Month: April 2022

It’s becoming a bit uncomfortable for Putin fans to express their adoration for their man what with all the atrocities and genocide and all. But never fear, they still have an authoritarian hero to celebrate:

Increasingly, the right has also decided to launder its Putinism though their support for Putin’s leading European ally, Viktor Orban.

Conservative Rod Dreher has long flirted with anti-Ukrainian and pro-Russian propaganda:

But this week he tweeted:

Make no mistake: #ViktorOrban is the leader of the West now — the West that still remembers what the West is.

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) April 3, 2022

The newly re-elected Hungarian strongman has made no secret of his position on the war.

In his victory speech Sunday night, Orban lashed out at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who had urged Budapest to do more for its neighbors, placing the Ukrainian leader in a constellation of perceived leftist and liberal enemies of his Christian nationalist project. Orban said his triumph came despite the efforts of the “left at home, the international left all around, the Brussels bureaucrats, the [George] Soros empire with all its money, the international mainstream media, and in the end, even the Ukrainian president.”

This is what the folks at CPAC are celebrating

Even as the bodies are still being gathered in the suburbs of Kyiv, as the death toll of children mounts, and Putin continues to target civilians in his campaign of genocide, CPAC has decided to go ahead with its festival of Orbanism.

April 5 (Reuters) – America’s most prominent conservative gathering, founded on ideals of personal liberty and limited government, convenes in Budapest next month to celebrate a European leader accused of undermining democracy and individual rights.

The May meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is seen by some Republicans as a test of how closely American conservatives are willing align themselves with a global movement of far-right, Russia-friendly strongmen embraced by former U.S. President Donald Trump.

As it often does, CPAC is following the lead of the right’s entertainment wing. Tucker Carlson has emerged as Orban’s leading American fluffer, broadcasting from Budapest last year, and airing a fawning interview of the new avatar of illiberalism.

“In the last few nights in Budapest,” mused Tucker Carlson, US rightwing media star, “I’ve run into a number of Americans who have come here because they want to be around people who agree with them, who agree with you. Do you see Budapest as a kind of capital of this kind of thinking?”

While Orban’s appeal may be elusive to those of you who think that liberal democracy defines the West, his attraction for Tucker and other elements of the right is obvious. A substantial faction of the conservative movement now regards his government “which censors LGBT content, demonizes immigrants and ethnic minorities, extols the virtues of the traditional family, and feuds constantly with the supposed globalists of the European Union” as a political model.

In other words, Orban gives them that sweet autocratic dopamine hit they so desperately crave, without the whole rotting corpse, war crime, genocide thing.

This is who they have become.

I hate to say it but it looks increasingly possible that France will vote in Marine LePen, which is crazy. That will probably break up NATO and if that happens, all bets are off.

A couple of weeks ago, some Republican senators took to the microphones to declare that the war in Ukraine has shown that Democrats are a bunch of weaklings who can’t defend America. What a shocker? One of them even called Joe Biden “Bambi’s brother.” But despite their fist-shaking, you could see they were just going through the motions. That’s because they know their party is hopelessly confused about what they need to do to appeal to their base on foreign policy these days. Elected GOP officials are all over the map on this issue, with a growing faction becoming more hostile to support Ukraine by the day.

It’s actually not unprecedented for Republicans to vote against military action instigated by Democratic presidents and it isn’t even unprecedented for them to refuse to back NATO. Back in the ’90s, many of them voted against intervention in the Baltic region after the former Yugoslavia splintered, even in the face of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The House GOP leader at the time, Tom Delay of Texas, said he didn’t trust the president and claimed the crisis was “falsely described as a huge humanitarian problem, when in comparison to other places, it was nothing.” ( It was not nothing.)

I think what he said accurately summed up the thinking of many Republicans at the time. Their hatred for Clinton was so overwhelming they simply could not support anything he did and frankly, they just didn’t care about all those war crimes. If anything, they were sympathetic to the Serbian strongman who had been terrorizing the region for most of the decade, Slobodan Milošević, who was eventually found guilty of war crimes by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

But after the many decades of reflexive GOP hostility to the Soviet Union and their virulent anti-communist scaremongering, it is still a bit startling to see so many of them suddenly ambivalent about Russian aggression.

Why?

There was a time when the hard-line right-wingers defined themselves by their antagonism toward America’s strongest post-war adversary. They were so paranoid about it that for a time they believed the entire government was overrun with Russian spies and the whole country was in danger of being overtaken from within. Not anymore.

On Tuesday night, the House of Representatives held a vote for a simple, non-binding resolution expressing support for NATO and calling on President Joe Biden to strengthen the organization’s commitment to defending democracy. All the Democrats and two-thirds of the Republicans voted for it.

63 Republicans voted against it.

Shall we call them the Z Caucus? https://t.co/etN402sE2m pic.twitter.com/dRfnWIlTy2

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) April 5, 2022

This was the most anodyne resolution under the circumstances you could possibly come up with. This isn’t like Kosovo when they were voting on whether to authorize airstrikes, it was a purely symbolic statement to back the NATO allies which are bearing a huge burden of taking refugees and a statement of support for NATO’s “founding democratic principles” citing the threat of “authoritarian regimes” and “internal threats from proponents of illiberalism.”

If you look at that list of the Republicans who voted against this resolution, nearly one-third of the caucus, you’ll see that it includes the usual Trumpist suspects and a few more we might not have known was in that faction. Considering all the kind words Trump himself has had to say about Putin ever since he began the invasion, it’s obvious this is where the Trump base is on this issue. And it seems to be growing in Congress.

And this wasn’t the first House vote that made that clear — although it did garner more votes than any of the previous ones. The first vote on March 2nd was a resolution urging sanctions against Russia and military aid to Ukraine for which all of the Democrats, even the true blue anti-war lefties, voted. Only three Republicans declined to support it: Matt Rosendale, R-Mt., Thomas Massie, R- Ky., and Paul Gosar, R-Az.

“Before Tuesday night, 21 House Republicans had already voted against support for Ukraine or sanctions on Russia”

Two weeks later on March 9th, the House voted to suspend oil and gas imports from Russia. Two Democrats voted against it as did 15 Republicans. On March 17, the House passed a bill to end favorable trade relations with Russia and Belarus and eight Republicans voted against it. All of the Democrats voted yes.

Meanwhile, members of this faction are busy proposing legislation of their own, which explains their objections to the aforementioned resolutions and bills. North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn and Arizona’s Gosar want to prohibit the military from deploying any more troops in support of Ukraine in Europe than are stationed at the Mexican border. 10 more Republicans want to bar the delivery of military aid to Ukraine until the border wall is completed. I think it’s only a matter of time before they propose an invasion of Mexico along the lines of Putin’s incursion into Ukraine.

Before Tuesday night, 21 House Republicans had already voted against support for Ukraine or sanctions on Russia. And that number had only grown from one vote to the next, culminating last night in 63 Republicans voting against even expressing support for democracy. That third of the caucus will have an enormous influence if the Republicans take control of the House next January.

So where is this coming from?

Some of it is simple contrarianism, of course, just as it was back in the ’90s. There is, after all, a Democrat in the White House. And some of it comes from a very real admiration for Russia, especially its leader Vladimir Putin. But a lot of this attitude is no doubt due to Trump’s trashing of Ukraine and its president Volodymyr Zelenskyy over the years. Some believe that Ukraine deserved to be invaded, largely based on the misinformation they’ve been fed about “biolabs” and “Nazis,” both of which they believe America is responsible for perpetrating. And, of course, Trump blamed Ukraine for the election interference in 2016 — no doubt having been told that by Putin himself.

But there are other rationales as well. Some simply don’t like NATO and have bought into Trump’s nonsensical view that Europe is a “welfare case.” Many of them just don’t think the U.S. has any reason to have allies or joint defense agreements, which reveals that they have no knowledge of history. They also seem to think that Russia is super strong and America is extremely weak, so it’s a mistake to hit the hornet’s nest. These are the people who dress up in the flag and sing “I’m proud to be an American ” at their wedding receptions.

“It’s obvious this is where the Trump base is on this issue”

And, needless to say, aside from his impressive manly manliness, a lot of Republicans appreciate Vladimir Putin because he believes in traditional family values and won’t let that “woke,” gay agenda infect his culture the way the Democrats have done here. Because, let’s face facts, this is all the Democrats’ fault, especially the alleged “Biden Crime Family,” and the bogus climate change pushers who cooked the whole thing up to screw up the oil markets and force their radical Green New Deal down the throats of Real Americans.

This faction within the Republican Party is powerful and it’s becoming mainstream. The big question is how many Republican voters are with them. If the voters are following the same trajectory as their representatives, there are more today than there were a month ago and that’s frightening. 

Salon

Here we go again:

Last year, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) publicly sounded the death knell for President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), his fellow holdout, is privately concurring, Axios has learned.

In closed-door conversations, Sinema has told donors a path to revival is unlikely. That’s dampened expectations Congress will act on a slimmed-down bill before Memorial Day. It also means any revived BBB legislation faces an arduous route back to the center of the Senate agenda.

No one’s reached out to Sinema about the contours of the slimmed-down deal Manchin has discussed, people familiar with the matter tell Axios.

Instead, Sinema’s telling donors most of her focus is on the $10 billion COVID-19 relief bill, the so-called China competition legislation and modifications to the Electoral Reform Act.

A Sinema spokesperson declined comment to Axios.

 With an expected vote on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to serve as a Supreme Court justice this week, the Senate still wants to act on coronavirus relief before leaving town.

If not, after a two-week recess, senators expect to finalize the new COVID-19 spending and then turn to settling differences with the House over the China bill.

As a practical matter, those issues will suck up much of the Senate’s bandwidth, leaving little room for Build Back Better talks.

Manchin is telling climate activists — as well as reporters — he’s open to raising taxes on corporations and wealthy Americans to pay for roughly $550 billion in new climate-related spending.

He also wants to bolster America’s energy independence by approving more permits for offshore drilling and domestic pipelines.

Some progressives are skeptical about Manchin’s seriousness and intentions. Others say they’re ready to accept his demands on natural gas in return for the $550 billion to lower carbon emissions, Politico reported.

 Last fall, Sinema forced the White House to abandon Biden’s plans to increase the corporate tax rate to 26.5% from 21% and raise the top individual rate for the wealthiest Americans from 37% to 39.5%.

But she did end up agreeing to raise the global minimum and domestic tax rate for corporations to 15%, which would raise about $600 billion over 10 years.

In all, she agreed to measures that would increase revenues by about $2 trillion — more than enough to offset the $1 trillion in new revenue Manchin has floated to pay for climate provisions and deficit reduction.

After Biden pivoted toward deficit reduction in the State of the Union address, indicating he might be willing to work with Manchin on a smaller package, Sinema said her support for the White House’s framework on Build Back Better was unchanged.

“Any new, narrow proposal — including deficit reduction — already has enough tax reform options to pay for it,” a Sinema spokesperson said in early March.

“These reforms are supported by the White House, target tax avoidance and ensure corporations pay taxes, while not increasing costs on small businesses or everyday Americans already hurting from inflation.”

 The White House has always needed to solve issues not just for Manchin but also for Sinema to get a reconciliation bill passed in a 50-50 Senate.

If and when she gets engaged, the talks will take on new urgency.

Whatever. These two are determined to help the Republicans take back the congress and the one silver lining in their plan is that it will make them irrelevant again. If it weren’t for all the carnage, it would be worth it.

Russia is a major exporter of fertilizer. Ukraine and Russia are major producers of wheat, corn, barley, and sunflower oil. Between them, about 30 percent of the world’s wheat exports. According to a study cited by Jack Nicas, New York Times’ Brazil bureau chief, Russia and Ukraine account for about 12 percent of the world’s calories. Nicas spoke about his March 20 story on The Daily podcast on Tuesday.

Nicas wrote in March:

The upheaval is compounded by major challenges that were already increasing prices and squeezing supplies, including the pandemic, shipping constraints, high energy costs and recent droughts, floods and fires.

Now economists, aid organizations and government officials are warning of the repercussions: an increase in world hunger.

The looming disaster is laying bare the consequences of a major war in the modern era of globalization. Prices for food, fertilizer, oil, gas and even metals like aluminum, nickel and palladium are all rising fast — and experts expect worse as the effects cascade.

“Ukraine has only compounded a catastrophe on top of a catastrophe,” said David M. Beasley, the executive director of the World Food Program, the United Nations agency that feeds 125 million people a day. “There is no precedent even close to this since World War II.”

Ukrainian farms are about to miss critical planting and harvesting seasons. European fertilizer plants are significantly cutting production because of high energy prices. Farmers from Brazil to Texas are cutting back on fertilizer, threatening the size of the next harvests.

Wheat prices are up 61 percent in the last year and 12 percent since the Russian invasion (as of March 20). There are stockpiles in many countries, but prices may render wheat products unaffordable until Eastern Europe stabilizes.

A report from Alistair MacDonald in The Wall Street Journal (March 21) is summarized in Illinois Farm Policy News:

“Much of the exports go to developing economies already struggling with food-cost inflation.”

MacDonald added that, “Russia’s naval blockade and fighting around Ukraine ports has all but stopped maritime shipping and left limited means for transporting goods. Wheat prices have hit record levels over the effect on Ukrainian and Russian shipments.

“Like Ukraine’s military efforts, the country’s agriculture sector is rallying. Exports are being rerouted, and Ukraine is asking the U.S., Poland, France and others for supplies, said Taras Vysotskyi, Ukraine’s deputy minister of agrarian policy and food. In the best case scenario, the country’s agricultural exports will fall by a fifth this year compared with 2021, he said, but a much bigger drop is more likely.

“Should Russian forces leave immediately, Dmitry Skorniakov said, his four farms would still struggle to resume work. Tractors, chemical sprayers and a grain silo were destroyed on one farm located close to the besieged city of Mariupol, he said. Some of his workers have left to join the country’s defense.”

Vladimir Putin doesn’t care what impact his actions have around the planet. Not when “Russia’s Tucker Carlson” says he is “waging a special operation not against Ukraine, but against the whole West.” You are all “Nazis” now.

Drink up. You may be paying more for beer soon.

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Remember when “Document the atrocities” was Internet snark for tweeting about Sunday talking heads shows? Ah, but we were so much older then.

Ukrainians and international human rights officials today are documenting literal atrocities committed by Russian troops against civilians. Desiccated corpses lie in the streets where they fell weeks ago, shot at random according to reports, or taken out behind buildings and summarily executed as Nazis. Or suspected Nazis. Or Nazi sympathizers. Or Nazi adjacent or Nazi whatever. Stories from survivors are remarkably similar.

Vladimir Putin’s indoctrination has been most effective. Cultural memory of World War II runs thick in Russia. Programming Russian citizens and soldiers to believe in (and act on) a lie about imaginary Nazis is easier when a handful exist among a far-right militia group in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. Easier still when the government led by a former KGB agent controls all major media.

Showed this to my dad, who grew up in and loathed every aspect of life in the USSR: "We had morning assemblies just like this, where they recited this nonsense about the war just like this, with the same booming, straining voice to convey the fullness of their feelings."

— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) April 5, 2022

Here on this side of the Atlantic, Republicans are mounting their own propaganda campaign. The American right’s “Nazis” are pedophiles.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes took on this growing propaganda effort Tuesday night. Republicans are smearing political opponents as “pro-pedophile.”

Republicans can't outright say, “There's an evil cabal of liberals running a child sex trafficking ring.”

“Instead, they find not-so-clever ways to play footsie with people that do believe—like accusing Judge Jackson of being sympathetic to child abusers," says @chrislhayes. pic.twitter.com/aimza9pmtD

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) April 6, 2022

New dog whistles in this campaign such as “Save the Children” and “grooming” suggest to QAnon supporters (one-quarter of the GOP base, Hayes claims) that supporters of LGBTQ rights are actually a Nazis pedophiles. It is, like Putin’s effort that has resulted in mass murder, a cynical ploy for attacking anyone in the way of their retaining power. And as the Ukraine atrocities demonstrate, such lies are irresponsible and dangerous.

this is like pre-genocide talk https://t.co/DR74rBrs0V

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 6, 2022

The Pizzagate conspiracy that circulated on the fringe right in 2016 alleged “that Hillary Clinton and her former campaign chair, John Podesta, ran a child sex ring at the basement of a pizzeria in DC, Comet Ping Pong (which doesn’t even have a basement),” Vox reported:

From there, people began speculating without any evidence that the restaurant was part of a broader child trafficking ring run by the Democratic Party — a popular but entirely false conspiracy theory on the fringes of conservative media. The conspiracy theories jumped over to Reddit, where the popular Trump subreddit r/The_Donald championed it; Twitter, where pro-Trump tweeters (including the son of Trump’s pick for national security adviser) have continued to promote it; and Facebook, where fake news outlets have written and shared articles about it.

And Alex Jones, the head of the fake news InfoWars who once argued that President Barack Obama and Clinton are literally demons, also boosted the conspiracy theory, saying on his show (in a video that was published in early November but later taken down) that “Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children.” That video earned more than 420,000 videos before it was removed.

Eventually, 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch from North Carolina arrived at Comet Ping Pong with an assault rifle “and fired at least one shot in the restaurant while investigating the conspiracy theory.” No one was hurt. That time.

Donald Trump’s Big Lie, however, resulted in thousands of MAGA supporters and militia members mounting an insurrection against the government on Jan. 6, 2021, resulting in several deaths and hundreds of injuries.

Still can't get over how on the SAME WEEK that Republicans are desperately trying to label everyone else pedophiles and groomers, the Tennessee GOP is advancing a bill *literally* legalizing child marriage. Truly beyond parody.

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) April 5, 2022

This is not a game. Such lies are not politics-as-usual. Nor are they innocent. Ask Ukraine. Ask Rwanda. People spreading them know exactly what they are doing.

That irony is lost on the GOP is no defense. That their supporters are lining up to consume the lies is neither.

He accused Disney of pushing pedophilia and called for a crackdown against the company, while at a lectern with the slogan "Pursuing Truth — Defending Liberty." https://t.co/JBotL7F6hT

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) April 6, 2022

Republicans do not yet have a Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines to spread their lies and incite their supporters to murder as effectively as Putin has. But they do have Fox News and other right-wing news sites. They have public forums. Their statements draw eyes and clicks. It is only a matter of time, if their smears continue and spread, before more armed Edgar Maddison Welchs decide to save the children and start executing the cabal of elite, Satan-worshiping, cannibal pedophiles their leaders have told them runs the world.

Stop it. Just stop it, Republicans.

But I’m not holding my breath.

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What a twisted weirdo. As Max Kennerly tweeted, “I’m getting mixed messaged here. Are M&Ms supposed to be sexy or not?

Tucker’s complaints about changing the shoes of the girl M&M is sheer culture war trolling. It’s the second one that’s important.

Hunter’s laptop doesn’t prove anything about corruption but it does contain a bunch of embarrassing photos of the man when he was seriously drug dependent. They want people to see those pictures in order to entertain GOP voters and make others uncomfortable but they are also trying to rattle Joe to get him to break down or get angry or both.

I’m sure you’re aware of Ron DeSantis’s ostentatious battle with Disney over their commitment to LGBT rights and his other initiatives to force the schools, government and businesses of Florida to adhere to his ideological line. He’s very popular.

Aaron Rupar interviewed Ruth ben-Ghiat, expert on authoritarianism for his newsletter today:

DeSantis rode the Trump cult of personality to the Florida governor’s mansion in 2018, but he’s since forged his own brand of right-wing demagoguery. Last Friday, he was on Fox & Friends, which has celebrated him for the stands he’s taken against public health regulations to combat Covid, against the LGBT community, and against liberalism in general. These have won him some passionate adherents, including the Van Zant brothers, who wrote a bizarre DeSantis propaganda anthem that was played on the show.

More importantly, DeSantis’s Fox & Friends appearance gave him a platform to rail against Disney, Florida’s largest employer, for publicly speaking out against “Don’t Say Gay” legislation he signed into law that allows parents to sue teachers who bring up gender or sexual orientation in K-3 classrooms.

“This wokeness will destroy our country,” DeSantis declared.

"When you're trying to impose a woke ideology on our state, we view that as a significant threat. This wokeness will destroy this country" — on Fox & Friends, Ron DeSantis encourages the Florida legislature to punish Disney over its opposition to the "Don't Say Gay" bill pic.twitter.com/RJELuO21px

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 1, 2022

Florida has a large LGBT population and Disney is a major economic driver for the state, so from one standpoint DeSantis picking a fight with Mickey Mouse doesn’t seem to make much sense. But he has his reasons. To better understand them, I reached out to Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarianism and professor of history and Italian studies at NYU.

Ben-Ghiat has written about how DeSantis is following in Trump’s authoritarian footsteps for both CNN and MSNBC. Last month, she wrote on her blog (“Lucid”) about how he’s turning Florida “into his own mini-autocracy.”

“DeSantis is a particularly dangerous individual,” she wrote. “He may be up for re-election as governor in Florida, but he has designs on the White House as soon as two years from now. It’s not hard to see what he is doing in Florida as a rehearsal for illiberalism on a national scale.”

A transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity, follows.

Aaron Rupar

Why do you think DeSantis warrants so much attention right now?

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

He seems to have learned the lessons of Trump the best, absorbed them, and made clear he wants to surpass the master. DeSantis is somebody who at first was this kind of Reaganite, and then he had an epiphany under Trump and became what he called a “pitbull Trump defender.”

For me, he’s an example of how when somebody like Trump is in office, the political system ends up populating with these imitators. What we see now is Trump’s gone, but DeSantis is using all of his agendas and lessons and making them his own and making Florida into this illiberal state.

Is Ron DeSantis copying Trump? pic.twitter.com/FGGFlLmQpH

— The Recount (@therecount) October 21, 2021

Aaron Rupar

I know this is a really big question, but when you mentions the “lessons of Trump,” what do you mean?

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

It’s a combination of ideological agendas, such as anti-LGBTQ sentiment, and also slogans that worked for Trump and then became slogans of the whole GOP, such as the claims of election fraud.

DeSantis himself always tried to be a bit cagey when he was asked whether Trump won the election or not. He’s the ultimate cynical opportunist, because he clearly assessed what worked for Trump and what was working for the GOP and he decided to double down on those points. You could say that’s what a good politician should do, but it’s creating a state, Florida, that is investing in Trump’s election fraud lies. He has this new office of election security. So it gets elevated into policy.

Also, with a lot of these measures, the point is to turn Americans against each other. He has a voter fraud hotline so you can report people. So it’s a combination of talking points that become policy that work to radicalize people, and work to keep you in power using questionable methods, but also personal style. And here his bullying authoritarian personal style is very important. I’m sure he was always somewhat like this, but this is someone who made a video of himself, as a campaign video, that showed his whole house decked out like it’s a Trump altar.

DeSantis clearly has this very bullying style. You can see that not only in this episode where he told high school students not to wear masks, but in how he speaks to people and how he doesn’t work brook any dissent.

“This is ridiculous.” – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis reprimands a group of students at the University of South Florida for wearing their masks, and also says he believes the recent guidance on masks was a political move for President Biden's State of the Union. pic.twitter.com/UansoyZfdq

— CNN (@CNN) March 3, 2022

That’s very Trumpian. But again, he sees that this is what makes politicians popular on the right now and he goes full in on it. That’s why I think he’s worth focusing on.

Aaron Rupar

During the Trump years there was obviously lot of concern about and attention to the national drift towards authoritarianism and what Trump represented in that respect. But do you think that the state-level drift toward authoritarianism in Republican-controlled states like Florida is an underrated threat?

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

I do think that it’s an underrated threat. Trump was able to do certain things, what I call autocratic capture — like remaking federal agencies and hiring corrupt people. And then the model is in a sense being continued and perfected at the state level. And certain states stand out.

Obviously Florida stands out because it has a very dedicated ideological governor. And Texas as well, and there are some others. I really think in DeSantis’s case, because he’s also very clear about seeking national office, it’s like a rehearsal for things that could be then funneled back at the national level. So it would be a completion of what Trump started.

But DeSantis is also dangerous because when you have somebody who’s very toxic like Trump, who’s very extreme in his personal style and has so much baggage, other people who are less unscrupulous seem better. So DeSantis seems palatable in a way that perhaps Trump isn’t. DeSantis doesn’t have the same baggage. For that reason, too, what he’s doing in Florida, we really need to look very closely at it because in the future he could indeed have a chance at the national level, unlike somebody like [Texas governor] Greg Abbott.

I agree. He’s the most dangerous politician in America. He’s distilled the essence of what everyone loves about Trump: he’s a straight up, no frills asshole.

There are so many. And I’m not talking about average Joe Republicans who are just ridiculously hypocritical. I’m talking about the Trumper officials who just blatantly cheated:

Matt Mowers, a former State Department official under the Trump administration who’s now running against Rep. Chris Pappas (D-NH) as a GOP challenger, cast ballots in two states in the 2016 GOP presidential primaries, records obtained by the Associated Press reveal.

Mowers first voted in New Hampshire’s primary via absentee ballot when he was working for ex-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) presidential campaign.

Then Mowers re-registered with his parents’ address to vote in his home state of New Jersey during the Garden State’s GOP primary four months later, according to the AP, in the face of a federal law that prohibits double-voting.

Christie had dropped out of the race at that point.

Mowers joined then-candidate Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign in July before being brought to the new admin’s State Department after the election.

Like other pro-Trump Republicans running for office, Mowers has been trying to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the U.S. elections process by baselessly suggesting — if not loudly claiming — that elections are in danger of being corrupted by fraudsters.

For example, Mowers’ campaign lists “election integrity” as a top issue on its website and calls for sham election audits and tighter voter ID laws.

However, Mowers’ 2016 voting record is just another example of the hypocrisy of the broader Republican effort — revealing that the GOP’s purported concerns over election integrity are little more than a cover to push voting restrictions and promote Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was rigged.

Then there’s this one, which is truly stunning:

Another particularly damning revelation came last month, when the New Yorker discovered that former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows registered to vote in the 2020 election with an address of a mobile home in Scaly Mountain, North Carolina that he apparently never spent a night in.

I guess they just figure they can get away with anything. I haven’t heard much about Meadows in the mainstream media. It was a half day story at best. I guess Trump can just go around saying that Democrats are committing voter fraud on a massive level, without presenting any evidence about how they are supposedly doing it, while Trump officials personally commit voter fraud and it’s no big deal.

It’s just one more data point that proves Republicans are above the law and are not even expected to be accountable for anything they say because they commit their crimes right out in the open.

Trump said something along these lines at his rally last weekend. He mentioned GOP congressman John Fortenberry who was recently convicted of violating campaign finance laws:

Trump: In a great state Nebraska, a congressman is being put in jail over a few dollars that he possibly didn’t know anything about. A few thousand dollars… I don’t know him well.. it was over a very small amount… over a number of thousands, like 20 thousand… pic.twitter.com/Rgqx26kvFm

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 3, 2022

He only stole $20,000 so it’s ridiculous that he should go to jail.

I don’t think he would say that about a Black man caught stealing a car, do you?

Trump has made a fortune since he left office. And unlike the Democrats who get pilloried for making money from speeches and books, Trump has made his money on the basis of speculation that he’s going to be running again and is supposedly building a media company to help him do it.

It may not be working out but he’s lining his pockets anyway:

Donald Trump, master of reinvention, has a new title: tech entrepreneur. It’s a stretch for the 75-year-old, who doesn’t even use email, preferring instead to scrawl notes in marker. But he doesn’t mind jumping into ventures in which he has little previous experience—and this gig should prove far more lucrative than the presidency. In fact, it has already boosted his net worth by $430 million, according to our math, helping lift his fortune from $2.4 billion a year ago to $3 billion today.

Banned from Twitter, the former president announced in October that he was creating his own social media platform, Truth Social, through the Trump Media and Technology Group, which uses his rapidly appreciating Palm Beach club, Mar-a-Lago, as its address. The app became available in February. Trump now has 835,000 followers—less than 1% of his previous total on Twitter. He has posted only once: “Get Ready. Your favorite President will see you soon!”

Investors don’t seem to care. Trump Media plans to merge with a SPAC that retail traders are buying like crazy, boosting its shares from $10 to more than $50. Based on clues buried in regulatory filings, Trump probably owns at least 50%. We estimated the value of the shares Trump should eventually receive at $10 apiece, reflecting the discounted rate that a handful of smart-money investors recently agreed to pay to jump into the frenzy.

I don’t know why investers are so high on this piece of trash (the ompany and the prson) but apparently they think he can’t lose, just like his cult followers do.

Interesting newsletter from Krugman today. New evidence has persuaded him to change his mind. Imagine that:

All of the evidence suggests that right now, it’s unusually easy for U.S. workers to find jobs and unusually hard for employers to find workers. The odd thing is that we have a very tight labor market, even though the number of employees is still about a million and a half below prepandemic levels and even further below the prepandemic trend:

For some time, many people, myself included, have been telling a story about this situation that goes by the name of the Great Resignation. That tale goes like this: The Covid pandemic caused many Americans to reconsider whether they really wanted or needed to keep working. Fear of infection or lack of child care kept some workers home, where they discovered that the financial rewards of their jobs weren’t enough to compensate for the costs of commuting and the unpleasantness of their work environment. Older workers, forced into unemployment, decided that they might as well take early retirement. And so on.

Well, when my information changes, I change my mind — a line often but dubiously attributed to John Maynard Keynes, but whatever. And the past few months of data have pretty much destroyed the Great Resignation narrative.

Have large numbers of Americans dropped out of the labor force — that is, they are neither working nor actively seeking work? To answer this question, you need to look at age-adjusted data; falling labor force participation because a growing number of Americans are over 65 isn’t meaningful in this context. So economists often look at the labor force participation of Americans in their prime working years: 25 to 54. And guess what? This participation rate has surged recently. It’s still slightly below its level on the eve of the pandemic, but it’s back to 2019 levels, which hardly looks like a Great Resignation:

What about early retirement? If a lot of that was happening, we’d expect to see reduced labor force participation among older workers, 55 to 64. But they’ve come rapidly back into the labor force:

A few months ago, it still seemed reasonable to talk about a Great Resignation. At this point, however, there’s basically nothing there. It’s true that an unusually high number of workers have been quitting their jobs, but they have been leaving for other, presumably better jobs, rather than leaving the work force. As the labor economist Arindrajit Dube says, it’s more a Great Reshuffling than a Great Resignation.

Yet if workers have for the most part come back to the labor force, how do we explain the seeming paradox with which I began this newsletter? How can labor markets be so tight when payroll employment is still well below the prepandemic trend?

I’m sure that labor economists are scrambling to figure this out properly, but a quick look at the evidence suggests a couple of factors that many people telling the Great Resignation narrative — again, myself included — missed.

First, as the economist Dean Baker has been pointing out, the most commonly cited measures of employment don’t count the self-employed, and self-employment is up by a lot, around 600,000 more workers than the average in 2019. Some of this self-employment may be fictitious — gig workers who are employees in all but name but work for companies that classify them as independent contractors to avoid regulation. But it also does seem as if part of the Great Reshuffling has involved Americans concluding that they could improve their lives by starting their own businesses.

Second, a point that receives far less attention than it should is the decline of immigration since Donald Trump came to office, which turned into a plunge with the coming of the pandemic:

Many immigrants are working age and highly motivated; their absence means that we shouldn’t have expected employment to maintain its old trend.

Does the declining plausibility of the Great Resignation narrative have any policy implications?

Well, I don’t like saying this, but it does seem to reinforce the case for higher interest rates. Until recently, it was fairly common for monetary doves to argue that we weren’t really at full employment, because there were many potential workers still sitting on the sidelines. That’s now a hard case to make; the U.S. economy now looks overheated by just about every measure, which means that it needs to be cooled off a bit.

The other implication is that if we want to revive U.S. economic vitality, we really should try to re-establish our nation’s historic role as a destination for ambitious immigrants. But that’s not a policy idea likely to get much traction, given the American right’s anti-immigrant hysteria.

Anyway, you should know that all of those stories about how Americans are no longer willing to work seem to have evaporated. The Great Resignation now looks like a Great Misunderstanding.

Fascinating. Low unemployment and a labor shortage should be good news for American workers. And it is, even with inflation. Having the freedom to change jobs is major. But we are a very sour culture right now , for a lot of reasons, so it’s going to take some time for this to sort itself out.