policies are unpopular across the board. Yet the Republicans have, for the most part, gained the momentum. What advice would you give the Democrats about messaging and strategy?

Everything has to be about the Jan. 6 hearings — getting that information out to the American people and keeping it front and center. This has to be done on the local level and through other means, not just through national news media. Communicate clearly to the American people and those Fox viewers and Republicans and others who back Trump that are persuadable. Tell them that what Trump did on Jan. 6 is treason. Don't be hyperbolic. Focus on the facts and information. Convince those people who can be convinced. Don't fight with people who you're never going to convince. Tell these Republican persuadables, "This is no longer the party that you were once a part of." Don't shame people because they've been Republicans for 40 years. Convince them that the party they're with now is not what they think it is, it's not what they remember. I guarantee you that many of these people are in that information silo and do not understand how much the Republican Party has changed for the worse. In addition, some of the best spokespeople in the Democrat Party are not visible enough. For example, Sheldon Whitehouse, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren. Those are the people who should be on the news all the time on Sundays, and even on the opinion shows. Republicans are using every tool in their toolbox and then some. Democrats are not — and they're the majority party in Congress.

What about accountability for the Republicans who helped to build this monster? There's a whole class of consultants, advisers, elected officials, media commentators and activists who helped to birth American neofascism. They should not be allowed to wash their hands of it all just by announcing they no longer support Donald Trump.

There are different levels here. Everybody didn't help to build this monster in the same way. Yes, there are political consultants and/or advertising experts who did such a thing. There are sincere Never Trumpers like me who can help the Democrats. There are some things I regret — but to want me to do penance because I was a Republican? You are not going to win over these persuadable Republican voters and win elections if the approach is to make them feel guilty. That kind of message is not going to work for people who are still Republicans but could be won over if they had different sources of news and other information outside the right-wing echo chamber. In the end, there were some people who were more responsible for getting us to this point with Trump and this democracy crisis. One of my errors was actually believing that the Republican Party was a "big tent." Now I realize that was absolutely not true. Hindsight is 20/20. When should I have known that the Republican Party wasn't really a big tent? I am still grappling with that.

So many centrist types and others, especially in the media class, have this standard line where they say that Republican elected officials and party elites, the news media personalities, the strategists and the like don't actually believe what they are saying. In other words, these talking points about "critical race theory" or "grooming" or the "great replacement" are so ridiculous they don't really believe it. My response is: Who cares? They are saying those things because it works to win elections and gain power. And the people who make excuses for them are just protecting their peer group.

It doesn't matter if the Republican elites believe what they are saying, because they are getting their public to believe it. I don't care what Tucker Carlson believes. I care that Tucker Carlson has a huge platform, and he's saying things that are getting people killed. I don't care if he believes it or not. He's doing it. Is the problem with Rupert Murdoch, for giving him a platform? It doesn't matter if they believe it. They're doing it. They have no conscience. They're doing it because they know how to fool the rubes. They know how to get people to be OK with it. And I hate to say it, but: American voters — are they stupid? Some of them are, yes. We've seen the stupid people at the Trump rallies. There are others who think they're informed because they've been told not to watch other media except Fox. They've been told that everybody else is lying to them. They think if they get the newsletters from Judicial Watch or Heritage Foundation, and they watch Fox and go to political gatherings that they are being informed. Again, they are not.

Can this Republican Party be rehabilitated or otherwise saved after Donald Trump?

I left the party the day after they nominated Trump. I'd been an RNC spokesperson. I've worked on Capitol Hill. For years, I had been a lobbyist. I was a TV pundit. All of it. I left the party, because I knew that it was over. Is the Republican Party salvageable? No. I didn't think it was salvageable even if Trump had lost in 2016. My fear is that the Democrats are still pretending that the Republican Party can be saved. They are pretending this is true because they are afraid to directly take on the Republican Party and the horrible things it now represents and has done. The Democrats in Congress are afraid that if they push for indictments for the Republicans who aided and abetted Trump and his coup, there will be retaliation when and if the Republicans take back control of the House and Senate. That's the driving force now behind a lot of the reticence on the part of Democrats: fear.

#us politics #news #salon #interviews #donald trump #Republicans #conservatives #gop #Cheri Jacobus #rnc #house select committee #capitol riot investigation #alt right #department of justice #merrick garland #ag merrick garland #2022

[stephenjaymorrisblog]

When Rich, WASP Men Break the Law

(Trump’s Next Court Appearance is Not Until December)

Stephen Jay Morris

4/4/2033

©Scientific Morality

Say, all you commoners! Did you see Trump in handcuffs? Did you see his mug shots? How about fingerprints? None of the above? Well, what did you expect? The Judge released him on his own recognizance. There was not a penny set for bail. Even though he is a flight risk, he dragged his fat, flat ass out the court house, free as a pigeon.

Here’s another question: Will he be issued a gag order? The judge knows that he has a loud mouth and loose lips. True to form, he attacked the judge at a public venue and on social media just hours after he’d stood in front of him.

The day began as his private jet took off from Florida. He flew First Class to his Lower Manhattan arraignment in style. Most people are driven to their own, handcuffed, in the back of a squad car. Before he left Florida, he was driven out of Mar-a-Largo with a caravan of federal, secret service agents surrounding his vehicle. On both sides of the road were his supporters, holding Trump banners and flags. He waved to the crowd wearing a bullet proof vest, which made his shoulders look bigger than they actually are. This flunky acted like he was going to his crucifixion when, in actuality, he was headed to his own penthouse at Trump Tower in Manhattan.

The police succeeded in preventing him from being videotaped or photographed in court. Cameras or press weren’t allowed. There was a courtroom sketch artist, however, who portrayed him all shit-faced, in colorful chalk. His face was as red as a communist flag and he looked as though he was going to puke at any minute. At least we got to see that. The bumptious Trump toned it down in court, however. He presented himself as docile with a dash of encomium toward the court.

Yes, in his narcissistic mind, he is above the law. He is God’s God baby! I’m getting the feeling that the judicial system is bending itself over backward to accommodate him. It’s as if he is some Godly saint, when he’s really just another scumbag grifter that was part of the lucky sperm club.

You wonder why authoritarian Communists treated members of the ruling class so badly: it was righteous class anger! The rich pigs just flaunted their wealth, while the peasants suffered in squalor and hunger! They laughed drunkenly while children died of scarlet fever!

What you saw on April 4, 2023, was choreographed and staged to satisfy the public’s anger toward Trump. If the establishment hadn’t done that and, instead, handed down true justice, Trump would have had to leave the country in secrecy to hide away in some shit hole country! You can do a lot in eight months. That should terrify all of you!

What I saw Tuesday proved to me that the poor and the middle class are held to a separate set of rules, while the wealthy get leniency. In 1924, two rich kids murdered a 14 year old boy in Chicago, Illinois. The reason they did it? So, they could commit the perfect crime. The two boys, Nathan Leopold, Jr. and Richard Loeb, viewed themselves as intellectually superior because they were white and wealthy. They got life in prison in what the print media called the “Crime of the Century.”

The Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians are going to portray Trump as being crucified by Jews. This is an ancient ploy, making the victimizers the victims. Will they succeed? I don’t know. With lots of money, anything is possible. The only surefire way for their defense is public apathy. I doubt that Trump has the support of 75% of the American people.

#stephenjaymorris #poets on tumblr #anarchist #antifascist #anarcho primitivism #anarchopunk #green anarchy #anarcho communism #anarcho socialism #anarchofeminism #anarchocommunist #anarcho mutualism

[mariacallous]

Making Sense of the Midterms

Catch up on election insights from our writers across the country. While the control of Congress remains undecided, we’re continuing to update our live blog with the latest news.

Stephania Taladrid on the role of female voters in deciding Nevada’s races: “Latinas have shown less affinity with Republicans than Latino men. In Nevada, the women I spoke to expressed dismay with the G.O.P.’s electoral tactics.”

John Cassidy on the missing Republican “red wave”: “Democrat John Fetterman’s win demonstrated how voters’ concerns about the economy and inflation, although real and tangible, didn’t assure a victory for problematic Republican candidates.”

Clare Malone on Fox News’ reluctance to mention Donald Trump during its coverage: “Given the unique influence of Fox on the G.O.P.’s nominating contests, tonight’s broadcast feels like one long act of passive aggression.”

E. Tammy Kim on J. D. Vance’s victory over Tim Ryan in Ohio: “Vance’s win confirms a Trumpian turn in Ohio and the continued evaporation of working-class, pro-union Democratic politics in the Midwest.”

Benjamin Wallace-Wells on Ron DeSantis’s triumph in Florida: He “has made himself into the most viable Republican alternative to Donald Trump, the avatar of the opposition to COVID restrictions, and the most bristling and visible culture warrior on the right.”

Eric Lach on Governor Kathy Hochul and the races in New York: “Republicans haven’t won a statewide race in New York in some two decades. But this election season raised as many questions as answers about what Democrats . . . want to do with their control over the fourth most populous state in the country.”

Sarah Larson on the fashion (and mood) of the Dr. Oz party: “A costumey Roger Stone chic, with a dash of Kellyanne Conway (spangles, dramatic flagwear in blazer-and-shawl form), along with feisty common-guy stuff, like ‘1776’ baseball hats.”

[realhankmccoy]

I'm enjoying this one so far at the 12 minute mark -- just because it's more about education than entertainment, and the tone is something the USA could use more of.

The kids sort of passively sitting around in a centrist stance on homosexuality do so in part because they were born into an easier time. That's how progress stagnates.

It's nice that this person picks up the LGBT activist torch and educates everyone.

Anyhow, add some socialist injections to Contrapoints and I'll call the person perfect enough. That's all they need, a little more socialism and some urgent thoughts on environmentalism, ending Muskism (which is a patriarchy sort of harem-owning Under My Thumb domination of women in the most squalid of ways), and what to do about the Gini coefficient about to surpass .5. I think only Mexico and Saudi Arabia have more inequality than the USA now for all of the northern hemisphere. I'm not a fan of either of those two countries.

I'm sure it's too much to ask that ContraPoints be every woman like Chaka Khan. I mean would you ask Michael Bolton to solve climate change and end capitalism, right -- he's busy being Michael Bolton.

The only thing I'd really disagree with in this video is I do find it productive to shame conservatives with their own philosophy. Maybe it's just because as a gay man I have less privilege than white women, but I very much enjoy telling them that by their own party's standards they would be more 'good' if they were barefoot in a kitchen and shut the fuck up and be subordinate to men forever.

I also love telling Candace Owens that she is pre-op trans and obsessed with manly ways and trying to turn women into men.

Likewise, I like pointing out that if Eric Trump can replace his big male snozz with that slender feminine almond, anyone can make their face more female.

I just think it's important to disrupt this notion that conservatives are 'pure blood' and 'very good conforming people -- PCs -- based -- 'square'. If the tactic is sort of misogyny as a joke to illustrate the dysfunction of a world in which feminism had never existed or were rolled back, I'm fine with that. I'm not going to 'wake up as a misogynist' one day per the slippy slope argument Contrapoints makes here. If anything, I think closing off too many tactics can generate misogynists in its way. It makes no sense to me that the left would not close off violence (Contrapoints does not) but try to lay down a harder line against attacking conservatism with conservatism. We leftists aren't just going to stop fighting in the ways we see fit because some upper middle class person has an arbitrary, nonsensical code of conduct that privileges violence against women not being called out and even celebrated -- but fake misogyny turned against misogynists is called out and off limits. That's perhaps just the male in Contrapoints wanting those pies in female faces while wanting to act morally superior to those with certain humorous, conservatism-mocking written tactics.

I personally had a nightmare last night that I was a published author who had a book on Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules as my first and only published book. It was a real nightmare knowing that some shitty book on Peterson would totally be on my record as a writer forever.

So yes in summation:

Long video, but educational.

I agree with everything except her ban on turning conservative misogyny against conservative women and such. I love doing that -- reminding them of their own ideology's consequences. She's pro-pie-in-the-face of conservative women, so her tactics are more violent than mine (which is fine). Also, I mean, that she's pro-pie but slipperily doesn't quite admit it and sort of equivocates just put her on the same tactics plane as that Phelps woman. She's not 'above' such tactics herself, though she claims to be.

#contrapoints #j.k. rowling #j.k. sowling #Youtube