Infowars sent Laura Loomer to Parkland to contend the mass shooting there was all a hoax
A new candidate won the primary last night in Trump’s new “home” district of Palm Beach. It’s a woman by the name of Laura Loomer. He’s very proud of her:
This piece from a few months back gives you a flavor of the person Trump is congratulating and almost certainly voted for himself. (She loves the MAGA…)
The Conservative Political Action Conference banned anti-Muslim provocateur Laura Loomer from its final day on Saturday, after she used her media credentials to harass reporters.
Loomer has risen to prominence on the right through a practice she calls “Loomering,” in which she aggressively confronts or heckles public figures. On Friday, Loomer badgered reporters at CPAC with a camera crew, using her media pass to enter the media filing area to pursue reporters from CNN and other outlets after they had already declined to speak with her.
Loomer and CPAC didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The CPAC ban is just the latest ban for Loomer, who has already been booted from a number of services. Loomer has been kicked off of Twitter, PayPal, Uber, Lyft, and even food delivery app Uber Eats for her attacks on Muslims, which included calling for a ride-hailing app that wouldn’t employ Muslims.
After harassing reporters on Friday, Loomer was refused access to the event on Saturday, according to a video she posted on YouTube. In the clip, Loomer attempts to convince CPAC security guards to let her into the conference anyway.
Now she is the Republican Party’s candidate for congress in the president’s home district. Okaaaay.
I don’t quite know how to react to the reporting by the mainstream media on this. The Washington Post describes Loomer as an “activist” which I suppose is literally true but only if you describe David Duke in the same terms.
As The Washington Post’s Rachael Bade and Isaac Stanley-Becker reported, the GOP is struggling to navigate Trump’s embrace of fringe candidates who have made statements denigrating Americans’ religions and ethnicities. That tendency was on display last week when the president backed Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia GOP candidate who openly backs the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Among the tweets Trump shared on Tuesday night was a post from Greene with a photo of her posing alongside Loomer and a demand Twitter reinstate Loomer’s account.
Maybe she’ll speak at the GOP convention next week.
Loomer is the fringiest of the fringe, a scary right-wing lunatic. They have always been around. But they are running for congress and winning the nomination of the Republican Party. This strikes me as a development worth noting.
I can’t say I ever love political conventions and I often hate them. (Trump and Pat Buchanan come to mind …) This one is better than I expected, all things considered. Last night’s roll call was actually pretty great. They should do it like that forever.
Jacquelyn Brittany was an unlikely choice to provide the first formal nomination of former Vice President Joe Biden for president. But the modest security guard’s presence during the the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday evening became a showcase moment — and allowed the Democratic Party to effectively present its favorite populist narrative about itself.
Jacquelyn Brittany, 31 — who has requested to be identified by only her first and middle names — appeared in a short but compelling video in which she nominated Biden to the ticket. And her appearance as a Black woman in a shirt and tie subtly delivered a message that Biden has been trying to capitalize on since the beginning of his campaign: that he is truly a man of all the people, and thus an effective counter to Trump’s exclusionary brand of populism.
Packed into Jacquelyn’s 40-second video was a dramatic metaphor: The idea of an elevator as both an equalizer — a place where common and powerful people meet and congregate — and, well, as an elevator of the common person. “I take powerful people up on my elevator all the time,” she said. “Me? I just go back to the lobby.”
Except not this time — Biden, positioned as a shrewd uniter of classes, was taking Jacquelyn all the way to the top with him.
Jacquelyn’s trajectory ultimately played out like a classic fairy tale — beginning, as such stories do, with a chance encounter. As a security guard for the New York Times, she frequently escorts prominent guests through the elevators. In January, Joe Biden visited the building, and was lucky enough to find himself in Jacquelyn’s elevator bank. During the ride, a film crew for the TV show The Weekly, a joint production between the Times and FX, captured a wide-eyed Jacquelyn telling Biden, “I love you. … You’re like my favorite.”
The moment, followed by a selfie with the former vice president, went viral after Biden pronounced himself “honored” to have met Jacquelyn.
What’s perhaps far more telling than the moment itself, however, was the way Biden has incorporated it into his campaign. He’d been meeting that day with the Times’s editorial board, and though he didn’t get the paper’s endorsement, he seized the opportunity to promote the meeting of minds in the elevator. Ten days later, at a campaign stump in Waukee, Iowa, he specifically framed Jacquelyn’s on-camera moment as worth the trip to the Times. According to the Washington Post, he told the crowd, “I got something better” than the Times’s endorsement: “I got to meet Jacquelyn.”
The statement, with its ring of both populism and anti-intellectualism, might have backfired in a different political climate, one where he wasn’t positioning himself against an anti-intellectual sitting president. But instead, it propelled Jacquelyn into Tuesday night’s spotlight. It was all part of the natural progression of the fairy tale: the star-struck fan getting to befriend and journey with Biden all the way to the White House. “I never thought I would be in a position to do this,” she told the Post. “I never thought I was worthy enough to do this.”
Yet Jacquelyn was one of the most talked-about faces of the evening. Her endorsement received positive response across social media, with many people seeing it — and the DNC’s roll call more broadly — as a symbol of the Democratic Party’s ability to unite people across the political and socioeconomic spectrum, and as a powerful reminder of the people policies of all parties effect.
The article makes it sound like a cynical political move and it is certainly political. But I don’t think it’s cynical. What the Biden campaign is recognizing is if they want to represent the working class in this country they need to expand the definition beyond just white guys in factories. Most working-class folks in America are black, brown and female. It’s a smart political calculation but it’s also morally right.
Since the moment President Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey and admitted to NBC’s Lester Holt that it was “because of Russia,” he has called the investigations a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.” Attorney General Bill Barr declared Trump to be exonerated in all matters related to Russian interference in the 2016 election and the ensuing cover-up, and all Senate Republicans except one voted in his impeachment trial to acquit him of charges that he similarly enlisted the help of the Ukraine government in the 2020 election.
We know Trump abused his power in the Ukraine matter: That is a matter of public record, which he himself released. We also have Robert Mueller’s voluminous report, which proved that the Trump campaign welcomed, if not directly conspired with, Russian government interference in the 2016 election and that the president subsequently obstructed the investigation.
All these probes have been attacked by Republicans as unjustified partisan attacks on Trump. However, this week, the Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., released the final volume of its investigation and it’s impossible to make that charge. The report was signed by all members of the committee. Indeed, this is the only time during Trump’s first term that Senate Republicans, aside from Mitt Romney of Utah, have done their duty to protect our democracy.
Essentially, the report shows the Trump campaign was crawling with Russians, many more than is commonly realized, and the evidence strongly indicates that any intelligence or law enforcement officials who didn’t look into this bizarre circumstance would have been derelict in their duty.
The Mueller report stated explicitly that as a law enforcement investigation Mueller’s team was not concerned with the non-legal concept of “collusion” and were instead bound by the criminal code’s definition of “conspiracy,” which they were unable to prove, largely due to a lack of cooperation by those involved in the probe. The Senate committee had no such restrictions and did investigate collusion — and found it.
Committee Republicans, led by Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, cherry-picked certain conclusions to deny that, but the details they provided in this 1,000-page report prove them to be either lying or delusional.
The report finds that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was basically acting as a Russian agent. The campaign chairman. This is the man Trump publicly heaped glowing praise upon two years ago, patting him on the back for refusing to cooperate with the special counsel:
I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family. “Justice” took a 12 year old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to “break” – make up stories in order to get a “deal.” Such respect for a brave man!
The New York Times describes the Manafort-Russia relationship that Trump was so delighted Manafort refused to talk about:
[T]he report showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied to the Kremlin — including a longstanding associate of the onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, whom the report identifies as a “Russian intelligence officer.”
In 2016, “on numerous occasions,” Trump’s campaign chairman “sought to secretly share internal Campaign information” with Kilimnik, who the investigation found was very likely tied to the main Russian interference operation centered at the GRU, successor organization to the KGB. There is also information that raises “the possibility of Manafort’s potential connection to the hack-and-leak operations,” which would be big news if it’s true.
The report calls Donald Trump’s campaign chairman a “grave counter-intelligence threat.” How that doesn’t fit everyone’s definition of collusion is hard to fathom.
Kilimnik was also found to have “almost certainly helped arrange some of the first public messaging that Ukraine had interfered in the U.S. election” which, coincidentally I’m sure, Trump pushed in his famous phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, an act of betrayal for which he was impeached. Yet somehow, Trump and his henchmen continue to say that the president was absolutely untainted by any of this.
It is also made clear in the report that Trump’s top dirty trickster, Roger Stone, directed some of the WikiLeaks dumps and that Trump almost certainly knew about it, according to numerous witnesses. So two people close to Trump, Manafort and Stone, appear to have been intimately involved in the most outrageous of the Russian interference operations, the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and the timed leaks of those emails on behalf of Donald Trump. Unless we are to believe that the man who claims to have “aced” a memory test right about the same time forgot that he repeatedly spoke with Stone about the WikiLeaks operations, this means that the president lied to Mueller in his written answers.
Just as Mueller found that the White House obstructed his investigation, the committee found that it obstructed their investigation as well:
As this experience illustrated, White House intervention significantly hampered and prolonged the Committee’s investigative effort. Most importantly, some witnesses were directed by the White House not to tum over potentially privileged information…
And a whole lot of people lied. As the Los Angeles Times has reported, the committee made criminal referrals of Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Erik Prince and Sam Clovis to federal prosecutors in 2019, for misleading Congress. There’s no word on what might have come of those referrals.
The report looks at the possibility of Kompromat and details some juicy testimony about trips to Moscow, an affair with a beauty queen and evenings at fetish clubs, among other things. They couldn’t produce evidence of blackmail but kept it in the report for the purposes of showing that even misinformation could be deployed to gain influence.
The picture that emerges is of a presidential campaign, and an administration, so completely out of its depth that it “presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities.” In other words, Trump and his cronies were willing dupes and the Russian government took full advantage of it. In fact, it still is.
This is not a particularly startling revelation but it does track nicely with another national security story this week, the commentary by former DHS national security official Miles Taylor who wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post headlined “At Homeland Security, I saw firsthand how dangerous Trump is for America.” He offers a scathing assessment of the president as an ignorant, reckless, obsessive, self-centered fool who cannot be trusted with a second term.
Taylor says that if Trump wins re-election it will be “shock and awe” and there will be no guardrails left at all.
In case you’re wondering what that might mean, just last month Vladimir Putin sneaked in a change to the Russian constitution that allows him to stay in power until 2036. He and Trump have been chatting frequently on the phone of late. We can only guess what they’re talking about.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., seconded the nomination of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for president Tuesday night during the Democratic National Convention.
Oh, look. It’s Republican John Kasich standing at a crossroads talking about … America being at a crossroads. The former governor of Ohio appeared at the Democrats’ virtual convention Monday to explain to all the Republicans watching why Democrat Joe Biden is the right man to take over the White House after four disastrous years of misrule by Donald J. Trump. He got four minutes. Progressive Democrats were not happy.
Kasich was one of several Republicans the Democratic National Committee saw as fitting salespeople for its brand. Other Republicans followed: former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman, billionaire Meg Whitman, and former New York Representative Susan Molinari.
What does it say about the party’s leanings that it not only nominated Biden, a moderate, but invited Republicans to the nominating convention to vouch for him? Colin Powell, secretary of state under George W, Bush, received time to do so on Tuesday.
Kasich defended his planned appearance in an interview with BuzzFeed News before the convention, noting that just “because AOC gets outsized publicity doesn’t mean she represents the Democratic Party.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who will be addressing the convention tonight for one minute, responded in a fundraising email: “An anti-choice, anti-worker Republican does not get to decide who represents the Democratic Party.”
Ocasio-Cortez appeared Tuesday night to pro-formally nominate Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders for president. But if not her, who?
Godfrey continues:
That Biden could be more beholden to moderates is a reasonable fear for progressives to have, given the Democratic Party’s changing makeup, says Dave Wasserman, an elections analyst at “The Cook Political Report.” While Sanders and his allies have made significant gains in intra-party policy debates, overall “Democrats have become a more moderate party in the past four years, because there’s a new name for suburban Republicans who don’t like Trump—and that’s Democrats,” Wasserman told me.
Um, maybe. But it was not suburban Republicans who resurrected Biden’s faltering campaign in South Carolina.
Elizabeth Warren and Stacy Abrams won speaking slots, but was that enough? Rebecca Traister was among those upset that the DNC has not given prominent, young progressives more featured airtime at the convention. (Rick Perlstein and Will Stancil took on the Gerontocrats in the Washington Post.) Instead, the party chose to feature 17 “rising stars” whose “major star-making distinction” seems to have been backing Joe Biden early:
Traister wonders if Democrats already leery of upstart young’uns are misreading Biden’s ascension. Fair enough, she writes, voters did pass over “the young, the progressive, the new, and made a beeline for a candidate redolent of America’s past,” so strong was their desire to defeat Trump at all costs:
But I fear that Biden and his cohort have overinterpreted this result, have mistaken his victory as actual enthusiasm for centrist white patriarchy, and not as a temporary (if worryingly familiar) concession to the old in order to win an extraordinary presidential contest.
Just as many centrists like to warn progressives that they cannot extrapolate too much about the nation’s leftist appetites from select victories like Ocasio-Cortez’s, I would argue that it’s a grave error to extract so much about the desires of a Democratic base from Biden’s victory.
But “Democratic base” is a rather contested term, isn’t it? I had a kind of Inigo Montoya reaction to its use here (“You keep using that word…”). Who owns being the Democratic base?
Many voters only participate once every four years. Many of them — Democrats and independents (Republicans even) — vote in open presidential primaries. How to separate “where base Dems are ideologically” from the candidate those voters chose? Strategic calculation? Okay. But does it say anything meaningful about who is the Democratic base?
Progressive activists like to think of ourselves as the Democratic base and the party’s future. But we also speak of black voters and black women as the Democratic base. In South Carolina, they voted for Biden, a moderate white man, and effectively made him the party’s nominee. They are faithful Democrats, sure, but generally not progressive activists in “The Squad” sense. So was that merely a crass, temporary, strategic choice or a reflection of where their faction of the Democratic base really is ideologically? Progressives faced the same strategic calculation, picked Warren and Sanders (both over 70), and lost.
There were many others from Indivisible, a friend observes, plus women young and old, black and white, who supported Biden. Others who have voted Democrat for years wanted Pete Buttigieg. Andrew Yang drew a surprising amount of support. Their supporters all represent the Democratic Party. “Democratic base” will continue to be a contentious frame for some time to come.
What is more important for progressives than prime time speaking slots once every four years is being able to advance their agenda. On that, the DNC’s appeal to moderate(?) Republicans reflected in its speaker choices is not helping move the public needle. The need to prove the party’s bipartisan bona fides is not either. Failing to present more of Democrats’ edgier progressive stars in prime time is not as much a personal slight as a missed opportunity. Democrats as a party keep pulling punches, both hoping for approval and flinching from expected blowback. Appeasement is not leadership.
Democrats’ reflexive desire to refashion their appeal to appease even a committed opposition in order to court a mythically fixed middle demonstrates lessons still not learned. The job of an effective message isn’t to say what is popular; it is to make popular what we need said.
Democrats chase public opinion. Republicans change it.
Drew Westen (“The Political Brain“) gave a Zoom webinar at last week’s Netroots Nation conference. He reinforced ideas from his research on effective storytelling that reminded me of this passage from the book:
That story should feel to the majority of Americans like their story. The story of the party and its principles should sound like a natural extension of the story of the nation and its principles. If the master narrative of the Democratic Party doesn’t make 60 percent of the electorate feel at home (roughly the percent of self-identified Democrats and Independents), it isn’t a good narrative. The party’s narrative needs to have enough elasticity that candidates in different parts of the country can draw out its implications in ways that fit their values and those of their neighbors. And it needs to draw on shared sentiments that have become associated with the other party, allowing moderates to cross over without feeling like strangers in a strange land. Democrats believe every bit as much in hard work and personal responsibility as Republicans. The problem is that they rarely say so.
Westen adds a but:
Conversely, if the master narrative doesn’t alienate about 30 percent of the electorate, it isn’t a good narrative, either. About a third of the electorate won’t turn left under any circumstances, and if the Democrats’ story doesn’t make them angry, there’s something wrong with it. A substantial minority of Americans hold authoritarian, intolerant ideologies driven by fear, hate, and prejudice that are fundamentally incompatible with Democratic (and democratic) principles. They are the antagonists of the Democratic story, and if they aren’t antagonized by it the same way liberals are antagonized by listening to George W. Bush’s storytelling, the Democratic story isn’t getting its message across.
Here in the Cesspool of Sin, we shorten that to: If you’re not pissing them off, you’re not doing it right. (Pissing off the Republican base, that is.)
The Democrats’ moderate factions will not tell their story that way. They are too busy trying to get conservatives to like and vote with them. They invite speakers such as Kasich to show off their bipartisanship to people fundamentally opposed to it. Dial-testing shows over and over what Shenker-Osorio and Westen say of successful messaging, that is should engage the base, persuade the middle, and alienate the opposition.
To their credit, there are some edgy messages coming out of the DNC convention so far. But out in the field where the real audience is, Democrats should assign that task to younger members with the guts and the right set of skills.
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Wow. @Olivianuzzi tried to go to Trump campaign volunteer trainings and events advertised and boasted about by the campaign…. and found they did not exist. @TeamTrump is smoke and mirrors. pic.twitter.com/DqZtAPXcxo
This was Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I was looking for the ground game. Have you heard about it? The campaign says it’s the greatest ground game to ever exist, that while you don’t see enthusiasm for the president reflected in the rigged polls, you do see it when you talk to his real supporters where they live in Real America. In fact, they talk about surveys of enthusiasm not just as though they are more reliable than real polls but as though they are the polls — as though the traditional kind simply don’t exist, or matter. I drove across the country last month, and I saw only two signs for Joe Biden the entire way. Is this meaningful? The Trump campaign is hoping that it is. In Pennsylvania, they’re making calls and knocking on doors — a million a week — powered by more than 1.4 million volunteers. Pennsylvania is uniquely important. Rural voters won the state for Trump by less than one percentage point in the last election. This time, Trump is behind Biden by a lot. To close the gap, the campaign says it’s hosting dozens of events here — more than in any other state. But good luck finding them.
It was 7 p.m. on July 23, and Team Trump had scheduled a training session for campaign volunteers in the area. Before I arrived, I had worried about my exposure to the virus. I imagined a scene that was part local political-party headquarters and part anti-quarantine protest. I imagined a lot of Trump supporters, maskless and seated close together, breathing heavily on a reporter leaning in to record their comments. But the office was quiet. I walked through the arch of books by right-wing personalities (Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh) and past the portraits (George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan) and maps of Pennsylvania voting precincts. I didn’t see anyone there.
In a blue room in the back, beneath an American flag with the words MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN printed in block letters inside the white stripes, a woman sat alone at the end of a conference table. She wasn’t participating in the volunteer training. She was the volunteer training. There just weren’t any volunteers.
When she first thought I might be one, she was friendly. She offered me coffee and asked me to sit down. Two people had signed up for the Trump Leadership Initiative training, she said, but each of them had canceled, one citing an ear infection and the other citing allergies. When she learned I was a member of the media, her face hardened. She returned her gaze to her computer and told me she wasn’t permitted to speak to the press.
Fifty miles away, at the GOP headquarters in Lancaster, another event was scheduled for 6 p.m. the next night. When I arrived, the local field director, Jason, was talking to an elderly man. “I appreciate all your support, sir,” he said. “Oh, absolutely. I think this election is more important than 1864. Then, we would’ve lost half the country. This time? We could lose the whole country.” Nick, the Trump-Pence regional field director, asked me if I was there for the food drive — which was part of the campaign’s “Latino outreach effort,” he said — or the volunteer training. The elderly man had made his way out the door, and now there was nobody left in the office besides the two men who worked there. “There’s pretty light turnout,” Nick said. But not to worry, as things were “going really well,” Jason said.
A few days later, on July 30, the campaign scheduled two voter-contact training sessions at Convive Coffee Roastery on Providence Boulevard in Pittsburgh. The evening session was supposed to start at 7 p.m., but when I arrived, early, at 5:30, the shop had already been closed for half an hour. A girl cleaning up inside came out to talk to me (even when it’s open, like many such establishments, the pandemic rules are takeout only). She said she had no idea that any campaign had scheduled any kind of meeting at the place where she worked for two hours after closing time. But she hadn’t worked the morning shift that day, when the first event was scheduled, so she texted a co-worker who had. He told her a few people came into the shop and asked about a Trump-campaign meetup but that he didn’t know what they were talking about and couldn’t help them. “I don’t know if they figured it out or not,” she said.
I hung around for another hour waiting until eight to see if anyone showed. Nobody did.
A ten-minute drive away, at the second-floor county Republican committee office, some staffers — two young women and two youngish men — sat peering at their laptops, an enormous portrait of a scowling Trump behind them.
“What event?,” Kevin Tatulyan, an Allegheny County Republican official, asked as he waved me into the room.
“What event?,” Dallas McClintock, the regional Trump-Pence field director, asked.
One of the women, with lilac-colored hair, whipped her head toward McClintock.
“It’s your email here!” she told him, pointing to the advertisement I’d mentioned.
“My email?,” McClintock said in disbelief.
“Yeah!” she said.
He scrunched up his face.
For the next several minutes, the staffers tried to sort out how, with fewer than 100 days until the election, they had unknowingly advertised official campaign events that didn’t exist to potential campaign volunteers in the most important swing state in the country.
They squinted at their screens and asked questions.
“What time?”
“Where did you learn about it?”
“What was the address?”
The second event had been listed with an apparent misspelling in the street name, a detail that prompted the girl with the lilac hair to laugh.
“Sounds right,” she said dryly.
“I’m sorry!” the other woman said, and she seemed to mean it. “If you want to leave us your card, we can make sure to invite you to our events in the future!”
Trump said on Monday that the only way he can lose the election is if the Democrats rig it.
170,000 families can blame those who trusted Donald Trump when they voted for him in 2016 — and can certainly blame the 52 GOP Senators who voted to acquit him of his other crimes last January.
Yes, trusting Trump is a pre-existing condition that can kill you. Unfortunately, Trump voters and the GOP establishment have spread that condition to all of us.
I have no doubt that this “summer of the pandemic” will be remembered by many of us as one of the most surreal times of our lives. We’ve been locked down, isolated, and living sort of disembodied life on the internet.
For me, it’s also been a weird journey into the past as I binge watched the seven seasons of “A French Village” and pondered survival and moral quandaries one must face when the Nazis come to town. I felt more emotional immediacy about that question than I expected and it’s frightening.
But I also spent much of the past few weeks reading the last volume of Rick Perlstein’s great series on the rise of the conservative movement, “Reaganland, America’s Right Turn” which goes on sale today. I’ve enjoyed all three of the previous books tremendously. They chronicle my youth, after all. But this one really hit home. I cast my first vote for president during this period. And I didn’t cast it for Jimmy Carter. I cast it for Gerald Ford, I’m ashamed to admit.
I didn’t like what I saw as Carter’s sanctimony. His religiosity offended me. I thought all the talk about how he would never lie was phony. It was an unfair assessment, based upon a youthful cynicism born of coming of age during Watergate and the Vietnam war. I just didn’t believe him.
Perlstein addresses this cultural shift from 60s idealism to 70s cynicism throughout the book and it all rings absolutely true to me:
70 percent of the electorate told pollsters they had no intention of voting in November at all. One of them, a rabbi, wrote a New York Times op-ed. “I was one of the millions who rejected Barry Goldwater’s foreign policy, voted for Lyndon Baines Johnson, and then got Mr. Goldwater’s foreign policy anyway. I, too, voted for law and order and got Richard M. Nixon and Spiro T. Agnew. And now I think of the man who promised Congress that he would not interfere with the judicial process, and then pardoned Mr. Nixon as almost his first official act.” So: no more voting. “If Pericles were alive today, he might be inclined to join me.”
The epidemic of political apathy spread particularly thick among the young. During the insurgent 1960s, the notion of universities as a seedbed of idealism was accepted as a political truism for all time. No longer. A university provost explained that he was seeing “a new breed of student who is thinking more about jobs, money, and the future”—just not society’s future. College business courses were oversubscribed. But politics? “Watergate taught them not to care,” a high school civics teacher rued. A college professor gave a speech to his daughter’s high school class, rhapsodizing about the excitement of the Kennedy years. “A few minutes into my talk I realized we weren’t even on the same planet.” He asked if they would protest if America began bombing Vietnam again. “Nothing. In desperation, I said: ‘For God’s sake, what would outrage you?’ After a pause, a girl in a cheerleading uniform raised her hand and said tentatively, ‘Well, I’d be pretty mad if they bombed this school.’”
I wasn’t that apathetic and disengaged. I voted. And I followed politics closely. But I didn’t feel much hope that things could get better — or perhapsmore importantly, it didn’t occur to me that things could get worse. When Reagan won, I sobered up. And I’ve never taken that for granted again.
Perlstein has been tracing the origins of the conservative movement going all the way back to Goldwater in each of the volumes in his series. But it’s in this one that we see how they truly gained power within the Republican Party. They dominated American politics for the next 40 years. And it’s worth remembering that much of what we think of as Trumpism today really isn’t that different from the conservative movement revolutionaries of the time.
For instance:
Paul Weyrich knew how to organize. He always claimed his awakening came while sitting in on meeting of liberal activists trying to pass a federal open housing bill — another of those legends that became right-wing holy writ. A think tank officer was commissioned to write a research report. A White House staffer was instructed to keep the president on task. Senate aides were dispatched to ride herd on Capitol Hill. Civil Rights leaders agreed to flush protesters into the streets. This was how liberalism had stolen Americans’ conservative birthright, Weyrich reflected. “I saw how easily it could be done with planning and determination and I decided to try it myself.”
Weyrich was a former radio newsman from Wisconsin who turned his political hobby into a vocation after working for Barry Goldwater in 1964. In 1968, he converted to the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, having concluded that his natal Roman Catholics had fallen to liberalism. In 1971, Weyrich and a former Senate staffer named Ed Feulner raised $250,000 from the beer magnate Joseph Coors and $900,000 from the petroleum heir Richard Mellon Scaife to found a more combative alternative to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank which, fearing for its IRS tax exemption and its reputation for scholarly probity, was loathe to take sides in partisan disputes.
For men like Weyrich, who drew their moral imagination from legends of the twilight struggle between lightness and dark as limned by former Communists like Whittaker Chambers, probity was counterrevolutionary. “We’re not here to be some kind of Ph.D. committee giving equal time ” the Heritage Foundation’s first research director explained. Indeed, Weyrich soon quit, finding Heritage not nearly aggressive enough.
This view that liberals are ruthlessly aggressive, not to mention super organized (hah!) is one of the founding myths of the conservative movement. They always used this as an excuse to push the envelope. But I think we all assumed the underlying conservative ideology was at least somewhat sincere.
The Trump experience makes us look at all that differently. It was never really about the ideas at all. It was about the “birthright” — and racism was the primary motivation from the very beginning.
The aggressiveness Weyrich convinced himself was necessary to secure his “birthright” was the same aggressiveness Richard Nixon’s dirty tricksters believed was necessary to defeat his enemies. It is the same mentality that drove the bogus Whitewater scandals and the partisan 2000 Supreme Court decision, swift-boating and birtherism and, inevitably, Russian collusion, sabotage of the voting system and a president who says he won’t accept the results of the election unless he wins and muses repeatedly that he may serve a third term.
This is essentially all they are, it’s all they have ever been.
The book is full of wonderful cultural and sociological observations about the period culled from thousands of news reports, magazines, interviews and popular culture of the era and as with all his books, is both informative and wildly entertaining. Perlstein really knows how to turn a phrase. As we look to what will almost certainly be a highly stressful fall with the pandemic, the economic distress and this most important election, I highly recommend settling in with “Reaganland.” It certainly won’t make you want to go back to the good old days. The old days weren’t that good.
Openly taunting voters and Congress about how he has no plans to accept the results of the November election, Trump’s coordinated assault on the U.S. Postal Service, a longtime hub of vote counting, represents an historic crisis for American democracy. Actively trying to subvert the will of voters, Trump is broadcasting his authoritarian ways, practically daring opponents to stand in the way of his attempts to steal an election. The press needs to do a better job ringing the alarm bells.
Following Trump‘S demand that a 200-year-old law be invoked to allow the U.S. military to wage war on U.S. street protesters, his campaign to undermine election integrity is another indication he’s anxious to trample long-standing American liberties. Enamored by authoritarians around the world, Trump has made his goal clear for years.
He fired an inspector general who reviewed the whistle-blower complaint that led to his impeachment, declared a phony national emergency in order to grab billions in government funds to build a border wall, worked to obliterate the country’s checks and balance system of government, purged the Department of Homeland Security, defied a lawful order to turn over his taxes, demanded the Department of Justice launch criminal investigations into his perceived enemies, and promised pardons to border officials who broke the law. These are the type of actions the United States traditionally condemns when they occur in other countries, particularly among emerging democracies. Now they’re happening here.
The Covid-19 pandemic sparked even more authoritarian moves by Trump. Like undemocratic leaders in China and Russia, Trump’s first response to the health crisis was to recklessly downplay the problem, silence scientists, lie about the government’s response, and lash out at critics.
The Beltway press corps has no experience covering authoritarian rulers and remains too timid to accurately label Trump’s behavior. In the process, they’ve allowed the unthinkable to become possible — like trying to defund the Postal Service for political gain.
Why that target? Because the 2020 election, taking place amidst the Trump pandemic, is going to feature way more mail-in ballots than usual and he doesn’t want them counted. “Trump and his designated henchman — his wealthy donor Louis DeJoy — are vandalizing the post office in plain sight with the election less than three months away, disappearing mailboxes and throwing expensive sorters into dumpsters,” noted Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Inquirer, who calls the unfolding attack a “nine-alarm fire for American democracy.”
The Postal Service is story is getting lots of attention, and deservedly so. But are most of the news media being sufficiently aggressive and sufficiently blunt about what’s happening and the history-changing consequences at hand? “If journalists don’t keep the pressure on Postal Service problems, they will be abdicating their duty,” warnedWashington Post media critic Margaret Sullivan.
So far the coverage is there, but the urgency and the direct connection to deliberate Trump interference is not. Here’s a sample of page-one headlines over the weekend:
· “Postal Service warns 46 states about ballot delays” (Arizona Republic,)
· “USPS to CT: Mail-in ballots not assured by Nov. 3 election (Connecticut Post:)
Notice what every headline was missing? Any mention of Trump. Here’s what an accurate headline would have looked like last weekend: “Trump threatens Postal Service funding to sabotage vote count.”
A Reuters news article on Monday did an awful job presenting Trump’s blatant attempt to steal the U.S. election, putting the onus on Democratic nominee Joe Biden, instead of the Republican authoritarian:
With fewer than 80 days to go before the U.S. presidential election, it looks like Joe Biden’s race to lose.
Yet, as Democrats nationwide gather online this week to nominate him as their party’s choice to challenge President Donald Trump on Nov. 3, many fear Biden may just do that – for factors almost entirely out of his control.
The story of Trump trying to defund the Postal Service to unravel an election should definitely not be framed around Biden, the target of the cheating.
We’re in a time of national crisis. Unfortunately the mainstream media have not been great at sounding alarms during the Trump years. Reluctant to portray a white, male Republican president as a radical player actively endangering America, much of the political press has taken the easy way out. That’s why almost none of the 100-plus newspapers that demanded Bill Clinton resign from office during impeachment because he was not “fit to serve,” have done the same and called for Trump’s removal from office, even as he plots the undoing of a U.S. election.
Incredibly, four days after Trump went on Fox News and specifically said he wanted to defund the Postal Service so that ballots would not be counted this fall, TheNew York Timeseditorial page not only failed to call for Trump’s resignation, it failed to publish a single sentence denouncing Trump’s authoritarian attack on election integrity.
This is the same editorial page that obsessed over the Whitewater non-scandal when Clinton was president, acting as a battering ram to drive the phony, GOP-concocted controversy, which cost taxpayers $64 million. Yet Trump threatening to steal an election elicited no institutional response from the Times.
Reminder: Authoritarians thrive off a compliant press corps.
Donald Trump is brazenly trying to steal the election by suppressing the vote in the middle of a deadly pandemic. You simply can’t treat this like just another political spat.
The Trump campaign chairman’s contacts with Kremlin-linked officials posed a “grave counterintelligence threat,” according to the final volume of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, which also found that some of the campaign’s other Russian contacts had closer ties to Moscow’s government and intelligence services than previously reported.
The volume, released Tuesday, states that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort worked with a Russian intelligence officer “on narratives that sought to undermine evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election,” including the idea that Ukrainian election interference was of greater concern.
The report also states that Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, who met with Manafort, the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and his son-in-law Jared Kushner at Trump Tower in 2016, had “significant connections” to the Kremlin. The information she offered to them was also “part of a broader influence operation targeting the United States that was coordinated, at least in part with elements of the Russian government,” the report states.
I guess the campaign chairman and the president’s son aren’t considered part of the campaign because:
“We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election,” acting chairman Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said in a statement Tuesday morning, though the acknowledged the “what the Committee did find however is very troubling” and included “irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.”
Actually this very report shows his campaign colluded but thanks for showing us once again what a sycophantic little twit you are, Marco.
Vice Chairman Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), meanwhile, noted “a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives that is a very real counterintelligence threat to our elections,” and he encouraged “all Americans to carefully review the documented evidence of the unprecedented and massive intervention campaign waged on behalf of then-candidate Donald Trump by Russians and their operatives and to reach their own independent conclusions.”
Nearly four years of Trump have shown us every day that he is both stupid and traitorous. There is no doubt that if he didn’t personally, actively collude with the Russian program to help him get elected it was only because he was too dumb to know it was happening. He certainly wouldn’t have had any qualms abut doing it. The Ukraine extortion plot proved that.
