Month: November 2022

“History’s footnotes await your arrival”

Here’s a great piece by Stuart Stevens on Ron DeSantis at the new site Resolute Square (which you can sign up for here.)

A governor popular in his own party announces for president with the promise to do for America what he did for his own state. He’s proud of his accomplishments, eager for America to embrace his successes. He was re-elected by a large margin. His campaign staff is confident they are working for the best governor in America and certain Americans will agree as they hear his story.
 
Michael Dukakis in 1987 or Ron DeSantis in 2022?
 
Take your pick. With the first ad of his presidential campaign launched by a
SuperPAC, Governor Ron DeSantis has adopted the Michael Dukakis strategy. And in doing so, has probably doomed his chances to win the nomination or the presidency.
 
Not satisfied with the obvious Dukakis-in-the-tank comparisons sparked by DeSantis’ “Top Gov” campaign ad, it’s as though the DeSantis brain trust closely studied past presidential campaigns and picked the Dukakis campaign as their model. Dukakis posed in a tank wearing a helmet. DeSantis posed in a fighter jet in a helmet. The most obvious difference was that the helmet seemed to wear Dukakis while it’s possible the jaws-of-life were used to free DeSantis’ ample head from his. Michael Dukakis had no answer to the most obvious question of what he would do if his wife were a victim of violent crime. Ron DeSantis had no answer to the most obvious question posed by Charlie Crist: would he commit to serving a four year term, if reelected, or was he already running for president? Michael Dukakis invited America to look closely at Massachusetts to appreciate the genius of his leadership. Ron DeSantis has decided to do the same.
 
It’s a great approach, except for everything that’s wrong with it, which is everything that’s going wrong in Florida. Why is this happening? How could a campaign make such obvious unforced errors?
 
The answer is simple: arrogance.
 
Michael Dukakis really did believe he had led a “Massachusetts Miracle.” He was surrounded by true believers who could not imagine others disagreeing. Ron DeSantis and his palace guard of sycophants have fallen into the same trap, or they at least know that, as with Donald Trump, pointing out flaws to egomaniacal, wannabe autocrats isn’t an effective way to keep your job.
 
In my years of helping elect candidates, I had a phrase I often used to advise candidates: “Never go for a murder conviction when manslaughter will do.” It was a cautionary warning to avoid overreaching. Don’t demand from voters more than you need to win. Don’t label an opponent “The Worst of Washington” when “Just as bad as Washington” will be more believable and disqualifying.
 
I hesitate to tell Ron DeSantis what to do for fear his campaign might actually be capable of learning, but the far better strategy for a governor running for president was the one taken by Bill Clinton in 1992. He had watched Dukakis be forced to defend his claims of Massachusetts greatness (remember the Bush attacks on the environmental quality of Boston Harbor or, yes, the attacks on the Massachusetts parole system that allowed Willie Horton to be released?). Clinton was careful not to fall into the same trap. Of course being from Arkansas, a state my fellow Mississippians ruefully praise when Arkansas shows up dead last in a category and bumps Mississippi up to just 49th, it would have been absurd to claim you wanted to “do for America what I did for Arkansas.” Instead Clinton declared, “There is no Arkansas miracle, only good people trying to make their lives a little better.” In doing so, he largely inoculated against attacks on his Arkansas record.
 
Ron DeSantis could have done a variation: “We’ve worked hard to make Florida a better place to live. There’s still much to be done but conservative leadership is working in Florida and it can work in America.” But that would evidence a combination of factors entirely lacking in DeSantis: self-awareness, humility, a touch of grace. Though Republicans have now stopped pretending they believe character is destiny, it remains true. Ron DeSantis is an angry, insecure, little man and those qualities will dominate his political life. They will be the Achilles heel in his very white boots. 
 
This is a man so lacking in character, he made a commercial featuring his toddler building a border wall with toy blocks. This is a man so lacking in character he yelled at teenagers on stage for wearing masks during a pandemic, as they had been instructed to do so by the event organizers. This is a man so lacking in character he used state funds to mislead legal asylum seekers in Texas into believing relocating would mean greater opportunity and security, just so he could “own the libs” by flying them to Massachusetts, leaving them with nothing. Think about the depravity that went into that decision: “What can we do to prove we are more cruel than Donald Trump? What about kidnapping some vulnerable men, women and children whose only sin is that they still believed in an America that Ron DeSantis has abandoned, if he ever did believe?”
 
It is predictably telling and tawdry to see the desperate efforts of the National Review crowd, who once declared their fervent opposition to Donald Trump only to perform the Ted Cruz ring kissing ritual of submission, attempt to invent Ron DeSantis. Call them “DeSantis Deniers.” Because DeSantis knows which fork to pick up and lacks Trump’s grotesque vulgarity, they are attempting to hail him as the new Ronald Reagan. Never mind the facts. Never mind that Ron DeSantis, like Trump, refuses to assert that Joe Biden won a free and fair election. Once Marco Rubio was the Florida Republican savior, now it’s Ron DeSantis. Rubio’s fate awaits DeSantis.
 
It will be grimly amusing to watch the deconstruction of DeSantis should he actually summon the gumption to challenge Trump. It is one thing to bully teenagers and traumatized asylum seekers but another to challenge a cornered psychopath like Trump. “You don’t really think his wife had breast cancer, do you?” asked an operative from my Republican days who is still deep down the Trump well, “Did she ever lose her hair? Give me a break, this was all bullshit for DeSantis to try and make himself look a little human.” That is where Donald Trump will take this race and enjoy every minute of it.
 
How many people know that Ron DeSantis, who routinely accuses teachers of perverting their pupils, was a high school teacher at a ritzy Atlanta prep School? How hard is it to imagine Donald Trump taunting DeSantis: “A lot of people are talking about what happened with DeSantis and his students. He only taught one year and after he left, Georgia passed a law requiring schools to report teachers who abuse students. You think that’s a coincidence?”
 
And there’s the reality that if DeSantis did manage to defeat Trump in a primary, Trump would spend every waking minute trying to block him from the presidency, which he can easily do. All it takes is Trump endorsing an independent run by Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, Ivanka Trump in Florida, Kari Lake in Arizona, and there is no path for DeSantis. If those “favorite son/daughter” candidates took even three percent of the DeSantis vote, there would be no path for DeSantis (or any other Republican) to win.
 
The two best options for DeSantis? Not challenge Trump and wait until 2028 or convince Trump he should be his VP. The VP route would require two almost unimaginable things to happen. Trump would need to be willing to share the spotlight with someone he’s desperately afraid will outshine him. And Trump would need to change his residency to NY or NJ since the Constitution prohibits a president and VP from the same state, but that’s hardly an obstacle. The latter is much more likely and easier to do. Dick Cheney was a Texas resident when picked by Bush and shifted his residency back to Wyoming. If there were a Trump-DeSantis ticket, one of two outcomes would unfold. Either Trump would win the presidency which positions DeSantis as the presumptive nominee in 2028 or Trump would lose. In either event, no one will blame DeSantis and he would be the overwhelming favorite for the 2028 nomination. For a guy who is only 42, there’s plenty of time.
 
Which brings us back to arrogance. Waiting until 2028 or playing to be Trump’s running mate are not the decisions an arrogant governor surrounded by sycophants will make. No, most likely DeSantis will run and Trump will relish destroying him like a budding serial killer torturing a pet. Ron DeSantis is not going to do for America what he did for Florida, but Donald Trump will do for DeSantis what he did to every other Republican opponent.
 
Run, Ron, run. History’s footnotes await your arrival.

I hope he’s right. As far as I’m concerned, this alone should disqualify him from ever holding public office again:

As the right mainstreams its bizarre counter-culture is it becoming too weird for America?

I think this guy may be on to something. For all the talk about the left and its allegedly counter-productive embrace of tolerance, check out what the right is signing on to these days.

An inkling of the Republican Party’s shocking underperformance in the midterms could be seen in a literal, not figurative, crusade. Allen West, former congressman and Texas Republican Party chairman, decided in September that the time was ripe to join the Knights Templar, the infamous sect of medieval soldier-monks. Photographed standing in a white robe emblazoned with a red cross draped jauntily over his tuxedo, West—a close ally of Donald Trump—tweeted that he had taken “an oath to protect the Christians in the Holy Land.”

The real Knights Templar, of course, were dissolved in 1312. The organization West joined is an American-based “chivalric order” that grants its members “knighthood” and, aside from its name, shares nothing with the actual Knights Templar.

West’s bizarre fascination with the imagery of medieval Europe does not exist in a vacuum: The right is getting weirder. That might begin to cost Republicans elections in years to come and undermine their own appeals to American patriotism in a way policy extremism alone could not. American voters see the political parties as equally extreme in policy, ignoring evidence that Republicans have moved right much faster than Democrats have moved left. However, a party fixated on genital sunning, seed oils, Catholic integralism, European aristocracy, and occultism can alienate voters not because of its positions but because of how it presents them—and itself. Among the right’s intellectual avant garde and media elites, there is a growing adoption of habits, aesthetics, and views that are not only out of step with America’s but are deliberately cultivated in opposition to a national majority that the new right holds in contempt.

This is a different—though parallel—phenomenon from the often raucous, conspiratorial personality cult that surrounds Donald Trump and his devoted base. This new turn has predominantly manifested among the upper-class and college-educated right wing. Indeed, as Democratic strategist David Shor noted, as those with college degrees become more left leaning, the remaining conservatives have gotten “really very weird.” In this well-off cohort, there exists a mirror of the excesses often attributed to the college-educated left, fairly or unfairly: an aversion to mainstream values and an extreme militancy.

The ascendant weird right will likely struggle to sell its deeply anti-patriotic vision to many voters. In these segments of the mostly young, online-influenced American right, the optimistic vision espoused by Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” has been discarded. The elite educated right has moved even beyond the overt pessimism of Donald Trump’s “American carnage”—now disgust with equitable citizenship, personal liberty, and democratic self-governance is commonplace. Fed by an endless outrage cycle and a motivated and well-resourced donor class willing to pour money into increasingly reactionary think tanks like the avowedly anti-democratic Claremont Institute, right-wing thinkers and activists have begun to identify the foundational pillars of the United States itself with immorality and adopted a new fascination with medieval Catholicism and imported European extremisms. Today, the right has shed its American and conservative roots and seeks a radical shift—a national “refounding.” Indeed, leading right-wing intellectuals like John Daniel Davidson have said that “the conservative project has failed” and that people like them constitute the educated vanguard of a “revolutionary moment.”

As we can now see—with even greater clarity—in the wake of the election, American voters respond poorly to a toxic brew of pessimism; the promise of radical cultural transformation; and the imposition of foreign ideas, values, and aesthetics. Nine in 10 Americans believe that being “truly American” involves respecting “American political institutions and laws,” the Public Religion Research Institute found last year. Americans consistently affirm that liberty, equality, and progress—the core values of republicanism and the Enlightenment—are ones they try to live by. While the content and meaning of those values have always been contested terrain, opposing them is a nonstarter.

The weird elite right risks losing these “normie” (as it calls them) Americans as it embraces what is fundamentally a niche subculture. The toxic far-right ideas that percolate in online youth communities and among cloistered college-educated young Republicans have not remained there—increasingly they have spilled out to influence policy and may have been deciding factors in close races this year.

John Gibbs, a Republican nominee for a Michigan swing seat, founded a think tank that argued for overturning the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. The country, he said, had “suffered” from women’s suffrage. He narrowly lost his bid. Blake Masters and J.D. Vance—two Republican candidates for Senate funded in part by tech billionaire and new-right linchpin Peter Thiel—have embraced new-right ideas and actively courted the “weird right.” Vance has questioned whether women should leave violent marriages; Masters has praised domestic terrorist Theodore Kaczynski’s infamous manifesto, argued against legal access to contraception, and openly said that democracy is a smokescreen for the masses “stealing certain kinds of goods and redistributing them as they see fit.” (Americans on balance like democracy; legal contraception is almost universally popular; and Kaczynski’s unpopularity is so widely assumed that pollsters rarely ask about him.) Masters, perhaps unsurprisingly, lost his bid to unseat Mark Kelly, and Vance badly underperformed in his blood-red home state.

The most outwardly visible element of the extremely online weird right is its often nonsensical lifestyle and consumption habits. The subculture has not only embraced vaccine hesitancy—once primarily a creature of the left—but also fringe health and dietary practices that recall the wildest excesses of 1960s new age spiritualism. The claims are varied and, to differing degrees, absurd: Real men don’t eat soybeans; seed oils are dangerous; meat substitutes will turn men into women and also are made from bugs (they aren’t); the best diet is all-meat. This is no mere online phenomenon: Representative Ronnie Jackson of Texas has stated that if one eats artificially cultured meat, “you’ll turn into a SOCIALIST DEMOCRAT.”

These trends are partly the result of declining social trust among conservatives. Loss of trust, in this case, manifests as hardening the body as a site of personal control. Health, arguably, is not the point—rather, expressing gender identity is. This is certainly true of “testicular tanning,” the belief that exposing the testicles to direct sunlight boosts testosterone (and therefore “manliness”), an idea that blends pseudoscience, tantric spiritualism, and self-help. Even this has not remained confined to the internet: Tucker Carlson has discussed it seriously.

Perhaps the most pernicious element of right-wing weirdness occurs at the intersection of standard traditionalist opposition to equal gender roles and an online youth subculture that has sought to make women’s disempowerment trendy. The idea of the “trad wife”—women who embrace subservient roles as homemakers and mothers, eschewing political leadership and careers—stands, like many of the weird right’s shibboleths, at the crossroads of internet meme, sociological critique, and political program. Trad wives are a pastiche of the idyll of the 1950s housewife and the imagined premodern agrarian mother, realities that only fully existed in advertisements and storybooks. They usually espouse complete submissiveness to husbands and a totalizing dedication to raising children.

By removing women from the labor market and circumscribing women’s social roles, the movement offers the illusion of sanctuary from modern woes and economic demands. It goes beyond simply reacting to perceived leftist excesses and embraces a sociopolitical program that would, if enacted, essentially remove the ability of American women to determine the course of their own lives—making them, once again, primarily subservient to and dependent upon male breadwinners. Millions of Americans are stay-at-home parents; most would likely be ill suited to the trad wife’s world. The aesthetics of trad wives are intertwined with darker impulses on the activist right toward a state that legally mandates specific gender roles—a form of recontainment that traps women in marriages and bars them from basic autonomy and self-sufficiency.

Women’s and reproductive rights are areas where meme-infused weirdness and actual policy align to set the right against most American voters. When right-wing writers like National Review’s Nate Hochman argue that no-fault divorce was “a tragic mistake” (a view shared by numerous other far-right figures), he is not only embracing a position outside the bounds of conventional American life but one that is deeply politically unpopular, opposed by at least four-fifths of Americans. The activist right’s legal alternative is “covenant marriage,” which allows divorce only under extreme circumstances like felony conviction or child abuse. Covenant marriage has recently made its way into the Texas Republican Party’s official platform as a replacement for existing marriage law.

Trad wife aesthetics are partly a result of right-wing influencers’ embrace of traditionalist religious attitudes. The embrace of traditionalist Catholicism and the rise of integralists like Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule—who espouses a quasi-theocracy that even the conservative stalwart George Will has said is “un-American”—are critical pieces of the aesthetic and moral revanchism now in vogue on the right.

The growing fascination with Catholicism—particularly sedevacantism, which denies the current pope’s legitimacy—is, according to one critic, indicative of the educated and activist right’s “admiration for the [European] aristocratic past” and a longing for a new elite to which it feels it belongs. This segment of the right has, both programmatically and aesthetically, lost interest in conserving that which is American and moved on to mine its influences from stranger sources. Constitutionalism, Enlightenment rationality, religious freedom, and republicanism are out. European aristocracy, crusading holy orders, and mysticism are in. Mr. West may still make the usual overtures to Americana in press releases, but the Knights Templar (so far as I know) never made it to Texas.

That idealization of the European right has led not just to the fetishization of historical monarchism—cheerled by figures like the reactionary thinker Curtis Yarvin—but to more immediate fascination with contemporary autocrats, especially Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary and President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

One such admirer is Nick Fuentes, a prominent activist among college Republicans and also a white supremacist and antisemite who has become cozy with some congressional Republicans. Fuentes has praised Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. “We continue to support czar Putin in the war effort,” Fuentes said, saying Putin would “liberate Ukraine from the Great Satan and from the evil empire in the world, which is the United States.” In this narrative, Putin’s invasion is a component of a broader war against American influence and democratic values—a goal shared by Orbán’s government, which has promoted “illiberal democracy,” decried “race-mixing,” crushed freedom of speech, and curtailed LGBTQ rights. Naturally, the Conservative Political Action Conference was held in Hungary earlier this year.

Among Americans more generally, the right-wing embrace of Putin is dismally unpopular: Just 6 percent U.S. adults have a positive opinion of the Russian president, the Pew Research Center found this year. Meanwhile, the “MAGACommunism” movement has combined American nationalism with praise for another authoritarian leader despised by most Americans, China’s Xi Jinping.

An awful lot of people do think the left is nothing but old hippies, drag queens and Black panthers which still freaks them out. The truth is that the left does have plenty of old liberals, LGBTQ people and Black activists and most Americans are fine with that. These are not ideas from outer space. They’re been percolating in American society for many decades and most people are familiar with it. Transgender issues are fairly new for most people but anyone who has kids sees that among the young it’s no big deal and are coming to accept that too.

The right on the other hand is …. this:

America has always had a fringe and they have always been plenty weird, right and left. But the mainstream of either side has never as openly embraced it as the right is today. As I wrote about below, Nick Fuentes — a real live Nazi who marched in Charlottesville and is an outright Holocaust denier had dinner with Donald Trump on Tuesday, along side Kanye West, noted antisemite and certified freak.

The mainstream media has an obligation to point this stuff out. I don’t know if it will get any more traction than their little pout that the Biden’s didn’t allow them to cover their granddaughter’s wedding so they could shout questions at Hunter Biden during the ceremony.

I don’t know exactly what’s wrong with this guy but he identifies as a conservative Republican. And his grandfather is a MAGA Republican office holder in San Diego.

It has long been a political truism that the only people allowed to act as special prosecutors are Republicans. I think Archibald Cox was the last one who identified as a Democrat. All the rest from Leon Jaworski, Lawrence Walsh to Ken Starr, Robert Ray, Patrick Fitzgerald and Robert Mueller were all known as conservatives. As it happens some of those conservatives were straight arrow types who took the job seriously. Some (*cough* Ken Starr*cough*) did not. But in no case was it even conceivable that one could appoint someone who is known as a liberal. Ever.

And the reason is ostensibly because if they did the right would smear them to “destroy their credibility.” Nowadays, it doesn’t matter. They get smeared anyway.

Here’s the first salvo against the new Special Counsel Jack Smith:

Former President Donald Trump raged online after finding out that the wife of the special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland is a Democratic donor who was involved in a documentary about former first lady Michelle Obama. 

Justice Department career prosecutor Jack Smith was appointed by Garland to oversee investigations into Trump with the apparent goal of shielding the department from accusations of partiality.

Katy Chevigny, Smith’s wife, was listed as a producer on “Becoming,” the former first lady’s 2020 documentary. She also donated $2,000 to President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, according to FEC records. 

Trump took to Truth Social to rant about Chevigny and Smith, attaching screenshots of her Tweets supporting the Democratic Party and accusing the Department of Justice of being biased in their investigation

“This is just a small amount of information from the wife of the hard-line Radical Left Special Counsel (prosecutor), an acolyte of Eric Holder and Barack Hussein Obama,” he wrote on Tuesday night.

Eric Trump joined his father on the conservative social media website, attaching a screenshot of Chevigny’s producer credit on the Wikipedia page for “Becoming” as proof of a supposed vendetta against the former president.  

“The wife of the Special Counsel Biden chose to investigate @realDonaldTrump (his likely opponent in 2024) reportedly produced the Michelle Obama documentary,” he wrote. “Yes America, you are reading this correctly.”

Former Trump spokesperson Taylor Budowich added on Twitter: “No wonder Jack Smith accepted this special assignment…The swamp is hard at work!”

“You would think that if the stated purpose to avoid any type of concern about bias were sincere, then they would at least check to see whether or not when you shake the family tree of the special counsel, any virulent Trump haters, Never Trumpers, Biden supporters fall out,” Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., said in an interview with Steve Bannon on Tuesday, 

Notably, many conservatives did not express the same indignation when Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote to Wisconsin and Arizona lawmakers to overturn the results of the 2020 elections and begged Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows in text messages to not concede. 

The former president is currently in the middle of two separate investigations by the Justice Department: one regarding his involvement in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and another into his keeping classified records from the White House in his Mar-a-Lago home after leaving office. 

They would find something no matter who they chose because the smear is designed to make the prosecutor go easy on Trump so as to prove he isn’t biased (or henpecked by this Hollywood wife.) And in any case they would do everything in their power to delegitimize the investigation, which they have already done. There is no point in even attempting to avoid it.

If this case every goes to trial you can bet that unless they appoint a jury who all shows up wearing MAGA hats, they’ll delegitimize that too. And even then, if the MAGA hat wearing jurors found him guilty they’d say they were Antifa in disguise. They cannot be appeased.

Soooo. This week we had Donald Trump meeting at Mar-a-Lago with notorious antisemite Kanye West and a Nazi named Nick Fuentes. (And when I say Nazi, I mean real, serious Nazi.)

Trump is the front runner for the Republican nomination for president. He may very well be president of the United States again.

Meanwhile, the new owner of the most influential global social media platform on the planet, who also happens to be the richest man in the world, is revealing himself to be one of them. By that I mean a deranged, right wing extremist:

Elon Musk plans to reinstate nearly all previously banned Twitter accounts — to the alarm of activists and online trust and safety experts.

After posting a Twitter poll asking, “Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?” in which 72.4 percent of the respondents voted yes, Musk declared, “Amnesty begins next week.”

The Twitter CEO did not respond Thursday to a request for comment from The Washington Post. The poll garnered more than 3 million votes.

The mass return of users who had been banned for such offenses as violent threats, harassment and misinformation will have a significant impact on the platform, experts said. And many questioned how such a resurrection would be handled, given that it’s unclear what Musk means by “egregious spam” and the difficulty of separating out users who have “broken the law,” which vary widely by jurisdiction and country.

“Apple and Google need to seriously start exploring booting Twitter off the app store,” said Alejandra Caraballo, clinical instructor at Harvard Law’s cyberlaw clinic. “What Musk is doing is existentially dangerous for various marginalized communities. It’s like opening the gates of hell in terms of the havoc it will cause. People who engaged in direct targeted harassment can come back and engage in doxing, targeted harassment, vicious bullying, calls for violence, celebration of violence. I can’t even begin to state how dangerous this will be.”

This is the second time in a week that Musk has used a Twitter poll to seemingly make a major decision related to the platform. On Nov. 18, he restored former president Donald Trump’s account after 52 percent of a poll’s respondents said he should do so. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted, Latin for “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”

On that day, he also unilaterally reinstated at least 11 high-profile far-right Twitter accounts, including Jordan Peterson, a professor who was banned from Twitter for misgendering a trans person, and the Babylon Bee, a conservative media company. He also restoredProject Veritas, a site that was frequently accused of misrepresenting events it commented on and banned “for repeated violations of Twitter’s private information policy,” andGeorgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s personal account, which had been banned since January for violating the platform’s covid-19 misinformation policies and pushing violent and extreme rhetoric.

Experts say that bots and bad actors can easily skew the results of a Twitter poll, and so basing decisions on one is irresponsible. “A Twitter poll can be manipulated, there’s nothing scientific or rigorous in any way about what he’s doing,” said Sarah T. Roberts, an associate professor at UCLA and faculty director for UCLA’s Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, who previously worked at Twitter researching content moderation processes.

“Before Elon took over,” Roberts added, “there were entire teams of people who did market and user research, who followed rigorous protocols established to conduct this kind of research. Suddenly, he’s running Twitter off of completely unscientific polls that are polling unknown people, and certainly not any kind of demographically representative swath of people.”

Many predict the restoration of banned accounts will help bring on the “free-for-all hellscape” that Musk had promised advertisers would not come to pass shortly after he took possession of the platform.

“This would be a major disaster especially in Africa where State sponsored Ghost accounts were suspended for endangering human rights activists & journalists,” Hopewell Chin’ono, a journalist in Africa tweeted. “You would have allowed vile people to put our lives in danger as journalists! You will have blood on your hands @elonmusk.”

Whether Musk can do what the Twitter poll seeks is a matter of debate. He has laid off leaders of the trust and safety team, which would normally handle the logistics of reactivating the accounts.And separating out those who “broke the law” is entirely dependent on whether Twitter has detailed documentation for each suspension. Without such a legal filter, which would be dependent on state and local laws for each tweet, every account would require a thorough review, given how laws vary widely by country and region.

Madeleine Burkholder, a senior technical solutions engineer who has worked on consumer products managing spam, said Musk’s ask is nonsensical. “Egregious spamming is not a technical term,” she said, and most record keeping at major tech companies doesn’t include questions of local governmental legal codes. The norm is to simply note whether an account violated a company’s terms of service, which are rules set by the platform, not a government entity.

“It gets really hairy to pull these threads apart and figure out what the exact behavior was that led to their suspension,” Burkholder said. “Was it an innocent mistake? Was it malicious? How malicious was it? … Doing that on a single case is challenging, trying to do it for every account ever, you’re guaranteed to make mistakes.”

Angelo Carusone, chairman and president of Media Matters, a nonprofit advocacy group and media watchdog, said that Musk’s decision could mean bringing back networks of individuals that include the American Nazi Party and “a whole bunch of 8chan, 4chan, conspiracy theorists who engage in harassment and abuse.” 8chan and 4chan are two message boards known for their racist and antisemitic posts.

Reversing the suspensions would mean “turning Twitter into a one-stop shop for operationalizing doxing and harassment, and an engine of radicalization,” Carusone said. “It’s a red pill Pez dispenser.”

And quitting Twitter won’t keep you safe. “Even if you’re not on Twitter, you can still be the recipient of these campaigns,” he said. He predicted that public health officials, election officials, journalists and teachers will all be targeted.

“Conducting major moderation and enforcement decisions on a whim is troubling CEO behavior,” said Nora Benavidez, senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at Free Press, a nonprofit advocacy group. “Musk, under the auspices of democracy, is legitimizing decisions that will have deeply dangerous consequences in the real world.”

Am I wrong to be concerned about the Republican front runner meeting with Nazis and the man who solely owns Twitter welcoming Nazis back on to the platform? Does this seem to you to be an ominous trend at all?

It’s getting hard to tell the Jokers from the fascists

Six hundred-plus mass shootings this year alone in the United States, on top of the 680 in 2021, the 610 in 2020 (I could go on), have spawned a new type of reporter: the “mass shooting correspondent.” Blood, victims, families, survivors. Career opportunities are built on growing piles of bodies.

Michelle Wolf of WAVY-TV News had covered a mass shooting in Charlottesville, Va. just 10 days before her police scanner alerted her to another at a Chesapeake, Va. Walmart this week.

“Nothing ever prepares you for when it happens,” Wolf said of the horror and chaos. “It hits you differently every single time.”

Greg Sargent writes (Washington Post):

When it comes to covering these mini war zones, reporters on the home front are beginning to sound like veteran correspondents. After a man with an AR-15 killed five people in an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs last weekend, Ashley Michels, a reporter at a Denver TV station, offered some grimly revealing testimony.

“Unfortunately, I have covered mass shootings multiple times in my career,” Michels tweeted. She posted examples of vitriolic messages she received for covering that mass killing, adding, “This is the first time I can recall getting message after message from viewers like this.”

The vile, deranged hate directed at LGBTQ victims was new to Michels. The experience of covering a mass shooting was not.

Wolf and Michels are only two reporters with growing resumes in covering mass murder and maimings. Doing their jobs is “a very fine balance,” says PBS NewsHour producer and correspondent William Brangham. Reporters stand beside sobbing families mourning their dead and others desperately seeking friends and loved ones who might be lying in pools of blood behind police lines. Or not.

Reporting on such scenes is now a specialty.

I haven’t looked. Has anyone been assaulted or killed yet in Black Friday mayhem?

But back to what Michels said about hate aimed at LGBTQ victims. It’s not just that there are more guns than people in the U.S. It’s that into that explosives-filled space we have hatemongers gleefully flicking lit matches and then standing back to see what explodes. From “the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, his boss Ben Shapiro, and Candace Owens” to Nick Fuentes and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, to Tucker Carlson and Chaya Raichik.

“Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn,” Alfred Pennyworth tells Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight to explain The Joker. In this country it’s getting harder every day to tell the Jokers from the fascists who sow hate and chaos because they do want power.

From Landru to Vrillon to Trump to Musk

Every new morning on Twitter brings evidence of the site’s rapid decay. The bird on Musk looks increasingly like the anarchic Festival from “The Return of the Archons” punctuated by cute animal videos. Except Musk is no Landru and every day is Festival.

“Over on Twitter it’s like the Penguin is in charge of Gotham,” writes George Takei at Mastodon. Chaos.

Brian Klass offers a decades-old tale of media hacking to support why he believes America’s lurch toward authoritarianism will not end soon:

Forty-five years ago, tomorrow, something unusual happened in southern England. It was November 26, 1977, and the nightly news was covering violent clashes in Rhodesia (modern day Zimbabwe). Suddenly, without warning, the picture on the TV went fuzzy, before being replaced by a buzzing sound.

For the next six minutes, viewers listened, perplexed, as a distorted, electronic voice began to speak to them. “This is the voice of Vrillon,” the voice began. “A representative of the Ashtar Galactic Command, speaking to you.” It urged viewers to pay careful attention to what is truth, and what is “confusion, chaos, and untruth.” The transmission ended with a kind note.

“May you be blessed by the supreme love and truth of the cosmos.”

The phones of Southern Television started ringing off the hook. Viewers wanted answers, and the broadcast company didn’t have them. Hundreds of people reportedly called seeking reassurance that an alien invasion wasn’t imminent. Vrillon made headlines in international media.

The official line, of course, was that it was a hoax, caused by some technical wizardry. But not everyone was certain. In a letter to The Times two days after the broadcast, a concerned citizen wondered: how could the authorities “or anyone else – be sure that the broadcast was a hoax?” The incident became a favorite for proponents of UFOs, recorded proof of intelligent life out there. Heck, these were no simpletons. They even had a Galactic Command.

In the last forty-five years, nobody has come forward to take responsibility for Vrillon.

“Vrillon” hacked the media and sowed disinformation. Some of it took root in soil prepared for it.

Regan King offers an E.O. Wilson quote from 2009: “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”

I once explained the resurgence of medieval spirituality, mysticism and superstition (even as technology accelerated) as resulting from people trying to navigate a 21st century world with a medieval collective unconscious.

The spread of hateful, false information and conspiracy theories is fertile ground for authoritarianism.

Klaas writes:

At its core, democracy is a system aimed at forging compromise through informed consent of the governed. In other words, the chief mission of democratic institutions is to create a forum for engaged citizens to debate and discuss problems, find common ground, enact solutions, and do so with the informed approval of the citizenry writ large. But if you don’t have accurate information about what’s going on in the world, you can’t properly consent to what the government is doing.

Everything in democracy therefore relies on two core assumptions: that citizens have a shared sense of reality, and that they agree that a problem exists, because otherwise it’s futile to have a debate about how to fix it. Neither of those assumptions currently holds true in the United States, and, to a lesser extent, in a few other dysfunctional rich democracies.

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Bottom line: Spreaders of disinformation intend to break down external reality and create a public space where “Nothing is true and everything is possible.” The point is not to convince people that anything specific is true but to make them wonder if it might not be true (like election results upon which the democratic process depends). The resulting chaos is the desired result.

Once you believe that nothing is true, that truth itself is subjective, then everything becomes possible in a Choose Your Own Reality-style adventure, and that opens the door to conspiracy theories, hucksters, and downright deranged people who prey on those who are looking for a more comforting version of events that aligns with their skewed worldview. Anything that challenges that worldview can be explained away with another possible version of events. Who cares if it’s not right? After all, nothing is fully true anyway.

On Jan. 6, 2021, we watched Festival unfold on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol. Security shot and killed Ashli Babbitt. Others died and hundreds were injured because people like Babbitt weaned on “confusion, chaos, and untruth” believed the conspiracy theories, the hucksters, and the deranged. For the more strategic among the disinformers, foreign and domestic, things unfolded just as they’d hoped.

They are at war with the truth and with those who still value it.

It’s true. They exist.

A Thanksgiving classic from The Atlantic :

William Bradford, looking out at Plymouth from the Mayflower in 1620, was struck by its potential. “This bay is an excellent place,” he later wrote, praising its “innumerable store of fowl.” By the next autumn, the new colonists had learned to harvest the “great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many.”

Soon they took too many. By 1672, hunters in Massachusetts had “destroyed the breed, so that ’tis very rare to meet with a wild turkie in the woods.” Turkeys held on in small, isolated patches of land that could not be profitably farmed. But by 1813, they were apparently extirpated from Connecticut; by 1842 from Vermont; and from New York by 1844.

In Massachusetts—land of the Pilgrim’s pride—one tenacious flock hid out on the aptly named Mount Tom for a while longer. The last bird known to science was shot, stuffed, mounted, and put on display at Yale in 1847, but locals swore they heard the distinctive calls of the toms for another decade. Then the woods fell silent for a hundred years.

* * *

Americans used to assume a clear line between wilderness and civilization. Bradford called the land he saw a “hidious and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.” As European colonists moved inland from the coast, they called that boundary the frontier—on one side wild, untouched forest, and on the other, cleared fields, farms, and settlements.

Where the early settlers found squirrels or coyotes or deer or turkeys, they knew that they were venturing into wilderness. These wild creatures they hunted for food, and for sport. Onto the clear-cut land they brought new creatures—pigs and dogs and cows. They even brought tame turkeys, domesticated from a Mexican subspecies, taken to Europe, and then reimported across the Atlantic.

As Europeans advanced across the continent, they drove out its native species. And as these creatures dwindled and disappeared, the settlers began to regret what they had done. Some, like Teddy Roosevelt, saw the fauna of the New World as a natural resource, a treasure to be protected and cherished so that it could be harvested by future generations. Others, like John Muir, viewed the remaining patches of wilderness as sacred trusts, little patches of Eden to be preserved and enjoyed.

But both groups of conservationists drew a clear line between the pure preserves of nature, and the soiled, sullied domain of man. The conservation movement aimed to cordon off parts of the country from development, where woodland creatures could thrive and survive. Without such spaces, they warned, they would vanish altogether.

* * *

The squirrels were the first to return. In the mid-19th century, Boston, New Haven, and Philadelphia released small numbers of squirrels on to their commons, as curiosities. Hundreds came to marvel at the incongruity; imagine, a squirrel in the city! They dined at the public trough, of course; such wild creatures could hardly be expected to find their own food in an urban environment.

Those first released did not survive for long. But within a few decades, squirrels became fashionable appurtenances for upscale urban parks. Their presence, one contemporary gushed, “excites feelings of admiration akin to those awakened by the birds and the fairer forms of nature.” They remained dependent on the kindness of people, a necessarily fragile existence. But city dwellers cherished them, little avatars of the natural world living peacefully in their midst.

Meanwhile, the forests of New England hit their nadir. They had once covered Massachusetts; by the mid-19th century, they accounted for less than a third of the state, a patchwork of land too hilly or marshy or rocky to farm. As agriculture exhausted the soil, new land to the west promised greater returns, and burgeoning industries offered steadier wages. Farmers abandoned the land their grandfathers had cleared, and trees sprouted up around the stone walls they left behind.

Today, more than 60 percent of Massachusetts is forestland. (Only a few thousand acres of that total are old-growth forest.) For conservationists, the return of the trees seemed a dream come true. As the population emptied off the land, returning to cities and their suburbs, it seemed possible to reestablish the frontier, to restore the woods to their pristine splendor, to again draw a line between nature and civilization.

Deer returned, and flourished in the woods. Hikers and campers came to see them on the weekends, and then returned to suburbia. Other creatures followed—some spreading on their own, some deliberately reintroduced. Soon the forests were teeming with beaver, bobcats, and coyotes. In 1972, biologists trapped 37 wild turkeys in New York, and began releasing them into the forests of Massachusetts.

That’s when something unexpected happened.

The turkeys looked around at the forests. They provided safety and shelter, but were otherwise uninviting. Food was scarce; the undergrowth was dense. But adjacent to the forests was abundant open cropland, where farmers thoughtfully spread manure, there for the taking. By the time researchers arrived to study the birds a decade later, the turkeys were spending almost two-thirds of their diurnal feeding time on the cropland. The turkeys that figured out how to thrive in tandem with human activity were dramatically more likely to survive tough winters than those who stuck to the woods.

Slowly, they migrated eastward across the state, adapting at every stage to new environments. They learned to forage in the exurbs. To find seeds and grubs in the suburbs. And finally, to thrive in cities like Boston. In some places, they are now so abundant and aggressive that they have become public nuisances.

In 2013, police in the affluent Boston suburb of Brookline euthanized a turkey that was terrorizing schoolchildren. “It requires the efforts of the entire neighborhood to help keep wild turkeys wild,” police warned residents. But even an entire neighborhood working together cannot reimpose the faltering boundary between wilderness and civilization.

* * *

When Bradford looked at the coast and saw only desolation, it was because he did not understand what he was seeing. Far from an unspoiled wilderness, it was, in fact, a carefully tended landscape, cultivated by a large and prosperous population to meet its wants and needs. Native Americans set fires to clear the underbrush and provide a habitat for the animals on which they depended. They hunted the deer and the turkey that thrived in the forests they maintained.

The near-miraculous abundance of game in those early years was, itself, very likely an artifact of human intervention—a legacy of the pathogens introduced by Europeans that killed so many of the land’s inhabitants, and that might have led game populations to explode in their absence. There was no frontier dividing nature from civilization—just two different agricultural landscapes, each optimized for a different purpose.

Small wonder, then, that the returning turkeys found the woods so uninviting. Naturalists hoped to restore a pristine wilderness, but that’s not where the turkeys had once thrived. No one was burning the underbrush for them anymore, or promoting the growth of nut-bearing trees. Turkeys had lived in the New England landscape in tandem with Native Americans, who had carefully tended the environment. And once the descendants of European settlers ceased hunting them at unsustainable levels, they moved right back in.

They came back to find cities that had more space to accommodate them. Dirt lots and pavement had yielded to grassy medians and green yards. Gone were the tens of thousands of horses pulling carts, the pigs rooting through slops, and the dogs wandering off-leash. They found few competitors, and fewer threats. The contemporary city might as well have been designed for turkeys.

Metropolitan Boston is again filled with squirrels, pigeons, peregrine falcons, and red-tailed hawks, as it was before the Pilgrims landed. The deer in its parks and woodlands are so abundant that they have become a nuisance, and attracted coyotes. The occasional bear or moose wanders into town. The store of fowl is so innumerable, as Bradford might have put it, that their droppings fairly pave the banks of the Charles.

And now the turkeys have come home too. They strut proudly about town, chests puffed out with infinite complacence. The line between wilderness and civilization has dissolved. But then, it was always an illusion.

She is a monster

From her local news station:

Republican U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert said she’ll continue her long-running verbal attacks on trans people despite the mass shooting targeting an LGBTQ nightclub near her district. 

Boebert made her comments on 850KOA’s Ross Kaminsky show on Tuesday morning, two days after Sunday’s shooting killed five people and injured 17 others at Club Q in Colorado Springs. 

When asked if she’d change her rhetoric, Boebert repeated her criticism of trans people and gender-affirming care. 

“This is stuff we absolutely have to be standing up for and talking about,” Boebert said. 

She rejected calls by critics to take responsibility for her language about the LGBTQ+ community in light of the mass shooting. 

“It’s absolutely disgusting to try to blame this on me and try to say that I’ve had bad rhetoric about the LGBT community,” Boebert said. “That is completely false.” 

Boebert’s anti-trans statements have been well documented. 

In response to a May 2022 fact-checking segment rebutting the false claim that people who discuss LGBTQ topics are grooming children for sex, Boebert replied on Twitter, “Okay, groomers.” 

In July 2022, Boebert said allowing children to identify as transgender is “grooming them.” 

When the Center for Countering Digital Hate identified Boebert as having one of the farthest-reaching social media accounts tweeting the “hateful grooming narrative,” Boebert promised to double down. 

“Guess that means I have to tweet about these sick, demented groomers even more,” Boebert said. 

In Tuesday’s interview on KOA, Boebert described trans women as “men dressing up as caricatures of women.” 

Boebert also falsely claimed that the media isn’t reporting on the two men who stopped the Club Q shooter or Colorado’s Red Flag law, which was not invoked despite the shooting suspect’s history of threatening behavior. Both topics have been widely covered by local and national media outlets. 

“It’s unfortunate that people aren’t talking about the two heroes who risked their lives to stop this vile shooter and they’re also not talking about enforcing the laws that are on the books,” Boebert said. “Why was that Red Flag law not enforced?” 

Boebert has previously opposed a federal version of Colorado’s Red Flag gun law, which allows a judge to temporarily seize a person’s firearms if they are deemed a danger to themselves or others. 

“Red Flag laws will be a liberal activist’s dream,” Boebert wrote in June 2022. “We all know that the Left will abuse them so flagrantly the Second Amendment will practically be nullified for anyone to the right of Mao.” 

The red flag law wasn’t enforced because gun nuts like Boebert decided that the county is a “2nd Amendment Sanctuary.” With anyone else I’d assume they knew that and were just lying but she’s an exceptional dullard so she might not be aware. On the other hand she is a premier MAGA liar so who knows?

She is a vicious, crude, nasty harridan who came within a hare’s breath of losing this last election. The Democrats should put everything they have into taking her out next time. She is a blight on humanity much less the US Congress.

Also, antisemites at the beach club

It’s every man for himself these days, isn’t it?

Early signs of a threat to shoot up a Manhattan synagogue were detected on Friday morning not by law enforcement officials but by an online security analyst working in a Manhattan office building.

A Twitter user with the handle @VrilGod posted a series of alarming tweets caught by the analyst’s filters used to identify possible online threats.

In one post, the user warned: “Big moves being made on Friday.”

In another, the user wrote: “Gonna ask a Priest if I should become a husband or shoot up a synagogue and die.”

Another post — “This time I’m really gonna do it” — seemed to reinforce the threat of attack, which the user indicated could be carried out at 10 p.m. Friday night along with a willingness to “die by cop.”

When the analyst saw these tweets, “alarm bells went off,” said his boss, Mitchell Silber, who leads the Community Security Initiative for the UJA-Federation of New York. They resulted in a police investigation that ended in the arrest of Christopher Brown, 21, and Matthew Mahrer, 22, just before midnight on Friday at Pennsylvania Station.

Incidents of harassment and violence against Jews and Jewish institutions have increased nationwide and have only intensified as celebrities like the rapper Kanye West, who goes by the name Ye, and the basketball player Kyrie Irving have come under fire for antisemitic posts on social media. This month, federal investigators issued a rare warning about a security risk at New Jersey synagogues and questioned a man who holds “radical extremist views” in connection with it.

On Tuesday, city and state authorities in New York announced increased security at synagogues and other Jewish institutions going into a long Thanksgiving weekend and with Hanukkah approaching on Dec. 18.

Gov. Kathy Hochul directed the State Police to intensify monitoring and increase support for communities that are potential targets of hate crimes. She also signed legislation requiring people convicted of hate crimes to undergo sensitivity education and training, as well as establish a new campaign under the state’s Division of Human Rights to promote inclusion and tolerance.

In New York City, Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said her department would be responding by “strategically deploying assets at sensitive locations.” She credited the work done by her department and other law enforcement agencies.

Analysts on Mr. Silber’s team who contacted the authorities about the threat were monitoring filters that scrape the internet for possible local attacks by employing search terms like “Jewish, New York, synagogue, kill, shoot and die,” said Mr. Silber, a former director of intelligence analysis with the New York City Police Department. The initiative was created after the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue attack in Pittsburgh, he said in an interview on Tuesday.

The filters search mainstream social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, as well as other chat forums including 4Chan, 8chan, Gab.com and Telegraph, he said.

The tweets on Friday morning, from an account linked to Mr. Brown, stood out from the online antisemitic chatter his analysts comb through daily because “they were talking about action” and included a time and day, Mr. Silber said.

Initially, the tweets indicated that perhaps the threat might occur on Long Island, so the consultants immediately alerted law enforcement authorities there. By early afternoon, the security team found additional online profiles seemingly linked to Mr. Brown that mentioned other threats, Mr. Silber said.

And by 2 p.m., it became apparent that the threat could be in New York City, at which point Mr. Silber’s team alerted city police officials.

“We basically told them that, ‘We know you get a lot of incoming, but you should pay attention to this,’” he said.

The police claimed it was all their doing but ok. I think these folks are less interested in credit than in saving lives.

The threat of antisemitism is very real. So, I’m sure you’ll be thrilled to hear that Donald Trump apparently welcomed Kanye West and white supremacist, holocaust denier Nick Fuentes down to Mar-a-Lago this week.

Fuentes is the leader of the so-called Groyper Army and holds an annual white nationalist conference as counter-programming to CPAC. Groypers are a loose network of alt-right figures who are vocal supporters of white nationalist ideals, often trolling mainstream conservative events to try and move conservativism more toward white nationalism.

Fuentes, who has also denied the Holocaust, supports “the closure of the U.S. borders to immigrants while opposing “liberal” values such as feminism and LGBTQ+ rights. Fuentes views these societal changes as the “bastardized Jewish subversion of the American creed,” according to the ADL.

While it remains unclear what Fuentes did at Mar-a-Lago or if Donald Trump and his staff even knew he was there, West claimed that he met with the former president in a tweet:

Reactions to the news that West and Fuentes, who have been seen meeting in recent days, reportedly traveled to Mar-a-Lago ranged from shock to condemnation.

“It’s hard to be shocked by anything anymore, but Charlottesville marcher and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes being hosted at the former president’s resort still feels uniquely bad,” wrote the Daily Beast’s Will Sommer in response.

No word from Mar-a-Lago denying that they met with Trump or denouncing him if they did. Gotta keep the cult together and these guys are founding members.