Month: July 2021

I was all prepared to write about a sad National Review Incel’s piece, but Roy Edroso did it so well in his newsletter that I just had to share a piece of it.

 Take this from Eric Kauffman at National Review:

Viewpoint neutrality should be legally mandated

The bizarre headline (and yes, I know that sometimes authors don’t write or approve their own headlines, though in the current journalistic environment a writer is unlikely to get even that level of editorial support) gives the impression that a few words were accidentally lopped off; surely Kauffman can’t mean that all viewpoints must be neutralized; am I not to be allowed a preference for coffee ice cream over chocolate, or the works of Carlton Mellick III over those of Chuck Tingle?

But then you read on:

When a sample of nearly 1,500 female Ivy League students was asked whether they would date a Trump supporter, only 6 percent said yes (after excluding the small minority of the sample who support him). So finds a survey of 20,000 university students that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) conducted in 2020. While people are free to discriminate however they wish in dating, this attitude bleeds into problematic spheres such as hiring and social toleration.

[Rips up a guy’s janitor position application] “Sorry, I just can’t see myself fucking him.”

This reveals the predilection among many young elite Americans for progressive authoritarianism…

I can’t break in for every nonsense phrase he uses but does “young elite American” mean college student? Because if so he should just say that. Now I’m really convinced Kauffman wrote the headline.

…a belief system that justifies infringing rights to equal treatment or free speech in the name of the emotional “safety” of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexuality groups.

So wokeness is keeping MAGA guys from getting their wick dipped? Is refusing to date a Jo Jorgensen supporter also woke/snowflake/slur-of-the-moment? (I bet Kauffman could cook up an algorithm whereby refusal to date Trumpkins is 100% authoritarian but your score goes down by increments if you’ll consider supporters of other terrible Presidential candidates.)

In this left-modernist worldview, conservatives’ resistance to racial, gender, and sexual progressivism mark them as moral deviants.

What’s sexual progressivism? Cunnilingus? No wonder these people have trouble getting dates.

Then Kauffman yaps a while about how, in order to generally get social results they desire, conservatives have to use power and force rather than persuasion (“As J. D. Vance, Michael Lind, and Richard Hanania suggest, conservatives will have to overcome their squeamishness about government to have any chance of holding back the woke domination of American institutions”). And he keeps on going back to dating. Did you know that only 23% of “Ivy League men” will date Trump women? (Kauffman finds this “highly discriminatory.”) “Non-Trumpist Republicans” are prejudiced against Trump supporters too! Conversely, other poll results show “that Trump supporters are considerably more politically tolerant than Clinton voters when it comes to dating.” Maybe they heard Democrats were good in bed.

Kauffman eventually appears to feel a need to explain why the refusal to date Trump supporters is significant of anything besides the sad recognition that one’s fascism is unattractive:

The problem of “affective polarization” has been well documented, in which people react negatively to those of the opposing political tribe, and this animosity spills over from politics into everyday social relationships. But what if polarization has an asymmetric effect on power in society? What if the elite is becoming a politically endogamous tribe that dominates positions of power in society, reserving them for those with the correct political pedigree?

In other words, Trump voters are not unfuckable because they’re rude, chest-beating bullies who smell; they’re rude, chest-beating bullies who smell because “affective polarization” made them unfuckable. Morlocks are made, not born! Consider the lifetime of lovelessness and loneliness to which you elites have condemned them! Can’t you at least offer them the dignity of a hand job?

Lol.

It’s almost a cliche that so much of the misogyny out there stems from certain men’s belief that they are entitled to have sex with all the beautiful women they are attracted to. (Women, of course, are entitled to no such privilege — they must fuck any man who wants them, apparently.) This is the philosophy of the incel movement and it’s underlying belief system does animate a whole lot of the resentment that seems to motivate some men. And they do seem to gather in greater numbers on the right (although not exclusively.)

This piece illuminates yet another aspect of the American right’s burgeoning neo-fascism. While whining about “cancel culture” and complaining about their freedom being curtailed by the Deep State, they are demanding that they be loved in spite of their toxic beliefs and openly requiring Orwellian surveillance of American citizens:

Tucker Carlson wants cameras in every classroom to make sure teachers arent teaching whatever it is he's defining as "critical race theory" pic.twitter.com/KA6mAHN6cw

— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) July 7, 2021

Shameless to the end.

Roy Edroso’s newsletter is really great, by the way. Nobody can touch his acerbic wit.

The Grim Reaper is just plain evil:

McConnell, in Kentucky, talks Biden’s $1.9T Covid relief law: “It passed on a straight party line vote… So you’re going to get a lot more money. I didn’t vote for it, but you’re going to get a lot more money. Cities and counties in Kentucky will get close to $700-800 million.”

McConnell, cont’d: “If you add up the total amount that’ll come into our state: $4 billion… So my advice to members of the legislature and other local officials: Spend it wisely because hopefully this windfall doesn’t come along again… We’ve floated entirely too much money.”

McConnell says Dems’ plans to spend trillions more is “wildly inappropriate” and will harm economy. “And that’s why the era of bipartisanship on this stuff is over.”

He says “there’s a way forward” on infrastructure “if that’s credibly paid for as opposed to adding to the debt.”

McConnell bashes Biden/Democratic plans to raise the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%: “Our friends on the other side act like corporations are not people. Well what about all the people that work there? And all the people who have stock in their retirement account?”

McConnell: “There is a process by which they could pass this bill w/out a single Republican. But we’re going to make it hard for them. And there are few Democrats left in rural America and some others who would like to be more in the political center who may find this offensive.”

Mitch McConnell on the 2020 election: “The president was not re-elected but his party had a really good day.”

McConnell says “some of the regulatory overreach” of the Biden administration “may well not survive the courts.”

“We have three new Supreme Court justices, 54 new circuit court judges. And it was my top priority…to get in place judges…referred to as strict constructionists.”

“I’m pretty happy with the new Court,” Mitch McConnell says of the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court he helped build, praising last week’s 6-3 ruling to uphold some voting restrictions in Arizona.

McConnell goes long in touting his impact on the courts, starting with the 2016 decision to block Pres. Obama from filling the Scalia vacancy. With Democrats now in control, he says, the courts are the main bulwark and “some of this stuff may be subject to judicial review.”

Originally tweeted by Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) on July 6, 2021.

The man is a monster. But you knew that.

Donald Trump held another rally over the July 4 holiday weekend and made a little news. He brought up the Manhattan district attorney’s felony indictment of his company and its CFO, Allen Weisselberg, by playing dumb about the law and making clear that he believes that important people like him shouldn’t have to pay taxes. This is no surprise. When he was confronted by Hillary Clinton in a 2016 presidential debate for failing to pay his taxes, he said, “That makes me smart.”

Whether any of that will ever add up to Trump himself being charged with anything is an extreme long shot, but he certainly doesn’t make it easy on his lawyers or, as Salon’s Amanda Marcotte points out, his henchmen. Nonetheless, he has a lot of them — henchmen that is.  And a good many new recruits appear to be running for office in 2022.

The Washington Post’s Amy Gardner did a rundown of some early-bird campaigns around the country and Trump loyalists are on the move. She wrote about one candidate for Arizona secretary of state, GOP State Rep. Mark Finchem, who told a  QAnon-friendly talk show that he believes it’s possible that the bogus “audit” of the 2020 presidential ballots will result in overturning the results of the last election. And there is Georgia Rep. Jody Hice, an evangelical pastor who was elected to Congress as a hardcore Christian conservative but has now been converted to full-time Big Lie purveyor. Donald Trump has enthusiastically endorsed Hice’s primary challenge to his nemesis, current Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who famously refused to help Trump steal the election in 2020.

Then there are the average citizens who’ve been moved to primary Republicans through Trump loyalty. Virginia House of Delegates candidate Wren Williams defeated a longtime incumbent solely because the latter said he’d seen no evidence of fraud in 2020. Then there’s Mellissa Carone of Michigan, the former temp worker for Dominion Voting Systems who appeared disoriented or perhaps inebriated at a hearing alongside Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, making claims so outlandish that she became the subject of a “Saturday Night Live” sketch. Of course she’s now running for a State House seat. How could she not?

These are just a few of the Trump Republicans who are running for state office on the Big Lie platform. If they win, their primary goal will be to change elections systems in their states to ensure that legislators will no longer be hampered by all those inconvenient laws that stand in the way of overturning election results that don’t reflect the will of Real America. You know, Trump voters.

Gardner reports:

While most of these campaigns are in their early stages, the embrace of Trump’s claims is already widespread on the trail and in candidates’ messages to voters. The trend provides fresh evidence of Trump’s continued grip on the GOP, reflecting how a movement inspired by his claims and centered on overturning a democratic election has gained currency in the party since the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

This, as I’ve written before, is the new Republican organizing principle. And it’s not confined to state offices. It’s early yet, but there are signs that Big Lie candidates will on the ballot for the U.S. House and Senate all over the country as well, in many cases running to take down Republican incumbents.

Obviously, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming is at the top of the hit list. Another is Rep. Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, once considered a rising star in the Republican Party, and now a prime Trump target. The race to unseat him is crowded, with all the candidates elbowing each other out of the way to prove just how energetically they can lick Trump’s boots. Trump has endorsed a political novice named Max Miller. who the Daily Beast describes as “a 32-year-old former White House aide with a thin résumé and a rap sheet that includes multiple charges … for assault, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest.” 

Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington was among the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in January (and it was she who revealed that Trump told House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy that he “didn’t care as much about the election” as the rioters did). She faces a primary challenge by a military veteran named Joe Kent, who says all incumbents who refused to challenge the Electoral College certification should be run out of office.

Senate races appear to be organizing along similar lines. Trump has already endorsed a primary challenger to Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who committed the unpardonable sin of voting to convict in his second impeachment trial. And Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma is shocked, I tell you, shocked, that the chairman of the Oklahoma GOP has endorsed his primary challenger, which he claims is unprecedented (and is indeed highly unusual). What is the reason for this break with party norms? Lankford failed to object to the certification of the presidential election on Jan. 6.

I’m sure there are governor’s races which will be fought on the same basis. I’m not entirely sure exactly why this is happening, but Allen West, the former Florida congressman, former Texas Republican Party chairman and former Army officer (who was forced to retire over the abuse of an Iraqi policeman) is challenging Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has practically handcuffed himself to Trump’s border wall as a symbol of his loyalty. Presumably West is going to run as the One True Texas Trumper, but it’s hard to see how he can be any more unctuous and sycophantic than Abbott.

Trump, meanwhile, is said to be focused almost exclusively on the Big Lie, clearly unable to deal with the fact that he lost in 2020 and bent on revenge for his humiliation. But that’s also his ticket to the 2024 election, and he isn’t confining himself to fantasies about “audits” and pyrrhic recount victories. He’s made the decision to portray Jan. 6 as his movement’s crucible.

Up until now it’s only been the fringiest of the fringe, like Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, who declare that the insurrectionists who have been arrested are being persecuted for their political beliefs. Only the most extreme elements have suggested, for instance, that Capitol rioter Ashli Babbit was murdered in cold blood without cause. Trump has now brought these ideas into the mainstream. At his rally in Florida, he said:

How come so many people are still in jail over Jan. 6? By the way, who shot Ashli Babbitt? Who shot Ashli Babbitt? We all saw the hand. We saw the gun. … Now they don’t want to give the name, It’s got to be released.

Trump is literally normalizing the insurrection and turning those who participated into heroes and martyrs. And all those sycophantic candidates who are running on the Big Lie platform will follow his lead and say the same things. 

This shouldn’t really come as a surprise. After all, the tweet that finally got Trump banned from twitter made clear that he saw it this way from the very beginning:

“Remember this day forever.”

Donald Trump’s tweet on the evening of January 6 — hours after the Capitol riot. 

The most damning tweet of all? pic.twitter.com/PKU0rqVIBl

— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) February 9, 2021

Salon

This has been a running joke with me for decades: “There are a lot of good jobs in [your town here]. I know people who have two or three.”

As the COVID-19 pandemic winds down and the Delta variant winds up, Americans are still re-evaluating their life choices, and not only what kind of working lives they want but are willing to tolerate. Especially younger Americans.

One trending narrative is that employment is rebounding, pay rates are up, and workers are in the driver’s seat. But not for long, Politico reports:

The country’s rapid reopening has created a unique economic environment where the demand for workers is rising faster than the supply, giving greater clout to lower-wage employees whose help is needed as Americans flock back to restaurants and retail stores.

But without significant structural changes — including legislation aimed at increasing workers’ bargaining power — the labor market will return to normal in a matter of months, handing the balance of power back to employers where it has been trending for decades, economists and worker advocates say. The flurry of bonuses is likely to be short-lived, and wage hikes might not have lasting benefits for the next round of hires.

“I think the gains of workers will be evanescent,” said Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.), a former labor organizer and a strong voice in Congress for workers. “They will not last.”

A personal version of this economy’s underbelly comes from an anonymous, semi-pro, college essay writer. The recent English graduate with $70k in student debt was out of bartending work when the pandemic shut down everything. When a friend recommended writing essays for a black-market essay mill, well, Anonymous needed the cash. Economics trumped ethics.

But customers’ situations did not meet expectations that all would be elite, rich kids too lazy to write their own papers (there were some). Hundreds, maybe most, were simply desperate:

They were not rich. Students would try to negotiate prices or work out payment plans. They said things like “I’ll be back to accept your offer on Friday when my check clears.” An assistant manager at Taco Bell, a drive-through operator at Wendy’s, a cashier at Whole Foods— you name it. My clients had a variety of low-income jobs and attended classes simultaneously. I’d ask them a question about their project, and they wouldn’t get back for a day or two. When I’d finally hear back, they’d say, “Sorry, I was working a double.”

And more often than not, it wasn’t students—or parents—at elite colleges purchasing papers. It was students at community colleges working for minimum wage who didn’t have time to write them.

It was single parents who had to balance work, child care, and college. They often had kids and multiple jobs, and they were just trying to advance their careers with a degree.

It was international college students. A few clients from China told me they could crush any American in calculus, but when it came to writing an English essay for their American lit class, they were at a major disadvantage, especially when COVID began and they went back to China.

Even fellow essay-writers from academia participated in the black market to make ends meet.

Everyone was cheating because it was the only way to stay afloat or to get anywhere in this economy. Bootstraps these days are mighty short and break easily. Anonymous eventually quit when Covid began to lift and bartending and other literary-related work again became options.

As much as we hear people emerging from their Covid cocoons are reevaluating their work lives, one wonders how little will change when we have fully recovered. This economy should be serving people, not the other way around. But there is little sign of that changing in my lifetime. The Market demands tribute. So long as those who benefit most set the rules (or ignore them), the tribute it demands are workers’ lives and souls.

I’ll likely be using “I know people who have two or three” when I’m 90.

The dismal science? Move over for dismal patriots.

Thomas Edsall this morning expands on the thesis that many of our loudest and proudest flag-wavers are animated by animus toward fellow Americans. In fact, another study, “Partisan Schadenfreude and the Demand for Candidate Cruelty,” indicates that these voters take “‘joy in the suffering’ of partisan others.” They “create a ‘demand for candidate cruelty’ since these voters are ‘more likely than not to vote for candidates who promise to pass policies that ‘disproportionately harm’ supporters of the opposing political party.’”

Exploiting that, and in the tradition of George Wallace, Edsall writes, Donald Trump “has mobilized and consolidated a cohort that now exercises control over the Republican Party, a renegade segment of the electorate, perhaps as large as one third of all voters, who disdain democratic principles, welcome authoritarian techniques to crush racial and cultural liberalism, seek to wrest away the election machinery and suffer the mass delusion that Trump won last November.”

At The Bulwark, Joshua Tait examines the paradox of Trump intellectuals (no, he’s not treating that as an oxymoron) who for all their “grandiose professions of love for country” seem to hate it deeply. Or at least more than half of it. A senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and a visiting research scholar at Hillsdale College, Glenn Elmers targets not only undocumented immigrants but those “who may technically be citizens of the United States but are no longer (if they ever were) Americans.”

In the same way that dehumanizing the enemy in war makes it easier for your soldiers to kill them, de-Americanizing political opponents makes it easier for Republicans to justify their disenfranchisement. Or in the case of insurrection, to hang them. Or in the case of an election loss to them, to overturn it.

Tait writes of these dismal patriots, “What’s unusual about the Trumpist right is the extent to which they think that America is not just on the brink of collapse, but that it has already toppled.” A product of post-electoral defeat malaise, perhaps, “but increasingly these American Greatness patriots appear to actively hate America and their fellow citizens.”

Their issue, Tait explains, is with “the rights guaranteed in the Founding documents gradually reinterpreted and expanded to include more Americans” as the country grapples, too, with the demands of modernity:

Many Trumpist intellectuals have bought into an idealized vision of a bygone America and see the present as its perverse antithesis. So they proclaim, or at least imply the existence of, an authentic American people that excludes more than it includes or a Golden Age that never really existed. Caught trying to theorize the dominance of an electoral minority, they rely on a narrative of the people versus a ruling class—a kind of Silenced Majority of real Americans battling elites and their captured voting blocs of immigrants and minorities.

“Fundamentally at odds with modernity,” Tait concludes, “the Trumpist intellectuals are at odds with the real America, but remain committed to the rhetoric of patriotism. They are strangers in their own country, all the while professing to love it.”

Which is to say they are losing and know it.

The Jim Crow South managed to snatch racist victory from the jaws of battlefield defeat after the Civil War. For over a century Southerners and fellow travelers held off modernity and the promise of a more perfect union “reinterpreted and expanded to include more Americans.”

Non-white Americans born and naturalized since the Civil Rights Era now occupy more of the political space than ever. The Real Americans™ Tait and Edsall describe remain just as committed to the rhetoric of capitalist competition while grinding their teeth to nubs at having to actually having to compete. They would rather rig the game.

Edsall writes that Trump appealed to the demographic seeing its vote-share shrinking, “the alienated, the distrustful, voters willing to sacrifice democracy for a return to white hegemony.” They will have their hegemony back or else set the country alight.

Easily the best film I’ve seen in well over a year, bar none, an opinion more than widely shared. There is little I can add to what’s already been said about the great performances, the excellent montage of music and documentary — clearly done by someone who really understands music — and the infuriating story which, if you haven’t heard. is:

This amazing footage, shot in 1969, sat on a shelf, unseen and unheard, for over fifty years because no one was interested in releasing a film that featured nothing but black music performed in front of a black crowd.

The question is why weren’t they were interested in releasing this film? One thing is certain: it had nothing to do with whether the film would make money. The performers are A-List artists with huge — including number one — hits at the time. Among the acts: Sly Stone, Hugh Masekela, a mind-boggling Stevie Wonder, The Staples Singers, the Fifth Dimension — of course it would have done well.

The most plausible conclusion for its disappearance is that the dominant white culture did not want an unabashedly positive celebration of black artistry and community out in the larger world. It may not have even been a conscious decision on the part of the (white) people who turned this project down. It just didn’t fit the dominant mindset of the decision makers.

That is textbook systemic racism. As a default attitude, Black culture gets disappeared, perpetuating myths of abjection and marginalization. In this case, systemic racism deprived the Black community, not to mention the larger American and world community, of a universally appealing expression of joy, companionship, and humanity.

One of the most remarkable things about Summer of Soul: As a child of the 60’s, who grew up with and loved all this music at the time… well, the music sounds even better now. This is a must see.

I thought this was decent thing to do:

The Rev. Al Sharpton and attorneys for George Floyd’s family have joined family and friends in mourning a white Arkansas teenager shot dead by a sheriff’s deputy. The shooting of 17-year-old Hunter Brittain has drawn the attention of civil rights activists, who say it highlights the need for interracial support to address police shootings.

In his eulogy to Brittain on Tuesday, Sharpton said the issue of policing is not about Black and white, but right and wrong. A Lonoke County sheriff’s deputy shot the 17-year-old during a traffic stop on June 23. Authorities have released few details about the shooting. Brittain’s family says he was unarmed and holding a jug of antifreeze. 

The right wing on social media is having a total shit fit.

Of course …

This rundown of the generational divide among Democrats and Republicans in the 2020 election may surprise you:

Biden, predictably, obliterated Trump with the youngest voters – members of the so-called Generation Z, born after 1996, as well as younger millennials. Exit polls had Biden winning 18- to 29-year-olds by 24 points, 60-36, whereas Pew pegs it at 58-38. Exit polls also showed Trump with just a 52-47 edge among voters over 65, and Pew’s numbers came in almost identical – 52-48 for Trump over Biden. And if those were the only topline stats you saw, you wouldn’t think there was a huge problem for Republicans.

But Pew also broke the survey down into not just age groups but generational cohorts. And it’s here where you’ll find the most terrifying information for the GOP. According to Pew, Trump won a decisive majority only with members of the “Silent Generation,” those born between 1928 and 1945 (and the extremely tiny number of living people older than that). Trump dominated that cohort by 16 points, 58-42. That means that the only reliably Republican voter bloc will shrink considerably between now and 2024, and that 65- to 74-year-olds must have been a much more blue-leaning group in 2020 to produce Trump’s comparatively narrow 4-point margin with all over-65s.

That’s the baby boomer cohort and there is a boatload of them. If the GOP can’t get a huge majority of them, they have a problem:

You don’t need a degree in actuarial science to know that in general, 65- to 74-year-olds will be around considerably longer than 75- to 102-year-olds. According to the Social Security Administration, a 65-year-old man has a remaining life expectancy of almost 18 years. At 75, it’s just over 11 years, and at 85 it’s less than six. Members of the Silent Generation are expected to shrink from 9 percent of the voting eligible population in 2020 to 7 percent in 2024. And while I hope that my over-75 parents are around as long as humanly possible, if I were a GOP operative I would be apoplectically trying to figure out ways to make the age profile of the average party supporter substantially younger, rather than tripling down on whatever Fox-driven cultural hysteria is dominating headlines in the conservative media. This stuff is not resonating with anyone who has more than 30 years to live.

Perhaps even worse for former President Trump and his acolytes, the Pew data showed little erosion in the millennial preference for Democrats over Republicans. Fifty-six percent of millennials voted for Clinton in 2016, and 58 percent voted for Biden in 2020. Remember, the first millennials voted in 2002, and as a group they simply have not budged. “Elder millennials” are turning 40 this year and they don’t love the Republican Party any more than they did when George W. Bush was lighting several trillion dollars on fire prosecuting a pointless war in Iraq. And that’s terrible news for the GOP’s hopes of ever becoming a majority party again, because if they keep losing the youngest voters by double digits election after election, they need a significant number of them to get more conservative as they age just to hold current margins in place.

That doesn’t mean Democrats are guaranteed to win the next several elections, even if the playing field is fair. “Demography is destiny” as a theory has aged badly, largely because Republicans remain competitive at the national level even as the country becomes more diverse and less white. Trump’s gains among Latino voters helped avert a total bloodbath in 2020, and there is no particular reason why Republicans couldn’t do better with them in 2024, in theory.

After all, Democrats’ deteriorating performance with non-college educated white voters over the past decade offset the ongoing diversification of the electorate. But according to Pew, the rightward march of white voters was halted and marginally reversed by Joe Biden in 2020, who did 4 points better with non-college-educated whites than Clinton. Republicans may have already run headlong into a white ceiling.

Republicans also continue to make up zero ground with young people. This year’s Harvard Youth Poll of 18- to 29-year-olds was the same horror show for the GOP that it has been for years, and it included yet another year of newly eligible voters who are repulsed by the dyspeptic, off-putting spectacle of the modern Republican Party, whose leading thinkers and politicians are staking their 2022 election strategy on a Woke Panic gambit dependent on demonizing an obscure academic concept (Critical Race Theory) and convincing voters that their imminent (and completely imagined) “cancellation” is their most important problem.

From the looks of these numbers, the most loyal GOP cohort actually is going to be cancelled very soon. By life.

So far, the majority of millennials aren’t getting any more conservative. And there are tons of them.. The boomers a split which, as I said, is very bad news because there are a whole bunch of them as well. It’sa problem.

Hey @VP to be fair, when the Trump’s angry mob at the Capitol chanted “Hang Mike Pence”, they could have been asking you to hang a guy also named Mike. They probably meant “Hang Mike, Pence.” Simple misunderstanding. #RemoveTrumpNow #ImpeachTrumpAgainNOW pic.twitter.com/7mz06d4m4x

— Jim Gaffigan (@JimGaffigan) January 10, 2021

More than 500 people have been charged in the January 6th Insurrection and Trump is getting upset. Josh Marshall notes today that at his rally over the week-end, he fired a shot across the bow:

(H)e now seems to be demanding the release of the various insurrectionists facing charges for storming the Capitol on January 6th. “How come so many people are still in jail over Jan. 6?” he asked the crowd.

He also went further and began to suggest or demand (the ambiguity is a central feature of all Trump incitement) the lynching of the Capitol Police officer who shot insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt.

“By the way, who shot Ashli Babbitt? Who shot Ashli Babbitt? We all saw the hand. We saw the gun … Now they don’t want to give the name, but people know the name. People know where he came from. Now if that were on the other side, the person who did the shooting would be strung up and hung. Now they don’t want to give the name. Who shot Ashli Babbitt? It’s got to be released.”

Making a martyr of Babbitt, who was shot trying to rush the Speaker’s Lobby while members of Congress were being evacuated, has become a staple on the far-right since January 6th. Rep. Paul Gosar, who has become notorious for his work with various white supremacist advocates, claimed Babbitt had been “executed” by an officer who had been “lying in wait” for her while questioning FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Trump says all sorts of wild things. Given the response he got, it seems highly likely this will become a staple of his rally speeches going forward. But what we can see from these comments is that he is focusing on the release of arrested insurrectionists and retribution against the unnamed shooter as leverage points to organize and maintain his hold on the GOP.

I think he’s right. This is rapidly becoming the new rallying cry. Check this analysis, also from TPM:

1 Trump suggested that the cop who shot Babbitt should be ‘hung.’

Trump rolled out Babbitt’s death as a theme in a speech he gave in Sarasota, Florida on July 3, part of a tour that marks his return to in-person events.

“Who shot Ashli Babbitt? We all saw the hand. We saw the gun,” Trump said. “You know, if that were on the other side, the person that did the shooting would be strung up and hung.”

It was a direct call to attack an official who helped defend Congress on Jan. 6, and one that uses language which could describe a lynching as much as anything else.

That segment of the speech got a roar from the crowd, and came after Trump issued a press release repeating what is fast becoming a mantra on the right: Who Killed Ashli Babbitt?

2 Babbitt’s already become a folk hero on the far-right.

Trump made the remarks after far-right figures have spent months trying to make Babbitt into a martyr.

Babbitt was shot and killed on Jan. 6 as she tried to climb through a broken window into the House Speaker’s Lobby, where members of Congress were evacuating.

In the days after her death, far-right Telegram channels lit up with attempts to build her into a folk hero.

“Her name was Ashli Babbitt,” read messages broadcast on both Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio’s account and on Western Chauvinist, a far-right Telegram channel.

That was accompanied by a meme which spread along the same networks, showing a flag with Babbitt’s face in front of a blood-red Capitol building. An Anti-Defamation League report described it as a “symbol of resistance.”

All this has spawned a witch hunt for the officer who shot Babbitt, with various far-right media personalities claiming to have identified the officer in question.

To Simon Purdue, a fellow at the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right, the fact that Babbitt was a white woman helped fuel the outage on the far right.

He likened her to Vicki Weaver, a woman killed by an FBI sniper during the 1992 siege at Ruby Ridge.

“Like Babbitt, Weaver quickly became a martyr for both the anti-government and white supremacists,” Purdue wrote. “Her perceived status as an innocent, white, female victim of ‘state aggression’ instantly placed her on a pedestal, and was used to justify tax protests, demonstrations and even violent action by far-right groups in the years that followed.”

3 Conservative media jumped on the bandwagon.

It’s not just the fringes that have seized on Babbitt’s death.

Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, has focused on Babbitt and the circumstances of her death since April, when he devoted a monologue to the subject after the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division closed its investigation. Carlson also interviewed the family’s lawyer.

“We know that Ashli Babbitt was short. She was female and she was unarmed. There was no evidence the officer who killed her gave her any kind of verbal warning before he pulled the trigger. Is that now standard procedure?” Carlson said. “So when did these rules change? And once again, who exactly shot Ashli Babbitt?”

Part of this, for Carlson and others, is criticism that the mainstream press is supposedly ignoring the issue, failing to hold the government accountable for killing one of its own citizens.

This, like much of the Babbitt discourse, is run through with the idea that police officers who shoot African Americans are swiftly and publicly punished, while Babbitt’s killer has received special treatment.

“Eleven hundred miles from Washington, in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, a police officer accidentally reached for her gun instead of a Taser and killed a man called Daunte Wright. It was a tragedy. All shootings are tragedies,” Carlson said in April. “But we know that officer’s name because every news organization in the country printed it immediately. She has now resigned. She is now facing charges. Her mug shot is everywhere. It is all over the internet.”

4 The fringes are trying to make the movement mainstream.

Trump used Babbitt as a cudgel with which to beat Republican leadership, demanding that the GOP begin to stoke grievances about her death in a way that, so far, only a few members of Congress, Carlson, and the far-right have done.

Amy Kremer, an organizer of the Jan. 6 rally at the ellipse and founder of Women for America First, tweeted a video of Trump “go[ing] there.”

He goes there💥💥💥

President Trump asks who shot Ashli Babbitt and then asks why people are still sitting in jail from Jan 6th, but Antifa and BLM roam free after terrorizing and burning cities down.

Why isn’t McConnell or Republican leadership asking these questions? pic.twitter.com/oMIVTDKj6D

— Amy Kremer (@AmyKremer) July 4, 2021

… apart from Gosar, the rest of the GOP has met the calls to unmask the officer in question not with opprobrium, but rather with silence. It’s in that vacuum that Trump demanded on Saturday that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) take up the cause.

“Why are Republican leaders like McConnell afraid to take up the subject and talk about it?” Trump asked, calling it a “disgrace to our country.”

Trump was always going to use the events of January 6th to martyr himself and his followers. What else is new? They thrive on grievance.

But this is even more dangerous than usual. It’s one thing to chant “lock her up” and push racist memes, as awful as that is. This takes it to a new level. He’s blatantly turning his MAGA cult into a violent revolutionary force.

QOTD:

"This world is run by gangsters. Agent Orange, the guy in Brazil and Putin. They're gonna do whatever they wanna do. They have no morals, no scruples. That's the world we live in. We have to speak out against gangsters like that," says Spike Lee https://t.co/6WmiFCL1IR pic.twitter.com/0jVs29Oe5O

— Variety (@Variety) July 6, 2021

He’s right. I could add a few more names to that list. Orban in Hungary, for instance who is getting a whole lot of love from certain quarters. This latest paean comes from Rod Dreher in The American Conservative:

 For those with eyes to see, Orban’s moves only reveal the illiberalism of those on the Left who still think of themselves as proper liberals. They can’t, or won’t, see how they have discarded pluralism for woke hegemony, but Orban understands that, and is not prepared to play by their rules. With the Left having become so illiberal, and exercising hegemonic power across society, the only effective pushback to it seems to be right-wing illiberalism. The only conservatives who will be spoken well of by liberals today are those who surrender. The liberals — including conservative liberals (e.g., UK Tories and establishment Republicans) — believe that everybody accepting their view of the world is in the natural order of things. Magyar Man, for all his flaws, is an extremely tough and competent politician who is not for surrendering. If we in America are not to be absorbed by the Cathedral, we are going to need our own version of Magyar Man. Given how deep our own Deep State goes, it is unreasonable to think that a single political leader, no matter how brave and skilled, can turn things around. But at least we would have a fighting chance.

The controversy around Viktor Orban is not only about an obstreperous Hungarian politician who doesn’t play well with others. It’s about the future of the West.

UPDATE: To put it succinctly, we might need soft authoritarianism to save us from soft totalitarianism.

Well ok then.

If you want to read Dreher’s full screed, it’s easily googleable. But I think that excerpt gets to the nub of it. He thinks the left’s “wokeness” is totalitarianism so we need authoritarianism to stop it.

In other words it’s Stalin vs Hitler, pick your poison. Except that Joe Biden isn’t Stalin any more than Roosevelt was but there were plenty of Hitler-curious types who said he was.

We’ve seen this movie before.