Month: December 2021

Do we want it?

Viewing this video has become a Christmas tradition for me. The song is so evocative and the visuals so stunning (when they’re not touching) that I could watch it on a loop all day. Heard it in my sleep last night. Beats a yule log.

This guy is apparently local, but I’ve not met him. Either he had the snow shipped in or went to find it at higher elevations. We don’t see so much these climate-changey days.

Merry Christmas.

One big Christmas celebration earlier this morning at NASA:

We have LIFTOFF of the @NASAWebb Space Telescope!

At 7:20am ET (12:20 UTC), the beginning of a new, exciting decade of science climbed to the sky. Webb’s mission to #UnfoldTheUniverse will change our understanding of space as we know it. pic.twitter.com/Al8Wi5c0K6

— NASA (@NASA) December 25, 2021

(CNN) It’s a moment that has been decades in the making. The James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s premier space observatory of the next decade, successfully launched on Christmas morning.

The telescope lifted off atop an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana at 7:20 a.m. ET.

“We have LIFTOFF of the @NASAWebb Space Telescope!” NASA shared on Twitter. “At 7:20am ET (12:20 UTC), the beginning of a new, exciting decade of science climbed to the sky. Webb’s mission to #UnfoldTheUniverse will change our understanding of space as we know it.”

Maybe send a little understanding our way, too.

#NASAWebb is safely in space with its solar array drawing power from the Sun! Its reaction wheels will keep the spacecraft pointed in the right direction so that its sunshield can protect the telescope from radiation and heat: https://t.co/NZJ7sSJ8fX#UnfoldTheUniverse pic.twitter.com/s4nfqvKJZD

— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) December 25, 2021

You just have to love them!

This is very weird but oddly soothing.

Have a great evening everyone.

Who can forget this one?

Donald Trump, answering phone call from 7-year-old on Christmas Eve: "Are you still a believer in Santa? Because at seven it's marginal, right?" pic.twitter.com/VHexvFSbQ1

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) December 25, 2018

This story about the NORAD tracker tradition is amazing. I had never heard it and it’s even better than the story we’ve all been told:

Perhaps you’ve heard the legend of Harry Shoup. The gruff Air Force colonel stood watch on December night 60 years ago, in a secure bunker at Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD), guarding against a nuclear strike. On his desk sat the Red Phone, connecting him directly to the four-star general at Strategic Air Command. Suddenly, the phone rang.

Colonel Shoup answered. “Is this Santa Claus?” asked a child’s voice. Rather than break a child’s heart, Colonel Shoup played along. Sears, it turned out, had published a newspaper ad, with a jolly Saint Nick urging, “Call me on my private phone, and I will talk to you personally.” Because of a typo, the ad accidentally listed the number for the Red Phone. As calls kept pouring in, Colonel Shoup assigned his staff to play Santa. They began to provide children with updates on the location of Santa’s sleigh. And the NORAD Santa Tracker was born.

The inspirational holiday tale is retold by countless outlets each December. If it had been the plot of a Capra film, The New York Times’ Michael Beschloss wrote last week, “moviegoers might have thought the story contrived.” It sounds too good to be true. And, as it happens, it almost certainly is.

The first clue is that the Santa Tracker takes its place in a long military tradition of keeping track of Saint Nick, using press releases to cultivate favorable coverage. At the height of the Second World War, Eisenhower’s headquarters put out a release offering “Christmas guidance” to war correspondents.  It confirmed that “a new North Pole Command has been formed,” that “Santa Claus is directing operations,” and that “he has under his command a small army of gnomes.” The censors, though, suppressed the location of Santa’s headquarters, directed that his delivery methods be described only as employing “secret devices” or “special scientific techniques,” and proscribed “any mention of radar or speculation on the purpose of reindeer antennae.”

In 1948, as the Cold War replaced the Second World War, it was the State Department that dispatched a diplomatic cable to Kris Kringle, communicating “united desire for peace on earth,” and authorizing him to communicate this “to all men, using herald angels if supplemental personnel imperative.” Perhaps that seemed too utopian a wish, at the height of the Berlin Airlift. The cable took pains to specify: “Danger vetoes, blockades, transportation-delays appears remote.” One day a year, it was nice to imagine a world in which that were actually true.

The Air Force, newly independent of the Army, was quick to get in on the act. It released its first seasonal communiqué in 1948, reporting that its “early warning radar net to the north” had detected “one unidentified sleigh, powered by eight reindeer, at 14,000 feet, heading 180 degrees.” The Associated Press duly passed it along.

By the 1950s, the nation stood on edge, worried that with little notice, the entire country might be incinerated in a nuclear attack. CONAD’s director of combat operations, Colonel Harry W. Shoup, had a flair for public relations. He won a citation for quelling noise complaints from communities adjacent to a base he commanded by explaining “that the noise from friendly jets isn’t as bad as bombs from enemy jets could be.” In October of 1955, he told reporters that Russian jets were capable of reaching any point in the continental United States in 9 to 12 hours. His point, presumably, was to stress the vital importance of CONAD’s role, standing vigilant against Soviet bombers crossing over the North Pole en route to the United States.

It was Shoup who manned the consoles in the fall of 1955. And on November 30, he was sitting at his desk when an ordinary phone rang. (It wasn’t a Red Phone, which ran through a dedicated, lead-encased cable. The whole point of a direct connection between CONAD to SAC was to ensure that the line would remain open, operational, and entirely secure; it wasn’t connected to a public exchange.)

A newspaper account unearthed by Gizmodo’s Matt Novak tells earliest known version of the story. A child trying to dial Santa on the Sears hotline instead dialed an unlisted phone at CONAD, “by reversing two digits.” Colonel Shoup “answered much more roughly than he should—considering the season: ‘There may be a guy named Santa Claus at the North Pole, but he’s not the one I worry about coming from that direction.’”

Bah, humbug!

There was no flood of calls that first year, because to reach CONAD, two particular digits had to be reversed. A few weeks later, when Shoup’s staff drew a flying Santa on the board for tracking unidentified aircraft, he spotted an opportunity. He had his public-relations officer, Colonel Barney Oldfield, tell the wire services that CONAD was tracking Santa, touting its cutting-edge capabilities, but with a rather martial take on the Christmas spirit:

CONAD, Army, Navy and Marine Air Forces will continue to track and guard Santa and his sleigh on his trip to and from the U.S. against possible attack from those who do not believe in Christmas.

The press ate it up. The next fall, as CONAD sought to boost its profile, Oldfield asked Shoup to repeat his Santa-tracking stunt. Shoup reportedly demurred, until Oldfield told him that the AP and UPI had already called. That was enough to tip the balance.

In subsequent years, the public-relations campaign grew more elaborate. By Christmas of 1960, the expanded North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) was posting regular updates from its northern command post in St. Hubert, Quebec, on the flight of one “S. Claus,” listed as “undoubtedly friendly.” Injecting a little drama into the evening, NORAD reported the heavily laden flight making an emergency landing on the ice of Hudson Bay. Canadian fighter interceptors swooped in to discover Santa tending to Dancer’s injured front foot. With the reindeer bandaged, Santa rejoined his fighter escort and completed his rounds.

As the stunts grew more elaborate, so too did Colonel Shoup’s story. In 1961, he still claimed that the number in the Sears Ad was a single digit different from one of the unlisted lines at the Combat Operations Center. “Inevitably, one childish finger missed by one digit,” he told the local Colorado Springs Gazette. But Shoup no longer remembered himself as a Grinch. When he picked up, he told the reporter, he heard a voice ask, “Are you one of Santa’s helpers?” He answered, “One of what?” assuming an airman was playing a trick on him. Then, he claimed, he figured out what was going on. “I’m no helper,” he remembered saying. “I am Santa Claus.”

In later years, Shoup and his family offered ever-more elaborate versions of his tale. The unlisted line became the Red Phone. It wasn’t a misdialed number, but a fateful misprint. It wasn’t one child, but a flood of calls. In the process, the story became a favorite holiday tale, of tough soldiers finding a soft spot in their hearts, and sustaining the hopes and dreams of countless children.

But, from the first, there’s been another side to this tale. Air defense is expensive, complicated, and not terribly glamorous. It competes with a host of other defense functions for scarce funds. Years before Harry Shoup answered a wrong number, the Air Force was already using Santa to sell the public on the utility of its early warning radar and vectored fighter interceptors. Shoup helped the Air Force figure out how to do this more effectively. So effectively, in fact, that his commanders turned his stunt into an annual campaign.

The Cold War is long over. NORAD is a shadow of its former self. But the legend of Harry Shoup endures, retold each December by a press eager to offer heart-warming stories to a public eager to consume them.

And along the way, something genuinely heart-warming happened. What began as a cynical Cold War public-relations campaign became something more. NORAD published an actual phone number, and encouraged children to call in. Military personnel gave their own time to answer those calls. Today, more than 1,200 men and women in uniform volunteer to staff the lines. Last year alone, NORAD answered more than a hundred thousand calls, and logged almost 20 million visits to its Santa Tracker.

The story was told so often, and so many believed in it, that it created its own reality. Tough soldiers really did find soft spots in their hearts, and sustained the hopes and dreams of countless children. Like the tale of Santa Claus itself, it spoke to the collective willingness to suspend disbelief and embrace the dream of a kinder, gentler world, at least for one night a year. And a new holiday tradition was born.

Amazing…

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I suppose it’s not surprising to learn that Fox news is totally corrupt but it’s always good to have the receipts:

In the weeks before the 2020 election, as Fox News executives and luminaries came to terms with its possible outcome, some began to see in it a long-awaited opportunity — a chance to break up with Donald Trump.

Even the president sensed a growing distance from the network that was once so closely aligned with him. “What’s the biggest difference between this and four years ago?” he asked rhetorically during an Election Day appearance on “Fox & Friends,” skipping over obvious choices such as U.S. foreign relations, immigration policy or the makeup of the federal courts. “I say Fox,” he answered. “It’s much different now.”

The sentiment was held most fervently on Fox’s news side and in its Washington bureau, according to current and former Fox News personalities familiar with the dynamic who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations. Many felt the network’s identity had become too tightly bound up with its opinion hosts — some of whom had become not just on-air cheerleaders but behind-the-scenes advisers for a president adored by their viewers — at the expense of the organization’s old self-forged image as a “fair and balanced” news operation.

Yet the post-Trump era opened for Fox with a ratings drop that quickly prompted a recalibration of those 2021 visions.

Now, one year later, the dream some harbored of distancing from Trump is long over. The biggest threat Fox now faces is a pair of looming lawsuits from two voting technology companies that claim the network, far from turning away from Trump, allowed Trump-allied personalities — including on-air hosts as well as guests — to falsely malign them with bogus conspiracy theories about widespread election fraud in 2020.

Over the course of the year, Fox managed to reassert itself as the No. 1 ranked cable programmer — and wholeheartedly realigned itself with the former president and his supporters.

It’s a hard-fought triumph that has allowed Fox executives to shrug off two other recent developments that, at least to outsiders, further undermined its credentials as a news broker — the departure of veteran anchor Chris Wallace and the revelation of panicked text messages that three of its hosts sent to Trump’s chief of staff,urging him to get the president to calm the Jan. 6 rioters at the U.S. Capitol.

They do not care. The ratings are up, they have fought off the challenge from Trump friendly rivals OAN and Newsmax and they have reconciled themselves to being nothing more than a propaganda network. It’s all good for them. But it’s an emergency for the rest of us.

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Trump was booed last week when he said he got the booster and he insisted that he should be given credit for the vaccines. Later he was interviewed by Candace Owens and he forcefully endorsed the vaccines as well. As we know, he’s wanted to take credit for saving the world because he’s a very stable genius and all, but he backed himself into a corner by downplaying the virus and pushing snake oil cures. Something persuaded him that he should be more aggressive in defending his great scientific prowess.

But I’ll be surprised if we hear any more about this:

As the president’s new, unabashed booster endorsement rippled out across right-wing social media, it was met with an combustible mix of anger, confusion, contorted excuses, and denial so pure it’s as if the former president had never uttered a word.

For a sign of just how severely Trump wrong-footed himself with his base by endorsing boosters, look no further than the editorial cartoonist Ben Garrison. The doodler’s devotion to the 45th president has been slavish, but Garrison’s opposition to the vaccine has also been stalwart. His latest cartoon opus shows Trump riding aboard on the “Big Pharma Vaccine Bandwagon” as he’s booed by the MAGA-hatted masses.

On the social media app Telegram, Ron Watkins — whom many believe role-played “Q” in the QAnon conspiracy that held up Trump as America’s heaven-sent savior in the battle against satanic Democrats — sent out a message on the day of Trump’s comments. Watkins blasted “the insidious global campaign to use poisonous injections to ‘save’ every living man woman, woman [and] child.” Watkins didn’t respond to Trump directly, but later urged the “VF” (or Vaccine Free community) to “stand strong,” “never fear,” and “never comply.” Two days later, Watkins was back to unvarnished anti-vax hysteria blasting jabs and boosters as “Subscription Suicide Shots.”

General Michael Flynn, the Trump’s pardoned former national security adviser, was on Telegram on the day before the former president’s remarks opining that: “The vaccine doesn’t appear to work to prevent this covid madness, it appears to be causing it.” Flynn seemed to ignore Trump’s booster endorsement entirely. By the next day he’d posted a link to “news” item alleging Bill Gates and Tony Fauci had been “charged with genocide” in a filing before the International Criminal Court.

Larry Cook — a top anti-vaxxer who once rivaled Robert Kennedy Jr. in his online reach before getting kicked off Facebook — runs the “Stop Mandatory Vaccination” online community. (Rolling Stone profiled Cook as part of this examination of the crossover between the anti-vax and Q Communities). A QAnon adherent and longtime Trump booster, Cook describes the vaccines as “experimental poisons.” He rails on his “Covid-19 Refusers” site that the “Deep State” seeks to “destroy our children through vaccination” as part of an effort to “usher in a one world government and police state for total Luciferian domination of every Child of God.” He took no notice of Trump’s vaccine endorsement — and instead used Telegram to promote a “powerful zeolite detox” spray that’s sold through his website.

While MAGA and anti-vax leaders tried to excuse, dismiss or ignore the former president’s booster boosting, some in the rank-and-file of the far-right movement weren’t ready to forgive and forget, instead training their fire directly at the 45th president.

A message posted to a popular Telegram channel dedicated to “controversial media” and “uncensored views” read: “How quickly ‘Trumpers’ and liberal-conservatives forget that this entire COVID debacle, including vaccines and mass vaccination, was initiated and promoted under Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s watch.”

The post continued by arguing that Trump and the GOP don’t occupy the “moral high ground” on Covid and should not be trusted anymore than Biden and the Democrats: “Democrats are corrupt. Republicans are corrupt,” the post reads. “If you’re still on that merry-go-round then time to wake up and join us over here where TRUTH and FREEDOM is prioritised[sic] over party politics.”

This sentiment was echoed by InfoWars host Alex Jones who used his platform to blast Trump for abandoning the fight of the anti-vaxxers. “Hell, we’re out here fighting Bill Gates and Fauci and Biden,” Jones said with disbelief: “And now we’ve got Trump on their team!”

Alex Jones is flipping out after Trump said he got the booster: “Hell, we’re fighting Bill Gates and Fauci and Biden and the New World Order and Psaki and the Davos Group .. and now we’ve got Trump on their team!” pic.twitter.com/fyEfx1OcFp

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) December 21, 2021

I very much doubt that Trump will rock that boat much more. He’s obviously insecure anyway about January 6th and the fact that he’s not getting the non-stop attention he’s used to. I don’t think he’ll push this.

Having said that, it would be good if he did. I don’t think many refusniks will change their minds but even a few is better than none.

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Some people have noticed that the GOP keeps losing elections and maybe he’s a drag on the party. Bush’s Brain, aka Karl “Turdblossom” Rove  argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Wednesday that Trump’s insistence on wreaking revenge and endorsing MAGA weirdos who fixate on the Big Lie will hurt the GOP’s electoral chances in 2022 and 2024:

President Trump has formally endorsed 85 Republican candidates so far this year, probably far more than any other president so soon after leaving office. He’s backed incumbents, primary challengers and candidates in open races for everything from the Senate and House down to state representatives and even a small-town mayor’s office, often with statements offering his “Complete and Total Endorsement!”

“Settling scores is a high priority for the former president,” Rove said in explaining Trump’s willingness to endorse in primaries where Republicans already hold the seat. Rove added that Trump endorsements are likely a way for him to “maintain his hold over the GOP and keep open the possibility of a 2024 White House run.”

Ya think? And it’s working. He is a big albatross around their necks — and they have decided to hug it tight.

Rove points out Trump’s endorsement is “hardly a guarantee of an election victory” and goes through the list of his endorsees who’ve lost. But it’s not just the weirdos like Herschel Walker that present a problem. It’s any Republican running:

All these candidates face a critical choice: Should they focus on Mr. Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen to protect their endorsement? Or should they make their race about providing a check on President Biden and risk incurring Mr. Trump’s wrath?

Mr. Trump could help some Democrats hang on in an otherwise devastating election cycle in 2022 by forcing their opponents to harangue voters about an unpopular topic. If the GOP can’t learn to shake the Trump obsession with alleged election fraud, the former president could even hand Democrats the White House—again.

They cannot learn to shake it. Trump won’t let them, and I’m not entirely sure they want to. Lindsey Graham has explained the cult’s rationale many times, most recently last week:

“When you look forward to this party, Donald Trump is the most consequential Republican in the entire Republican Party, maybe in the history of the party since Ronald Reagan. And if you’re going to lead this party in the House and the Senate, you have to have a working relationship with Donald Trump or it will not work.”

Republican officials either agree with Graham (and there are more of them Rove thinks) or are terrified of his voters. They are trapped.

Sooo, if Rove is right, this may be the Democrats’ best chance in 2022. As I have been saying, Trump’s Big Lie has been the organizing principle of the GOP ever since January 6th. It’s a nice delusion to think that the party would sober up but if it wasn’t clear before, it’s certainly clear now that they are going to stay on their Trump bender for the foreseeable future. And it’s highly unlikely that Trump and his people are going to allow any more candidates to hedge on the Big Lie or pretend to distance themselves from their leader.

Jonathan Swan of Axios reported that people who see him at Mar-a-Lago say “it’s impossible to carry out an extended conversation with him that isn’t interrupted by his fixations on the 2020 election” and he continues to insist that there should be more “audits” that will somehow overturn the results. He is obviously very disturbed at this point if he actually believes that.

But it doesn’t matter, he’s reorganized the Republican Party around the belief that he must be restored to the White House one way or another.

When it comes to elections, Trump may be the gift that keeps on giving for Democrats.

It’s going to be another tumultuous year in American politics. There are going to be public hearings and trials related to January 6th, the ongoing saga of the pandemic, a very weird booming economy and, of course, a midterm election that everyone assumes is pre-ordained. But as Karl Rove and I agree (I never thought I write those words) there is a big orange wild card that could turn everything on its head.

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Happy Hollandaise everyone!

He can’t get over his obsession with China, can he?

A Chinese firm helping former president Donald Trump take his new media company public has been the target of investigations by federal securities regulators, who say the firm misrepresented shell companies with no products and few employees as ambitious, growing enterprises, documents and interviews show.

Arc Capital, an investment advisory firm based in Shanghai, has repeatedly helped create or finance companies with little or no revenue, no customers and office locations that point to P.O. boxes, according to a Washington Post review of regulatory and court filings. One claimed to be developing autonomous drone software despite having no employees; another said it operated a publicly traded in-home bakery “specializing in freshly-made cakes and cupcakes” before saying it pivoted into touch-screen technologies for a “diversified blue-chip client base,” regulatory filings show.

The Washington Post has a lot more detail on Arc that non-financial types like me may not really grasp. Except for the fact that there are a lot of shell companies involved that make nothing, sell nothing, and do nothing except attract capital.

This year, Arc helped create Digital World Acquisition, an investment vehicle that has raised over $1.2 billion to conduct a merger with Trump Media and Technology Group. Digital World is what’s known as a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, a type of shell business that raises money from investors to acquire a private start-up with strong growth prospects. The deal, which still must be approved by shareholders and regulators, has the potential to enrich the former president and turn his nascent social media start-up into a public company overnight.

True-to-form, Trump is always Trump. Bold promises backed by little but a song and dance:

Still, the lack of specifics in the Trump slide presentation was “hilarious, even compared with other SPACs,” said Michael Ohlrogge, an assistant law professor at New York University who has researched SPAC transactions.

“So far, it’s vaporware,” said James Angel, a professor of finance at Georgetown University. The true test will come after the merger, when shareholders will expect Trump to use the money he has raised to build a formidable business, he said.

“Now that our ex-president has a billion-dollar war chest to play with,” Angel said, “it remains to be seen if he can actually build a successful media franchise.”

Maybe his fascination with China is because authoritarian capitalism (with a bit of misrepresentation thrown in) is just his style.

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Are we all Jim Jordans now? Witnesses to crimes about which we do nothing? Either to punish what’s happened or to prevent what will? Are we collectively caught in one of those nightmares in which we are desperate to flee imminent danger, yet our legs won’t work?

Virtually every Democrat inside the Capitol dome is committed to seeing Joe Biden’s social spending package pass into law. They remain hopeful, if not convinced that, as in normal times, voters will reward good governance at the polls. But these are not normal times.

Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the White House wasted months this year trying to coax, cajole, and threaten their Senate outliers into voting for the Build Back Better act, the centerpiece of President Joe Biden’s first-term agenda. Solid legislative accomplishments, in normal times, provide a platform for winning a second term. But these are not normal times.

Republican legislators outside the Beltway are throwing acid and sand into the machinery of elections in state after state to ensure they can control the outcome of future elections whatever Democrats accomplish between now and November 2024. Or even 2022.

Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence H. Tribe and colleagues fret openly in the New York Times that despite what we collectively witnessed in real time on Jan. 6 this year, too little is being done to dissuade the ringleaders from attempting a second coup in 2024. Information already in the public record is sufficient, they argue, for the Department of Justice to launch a criminal investigation of “Mark Meadows, Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and even Donald Trump — all of whom were involved, in one way or another,” in events that led to the violent attack by Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol:

Almost a year after the insurrection, we have yet to see any clear indicators that such an investigation is underway, raising the alarming possibility that this administration may never bring charges against those ultimately responsible for the attack.

The legal paths are there, and clear.

And yet there are no signs, at least in media reports, that the attorney general is building a case against these individuals — no interviews with top administration officials, no reports of attempts to persuade the foot soldiers to turn on the people who incited them to violence. By this point in the Russia investigation, the special counsel Robert Mueller had indicted Paul Manafort and Rick Gates and secured the cooperation of George Papadopoulos after charging him with lying to the F.B.I. The media was reporting that the special counsel’s team had conducted or scheduled interviews with Mr. Trump’s aides Stephen Miller and Mr. Bannon, as well as Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

If there is work going on behind the scenes, the press should have reported something. Perhaps Attorney General Merrick Garland awaits a final report from the House select committee. Perhaps there is not enough evidence extant to convict. But, they write, uncertainty about conviction is “no reason to refrain from an investigation. If anything, a federal criminal investigation could unearth even more evidence and provide a firmer basis for deciding whether to indict.” Meanwhile, enemies of democracy hack away at its pillars.

Look what I ran into at the grocery store. 🙄😡 pic.twitter.com/0xrAu4zgol

— Lee (no $ for Elon) Johnson (@LeeJohnson65) December 23, 2021

In Congress, Democrats supposedly able to walk and chew gum have yet to pass voting rights legislation that could stop the manifold, post-2020 attacks against voters, voting rights, and democracy itself. Like the nuclear doomsday clock, the hands move closer to midnight as 2022 approaches. Crimes against this once-democratic republic, passed under color of law in state after state and in the light of day, go unanswered. Like Jim Jordan, we are witnesses and do-nothings.

The Big Lie festers:

“I’ve never been more scared about American democracy than I am right now, because of the metastasizing of the ‘big lie,’ ” says election law expert Rick Hasen, co-director of the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center at the University of California, Irvine.

“This is not the kind of thing I expected to ever worry about in the United States,” Hasen says. “I kind of feel like a climate scientist from five years ago or [an] expert on viruses a couple of years ago, sounding the alarm and just hoping that we’re not too late already.”

Timothy Snyder (“The Road to Unfreedom” and “On Tyranny“) warns, “the ‘big lie’ is not just in people’s minds. It’s also now in the law books.” In dozens of laws passed in 19 states so far:

“All of those things set us up for a scenario where the candidate who loses by every measure, not just by the popular vote, but by the Electoral College, the candidate who loses by every measure will nevertheless be installed as president of the United States,” Snyder says. “I think that is probably the most likely scenario in 2024 as things stand now.”

That scenario needs to be confronted immediately, Snyder says: “It’s right in front of our eyes. The most interesting and the most distressing thing about American news coverage right now is that we don’t treat the end of democracy in America as the story. That is the story.”

Carol Anderson, professor of African-American Studies at Emory University, tells NPR voting rights legislation needed to “short circuit” what “the ‘big lie’ is doing and will do.” But the Democratic Party seems not to grasp “the fierce urgency of now.”

We have been, in her words, “baptized in American exceptionalism” — the naive belief that the demise of democracy can’t happen here.

“Even after you have had the insurrection,” Anderson says, “even after you have had these legislatures write these laws figuring out not only how to stop Black people, brown people, indigenous people from voting, but also how to lower the guardrails of democracy that prevented Trump from being able to overturn the results in these states; so even after seeing this, to not move and do what needs to be done to protect this nation?” Anderson sighs. “It’s unconscionable.”

Having failed, Jan. 6 was a rehearsal, says Snyder. “This is what historians and political scientists who study coups d’etat say. They say a failed coup is practice for a successful one.” The end of democracy in America lies ahead and we choose not to see.

We have to stop looking the other way and act. Or else stop pointing fingers at Jim Jordan.

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