Month: December 2022

If only…

Meet reflexive bitterness

President Joe Biden, a famously observant Roman Catholic, issued a Christmas message from the White House Thursday afternoon, in part:

There is a certain stillness at the center of the Christmas story.  A silent night when all the world goes quiet and all the glamour, all the noise, everything that divides us, everything that pits us against one another, everything — everything that seems so important but really isn’t, this all fades away in stillness of the winter’s evening. 

And we look to the sky, to a lone star, shining brighter than all the rest, guiding us to the birth of a child — a child Christians believe to be the son of God; miraculously now, here among us on Earth, bringing hope, love and peace and joy to the world.

The “smallest act of kindness can mean so much,” Biden said. “A simple smile. A hug. An unexpected phone call. A quiet cup of coffee.” Simple acts of kindness can not only “provide comfort” but “perhaps maybe even save a life.”

“So, this Christmas, let’s spread a little kindness,” Biden concluded.

Nonetheless, since Henry Ford, American conservatives have insisted our holiday traditions include diatribes against secularization (and Jews). Since at least the birth of Fox News, the modern “War on Christmas” tradition has brought comfort and joy to those whose knee-jerk reaction to “Good morning!” is a bitter “What’s good about it?!”

Far-right cable news network Newsmax is really scraping the bottom of the outrage du jour barrel this holiday season by condemning Biden’s use of “son of God” in his Christmas message without naming Jesus. Actor/director/producer Kevin Sorbo complains to Newsmax that devout Catholics Biden and Nancy Pelosi are phony Christians. Former Dukes of Hazzard actor John Schneider asks why Biden can’t just say “ ‘Jesus Christ is my Lord and savior,’ and I will run my country under His guidelines?”

Um, because the U.S. is not a theocracy? (Yet.)

“Satan never mentions Jesus by name, he is afraid of God,” responds Twitter/Truth Social/GETTR user Hamlet Garcia.

Conservatives Outraged Joe Biden Didn’t Say ‘Jesus’ in Christmas Message, blares Newsweek. Father Gerald Murray of the Archdiocese of New York is upset. Former Representative Doug Collins, Republican of Georgia, is upset. And Heritage Foundation’s Kara Frederick.

Which is plenty odd because, well:

Many Names, One Meaning says the Museum of the Bible. 50 Names and Titles of Jesus, says pastor’s wife Debbie McDaniel at Crosswalk blog.

Oh, we can do better than that, says Christ Unlimited Ministries: All the Names of Jesus (over 100). And Ralph Andrus of Faithlife Sermons: 100 Names of Jesus (another 100+).

And not to be outdone, Believers Portal offers: The Over 200 Names & Titles Of Jesus Christ Found In The Bible. They even include a Wordle.

Biden could have read them all and still be condemned. It’s how some Christians celebrate “the reason for the season.”

Happy Hollandaise!

A few minutes of comfort music

The bomb cyclone still battering much of the country with insane cold and wind may be the worst ever for Buffalo, New York, said Erie County executive Mark C. Poloncarz on Saturday. Hundreds were stranded in restaurants or stuck in cars Friday night beyond the reach of rescuers.

A Buffalo physician “was coaching over the phone as a woman delivered her sister’s baby at home,” the Washington Post reports.

“[L]ife-threatening lows … blizzards and floods …. left more than a quarter million people without power on Christmas Day” across the country, CNN adds.

The Southeast saw rolling blackouts on Saturday as Duke Energy and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) tried to cope with electrical demand that threatened to crash their grids.

Whether you’re snug inside this morning or stuck in an airport — and not in your car in a blizzard, we hope — let me regift you a few minutes of peace on Earth. The last few days have been so hectic, I almost forgot about this charming video from 2018:

My wife received this new music video the other day via IM from Robert Henderson, one of the songwriter/producers, an old acquaintance. The images are arresting and beautiful. The song is soothing and stays with you. It has been the best Christmas gift so far this year. We’ve played it over and over. (Watch the sun traverse at timestamp 1:35.)

Thank you for visiting with us every day. It is a privilege (and a coping mechanism) in these stressful times to share this modest platform with Digby, Dennis, and our friends. It means a lot.

Happy Hollandaise!

From your favorite president, not The Onion

Thank God he made it safe to say Merry Christmas again.

Happy F’in Hollandaise everyone!

The numbers tell the story

To all those Republicans celebrating Christmas this year, going to church, calling yourselves Christians: what the hell are you thinking?

No country has a perfect COVID vaccination rate, even this far into the pandemic, but America’s record is particularly dismal. About a third of Americans—more than a hundred million people—have yet to get their initial shots. You can find anti-vaxxers in every corner of the country. But by far the single group of adults most likely to be unvaccinated is Republicans: 37 percent of Republicans are still unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated, compared with 9 percent of Democrats. Fourteen of the 15 states with the lowest vaccination rates voted for Donald Trump in 2020. (The other is Georgia.)

We know that unvaccinated Americans are more likely to be Republican, that Republicans in positions of power led the movement against COVID vaccination, and that hundreds of thousands of unvaccinated Americans have died preventable deaths from the disease. The Republican Party is unquestionably complicit in the premature deaths of many of its own supporters, a phenomenon that may be without precedent in the history of both American democracy and virology.

Obviously, nothing about being a Republican makes someone inherently anti-vaccine. Many Republicans—in fact, most of them—have gotten their first two shots. But the wildly disproportionate presence of Republicans among the unvaccinated reveals an ugly and counterintuitive aspect of the GOP campaign against vaccination: At every turn, top figures in the party have directly endangered their own constituents. Trump disparaged vaccines while president, even after orchestrating Operation Warp Speed. Other politicians, such as Texas Governor Greg Abbott, made all COVID-vaccine mandates illegal in their state. More recently, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called for a grand jury to investigate the safety of COVID vaccines. The right-wing media have leaned even harder into vaccine skepticism. On his prime-time Fox News show, Tucker Carlson has regularly questioned the safety of vaccines, inviting guests who have called for the shots to be “withdrawn from the market.”

[…]

But to understand why Republicans have died at higher rates, you can’t look at vaccine status alone. Congressional districts controlled by a trifecta of Republican leaders—state governor, Senate, and House—had an 11 percent higher death rate, according to the Lancet study. A likely explanation, the authors write, could be that in the post-vaccine era, those leaders chose policies and conveyed public-health messages that made their constituents more likely to die. Although we still can’t say these decisions led to higher death rates, the association alone is jarring.

One of the most compelling studies comes from researchers at Yale, who published their findings as a working paper in November. They link political party and excess-death rate—the percent increase in deaths above pre-COVID levels—among those registered as either Democrats or Republicans, providing a more granular view. They chose to analyze data from Florida and Ohio from before and after vaccines were available. Looking at the period before the vaccine,  researchers found a 1.6 percentage-point difference in excess death rate among Republicans and Democrats, with a higher rate among Republicans. But after vaccines became available, that gap widened dramatically to 10.4 percentage points, again with a higher Republican excess death rate. “When we compare individuals who are of the same age, who live in the same county in the same month of the pandemic, there are differences correlated with your political-party affiliation that emerge after vaccines are available,” Jacob Wallace, an assistant professor of public health at Yale who co-authored the paper, told me. “That’s a statement we can confidently make based on the study and we couldn’t before.”

Even with this new research, it is difficult to determine just how many people died as a result of their political views. In the “excess death” study, researchers dealt only with rates of excess death, not actual death-toll numbers. Overall, excess deaths represent a small share of deaths. “On the scale of national registration for both parties,” Wallace said, “we’re talking about relatively small numbers and differences in deaths” when you look at excess death rates alone.

The absolute number of Republican deaths is less important than the fact that they happened needlessly. Vaccines could have saved lives. And yet, the party that describes itself as pro-life campaigned against them. Democrats are not without fault, though. The Biden administration’s COVID blunders are no doubt to blame for some of the nation’s deaths. But on the whole, Democratic leaders have mostly not promoted ideas or enforced policies around COVID that actively chip away at life expectancy. It is a tragedy that the Republican push against basic lifesaving science has cut lives short and continues to do so. The partisan divide in COVID deaths, Hanage said, is just “another example of how the partisan politics of the U.S. has poisoned the well of public health.”

What’s most concerning about all of this is that partisan disparities in death rates were also apparent before COVID. People living in Republican jurisdictions have been at a health disadvantage for more than 20 years. From 2001 to 2019, the death rate in Democratic counties decreased by 22 percent, according to a recent study; in Republican counties, it declined by only 11 percent. In the same time period, the political gap in death rates increased sixfold.

Health outcomes have been diverging at the state level since the ’90s, Steven Woolf, an epidemiologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, told me. Woolf’s work suggests that over the decades, state policy decisions on health issues such as Medicaid, gun legislation, tobacco taxes, and, indeed, vaccines have likely had a stronger impact on state health trajectories than other factors. COVID’s high Republican death rates are not an isolated phenomenon but a continuation of this trend. As Republican-led states pushed back on lockdowns, the impact on population death rates was observed within weeks, Woolf said.

If the issue is indeed systemic, that doesn’t bode well for the future. Other factors could explain the higher death rate in Republican-leaning places—more poverty, less education, worse socioeconomic conditions—, though Woolf said isn’t convinced that those factors aren’t related to bad state health policy too. In any case, the long-term decline of health in red states indicates that there is an ongoing problem at a high level in Republican-led places, and that something has gone awry. “If you happen to live in certain states, your chances for living a long life are going to be much higher than if you’re an American living in a different state,” Woolf said.

Unfortunately, this trend shows no signs of breaking. The anti-science messaging that fuels such a divide is popular with Republican leaders because it plays so well with their constituents. Far-right crowds cheer for missed vaccine targets and jokes about executing scientific leaders. In an environment where partisanship trumps all—including trying to save people’s lives—such messaging is both politically effective and morally abhorrent. The data, however imperfect, demand a reckoning with the consequences of such a strategy not only during the pandemic but over the past few decades, and in the years to come. But to acknowledge how many Republicans didn’t have to die would mean giving credence to scientific and medical expertise. So long as America remains locked in a poisonous partisan battle in which science is wrongly dismissed as being associated with the left, the death toll will only rise.

Honestly, to my mind, this remains the sickest thing they did. And while Trump bears responsibility for turning the pandemic into a culture war weapon, the lack of vaccination isn’t his fault. For that, look to the others, including our new GOP “mainstream” hero Ron DeSantis who sees this as his ticket to the White House.

I hope that everyone stays safe this holiday weekend. Take care of yourself and your loved ones. You can be sure that many of our Republican neighbors won’t do the right thing. They are literally dying for MAGA.

Happy Hollandaise folks.

I should have known that the Christmas celebration in India would be incredibly festive and colorful because India is incredibly festive and colorful. And I would love to try all this food. It’s got me salivating:

In the 1950s and ’60s, women baked cakes in the abandoned ammunition boxes left behind by British troops in the villages of Nagaland, a state in northeast India. The Naga writer Easterine Kire recalls how wives of Christian missionaries taught English and cake-baking to young girls, including her mother. While they didn’t really pick up the language, the tradition of baking cakes was passed down “from mother to daughter and from daughter to granddaughter.” It was the men who thought to repurpose the boxes — they were airtight, preserved heat well and fit perfectly over the wood fire. Since they had no temperature controls, the baker had to sit by the fire, constantly stoking it and eventually reducing it to embers. The timing had to be perfect: A minute too soon or too late could alter the fate of the cake. The boxes eventually ended up becoming part of a family’s heirloom until electric ovens became commonplace.

In the opposite corner of India, in Kerala in the deep south, several bakeries trace their history to the Mambally Royal Biscuit Factory in Thalassery, established in the late 19th century. Its founder, Mambally Bapu, is said to have baked India’s first Christmas cake. Bapu had trained as a baker in Burma (now Myanmar) to make cookies, bread and buns. When he set up shop in 1880, he made 140 varieties of biscuits. Three years later, the Scotsman Murdoch Brown, an East India Company spice planter, shared a sample of an imported Christmas plum pudding. Wanting to re-create this traditional recipe but unable to source French brandy, Bapu improvised with a local brew made from fermented cashew apples and bananas. He added some cocoa and — voila — the Indian Christmas cake was born.

The beauty of the Indian Christmas cake lies in its local variations. The Allahabadi version from north India features petha (candied ash gourd or white pumpkin) and ghee instead of butter, along with a generous helping of orange marmalade. Maharashtrians, in west India, add chironji, also known as cuddapah almonds. The black cake in Goa derives its color from a dark caramel sauce. In the south, in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, cashew nuts are added to the mix. The Indian version is “a close cousin” of British plum pudding, but it has no lard and is not steamed. “Indian Christians add a generous dose of hot spices such as nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves and shahi zeera (royal cumin seeds), roasted dry and then ground and added, also referred to as ‘cake masala,’” writes Jaya Bhattacharji Rose, an Indian publishing consultant, in “Indian Christmas,” an anthology of personal essays, poems, hymns and recipes.

“Our Christmas cakes reflect how India celebrates Christmas: with its own regional flair, its own flavor. Some elements are the same almost everywhere; others differ widely. What binds them together is that they are all, in their way, a celebration of the most exuberant festival in the Christian calendar,” writes Madhulika Liddle, co-editor of the anthology. Reading the book feels like a celebration in itself and makes one realize that Christians in India are as diverse as India, with Syrian Christians, Catholics, Baptists, Anglicans, Methodists, Lutherans and others. Though Christians make up just 2% of India’s population, this equates to some 28 million people.

Christianity came to India in waves. It is believed that Thomas the Apostle arrived in present-day Kerala in 52 CE and built the first church. Syrian Christians believe he died in what is now Chennai in Tamil Nadu. San Thome Basilica stands where some of his remains were buried. Toward the end of the 15th century, the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama landed on Indian shores, followed by others, paving the way for Portuguese colonies in the region. Christian missionaries, who set up Western educational institutes, spread the religion further. The trend continued under the British Empire.

What is unique about India is the “indigenization of Christmas,” notes Liddle. It can be seen in the regional dishes prepared for Christmas feasts and celebrations. Duck curry with appams (rice pancakes) is popular in Kerala, while Nagaland prefers pork curries, rich with chilies and bamboo shoots. In Goa, dishes with Portuguese origins, such as sausage pulao, sorpotel and xacuti, adorn the tables. Biryanis, curries and shami kababs are devoured across north India.

The same regional diversity can be seen in Christmas snacks. “East Indians,” a Christian community in Mumbai described as such for their close ties to the East India Company, fill their plates with milk creams, mawa-filled karanjis (pastry puffs filled with dried whole milk), walnut fudge, guava cheese and kulkuls (sweet fried dough curls). In Goa, a platter of confectioneries called kuswar is served, including kormolas, gons, doce and bolinhas, made with ingredients ranging from coconut to Bengal gram, a yellow lentil. In Kerala, rose cookies are popular. Common across north Indian Christian households are shakkarpara, a sweet fried dough, covered in syrup; namakpara, a savory fried dough studded with cumin seeds; gujiyas, crisp pastries with a sweetened mix of semolina, raisins and nuts; and baajre ki tikiyas, thin patties made from pearl millet flour sweetened with jaggery, an unrefined sugar.

Liddle, who used to spend the festival at her ancestral home in the north Indian town of Saharanpur, also tells us about a lesser-known variation of the Christmas cake: cake ki roti. (In Hindi, “roti” means “flatbread.”) Like most communities in India, many Christian families in north India buy the ingredients for the Christmas cake themselves and take them to a baker who will prepare it. Bakers used to make the Christmas cake by the quintal (220 pounds) or more, and cake ki roti was a byproduct of that large-scale baking. The leftover Christmas cake batter was “not enough for an entire tin, not so little that it can be thrown away,” Liddle explained. So the baker would add flour and make a dough out of it. “It would be shaped into a large, flat disc and baked till it was golden and biscuity,” she said. The resulting cake ki roti may have “stray bits of orange peel or candied fruit, a tiny piece of nut here or there, a faint whiff of the spices … It was not even the ghost of the cake. A mere memory, a hint of Christmas cake.” Since cake ki roti was considered “too pedestrian,” it wasn’t served to the guests. Instead, it would be reserved until the New Year and eaten only after all the other snacks were gone.

Jerry Pinto, co-editor and contributor to “Indian Christmas,” recalled his childhood Christmases in Mumbai. There may not have been much snow in this tropical city, but wintry scenes of London and New York adorned festive cards and storybooks, and children would decorate the casuarina tree with cotton balls, assuming it to be pine. The mood would be set with an old Jim Reeves album featuring “White Christmas.” “Where do old songs from the U.S. go to die? They go to Goan Roman Catholic homes and parties,” quipped Pinto. Raisins would be soaked in rum in October, and cakes baked at an Iranian bakery. Every year, there was a debate about whether marzipan should be made with or without almond skins. The “good stuff” meant milk creams and cake slices with luscious raisins, while rose cookies and the neoris (sweet dumplings made of maida or flour and stuffed with coconut, sugar, poppy seeds, cardamom and almonds) were just plate-fillers.

The feasting is accompanied by midnight mass, communal decorations and choral music, with carols sung in Punjabi, Tamil, Hindi, Munda, Khariya, Mizo tawng, as well as English. “One of our favorite carols was a Punjabi one, which we always sang with great gusto: ‘Ajj apna roop vataake / Aaya Eesa yaar saade paas’ [‘Today, having changed His form / Jesus comes to us, friend’],” Liddle remembered.

Starting as early as October, it would not be unusual to hear Christmas classics by Boney M., ABBA and Reeves in Nagaland’s Khyoubu village. “The post-harvest life of the villagers is usually a restful period, mostly spent in a recreational mood until the next cycle of agricultural activities begins in the new year,” wrote Veio Pou, who grew up in Nagaland.

“Christmas is a time when invitations are not needed. Friends can land … at each other’s homes any time on Christmas Eve to celebrate. … The nightly silence is broken, and the air rings with Christmas carols and soul, jazz and rock music. Nearly every fourth person in Shillong plays the guitar, so there’s always music, and since nearly everyone sings, it’s also a time to sing along, laugh and be merry,” wrote Patricia Mukhim, editor of Shillong Times, a local newspaper in the northeastern state of Meghalaya.

Neighborhoods in areas with Christian populations, like Goa and Kerala, are lit up weeks in advance with fairy lights, paper lanterns and Christmas stars. In Mizoram’s capital of Aizawl, local authorities hold a competition every Christmas for the best-decorated neighborhood, with a generous prize of 500,000 rupees ($6,000) awarded to the winner. This event is gradually becoming a tourist attraction.

Rural India has its own norms and traditions. In the villages of the Chhota Nagpur region, mango leaves, marigolds and paper streamers decorate homes, and locally available sal or mango trees are decorated instead of the traditional evergreen conifer. The editor Elizabeth Kuruvilla recalled that her mother had stars made of bamboo at her childhood home in Edathua, a village in Kerala’s Alappuzha district. The renowned Goan writer Damodar Mauzo, who grew up in a Hindu household, said his family participates in many aspects of the Christmas celebrations in the village, including hanging a star in the “balcao” (“balcony”), making a crib and attending midnight mass.

In the Anglo-Indian enclave of Bow Barracks in Kolkata, Santa Claus comes to the Christmas street party in a rickshaw — the common form of public transport in South Asia. “Kolkata’s Bengali and non-Bengali revelers now throng the street, lined by two rows of red-brick terrace apartment buildings, to witness the music and dance and to buy the home-brewed sweet wine and Christmas cake that some of the Anglo-Indian families residing there make,” wrote the journalist Nazes Afroz. Bow Barracks was built to house the Allied forces stationed in Kolkata during World War I, after which they were rented out to the city’s Christian families.

Kolkata also is home to a tiny community of about 100 Armenian Christians, who celebrate Christmas on Jan. 6, in line with the Armenian Apostolic Church. Many break their weeklong fast at the Christmas Eve dinner, known as “Khetum.” The celebration begins with an afternoon mass on Christmas Eve followed by a home blessing ceremony to protect people from misfortune, held at the Armenian College and Philanthropic Society, an important institution for the community. The Khetum arranged for the staff members and students includes a customary pilaf with raisins and fish and anoush abour, an Armenian Christmas pudding made with wheat, berries and dried apricots, among other dishes. The Christmas lunch also includes traditional Armenian dishes such as dolma (ground meat and spices stuffed into grape leaves) and harissa, a porridge-like stew made with chicken, served with a garnish of butter and sprinkled ground cumin.

“Missionaries to Indian shores, whether St. Thomas or later evangelists from Portugal, France, Britain or wherever, brought us the religion; we adopted the faith but reserved for ourselves the right to decide how we’d celebrate its festivals,” Liddle wrote. “We translated the Bible into our languages. We translated their hymns and composed many of our own. We built churches which we at times decorated in our own much-loved ways.”

People deciding for themselves how to celebrate the religion is, I think, one of the reasons Christianity was able to spread the way it did. This celebration sounds delicious!

Happy Hollandaise!

*scroll down for newer posts

Happy Christmas Eve, everyone! I also hope that whatever you celebrate this holiday season, whether it’s religious, secular tradition or just a nice winter break, that it’s everything you wished for. (And I hope that very few of you are reading this sitting in an airport waiting for your delayed flights to take off…oy.)

I just want to take a moment here because it’s Saturday, to thank my good friend Dennis Hartley for his work week in and week out bringing us film reviews, curated lists of music and humorous insights on culture and politics every weekend for more than a decade. He’s got a new one coming up tonight. And his playlist from last week might come in handy today if you’re looking for a respite from the same old Christmas music.

I’ve known Dennis for most of my life and he’s the first person I turn to for a movie recommendation or a fun playlist. I am so grateful that he shares his insights and knowledge here each week. (You can get even more Dennis at Denofcinema.com.)

Cheers! Have a wonderful weekend everyone. We’ll still be churning it out all this Christmas week (maybe just a teensy bit tipsy from time to time) so please stop by if you want to catch up.

And if you’d like to slip a little something into the Hullabaloo stocking to help keep this old blog going for another year, you can hit one of the buttons below. Happy Hollandaise!

Tucker Carlson has a sick obsession with Ukraine. He even went after his erstwhile ally Lindsey Graham over it this week in an extremely crude fashion:

On Thursday, Carlson attacked Graham over his support for U.S. aid to Ukraine in its war against Russia, which invaded the country in February. The Fox News host’s remarks came a day after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed a joint session of Congress.

Graham had said the war will end when President Vladimir Putin is no longer in power. Carlson said calling for regime change in Russia is wrongheaded.

“So, the other day Lindsey Graham came out–” Carlson began, taking a long pause “–the Republican from South Carolina, and said that he agreed with Joe Biden and Zelensky.”

Some have speculated about the sexuality of Graham, who is a bachelor.

“And you don’t want to play shrink and wonder about, you know, what emptiness at the core of Lindsey Graham’s personal life causes him to identify so strongly with a country he’s not a citizen of,” Carlson declared. “Something’s going on there.”

I mean … that’s Fox News saying that, not some snarky blogger.

Greg Sargent took a deeper dive into Carlson’s Ukraine crusade and it’s disturbing:

After Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a rousing speech to U.S. lawmakers this week, Tucker Carlson unleashed a diatribe that put schoolyard sadists everywhere to shame. “No one’s ever addressed the United States Congress in a sweatshirt before,” he seethed, slamming Zelensky as a “strip club” manager whose presence was “humiliating” to “the greatest country on Earth.”

Carlson’s attack on the Ukrainian president, whose olive green garb was meant to dramatize his country’s wartime plight, has sparked outrage because of its demeaning quality at a time of extraordinary duress for the Ukrainian people. But this episode deserves a deeper look than Carlson’s adolescent belittling usually merits.

Carlson’s rant carried a more hateful edge than usual, a kind of shrill fury. Perhaps that’s because Zelensky’s presence before Congress was far more humiliating to Carlson and his ideological comrades than to anyone else: It demonstrated how badly they misjudged Ukraine’s will to resist Russian conquest and the durability of the U.S. commitment to our beleaguered ally.

This represents the failure of a worldview, a strain of far-right authoritarian populism, that goes well beyond Ukraine. A whole lot of things have happened that — in Carlson’s mental universe — were not supposed to happen.

In his diatribe, Carlson depicted Zelensky as little more than a sleazy street thug who had come to “demand money” from Congress, telling his audiencethat thelawmakers “love him much more than they love you.” He exaggerated Ukraine’s conditions for ending the war, depicting Ukraine as the unreasonable party.

Carlson has long insisted that Ukrainians are “pawns” in the United States’ quest for “regime change” in Russia, predicting our warmongering would trigger nuclear catastrophe. He has trivialized the invasion as a faraway “border dispute,” and has scoffed that Democrats are hypnotizing Americans into feeling “hate” for Russia.

Carlson’s obvious bet has been that voters wouldn’t care about the conflict and would see little virtue in U.S. military aid to Ukraine. Lawmakers would ultimately abandon the cause.

But Zelensky’s appearance itself forcefully repudiated all of this. It demonstrated that Ukrainian resistance is driven by its people’s own extraordinarily courageous commitment to self rule. It showed that U.S. support for Ukraine is unwavering. It displayed the success of President Biden’s careful balance, which has enabled Ukraine to regain substantial ground while avoiding direct U.S. escalation, refuting Carlson’s predictions otherwise.

There is an ideology behind all that wrongness, and Carlson has clearly laid it out. It tells Americans that Democratic elites prioritize Ukraine’s border over our own — they love Zelensky more than they love you. Thisconflation of the two borders, a widespread right-wing populist trope, encourages Americans to turn inward in multiple ways, washing our hands of responsibility for international allies and desperate migrants alike.

This worldview also rails against elite wokeness. Carlson frequently tells viewers that the same elites who want people to hate Russia and are obliterating the southern border are also brainwashing kids with anti-White racism.

As Cathy Young writes at the Bulwark, right-wing populist distaste for Zelensky is driven partly by Ukraine’s desire for integration with the liberal, secular, internationalism-minded West. That through-line links attacks on elite wokeness, pro-Ukraine sentiment and receptiveness to migration.

As a political argument, all this has proved pretty impotent.

Just before the midterm elections, Carlson wrongly predicted a “humiliating repudiation” for Democrats. Importantly, Carlson based this in part on Democrats’ wokeness and border policies, hubristically certain that voters would reject both.

The piece then lays out the record of Carlson’s electoral losses here and around the world and his assaults on the January 6th Committee and the Mar-a-Lago case. It’s almost as bad as Trump’s.

There have been a number of long form profiles of Carlson over the past year or so since he’s become the most popular cable news host in America. He hob nobs with all kinds of influential wingnuts and openly endorses the Victor Orban white nationalist ideology. And he’s apparently really obsessed with making money. So his motives all seem on the surface to be rational, if evil.

But I have to say that more and more I think there’s actually something wrong with him. Taking that kind of swipe at Graham doesn’t appear to me to be calculated, That’s the kind of thing a 13 year old says when they’re experiencing an emotional tidal wave. It’s possible that he thought it through as a way to tickle the pro-Putin, anti-gay, anti-RINO lizard brain but that’s a stretch. It sounds like he was just having a bit of a tantrum.

Not that it matters. He is a blight on American politics, a Father Coughlin for our times. He’s showing that there are no limits for him. He’s dangerous.

If you’d like to slip a little something into the Hullabaloo stocking to help keep this old blog going for another year, you can hit one of the buttons below. Happy Hollandaise!

Did the Willard Hotel get memory-holed?

Been watching for mention in the J6 reporting and transcripts of the connection between the Willard Hotel war rooms and the January 6th insurrection. There is still a lot to review in the new transcripts, but so far it has been mighty slim.

The Willard “has been asked to provide information for us,” committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson told Dana Bash in January, but there is precious little so far to indicate what, if anything, his team obtained. There are only two mentions of the Willard Hotel in the J6 final report (pg. 518).

The J6 committeee lacked the power to immunize the players who strategized there on behalf of Donald Trump, as Jennifer Rubin notes:

The House committee lacked the ability to immunize witnesses to obtain cooperation. But special counsel Jack Smith, whom Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed to oversee investigations into Trump, does have that power. He will therefore be able to probe further to answer questions. For example: What communication took place between the White House and the Trump team’s “command center” at the Willard Hotel? How much did Trump know about the violent groups he was inciting?

Clearly, Rep. Liz Cheney went gunning for the president who hijacked her party. The 845-page report has a heavy focus on the godfather behind the insurrection, as Mary Wheeler finds, but leaves out a lot Jack Smith will want to examine:

Some of those blind spots were created by the limits on the Committee’s investigative authorities, some were created by the Committee’s (perhaps resultant) limited understanding of the attack.

To demonstrate those blind spots, I wanted to show what the report includes in the body of the report about December 27 (some of these may be out of order and I need to clean it up, but this will be a useful demonstration). Here are things that happened on December 27, 2020:

• Bernie Kerik publicly attacks Pat Toomey for opposing fraud (the Report ties this attacks to physical threats against officials opposed to Trump’s fraud)
• Mark Meadows continues to pressure Georgia
• Doug Mastriano speaks to Trump and feeds members of Congress bullshit
• Trump attempts to get Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Donoghue to endorse his fraud message and — failing that — threatens to replace Rosen
• With Trump’s blessing, Louie Gohmert files suit against Mike Pence
• Trump pardons Stone and they talk about January 6
• Trump gets more involved in planning January 6, which leads to a plan to have his supporters march on the Capitol and then a plan for him to march
• The FBI creates a system to collect threats related to the “election certification” on January 6 by using a tag, “CERTUNREST

Some of these events (such as the Louie Gohmert lawsuit) were obviously in the work before December 27, but this provides a good read of where the parallel strands of the attack were on that particular day.

But given what we know, the far most important event of the day was the increased involvement by the White House in January 6. This was the moment the plans for January 6 started becoming a plan for a coup.

Without the communications of many of the key players outside the White House and Congress, we still do not know. But the Washington Post in October 2021 had this to report about the team assembled at the Willard to help Trump:

They were led by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani. Former chief White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon was an occasional presence as the effort’s senior political adviser. Former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik was there as an investigator. Also present was John Eastman, the scholar, who outlined scenarios for denying Biden the presidency in an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 4 with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.

Also among those present at the Willard were Boris Epshteyn, much mentioned in the report as a member of Giuliani’s legal team; Russell J. Ramsland Jr., who filed a “a grossly inaccurate affidavit” [pg. 228] regarding Dominion voting machines and voting irregularities in Antrim Co., Michigan; Christina Bobb of One America News Network, made more famous for certifying Trump had returned all the stolen federal documents at Mar-a-Lago; and Philip Luelsdorff, reportedly director of Business Development for 1st Amendment Praetorian (1AP), a fascist paramilitary security group.

Luelsdorff’s witness testimony was released on Dec. 21, but he makes no appearance in the final report, having refused under the Fifth Amendment to answer any questions or produce documents.

Jack Smith has his work cut out.

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