Month: May 2021

I think I’m more worried about this than I was about Trump himself. It’s a form of mass delusion and I don’t know what will break the spell:

Debra Ell, a Republican organizer in Michigan and fervent supporter of former president Donald Trump, said she has good reason to believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

“I think I speak for many people in that Trump has never actually been wrong, and so we’ve learned to trust when he says something, that he’s not just going to spew something out there that’s wrong and not verified,” she said, referring to Trump’s baseless claims that widespread electoral fraud caused his loss to President Biden in November. [Whaaat???]

In fact, there is no evidence to support Trump’s false assertions, which culminated in a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. But Ell, a Republican precinct delegate in her state, said the 2020 election is one of the reasons she’s working to censure and remove Jason Roe from his role as the Michigan Republican Party’s executive director — specifically that Roe accepted the 2020 results, telling Politico that “the election wasn’t stolen” and that “there is no one to blame but Trump.”

“He said the election was not rigged, as Donald Trump had said, so we didn’t agree with that, and then he didn’t blame the Democrats for any election fraud,” said Ell, explaining her frustration with Roe. “He said there was no fraud — again, that’s something that doesn’t line up with what we think really happened — and then he said it’s all Donald Trump’s fault.”

Nearly six months after Trump lost to Biden, rejection of the 2020 election results — dubbed the “Big Lie” by many Democrats — has increasingly become an unofficial litmus test for acceptance in the Republican Party. In January, 147 GOP lawmakers — eight senators and 139 House members — voted in support of objections to the election results, and since then, Republicans from Congress to statehouses to local party organizations have fervently embraced the falsehood.

In Washington, normally chatty senators scramble to skirt the question, and internal feuding over who is to blame for the Jan. 6 insurrection has riven the House Republican leadership, with tensions between House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, spilling into public view. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is facing a Trump-aligned primary challenger in her 2022 race, inspired by her call for Trump to resign after the Jan. 6 attack and her later vote to convict him over his role in inciting the insurrection.

Local officials, too, are facing censure and threats — in states from Iowa to Michigan to Missouri — for publicly accepting the election results. And in Arizona’s largest county, a hand recount of 2.1 million votes cast in November is underway by Republicans who dispute the results, in yet another effort to overturn the results of the November contest.

The issue also could reverberate through the 2022 midterms and the 2024 election, with Trump already slamming Republicans who did not resist the election results. For Republicans, fealty to the falsehood could pull the party further to the right during the primaries, providing challenges during the general election when wooing more moderate voters is crucial. And for Democrats, the continued existence of the claim threatens to undermine Biden’s agenda

“It is not just about the Donald Trump persona,” said Jennifer Palmieri, who served as White House communications director under President Barack Obama. “Trump is also a proxy in a culture war that’s about whose side are you on, and the people that buy into QAnon and other conspiracy theories are always looking for ways to discern whose side you’re really on.”

Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, said that although such fealty to Trump may play well in a Republican primary, the calculation is far more complicated in local elections, general elections and critical swing states.

“In the battleground states — and Georgia is a prime example of where this played out — you had local officials who were really caught between the narrative of the ‘Big Lie’ and defending their own elections and the job they’d done,” Lake said.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, both Republicans, resisted direct pressure from Trump to overturn their state’s election results in favor of a Trump victory. The backlash was swift: Trump called for Kemp to resign and endorsed Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.), a challenger to Raffensperger, for Georgia secretary of state.

Will it eventually wear off and these people will just pretend it never happened? (We know they’ll never admit they were duped.) Or is this going to be an organizing mechanism for the right going forward even if Trump passes off his mortal coil. like some sort of religion? I honestly don’t know.

Meanwhile, the purge continues:

Several local Republicans have either stepped down or been forced out of their party positions for not supporting Trump’s baseless election claims or for criticizing the former president’s role in inciting the deadly Capitol riot. In Iowa — after telling a local newspaper that Trump should be impeached for his “atrocious conduct” in egging on the Jan. 6 attacks — Dave Millage was called a “traitor” and forced to step down as chair of the Scott County Republican Party. In Missouri, the state’s Republican Party executive director, Jean Evans, resigned from her term several weeks early amid angry and threatening calls from Trump supporters, who urged her to do more to help Trump hold onto the White House after his loss in November.

And in Michigan, Ell is circulating a resolution to fellow precinct delegates to censure and remove Roe from his role as the party’s executive director. “WE, REPUBLICAN PARTY PRECINCT DELEGATES OF MICHIGAN believe that our voices and votes were removed in an illegal election on November 3, 2020,” reads the resolution.

Those pushing for Roe’s removal are in the grass-roots wing of the party, not on the state committee, and Roe declined to comment on the specifics of the ongoing turmoil. But he said he believes voting reforms are needed — if only to reassure the large percentage of voters who, spurred by Trump’s false claims, do not trust the electoral process.

“When half of the voters of this country don’t have faith in our electoral system, doing nothing is not an option,” Roe said. “Overwhelming majorities of Michiganders and Americans support voter ID. If all we did was make that change in our law, it would release a lot of steam from this boiling cauldron and help us get back to a more normalized political system.”

Trump, meanwhile, has continued making false assertions about the election, including at a Republican gathering in Florida last month.

A CNN poll released Friday found that 30 percent of Americans say Biden did not legitimately win enough votes to win the presidency, including 70 percent of Republicans. Less than a quarter of Republicans — 23 percent — believe Biden legitimately won enough votes for the presidency. However, the percentage of Republicans who falsely say there is solid evidence that Biden did not win has dropped by eight percentage points, from 58 percent in January to 50 percent now.

Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of communication and rhetorical studies at Syracuse University, said the pressure inside parts of the Republican Party to support Trump’s false election narrative has “a long tail.”

“It feels like this has been happening in the Republican Party for a really long time,” Phillips said. “If you allow an entire contingent of your caucus to be steeped in conspiratorial thinking, what … do you think is going to happen? They’re going to turn on you.”

In Arizona, Republicans in the state Senate instructed Maricopa County to turn over all of its voting machinery and 2.1 million ballots for a new recount, which is underway. Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Jack Sellers said that after the five-member board voted in November to certify election results that showed Biden winning the growing and diversifying county by more than two points, the backlash from local Republicans was so intense that police officers were posted at supervisors’ homes for their protection.

Now, Sellers said, he worries about the divisiveness, not just in the country but in his own party — especially in a place like Maricopa, where Republicans already have been losing ground.

“In Maricopa County, only a third of the voters are Republican,” Sellers said. “A third are Democrats and a third are independents. If you don’t even have a third of the voting public all together, how on earth can you expect to win over enough independents and others?”

They are going to cheat. That’s nothing new, of course. The party has been stoking vote fraud conspiracies forever and now Trump has turned it into an article of faith and they are taking action all over the country. Apparently, it helps to have a cult behind you if you want to destroy democracy.

ABC News:

President Joe Biden completes his first hundred days in office with a country that is more optimistic about the coming year, according to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans (64%) are optimistic about the direction of the country in the poll, which was conducted by Ipsos in partnership with ABC News using Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel.

The last time the country came close to that level of optimism about the coming year was in December 2006, when 61% said they were optimistic about where the country was headed, according to previous ABC News/Washington Post polls. Shortly before the 2016 election catapulted Donald Trump to the Oval Office, only 42% of Americans were optimistic about the future, compared to 52% who were pessimistic.

In December 2006 (post-Hurricane Katrina and with the U.S. bogged down in Iraq), Democrats had won control of both houses of Congress, picking up 31 House seats, five in the Senate, and six governorships.

I could stand that again.

CNN last night ran with ‘The honeymoon is over‘ between progressives and Biden, citing a Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement memo and challenges in passing his agenda, The groups agree with Biden and are just champing at the bit for more wins more quickly and less bipartisan posturing. There was no controversy or split there, but controversy draws eyeballs.

A mandatory one year of service by young people to the country would be one way to begin healing a bitterly divided country, the New York Times Editorial Board suggests. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” etc.

“On the surface, the idea would seem to be attractive across the political spectrum — the idealism to liberals, the service to conservatives, the virtues of selfless sharing to millions of Americans who already perform some form of community service,” the Board explains. Service at an early age could be “an introduction to the responsibilities of citizenship, a communion with different layers of society and people of different backgrounds, a taste of different life paths.” Perhaps there would be tuition credits involved like the G.I. Bill, etc.

The Board is talking high concept here and is light on detail. But what is important is establishing a norm:

With America’s democracy threatened by a political and ideological chasm that seems to widen by the day, with dialogue rendered almost futile on fundamental issues such as racial justice, the environment, a battered economy and America’s role in the world, the debate over national service is really a debate over how we move forward.

And what about that? Before getting to ways we might heal the rifts and instill a sense that we are all in this centuries-old political experiment together, the Board acknowledges our libertarian brethren might have other ideas:

To libertarians, talk of government-mandated service smacks of more government imposition on individual liberties, possibly even a violation of the 13th Amendment’s proscription against “involuntary servitude.” Some conservatives argue that national service would be, in effect, government-paid and government-managed social activism, displacing private and faith-based charity. Coerced service is not service, they argue. The rich would get the desirable jobs, while the poor would be stuck with the bad ones. The cost would outweigh the benefits to society.

Perhaps. But the health of private and faith-based charities is hardly the real concern either for conservatives or for libertarians (and there is a great deal of crossover). Charity itself is abhorrent to the Randian ideal of liberty as the freedom to sink or swim on one’s own efforts unaided. One is free to aid someone else, but unless it benefits the person doing the giving, self-sacrifice is vice. Freedom has become an idol without a corresponding graven image. Responsibility is an imposition. Greed is good.

It is that brain toxin as much as any other societal ill that national service between high school and college might help quell. Indoctrination in “the real world” and the real United States prior to college rather than after several years of social theory or before plunging into skills training.

In arguing for national service nearly a decade ago, E.J. Dionne reminded readers that while the Declaration’s “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” trips off the tongue, mutually pledging “to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our Sacred Honor” gets left in the dust.

“We are sharply divided over the very meaning of our founding documents,” Dionne explains, “and we are more likely to invoke the word ‘we’ in the context of ‘us versus them’ than in the more capacious sense that includes every single American.”

Dionne wrote:

Who knows whether the universal expectation of service would change the country as much as [retired U.S. Army Gen. Stanley] McChrystal hopes. But we have precious few institutions reminding us to join the Founders in pledging something to each other. We could begin by debating this proposal in a way that frees us from the poisonous assumption that even an idea involving service to others must be part of some hidden political agenda. The agenda here is entirely open. It’s based on the belief that certain unalienable rights entail certain unavoidable responsibilities.

Yet consumer capitalism and the pressures of making one’s way condition us to deploy with all haste that cherished liberty (won by others) in pursuit of money to make and stuff to buy. For ourselves. We’ll (grudgingly) pay association fees, but taxes for the upkeep of the country? Taxes are theft.

Widespread support for President Biden’s infrastructure proposal suggests that that spell might be breaking at long last. (Broken axles and tires blown on the nation’s decaying roadways might be helping.) A spell of self has taken hold in late-stage capitalism at the expense of e pluribus unum. A period of national service might be one way to shore up the republic, hasten the spell’s demise, and ensure it does not return soon.

What is it about the Republican Party that inspired so many batshit crazy people to run? And what is it about GOP voters who just love to vote for them?

Here’s a doozy:

Kansas state Rep. Mark Samsel was arrested and charged with misdemeanor battery on Thursday after getting into a physical altercation with a student while substitute teaching in Wellsville.

Samsel, 36, was booked into the Franklin County Adult Detention Center after 3:30 p.m. Thursday. He has since been released on $1,000 bond, Sheriff Jeff Richards said.

Superintendent Ryan Bradbury said that Samsel will no longer be allowed to work for the district.

On Wednesday, Samsel, R-Wellsville, was substitute teaching at the Wellsville school district’s secondary school. Throughout the day, high school students began recording videos of the lawmaker talking about suicide, sex, masturbation, God and the Bible.

In one video shared with The Star, Samsel tells students about “a sophomore who’s tried killing himself three times,” adding that it was because “he has two parents and they’re both females.”

“He’s a foster kid. His alternatives in life were having no parents or foster care parents who are gay,” Samsel tells students. “How do you think I’m going to feel if he commits suicide? Awful.”

In another video, Samsel is recorded telling students, “make babies. Who likes making babies? That feels good, doesn’t it? Procreate. … You haven’t masturbated? Don’t answer that question. … God already knows.”

Videos shared with The Star show Samsel focusing most of his attention on one male student. Both Samsel and the student paced around the classroom, talking back and forth. Samsel is shown following the student around and grabbing him. In one video, he puts his arms around the student and says that he was being hard on him.

At one point, Samsel tells the student, “You’re about ready to anger me and get the wrath of God.” He then pushes him.

In another video, he tells students, “Class, you have permission to kick him in the balls.”

Parents told The Star that Samsel “put hands on the student” and allegedly kneed him in the crotch. In a video apparently taken immediately after the incident, the student is shown laying on the ground. Samsel is standing over him and says, “did it hurt?”

He then asks him why he is about to start crying, pats him on the shoulder and apologizes, and then says he can “go to the nurse, she can check it for you.”

Samsel addresses another student and says, “do you want to check his nuts for him, please?”

The videos angered dozens of parents, who felt that their children were put in danger. Samsel works with students in several capacities, including as a referee and through church groups, parents said.

“I’m a concerned parent who doesn’t want this swept under the rug,” said father Joshua Zeck. “He’s around kids all the time. He’s a state representative. He’s in a position of power.”

Zeck said that he felt Samsel was “bullying” the student.

In a message to families, Bradbury said that the situation is being investigated.

“Student safety has and always will be our first priority,” he said.

Samsel is the second Kansas lawmaker to be arrested this year. Former Senate Majority Leader Gene Suellentrop, a Wichita Republican, was charged with felony eluding and fleeing from police and also faces misdemeanor charges of drunk and reckless driving after allegedly driving the wrong way on Topeka highways on March 16. He was forced to step down from his leadership post.

On Twitter, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas posted: “What the hell is going on with the #KSLEG this session?” He added that Samsel “shouldn’t just be terminated from substituting. He should be blocked from being around all kids.”

The district reported the incident, and an investigation was conducted by the Wellsville Police Department and Franklin County Sheriff’s Office. After the investigation, Samsel was arrested for misdemeanor battery, according to a news release.

In a Snapchat post shared with The Star, Samsel wrote that “it was all planned.”

“Every little bit of it. That’s right. The kids and I planned ALL this to SEND A MESSAGE about art, mental health, teenage suicide, how we treat our educators and one another. To who? Parents. And grandparents. And all of Wellsville,” he posted.

He wrote that he gave one particular student “hope.”

“I went to jail for battery. Does that really make me a criminal? Time will tell.”

He said that the incident happened during fifth period, and that the classes before that hour went as planned, and he shared the same lesson in each one. He said what happened was “exactly what God planned. The kids were in on it. Not all of them. But most.”

Parents told The Star that their children were upset by what took place that day.

“He’s a leader. He’s in the statehouse. He’s somebody in a position of power. And he did not do right by those kids,” Zeck said. “A lot of kids were affected by that.”

Jessica Roberts, a mother with two children who attend the school, said that she is now more concerned about Samsel’s involvement in youth sports and activities.

“I think he shouldn’t be around children,” she said.

House Speaker Ron Ryckman told The Star that “we’re not yet aware of the details and in the process of gathering as much information as we can.”

Samsel, who is an attorney, is in his second term in the House, where he’s occasionally courted controversy. In February, he was one of just 13 lawmakers to vote against a bill that would have ended an exemption for spouses from the state’s sexual battery law.

Ahead of the vote, he gave a speech in which he appeared to express concerns about criminalizing sexual relations between spouses.

“To me, it gets to what does the sanctity of marriage mean?” Samsel was quoted as saying, according to the Kansas Reflector. “And I’m single, so I’m not the best person to speak to this. But when you do get married, what does that mean? And what implied consent are you giving?”

More recently, Samsel raised the possibility of impeaching Suellentrop, but the state constitution doesn’t allow the impeachment of legislators.

“If we’re going to be in a leadership position, who’s most important that’s watching us? To me, it’s the kids,” Samsel told The Star recently when discussing the Suellentrop case.

“And when they look across our country right now and see that you can do things under bathroom stalls or whatever else, make up an excuse, deny immediately and then it turns out, yeah, you were kind of guilty — the process happens way too many times and it’s not been done the right way.”

Issues? What issues?

There are a lot of bad ones. But this one is just horrifying:

Former President Trump was an expert at sowing the doubt that’s now made it into proposals of at least 40 measures aimed at expanding the power of poll watchers — largely seen as an attempt to give legislative weight to former president’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and a stolen 2020 election.

“Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do,” the increasingly desperate candidate Trump told a crowd of supporters during a campaign stop in North Carolina weeks before the Nov. 3 election. 

“I’m urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully because that’s what has to happen. I am urging them to do it,” Trump said during a presidential debate last fall against the then-Democratic nominee who would become his successor, Joe Biden.

The message was clear: Trump was calling on his supporters to monitor voting activity, but that call was cached in a broader effort to sow distrust in the 2020 elections.

Now months into Biden’s presidency, Republican state legislators in at least 20 states are responding.

Thirty-three of those measures would give poll watchers more authority to observe voters and election officials and would impose fewer limitations on the watchers’ actions at polling places and other locations, according to a tally published by the Brennan Center for Justice.

The report comes as bills expanding the powers of poll watchers were enacted into law in Georgia and Iowa last month.

A bulk of the measures detailed by the Brennan Center that are currently at play (12 have passed one or both chambers or have seen some sort of committee action, according to the report) were filed in Texas where they are working their way through the GOP-controlled legislature.

Voting rights experts have warned that expanding the powers of poll watchers could increase the possibility of voter intimidation and harassment. 

Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, Trump often urged supporters to appear at the polls and join an “army” of poll watchers, often tacking the call to guard the polls onto a broader effort to sow distrust in the elections process rather than reinforce confidence about safeguarding the vote.  

I think we know hat’s going to happen, don’t you? A bunch of Red Hat yahoos are going to flood voting places and try to harass and terrorize racial minorities, students and the elderly who they believe might be voting the wrong way. And it will be legal to do so.

I had just finished watching some clips of Tucker Carlson when I came upon this twitter thread. For some reason it all seemed familiar:

The images I found researching my new Nazi May Day piece are really mindblowing. First up: socialist imagery plastered in swastikas. Then: swastikas on top of maypoles. The Nazis phased the holiday from the first to the second in order to supplant socialism with Völkisch fascism

Workers holding tools and red flags — classic May Day, except they’re surrounding Hitler and the flags have swastikas on them

Meanwhile, the trade unions were banned and replaced by the German Labor Front, whose flag appropriated classic workers’ movement imagery and paired it with the swastika

You can read about what the hell was going on here

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/05/nazi-may-day-hitler-socialism

Originally tweeted by Meagan Day (@meaganmday) on May 1, 2021.

Read the whole piece if you get a chance. It’s just fascinating. The Nazis were totally blatant about co-opting the rhetoric and imagery of their enemy and turning it into their own propaganda.

Our homegrown neo-fascists aren’t quite as good at it, but listen to Tucker Carlson some time as he uses left wing language and complaints against the left. Check out his paeans to Elizabeth Warren’s book some time. It’s chilling the way he twists her intent into an Viktor Orbanesque white nationalist call for women to leave the workplace and have many more children so the country can be repopulated with “Real Americans.” He knows what he’s doing.

The Republicans are yearning for its return but for some reason it isn’t. I wonder what that might be?

President Joe Biden has spent his first 100 days pushing massive spending bills, proposing higher taxes and enacting progressive policies. But unlike his Democratic predecessor, President Barack Obama, a mass movement in opposition hasn’t materialized yet.

At this point in his presidency, Obama faced the Tea Party revolt. On April 15, 2009 ― Tax Day ― thousands of protesters took to the streets in cities across the U.S. to demonstrate against high taxes and increased government spending following the Great Recession. In Washington, D.C., a crowd even forced a temporary shutdown of the White House after they hurled tea bags onto the executive mansion’s lawn. 

Republicans insist the same type of backlash is coming for Biden if he continues down the path he’s on. But the party, still reeling from years of Donald Trump and a Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, faces a problem: some of Biden’s policies are very popular. 

That’s particularly true of the coronavirus stimulus. Turns out, people are less displeased with spending when it puts dollars in their pockets, as Republican Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) acknowledged to HuffPost this week. 

“Even my counties back in Indiana are happy, which is a very conservative area,” said Braun, a deficit hawk. “They’re asking, ‘How can I spend $15 million in a rural county?’ I think the spending part of it was smart politically because they put a sugar high out there and put a smoke screen to how radical some of the legislation may end up being.”

What if it isn’t really radical at all and people are happy to have the government do something positive for a change? What if people never really gave a damn about “deficits” and other abstract fiscal policies but were just mad that the government was helping “others” and didn’t feel they were getting their fair share?

The Republicans are hoping against hope that their tired old tropes will reawaken the nation to embrace the ghost of Ronald Reagan and hate Joe Biden but it isn’t happening. I think it’s because the base of the party is irrevocably hooked on the red meat racist demagoguery of Donald Trump and those kinds of abstractions just don’t get their blood pumping anymore.

It’s clear these officials think they can get traction by screaming “Marxism” over and over again and trying to conflate that with “cancel culture” in order to create more opposition to Biden’s agenda. So far, it’s not working. Republicans want unadulterated victimization and racist propaganda. See: Tucker Carlson. This old-fashioned Reaganomics crapola just doesn’t sell like it used to.

This happened on Thursday:

MIllions of people still believe this too:

I think we probably need to grapple with the fact that 50% of Republicans have been brainwashed and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Amanda Marcotte’s tweet this morning caught my attention and brought to mind a swirling toilet bowl.

From the referenced Talking Points Memo post:

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) plans to burst back onto the scene with guns blazing through a public crusade to take down “RINOs” (“Republicans In Name Only”), along with Democrats, as the feds investigate him for alleged sex trafficking.

According to Politico, Gaetz is teaming up with far-right extremist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) to launch an “America First Tour,” where they’ll rail against “the radical left” and Republicans who they believe aren’t loyal enough to ex-President Donald Trump.

Maybe I’m imagining things, but this feels like a story we have seen before. RINOs are like commies hiding in woodpiles for conservatives, I guess, and they are still on the watch for those. No matter that the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed 30 years ago in a different century.

Gaetz’s upcoming tour marks an apparent strategy to bombast his way through the ever-growing scandal around his alleged payments to women and a 17-year-old minor for sex, along with allegations that he paid to have the minor travel across state lines. The congressman has not been criminally charged in the federal probe, which also now reportedly includes an investigation into his ties to Florida’s medical marijuana industry.

Gaetz has denied all the allegations.

The Republican’s renewed push to aggressively defend Trump’s honor against “RINOs” comes even as the ex-president reportedly keeps Gaetz at arm’s length. CNN also reported earlier this month that Trump had rejected Gaetz’s request for a meeting.

The stiff-arm from Trump will only heighten Matt’s ardor.