Month: April 2021

This is really stupid pic.twitter.com/SxTykCkgey

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 24, 2021

That’s their new line. Rightwing, celebrity, superstars are attacking the “well-heeled” powerful forces who hate freedom:

Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Friday night suggested that the “goofy” pro-Trump mob who stormed the Capitol in January were a much less dangerous than what she called “Biden’s insurrectionists.” 

In a bizarre comparison during her Friday night program, the conservative news host took aim at President Joe Biden — calling him “the real threat” — while dismissing notions that a mob of former President Donald’ Trump’s supporters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 posed much danger. 

“America’s most dangerous insurrectionists aren’t the goofy QAnon people in fur and face paint,” Ingraham said. “The real threat to our future is Biden and the well-heeled powerful forces who want us to lose sight of what made America great in the first place. It’s not our diversity. It’s our freedom.”

Right. Because as everyone knows, those two things are in direct conflict. If we value our diversity then white people aren’t as free to be racist pigs and celebrated for it. Natch.

Ingraham’s effort to reimagine Capitol rioters as nonthreatening, while painting Biden and unnamed “powerful forces” as the true danger, reinforces the narratives advanced by Republican lawmakers who have sought to recast the events of Jan. 6.

In an effort to divert attention from the aftermath of the Capitol attack, some GOP lawmakers have insisted that they had not feared for their safety while their congressional colleagues hid under desks as rioters stormed the Capitol earlier this year. 

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), for example, has said that he held little fear on Jan. 6, as Capitol rioters invaded the complex– but would have felt imperiled had those entering the Capitol on that day been supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement.

“I knew those were people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, and so I wasn’t concerned,” Johnson said of the thousands that gathered on Jan. 6, which included many of the rioters who later stormed the Capitol.

And then there’s this phony “populist” letting his little, white, fascist, slip show:

Mainstream US journalists are “cowards”, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on Friday, without naming any such reporters whom he also called “cringing animals not worthy of respect”.

The primetime host also called others in his chosen field “small-minded, status-obsessed, insecure, not that bright, just not impressive”.

“It just makes me sick,” he said. “I really hate them.”

Carlson was speaking to Outkick, a sports and pop culture website. His complaints included that mainstream journalists’ work was not “aimed upwards”.

“I just can’t overstate how disgusted I am,” he said, “not simply by the details of the lying of the medium, but disgusted by the emphasis. The media is basically Praetorian Guard for the ruling class, the bodyguards for Jeff Bezos. That’s the opposite of what we should have.

“I really hate them for it, I’ll be honest.”

Carlson has been broadly supportive of Donald Trump in and out of power, last October famously hosting a bizarre interview after the then president recovered from a bout with Covid-19.

One Washington Post columnist called Carlson “sycophancy-adjacent rather than entirely immersed in the MAGAverse”, a relative distancing made possible because “Trump shares many of his core philosophies, like preserving institutional power for white Americans”.

Carlson regularly espouses the racist “replacement theory”, which says Democrats encourage immigration in order to win elections. Recent calls for him to be fired for doing so were rebuffed by the Murdochs – the immigrant family that owns Fox News.

On Friday, the Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent accused Carlson of peddling “a monumental scam with potential real world implications”.

A recent poll, Sargent wrote, “found that nearly half of Republican respondents believe politics is about ‘ensuring the country’s survival as we know it’” and that “there is a ‘real sense in the Republican coalition today that they are under siege’”.

Carlson is seen in some quarters as a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2024, should Trump chose not to run.

In an echo of controversy over comments in which he said immigration made America “dirtier”, the Fox News host also told Outkick: “Unrestrained mass immigration has also put a huge strain on the natural world.

“Just the amount of pollution and litter and destruction that’s generated by the movement of hundreds of thousands of people, unrestrained, across the border. That’s not a small thing to me. But you never hear that. I’ve never heard anybody mention that. And it’s so awful.”

Yeah, his concern is all about the environment. Sure it is.

I don’t know exactly what’s going on with Carlson but something is. If he’s truly gone this radical he may just be this year’s Glenn Beck, who had a similar trajectory before his lunacy flamed him out. If he’s being an opportunist, then he’s actually way more dangerous. I’m honestly not sure.

This piece by Alex Pareene sent chills down my spine in a way that I haven’t felt in a while. He talks about the new laws that are removing liability for people who use vehicles as weapons against protesters:

Earlier this week, Florida Republicans enacted a law they claimed would prevent riots in the state. Its real purpose, of course, was to discourage protesting and punish demonstrators. One of the bill’s provisions has received a fair amount of national attention, as it seems to give Floridians permission to attack protesters with their cars. The bill doesn’t exactly make it legal to run someone over, but it does shield drivers from civil liability if they injure or kill protesters on Florida roads.

In isolation, it’s hard to understand the purpose of such a curious provision. What problem does it solve? As the Florida American Civil Liberties Union pointed out, very few recent protests in the state involved violence or even vandalism, and police and prosecutors were already well equipped (some would say, more than well equipped) to handle whatever rioting might occur. If demonstrators blocking roads and snarling up traffic were a serious problem in Florida in need of a legislative remedy, surely thoughtful legislators could come up with a more effective or ethical response than making it less personally risky for people to injure or kill those demonstrators with cars. But efficacy and ethics don’t really seem to be guiding the decisions of Republican-run state legislatures lately.

To understand what’s really behind the bill, recall that it comesless than four years after a 20-year-old neo-Nazi named James Alex Fields Jr. deliberately drove a Dodge Challenger into a crowd of people counterprotesting the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Fields injured scores of people and killed a woman named Heather Heyer. The obvious and immediate response to this intentional attack was nearly universal shock and horror. Fields was charged with murder and convicted. But since just before that attack, and even more so after it, Republican elected officials across the country have been trying to make it easier for certain people to run over certain other people.

Ari Weil, a researcher at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, counted six states that considered laws shielding drivers who attack protesters in 2017, but most of those “hit and kill” bills (as the ACLU refers to them) went nowhere. It took a few more years for the right-wing propaganda apparatus to fully numb conservative consciences, and prepare them to openly endorse an idea as plainly depraved as this one. In the meantime, the car attacks kept coming: In 2020, Weil tracked “72 incidents of cars driving into protesters across 52 different cities,” over the span of just over a month. The online far right memed about running over demonstrators regularly, and cops openly encouraged it in social media comments. Cops also, in cities such as New York and Detroit, participated in the practice themselves. In Boston last year, Police Sergeant Clifton McHale was recorded on a police body camera bragging about hitting demonstrators with a police cruiser. His year of unpaid suspension is apparently up, and Eoin Higgins reports that he is back on duty.

Now lawmakers seem to have overcome whatever reticence they may once have felt about formally endorsing automobile attacks. Five states besides Florida introduced similar bills this year, granting some form of immunity to people running into demonstrators. The Iowa measure passed the state House and awaits Senate approval. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt just signed another version into law in his state. This one shields attacking drivers from criminal liability.

The impetus for the Oklahoma bill, according to the Republican lawmaker who authored it, was an incident in which a pickup truck driver drove into a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Tulsa, paralyzing one person. The driver claimed to be scared and, notably, was not charged with a crime. That is to say that it was apparently already legal to drive into protesters in Oklahoma; these politicians merely helped clarify that fact.

This is stunning to me. Even if a person was “scared” and accidentally stepped on the gas in the midst of a protest, if they kill or hurt someone in their car, there is no reason to create a legal shield for them. The incident must be adjudicated in a court of law and if they are found not guilty of manslaughter that’s one thing. That’s how we used to do this. Carving out a legal exception to killing someone because they happen to be protesters is mind-boggling.

After all:

A few years ago, most people would have seen “politically motivated vehicle attacks” as a terrorist tactic pioneered by ISIS. Now American police regularly carry out these kinds of attacks, and Republican policymakers have officially endorsed the practice.

There’s something very telling about how the car (or police cruiser, or truck, or SUV) has been enshrined into law as an instrument of state-sanctioned violence. American conservatives are creating, really, a sort of Second Amendment for cars. Not the Second Amendment in terms of the literal text in the Constitution, but the Second Amendment as existing doctrine. The legal framework conservative politicians and jurists spent years crafting and refining to facilitate politicized and racialized gun violence in this country is now expanding to another of America’s omnipresent and deadly institutions.

[…]

Even if this progression follows a certain twisted logic, it was far from inevitable. Americans should be horrified at the speed with which this practice spread and then was normalized. While these laws may claim to protect only those responsible for “unintentional” crashes, they are effectively legalizing the attempted murder of people demonstrating for racial justice. As an Oregon cop put it in 2016, under a photo of Black Lives Matter demonstrators: “When encountering such mobs remember, there are 3 pedals on your floor. Push the right one all the way down.” In a few states, with maybe more to come, that’s simply policy now.

What kind of a country would codify this? I don’t think even Putin or Xi have laws like this on the books.

Despite the fact that they love, love, love the ultimate Big City guy Donald Trump, we know that Republicans hate cities for the obvious reason that they are populated by people who don’t look like them or vote for them. And they are doing everything in their power to disenfranchise those voters they hate so much. But Trump himself has taken it to the next level by refusing to pay for his rallies, even in places that did vote for him.

The past five years brought unprecedented reporting on what seemed to be transparent corruption within the Trump organization and administration. Much of the clearly dubious handling of money came out of Donald Trump’s campaign apparatus. Up until the end, Trump’s campaign was run like a traveling con job, and any and all fundraising done in service of his candidacy was used to pay off everything but campaign costs. The Trump administration, like the Trump organization of the past 40+ years, tried to leave citizens holding the bag at every turn. One of the main gripes that states and localities had with Trump’s never-ending campaign was his propensity to leave the costs of enormous security bills on the shoulders of local taxpayers.

One city that has waited more than 19 months for the Trump campaign to pay its debt is Albuquerque, New Mexico. KOB4 reports that Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller sent a $200,000 bill to a collection agency in the hopes of receiving money he says the Trump campaign owes the city. “We actually treated it like any other debt, and so it goes through a somewhat process where you send a bunch of letters out. We got no response from those letters. And then automatically, it does go to an agency that helps try and collect debts, and so that’s those annoying phone calls you get that say, you know, you owe money to so-and-so—like now, Trump is getting those.”

The Albuquerque mayor is not the first public official to make a statement concerning Trump’s campaign rallies, their costs, and his tendency to leave large bills for state and city budgets to reconcile themselves. The strangely coifed conman got bent out of shape while still in office when Minneapolis, Minnesota, Mayor Jacob Frey sent the Trump campaign a preemptive $500,000 estimated security bill back in October 2019. 

Back in November, Newsweek reported that the loser campaign owed at least $850,000 to various local agencies for the costs of his rallies. The City of El Paso, Texas, which says the twice-impeached president owes $500,000, hired outside legal counsel in November 2020 to help with the collection of that debt. El Paso officials say that debt has been outstanding since February 2019.  

Think about that. These were places that welcomed his Nuremberg rallies and paid for all the amenities, including police protection — and he stiffed them. I know it’s an old story. But it’s important that we never forget just how corrupt Trump really is, in both big ways and small. They had plenty of money to pay for this. They just chose to keep it for themselves.

And keep in mind that it was the prospect of losing his vaunted rallies that motivated him to downplay the pandemic, resulting in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. They were everything to him. But once one was over he moved on to the next apparently assuming that wherever he went the people would be happy to pick up the tab.

He says capital punishment is coming to an end because the laws have made it harder to achieve so it’s more and more capricious.

Capital punishment is ending because of a wholesome squeamishness that reflects (in Chief Justice Earl Warren’s words) society’s “evolving standards of decency.” And because attempts to make it neither cruel nor unusual have made its implementation increasingly capricious, and hence morally absurd.

In some places, that’s no doubt true. In others, the capriciousness of it and the lack of decency are features not bugs. The last US Attorney General actually reinstated the federal death penalty. The current Supreme Court just ruled that you can sentence children to life without parole on the basis of one crime. Nothing cruel or unusual about that?

As for evolving standards of decency, I’ll just leave you with this:

Those Dutch artists knew how to party:

2/2 Artist, with some pretty shocking studio props on hand. What is he painting? Only Cornelis Dusart knows, and today is his day. pic.twitter.com/yI6cxKs7U8

— Dr. Peter Paul Rubens (@PP_Rubens) April 24, 2021

The multi-talented Vicki Roush of Convey Communications pointed me to this thread of post-pandemic New Yorker cover mock-ups by Tomer Hanuka‘s illustration class.

This one by Lauren V got me where I still live:

But this one below by Amy Young stings. I’ve been fortunate not to have lost anyone in my life. For those of you who have, my sincere condolences.

A little serendipity leads me to offer a couple of suggestions this morning.

“Mistakes were made” is a classic D.C. euphemism for excusing everything from sexual peccadilloes to untold “colateral” deaths. At least it did until doubling down replaced a mea culpa among a large fraction of the political class.

Adam Davidson, contributing writer to The New Yorker, points to a tweet thread by Oliver Kim, a Ph.D. student at the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Kim recounts just one of the many errors that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.

S Vietnam had tried land reform in 1956, but it had been hijacked by local landlords, and very little was redistributed.

Meanwhile, the Viet Cong enacted land reform in the areas under their control—and attracted 1000s of recruits in the process. 3/ pic.twitter.com/qwfBEfNsB8

— Oliver Kim (@oliverwkim) April 21, 2021

In his report, Mitchell ran a province-level regression of S Vietnamese govt control on local land inequality as of 1960, and 5 other "independent" variables.

He found a positive relation.

Mitchell's conclusion? That redistribution would encourage more insurgency. 5/ pic.twitter.com/f0atVFi4gn

— Oliver Kim (@oliverwkim) April 21, 2021

In his clinical analysis of the land reform question, Edward Mitchell fell victim to one of the classic blunders, Kim explains: reverse causality. In his rebuttal, Robert L. Sansom likened Mitchell’s error to “observing that all who had the flu had been visited by doctors, [& concluding] that the doctors caused the flu.”

The most famous classic blunder is never get involved in a land war in Asia.

Coincidentally, Wired‘s Kevin Kelly included that one in a list of maxims he offered last year on his birthday. Digby passed it along (via James Fallows) last weekend. It’s worth reading.

To that list, I’ll add a couple, beginning with one that bit Mitchell:

● Know what you don’t know. The most famous example is suggesting injecting disinfectant to cure COVID-19. “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

● I’m not as smart as I think I am. A corollary to the one above. There are libraries filled with things I don’t know.

● First identify the right problem. Clients often asked me to solve the wrong problem. My job was not to fix the problem they’d identified but to solve the problem that really needed fixing. The fix was often simpler than what they imagined.

If I think of any others, I may add them here later.

Meerkats!

After more than twenty years, three meerkats have been born at Amersfoort Zoo.

“A very special moment, because a meerkat birth is no easy feat,” explains animal caretaker Marc Belt.

“Before meerkats form a love couple, they have to like each other very much. After two decades there is a match between a male and a female and that now results in three youngsters that are doing very well.”

These African predators have been living in the zoo for many years, but births have been delayed for a long time.

Meerkats are choosy in choosing their love partner.

There has to be a strong click between the two before they end up on a pink cloud.”

A pregnancy lasts about 2.5 months in these animals.

“At birth, the young are initially still blind, deaf and bald. After about ten days their eyes and ears open and they explore the world. When mom goes looking for food, the rest of the group babysits; they are very caring animals”, says Marc.

The birth of these three meerkats gives hope. Marc: “Love is in the air, so maybe we can expect more births soon.

Hopefully the park will be able to open its gates again on 11 May and visitors can come for a maternity visit in Amersfoort Zoo .

I loved “Meerkat Manor” even though it broke my heart when Shakespeare disappeared … They are adorable.

Turns out Generation Z’s don’t reflexively hate their granddads and actually care about policy. How refreshing:

‘THE BOY NEXT DOOR PHENOMENON’: Young Americans are more optimistic about the future and far more approving of U.S. leadership under President Biden than during ex-president Donald Trump’s tenure, according to a new Harvard Youth Poll released on Friday. 

Biden has hit the highest favorability rating — 63 percent — among college students who are registered voters of any president in the youth poll’s 21-year history, according to the poll. 

Sitting at an overall 59 percent approval rating with those surveyed, Biden’s popularity among young voters also marks a dramatic U-turn for the 78-year-old president: at this time last year, only 34 percent of all young adults viewed Biden favorably, per the spring 2020 Harvard Youth Poll. Read the full results here.

• “Joe Biden hasn’t really changed much but it’s like the ‘boy next door’ phenomenon: you take a second look and you see these qualities that you never appreciated before,” John Della Volpe, a former Biden campaign youth vote adviser and the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics polling  director told Power Up. “You knew he kind of had the same values but he shares much more of your values that you might have thought before — certainly in the way he thinks about government and America and people are responding to how quickly he’s been able to instill some of his values in the practice of government.
  
• George W. Bush came in at 61 percent in 2003; Barack Obama at 57 percent in 2016. 

• Fifty-nine percent of 18-to-29 year old Americans approve of Biden’s overall job performance; 65 approve of his handling of the coronavirus; and 57 percent of race relations, according to the poll.

Another striking development: young Americans are more hopeful about the future of America than they were in the fall of 2017 – almost a year after former president Trump took office. Only 31 percent of young Americans were hopeful about the future of America at the time and 67 percent were fearful. 

Four years later, 56 percent of young Americans are more optimistic – especially young people of color. 

• “While the hopefulness of young whites has increased 11 points, from 35 percent to 46 percent – the changes in attitudes among young people of color are striking,” according to a memo penned by Della Volpe. “Whereas only 18 percent of young Blacks had hope in 2017, today 72 percent are hopeful (+54). In 2017, 29 percent of Hispanics called themselves hopeful, today that number is 69% (+40).”
  
• Notable: the polling was conducted before the verdict that found former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin guilty of murder and manslaughter in the death of George Floyd.
  
• “It wasn’t long ago at all that a supermajority of young Black Americans – and almost as many Hispanic Americans – would tell me that they felt under attack in America simply because of the color of their skin,” Della Volpe noted. 

And for all of the caricatures of young Americans, the poll found that young people are open minded, more likely to be politically engaged than they were a decade ago and favor big government solutions to problems. 

• Thirty-six percent of young Americans are politically active, with young Black voters (41 percent) the most active among that group. That’s a 12-point difference from a 2009 poll that found in the fall after Obama’s election that 24 percent of young Americans considered themselves to be politically active.
  
• “By a margin of nearly three-to-one, we found that youth agreed with the sentiment, ‘Americans with different political views from me still want what’s best for the country’ — in total, 50% agreed, 18% disagreed, and 31% were recorded as neutral,” according to Della Volpe’s memo. 
  
• The poll found a majority of young Americans favor government intervention on the issues of poverty, combating climate change, and health care. 
  
• From a messaging perspective, Della Volpe argues the Biden administration should continue to focus on “helping people who need it … there’s zero question that there’s was a significant generational shift when Generation Z’ers came into the election on every issue supporting a bolder, strong government.” 

Yay for Gen Z!

Does this make David Brooks “woke?”

Those of us who had hoped America would calm down when we no longer had Donald Trump spewing poison from the Oval Office have been sadly disabused. There are increasing signs that the Trumpian base is radicalizing. My Republican friends report vicious divisions in their churches and families. Republican politicians who don’t toe the Trump line are speaking of death threats and menacing verbal attacks.

It’s as if the Trump base felt some security when their man was at the top, and that’s now gone. Maybe Trump was the restraining force.

What’s happening can only be called a venomous panic attack. Since the election, large swathes of the Trumpian right have decided America is facing a crisis like never before and they are the small army of warriors fighting with Alamo-level desperation to ensure the survival of the country as they conceive it.

The first important survey data to understand this moment is the one pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson discussed with my colleague Ezra Klein. When asked in late January if politics is more about “enacting good public policy” or “ensuring the survival of the country as we know it,” 51 percent of Trump Republicans said survival; only 19 percent said policy.

The level of Republican pessimism is off the charts. A February Economist-YouGov poll asked Americans which statement is closest to their view: “It’s a big, beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to embrace each other and not allow ourselves to become isolated” or “Our lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants, and our priority should be to protect ourselves.”

Over 75 percent of Biden voters chose “a big, beautiful world.” Two-thirds of Trump voters chose “our lives are threatened.”

This level of catastrophism, nearly despair, has fed into an amped-up warrior mentality.

“The decent know that they must become ruthless. They must become the stuff of nightmares,” Jack Kerwick writes in the Trumpian magazine American Greatness. “The good man must spare not a moment to train, in both body and mind, to become the monster that he may need to become in order to slay the monsters that prey upon the vulnerable.”

With this view, the Jan. 6 insurrection was not a shocking descent into lawlessness but practice for the war ahead. A week after the siege, nearly a quarter of Republicans polled said violence can be acceptable to achieve political goals. William Saletan of Slate recently rounded up the evidence showing how many Republican politicians are now cheering the Jan. 6 crowd, voting against resolutions condemning them.

Liberal democracy is based on a level of optimism, faith and a sense of security. It’s based on confidence in the humanistic project: that through conversation and encounter, we can deeply know each other across differences; that most people are seeking the good with different opinions about how to get there; that society is not a zero-sum war, but a conversation and a negotiation.

As Leon Wieseltier writes in the magazine Liberties, James Madison was an optimist and a pessimist at the same time, a realist and an idealist. Philosophic liberals — whether on the right side of the political spectrum or the left — understand people have selfish interests, but believe in democracy and open conversation because they have confidence in the capacities of people to define their own lives, to care for people unlike themselves, to keep society progressing.

With their deep pessimism, the hyperpopulist wing of the G.O.P. seems to be crashing through the floor of philosophic liberalism into an abyss of authoritarian impulsiveness. Many of these folks are no longer even operating in the political realm. The G.O.P. response to the Biden agenda has been anemic because the base doesn’t care about mere legislation, just their own cultural standing.

[…]

Republicans and conservatives who believe in the liberal project need to organize and draw a bright line between themselves and the illiberals on their own side. This is no longer just about Trump the man, it’s about how you are going to look at reality — as the muddle its always been, or as an apocalyptic hellscape. It’s about how you pursue change — through the conversation and compromise of politics, or through intimidations of macho display.

I can tell a story in which the Trumpians self-marginalize or exhaust themselves. Permanent catastrophism is hard. But apocalyptic pessimism has a tendency to deteriorate into nihilism, and people eventually turn to the strong man to salve the darkness and chaos inside themselves.

Yes, well, while Brooks was fulminating about kids on college campuses and worrying about why liberals don’t go to Applebee’s enough, this is what was happening to his party. It has been coming on for a long time, going back to the radical Newt Gingrich all the way through the years when people like him were shrugging at torture.

It’s good that center-right types like Brooks are finally awake to the threat. The GOP base that is even more radical than Trump is the GOP base that the Republican party created. Now they are out of control and there are plenty of cheap, opportunists ready to step up to the front of the line and lead the charge: