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Month: November 2022
Naturally, evangelicals are doubling down
Donald J. Trump is not the only albatross around the Republican Party’s neck (although he is). Religious conservatives weight down GOP ambitions, writes Amanda Marcotte (Salon):
As with Trump, Republicans are in a “can’t win with them/can’t win without them” relationship with the religious right. Fundamentalists remain a main source of organizing and fundraising for the GOP, as well a big chunk of their most reliable voters. They can’t afford to alienate this group any more than they can afford to push away Trump. Doing so risks the loss of millions of loyal voters. But by continuing to pander to the religious right, Republicans are steadily turning off all other voters, a group that’s rapidly growing in size as Americans turn their backs on conservative Christianity. That’s doubly true when one looks at the youngest voters, the ones Republicans will need to stay viable as their currently aging voter base starts to die off.
More data showing that younger voters, in essence, stuck it to Republicans at the ballot box this month suggest they will develop a taste for giving a middle finger to the people who gutted Roe this summer. Their ballots ruined Republican dreams of a red wave as surely as a splash of water melted the Witch of the West.
Republicans told voters to fear inflation, crime and LGBTQ people. What their leaders actually fear, John Della Volpe wrote over the weekend, is the youth vote. The young vote Democratic (New York Times):
Democrats who court the youth vote fully will likely outperform their competitors in 2024. Now is the time to listen more intently, see beyond the top-line polling data and better understand the values and vision of this still emerging voting bloc intent on saving the America they believe is under threat.
Marcotte adds this morning:
New data from the progressive polling firm Navigator Research shows how dire the situation is for Republicans. On “culture war” issues like reproductive rights and LGBTQ equality, the voters broke hard on the progressive side of things. Among Democratic voters this midterm, 48% said abortion was an important issue for them, showing strong pro-choice sentiment. But among Republicans, only 13% ranked abortion (and the banning of it) as a driving factor in their vote. When Democratic voters were asked their main reason for their voting choice this year, abortion rights was the most popular, cited by 49% of voters. But among Republican voters, only 24% cited support for abortion bans as a major factor.
The religious right’s hunger for dominating the rest of us for Jesus led to Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Dobbs decision, and a flood of draconian abortion bans in GOP-dominated state legislatures. People noticed, especially younger voters.
“A defining attribute of young Americans today,” Della Volpe wrote, “is the degree to which they stand up and fight for those even more vulnerable than they are.” The Harvard youth poll he oversees found “59 percent of young Americans believe their rights are under attack and 73 percent are troubled that the rights of others are threatened.” Including by the religious right’s rhetorical pogrom against LGBTQ people.
Marcotte argues:
This rash of queerphobic policy has been accompanied by an escalation of bigoted rhetoric in right wing media, all aimed at painting LGBTQ people as perverts and child predators. From Fox News on down the entire conservative media ecosystem, it’s become routine to accuse queer people of being “groomers,” which is a not-especially-oblique way to call them child molesters. Groups like the Proud Boys routinely target drag shows with intimidating “protests,” which are starting to get violent. Over the weekend, there was a gun massacre at a gay club in Colorado Springs. While the police are still not speaking publicly about the killer’s motive, observers have pointed out that the murders happened mere hours before a drag brunch, the kind of event that conservative groups have been targeting for harassment.
All of this ugliness did not help Republicans in the midterms. On the contrary, it appears to have hurt them, especially with such high youth voter turnout. As a national youth poll run by Harvard shows, younger people reject the fundamentalism that animates the Republican party. Only 12% identify as “fundamentalist/evangelical,” while 37% — by far the biggest group — say they have no religious preference at all. This comports with other polling that shows that Christian churches are becoming older and smaller all the time, as young people leave in droves. Overall, 71% of Americans support same-sex marriage. About two-thirds of Americans want abortion to remain legal.
Even Republican voters this month did not warm to evangelicals’ enthusiasm for repression and retribution against those who do not share their beliefs about women. “The Republican party still appeals to racist voters, but even they’ve lost the enthusiasm for being the panty police,” Marcotte writes. Nevertheless, evangelicals blamed the Republican underperformance on not being harsh enough on women who believe it is their right to decide when and with whom to have a child.
As Prof. Drew Westen (“The Political Brain“) observed at Netroots this summer, Republicans believe every rapist has the right to choose who has their child. Democrats believe that’s a family choice. American voters agree, especially younger ones who may decide the 2024 elections.
Marcotte concludes:
Fundamentalists are learning they’re just as dependent on the Republican party as the GOP is on them. No wonder they’re doubling down. As more and more people leave their pews, their only foothold in staying relevant is to maintain control over the Republican party. As with Trump, they will not leave quietly, but continue to hold the GOP hostage to their increasingly unpopular agenda.
Good luck with that.
Or maybe we could just ban assault weapons instead.
Just wow. These people are heroes. But damn, you shouldn’t need to have heroes present when you go out to a nightclub to enjoy a show.
Richard M. Fierro said he was at a table in Club Q with his wife, daughter and friends on Saturday, watching a drag show, when the sudden flash of gunfire ripped across the nightclub. His instincts from four combat deployments as an Army officer in Iraq and Afghanistan instantly kicked in. Fight back, he told himself.
In an interview at his house, where his wife and daughter were still recovering from injuries, Mr. Fierro, 45, who left the Army in 2013 as a major, according to military records, described charging through the chaos at the club, tackling the gunman and beating him bloody with the gunman’s own gun.
“I don’t know exactly what I did, I just went into combat mode,” Mr. Fierro said, shaking his head. “I just know I have to kill this guy before he kills us.”
[…]
When the shooting started, Mr. Fierro said, he hit the floor, pulling a friend down with him. As bullets sprayed, he saw the gunman move through the bar toward a door leading to a patio where dozens of bar patrons had fled. Mr. Fierro, who served in the Army for 15 years, said he raced across the room, grabbed the gunman by a handle on the back of his body armor, pulled him to the floor and jumped on top of him.
“Was he shooting at the time? Was he about to shoot? I don’t know,” Mr. Fierro said. “I just knew I had to take him down.”
The gunman, who Mr. Fierro estimated weighed more than 300 pounds, sprawled onto the floor, his military-style rifle landing just out of reach. Mr. Fierro started to go for the rifle, but then saw that the gunman had a pistol as well.
“I grabbed the gun out of his hand and just started hitting him in the head, over and over,” Mr. Fierro said.
As the fight continued, he said, he yelled for other club patrons to help him. A man grabbed the rifle and moved it away to safety. A drag dancer stomped on the gunman with her high heels. The whole time, Mr. Fierro said, he kept pummeling the shooter’s head while the two men screamed obscenities at each other.
Sorry, you’re on the hook right along with the rest of them:
Ivanka Trump tried and failed last week to slink out of having a court-appointed monitor watch her financial moves, as New York prosecutors worry the Trump Organization and its executives may quietly try to relocate assets in anticipation of law enforcement action, according to a source familiar with those deliberations.
In private letters, Ivanka’s attorneys tried to exclude her—and only her—from a New York state judge’s order that laid out how the family company is going to be overseen in the coming months, this source said.
On Thursday, Justice Arthur F. Engoron took the boldest move yet against the former president’s company. He gave the Trump Organization two weeks to give retired federal judge Barbara S. Jones “a full and accurate description of the corporate structure,” empowering her to review “all financial disclosures to any persons or entities” by the company. The Trumps must also inform the judge 30 days in advance of shifting any assets, ensuring they cannot outrun the New York attorney general’s $250 million lawsuit.
AG Letitia James’ three-year investigation exposed how the family-run company routinely inflated the value of the properties it owns to snag better bank loans or maximize tax-write offs for donated land. She filed a lawsuit in September against the company’s various entities, some of its top brass, former President Donald Trump, and the offspring he made executives there: Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric.
Despite Ivanka Trump’s strong, last-minute plea to escape scrutiny, Engoron was unmoved. The final order does not give her preferential treatment or even name her, meaning she too must abide by the rules.
Ivanka was, notably, the only defendant in the lawsuit who tried to negotiate for a better deal on her own, according to the source who spoke to The Daily Beast.
She was right in the middle of the whole corrupt mess. She lied to clients, she lied to banks and she lied to investors. She was, for years, along with her father, the face of the organization.
Some early exit analysis
From Navigator:
The slides in this presentation are based on interviews with 5,013
registered voters who had already voted or planned to vote in the
November election, with interviews conducted November 1st through
November 14th
.
Support for Democratic candidates and Republican candidates in
elections for Governor, Senate, and the House of Representatives have
been adjusted to reflect the actual expected results as of November 14th
.
The analysis aims to provide a new tool for Americans to understand
what happened in the 2022 election, why it happened…and what’s next.
Personally, I love the fact that so many Republicans are concerned about corruption in government but are almost certainly Trump voters. The inability to get through to people that Trump’s grotesque money grubbing and abuse of power is beyond anything an American president has even attempted before has real consequences. These folks live in an alternate universe created by more corrupt money grubbing abusers in the right wing media and it seems there’s not a lot we can do about it.
The “trans crisis” is way down the list of GOP concerns
I understand that this is a confusing and disorienting issue for a lot of people. It’s a big social change. But having been through a whole lot of big social changes in my life, I feel confident that people will adjust. In fact, it appears that most other people do too.
Having said that the anger among the small minority that put this at the top of their list of concerns is overwhelming. And it is violent and hostile as we saw in that horrific mass shooting this weekend. The 20% of Republicans who said this was a big issue for them represent millions of people and among them are terrorists, bullies and gun nuts. America is a dangerous place for trans people. The 80% of Republicans who recognize that this is not an existential crisis should step up, especially their leadership and the media who serve them, but I am not holding my breath.
Why would it be? The GOP base doesn’t think they really lost.
After all the years of Donald Trump’s corruption, lies, depravity, ineptitude, recklessness and greed, the Republican establishment has finally found their red line, the one thing they simply will not abide: losing. Or at least that’s what they seem to have decided might be a winning message with Republican voters — who by and large have no problem with Trump’s grotesque character or his unique talent for destroying everything he touches. GOP leaders apparently believe that Trump’s loyal flock can be persuaded to abandon their Dear Leader because they want Republicans to win elections more than anything.
I have my doubts. Trump has a full-blown cult following and it has little to do with the Republican Party per se, or even with winning elections. Trump’s fans worship him because he is their greatest martyr, the man who suffers for their sins and takes the slings and arrows they believe are aimed at all of them. They see these Republicans who are coming after him as no better than the hated Democrats. They don’t blame him for losing the midterm elections any more than he blames himself.
Regardless, this is what the GOP establishment seems to be going with. Former House Speaker Paul Ryan, who has kept his head down for the last few years — quietly amassing a fortune on the Fox Corporation board of directors, among other things — suddenly rose up to offer an opinion after having stayed silent through the entire Big Lie saga:
Now there’s a man of principle for you.
All these comments come on the heels of Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan saying, as early as last May, “Well, I’m tired of our party losing.” (Hogan now petulantly says the other potential GOP candidates have stolen his line.) The Next Big Thing, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, took a slightly different tack at the governors’ confab, bragging in Trump-like fashion that voters would “walk barefoot over broken glass” to vote for him — but not necessarily for others he did not mention.
Other potential contenders, including Sen. Ted Cruz, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu and former Vice President Mike Pence, made the rounds talking up potential donors and seeking to appear presidential. That brings the number of potential Trump rivals up to double digits.
Trump himself appeared by video, almost as if he’s so busy being the president in exile that he couldn’t take the time to appear, and received a standing ovation. You cannot help but wonder whether he didn’t want to be in the same room with all those possible rivals complaining about how the party has been a failure under his leadership. After all these years of being treated like a demigod, he likely didn’t expect to have to get down in the dirt and fight for the nomination. Just this week, Rolling Stone reported that Trump has made numerous calls to prominent Republicans demanding that they endorse him immediately or there would be hell to pay.
All these potential GOP candidates say they’re tired of losing, and suggest that someone is to blame. But none except Chris Christie has called out Donald Trump by name.
Let’s notice that none of the would-be candidates except Chris Christie has actually called out Trump by name, so it’s premature to assume that the Republican Party has finally turned its back on the man who has led them to defeat in the last three elections. They just keep saying they are tired of losing, which of course Trump and his followers blame on the faithless RINO establishment. So I really don’t think this tactic is going to work with anyone except big GOP donors, who really do want to win. (They need those taxes and regulations cut!)
It was conventional wisdom until quite recently that Trump would run virtually unopposed in 2024. The rise of DeSantis raised the prospect of a two-man race, which most GOP professionals would relish. They seem convinced that Florida Man is an exciting politician, and he clearly agrees. The idea was that one principal rival has a better chance of defeating Trump, given that the large and contentious field in 2016 was a big reason he managed to win the nomination. (Republican state primaries are often winner-take-all events, allowing a candidate to build up a majority of delegates while only garnering a plurality of votes.) The problem here is that the Republican establishment’s theory of the case is something of a myth. Trump won in 2016 because he was genuinely more popular among Republican voters.
Ed Kilgore at New York magazine explains:
It’s not as though Trump marched to the 2016 nomination by piling up delegates against a perpetually divided field of rivals who wouldn’t let each other get a clean shot at the MAGA man. The dynamics were more like a King of the Mountain game in which various rivals serially tried to topple the front-runner, who gained strength during the process before nailing the nomination down when there was no one left to oppose him other than Ted Cruz.
He mowed down those rivals one by one, and by the end of the primary season was winning decisive majorities. Those voters really liked him. That important fact has long been one of the hardest things to accept about Trump’s rise, I know, but it is unfortunately true. At least it has been until now.
Trump will soon be criss-crossing the country again holding his trademark rallies, which might have been exciting if he had ever stopped doing them. These events feel tired these days. In fact, Trump himself seems tired these days. Imagine if he’d been off the road for the last two years. For such an experienced showman, he sometimes has a poor sense of how to leave the crowd wanting more.
I’m sure he’ll have no real trouble filling up the event spaces as usual, but whether that illustrates anything beyond the fact that his hardcore fan base is desperate to keep the party going won’t be evident for a while yet. Trump should probably think about getting a new act.
Nonetheless, it’s hard to imagine how any of his following can be persuaded that he’s a loser. They see that that legal authorities and leading Republicans keep aiming at Trump and missing, and most of them truly believe he won the 2020 election in a landslide.That’s the cost of the GOP establishment’s failure to push back against the Big Lie, and it’s why this new mantra about being tired of losing must sound bizarre to their base today. A majority of Republican voters think Donald Trump is the greatest winner they’ve ever seen, and they just want him to keep on doing it.
DeSantis summons his own cult
I really can’t stand this guy. He was at the Republican Jewish Coalition, really feeling his oats:
“Florida really has a blueprint for success … we’re all about exercising leadership and delivering results for the people that we represent,” he said.
DeSantis touted his “free state of Florida,” and boasted of battling vaccines in a fight against a “Faucian dystopia where people’s freedoms were curtailed and their livelihoods destroyed.”
He also preened that “the state of Florida is where ‘woke’ goes to die,” as he detailed various programs restricting freedoms for the LGBTQ community and sharply narrowing what’s taught in schools.
“When you stand up for what’s right, when you show people you’re willing to fight for them, they will walk over broken glass barefoot to come vote for you, and that’s exactly what they did for me in record numbers,” the Republican governor said to a standing ovation. “We’ve got a lot more to do, and I have only begun to fight.”
That Messiah complex is really getting out of hand. Is this guy for real?
Not just asleep at the switch, but flipping it
The Associated Press supplies background on the Colorado Springs mass shooting at a gay nightclub:
A year and a half before he was arrested in the Colorado Springs gay nightclub shooting that left five people dead, Anderson Lee Aldrich allegedly threatened his mother with a homemade bomb, forcing neighbors in surrounding homes to evacuate while the bomb squad and crisis negotiators talked him into surrendering.
Yet despite that scare, there’s no public record that prosecutors moved forward with felony kidnapping and menacing charges against Aldrich, or that police or relatives tried to trigger Colorado’s “red flag” law that would have allowed authorities to seize the weapons and ammo the man’s mother says he had with him.
You read that right.
Half the United States is not just asleep at the switch, but flipping it.
Laws that might have prevented mass murder went ignored:
Gun control advocates say Aldrich’s June 2021 threat is an example of a red flag law ignored, with potentially deadly consequences. While it’s not clear the law could have prevented Saturday night’s attack — such gun seizures can be in effect for as little as 14 days and be extended by a judge in six-month increments — they say it could have at least slowed Aldrich and raised his profile with law enforcement.
“We need heroes beforehand — parents, co-workers, friends who are seeing someone go down this path,” said Colorado state Rep. Tom Sullivan *, whose son was killed in the Aurora theater shooting and sponsored the state’s red flag law passed in 2019. “This should have alerted them, put him on their radar.”
Where police ignored existing law, another AP story explains what did stop the killing:
As bullets tore through a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs, killing five people and wounding many more, one patron who had been partying moments before rushed into action, grabbing a handgun from the suspect, hitting him with it and pinning him down until police arrived just minutes later.
That customer was one of at least two whom police and city officials credit with stopping the gunman and limiting the bloodshed in Saturday night’s shooting at Club Q. The violence pierced the cozy confines of an entertainment venue that has long been a cherished safe spot for the LGBTQ community in the conservative-leaning city.
“Had that individual not intervened this could have been exponentially more tragic,” Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers told The Associated Press.
Podcaster Dan Savage says what others won’t:
I posted this earlier, but it bears another viewing:
The right will not stop. They have to be crushed, crushed, humiliated and repudiated at the ballot box. November 2022 provided a hint that the public has had enough. Let’s hope 2022 was just a foretaste.
*That’s a different Tom Sullivan although John Hickenlooper twice mistook me for him.
Anti-intellectualism on the right keeps peasants in line
A lengthy article by Matt McManus in Current Affairs (h/t Greg Sargent) studies the impulses driving anti-intellectualism on the right. What intellectuals on the right mean to defend (and conserve) is power and privilege. The existential threat, the wolf at the door, as it were, is any idea(s) that might make the ruled take issue with their rulers:
The heart of the problem for conservatives is this: they instinctively fear that excess and critical intellectualism will induce anyone and everyone to “submit” authority to the “discussion” of each individual. In other words, the individual might have thoughts and ideas that lead them to question authority figures like kings and presidents. Imagine that!
Egalitarianism of the sort Jefferson advanced in the Declaration stands at odds with preserving the presumed natural hierarchy atop which the elite sit. Defense of the natural order, as it’s seen, may “take the form of doubling down on even more extreme authoritarianism and inequality.” Or it might require attaching “transcendent qualities” to “profane (worldly or non-sacred) institutions, beliefs, and hierarchies which the right values.”
McManus adds:
These transcendent qualities are usually further dolled up with a mysterious and even paradoxical quality to make them appear even more dazzling in the eyes of the beholder. The transcendent qualities of sublime idealizations are both comprehensible to human reason while exceeding the limitations of its understanding—usually just comprehensible enough so that we may submit to their excellence, but not so transparent that they could be scrutinized and or criticized.
Should sublimation fail, the right falls back on “that’s just the way it is” fatalism. Get over it.
“That’s the way God planned it |That’s the way God wants it,” as Billy Preston sang.
Like many a faith, relying on reason is discouraged. Don’t question. Believe.
The Good Liars make comedy out of that feature of MAGA insanity. Their videos hold up to mockery unsuspecting Trump fans who checked their brains at the door. But there are occasionally clever debunks in them.
Jason Selvig points out the essential nonsense in believing ANTIFA was behind the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
“Why would ANTIFA interrupt the certification of an election in which their candidate won?” Selvig asks.
“If you think about it,” Stephen Colbert said in explaining truthiness in 2005, it makes no sense. But doesn’t it feel right that ANTIFA, not MAGA, perpetrated the sedition?
In another clip, the Liars suggest that schools ban a book with a story about daughters who get their father drunk to get pregnant by him. People heartily agree until told it is the Bible (Genesis 19).
Reason itself is less valued on the right. Referencing the right-wing defense of Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, one Kenneth Ray McClain argues, “If your recourse to the terrorist is to look up the criminal history of the victims, it is no different from looking up the criminal past of everyone that died on 9/11 in order to justify the hijackers.”
“This shit is ridiculous,” McCain writes. But that is what the right’s up-is-downism delivers. By design.
Just for free, a couple of other “snappy comebacks” that popped up over the weekend.