Month: November 2021

“Inspiration can come from unexpected sources,” a friend tweeted this morning.

The Free Britney people knew something was really wrong and that it was up to them to protect and defend her. They didn’t care that people ridiculed them, and they were never going to quit. Exactly what we need to do for our democracy and the Democrats who uphold it. https://t.co/jPQBxgiYR3

— Mara Dolan 🟦 (@MaraDolan) November 17, 2021

I’ve said it before:

I used to describe George W. Bush as a Jack Russell terrier playing tug of war with a knotted rope. Once he sank his teeth into something, he simply would not let go. You could lift him bodily off the ground and watch his butt cut circles in the air as he wrestled with his end of it. But in the end you would tire of the game first, let go, and he’d retire triumphantly to his doggy bed with his prize. I was never sure myself whether I meant that as a cut or a compliment.

This how the right wins and we lose. The thing is, conservatives often beat the left, not simply with money, but with sheer relentlessness. They play tortoise. Liberals choose hare.

The usually dissmissable Chris Cillizza was right about this in 2015:

Traditionally, Democrats — and, in particular, the party’s major donors — have not been terribly good at either a) seeing the big/long-term political picture or b) getting excited about downballot races. (Republicans, on the other hand, have been brilliant at both.)

Marketing has never been a strong skill for the campaign industrial complex, the “fraternity-like network of former staffers who move from public service into the private campaign industry and back.” Washington insiders hire their friends. Plus, Democratic donors are too cheap to hire the pros, a friend observed recently. Relentlessness and long-term investment have never been a strong impulses among Democrats’ donors. They want quick fixes, and cheap ones.

Democrats also have an “a tree falls in the forest” problem, I wrote yesterday. No matter what their message is and no matter how impressed they are with it (even if it’s lame), it matters little if no one hears it.

Speaking of … this 2006 Dave Johnson post from Seeing the Forest speaks to what too many fail to understand about the sales job “Democrats” are not doing:

First, it is not the Republican Party that does that sell-job. To me, this is a key point to understand if we’re going to work on countering the conservatives and bringing the public back to understanding and accepting progressive values and ideas and candidates. It is not the Republican Party. And when you understand this point, you understand that it is not the Democratic Party that is falling down on selling progressive ideas.

It is not the Republican Party, it is the “conservative movement” infrastructure that does the selling. It is the Heritage Foundation and the (oh-so-many) other marketing/communications think tanks. It is the anti-tax and anti-government organizations. It is the Christian Right organizations. It is the corporate lobbying groups that would be selling it. It is the right-wing media that would be selling it. Rush Limbaugh and 100 other radio talk-show hosts would be selling it. Fox News would be selling it. The Drudge Report would have headlines about it. The think tanks would be dispatching 100 pundits to the TV news shows to be selling it. The Ann Coulters and the Cal Thomases and Jerry Falwells would be selling it. There would be professionally-crafted op-eds in every newspaper selling it. There would be an organized letter-to-the-editor campaign selling it. There would be e-mail chain letters selling it. There would be anonymous posts on internet sports forums selling it. There would be PR firm-produced-and-placed YouTube videos selling it. There would be strategically-placed MySpace friends selling it. They would ALL be selling it, in concert, using the same polled-and-focus-group-tested talking points, repeating the same message over and over and over… But they are not the Republican Party.

Winning is about being relentless, and relentlessness doesn’t work on a campaign cycle, nor on funds raised specifically for election/reelection campaigns. The deepest-pocketed among us need to ante up if we hope to compete in this messdaging environment. Hell, the Lincoln Project is doing more than the left, and devoting real resources, another friend observes. Campaign finance fixes won’t fix this.

The above quote from Mystery Men supervillain Casonova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush) comes to mind time and again in considering Republicans’ treatment of their own supporters. “It’s so easy to get the best of people when they care about each other,” he says. “Which is why evil will always have the edge. You good guys are always so bound by the rules.”

Republicans pass photo ID laws knowing they could disenfranchise not just Democratic women, but their own.

Republicans hold pandemic relief hostage. prolonging their supporters’ suffering if it will harm Democrats.

Republicans refuse time-tested practices for fighting a global pandemic, and promote Covid denialism and crank cures while hundreds of millions of their own supporters die.

Now in Michigan, Republicans have found a new way to harm their own voters on the prospect that they will harm Democrats more. Having failed to override Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s (D) veto of their proposed voting restrictions, they hope to eliminate 20 percent of voting places statewide.

Igor Derysh writes at Salon:

The head of the Michigan Republican Party is funding the “Secure MI Vote” petition, which includes a ban on in-kind contributions to local election clerks. Organizers have acknowledged that this provision would in fact end the use of donated polling sites, such as churches. Some cities and townships could lose half their polling sites — or in some cases all of them — under the new restrictions, according to a new report from the liberal advocacy group Progress Michigan.

The initiative includes no funding to compensate for the loss of the donated polling sites and would include schools and senior centers in its scope.

“I hope people are able to see the danger and the impact of this proposal,” Mary Clark, president of the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks and Delta Township clerk, said in a statement. “This is the type of policy that causes me to lay awake at night because it will cause so much confusion amongst voters and put clerks in impossible situations. This would absolutely negatively impact legally registered voters in my jurisdiction and every jurisdiction in this state.”

A provision in the state’s constitution allows the legislature to adopt a citizen initiative petition without sending it to the voters. If the GOP-supported ballot petition receives signatures of just 8% of the voters who cast ballots in the previous gubernatorial election, the Republican-controlled legislature may adopt it. The governor has no veto.

Civil war by other means

The initiative would create the “most restrictive voter ID law in the entire country,” voting rights groups say, even though the state already has a voter ID law on the books. It would also ban election officials from “sending or providing access to” an absentee ballot application unless it is requested and ban election clerks from accepting donated spaces or private donations to help administer the elections.

Local election clerks have sounded the alarm over the proposed initiative, arguing that the stricter voter ID requirement amounts to a “poll tax” and will restrict ballot access while causing confusion among voters. But the ban on donated spaces “would be devastating,” Clark said in a news conference last week.

Churches and religious spaces accounted for 664 of the state’s 3,355 polling places in 2020. Religious spaces accounted for more than 40% of polling places in five counties and more than 20% of polling places in 15 counties. More than 1.5 million voters across Genesee, Kalamazoo, Kent and Ottawa counties could lose about half of their polling locations, according to the Progress Michigan report. Religious sites also made up more than 25% of polling locations in the state’s largest counties, Wayne and Oakland. About 111 cities and townships used churches as 50% or more of their polling sites and 28 cities and townships used churches as 100% of polling locations.

Cutting funding is an effective way to kill any government effort, Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum told Salon. Her county of 285,000 (which includes Lansing) may lose a quarter of its polling places. Delta Township’s 26,000 voters had 16 sites in 2020, 12 located at religious sites.

“I wake up in the middle of the night and think, ‘Where am I going to put 26,000 voters?’ There are townships that don’t have a township hall. What are you going to do in a small community?” she said, adding, “It’s alarming, it’s frustrating, and it’s scary. … It’s starting to create panic about how we are going to manage this.”

Elimination of customary voting places, longer lines at new ones, and longer travel distances to get there. It is an attack on democracy itself, civil war by other means.

Since I don’t travel in these circles, this “fraud” rumor was new to me:

The proposal in the Secure MI Vote petition are similar to the voting restrictions introduced by Republicans in the state legislature amid a slew of Republican legislation restricting ballot access nationwide amid baseless allegations of voter fraud from President Donald Trump and his allies. But the ban on private donations appears aimed at Republican suspicions over “Zuck bucks,” or private grants from a nonprofit that received funding from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.

The couple gave $400 million to the Center for Technology and Civic Life, a nonprofit that donated funding to local election officials to help administrators conduct elections amid the pandemic. The funds, including nearly $8 million that it donated to cash-strapped election officials in Michigan, were meant for renting polling places, recruiting poll workers, equipment and PPE, according to the organization.

Though the organization said it donated funds to urban, suburban and rural areas, Republican lawmakers have raised suspicions over “what strings are attached” to the grants and whether third-party group donations may favor liberal areas. Some Trump allies have used the donations to claim that tech “oligarchs” are “buying the administration of the state’s elections.”

Naturally, the effects of long lines and confusion will be most pronounced in urban centers more prone to vote Democrat. But as we have seen again and again, Republicans are not averse to harming their own if their vote-suppression schemes harm Democrats more.

Chris Christie is out there pretending to be a brave opponent of Trumpism, with a new book and lots of hints that he’s going to run for president. But he’s still slime.

Nicolle Wallace gave him no slack:

Nicolle Wallace: ” The book is about conspiracies and lies and yet you really don’t take on Fox News. Why not? Have you seen the Tucker Carlson program?”

Chris Christie: “No. I don’t watch it.”

Wallace: “Are you aware of what he does?

Christie: “Not really.”

Nicolle Wallace: “I don’t think it’s an intellectually honest case to make against conspiracy theories without taking on Fox News.”

Chris Christie: “Well, listen, you can write that in your book.”

Wallace: “Well, I’m not trying to rescue the Republican Party.”

Nicolle Wallace: “Do you think Fox News in primetime is good for the country or bad?”

Chris Christie: “Listen, there are shows I like in Fox News and shows I don’t like.”

Wallace: “Are you afraid to question the purveyors of conspiracy theories?”

Christie: “I don’t consider people like Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham purveyors of [conspiracy theories].”

Wallace: “I didn’t say either of their names — Tucker Carlson. The 8 pm hour.”

Christie: “I don’t watch the show, so I don’t know what Tucker does from night to night.”

Originally tweeted by Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) on November 16, 2021.

This article by the Huffington Post’s Christopher Mathias takes a deep dive into Tucker Carlson’s propaganda series “Patriot Purge.” I have been meaning to watch it but for some reason (I wonder what it could be?) I just haven’ been able to get myself to do it.

It’s a dangerous piece of work and the only hope is that because it’s on the Fox streaming network, most of the elderly MAGA’s haven’t seen it because they don’t know what streaming is.

The following twitter thread caputured a bit of it:

Tucker Carlson outright says that the people who went into the capitol on January 6 were "set up"

A lot of deranged commentary here but "legacy Americans" might be the most ridiculous way to say "white" I've ever heard.

Been thinking a lot about this specific Tucker monologue from 2020

https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-unleashes-deranged-rant-calling-protesters-be-labeled-domestic

Tucker's Jan. 6 special straight up argues that the riot could be a "false flag"

Fox really maxed out the action-movie-trailer-audio-effects budget on this thing.

Originally tweeted by nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) on November 2, 2021.

Tucker Carlson’s “Patriot Purge,” a revisionist history of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, clocks in at an easily binge-watchable 70 minutes, spread over three episodes. It’s produced with the aesthetics and narrative suspense of an action thriller. The good guys are the “patriots” who stormed the Capitol. The bad guys are those in the media and government who are persecuting them. “The left is hunting the right,” Carlson warns his viewers.

It is the most nakedly fascist piece of propaganda Carlson has ever produced. And it comes at a dangerous moment: The insurrection is on its way to becoming as noble an enterprise as the Boston Tea Party for large parts of the American right.

[…]

Nicole Hemmer, author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics,” described “Patriot Purge” as “an overarching fantasy about the insurrection that goes like this: It was not an insurrection,” she wrote for CNN. “To the extent there was violence, it was stirred up by members of the government and left-wing agitators. All of it was orchestrated so that the full force of federal law enforcement could be unleashed against Trump supporters, marking them as enemies of the state.”

Carlson’s insurrection agitprop sparked a similar wave of warnings from many experts on fascism and misinformation: Propaganda like this, they argued, could one day render the shocking events of Jan. 6 as a mere preview of the right-wing violence to come.

A White Nationalist Whitewash

Tucker is really just doing InfoWars style “they’re coming for you, viewer” but with a bigger budget

Matthias writes:

“Patriot Purge” is deeply conversant with far-right mythologies about Jan. 6 and broader fantasies about supposed persecution of far-right groups by the federal government. That’s not surprising, considering who worked on the series: Carlson co-wrote “Patriot Purge” with a man who previously produced white nationalist movies, and the series counts two white nationalists among its protagonists.

Carlson’s narration is shot through with coded terminology: In the first episode, he describes the arrest of Jan. 6 rioters as the precursor to a “purge” of “legacy Americans.”

Darren Beattie is the first person interviewed in “Patriot Purge,” warning the viewer that “the domestic war on terror is here. It’s coming after half the country.”

Beattie made headlines in 2018 after he was forced out of the Trump White House when CNN revealed he’d spoken at a white supremacist conference. Since then, Beattie has openly allied himself with white supremacists — most notably Nick Fuentes — frequently promoting them online. He once tweeted, “If white people are targeted as a group, they must learn to defend themselves as a group.”

None of this background is mentioned in “Patriot Purge.” Instead, Carlson says simply: “Darren Beattie, of Revolver News, is one of the few in media who’s done real reporting on what actually happened on Jan. 6.”

Elsewhere, “security analyst” J. Michael Waller is trotted out in Episode 1 to make the baseless claim that the violence on Jan. 6 was a “political warfare operation” orchestrated by “agent provocateurs.” Though Carlson mentions that Waller works for the Center for Security Policy, it goes unmentioned that the organization is one of the foremost anti-Muslim groups in the country.

Sliding these extreme voices into the show with the patina of expertise is in line with how Carlson routinely smuggles white nationalist talking points into the mainstream via his nightly cable show. For “Patriot Purge,” he had some extra help

The co-writer for the docuseries is a man named Scooter Downey, who directed movies for white nationalists before joining Fox Nation as a writer. As reported by The Daily Beast, Downey directed a documentary called “Crossfire” starring Lauren Southern, the Canadian alt-right activist best known for teaming up with European neo-fascists on a cruel mission to stop boats from rescuing refugees stranded in the Mediterranean.

Downey has also directed a live-action movie called “Rebel’s Run” based on a comic book written by Theodore Robert Beale, aka Vox Day, an alt-right artist who once wrote that “Western civilization” rests on “white tribalism, white separatism, and especially white Christian masculine rule.”

Interview With An Insurrectionist

There’s an awkward, ultimately untenable tension at the heart of “Patriot Purge”: The core argument that Jan. 6 might have been a “false flag” operation orchestrated by the left is advanced by deeply unreliable narrators — the very people who planned the rally or took part in the Capitol invasion in the name of Trump and who have a vested interest in absolving themselves of that day’s events.

The series is also desperate to exonerate all of the Trump supporters in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, and the wider MAGA movement, for the horrifying violence of the siege. It was all a “set-up,” Carlson says. He blames antifa, agent provocateurs and the FBI separately for orchestrating the attack, all as a pretext for what he portrays as a brutal state crackdown.

Elijah Schaefer, a host for the far-right conspiracy site Blaze TV, declares at one point in “Patriot Purge” that “January 6th was a honey pot,” using the term for a trap set up by law enforcement. “They’re going to use this event for every bit of political persecution they can milk out of it.”

But Schaefer himself entered the Capitol building on Jan. 6, tweeting out videos and cheering on the riot. “BREAKING: I am inside Nancy Pelosi’s office with the thousands of revolutionaries who have stormed the building,” he tweeted. “To put into perspective how quickly staff evacuated, emails are still on the screen alongside a federal alert warning members of the current revolution.”

Schaefer later deleted the tweet and other posts that implicated him in the riot, claiming to have been inside the building as a reporter.

[…]

Something Worse Than Jan. 6

The billionaire owners of Fox Corporation — Rupert Murdoch and his son, Lachlan — would very much like you to watch this series, commercial-free, by subscribing to their digital streaming service Fox Nation for just $5.99 a month.

Produced as part of a contract Carlson signed earlier this year, “Patriot Purge” was designed to attract new subscribers to Fox Nation, which the Murdochs see as the future of their media empire. (It’s also a platform conveniently free of any pressure from advertisers who object to extreme political content.) That they are willing to peddle vile lies and bigotry for profit is not news. But Patriot Purge marks an escalation, even for the Murdochs, at an especially fraught moment in American history. (Fox News and Fox Nation did not respond to a request for comment for this article.)

Nikki McCann Ramirez, a senior researcher at Media Matters, is one of the foremost chroniclers of Carlson’s extremism and lies. “Patriot Purge,” she wrote recently, is essentially a “repackaging” of the “InfoWars-style” conspiracy-mongering about Jan. 6 that he’s pushed on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” over the last year.

On his cable show, Carlson is mostly limited to talking into the camera, but in “Patriot Purge,” he gets to play with “lens flares, overwhelming graphic imagery” and a “sound effect budget big enough to make Michael Bay jealous,” Ramirez wrote.

The alleged “purge” targeting conservative Americans — thus far, mostly misdemeanor charges against hundreds of people who stormed the Capitol — is compared to “any kind of torture porn imagery Fox News could find in its archives,” Ramirez observed. “Viewers are treated to montages of waterboarding, terrorist attacks, an ISIS beheading, drone strikes, and even comparisons of the arrest of Jan. 6 rioters to de-Baathification in Iraq.”

Episode 2 ends with a video clip of someone being hung. The message is clear: this kind of state violence will be visited upon you, the good patriotic viewer, very soon, unless something is done.

None of the conspiracy theories the series peddles are true, of course, and fall apart under the slightest bit of scrutiny. But Hemmer argues that “Patriot Purge” is unconcerned with truth, despite Carlson’s claims to the contrary. Carlson told “Fox & Friends” the series was “rock-solid factually.”

“Patriot Purge,” Hemmer wrote, is “politically, historically and logically confused, but its point isn’t to make sense, or to stand up to critical scrutiny. The point is to convince watchers that the insurrectionists are victims and government is the enemy.”[…]

Ultimately, Carlson and Downey’s deliberate erasure of the extremism of the people in “Patriot Purge” could have dangerous consequences.

“In an environment in which the same right-wing ‘patriots’ who attacked the Capitol and condoned it afterwards have been shouting for a ‘civil war’ waged against their political opponents — and in which some of them are now wondering aloud ‘when do we get to use the guns’ so ‘we can start killing these people’— this kind of propaganda is akin to throwing napalm onto a bonfire,” wrote David Neiwert, author of “Alt-America: The Rise Of The Radical Right In The Age Of Trump” in a recent column for The Daily Kos.

Neiwert argued that the central message of “Patriot Purge” — that a tyrannical government is going to target, incarcerate and possibly kill conservatives — could lead to another Jan. 6, or something even worse.

“It is impossible to accept this message in total without taking it to justify violent mass action against the current government, or something like a police and military coup,” Neiwert wrote.

Yes, it is justifying violence. That’s obviously a central pillar of this extremist movement’s platform. I don’t see how anyone can dispute that at this point. This propaganda is just part of the larger effort by various far-right organizers and establishment opportunists to give a justification for it.

I recall hearing something about some cabinet members considering the 25th Amendment after January 6th but I don’t think it was ever confirmed. The new Karl book has the details. It turns out that two of Trump’s most loyal henchmen, people who backed every crackpot proclamation and policy he ever proposed, thought about it for a couple of minutes and then dropped it allegedly because it would be too hard.

Top aides to former President Trump mulled a plan to use the 25th Amendment to remove him from office after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, according to a new book.

ABC News’s Jonathan Karl writes in “Betrayal” that then-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin spoke with other Cabinet members including then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about attempting to remove Trump from office through the 25th Amendment, according to excerpts published by MSNBC.

Karl, during an interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” early Monday, said Pompeo “asked for a legal analysis of the 25th Amendment and how it would work,” but the idea was “quickly jettisoned” the next day once the officials recognized how difficult the path for such an effort would be, namely as then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and then-Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao were resigning.

“It would not be quick enough and it would be subject to legal challenges,” Karl said on MSNBC.

“But in the hours after the riot, there were high-level conversations about this,” he emphasized.

Karl attributes the reporting to “a source familiar with the conversations,” and told the MSNBC hosts that his story is “rock solid.”

He said that despite multiple attempts to get in touch with Pompeo or Mnuchin to confirm the story, he had not received any communication, until he brought up the story to Trump.

During their final interview for the book, Karl asked the former president why the two men would not deny the story if it wasn’t true.

Karl told the MSNBC hosts that a few hours after that interview, he received the statement through Pompeo’s spokesperson, Rolling Stone reports.

“Pompeo through a spokesman denied there have ever been conversations around invoking the 25th Amendment,” according to Rolling Stone.

Yeah, right. They no doubt discussed it briefly and then realized that the MAGA faithful were dangerous and backed off. Mnuchin no doubt wanted to preserve his massive grift in the middle east and Pompeo is clearly running for president if Trump somehow shuffles off his mortal coil before 2024.

They were almost certainly weighing the political downsides of controlling an out of control, would be dictator and decided it wasn’t worth the risk. Another couple of profiles in courage.

I get the feeling that everyone’s throwing up their hands in acceptance of a GOP rout next year. It’s not just coming from the media, but the Democrats as well. “Well, it always happens so whatever, its’ just the way it goes. It happened to Clinton and Obama and everything turned out ok.”

I don’t think people are fully understanding the ramifications. This podcast interview of Mary Trump by Molly Jong-Fast shows it:

“What gets completely left out of the narrative,” says Mary, “is the absolutely horrific hand Biden was dealt. Look what he came into office having to deal with.”

This is an important point and one that is wholly ignored. Biden came into office in the middle of a global pandemic and the resulting unprecedented global economic upheaval after four years of an incompetent sociopath destroying everything in his path. All the people caterwauling about how he was elected to “return to normal” refuse to acknowledge just what a heavy lift that is in the face of a radicalized GOP and massive problems. It takes a big agenda to right this ship, much less make any progress on the acute and chronic problems on Biden’s plate.

And if they win the House, I don’t think there’s any doubt that this is going to happen immediately:

And things could get worse, says Molly, since, “If Democrats lose the House, we’re going to have a Joe Biden impeachment.” And, she says to Mary, “You could get brought up there for, like, being disloyal to your uncle. I mean, it’s really scary what could happen.”

Of course they are going to impeach him. Dear Leader will demand it and they will do it. Jim Jordan is set to become the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, so …

As Steve Bannon would say, strap in. If they win the House it won’t just be the end of the Biden agenda. It will be a spectacle of epic proportions. And they won’t hold back the way the Democrats did. It’s laughable to think they would. Retribution will be on the menu.

I have been impressed with the amount of previously unknown facts uncovered by Jonathan Karl in his new book “Betrayal” and have been sharing them here. I will admit that I’ve been surprised by this since Karl has always been “Republican friendly” to put it politely. This is not someone I would have expected to be particularly critical of Trump. And, in fact, he wasn’t previously. His first book about the administration was pretty milquetoast. This review in the NY Times takes on Karl’s belated incredulity at finding that Trump is a monster in his new one:

By the looks of his formidable résumé, the veteran Beltway journalist Jonathan Karl shouldn’t startle all that easily. “Karl has covered every major beat in Washington, D.C., including the White House, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon and the State Department,” his author bio notes, “and has reported from the White House under four presidents and 14 press secretaries.” Until recently he was the chief White House correspondent for ABC News — a perch that placed him, as he put it in the title of his previous book, “Front Row at the Trump Show.”

Yet in his new book, “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show,” Karl comes across as almost poignantly ingenuous and polite to a fault, repeatedly flummoxed by what he saw in the last year of the Trump administration. “Front Row,” which had the unfortunate timing of being published in March 2020, before the consequences of Trump’s governance were fully laid bare, began with a solemn tribute to “objectivity and balance” and a complaint that “the mainstream media coverage of Donald Trump is relentlessly and exhaustively negative.” Just a year-and-a-half later, after 750,000 American Covid deaths and an attack on the Capitol, Karl allows that the “Trump show” may have in fact been more sinister than mere theatrics after all.

“I have never wavered from my belief that journalists are not the opposition party and should not act like we are,” Karl maintains in “Betrayal.” “But the first obligation of a journalist is to pursue truth and accuracy. And the simple truth about the last year of the Trump presidency is that his lies turned deadly and shook the foundations of our democracy.”

She goes on to talk about some of the scoops in the book like the story of the former Fox News gopher and Trump suitcase handler Johnny McEntee taking over all the hiring in the executive branch. An then:

Trump reminisced about the speech he gave on Jan. 6, 2021, shortly before the attack on the Capitol, calling it “a very beautiful time with extremely loving and friendly people.” Karl, at least inwardly, was aghast. “I was taken aback by how fondly he remembers a day I will always remember as one of the darkest I have ever witnessed,” he writes, adding that Trump seemed to justify the death threats made against his own vice president. “It boggled my mind,” Karl says.

It did? The author’s expressions of surprise are so frequent and over-the-top that they are perhaps the most surprising parts of this book. “Betrayal” is less insightful about the Trump White House and more revealing of Karl’s own gradual, extremely belated awareness that something in the White House might in fact be awry. Events strike him as “wacky,” “crazy,” “nuts.” He delves into the outlandish conspiracy theories around the presidential election, earnestly explaining why each of them is wrong. He scores a number of on-the-record interviews with Trumpworld insiders — nearly all of whom insist that even as they publicly sided with Trump, they were bravely telling the president some very tough truths in private.

Karl recalls Sept. 10, 2020, as a turning point for him: the day he asked “the most forcefully confrontational question I had ever asked of a president — or any other political leader.” By that point Trump had been playing down the pandemic for half a year, insisting the coronavirus “affects virtually no one.” Karl, who until that moment had “cringed” when he heard other reporters use the word “lie,” was sitting in his front-row seat at a briefing and moved to press Trump: “Why did you lie to the American people, and why should we trust anything you have to say now?”

I remember that exchange and it surprised me too. As I said, I have always thought of Karl as being pretty much wired into the GOP.

It was a good question, though it simply got turned, like so many exchanges during those briefings, into more Trump theater, with the president scowling and calling Karl “a disgrace to the ABC television network.” You also wonder how Karl, who mentions in his previous book that George W. Bush took the country to war with Iraq under false pretenses, had spent two decades covering politics without asking anything so “forcefully confrontational” before. “Front Row” includes a conversation in which Karl informed Trump that calling the press “the enemy of the people” was perhaps dangerous: “‘Some sick person might take your words to heart,’ I told him. ‘I hope people take my words to heart,’ he said, missing the point that I was warning of possible violence against journalists.”

Or perhaps it wasn’t Trump who was missing the point of that exchange — something that didn’t seem to occur to Karl, apparently so entrenched in his establishmentarian assumptions that until very recently he deemed certain distressing possibilities simply unfathomable. More than a year before the 2020 election, Karl asked John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, what would happen if Trump lost and refused to concede. Kelly was sure that Trump would leave — and “if he tried to chain himself” to his Oval Office desk, “they would simply cut the chains and carry him out.”

Karl recalls being impressed by Kelly’s tone of confident authority. “I didn’t ask any more questions, but I still had a few,” he writes — a strange admission for the chief Washington correspondent of a major network. “The scenario described by John Kelly seemed too disturbing — and too absurd — to consider any further. I tried not to think about it again.”

The Trump era blew a hole through all kinds of institutional norms and presuppositions, revealing vulnerabilities and blind spots. It probably speaks to Karl’s decency as a person that he didn’t want to contemplate anything so terrible, but for all the high-minded talk in his books about the journalistic pursuit of accuracy, he gives little indication that he had the imagination to handle the truth.

The truth was obvious to any sentient being long before Karl suddenly realized that Donald Trump was a sociopathic liar and cretinous moron. Better late than never, I guess. But I don’t think he was the only one late to this party. In 2016, the whole press corps was.

And don’t think they won’t do it again. Their reflexive need to hysterically trash Joe Biden to even out the coverage shows that they haven’t learned a thing.

I think it’s fairly obvious that the reason there was hours upon hours of coverage of the Virginia Governor’s race was because so many of the journalists reporting on it live there. This is an old story, of course. Just note the amount of coverage of a blizzard in the area compared to any other weather story in the country no matter how severe.

Anyway, the Washington Post’s Philip Bump took a look at the CRT issue and how it was covered in the off-year elections:

One of the less-remarked-upon details about the elections in Virginia and New Jersey earlier this month was that, for all of the focus on Virginia in the weeks before Election Day, it was New Jersey that saw the bigger shift to the right since the 2020 presidential election (13 points vs. 12). In other words, for all of the emphasis on tumult in Virginia’s schools — and there was a lot — voters in New Jersey turned out and voted in much the same way.

In other words, it’s possible that the focus on how critical race theory, in particular, was allegedly integrated into Virginia schools’ curriculums was not the decisive factor in the outcome of the election, something that The Washington Post’s Scott Clement suggested was possible shortly afterward.

New polling from The Post and ABC News offers some additional insight into partisan views of education. For example, one of the factors that was identified as being a source of frustration for those evaluating how schools are run in each state was the response to the coronavirus pandemic. It’s certainly the case that there was a lot of expressed frustration about mask rules. But The Post-ABC poll finds that half of Republicans think the rules governing the pandemic in their local schools were either about right or not strict enough. There is, however, a 41-point gap between the parties when considering just those who think the policies were “too strict.”

The Virginia race also focused heavily on the question of how much say parents should have in educational curriculums, thanks in part to the Democratic nominee, Terry McAuliffe, making a comment that parents shouldn’t dictate what children are taught. Most Americans think that parents should have some say in what children are learning, with nearly half saying that parents should have a lot of say. On that question, there was again a wide partisan divide, with three-quarters of Republicans saying parents should have “a lot” of say, 48 percentage points more than among Democrats.

That question heavily centered on how issues of race are taught in schools. Thanks largely to right-wing activism and the focus of conservative media, the idea that schools are teaching critical race theory — an intellectual movement that examines the way policies and laws perpetuate systemic racism — gained traction in the months leading up to the election. Schools almost universally aren’t teaching critical race theory but, instead, have often (though, again, not universally) increased the attention paid to how historic racism still has effects in American society.

The Post-ABC poll asked specifically about that: How much should those lingering effects be taught? More than two-thirds of adults said they should be taught a “great deal” or a “good amount” — but most Republicans thought it should be taught “not so much” or “not at all.”

This is a more nuanced question than one posed by Monmouth University in a recent poll (though, of course, I’m a bit biased). Monmouth asked if schools should teach the history of racism, finding that 4-in-10 Republicans said they shouldn’t. The question in our poll focused specifically on the effects of racism, with a greater percentage of Republicans expressing disapproval.

Here’s the kicker and I think the most logical explanation for what happened:

There have been some efforts to suggest that the attention being paid to this issue is primarily a function of parental discontent, that the conservative media’s emphasis on critical race theory was the hatched chicken, not the egg. This argument is hard to adjudicate since the lines can get blurry, but it is clearly the case that one conservative activist, Chris Rufo, is heavily and proudly responsible for both elevating critical race theory and repurposing the term to refer to a wide array of race-related concepts. It is also worth noting that Fox News’s focus on the issue, frequent during the spring and summer, reemerged in October — and faded quickly after the elections in Virginia and New Jersey.

Perhaps this is because the network was mostly discussing it in the context of schools because it had become a salient issue for the election (again to some significant extent because Fox had helped elevate it and Rufo). Perhaps it was because those on the right who hoped to see Republican gains in the Virginia and New Jersey elections believed that the mission had largely been accomplished…

Whether you expect this change to negatively affect students in those places probably depends on your politics. Whether we might expect this to be a centerpiece of future elections probably depends on Fox News.

Honestly, I doubt it will be the centerpiece of the elections a year from now. The right moves very quickly with its culture war propaganda these days and they time it to take advantage of peak hysteria. It’s possible that this will be live next November but if I had to bet they’ll have something fresh to stimulate the rubes.

A friend in tech remarked the other day on how smart engineers have no clue about marketing. They are so wrapped up in their design-bubbles that they think they are done once the product is. The left (and Democrats) have the same problem.

Like those engineers, lefties in general think their bright ideas and beneficial policies sell themselves. They don’t, and they are painfully slow to recognize that. It’s why one of my shticks is to poke a finger at someone and loudly say, “Oh, yeah? Well, I’m not as smart as I think I am.”

But it is also the problem that what Democrats conceive of as marketing is not particularly catchy or innovative, like having cabinet secretaries do the selling (on the cheap) instead of hiring a serious marketing firm.

We asked some of President Biden’s cabinet members to break down the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal. Here’s what they had to say: pic.twitter.com/FJPBJXZHxO

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) November 15, 2021

“Climate resilience”? “Build out the clean energy sector”? Um, how does that make my clothes cleaner or my breath fresher or put more money in my pocket at the end of the month? Speak like ordinary people to their everyday needs. Sell the brownie, not the recipe. And sell it where people will hear it.

Greg Sargent on Monday cites Democrats’ ham-fisted attempts to counter the right’s crtical race theory messaging. He spoke with Rep. Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.), the chair of the House Democrats’ campaign arm:

“We have learned from the lies and distortions of the last election,” Maloney told me, noting that Democrats will “say what we stand for,” which is “building a society where everyone is treated equally and fairly, and learning from our past.”

Democrats will argue that “children need to learn their history — all of it — without censorship or politics limiting what they can learn,” Maloney said.

“We shouldn’t talk like eggheads,” Maloney continued. “But I’m not going to accept the false choice that because people can exploit a concern for racial justice and twist it into something they call ‘wokeness,’ that we should stop fighting for it.

Slow learners for such smart people. Not to mention that they are too busy responding to the Republicans’ narrative to sell their own accomplishments. And not just accomplishments, but their brand.

Seeing their story told (on the cheap) on Twitter or through the filter of the NY Times “does not mean people in Oklahoma are hearing about it,” as my friend said. Democrats have an “a tree falls in the forest” problem. No matter what their message is and no matter how impressed they are with it (even if it’s lame), it matters little if no one hears it.

There is no telling what the Kyle Rittenhouse jury will do when it begins deliberations later this morning in Kenosha, Wisconsin. It feels highly unlikely that the AR-15-toting, medic cosplayer who pleads self-defense will be convicted on all counts. The “reasonable doubt” standard for murder will make that a tough lift. Even with the two men he shot dead being unarmed.

Rittenhouse (17 year-old at the time) was a “chaos tourist,” the prosecution told jurors. He came to Kenosha from out of state, armed, for adventure because he knew the situation in the street protest-turned riot could be dangerous. I did not catch all of the trial. Did Rittenhouse-the-“medic” even treat anyone the night of the shootings or was he using his medical bag as cover for carrying a rifle to a riot?

For reasons as opaque as the statute he cited, Judge Bruce Schroeder threw out the misdemeanor weapons possession charge against Rittenhouse before closing arguments:

Legal experts had considered the misdemeanor gun charge — which carries up to nine months in jail — to be the easiest charge for the state to prove.

Ahead of Monday’s closing arguments, Judge Bruce Schroeder ruled Wisconsin’s open carry law is so confusingly written it can be interpreted to mean 17-year-olds can openly carry firearms as long as they’re not short-barrel rifles. He believed the jury could only convict if prosecutors proved the barrel of Rittenhouse’s rifle was less than 16 inches and has an overall length shorter than 26 inches.

The AR-15-style rifle Rittenhouse used to fatally shoot two men and injure a third is 35 inches long with a barrel length of 16 inches. Under defense questioning, a Kenosha police detective said he believed the Smith & Wesson M&P 15 was standard size.

It was the kind of technical hair-splitting that drives gun control advocates nuts.

Paige Williams sums up the challenge for The New Yorker in a piece written before Monday’s closing arguments and Schroeder’s instructions:

The Rittenhouse jury’s task has been described as complex: jurors must consider five felony counts and one misdemeanor, the unlawful possession of a dangerous weapon. The most serious of the charges is first-degree intentional homicide, for the death of Huber, who was shot in the heart. The charge carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. Rittenhouse is also charged with first-degree reckless homicide, for killing Rosenbaum; attempted first-degree intentional homicide, for shooting Grosskreutz; and two counts of first-degree reckless endangerment, for jeopardizing the lives of Jump-Kick Man and Richie McGinniss, who, as the Daily Caller’s video chief, was filming the protests that night.

Grosskreutz, a paramedic from Milwaukee, testified for the prosecution. Rittenhouse’s supporters had rabidly anticipated this appearance, hoping that Grosskreutz would admit to having been armed and underscore the defense’s central argument—that Rittenhouse had to shoot because he was under threat. Watchers live-streamed themselves watching the live stream of the trial. One of Rittenhouse’s lawyers said to Grosskreutz, “It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him” and “advanced on him” that Rittenhouse fired, “right?” Grosskreutz replied, “Correct.” The three hosts of one stream—which has been viewed more than three and a half million times—said, “Oh, shit!” and “Wowwww” and “That’s it!” Observing Rittenhouse’s response in the courtroom, one noted, “He just exhaled!” Another declared, “How do you not acquit after that?” The streamers then mocked the prosecutors, calling one of them a nasty name based on his appearance.

It did not help that Schroeder’s instructions to the jury about considering lesser charges were unintelligible, as was much of the judge’s behavior during the trial.

“I think the jury is sufficiently confused and that’s what gets scary when you’re a prosecutor,” trial lawyer Katie Phang told “The ReidOut” Monday night [timestamp 6:10]. Former federal prosecutor Paul Butler concurred, “I didn’t understand half of what the judge was saying.”

.@KatiePhang: "They called Rittenhouse a 'chaos tourist.' Kind of reminded you a little bit of the Jan. 6 insurrection." #TheReidOut #reiders pic.twitter.com/k9Xtbjct1h

— The ReidOut (@thereidout) November 16, 2021

“There are no winners in this case,” Rittenhouse defense attorney Mark Richards told the jury. In that, at least, we can agree.

There is no win here for public safety, as Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall observed:

Rittenhouse’s likely acquittal will simply make these right wing murder safaris more common. We’re seeing the inevitable result of the interaction between permissive open carry laws and expansive and subjective self defense justifications for homicide. It won’t end well.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 12, 2021