Month: November 2022

Yeah, we’re back to that…

Liz Cheney tweeted this out earlier, saying:

With Trump back on Twitter, it’s a good time to watch this Jan 6 hearing. It covers each of Trump’s tweets that day, including those that have been deleted, and features multiple Trump WH staff describing his inexcusable conduct during the violence.

I don’t know what they have been putting together around January 6th and I’m not getting my hopes up. But there’s certainly a lot there for them to look at and the only defense that I can see is for Trump to claim he is too stupid and narcissistic to know that what he was doing was illegal. That has certainly worked for him in the past.

Yeah, I don’t think he realizes why that is:

Well before he was asked to offer a prayer at Monday’s ceremony marking the U.S. Embassy’s move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, earning the enmity of Mitt Romney, Pastor Robert Jeffress offered tangential insight into why he and many evangelicals think the move was so important.

“Jerusalem has been the object of the affection of both Jews and Christians down through history and the touchstone of prophecy,” Jeffress told CNN last year. “But, most importantly, God gave Jerusalem — and the rest of the Holy Land — to the Jewish people.”

The latter half of that quote hints at the deep religious meaning of the existence of Israel for Jeffress and other Christians. As University of North Texas professor Elizabeth Oldmixon told Vox last year, the issue of recognizing Jerusalem is inextricable from that belief.

“The tenet of Christian Zionism is that God’s promise of the Holy Land to the Jews is eternal. It’s not just something in antiquity,” Oldmixon said. “When we talk about the Holy Land, God’s promise of the Holy Land, we’re talking about real estate on both sides of the Jordan River. So the sense of a greater Israel and expansionism is really important to this community. Jerusalem is just central to that. It’s viewed as a historical and biblical capital.”

Polling bolsters Oldmixon’s explanation. In December, LifeWay Research conducted a poll evaluating the views of evangelical Americans on issues related to Israel and the politics of the Middle East. (The definition used to identify evangelicals, we’ll note, was more specific than most polls necessitate.) Among the questions was one about the biblical promise of the Holy Land to Abraham and his descendants. Two-thirds of respondents strongly agreed that the promise was an eternal one from God.

But it’s also worth picking out another part of what Jeffress said to CNN. Jerusalem, he said, is “the touchstone of prophecy.” That prophecy is the biblical prophecy of the return of Jesus Christ and the beginning of the Rapture — the end times.

“What kick-starts the end times into motion is Israel’s political boundaries being reestablished to what God promised the Israelites according to the Bible,” Pastor Nate Pyle told Newsweek in January.

This is not an uncommon view.

The LifeWay poll found that 80 percent of evangelicals believed that the creation of Israel in 1948 was a fulfillment of biblical prophecy that would bring about Christ’s return.

They don’t call it nuclear Armageddon for nothing.

Do you think he doesn’t know, doesn’t care, or both? I’m going to guess it’s door number 3.

The method to their madness

Greg Sargent has a blazing insight here, one that I had not considered before.He discusses the fact that Democrats believe the investigation extravaganza planned by the House GOP won’t add up to much unless they uncover something devastating about Joe Biden. But they have another reason for doing it: “if they can confuse voters — and seduce the news media — into treating any and all congressional oversight as inevitably politically motivated, they will succeed in a whole different fashion.”

This goal — which entails obfuscating the basic distinction between oversight conducted in good faith and in bad — will be within reach for Republicans, due to a peculiar situation. The House select committee examining Donald Trump’s coup attempt will release its report before the end of this year, and might make criminal referrals. Those findings will be debated well into next year, while Trump is running for president.

Which means that for House Republicans, the goal of next year’s investigations will not just be to let a thousand Hunter Biden probes bloom. It will also be to discredit revelations produced by Democrats about Trump.

This week, we learned that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) won a promise from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), potentially the next speaker, to begininvestigations of the Justice Department’s treatment of Jan. 6 defendants. Other Republicans are vowing investigations of the department, too.

Congressional oversight of the department serves a critical public function. We want law enforcement to feel constrained by oversight, which Republicans could theoretically do in good faith, in a valuable and revelatory way.

But Republicans have signaled something different. Greene describes Jan. 6 defendants as “political prisoners.” She and others have demanded the defunding of the FBI simply because it executed a lawfully approved search, which they describe as unchecked jackbooted lawlessness, of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

Their position, then, is essentially that all investigative activity involving Jan. 6 and Trump is inherently illegitimate. So their oversight is likely to metastasize into an industrial-strength bad-faith effort to discredit all such activity, expressly to protect Trump from accountability, and to bury the Jan. 6 committee’s final report in a blizzard of propaganda. Republicans could even try to defund continuing law enforcement investigations and prosecutions.

He’ right. This is exactly how it will unfold. And the media will help them do it with equally breathless coverage of the bogus investigations as the real ones, eagerly chasing “scoops” and granting the phony scandals the same stature as the attempted coup.

And the thing is that I doubt very many Republicans, if any at all, are even aware of the strategic value of doing this. They are driven by a primitive desire for vengeance and juvenile “I know you are but what am I” tactics. But the end result is exactly what Sargent outlines here. And it can work.

Seriously

I can hardly believe that guy had the guts to say that. David Corn took a look at Walkers own problems in that regard:

A few days ago, I wrote a piece noting that Georgia Republican Senate contender Herschel Walker, who faces Democratic incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnoff in a December 6 runoff, owes Peach State voters the release of his medical records. As Walker acknowledges, he has a history of dangerous and reckless behavior. He played Russian roulette with a loaded gun and fantasized viscerally about committing murder, and his ex-wife says he once held an ex-gun to his head. Walker asserts he doesn’t remember that horrific incident, but he claims other troublesome actions and violent thoughts were the result of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), which causes a person to have multiple autonomous personalities. (Many mental health experts question whether this disorder truly exists.). And, Walker maintains, he has been cured. So regarding the violence in his past, Walker essentially says, It was my other personalities, and they no longer have a grip on me.

But there’s no proof of any of this.Walker is covering up, providing no documented details of his professed bout with DID or his purported cure. 

Walker has not released medical records, which presumably would confirm the initial diagnosis and show the treatment he underwent. They also would disclose his current condition. Might Walker still be afflicted by DID, despite his insistence he has been “healed”? Walker is covering up, providing no documented details of his professed bout with DID or his purported cure. 

Georgia voters certainly deserve to know if they might be electing to office a man who still suffers from what was once popularly known as Multiple Identity Disorder—think Sybil—and who could at times be controlled by one or more alternative personalities. 

Once upon a time, Walker himself agreed with the notion that political candidates—at least those running for president—ought to demonstrate that they are mentally and physically fit to hold office. 

In September 2020, Walker, then almost a year away from announcing his Senate bid, responded to the popular right-wing talking point that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden was not mentally acute enough to serve in the White House. Walker proposed that Biden (and Donald Trump) submit to exams to determine each candidate’s physical and mental health. In a tweet, Walker, a former football star [tweeted the above]

[…]

Though the standards may be different for a president than a senator, Walker’s reasoning certainly applies to his own case. He has contended that he once was burdened by a mental disease that led to dangerous conduct and violent thoughts and that could hamper his performance in office. What might happen were he to be elected a senator and his alternative and violent personalities return?

Mother Jones contacted Walker’s campaign to see if he planned to take a mental health examination and make the results public. The campaign did not respond.

Walker’s medical records would likely indicate whether he truly had DID—as opposed to the possibility that he’s hiding behind it—as well as reveal how effectively he has been treated and whether his “alters,” as they are called, are gone for good. Walker claims that he was cured by a  Jerry Mungadze, one of Walker’s “best friends,” who has a Ph.D. in counselor education from the University of North Texas. Mungadze takes an unusual approach to treating DID that includes exorcism as an option. Have any medical doctors been involved in Walker’s treatment? His records should disclose that. 

But in lieu of releasing his records, Walker could do what he called for Biden to do in 2020: submit to a mental health examination. After all, being a senator can be a grueling job, perhaps as grueling as playing in the NFL. During that campaign, Biden did disclose a summary of his medical records and the results of a recent physical exam. Walker has not even done that. 

Mother Jones contacted Walker’s campaign to see if he planned to take such a test and make the results public. The campaign did not respond. It seems that Walker, who once prescribed testing to ensure the mental fitness of a politician, is now not willing to apply that standard to himself. 

They said they would do it and so they are

It’s really dumb but there you have it:

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Monday he plans to remove Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from their respective committees if Republicans retake the House majority.

Why it matters: McCarthy’s comments offer a preview of the scorched-earth tactics Republicans may adopt if they win back control of Congress in 2022.

McCarthy has long said the removals of Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) from their committees set a new standard that his party will not hesitate to use against Democrats.

In a floor speech opposing the Gosar’s ouster in November, McCarthy said certain members, including Schiff, Swalwell and Omar, will “need the approval of a majority” to remain on their panels.

Republicans also point to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to seat two of McCarthy’s picks for the Jan. 6 select committee as another precedent-setter.

What they’re saying: “He will not be serving there,” McCarthy said of Swalwell’s placement on the House Intelligence Committee in an interview with Breitbart.

“Ilhan Omar should not be serving on” the House Foreign Affairs Committee, McCarthy added. “Adam Schiff, he should not be serving on Intel.”

McCarthy pointed to Swalwell’s association with a Chinese spy, reported by Axios. Swalwell, who cut ties with the spy after being alerted to her activities by federal investigators, has not been accused of wrongdoing.

In the case of Omar, McCarthy quoted her 2019 remark that a pro-Israel lobbying group’s influence in Congress is “all about the Benjamins,” which was blasted by members of both parties at the time as anti-Semitic.

McCarthy also said Schiff “lied to the American public” with his support of the unverified Steele dossier, which alleged extensive ties between former President Trump and Russia.

The other side: “It is always difficult to take Kevin McCarthy seriously,” Schiff spokesperson Lauren French told Axios.

“Nevertheless, allowing McCarthy to get anywhere near the Speaker’s gavel would be catastrophic — not just because of his propensity for falsehoods and smears, but because he will exist solely to do Donald Trump’s bidding — even potentially overturning the 2024 results.”

Swalwell’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but he responded to McCarthy on Twitter: “McCarthy is targeting me for 1 reason: I’m effective. He wants to carry water (& sort Starbursts) for Trump’s Big Lie & not be called out. He’s projecting onto me b/c he’s incapable of facing down the Ku Klux Klan elements in his caucus. If he thinks he’s silencing me, he’s not.”

A spokesperson for Omar declined to comment.

There’s no point in commenting. It’s all nonsense. But it’s just the first salvo in a barrage of payback. Hopefully, most of the public will see it for what it is.

They have landed where they were always going

Here is a short thread on the phenomenon from Thomas Zimmer, professor at Georgetown and expert on democracy:

Musk is yet another example of the libertarian-to-far-right-pipeline – a stark reminder that this type of libertarianism has always been driven by a desire of elites to do as they please and be freed from regulation of any kind, from demands for fairness and equality.

Thoughts on Twitter, Musk, and the destruction of the virtual public square.
 
The end may be near. No amount of snark or schadenfreude will change the fact that this situation is a disaster. Twitter has always been a mess – but also a crucial instrument to democratize America.

There are two distinct, but intertwined issues here: There is the fact that a tech oligarchy, animated by an inherently anti-democratic worldview, holds so much power; and there is, more specifically, the threat to the world’s most important political communications platform.

In general, from a democratic perspective, it’s highly problematic that these tech oligarchs are amassing so much power and influence. They are not democratically controlled in any way, there are no checks and balances, they are not guided by any concern for the public good.

What is happening here is not politically neutral. Musk has been on a rightward trajectory for quite some time, he shares all the reactionary moral panic concerns over “wokeism” and “Cancel Culture” – a big reason why he wanted to control Twitter in the first place.

It is not a coincidence that the Right – the Trumpist Right, specifically – is cheering Musk on. If someone has the enthusiastic support of those who want to undermine and abolish democracy, it is probably fair to assume that there is cause for concern.

Musk is yet another example of the libertarian-to-far-right-pipeline. Peter Thiel is probably the most striking example of this – a stark reminder that these types of libertarians have always been driven by a desire for freedom from regulation of any kind to do as they please.

Thiel and Musk believe that the world works best if people like them are in charge, get to do whatever they want to do, unhampered by regulations or demands for equality – because they are convinced that their personal interest is identical with the interest of humanity itself.

It’s an inherently anti-democratic worldview that tracks very well with the reactionary political project of maintaining traditional hierarchies. This is what is pulling these people to the Right, why they eventually gravitate towards autocratic regimes at home and abroad.

And now that inherently anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian worldview is animating the man in charge of the world’s most important political communications platform, a virtual public square functioning as an essential part of democratic culture.

Twitter could have been, should have been, so much better. But casually dismissing the platform as “not real life” has always been silly – its enormous influence on the broader public, media, and political discourses is undeniable.

As @RVAwonk points out, Twitter has functioned as an indispensable communication tool in disaster and emergency situations – on a global scale. The potential loss of that alone is highly problematic. And that’s before we take into account the platform’s democratizing effects.

Twitter established a conversation between people in powerful positions to shape the political and public imaginary – because they are journalists, or politicians, or public figures – and people who would otherwise never have access to those levels of influence.

For instance, Twitter allowed people from the academic world to share with a broader audience what they think and observe – and thereby inject their analysis and commentary into the public debate to an entirely unprecedented degree.

Most importantly, Twitter has been instrumental in amplifying the voices, demands, and the critique of traditionally marginalized groups. That’s where it really demonstrated its democratizing potential.

Much of the moral panic over “cancel culture” is a reaction to precisely this: Traditionally marginalized groups have gained enough influence and, crucially, have acquired the technological means to affect the political debate.

Twitter has been crucial in this uphill struggle of traditionally marginalized groups to finally make their demands heard, be able to extract a political cost for certain discriminatory speech and behavior: a tool for organizing, a platform, a global amplifier.

Twitter has enabled people with absolutely no traditional access to power to speak to powerful elites directly, criticize them in the public square. How valuable this has been is evidenced by the fact that many of those elites are so consistently bemoaning “persecution.”

To the extent that traditional societal elites – and elite white men, in particular – face a little more scrutiny today than in the past, that they have been deprived of their supposed “right” to unquestioned deference and affirmation, Twitter has helped democratize public life.

Losing this will hurt – hurt the attempts to finally make America live up to the promise of egalitarian multiracial pluralism, to become the democracy it never has been yet. That those elected to safeguard democracy have seemingly cared little about this is a massive failure.

Finally, there is this: White male hero worship of the worst kind. The message here seems to be that we’ll just have to live with the damage these tech oligarchs cause – and be grateful for all the wonders with which they are supposedly blessing the world. No, no, no.

This type of sacrifice at the altar of the white male genius is so toxic. Artists, entrepreneurs, inventors – let us no longer suspend the rules for them, enable them, make vulnerable people pay the price for their awfulness. This needs to stop. We need to hold them accountable.

For those who are concerned about the seemingly impending destruction of the virtual public square, let me add: We just discussed Musk, Twitter’s importance, and the libertarian-to-far-right tech oligarchy’s anti-democratic project in the new episode of @USDemocracyPod:

Addendum: I’m getting a lot of “Musk and Thiel are just greedy narcissists” responses. Sure. But there is also a clear political valence to what they do. They are part of an anti-democratic political project. De-contextualizing and de-politicizing that underestimates the threat.

This thread, and an unrelated tweet about the same topic QTed below, have sparked by far the most, the angriest, the most abusive responses I have ever gotten – a parade of Trumpists and Musk worshippers, all basically making the same angry point: “Twitter belongs to us now!”

Almost without exception, these responses have come in the form of racist, sexist, misogynistic slurs, mostly directed at my supposed lack of manliness, something with which these people seem entirely obsessed. A raging mob feeling enabled to act out their aggressions.

A few things stood out as interesting. The attacks have been remarkably similar: The same slurs, the same memes, over and over again. A testament, I’d say, to how quickly the rightwing propaganda machine can mobilize rage, and the level of directed groupthink that is the result.

To the extent there was an actual “argument” being made, it was this (and I’m giving you a rare example that doesn’t come with a sexist slur): Before Musk, Twitter was supposedly a liberal propaganda machine, banning conservatives – now, finally, there will be “free speech.”

Most people who say this are probably just parroting bad-faith propaganda lines. But if we take it seriously for a moment, it is incredibly revealing of an underlying worldview that is driving much of the Right and is animating the reactionary political project.

Were conservatives banned from pre-Musk Twitter? Of course not. But some of the most toxic racist, misogynistic, conspiratorial accounts were – with Trump being the most high-profile case. Instead of drawing a line, the Right embraces these extremists as “conservatives.”

This is emblematic of the entire reactionary “free speech” and “cancel culture” talk: It always deals in vague abstractions – “banning conservatives” – because once you start asking about the substance of those “conservative” opinions, it gets dicey really, really fast.

Finally, there is the assumption that any institution or platform that is not dominated by the Right must have a discriminatory liberal bias against conservatives. It is unthinkable for rightwingers to exist in a space that allows traditionally marginalized groups an equal voice.

That’s the dark heart of the reactionary political project: It is fundamentally anti-democratic, anti-pluralistic. For rightwingers, there are only two ways to handle egalitarian pluralism: Retreat entirely from society – or, more often, attack and restore reactionary domination.

Originally tweeted by Thomas Zimmer (@tzimmer_history) on November 18, 2022.

If it seems to be a contradiction in terms to be a libertarian authoritarian, it is. But you can just remove the libertarian part. Like all authoritarian types, these people demand freedom for themselves. Others not so much. They care deeply about their money. And they think they are always the smartest people in the room. And now they have made the full transition.

Libertarians, like the Christian Right, have finally been exposed as the hypocrites they are. They no longer need to be taken seriously as distinct ideologies or moral arbiters. But they are dead serious about their authoritarian ambitions.

Jack Smith: Is Trump below his pay grade?

Reactions to the Merrick Garland announcement this week of a Trump-case special prosecutor span the spectrum from the cautiously optimistic to the reflexively cynical.*

The legal process has been grindingly slow. Both in Washington, D.C. and in Fulton County, Ga., by the way. But there is less bitterness shown toward Fulton D.A. Fani Willis and her slow, deliberative approach even though she’s holding Trump’s recorded confesssion. Make of that what you will.

Depressing volunteer enthusiasm is the last thing you want to do in field operations. So the bitter, glass-half-empty stance toward this announcement seems pointlessly self-defeating as well as prematurely unjustifed. Ruth Marcus’s observations about Jack Smith run in the opposite direction:

Jack Smith, Garland’s choice, is decidedly low profile. I spoke with a number of former prosecutors who not only didn’t know Smith — they hadn’t even heard of him. But Smith, a longtime federal prosecutor who has been working at The Hague investigating war crimes in Kosovo, offers advantages that the boldface names don’t. He knows how the department works. He knows how to speed an investigation along. “Stop playing with your food,” Mueller used to instruct hand-wringing prosecutors. Smith is, by all accounts, no food-player. And he offers a potential counter-balance to Garland’s innate cautiousness; hard-charging is the word that comes up in speaking with former colleagues.

“Jack Smith makes me look like a golden retriever puppy,” tweeted Andrew Weissmann, the famously aggressive former Enron and Mueller prosecutor who worked with Smith for years in the federal prosecutor’s Brooklyn office.

The process is what it is. Haste makes for lost cases. These people do not like losing. Or wasting their time. Smith has built a career on prosecuting “war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.” Prosecuting posturing pols and con men seems like work below his pay grade. Marcus concludes that Smith’s arrival is ominous for Trump and his accomplices:

Smith didn’t leave his job as a war crimes prosecutor in The Hague to preside over a non-case.

Call me naive, but I find that persuasive. For now, I’ll take Smith’s appointment as a bad sign for the Trump Gang.

* The latter types will use Nancy Pelosi’s withdrawal from leadership to catalog her faults rather than celebrate her accomplishments. Their story has become tiresome.

Turkeys might survive us all

“They eat everything: worms, hot dogs, sushi, your breakfast, grubs. They are fairly flightless and eerily fearless, three-foot-tall feathered dinosaurs,” writes Jill Lepore in The New Yorker. Once nearly extinct in New England, turkeys are now back (with a vengeance?) and “brunching at Boston’s Prudential Center, dining on Boston Common, and foraging alongside the Swan Boats,” Lepore adds:

“Don’t feed the turkeys,” one city office warns civilians, of the non-hunting sort. They may attack small children. (Small children’s approach, however, may prove difficult to deter.) “Don’t let turkeys intimidate you.” To daunt them, the henpecked advise, wield a broom or a garden hose, or get a dog. You sometimes see people standing their ground, a man chasing a squawking flock off his front porch, waving his arms. “Tired of the turkey shit on my steps,” he snaps. A bicycle cop veers into a hen, on purpose, a near-miss, urging her away from a playground: “Scram, bird, scram!” And still the turkeys gain ground: the people of New England appear indifferent to the advice of the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, recalling childhood afternoons spent in schoolrooms, placing a hand on construction paper and tracing the outline of splayed and stubby fingers to draw a tom, its tail feathers spread wide. A turkey seemed, then, an imaginary, mythical animal—a dragon, a unicorn. And here it is! Roosting in the dogwood tree outside your window, pecking at the subway grate, twisting its ruddy red neck and looking straight at you, like a long-lost dodo. What more might return in full force? Will you ever see a moose in Massachusetts? A great egret in Connecticut?

Birds in general are not faring well in North America. It’s “an avian apocalypse.” But turkeys have adapted.

Most days, I pass a group of five big ones on my daily walk. They wander down the mountainside, cut across the Grove Park Inn golf course, hop up a wall, and stroll into the manicured yards on a well-traveled thoroughfare. Yesterday, one grazed casually beside the 1st Tee as golfers teed up. Neither human nor bird took notice of one another.

Whole families (a dozen or more) wander through my neighborhood, coming from where and headed where, I don’t know.

And bears. There are dens in the draw behind and above and below my late MIL’s house. A neighbor once remarked she could hear cubs in the den below suckling at night from her deck.

So far, turkey seem nonplussed by the skyrocketing real estate prices that are forcing working people out of town. So too in Boston. The only force that will stop birds or bears will be annoyed second- and third-home owners demanding the city do something. Perhaps they can hire the coyotes so long as they ban them from using ACME products on their nightly hunts.