Month: January 2023

Americans are safer because we didn’t label Saudi Arabia a pariah state. I never let the media bully me. Just b/c someone is a part-time stringer for WaPo doesn’t make their life more important than our military serving in dangerous places protecting us all. I never forgot that. https://t.co/jidmb6R6oU

— Mike Pompeo (@mikepompeo) January 24, 2023

Pompeo has done some very lowdown things in his ignominious career, but this takes the cake. The WaPo editorial board:

Mr. Khashoggi was suffocated and dismembered with a bone saw inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, 2018. The 15 killers included seven members of the elite personal protective detail of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, who, according to the U.S. intelligence community, “approved an operation” to “capture or kill” Khashoggi. His body has never been found.

Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist and Post contributing columnist since 2017, was killed in Istanbul at the consulate of Saudi Arabia in 2018. According to a U.S. intelligence assessment, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved an operation to capture or kill him.

Fred Hiatt, The Post’s editorial page editor at the time, called it “a monstrous and unfathomable act.” He wrote a column titled “Why bring a bonesaw to a kidnapping, Your Highness?”

Khashoggi’s columns for The Post described Saudi Arabia under Mohammed bin Salman, calling it “unbearable” and comparing him to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

President Biden, after vowing on the campaign trail to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah,” visited the country in July 2022. Biden defended the trip in a guest opinion for The Post. Washington Post Publisher Fred Ryan wrote that Biden’s trip showed American values are negotiable.

Biden greeted Mohammed bin Salman with a fist bump, which columnist Karen Attiah called “a crass betrayal.” Attiah edited Khashoggi’s columns for The Post.

The murder was at least partly retribution against Khashoggi for commentaries in The Post in which he had called for a freer Arab world and a more open and tolerant Saudi Arabia — and in which he criticized MBS’s dictatorial ways. President Donald Trump and his secretary of state reacted to the murder by protecting the Saudi despot, refusing to impose serious penalties against the kingdom, ignoring a congressional resolution calling for sanctions, and seeking to refurbish MBS’s standing. Mr. Pompeo makes no secret of his admiration, saying MBS is “leading the greatest cultural reform in the kingdom’s history” and is “a truly historic figure on the world stage.”

Mr. Pompeo reveals that, in private, he and Mr. Trump felt they rescued the crown prince from disrepute. He recalls that the then-president asked him to go to Saudi Arabia, and that he was the first Western official to see MBS since Khashoggi’s murder. “In some ways I think the president was envious that I was the one who gave the middle finger to The Washington Post, the New York Times and the other bed-wetters who didn’t have a grip on reality,” Mr. Pompeo writes. “He said, ‘Hey Mike, go and have a good time. Tell him he owes us.’”

Let’s face facts. Those two ultra-tough guys were clearly so petrified of MBS that they couldn’t even take a chance on condemning him for assassinating and dismembering a US resident.

And tough guy Pompeo who didn’t let the media bully him was one of Trumps most enthusiastic sycophants:

Pompeo had never met Trump. Like many Republicans who called Trump a “kook,” a “cancer,” and a threat to democracy before ultimately supporting him, Pompeo disagreed with much of Trump’s platform. He took issue in particular with Trump’s “America First” skepticism about the United States’ role in the world. Pompeo was a conservative internationalist who had been shaped by his Cold War-era military service, and he remained a believer in American power as the guarantor of global stability. Yet, after Trump won the Presidency, Pompeo sought a post in his Administration and did not hesitate to serve as his C.I.A. director. In 2018, after Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, by tweet, Pompeo happily replaced him as America’s top diplomat.

Pompeo, an evangelical Christian who keeps an open Bible on his desk, now says it’s possible that God raised up Trump as a modern Queen Esther, the Biblical figure who convinced the King of Persia to spare the Jewish people. He defines his own job as serving the President, whatever the President asks of him. “A Secretary of State has to know what the President wants,” he said, at a recent appearance in Washington. “To the extent you get out of synch with that leader, then you’re just out shooting the breeze.” No matter what Trump has said or done, Pompeo has stood by him. As a former senior White House official told me, “There will never be any daylight publicly between him and Trump.” The former official said that, in private, too, Pompeo is “among the most sycophantic and obsequious people around Trump.” Even more bluntly, a former American ambassador told me, “He’s like a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass.”

Yeah, he’s a real hero, isn’t he? It’s hard to imagine what he thinks his constituency might be but from what I can tell from his book, he thinks people are just yearning for the biggest asshole they can find. Between Trump, DeSantis and him, they have quite an array of choices already.

After spending the Trump administration cutting taxes for the wealthy and massively raising military spending, congressional Republicans are back to caterwauling about deficits. This was as predictable as the sun coming up in the morning. When Republicans are in power they give away the store and then when the Democrats are called in to clean up their mess, Republicans immediately rant and rave about government spending and the debt. This has been going on for decades and it would have been short-sighted to expect anything different from them this time.

Naturally, they’re putting the safety net programs on the chopping block. The Washington Post reports:

In recent days, a group of GOP lawmakers has called for the creation of special panels that might recommend changes to Social Security and Medicare, which face genuine solvency issues that could result in benefit cuts within the next decade. Others in the party have resurfaced more detailed plans to cut costs, including by raising the Social Security retirement age to 70, targeting younger Americans who have yet to obtain federal benefits.

If that immediately brings to mind the words “Simpson-Bowles” (and makes you break out in a cold sweat) you might be like me and have PTSD from the last time this was introduced back in 2012. It didn’t make it into law but only because the Freedom Caucus refused to take yes for an answer when the Obama team opened the door for some serious reductions in benefits. That wasn’t the first time Democrats offered up cuts to those programs and were rebuffed. Back in 1995 when the House Republicans shut down the government to force spending cuts, Bill Clinton offered cuts to Medicare and speaker Newt Gingrich said it wasn’t enough and walked away. 

Republicans have been trying to do away with these vital programs from the moment they were introduced. When Social Security was passed in 1935, only 2% of Democrats voted against it (ironically because it didn’t go far enough) and 33% of Republicans voted against it. In those days it was out of fealty to corporate America which was appalled at the prospect of “destroying initiative, discouraging thrift and stifling responsibility.” The program became popular and difficult to dislodge but Republicans never gave up.

It wasn’t long until the libertarian thinkers on the right were coming up with a new plan to replace the program with private investment accounts. This long-standing dream was finally formally proposed by George W. Bush in 2005 and it went down in flames. When the stock market crashed three years later in the epic financial crisis of 2008, that idea mercifully died a quiet death.

Medicare had the same trajectory. Former president Ronald Reagan helped to make his name as an opponent of Social Security and Medicare back in the early ’60s. In those years before social media, he had a big hit with a spoken word record album entitled “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine” which came out in 1961, as the program was still in the proposal stage. He said:

One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project, most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it… it’s simply an excuse to bring about what they wanted all the time: socialized medicine.

The GOP’s opposition never ceased.

When he was a congressman, vice president Mike Pence voted against Medicare Part D, the program’s drug benefit, along with dozens of other Republicans. And I don’t think I need to recapitulate the hysterical opposition to Obamacare, which they also claimed was a swift descent into socialist hell.

Opposition to any and all safety net programs is in the right’s DNA. The problem for them, however, is that these programs are popular so they have been unsuccessful in eliminating them altogether. So instead they’ve managed to protect their wealthy benefactors from having to kick in more money, which they could easily afford, to shore up the finances. If they can slowly starve the programs (and the people who depend upon them) they may just win in the long run.

What’s different with the new Republican majority’s plans is that there is no ideological rationale for doing it anymore.

In the past you had the likes of Reagan and Gingrich, influenced strongly by anti-communism and libertarian, free-market dogma, proposing to end these so-called entitlement programs because they were evidence of creeping socialism. In the words of anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, the federal government must be shrunk to a size so small it could be drowned in the bathtub. “Small government” and “local control” were their watchwords. Today, what we have known as the modern conservative movement barely exists in any recognizable sense. They constantly throw the words “freedom” and “socialism” around, but they have no discernible meaning except as weapons in the culture war.

GOP governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis require businesses to bend to his will or risk state sanction while books and topics that Republicans don’t like are being officially censored by the government in public schools and universities. They are full-blown authoritarians — their supposed “live or let live” libertarian ethos (always pretty weak in my opinion) drowned itself in the bathtub when Donald Trump came down that golden escalator.

This new House majority is driven by one thing and one thing only: owning the libs. Shutting down the government or holding the debt ceiling hostage for the ostensible purpose of lowering the deficit is just a power play to them for the purpose of showing they can do it. If they have to crash the world economy in the process, so be it.

It remains to be seen if this new House majority will use the safety net as leverage in their debt ceiling game of chicken. Donald Trump is adamantly against it because his feral instinct tells him that even attempting to do it is unpopular with older voters, his base. The fact that instead of putting it directly into their negotiations and instead creating some “special panels to look into it” suggests that even the House crazies understand that the risks are high with no chance of reward. (President Joe Biden will never sign a bill cutting these programs in an election year.) But they’ll put on some kind of show for the Fox News crowd anyway. After all, if the whole point is to own the libs, the mere threat is all it takes to give their followers a thrill. 

Salon

Remember when dandruff was the kiss of death?

Robin DiAngelo’s 2018 “White Fragility” has plenty of critics. Here and here, for example. John McWhorter writes that her diversity training approach is not only misguided but “deeply condescending to all proud Black people.”

But while academics debate sociological theory, aren’t ad men selling millions in products designed around the notion that men’s sense of self is deeply fragile?

Seeing another of those ubiquitous Nugenix Total T ads brings home just how deep (strong? powerful? vigorous? potent?) the insecurity market is. Weapons makers sell guns based on it. Nazis sell white supremacy based on it. Mass shooters base their manifestos on it. Fox News built its business model around it. Without “great replacement theory,” drag queens, and sexy M&Ms to get mens’ fee-fees in a knot, what has Tucker Carlson to talk about?

In more innocent, mid-century times, it was fears about bad breath, BO, and dandruff that sold mouthwash, deoderant, and shampoo to men worried about not getting laid. Two decades ago, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy offered grooming, fashion and dating tips to men having trouble attracting women.

Now it’s BlueChews and “testosterone levels” and middle age bulges. Now it’s AR-15s and AK-47s and stomping around in matching khakis chanting like Vogon spaceship guards. Resistance is useless!

Yeah, they’re fragile, all right.

Trade masks for body armor?

First news out of California this morning was a magnitude 4.2 earthquake rumbling off the coast about 10 miles south of Malibu Beach:

The fire department “completed a strategic 470 square-mile survey of the City of Los Angeles following the 4.2M earthquake near Malibu. No damage or injuries were reported and normal operational mode has resumed,” it said.

Relax, Southern California. Just another earthquake. Not another mass shooting. The latter will be along presently. You know, “normal operational mode.”

CNN reported on the epidemic mass shootings already this year:

The scenes of agony and horror are increasingly all too familiar in America. In fact, 39 mass shootings have taken place across the country in just the first three weeks of 2023, per the Gun Violence Archive.

Communities from Goshen, California, to Baltimore, Maryland, are reeling while others brace for the possibility of such violence in their own backyards.

“A time of a cultural celebration … and yet another community has been torn apart by senseless gun violence,” Vice President Kamala Harris told a crowd in Tallahassee, Florida, on Sunday. “All of us in this room and in our country understand this violence must stop.”

But how that happens with a divided Congress, vastly different policy prescriptions, and a deeply entrenched gun culture remains to be seen.

As you can see from the graphic above, the reporting cannot keep up with the body count.

When people three years ago started dying of COVID-19 so fast that bodies had to be buried in mass graves and stored in refrigerated trailers, government authorities built field hospitals to handle flood of patients. They conscripted manufacturers to convert production lines to ventilators and protective gear for hospital staff strained to the breaking point. Government authorities and drug makers scrambled to develop and distribute a vaccine to stop the plague.

It helped. But 4,000 people per week are still dying.

There is no vaccine for stopping bullets. Health officials who nearly three years ago insisted people wear surgical masks to stop the spread of the plague might as well recommend we all don body armor now as protection. Maybe they’ll enlist manufacturers to convert production lines to plate armor and helmets.

We know what the “only a good guy with a gun” nuts will buy as protection. Never mind the unarmed hero who wrestled a MAC-10 away from the Monterey Park gunman last week.

Firearm injuries are now the leading cause of death among people younger than 24 in the United States, according to a study published in the December 2022 edition of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

From 2015 through 2020, there were at least 2,070 unintentional shootings by children under 18 in the US, according to a report from Everytown. Those shootings resulted in 765 deaths and 1,366 injuries.

We are the United States of Insanity. Our collective lunacy is unique in the world:

It certainly doesn’t have to be this way. Countries that have introduced laws to reduce gun-related deaths have achieved significant changes, a previous, in-depth CNN analysis found:

Australia. Less than two weeks after Australia’s worst mass shooting, the federal government implemented a new program, banning rapid-fire rifles and shotguns, and unifying gun owner licensing and registrations across the country. In the next 10 years gun deaths in Australia fell by more than 50%.

A 2010 study found the government’s 1997 buyback program – part of the overall reform – led to an average drop in firearm suicide rates of 74% in the five years that followed.

South Africa. Gun-related deaths almost halved over a 10-year-period after new gun legislation, the Firearms Control Act of 2000, went into force in July 2004. The new laws made it much more difficult to obtain a firearm.

New Zealand. Gun laws were swiftly amended after the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings. Just 24 hours after the attack, in which 51 people were killed, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that the law would change.

New Zealand’s parliament voted almost unanimously to change the country’s gun laws less than a month later, banning all military-style semi-automatic weapons.

Britain tightened its gun laws and banned most private handgun ownership after a mass shooting in 1996, a move that saw gun deaths drop by almost a quarter over a decade.

But America’s gun culture is a global outlier. For now, the deadly cycle of violence seems destined to continue.

Why does the conservative American Dream look like Mogadishu? https://t.co/bBErvWVP3t pic.twitter.com/ne6Ea29ph2

— @TomSullivan@mstdn.social (@BloggersRUs) January 7, 2023

So for those of us who don’t want to add to the problem by strapping on a sidearm or strutting around with a military-grade rifle as though we live in Mogadishu, it’s body armor, isn’t it?

Apparently, no one ever died before the COVID vaccines

BREAKING: Silk reveals the possible reason for Diamond's death. WATCH! #RipDiamond pic.twitter.com/EvWh1PlJsj

— RSBN 🇺🇸 (@RSBNetwork) January 21, 2023

My god this is stupid … so stupid it makes my head hurt.

Many of Donald Trump’s fiercest supporters are convinced MAGA influencer Rochelle “Silk” Richardson—half of the “Diamond and Silk” duo—attempted to send the former president a secret message during Saturday’s ceremony to celebrate her sister’s life.

And what supposedly was that covert message that Silk floated while speaking at Lynnette “Diamond” Hardaway’s funeral? A plea for Trump to stop pushing COVID-19 vaccinations.

In her nearly hour-long speech, Silk shared what occurred during Diamond’s final minutes with around 150 attendees at a theater in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

“She said to me, ‘I can’t breathe.’ It was something out of nowhere and no warning,” Silk recalled. “Each breath was less and less and less.”

“What I want to say to everybody is don’t you dare call me a conspiracy theorist. Because I saw it happen. I saw how it happened. I was there when it happened, and it happened suddenly,” the pro-Trump pundit continued while the ex-president was seated on stage.

Silk called for an investigation into “why people are falling dead suddenly,” which appeared to be a nod to the increasingly popular phrase “died suddenly” on the far right that has to do with unsubstantiated medical claims of those that take the COVID vaccine falling dead.

Since Silk’s suggestion that Diamond died due to taking a COVID-19 vaccine, far-right pundits have reignited their war against Trump over his push to produce the shot en masse.

“The message is simple. Nobody needs to overthink this. The injections and the ‘virus’ are weapons of biowarfare, and it’s time to indict, try and fry those responsible for the deployment of these weapons of mass destruction,” MAGA-loving radio host Stew Peters told The Daily Beast.

Notably, such a suggestion would mean Trump is also partially to blame, which wasn’t lost on Peters.

“If Trump’s ego won’t allow him to admit this out loud, he’s equally as complicit as Tony Mengele Fauci,” Peters said.

“Everyone knows Diamond and Silk were some of Donald Trump’s biggest supporters. And everyone knows Trump was pushing this bioweapon on the entire country,” he concluded, insisting Silk’s plea wasn’t a “cryptic” or a “secret message.”

Other right-wing pundits jumped to medical conclusions while also taking their digs at the former president.

“Silk reveals Diamond died suddenly from what appears to be a blood clot in her lung,” far-right Pizzagate truther Jack Posobiec said following the memorial. “Silk stood right in front of Trump and told him the vaccine killed Diamond, and there needs to be an investigation into why people are suddenly dropping dead,” he added.

By the way:

No autopsy was performed on Diamond, and Silk has not clarified if her sister—a staunch anti-vaxxer—ever even took the COVID vaccine. The Associated Press reported Monday evening that Diamond’s death certificate said her cause of death was heart disease stemming from “chronic high blood pressure.”

Ron DeSantis is banking on Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” (the one decent policy of his entire administration) being the poison arrow that takes him down. Yes, he is going to run on this utter bul…. er, nonsense.

Nope

Sen. James Lankford (R-OK): "It's not just about making abortion illegal in the country. I would tell you I'm working to make abortion unthinkable in our country." pic.twitter.com/H5aSo6vhk4

— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) January 24, 2023

And yet:

Paul Krugman on where we stand

From his newsletter today (subscription only)

The tax cuts, on the other hand, were downright idiotic, especially as they were passed by the people who are now clutching their pearls over the debt. Please. let’s not hear anymore from them about credit card bills. These are people who run up debt and then decide to take a huge pay cut for no good reason.

You knew they would be, right?

The WaPo reports:

House Republicans have started to weigh a series of legislative proposals targeting Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, part of a broader campaign to slash federal spending that could force the new majority to grapple with some of the most difficult and delicate issues in American politics.

Only weeks after taking control of the chamber, GOP lawmakers under new Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) have rallied around firm pledges for austerity, insisting their efforts can improve the nation’s fiscal health. They have signaled they are willing to leverage the fight over the debt ceiling — and the threat of a fiscal doomsday — to seek major policy concessions from the Biden administration.

So far, the party has focused its attention on slimming down federal health care, education, science and labor programs, perhaps by billions of dollars. But some Republicans also have pitched a deeper examination of entitlements, which account for much of the government’s annual spending — and reflect some of the greatest looming fiscal challenges facing the United States.

In recent days, a group of GOP lawmakers has called for the creation of special panels that might recommend changes to Social Security and Medicare, which face genuine solvency issues that could result in benefit cuts within the next decade. Others in the party have resurfaced more detailed plans to cut costs, including by raising the Social Security retirement age to 70, targeting younger Americans who have yet to obtain federal benefits.

“We have no choice but to make hard decisions,” said Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), the leader of the Republican Study Committee, a bloc of more than 160 conservative lawmakers that endorsed raising the retirement age and other changes last year. “Everybody has to look at everything.”

Any plan to rethink entitlements is likely to face steep opposition in the Democratic-led Senate and may never gain meaningful traction even among other Republicans in the House. Adding to the political challenge, former president DonaldTrump waded into the debate Friday, warning his party publicly against cutting “a single penny from Medicare or Social Security.”

Democrats, meanwhile, have been unsparing in their criticisms, saying millions of Americans could see their benefits cut at the hands of the new House GOP majority. President Biden has stressed he will not negotiate such a deal with Republicans, as he prepares to discuss a raft of fiscal issues with McCarthy in the coming days.

“This is something that should be done without conditions, and we should not be taking hostage key programs that the American people really earned and care about — Social Security, Medicare, it should not be put in a hostage situation,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Monday.

The early wrangling underscores the stakes as Republicans look for aggressive ways to limit federal spending. In a time of immense, growing debt, the party’s looming decisions could carry vast consequences: Every cut in Washington, large or small, threatens to spell dramatic changes for millions of Americans’ finances — not to mention the GOP’s own political fortunes.

I think the Democrats need to make it clear that the Republicans are holding the country hostage for massive concessions rather than follow the rules and hash all this out in budget negotiations.

If they want to slash spending to the bone all they need to do is elect a majority in both houses of congress and get a Republican president. That’s how it works. This economic terrorism is undemocratic — which is how they roll these days.

As for chopping SS and Medicare, well, they’ve been trying to do that for many, many decades. It’s in the DNA. But today, it has nothing to do with the anti-communist ideology of “small government” or any libertarian principles which they’ve abandoned. This is just cutting and slashing to own the libs.

And they’re even more fatuous than usual

Charlie Sykes takes it on:

In today’s edition of Unfathomable Mysteries: Andrew Sullivan ponders the question: Why is the right losing the young? And what can it do to win them back?

It’s worth reading because he gets so much right… and so much very wrong. In the end, Sullivan’s analysis is extraordinarily revealing, but not, perhaps, for the reasons he intends.

The problem itself is pretty obvious, as young voters have increasingly been moving away from the GOP, and played a major role in breaking the Red Wave in the midterms.

The problem with young women is especially dire, with one exit poll suggesting that “72 percent of women ages 18-29 voted for Democrats in House races nationwide. In a pivotal Pennsylvania Senate race, 77 percent of young women voted for embattled Democrat John Fetterman, helping to secure his victory.”

What’s happening here?

“It’s dawning on many on the political center and right that the current younger generation in America is not like previous younger generations,” Sullivan wrote last week. “Zoomers and Millennials are further to the left to begin with and, more critically, don’t seem to be moving rightward as they age.”

He cites a widely read article in the Financial Times that argued that, by the time they turn 35, Millennials should be around five points less conservative than the national average if they were to follow historical patterns.

In fact, they’re more like 15 points less conservative, and in both Britain and the US are by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in recorded history … Millennials have developed different values to previous generations, shaped by experiences unique to them, and they do not feel conservatives share these….

A lot of things explain this, including a job market shaped by a global financial crisis, and declining living standards. Younger voters have also grown up in a “far more multiracial and multicultural world than anyone before them; seeing gay equality come to marriage and the military, experiencing the first black president and nearly the first woman; and the psychological and cultural impact of Trump and Brexit.”

So it is a mistake, Sullivan writes, to assume that “all of the young’s stickier leftiness — especially the most irritating varieties of it — are entirely a function of woke brainwashing, and not related to genuinely unique challenges.”

He begins his analysis with a candid admission: “The left’s advantage is that they have directly addressed this generation’s challenges, and the right simply hasn’t.”

That’s because the right doesn’t care about any of that stuff. They’re obsessed with gay M&Ms and Dr Suess and non-existent “grooming” by public school teachers.

The woke, however misguided, are addressing the inevitable cultural and social challenges of a majority-minority generation; and the socialists have long been addressing the soaring inequality that neoliberalism has created. Meanwhile, the right has too often ducked these substantive issues or rested on cheap culture-war populism as a diversionary response. I don’t believe that the young are inherently as left as they currently are. It’s just that the right hasn’t offered them an appealing enough alternative that is actually relevant to them.

Well, yes.

Sullivan is quite eager to convince his putative new allies on the right that they have to embrace what he calls “smarter policies,” if they want to avoid being swamped by this demographic tsunami.

At this point Sykes lays out Sullivan’s policy suggestions which basically adds up to having the right take up the Democratic agenda. And then this laughable suggestion:

Wait for it now.

[Above] all, celebrate a diverse society — and the unique individuals and interactions that make it so dynamic and life-giving.”

After a half-decade of Trumpism, Sullivan hopes that the American Right will now realize that “Diversity is a fact — which is why white nationalism is both repellent and a dead end.”

In the ideal world of his imagination, the right could present an appealing alternative to woke-ism.

In an ever-more complex mix, do we resort to policing language, censoring and canceling, and a new, elaborate regime of active and supposedly benign race and sex discrimination? Or do we unwind the racial and gender obsessions, stop discriminating, encourage live-and-let-live toleration, and allow a free society to sort these things out, without top-down engineering.

Sykes says he’s in sympathy with Sullivan here but if I could just take a moment to point out that it’s the younger generation that’s leading the charge on all this stuff. This is their agenda. Moreover, older people like Sullivan and Sykes (and yes, yours truly) should recognize that for most of us these issues are as new as the long hair, anti-war, braless, revolutionary spirit of our own youth was to our parents. It is the way of the world and there’s not a goddamn thing anyone can do about it.

Anyway, Sykes continues:

“Technically,” he writes, “the right supports something like” what he describes. But, he acknowledges, “the emphasis is always on the negative against the other side, rarely on the positive. And the tone is awful, full of resistance, resentment and fear.”

Ditto race and trans issues. You can note that it is absolutely right to keep the appalling moral iniquity of slavery and segregation in the front of our collective consciousness; and it is simply true that African-Americans bear a burden from the past that is unique in its scale and depth. It’s also true that old systems endure in unintended ways that we need to be more aware of. Don’t be lured into minimizing this. It shouldn’t be minimized.

They don’t believe this!!! They really, truly, deeply disagree that any of this is true. They also don’t want to accept LGBT issues beyond a grumpy acceptance of marriage equality as long as the people in question don’t make them uncomfortable. They aren’t on board with changing anything much less the structures that privilege them. Pretending that they are in favor of diversity but just don’t express themselves well is ridiculous.

Sullivan then says that the right should adopt the speaking style of his greatest man-crush, Obama:

Here, Sullivan offers a series of tortured and, frankly, confusing proposals. Sullivan begins by suggesting that the right should start sounding more like… Barack Obama.

But then take the Obama position: look how far we’ve come, and don’t define America by this original sin because it is so much more than that. And then pivot to what can actually be done now: better and more policing; better and affordable childcare; encouraging stable two-parent families.

He proposes somehow blending this renewed Obama-ism with what he calls “South Park” conservatism that “constantly mock[s] the humorlessness, newspeak, and censoriousness of our new woke overlords.”

The natural demeanor of the young is to resist censorship, silencing and the stamping out of heterodoxy. Appeal to that. Let a thousand diverse flowers bloom. And make the woke seem like the miserable, micro-managing puritans they are.

Sullivan argues that “the tide is already turning in the broader culture: I see more eye-rolls at woke excess from my liberal friends than I used to; more canniness on the left about the cynicism of woke corporations; and exhaustion from the toxic dysfunction that has crippled progressive organizations.” Sullivan cites the influence of comedians like Bill Maher, Joe Rogan, Tim Dillon, Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Bill Burr or Matt and Trey. “They understand that a truly diverse society needs wicked humor to vent its tensions, not pious censorship and threats of cancellation to suppress them all.”

Is he daft??? The “woke” he is talking about are the very young people he’s trying to attract to the right! They aren’t attracted to the right’s own avatars of that snotty humor Greg Gutfeld and Tucker Carlson (or Bill Maher and Dave Chappelle for that matter.) That misanthropic humor is enjoyed by certain males of all ages, to be sure, but I would guess that it’s completely foreign to 90% of younger Millennials and Gen Zs. It sure as hell doesn’t appeal to women.

Sykes continues:

Somehow, somewhere, he seems to imagine that all of this will lead to younger voters flocking back to the party fronted by Kevin McCarthy et. al.

But his wish-casting also highlights the gap between the actual, real-world right and the right of Sullivan’s imagination.

What he describing is, in fact, the sort of centrist liberalism that has been roundly and enthusiastically rejected by a conservative movement that which bears little resemblance to the nuanced right of Sullivan’s hopes.

Sullivan thinks that cultural figures like “JK Rowling, Lil Nas X, Mike White, Bari Weiss, Glenn Greenwald (!) and Arnold Schwarzenegger” will “help scramble the idea that embracing diversity means simply adopting the mantras of the woke sect.”

Unmentioned are the actual stars of the conservative movement as-it-actually-exists, such as Charlie Kirk and the trolls of TPUSA, whose approach to “diversity” bears little resemblance to what Sullivan is describing.

In December, at TPUSA’s AmericaFest conference of young conservatives, speakers included Tucker Carlson (who has pushed the Great Replacement Theory), seditionist Steve Bannon, election denier Kari Lake, Running Josh Hawley, along with My Pillow Guy, Donald Trump Jr., and his fiancé Kimberly Guilfoyle.

Last September, in the run-up to the election, a “Youth Summit” in Texas featured a speaker lineup that included Matt Gaetz, Ted Cruz, talk show host Candace Owens, and U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, “who wore a pistol strapped to her leg as she addressed the hall.”

These are the faces that the right is presenting to younger voters.

Get a load of this. You won’t believe it:

To be sure, Sullivan does not hold up any of these misfit toys as the key to winning back the young. Instead, the one political figure he cites is… Ron DeSantis.

Sullivan argues that DeSantis’s numbers in Florida’s recent gubernatorial election demonstrate that “it’s perfectly possible to be nearly defined as anti-woke and win 61 percent of men between the ages of 18 and 29, compared with 66 percent from men over 65; and 47 percent of women in the same age group.”

This, he argues is “proof of principle.”

But, he admits, “if DeSantis wants to win the center, he needs to show that his love of real diversity is as strong as his loathing of the wokeness that claims to speak for it.”

But we have some questions.

When Sullivan writes about Ron DeSantis’s “love of real diversity,” is he talking about this Ron DeSantis? The one who just banned a course in African-American Studies? Or the Ron DeSantis. who once spoke at a conference hosted by a writer described as “driving force of the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-Black movements.”

The guy who signed the “Don’t Say Gay” Bill?

Is he talking about the Ron DeSantis who signed HB1467, a law that “bans schools from using any books that are pornographic or age ‘inappropriate,’ and allows parents broad access to review and challenge all books and materials used for instruction or in school libraries”?

Or perhaps, Sullivan was thinking of the youthful charisma of the guy who berated high school students for wearing masks at one of his photo-ops during the height of the pandemic.

Or the Ron DeSantis, who just named the race/gay-baiting charlatan Christopher Rufo to the board of small Florida liberal arts college?

This is the guy who will reverse the demographic tide by showing his “love for real diversity”? This is the guy who will be a magnet for the youngs?

Really?

The idea that DeSantis is the guy who can attract the youth vote by showing how much he hates wokeness but loves diversity is actually hilarious.

Sullivan loathes “wokeness” with every fiber of his being, so much so that it’s completely defining his politics. Change is hard and for a lot of men especially it seems to freak them out that young people are asserting their right to challenge the status quo and using the tools of our time to do it. But pretending that the right is actually in sympathy with the underlying principles is downright delusional. They hate diversity and they have no empathy for people who have different lived experiences than they do. It’s definitional. Sure some young men will be attracted to an authoritarian asshole like DeSantis. What else is new? But overall, not a chance in hell.

Good luck with this, guys. Best look elsewhere for allies, Andrew.

Lookee here:

A lawyer for former Vice President Mike Pence discovered about a dozen documents marked as classified at Pence’s Indiana home last week, and he has turned those classified records over to the FBI, multiple sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

The FBI and the Justice Department’s National Security Division have launched a review of the documents and how they ended up in Pence’s house in Indiana.

The classified documents were discovered at Pence’s new home in Carmel, Indiana, by a lawyer for Pence in the wake of the revelations about classified material discovered in President Joe Biden’s private office and residence, the sources said. The discovery comes after Pence has repeatedly said he did not have any classified documents in his possession.

It is not yet clear what the documents are related to or their level of sensitivity or classification.

Pence’s team notified congressional leaders and relevant committees of the discovery on Tuesday.

Pence asked his lawyer to conduct the search of his home out of an abundance of caution, and the attorney began going through four boxes stored at Pence’s house last week, finding a small number of documents with classified markings, the sources said.

Pence’s lawyer immediately alerted the National Archives, the sources said. In turn, the Archives informed the Justice Department.

A lawyer for Pence told CNN that the FBI requested to pick up the documents with classified markings that evening, and Pence agreed. Agents from the FBI’s field office in Indianapolis picked up the documents from Pence’s home, the lawyer said.

On Monday, Pence’s legal team drove the boxes back to Washington, DC, and handed them over to the Archives to review the rest of the material for compliance with the Presidential Records Act.

In a letter to the National Archives obtained by CNN, Pence’s representative to the Archives Greg Jacob wrote that a “small number of documents bearing classified markings” were inadvertently boxed and transported to the vice president’s home.

“Vice President Pence was unaware of the existence of sensitive or classified documents at his personal residence,” Jacob wrote. “Vice President Pence understands the high importance of protecting sensitive and classified information and stands ready and willing to cooperate fully with the National Archives and any appropriate inquiry.”

The classified material was stored in boxes that first went to Pence’s temporary home in Virginia before they were moved to Indiana, according to the sources. The boxes were not in a secure area, but they were taped up and were not believed to have been opened since they were packed, according to Pence’s attorney. Once the classified documents were discovered, the sources said they were placed inside a safe located in the house.

Pence’s Washington, DC, advocacy group office was also searched, Pence’s lawyer said, and no classified material or other records covered by the Presidential Records Act was discovered.

The news about Pence come as special counsels investigate the handling of classified documents by both Biden and former President Donald Trump. The revelations also come amid speculation that Pence is readying for a run at the Republican nomination for president in 2024.

Since the FBI searched Trump’s home in Florida for classified material in August with a search warrant, Pence has said that he had not retained any classified material upon leaving office. “No, not to my knowledge,” he told The Associated Press in August.

In November, Pence was asked by ABC News at his Indiana home whether he had taken any classified documents from the White House.

“I did not,” Pence responded.

“Well, there’d be no reason to have classified documents, particularly if they were in an unprotected area,” Pence continued. “But I will tell you that I believe there had to be many better ways to resolve that issue than executing a search warrant at the personal residence of a former president of the United States.”

While Pence’s vice presidential office in general did a rigorous job while he was leaving office of sorting through and turning over any classified material and unclassified material covered by the Presidential Records Act, these classified documents appear to have inadvertently slipped through the process because most of the materials were packed up separately from the vice president’s residence, along with Pence’s personal papers, the sources told CNN.

The vice president’s residence at the US Naval Observatory in Washington has a secure facility for handling classified material along with other security, and it would be common for classified documents to be there for the vice president to review.

Some of the boxes at Pence’s Indiana home were packed up from the vice president’s residence, while some came from the White House in the final days of the Trump administration, which included last-minute things that did not go through the process the rest of Pence’s documents did.

The discovery of classified documents in Pence’s residence marks the third time in recent history in which a president or vice president has inappropriately possessed classified material after leaving office. Both Biden and Trump are now being investigated by separate special counsels for their handling of classified materials.

Sources familiar with the process say Pence’s discovery of classified documents after the Trump and Biden controversies would suggest a more systemic problem related to classified material and the Presidential Records Act, which requires official records from the White House to be turned over to the National Archives at the end of an administration.

Right. And let’s be clear. One of these things is not like the other. Only Trump refused to turn over the documents and had to be served with a warrant to retrieve them.