Month: May 2022

Trump is just riding this nag

Dan Pfeiffer calls out the press for its horse-race political coverage. Except, for its focus on the jockey instead of the horse. The preponderance of primary coverage is about what the primaries mean for Donald Trump’s expected run for president in 2024 and what his endorsements say about his grip on the Republican Party. The press is getting the story backwards:

Trump didn’t turn the Republicans into a party of ethno-nationalist, conspiracy theory-believing authoritarians. He just figured out the Republicans were a party of ethno-nationalist, conspiracy theory-believing authoritarians before anyone else. Trump’s political strategy is the modern version of the famous (likely apocryphal) adage from French politician Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin:

There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.

Trump did not lead the Republican base to MAGA-Land. He followed them there. He did to the Republican Party what he has done to countless buildings and brands — slapped his name on an existing structure and then pretended he built it.

It’s the Trumpism, stupid

That feels exactly right. One of Trump’s few real talents besides for self-promotion and self-preservation is reading the marks and knowing what they’ll buy. The English and History majors that dominate political coverage tend to buy “the outdated ‘Great Man Theory’ of history,” Pfeiffer writes. That suits the narcissist of Mar-a-Lago just fine. But it means there is less coverage of why Republicans became the party of White nationalism.

James Hohmann writes in the Washington Post:

Trumpism is now outrunning Donald Trump. The former president has unleashed forces that are spawning Republican candidates who are more radical than he is, less committed to democratic values and capable of taking the GOP down roads Trump hasn’t imagined.

“MAGA does not belong to President Trump,” Pennsylvania Republican Kathy Barnette said during a U.S. Senate candidate debate. “Our values never, never shifted to President Trump’s values. It was President Trump who shifted and aligned with our values.” Barnette has figured out what the press is barely covering.

Pfeiffer continues:

The Republican Party was headed in this direction long before Trump showed up. Republican candidates across the country are acting like MAGA sock puppets not because they are afraid of Trump or want his endorsement. They are doing it because it’s what the voters want. Yes, Trump’s candidate won in Ohio, but no matter who won that primary — the nominee would have been an enthusiastic unbridled MAGA extremist. Maybe Trump’s candidate will win in Pennsylvania. Maybe he won’t. But Trumpism already won regardless.

Whether Trump runs for President or is in prison, the 2024 Republican nominee will be a full-throated extremist spouting a MAGA message. When we obsess over Trump’s role in the Party, we are in danger of deluding ourselves into thinking that the threat of Trumpism will go away when he does.

The fight for the soul of our nation is bigger than one very bad man. This is a long fight and we must be ready for it.

We are not. Nor is the press.

Ethno-nationalist, conspiracy theory-believing authoritarians see demographic shifts that will make them a permanent minority in this country as an existential threat. They too are getting the story backwards. Their Trumpism is the existential threat.

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com.

The meddling is coming from inside the country

Primaries today in multiple states will determine candidates for the fall … providing they don’t end in runoffs. Since there is an elephant in my room, let’s look first at what experts who “ain’t from around here” have to say about North Carolina.

Big surprise, FiveThirtyEight ignores Madison Cawthorn (NC-11) altogether to focus instead on the U.S. Senate; 1st, 4th and 13th congressional districts:

In the state’s 1st Congressional District, Rep. G.K. Butterfield is retiring and has endorsed state Sen. Don Davis to succeed him, arguing that the moderate Davis would be Democrats’ strongest general-election candidate in a seat that will likely be competitive in 2022. (It has a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean² of just D+5.) 

However, progressive figures like the PCCC and Sen. Elizabeth Warren are backing former state Sen. Erica Smith, who has tried to make the race about Davis’s spotty support for abortion rights in the wake of the Supreme Court’s leaked draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Smith has outraised Davis $831,937 to $612,266, but Davis has benefited from more than $2.3 million in outside spending from the United Democracy Project, a pro-Israel super PAC funded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The primary still looks competitive, though: Despite the Davis campaign recently releasing a survey giving himself a 13-point lead, that isn’t very convincing since internal polls often overstate their sponsors’ positions by several percentage points.

I’ll admit I did not know Butterfield had endorsed Davis, a regular source of frustration for members of his caucus precisely because of his centrism.

Another race that has attracted attention and raised hackles on the left is in North Carolina’s 4th District:

Both Bankman-Fried (the cryptocurrency magnate) and AIPAC are also pouring money into the Democratic primary to replace retiring Rep. David Price in North Carolina’s safely blue 4th District, around Durham. Protect Our Future has spent more than $1 million and the United Democracy Project nearly $2.1 million to help state Sen. Valerie Foushee defeat Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam and singer Clay Aiken. (Yes, that Clay Aiken.) AIPAC has probably gotten involved here due to Allam’s history of anti-Israel activism, but its investment has rubbed some voters the wrong way given that it also supports Republicans and Allam is Muslim. (Her religion has also made her the target of Islamophobic push polls and death threats.) The Progressive Caucus of the North Carolina Democratic Party even revoked its endorsement of Foushee for accepting AIPAC’s money. 

The three candidates have all embraced progressive policy platforms, but it’s Allam who has gained endorsements from the movement’s big names: Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the People’s Alliance, a local progressive group. Foushee’s backers include the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People and EMILY’s List, which are closer to the Democratic Party establishment but also reflect her identity as a Black woman. EMILY’s List also commissioned the only poll we’ve seen of the race, which put Foushee at 35 percent, Allam at 16 percent and Aiken at 10 percent. (Remember, though, EMILY’s List is not a neutral observer here.) If no candidate receives more than 30 percent of the vote, the race will go to a runoff on July 26.

Incumbent bomb-thrower Rep. Madison Cawthorn (NC-11) is seriously on the outs with his party after a series of missteps more worthy of a college frat boy than a congresssman. Voting here has been brisk among Republicans and UNAffiliated voters pulling R primary ballots. It’s not clear whether they are voting for Cawthorn or against him. State Senator Chuck Edwards is the likely beneficiary of NCGOP ire. I’ll be surprised if the two do not face each other in a runoff. At this point, Democrats would prefer to run against the wounded Cawthorn; his presence would energize their base. If Edwards wins the nomination, the race is not likely to be competitive in the fall.

In the avg NC county, ~9.36% of reg voters turned out in early & mail voting (dashed horizontal line below).

All #nc11 counties except Swain, Madison, Rutherford & McDowell are, like the children of Lake Wobegon, above average

Macon turnout % is 3rd in the state#ncpol #wncpol pic.twitter.com/y68G1UMdip

— Chris Cooper (@chriscooperwcu) May 16, 2022

New York Times on NC’s GOP Senate primary:

In the Senate race, for an open seat, Representative Ted Budd, also endorsed by Mr. Trump, has made a late surge, seeming to surpass former Gov. Pat McCrory.

Mr. McCrory, whose conservative credentials include signing the infamous 2016 “bathroom bill” that targeted transgender people — and drew a major backlash upon his state — is no longer conservative enough for some Republicans. The anti-tax Club for Growth has brought millions of dollars in TV attack ads down on his head, accusing him of being “a liberal faker.”

The presumptive Democratic nominee is Cheri Beasley, a former chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court.

FiveThirtyEight sees Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate Democratic primary as settled:

While the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania devolves into chaos, the Democratic one is likely to be a coronation. Despite recent news that he had suffered a stroke, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman is the clear front-runner, thanks to being an extremely active lieutenant governor and raising more money than any other candidate ($16.0 million). According to a recent poll from Franklin & Marshall College, Fetterman leads his closest competitor by 39 percentage points.

This is not to say that other candidates haven’t tried to take him down. Centrist Rep. Conor Lamb is running on the argument that he is more electable, but voters don’t seem to be buying it; Fetterman’s tough, outsider image (literally — he is 6′ 8″, is heavily tattooed and wore basketball shorts to meet President Biden) seems tailor-made to win back the white, working-class voters who have made Pennsylvania a slightly Republican-leaning state. 

But hasn’t AIPAC been busy? In Pennsylvania, it’s pouring money into the Democratic primary for Pittsburgh’s 12th Congressional District:

Virtually every progressive influencer under the sun — Justice Democrats, Our Revolution, the PCCC, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, Warren — has lined up behind state Rep. Summer Lee. And as of a couple months ago at least, Lee looked like the front-runner: She led attorney Steve Irwin 38 percent to 13 percent in a March poll sponsored by EMILY’s List (which also supports Lee). 

But AIPAC is trying to stop progressives here, too: The United Democracy Project has dropped $2.4 million to help Irwin, who has also outraised Lee $1.2 million to $707,344. (A third candidate, law professor Jerry Dickinson, has also raised a respectable $685,185.) Irwin also has the support of Rep. Mike Doyle, the district’s current congressman, and Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald, who has argued that Lee (who is Black) would join the “Squad” in obstructing Biden’s agenda. Without any more recent public polls, it’s tough to say if the spending has made an impact, but both sides are treating this like a competitive race.

Meanwhile, from his redoubt in Florida Donald Trump is trying to stop insurgent Pennsylvania Republican candidate for Senate, Kathy Barnette, from upsetting his endorsed candidate, TV pitchman Mehmet Oz. Barnette has signaled that MAGA does not need Trump, hurting the man-child’s feelings (Politico):

Trump has done everything he can to stop Barnette in the final days, but he may have muddied things — or perhaps hedged his bets — by endorsing DOUG MASTRIANO, the longtime frontrunner in the gubernatorial primary, just three days ago. Steve Shepard notes that Barnette and Mastriano, both of whom were in Washington to protest on Jan. 6, “have been running as a loosely joined ticket for months.”

Charlie adds that “Republican strategists and officials [are] nervous and despairing” over the “prospect that the party might blow its chances in a key industrial swing state this fall by nominating far-right election deniers.”

The GOP bred and fed the MAGA monster. Now it’s coming for them.

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com.

First some happy good news. Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss won their defamation case against OAN!

OAN Settles One Election Defamation Suit, Only One Million To Go

After months of vicious harassment Freeman and Moss sued Giuliani and OAN, which “spent months airing grainy edited footage of the pair, and the network’s White House correspondent Chanel Rion for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Separately, the pair filed a similar suit against wingnut website Gateway Pundit in Missouri state court.”

Joy Reid’s story in the Reidout Blog reminds people of the threats the two received.

In this third piece on threats I wanted to give an example of what to DO when threatened by the right. (Part 1 , Part 2)

This Freeman defamation case is a prime example of a successful action given our current justice system, media and social media environment. I’ve been looking into civil actions because criminal cases take a long time and you have to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. Civil cases can be won with a preponderance of evidence.

The civil cases against Rudy Giuliani and the Gateway Pundit that involves doxxing are still open. I hope those will be successful too.

Every week I listen to Glenn Kurschner explain why prosecutors don’t want to take on cases that they think they can’t win, especially cases against TFG. In part one I wrote about all the excuses police, the media and politicians use to avoid dealing with cases involving threats & harassment.

Too often financial settlements can turn into, “Just the cost of doing business” especially for people who have the resources to pay the fines. A financial settlement also can be used to shut down criminal cases, as we have seen with sexual harassment cases. So to get justice for the victims we need to also use the criminal justice system. This is why we still need to find the people who made the death threats against Ruby and Shay and put them in jail.

Ask your lawyer if a defamation case is right for you!

I had a great conversation with Daniel Powell, the Managing Attorney at Minc Law, LLC. they handle defamation cases and his firm has a lot of excellent info on their website. One of the things he explained was the importance of figuring how what is and isn’t a good case and what can be done to help people. Sometimes it doesn’t involve filing a defamation case.

He explained the process of getting evidence, uncovering anonymous users, and how they work with social media companies. (I was so impressed by the depth & breath of the info I told him to pass on my praise to the research and writing staff. )

The right has increased the level of threats, harassment and defamation against the left in the last 5 years. We now have a model for a successful defamation case, let’s use it!

I’ve passed on the info about dealing with defamation to my friends in the media. I’m also going to pass it onto my friends in public health. Hundreds of individuals have chosen to leave the public health profession rather than deal with the harassment and attacks. The protections in most states are weak or non-existent. A few states finally passed some laws against harassing and doxxing public health officials. The folks at the Network for Public Health Law. ( NPHL) put together a 50 state guide of the legal protections for public health community for the National Association for Country and City Health Officials (NACCHO)

NACCHO does great work. I’ve talked to the CEO, Lori Tremmel Freeman many times, and learned what their members are facing with regard to threats on social media and other attacks. The lawyers at NPHL have been educating people on what laws apply to them in their states. But right now it’s not in either of their remits to help individual public health staff to find, and then sue, the people who have been harassing, threatening and defaming them.

I’m encouraging them and the folks within State Associations of County and City Health Officials (SACCHO) to help their members deal with the attacks. Based on the number of threats around the country, the odds are high that many of them have legitimate civil defamation cases.

For a current example look at this case St. Luke’s Health System filed against Ammon Bundy, Diego Rodriguez and their various political organizations for defamation and “sustained online attacks.” Bundy’s lawyers are incredibly smart and have evaded criminal charges for years, but assembling a preponderance of evidence against them is very doable. What most people don’t know is that Bundy’s group has backers with deep pockets.

But if defamation becomes a profit center, won’t everyone do it?

When I say, “Turn defamation into a profit center!” I know there is are right-wing groups that will say, “We were defamed too! We’re going to file cases against the LEFT!” But here’s the deal, they aren’t looking for justice after being threatened and defamed. They’re filing lawsuits to scare people, shut them up and force them to use their resources to defend against frivolous cases.  As a demonstration of this, with an instant example, OAN filed a defamation suit against Rachel Maddow. THEY LOST. BIG TIME OAN Ordered to Pay MSNBC $250,000 After Losing Defamation Suit)

We all know that the right loves to be the victim, even when they aren’t. Besides whining about what they’ll call defamation, they’ll start reporting dubious cases against us on social media, start filing bogus police reports about being attacked by chalk and start frivolous lawsuits. They’ll use the new Texas social media law to tie up the courts.

When the media starts reporting on this I worry they’ll get bogged down into the technicalities and miss how the right has been using he law to muddy it’s legitimate use.

We need to point out the MASSIVE DIFFERENCE between the left trying to get justice and compensation for harm inflicted on them vs the right using the legal system to inflict new harm based on bogus claims.

We need to be clear about the serious harm that is being done by the right to the left with their threats, harassment and defamation. We need to build a record of multiple successful criminal and civil cases against the right. But it won’t be easy. As Atrios so succinctly put it:

“…the job of Dem lawyers is to tell you why you can’t do things, and the job of Republican lawyers is to tell you (them) why they can.
Also, too, Dems have a “if you can’t win, don’t try” approach, instead of “keep trying to show what you’re up against” attitude.”

@Atrios, Eschaton Blog May 5, 2022

I’m calling for the legitimate and totally appropriate use of the civil legal system. I’m also calling for clear messaging from the left on this like, “THIS IS A GOOD THING. DO MORE OF THIS.”

(MSNBC could, for example, compare Freeman’s successful case against OAN’s to OAN’s failed defamation case against Rachel Maddow. But they won’t. They hate being the subject of a story. )

The right will use the legal system to slow down, wear down and depress us. But they’ve been losing. Some are even getting disbarred in the process for their frivolous cases.

The court of public opinion matters too. We must cheer on the fact that Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss won a big defamation case. OAN lost. Our case was legitimate. Their case wasn’t.

We Fight. We Win. We Do It Again.

The Trump strategy of using threats, intimidation and defamation to get what he wants has been working for him for decades. He’s encouraged others to do the same. He’ll never change his behavior. But not everyone has his resources. He’s not the target for these cases.

Civil cases are just one way change the behavior of the people on the right. They know that what they are doing is wrong, but it doesn’t become real to them until they have to pay a price. They are paying now. Make more of them pay.

Cross posted to Spocko’s Brain

On Russian TV

Josh Marshall offers commentary on this clip from Russian TV:

In an extremely rare moment of candour on Russian state TV today, defence columnist Mikhail Khodaryonok gave a damning assessment of Russia's war in Ukraine and his country's international isolation. It's fairly long but worth your time so I've added subtitles. pic.twitter.com/0mr7WAgSx6

— Francis Scarr (@francis_scarr) May 16, 2022

Fascinating clip. Russian mil expert goes a rogue on Russian TV. States fairly clearly grim military situation for Russia. Other panelists argue with him. But the best part is when says that even Rand Paul won’t be able to save them. (Not by name but says the single senator blocking the flow of arms to Ukraine won’t be able to hold out forever.)

Full quote: “The whole issue is to what extent they’re able to supply this army with modern weapons … On their own of course they wouldn’t have done anything …But considering that the Lend-Lease program is about to start functioning and the resistance of a single senator will be overcome quite quickly.”

Originally tweeted by Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) on May 16, 2022.

and it’s not good

The surge in firearms homicides that began in 2015 has an important feature not highlighted in the recent CDC report.

Prior to 2015, nonfirearm homicides and firearm homicides tracked each other well (figure shows raw CDC data).

In 2015, these trends diverged.

From the early 1990’s to 2015 firearm homicide rates declined across all major demographic groups. But those trends have reversed, and with the latest jump in firearm homicides, we are back to rates not seen since the crack epidemic. Alarming! https://t.co/vojqEqBThw

— Andrew Morral (@AndrewMorral) May 11, 2022

Firearm assaults are more lethal than assaults using most other weapons. Therefore, any shift causing assailants to favor firearms might cause such a divergence, even if rates of assault are stable.

This begs the question: why are assailants more likely to use firearms recently?

Originally tweeted by Andrew Morral (@AndrewMorral) on May 16, 2022.

I’m going to take a wild guess and say that when states loosen gun laws and guns flood the streets, when a national party elects an unfit white nationalist to the the White House and when a large minority of a country goes batshit crazy this sort of thing can happen.

There are too many guns. And it appears that as far as the gun nuts are concerned there are never enough. They have to have their toys and if large numbers of innocent people, including children, die, well that’s the price we all have to pay for their freedom.

No surprise. They allowed hundreds of thousands of their own voters to die rather than promote a safe, effective vaccine instead of snake oil. Half the country is not rational.

All the way to the top

Greg Sargent does a nice job explaining exactly how the “mainstream” of the GOP launders vile white nationalist rhetoric into their own:

Nothing gets Republicans like Rep. Elise Stefanik angrier than reciting their own words back to them at a politically inconvenient moment. So it is that the New York lawmaker is lashing out at critics who have noted her flirtation with “great replacement theory” in the wake of the horrific racist shooting in her home state.Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates

The online screed of alleged Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron posits a conspiracy to exterminate and replace native-born Whites in Western nations. He explicitly labels this a planned “genocide.”

Stefanik, meanwhile, declared in ads last September that Democrats would legalize undocumented immigrants in a “PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION.” That’s a vile replacement trope pushed by the No. 3 in the House GOP leadership.

Confronted by this in the wake of Gendron’s alleged mass murder of mostly Black victims, a Stefanik adviser insisted she has “never advocated for any racist position,” while raging against “sickening” reporting and a “disgusting low for the left.”Advertisement

Actually, the “disgusting low” was committed by Stefanik herself. Because in this episode we see how Republicans like Stefanik launder and sanitize these ideas in ways that insinuate them ever deeper into mainstream discourse. […]

How does this mainstreaming happen? Experts have described several mechanisms.

Case in point: A speaker floats “great replacement” ideas — then claims it is intended as racially neutral. Carlson is an expert at this ruse: Oozing with phony piety, he insists he’s just disinterestedly observing what Democrats, in supporting immigration, actually want to happen.Advertisement

Of course, Democrats support immigration for many reasons utterly unconnected to electoral politics. What’s more, given that Latinos may be shifting Republican — and that gaining citizenship takes many years — Carlson cannot even claim with any certainty that this will electorally benefit Democrats in the immediate or long term.

So his motive for railing about this cannot be chalked up to a mere disinterested observation about Democrats’ political incentives. What exactly is the true nature of his warning to native-born Americans? What is he trying to get them to fear?

Stefanik also plays this sanctimonious game: How dare anyone discern any racial overtones in her warning that native-born Americans should fear permanent subjugation from the largely non-White immigrants in their midst! What an absolutely outrageous suggestion!

Similarly, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas has declared that Democrats would effect a “silent revolution” by “allowing” an “invasion” of migrants. Patrick carefully couched this as a warning about “millions of voters” set to impose their will on the current population, and we’ve heard talk about imported voters from other Republicans, including Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.

Or take J.D. Vance, the GOP Senate nominee from Ohio. He recently claimed that President Biden’s “open border” will ensure “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”

But once again, for the same reasons that Carlson and Stefanik cannot be permitted to get away with this scam of feigning racial neutrality, none of these Republicans can pretend to be warning only of electoral consequences.

This sort of trickery works on still another level: It recasts racist conspiracy theorizing in a more acceptable form. As Gorski puts it, the talk about new voters is really a “fig leaf to hide white supremacy.”

“By wrapping up ‘great replacement theory’ in concerns about democracy, they’re injecting the theory into our public conversation,” Gorski told me, noting that this moves it “from the white supremacist fringes into the conservative mainstream.”

Nicole Hemmer, a historian of the right, adds a crucial point. She notes that when high-profile figures float these ideas in a more benign form, it seduces people into being more accepting of them than they otherwise might be.

Once this tactic “legitimates those ideas” and makes them “seem less radical,” notes Hemmer, this might lead people to explore them further, slowly acclimating them to their more virulent ideological core. Meanwhile, as fascism scholar Jason Stanley details, even the sanitized, coded version will be entirely legible and extremely energizing to the movement’s true believers.

So when Stefanik declares herself shocked, shocked that anyone would suggest that nefarious intentions undergird her “great replacement” parroting, remember: This is a key feature of how the whole sordid game is supposed to work.

It’s even more infuriating watching them smirk while they do it, knowing very well that they are full of shit — and their followers do too. It’s the highest form of lib-owning.

Trump sticks by another sexual harassing weirdo

Cawthorne is a disaster and Republicans know it. And Trump would mock and degrade him life a 5th grade bully if he wasn’t one of his sycophants. But he’s stepping in so that he can pretend that he is a loyal, compassionate person, which everyone knows he absolutely is not.

Two GOP apostates see the white supremacy

It’s interesting to see how splitting from the GOP on one issue can pull the veil from your eyes on others:

“The House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-semitism,” Cheney wrote on Twitter. “History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse. @GOP leaders must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them.”

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., the only other Republican who serves alongside Cheney on the House Jan. 6 committee, tweeted that his “replacement theory” is that “we need to replace” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Reps. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y.; Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.; and Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., among others.

“The replacement theory they are pushing/tolerating is getting people killed,” Kinzinger wrote.

The congressman in another tweet again called out Stefanik for pushing the “white replacement theory” while serving as the No. 3 Republican in the House, a position Cheney was removed from for “demanding truth.”

I doubt either of these people are becoming liberals but I don’t think they would have said these things before they were ostracized by their party.

What you see with many Never Trumpers is that once they separate from the party they start to see the whole ugly project more clearly. These two are very conservative so I can’t see them switching parties (and I doubt we’d want them to) and I don’t know where they end up politically. Maybe they’ll move on to something else. But it’s interesting to watch the evolution.

The Radical Right Court is poised to flood the streets of America with even more guns

This weekend’s horrific mass killing in Buffalo serves as a tragic reminder that the radicalism of the American right-wing is not confined to abortion policy or an anti-democratic movement to take over the election machinery for partisan gain. The most established extremist movement in the country is the unfettered gun rights movement.

Much like the anti-abortion zealots, gun extremists have been methodically chipping away at existing gun safety laws in states while pushing for federal action that would finally achieve their goal of legal possession of deadly firearms by anyone, anywhere, for any reason. There hasn’t been as much talk about it, but the Supreme Court heard a case this session that could do for gun proliferation advocates what the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case looks poised to do for the anti-abortion movement. The decision could even be announced on the same day.

It was just 14 years ago, in a case called District of Columbia v. Heller, that a bare majority of the Supreme Court held for the first time that the Constitution grants an individual right to bear arms. It was a landmark case that handed the gun lobby the definition it had long sought. Former Justice John Paul Stephens called it the worst decision of his tenure, noting that when he came on the court there was not even any discussion of gun ownership being a “fundamental right.” Over the years, however, the NRA worked very hard to make the case and Heller was finally taken up by the conservative majority in 2008. However, even with that proclamation, the court did not suggest that this meant states had no right to enact gun safety measures. The author of the opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia held that while people had the right to keep guns in their homes, communities still had an interest in public safety and keeping dangerous modern weapons off the streets. That was unsatisfying for the gun fetishists so they immediately began taking steps to ensure that interest was as proscribed as possible.Advertisement:

The case the court heard this term, New York State Rifle and Pistol Asso­ci­ation v. Bruen, involves New York’s long-standing law that only people with a specific need (“proper cause“) can be licensed to carry a concealed weapon in the state. The plaintiffs in this case both applied for and were granted concealed carry permits but were restricted in where they were allowed to carry their guns. They, along with the NRA, sued, saying they have an unfettered 2nd Amendment right to carry their guns virtu­ally whenever and wherever they feel they might need to defend themselves. In other words, they believe they have a constitutional right to carry a gun at all times.

The thinking among legal observers is that this court is not going to uphold New York’s law as it currently stands, which seems obvious. The only question is whether they find a workaround of the “proper cause” standard to keep it on the books without any real purpose or use the case to greatly expand gun rights. Law professor Eric Ruben explains what that means:

Bruen could be a turning point for how judges evaluate all Second Amendment cases – whether they’re about assault weapons, tasers or felon-in-possession offenses. Until now, judges have generally assessed whether such restrictions are justified by current public safety concerns.

Many gun rights advocates are asking the Supreme Court to reject that approach. Instead, they want judges to decide cases on the sole basis of history and tradition unless the judiciary’s interpretation of the text of the Second Amendment resolves the issue. This is known as the “text, history and tradition” test.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh is credited with first articulating this test in a dissent he issued prior to his rise to the Supreme Court. Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett all have embraced similar judicial philosophies to some degree.

Unless they’ve all had some kind of wake-up call over the leaked abortion draft, I don’t think you need to be a professional fortune-teller to read the tea leaves on this one. There is an excellent chance they are going to overturn the New York law under this specious new philosophy from the beer-swilling Kavanaugh and that will be that.

Ruben points out that in 1980 most Americans lived in states that regulated concealed carry of weapons. The NRA managed to lobby many of them to overturn those laws leaving big, populous states New York and California, along with Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island refusing to go along, thus necessitating the organization to use the courts to get their way when the people in those states refused.

The states in question represent one-quarter of the U.S. population. If the Court overturns the New York law, the gun proliferation advocates will tell the people in those states they just don’t know what’s good for them and that “an armed soci­ety is a polite soci­ety.”  The evidence is clear that this simply isn’t true.

This ruling would open the door to confusing litigation based upon this daft “text, history and tradition” test that will require judges to figure out if other, long -standing, regulations adhere to it. They will be forced to decide if regulation of large capacity magazines or semi-automatic weapons are constitutionally based upon their similarity to guns and laws in use 150 years ago which is ridiculous.

Legal observers worry that the Court could take the most extreme approach and introduce this new “text, history and tradition” test at least partly because of trumped up partisan grievance politics that insist the 2nd Amendment has been treated as a “second class” right. The whining, self-pitying tone underlying Alito’s draft in the abortion decision suggests that the radical majority is not immune to such all-too-common, self-indulgent right wing predilections.

No one knows for sure, but the assumption among some court watchers is that Justice Clarence Thomas will probably write the Bruen opinion since he seems to be particularly energized over the prospect of blowing up all gun regulations and turning the country into even more of a free fire zone than it already is. I doubt if he, or any of the other ultra-right wingers on the Court, would be any more respectful of precedent in gun rights cases than they are in women’s rights cases. They have a revolutionary agenda and they aren’t going to let anything stand in their way.  

Salon

From conspiracy theory to talking point to mass murder

The New York Times is shocked, shocked that white supremacy is animating the GOP. The Party of Trump has chucked its Southern Strategy for replacement theory. Tucker Carlson of Fox News is its biggest promoter. They are getting people killed:

In just the past year, Republican luminaries like Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and Georgia congressman, and Elise Stefanik, the center-right New York congresswoman turned Trump acolyte (and third-ranking House Republican), have echoed replacement theory. Appearing on Fox, Mr. Gingrich declared that leftists were attempting to “drown” out “classic Americans.”

In September, Ms. Stefanik released a campaign ad on Facebook claiming that Democrats were plotting “a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION” by granting “amnesty” to illegal immigrants, which her ad said would “overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” That same month, after the Anti-Defamation League, a civil rights group, called on Fox to fire Mr. Carlson, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, stood up both for the TV host and for replacement theory itself.

“@TuckerCarlson is CORRECT about Replacement Theory as he explains what is happening to America,” Mr. Gaetz wrote on Twitter. In a statement after the Buffalo shooting, Mr. Gaetz said that he had “never spoken of replacement theory in terms of race.”

One in three American adults now believe that an effort is underway “to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains,” according to an Associated Press poll released this month. The poll also found that people who mostly watched right-wing media outlets like Fox News, One American News Network and Newsmax were more likely to believe in replacement theory than those who watched CNN or MSNBC.

Mass shooters in Pittsburgh, in El Paso, and in Buffalo this weekend referenced replacement theory as inspiring their murders:

Three shootings, three different targets — but all linked by one sprawling, ever-mutating belief now commonly known as replacement theory. At the extremes of American life, replacement theory — the notion that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to “replace” and disempower white Americans — has become an engine of racist terror, helping inspire a wave of mass shootings in recent years and fueling the 2017 right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Va., that erupted in violence.

But replacement theory, once confined to the digital fever swamps of Reddit message boards and semi-obscure white nationalist sites, has gone mainstream. In sometimes more muted forms, the fear it crystallizes — of a future America in which white people are no longer the numerical majority — has become a potent force in conservative media and politics, where the theory has been borrowed and remixed to attract audiences, retweets and small-dollar donations.

“[A]s the era of the white majority nears its end, a revanchist, racist right has treated the facts of demography as an occasion for a sweeping, violent moral panic,” writes Talia Lavin at Rolling Stone.

The pathetic irony is that while white people may have held the numerical majority in the U.S. for eternity in political terms, Republican-voting whites have not constituted a majority of the presidential vote in decades. Not since 1992 have conservative whites (including Ross Perot voters) topped 50% of the electorate. Their population share continues to decline. It was the election of a Black man in 2008 that set off the alarm bells on the white right. The fringiest went to guns.

The Buffalo shooter is no longer a lone wolf, Lavin explains. He’s a mainstream Republican.

Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming is the Republican fringe these days.

The House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-semitism. History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse. @GOP leaders must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them.

— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) May 16, 2022

Mainstream Republicans are plotting revenge against their enemies, white and non-white, once they secure their one-party state.

Lots of “when we take power” we are going to get revenge coming out of Republicans these days. pic.twitter.com/bBKR7oJP8X

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 15, 2022

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