Month: May 2021

A rightwing anti-immigration group wants the US to encourage birth control for women in central America. I don’t have a problem with that on the merits. Birth control is very good for women to be able to control their lives. But the reasoning behind this particular initiative is so odious it’s hard to believe these people can exist in modern civilization:

The three most influential anti-immigration groups in politics today are the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA, and the Center for Immigration Studies. All three groups were founded in part by John Tanton).

Tanton was an anti-population crusader who founded local chapters of Planned Parenthood and was president of the group Zero Population Growth. As global fertility rates fell, he focused more on opposing immigration. Bankrolled by a similarly obsessed heiress, Cordelia Scaife May, Tanton established a propaganda machine devoted to criticizing immigration from a perspective that mixed radical environmentalism and white nationalism.

Tanton and May didn’t just want to keep people out of their back yard. They wanted to keep them off their planet.

Thus Tanton, whose groups fight against what he called a “Latin onslaught,” also advocated for government policy to limit the years in which all American women could permissibly bear children, specifically “restricting childbearing to the years of maximum reproductive efficiency, between the ages of 20 and 35.” And May worried that when it came to immigrants, “their most dangerous contribution of all” was that they “breed like hamsters.”

May was arguably the less mentally stable of the two. She lived as a recluse for most of her adult life, had no children, suggested that her brother had murdered her husband, and committed suicide at the age of 76. She was also a big fan of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. In one letter to Sanger, May wrote, “I have always admired and tried to take a part in the work that you started.”

In another letter, May explained to Sanger that “The unwanted child is not the problem, but, rather, the wanted one that society, for diverse cultural reasons, demands.”

All of which sheds light on the new CIS recommendation that the American government work to prevent babies from being born in Central America.

There are other signs that CIS and its sister groups are continuing Tanton and May’s work.

CIS became the landing place for disgraced author Jason Richwine, who left the Heritage Foundation once his preoccupation with painting Hispanics as less intelligent than non-Hispanic whites came to light. “No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against,” wrote Richwine.

Richwine was also a contributor to white-nationalist Richard Spencer’s website. Because, of course.

The history of anti-immigration activism demonstrates these recurring themes. The Pioneer Fund, for instance, is an unabashedly racist group started in the 1930s to promote “research in heredity and eugenics.” Over the last few decades, they’ve donated at least a million dollars to groups Tanton founded.

In 1993, Dan Stein, the current president of FAIR, bragged that “My job is to get every dime of Pioneer’s money” while longtime FAIR Board Member Garret Hardin claimed that “it would be better to encourage the breeding of more intelligent people rather than the less intelligent.”

Despite the Tanton network’s very public record of extremism, some Republicans still affiliate themselves with these groups. I was forwarded an email from a Republican Capitol Hill staffer that Jim Jordan’s office circulated in the run up to the recent floor vote on the Farm Worker Modernization Act. Jordan’s office referred to FAIR as a “stakeholder” and included a FAIR-produced document in opposition to the bill. In addition, Jordan previously did a local town hall event with a representative from FAIR.

Tanton network groups have been cited scores of times in the Congressional Record and the groups routinely brag on their respective websites about their invitations from Republican lawmakers. Ted Cruz even hired a FAIR operative to be on his Senate staff.

As the saying goes: when people tell you who they are, you should believe them.

Don’t think for a moment that the beliefs undergirding this aren’t shared by millions of our fellow Americans. If these extremists ever really get their hands on power they’ll do a lot more than push for birth control.

I think this is supposed to be cutting satire of some sort:

If you’re confused about what “M” word he’s referencing:

Very feeble.

When you have to explain your “joke” maybe it isn’t really funny?

They just love him, that’s all. Denying that and trying to find some deeper, structural reasons like “economic anxiety” is missing the point. He channels their grievances which are all tied up in white patriarchal nationalism and there’s no appeasing them.

We conducted a large, mostly cell phone survey with an oversample of Republicans in the 2022 battleground for the U.S. Senate, governorships, and House, and it is painfully clear Don-ald Trump, Lindsey Graham, and Kevin McCarthy know their party. The Trump loyalists who strongly approve of him are two-thirds of those who identify as, “Republican.” And they are joined by the Trump aligned to form a breathtaking, three quarters of the party in the electoral battleground states and districts that will decide who leads the country.

The survey also finds that the critical bloc of non-Trump conservatives and moderates is only a quarter of the battleground electorate — compared to 30 percent in our national poll last month. The non-Trump conservatives are a healthy 16 percent of Republicans, but there are just fewer moderates (9 percent) in the battleground. Democrats win 5 percent of the former and 13 per-cent of the latter, but a greater risk to Republican consolidation are the “Biden Republicans” and their choosing to abstain or vote third party. After all, these races may be decided by only a few points.

We were also surprised by how much Donald Trump’s loyalist party is totally consolidated at this early point in its 2022 voting and how engaged it is. Yes, they have pulled back from histor-ic presidential year levels: the percent scoring 10, the highest level of interest in the election, has fallen from 84 to 68 percent. But Democrats’ engagement fell from 85 percent to 57 per-cent. Republicans are following their political theater much more closely than are Democrats — producing an 11-point gap.

Neither is showing the level of interest of the presidential election in 2019 and 2020, but they are higher than a comparable point in 2018, suggesting the era of high turnout elections is not over. And with such high early engagement of Republicans and white working class voters in this survey, it means the era of Donald Trump shaping the electorate is not over either.

It is what it is. We are living among tens of millions of neo-fascist cultists. We are going to have to accept that and plan accordingly.

I remain a little bit stunned at the “evolution” of some of these Never Trumpers.

"House Republicans are united in our fight to save our country from the radical Socialist Democrat agenda."
–Elise Stefanik
Perhaps Pelosi should bring to the floor, every day, a popular, mainstream part of the Biden agenda, and force House Republicans to vote No day after day?

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) May 14, 2021

There was a time when he would have been saying exactly what Stefanik says here. But I read his twitter feed and much of the time he sounds more like Mark Warner these days. Still not progressive of course. But pretty mainstream on many issues.

Of course that could all change and probably will. Kristol loves Liz Cheney and not just for her defense of democracy. Still, it’s quite astonishing to see this sort of public comment from someone like him.

A sick cookie:

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) expressed concern on Friday for conservative firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s mental well-being amid Greene’s obsessive harassment of the Democratic lawmaker. Greene (R-GA) pursued and aggressively screamed at Ocasio-Cortez outside the House chamber earlier this week, prompting AOC to raise security concerns. CNN’s KFILE also unearthed a since-deleted 2019 livestream of Greene hurling abuse. “Get rid of your diaper,” Greene, who wasn’t yet a congresswoman, yelled through Ocasio-Cortez’s locked office door. “Stop being a baby and stop locking your door and come out and face the American citizens that you serve!” (One of the livestreamers with Greene at the time, Anthony Aguero, was later seen at the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.)

AOC responds:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Marjorie Taylor Greene:

“This is a woman that’s deeply unwell and clearly needs some help. … At this point, I think, the depth of that un-wellness has raised concerns for other members. … I’m concerned about her perceptions of reality." pic.twitter.com/hNDYuWj6Di

— JM Rieger (@RiegerReport) May 14, 2021

I’m concerned she’s going to burn the House down.

Here’s the video of her in 2019. I’m frankly more appalled that the citizens of her district thought this monster was an appropriate choice for member of congress than I am of her. What kind of people are they?

https://twitter.com/KFILE/status/1393208622054842368

One of the big questions that still seems to befuddle the media is “how in the world did the Republican Party get so crazy that they would embrace the Big Lie?”

The knee-jerk assumption is that Donald Trump, with his crude declaration back in 2016 that he would only accept the results of the election if he won brought this level of electoral lunacy to the GOP. While it’s true that believing (or pretending to believe) that Donald Trump is incapable of losing an election has become a litmus test for party membership, the anti-democratic machinations that are happening all over the country are not new at all. In fact, the party’s ongoing, meritless, insistence that undocumented immigrants are voting by the millions and that voter fraud is rampant among Democratic voters is why it was so easy for Donald Trump to persuade his rabid following that it happened to him.

You can go back many decades to find examples of disenfranchisement of Black people and immigrants, but as I wrote a while back, the modern conservative movement’s push to restrict voting really took off after the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s successful program to register voters in urban America. The Democrats fought back and passed major voting rights legislation which President George H.W. Bush promptly vetoed. That was the “motor voter bill” which required that states effectively register any citizen over 18 when they obtain or renew a driver’s license. It also allowed registration by mail and tasked government offices with voter registration duties. The Republicans howled like banshees, as usual, charging the Democrats with trying to expand their own ranks —as if Republicans don’t get driver’s licenses too — when President Bill Clinton signed the bill as one of his earliest actions upon taking office in February 1993. They haven’t stopped screaming about phantom “voter fraud” in the 30 years since.

And they didn’t just scream about it. Republicans took action on the state level, winning an early battle when George W. Bush managed to eke out a disputed victory after his brother, Governor Jeb Bush, purged the Florida voter rolls of many eligible voters in numbers that could have made the difference with such a razor-thin margin of victory. Year after year, Republicans have pounded the message to their base that the only way Democrats win is by cheating. (The irony that the two politicians most credibly accused of cheating are none other than GOP leaders Richard Nixon and Donald Trump cannot be overstated.)

The 2000 election must have reinforced their belief that Democratic vote suppression and disenfranchisement was a winning strategy because Republicans immediately set about using the federal government to get the job done. First, they embarked on a mission to “root out” voter fraud but after five years of trying they just couldn’t come up with goods. That’s because there really isn’t any to speak of. They even deployed the Department of Justice to create phony accusations of voter fraud and it was only because a handful of Republican U.S. Attorneys refused to go along (and were subsequently fired) that the facts came out and the Attorney General had to resign.

But the federal government wasn’t really a big player in this program. It was the think tanks and interest group organizations, backed by big money, that did the heavy lifting in the states. One of the Koch Brothers’ organizations, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which creates so-called “model legislation” for lockstep right-wing state legislatures to easily enact without having to even understand what they’re doing, was heavily involved in various vote suppression schemes over the past couple of decades. Anti-immigrant operatives, like former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach, networked all over the country providing Republican politicians with templates of vote suppression bills. (You may remember Kobach was later tapped by Trump to prove that millions of non-citizens had voted in 2016, giving Hillary Clinton a popular vote victory, but he was unable to do it and slunk off back to Kansas where he keeps running for office and losing.)

A few weeks ago, Salon’s Igor Derysh took a deep dive into all of this noting that the rise in activity in this sector of right-wing activism had taken off in the wake of Trump’s loss. He listed groups that are involved in selling Trump’s lie that he won the election, from faith-based groups like The Family Research Council and the Susan B Anthony List to Freedomworks and the Tea Party Patriots, all of which were focusing their full attention on keeping the delusion going. Derysh homes in on the motive for many of them to do so:

Frank Cannon, senior strategist for the Susan B. Anthony List and American Principles Project, told The New York Times that conservative activists quickly realized that the only way they could keep donations rolling in is by making the effort to restrict voting access the “center of gravity in the party.”

Leave it to right-wingers to find a way to make a profit from The Big Lie. No wonder they love Donald Trump so much.

Derysh also noted that The Heritage Foundation and ALEC were working together on this project, creating some of that “model legislation” for Republican-led states to enact as quickly as possible. On Thursday, Mother Jones published a leaked video of Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action for America, giving big money donors an update on their progress:

“Iowa is the first state that we got to work in, and we did it quickly and we did it quietly,” she said. “We helped draft the bills. We made sure activists were calling the state legislators, getting support, showing up at their public hearings, giving testimony … little fanfare. Honestly, nobody even noticed. My team looked at each other and we’re like, ‘It can’t be that easy.'”

Heritage is busily doing that dirty work all over the country, notably in swing states like Georgia and Arizona. Meanwhile, the Democrats are counting on the federal government and the courts to mitigate the worst of the damage these bills are going to create.

This week Senator Joe Manchin, D-WV, threw cold water on the prospects for passage of the “For the People Act” the voting rights bill that just made it out of committee on a party-line vote. He fatuously insists that voter protection bills aren’t legitimate if they aren’t passed on a bipartisan basis which essentially means no vote protection bills can pass since the entire Republican Party is determined to prevent as many Democrats from voting as possible.

Still, Manchin did come out in favor of requiring “pre-clearance” of any changes to voting laws by the Justice Department in all 50 states which is actually more radical than any provision in the For the People Act or the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act which is also in the hopper. The chances that he can get 10 Republicans on board, which is what it would take to break the filibuster, is nil but it appears he wants to try.

So we are still in that place of waiting to see if the inevitable betrayal by Manchin’s GOP buddies will make him understand that the weapon of the filibuster is being used to destroy the country. I wouldn’t get my hopes up.

Salon

It is official. Rep. Elise Stefanik, 36, who once pledged to be a “uniter and a bridge-builder” who would bring “a sunny side of optimism to Congress” is the newly elected House GOP Conference Chair.

Come and watch her sing and play. She’s the young generation, and she’s got something to say:

Kevin Kruse responds: “Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years,” President Harry Truman said in 1952. “Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.”

It was one of the 2008 national conventions (IIRC) when Pat Buchanan, sharing the MSNBC dais with Rachel Maddow, directed some snide comment toward Maddow that made her eyes widen in a smile.

“Are you red-baiting me?” Maddow asked with a mixture of surprise and delight. Pat Buchanan is red-baiting me!

I’ll say it again. When the Berlin Wall fell, Republicans declared Sir Ronald of Reagan had slain the Evil Empire and won the Cold War. Yet 30 years later in a different century, one they believe only they are fit to lead, Republicans are still warning of Commies hiding in woodpiles as though it is 1963.

Democrats, Republicans in Congress say, are radical socialists (or communists, when red-baiting as though the Cold War never ended) and a threat to America. They say this even as their state-based brethren work feverishly to twist this democratic republic into an oligarch-led autocracy.

Allow us to introduce you to the new Chair of the House Republican Conference: pic.twitter.com/koZi0uQLxd

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) May 14, 2021

Update: Fixed an egregious misspelling.

A common joke about high school boys is that those who talk about having sex the most are having it the least. Among people of faith, many zealously declaring theirs from street corners or in front of cameras understand faith the least. And flag-draped, self-described patriots who assaulted the Capitol Jan. 6 seeking to overturn an election? Well.

They do not love the actual ideals and democratic institutions of this republic so much as the land they were born into because they were born into it. They are nationalists more than believers in democratic principles, in “created equal,” in e pluribus unum, or in one person, one vote. Their faith in those is a mile wide and an inch deep. They believe in power for their tribe, not in principle.

SCOOP from me & @NickSurgey: In new leaked video dark money group Heritage Action brags to top donors about writing “model legislation” making it harder to vote in GA TX IA FL AZ. This is proof of massive coordinated right-wing voter suppression campaign https://t.co/BeBhav73un

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) May 13, 2021

Proof of that is on display in Republican-controlled legislature after Republican-controlled legislature where model legislation drafted by the Heritage Foundation is advancing for the purpose of thwarting democracy and securing minority rule in violation of the principle of popular sovereignty. It is on display in how histrionics have replaced any Republican effort to advance policy for improving Americans’ lives.

A candidate for U.S. Senate in North Carolina describes recent debate over updating the state’s social studies curriculum:

Dahlia Lithwick writes at Slate, “The fact that all of the current Republican grievance can be distilled into some version of wailing about “woke cancel something something” certainly says something about the difference between actual governance and performance of governance.”

The effort to “frame their opposition to protecting fair and universal suffrage in free speech terms gives away the game,” Lithwick says of vote suppression legislation:

Maybe the abiding lesson in the case of Voting v. Speech, the 2021 edition, isn’t that the speech claims are trivial but that those trying to protect the right to vote are doing so on behalf of all Americans, across party, ideology, and race, whereas those making claims about who is being “canceled” are really only ever concerned about powerful Republicans and, in fact, only about powerful Republicans who are not named “Liz Cheney.” In other words, before we tumble too deeply into the false choice of privileging speech over voting, or succumb to the temptation to frame absolutely everything as a choice between being woke and being canceled, let’s recall that the party whining about being “canceled” (again, whatever that means) is also attempting to cancel the results of the 2020 election and therefore the actual votes of millions of people who voted in that election; to cancel political speech about the 2020 election results; to cancel the votes of millions of people who will vote in upcoming elections, by way of new vote suppression legislation; and to cancel speech and protest by ordinary citizens around the country by way of a raft of new anti-protest legislation. And all of this is being done by pushing provably false claims about a stolen election and illegal voting.

Republicans decry Democrats as socialists or as communists (when more bluntly red-baiting as though the Cold War never ended). Yet, they are “only interested in free speech for some, and in quashing speech for most,” Lithwick observes. “All animals are equal, but …” as Orwell wrote in his allegory about communist rule.

“Actions taken to protect against cancel culture (whatever that is) are symbolic and self-serving,” she writes, while the fight against voter suppression is fundamentally democratic. “Not every provision of the current voting reform bills is perfect, but to cast voting itself as anti-democratic is not just the stuff of Trump’s Big Lie, and of Jan. 6 itself, but the stuff of authoritarianism.”

Nationalism masquerading as patriotism.

Following up tristero’s post below about Marjorie Taylor Green reminded me of this piece by J.V. Last at the Bulwark. I think he’s right. Republicans are no longer engaged in governance and policy. They are engaged in marketing and branding. And that’s all they are doing.

The whole article is well worth reading but here’s an excerpt:

The unifying principle that binds Red Bull and Elon Musk is attention economics: The idea that in a world moving toward post-scarcity,1 the attention of human beings becomes increasingly valuable.

And not just “valuable,” but in extreme cases, much more valuable than goods and services. For instance:

In 2020, Tesla delivered 499,550 cars. Tesla’s market cap is currently $661.57 billion. Let’s compare that with the Big Four’s numbers for 2020:

So, you know, you could revolutionize supply chain logistics and vehicle reliability. Then you could make several million cars and trade them to consumers for money.

Or you could have a memelord as your CEO. They’re equally valid business plans.

Which brings us to Matthew Louis Gaetz II.

A lot of people have goofed on Matt Gaetz for this statement: “If you aren’t making news, you aren’t governing.”

But he’s right. Or at least, right in his conclusion that Republican party politics now behave according to attention economics.

Does it matter to his future political prospects that Matt Gaetz doesn’t advance legislation? Does it matter that Madison Cawthorn staffed up his office with comms people? Does it matter that Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t have committee assignments?

Well, these quirks would matter in a system where legislative accomplishments influenced voter behavior. But the preponderance of evidence suggests that Republican voters don’t care about tangible government outcomes.

They don’t care whether or not a border wall is built, or who would have (theoretically) paid for it. They don’t care about whether or not the government fails to manage a global pandemic, killing hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens. They don’t care if unemployment is up—or down. They don’t care about stimulus checks. Or the national debt.

It’s a little bit like—check that—it’s exactly like Red Bull.

Consumers don’t care who makes Red Bull. They don’t even care what’s in the can that says “Red Bull.” What they care about is the amazing content on the Red Bull YouTube channel.

This is post-scarcity politics. Republican voters—a group distinct from Conservatism Inc.—no longer have any concrete outcomes that they want from government.

What they have, instead, is a lifestyle brand.

And if you want to move up the ladder within a brand network, you don’t do it by governing or making policy.

You do it by getting attention.

Donald Trump was the first figure to understand that this was where Republican voters had moved. Once you view Republican politics as an attention economy, everything about Trump’s rise and domination makes sense.

And it explains Matt Gaetz, too.

His current—I’m not sure what we’re supposed to call this, maybe “predicament”?—isn’t a threat. It’s the best thing that could possibly have happened to him. Gaetz gets to fill the attention vacuum left by Trump’s exile. He gets to posture and preen. Everyone talks about him and the fact that Democrats hate him only makes him more attractive to Republican voters.

This “scandal” has leveled up Matt Gaetz and made him a contender for any office he so desires (so long as he doesn’t actually go to jail) because the attention he has from Republican voters is incredibly valuable—and can be leveraged into power. No part of the Republican voting coalition will consider any of this as a mark against him.

I think this is an important insight. It explains the behavior of all the politicians who now sound more like twitter trolls than serious politicians. They don’t even try to engage in anything of substance. It explains Tucker Carlson’s recent descent into madness as well.

This headline from CNN is typical: “Marjorie Taylor Greene confronts Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez outside House chamber.” But that’s not what happened.

What happened was that Representative Ocasio-Cortez wouldn’t let herself be pushed around by a sleazy bully. When the bully persisted, AOC turned around, threw up her hands, and walked away. There was no confrontation, no accosting. She — quite properly — refused to lower herself to the bully’s level. Good for her.

I’ve seen not a single headline, anywhere, that got this bizarre incident right.