Month: July 2022

The Republican War on Teachers continues to escalate: “You would not trust these people to babysit your children for 20 minutes, why should we let them educate millions of American students? .. We must liberate these children from the captivity of these marxist teachers.” pic.twitter.com/mmInZc03K5

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 24, 2022

This is so disturbing:

Last year, when the state board of education proposed new sex-education standards for teaching about issues such as sexual orientation, gender identity and consent, a retired pediatrician in this central Nebraska town reached out to Gov. Pete Ricketts and state lawmakers.

“This is NOT Sex Ed as anyone knows it,” Sue Greenwald wrote in a July 16, 2021, email obtained by The Washington Post. Lessons that met these standards, she wrote, would be “ ‘grooming’ children to be sexual victims.”

It was a shocking claim, and it was catching on — repeated by Greenwald, by members of the Protect Nebraska Children Coalition, agroup she co-founded to oppose the standards, and embraced by Ricketts (R) himself. The message also spread through screenings at libraries and churches of “The Mind Polluters,” billed as an “investigative documentary” that “shows how the vast majority of America’s public schools are prematurely sexualizing children.”

Grooming erupted as a national issue earlier this year, but this state in America’s heartland has been roiled by that attack on comprehensive sex education since last spring, providing a unique window into a newly inflamed debate. The unsubstantiated claim helped activate an army of self-described Nebraska patriots who rose up against the standards, took over the local Republican Party and propelled a wave of far-right candidates for local and statewide school boards, a Post examination found. Earlier this month, these activists were part of a broader, anti-establishment insurgency that toppled leaders of the state Republican Party.

They’ve always hated public education. It’s a government policy after all and is open to everyone even if you’re not white or rich. What’s not to hate? And teachers are unionized and predominantly female which makes them all the more hated. Now they are focusing on the curriculum, particularly the teaching of history, which they insist must be whitewashed and now we have the targeted campaign against gay teachers, trans kids and sex-ed on top of last year’s hysterical tantrum over masking and vaccines. It’s getting much more personal and it’s activating these brainwashed wingnuts to get involved.

They’re coming for public school teachers, don’t kid yourself. This one’s been percolating for a long time and it’s coming to a boil.

Don’t blame Trump. It’s been a cesspool for a very long time

This piece on the Claremont Institute exposes so much of the rot at the heart of the right’s intellectual institutions:

 Early in 2016, as Donald Trump’s march toward the Republican presidential nomination gathered the air of inevitability, alumni of a conservative think tank nestled hereat the base of Southern California’s San Gabriel Mountains received an email with a tough question: Was it time for supporters of the Claremont Institute to help make Trump president?

“I’d sooner cut off my arm with a rusty spoon!” replied Nathan Harden, an editor at RealClearEducation, an offshoot of the political site RealClearPolitics, according to emails obtained by The Washington Post.

Others were interested,however. “I’m graduating this May and would very much like to get involved,” wrote Darren Beattie, a philosophy graduate student who would later work in Trump’s White House, until he was fired in 2018, after revelations that he had attended a conference with white nationalists. Harden declined to comment. Beattie did not respond to requests for comment.

The next four years would revolutionize the role of the Claremont Institute and a handful of other intellectual institutions that preach an America-first, originalist ideology. The institute — along with its journal, the Claremont Review of Books, as well as related journals such as American Greatness, andallied organizations, including Michigan’s Hillsdale College — gained influence during Trump’s tenure, funneling ideas and personnel to the administration despite Trump’s lifelong suspicion of academics and other experts.

Claremont blossomed under Trumpjust as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute had during the presidency of RonaldReagan, adding a Washington office and expanding its recruitment of conservative activists and sheriffs to study its ideas.

But now, as the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6,2021, assault on the Capitol reaches its zenith, the role played by one of Claremont’s leaders, John Eastman, has divided its followers and raised some ofthe same questions posed in that 2016 email: How far should scholars go to put their ideas into action?

Eastman, once a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was a mainstay of the institute from its earliest days and an architect of its approach to the Constitution. He argued, against centuries of legal precedent, that Kamala D. Harris was ineligible to serve as vice president because her parents weren’t American citizens when she was born in California. Then, in the final months of 2020, he burst into the national consciousness as he helped leadTrump’s drive to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He wrote confidential memos urging then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject officialelectoral vote totals and went on former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon’s show to build support for his widely discredited theory. And, on Jan. 6, he rallied Trump supporters at the Ellipse before a mob stormed the Capitol.

As dozens of courts rejected Eastman’s arguments, he fell from grace in many quarters. At Chapman University, where he was a professor and former dean of the law school, more than 140 faculty members signed a letter demanding he be disciplined. The university quickly announced his resignation.

But the Claremont Institute, where he sits on the board of directors, stood by Eastman, keeping him on as head of its Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a position forwhich he was paid $120,000 in 2020, tax records show. An institute statement condemned “widespread lies peddled by malicious domestic political opponents” and decried a “blackout on the Claremont Institute or on John.”

To some who have gone through institute programs, its trajectory is less surprising. Several former Claremont fellows said Eastman’s legal strategy drew on doctrine that for many years has been at the heart of the institute’s politics.

“How on Earth does Eastman get to this point of being ready to jettison the Constitution?” said one former fellow, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid alienating friends at the institute. “It’s by pushing deeper into this idea of natural rights, which justify any means necessary to preserve the republic. … That’s how Claremont goes from this quirky intellectual outfit to one of the main intellectual architects of trying to overthrow the republic.”

Charles Kesler — a senior fellow at the institute, editor of the Claremont Review of Books and a government professor at Claremont McKenna College, which is located nearby but is not related to the think tank — said the institute is split between some “who continue to believe that the election was stolen and some who have denied that from the beginning.”

Many of the institute’s leaders remain close with Eastman, but Kesler said: “I’m persuaded that John was wrong in the advice he gave Trump. … Whether his actions will hurt us or not, I’m not sure. It’s awkward and it raises some questions.”

Eastman did not respond to requests for comment.

A spokesman for the institute’s president, Ryan P. Williams, declined to make him available for an interview and asked for written questions. Those yielded no response. There was no answer when a reporter knocked on the door of Williams’s home in Claremont. At the institute’s headquarters, a two-story unit with gold-colored chandeliers at the back of a drab office building in nearby Upland, a receptionist said Williams was away.

Later, as The Post prepared to publish this story, Williams, 40, who has risen through the institute’s ranks since graduating from Hillsdale College in 2004, sent an emailed statement that read, in part: “We’re proud of what we do at the Claremont Institute; for over 40 years, our scholarship and teaching have had a positive and substantive effect on the nation’s political discourse. … That said, the Claremont Institute is not interested in participating in the fiction that the Washington Post is a legitimate media outlet, or that its chronically discredited journalists are dispassionate fact-finders intent on bringing their readers objective news.”

Ralph Rossum, who supervised Eastman’s PhD work at Claremont Graduate University, which is unaffiliated with the institute,said Eastman’s notion that Pence could overturn the election result left him “extraordinarily disappointed.”

“His reputation is in tatters, and the institute is badly damaged,” Rossum said.

It’s not just him, it’s the whole damned place. They were rolling around in the muck long before Trump came around.In 2003, the Institute gave Rush Limbaugh their “Statesmanship Award.” Here is a little piece of the speech the racist creep gave at the “Churchill Dinner” where he accepted a bust of old Winnie himself:

How many of you yesterday happened to see any pictures at all of the opening ceremonies of the Bill Clinton Library and Massage Parlor? (Laughter) How many hands do I see? Okay. I don’t see too many hands and I’m not surprised. Let me tell you, I watched it. Not because I wanted to. I watched it for you. I watched it, my friends, because it’s my business to do this. The Clinton library opening ceremonies epitomized, if you will, exactly where the left in this country is today. First, where was it? It was in a red state. They hate red states. In fact, the media in this country, the — what I call them, the liberal spin machine — I don’t like to use the word “mainstream press” anymore. The liberal spin machine was there. They were all excited. But they’re thinking about sending foreign correspondents to the red states to find out what people — and to the red counties of California — to find out what Americans are really like.

That’s the intellectual caliber of the Claremont Institute in a nutshell. That anyone ever gave them any respectability is on them. Don’t blame Eastman.

It’s going to be awful

I’m not sure I understand why, but every time I read about the Republican plan to persecute Dr. Anthony Fauci the minute they gain a majority, I feel the anger well up in me like nothing else. It reminds me of the persecution of intellectuals, scientists and artists in Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Fauci’s planned humiliation will beat the hands of Rand Paul, the supposed “libertarian” who has revealed himself as the authoritarian cretin we always knew him to be:

Congressional Republicans are eagerly floating investigations into Anthony Fauci and the Biden administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic if they win back control of the House or Senate in the midterm elections. 

“One way or another, if we are in the majority, we will subpoena his records and he will testify in the Senate under oath,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who is in line to become the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee if Republicans win the majority with the panel’s current ranking member, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), retiring. 

Republicans have not been shy about launching probes into the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic, focusing on the origins of the virus and whether the federal government — and by extension, Fauci — helped fund controversial research that might have played a role in its creation.

While Republicans have been in the minority, those investigations have not gained much momentum. But with the majority, the GOP would have the authority to lob subpoenas at the administration to force it to hand over documents. 

“If we win in November, if I’m chairman of a committee, if I have subpoena power, we’ll go after every one of [Fauci’s] records,” Paul said earlier this year.

Public health experts said a hard look needs to be taken at the totality of the U.S. response to the pandemic across both the Trump and Biden administrations, but without getting into partisan finger-pointing.

“If you want to have a hearing, you need it to be a credible one. And that has to have a purpose. Other than going out to an 81 year old man,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.

Benjamin has been among health advocates pushing for an independent commission modeled on the 9/11 Commission to be formed to examine the pandemic response.

“It should be designed to actually get to the right answers. Until they do that, you know, they’re gonna continue to politicize it,” Benjamin said.

Fauci is a career government official who has become a political lightning rod and a villain in the eyes of many on the right. Conservative media has painted him as a scapegoat for many of the nation’s missteps over the pandemic.

Paul, a libertarian ophthalmologist, has repeatedly antagonized the nation’s top infectious diseases doctor over the benefits of masks, vaccinations and the origins of COVID-19. 

They also plan to blame him and his unit at the NIH for COVID. They say he financed experiments in Wuhan, China that they say were then purposefully spread to the population. In QANON circles he is accused of being a comic book evil mastermind responsible for the deaths of millions. I’m not kidding.

The Republican Party is planning to degrade and humiliate him publicly based upon all these lies. That’s not a “kitchen table issue” and I think it’s probably important that people recognize the stakes in allowing the GOP to gain a majority in November. Is having a tantrum over gas prices worth the horrors they are going to unleash?

Read it and weep

We are so exceptional that despite having the youngest population out of the Group of 7 advanced countries we have the highest death rate from a disease that predominantly kills old people. We are a rich but unhealthy country in more ways than one:

The Group of Seven (G7) club of countries consists of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. Its members are among the world’s richest countries. Despite their relative similarity, the G7 shows huge diversity in terms of how COVID-19 has affected mortality outcomes. In what follows, we highlight the experience of the two countries at opposite extremes: Japan and the US.

COVID-19 mortality

The chart below shows over the course of the pandemic the evolution of the cumulative COVID-19 mortality rate. This expresses reported deaths with COVID-19 as the underlying cause relative to population size (per 100,000 people). 

A few results are immediately obvious when looking at this chart. We can see the effect of different waves when the slope of the curve steepens. We can also see the huge variety in outcomes across G7 countries. 

Let’s focus in what follows on the extremes: the US and Japan. It is astonishing how different the outcomes are of these two high-income countries. The cumulative COVID-19 mortality rate in the US is currently 12 times larger than in Japan. 

Excess mortality

We can also look at excess mortality, which captures the gap between the total number of deaths that occur for any reason and the amount that would be expected under normal circumstances.  Given the massive undercounting of the mortality toll both directly and indirectly attributed to COVID-19, excess mortality provides a useful way to get a glimpse of the true mortality toll.

Below we show the cumulative estimated excess mortality rate, where the estimates are the mid-points of the excess death model produced by The Economist. They are estimates on the basis of a machine learning algorithm that compensates for the lack of (timely) available data on excess mortality. The results of the model are discussed here. 

Here’s one whopping results: the differences across G7 countries are even starker when we look at excess mortality rates. Again the US and Japan stand out. The cumulative excess mortality rate in the US is currently 7 times higher than that of Japan.

In the table below, we provide the latest data on COVID-19 and excess mortality both in absolute and relative terms. Because of its large population size, we expect that the US has a larger absolute death toll. However, even on a relative basis, the US has high numbers both for reported COVID-19 mortality and estimated excess mortality. 

The reason why the ratio between US and Japanese mortality rates is so much greater for excess deaths than COVID-19 deaths is two-fold. First, the US excess death rate is considerably larger than the reported COVID-19 one, as per the estimates of The Economist. Second, the opposite is true for Japan, where excess mortality is in fact lower than COVID-19 mortality. 

What might explain the stellar performance of Japan? The country has a long and well-established tradition of wearing masks, which has been proven to be effective in mitigating the spread. The general health profile of the population is likely to have helped as well: low prevalence of obesity; low intake of red meat, especially saturated fatty acids; high intakes of fish, specifically n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, plant foods such as soybeans, and non-sugary beverages such as green tea.

One could point to other factors that may have played a role. But the overall point here is that Japan’s performance has been remarkable when placed in international perspective. Japan’s demographic profile (chart above) makes this performance all the more remarkable: Japan has the 2nd oldest population in the world (after Monaco) and COVID-19 is an age-discriminating disease. 

On every level, America failed to meet this moment.

Viktor Orbán on race

I wrote about “The Orbán System” the other day, featuring a long piece by Kim Lane Scheppele on the influence of Hungarian leader ViktorOrbán on the global right and particularly here in the U.S. In case that was too esoteric, perhaps this latest report on Orbán brings the point home more clearly:

Hungary’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has lashed out against the “mixing” of European and non-European races, in a speech that immediately drew outrage from opposition parties and European politicians.

“We [Hungarians] are not a mixed race … and we do not want to become a mixed race,” said Orbán on Saturday. He added that countries where European and non-Europeans mingle were “no longer nations”.

Orbán has been making similar claims for years, but these comments were couched in stark far-right terms.

Katalin Cseh, an MEP from the opposition Momentum party, said she was appalled by the prime minister’s speech. “His statements recall a time I think we would all like to forget. They really show the true colours of the regime,” she said.

[…]

Orbán made the remarks during a showpiece annual speech in Băile Tuşnad, Romania, where he has previously floated major policy ideas or ideological directions. It was there, in 2014, that he first said he wanted to build an “illiberal democracy” in Hungary.

This year, Orbán gave an apocalyptic speech predicting the decline of the west and prophesying “a decade of peril, uncertainty, and war”. He also sharply criticised western military support for Ukraine, positioning himself as Moscow’s foremost ally inside the European Union.

“The more modern weapons Nato gives the Ukrainians, the more the Russians will push the frontline forward … What we are doing is prolonging the war,” said Orbán during a speech on Saturday.

Hungary is a member of Nato, but the far-right Orbán has long had warm relations with Putin, and spent five hours in Moscow talking to the Russian leader in February, shortly before the Russian invasion. The speech came two days after his foreign minister made a surprise trip to Moscow for talks, and puts him far outside the European consensus on the war.

Orbán said the job of the west should not be to hope for a Ukrainian victory, but to mediate a peace deal. “We shouldn’t be on Russia’s side, or Ukraine’s side, but between the two,” he said, adding that the policy of imposing sanctions on Russia had not worked.

Oleg Nikolenko, spokesperson for Ukraine’s foreign ministry, described Orbán’s claims as “Russian propaganda”.

[…]

Orbán won a fourth consecutive term in office in an election earlier this year, with his government accused of stifling media freedom and backsliding on democratic norms since his Fidesz party won power in 2010. Since the 2015 refugee crisis, Orbán’s government has used far-right anti-migration rhetoric as its main talking point.

On Saturday, he made frequent nods to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which claims there is a plot to dilute the white populations of the US and European countries through immigration. He said it was “an ideological trick of the internationalist left to say the European population is already mixed race”.

He named demographics, migration and gender as the main battlefields of the future, on the same day that thousands of people rallied in Budapest for the city’s annual Pride march.

He’s coming soon to America to share his vision with eager allies:

Orbán will be hoping for Italian elections in September to return a rightwing coalition, and is also rooting for the return of Donald Trump in 2024. Next month, he is due to travel to Dallas, Texas, where he will address CPAC, a large gathering of American conservatives. Earlier this year, CPAC hosted a special session of the conference in Budapest.

Orbán has shown how to institutionalize the culture war.America isn’t exactly the same, of course. Hungary, for instance, has a much more liberal abortion policy. Religion plays a different role. We have our own priorities and our history of racism is unique. But essentially America’s culture wars are the same — race, demographics, migration and gender. This is the battlefield.

For people engaged in mindless point-scoring

“Access journalism” has pushed back so little over the years on interviewees who spout nonsense, that it is refereshing to see it happen even in glimpses. Jim Acosta does it regularly for CNN and did again over the weekend:

ICYMI: Trump is set to return to DC this week, for the first time since leaving office in disgrace, to deliver what’s billed as a “policy speech.” So asked the question… what’s the policy? How to do a coup? pic.twitter.com/h2bPzXo5b7

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) July 24, 2022

Margaret Brennan pushed back on CBS against the suggestion that Democrats alone are to blame for Republican obstructionism.

MIAMI MAYOR FRANCIS SUAREZ (R): Democrats unfortunately have failed to be able to pass bills to address climate

MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, they don't have any Republican votes pic.twitter.com/fBKlx2FVXf

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 24, 2022

This last exhibit is not from an interview but points up the same challenge of trying to advance legislation with a narrow majority against a reactionary minority and a 50-50 Senate. Karoli Kuns of Crooks and Liars responded to a tweet from the Women’s March.

I’m sure Republicans will appreciate you giving them a chance. I fail to see how this tweet is at all helpful. https://t.co/L8JJMt2fyE

— Karoli 💙 (@Karoli) July 24, 2022

People are often purposefully dense for the sake of point-scoring, but these attempts begin to resemble a stupid “Tell us without telling us” meme. As in, “Tell us you don’t know how government works without telling us you don’t know how government works.”

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Jesus is their savior, Trump is their president

“We need to be the party of nationalism and I’m a Christian, and I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists,” Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene told an interviewer from Next News Network at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in Florida. Greene has expressed that view before recently, and she means it. She speaks for a growing, radicalized faction that claims it is mainstream.

The fringe right wears Christianity the way it wears red, white, and blue. Nationalists wear the label the way others wear designer logos — as less-than-sterling advertisements for brands with which they identify but no longer represent. If they ever did.

The movement “uses Christian language to cloak sexism and hostility to Black people and non-White immigrants,” writes CNN’s John Blake. People who once insisted ahistorically that the United States was founded as a Christian nation now insist it is a White Christian one:

A report from a team of clergy, scholars and advocates — sponsored by two groups that advocate for the separation of church and state — concluded that this ideology was used to “bolster, justify and intensify” the attack on the US Capitol.

Much of the House January 6 committee’s focus so far has been on right-wing extremist groups. But there are plenty of other Americans who have adopted teachings of the White Christian nationalists who stormed the Capitol — often without knowing it, scholars, historians, sociologists and clergy say.

White Christian nationalist beliefs have infiltrated the religious mainstream so thoroughly that virtually any conservative Christian pastor who tries to challenge its ideology risks their career, says Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of the New York Times bestseller, “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.”

Wave the flag. Hug the Bible. Then advocate beliefs antithetical to both. The composite ideology was deployed to “bolster, justify and intensify” the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, a team of religious scholars concluded in February.

In a statement issued in July 2019, Christians Against Christian Nationalism declared, “Christian nationalism demands Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian. It often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation. We reject this damaging political ideology and invite our Christian brothers and sisters to join us in opposing this threat to our faith and to our nation.”

“Imposter Christianity,” says Samuel Perry, a sociologist specializing in religious studies at the University of Oklahoma.

The “Christian nation” idea is an oldy, as folk beliefs go, “a half truth, a mythological version of American history,” says the co-author of “The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy,” Yale University sociologist Philip Gorski.

But several other elements make up the ascendant Christian Nationalism.

Warrior Jesus

Faith in a “warrior Christ” is another. How does violent insurrection square with “the prince of peace”? It doesn’t:

That’s because they follow a different Jesus than the one depicted in the Gospels, says Du Mez, who is also a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University — a Christian school — in Michigan. They follow the Jesus depicted in the Book of Revelation, the warrior with eyes like “flames of fire” and “a robe dipped in blood” who led the armies of heaven on white horses in a final, triumphant battle against the forces of the antichrist.

White Christian nationalists have refashioned Jesus into a kick-butt savior who is willing to smite enemies to restore America to a Christian nation by force, if necessary, Du Mez and others say.

“That Jesus brings peace, but only after he slays his enemies,” Mez adds. Thousands came to help Trump/Him do it on Jan. 6. There is some confusion about which is which.

The other element familiar to readers here is the Orwellian notion that some Americans are more American than others. The votes of Real Americans™ count. The votes of all others count less or not at all.

“It’s the idea that we are the people, and our vote should count, and you’re not the people, and… you don’t really deserve to have a voice,” Gorski says. “It doesn’t matter what the voting machines say, because we know that all real Americans voted for Donald Trump.”

With God and the Supreme Court on their side

With fewer Americans attending church and fewer than ever identifying as White alone, this movement should not enjoy ascendancy. But what it lacks in numbers it makes up for in fervor and long-term committment (see Federalist Society). Now this beset minority has a conservative Christian (mostly Catholic) conservative majority on the Supreme Court to help impose its will on everyone else, whatever the majority of Americans think. Plus a Republican Party ruthlessly committed to cementing its minority rule by any means necessary.

Gorski, the historian, says White Christian nationalism represents a grave threat to democracy because it defines “we the people” in a way that excludes many Americans.

“The United States cannot be both a truly multiracial democracy — a people of people and a nation of nations — and a white Christian nation at the same time,” Gorski wrote in “The Flag and the Cross.” “This is why white Christian nationalism has become a serious threat to American democracy, perhaps the most serious threat it now faces.”

So, here we are. Hoping that demography will save us before climate change slays us or fascism overtakes us. The irony behind Greene’s promotion of Christian nationalism is what the misogyny of her male allies means for her gender should the Christian right gain more power. Perhaps she should consult gay and black former Republicans.

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Oh, I hope so

It looks like somebody’s wearing out his welcome:

When J.D. Vance took the stage at a conservative conference last week, it should have prompted sighs of relief from Republicans hoping to see the Ohio GOP’s U.S. Senate nominee hit the campaign trail harder.

There was just one problem: the stage Vance took was in Israel, 6,000 miles away from Ohio.

The spectacle of Vance gushing in Tel Aviv about Israel’s high birth rates—to a friendly audience stocked with plenty of conservatives but almost certainly no Ohio voters—seemed to distill for some Republicans everything that’s wrong with his campaign right now.

Back in the Buckeye State, many are still waiting for Vance to show up, as the most critical phase of the campaign season draws near.

Bill Cunningham, a fixture on conservative talk radio airwaves in Cincinnati for decades, told The Daily Beast that voters, party activists, and even statewide officials are telling him that Vance has been phoning it in. Vance is allegedly missing from many of the county fairs, party meetings, and campaign stops where candidates in this state are expected to be.

“The Republican faithful are telling me,” Cunningham said, “they can’t find J.D. Vance with a search warrant.”

Others say it’s not just that they don’t see Vance—the anti-Trump literary celeb turned MAGA firebrand—pounding the pavement in Ohio. Privately, some aren’t even getting calls back from him, or his campaign, to discuss how they can help.

That group includes campaign donors whom Vance literally cannot afford to lose. The candidate’s fundraising has been anemic, and because he’s carrying debt from the bruising primary, Vance is in the unenviable position of asking donors to pay off those debts.

One GOP source in state politics said Vance’s lack of followup with some important donors in the state has been disappointing. “When the fundraising numbers came out, it’s full-on panic now,” they said.

“It’s a code red,” said Ron Verb, a longtime talk radio host in Youngstown, who has been sounding the alarm about Vance on his show. “I think he’s running the worst campaign that you could possibly run.”

Meanwhile, Republicans begrudgingly admit that the Democratic nominee, Rep. Tim Ryan, is perhaps running the best possible campaign from a Democrat in this increasingly conservative state.

Ryan has raised a staggering $12 million for his campaign so far. And he is using that war chest to blanket Ohio airwaves with ads touting his blue collar bona fides, amplifying his professed desire to break with fellow Democrats on key issues, like inflation and crime. (Notably, Ryan has been a reliable Democratic vote during his two decades in Congress.)

With Vance largely absent on the airwaves and the campaign trail, Republicans fret that Ryan is successfully defining himself before Vance is—and that time is running out for the Republican to right the ship.

I’m sure Peter Thiel will swoop in with a few million but still, this says something.

OK, I'm not going to say every Republican is like Matt Gaetz — though there will be more like him in the next Congress.

But look at how the audience reacts to this brain-dead misogyny, at a conference meant to showcase the youthful future of the GOP. https://t.co/yBnpNa5RJd

— Tom Malinowski (@Malinowski) July 24, 2022

The man is accused of sex-trafficking underage girls but he’s a hero to the Trumpen-Jugen.

Dave Weigel on the campaign trail is seeing some very disturbing rhetoric:

Days before Maryland’s July 19 primary, Michael Peroutka stood up at an Italian restaurant in Rockville and imagined how a foreign enemy might attack America.

“We would expect them to make our borders porous,” Peroutka told the crowd, which had come to hear the Republicans running for state attorney general. “We would expect them to make our cities unsafe places to live. We would expect them to try to ruin our economy.” The country was “at war,” he explained, “and the enemy has co-opted members and agencies and agents of our government.”

On Tuesday, Peroutka easily dispatched a more moderate Republican to win the nomination. State Del. Dan Cox, who won Donald Trump’s endorsement after supporting the former president’s effort to subvert the 2020 election, also dispatched a Republican endorsed by the state’s popular governor, Larry Hogan.

Both candidates described a country that was not merely in trouble, but being destroyed by leaders who despise most Americans— effectively part of a civil war. In both swing states and safe seats, many Republicans say that liberals hate them personally and may turn rioters or a police state on people who disobey them.

Referring to the coronavirus and 2020 protests over police brutality, Cox told supporters at a rally last month, “We were told 14 days to bend the curve, and yet antifa was allowed to burn our police cars in the streets.” He continued: “Do you really think, with what we’re seeing — with the riots that have happened — that we should not have something to defend our families with? This is why we have the Second Amendment.”

The rhetoric is bracing, if not entirely new. Liberal commentators made liberal use of the word “fascism” to describe Trump’s presidency. The baseless theory that President Barack Obama was undermining American power as a foreign agent was popular with some Republicans, including Trump, who succeeded Obama in the White House.

Many Democrats saw the backlash to Obama as specific to his race, and saw Biden as unlikely to inspire mass opposition to Trump in the presidential election. But many Republicans also portray Biden as a malevolent figure — a vessel for a hateful leftist campaign to weaken America.

“It’s purposeful,” said former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who is running in next month’s special election for the state’s sole House seat, in an interview with former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon. “It’s all about the fundamental transformation of America. You only fundamentally transform something for which you have disdain.”

That argument has been dramatized in ads that, for instance, show one armed candidate appearing to charge into the home of a political enemy, and another warning of “the mob” that threatens ordinary Americans. In many cases the candidates are brandishing firearms while threatening harm to liberals or other enemies.

In central Florida, U.S. Army veteran Cory Mills has run ads about his company selling tear gas that was used to quell riots in 2020. “You may have seen some of our work,” he says, introducing a montage of what are labeled “antifa,” “radical left” and “Black Lives Matter” protesters running from the gas.

In northwest Ohio, a campaign video for Republican congressional nominee J.R. Majewski shows him walking through a dilapidated factory, holding a semiautomatic weapon, warning that Democrats will “destroy our economy” with purposefully bad policies.

“Their agenda is bringing America to its knees, and I am willing to do whatever it takes,” says Majewski, who’s seeking a House seat in a district around Toledo that has been redrawn to make Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) beatable. “If I have to kick down doors, that’s just what patriots do.”

In Missouri, Republican Senate candidate Eric Greitens has issued two ads this summer in which he holds or fires weapons, vowing to go “RINO hunting” — for “Republicans in name only” — in one ad and targeting the “political establishment” in the second.

Dreading deep losses in November, some Democrats have spent money to help Republican candidates who talk this wayunder the theory that they will be easier to beat in November. The Democratic Governors Association spent more than $1.1 millionon positive ads for Cox, as he was telling voters that they might one day have to battle antifa with their own weapons.

Candidates like Majewski, however, have won with no assistance from Democrats, aided instead by high turnout and grass-roots energy. The idea that the Biden administration’s policies are designed to fail — to raise gas prices, or increase the cost of food — is a popular campaign theme.

Pollsters have found that Americans are worried about the country sticking together; a YouGov poll released last month had a majority of both Democrats and Republicans agreeing that America would one day “cease to be a democracy.”

Republican wins since 2020, including a sweep in Virginia’s state elections and victory in a special election in June between two Hispanic candidates in South Texas, haven’t lightened the GOP mood. Andy Surabian, a Republican strategist who works with Trump-backed U.S. Senate candidates J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona, said that last year’s vaccine-or-test mandate for large companies was a turning point in views of the Biden administration, even after it was blocked by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.

“It’s the number one thing that caused people to go from ‘maybe this is incompetence’ to ‘there’s something else going on here,’ ” Surabian said. “Like, do these people actually want a Chinese-style social credit system?”

Rick Shaftan, a conservative strategist working with Republican challengers this cycle, said that the party’s voters were nervously watching crime rates in the cities, asking whether public safety was being degraded on purpose. He also pointed to government responses to the pandemic as a reason that those voters, and their candidates, were nervous.

“People paid a lot of attention to the truckers,” said Shaftan, referring to Canadian protests against vaccine mandates that occupied Ottawa this year and briefly shut down an international bridge. “Canada’s supposed to be a democracy. … People worry: Can that happen here?”

The arrests of hundreds of rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, has frequently been cited by Republican candidates as proof of a government war on its people.

In early July, at a town hall meeting in southwest Washington state, Republican congressional hopeful Joe Kent told his audience that the “phony riot” on Jan. 6 was being “weaponized against anybody who dissents against what the government is telling us,” from parents angry about public school education to people who had questioned the outcome of the 2020 election.

“These are the types of tactics that I would see in Third World countries when I was serving overseas,” Kent told the crowd gathered in a gazebo in Rochester, a town currently represented by Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.). “You’d see the Praetorian Guard or the intelligence services grab the opposition and throw them in the dungeons. I never thought I’d see that in America.”

Trump himself has frequently accused President Biden of trying to ruin the country and create conflict to maintain power.

“Joe Biden helped lead his party’s vile campaign against our police officers, and then he carried the rioters’ agenda straight into the White House,” Trump told supporters at a rally in Las Vegas last month, joined by Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, the GOP nominee for governor. “The streets are flowing with the blood of innocent crime victims.”

Hookay. I’m guessing these are people who didn’t think January 6th was violent enough.

He has more examples. I’m not sanguine that this is just talk. These people have worked themselves up into a frenzy having been convinced by Orange Julius Caesar that the election was stolen and the system is rigged against them. They are armed to the teeth. I don’t think we should assume this is idle chatter.