Month: February 2023

You knew they would

I have been convinced for some time that one of the main motivations for the obsession with Hunter Biden is to get Joe Biden to break down in public. I think of it as the “Muskie gambit” which you old duffers will recall was the Nixon dirty trick that made Democratic frontrunner Edmund Muskie cry over a false allegation against his wife in 1972.

I think Joe Biden is pretty inured to the stuff about Hunter. But I’m sure they figure that this might work if they go after Biden’s dead son:

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer invoked the late son of President Joe Biden on Tuesday, lamenting that Beau Biden was never prosecuted over an investigation into illegal contributions involving his father’s 2008 presidential campaign.

When he’s not busy threatening pay-TV providers for not carrying his favorite right-wing channels, or warning that Chinese spy balloons may drop “bioweapons” on the U.S., Comer has devoted much of his energy to launching an investigation into presidential son Hunter Biden’s business dealings.

During an appearance on former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs’ podcast, Comer and the election-denying MAGA acolyte bemoaned that the U.S. attorney probing Hunter Biden has yet to bring any charges.

United States Attorney for the District of Delaware David Weiss, a Trump-era appointee, has been investigating the president’s son over his tax affairs since 2018, and it has been reported that prosecutors are close to wrapping up the case. Additionally, authorities have also weighed bringing charges against Hunter Biden for allegedly lying on a gun application form.

At one point, Comer seemingly suggested that Weiss was overly sympathetic to the Biden family before bringing up Beau Biden, the former Delaware attorney general who died of a brain tumor in 2015.

“This U.S. attorney had had an opportunity to go after the Bidens years ago,” the Kentucky lawmaker huffed. “In fact, it was Beau Biden, the president’s other son, that was involved in some campaign donations from a person that got indicted, as well as Joe Biden was involved in some of these campaign donations when he was a senator, and then when he ran for president against Obama.”

Comer continued: “But nothing ever happened. So I don’t know much about this U.S. attorney other than he’s had an opportunity to investigate the Bidens before and he chose not to. We all know that he’s just been silent for a long time.”

After grumbling that Weiss didn’t go after the president’s dead son when he had the chance, the GOP congressman then fumed that “we know what’s on that laptop” while wondering why Weiss has yet to prosecute Hunter Biden.

“There’s enough to indict Hunter Biden now, there was enough to indict Hunter Biden three or four years ago with what’s on the laptop,” he exclaimed. “So for whatever reason, this U.S. attorney hasn’t produced very many results.”

Comer makes Dan “watermelon” Burton look like an amateur.

From the “you cannot make this shit up files”

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) slams Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) for bringing “somebody that he met at a gun club” to the first House Judiciary Committee hearing to lead the Pledge of Allegiance.

Turns out, Gaetz’s honored guest was charged with killing a family member in April 2019. pic.twitter.com/15Dzmo343u

— The Recount (@therecount) February 28, 2023

Here’s that story:

When members of the House Judiciary Committee convened for their first meeting of the year last week, the new Republican majority instituted a change in procedure: Before every hearing, everyone in the room would recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

The honor of leading thefirst pledge was given to Corey Beekman, a U.S. Army National Guard combat veteran who traveled to Capitol Hill at the invitation of his congressman, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL).

“It is my pleasure and distinct honor to introduce to the committee Staff Sergeant Corey Ryan Beekman, an American hero and a constituent of mine residing in Pensacola, Florida,” Gaetz said. He praised Beekman’s 16 years of military service, his Purple Heart award, and his position on the board of a local gun club.

For Gaetz, who was seeking to spearhead the GOP’s show of patriotism and invite a fight with Democrats, Beekman was a picture-perfect symbol.

There was just one thing that Gaetz didn’t mention in his glowing introduction: Beekman is an accused murderer yet to face his day in court.

In 2019, Beekman allegedly shot and killed 33-year old Billy Buchanan inside a home in rural Mason County, Michigan, and was arrested by police after a lengthy standoff. He was later charged with murder, but his case still has not yet gone to trial, and he moved to Florida.

For Buchanan’s family, the pain of losing Billy has been compounded by the failure of his case to be resolved in court—and it was compounded even further by seeing his alleged killer appear in full military dress as an honored guest on Capitol Hill.

“It was like getting a dagger stuck in our heart again,” said Denita Buchanan, Billy’s mother.

“We were infuriated when we first saw it,” Hannah Buchanan, Billy’s niece, told The Daily Beast. “I was disgusted with the whole thing.”

Imagine if a Democrats did … oh never mind.

You can understand why these people would believe they can get away with this level of lying. Look at Donald Trump? He has lied about virtually everything in his life and he’s beloved by most of the Republican party.

Freshman Republican Rep. Andy Ogles (TN) says he’s a trained economist, but in reality, he only took one community college course on the subject—and he got a C, a transcript obtained by NewsChannel 5 in Nashville revealed. Ogles’ congressional bio says he graduated from Middle Tennessee State University, “where he studied policy and economics.” However, a resume he used in 2009 said he got a degree in international relations, with no mention of economics.

But both claims were false, according to the transcript, which Ogles had tried to keep sealed. Ogles actually majored in liberal studies. The congressman also enrolled in classes titled U.S. Presidency, Problems in Government, Political Theory and National Security Policy—failing all of them twice, once in 1995 and again in 1998. It took Ogles 17 years to attain his degree, graduating in 2007 with a 2.4 GPA, NewsChannel 5 reported. And the Freedom Caucus member has already admitted to his false claims, too, telling a conservative local paper, “When I pulled my transcript to verify, I realized I was mistaken.” “I apologize for my misstatement,” he added.

Uh huh. Sure.

After the local report was published, the congressman stopped talking about “condensed” résumés, “partisan hacks,” and “the liberal media,” and started acknowledging reality.

“I previously stated that my degree from [Middle Tennessee State University] was in International Relations,” Ogles said in a written statement. “When I pulled my transcript to verify, I realized I was mistaken. My degree is in Liberal Studies. I apologize for my misstatement.”

It’s worth emphasizing for context that Ogles is only 51. This isn’t a situation in which a politician is 103 years old and forgot about a collegiate career that was practically a lifetime ago. Ogles graduated from college in 2007.

His mea culpa yesterday was that he forgot his own major until he reviewed his transcript. I supposed anything is possible, but ask literally anyone you know with a college degree what they majored in, and I have a hunch they’ll know the correct answer without having to check any records.

To be sure, the fact that Ogles misstated the details of his degree, in isolation, may not seem especially noteworthy. But it’s the larger context that paints a rather brutal portrait: The Tennessee Republican appears to have lied about much of his academic and professional background, and to date, he’s offered literally nothing to challenge the accuracy of the revelations.

It also comes against a backdrop of Republican Rep. George Santos’ brazen lies about multiple aspects of his own life.

To date, GOP leaders haven’t commented or expressed any concerns about Ogles’ related dishonesty, though if recent history is any guide, they’ll wave it off as irrelevant. With a narrow majority in the House, Republican leaders apparently don’t believe they can afford to care too much about whether some of their members lied their way onto Capitol Hill.

Plenty of people pad their resumes. But this level goes way beyond “padding” and these are people who should know that the public or their political rivals will check. But I guess they assume they can get away with it regardless.

We are living in a shameless time.

Why don’t all “those people” appreciate it?

Jon Schwarz gives us a reminder of how ungrateful those subjugated by white people are. They just don’t know how good they have it:

WEDNESDAY’S PECULIAR YOUTUBE remarks by “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams about Black Americans being a “hate group” have certainly received a lot of attention. Hundreds of newspapers across the U.S. have now dropped Adams’s strip.

What’s gotten almost no notice, however, is how Adams went on at length about his efforts to be “helpful to Black America.” But my ears perked up when I heard this, since the most berserk racial ultraviolence in U.S. history has always been accompanied by this kind of rhetoric from white Americans — i.e., we’ve done our best to help others, only for them to turn around and loathe us rather than respond with the gratitude we deserve for our openhearted kindness.

Here’s some of what Adams said on this subject:

As you know, I’ve been identifying as Black for a while. Years now, because I like to be on the winning team.

And I like to help. And I thought, if you help the Black community, that’s sort of the biggest lever, you can find the biggest benefit. … So I like to focus a lot of my life resources on helping Black Americans. So much so that I started identifying as Black, just to be on the team I was helping. …

I think it makes no sense as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens anymore. … That’s no longer a rational impulse. I’m going to back off from being helpful to Black America, because it doesn’t seem like it pays off. I’ve been doing it all my life, and the only outcome is that I’ve been called a racist. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you’re white. … Don’t even think it’s worth trying.

Now here’s what white Americans have been saying for the past 400 years about Native Americans, African Americans, Vietnamese people, Iraqis, and many, many other people. See if you can spot a pattern.

The first seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, created after King Charles I granted the colony a charter in 1629, portrayed a Native American saying, “Come Over and Help Us.” Just eight years later, during the Pequot massacre, the men of Massachusetts helped about 500 women, children, and other civilians become dead.

By the early 1800s, white America had decided that we had to separate ourselves from the ungrateful wretches surrounding us. President Andrew Jackson began his famous 1830 speech to Congress with the happy news that “the benevolent policy of the government, steadily pursued for nearly 30 years, in relation to the removal of the Indians beyond the white settlements is approaching to a happy consummation.” This was all thanks to how nice we were. “The policy of the general government toward the red man,” said Jackson, “is not only liberal, but generous.”

The government’s benevolent policy had already been enacted by Jackson’s soldiers during the Creek War in 1814, when they removed strips of skin from their defeated enemies and made bridles for their horses out of them. Then, after Jackson’s speech, the government helped about 60,000 Native Americans experience the Trail of Tears.

It wasn’t too much later that President Teddy Roosevelt explained in his book “The Winning of the West” that “no other conquering and colonizing nation has ever treated the original savage owners of the soil with such generosity as has the United States.”

You might ask what the reaction of Indigenous people was to all this help. Sadly, there was just a total lack of appreciation. As the Rocky Mountain News pointed out, they were an “ungrateful race” that “ought to be wiped from the face of the earth.”

And what about slavery? You guessed it: It was also the product of white America’s sincere efforts to help others. One well-known elucidation of this concept was written before the Civil War by William Gilmore Simms, a popular novelist and member of the South Carolina House of Representatives. As he put it, slavery was “not simply within the sanctions of justice and propriety, but constituting one of the most essential agencies … for elevating, to a condition of humanity, a people otherwise barbarous, easily depraved, and needing the help of a superior condition.”

Another South Carolinian, John Calhoun, had similar insights. Slavery, he argued, was a “positive good” for enslaved people and demonstrated the lengths slave owners would go to in their efforts to help others. “In few countries so much is left to the share of the laborer,” Calhoun said in a speech on the floor of the Senate, “and so little exacted from him, or where there is more kind attention paid to him in sickness or infirmities of age.”

This led to a lot of white people getting their feelings hurt when their benevolence wasn’t recognized. Harriet Jacobs escaped a plantation in North Carolina and later wrote about her attempts to persuade her owner — who raped many of the women he enslaved — to sell her to someone else:

On such occasions he would assume the air of a very injured individual, and reproach me for my ingratitude. “Did I not take you into the house, and make you the companion of my own children?” he would say. “And this is the recompense I get, you ungrateful girl!”

U.S. history just goes on from there in exactly the same way. In 1966, the editor of U.S. News & World Report told the publication’s readers that “what the United States is doing in Vietnam is the most significant example of philanthropy extended by one people to another that we have witnessed in our times.” When challenged, he responded that “primitive peoples with savagery in their hearts have to be helped to understand the true basis of a civilized existence.” A recent book on Vietnam records that “in the oral and written accounts, the [American soldiers] in Vietnam constantly register bitter complains about what they consider Vietnamese ingratitude.”

The Iraq War was, of course, all about helping Iraqis. In a speech just before the U.S. and its allies invaded, President George W. Bush proclaimed, “The United States and our coalition stand ready to help the citizens of a liberated Iraq.” Trent Lott of Mississippi, then the top Senate Republican, agreed after the war had started, saying, “We went in there to free those people.”

It was a beautiful moment, but America soon ran into the same problem we’d faced so often before. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard took a trip to Iraq and reported that “Iraqis want help. Indeed, they demand it and are angry and frustrated when they don’t get it instantly. But they appear to hate being helped.” Barnes said he’d like to see “an outbreak of gratitude for the greatest act of benevolence one country has ever done for another.” Instead, Iraqis were “sullen and suspicious and conspiracy-minded. … Papers obsess on the subject of brutal treatment of innocent Iraqis by American soldiers.” For Lott’s part, by this time, he was musing that “if we have to, we just mow the whole place down, see what happens.”

That brings us up to today and the genuine distress of Scott Adams. People like him have been helping so many others, so vigorously, for so many centuries. It’s no wonder that he’s tired of not getting the least bit of thanks.

You give and you give and give and these ungrateful wretches just spit in your face. And now they’re cancelling Dilbert and poor Scott Adams is paying the price for white benevolence. Such a shame.

Philip Bump on the Murdoch filings:

Donald Trump couldn’t have asked for much more from Fox News over the course of the 2020 presidential election — or, really, over the course of his presidency. From start to finish, Fox News-viewing Republicans were more enthusiastic about Trump than about other Republicans (and certainly than Americans overall), thanks in part to the network’s incessant efforts to bash the left and its efforts to mostly ignore stories that would hurt him.

As the 2020 campaign progressed, the network ran interference in myriad ways. It quickly elevated Trump’s insistences that the country should move on from the coronavirus (so, Trump hoped, the economy would rebound before the election). It aired incessant footage of violence that followed Black Lives Matter protests that summer, often recycling footage for weeks on end. Earlier in his administration, Trump had simply rolled Fox News coverage into his campaign rallies. Host Sean Hannity explicitly endorsed him in 2016.

On Monday, though, we got a new look at how Fox boosted Trump — quietly, behind the scenes. And in the person of Fox Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch.

The revelation comes from a court filing submitted by Dominion Voting Systems as part of its $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the company. Dominion makes voting machines that were the center of unfounded claims of fraud and tampering in the wake of the 2020 election — including on Fox News and Fox Business Network. In a filing released earlier this month, Dominion revealed internal messages between Fox News hosts showing that they didn’t believe the claims for which they were nonetheless providing airtime. The filing released Monday focuses more on Murdoch, as head of the Fox empire.

It includes this comment, offered almost as an aside.

“During Trump’s campaign, Rupert provided Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, with Fox confidential information about [Joe] Biden’s ads, along with debate strategy,” the filing reads. In a parenthetical, it explains some or all of that confidential information as “providing Kushner a preview of Biden’s ads before they were public.”

This is a remarkable claim. To best understand why requires an understanding of how political campaigns work.

There are two groups of voters that a campaign tries to contact: core supporters, whom the campaign tries to ensure cast a vote, and persuadable voters, people who would back the candidate if approached with the right message. To determine that message, campaigns conduct polls. Commonly, they’re structured like this:

-Ask whom a respondent supports.

-Offer arguments against the candidates and measure support again.

-Offer rebuttals to those arguments and measure support for a third time.

The idea is to assess what issues or rhetoric will move persuadable voters or tamp down turnout among their opponent’s core support. In a well-funded campaign, attack ads are not random; they are leveraging issues that polling shows will achieve one of those outcomes.

Campaigns do opposition research on their own candidates to get a sense of what attacks are coming and to prepare for them. Now imagine if they knew with certainty what attacks were coming because the friendly chairman of a right-wing media organization was tipping you off.

My first response when reading the allegation included in the Dominion filing was to wonder what ads Murdoch had access to. Was there some repository of ads that media outlets shared? (There is not, a person familiar with the industry confirmed.) Did he have access to ads that run on Fox affiliates in local markets? My assumption was that the Biden campaign wasn’t spending a lot of money on Fox News spots, given the network’s audience.

But they were. Remember: One intended outcome of campaign spending can be to dampen support among your opponent’s base. During the Republican National Convention in August, for example, Biden’s campaign ran this two-minute spot on Fox News.

The campaign also made national buys, often during sporting events like the World Series. From April to June of 2020, one-fifth of the Biden campaign’s cable-TV advertising was on Fox News. The campaign ran more than 100 spots on “Fox & Friends” alone — even as the show was amplifying pro-Trump, anti-Biden messaging.

It’s not clear how often Murdoch might have given Kushner a preview of Biden spots or what came of it. The Trump campaign was not a traditional campaign, of course, rebutting attacks on the incumbent president’s policy positions and so on. It seems more likely that the fingerprints of Trump’s team seeing Biden’s spots would appear in the president’s Twitter feed, the campaign’s most closely watched rapid response outlet. (The ad above, leading with Trump’s slow descent down a ramp at West Point, does not seem to have inspired any response, much less a prebuttal.)

That Murdoch facilitated this isn’t a surprise, nor is it a surprise he offered Trump debate advice. In both the most recent and earlier filings from Dominion, Murdoch is quoted as advocating explicitly for his charges to help boost Republicans. “[W]e should concentrate on Georgia, helping any way we can,” Murdoch wrote to his team in the days before the runoff Senate races in that state — meaning, obviously, that they should help the Republicans win. In the new filing, he’s quoted as writing to the head of Fox News that “we must tell our viewers again and again what they will get” with tax legislation proposed by Trump. He was advocating for acting in service to Trump and Trump’s politics.

It’s useful to contrast this with other cable-news channels. In 2010, MSNBC suspended host Joe Scarborough for having made small political contributions several years prior. “[I]t is critical that we enforce our standards and policies,” the network’s then-president, Phil Griffin, said in a statement. Fox News hosts, on the other hand, host Republican fundraising dinners and speak at political rallies. The difference is stark.

A decade ago, Murdoch was mired in a different scandal. British publications he owned were caught illegally accessing voice mails of various public figures. An extensive investigation led to arrests and resignations, the closure of one of Murdoch’s papers and the end of a takeover bid News Corporation was planning.

Murdoch himself was able to remain at a distance from the scandal but admitted that he bore responsibility for what had occurred. A parliamentary report was harshly critical of Murdoch, stating that he “exhibited willful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications.” Because this culture of illegal behavior was allowed to spread, the report concluded, “Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company.”

He remained the primary steward of Fox, luckily for Trump.

Murdoch and his spawn are a blight on this world in a dozen different ways. I really hope they take a gigantic financial hit for this. They are completely reckless and it’s more and more obvious that it stems from greed as much as ideology.

Dear Leader, that’s who

Following up on Tom’s post below with the Florida diners who all chose Trump for the nomination, Politico finally asks, “what about the Always Trumpers?“

Chris Sununu, the New Hampshire governor and potential presidential candidate who once joked that former President Donald Trump is “fucking crazy,” backpedaled and pledged recently to support Trump if he’s the nominee in 2024.

Nikki Haley, offered a similar chance to distance herself from the former president, insisted she doesn’t “focus” on him. Vivek Ramaswamy, the anti-woke entrepreneur and most recent entrant into the race, went so far as to say he’s “not running against President Trump” at all.

He is, of course. Every candidate in the emerging GOP field will be.

That they can’t quite acknowledge as much underscores one of the defining features of this very early primary and, more generally, GOP politics over the last six years: Trump’s base remains rigid, and even his critics believe it may be fatal to annoy them.

Despite his difficulties since he left office, about a third of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters still consider themselves supporters more of Trump than the Republican Party, according to a recent NBC News poll. Many of them aren’t going anywhere. Fully 28 percent of Republican primary voters are so devoted to the former president that they said they’d support him even if he ran as an independent, according to a national survey last month from The Bulwark and longtime Republican pollster Whit Ayres. Indeed, the “Always Trump” component of the party is so pronounced that it’s affecting how Trump’s opponents operate around him.

“All these folks are just hoping that Trump’s going to have a heart attack on a golf course one day, and that’s going to solve this problem for them,” said Fergus Cullen, a former New Hampshire Republican Party chair. “Not much of a strategy.”

It’s hard to fault them. Republican campaigns have calculated that they can’t afford to offend an entire swath of the GOP electorate still sympathetic to Trump. Instead, they’ve chosen to chip away at them through non-aggressive means.

In her announcement speech, Haley did not directly criticize Trump but called for “mandatory mental competency tests for politicians over 75 years old” — an age that would include both President Joe Biden, 80, and Trump, 76. Meanwhile DeSantis has either ignored or brushed aside Trump’s attacks, choosing to contrast himself by his 2022 results and Trump’s 2020 ones.

“I spend my time delivering results for the people of Florida and fighting against Joe Biden; that’s how I spend my time,” DeSantis said. “I don’t spend my time trying to smear other Republicans.”

It hasn’t gone unnoticed in Trump world. One Republican strategist close to the Trump campaign said potential candidates don’t want to directly go after Trump for fear of alienating his voters who they ultimately need to win.

“If a primary gets too nasty between Trump and DeSantis, I could forsee a chunk refusing to support DeSantis,” the strategist said. “Why were there ‘Never Trumpers’? Because of the nastiness of the primary. I do think that’s something other candidates need to be cognizant of. The voters loyal to Trump are a much more significant chunk than the Never Trumpers.”

A person close to Trump said the ex-president and his campaign do not take that core base of supporters for granted.

“He ran on a platform of the forgotten man and woman in America — they have been with him since he announced in 2015, they were with him in 2020,” the person said. “They won’t leave him.”

Trump, for his part, is actively weaponizing his hold on the party. While Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, said Sunday that participants in the party’s first primary debate this summer will have to sign a pledge to support the eventual nominee, Trump has balked at that idea, saying “It would have to depend on who the nominee was.”

Even if Trump did sign a pledge, Republicans know there would be no holding him to it. Trump signed a loyalty pledge to support the eventual nominee in 2015. But like a TV character telling the GOP they have a “nice party” and “it’d be a shame if something happened to it,” he was openly raising the prospect of running as an independent just a few months later.

“That’s the threat,” said David Kochel, a veteran of six Republican presidential campaigns. “That’s the constant threat that he brings to the race, that if he wants to go somewhere else, if he were not to be nominated, what is the potential damage that he could do?”

Trump wouldn’t even have to run as an independent to inflict damage. He could do it from the sidelines, baselessly casting doubt on the legitimacy of elections, as he did in the Georgia Senate runoff following his loss in 2020, depressing Republican turnout.

That’s one reason few Republicans are going after Trump directly at all. Even if Mike Pence, Trump’s former vice president, insists “we’ll have better choices” than Trump in 2024, he’s careful to laud “the policies of the Trump-Pence administration,” avoiding anything close to a direct hit on his one-time running mate.

“What they’re so afraid of is him being out of the tent shooting in,” said Sarah Longwell, the Republican political strategist and Bulwark publisher who became a vocal supporter of Joe Biden in 2020. “That threat… is all the more puzzling why people aren’t taking him on early, trying to chip away at the ‘Always Trumpers.’”

It may be impossible. How much Trump will benefit from an expected large primary field has been a source of intensifying debate in GOP circles in recent weeks. It’s possible weaker candidates will drop out before the first caucuses in Iowa, fearful of a repeat of 2016, when a large number of more establishment and elected Republicans split the vote in early primary states, allowing Trump to advance with less-than-majority support. Trump himself has acknowledged the advantage a bigger crowd of candidates would have on his chances.

“The more the merrier,” Trump said.

Many Republican strategists doubt the field will be as large in 2024 as it was in 2016.

“I think there is more of an awareness on the part of people who are going to get into this thing that there’s going to have to be an off-ramp at some point,” Kochel said.

Requirements to make the debate stage may knock out some contenders who fail to qualify. Others polling poorly or underperforming in the earliest state contests may heed the lessons of 2016 — or 2020, when Joe Biden benefitted from an early consolidation around him after South Carolina.

If the field isn’t as crowded as 2016, that could change things. Scott Walker, the former Wisconsin governor and early frontrunner in the 2016 campaign, said DeSantis is in a stronger position to run against Trump than Walker himself was because “we weren’t viewed as the alternative or the one other person at the forefront, like DeSantis is today.”

But Trump, as polarizing as he is, can always expand his own base. Following Trump’s appearance at the site of a toxic train derailment in Ohio last week — a visit derided by the left and mocked on Saturday Night Live — Walker called it a “prime example of what got Trump elected in the first place.”

“If he does more of that, he’ll be the nominee and the president again,” Walker said. “But as you and I both know, too, he has moments like that that are both wonderful and brilliant politically, as well as just decency-wise. And then he’ll have other moments where other things happen, where he’s taking on fellow Republicans or God knows what.

Actually, no. Trump didn’t do that stuff when he first campaigned. He held big rallies and showed up in his helicopter. And when he was president he showed up and insulted the locals in disaster areas. So no, that’s not his appeal.

Here he is being himself:

Let the games begin.

Even among white Floridians

From some site called The Big Lead:

Fox & Friends‘ Brian Kilmeade was tasked this morning with visiting a Florida eatery to ask people about this country and hopefully to snag some complimentary flapjacks. On the Republican side, these patrons’ governor, Ron DeSantis, has emerged as a trendy pick to unseat Donald Trump and earn the nomination. And yet Kilmeade struggled mightily to find one of them who supported DeSantis. Hell, even the person wearing a shirt with his name on it seemed to be on the fence in terms of her support.

WATCH: Fox’s Brian Kilmeade Has To SEARCH A Florida Diner To Find a Single Person Who Supports DeSantis Over Trump for 2024 — And Even She’s On The Fence. 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/GmFEDfD2Oo

— Alex Bruesewitz 🇺🇸 (@alexbruesewitz) February 28, 2023

That seems … not great. Even the dulcet tones of Smashmouth’s “All-Star” will do little to blunt the warning bells going off at DeSantis HQ. Of course, as Kilmeade alluded to, that decision is way, way down the road and it sounds like a lot of people need a break from talking about the election, especially after they are asked to talk about the election.

i see white people pic.twitter.com/2CvbhOrRzV

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 28, 2023

Definitely not a cult.

Cue Jethro Tull.

Our Father high in heaven, smile down upon your son
Who is busy with his money games – his women and his gun
Oh Jesus save me

The Looking Glass world of Ron DeSantis

Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina has a reputation for being a very, very conservative school. But not the most conservative school in town. Rumor had it that a local Bible college forbade its male students from having photos of their mothers in their rooms lest they lead to impure thoughts.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis want to forbid impure thoughts in his state’s schools. Heaven forfend that little ones (and older ones) might have impure thoughts about their country’s exceptionalism and history. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates said at his trial for corrupting youth. DeSantis wants to ensure Florida’s youth go uncorrupted and their lives unexamined.

At The Bulwark, Mike St. Thomas who heads the English Department at Rhode Island’s Portsmouth Abbey School, considers what it means to force Florida classrooms to be more conservative, to not to teach AP African American Studies, and to pass such (deliberately?) vague laws that teachers must walk on eggshells around ideas that might lead to thoughts DeSantis deems impure.

Himself raised a conservative Catholic, St. Thomas nonetheless found the majority liberal atmosphere of academia not as oppressive as conservatives allege. This contrasted with what he found when turoring a local home school senior writing a senior research paper:

But I soon found out that my student’s curriculum did not allow him to choose his own topic. It did not even allow him to choose his own argument—the homeschool program provided all its students with an identical pre-written thesis statement, which they were then instructed to copy verbatim into the first paragraph of their final paper. The thesis went something like this: The Roe v. Wade decision was both unethical and unconstitutional and should therefore be overturned. It was the students’ job to pick up this baton and run a set course with it, drawing upon legal decisions and political philosophy specified by the curriculum itself to provide support for the predetermined conclusion.

My disbelief soon gave way to anger. I, too, considered myself pro-life, but I was incredulous that that belief—any belief, really—would be used to justify this infantilizing treatment of a capable high school senior. Looking back on it now, this was my first conscious encounter with programmatic ideology in an educational setting, my experience in graduate school notwithstanding. The idea that my student’s homeschool curriculum was designed to dogmatically advance ended up disfiguring the proper relationship between curriculum and student. Not only was it blatant indoctrination, but it could also probably be construed as a form of plagiarism—albeit one designed by Kafka or Orwell, where a student must lift just the right ideas from just the right sources and pass them off as his or her own sincere opinions. I helped my student with the paper, but it tore me up inside. It still bothers me to this day.

DeSantis means to turn Florida into one large home school by banning disappoved ideas. Which ideas? Prohibited item 7 in the Stop WOKE Act, for example:

An individual, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the individual played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex, or national origin.

Anyone who has read Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” has felt anguish and psychological distress over the dehumanizing of disfavored classes from India to Germany to the United States. That’s the point, as much as classical tragedies evoke tears. To know yourself better and to experience the broader world through new eyes are goals of education. Just not in Florida.

Are universities liberal-leaning like Bob Jones is right-leaning? Sure, St. Thomas writes, but

In graduate school, I saw up close the predominance of progressive politics and “intersectionality,” an erstwhile academic term of art that has become a much larger cultural shibboleth, in the university setting. In many ways—ironically, given its commitment to diversity—my program was a homogeneous environment to learn in. Even so, I would choose it without hesitation over the bleak paradigm that gave rise to the homeschool research-paper edict. The department was very liberal, but by and large, the professors treated my arguments on their own merits, encouraged me to read widely and think deeply, and helped me both pursue my own interests and better articulate what I had to say about them. Though academic communities of like-minded individuals can skew toward cultish conformity (as even some progressives acknowledge), mine did not: Though culturally lopsided, the atmosphere was not coercive. That would have made it, in a word, unacademic.

How does one go about banning an idea from a place where ideas are meant to be explored, examined, and critiqued? DeSantis’s efforts are bound to fail, of course, if success is measured by anything resembling the academic standards of open inquiry, the pursuit of truth, and reasoned debate. But political success is another matter entirely. DeSantis is using the Trump playbook, which means the goalposts are movable, the better to suit those who wield the power.

Florida House Bill 999 which seeks to limit diversity efforts even bans the word democracy from its text, preferring the conservative formulation, “education for citizenship of the constitutional republic” (three times in its 23 pages).

“That pedagogy, as I’ve tried to make clear,” St. Thomas writes, “does not aim to help students think for themselves. After all, why bother with that if minority rule, rather than democracy, is the goal?”

Q.E.D. Is that Latin abbreviation too elitist?

Minority rule, the conservative goal, is a looking glass inversion of classic democracy. That’s why democracy must be banned and constitutional republic substituted. Our slave constitution’s compromise allows a minority of the population to enjoy majority representation in the U.S. Senate and electoral college. As their God intended.

Of course he did…

More info from the Dominion case was released today:

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the conservative media empire that owns Fox News, acknowledged in a deposition that several hosts for his networks promoted the false narrative that the election in 2020 was stolen from former President Donald J. Trump, court documents released on Monday showed.

“They endorsed,” Mr. Murdoch said under oath in response to direct questions about the hosts Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, a legal filing by Dominion Voting Systems said. “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight.”

Mr. Murdoch’s remarks, which he made last month as part of the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox by Dominion, added to the evidence that Dominion has accumulated in an attempt to prove its central allegation: The people running the country’s most popular news network knew Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud during the 2020 election were false but broadcast them anyway.

The new documents and a similar batch released this month revealed that top executives and on-air hosts reacted with incredulity bordering on contempt to the various fictitious allegations about Dominion, including that a secret algorithm in its machines allowed votes to be switched from one candidate to another and that the company was founded in Venezuela to help that country’s longtime leader, Hugo Chávez, fix elections.

Dominion’s latest filing also described how Paul D. Ryan, a former Republican speaker of the House and current member of the Fox Corporation board of directors, said in his deposition that he had told Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Murdoch’s son Lachlan, the chief executive officer, “Fox News should not be spreading conspiracy theories.” Mr. Ryan suggested that the network pivot and “move on from Donald Trump and stop spouting election lies.”

The filing casts Mr. Murdoch as a chairman who was both deeply engaged with his senior leadership about coverage of the election and operating at somewhat of a remove, unwilling to interfere. Asked by Dominion’s lawyer, Justin Nelson, whether he could have ordered Fox News to keep Trump lawyers like Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani off the air, Mr. Murdoch responded: “I could have. But I didn’t.”

They asked him why they allowed election denier Mike Lindel to defame Dominion repeatedly and he said it wasn’t a matter of red and blue, it’s a matter of green.

This whole thing is just about ego and greed — Trump’s ego and Murdoch’s greed. The rubes are just their marks.

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That’s Smith and Wesson using the Proud Boys to see its product. The NRA retweeted it.