People like to harrasss the left for being impractical and refusing to face reality but here you have one of its most important leaders make the danger of January 6th and the ongoing coup attempt very clear. The left is not the problem when it comes to understanding what we’re facing.
Over the last week, everyone from Carville to Bernie have praised Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow for her aggressive take-down of the right’s culture war nonsense. Everyone agrees that Democrats should all be this straightforward in confronting their lies.
But these outrageous assaults on Black and LGBT people (not to mention teachers and health care workers) aren’t the right’s only vulnerabilities. There’s also the Rick Scott agenda.
Dan Pfeiffer makes the case in his newsletter:
Up until a few months ago, the Republican strategy for 2022 was clear — say little, stand for nothing, and get out of the way. This strategy hoped the public would view them as a generic alternative. Of course, they were counting on Trump, Fox News, and the MAGA media to fire up the base, but the bulk of the public wanted leaders different from the people in charge currently. Is this approach incredibly cynical? Yep. Is it deeply dishonest? Sure is. Is it effective? Almost certainly.
Mitch McConnell, an incredibly cynical, deeply dishonest man, was the architect of this strategy. And it was proceeding apace until Florida Senator Rick Scott decided to commit the cardinal sin of telling the voters about the Republicans’ secret agenda.
Scott released an “11-point plan to rescue America” for the Republican Party. This plan was filled with unpopular items that Democrats love to run against. Among other items, Scott asserts that the new Republican majority will:
-Raise taxes on half of Americans including senior citizens;
-Sunset all federal legislation including Social Security and Medicare in five years;
-Build a wall on the Southern border named after Donald Trump.
The Biden White House is using the Scott plan as part of their midterm message with multiple tweets and graphics comparing Biden’s (good and very popular) tax plan with Scott’s (bad and very unpopular) plan.
Sensing an opportunity to demonstrate their “both sides” bona fides, some in the traditional political media began criticizing Biden for being unfair to the party that refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of his election and is cruelly and cynically targeting LGBTQ kids. Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post fact-checker, gave Biden “three Pinocchios” and wrote:
Scott’s tax plan is certainly ripe for political fodder, but the White House is pushing its luck here. Scott is a Republican, and he is in Congress and part of the GOP leadership. But his snippet of an idea, such as it is, cannot be labeled a “congressional Republican” plan. No legislation has been crafted, and no other Republican lawmakers have announced their support. One cannot instantly assume every person in a political party supports a proposal by a prominent member.
Puhleeze!!! Yes, they are all signed on to this crap. He is the head of the Senate Campaign Committee and he’s all over the media pushing it. It’s not the Democrats’ responsibility to parse this for the Republicans. Let them come out and repudiate it if they don’t like it!
Fergawdsakes…
With all due respect to Kessler, this is overly-literal idiocy and does more to undermine truth in political discourse than reinforce it. Here’s why the fact-checkers are wrong and Democrats should aggressively make the case against Scott’s plan.
Why The Fact Checkers are Wrong
Rick Scott is not just some random Republican Senator. He is the person chosen by Mitch McConnell to head up the Senate Republican’s campaign arm. This role makes him a de facto part of Senate leadership and a major fundraiser. Most importantly, Scott is very close to Donald Trump. So close, according to Politico Playbook, that:
In a private meeting at Mar-a-Lago a few days ago, DONALD TRUMP made a personal pitch to Senate Republican campaign chief RICK SCOTT. “You should run for Senate majority leader,” he told the NRSC chair, according to someone familiar with the exchange.
It wasn’t the first time, either: Trump has repeatedly told Scott he’d be great at the job and should challenge MITCH MCCONNELL, multiple people familiar with the interactions told Playbook.
Scott didn’t agree to challenge McConnell and would probably lose if he did. But Trump hates McConnell and John Thune, the second in command, with the passion of a thousand suns. Being close to Trump is a position of real influence in the party. No one knows how the next few years will play out, but McConnell is on borrowed time. If Trump runs for President (which he announced he would do last week), McConnell will be taking orders from Scott whether he likes it or not.
As a sign of McConnell’s incredible weakness, Scott doubled and tripled down on his ideas after being publicly chastised by his boss. Scott penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and put out this video promoting his ideas:
Democrats do not have to be too concerned about this. Republicans treat Defund the Police — a position pushed by activists and opposed by nearly every elected Democrat in the country — as if it was a core part of the party’s platform.
The Power of this Political Gift
We don’t need a poll to tell us that taxing the poor and retired is unpopular, but Morning Consult gave us one anyway. Scott’s proposal to tax everyone who does not currently pay income tax — a group made up of retirees and the working poor — is supported by only a third of voters. Majorities of independents, people making under $50,000, and retirees all oppose the idea. For what it’s worth, a majority of voters also oppose the cockamamie wall idea.
The Morning Consult poll does show support for some of Scott’s ideas, but several of those ideas are actually part of the Biden agenda including prioritizing domestic manufacturing and increasing funding for the police. By a margin of 48 to 30 percent, voters support Scott’s plan to cut federal spending by reducing the federal workforce by 25 percent and selling government buildings. However, getting people to support theoretical reductions in government is easy. The politics become treacherous when the impacts of those cuts are delineated — delays in Social Security payments, longer wait times at veterans’ hospitals, an inability to respond to national disasters (or the current pandemic). I am very confident that some smart progressive policy people can spit out a report with the specific consequences of this seemingly popular idea. And then some very smart Democratic ad can hammer every Republican for these cuts in popular services and programs.
More broadly, this Republican agenda gives Democrats the opportunity to tie the GOP to the Trumpist philosophy that motivated the Democratic base and brought swing voters to our side. As Ed Kilgore wrote in New York Magazine:
Whoever drafted this monstrosity must have been told to ask “What Would Trump Do?” on every topic and then ratchet up the Right-Wing anger and MAGA rhetoric considerably. Instead of just attacking affirmative action, the plan would ban collection of Census information by race or ethnic group. Criticizing excessive “wokeness” isn’t enough; Scott’s agenda promises to ban the use of “tax dollars for any diversity training.” And Trump gets his props in the plan, too: It proposes to “finish building the wall and name it after President Donald Trump.”
How to Push Our Ideas
The Right is very good at cherry-picking any politically advantageous statement or issue and then aggressively messaging it to the public at scale. They have done this to great effect with Hillary Clinton’s email habits, Defund the Police, and the idea that Democrats are socialists. They have the advantage of a much louder megaphone powered by Fox and Facebook. Though the Democratic messaging operation is not as powerful, it doesn’t mean we are powerless. We can drive narratives and make attacks stick, but it takes more work and it requires all of us to leverage the power of our own networks by texting and sharing the right content.
To make this work, every Democrat at every level must push the idea that Republicans want to raise taxes on half of all Americans to pay for a wall named after Donald Trump. The message has to be in ads, hammered on social media, and delivered on the stump. We must brush off the annoying reporters tsk-tsking us to push an agenda that Mitch McConnell won’t publicly support. The political press holds Democrats to different sets of rules, but that doesn’t mean we have to play by them.
This is a plan consistent with decades of Republican values being pushed by the former President’s handpicked choice to lead the Senate. Democrats should proceed with confidence and without fear of some overly literal nattering nabobs.
I couldn’t agree more. There is zero downside to this. It’s even negative partisanship in service of their precious “kitchen table issues” since Scott is pretty much promising to burn the whole house down. If there’s a less welcome economic message than Scott’s I don’t know what it is.
Between this, their general insanity on these culture war issues and, of course, the f=gift that keeps on giving, Donald Trump, they have a chance to save themselves. And us. The jury is still out on whether they will do it. And time is getting short.
The New York Times profiled the right’s latest scumbag hero, Christopher Rufo, the man most responsible for making blatant racism and homophobia great again:
Mr. Rufo is the conservative activist who probably more than any other person made critical race theory a rallying cry on the right — and who has become, to some on the left, an agitator of intolerance. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank, he has emerged at the front of another explosive cultural clash, one that he sees as even more politically potent and that the left views as just as dangerous: the battle over L.G.B.T.Q. restrictions in schools.
Mr. Rufo has taken aim at opponents of a new Florida law that prohibits teachers in some grades from discussing L.G.B.T.Q. issues and that critics call “Don’t Say Gay.” He declared “moral war” against the statute’s most prominent adversary, the Walt Disney Company.
[…]
On Friday, Mr. Rufo appeared with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida at the signing of a bill known as the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, which bars teaching in workplaces and schools that anyone is inherently biased or privileged because of race or sex. Mr. Rufo, who consulted on the bill, warned Disney that an in-house program it had run that urged discussion of systemic racism was “now illegal in the state of Florida.”
The signing was the culmination of Mr. Rufo’s long campaign to short-circuit corporate and school efforts at diversity and inclusion training. He has acknowledged twisting hot-button racial issues to achieve his aims. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory,’” he wrote on Twitter last year.
Friday was also a milestone in Mr. Rufo’s latest fixation. As he looked on, Mr. DeSantis signed a second measure abolishing Disney’s special tax status in the state.
The retaliation against Disney emerged after its opposition to the Parental Rights in Education law, signed by Mr. DeSantis last month, which bans classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity for children below fourth grade, and limits it in older grades. The anti-L.G.B.T.Q. statute is part of a political brawl unfolding in an election year as both parties try to excite their bases. Republican lawmakers in multiple states have proposed measures similar to Florida’s.
He’s having a huge influence on the Republican Party because he’s giving them a new avenue to pursue their life’s work of being hate-filled bigots.
Mr. Rufo is convinced that a fight over L.G.B.T.Q. curriculums — which he calls “gender ideology” — has even more potential to spur a political backlash than the debate over how race and American history are taught.
“The reservoir of sentiment on the sexuality issue is deeper and more explosive than the sentiment on the race issues,” he said in an interview.
“Reservoir of sentiment” is a nice way of saying “fear and loathing” aka racism and homophobia. They hate ’em all. And they hate foreigners, feminists, liberals etc too.
Critics of Mr. Rufo, and of the broader right-wing push on L.G.B.T.Q. issues, say the attacks represent a new era of moral panic, one with echoes of slanders from decades ago that gay teachers were a threat to children. Some champions of Florida’s law, including Christina Pushaw, Mr. DeSantis’s press secretary, have labeled their opponents “groomers” — adults who want to sexually pursue children.
Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, said conservatives had falsely and intentionally linked child sex predators with opponents of the Florida law. Mr. Rufo, he said, had provided fuel for their arguments.
Yes he did. And he is devious and dishonest about it too. Of course.
After Mr. Rufo released the Disney employee videos, he shared mug shots on Twitter of Disney workers who had been charged in child sexual abuse cases over the years, based in part on CNN reporting from 2014.
He failed to note, in an article he wrote about the arrests for City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute, that none of the cases in the CNN report involved children at Disney’s parks. Nor did he include Disney’s response to CNN that the arrests were “one one-hundredth of 1 percent of the 300,000 people we have employed during this time period.”
In another article for City Journal, Mr. Rufo claimed that American schools were “hunting grounds” for teachers, and that “parents have good reason” to worry about “‘grooming’ in public schools.”
He cited data from a decades-old survey, in a study for the Education Department, but he omitted the study’s declaration that “the vast majority of schools in America are safe places.”
Reihan Salam, the president of the Manhattan Institute, defended Mr. Rufo’s work for giving voice to parents’ concerns about the “ideological climate in public schools,” specifically a “lack of transparency over the teaching of contentious subjects.”
Salam is supposed to be one of the “reasonable” Republicans. Uh huh. There is not such thing. I wish people would stop saying it. If you are a Republican these days, a member of the right, you are, by definition, unreasonable.
And he is a slimy, unctuous liar too:
Mr. Rufo denied that he had broadly equated opponents of the Florida law with groomers. “It’s wrong, factually and morally, to accuse someone of being a groomer with no basis and evidence,” he said.
“It’s become a powerful word that should be used with great responsibility,” he added. Nevertheless, some L.G.B.T.Q. people have reported an increase in harassment as the use of the term has surged online, echoing the QAnon conspiracy theory’s fixation on a cabal of “deep state” Democratic pedophiles.
He knows exactly what he’s doing:
He’s also a rank opportunist — of course:
Mr. Rufo, 37, lives and works in Gig Harbor, a picturesque boating town on Puget Sound south of Seattle. A former documentary filmmaker and, briefly, an unsuccessful candidate for Seattle’s City Council, he burst on the scene in 2020 by publicizing examples of diversity trainings in government that seemed to have gone off the rails, such as asking bureaucrats to examine their “complicity in the system of white supremacy.” Diversity trainings, long a fixture in government and corporate America, typically support the idea that people’s unconscious biases involving race and gender can create hostile work environments.
His reporting in City Journal and posts on social media electrified readers, who leaked him more documents from anti-bias and diversity seminars.
Perusing footnotes, he discovered the field of critical race theory. Originally a graduate-level academic thesis before conservatives turned it into political shorthand for a variety of teachings on race, it holds that racism is systemic in American institutions, not just a matter of individual bigotry.
Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show in 2020, Mr. Rufo urged President Donald J. Trump to abolish critical race theory trainings in the government.
The next day, he said, he received a call from Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, telling him that Mr. Trump had seen him on Fox, and asking him to consult on an executive order. Framed in his home, Mr. Rufo has the pen that Mr. Trump used to sign the order, and a handwritten card from the White House: “Who says one person can’t make a difference?!”
Although President Biden quickly revoked the order, critical race theory became a volatile political issue as Mr. Rufo and allies accused school systems of indoctrinating K-12 students.
He’s getting rich doing it. The article opens with the anecdote that he built a TV studio in his home replete with uplink to Fox so he could more easily appear there.
His advocacy has been financially rewarding. Besides his Manhattan Institute position, he has a newsletter with 2,500 paid subscribers, and he runs a nonprofit entity to support his work, which he said had received over $500,000 in donations since late last year.
Mr. Rufo said he thought a great deal about selecting the right language to define what he opposed. A fan of postmodernist thinkers, he refers to the importance of “meta-narratives.” He said that to maximize voters’ anxieties about gender issues, he plans to write a series of articles on classroom practices he deems outrageous.
“You have to provide the vocabulary for people to talk about” gender issues, he said. “Once that happens, it’s going to be explosive.”
People are going to get hurt, many of them kids, because of this disgusting creep. It’s common on social media now to see people hurling homophobic slurs in a way I haven’t head in decades. It’s back. And you can thank this asshole nobody and his friend Tucker Carlson for it.
This is happening all over the country:
A year after a new Montana law stripped local health boards of their rulemaking authority, confusion and power struggles are creating a patchwork oversight system that may change how public health is administered long after the pandemic is over.
The law, which took effect last April amid criticism of mask mandates and other covid restrictions on businesses, gave local elected leaders the final say in creating public health rules. Supporters said elected officials would be accountable to voters if they abuse that authority, while opponents said the change would inject politics into health decisions.
Matt Kelley, CEO of the Montana Public Health Institute, a nonprofit focused on strengthening public health systems, said local health boards still have a duty to protect their communities, but the law limits their power to do so.
“Anybody who has ever been in a job where they have a responsibility for something but not the authority to actually get that done knows how hard that is and how bad that feels,” Kelley said.
The law was part of a wave of bills passed in statehouses amid a pandemic backlash. At least 26 states adopted laws rolling back public health powers. Montana legislators passed some of the most restrictive changes, including preventing limits on religious gatherings and banning employers — even hospitals — from requiring vaccination against covid-19 or any other disease.
Before the new law, health boards comprising appointees by local governments set public health rules and approved emergency health measures for their regions. The measure limiting health boards’ powers allows them to pass orders in an emergency, though the elected officials can change or revoke those orders. Elected officials also have final say in appointing a health officer. But local health departments’ and health boards’ day-to-day operations are supposed to be untouched by the new rules.
The law left county commissions to oversee county health boards and city councils to oversee city health boards. But for local governments with joint health departments, the law is vague; they’re left to define their own “governing body” to provide oversight.
As a result, those cities and counties have to rework agreements that define how their joint boards operate, said Kelly Lynch, executive director of the Montana League of Cities and Towns.
Several haven’t figured it out. In some places, the holdup has been local officials butting heads over who should get a vote and how much sway each should get. In other areas, established bodies have not outlined how they’ll operate.
As of early April, four out of six of Montana’s most-populated counties — Missoula, Cascade, Yellowstone, and Gallatin — still hadn’t finalized their governing bodies. That left public health boards in limbo. Many of the health officials stuck in the middle are new to the job after their predecessors quit or retired in the face of an increasingly polarized public.
When D’Shane Barnett was hired as health officer for the Missoula City-County Health Department, he expected the new rules to roll into place soon after. A year later, he’s still waiting.
“The weirdest impact is that I don’t know who my boss is,” Barnett said.
County spokesperson Allison Franz said local officials hope to have a draft interlocal agreement ready for county and city leaders in June.
Until then, Barnett said, he tries to make sure all interested local government officials are on board with his department’s actions. “So far, everybody is, but it won’t be that way forever,” he said.
David Bedey, a Republican state representative from Ravalli County who proposed the new law last year, said the idea to shift public health authority to elected officials preceded the pandemic. Although politicians aren’t experts in roadways, they craft the rules of the road — and the same idea should apply to public health, he said.
Bedey said he’s surprised it’s taken localities this long to establish governing bodies, but he believes they’ll work it out.
“The idea here was local jurisdictions and citizens within those jurisdictions would settle this amongst themselves,” Bedey said. “If they have pending regulations that need approval, that ought to give them plenty of motivation.”
John Felton, Yellowstone County’s health officer, said the law has created confusion in the state’s largest county. There, four jurisdictions — the county, the cities of Billings and Laurel, and the town of Broadview — overlap in oversight of a health department, RiverStone Health, which has its own clinics and offers medical services beyond the scope of most public health agencies in the state.
Felton wonders how new oversight might affect future changes in non-covid areas of public health, such as food prep rules or how tattoo artists wrap clients’ new ink. He’s waiting to see how local leaders define a governing body’s interactions with other new laws, such as one that restricts health officials from getting between a business and its clients.
The GOP response to a global pandemic that killed at least a millions Americans alone is to put public health into the hands of local officials who know nothing about public health. They harassed, threatened and intimidated experts into leaving town because they didn’t want to hear what they were saying and refused to follow science based rules.
We know there is going to be another pandemic. And they’re going to kill even more people with this infantile, backwards, ignorant worldview.
Tom wrote about today’s French election below. As I write this we still don’t know how it went. But it’s been clear for a while that the right is on the rise around the world, including here, so it’s very important to keep a close eye on where this is going.
I wrote before about CPAC going to Hungary to kiss the ring of Viktor Orban. Here’s a full analysis of what’s going on there by Craig Unger:
Come May 18, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), for nearly 50 years the largest and most influential gathering of conservatives in the world, will assemble in Budapest, with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as its keynote speaker.
That means leading American conservatives who are supposedly deeply committed to the ideals of personal liberty, limited government, free markets, human dignity, and the like will be joining forces behind one of the most authoritarian and antisemitic heads of state in the world. The speakers reportedly will include Orbán, who won his fourth term as prime minister on April 3; Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of Brazil’s president; and Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain’s far-right Vox party.
At this writing, it’s unclear which big name American conservatives will be headlining the event. “I can’t tell you who is actually scheduled to speak,” said Daniel Schneider, executive director of the American Conservative Union (ACU), which sponsors CPAC. In recent months, however, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, and Tucker Carlson, have all made highly visible appearances on the Orbán bandwagon, with Carlson repeatedly extolling the virtues of the Hungarian strongman to millions of viewers on Fox News.
The hard-right’s growing affinity for Orbán’s Hungary should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed how the Republicans became Putin’s Party and how they have responded to the ongoing Russian atrocities in Ukraine. Think of Hungary in terms of Russia’s trajectory in recent years, during which Putin ushered in an era of global theft on an unimaginable scale, putting together a mafia state in which his handpicked oligarchs had monopolistic control of Russia’s strategic resources—an authoritarian kleptocracy in which billions in dark money were stashed in anonymous shell companies. As has been widely reported, Ukrainian-born billionaire Leonard “Len” Blavatnik, a naturalized American citizen, has contributed millions to leading GOP candidates, including Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, and Lindsey Graham. Similarly, as I reported in House of Trump, House of Putin, and American Kompromat, Russian oligarchs have paid countless millions to huge white-shoe American law firms representing their banks and energy companies and have plowed millions of dollars into supporting right-wing, populist movements elsewhere in the West.
But now that Russian atrocities in Ukraine dominate the news cycle 24/7, the mechanisms through which Putin’s propaganda, disinformation, and dark money flow to the West are finally being shut down. More than a thousand Russian businesses and individuals have been sanctioned. Russia has defaulted on foreign loans. Its banks have been removed from Swift. All Russian flights have been banned from United States, the U.K., the EU, and Canadian airspace. New investment in Russia from the West is being shut down. Yachts are being seized. One by one, the faucets are being turned off. And, as The Bulwark put it, that’s why the right has begun to increasingly “launder its Putinism” through support of Orbán.
Indeed, Putin has become so toxic that even the sponsors of CPAC Budapest take pains to assert—rather unconvincingly, I might add—that the Hungarian prime minister is no friend of the Russian ruler. “It’s untrue to say that Orbán is an ally of Putin,” ACU’s Daniel Schneider told me in a phone interview in which he further asserted that “Hungary and Orbán voted for sanctions” against Russia.
But that assessment does not hold up under close scrutiny. Even in the wake of Russia’s murderous attacks, Orbán has declined to criticize Putin directly, has prohibited arms shipments to Ukraine through Hungary, and has fought proposals for EU sanctions on Russian natural gas.
It is true that initially Orbán condemned the Russian invasion and did not veto the EU sanctions against Moscow, a stance that helped him win reelection on April 3. But just four days later, on April 7, Hungary announced that it would continue to receive nuclear fuel for power plants from Russia. Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Oleh Nikolenko said that now that Orbán’s election is over, Hungary is “on to the next step—to help Putin continue his aggression against Ukraine.”
Hungary’s position is particularly striking in view of the astonishing unity of the rest of Western Europe. As a member of both NATO and the European Union, Hungary is the only country in those organizations that remains firmly in Putin’s pocket. It is the fox in NATO’s henhouse.
“For CPAC to have its conference there, it’s absolutely a security threat,” says Richard Kraemer, senior fellow at European Values Center for Security Policy and the co-author of a recent report for the center that characterized Hungary as a Russian proxy state. “Just take the International Investment Bank [IIB] in Budapest as an example. It’s essentially a staging ground for Russian intelligence interests. Everyone at the bank has diplomatic immunity. Why you need that is completely beyond me.”
Kraemer noted that the president of the IIB, Nikolai Kosov has long-standing ties to Russian and Soviet intelligence through his parents, Nikolai Kosov and Yelena Kosova, both of whom were well-known KGB agents.
In a similar vein, a piece by Dr. András Göllner in the Hungarian Free Press notes that Budapest is home to approximately 1,000 members of the Russian secret service, many of whom are allowed “to work and travel without any restrictions within the EU, and more importantly, to travel to the USA without a visa.”
A Hungarian born author and academic who is emeritus professor at Concordia University in Montreal, Göllner worked with Orbán in the 1990s but broke with him in 2001 “after I became aware of his wholehearted embrace of corruption.”
Such security vulnerabilities are compounded by rampant corruption in Hungary, which will now provide a place for CPAC political operatives to mix with intelligence assets and the criminal class of Hungary and Central Europe. “It’s mind-blowing,” Göllner told me. “It’s almost as if the FBI or the Department of Justice decided to hold a bash in a village in Sicily that is the home of organized crime.”
There were other alternatives. “Paris is a nice place,” Göllner said. “London is nice. Why did CPAC choose to have the conference in the center of criminal activity? Because they can make financial transactions with the criminal class of Central Europe for funding that provides the leverage to gain political influence.”
The Hungarian connection with the Republicans dates to 2008, when Arthur Finkelstein, the late GOP political consultant, secretly worked to get Orbán elected. Finkelstein, you may recall, was the legendary Republican attack dog and “merchant of venom” who did more than anyone else in the U.S. to transform the word “liberal” into a vile political epithet. Finkelstein’s greatest strength as a political warrior was a shamelessness so profound that it allowed him—a gay Jew—to mastermind viciously homophobic and virulently antisemitic political campaigns without the slightest compunction. In 1996, Finkelstein was “outed” by Boston magazine in an article by Steve Rodrick that I edited. It noted that his clients—Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), Lauch Faircloth (R-NC), and Don Nickles (R-OK) among them—were instrumental in defeating a bill that would ban anti-gay job discrimination.
When it came to helping Orbán get elected prime minister in 2008, once again Finkelstein’s shameless hypocrisy won the day. As Buzzfeed described it, at the heart of Finkelstein’s secret work for Orbán was the demonization of George Soros via a series of antisemitic attacks on the billionaire investor. The fact that Soros had not lived in Hungary for years was of no consequence. He was a rich Jew and a liberal who supported protecting the climate, equality, and the Democrats, so Finkelstein devised a massive campaign that transmogrified Soros into a dangerous and conniving Jewish billionaire who could be portrayed as an enemy in different countries all over the world. Before long, there were billboards all over Hungary featuring Soros with the text “Don’t let him have the last laugh.”
With the exception of Paul Manafort, who helped elect pro-Putin candidates Viktor Yanukovych as president of Ukraine and Donald Trump in the United States, no American political consultant did more for the Russian president than Finkelstein. Putin liked Finkelstein’s anti-Soros campaign so much, he joined in with antisemitic dog whistles. Similarly, Donald Trump’s final TV ad before the 2016 election featured Soros as a force representing “global special interests” who do not have “your good in mind.”
The campaign was so successful that Finkie, as Orbán called him, got a home in Budapest and served as the prime minister’s chief strategist for 10 years, according to the Hungarian Free Press. As Steve Bannon put it, by helping Viktor Orbán get elected prime minister, Finkelstein allowed Hungary to give birth to “Trump before Trump.”
Meanwhile, Orbán had his own ties to Russia’s mafia state through Semion Mogilevich, the so-called Brainy Don of the Russian Mafia, who is alleged to have orchestrated a vast array of global crime scams, often working out of Budapest, and is back in the news with a bounty on his head. On April 6, in partnership with the FBI, the State Department’s Transnational Organized Crime Rewards Program put out a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest and/or conviction “for his alleged participation in a scheme that defrauded thousands of investors out of more than $150 million.”
Especially renowned when it comes to money laundering, Mogilevich and his network have been particularly successful in using resources culled from organized crime to win favor among the powers that be. Back in 1984, David Bogatin, a Russian mobster who had ties to Mogilevich, met with Donald Trump and laundered millions through Trump real estate, buying five different condos in Trump Tower.
In addition, as I reported in House of Trump and House of Putin, Orbán’s ties to the Russian Mafia date back to 1994, when Mogilevich was allegedly overseeing a vast array of criminal operations for that organization—arms dealing, contract murder, drug trafficking, pump-and-dump stock swindles, extortion, sex trafficking, and more—based largely out of Budapest. His close ties to the powers that be in the post-Soviet world, including Hungary, were crucial to Mogilevich’s success.
It was in service to this network that Mogilevich allegedly arranged for Dietmar Clodo, a longtime associate who was a suspected drugs and arms trafficker, to make a one-million-deutschmark payment to a rising young star in Hungarian politics who had been instructed to come by and pick it up in a suitcase. Given the scale of his operations in Hungary, Mogilevich wanted to make sure the authorities looked the other way. This was protection money.
As Clodo recalled, when the man arrived, he “didn’t want to come into the house. I told him, ‘Listen to me. I have that damned money in a suitcase. I don’t want to go out in the street with the suitcase. If you refuse to come in, I’ll give it back to Mr. Mogilevich. I don’t care.”
Of course, Clodo didn’t explain why he really wanted the transaction to take place indoors—namely, that there was a hidden camera recording the transfer.
At the time, Clodo didn’t even know the name of the young pol who had arrived on his doorstep, but it turned out to be Viktor Orbán, of Fidesz, Hungary’s right-wing populist party. Orbán went on to become prime minister from 1998 to 2002 and from 2010 to the present. Throughout his early career, and even in his first term as prime minister, starting in 1998, Orbán was quite free in criticizing the Kremlin and denouncing other European governments as Moscow’s puppets. But in 2009, he abruptly reversed field and became a key Putin apologist.
And what was behind Orbán’s dramatic U-turn? In 2008, Semion Mogilevich had been jailed in Russia on tax evasion charges and desperately wanted to get out. According to Dietmar Clodo, as first reported by Anastasia Kirilenko on The Insider, that’s when Mogilevich gave the videos of Orbán taking the million-deutschmark payment to the Financial Stability Board in exchange for the Kremlin’s agreement to release Mogilevich.
In other words, thanks to Mogilevich, Putin had Orbán exactly where he wanted him. “Whatever happened to Orbán in such a short period of time?” asked The Insider in a story whose headline provided a likely answer: “A Suitcase Full of Cash from the Solntsevo Mafia: Does Putin have a Video Kompromat on the Hungarian Leader.”
In the years since, Orbán has become an astute practitioner of the authoritarian playbook. He centralized power, changed elections laws in his favor, assembled his own clique of oligarchs, promoted white Christian nationalism, passed anti-LGBTQ legislation, curtailed freedom of the press, cracked down on dissent, and drew closer to Putin.
He also began to raise his profile in the West with the help of Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Now one of Orbán’s most fervent fanboys, Carlson already had family ties to the Hungarian leader through his father, Richard Carlson, whose lobbying firm, Policy Impact Strategic Communications, is a registered lobbyist for Orbán. According to The New York Times, in 2019, the firm introduced Tucker to the Hungarian ambassador, set up an interview on Carlson’s show that year with Hungary’s minister of foreign affairs and trade, and otherwise helped Fox News orchestrate meetings and interviews with relevant Hungarian officials.
Then, last August, Carlson spent a full week broadcasting his nightly Fox News show from Budapest, replete with fawning interviews with Orbán and gushing voice-overs about how Hungary was a “small country with a lot of lessons for the rest of us.”
Earlier this year, Carlson went even further, releasing a “documentary” called Hungary vs. Soros: Fight for Civilization, which portrays the country as a rightist utopia that has conquered illegal immigration thanks to its supposedly impenetrable border fence. Not one to shy away from antisemitism, Carlson depicts Soros as a villainous Jewish financier pulling the strings of the world leaders, directing a global conspiracy to keep borders open, and serving the interests of leftist ideologues through his support of civil society groups. “It’s appalling to see Tucker Carlson and FOX invoke the kind of anti-Semitic tropes typically found in white supremacist media,” tweeted Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League. “There’s no excuse for this kind of fear mongering, especially in light of intensifying #antisemitism.”
Whether Carlson shows up in Budapest or Marjorie Taylor Greene comes with her Jewish space lasers, CPAC’s expansion into Hungary and other countries—it has similar events planned in Brazil, Israel, Japan, South Korea, and more—raises a number of troubling questions.
Inept as the Russians have been in invading Ukraine, it is easy to forget that not too many years ago they created an amazingly creative and efficient new kind of hybrid warfare that eschewed bombs, bullets, and boots on the ground for a sophisticated blend of disinformation, cyber warfare, kompromat, and the like, in the end helping install Donald Trump in the White House.
All of which creates opportunities for CPAC conferencegoers to seek out opportunities to reap the same kinds of vast sums that Manafort and Finkelstein got from Putin’s and Orbán’s coffers. It comes at a time when effects of the sanctions have not yet been fully felt, but are just starting to kick in. “I think the new sanctions are quite effective,” says Swedish economist Anders Åslund, the author of Russia’s Crony Capitalism. “Oligarchs are being sanctioned and are losing property the world over.”
However successful they turn out to be, it will be important to keep an eye on Hungary. Because it is integrated into both the EU and NATO while Orbán maintains his loyalty to Putin, the conference in Budapest provides fertile breeding ground to resurrect Putin’s most effective influence operations. As the only Putinist in power in the EU, Orbán is a pivotal force promoting Putin-style authoritarianism in the West.
This right wing movement is very, very incestuous as you can see. The question is whether or not it really starts to pick up speed.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine may have set back the cause. The world is appalled by what it’s seeing and it’s made this right wing movement dance on the head of a pin trying to justify it. So perhaps there is some hope that it’s lost some traction. They’re betting that the culture war is more important than a real war in people’s minds. I wonder.
At least Fort Bend County is not likely to sink into the ocean. It’s just likely to flood. But y’all come:
TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — A Texas judge wrote a letter to Disney’s CEO inviting the company to move its Walt Disney World resort to the Lone Star State after its issues with Florida’s state government.
Friday, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill dissolving the Reedy Creek Improvement District, Disney’s private government that has been in place for 55 years.
This came after Disney openly opposed the Parental Rights in Education Bill, also known as the “Don’t Say Gay” Bill. Last March, the company announced it would end its political donations in Florida and instead support organizations in opposition to the law.
In the midst of DeSantis’ feud with the Disney Company, Fort Bend County Judge JP George, the chief executive officer of Fort Bend County, Texas, wrote a letter inviting the company to relocate to his area and avoid “authoritarian, anti-business, and culture war attacks from extremists in Florida.”
The letter, addressed to CEO Bob Chapek, promoted his county as an ideal location for the large amounts of purchasable land and its strategic location in the state of Texas.
Here’s the letter.
A few Republicans are beginning to believe their party’s anti-gay rights campaign may have gone a skosh too far. What if it spurs a moderate-voter backlash? What if they think the party is anti-gay? What if they have gay family members?
As The Washington Post considers all the anti-gay bills Republican legislatures like Florida’s recently have enacted:
The measures have been accompanied by a push among some Republicans to falsely describe backers of gay rights as “groomers” who are recruiting children to question their own sexuality or gender identity at a young age, torquing up rhetoric that LGBTQ activists say is dangerous. One top Senate Republican also recently criticized the legal underpinnings of a 2015 Supreme Court decision affirming the right to same-sex marriage — a ruling that has broad public support.
Republicans needed a wedge issue for 2022. They created two, at least. One, over discussions of race in schools. Another, over classroom mention of gender differences. They’ve couched these nontroversies as matters of parental rights. That’s the GOP’s preferred smoke screen for thinly disguising widespread prejudice:
“[Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn] Youngkin invented this, and DeSantis has perfected it,” said Dan Eberhart, a GOP donor who is close with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). Eberhart said laws like the one in Florida signal to the base of the party a willingness to take on fights.
But Eberhart said that he thinks DeSantis “may have gone too far” in pushing subsequent legislation that stripped special tax breaks from the Walt Disney Co. after it opposed the parental rights bill. Now, he said, Democrats can paint DeSantis as hurting the economy in central Florida, where Disney employs thousands of workers.
The resurgence of anti-gay rhetoric is reminiscent of a past era, some observers said. In 2004, for example, Republicans pushed state referendums banning same-sex marriage. But by the time of the Donald Trump administration, GOP antipathy to gay and lesbian rights had in many respects faded.
But their true purpose is to inflame passions against Democrats. And against public schools whose funding conservatives would like to see handed to for-profit, Republican-friendly donor businesses. If those businesses will still have them after what DeSantis is doing to Disney.
So move over, Black Lives Matter. Move over, Antifa. Move over Southern Strategy. Hell, move over Republicans’ traditional back-scratching of the Chamber of Commerce. DeSantis and the Republicans of MAGA 2.0 have turned off their inhibitor chips. They’re attacking the hands that feed them. They’ve rejected the principles of democracy, the Declaration and the Constitution. They’re going full authoritarian.
“Free speech for me, compliance for thee.”
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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
French radicals in this morning’s runnoff election are trying to elect a far-right president who might do what Donald Trump failed to: fracture NATO. Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally (until recently the National Front), has said that once there is a Ukraine peace treaty, she would pursue “a strategic rapprochement between NATO and Russia” and remove France from NATO’s command structure. Final polls showed incumbent President Emmanuel Macron with a 10-point lead going into Sunday.
Polls have been wrong before. Polls were off by nine points in 2017, the Washington Post advises:
A runoff win by Le Pen, 53, would put an anti-immigrant populist in charge of the European Union’s second-biggest economy and its only nuclear power. It would replace a fervent defender of the E.U. with a longtime critic of the bloc. Le Pen’s past admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin and her recent calls for reconciliation between NATO and Russia have also prompted concerns that a far-right victory would empower a leader who shares Putin’s worldview, and who could become a key obstacle to Western support for Ukraine.
The U.S. elected an anti-immigrant populist and Putin admirer in 2016. The country survived his four years in office, but not without a violent insurrection that left several dead and over a hundred injured. Investigators are still gathering evidence on the self-coup attempt by the former president and his allies. Key players have yet to face prosecution.
France may yet avoid that outcome. Candidates who failed to advance in the first round have urged supporters not to vote for Le Pen.
French voters are not known for their forgiving nature when it comes to incumbent presidents. Macron’s favorability has waned. But Macron may benefit from the anti-LePen sentiment (New York Times):
Slowly dragging a shopping bag through the alleys of a bustling market in Saint-Denis, a city in Paris’s northern suburbs, Assina Channa did not hide her growing weariness. She had just left the polling station where she had grudgingly cast her vote for the incumbent president, Emmanuel Macron.
“Nothing is going to change,” Ms. Channa, 58, said, stopping for a moment near a stall selling secondhand clothes. “But I had no choice.”
Like many other voters in Saint-Denis, a multicultural place with many residents who are Muslim or from an immigrant background, she said she had voted without conviction for Mr. Macron, only to keep his rival, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen, from power.
“At least he doesn’t threaten us like she does,” Ms. Channa, a Muslim of Algerian descent, said, pointing to Ms. Le Pen’s tough stance on immigration and her proposal to ban the Muslim head scarf from public spaces. “But with him, life will continue to be expensive.”
Ms. Channa’s tactical vote on Sunday was the same as the one she cast five years earlier, when Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen were the candidates in that presidential runoff. Her fatigue echoed the apathy that seems to have set in among many voters in Saint-Denis and throughout France, especially on the left, as they feel compelled to once again hold their noses and vote without enthusiasm for anyone but the far right.
In their debate last week, Macron painted Le Pen as “a dependent of Russia,” a reference to loans held by Russian banks. As Channa notes above, Le Pen confirmed in the debate that she would ban Muslim women from wearing a hijab in public.
The American New Right is prepared to toss self-evident truths and democratic principles onto the ash-heap of history. French radicals want to trade liberté, égalité, fraternité for whatever version of “Russian fascism” the authoritarian right has planned for Europe. The U.S. has its own house to tend.
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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
The 2022 Seattle International Film Festival is running now through April 24th. This year’s SIFF is a “hybrid experience”, combining virtual access to many selections with a return to in-person screenings. SIFF is showing 262 shorts, features and docs from 80 countries. I’m wrapping up my coverage by highlighting some of the films that I caught. Hopefully, some will be coming soon to a theater (or a streaming service) near you!
Day by Day ***½ (Sweden) – Felix Herngren’s dramedy (scripted by Tapio Leopold) is a delightful, life-affirming road movie about…death. Before a terminally ill man (Sven Wallter) can make his getaway for a solo trip to a Swiss assisted-suicide clinic, several of his longtime friends at the retirement home catch wind of his plans, and it turns into a group outing (much to his chagrin). Lovely European travelogue (nicely photographed by Viktor Davidson). Funny and touching (yes …I laughed, I cried). Sadly, Wallter passed away soon after the film wrapped, adding poignancy to his performance.
Drunken Birds *** (Canada/Québec) – Ivan Grbovic’s languidly paced, beautifully photographed culture clash/class war drama (Canada’s 2022 Oscar submission) concerns a Mexican cartel worker who finds migrant work in Quebec while seeking a long-lost love. Grbovic co-wrote with Sara Mishara. Mishara pulls double duty as DP; her painterly cinematography adds to the echoes of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. It also reminded me of Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm; a network narrative about people desperately seeking emotional connection amid a minefield of miscommunication.
Hinterland **½ (Germany/Austria/Luxembourg) Stefan Ruzowitsky directed this expressionist police procedural set in post WWI Vienna. A PTSD-afflicted veteran (Murathan Muslu) who was a policeman before the war is drawn into the investigation of a serial killer who is picking off his former fellow POWs one-by-one. A cross between Babylon Berlin and Sin City (with a hint of Berlin Alexanderplatz), it’s stylish and visually arresting, but hobbled by slow pacing and a boilerplate murder mystery. Co-written by the director, along with Robert Buchschwenter and Hanno Pinter.
Juju Stories **½ (Nigeria) – Submitted for your approval…an anthology of three modern urban horror tales steeped in juju lore (directed by Michael Omonua, Abba T. Makama, and C.J. Obasi). It’s an uneven collection; the most compelling of the triptych is Obasi’s “Suffer the Witch”. The film is presented by the Surreal 16 Collective, described as “…an initiative that intends to create artistically minded films that move away from the reigning imperialism of Nollywood aesthetics and production practices”.
The Man in the Basement *** (France) – Philippe Le Guay’s “neighbor from hell” thriller (scripted by Le Guay with Gilles Taurand and Marc Weitzmann) stars one of my favorite contemporary French actors, François Cluzet (Tell No One). Cluzet plays a quiet fellow who buys the unused basement of an upper-crust couple’s Parisian apartment, presumably for storage . However, with the ink barely dry on the deed, the couple discovers to their dismay that he clearly intends to live in the cellar (sans plumbing). It gets worse when they discover his online persona is every progressive liberal’s nightmare. A slow-burner with a key takeaway: always check references!
Nothing Compares ***½ (Ireland) – Kathryn Ferguson’s documentary is a beautifully constructed profile of singer Sinéad O’Connor. Arguably, O’Connor is more well-known for making her polarizing anti-Vatican remarks on SNL than for her music catalog-but history has proven not only the prescience of that stance, but how her refusal to “just shut up and sing” has inspired female artists and activists who followed in her footsteps to speak truth to power (“They tried to bury me, but didn’t realize they’d planted a seed,” she says). A superb portrait of an artist with true integrity. It’s a Showtime production, so if you’re a subscriber, keep your eyes peeled for it.
Only in Theaters *** (USA) – If you’ve ever fallen in love with a neighborhood art house, you’ll love Raphael Sbarge’s doc, which examines the history of a venerable LA-based theater chain that has been run by the Laemmle family for 84 years. A nice blend of great archival footage with observations by family members and admirers like Leonard Maltin, Ava DuVernay, Cameron Crowe, and James Ivory. It reminded me of the 2004 doc Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession. Unexpectedly moving.
The Passenger *** (Spain) – I’m not really a gore fan, so I did not expect Raul Cerezo and Fernando González Gómez’s sci-fi/horror road movie to be so…fun. A self-employed shuttle driver and his three female passengers unwittingly take a parasitic alien onboard, and all hell breaks loose. Luis Sánchez-Polack’s screenplay is clever and frequently hilarious, with subtle undercurrents of social satire amid the mayhem. Think Lina Wertmüller’s Swept Away meets John Carpenter’s The Thing.
Quant *** (UK) – London swings like a pendulum do. A breezy doc about pioneering, self-taught fashion designer/entrepreneur Mary Quant (still kicking at 92). Sadie Frost’s portrait is a pleasant wallow in 60s nostalgia, connecting the dots between fashion statements and gender politics (“I didn’t have time to wait for women’s lib,” Quant says in an archival interview). Her heyday may be long past, but her influence is indelible. Commentators include Vivienne Westwood, Kate Moss, and Dave Davies.
Sweetheart Deal **** (USA) – Dopesick and finding temporary solace from an RV-dwelling man of means by no means dubbed “The Mayor of Aurora Avenue”, four sex workers (Kristine, Sara, Amy, and Tammy) strive to keep life and soul together as they walk an infamous Seattle strip. With surprising twists and turns, Elisa Levine and Gabriel Miller’s astonishingly intimate portrait is the most intense, heart-wrenching, and compassionate documentary I have seen about Seattle street life since Streetwise.
Previous posts with related themes:
SIFF-ting through cinema 2022: Week 1
I Caught It At The Movies: Can theaters survive?
More reviews at Den of Cinema
—Dennis Hartley
Yes, there are a million reasons why there was resistance to Trump from the very beginning. But if his moronic follower can’t figure out that this was the coup de grace, the final nail in his bit gold coffin, they are even more deluded than he was.
Two years ago today, in the midst of a global pandemic:
He did this while the entire world was petrified that they were going to die from this insidious disease. The whole economy was shut down, we had unemployment almost as high as the Great Depression and this jackass was out there pushing snake oil cures and instructing scientists to look into whether drinking bleach or lysol might be a good treatment.
It was shocking. And the fact that normal, intelligent people didn’t rush out to join political rallies,l which they always cite as proof that Joe Biden could have possibly won, makes them even dumber than he is.
The CEO of Disney made a statement in support of his LGBT employees. For that the Governor of Florida has cancelled a special dispensation for Disney (for which they pay handsomely, saving the taxpayers many millions of dollars) that has been in place since 1968. Apparently, that CEO does not have the right to speak and if his money speaks by refusing to donate to Republicans, the company will suffer.
Ian Millhiser at Vox is appalled and says this is unconstitutional:
At the urging of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, the Florida legislature voted this week to punish one of the world’s biggest producers of entertainment and pop culture, because DeSantis and his fellow Florida Republicans disagreed with that producer’s First Amendment-protected speech. DeSantis signed the bill into law on Friday.
Florida’s decision to strip a government benefit from Disney because, in DeSantis’s words, Disney expressed “woke” opinions and “tried to attack me to advance their woke agenda,” is unconstitutional. And it’s not a close case.
As the Supreme Court said in Hartman v. Moore (2006), “official reprisal for protected speech ‘offends the Constitution [because] it threatens to inhibit exercise of the protected right.’” Nor does it matter how the government retaliates against a person or business who expresses an opinion that the government does not like — any official retaliation against someone because they engaged in First Amendment-protected speech is unconstitutional.
The conflict between DeSantis and Disney arose after Disney denounced Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, an unconstitutional law which allows parents to sue their local school district if topics such as sexual orientation or gender identity are mentioned in the classroom. The law is unconstitutional because it is so vaguely drafted that teachers cannot determine what kinds of instruction are permitted and what kinds are forbidden — although it remains to be seen whether a federal judiciary dominated by Republican appointees will strike the law down.
Florida plans to strip Disney of an extraordinarily unusual benefit it receives from the state. Walt Disney World is located in a nearly 40-square-mile area that Florida has designated the “Reedy Creek Improvement District.” Within this district, Disney essentially functions as the primary landowner and the local government.
This provides Disney with several advantages — among other things, if it wants to build a road or a new hotel, it can approve that project itself rather than going through the ordinary permitting process run by local Florida governments, though Disney still must comply with state building codes. This Reedy Creek arrangement also allows Disney to tax itself at a higher rate to pay for governmental services like sewage and a fire department — according to one analysis, property taxes on non-Disney landowners in Florida’s Orange County could go up by as much as 25 percent if Disney loses its ability to tax itself.
Few Floridians, and, indeed, few major companies, receive this kind of benefit from their state. But the fact that Florida only plans to strip a special benefit from Disney — rather than, say, tossing its executives in prison — does not mean that it can punish Disney for its protected speech.
Think of it this way: Imagine that José owns a bar in Orlando. One day, José tells the local paper that he dislikes Ron DeSantis and plans to vote for DeSantis’s opponent in the upcoming election. The next day, the state sends him a letter informing him that “because you disparaged our great governor, we are stripping your business of its liquor license.”
José does not have a constitutional right to sell liquor for profit. And the overwhelming majority of Florida businesses do not have a license permitting them to do so. But if Florida strips José of his liquor license because the government disapproves of José’s First Amendment-protected speech, it violates the Constitution.
Disney’s ability to govern the Reedy Creek Improvement District is no different from Florida’s hypothetical decision to take away José’s liquor license. If Florida has a legitimate reason to strip away this benefit from Disney, the Constitution most likely would permit it to do so.
But no one can be punished because they express a political opinion.
Florida’s best defense is to pretend they are punishing Disney for legitimate reasons
While existing law is crystal clear that the government may not sanction someone because it disagrees with their political views, First Amendment retaliation cases are often difficult to win because the plaintiff must prove that they were targeted because of their speech. As the Court explained in Hartman, such a plaintiff “must show a causal connection between a defendant’s retaliatory animus and subsequent injury in any sort of retaliation action.”
But in this case, the evidence that Florida targeted Disney because of its protected speech is overwhelming. DeSantis called upon Florida lawmakers to consider “termination” of Reedy Creek on Tuesday. On Wednesday, he sent a fundraising email to supporters where he denounced Disney for being “woke” and for criticizing him personally.
The email was explicit that DeSantis wants to punish Disney for its political views and because the governor believes that Disney is too close to the opposition party. “Disney and other woke corporations won’t get away with peddling their unchecked pressure campaigns any longer,” DeSantis said in his email. “If we want to keep the Democrat machine and their corporate lapdogs accountable, we have to stand together now.”
By Thursday, both houses of the Florida legislature had passed legislation retaliating against Disney. That’s also the same day that DeSantis’s lieutenant governor, Jeanette Nunez, told Newsmax’s Eric Bolling that the state could reverse course if Disney stopped producing art that the Florida government finds objectionable.
Disney, Florida’s second-highest-ranking government official informed Bolling, is being targeted because it has “changed what they really espouse.” Nunez complained that Disney used to support “family values” but that it now produces art that emphasizes topics that Nunez deems “very inappropriate.’
And yet, despite this and other evidence indicating that the Florida government is retaliating against Disney because it criticized the governor’s policies and produced works of art that high-ranking government officials find objectionable, there is a possibility that the Republican-controlled federal judiciary will give DeSantis a pass — much as it did when former President Donald Trump committed a similar violation of the First Amendment.
As a presidential candidate, Trump bragged about his plans to bring about a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Such a proposal violates the First Amendment’s safeguards against religious discrimination.
After Trump was criticized for this unconstitutional proposal, he changed his rhetoric slightly. Instead of calling for an explicit ban on Muslim migration to the United States, Trump said he would disguise the ban by targeting countries with large Islamic populations. “People were so upset when I used the word Muslim,” Trump told NBC’s Meet the Press in 2016, “and I’m okay with that, because I’m talking territory instead of Muslim.”
And yet, in Trump v. Hawaii (2018), the Court’s Republican majority permitted Trump to ban travel from several majority-Muslim nations — even after Trump confessed his plans to give his Muslim ban a patina of legitimacy by presenting it as a ban on travel from certain foreign nations. The majority opinion in Hawaii leaned heavily into the fact that the Trump administration offered a national security justification for the policy that “says nothing about religion.”
The Trump administration’s proclamation announcing this travel ban, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the Court’s Republicans, “is expressly premised on legitimate purposes: preventing entry of nationals who cannot be adequately vetted and inducing other nations to improve their practices.” And the Court accepted this national security justification for the policy, despite considerable evidence that the Trump administration came up with this justification as a pretext to justify religious discrimination.
In the likely event that Disney raises a First Amendment challenge against Florida, Florida’s lawyers will undoubtedly spin a similar narrative to the one that the Trump administration came up with in Hawaii. Though those lawyers won’t be able to claim that abolishing Reedy Creek is justified by national security concerns, their brief will undoubtedly offer legitimate-sounding policy justifications for punishing Disney — some of which may actually be persuasive. There are, after all, plenty of legitimate reasons why a for-profit corporation shouldn’t be allowed to exercise governmental authority.
A Republican judiciary may uphold DeSantis’s attacks on Disney by claiming that Florida’s government was motivated by legitimate concerns about giving Disney so much control over the Reedy Creek Improvement District, much as the Supreme Court thumbed its nose at the evidence in Hawaii that Trump was motivated by anti-Muslim animus.
But, again, if the courts follow what the law says, it doesn’t matter if there are legitimate reasons why Florida could have chosen to strip Disney of a valuable government benefit. What matters is whether Florida targeted Disney because it disapproves of the company’s First Amendment-protected speech.
This is insidious stuff but DeSantis is on a roll and I’m not sure what will stop him.