Month: May 2022

Where at least they’re “partly free”

The Guardian scans the cast of speakers at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held this year, this weekend, in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary:

A notorious Hungarian racist who has called Jews “stinking excrement”, referred to Roma as “animals” and used racial epithets to describe Black people, was a featured speaker at a major gathering of US Republicans in Budapest.

Zsolt Bayer took the stage at the second day of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Hungary, a convention that also featured speeches from Donald Trump, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and Trump’s former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

The last featured speaker of the conference was Jack Posobiec, a far-right US blogger who has used antisemitic symbols and promoted the fabricated “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory smearing prominent Democrats as pedophiles.

There are, of course, plenty of venues for holding the largely Republican conservative event in the United States. The usual cast of young, low-level extremists at CPAC cheer their heroes, take selfies, and purchase “in your face, lib” merch. But the conservative elite needed to make a statement this year, even if it meant excluding the hoi polloi. The statement? “Partly free” is where they wish to take the United States (per Freedom House).

Orbán, like many American Republicans, has embraced the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which involves promoting the belief that the white population is being deliberately reduced by leftist policies and diluted by immigration.

CPAC, which is organised by the American Conservative Union, did not respond to a request for comment on Bayer’s participation. Matt Schlapp, the CPAC chairman, complained on its website that: “Leftist media launched a coordinated smear campaign” on the event.

“Our mission is to increase freedom and opportunity across the globe, including for those living under socialist and Communist regimes,” Schlapp said.

CPAC proclaiming its embrace of “freedom and opportunity” in what has become an authoritarian state is like ingesting Ivermectin as an inoculant against charges it has rejected democracy.

Orbán said in his opening speech to the conference, “We have to take back the institutions in Washington and Brussels. We must find allies in one another and coordinate the movements of our troops.” That includes ensuring the right has its own media and that shows like Tucker Carlson’s run “24/7”.

David Rothkopf responded on Twitter, “The main take-away from the CPAC hatefest in Hungary should not be the overabundance of racists or authoritarians, it should be that it underscores that the movement currently attacking US democracy is global in scope & represents a worldwide threat.”

“CPAC in Hungary demonstrates that, precisely as intended, Putinism is a cancer that has spread through the political systems of democracies worldwide and is now metastasizing,” the professor of international relations added.

Schlapp’s twinning of freedom and opportunity recalls the warning Steve Fraser gave Bill Moyers in 2014 about “the triumph of the free market ideology as the synonym for freedom.”

“It is axiomatic in our current political culture,” said Fraser, “that when we say freedom we mean capitalism.”

In the aftermath of the first Gilded Age, Fraser added, Americans created a social safety net, a “civilized capitalism that protects people against the worst vicissitudes of the free market.” 

But if Putinism is metastasizing in democracies worldwide, so is corporate capitalism. Conjoined, the result tends toward fascism. Democracy becomes mere window dressing and freedom a shibboleth. In Orbán’s Hungary, Freedom House reports, constitutional and legal changes made by his Fidesz party “have allowed it to consolidate control over the country’s independent institutions, including the judiciary.”

American white nationalists are not tiptoeing around where they mean to take this country. By holding CPAC in Hungary, they are broadcasting it.

Working people in the first Gilded Age, says Fraser, “summoned up a kind of political will and the political imagination” to civilize capitalism,” to say to themselves, “we are not fated to live this way.”

Nor are we fated to live in the authoritarian mockery of democracy Republicans, white nationalist authoritarians, autocrats, and oligarchs mean to spread across this continent.

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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.

Donald Trump is still welcome somewhere

Maybe there’s still hope for Trump Tower Moscow (Washington Post):

On Saturday, the Russian Foreign Ministry published an updated list of 963 Americans barred from entering Russia — a largely symbolic move featuring a wide-ranging collection of Biden administration members, Republicans, tech executives, journalists, lawmakers who have died, regular U.S. citizens and even actor Morgan Freeman.

[…]

Some of those mentioned in Saturday’s list, including Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, were sanctioned in March and barred from entering Russia.

The list appears to include major officials from the Biden administration, such as Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and former White House press secretary Jen Psaki. The president’s son, Hunter Biden, is also named, as is former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

Former president and unindicted co-conspirator Donald Trump did not make the exclusive exclusion list. The only prominent former Trump official banned from entering the Russian Federation is Mike Pompeo. Many members of Congress joined him.

Good boy. Have a biscuit.

Not included on the list of the banned are Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Rand Paul, both Republicans from Kentucky. Paul delayed a vote on an aid package for Ukraine. His action drew a mention last week on Russian television.

Meanwhile, the usual whining from the man-child himself.

Trump is still welcome in Russia should he need to exit the U.S. in a hurry.

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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.

My sentiments exactly. Read the entire article:

It was a Freudian slip for the ages: during a speech in Dallas this week, former President George W Bush condemned the “decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq”. Whoops! “I mean of Ukraine,” he added a second later, as laughter rang out in the room. Isn’t it funny when a former president accidentally confesses to war crimes? Ha! Ha! Ha!

…

 [I]magine it’s 2042 and Vladimir Putin has transformed himself from war criminal to cuddly grandpa who paints in his dotage. Imagine he slips up while making a speech and talks about the wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Ukraine. Imagine everyone in the room laughing. That wouldn’t be terribly funny would it? In fact, the idea that a guy like Putin could face zero accountability and spend his old age giving speeches instead of serving time for war crimes, would be horrifying. 

It’s very simple: without Bush, there would never have been Trump. Sure, the GOP and our mainstream discourse was not well before Bush. But Bush’s murderous lies turbocharged America’s descent into our present psychotic politics.

Trump predicts they will

Sad!

Republicans here still seething about the 2020 presidential race say they would rather sit out the election in November if Trump’s candidate, former Sen. David Perdue, loses an upcoming GOP gubernatorial primary than ever support incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp.  

The animosity towards Kemp, whom several MAGA Republicans described as a “Judas” and “betrayer” for certifying Joe Biden’s win in 2020, is unlikely to affect the outcome of the May 24 primary. But it may hurt Kemp’s chances this fall in an anticipated rematch with presumed Democratic nominee Stacey Abrams, the woman he narrowly beat in 2018 — with Trump’s support.

“I don’t want Stacey Abrams. But I don’t think I can vote for Brian Kemp,” a 27-year-old Gordon County resident who declined to give his name told Insider at a “Bikers for Trump” rally about an hour north of Atlanta. 

The local Republican, who accused Kemp of “rolling over and letting the country get crucified” during the last election, said he planned to vote for Perdue on Tuesday because the Trump-endorsed former senator from Georgia had vowed to hold everyone involved in the “rigged and stolen” presidential contest accountable if he gets elected. 

Earlier in the day, an 81-year-old Georgian who said he’s voted Republican since 1964, couldn’t even bring himself to say Kemp’s name or that of Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger. 

“I wouldn’t vote for either one of them. They’re not Republicans. They’re liars,” David, who declined to provide his last name, said at Perdue’s May 20 event at a rural airfield. He added that Kemp and Raffensperger “did Trump in in Georgia” by not investigating the results to the twice-impeached former president’s satisfaction. 

Kemp and Raffensperger conducted a statewide audit and oversaw recounts of the more than 5 million votes Georgians cast in the 2020 presidential election. Biden beat Trump there by about 12,000 votes. 

Amy Steigerwalt, a professor of political science at Georgia State University, said the 2020 race is over for everyone but the Trumpiest locals. “Most voters know that the recounts and audits all showed that the election was conducted fairly and transparently, and that there was no evidence of fraud or malfeasance,” she told Insider. 

Still, Trump mentioned the possibility of his devotees sitting out the governor’s race earlier this month. CNN reported that he said “many Republicans are just not going to vote for Kemp” during a call-in rally he did for Perdue. 

The “Trumpiest locals” make up a substantial fraction of the Georgia GOP. If they do decide to sit it out it could make the difference. And I frankly think that Trump would be just fine with it. All he cares about is vindicating his loss in 2020 and his people refusing to vote for Kemp and Raffensberger would prove that in his mind. He is pushing for Herschell Walker to win the Senate but I have a sneaking suspicion that Herschell is going to implode before November so I wouldn’t count on him bringing out the Trumpers either.

One thing we know for sure is that the only thing that matters to Trump is Trump. What he believes serves him in 2024 is what he will do.

The wingnuts are giving it a try

It’s not just schools folks. Did you think they’d stop there?

Two Virginia Republicans have asked a court for restraining orders that would prevent private bookseller Barnes & Noble from selling two books to minors, marking an escalation in the conservative campaign to limit students’ access to literature.

The two books are “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe, a memoir about identifying as genderqueer or nonbinary, and “A Court of Mist and Fury,” a fantasy novel by Sarah J. Maas. The two Republicans, Del. Timothy Anderson of Virginia Beach and Tommy Altman, a congressional candidate, requested the orders from Virginia Beach Circuit Court on Wednesday as part of their larger, ongoing lawsuit targeting the books.

The requested restraining orders would also prohibit distribution of the two books by Virginia Beach City Public Schools. The board of that school system voted this week to remove all copies of “Gender Queer” from its libraries over its sexual content.

This is performative, of course. They can’t really stop a book from being disseminated. Perhaps they’ve heard of this thing called “the internet.” Or maybe not. But the performance they’re giving should be chilling to anyone who still cares about living in a free society. It’s bad enough they are doing this to schools. Now they’re trying to ban books in bookstores.

Gosh “Gender Queer” sure sounds dangerous:

In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia’s intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears.

Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity—what it means and how to think about it—for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.

“It’s also a great resource for those who identify as nonbinary or asexual as well as for those who know someone who identifies that way and wish to better understand.” — SLJ (starred review)

Right. The last thing we would ever want to do is better understand …

A harrowing story of citizens trying to protect democracy

TPM interviewed a former election security officer. It’s bad:

As midnight approached on November 3, 2020, Ken Matta was sitting in a Phoenix conference room with Arizona’s secretary of state. And he was feeling pretty good.

Sure, COVID-19 had disrupted his office’s typical election plans, but the secretary’s team had pulled off one of the smoothest elections in years. 

It took a lot of work to make it happen. They had received unprecedented help from the federal government. County election offices had become a buzzing hive of activity, cooperating with each other and sharing best practices. The counterterrorism “fusion center” in Arizona — which was stocked that day with intelligence and law enforcement officials from every level of government — had overseen an Election Day without a hitch. 

And so Matta, the election security lead in Arizona and a nearly 20-year veteran of the secretary of state’s office, was optimistic.

“We built this great community in Arizona, like never before,” said Matta. “We felt so good. A week before the election, we’re looking at each other going like, ‘Alright, what else can we do?’ It’s not very often when we get a chance to say, ‘You know what, we’re sitting pretty.’” 

Then, the President of the United States appeared on television. As he started to speak, Matta’s heart sank. The election, Donald Trump said, was a fraud on the American people. 

That speech by Trump, falsely claiming victory just after 2 a.m. in Washington, marked the beginning of months of attacks on election workers, like Matta, that continue today. Matta had worked in government for two decades after being bitten by the election security bug during the 2000 Bush v. Gore recount. He had never seen anything like it. 

“Instantly, our lives changed,” he recalled in an interview with TPM. “None of us in the whole industry at that moment felt safe and secure. That’s the good name of elections thrown under the bus. And we had worked harder up to that point than we ever had before to make sure the elections were secure.” 

That work didn’t matter: They were standing between Trump and power. What Matta witnessed in the 18 months since Trump’s election-night proclamation has made him fear for the future of American democracy: a sustained attack on election workers, and the resulting attrition and political gamesmanship that he says will allow conspiracy theorists and political operatives into key jobs in election administration, including secretary of state positions — the officials who in many state run elections. 

The arsonists, in other words, are now arriving at the firehouse. 

Matta left state government this month.

“I’m worried that people that only follow a political agenda get into power and have control over our elections,” he said. “If we get to that point, the outlook is bleak.”

Most of those leading the election fraud crusaders are cynical opportunists who see a path to power by cheating. And unfortunately, they have now brainwashed millions of people into believing their bullshit:

Assault Rifles, Threats To ‘Hunt’ Election Workers, And A Creepy Gas-X Gift Box

Nov. 3, 2020, which should have been nearly the finish line to a challenging election year, turned out to be the start of something new.

After Trump’s election-night address, “we swung into debunking mode,” Matta said. The office began strategizing how to fight back against the misinformation, working out communication strategies to address the President’s lies. But the lies were already bearing fruit.

The calls started rolling into the secretary’s office: Harassment, threats. A mob swarmed the Maricopa County voter tabulation center. Political operatives began their work to overturn Joe Biden’s victory. Alex Jones showed up in the state. Soon, Rudy Giuliani arrived too, to meet with state legislators and hold a theatrical “hearing” on supposed voter fraud. 

It didn’t end with Joe Biden’s inauguration, of course. A few weeks later, the Republican-controlled state Senate subpoenaed all 2.1 million ballots from Maricopa County, handing them over to a group of privately-funded conspiracy theorists led by the contractor Cyber Ninjas, which began a sham “audit” that included recounting the ballots and inspecting them for bamboo fibers — sure signs of meddling from Asia, the theory went. 

Matta witnessed that whole episode first-hand, including as an observer of the “audit” for the secretary of state, where Cyber Ninjas’ audit workers often tried to convince him that he and his colleagues would end up in jail. 

At one point, Matta began noticed pro-audit demonstrators with assault rifles eyeing the cars entering the state fairgrounds, where ballots were being stored and recounted at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum. 

He, too, began carrying a gun. 

But equally alarming for him was the treatment of millions of voters’ ballots: Matta saw audit workers mistakenly double-count 100 overseas and military ballots, but only after they’d mistakenly believed they’d uncovered evidence of fraud. Later, when the audit contractors moved into a new building, rain dripped from a leaky roof directly onto ballot boxes, and Matta saw ballots sag in the humid, un-air-conditioned room. 

“They didn’t even know how many ballots they had,” he scoffed a year later, in an interview with TPM. “Their numbers didn’t jive at all.”

The audit also revealed the disdain that Trump’s true believers had for the state employees. 

Audit workers were “questioning our integrity, our democratic allegiances, our sexuality,” he recalled. “It was tough to walk through that everyday.”

At the end of the ordeal, he found a “very creepy” gift box waiting on a table for him. Inside was  a plastic cockroach that audit workers had repeatedly placed on his phone, a bottle of Pepto Bismol (a reference to the pink shirts that secretary of state observers were forced to wear), a seat-saver for a Trump rally with Matta’s name on it, a ticket stub for audit bankroller Patrick Byrne’s “Deep Rig” conspiracy theory movie, red and green pens, and a pack of Gas-X, which Matta said referred to the audit workers’ repeated taunts to the state observers that they should be anxious about the outcome of the audit — they would, after all, soon be behind bars. 

“They were always saying, ‘Are you nervous? Because you’re going to jail.’” 

They love to say that, don’t they? It’s become their all-purpose cri de guerre. Considering that hundreds of them have been indicted for january 6th you’d think they’d dial that back but they won’t. They love to say it.

And they love to say it to average citizens just doing their work in a non-partisan fashion.

Matta spoke to TPM a few weeks after leaving his job at the secretary of state’s office. He was worried about the attrition of election workers in the face of continued attacks and threats. At the secretary of state’s office, he reviewed at times more than 30 threats a day that were sent to employees in the office, everything from menacing emails to voicemails informing staff that they would “be hunted.” The number of threats flagged to him eventually tapered, but Matta thought that may have simply been because employees grew “calloused” to their lives being threatened. 

Across the country, an alarming number of election workers are leaving their jobs, as are seasonal poll workers. Conservative activists have taken note, and are working hard to replace them with true believers.

“If you’re a senior citizen — we’ve heard them say, ‘Why would I volunteer to go get shot up at the polls or something for this amount of money?’” Matta said.

He thinks election deniers are bound to fill those gaps.

There is no doubt about it. They already are in the swing states Trump is intent upon stealing in 2024.

There was a time when I might have thought that average people being exposed to the way things really work would sober them up. But these people are so far gone that it’s clear even irrefutable proof right before their eyes won’t convince them. After all, quite a few of them believe that the Democratic Party and George Soros are running a blood drinking satanic pedophile ring. There’s no reasoning with people like that.

John Eastman’s sad attempts to protect Dear Leader

One of Trump’s pathetic coup lawyers is fighting a subpoena by the January 6th Committee asking for documents pertaining to his work trying to overturn the election. He claims it is privileged and has filed a suit to that effect.

Philip Bump breaks down his claims in that filing. It’s not pretty:

The new court filing asserts that the issue Eastman was discussing with Trump was “not whether there had been illegality and fraud in the election—there was ample evidence of that at the time, and the evidence on that score has only grown since—but whether it was of sufficient scope to have altered the outcome of the election, warranting reversal, or at least called it into question, [warranting] a new election.” Setting aside that the example of a new election being called was the fraud uncovered in a congressional race in 2018 — an incident in which the repercussions were far lower and the evidence far greater — it’s useful to point out the falsehood in the middle of the sentence. There was no “ample evidence” of fraud on Jan. 6, 2021, and the idea that there was has only decreased since.

“Countless examples of election illegality and fraud, and expert opinion indicating a high likelihood of fraud, were available to President Trump and Dr. Eastman at the time,” the filing claims. It points to a petition filed by the Trump campaign against election administrators in Georgia, documenting “scores of violations of Georgia election law” that purportedly affected the election.

Notice what Eastman’s doing here. He’s conflating changes to the law with fraud, in an effort to bolster the idea that the election was stolen via efforts to expand voter access that he and Trump believe worked against the incumbent. It’s like claiming that someone committed arson and citing as evidence the fact that the service station near their house was selling gas without charging the required taxes.

The Georgia Supreme Court rejected the suit in December 2020. Eastman’s filing elevates claims from that lawsuit anyway and loops in new assertions, including an incident in which a Georgia Tech student alleges that someone voted with her absentee ballot. That claim was central to a lawsuit against the 2020 results filed by former senator David Perdue that was ignominiously tossed out of court this month.

“This evidence was known by Dr. Eastman and his client at the time,” the filing reads, speaking of the Georgia assertions, “but it has recently been lent additional support by revelations contained in a new documentary film by Dinesh D’Souza, 2000 Mules, supported by exhaustive analysis of geospatial cell phone data and drop box video surveillance footage, of a massive and illegal ballot harvesting scheme.”

In reality, “2000 Mules” offers no robust evidence of anything. Not of the scheme alleged in the movie and, therefore, not of the validity of Eastman’s claims. Of course, as the filing admits, this concocted allegation didn’t exist at the time Eastman was advising Trump, making its inclusion here a particularly odd choice that serves mostly to reveal how thinly supported the overall argument is.

The filing then points to other examples of lawsuits focused on legalities rather than fraud, but it soon returns to the idea that he and Trump were warranted in assuming there was robust fraud.

“Statistical evidence, contained in Dr. Eastman’s privileged email exchanges … but also that which was publicly available at the time, strongly indicated ‘the intense improbability of the accuracy of the present Biden lead,’ ” it reads. The source for that? A purported analysis of the statistical unlikelihood of Biden’s win that focuses on things such as the fact that Joe Biden received more votes in many places than Barack Obama did in 2008 — something easily explained by both population growth and fervent opposition to Trump.

The author of that analysis, incidentally, was Steve Cortes, an adviser to Trump’s campaign.

One of the most ludicrous arguments in the new filing centers on the commonly repeated refrain that the election was the “most secure in American history,” an assertion made by Trump administration officials soon after the vote concluded. That statement also said there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” It was an effort to rebut baseless claims about electronic voting machines that were being made by people such as Trump attorney Sidney Powell.

But the Eastman filing rejects that assertion using one example.

“The forensic audit conducted in Antrim County proved that statement to be false,” it reads, “as even the State’s own expert acknowledged that votes were switched in the machine due to an improper software upgrade.”

This is nothing short of embarrassing. First, it aims to rebut a broad claim about the reliability of electronic voting machines nationally based on the results in a Michigan county where 16,000 votes were cast. Second, it aims to rebut that claim based on an incident that was easily and quickly explained as an error in how vote-counting machines were configured by county officials. Third, even had the incorrect results stood, Trump would have lost Michigan handily. Fourth, it is not in the least an example of votes being lost, changed or compromised, just an error in how they were at first counted. Fifth and most important, no good-faith assessment of the election should treat Antrim’s goof as evidence of rampant uncertainty about the results.

In fact, a Republican-led probe of the election found last year that “all compelling theories that sprang forth from the rumors surrounding Antrim County are diminished so significantly as for it to be a complete waste of time to consider them further.” Yet here is Trump’s former attorney considering them further…

These Trump accomplices are ridiculous, all of them. Sadly, like most everyone else, I suspect, I have little faith that anything serious will happen to any of the coup plotters. In fact, if the Republicans take the House in 2022, I think we’ll see rabid Benghazi-style hearings that will have the mainstream media slavering over Hunter Biden and Nancy Pelosi in ways that will mirror what the right wing media will be presenting — thus creating the effect of consensus that it’s the Democrats who are corrupt and anti-democratic. I hope I’m wrong.

If the jackboot fits …

Brian Beutler has some thoughts in his latest Big Tent newsletter about the new, focus grouped, “ultra-MAGA” designation the Democrats are trying out It’s a long piece and I urge you to subscribe so you can read the whole thing. It’s excellent. But I’ll provide some excerpts:

I’ve come to appreciate the (possibly unintentional) cleverness of the strategy on an abstract level. If you assume many Republicans will appropriate the term “ultra-MAGA” for themselves (aside: this is why I suspect the cleverness is unintentional) then it makes some sense to roll it out to them, let them all tattoo “ultra-MAGA” on their foreheads. That’s what Elise Stefanik did. It’s what all the MAGA faithful did or will do. And as the radius widens, it’ll encircle more and more Republicans who will be expected to brand themselves the same way. If you’re a frontline Republican, do you want people to think you’re “ultra-MAGA”? Do you want them to know you’re not? Because now you’ll probably have to choose. 

All of which is to say, if it was intended as psychological trickery, there’s a kind of elegance to it. My main lingering doubt is with the decision to revert to mind games, instead of tackling the challenge of toxifying the Republican brand more frontally. I don’t really understand the instinct—when confronted with viscerally loathsome people—to ask market researchers to fool those people into admitting something they’re completely unashamed of. It’s a plan that’s just as likely to make wavering Republican voters more comfortable with “MAGA” than it is to make those voters decide they can’t abide by MAGA-branded candidates anymore. Between Biden decrying the GOP agenda as Ultra-MAGA, and Trump, in his best Mel Brooks voice, singing ‘don’t be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the MAGA party,’ who are they going to follow?

He goes on to discuss the Fetterman-Lamb race in Pennsylvania with some tart observations about the establishment-backed Lamb’s theory of how to win with “kitchen-table-issues.” (Those of you who read this blog regularly know what I think about “kitchen table issues” in a time of right wing authoritarianism as an election strategy — not much.)

And then we get to the meat of the matter:

Republicans are of course happy to tell all kinds of egregious lies about their opponents, particularly in the Trump era. But the idea isn’t to just turn the tables. It’s to make voters hear accurate warnings about the modern GOP at least as often as they hear GOP agitprop about socialism or “grooming” or whatever the latest slander is.

And this is why I think simple, forceful, resonant messages will serve Democrats much better than over-researched ones or excessively specific ones. Precision is important for getting tenure but it’s often the enemy of solidarity.

Liberals (because they’re liberals) like to parse the fascism question into dust. Perhaps it’s safer, to avoid the wrath of fact-checking gods, or to play it safe with more all-encompassing terms like authoritarianism, or more refined ones like Christian nationalism. But we are by no means playing a Price is Right-style game where the goal is to lay the GOP bare with as much nuance as possible, without going even $0.01 over the perfectly accurate description. For one thing, there is no perfectly accurate description; for another, pinpointing various shades of fasc-ish authoritarianism makes it hard to convey the critical fact, which is danger: racial supremacy, violence, Orwellian lies, dictatorship.

Christian nationalism is not a good thing, when you know what it is—but if you don’t know what it is, the words don’t convey the horrors Republicans would like to impose on the country. Which explains in part why the far-right is so fond of it: There are a lot of Christians in America, and most Americans don’t have uniformly negative associations with the word nationalism. “Since [Charlottesville], there has been a major shift among far-right groups, white nationalists, and militias toward espousing Christian nationalism, much like the Ku Klux Klan did,” Alexander Reid Ross, a scholar of radical-right movements, told the New Yorker last year. “The tactic has been to use Christian nationalism to cool down the idea of fascism without losing the fascism.”

To me the fair distinction to draw is that while the GOP has fused itself with a fascist movement, and will neither expel nor marginalize its members, not every Republican in Congress uses fascistic rhetoric or seeks fascistic power. 

But you don’t have to be particularly silver tongued to say both things. It’s easy to talk about non-ultra-MAGA Republicans without saying they’re all fascists. It’s perfectly fair to observe that almost every Republican in elected office has acted irresponsibly since Donald Trump took over their shop. Some of them, the ones who have gone from Trump-tolerant, to anti-Trump, have even admitted it. To take just one example I think about often, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) kept a foot in both camps until the insurrection, after which he felt free to admit that his vote against Trump’s first impeachment was a shameful error. There are still many Republicans who may feel caught in a collective-action problem, who nevertheless keep making individual choices they know to be immoral. It’s fair to say of them their irresponsibility—whether driven by fear or ambition or both—has included putting party over country.

Not all of them have fully embraced the ethos of fascist slime like Elise Stefanik and Donald Trump and his supplicants; but the time has come for them to take sides. Do they subscribe to the the same ideology as the Nazi who massacred the grocery store or not? Their colleagues are fascists—what are they going to do about it?

Toying around with terms like ultra-MAGA is a way of getting at this same distinction by speaking in code. But after everything we’ve been through, who honestly believes allusion is a more persuasive tactic, a better way to drive narratives, than just shouting screed from the rooftops. 

The good news for Democrats, who aren’t typically comfortable politicking outside the material realm, is breaking the F-ceiling wouldn’t entail confining their campaign rhetoric to the realm of naming and shaming. On the other side of abstraction and subjective criticism, they can note that Doug Mastriano will steal elections from voters, and Joshua Shapiro will not; Mastriano will sign a bill banning abortion; Shapiro will veto it. The Republican wants to crush our freedoms to govern ourselves, our bodies, our families. What does that sound like to you? 

In the spirit of not falling into the trap that swallowed Conor Lamb, Democrats should wage the election in fighting words, and save the clever tricks and sleights of hand for a better day, when we’re not staring collectively down the barrel of an assault rifle. 

Yes.

The word is a hard one to fling around and I’ve been playing with it for six years now, ever since Trump came down the escalator. It’s objectively the right word, but it’s hard to get used to saying it. And I think Beutler doesn’t grapple with the right’s inevitable projection of the term back on the left. They may call us all communists today but fascist will be next, I’m sure. It’s their way.

Still, there is utility in using correct terminology. At least some people will find it easier to understand what you’re talking about! So yes. Why are we pussyfooting around this stuff? It’s happening and it’s very, very threatening.

It’s hard to tell these days

They weren’t meant to, but these two pictures Michael Beschloss posted got me wondering which direction this country is headed.

Polling too. Had to look at these two or three times so figure out which way numbers are trending.

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