Month: December 2022

“Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party,” Taibbi tweeted while sharing an internal communication that included a James wood tweet apparently sent to Twitter’s content moderation team “from the DNC.”

Speaking to Carlson, Woods said that he would be suing the DNC over the claim and said “these very people” were responsible for destroying his career.

“I can guarantee you one thing more than anything else you’ll ever hear in your life: I will be getting a lawyer. I will be suing the Democratic National Committee no matter what,” Woods said.

“Whether I win or lose, I am going to stand up for the rights that every American – not a so-called celebrity. I’m not a celebrity — I’m hardly recognizable anymore because my career has been destroyed by these very people,” he said.

Boo fucking hoo.

His career was destroyed because he is a loud, obnoxious right wing scumbag. Posting dick pics of Hunter Biden (which is what got him booted off twitter) has little to do with his career. He destroyed it all by himself by being an asshole nobody can stand to be around.

Secular Democrats are a real faction in American politics

It’s an old tradition but it’s becoming much more common:

When members of the small Pennsylvania chapter of Secular Democrats of America log on for their monthly meetings, they’re not there for a virtual happy hour.

“We don’t sit around at our meetings patting ourselves on the back for not believing in God together,” said David Brown, a founder from the Philadelphia suburb of Ardmore.

The group, mostly consisting of atheists and agnostics, mobilizes to knock on doors and make phone calls on behalf of Democratic candidates “who are pro-science, pro-democracy, whether or not they are actually self-identified secular people,” he said. “We are trying to keep church and state separate. That encompasses LGBTQIA+, COVID science, bodily autonomy and reproductive rights.”

Brown describes his group as “small but mighty,” yet they’re riding a big wave.

Voters with no religious affiliation supported Democratic candidates and abortion rights by staggering percentages in the 2022 midterm elections.

And they’re voting in large numbers. In 2022, some 22% of voters claimed no religious affiliation, according to AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of more than 94,000 voters nationwide. They contributed to voting coalitions that gave Democrats victories in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona.

The unaffiliated — often nicknamed the “nones” — voted for Democratic House candidates nationwide over Republicans by more than a 2-1 margin (65% to 31%), according to VoteCast. That echoes the 2020 president election, when Democrat Joe Biden took 72% of voters with no religious affiliation, while Republican Donald Trump took 25%, according to VoteCast.

For all the talk of the overwhelmingly Republican voting by white evangelical Christians in recent elections, the unaffiliated are making their presence felt.

Among all U.S. adults, 29% are nones — those who identify as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” — according a 2021 report by the Pew Research Center. That’s up 10 percentage points from a decade earlier, according to Pew. And the younger the adults, the more likely they are to be unaffiliated, according to a 2019 Pew analysis, further signaling the growing clout of the nones.

“People talk about how engaged white evangelicals are, but you don’t know the half of it,” said Ryan Burge, a professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University who focuses on the interaction of religious and political behavior.

Atheists and agnostics form only a subset of nones and are less numerous than evangelicals. But they are more likely than evangelicals to make a campaign donation, attend a political meeting or join a protest, Burge said, citing the Harvard-affiliated Cooperative Election Study.

“When you consider how involved they are in political activity, you realize how important they are at the ballot box,” he said.

The nones equaled Catholics at 22% of the electorate, though they were barely half the figure for Protestants and other Christians (43%), according to VoteCast. Other religious groups totaled 13%, including 3% Jewish and 1% Muslim.

Separately, 30% of voters identified as born again or evangelical Christians.

In several bellwether races this year, the secular vote made its impact felt, according to AP VoteCast.

__About four in five people with no religious affiliation voted against abortion restrictions in referendums in Michigan and Kentucky.

__Between two-thirds and three-quarters of nones supported Democratic candidates in statewide races in Arizona and Wisconsin.

__About four in five people with no religion voted for Josh Shapiro and John Fetterman, the Democrats elected Pennsylvania’s newest governor and senator, respectively.

While Shapiro openly speaks about his Jewish values motivating his public service, Fetterman has not incorporated any discernible religious tradition in his public statements. He often frames issues in ethical terms— such as promoting criminal justice reform and raising the minimum wage, even calling abortion rights “sacred” — without reference to a religious tradition.

Fetterman’s campaign did not return a request for comment.

The secular population is a diverse group, Pew reported in 2021. Two-thirds identify as “nothing in particular” — a group that is alienated from politics as well as religion, Burge said.

But atheists and agnostics, though only a third of the nones, punch above their weight, given their heavy involvement in politics.

The twin trends of a growing secular cohort among Democrats and the increased religiosity of Republicans are not coincidental.

Several prominent Republican candidates and their supporters have promoted Christian nationalism, which fuses an American and Christian sense of identity, mission and symbols.

That prompts a reaction by many secular voters, Burge said: “At least among white people, it’s become clear the Democratic Party has become the party for the non-religious people.”

Yet it’s not their party alone. The Democratic coalition draws heavily from religious groups — Black Protestants, liberal Jews, Catholics of color. The Black church tradition, in particular, has a highly devout base in support of moderate and progressive policies.

“I think the Democrats have the biggest problem in the world because they have to keep atheists and Black Protestants happy at the same time,” Burge said.

Tensions surfaced in 2019 when the Democratic National Committee passed a resolution praising the religiously unaffiliated in language that some saw as overstating their clout and denigrating religious values.

Differences between secular and religious Democrats showed up in VoteCast. Majorities of Democratic voters across all religious affiliations say abortion should be legal at least most of the time, but 6 in 10 Democratic voters unaffiliated with a religion say it should always be legal, compared with about 4 in 10 Democratic voters affiliated with Christian traditions. In general, 69% of Democratic voters unaffiliated with a religion identify as liberal, compared with 46% of Christians who voted for Democrats.

But growing secular constituency doesn’t worry Bishop William Barber, a leader in one of the nation’s most prominent faith-based progressive movements.

“Jesus didn’t worry about it, so why would I?” said Barber, president of Repairers of the Breach, which calls for moral advocacy by faith and other leaders on behalf of the poor, immigrants and other marginalized communities. “Jesus said the one who is not against me is for me.”

“We have a lot of people who claim they’re agnostic or atheist, and they will come to our rallies,” said Barber, who is also co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign. “They will say, ‘I don’t necessarily believe in God, but I believe in right. I believe in love. I do believe in justice.’”

Brown, of the Secular Democrats group in Pennsylvania, said he had no problem supporting Democratic candidates like Shapiro, who talked openly about his Jewish values on the campaign trail. His opponent, Republican Doug Mastriano, incorporated Christian nationalist themes and imagery in his campaign.

“While on the one hand I am frustrated that politicians feel the need to justify their doing the right thing by religious affiliation, I also appreciate that this was a calculated decision to appeal to religious voters,” Brown said. “I have no problem with it because I feel it was in the service of defeating a Christian nationalist candidate on the other side.”

In fact, Brown even traveled to Georgia in late November to campaign door-to-door for an ordained minister — Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, the Democrat in a runoff election. And for the same reason — despite religious differences, he sees Warnock as sharing many of the values of secular voters.

There isn’t much daylight between liberal religious folk and secular humanists. The values and ideals are the same and they both believe that there is no role for government in religion and vice versa. It’s the conservatives who want to push their beliefs on to everyone else. The differences are personal, rarely political.

I think this is a strength for the left. I hope they embrace it.

Change is coming

Ed Kilgore helpfully explains the reasons for the changes in the Democratic primary calendar. It’s good news:

The half-century run of Iowa as the first stop on the road to the Democratic presidential nomination has finally come to an end. On Friday, the Rules and Bylaws panel of the Democratic National Committee ejected the state from the charmed circle of sanctioned “early states” holding contests prior to March. But thanks to a last-minute push from President Biden, the calendar-makers didn’t just dump Iowa and move up the other states while adding Michigan as a new midwestern early state, as many expected. Instead, South Carolina, in the fourth position since it first became an “early state” in 2008, will jump all the way to the front of the line. This proposal — which apparently came as a complete surprise to the South Carolinians — likely reflected Biden’s gratitude to Palmetto State Democrats for saving his candidacy in 2020 after terrible defeats in Iowa and New Hampshire. And it could be a signal to potential rivals that he intends to begin 2024 with a bang. But it also shows that Democrats generally are serious about diversity being a hallmark of the party and strong engagement of people of color (a majority of South Carolina Democratic primary voters are Black) being a strategic necessity.

New Hampshire and perhaps even Iowa will fight the new calendar, which will be finalized by the full DNC in February. But it looks like a done deal that states can defy at the peril of losing their 2024 delegates, and perhaps interest from candidates as well. It appears the committee may have made one accommodation to the states that will be second and third in the new calendar by modifying Biden’s proposed calendar to stage New Hampshire and Nevada primaries concurrently just four days after South Carolina’s. But this too will draw some criticism from those who argue less well-known and impecunious candidates need one small state to focus on in the early going, the position Iowa has held since 1972.

In the end, the representatives of Iowa and New Hampshire were the only “no” votes on the proposed 2024 calendar, and both states will threaten to make their own 2024 plans, with Iowa holding a now-unsanctioned caucus (it can’t move to a primary without the cooperation of Iowa Republicans, who are perfectly happy with the existing system and calendar), and New Hampshire following a state law requiring its secretary of State to move its primary back perpetually to maintain its first-in-the-nation primary status. But in a gesture that the national party is not in a mood to negotiate with potential renegade states, its resolution requires proposed “early” states to certify their progress towards implementing the new calendar by early January or lose their exemption from the usual rules banning primaries prior to March.

So how did this shift in the presidential nomination process finally happen after years and years of complaints from Democrats about the Iowa–New Hampshire “duopoly” of wintry states with pale populations? It had been building for years, but Iowa critics got a big gift when tabulation of the 2020 Caucus results collapsed amid a welter of technical problems and human failure (though much of it was caused by new national party reporting requirements). And once it became inevitable Iowa would lose its status, all sorts of changes seemed possible, and for the first time the “duopoly” was helpless to stop them (prior to 2008, pressure to remove Iowa and New Hampshire led instead to the inclusion of Nevada and South Carolina as “early states”). The fact that Democratic presidential candidates will begin first in a place like South Carolina rather than Iowa has profound implications for strategy and messaging, and the addition of two relatively large and diverse states, Georgia and Michigan, matters too.

Iowa’s defenestration from its privileged position is a really big deal to Democrats in that state. Democratic presidential nominees who got a boost from winning Iowa included Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980; Walter Mondale in 1984; Al Gore in 2000; John Kerry in 2004; Barack Obama in 2008; and Hillary Clinton in 2016. And it’s not just front-running nomination winners who were happy with beginning their campaign in Iowa: The state’s retail-intensive politics, its plentiful progressive activists, and its manageable size made it attractive to insurgents like Bernie Sanders as well.

It is important to understand, however, that the DNC’s actions have no direct effect on Republican plans for 2024. The RNC has already locked in a calendar with the traditional four states holding contests in their traditional order. In two of the five proposed early states (New Hampshire and Nevada), Republicans have key positions (they hold a trifecta in the former and the governorship in the latter) in determining the state laws governing the primary calendar; in another, Georgia, the Republican secretary of State controls the dates. As nomination-process wizard Josh Putnam points out, only in South Carolina (which is also a state accustomed to Democratic and Republican primaries on different days) can the state Democratic Party control its primary date (though in Michigan a Democratic state legislature will make that decision).

Some wonder why the national parties don’t just adopt a “rational” system like a national primary or rotating regional primaries or whatever “reform” can be devised. But the abiding reality is that states have the exclusive power to set up taxpayer-funded primaries (one advantage of caucuses is that as party-managed and financed affairs, they don’t require any official state legislative authorization); the national parties can nudge them in the desired direction with carrots and sticks, but in the end there’s really no such thing as a primary “system.”

Given this basic structural limitation, Democrats have probably gone about as far and as fast as they could in shuffling the deck for 2024, and even now the rebellious muttering from the excluded or downgraded states could mean trouble down the road. The irony is that if Joe Biden winds up running for reelection without significant Democratic opposition while Republicans have some sort of Trump-DeSantis-Pence-Haley-Pompeo-Cruz donnybrook, the same old calendar, complete with a first-in-the-nation Iowa caucus, may be where all the action is, making the “reformed” Democratic calendar irrelevant (and Democrats are already saying they will revisit the whole subject in 2028). But for now, the old Democratic duopoly looks dead.

They should get rid of all caucuses too. They’re a mess.

Not just new faces

In August, somone tweeted a prank notice that Sen. Dianne Feinstein had announced her retirement. It is overdue, you may have noticed. It was the same day a French scientist admitted pranking the world with a photo of a distant star that was actually a slice of chorizo.

Succession planning is not Democrats’ strong suit (from where I sit). Speculation about Feinstein’s retirement continues. California Democrats are jockeying for position (Politico):

Sen. Dianne Feinstein hasn’t said if she intends to seek another term in 2024 — but the competition to succeedthe oldest member of Congress is escalating.

Reps. Ro Khanna and Katie Porter are fielding entreaties to jump into the race, and Rep. Adam Schiff has publicly declared he is exploring a run. Rep. Barbara Lee is spending the holidays mulling her next move. Three hopefuls have contacted former Sen. Barbara Boxer to seek her advice, marking the incipient stages of a fierce fight between California Democrats for a seat that has not been open for a generation.

“They’re starting to call me to get ready for what is a massive campaign – truly, massively expensive and hard-fought,” Boxer said. “It will be a very crowded field.”

Schiff fired the first salvo last month by openly admitting his long-known interest in the seat, telling a Los Angeles television station that, after his House leadership bid fizzled, he would “consider running for the Senate if Senator Feinstein decides not to run for reelection.” Schiff also met with Feinstein to inform her of his intentions, according to two people familiar with the exchange.

Feinstein’s plans remain a wildcard. The 89-year-old senator’s standing has eroded as California Democrats sour on her centrism and the San Francisco Chronicle detailed her perceived cognitive decline in an explosive piece this spring that bolstered previous reporting by POLITICO about Feinstein’s capacity to serve.

One reason the Democratic Party seems so stultifyingly to young activists is because, like Feinstein, it is old. That is not necessarily a bad thing. As Digby noted on Saturday, maybe Joe Biden, 80, does know a thing or two. But there needs to be more churn in the ranks from the precinct to the White House if Democrats as a party hope (do they?) to make it look not only more diverse in sex, race, ethnicity, etc., but in age as well. Younger voters need to see the party look more like people from their century.

A twenty-something activist told me yesterday (several times) that the party needs a culture reset. Party elders perpetuate a series of beliefs about how things are done and who gets to do them. I’ve long criticized the campaign industrial complex and party hacks looking primarily to their next step up the ladder. But what puts off young activists (like my friend) is more than that.

“It’s not his turn,” one told me about Barack Obama when he entered the 2008 primaries. We must at all costs avoid “division in the party,” the same insiders solemnly intone whenever upstarts threaten to keep the “old guard” from having its way. “What will the Republicans say?” they ask like victims of spousal abuse whenever the kids suggest coloring outside the lines. And changing that culture? “Good luck,” a former state chair told me Saturday.

Nothing ventured….

Scattered, low-grade terrorism

Maybe them good ol’ boys heard their marching orders wrong. “We said attack the electoral system, not the electrical system, you idiots!” Whatever.

On the same day the (soon indicted?) leader of the Republican Party and its 2024 presidential frontrunner called for “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” power went out for roughly 40,000 customers in Moore County, North Carolina east of Charlotte. The Moore County Sheriff’s Office cited “intentional vandalism” at several electrical substations serving almost two-thirds of the county.

The Pilot newspaper of Southern Pines (emphasis mine):

The Moore County Sheriff’s Office says is investigating incidents at multiple electric substations in Moore County that were shot up on Saturday night as a “criminal occurrence,” causing more than half the county’s electric customers to lose power.

[…]

Workers from Duke Energy and authorities from the sheriff‘s office were at the substation off N.C. 211 near West Pine Middle School looking over the damage around midnight. Deputies were scanning the the area for bullet casing, and vehicles were going through the woods in search of more evidence at the scene.

In a text message to a reporter, Chief Mike Cameron of the Southern Pines Fire and Rescue Department confirmed that substations had been shot at. He said the agency is “preparing to be out of power for 24 hours.”

Heavy police presence was around several gun shops and Wal-Mart in Aberdeen around 10:30 p.m. after reports of looting. One woman was detained in front Wal-Mart and police were conducting a headcount of employees outside of the store.

There is no confirmation of looting. No motive is known and no suspects have been apprehended.

Even so, this thread popped up on the Bird site Saturday evening suggesting the substation attacks were connected to a planned drag show at the Sunrise Theater in the golf resort town of Southern Pines.

A CBS report soon after the Jan. 6 insurrection describes Emily Rainey as an Army psychological operations officer. “Rainey had resigned her commission after receiving a career-ending letter of reprimand for her actions at an earlier protest in the Fort Bragg area.” Rainey led 100 members of Moore County Citizens for Freedom to the Jan. 6, 2021 rally on the Mall.

Rainey’s Facebook post Saturday night prompted a visit from sheriff’s deputies:

With full awareness that Rainey was an Army psychological operations officer trained in using “information and misinformation to shape the emotions, decision-making and actions of American adversaries,” readers should take this next string with a full measure of salt. Again, no suspects have been identified and no motive for the substation attacks is established.

The right-wing Daily Haymaker blog of Pinehurst, N.C. a week earlier railed against the Sunrise Theater bringing the show from the “nation’s urban hellholes” to “force it on church-going, conservative suburban and rural community residents.” Perhaps some good ol’ boys took the hint.

Attacks like these for the near future are more likely to characterize any Civil War 2.0 than stand-up gun battles. Especially since in small-town America those gun battles would be against law enforcement officers that CSA 2.0 “troops” likely know personally.

Let the false flag narratives about Antifa begin. Watch for copycats.

His emphasis on democracy in the 2022 midterms was important

Biden has gotten an amazing amount done considering that he’s had a very tiny margin in congress and a batshit insane opposition.

He’s also pretty good at politics it turns out. He ignored all the pundits and carried on about democracy all through the campaign. (They wanted him to talk about inflation which was a bad issue for Democrats without any good answers…) He gave several big set piece speeches and put it at the top of the agenda and kept it there.

Anyway, he was right:

In his final speech before the Nov. 8 midterms — the first general election since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — President Joe Biden warned that “American democracy is under attack” from “extreme MAGA Republicans” who would seek to “suppress the right of voters and subvert the electoral system itself.”

“This is no ordinary year,” Biden said. “So I ask you to think long and hard about the moment we’re in. In a typical year, we’re often not faced with questions of whether the vote we cast will preserve democracy or put us at risk. But this year, we are.”

The press and some Democratic Party allies panned the president’s remarks. His speech was “head-scratching,” according to CNN’s Chris Cillizza. It was “important” but “puzzling,” said Politico’s Playbook newsletter. “[As] a matter of practical politics, I doubt many Ds in marginal races are eager for him to be on TV tonight,” tweeted David Axelrod, former President Barack Obama’s top political aide.

The results of the election, however, speak for themselves. The predicted Republican “red wave” disappeared before it reached shore, with the GOP only picking up 8 seats to narrowly take control of the House. It could still lose one seat in the Senate. Democrats flipped control of more governorships and state legislature chambers than Republicans. And, most importantly, nearly all high-profile election deniers lost their races, including competitive secretary of state competitions in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota and Nevada and gubernatorial contests in swing states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Now, one poll of the 71 most competitive House districts backs up the importance of the democracy issue in Democrats’ midterm success. Concerns about threats to democracy motivated Democrats and independents to turn out while also helping independents decide to vote for Democrats, according to a voter survey from Nov. 11-16 by Impact Research, a Democratic polling firm.

“The biggest takeaway here is just how important protecting democracy was for voters in this House battlefield immediately coming out of the election,” said Molly Murphy, the president of Impact Research, which conducted the survey for Democratic Party-aligned political action committees End Citizens United and Let America Vote.

Six in 10 voters cited protecting democracy as an extremely important reason that they decided to vote in November. This put the issue ahead of inflation (53%), abortion (47%) and crime (45%). When asked to choose the top two issues that motivated them to vote, 50% chose protecting democracy, second only to inflation at 55%.

These findings are largely in line with preelection surveys from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CBS News, NBC News, Quinnipiac University Poll and the Grinnell College National Poll, as well as exit polling from The Associated Press, NBC News and CNN.

The issue of democracy “was really one of the most dominant factors” for Democrats and independents in determining whether they would turn out and “decisive in decision-making in terms of whether independent voters were going to vote for the Democratic candidate or the Republican candidate,” Murphy said.

Apparently, many, many Americans will vote on concerns that are not directly connected to their pocket books. Not everything is about money after all…

How they plan to discredit the January 6th Committee and protect Donald Trump

Greg Sargent is right about this:

As Republicans prepare to take over the House, they clearly see oneof their highest missions as transformingthe lower chamber into Donald Trump’s 24/7 personal shield against accountability. They are signaling plans for “investigations” next year designed chiefly to discredit revelations about Trump’s effort to destroy U.S. democracy.

Democrats can get ready for this now. The Jan. 6 select committee probing Trump’s insurrection can release the maximum amount of investigative material before Republicans take over next month, making it harder for them to distort its findings. As Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), a committee member, told me: “Releasing all of it is important.”

Just how important was emphasized thisweek, when House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) tipped his hand about GOP strategy in a way that passed largely unnoticed. In a letter dripping with a contrived, ominous tone, the man who hopes to be speaker instructed committee chair Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) to “preserve all records collected and transcripts of testimony taken,” suggesting Republicans intend to scrutinize those findings in the majority.

The letter made news, even though the committee is already required by law to preserve all records and transcripts. The GOP majority will have access to all those records no matter what the committee publicly releases.

But buried in the letter is a cryptic reference with ugly implications for what’s to come. McCarthy wrote that Republicans want those materials preserved “with an eye toward encouraged enforcement of 18 USC 1001,” with no further comment.

What does that mean? Well, that statute criminalizes lying to Congress. From that, I think, we can glean what might beone of the House GOP’s coming schemes: Dig through transcripts and other material to twist committee findings into “proof” that key elements of the anti-Trump testimony were deceptive, or even perjury.

That could function as a pretext to haul witnesses back for another grilling from Republicans. This would be deliberate spectacle: By publicly flogging witnesses who most damaged Trump, Republicans would provide grist for right-wing media to claim the most damning revelations had been decisively discredited, no matter what the facts show.

NYU law professor Ryan Goodman, who has closely tracked the Jan. 6 investigation, agrees Republicans have tipped their hand. “They appear to be devising a tactic to try to undermine testimony, to the end of satisfying Trump and the far-right parts of the party,” Goodman told me.

As Goodman noted, Republicans don’t even have to grill witnesses again (which could backfire with sympathetic ones such as former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson). They could simply cherry-pick from full transcripts in ways designed to distort their actual testimony.

“There’s no reason to think they will faithfully examine the transcripts,” Goodman said. “They’ll quite likely selectively use quotes just to create the appearance of contradictions or false statements.”

Of course, there’s plenty of devastating witness testimony to try to distort. Former Justice Department officials testified that Trump pressured them to manufacture the appearance of fraud. State officials testified that Trump pushed them to corruptly help subvert his loss.

And former White House lawyers and aides testified that Trump pressured his vice president to obstruct the election’s certification in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021. They also recounted fearing Trump had incited the mob to finish that job through violence, and that Trump deliberately did nothing when the mob attacked.

To see why targeting all this is critical for Republicans, note that one of those witnesses, former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, has been ordered to testify before a grand jury in connection with the Justice Department’s criminal investigation of Trump’s 2020 insurrection efforts.

That investigation is now being overseen by a special counsel, Jack Smith.As Goodman notes, McCarthy’s hint that Republicans will “reveal” that Jan. 6 witnesses perjured themselves shows how they’ll try to counter the special counsel’s investigation, which is plainly growing more serious.

“Whether intentional or not,” Goodman told me, “these efforts could muddy the waters of the special counsel’s investigation, at a minimum in the mind of the public.”

They want to verbally beat the shit out of Cassidy Hutchinson. That is their plan. I hope she calls up Hillary Clinton to get pointers on how to withstand their special brand of asinine grilling. I think she’s up for it, don’t you?

This piece in the Washington Monthly rings true to me. He gets the moment better than any other Democrat IMO. Whether he can help the Dems or carve out a future path for himself remains to be seen. It will be interesting to see how he rolls:

The midterm elections had some clear winners, starting with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whose in-your-face politics and wide victory margin continued to impress Republican donors. With less attention from the media herd, California Governor Gavin Newsom coasted to an electoral win equally as decisive as DeSantis (around 59 percent for both)—and gave his brand of Democratic politics a major jolt of validation.

Newsom took on DeSantis with a variety of public taunts this year on the bet that the politics of trolling was a growth stock. DeSantis’s ugly use of migrants, untoward battles with Disney, and demagoguing of the trans community triggered a response from the California governor, who placed ads in Florida media markets urging residents who believe in freedom to move to his state. The investment paid off, leaving Newsom as one of the few Democrats positioned to spar with the pugilistic Florida governor and get anywhere.

Newsom, I expect, is just getting started, though not in the way many national prognosticators have been projecting. He will continue to have fun taking shots at the strutting self-caricature in Florida for the simple reason that, so far, it’s been working.

Newsom’s tactics, from challenging DeSantis to a debate to running ads in Florida, might have been written off in Beltway journalism circles as “obvious” preparation for a 2024 Newsom presidential run should Joe Biden decline to seek a second term.

But that’s highly unlikely. One former Democratic governor I talked with about Newsom recently said Newsom knows it’s highly unlikely an opportunity would open up next year to run for president. First, he knows that Biden is planning on running again, barring unforeseen developments. If Biden does not run, Newsom’s fellow Californian, Vice President Kamala Harris, would deserve the respect of putting together her own run—and would, I’m told, have the endorsements not only of Representative Jim Clyburn, the South Carolina kingmaker whose approval proved so pivotal to Biden in 2020, but possibly of Barack Obama as well. Newsom can’t try to roll over Harris, the next in line and an African American woman when African American women are essential to the party. No, Newsom is exploring the art of the political hack, as we would call it here in Northern California, since he understands that nothing else cuts through autopilot journalism and the amygdala overload of social media.

Hence, the former governor told me, if you’re Newsom, “why not have your fun?”

Few were surprised here in California when Newsom firmly pledged to serve his four-year term.

This leads us back to Newsom’s attempts at what everyone in Silicon Valley used to call “disruption.” As the Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. wrote earlier this fall, Newsom stood up for the fundamental democratic value of fighting for what you believe instead of letting the exasperating crazy energy of the MAGA right run rampant and “earned the gratitude of many in his party who are tired of being pushed around.” Newsom told Dionne, “I’m trying to change the narrative because I think they’re dominating the narrative.”

The best way to do that is through political hacking. To the public, “hacking” mainly involves infiltrating a computer system and collecting data. Hackers themselves see what they do much differently. I’ll never forget attending a hacker convention in the Netherlands for Wired.com in August 2001 and listening to the testimonial of the Chaos Computer Club cofounder Wau Holland, who might be called one of the founders of the hacking movement.

A hacker, Holland believed, always sought to impact public opinion through timely actions that played off of ill-founded perceptions. As I wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle, in 1984, Holland and another hacker “found a security hole in Germany’s archaic Btx network, which they pointed out to authorities—and were ignored. To make their point, the pair hacked into the system using the password of the Hamburg savings bank—and ran up the equivalent of roughly $50,000 in credit to the CCC account. Then they went to the media with the story, which caused a major stir in West Germany.”

To Trump and his fellow MAGA-style politicians, politics is poll-driven entertainment for cash, and it takes a certain amount of flair—and fearlessness—to combat that. The Newsom barbs at DeSantis—like President Biden’s unfairly dismissed speeches on the importance of fighting for democracy—seem far more in line with where the electorate turned out to be than the media horde or even bedwetting Democrats.

Will Newsom ever run for president? My guess is yes, just not any year soon. In the short run, his connection with Silicon Valley optimism and can-do dynamism has become more of a liability in an era when wealthy buffoons turn major social media platforms into playthings. (Politico reported that Newsom had been in touch with the White House to confirm that he would firmly support Biden for reelection—and would not mount a primary challenge.)

Over the long run, being from California is an asset, not just because of the state’s size, but also because, despite GOP efforts to portray it as one big homeless encampment, it is the future. Newsom has yoked his fortune to his state; he is California, making him both a juggernaut and a work in progress. He’s taken fascinating steps, signing an executive order last August to halt sales of new gas-powered cars in California by 2035, for example, which fits with the state’s requirement that all new homes come equipped with solar power, as examples of a serious push toward reducing emissions. There’s never been a Democratic president from California, but Newsom could be the first.

You can’t write about Newsom without mentioning some glaring vulnerabilities. The national press naturally wore itself out with references to Newsom’s peak-of-the-COVID-era gaffe of having dinner at an exclusive Napa restaurant, with some claiming—from a considerable distance—that the French Laundry fiasco might end up getting Newsom recalled from office. To Californians, that was funny. The recall effort, widely seen as a clumsy right-wing attempt to smear a rising Democratic star, was voted down by 62 to 38 percent. The degree of suspense was the same as John Belushi’s grade-point average in Animal House: 0.0.

“A lot of the California recall coverage was absurd,” the late, great press critic Eric Boehlert, author of Lapdogs: How the Press Lay Down for Bush, told me last year. “The D.C. press swooped in all summer to push the story line that Newsom ‘could’ lose. They love the ‘Dems in disarray’ narrative.”

When I spent some time with candidate Newsom, interviewing him for a 2018 New York Times piece on the Californization of America, he was lugging around a thick volume of Robert F. Kennedy’s letters, almost apologizing for how often he was then dipping into the book for inspiration. Newsom’s political polestars are the idealism and thoughtfulness the Kennedys at their best represent to him and the pragmatism and optimism of Bill Clinton. If he could package a mix of those qualities, it could boost his appeal outside of California. Still, alas, the comparison with the Kennedys and Clinton comes with some unwanted associations.

Back to Newsom’s days as a young operator in San Francisco—founder of PlumpJack Wine and friend of California power families, though raised by a single working mother—Newsom was annoying people, what with his slicked-back hair and distracting good looks and showing up often in the society pages with glamorous dates on his arm. He married one San Francisco attorney/party girl, Kimberly Guilfoyle, long before her days as a Fox star, Don Jr.’s arm candy, and the shrieking Joker of Trump World, which indicates lousy luck or an eye for political talent, depending on your viewpoint. Newsom’s moved well beyond his wild youth and settled into fatherhood and marriage. But he still inspires prurient interest, as when he traveled to LA this month with his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, to support her as she went through the horrific ordeal of testifying against Harvey Weinstein.

Newsom would be wise to make himself more of a national voice on immigration and directly take on the Fox News–MAGA foundry spewing anti-immigrant hysteria. He could do worse than to point out that hurricane-battered Southwest Florida is only going to be rebuilt by immigrants like the ones DeSantis was using as props by sending them to Martha’s Vineyard.

The myth of an “exodus” from California, pushed by the right-wing noise machine, missed California’s embrace of immigration. It attracts immigrants from other countries who resettle in other states. California’s tiny drops in population in the past two years—in January 2022, the decrease over the previous January was all of .3 percent—was mostly about sputtering immigration. Numbers are numbers. For 2022, the decline was 117,552, according to state figures. Foreign immigration brought in 43,300 that year, compared to an average rate of 140,000 before the pandemic. As Walter Schwarm, the lead demographer for the California Department of Finance told me during the pandemic: “Due to COVID, international migration was more or less halted.”

Newsom has earned the right to pressure the Biden administration, which has not done enough to boost those numbers to pre-pandemic levels, especially regarding skilled high-tech workers. A 2018 Seattle Times analysis found that 71 percent of tech workers in and around San Jose were foreign-born, and California needs that influx to bring fresh talent and innovation.

If Newsom could make a case for a multiethnic immigration economy fused with an orderly border that Americans demand, he could become an essential part of a national dialogue on renewal.

The most crucial thing Newsom has shown is a capacity for growth. He went through an over-the-top wonky phase as governor. Last year, the San Francisco Chronicle political reporter Joe Garofoli wrote a hilarious and spot-on takedown of the gobbledygook Newsom speaking nonstop early in his time as governor, “Where ‘Saturday Night Live’ got Gavin Newsom wrong.” Like the former collegiate ballplayer he is, Newsom made adjustments. He’s dialed back language like “the iterative process” and more often talks like a regular guy.

Bill Clinton, who was the master of growing as a politician, once told me, talking about sports and politics, “All great contests are mind games.” Newsom may be one of the few Democrats of national standing who truly grasps the need to fight MAGA depravity with unpredictability and joy in combat, not just a dour civics lesson in the threat to democracy. In high school, when Newsom was a star two-sport athlete at Redwood High in Marin County, he refused to come out of the lineup despite a painful stress fracture. His basketball coach told a local paper at the time, “In all my thirty-seven years of coaching, I have never had a boy who has played with such consistent pain.” Said Newsom at the time: “There’s no way I’m giving it up. I love the game too much.”

I don’t know if he can go the distance. But I’m happy to see a fighter on the side of the good guys.

The right is turning social media into a hellscape

This piece by Charlie Wurtzel in the Atlantic lays it all out:

If you’re looking for a way to understand the right wing’s internet-poisoned, extremist trajectory, one great document is an infamous October 6 tweet from the House Judiciary GOP that read, “Kanye. Elon. Trump.” This tweet was likely intended to own the libs by adding Kanye to an informal, Avengers-style list of supposed free-speech warriors and truth tellers—a variation, perhaps, on the sort of viral meme that the Trump camp deployed during the 2016 election. (Remember the “Deplorables”?) It was written in support of the rapper Kanye West, now known as Ye, shortly after he wore a white lives matter shirt during one of his fashion shows.

This was just the beginning of a shocking two-month spiral of anti-Semitic rhetoric that has led to the undoing of Ye’s business empire and his full transformation into arguably the most openly bigoted famous person in American life. Throughout this grim unraveling—which has as its backdrop Ye’s ongoing mental-health issues—he has been thoroughly embraced by right-wing media as well as prominent white nationalists. He has also been active on the Republican political scene, most recently dining with former President Donald Trump and the white supremacist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago.

All throughout, the @JudiciaryGOP tweet stayed up. Over the past eight weeks, people have used it as a barometer for what kind of awful behavior the GOP will accept. And so it is notable that, yesterday afternoon, it was finally deleted after Ye’s calamitous appearance on Alex Jones’s Infowars broadcast. Wearing a black face mask, Ye drank Yoo-hoo, read from the Bible, and repeatedly and enthusiastically offered his praise for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis (“They did good things, too”) while spewing anti-Semitic rhetoric alongside Fuentes.

Ye’s Infowars disaster is emblematic of something that seems to be happening across the far right. Although their messaging is always noxious and hateful, right-wing shock jocks and politicians like to employ thinly veiled innuendo and dog whistles to rally their audience. The game is to push the boundaries of social acceptability but leave just enough room to deny culpability when things go off the rails. Then they can blame political opponents for bias and censorship when they’re criticized or suspended by the supposedly “woke” left.

But things are taking a turn, and it’s not just about Ye. Though it’s always been a sewage system for political sludge, Twitter has recently lifted its floodgates under Elon Musk’s ownership, reinstating banned accounts, suspending researchers without cause, and drastically reducing content moderation overall. The New York Times reported today that hate speech has “soared” on the platform in the weeks since Musk’s takeover. And there’s reason to suspect that things may get even worse: Musk said yesterday that he wants to foreground “view count” on every tweet, which could encourage attention-grabbing and incendiary posts even more than the platform already does.

It’s a dog-catches-car moment: Republicans are getting what they asked (and tweeted) for, and finding that it makes them uncomfortable by association (in public at least). The makeshift walls have crumbled around the far right, and it’s flummoxing those who try to launder their message for a wider audience.

As Melissa Ryan, a progressive strategist who tracks the far right, told Semafor’s Dave Weigel earlier this week, Musk’s reinstating of banned right-wing accounts is “going to suck for Republicans … Some of these guys are going to go hog wild as soon as they can.”

Travis Brown, a researcher who has been tracking the reinstatement, has been struck by the rise in violent anti-Semitic rhetoric on the platform. “One thing that’s been remarkable to me is the sheer amount of blatant anti-Semitic stuff you can see,” he told me this week. “It’s much more on the surface recently. Click around in any of these Pepe avatar accounts and you will see jokes referencing 6 million cookies, which is a Holocaust reference.” Some of these accounts, Brown noted, have also thanked Musk for their reinstatement.

It’s well worth noting that researchers, academics, activists, politicians, and journalists covering the far right have been issuing warnings about this dynamic for years, sounding the alarm on the profound harm caused by the mainstream right’s embrace of anti-Semitic rhetoric and the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, as well as its associations with bigots. Though these problems do not begin and end with Trump, they’ve noted an acceleration of extremist and bigoted rhetoric that coincides with his descent down the golden escalator; his description of Mexicans as rapists; his refusal to condemn the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke; his mention of “good people on both sides” at the Charlottesville, Virginia, “Unite the Right” rally; and his flirtations with QAnon during his presidency (which became an open endorsement postpresidency).

All of which leads us to Ye, whose appearances on popular right-wing media channels have caused visible discomfort for shock jocks who love to toy with or even use hateful rhetoric in their broadcasts. On Monday, Ye and Fuentes appeared on Tim Pool’s popular YouTube channel. Before the show, Pool excitedly shared photos of Ye, Fuentes, and the noted troll Milo Yiannopoulos en route to the appearance in a private jet and hyped the broadcast on his Twitter feed. But during the show, Pool—who has recently begun monologuing about Great Replacement and has been called out by The Daily Beast for “dangerously whitewashing the far right”—was reduced to stammering as Ye went into a stream-of-consciousness riff about Jewish executives de-banking him and invoked Jared Kushner and Rahm Emanuel as members of a Jewish political conspiracy.

Pool appeared eager to try to sympathize with parts of Ye’s rhetoric. “I think they’ve been extremely unfair to you,” Pool said. But when Ye pushed back, asking, “Who is ‘they,’ though? We can’t say who ‘they’ is, can we?” Pool stammered and said he disagreed with the implication that Jews control the media. Ye walked out, leaving the host looking overwhelmed.

The dynamic was similar to Ye’s appearance yesterday on Infowars. Jones—who has made a career out of anti-Semitic dog whistling about a Jewish-controlled media, egged on birtherism, and spread lies that the Sandy Hook shooting was a “false flag” operation—seemed uncharacteristically rattled as Ye began talking favorably about Hitler. He tried to give the rapper an out, saying, “You’re not Hitler. You’re not a Nazi.” But, as in other appearances, Ye seemed almost delighted not to take it. “Well, I see good things about Hitler, also,” he responded. “Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler.” Later on, in a jarring exchange just before a commercial break, Jones clarified for his audience that “I don’t like Nazis.” Ye, sneaking in the last word, shot back, “I like Hitler.” Jones can’t recontextualize this moment or accuse the media of misrepresenting what happened on Infowars yesterday. It was hours of Nazi sympathizing. There’s a small difference between this and Jones’s generally repugnant broadcasts—which have cost him dearly, thanks to a series of defamation cases—but it’s a meaningful one.

We should not mince words: The normalization and increase of this rhetoric are terrifying and threatening in a country that continues to watch as extremists commit hate crimes against people of color, religious minorities, and LGBTQ communities. At the same time, it is unclear what it means for politicians and launderers of the extremist right when the rules of the game change. It seems that the far right, which has longed for the marketplace of ideas to turn into a free-speech-maximalist thunderdome, is going to be forced to test how the rest of the country feels about having its most vile and extreme views amplified as explicitly as possible.

It’s easy enough for them to tell us that we don’t have to participate if we don’t want to be in a place where people can anonymously hurl vile insults at us night and day and overwhelm the conversations with degrading commentary just for the lulz. That is what online spaces turn into when you have no moderation. I learned that the hard way when I had a lively comment section that became nothing more than a repository for insults toward me 24/7 and I just finally closed it down. But these spaces have become important for activism, journalism and general information gathering and it’s a real problem that they are being turned into hellholes.

This is what they wanted, a universe where right wing bullies just run off decent people and the gullible and naive (especially the young) come to believe their dystopia is normal discourse. The promise of the internet is rapidly turning into The Lord of the Flies.