Month: April 2022

They are openly talking about nuclear war

From TPM:

On a nightly talk show this week, one of the Kremlin’s top propagandists decided to quote Vladimir Putin.

“We’ll go to heaven, and they’ll simply die off,” said Vladimir Solovyov, a TV presenter known for his anti-Western polemics.

Solovyov was repeating a remark that Putin himself made in 2018, about nuclear war, in which the Russian president said that his country would go to heaven, as martyrs.

Solovyov, however, was focused on the war in Ukraine. He was responding to Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT, who framed the war’s progress as: “either we lose in Ukraine, or World War Three starts.”

“I personally think that World War Three is more realistic, because knowing us and our leader Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the most improbable outcome – a nuclear strike – seems more likely than the other course of events,” she added.

The exchange comes as prominent Russians increasingly express frustration with the course of the war, and as some hawks call for Putin to intensify the war effort.

Though the Kremlin zealously arrests those who criticize Putin for deciding to invade Ukraine, those who argue for more aggressive approaches or who scold the Russian government for supposed weakness are largely left alone.

One Russian-language video that recently went viral featured a former Special Forces officer asking: “Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin], please decide: are we fighting a war? Or are we masturbating?” A Friday Telegram post, written by embedded Russian war correspondent Aleksandr Sladkov, sarcastically remarked on the heroism of the country’s troops, adding that “one man’s heroism is the result of another’s errors.”

Russia abandoned its effort to take Kyiv and Ukraine’s north at the end of last month, with officials saying that the country would focus on the Donbas, in Ukraine’s east. But even that effort appears to have gone far slower than expected, as relatively small gains are coupled with reports of big losses.

Instead of chastening the war’s supporters, however, these setbacks appear to have further energized them. As a result, increasingly vocal Western assessments warn Putin may soon decide to expand the scope of the war by ordering mass mobilization of Russians to augment current force levels.

Some expert observers think that Putin may use the May 9th WW2 Victory holiday to declare full scale war against “Nazis” as opposed to what he now calls a “special military operation.” This would allow the government to institute a draft.

Igor Girkin, a former FSB colonel who took part in Russia’s 2014 campaign in Ukraine but has been on the outs since then, has repeatedly called for a formal declaration of war and for mass mobilization. That, he has said, would give commanders the legal authority to imprison soldiers who refuse to fight, and for the military to conscript Russians en masse for the fight.

“Mobilization is a question of time,” Girkin said in a video released last week, in which he described Ukrainian soldiers as having been “zombified” by the West.

Girkin, who also goes by Strelkov, added that there was nothing to stop the Russian government from turning its peacetime population into soldiers.

“Why can’t an office manager become an infantryman after the minimum, two weeks of training?” he asked, rhetorically. “Some of them so easily go skiing, go diving – they’re as healthy as bulls. Why can’t they be an infantryman, or put shells into a cannon, or drive gas trucks?”

Here’s more from the Daily Beast’s Julia Davis who monitors Russian TV:

During Tuesday’s broadcast of 60 Minutes, Vladimir Avatkov of Russia’s Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs delivered an Orwellian perspective of current events. “What is happening right now is not about Ukraine, but about the future world order, which has no room for hegemony and where Russia can’t be isolated.”

Host Olga Skabeeva described a summit hosted by the U.S. in Germany that day to discuss upping Ukraine’s defense capabilities as a sign that this is indeed “World War III, no longer just a special operation, with 40 countries against us. They declared a war.” Portraying global opponents of Russian aggression as evil incarnate, political scientist Mikhail Markelov claimed: “The representatives of those 40 different countries are today’s collective Hitler.”“We’re all going to die someday.”

Later the same day, on The Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, host Vladimir Solovyov lamented the West’s refusal to heed the Kremlin’s warnings. “If they decide to support Ukraine—even though [Russia’s Foreign Minister] Sergey Lavrov told them that this could lead to WWIII—nothing will stop them. They’ve decided to play it big… These are the bastards with no morals.” Head of RT Margarita Simonyan added: “Personally, I think that the most realistic way is the way of World War III, based on knowing us and our leader, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, knowing how everything works around here, it’s impossible—there is no chance—that we will give up.”

In perhaps the most shocking declaration about a nuclear holocaust delivered on Russian television in recent months, Simonyan concluded that the idea “that everything will end with a nuclear strike, to me, is more probable than the other outcome. This is to my horror, on one hand, but on the other hand, with the understanding that it is what it is.” Solovyov chimed in: “But we will go to heaven, while they will simply croak.” Simonyan comforted the audiences by adding: “We’re all going to die someday.”

Once the conversation turned to Western arms deliveries to Ukraine and a series of fires and explosions on Russian territory, Solovyov pondered out loud: “What is preventing us from striking the territory of the United Kingdom, targeting those logistical centers where these arms are being loaded?” Andrey Sidorov, deputy dean of world politics at Moscow State University, retorted that rather than strike the U.K., Russia should target the real mastermind: America. He specified: “If we decide to strike the U.K., we should rather decide to strike the United States… Final decisions are being made not in London, but in Washington. If we want to hit the real center of the West, then we need to strike Washington.”

There’s more at the link and it’s very unnerving. All it’s going to take is one misstep by an errant pilot or Putin waking up on the wrong side of the bed for this to hurtle out of control.

We’re watching this whole thing like it’s a movie. It’s not a movie.

He’s right about this.

The president thinks the Democrats should run against the batshit crazy Republicans. Imagine that:

Biden is frustrated that journalists aren’t calling out Republicans for, as he sees it, giving up their principles in pursuit of power, according to a dozen people familiar with the President and his inner circle. He’s eager to unleash on the GOP ahead of the midterm elections but worries that doing so could endanger his last remaining hopes for bipartisan legislative wins. He knows he’ll be blamed for the economic pain that people are feeling — but deliberately, the statement he put out on Thursday about the latest contraction in the US economy spent as much time attributing the situation to “technical factors” as hammering congressional Republicans for their proposal to raise taxes on the middle class.

A roadmap to the 2022 midterm electionsWith his approval rating as bad as the low 30s in some polls and nearly every Democratic strategist warning that the political environment is dire — and many in the party still complaining that the White House’s political operation lacks enough planning or urgency — the President is short on other options. But advisers and others who’ve spoken directly with the President tell CNN the polarized country gives him a chance to make a more effective contrast than in any prior midterm cycle, boosted by the material they’re counting on from expected primary wins by Trump loyalists and other far-right candidates in May and June — as well as the anticipated Republican opposition to Biden’s last attempt at a domestic policy push in the congressional reconciliation process underway.

Look, there is almost no chance that they will get anything else done now. Manchin and Sinema are still strutting around flexing their muscle pretending that they are open to legislation. They are supposedly working on bipartisan legislation on Immigration and climate change which Mitch will never let them get 60 votes for in an election year. (I would be thrilled to be wrong about that but I don’t think I am.)

The country is in a foul mood and they are looking to hold somebody responsible. The Democrats should point them in the right direction instead of just standing there like potted plants absorbing the blows. Biden seems to know this:

In private conversations, the President has lamented how much people have stopped focusing on how bad a state he believes the country was in under former President Donald Trump. And so his old line, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative,” has become a midterm mantra around the West Wing.

“Voters can easily believe that the country isn’t where they hoped,” one Biden adviser argued, “but also believe that they don’t want to turn it over to Marjorie Taylor Greene in ’22 and Trump in ’24.””Part of the value of contrast in any midterms is to try to force voters to think about this as a choice, as opposed to making it a referendum,” said another Biden adviser. “That’s most effectively done from the top — it’s hard to send candidates around the country even if they’re all singing from the same hymnbook if you don’t have the President driving it.”

Yes. Run against Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Green! They are what awaits and people need to be reminded of it.

We’ll see if they are able to get off the dime on this. It’s clear that those who live and die by focus groups have been persuaded that Real Americans only care about gas prices when, in reality, people repeat back what they think they’re supposed to say and what they’re hearing is that “kitchen table issues” are the only thing that matters. It’s a self-fulfilling prophesy.

It was always cynical opportunism

t’s been a big couple of weeks in Republican Party inside gossip. Newly leaked audio tapes and text messages illustrate the utter hypocrisy of virtually everyone in the party. But it’s not as if we didn’t know that about them already, just as we already knew about their utter cowardice and cynicism. That, too, has been on full display ever since Donald Trump won the nomination for president six years ago. But considering the stakes now, the cravenness of their opportunism can still shock even after all of this time.

In their new book, “This Will Not Pass,” New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns reveal both House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to be even more nihilistic than we knew. Most people seem to think that because they said to various parties in the aftermath of January 6th that they were appalled by the events of that day and that they were done with Trump that they were showing what they truly believed. Upon reflection, it seems more likely to me that they simply thought that the American people would be so upset by the insurrection and Trump’s incitement that they would turn on him and so they assumed that was the smart place to be. But when it became evident that their voters were actually supportive of the assault and more devoted to Donald Trump than ever, they changed their minds. Why should we assume that they were telling the truth at any point in that series of events, private or public? They lie about everything, just like Trump.Advertisement:

And it’s not as if that’s the first time we’ve seen this dynamic.

Going all the way back to Trump’s dissing of GOP Senator John McCain to the Access Hollywood tape to talking about the size of his manhood in a presidential debate, the 2016 campaign laid out the template for Donald Trump behaving in insanely inappropriate ways, Republicans deciding it was the smart move to distance themselves from him only to find out that their voters loved every minute of it. By the time he was done he had created a situation in which millions of people were taking snake oil cures in the middle of a deadly pandemic and storming the Capitol, threatening to hang the vice president. Republican leaders and elected officials thought that was the end and it wasn’t. Trump famously said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any voters and he was right.

If GOP establishment figures like McCarthy and McConnell had truly felt that what Trump did was egregious, and deep in their hearts wanted him gone, they could have led instead of followed. After all, it would have only taken 10 more Senators to vote to impeach Trump to prevent him from running again. From what we’re seeing in this latest reporting, they didn’t even try.

There have been examples of principled Republicans, however, they just aren’t in Washington.

As we saw during the post-election period, state and local officials around the country actually put up a fight. (It was lucky they did, too.) The battle is ongoing with state parties still facing tremendous pressure from Trump and his followers and while it’s hard to determine their real motives there are some outside groups still invested in the party who are also pushing back.

The Times reported on Thursday that the Michigan GOP is involved in a serious battle between Trumper extremists and the old guard which is unwilling to go along with the anointment of 2020 election deniers to the ballot for the offices of Secretary of State and Attorney General. According to the Times:

This week, Tony Daunt, powerful figure in Michigan politics with close ties to the influential donor network of the DeVos family, resigned from the G.O.P.’s state committee in a blistering letter, calling Mr. Trump “a deranged narcissist.” Major donors to the state party indicated that they would direct their money elsewhere. And one of Mr. Trump’s most loyal defenders in the State Legislature was kicked out of the House Republican caucus…

“Rather than distancing themselves from this undisciplined loser,” Mr. Daunt wrote in his resignation letter, “far too many Republican ‘leaders’ have decided that encouraging his delusional lies — and, even worse — cynically appeasing him despite knowing they are lies, is the easiest path to ensuring their continued hold on power, general election consequences be damned.

The whole state party is in turmoil and nobody knows how it’s going to end in November. But at least they’re trying.

In neighboring Wisconsin, the Trump faction continues to argue for “de-certification” of the 2020 election with a GOP “investigation” released in early March advancing the argument that the state legislature could do it even though there was no mechanism for overturning the election. Republican Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos rejected the idea saying that it’s “legally impossible” and tried to disband the so-called investigation. Trump intervened, implicitly threatening to back Vos’s primary challenger if he didn’t keep the investigation funded because it’s continuing to beat the Big Lie drum. So he took the path of least resistance and kept the office going, adding to the $680,000 of taxpayer money that’s already been wasted.

According to Vice news, this whole issue has made the Wisconsin GOP melt down, with the state establishment and Trumpers going at it constantly. Nobody knows how this one will turn out either, but you can be sure that if Trump’s people prevail, the 2024 election will be a three-ring circus.Advertisement:

In Ohio, you have the fierce fighting among all the primary candidates, all of whom spent months attempting to curry favor with Trump. J.D. Vance was the big winner there with the venerable right-wing group the Club for Growth backing his rival and spending a lot of money attacking Vance for not being Trumpy enough. It didn’t work. Trump’s endorsement vaulted him to the lead in the polls. Rolling Stone reported that Trump was persuaded to pick Vance largely on the basis of crude sexual gossip from Fox News celebrity Tucker Carlson about the head of Club for Growth David McIntosh. Perhaps the Club for Growth should have appealed to the voters on principle — they used to have them — instead of playing this game and they might at least have come out of this with some dignity intact. Nonetheless, they did try to go up against Trump, however ineffectively.

Other battleground states like Georgia and Pennsylvania also have their own internal fights between the establishment and the Big Liars. Unlike what we see in DC, there are at least some Republican attempts to stop the Trump train still happening around the country. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look very promising. It appears that job is going to be left for the Democrats to do in the fall — and that’s a terrifying subject for another day.

Salon

Is the balance of power shifting in Ukraine’s favor?

A tweet from former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul popped up this morning:

NATO has never attacked USSR or Russia and never will, unless Putin attacks NATO first.

— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) April 29, 2022

Russians are already speaking as if NATO is their enemy because Russian security experts know the war in Ukraine has gone badly:

Russia’s military believes that limiting the war’s initial goals is a serious error. They now argue that Russia is not fighting Ukraine, but NATO. Senior officers have therefore concluded that the Western alliance is fighting all out (through the supply of increasingly sophisticated weaponry) while its own forces operate under peacetime constraints like a bar on airstrikes against some key areas of Ukraine’s infrastructure. In short, the military now demands all-out war, including mobilization.

They now see Ukraine as a proxy battle against NATO. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes played a clip Thursday night in which Russian state TV pundits discussed the prospect of using nuclear weapons in a gambit to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Because “we can’t quit now,” as Hayes put it. Yeah, that will redound to Russia’s advantage.

But are they serious? The public rhetoric is all about saber rattling, said Ilya Lablokov of the University of Sheffield. “I don’t thjnk they are ready to die themselves.” Or as John Kerry once said, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

Paul Krugman suggests that in this war of attituion with the “arsenal of democracy” and NATO on its side, Ukraine may yet be the victor. A lot more than Ukraine is at stake:

And let’s be clear about two things.

First, if Ukraine really does win, it will be a triumph for the forces of freedom everywhere. Would-be aggressors and war criminals will be given pause. Western enemies of democracy, many of whom were huge Putin fanboys just the other day, will have been given an object lesson in the difference between macho posturing and true strength.

Second, while credit for this victory, if it materializes, will, of course, go above all to the Ukrainians themselves, this wouldn’t have been possible without brave, effective leadership in some (if, alas, not all) Western nations.

Whatever else you may say about Boris Johnson, Britain has been a rock in this crisis. Poland and other Eastern European nations have risen to the occasion, defying Russian threats. And Joe Biden has done an incredible job, holding the Western alliance together while supplying Ukraine with the weapons it needs.

Previous U.S. presidents have given stirring speeches about freedom: “Tear down this wall,” “Ich bin ein Berliner.” And it’s good that they have. But Biden has arguably done more to defend freedom, in substantive ways that go beyond mere words, than any president since Harry Truman.

I wonder whether and when he’ll get the credit he deserves.

Let’s worry about that when Vladimir Putin’s forces have slunk back to Mother Russia.

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Democrats cannot ignore the culture wars any more than Ukrainians can ignore the Russians

Looking back a moment:

It was one of the 2008 national conventions (IIRC) when Pat Buchanan, sharing the MSNBC dais with Rachel Maddow, directed some snide comment toward Maddow that made her eyes widen in a smile.

“Are you red-baiting me?” Maddow asked with a mixture of surprise and delight. Pat Buchanan is red-baiting me!

For most of us, it’s not fun being on the receiving end of vile accusations. Our first impulse is to deny rather than to counterattack as did Michigan State Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D). Maddow called out Buchanan so the blatant attempt to smear her did not slide by the audience unnoticed. Let them in on the game being played. Let people know that they are being played.

Jamelle Bouie recently reminded Democrats what the culture wars are really about:

Almost 60 years ago, the historian Richard Hofstadter described what he saw as the true goal of McCarthyism. “The real function of the Great Inquisition of the 1950s was not anything so simply rational as to turn up spies or prevent espionage,” he wrote, “or even to expose actual Communists, but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere than in the Communist issue itself.”

Conservatives, especially white Christians, believe they own exclusive rights to this country. Only they can be first-class, Real Americans. Everyone else needs to know their places and stay in them. Preferably, out of sight. E pluribus unum? What’s that? Some kinda commie slogan? Created equal? My ass.

Jonathan Chait reflects on the culture wars and what liberals need do to win them. They were split during the McCarthy era and need to avoid that mistake today. Most of the right’s accusations are based on lies:

On the other hand, there are some examples of schools embracing radical pedagogy or whacky DEI concepts. Christopher Rufo might be an utterly unprincipled operative, but his nationwide search for examples of government agencies, states, and school districts incorporating radical ideas does turn up some real examples. One of the lessons of the McCarthy episode is that smear artists occasionally manage to accuse the guilty along with the innocent.

When these examples do materialize, temptation on the left is to withhold criticism of any of this excess and fight Republicans on their lies. This no-enemies-to-the-left tactic makes Democrats hostage to the most radical positions within their coalition.

The intracoalitional sweet spot is to deflect criticism of your radical allies. Deflection simultaneously gives uncomfortable moderates permission not to take any stance on the thing in question while allowing radicals to defend it as a positive good. But the price of intracoalitional peace is that it disables any brakes on the extremists.

Chait’s approach, however, is deficient in that it is still defensive. As the expression goes, if you’re explaining, you’re losing.

Meanwhile, Democrats seem reluctant to fight back. That too is losing, says Bouie:

The theory seems to be that Democrats can only lose if they engage this culture war, and that they’ll be on safer ground if they can deliver in Washington and run on their policy achievements without getting into the muck with Republicans.

Democrats have notably not delivered on many of their promises. The bulk of President Biden’s agenda is stalled in Congress, and the White House has been reluctant to the point of timidity when it comes to the use of executive orders to achieve its goals. But even if that were not the case, this posture toward the culture war would be a mistake. These are not just attacks on individual teachers and schools; they don’t stigmatize just vulnerable children and their communities; they are the foundation for an assault on the very idea of public education, part of the long war against public goods and collective responsibility fought by conservatives on behalf of hierarchy and capital.

Democrats need to ac t more like Maddow. Instead of defending against culture-war accusations, they need to call out the ultimate goal of American apostates on the right: to reduce the United States to an authoritarian, white-Christian homeland, the very antithesis of the American idea. Real Americans, my ass.

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They are obsessed with cartoons

“When we were young, you could watch cartoons without having to worry.”

— Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) again baselessly claims Disney is injecting sexuality into cartoons while stumping for Nevada Senate candidate Adam Laxalt pic.twitter.com/7FrKGGjzLT

— The Recount (@therecount) April 28, 2022

He must have missed this. The responses are just … epic

https://twitter.com/ParkerMolloy/status/1519767578763268097

pic.twitter.com/LmQe8ZgMWJ

— Britton Taylor (@brittontaylor) April 28, 2022

It’s completely wrong

This is literally the opposite of what has happened, empirically speaking

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/11/12/republican-party-trump-authoritarian-data/

https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/2589680-Global-Party-Survey-Dems-are-a-Centre-Lefte-Party

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/09/1053929419/feel-like-you-dont-fit-in-either-political-party-heres-why

75% of Republicans call themselves conservatives. 50% of democrats say they are liberal

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/08/new-era-democratic-politics-one-graph/

Originally tweeted by G. Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris) on April 28, 2022.

But we don’t really need those charts, do we? It’s obvious that the right has gone batshit crazy electing an ignorant, pussy grabbing cretin as president and pushing conspiracy theories about satan worshipping, blood drinking Democrats not to mention inciting insurrections and lying about the election results. They are completely around the bend.

But Elon Musk doesn’t seem to be aware of any of that and thinks the left is way more extreme because some people say things on twitter that he doesn’t like.

Call me crazy but I don’t think this guy knows what he’s doing. He may be a genius in certain areas but he is no renaissance me.

Uhm. The GOP’s been doing this for a while. He just weaponized it.

The New York Times reports today that the Republicans have come up with a new accusation of voter fraud: they are blaming undocumented immigrants. I hate to tell them but there’s nothing new about that. Donald Trump didn’t come up with the voter fraud Big Lie all by himself or the anti-immigrant crusade for that matter. Doesn’t anyone remember this stuff?

Thursday, June 08, 2006 

The Theme

by digby 

As I mentioned a month or so ago, Karl Rove was at the Republican Lawyers Association talking about how the Democrats are stealing elections. I can’t find an exact transcript of his talk, but it exists on C-SPAN for 30 bucks if anyone wants to watch it. Raw Story caught a few excerpts although not the ones I recall about about the dirty elections in the “state of Washington and around the country.”

I want to thank you for your work on clean elections,” Rove said. “I know a lot of you spent time in the 2004 election, the 2002, election, the 2000 election in your communities or in strange counties in Florida, helping make it certain that we had the fair and legitimate outcome of the election.”

Rove then suggested that some elections in America were similar to third world dictatorships.

“We have, as you know, an enormous and growing problem with elections in certain parts of America today,” Rove said. “We are, in some parts of the country, I’m afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where they guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses. I mean, it’s a real problem, and I appreciate that all that you’re doing in those hot spots around the country to ensure that the ballot — the integrity of the ballot is protected, because it’s important to our democracy.”

Nobody can ever accuse these Republicans of not having balls. It’s really breathtaking sometimes. This is not an isolated remark. Here’s an excerpt from yesterday’s Chris Matthews show:

MATTHEWS: … What did you make—we just showed the tape, David Shuster just showed that tape of a woman candidate in the United States openly advising people in this country illegally to vote illegally.

MEHLMAN: It sounds like she may have been an adviser to that Washington state candidate for governor or some other places around the country where this has happened in other cases with Democrats.

That is almost verbatim what Rove said at that lawyers conference. He also singled out one very special “voting rights” Republican lawyer named Thor Hearne, about whom Brad Friedman did a great deal of investigation last year. (Links here.):

Karl Rove spoke to Republican lawyers this weekend (carried on C-SPAN) and thanked them for their work ensuring “clean elections” in 2000 and 2004.

He singled out Mark F. “Thor” Hearne by name. Hearne was the National General Counsel for Bush/Cheney ’04 Inc. who, along with RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke, created the so-called non-partisan “American Center for Voting Rights” (ACVR) just three days before being called to testify before Rep. Bob Ney’s (R-OH) U.S. House Administrative Committee hearing in March of 2005 on the Ohio Election. The front group, which declared tax-exempt 501(c)3 status, has still failed, to our knowledge, to disclose any information of it’s funders or proof of their 501(c)3 non-profit, non-partisan status. They operate out of a PO Box in Houston, TX, though neither of their founders live in Texas.

ACVR was the only “Voting Rights” group called by Ney to testify at the hearings, and identified himself only as a “longtime advocate of voter rights” in his testimony. He failed to mention his connections to Bush/Cheney ’04 Inc.

Hearne and ACVR have done little more since they opened shop beyond creating propaganda reports to suggest that their is an epidemic of Democratic voter fraud in the country to encourage state legislatures around the country to implement Democratic voter disenfranchising “Photo ID requirements” at the polls. Their charges of a voter fraud epidemic has been roundly disproven in various court cases around the country. (Though it does appear that at least one voter, Ann Coulter, seems to have engaged in voter fraud lately.)

They have been gearing up for this for some time. However, Rove had wanted to use this against African Americans, not Hispanics. He knows that alienating the Latino vote is the kiss of death for the party long term. But it’s out of his hands now. Immigration has a life of its own and I suspect it will be quite easy to adjust the plan and the machinery to try to 1) get out the base, 2) suppress the Latino vote which is now heavily leaning democratic and 3) serve as a rallying cry and cause when they lose seats and possibly their majority. This will be immediately played for 08 with a whole bunch of “voter integrity” legislation. They will be screaming to high heaven. Lou Dobbs will have his aneurysm removed on live television.

The Democrats could have innoculated against this when the Republicans stole the 2000 election, but they didn’t. Had they been screaming bloody murder for six solid years about Republican vote fraud, it would be much more difficult for the GOP to suddenly glom onto this issue. Instead, it was a mere underground drumbeat that was heard, but only in the vaguest way. Now the CW about stolen elections is going to be turned on us — and we will be on the defensive fighting both the charge of electoral fraud and being soft on criminal Mexicans because we need illegal aliens to stuff the ballot boxes for us. 

If we allow the Republicans to define this next election as they usually do, it will be about immigration and voter fraud. If I were in Vegas I’d be placing a bet on it. And it won’t take a gaffe like Busby’s. They will attempt to create a national story, which will be exploited in the last days of the campaign in various individual ways through their media infrastructure. If they lose it will be blamed on dishonest vote stealing Democrats and illegal aliens. If they win it will be be because they fought back against the dishonest vote stealing Democrats and illegal aliens. 

I dredge this moldy old post up because of this new “study” being ballyhooed all over the right wing media that supposedly proves that illegal immigrants are voting by the millions.

If you go to that link you’ll see the study is flawed, to say the least.  But that won’t stop them.I think it’s fairly predictable what they will say if close elections don’t go their way these days.

Yeah. Big Lies have been around for a long time.

DeSantis is enacting the Viktor Orban agenda

Gosh, it seems like just last week that I was saying this very thing. In fact, it was. But Zack Beauchamp at Vox digs deeply into it and I am more convinced than ever that this is an important observation:

In June of last year, Hungary’s far-right government passed a law cracking down on LGBTQ rights, including a provision prohibiting instruction on LGBTQ topics in sex education classes.

About nine months later, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill banning “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity” up through third grade. According to some knowledgeable observers on the right, these two bills were closely connected.

“About the Don’t Say Gay law, it was in fact modeled in part on what Hungary did last summer,” Rod Dreher, a senior editor at the American Conservative magazine, said during a panel interview in Budapest. “I was told this by a conservative reporter who … said he talked to the press secretary of Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida and she said, ‘Oh yeah, we were watching the Hungarians, so yay Hungary.’”

(When I asked DeSantis press secretary Christina Pushaw about a possible connection, she initially denied knowing of Hungarian inspiration for Florida’s law. After I showed her the quote from Dreher, she did not respond further. Dreher did not reply to two requests for comment.)

It’s easy to see the connections between the bills — in both provisions and justifications. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán described his country’s anti-LGBTQ law as an effort to prevent gay people from preying on children; Pushaw described Florida’s law as an “anti-grooming bill” on Twitter, adding that “if you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer” — meaning a person preparing children to become targets of sexual abuse, a slur targeting LGBTQ people and their supporters that’s becoming increasingly common on the right.

This is not a one-off example. DeSantis, who has built a profile as a pugilistic culture warrior with eyes on the presidency, has steadily put together a policy agenda with strong echoes of Orbán’s governing ethos — one in which an allegedly existential cultural threat from the left justifies aggressive uses of state power against the right’s enemies.

Most recently, there was DeSantis’s crackdown on Disney’s special tax exemption; using regulatory powers to punish opposing political speech is one of Orbán’s signature moves. On issues ranging from higher education to social media to gerrymandering, DeSantis has followed a trail blazed by Orbán, turning policy into a tool for targeting outgroups while entrenching his party’s hold on power.

Orbán has recently emerged as an aspirational model for many on the Trump-friendly right. During his presidency, many observers on both sides of the aisle compared Trump to the Hungarian autocrat — and not without some justification. But after a 2018 visit to Hungary, I concluded that Trump was not competent or disciplined enough to implement Orbán-style authoritarianism in America on his own. The real worry, I argued, was a GOP that took on features of Orbán’s Fidesz party.

DeSantis’s agenda in Florida is evidence that the Republican shift in this direction is continuing, maybe even accelerating. He has shown little interest in moderation or consensus-building instead centering his governing philosophy on using policy to own the libs. While Trump may have been an ideological catalyst for the GOP’s authoritarian lurch, DeSantis is showing how it could actually be implemented in practice. The consequences for democracy in Florida, and America in general, could be dire.

The many places where DeSantis and Orbán meet

There is no doubt that Hungary, an authoritarian state in all but name, is becoming more and more important in the American right-wing imagination.

Tucker Carlson, the most influential media figure in today’s GOP, is at the forefront of this effort. In January, Carlson released a “documentary” on Orbán’s government lionizing his regime and encouraging Republicans to emulate it. That same month, Donald Trump endorsed Orbán for reelection, calling him a “strong leader” who has “done a powerful and wonderful job in protecting Hungary.”

This makes the echoes between DeSantis’s agenda and Orbán’s especially notable — with the “Don’t Say Gay” law, and the ensuing fight with Disney, being the most glaring examples.

Orbán’s political model has frequently employed a demagogic two-step: Stand up a feared or marginalized group as an enemy then use the supposed need to combat this group’s influence to justify punitive policies that also happen to expand his regime’s power. Targets have included Muslim immigrants, Jewish financier George Soros, and most recently LGBTQ Hungarians. Hungary’s version of the “Don’t Say Gay” law — which the government labeled an anti-pedophilia bill — expanded both government control over curricula and its powers to regulate programming on Hungary’s airwaves.

You see a similar logic in DeSantis’s Florida. Alleging that classroom education on LGBTQ topics somehow threatens children, the governor and his allies pushed through a vague and broadly worded bill that empowers both the state and private citizens to go after schools that teach about LGBTQ identity. A moral panic about alleged LGBTQ “grooming” serves to justify the imposition of ideological controls on public education — and the speech rights of progressive and LGBTQ teachers. (Relatedly, both Orbán and DeSantis have taken aim at curricula and textbooks used in K-12 schools on expressly political-cultural grounds.)

Predictably, the Florida bill provoked a backlash from corporate America — which DeSantis used as a justification to engage in even more Orbán-like behavior.

After Disney put out a statement criticizing the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, DeSantis moved to strip the corporation of its special tax status in a 40-square-mile area around Disney World. In this area, called the Reedy Creek Improvement District, Florida allows the mega-corporation to essentially function as a local government, giving it the power to, for example, collect taxes (from itself) and build roads. These privileges, first granted by the state in 1967, are hugely beneficial for the company — and, on Friday, DeSantis signed a bill revoking them.

In doing so, he was very explicit about his reasoning: This move was direct punishment for Disney’s stance on the “Don’t Say Gay” law. In a fundraising email, DeSantis wrote that “Disney and other woke corporations won’t get away with peddling their unchecked pressure campaigns any longer.” In an appearance on Newsmax, Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nunez noted that Disney had “changed what they really espouse,” lambasting the company’s “very public agenda to indoctrinate our children.”

This use of regulatory power to punish political opponents is right out of Orbán’s playbook. In 2015, Lajos Simicska — an extremely wealthy Hungarian businessman and longtime Orbán ally — turned on his patron, using a vulgar term to describe the prime minister.

In retaliation, the government cut its advertising in Simicska’s media outlets and shifted contracts away from his construction companies. After Fidesz’s 2018 election, Simicska sold his corporate holdings (mostly to pro-government figures). He moved to an isolated village in western Hungary; his last remaining business interest was an agricultural firm owned by his wife.

DeSantis isn’t the first Republican to follow Orbán here. Trump tried this kind of move a few times, most notably attempting to block AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner because he hated CNN’s coverage of his campaign and administration, according to Jane Mayer’s reporting in the New Yorker. But he failed to follow through, whereas DeSantis actually made good on his threats (at least for now).

Higher education is another area where DeSantis, like Orban, has taken special aim. On April 22, DeSantis signed the “Stop WOKE Act”, a bill that, among other things, expressly regulates what professors are allowed to teach about race and gender in college courses. In a letter to Florida State University, the free speech advocacy group FIRE argued that the bill (also known as HB 7) was so obviously an unconstitutional abridgment of speech that administrators might simply “refuse to enforce” the bill.

“By barring any ‘instruction’ that ‘espouses,’ ‘promotes,’ or ‘advances’ a prohibited concept, HB7 chills vast swaths of academic discussion and inquiry protected by the First Amendment,” FIRE writes. “Florida’s new prohibition will silence discussions on (among other topics) systemic racism, the gender pay gap, affirmative action, [and] reparations for slavery or indigenous peoples.”

Orbán’s assault on higher ed has been even more striking. In 2018, his government issued a decree removing accreditation for Hungarian gender studies degrees, a move that effectively banned Hungarian universities from teaching the subject. Later that year, his government forced Budapest’s Central European University — a widely respected liberal arts college founded by Orbán’s foil, George Soros — to leave the country altogether.

For both men, the focus on academia is unsurprising: Universities are places where cultural liberal views flourish, and a forceful conservative agenda should take the fight to them. Conservatives believe state power can and should be wielded to prevent professors from “indoctrinating” students into a left-wing worldview (which doesn’t actually happen).

On another hot-button culture-war issue, social media, DeSantis has actually outstripped Orbán.

In February 2021, Hungarian Justice Minister Judit Varga proposed a bill to regulate “the Hungarian operations of large tech companies” to counteract what she earlier called their alleged restrictions on “Christian, conservative, right-wing opinions.” While Varga’s bill never passed, a version of it became law in Florida just three months after her proposal. Florida Senate Bill 7072 gave state regulators the power to fine social media companies if state authorities determined they improperly “deplatformed” a political candidate for office. (Shortly after its enactment, a court ruled that the bill violated the First Amendment; oral arguments for Florida’s appeal are set for mid-May.)

Finally, the Hungarian and Florida governments share a penchant for extreme gerrymandering (as, to be fair, do quite a few other Democratic and Republican state governments).

Shortly after its initial victory in 2010, Fidesz created a new set of single-member districts that gave its supporters outsize representation in the country’s parliament. In the 2022 election, Fidesz won 53 percent of the vote nationally and 83 percent of the seats in single-member districts — including a whopping 98 percent of seats in districts outside of Budapest.

During the current redistricting cycle, DeSantis rejected a congressional map drawn by Florida’s Republican legislature, instead insisting on new maps that would give the party a substantially larger leg up in House elections. The statehouse complied, producing new maps that are so biased that, by one estimate, they could swing the national House bias a full point in the GOP’s direction.

There’s more at the link but you get the gist. I didn’t know that DeSantis’ toxic spokeswoman had actually admitted it. Very interesting.

I’ve been following the American right’s obsession with Orban for a few years now. CPAC is having their meeting there this year. Tucker has been there twice to broadcast from his authoritarian utopia. This is real. And DeSantis is the guy who’s taken up the mantle.

Taylor Green says the Catholic Church is satanic

Marjorie Taylor Green joins another culture war — the one inside the Catholic Church. I wonder how all those suburban moms will like this one? Kathryn Joyce at Salon reports:

Last Thursday, on the eve of testifying in a lawsuit that seeks to prevent her from running for re-election, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the legendary or notorious Georgia Republican, granted an hourlong interview in her home to an unlikely outlet: the far-right Catholic news organization Church Militant, which for years has positioned itself as one of the noisiest and most outlandish partisans in the Roman Catholic Church’s ongoing fight with itself. Greene is an evangelical Protestant, not a Catholic, but Church Militant is making the most of this opportunity, and has featured segments of the interview all week, starting with its opening video on Monday, entitled “Marjorie for Pope.”

In the interview, Greene rehashed old beefs, described herself as a victim of Jan. 6, said the United States is so sinful she doesn’t understand “why God hasn’t destroyed us” and — most exciting for Church Militant — suggested that Satan is controlling the Catholic Church.

That might sound like a claim that would offend most Catholics, but Church Militant is not most Catholics. Originally founded as Real Catholic TV by former CBS News producer Michael Voris in 2008 to offer a more orthodox depiction of Mother Church than is found in pop culture fare like “The Da Vinci Code,” the organization grew increasingly strident and at odds with the formal church, until the Archdiocese of Detroit, where it’s located, successfully blocked it from using the word “Catholic” in the outlet’s name.

These days, Voris describes the website as an apostolate trying to preserve authentic Catholicism in the face of a church hierarchy he describes as an “international crime syndicate” run by a gay cabal. In his crusade against the church, Voris has launched two coalitions for what he calls “canceled” and “persecuted” priests as well as an anonymous network he calls “the New Catacombs,” comprising clerics who denounce “the evil in the hierarchy.”

In 2020, Church Militant pronounced itself the home of “the red-pilled laity” and became such a vitriolic supporter of Donald Trump’s re-election campaign that Voris warned that a Biden presidency would result in faithful Catholics being declared “illegal” and “hunted down” and said that if any viewers considered Trump too “crass” to support, they’d better not complain when they were “herded onto the trains headed for the camps.”

After cheering on the Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol, last summer Church Militant brought disgraced former “alt-lite” personality Milo Yiannopoulos into the fold. He had recently declared that returning to the Catholic faith had helped him become “ex-gay” — similar to Voris, who in 2016 publicly repented for having had same-sex relationships and committed to live a “chaste” life — and that he was planning on opening a Catholic conversion therapy clinic in Florida.

After starting as a columnist, by last fall Yiannopoulos was hawking Virgin Mary icons and CDs of himself reading from the books of Psalms and Proverbs on Church Militant’s home shopping channel. He even appeared on behalf of the group in a Baltimore court as Church Militant fought to hold a protest rally outside the annual gathering of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. When the protest took place last November, Yiannapoulos served as emcee, pairing jokes about gay culture with homophobic slurs as he egged on the audience to chant “Lock them up” at the bishops meeting next door.

This February, Yiannopoulos also facilitated Greene’s appearance as the honored “surprise guest” at white nationalist Nick Fuentes’ third America First Political Action Conference. At that gathering, Greene greeted the crowd of 1,200 white nationalists as fellow “canceled Americans,” and told them they had been “handed the responsibility to fight for our Constitution and stand up for our freedoms and stop the Democrats who are the Communist Party of the United States of America.” In the aftermath of that colorful event — which featured chants in support of Vladimir Putin, calls to hang political enemies, abundant “great replacement” theory and Fuentes praising Hitler — Greene defended her appearance as an effort “to break barriers and speak to a lost generation of young people” who had “gathered to declare that Christ is King.”

In a tweet on Monday, Greene referenced Yiannopoulos again, seemingly in response to the news that Elon Musk had bought Twitter, calling on unseen forces to “bring back” her personal Twitter account as well as those of Trump, COVID skeptic Robert Malone, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Yiannopoulos and the entire “canceled nation.” It’s fair to speculate that Yiannopoulos helped facilitate Greene’s interview with Church Militant as well, in which Voris praised her as “the lioness in the Congress, defender of traditional values, America, all of that,” and suggested that she might become the next speaker of the House.

In the interview, MTG did what MTG does. She insulted Joe Biden, claimed that Speaker Nancy Pelosi had forbidden members of Congress from using “pronouns and family names” such as “mother” and “grandparent,” recounted confrontations with fellow lawmakers and Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg, and described efforts to address the student loan debt crisis as “Satanic.” Here’s the logic on that one: “When people think they don’t have to be responsible with their money and they can just borrow as much as they want and not have to care about giving it back, that is Satan destroying rules.”

This interview was recorded just before Greene’s appearance in a lawsuit challenging her eligibility to run for Congress again on the grounds that she supported the Jan. 6 insurrection. So she protested, predictably enough, that she too was “a victim” of Jan. 6, since she’d been evacuated from the House chamber as well. The lawsuit, which is unlikely to be successful, is based on a provision of the 14th Amendment, written in the aftermath of the Civil War, which holds that people who have sworn an oath to protect the Constitution and subsequently support an insurrection are barred from holding any political office in the future.

But in the interview, Greene showed herself willing to be party to another civil war: the one within the Catholic Church, which for most of the last decade has pitted conservative American Catholics against a pope they consider too liberal to be legitimate, as well as against much of the rest of the global church.

After asking Greene how she gauged the “spiritual character of the United States right now” — the question that prompted her to wonder why God hadn’t destroyed America yet for its failure to end abortion — Voris guided her into issues within Catholic World, taking specific aim at the church-affiliated aid organization Catholic Relief Services, which has recently been targeted by conservative Catholics for its work to help immigrants at the southern border.

“What it is, is Satan’s controlling the church,” Greene responded. Catholics and other Christians who cited biblical mandates to “love one another” by taking care of migrants, she continued, were “perverting” both the meaning of the Bible and the Constitution.

Greene argued that Christians who cite the biblical mandate to “love one another” by caring for migrants and refugees are “perverting” the Bible and the Constitution.

Instead, Greene argued, the U.S. government should cut off all aid to Central American countries until they repatriate any citizens who have immigrated to the U.S. “We should hold those countries accountable. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Guatemala, you’re not getting a check this year because you’ve sent X number of thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of people to illegally invade our country as if they’re an army,'” she said. “‘We won’t be able to send you your foreign aid until you bring your people back.”

As for the Catholic Church, she continued, “The bishops of Catholic Relief charities and services, they should be all in support of that…. If the bishops were reading the Bible and truly preaching the word of God to their flock… and not covering up child sex abuse and pedophilia, that would be loving one another, would have the true meaning and not the perversion and the twisted lie that they’re making it up to be.”

Greene isn’t the only political figure to have visited Church Militant, despite its marginal reputation. Onetime Trump adviser Steve Bannon has been a frequent guest. Former Newsmax host Michelle Malkin, who has openly associated with white nationalists, spoke at the group’s November rally in Baltimore, charging that U.S. bishops’ aid to immigrants was part of their larger agenda to “destroy the historical American nation.” In the fall of 2020, just weeks before the election, Trump’s Federal Election Commission chair Trey Trainor talked with Voris in a lengthy interview in which he described the election as a “spiritual war.” This year, Church Militant has interviewed a number of right-wing Catholic candidates for higher office, including gubernatorial candidates Dan Cox of Maryland, Ryan Kelley of Michigan and Jim Renacci of Ohio, as well as Missouri Senate candidate Mark McCloskey, who became internet-famous for waving a gun at Black Lives Matter marchers in the summer of 2020.

“What I find interesting about Church Militant’s increased focus on promoting far-right politicians and influencers is that, a year and a half after the 2020 election, the alliance between reactionary Catholic media and the Republican Party seems to have only grown stronger,” said Mike Lewis, founder of the website Where Peter Is, which tracks the role of the far-right within the Catholic Church.

“In a lot of ways, a significant part of the U.S. Catholic Church resembles today’s Republican Party,” he continued. “I think that Greene and her advisers see in this group a small but motivated segment of her base.” As for Church Militant, he continued, “the benefits are obvious. When [Voris] gives attention to politicians, especially well-known figures like Greene, he raises his own profile and gets attention in the mainstream press. He’s trying to expand his audience, and he’s going to do that more effectively if he interviews fewer Catholic figures and more national figures.”

“There used to be a genuine ‘ecumenism of the barricades’ among culture-war believers, like the old First Things crowd in the Richard John Neuhaus days,” said David Gibson, director of Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture, referencing the ecumenical Christian right magazine that helped cement the partnership between conservative Catholics and evangelicals. “But they were believers.” Greene and Voris, by contrast, he continued, “seem to be political performers following a script more than scripture. They are so alienated from their respective faith communities it is hard to see them as evangelical Protestant or Roman Catholic. They seem to be trying to pump each other up more than pursuing some actual goal.”

She has a perfect right to condemn any religious institution she wants, of course. This is America. But calling the Catholic Church satanic used to be something the “Judeo-Christian Right” would condemn in no uncertain terms and not because it would be offensive on its own terms. They knew it would offend many of their voters who happen to be Catholic and aren’t deep into the details of the current culture wars.

I can see this becoming a bigger thing in right wing circles. If the QAnon folks remain as influential as they currently are, there’s no doubt about it. In fact, I’ve been surprised they haven’t gone here more energetically before. After all, they are obsessed with pedophilia and the church is probably the most powerful institution on earth that has been proven guilty of systematically covering it up. In fact, I have to suspect that it’s that scandal that subconsciously fed the right’s pedophilia panic, even though the conspiracy theorists are too dumb to know that.