Month: February 2023

Even worse than we expected

In case you missed the fireworks, here’s Dana Milbank on the “weaponization” committee:

One thing is clear after Thursday’s first hearing of the new “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government”: The weaponization panel’s weapon of choice will be the blunderbuss.

I don’t want to be conspiratorial about it, but House Republicans somehow turned Room 2141 of the Rayburn House Office Building, the Judiciary Committee hearing room, into the main ballroom of a QAnon convention. The witnesses — including world-class conspiracy purveyors Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Ivermectin) and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (I-Ukraine bioweapons labs) — might as well have been auditioning to guest-host “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

It is possible that, by random chance, one of the witnesses may have said something that is factually true, but any pellet of accuracy was lost amid all the errant slugs that ricocheted crazily out of their muzzles.

They revisited the “Russian collusion hoax” perpetrated by the “fake dossier,” Fusion GPS, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. They conjured an “engineered” Trump impeachment and a “coordinated effort” to “sabotage any public revelation of Hunter Biden’s laptop.” They alleged maltreatment of Jan. 6 insurrectionists and suggested that embedded federal agents provoked the crowd to attack the Capitol. They went back a decade to revive the debunked charge that a politically motivated Obama administration sicced the IRS on tea party groups.

They imagined that the U.S. government funded the creation of the coronavirus, that the World Health Organization has been “captured by the Chinese government,” and that doctors have been wrongly “vilified” for treating the virus with hydroxychloroquine and other bogus treatments. They fantasized about a government coverup of harms caused by coronavirus vaccines. They imagined that ordinary people are being labeled “domestic terrorists” for asking questions at school board meetings or for flying the Betsy Ross flag.

Above all, the witnesses testified to their own victimhood. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) recited a long list of Democratic colleagues who are out to get him as part of a “triad” that also involves partisan journalists and the FBI. Gabbard, who left the Democratic Party for Fox News after a failed presidential campaign, expressed her outrage that Hillary Clinton said mean things about her and that Mitt Romney made “baseless accusations of treason.” (Apparently, the senator from Utah and 2012 Republican presidential nominee is part of the vast left-wing conspiracy.)

“RonAnon” Johnson testified about a conspiracy so huge it includes “most members of the mainstream media, Big Tech, social media giants, global institutions and foundations, Democrat Party operatives and elected officials,” all working “in concert” with “corrupt individuals within federal agencies” to “defeat their political opponents and promote left-wing ideology and government control over our lives.”

You’ve caught us red-handed, senator! In fact, the weaponization committee needs only one more thing to complete its work: a scintilla of evidence.

White nationalists get a seat on the dais

Rep. Paul Gosar just won’t stop saluting those white nationalists.

The Arizona Republican has dined with them, traveled with them, spoken at their conferences, defended them on social media and promoted their racist themes. He lost his committee assignments in 2021 when he posted a cartoon video of himself killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a Latina.

But House Republican leaders, in their wisdom, restored Gosar’s committee status, giving him a seat on the House Oversight Committee. And Gosar this week repaid their confidence in him — by using one of the very first hearings of the committee to promote white nationalism.

At a hearing Tuesday on border security, Gosar declared that President Biden has “a plan … to deliberately open our borders and cede power to the cartels,” and thereby create chaos. “What is the answer to this mess for Biden and the Democrats?” he asked. “More big brother? More control? Even changing our culture?”

That is the very definition of the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory: that the left is deliberately importing immigrants to replace White people and White culture.

As it happens, Democrats on the committee anticipated this. At the hearing’s start, they tweeted a warning about Republican lawmakers “who are using today’s hearing to amplify white nationalist conspiracy theories.” The tweet linked to previous expressions of great replacement sentiments by panel Republicans, including Chairman James Comer of Kentucky (who said Democrats encourage illegal immigration as “part of their social equality campaign to fundamentally change America”) and Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania (who claimed “we’re replacing … native-born Americans to permanently transform the landscape of this very nation”).

Republicans saw red after the Democrats’ mention of white nationalism — “offensive” and “inflammatory” was the view of Rep. Glenn Grothman (Wis.) — but then proceeded to validate the accusation.

Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) both decried the migrant “invasion” of the country.

Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) informed the committee who the “million gotaways” — migrants who avoided capture the past two years — are: “stout young men … wearing camouflage, rolling hard … they’re carrying backpacks, they work for the drug cartels.”

And Republican after Republican claimed the Biden administration has conspired to endanger Americans with an “open border” policy.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials testifying at the hearing played it straight. Yes, they are overwhelmed by the number of migrants, and they need more agents. No, a border wall isn’t a panacea.

Perry repeatedly demanded to know “what changed” since the Trump administration ended to cause such a flood of migration. He was clearly fishing for the officials to blame Biden.

But John Modlin, chief of the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, testified that the real cause was disinformation. Apprehended migrants, he said, primarily tell border agents that they heard the border “was open.” Said Modlin: “All it takes is a few people to say the right words.”

Now where would migrants get the false impression that the United States has an open border? Hmm.

McCarthy blames Biden for House Republicans’ State of the Union hooliganism

Fourteen years ago, I was in the House chamber when Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) shocked the world by shouting two words at President Barack Obama during an address to Congress: “You lie!” In the outcry that followed, House Republican leaders demanded Wilson apologize, which he did, calling the White House and issuing a public statement offering “sincere apologies to the president for this lack of civility.”

In retrospect, the episode looks almost quaint. Wilson might as well have been operating under Emily Post’s rules of etiquette compared with the boorishness of his Republican colleagues at Tuesday night’s State of the Union address.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) reportedly asked Biden in advance not to use the phrase “extreme MAGA Republicans,” and Biden honored the request. The president’s goodwill didn’t end there. He opened by congratulating McCarthy and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). He used the word “together” 20 times in the speech, hailing bipartisan achievements, offering to resolve the debt-ceiling standoff (“let’s sit down together and discuss our mutual plans together”) and closing with a rallying cry: “We’re the United States of America, and there’s nothing — nothing — beyond our capacity if we do it together.”

Republicans answered him with hooliganism and obscenity. Greene shouted “Liar!” at the president — not once, as Wilson had done, but over and over. As Biden talked about solving the debt standoff together, a woman in Greene’s vicinity (Politico identified her as Greene) shouted “bulls—!” at Biden. Some closer to the front — GOP Sens. Mitt Romney (Utah) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) among them — whipped their heads around in surprise.

House Republicans by the dozens groaned, booed, laughed, jeered, waved their hands dismissively at the president and pointed their thumbs down — ignoring an attempt by McCarthy, seated behind Biden, to shush them. Several shouted “secure the border!” One shouted at Biden that fentanyl deaths are “your fault.” Rep. Ronny Jackson (Tex.) noisily chewed gum, Rep. Byron Donalds (Fla.) interrupted Biden with a series of taunts (“don’t say it!”), Boebert shook her head in disgust, others shared laughs about messages on their phone screens, and, in the middle of the mayhem, GOP leaders Steve Scalise, Tom Emmer and Elise Stefanik sat stone-faced.

Decorum has broken down before during presidential addresses. Justice Samuel Alito shook his head and said “not true” during an Obama speech. Democrats groaned and booed during a Trump speech, and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) ripped up her text after Trump finished. Trump called Democrats “treasonous” for failing to applaud him sufficiently.

If holding applause is treason, one can only imagine what capital offenses Republicans committed Tuesday night. And the shouting didn’t end on the House floor.

In Statuary Hall after the speech, I caught up with Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Tex.), who had been sitting next to Greene:

“He lied about the economy! He lied about the deficit! He lied about us cutting Medicare and Social Security. … He lied about the labor shortage! … He lied about burger joints! … He lied about policing. … He lied about Mr. Pelosi.”

“So overall, you liked it?” I asked Fallon.

“I loved the ending, because it was over,” Fallon replied, soon resuming his catalogue: “He said a couple of things like we’re going to work together. He’s lying there, too!”

Fallon shared with me and Joseph Morton of the Dallas Morning News three pages of scribbled notes he took during the address. Among his observations: Biden is a “SNAKE OIL SALESMAN” (and, of course, a “LIAR”) who “MUMBLES” (Fallon thought this evidence of a “health issue”), engages in “climate alarmism” and “CLASS WARFARE” and is apparently a “a communist — accuse him of central control.”

Even some Republicans thought Biden deserved a more “respectful” audience for his “cordial” speech, as Rep. Ryan Zinke (Mont.) told us. But it requires leadership to keep the hooligans in line — and House Republicans don’t have that. McCarthy went on Fox News on Wednesday and blamed the Republicans’ outbursts on Biden. “Well, the president was trying to goad the members, and the members are passionate about it,” the speaker said.

This is how McCarthy repays Biden’s goodwill? It’s going to be a long couple of years.

Probe of Hunter Biden’s laptop already needs a reboot

Rep. James Comer is rapidly establishing himself as the Chief Inspector Dreyfus of the 118th Congress.

First, the newly installed chairman of the House Oversight Committee said he would investigate Biden’s mishandling of classified documents from his time as vice president, but not President Donald Trump’s mishandling of classified documents. Why? “The president has the authority to declassify documents,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Jan. 15. “The vice president does not.”

That rationale blew up a few days later, when it emerged that former vice president Mike Pence also mishandled classified documents. So Comer approached reporters in the Capitol basement on Jan. 31 in an attempt to establish a new justification for probing Biden but not Trump. But Comer succeeded only in confusing himself. “We’re very concerned about who had access to Pence’s documents,” he said — then stopped. “I said Pence. I’m sorry. Let me start all over. We’re very concerned about who had access to Biden’s documents.” Moments later, he added: “I want to be very clear, I was talking about Biden.”

Comer tried again this week, returning to CNN for an interview with Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday. This time, he said he wasn’t looking into Trump’s documents because “there’s a special counsel looking into everything at Mar-a-Lago.”

Collins pointed out that “there’s a special counsel looking into Biden as well.”

Comer, trapped, grasped for a lifeline. “Pardon me for not having as much confidence in this special counsel appointed by [Attorney General] Merrick Garland on Joe Biden.”

Collins checked him again: “But he appointed the special counsel into Trump as well.”

“I’m against both special counsels!” blurted out Comer, contradicting his latest rationale, expressed mere seconds earlier, for probing Biden but not Trump.

Comer is not bound by reason — even his own. Last week, he speculated on Fox News that the Chinese spy balloon might contain bioweapons from Wuhan — speculation he later admitted was based on “no evidence.” Yet he seems sensitive to the impression that he sounds nutty. He recently protested that “I’m sincere about trying to do the right thing.” His evidence: He didn’t vote to overthrow the 2020 election.

Baby steps, Mr. Chairman.

This week, after giving white nationalism a platform, he led his committee the following day into a doomed attempt to prove that the FBI and the Biden campaign colluded with Twitter “to suppress and delegitimize information contained in Hunter Biden’s laptop about the Biden family’s business schemes.” That’s how Comer put it as he sat in front of a blown-up New York Post front page screaming “BIDEN SECRET EMAILS.”

The hearing extended for six hours — including an hour-long break in the middle when the power went out in the hearing room. In the darkness, somebody on the panel (it sounded like Clay Higgins) said: “Now did Twitter do that?”

The conspiracies never end!

Committee members succeeded in mentioning Hunter Biden’s name — at least 82 times, a transcript shows. They also succeeded in bashing Twitter for its practice of punishing people (including multiple Republicans on the panel) for spreading disinformation.

“You can consider your speech canceled … because you canceled mine,” Greene hollered at the former executives. (She was suspended from Twitter for claiming that face masks and vaccines were useless.) “By the way, I’m a member of Congress and you’re not,” she taunted.

Boebert shouted about how her Twitter account was suppressed by the “sinister overlords” of “fascist Twitter” because she made “a freaking joke about Hillary Clinton.”

And Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) used the forum to complain that the covid vaccine caused her tremors, asthma and “occasional heart pain that no doctor can explain.”

But Comer and his sleuths failed utterly in their quest to prove collusion between the FBI, the Biden campaign and Twitter. The ex-Twitter officials testified that neither entity spoke to them about Hunter Biden’s laptop when Twitter, fearing that the tabloid story was based on hacked material or Russian propaganda, blocked it for all of 24 hours in 2020 before reversing the ban and apologizing.

It turns out Comer had no more evidence for his claim that there was a “coordinated coverup” of Hunter Biden’s laptop than for his claim that the Chinese balloon was a bioweapon. In both cases, he just made it up.

“My, my, my,” gloated Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly (Va.). “What happens when you hold a hearing and you can’t prove your point?”

Chief Inspector Comer has just found out.

Sadly, the right wing will never see any of this — Fox didn’t cover the live and the whole right wing media complex just cherry picked the stuff they knew their people would like.

One of the issues with seditious conspiracy charges against Trump is the matter of intent. Did he know that he had lost the election and went ahead with his plot anyway?

Of course he did. And here is some external proof we haven’t seen before:

Former president Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign commissioned an outside research firm in a bid to prove electoral fraud claims but never released the findings because the firm disputed many of his theories and could not offer any proof that he was the rightful winner of the election, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The campaign paid researchers from Berkeley Research Group, the people said, to study 2020 election results in six states, looking for fraud and irregularities to highlight in public and in the courts. Among the areas examined werevoter machine malfunctions, instances of dead people voting and any evidence that could help Trump show he won, the people said. None of the findings were presented to the public or in court.

About a dozen people at the firmworked on the report, including econometricians, who use statistics to model and predict outcomes, the people said. The work was carried out in the final weeks of 2020, before the Jan. 6 riotof Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol.

Trump continues to falsely assert that the 2020 election was stolen despite abundant evidence to the contrary, much of which had been provided to himor was publicly available before the Capitol assault.The Trump campaign’s commissioning of its own report to study the then-president’s fraud claims has not been previously reported.

“They looked at everything: change of addresses, illegal immigrants, ballot harvesting, people voting twice, machines being tampered with, ballots that were sent to vacant addresses that were returned and voted,” said a person familiar with the work who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private research and meetings. “Literally anything you could think of. Voter turnout anomalies, date of birth anomalies, whether dead people voted. If there was anything under the sun that could be thought of, they looked at it.”

The findings were not what the Trump campaign had been hoping for, according to the four people. While the researchers believed there were voting anomalies and unusual data patterns in a few states, along with some instances in which laws may have been skirted, they did not believe the anomalies were significant enough to make a difference in who won the election.

The research also contradictedsome of Trump’s more conspiratorial theories, such as his baseless allegations about rigged voting machines and large numbers of dead people voting.

[…]

Senior officials from Berkeley Research Group briefed Trump, former chief of staff Mark Meadows and others on the findings in aDecember 2020conference call, people familiar with the matter said. Meadows showed skepticism of the findings and continued to maintain that Trump won. Trump also continued to say he won the election. The call grew contentious, people with knowledge of the meeting said.

Not that we didn’t already know this.

But never fear, Trump is now adding another layer to The Big Lie with the help of his chief sycophantic accomplice:

This is even dumber than the notion that Democrats stole the elections in six different states with Hugo Chavez’s election machines and Italian spy satellites. It is completely absurd.

Even if this Hunter Biden bullshit was true, which it isn’t, it wouldn’t have changed even one vote. Biden was running against Donald Trump a man under more investigations than his hero John Gotti ever was. It’s absurd on its face, and frankly, pretty desperate.

Or sanctimonious right wing NY Times op-ed writers either

This, from Eric Levitz in NY Magazine, is right on about Ron DeSantis:

Ron DeSantis is the popular governor of a racially diverse state with a substantial Democratic population. He is also a reactionary.

In the New York Times, Pamela Paul argues that liberals have a lot to learn from these two facts. The columnist implores her fellow Democrats to avoid writing DeSantis off as “another unelectable right-wing lunatic unfit for national office.” Rather than dismissing the Florida governor and his supporters as “racist, homophobic, transphobic, and xenophobic,” Paul advises liberals to reflect on his political strengths.

She explains that, unlike Donald Trump, DeSantis was a star student at an Ivy League school. It’s therefore likely that he “knows what he’s doing” when he scandalizes progressives. He is a savvy political actor, if his approval rating is any guide. Democrats should therefore seek to learn from his example. It isn’t clear precisely what Paul believes we should learn.

She notes that many voters approved of DeSantis’s denigration of all manner of anti-COVID policies (including vaccination, which imposes few costs on personal freedom as it dramatically reduces COVID fatalities). She concedes that it’s worth condemning his decision to send desperate migrants to Martha’s Vineyard in a misbegotten bid to expose liberals’ supposed hypocrisy. But she observes that many Hispanic Floridians actually approved of the policy.

DeSantis’s Stop WOKE Act, which prohibits discussion of sensitive racial issues in the classroom, may be antithetical to free speech, but Paul insists some parents are “tired of racial and ethnic divisiveness and the overt politicization of what’s taught in the classroom.” (Why parents who merely oppose the “politicization” of curricula would be pleased by a partisan legislature forbidding entire topics from classroom discussion is not explained.) DeSantis’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law may forbid a teacher from explaining why one of her students has two mothers, yet it also, according to Paul, has “reasonable and legitimate attractions” for parents worried that their gender-confused children may be socially transitioned without their consent.

Paul’s overarching argument — that liberals should not assume a politician who offends their sensibilities can’t win the presidency — is indisputably true. But it’s not clear who precisely is trying to dispute it. Paul does not quote a single liberal writer or politician making the claim that DeSantis could not possibly defeat Joe Biden in 2024. After Trump won an Electoral College majority while campaigning in support of mass murdering Muslim prisoners of war with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood, few progressives believe the United States is incapable of electing a president with noxious views.

The fact that DeSantis has managed to comport himself as an unabashedly illiberal right-wing governor while commanding popular support in a state that is only 53 percent non-Hispanic white is certainly concerning. And it challenges blue America’s conventional wisdom about “the Hispanic vote” circa 2013. But Trump’s gains with nonwhite voters in 2020 have already prompted two years of liberal introspection about the cross-racial appeal of right-wing populism. It’s unclear what specifically Paul believes Democrats should do to combat it.

Her piece does appear to endorse DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” law on the merits without actually arguing for it in any detail. The column also seems to imply that Democrats should consider moving rightward on immigration and distancing themselves from “woke” identity politics but does not say this explicitly. Liberals should not assume that “the best way to defang DeSantis” is “to mock and belittle him,” Paul writes. What is the best way to defeat him goes unexplained.

Generally speaking, it is wiser to overestimate one’s political rivals than to underestimate them. But it would nevertheless be a mistake for Democrats to grow so awed by a Florida governor with a 56 percent approval rating as to conclude that their only hope for keeping a reactionary out of the White House is to become more reactionary themselves.

DeSantis’s much-publicized political strengths are paired with underexposed weaknesses. And the issues on which he is most vulnerable — Medicare, Social Security, and abortion rights — are far more nationally salient than his crusades against “wokeness” in public schools.

Before his present incarnation as a populist purple-state governor, DeSantis was a pro-austerity, right-wing House member. In his 2011 book, he wrote that the U.S. Constitution was designed to “prevent the redistribution of wealth through the political process” and that this was commendable because “when the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” He further lamented that “popular pressure to redistribute wealth or otherwise undermine the rights of property … will ever be present.”

In other words, the self-styled “populist” argued that democracy is inherently dangerous since ordinary voters are sometimes able to pursue their economic interests through the political process — interests that include the progressive redistribution of income. Thus, DeSantis implied that the very existence of social-welfare programs that take resources from the wealthy and transfer them to the middle class, poor, and elderly is a violation of property rights and inherently tyrannical.

Although Congressman DeSantis did not go so far as to propose the wholesale abolition of all transfer programs, his congressional record is largely of a piece with his libertarian musings. During his 2012 congressional campaign, DeSantis expressed support for privatizing Social Security and Medicare. In 2013 and 2014, DeSantis deemed Paul Ryan’s infamous proposals for balancing the federal budgets insufficiently austere. Instead, as Josh Barro notes, DeSantis voted to replace those proposals with the Republican Study Committee’s more radical budget blueprints. The RSC’s 2013 fiscal vision would have raised the age of eligibility for Social Security and Medicare to 70, slowed the growth of Social Security benefits, and ended Medicare as we’d known it, transforming the program from a health-insurance entitlement to a stipend that wouldn’t necessarily increase with rising health-care costs.

In the decade since that proposal, the percentage of U.S. voters who rely on Social Security and Medicare has only grown. Perhaps not coincidentally, the idea of cutting such entitlement benefits has only become more politically toxic. Whereas the House GOP of 2013 argued unabashedly for shrinking Medicare and Social Security, today’s Republican Caucus has already vowed to spare cuts to those programs in any debt-ceiling deal. In a recent Pew poll of voters’ priorities, “reducing health-care costs” came in second behind “strengthening the economy.” Restricting eligibility for Medicare and cutting its benefits would seem antithetical to satisfying that concern. The issues DeSantis has concentrated on and Paul advises liberals to concern themselves with — such as public schools’ handling of racial and gender issues — do not rank in any recent survey of voters’ priorities.

Meanwhile, DeSantis’s record on abortion is poised to grow more politically vexing. At present, Florida bans abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy with no exceptions for cases of rape or incest. Before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, polls often found plurality support for banning abortion after 15 weeks. There is some evidence that Americans have become less tolerant of abortion bans now that they are becoming more commonplace. In a YouGov poll from last September, only 39 percent of voters endorsed a 15-week ban. Regardless, it is doubtlessly true that there is considerably more popular support for banning abortion after 15 weeks than there is for doing so earlier in a pregnancy.

Yet the vast majority of abortions are performed within those first 15 weeks; therefore Florida conservatives are eager for a more comprehensive ban. For his part, DeSantis may want to get a more thoroughgoing ban into law himself so as to shore up Evangelical support in the GOP primary. A little over a week ago, he appeared to signal an openness to signing a ban on abortions after the fetus attains a heartbeat, which generally occurs in the first six weeks of pregnancy. Florida state senate president Kathleen Passidomo is advocating for a 12-week ban, but the Florida Family Policy Council believes the “heartbeat” bill is more likely to move forward. Even if DeSantis doesn’t sign such a bill into law, a competitive GOP primary will likely force him to endorse draconian abortion restrictions if not an outright ban.

In last year’s midterms, voters consistently listed abortion as one of their top issues. The available data strongly suggests that voters’ opposition to the GOP’s reproductive agenda enabled Democrats to retain the Senate and limit Republican gains in the House. In a recent Gallup poll, the percentage of Americans who favored “less strict” abortion laws exceeded the percentage who favored “stricter” ones by a 46 to 15 percent margin. That represents the highest level of support for loosening abortion restrictions in the history of Gallup’s survey.

DeSantis’s landslide reelection was impressive, but there is reason to think Florida’s politics have become increasingly unrepresentative of the nation as a whole. And whatever his approval rating, the fundamental reality is that DeSantis is much more conservative than the median U.S. voter. Just a few years ago, he was among the most right-wing members of a historically reactionary House Republican Caucus. It is possible that he is the most “electable” Republican who could survive a GOP primary. But that says more about the radicalization of the Republican primary electorate than it does about the breadth of DeSantis’s appeal.

Biden remains an unpopular president, and U.S. voters remain unhappy with inflation. Were Republicans capable of nominating a (relatively) moderate figure like former Maryland governor Larry Hogan, Democrats’ 2024 prospects might look poor. But a short, charisma-free, nasal-voiced proponent of Social Security cuts and abortion bans is not an especially fearsome adversary. Conventional Democratic politics — which is to say, promising to sustain entitlements by taxing the rich and to protect abortion rights by beating back the Bible-thumpers — is quite plausibly equal to the challenge of Ron DeSantis. And in his State of the Union on Tuesday night, Biden showed he remains more than fluent in such politics.

Democrats may have some things to learn from DeSantis’s success. But the party has no great need for lessons in how to simultaneously appeal to Evangelicals in the panhandle and anti-woke book reviewers in Manhattan.

DeSantis may also have a glass jaw, as he showed in his Gubernatorial debate and his response just this week to Trump’s attack on him as a pedophile “groomer.” He said he was above all that and the only Republicans who like that are the anti-woke book reviewers in Manhattan. GOP voters want a fighter and at some point he’s going to have to do more than pontificate with prepared speeches at press conferences or put out a phony video pretending to be a fighter pilot. He has the spontaneity of a wooden spoon, so it’s not going to be easy.

I’m a boomer and the Gen Zs are grandchild age so I suppose it’s natural that I relate to them. That whole “skip a generation” thing is often true. Certainly, when it comes to politics it seems to me that the Democratic new guard is much savvier than both their immediate predecessors and the old guard my age. They see the opposition for what it is in a way that many liberals my age took forever to recognize (and that’s assuming they ever have.) I’m not sure why I could see the truth when so many couldn’t but I’m super relieved to see the younger generation in electoral politics is moving beyond some of the more parochial types of infighting that has so often characterized the Democratic party to form a popular front against the fascist tide on the right. Maybe we’ll get through this after all.

Note that I’m speaking specifically of elected politicians. The campus wars are something else and I would guess it’s at least partially attributable to the fact that these young people are not exposed to the right while the elected politicians are. Much like the right wing bubble, that left wing bubble thinks it fully reflects the whole world so they end up fighting amongst themselves because they know, on some level, that there is a fight to be had. Maybe this is a good division of labor… they press cultural change while the more overtly political types wage the partisan political fight. (Maybe ….. I’m not actually sure about that. Some pretty toxic stuff is happening in left wing institutions.)

This article by Greg Sargent about the first Gen Z in Congress Maxwell Frost illustrates my point:

Rep. Maxwell Frost, the first Gen Z member of Congress, had numerous breakthrough moments this week during hearings run by House Republicans. The Florida Democrat’s performance did more than unmask the folly of GOP investigations, though it certainly did that. Subtly but unmistakably, he signaleda generational turn in the Democratic Party.

Young, rising Democrats such as Frost and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York — whose own big moment this week revealed Twitter’s special treatment for Donald Trump — are putting their stamp on the party by modeling how to break through the informational clutter.

“Oftentimes, our party has a problem with having a simplified message that’s able to cut through all the noise,” Frost told me in an interview. “This is something I think Republicans are actually good at.” He added: “It’s something we can get better at.”

During a Tuesday hearing on border security, Frost used his backbench seat on the Oversight Committee to gettwo border police officials to overturn the entire premise of the GOP argument on immigration, that Democrats want “open borders”:

Frost: When President Biden took office, did your agents stop enforcing the border and just allow everyone to come in thus creating what we hear is an open border.
Chavez: The answer is no pic.twitter.com/RGP8t6KWrM

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 7, 2023

Note the “Dick and Jane” quality here, as though Frost were asking these officials to explain these truths to a child. This highlights a key move: While Democrats sometimes respond to things like the “open borders” claim with high dudgeon, here the tone is one of mockery and contempt.

Asked about this, Frost said he calibrates the tone of his responses to the seriousness of the underlying assertion.

“You match the energy of the claim,” Frost said, noting he hopes to “dismantle the other folks’ arguments but also really show people how absurd they are.” Outrage risks “elevating” weak claims, whereas mockery “diminishes” them, he said.

Similarly, Frost mocked Republicans for obsessing over Twitter’s treatment of a 2020 story about Hunter Biden. Frost pointed out that Republicans are angry that the story didn’t help Trump win in 2020, dryly noting: “That’s the point of this hearing.”

To drive home this idea, Frost also questioned a Twitter executive about the Trump White House’s pressure to take down a tweet by model Chrissy Teigen that attacked Trump in a highly colorful phrase:

it was not my intention to get PAB in the Congressional record but I’m glad the hearing wasn’t a COMPLETE waste of time pic.twitter.com/T2K7QWeX84

— Maxwell Alejandro Frost (@MaxwellFrostFL) February 8, 2023

Frost went out of his way to get the explicit phrase “p—y a– b—-” into the congressional record. This made the moment viral and underscored the absurdity of the whole affair.

Older Democrats sometimes seem beholden to a picture of the GOP as it existed in the 1980s (or earlier among certain much older Democrats). In their nostalgic vision, bipartisanship was an ideal that could be maintainedthrough outrage and shaming.

By contrast, younger Democrats came of age in the aftermath of Newt Gingrich’s scorched-earth politics, conspiracy theories about the Clintons, the partisan Supreme Court’s handing of the presidency toGeorge W. Bush, Karl Rove’s Iraq War propaganda, and the deranged “birtherism” directed at Barack Obama.

Frost also chalks up this generational difference to younger Democrats’ experience of defining events such as police killings and mass shootings “via social media,” which he described as “unifying moments” of national “trauma.” Previously, Frost was an activist in the segment of the gun control movement organized by social-media-savvy young people.

He uses a harder-edged approach when warranted, such as when he went after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s reactionary use of government power to limit free expression. During the Twitter hearing, Frost underscored the absurdity of the GOP’s stated concerns about free speech with this detour into DeSantis’s suppression of it:

Maxwell Frost (@MaxwellFrostFL) has Floridians' backs against the abuse Ron DeSantis is doling out on a daily basis… pic.twitter.com/4dI7MpblRs

— Never Trump – Never Again! (@NeverTrumpNeve1) February 9, 2023

The generational difference goes only so far. Frost’s safe Democratic district in Orlandoliberates him to adopt an approach oriented toward viral information warfare. Other youngish Democrats who represent tougher districts — such as Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia — are moving the party forward in a more conventional way, stressing bipartisanship and national security experience.

What’s more, older Democrats have had their ownviral moments, such as when Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (Md.) offered Republicans a brutal lesson on the First Amendment. Even here, though, you can discern a difference between Raskin’s party-elder-like approach and Frost’s archly detached internet-savvy mockery.

As media critic Jay Rosen notes, the sheer absurdity of these GOP hearings poses a challenge to our discourse: It’s hard to talk about them at all without lending them more validation than they merit.

If so, perhaps Frost’sapproach offers an answer: Treat the hearings with the ridicule they deserve while marshaling the viral reach that this contemptfacilitates to supplant bad information with good.

This person is so good she sends chills down my spine:

Democrats’ new direction?

“There has to be a dream. We have to stand for a thing,” messaging consultant Anat Shenker Osorio tells students. That seems to have filtered up to top Democrats more accustomed to “being too reactive and too defensive when confronting Republican attacks,” writes Christian Paz at Vox.

If President Joe Biden is, as he appears, already campaigning for a second term, it “is likely to be less oppositional and more optimistic, with less focus on highlighting how bad the other side is, and more attention on imagining how much more Democrats can accomplish with four more years in power,” Paz writes (although the White House declined comment).

Negativity is out of fashion:

That’s not necessarily how Democrats have run their campaigns in the Trump era and even into Biden’s presidency. Since the 2016 election, much of Democrats’ political strategy has been to run vocally and clearly anti-Trump, anti-MAGA Republican campaigns. This approach fueled much of the closing message of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and boosted the 2018 blue wave and 2020 Biden victory, when Biden cast the election as a battle between him and Trump’s “season of darkness in America.” That kind of message also helped Democrats defy the odds during the 2022 midterms.

But 2024 offers Biden a different opportunity, as an incumbent, to make a proactive case for the government’s role as a force for good, and a hopeful vision for improving the middle and working classes. “In the [2022] midterms, there was a split in thinking about how Democrats should campaign. Democrats — congressional Democrats — in general have a hard time talking about their accomplishments in a cohesive way,” Rodell Mollineau, a senior adviser to the pro-Biden super PAC Unite the Country, told me. “Biden’s stubbornness and his realization that, ‘Hey, we got a lot of stuff done, and we shouldn’t hide it,’ was helpful in the midterms and shows his political instincts.”

Incumbency has its advantages. And an improving economy may soften some opposition on the center-right by 2024 as the pandemic’s effects fade.

It also helps that Republicans have chosen a doom-and-gloom political message, exemplified through Arkansas Gov. (and former Trump spokesperson) Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s State of the Union rebuttal. Choosing to hype up talk of gender pronouns, critical race theory, and Latinx is a calculated tactic among leading Republican presidential candidates like Trump and Ron DeSantis, who have engaged in a once-fringe but now normalized cultural crusade that most Americans might not understand.

I covered some of that in Code Talkers on Friday.

That doesn’t mean Democrats need to cede the ground on social issues. Progressives, like Sawyer Hackett, a senior adviser to former presidential candidate Julián Castro, told me there’s a way to take on the culture war fights while still drawing up an optimistic vision for America. “We can tout our achievements,” Hackett said, “while still reminding voters that there’s so much more we can do if Republicans weren’t standing in the way.” Democratic messaging in culture war battles can protect vulnerable communities, Hackett said, and give Democrats “an opportunity for some mockery” of Republicans. That levity, Hackett said, can help Democrats hold on to parts of their base, like young voters, infrequent voters, and nonvoters.

Roger that, suggests Stuart Stevens, who believes Republicans have jumped the shark with their culture war fixation. If Biden’s widely praised State of the Union Address this week was a foretaste, mockery by the left will be met on the right by quadupling down on crazy. Normies won’t take well to it and haven’t. “Three thread lines comprise most Republican cultural wars: race, sex, and education,” Stevens writes. “All three are losers for Republicans.”

Still, writes Dan Pfeiffer, “There is no math that supports a governing coalition that is entirely dependent on college-educated voters.”

Paz concludes:

Making smarter economic appeals will be crucial to rebuilding the Obama-era coalition of college-educated voters, Black and Latino voters, and working-class voters without college degrees. “We saw the beginnings of that in the speech,” Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the co-founder of the progressive group Way to Win, said. “To have a story that goes up against those culture war attacks, it has to be a story of economic renewal that addresses and celebrates diversity, and that talks about the role of government in including everyone.”

Biden-style populism rather than the grievance populism of MAGA Republicans could crack that code. In his SOTU, Biden declared Democrats are indeed “for a thing.” In fact, for government fixing a list of complaints that nag average Americans of all political leanings, from tax cheats to junk fees to paid family medical leave and affordable childcare. It’s hard not to be for those.

And Republicans? What are they for that a majority of Americans want?

“Let’s finish the job,” Biden repeated. He’s off to a good start. Let’s hope Democrats don’t screw it up.

Solidarity is power

Many isms attempt to capture the divide between left and right both in the U.S. and abroad. A broad set of impulses fuel the personal, religious, cultural, class, and political clashes roiling society.

Without naming it, Heather Cox Richardson examines the shortsightedness in the current appetite in some quarters for fascism:

Over all the torrent of news these days is a fundamental struggle about the nature of human government. Is democracy still a viable form of government, or is it better for a country to have a strongman in charge?

Democracy stands on the principle of equality for all people, and those who are turning away from democracy, including the right wing in the United States, object to that equality. They worry that equal rights for women and minorities—especially LGBTQ people—will undermine traditional religion and traditional power structures. They believe democracy saps the morals of a country and are eager for a strong leader who will use the power of the government to reinforce their worldview.

But empowering a strongman ends oversight and enables those in power to think of themselves as above the law. In the short term, it permits those in power to use the apparatus of their government to enrich themselves at the expense of the people of their country. Their supporters don’t care: they are willing to accept the cost of corruption so long as the government persecutes those they see as their enemies. But that deal is vulnerable when it becomes clear the government cannot respond to an immediate public crisis.

Behold the weak earthquake response in Turkey and Syria, Richardson writes. There should be billions in Turkish coffers from the earthquake tax levied since 1999. Where is it? Syria blocks western aid to communities held by his opponents and hard-hit by this week’s quakes.

Consider Russia’s new imperial project in Ukraine and its designs on Europe. “On Tuesday, Ramzan Kadyrov, a close ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin, spoke openly of attacking Poland after conquering Ukraine. It was time, he said, for the West to fall to its knees before Russia …” Yet, the “freedom-loving” American right has a crush on Putin because he shares their cultural grievances and their disdain for democracy.

Underlying the isms humans blithely toss about is the fact that we are, in the end, animals, social creatures with a feral sense of who’s up and who’s down. Fascism, racism, fundamentalism, sexism, classism, you-name-it. They are all about power: who has it and who doesn’t. About the haves who crave more and the have-nots who fear losing what little they’ve got.

Heather McGhee speaks to the fruitlessness of viewing the world through a zero-sum lens. Slavery, America’s original sin, taints our perceptions and American institutions so thoroughly as to be invisible, she explains. The key to the sum of us prospering is to get past the racist legacy of believing that if those below us on the social ladder advance it necessarily comes at the expense of those on the next wrung up. Those at the top exploit the power anxieties of those in the middle and lower to keep them squabbling. Why? Because the elite are as addicted to needing more and more as the opioid-addicted are to their OxyContin.

Solidarity. Everyone does better when everyone does better, McGhee argues. Yet, our zero-sum lens gets in the way. The rich and powerful get more and keep the rest arguing over scraps.

Digby wrote on Friday, “For the past half century, social justice and social evolution has been unstoppable despite the right’s relentless backlash and attempts to turn back the clock.” Stuart Stevens quotes former client, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, “Be for the future. It’s going to happen anyway.”

Hunger for a strongman, then, is a losing proposition for everyone in the long run. He will not protect followers when the chips are down. The middle will suffer along with the bottom, in the end only differing by a degree not worth fighting over. The principle of equality for all people protects us all more surely and in the long run.

Forsaking democracy for a strongman’s short-term protection is a fool’s game. But like the poor, we will have fools with us always.

The cutest baby ever:

Conservationists at Chester Zoo become the first in Europe to successfully breed a rare Coquerel’s sifaka lemur.

The precious youngster arrived to parents Beatrice (10) and Elliot (10) – 18 months after the duo were translocated from the USA to Chester Zoo to begin a vital new conservation breeding programme, designed to protect the crtically endangered primates from extinction.

Born with a thick fuzzy white coat and weighing just 119 grams, experts say the baby will cling tightly to mum’s belly for several weeks, before riding on her back like a backpack until around six months old.

Currently only seven of the rare primates are cared for in three zoos in Europe and the family trio at Chester are the only Coquerel’s sifaka to live in the UK. Conservationists at the zoo say the birth is a ‘landmark moment’ for the species that is on the brink of extinction in the wild. 

“It’s really exciting to be the first team of conservationists in Europe to successfully breed this unusual and extremely rare primate.

“While it’s still early days, both mum and baby are doing great. Beatrice is feeding her new arrival regularly and is keeping it nestled in her fur as she leaps from tree to tree. In a few weeks’ time, the baby will graduate to riding on her back, before branching out and learning to climb trees independently at around six months old. It won’t be long until this bright-eyed baby will be bouncing 20ft between tree to tree just like its parents.”

More at the link.

Stuart Stevens on Democrats and the usefulness of the culture wars:

For decades it has been a given in American politics that Republicans are masters of “cultural wars” and Democrats should avoid engaging. That might have been true at one time, but as a long-time veteran of Republican campaigns, I think it’s time for Democrats to run toward the sound of the guns in cultural wars. Not only can Democrats win cultural wars, they are winning them, even if they don’t seem to understand their potential electoral benefits.

In the Trump era, MAGA Republicans attacked Nike for supporting Colin Kaepernick and his campaign to highlight racial injustice with police. At a 2017 rally in Alabama for Senator Luther Strange, Trump thundered, “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!’”

In September, before the 2018 midterms, Mitch McConnell’s long-time top political aide, DC lobbyist Josh Holmes, touted the political impact of attacking the NFL. “It’s a powerful tool against liberals who are trying to make cultural inroads into a conservative electorate. It reaffirms conservative skepticism about whether a liberal candidate sees the world the same way as they do.”

So how did that work out? Nike’s value increased by $6 billion in the weeks after airing their “Believe in Something” national Kaepernick campaign. Luther Strange lost his election, Republicans lost the House in 2018, and Donald Trump is working out of a bridal suite in a Florida country club. Josh Holmes’ client and fixer, Mitch McConnell, is now Minority Leader of the US Senate.

In July 2020, Trump went after NASCAR for their treatment of an alleged racial threat against one of NASCAR’s few Black drivers and their ban on the Confederate flag. “Has @BubbaWallace apologized to all of those great NASCAR drivers & officials who came to his aid, stood by his side, & were willing to sacrifice everything for him, only to find out that the whole thing was just another HOAX?” Trump wrote on Twitter. “That & Flag decision has caused lowest ratings EVER!”

Talk about jumping the shark. A Republican president in a cultural war against NASCAR. NASCAR?

Three thread lines comprise most Republican cultural wars: race, sex, and education. All three are losers for Republicans.

Eighty-five percent of Trump’s 2020 coalition was white in a country that is 60% white, and since you have been reading this, a little less white. We are headed to becoming a non-white-majority country. Outside of some dark corners of the internet, there is very little in our popular culture that glorifies or defends racism. When Donald Trump’s post-Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally declares, “there were very fine people on both sides,” he’s helping Democrats win suburban voters repulsed by the sight of tiki torch-carrying neo-Nazis. As a seventh-generation Mississippian, I know your average white teenager in Mississippi would rather be a Black rap star than a Confederate general.

In the 2008 presidential race, every candidate in both parties was against same-sex marriage. Then in 2012, President Obama reversed his position. Democrats routed the political field so much on gay marriage that the issue is rarely discussed.

As the pro-choice element of their party gradually became all but extinct, Republicans used abortion as a cultural wedge issue to motivate low-propensity white voters. That was, at best, a marginal plus for Republicans, as indicated by how few Republican candidates made abortion a centerpiece of their campaigns. But following the overturning of Roe V. Wade, pro-choice voters turned out in record numbers to give Democrats one of American history’s most successful off-year elections for a party in power.

In the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race, Republican Glen Youngkin used the phony issue of “CRT education” to play the race card in a rare combination that appealed to both lower-income whites and suburban elites. The response by the McAuliffe campaign was reminiscent of the 1988 Dukakis response to issues like the Pledge of Allegiance and the pardon program that released Willie Horton. It was a combination of “this can’t be happening” and “it’s not fair.”

In search of a repeat of the electoral juice of CRT, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is making a classic political mistake of pushing an issue too far. There were no public high schools in Virginia teaching CRT, but there are high schools in Florida that offer students advanced placement classes in African American history. At least until DeSantis’s “Stop Woke Act” banned the classes. This followed the banning of books DeSantis found offensive to whites and his attack on LGBTQ students and their families.

Democrats should run directly at these educational attacks. There is a reason suburban voters move to find better schools or spend thousands to send their kids to private schools. While Republican politicians increasingly view higher education as a gateway drug to socialism, these parents are more motivated by their kids getting into a good college than by fear of exposure to dangerous ideas.

Educated at Yale and Harvard, a former teacher at the elite Darlington School in Atlanta, Ron DeSantis doesn’t believe a word he says about the dangers of so-called “woke” education. He’s clumsily playing to a small percentage of the electorate that votes in Republican presidential primaries. This might help him in the Iowa caucuses, which can be won with far fewer votes than the student enrollment at Florida’s larger universities, but it is a huge opportunity for Democrats to win a cultural war on education in a general election.

One of my old clients, former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, a skilled political operative before he ran for office, liked to say, “Be for the future. It’s going to happen anyway.” Republicans have decided to be for an imaginary past, and it’s a gift to Democrats if only they seize the opportunity. You can win cultural wars. If you fight.

I couldn’t agree more.

I would just point out, however, that Democrats have long been winning the culture war — in the culture. For the past half century, social justice and social evolution has been unstoppable despite the right’s relentless backlash and attempts to turn back the clock. That’s why they are now turning to the power of the state at all levels to get it done.

But there’s no turning back this stuff without massive governmental coercion. As Biden would say, “good luck in your senior year.”

DeSantis is running it

I’ve been making this point for a while but here’s some direct evidence that DeSantis is consciously copying the Hungarian prime minister (and Tucker Carlson’s) “illiberal democracy” playbook from Media Matters:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and anti-civil rights activist Christopher Rufo are waging a campaign against New College of Florida that strongly resembles actions taken by Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán in 2017 and 2018 to shut down Central European University.

DeSantis appointed Rufo, known for his anti-Black and anti-LGBTQ messaging propaganda, to the board of trustees at New College of Florida in early January. Since then, Rufo has engaged in what amounts to a hostile takeover of the school, forcing the president out and attempting to reinvent the school as a conservative institution. The scheme echoes Orbán’s plot to force CEU out of Hungary just years earlier.

Right-wing media personalities and activists in the United States have extensively praised Orbán in recent years, including after he gave what his own adviser called a “pure Nazi speech” in which he decried “race mixing” among Hungarians. During a May 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference event in Hungary, Orbán referred to Fox News star Tucker Carlson as a “friend” whose show should be “broadcasted day and night.” (Carlson passionately defended Orbán in 2021, characterizing his views as “moderate and conventional.”) A separate event known as the National Conservatism Conference also served to strengthen the ties between the illiberal Hungarian leader and his stateside admirers. 

Whether DeSantis and Rufo are deliberately modeling their efforts on Orbán’s — or the similarities have arisen naturally from the authoritarian ideologies all three men share — isn’t clear. Regardless, Rufo himself appeared to endorse Orbán’s targeting of CEU in a tweet to conservative writer and Orbán fanboy Rod Dreher.

Other members of DeSantis’ inner circle have praised Orbán’s administration. During the National Conservatism Conference in Miami last September, Christina Pushaw, a longtime DeSantis aide, “told the audience that Orbán’s government gave her inspiration” for icing out mainstream journalists, as reported in New York magazine.

“The New Yorker wrote to Orbán and asked for comment on their hit piece, and they received a response that was just perfect. It said, ‘We are not going to participate in the validation process for liberal propaganda,’ ” she recounted, “and I don’t think we need to participate in that validation process either.” Instead, she noted, DeSantis gives access to conservative sites, which then get quotes and scooplets they can use to build their audience.

At the same conference, an Orbán adviser praised DeSantis and used the governor’s policies to justify and normalize Hungary’s own. From New York magazine: 

At one panel, The Federalist’s Sean Davis asked Balázs Orbán, an adviser (no relation) to Viktor Orbán, how his government is preventing the fake-news media from poisoning the minds of the youth. “Just as is done in Florida,” Orbán replied, explaining that the Hungarian regime used state power to prevent the left from indoctrinating the country in its ideology. (His spokesperson explained that he was referring specifically to “gender propaganda.”) He mocked the idea that the regime was behaving autocratically: “You can say I am autocratic, pro-Putin, pro-everything that is bad, but look, in Florida, in the United States, the Republicans are doing the same.”

The similarities in the campaigns that DeSantis and Rufo in Florida, and Orbán in Hungary, have waged against a particular institution of higher learning are striking. Beginning in 2017, Orbán set his sights on CEU, one of Budapest’s top universities. Founded in 1991 by liberal philanthropist George Soros, who was born in Hungary, the school was meant to serve as a model of post-Cold War openness and cosmopolitanism. Orbán saw it as a threat — a bastion of liberalism that threatened his far-right regime. 

Orbán, who studied law at István Bibó, a college in Budapest, moved to impose requirements on CEU that appeared to be impossible to meet by design. As The Atlantic reported:

Although the legislation didn’t mention CEU by name, the school was its obvious—and only—target. The bill would suddenly make CEU’s existence in the country dependent on quickly meeting a series of impossible-seeming requirements. As a foreign university, it would have to operate a campus in its country of origin. (CEU was chartered in the state of New York, but it didn’t have any faculty or facilities there.) Its national government would need to enter into a bilateral accreditation agreement with Hungary. (In the U.S., accreditation agreements are the jurisdiction of the states, not the federal government.)

The law passed, ultimately forcing CEU to close its campus and relocate to Vienna, Austria. 

Orbán’s broader intrusions into school curricula also anticipate DeSantis’ own attempts to exert control over classroom instruction. The Atlantic writes:

Textbooks and curricula, once the domain of municipalities, have been centralized and now inculcate the regime’s politics. “The government is quite clear that patriotic education is as important as transferring knowledge,” Péter Kréko, the political analyst, told me. An eighth-grade history book praises Orbán as a “foundational figure.” A high-school textbook opens a section on “multiculturalism” with an image of refugees huddled at the Budapest train station, accompanied by a quotation from the prime minister: “We consider it a value that Hungary is a homogeneous country.”

Rufo has been alternately open and cryptic about his plans for New College. He sometimes describes his efforts almost modestly, as in a closing paragraph on his blog at City Journal:

My proposals include redesigning the curriculum to align with the classical model; abolishing DEI programs and replacing them with “equality, merit, and colorblindness” principles; adopting the Kalven statement on institutional neutrality; restructuring the administration and academic departments; recruiting new faculty with expertise in the classical liberal arts tradition; and establishing a graduate school for training teachers in classical education.

But in the same post, he endorsed DeSantis’ chief-of-staff’s comment that the goal is to remake New College into a “Hillsdale of the South,” referencing the far-right Christian college in Michigan.

As New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote (emphasis in original):

The new majority’s plan, Rufo told me just after his appointment was announced, is to transform New College into a public version of Hillsdale. “We want to provide an alternative for conservative families in the state of Florida to say there is a public university that reflects your values,” he said.

Rufo has made clear that New College is just the beginning. “If we are successful, the effort can serve as a model for other states,” he wrote at City Journal.

Orbán was successful in driving CEU out of Hungary. Whether DeSantis and Rufo can remake New College remains to be seen, much less whether their actions are scalable. Regardless, Rufo has stated that his ambitions do not end with the DeSantis administration. In a recent video titled “The Strategy Behind the Campaign to Abolish DEI Bureaucracies in Public Universities” posted to his YouTube page, he says that his goal is to “get it done in one state, in the state of Florida, and then see a domino effect of other states following suit.”

But it would be wise to take warning from CEU’s president, Shalini Randeria.

“We are a textbook case because what we need to realise is that all of these ‘soft authoritarian’ regimes, as I call them, are learning from one another. There is a playbook they are carefully watching to see what works in one case or another,” she said in an interview with University World News. “We need to study this carefully to see there is a certain toolbox they’re using, and no university is safe.”

There are a lot of things that aren’t safe with these people including the press and democracy itself. DeSantis isn’t an original by any means. He’s following the playbook.

He hits them from the right … and the left

Dark Brandon aimed his death ray at the congressional Republicans in front of the whole country this week and in the process seems to have banished all thoughts of a primary challenge should he decide to seek a second term. Unless something dramatic changes, it appears that the Democrats are not going to have a nomination fight on their hands. The Republicans, on the other hand, look to be gearing up for a knockdown, drag-out, bare-knuckled brawl — and the dynamics already taking shape are fascinating.

It was always a good bet that Donald Trump would run again for no other reason than he is the sorest loser in world history and he simply cannot accept that he lost the last election. He didn’t expect to have any rivals, however, assuming that he would receive the nomination by acclamation and not really even have to campaign until the general election. He didn’t realize that his epic pout after the 2020 election would turn off so many GOP suburban voters and no doubt believed that he would be a kingmaker in the 2022 election, reaffirming his position as the only possible candidate. None of that has gone as he’d hoped, however, and he’s now faced with having to campaign in earnest amongst a crowded field as he did in 2016.

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The tension between his need to lash out at former sycophants even as he knows it’s good for him if they run will be very interesting to watch, especially if, as expected, former VP Mike Pence and former Sec. of State Mike Pompeo get in the race in the next few months. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Virginia Gov. Glenn Younkin are all reportedly also contemplating runs.

Once the games begin in earnest we can certainly expect the usual insults, lies, and character attacks against all who dare to step into the arena.

As we all know, Trump’s main rival is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, with some polls showing Trump in second place in a two-way race. DeSantis is the great hope of Republican establishment figures who don’t care that Trump kissed up to every dictator on earth, botched a global health emergency and then attempted a coup, but are mad as hell that he isn’t the winner he pretends to be. And the GOP base is certainly Ron-curious, attracted to his trollish, “own the libs” approach to the culture war in which he fearlessly attacks asylum seekers, transgender kids, gay teachers, AP history students and high schoolers wearing masks in public, proclaiming “Florida is where woke goes to die.” He’s one tough hombre.

This stuff is catnip to MAGA followers and Trump knows it. (He’s got a highly developed nose for the wingnut zeitgeist.) He’s decided to try to out-troll DeSantis — who is one of the leaders of the burgeoning anti-LGBTQ movement, and is getting a lot of love from the MAGA crowd for it — by coming at him from the right on the issue. Trump released one of his weird campaign videos last week in which he pledged to outlaw all gender-affirming treatment for minors and punish any doctors who provide it. And he doesn’t confine his draconian proposals to kids. He’s going after trans adults too. He proposes a federal law that recognizes only two genders and bars transgender women from competing on women’s sports teams. He also pledged to immediately cease programs that promote the concept of gender transition “at any age,” banning all federal dollars from being used for gender-affirming treatment. It’s a full-on assault on transgender Americans of all ages. Trump’s anti-trans proposal is as fascist a set of policies we’ve seen in America since Jim Crow.

I’d imagine most of his people haven’t heard about this yet but you can bet it will be a huge feature of his rallies. And just to make sure he’s positioned as the one true culture warrior, he even re-posted a couple of Truth Social posts that recycled a picture alleged to be DeSantis during his brief tenure as a high school teacher, drinking with some underage girls, with the word “groomer” in the commentary.

It was a shot across the bow and DeSantis didn’t handle it well when a reporter brought it up. He responded with a schoolmarmish reply that he doesn’t spend his time “trying to smear other Republicans.” (It’s true — he spends all his time smearing ordinary citizens.) But that response isn’t going to work with Trump or the MAGA crowd. The dustbin of GOP history is littered with the political careers of Republicans who failed to parry his insults. And those who tried fared little better. He had better figure out how to take a punch from Trump or he’ll be out as quickly as you can say the words “Scott Walker.”

But Trump isn’t just trying to run to DeSantis’ right on the culture war. He’s doing something clever that helped him greatly in 2016 and will likely help him again. He’s running to his left on economics. He’s already trapped him (and the rest of the field) on the issue of cutting Social Security and Medicare, which almost all of them have supported in the recent past, including DeSantis. He’s also tying him to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former Speaker Paul Ryan, the hated RINO, by posting a video in which DeSantis praises Ryan’s economic program — which proposed privatizing Social Security and Medicare. Sure the House Republicans became hysterical when Biden said they wanted to do all that in his State of the Union address, but Trump saying it too and using Biden’s attack lines against his rivals makes for an interesting dynamic, to say the least.

This same formula allowed Trump to vanquish a dozen rivals in 2016 and it could work again.

He has a record now but it’s hard to see how any of these people can persuasively condemn him for any of it since they were in lockstep with him all the way. Donald Trump, former president and current head of the Republican Party, is managing to do something seemingly impossible: He’s running as an outsider and making Ron DeSantis (or whomever else is left standing) into the swampy establishment.

Does the Republican Party want that this time? Just watch Fox for a few minutes or Steve Bannon’s War Room and you’ll get your answer. The only question is whether Trump can convince them that he’s their guy one more time. 

Salon