The schedule for this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference is yet more evidence that much of the conservative movement remains deeply committed to the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump.That lie continues to be a widespread belief among Republican voters.It continues to be endorsed or at least humored by some Republican candidates seeking the support of those voters in party primaries.It is fueling Republican state legislators’ attempts to impose hurdles to voting.
And the CPAC agenda suggests it is about to be given another big public push at one of the most prominent gatherings on the conservative calendar — which will feature not only speeches from Trump and son Donald Trump Jr. but seven separate panels or addresses under the title “protecting elections.”
These have not been set up as benign, educational discussions among experts. Rather, the sessions in Orlando appear designed to allow right-wing partisans to promote some of the same complaints Trump made in the highly dishonest January 6 rally speech that immediately preceded a mob of his supporters’ attack on the Capitol.
.One of the seven discussion subtitles is “Failed States (PA, GA, NV, oh my!)” (Those states held free and fair elections that happened to be won by Joe Biden.) Another subtitle is “Other Culprits: Why Judges & Media Refused to Look at the Evidence.” (As journalists and judges have noted, there is no good evidence of widespread voter fraud or election malfeasance in 2020.) A third subtitle is “They Told Ya So: The Signs Were Always There.” (This panel features lawyer Hans von Spakovsky, who, in fact, has previously said false things about voter fraud.) A fourth subtitle: “The Left Pulled the Strings, Covered It Up, and Even Admits It.” (We’re not yet sure exactly what this means, but there was no left-wing election conspiracy.)
The speakers on the “protecting elections” panels include Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks and Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin, both of whom, in the weeks leading up to the Capitol attack, echoed the lie that the election was stolen; Pennsylvania Rep. Mike Kelly, who has uttered baseless fraud claims and unsuccessfully tried to get Pennsylvania’s results invalidated in court; and Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who joined Trump on the January 2 phone call during which Trump asked Georgia’s top elections official to “find” him enough votes to overturn Biden’s victory in the state.
CPAC has long featured a hodgepodge of speakers, from anti-abortion activists to anti-tax activists to conservative celebrities. Since Trump took office in 2017, though, it has highlighted distinctly Trumpian themes and voices. This year’s agenda — which also includes discussions on some of Trump’s favorite campaign subjects, from “Big Tech” to “The Angry Mob and Violence in our Streets” — is a testament to the former president’s grip on the party even after he was voted out of office.It helps him, of course, that much of the party doesn’t believe he was truly voted out of office. And CPAC seems to be trying its best to cement the conspiracy myth into party orthodoxy.
It’s tempting to rail about this as yet another sign that the GOP has descended into insanity. But the truth is, CPAC’s always been batshit and Trump’s triumphant return is just part for the course. The fact is that CPAC was Trumpists before Trump was.
From 2004 through 2019, the annual rate for electricity from Texas’s traditional utilities was 8% lower, on average, than the nationwide average rate, while the rates of retail providers averaged 13% higher than the nationwide rate, according to the Journal’s analysis.
The Texas Coalition for Affordable Power, a group that buys electricity for local government use, produced similar findings in a study of the state’s power markets and concluded that high statewide prices relative to the national average “must be attributed to the deregulated sector of Texas.”
As Kevin Drum pointed out, there will likely be no change. Deregulation in Texas is akin to religion. They’d rather pay through the nose than admit otherwise.
And, by the way, welcome Kevin back to independent blogging at his new home https://jabberwocking.com/ Good to have him back!
Former NC Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley (from her website).
Ari Berman of Mother Jones is worried about what happens next in the states for voting rights:
After record turnout in 2020, Republican-controlled states appear to be in a race to the bottom to see who can pass the most egregious new barriers to voting.
According to a new analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice, 253 bills to restrict voting access have been introduced in 43 states already this year. Georgia is ground zero for the GOP’s escalating war on voting, targeting the voting methods that were used most by Democratic voters in 2020 and which contributed to flipping the state blue and electing two Democratic senators.
A flip through that Brennan Center list confirmed that North Carolina Republicans have not yet added to it. Likely, they are already sharpening their redistricting scalpels for when the Trump-delayed census data arrives in the fall this year. Having to pass new voting restrictions over Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto no doubt also gives them pause.
Linda Greenhouse (NYT) wonders what’s next from the Supreme Court on voting rights. The ruling this week to deny Pennsylvania Republicans’ efforts to further litigate the 2020 election was not reassuring. Three justices would have taken the case: Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch. Their dissents provided “both a road map and a rationale for the Supreme Court’s future intervention in the quintessentially state matter of how to conduct elections.”
Such intervention could interfere with state courts’ role in quashing the kinds of legislative disenfrancisement defeated repeatedly over the last decade in North Carolina and federal courts. Only those fights focused both on gerrymandering and on voting law.
When state high-court judges are elected, as they are in many states, they typically run in statewide races that are not subject to the gerrymandering that has entrenched Republican power in states that are much more balanced politically than the makeup of their legislatures reflects. What better way to disable the state courts in their democracy-protecting role than to push them to the sidelines when it comes to federal elections.
North Carolina is one state that elects judges. And like the Georgia voting laws Berman mentioned, North Carolina Republicans keep jiggering with voting methods looking for any advantage after they lose races.
Former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley was the first black woman to win a statewide office in 2008 (on the NC Court of Appeals, below):
Gov. Bev Perdue appointed Beasley to the state Supreme Court in 2012 and she won a full term in 2014, a year Democrats lost across the country (below).
Gov. Roy Cooper made Beasley Chief Justice in 2019, but she lost her reelection bid by a hair in 2020. COVID-19 hampered campaigning statewide (result below):
Look carefully at the three race results above pulled from the state returns website. Can you spot the difference?
After 2016, the Republican-controlled NC legislature changed how judges races were displayed on the ballot. They switched them from nonpartisan to partisan races after Associate Justice Michael Morgan won his seat on the court in 2016. (Republicans had already applied the change to lower court races.) Like Beasley, Morgan is Black (2016 result below).
In one sense, one cannot fault the change. Voters tend not to vote in races where they do not know the candidates, especially when there is no party identification. A quick check I made last week showed voting in these judicial races was over 10 percent higher in 2020 than in 2016. But that did not help Beasley. Republicans gained two seats last November. Democrats’ 6-1 state Supreme Court majority shrank to 4-3.
The New York Times reported on Sunday that Beasley’s name has been mentioned as a possible Biden Supreme Court nominee. Unless Cheri Beasley runs for North Carolina’s open U.S. Senate seat in 2022. She is rumored to be considering it.
Meanwhile, states across the country brace for more Republican election law fiddling for advantage.
Currently, 86.7% of Americans say they are heterosexual or straight, and 7.6% do not answer the question about their sexual orientation. Gallup’s 2012-2017 data had roughly 5% “no opinion” responses.
The latest results are based on more than 15,000 interviews conducted throughout 2020 with Americans aged 18 and older. Gallup had previously reported annual updates from its 2012-2017 daily tracking survey data, but did not routinely measure LGBT identification in 2018 or 2019.
The identity question asked in 2020 offers a greater level of detail than the question asked in previous years. Now, respondents indicate their precise sexual orientation, rather than simply answering “yes” or “no” to whether they identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.
Majority of LGBT Americans identify as bisexual
More than half of LGBT adults (54.6%) identify as bisexual. About a quarter (24.5%) say they are gay, with 11.7% identifying as lesbian and 11.3% as transgender. An additional 3.3% volunteer another non-heterosexual preference or term to describe their sexual orientation, such as queer or same-gender-loving. Respondents can give multiple responses when describing their sexual identification; thus, the totals exceed 100%.
Rebasing these percentages to represent their share of the U.S. adult population finds 3.1% of Americans identifying as bisexual, 1.4% as gay, 0.7% as lesbian and 0.6% as transgender.
In addition to the pronounced generational differences, significant gender differences are seen in sexual identity, as well as differences by people’s political ideology:
Women are more likely than men to identify as LGBT (6.4% vs. 4.9%, respectively).
Women are more likely to identify as bisexual — 4.3% do, with 1.3% identifying as lesbian and 1.3% as something else. Among men, 2.5% identify as gay, 1.8% as bisexual and 0.6% as something else.
13.0% of political liberals, 4.4% of moderates and 2.3% of conservatives say they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.
Differences are somewhat less pronounced by party identification than by ideology, with 8.8% of Democrats, 6.5% of independents and 1.7% of Republicans identifying as LGBT.
There are no meaningful educational differences — 5.6% of college graduates and 5.7% of college nongraduates are LGBT.
They make the important point that nobody really knows if the increase in the younger generations identifying as LGBT reflects a real increase or whether it’s just greater social acceptance. I’m pretty sure it the latter. There have always been LGBT people, they were just forced to live in the closet or face a lifetime of intolerance and discrimination. And that means the numbers are probably a lot higher, it’s just that older people are still reluctant to identify as LGBT. The younger generation is showing the way.
I suspect this greater social acceptance will end up being one of the greatest advances in human happiness in history. People are able to be who they are, live their lives honestly and openly. It’s an astonishing step forward and I’m glad to be alive to see it happen.
WASHINGTON, DC – FEBRUARY 13: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) (R) listens to House Republican Conference Chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) during a news conference following a caucus meeting at the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center February 13, 2019 in Washington, DC. McCarthy said that he supports the framework of a bipartisan spending deal that would avert another partial federal government shutdown but is waiting to read the bill before deciding on whether he would vote for it. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Liz Cheney is a scary national security hawk who should never be allowed anywhere near the White House. But credit where credit is due. She isn’t afraid to buck the Trump cult:
Never has a Congressional leader been instantly rebuked by a lower ranking member at his own press conference. Until now. https://t.co/2CQF43Nb2t
I think she may be overrating the GOP’s appetite for “mavericky” brass balls. They say they like it. But practically the whole party has joined a cult that worships an orange, narcissistic, misogynist, racist, imbecile. They love him and they love being members of his cult of drooling followers. They expect everyone to fall in line and waltz over the cliff with them. But hey, good for her. Putting McCarthy in his place and acting out the GOP civil war is always worthwhile.
Mitch McConnell is savvy enough to know that when he took the Senate floor to blame Donald Trump for the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, he was pouring gasoline on an intraparty feud.
As accurate as McConnell’s statement may have been — “There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day” — McConnell was attacking a man who had won an unprecedented level of devotion from a majority of the Republican electorate, devotion bordering on religious zeal.
The escalating feud threatens to engulf the party in an internal struggle that will be fought out in the 2022 House and Senate primaries, pitting Trump-backed candidates against those who have offended the former president.
When Trump viciously counterattacked on Feb. 16, Democrats were especially cheered by this passage in his remarks:
Where necessary and appropriate, I will back primary rivals who espouse Making America Great Again and our policy of America First. We want brilliant, strong, thoughtful, and compassionate leadership.
In effect, Trump is gearing up to run a slate of favored candidates in the 2022 primaries against incumbent Republicans, especially, but by no means limited to those who supported his impeachment.
Trump will soon begin vetting candidates at Mar-a-Lago who are eager to fulfill his promise to exact vengeance upon incumbent Republicans who’ve scorned him, and to ensure every open GOP seat in the 2022 midterms has a MAGA-approved contender vying for it.
Twenty Republican-held Senate seats are at stake in 2022, and at least two of the incumbents up for re-election — John Thune of South Dakota and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — are certain to be on Trump’s hit list.
Murkowski voted to convict the president. Thune voted against conviction, but before that he publicly dismissed efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory. Trump then tweeted on Dec. 13:
RINO John Thune, ‘Mitch’s boy’, should just let it play out. South Dakota doesn’t like weakness. He will be primaried in 2022, political career over!!!
McConnell will not be on Trump’s hit list for the simple reason that he just won re-election and does not have to face voters until 2026. But his name will be there in invisible ink.
Another group Trump is very likely to target for political extinction is made up of the 10 Republican members of the House who voted to impeach the president.
These incumbent Republicans only scratch the surface of the potential for intraparty conflict in the event Trump adopts a scorched earth strategy in an all-out attack on Republican candidates who voiced criticism of the former president.
Trump’s venom is likely to encompass a host of state-level Republicans who disputed his claims of a stolen election, including Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, both up for re-election in ’22.
Assuming that Trump versus McConnell becomes a major theme in the 2022 Republican primaries, the numbers, especially among white evangelical Christians, favor Trump.
Robert Jones, founder and chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, noted that his group’s polling has found that many Republicans have elevated Trump to near-deity status. In an email, Jones wrote:
Just ahead of the election, a majority (55 percent) of white evangelicals and a plurality (47 percent) of Republicans said they saw Trump as “being called by God to lead at this critical time in our country.”
Jones continued:
If McConnell is counting on the impeachment for inciting insurrection to weaken Trump’s future within the party, he seems to have miscalculated: Three-quarters of Republicans and two-thirds of white evangelicals agreed with the statement, “Trump is a true patriot.”
I asked Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, about the consequences of a Trump versus McConnell battle over the future of the Republican Party. He emailed in reply: “The deck is stacked against McConnell, at least for the next election cycle.”
Jacobson sent a copy of a paper he is working on, “Donald Trump’s Big Lie and the Future of the Republican Party,” that provides strong evidence in support of his assessment.
Among Republicans, over much of the Trump presidency, the favorability ratings of Trump, the party and McConnell generally rose and fell in tandem, Jacobson noted. That changed in December 2020:
After the Electoral College voted in mid-December, the proportion holding favorable opinions of all three fell, but more for the Republican Party and much more for McConnell than for Trump. Trump’s average was 5.6 points lower for January-February 2021 than it had been for all of 2020, the party’s average was 11.3 points lower.
According to Jacobson, the drop was disastrous for McConnell:
In December, after McConnell congratulated Biden, his favorability ratings among Republicans dropped about 13 points from its postelection average (66 percent) and then fell another 17 points after he blamed Trump for the Capitol invasion, with the biggest drop occurring among the share of Republicans who held very favorable opinions of Trump (57 percent in this survey).
The pattern is clear in the accompanying graphic:
Breaking with Trump, Jacobson continued,
was clearly a greater sin in the eyes of most ordinary Republicans than anything Trump had done to subvert democracy or incite the Capitol mob.
The drop in Republican support for McConnell was
a telling sign of Trump’s continuing ascendancy among Republican identifiers and a clear warning to any Republican leader who might want to marginalize the ex-president.
There’s more at the link. And I don’t think people should pretend this isn’t true. The threat is real.
Unless something happens to his health, Donald Trump is running again. The man lives for revenge. And his people are sticking with him.
So, the congress is doing its usual bullshit dance with the so-called “centrists” wringing their hands over the COVID relief bill and the right wing acting like a bunch of barbarians and simply obstructing because they can. It is so, so tiring.
Here is the latest polling on the the bill:
While Republicans in Congress have balked at the overall price tag for Biden’s proposed package, new Morning Consult/Politico polling shows that the public — including Republican voters — overwhelmingly supports the legislation.
In the poll, which was conducted Feb. 19-22 among 2,013 registered voters and has a margin of error of 2 percentage points, 76 percent said they back the stimulus package, including 52 percent who said they “strongly” support the bill. Only 17 percent of voters said they oppose it.
Support is highest among Democrats, 70 percent of whom said they strongly back the legislation, which includes $1,400 in direct payments to some Americans, $350 billion in emergency funding for state and local governments, funding to support the reopening of K-12 schools and higher education and an extension of increased unemployment benefits until September. Nineteen percent said they somewhat support it.
A combined 71 percent of independents said they support the stimulus package, compared with 22 percent who oppose it.
While Republicans offered the lowest amount of support, more than half of GOP voters still back the stimulus package at 60 percent. Thirty percent said they somewhat or strongly oppose the package.
The stimulus package and Biden’s other economic plans have enjoyed support from voters so far. Sixty-four percent of voters said in January that they strongly backed additional economic stimulus, and 51 percent said in a separate poll that the federal government should continue spending even at the expense of the national debt.
It should be passed today, with a huge bipartisan majority. Obviously! The fact that it isn’t, and that Susan Collins and Joe Manchin are picking it apart tells you everything you need to know. It’s ridiculous.
One of the great challenges for public health officials during the COVID pandemic has been establishing trust among the public, particularly racial minorities who have a long history of both exploitation and neglect by the medical establishment and the government. In recent months there has been a lot of discussion about how to get past vaccine hesitancy in this population with efforts at outreach and communication aimed directly at these communities. And thank goodness, after all, Black and brown Americans have been hit the hardest of all demographic groups aside from elderly residents of nursing homes. There has been an unconscionable number of deaths and serious illnesses in these communities so it’s vital to get them the latest information, delivered by trusted messengers, as well as easy access to the vaccines.
The good news is that the vaccination program is quickly picking up steam, with Black and Hispanic vaccine skepticism specifically falling substantially over the past few months. There, of course, must be continuing efforts to get the word out and get vaccines in some of the hard-to-reach areas to encourage even more participation, but it now appears that a new group has arisen as the real barrier to achieving herd immunity: white Republicans.
Coronavirus vaccine skepticism has come way down for Black and Hispanic people since last fall. Where skepticism remains high is among white Republicans. Nearly 60% of white Rs will either not take the vaccine or are unsure.@Civiqs tracking: https://t.co/lLKHxCP3IMpic.twitter.com/O1NT9xB4ZF
A study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found similar numbers.
From a Republican respondent asked “If there is one message or piece of information you could hear that would make you more likely to get vaccinated for COVID-19, what would it be?”
‘Not sure there is anything that could be said. If it is proven effective and no side effects after a year or 2 of use I would no longer have concerns.’
Republicans who want to “wait and see” are less likely than others to say they will turn to the CDC or state and local health departments for information when making decisions about whether to get vaccinated for COVID-19.
The partisan gap among white people on vaccinations is simply astonishing. But then again we shouldn’t be too surprised.
Some of this is simply reflexive loyalty to Donald Trump, who constantly “downplayed” the virus and consequently allowed it to run out of control on a level unmatched by any other developed country. But it isn’t all Trump. Right-wing media must shoulder much of the responsibility for the growing anti-vaxxer attitude on the right.
This week we passed the grim milestone of 500,000 COVID deaths. A year ago, when the virus was first declared a global pandemic, such a number would have been unthinkable. Trump said at the time that he had it completely under control. Obviously, he didn’t. It’s one of the main reasons he lost the election and it was left to his successor to memorialize the dead on Monday.
Luckily, this is something that President Joe Biden is very good at. He held a somber ceremony at the White House which was carried live on the mainstream news networks and observed with appropriate gravity by nearly all who commented —except Fox News.
The hosts of Fox News followed up their coverage of the memorial with their same COVID disinformation they’ve fed their viewers from the beginning. And they did this even after issuing a statement the same day insisting that they have always given accurate scientific information during the crisis. As Media Matters reported, on the night that America observed the horror of half a million COVID deaths, Laura Ingraham was insulting the head scientist at the National Institute of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, as an “ancient medical bureaucrat with a fancy title spewing lies or unprovable accusations.” Ingraham took issue with Collins calling masks a “life-saving medical device.” She later featured former Trump adviser Dr. Scott Atlas, a man with no expertise in epidemiology, who agreed with her about the uselessness of masks.
Likewise, fellow Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson snidely asserted that Americans are “not allowed” to ask questions about the vaccines and insisted that social distancing measures have resulted only in “traumatized citizens and destroyed lives.” Sean Hannity spent the evening flogging the useless treatment pushed by Trump, Hydroxychloroquine, again. When Hannity tossed the show to Ingraham she declared, “when you look at the full, full picture on COVID there are going to be a lot of villains when the history is actually written on this.” Hannity agreed, saying, “a lot of people were dead wrong and it hurt a lot of us.”
I don’t think it’s going to go quite the way they think it will.
Watching Fox News, it’s easy to see how so many Republicans are skeptical of the virus and the vaccines. If they’ve been listening to their leaders and conservative media, they have been hearing lies and propaganda. But the sad truth is that this is actually an old story that predates Trump and Fox News. There is something about health care to which the right-wing seems to be inherently hostile.
As this piece in the Economist lays out, going back to Ronald Reagan in the 1960s when he railed against Medicare and called any expansion of the program “socialized medicine” to his refusal to acknowledge the AIDS crisis as president, conservatives have consistently put up roadblocks to creating a decent health care system in the U.S. In the 1990s, former House speaker Newt Gingrich deep-sixed any hope of passing a health care plan under President Clinton but was actually in favor of a program similar to the one that was later adopted by Senator Mitt Romney, R-Ut, when he was governor of Massachusetts. That plan formed the basic template for what became Obamacare and we all know how the Republicans reacted to that, Newt Gingrich included.
It isn’t just ideological resistance or a belief that it’s economically unsound. It’s not even simple partisanship. There’s just a bone-deep antipathy to any collective attempt to extend a helping hand. I’m reminded of this awful scene from the town hall protests against Obamacare in 2010, which may illustrate what this is really all about:
That lack of empathy there says everything.
When the pandemic hit and state governments and public health officials tried to marshall the people to work together to prevent the spread of the disease, once again the right-wing inexplicably rose up in protest, some even storming their statehouses, carrying guns, demanding they be “freed” from any requirement to follow measures designed to save lives. Today, they make up the largest group of vaccine resisters which, like rejecting Obamacare, will end up hurting themselves the most.
Certainly, the economic hardship of the past year has taken a toll on many people and the frustration of business owners and workers is understandable. But refusing to wear a mask or take the vaccine has nothing to do with that. No, this attitude toward health issues in our culture is something that runs much deeper in the American right-wing. It’s not ideology, it’s pathology.
The malignant Tucker Carlson went on TV last night and said that the QAnon conspiracy theory doesn’t exist. To be clear, he didn’t say that the conspiracy itself is nonsense and doesn’t exist. He said there is no QAnon conspiracy theory at all. In other words, it’s a liberal hoax to make right wingers look bad. The term gaslighting is thrown around too much, but there has never been a better example than that.
Amanda Marcotte does a great job of breaking down the right’s next move and basically, that’s all they’ve got:
Donald Trump’s insurrection failed. While historians will likely debate for decades how close he really came to succeeding, one thing is for certain: His failure has put his most prominent defenders in a tough spot. Instead of lining up to sing the praises of President-for-Life Donald Trump, which is where they want to be, his sycophants are stuck trying to make excuses for, minimize, or deflect attention from Trump’s failure.
First, they tried to minimize Trump’s responsibility for the insurrection. That tactic fell apart after an impeachment trial where the prosecutors made such an airtight case for Trump’s guilt that even people who voted to acquit him pretended it was on a legal technicality, rather than try to argue for his innocence. Now, some folks on the right are trying a new tactic, one you might call the “go big or go home” strategy. Trump’s loudest defenders are now outright denying that the nation saw what we all clearly saw on January 6.
During a Tuesday hearing about the security failures that led to the Capitol riot, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin unleashed a bunch of conspiracy theories denying that all those people waving Trump flags while chanting “no Trump, no peace” were, in fact, there for Trump.
Ron Johnson is using his questioning time during the Capitol security hearing to promote a conspiracy theory that the January 6 insurrectionists weren't actually Trump supporters, but were "provocateurs" and "fake Trump protesters" pic.twitter.com/t72QkHDbaG
Johnson was echoing a narrative that has been percolating up, as these narratives do, from the right-wing fringes. And there’s every reason to be concerned that this will follow the same path so many other right-wing conspiracy theories do, where it starts from the fringes, gets amplified by people like Johnson, and eventually settles into the common wisdom of the Republican Party.
“There was no insurrection, there was no coup,” said Dinesh D’Souza, a fake historian, convicted criminal, and conservative pundit still in good standing enough to appear on Laura Ingraham’s show Fox News Tuesday night. Instead, he insisted the heavily videoed and photographed insurrection is “a false narrative” invented by liberals who want to say “Trump was presiding over all the social unrest so they could then try to blame on him.”
The “don’t believe your lying eyes” strategy was in full bloom on Tucker Carlson’s Tuesday night show in a segment where Carlson denied the existence of QAnon, the online conspiracy theory cult that many of the insurrectionists are engaged in.
“We spent all day trying to locate the famous QAnon, which, in the end, we learned is not even a website. If it’s out there, we could not find it,” Carlson said, insisting that “cable news” and “politicians talking on TV” are “the ones spreading disinformation to Americans” by talking about the existence of QAnon.
Of course, QAnon is very real and well-documented — more so than most cults, since it exists mostly online and thus has a lengthy written history across many websites, including 8kun, where the “Q drops”, which are believed to be authored by the people who own the site, are published. Indeed, Carlson is no doubt aware that a good deal of his own audience believes the QAnon conspiracy theory, and likely are taking this broadcast as a coded signal to play dumb about it.
The word “gaslighting” gets thrown around a lot, but this is very much the definition of the word. It comes from the psychology of abuse, and refers to the way an abuser might, for instance, beat his wife and then pretend the next day it didn’t happen, calling her hysterical if she insists it did. Gaslighting isn’t just lying. It’s denying an obvious truth, and insisting that anyone who disagrees is crazy or is making stuff up. It was a favorite tactic of Trump’s, who kicked off his presidency by gaslighting the nation about the size of his inauguration crowd. And now it’s being used by his allies, to argue that the evidence of our own eyes and ears isn’t real.
By the way:
Here is QAnon conspiracy theorist DeAnna Lorraine traveling back from D.C. the day after the insurrection, blasting conservatives for trying to blame it on antifa and declaring she's immensely proud of what happened: "We need more of it, not less. https://t.co/qq9aDYPaLu
The following is from a fascinating twitter thread that shows just how screwed the majority is in this country. It’s lucky to hold power even half the time. And you can believe if the shoe were on the other foot conservatives would do everything in their power the change this. Look what they’re doing now.
NEW: We calculated 3 decades of the Senate “popular vote” & how many people each party represented. The results are astonishing: The GOP hasn’t won more votes or represented more people than Dems since the 1990s but has run the Senate > half the time since
GOP minority rule is a defining feature of what’s wrong with American politics, & no institution has it worse than the Senate. Dems represent tens of millions more people & won millions more votes but won the same number of seats as GOP in 2020. Minority rule could return in 2022
NEW: We calculated 3 decades of the Senate "popular vote" & how many people each party represented. The results are astonishing: The GOP hasn't won more votes or represented more people than Dems since the 1990s but has run the Senate > half the time since https://t.co/H7iqVmbK4Kpic.twitter.com/YfYYILMSPb
— Stephen Wolf @stephenwolf.bsky.social (@PoliticsWolf) February 23, 2021
From 2000-2006 & 2014-2020, Senate GOP owed its majorities to minority rule. The results are far-reaching: A majority of 5 SCOTUS justices were confirmed by GOP senates elected with less support than Dems. Those justices have since undermined voting rights & upheld gerrymandering
NEW: We calculated 3 decades of the Senate "popular vote" & how many people each party represented. The results are astonishing: The GOP hasn't won more votes or represented more people than Dems since the 1990s but has run the Senate > half the time since https://t.co/H7iqVmbK4Kpic.twitter.com/YfYYILMSPb
— Stephen Wolf @stephenwolf.bsky.social (@PoliticsWolf) February 23, 2021
Given the tendency of the president’s party to lose seats in midterms, there’s a strong risk that Dems will lose the Senate in 2022. The GOP could once again regain control of the Senate despite winning fewer votes & representing fewer people than Dems
GOP minority rule in the Senate is in large part a result of how the GOP gerrymandered the upper chamber in the 19th Century by admitting several lightly populated, heavily white rural states in the northwest, including splitting the Dakota territory in two for more senators
SOUTH Dakota literally exists because Republicans split the Dakota territory into two so that they could have two more senators. It was part of a broader GOP effort to gerrymander the Senate by admitting 6 thinly populated northwestern states in 1889-1890 https://t.co/juApYJuqfZhttps://t.co/gevJkkQ7OD
— Stephen Wolf @stephenwolf.bsky.social (@PoliticsWolf) January 28, 2021
When the Senate was originally created, the largest state had 13 times as many people as the smallest state, but the gap is now 68 times today. Malapportionment may only grow worse in coming decades as the U.S. population becomes increasingly concentrated in several big states
Fortunately, there’s a solution at hand that would modestly reduce the Senate’s huge bias toward rural white Republicans: Ending the disenfranchisement of 4 million U.S. citizens by granting statehood to D.C. & Puerto Rico. Dems could pass it if they curtail the Senate filibuster
NEW: We calculated 3 decades of the Senate "popular vote" & how many people each party represented. The results are astonishing: The GOP hasn't won more votes or represented more people than Dems since the 1990s but has run the Senate > half the time since https://t.co/H7iqVmbK4Kpic.twitter.com/YfYYILMSPb
— Stephen Wolf @stephenwolf.bsky.social (@PoliticsWolf) February 23, 2021
However, even adding D.C. & Puerto Rico as new states would still leave the Senate with a major overrepresentation of rural white Republicans. In the long-term, more transformative solutions will be needed to prevent a return of frequent GOP minority rule
Fortunately, there's a solution at hand that would modestly reduce the Senate's huge bias toward rural white Republicans: Ending the disenfranchisement of 4 million U.S. citizens by granting statehood to D.C. & Puerto Rico. Dems could pass it if they curtail the Senate filibuster https://t.co/XZCR0me2CS
— Stephen Wolf @stephenwolf.bsky.social (@PoliticsWolf) February 23, 2021
You can find all of our data calculations & a methodology statement explaining how we arrived at these conclusions in this spreadsheet. Senate vote totals from 1990-2021 are from the invaluable @uselectionatlas:
NEW: We calculated 3 decades of the Senate "popular vote" & how many people each party represented. The results are astonishing: The GOP hasn't won more votes or represented more people than Dems since the 1990s but has run the Senate > half the time since https://t.co/H7iqVmbK4Kpic.twitter.com/YfYYILMSPb
— Stephen Wolf @stephenwolf.bsky.social (@PoliticsWolf) February 23, 2021
GOP minority rule is only growing worse. If the GOP had won just ~40,000 more votes for president, 1,000 more votes for Senate (NH 2016), & hadn’t lost key redistricting lawsuits last decade, they’d have won the presidency, Senate, & House in 2020 despite millions more Dem votes
Last tweet in this thread: Via @leedrutman, the Senate for many decades has overrepresented Republicans (& conservative Southern Dems before that). Senate GOP has rarely ever represented more people than Dems since 1980 but has won power many times since
The Washington Post’s @pbump did an additional analysis of our new data on the Senate “popular vote,” including new graphs showing how frequently the GOP has won control of the Senate since the 1990s despite Dems winning more votes overall
Relevant to this thread on how the Senate massively over-represents Republicans. Curtailing the filibuster to admit new states such as D.C. is critical to rebalancing the Senate & restoring democratic majority rule (along with passing new voting reforms)
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