Month: September 2021

Here’s why he’s crying:

There was never any reason to question the election results out of Arizona. There was an official count of the state’s ballots, followed by an official recount. There was an independent audit, which found literally nothing untoward. The facts were unambiguous: President Joe Biden narrowly defeated Donald Trump in the Grand Canyon State last fall.

But Republican conspiracy theorists — from Phoenix to Mar-a-Lago — were nevertheless convinced that the vote count, recount, and independent reviews weren’t quite good enough. What the GOP needed was a strange company called Cyber Ninjas, led by a guy who promoted QAnon content, which had no relevant experience, to conduct yet another review of the ballots from Arizona’s most populous county.

Republicans in the state Senate, who authorized the fiasco, said it would take a few weeks. Five months later, according to multiple accounts, the endeavor appears to have backfired spectacularly. The Arizona Republic, among many other news organizations, reported overnight:

A monthslong hand recount of Maricopa County’s 2020 vote confirmed that President Joe Biden won and the election was not “stolen” from former President Donald Trump, according to early versions of a report prepared for the Arizona Senate. The three-volume report by the Cyber Ninjas, the Senate’s lead contractor, includes results that show Trump lost by a wider margin than the county’s official election results. The data in the report also confirms that U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly won in the county.

The official results won’t be released until this afternoon, at a presentation scheduled for 4 p.m. eastern, but not surprisingly, the findings appear to have leaked.

To be sure, Arizona’s utterly bonkers sham “audit” appeared pitiful long before these revelations. From the hunt for bamboo fibers to the examination of non-existent watermarks to the scrutiny of “kinematic artifacts,” this process has been an obvious debacle from the outset.

As far back as May, Republican-dominated Maricopa County Board of Supervisors tried to convince GOP state senators that the outlandish process had become a “spectacle that is harming all of us,” adding, “Our state has become a laughingstock.” Around the same time, one Republican state legislator conceded, “It makes us look like idiots…. I didn’t think it would be this ridiculous.”

But if the overnight reporting is correct, and the “audit” showed the Democratic ticket winning by an even wider margin than previously known, the Arizona Republicans’ multi-million-dollar process will soon enter the American Politics Hall of Shame as one of the most brutal own goals of all time.

I wish I could be sure that this will blow back on Trump as he deserves. But you have to remember that his followers believe that Hillary Clinton ran a blood-drinking, pedophile ring out of a pizza parlor in Georgetown, so I think they’ll be able to rationalise anything.

But let’s take a moment to wallow in the schadenfreude, shall we? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so thoroughly hoisted by his own petard.

Sad!

There are many inane rituals that take place in the U.S. Capitol, but none that rival the tiresome conventions around the annual funding of the government known as “raising of the debt ceiling.”

It’s like Groundhog Gay, with Republicans balking at participating and everyone else running around in circles trying to cajole them into getting onboard so the United States doesn’t crash the world economy. It is no way to run a country. This year the issues are more acute than usual because the Democratic majority is concurrently trying to pass two very large programs — the bipartisan physical infrastructure bill and the reconciliation bill that contains the vital human infrastructure program that Joe Biden and the party ran on in 2020. It’s all coming to a head at the same time.

The progressives in both chambers of Congress are standing firm in their demand that Congress pass the agenda that they and Joe Biden both ran on. But sadly, there is a small handful of so-called moderate Democratic House members who have decided to be divas and are threatening to blow up Biden’s program unless it is stripped of much of the funding that makes the rest of it possible, while certain so-called moderate Democratic senators are strutting around insisting the price tag is too high without bothering to name any specific cuts. D.C. is full of demands to meet meaningless and arbitrary deadlines, constantly moving targets and endless tedious posturing these days. 

This dynamic is anything but unprecedented (there are always a few who just have to gum up the works) but with margins as narrow as they are in this polarized body, and with the presidency on the line, you would think these moderates could stay unified with the majority just this once. If they succeed in destroying the president’s signature initiative, they are effectively Republicans. I hope they look good in red MAGA hats.

It’s nice that a handful of Republicans in the Senate managed to vote for the physical infrastructure bill (although the GOP House leadership is now whipping against it) but no one expected that the Republicans would vote for the big infrastructure bill that directly benefits actual humans and addresses climate change. They have no interest in such things. The Democrats are happy to put that bill through the reconciliation process which only requires 50 votes, although corralling all 50 is predictably difficult for the reasons outlined above. But funding the government and raising the debt ceiling should basically be pro-forma votes and the fact that it is pulling teeth every single time is one of the most pathetic annual displays of dysfunction in our government.

It didn’t use to be that way.

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Government shutdowns were never even thought of until the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. It’s happened 21 times since then.

Haggling through the budget process didn’t necessitate actually furloughing workers — until the Reagan Justice Department issued a set of opinions saying that if there is a period when Congress doesn’t allocate funds for some reason, the government must partially or fully shutdown until it comes to an agreement. The longest shutdown came in 2019 when President Trump had a tantrum over his border wall which the Democratic majority refused to fund.

It might happen again this year and it would be particularly destructive. We are still in the middle of a major crisis, a deadly pandemic that is being exacerbated by so many Republicans refusing to get themselves vaccinated. Meanwhile, the need to lift the debt ceiling looms.

The law states that the Treasury Department must come to Congress and get permission to raise the debt ceiling and, according to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, that time is upon us. If Congress fails to lift it by mid-October, the United States will default on its debt and all hell will break loose.

So it’s important to look at how this came to pass. After all, the idea that the U.S. should pay its bills is a no-brainer. And throughout most of our history, that’s exactly how it was treated. In fact, until 1917 it was just done automatically when Congress instituted the rule because federal agencies were spending willy nilly without congressional approval. And mostly it continued to be done automatically without much fanfare. At one point the House instituted what they called the Gephardt Rule (after former Missouri congressman Dick Gephardt), which simply “deems” the debt ceiling lifted when a budget resolution is passed and it is an excellent idea.

However, the modern GOP’s original bad seed, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, saw the opportunity to turn the debt ceiling into another Republican weapon and it’s now pulled out whenever they want to yank the Democrats’ chains. In 1995, in a speech before the Public Securities Association, Ginrich raised the specter of default as if it was a serious option in order to force a budget on radical GOP terms. The demands were not met, but the brinkmanship became an annual GOP custom that’s still playing out today.

This time there’s a new twist, however. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell isn’t even negotiating. He says that Republicans will not vote to raise the debt ceiling because it isn’t their responsibility. And that’s that. Sure, several Democrats just voted to raise it during Trump’s term but that’s their thing. Republicans are now all simply refusing to participate. Except, of course, they are. They are filibustering the budget resolution and the debt ceiling hike making it necessary to get 60 votes, which don’t appear to exist.

McConnell and company insist that Democrats can just raise the debt ceiling in reconciliation which only requires 50 votes. Of course, that also means opening up another round of “vote-o-rama” and that takes time. They also seem to think that somehow voting for the debt ceiling in a party-line reconciliation bill will really hurt the Democrats in 2022. Seems a bit far-fetched to me. Republicans are already going to attack Democrats mercilessly as tax-and-spend liberals no matter what, so it’s hard to see why this would make much difference.

Obviously, McConnell also believes that this gumming up of the works may prevent them from passing their two big infrastructure bills although it looks like Democrats may do that dirty work for him. But you have to wonder why Republicans keep going down these roads. Every government shutdown since Gingrich’s time has blown back on the GOP because everyone knows that they are the ones who are obstructing the normal process. It’s their brand!

Ultimately, they are just obstructing for the sake of obstructing. Will Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia ever wake up and realize that their “principled” stand protecting the filibuster has simply made them pawns in Mitch McConnell’s obnoxious trolling strategy? I don’t know, but if they ever plan to do it, now would be an excellent time. 

Salon

As you head into the weekend, spend some time with Robert Kagan’s Washington Post essay on the dangers we face heading into the next election cycle(s). You’ll either start drinking or sober the hell up.

Former Republican and PNAC co-founder, Kagan begins:

The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.

Barring health problems, Trump will run again for the presidency. He and his party “are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary.” He poses challenges the framers had no way to forsee, Kagan warns. They did not forsee the rise of national political parties nor of mass communications that would make possible a mass cult of personality.

For those who know the reference, Trump is a nonfiction version of Asimov’s Mule, an individual with the ability to alter emotions, “a power he used to first instill fear in the inhabitants of his conquered planets, then to make his enemies devoutly loyal to him.” Policy debates are meaningless. Trump himself is their policy.

Trump is different, which is one reason the political system has struggled to understand, much less contain, him. The American liberal worldview tends to search for material and economic explanations for everything, and no doubt a good number of Trump supporters have grounds to complain about their lot in life. But their bond with Trump has little to do with economics or other material concerns. They believe the U.S. government and society have been captured by socialists, minority groups and sexual deviants. They see the Republican Party establishment as corrupt and weak — “losers,” to use Trump’s word, unable to challenge the reigning liberal hegemony. They view Trump as strong and defiant, willing to take on the establishment, Democrats, RINOs, liberal media, antifa, the Squad, Big Tech and the “Mitch McConnell Republicans.” His charismatic leadership has given millions of Americans a feeling of purpose and empowerment, a new sense of identity. While Trump’s critics see him as too narcissistic to be any kind of leader, his supporters admire his unapologetic, militant selfishness. Unlike establishment Republicans, Trump speaks without embarrassment on behalf of an aggrieved segment of Americans, not exclusively White, who feel they have been taking it on the chin for too long. And that is all he needs to do.

Small-r “republican virtue” is dead, Kagan believes. There is no longer commitment among Republicans to “a love of freedom not only for oneself but also as an abstract, universal good; a love of self-government as an ideal; a commitment to abide by the laws passed by legitimate democratic processes; and a healthy fear of and vigilance against tyranny of any kind.”

“A Trump victory [in 2024] is likely to mean at least the temporary suspension of American democracy as we have known it,” Kagan warns.

“American democracy is over,” should Donald Trump retake the Oval Office, Mary Trump pre-concurred in her visit with UnPresidented this week. She herself might need to go into hiding. Donald will have an enemies list and a thirst for vengeance.

Kagan concludes:

We are already in a constitutional crisis. The destruction of democracy might not come until November 2024, but critical steps in that direction are happening now. In a little more than a year, it may become impossible to pass legislation to protect the electoral process in 2024. Now it is impossible only because anti-Trump Republicans, and even some Democrats, refuse to tinker with the filibuster. It is impossible because, despite all that has happened, some people still wish to be good Republicans even as they oppose Trump. These decisions will not wear well as the nation tumbles into full-blown crisis.

It is a slap across the face and a “snap out of it” moment. Peril remains. It is unclear whether there is any vestigial conscience left inside Kagan’s former party. But he is sounding a klaxon to awaken the somnambulant among them, and among the rest of us before it is too late.

“He’s a sociopath. Take that for what it’s worth,” Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, says in comparing Ivanka Trump to her grandfather Fred.

Raw Story has more on Mary Trump’s conversation with John Aravosis and Cliff Schecter of the UnPresidented Podcast. Trump is promoting her latest book, “The Reckoning: Our Nation’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal.” The podcast format gave the former president’s niece much more freedom to speak her mind than a six-minute cable news appearance. She did, beginning with her late father’s story:

Fred Trump’s eldest and namesake, Freddy Trump, was supposed to take over the business and build it bigger and better. But he was so disenchanted with what he had to deal with that he left and decided to do what he loved, flying. That was what ultimately turned Donald into the new Trump heir.

Like his father, Donald also skipped over his namesake and elevated Ivanka to be the more important part of the business. This was, in part, because Don Jr. is the least intelligent of the Trump children, Mary Trump explained.

As for Donald, he is “the weakest person on the planet” but still is successful after his fashion because “he’s been propped up so much.” And Don Jr. (Donnie)?

“Donnie is weak in a different way,” she continued. “He had no intention of striking out on his own. He had no intention of doing anything but sucking up and toeing the line, and the problem is — one of the problems is — and who knows how this happens — but kind of the same problem that happened to him happened to my dad. My grandfather, for whatever reason, didn’t like my father and saw something in his sibling Donald, and the only thing that’s weird is that Donald did the same thing but with Ivanka.”

Donald exhibits childlike behavior like threatening not to be someone’s friend if they are not nice to him. “Some of that’s just arrested development,” says Mary Trump [timestamp 26:00].

The thing he wants most is to be loved, yet “my grandfather made him unlovable.”

But the people who love him he despises. He thinks they’re suckers, assholes, dupes and marks, but he’d never admit it to himself. That would diminish how their adulation burnishes his image. [29:15]

The country suffers from chronic PTSD from its inception, Mary explains in her book. The traumas made us susceptible to men such as Donald because “no powerful white men have ever been held accountable, starting with Robert E. Lee.” And the U.S. has never acknowledged nor atoned for how powerful white supremacy was and continues to be. [36:20]

Despite our progress on matters of race, saving the country from democracy’s downward spiral presents a challenge made worse by the untreated PTSD and our own habits of mind. The notion that bipartisanship is an essential function of governing leaves people like Sen. Joe Manchin trying to make common cause with “a party of fascists” seeking to turn the U.S. into “a theocratic apartheid state.” [43:40]

At its most basic, one party only wants Republicans to vote and the other wants everyone to vote. The voter suppression Republicans promote as rampant is a lie used to justify passing voter suppression laws.

Aravosis responds that where one party believes only Republicans should vote and the other believes everyone should vote, the public concludes, well, let’s compromise, and it’s a win for the anti-democracy party. We get a watered-down version of “only Republicans should vote.”

Should Donald regain the Oval Office in 2024, Mary argued, now that he knows better how to wield the power the office affords, Donald would spent his next term settling scores and seeking vengeance against perceived enemies. There is surely a list, one with her on it. She might have to go into hiding, Mary laughed. Turning serious, she added that she really wasn’t joking. [1:40:00]

The former president this week filed a lawsuit against Mary and the New York Times for “conspiring in an ‘insidious plot’ to improperly obtain his confidential tax records and exploit their use in news articles and a book.” Pulitzer Prize judges called the 2018 Times report “an exhaustive 18-month investigation” that “revealed a business empire riddled with tax dodges.”

“This is the latest in a long line of frivolous lawsuits by Donald Trump that target truthful speech and important journalism on issues of public concern,” said Mary Trump’s attorney Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., It is “doomed to failure.”

But winning in court is not always Donald Trump’s goal. He threatens lawsuits to silence critics. As longtime Hullabaloo readers know, two years ago Trump sicced one of his lawyers on us. He is that petty.

This is good news. If there is evidence of what went on in the White House on January 6th, the country needs to see it:

The White House is leaning toward releasing information to Congress about what Donald Trump and his aides were doing during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol despite the former president’s objections — a decision that could have significant political and legal ramifications.

Trump has said he will cite “executive privilege” to block information requests from the House select committee investigating the events of that day, banking on a legal theory that has successfully allowed presidents and their aides to avoid or delay congressional scrutiny for decades, including during the Trump administration.

But President Biden’s White House plans to err on the side of disclosure given the gravity of the events of Jan. 6, according to two people familiar with discussions who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private discussions.

In response to questions about White House deliberations over what information to release, Biden spokesman Michael J. Gwin said the president views the attack on the Capitol as “a dark stain on our country’s history” and is “deeply committed to ensuring that something like that can never happen again, and he supports a thorough investigation.”

Members of the investigative committee argue that Trump no longer enjoys the protection of executive privilege, encouraging the White House to push aside institutional concerns about sharing information with Congress and aid the panel in an investigation focused on what Democrats and a handful of Republicans have called an assault on democracy.

“It’s not really relevant because there’s no president involved — there’s no such thing as a former president’s executive privilege,” said Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), a committee member who teaches constitutional law. “That’s extremely dilute and not really relevant.”

What Trump was doing while the attack was occurring and who he was speaking with are among the big, unanswered questions concerning the assault on the Capitol.

[…]

“The highly partisan, Communist-style ‘select committee’ has put forth an outrageously broad records request that lacks both legal precedent and legislative merit,” Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich said in a statement. “Executive privilege will be defended, not just on behalf of President Trump and his administration, but also on behalf of the Office of the President of the United States and the future of our nation.”

In response to the House panel’s request, the National Archives has already identified hundreds of pages of documents from the Trump White House relevant to its inquiry. As required by statute, the material is being turned over to the Biden White House and to Trump’s lawyers for review.

The committee’s Aug. 25 letter to the National Archives was both sweeping and detailed, asking for “all documents and communications within the White House on January 6, 2021, relating in any way” to the events of that day. They include examining whether the White House or Trump allies worked to delay or halt the counting of electoral votes and whether there was discussion of impeding the peaceful transfer of power.

Well we know there was, don’t we? We’ve seen the memos. They had a full blown plot.

Trump will delay as long as he can so I’d guess the Supremes will have to decide if they are going to weigh in on how the other branches deal with one another. That would unusual. But with this court, who knows?

Update —The committee is in full effect:

The select panel investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection is issuing subpoenas to four current and former top aides to President Donald Trump, including his most recent chief of staff Mark Meadows.

The committee issued its first subpoenas on Thursday to Meadows; former Pentagon official and longtime House Intelligence Committee aide Kash Patel; former top White House adviser Steve Bannon; and longtime Trump social media chief Dan Scavino. It marks a turning point in the investigation as lawmakers begin homing in on Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results.

They used to make pilgrimages to Iowa and New Hampshire. Now they go to Budapest:

Former Vice President Mike Pence said Wednesday he’s hopeful the majority-conservative Supreme Court secured during the Trump administration will overturn abortion rights in the United States, according to AP.

Pence made the comments at a biennial forum held in Budapest by conservative leaders concerned about changes in demographics, family values, fertility rates and illegal immigration into Western countries.

 “We see a crisis that brings us here today, a crisis that strikes at the very heart of civilization itself,” Pence said during his speech at the forum, according to AP. “The erosion of the nuclear family marked by declining marriage rates, rising divorce, widespread abortion and plummeting birth rates.”“

We may well have a fresh start in the cause of life in America. It is our hope and our prayer that in the coming days, a new conservative majority on the Supreme Court of the United States will take action to restore the sanctity of life at the center of American law.”

Pence praised Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has been recently commended by other American conservative figures, for falling abortion rates under his leadership.

Orban has been accused of eroding Hungary’s democratic institutions and discriminating against minorities, including asylum seekers and LGBT people, according to AP.

Mike Pence made a pilgrimage to to right’s new European epicenter. I guess he figures he can out-Trump Trump? Uhm, not gonna happen.

But nobody can doubt his credentials when it comes to forced childbirth.

You will recall that Collins often had “concerns” about Donald Trump’s horrific policies and behaviors. Not that she ever did anything substantial about it but she would wring her hands and publicly express her differences. But in the end she generally stuck with McConnell’s agenda despite her protestations of “moderation.”

Those days are over:

We saw not one but two examples of that pivot to the right on Wednesday. First, she announced in an interview that she would not be supporting the Democratic effort to pass federal legislation protecting pre-viability abortions as a matter of policy in case the Supreme Court fully reverses Roe v. Wade (as it may this year or next). Although she had a rationalization involving the alleged encroachment of the draft abortion-rights bill on religious liberties and claimed to be working on her own “codify Roe” legislation, it was still notable that one of the two pro-choice Republicans left in the entire Congress (the other being the embattled Lisa Murkowski) would go out of her way to offer this pleasing token to the anti-abortion majority of her party’s base.

But the bigger gesture of party solidarity came later via the Portland Press Herald:

U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, will endorse former Republican Gov. Paul LePage Wednesday in a pre-recorded video as LePage kicks off his campaign to challenge Democratic Gov. Janet Mills in 2022 …

“As Maine recovers from the pandemic, Paul is the best candidate to grow our economy,” Collins says in the minute-long video, which was released exclusively to the Press Herald on Wednesday afternoon.

LePage was the Maine governor (elected twice by pluralities) who was sort of a proto-Trump, delighting in crude, offensive, and often racist statements while compiling a record in office typified by his monomaniacal efforts to stop a Medicaid expansion even after Maine voters approved it by a landslide. For eight long years, he was a living reminder of the harsher cultural and political trends beneath the placid surface of New England politics, and now, like a bad penny, he is back seeking a third term. But before a temporary move to Florida, he helped head off a potential right-wing primary challenge to Collins by endorsing her prior to her tough 2020 reelection contest. It was perceived at the time as sort of a MAGA thank-you note for the senator’s crucial last-minute decision to back Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation in 2018. She is now returning the favor.

Susan Collins is 68 years old and won’t be up for reelection until 2026.

LePage is a total nutcase. But Susan owes him and she’s paying him back. That’s nice. Too bad she doesn’t feel an equal need to pay back all the women who once supported her for her pro-choice beliefs over the years.

This report from Media Matters is depressing:

The ABC, CBS, and NBC morning and evening news broadcasts have all ignored the revelation that one of then-President Donald Trump’s lawyers authored a memo laying out how Trump could effectively pull off a coup.

John Eastman, a member of the conservative legal establishment who worked with Trump’s legal team as the then-president sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election, wrote the document in the days leading up to the January 6 counting of electoral votes. His plan lays out various ways then-Vice President Mike Pence and congressional Republicans could use that event to subvert the election, ensure that Trump remained in office, and terminate the American experiment with democratic rule.

Reporters at The Washington Post and CNN obtained a two-page version of the memo, which CNN published on Monday. On Tuesday, CNN reported that Eastman claimed that document was a “preliminary” version and published a six-page version dated January 3 that the lawyer had provided.

That longer version lays out a series of “alternatives” using the Trump campaign’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and “illegal actions by state and local election officials” during the election as a pretext for Pence and congressional Republicans to throw out electors from as many as seven states that President Joe Biden won. His argument was legally preposterous, but dangerous ambiguities in federal law left the election vulnerable if Republicans were willing to act.

“BOLD, Certainly,” Eastman comments in the memo after laying out the plot. “But this Election was Stolen by a strategic Democrat plan to systematically flout existing election laws for partisan advantage; we’re no longer playing by Queensbury Rules, therefore.”

That’s the president’s lawyer rationalizing a scheme to steal the election on his client’s behalf.

The story has been widely covered on CNN and MSNBC. But the broadcast evening and morning news shows — which generally have larger audiences, particularly in the evenings — have ignored it. As of posting time, the memo has not been mentioned on CBS Evening News or CBS Mornings, on NBC’s Nightly News or Today, or on ABC’s World News Tonight or Good Morning America, according to a Media Matters review.

In fact, the only national network broadcasts to mention Trump’s coup memo were the late-night variety shows hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and Seth Meyers.

That is pathetic. This memo reveals the game plan in detail, which is new. And the game plan was to overturn a legal election aka a coup. The big news broadcasts all felt it was more important to report on the case of Gabby Petito. Says it all.

Tucker Carlson outright calls Biden's immigration policy a "great replacement" likens it to "eugenics." pic.twitter.com/K228CnNK1H

— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) September 23, 2021

Well, he did it. And that’s despite the Murdochs’ making it pretty clear they wanted him to use euphemisms rather than say the words outright:

Last spring, Fox News host Tucker Carlson used one of his inflammatory monologues to accuse the Biden administration of “​​trying to replace the current electorate” with “more obedient voters from the Third World.” Carlson has spent years edging up to the border of explicit white-supremacist rhetoric, but here he crossed over by echoing the precise theories of neo-Nazis, using their preferred terms.

An alarmed Anti-Defamation League wrote to Carlson’s employers demanding they sack him. Lachlan Murdoch wrote back, denying that Carlson had done the thing everybody saw him do on television. Murdoch’s denial consisted of a fine parsing of Carlson’s rhetoric:

“Concerning the segment of ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ on April 8th, however, we respectfully disagree,” Murdoch continued in the letter, which the ADL provided to CNN. “A full review of the guest interview indicates that Mr. Carlson decried and rejected replacement theory. As Mr. Carlson himself stated during the guest interview: ‘White replacement theory? No, no, this is a voting rights question.’”My Week In New YorkA week-in-review newsletter from the people who make New York Magazine.

Murdoch’s defense hinged on two very narrow points. First, Carlson had focused on voting, not on the racial composition of the electorate per se. And second, while he had used the word “replace” in conjunction with this alleged scheme, he had not uttered the words “replacement theory.”

Fast-forward to last night. Here is Tucker Carlson accusing the Biden administration of planning to “change the racial mix of the country,” explaining, “This policy is called the ‘great replacement.’”

Note that Carlson has blown up Murdoch’s carefully constructed defense by (1) casting his theory explicitly in racial terms, dispensing with the voting-rights fig leaf, and (2) describing this method explicitly as “replacement theory.”

Now in all likelihood, Murdoch will just ignore this. Carlson is spreading white-supremacist propaganda on his network, but the ratings are good.

What’s perhaps most interesting here is that Carlson appears to have gone out of his way to step right over the trip wires Murdoch set up last spring. Murdoch wanted to have the pretense of deniability that his prime-time star was name-checking Nazi ideas on air, and Carlson (who is not an idiot) took the two-part test Murdoch created and unchecked both boxes.

It is interesting. It makes you wonder if Tucker isn’t thinking of making a change. Like running for office.

Happy one year anniversary of trump making it official that he would try to do a coup. https://t.co/myblABHn7W

— Doggo (@AlGoodNameRGon) September 23, 2021