Month: February 2023

It’s hard to believe that Sarah Huckabee Sanders is now a Governor but that says it all about today’s Republican Party. She’ll be giving the State of the Union rebuttal, a slot reserved for the GOP’s “rising stars.”

Huffington Post gathered a list of Sarah’s lies and outrageous rhetoric as press secretary just to remind you all of what qualified her for her new prestigious post:

During Sanders’ two-year tenure as the press secretary for Donald Trump’s White House, stint as a Fox News commentator and new job as Arkansas’ Republican governor, Sanders has earned a reputation among her critics for lying with ease ― something she’s admitted under oath to doing ― and fiercely defending Trump’s most offensive behavior.

In no particular order, here are some of Sanders’ most egregious lies and outrageous remarks you should reacquaint yourself with before her Tuesday night address:

She said Trump’s policy of separating children from their parents at the border and locking them in detention facilities was “very biblical.”

When Trump retweeted three unverified, Islamophobic videos, Sanders insisted it didn’t matter if the videos were “real” and told reporters that if they’re focusing on “the nature of the video, you’re focusing on the wrong thing.”

Weeks after a gunman slaughtered 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, she declared in a speech that “we will make sure that when a kid is in the womb, they’re as safe as they are in a classroom.” At that point in 2022, there had already been 27 school shootings that year.

She refused to say the press was not the “enemy of the people.”

She admitted to lying during a press conference about former FBI director James Comey when she claimed “countless” FBI agents told her they were happy Trump fired him. She confessed under oath during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation that this was not true, but she downplayed it as a mere “slip of the tongue.”

She twice used her government Twitter account to slam businesses she took personal issue with: a small restaurant in Virginia that refused to serve her and The New York Times for publishing an anonymous op-ed critical of the Trump administration. Former White House ethics chiefs said these incidents were illegal ethics code violation.

She mocked Biden for stuttering ― a speech impediment he’s dealt with throughout his life ― after a Democratic presidential debate in 2019.

She posted an Infowars-produced video of CNN’s Jim Acosta that appeared doctored to make him seem aggressive toward a White House intern, and used it to defend the Trump administration taking away Acosta’s White House press credentials.

She claimed God “wanted Donald Trump to become president.”

She falsely claimed that Trump’s border wall had stopped nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018. In reality, the wall ― for which Trump was demanding $5.7 billion in federal funds to build ― had only stopped six people on the No Fly List.

She claimed that the Mueller report findings were “a total and complete exoneration” of Trump even though the report summary explicitly said it “does not exonerate him.”

When a journalist used the term “lopping heads off” to refer to the need for a staff shakeup on the White House communications team, she took it very, very literally. “They’ve said I should be choked, they said I should deserve a lifetime of harassment, but certainly never had somebody say that I should be decapitated,” Sanders said in 2019.

She defended Trump’s unprecedented refusal to share his tax returns by claiming members of Congress are not “smart enough to look through the thousands of pages that I would assume President Trump’s taxes will be.”

While running for governor of Arkansas, she vowed not to support any rape or incest exceptions in legislation banning abortion ― an extreme position out of step with the vast majority of Americans, including more than three-quarters of Republicans, studies have found.

As Arkansas governor, she banned the term “Latinx” from any official state documents, saying the word ― which came into use in recent years as an inclusive, gender-neutral term to describe someone of Hispanic or Latino origin ― constitutes “ethnically insensitive and pejorative language.”

What a gal…

She doesn’t have much of a sense of humor about herself I’m afraid:

It’s that time again …

Yes, we are hearing all sorts of rumbling hat Biden needs to step aside for the next generation because he can’t beat DeSantis/Trump/whomever and the Democrats need new leadership. This always happens and it won’t make a bit of difference in the end. If Biden wants to run he will run and he will win the nomination because he’s the incumbent.

JV Last with a helpful reminder:

 It’s worth remembering that the in-party frequently has doubts about the prospects of the incumbent. For instance, here are some headlines from 2010-2011:

This is a dance we do. How often? Buckle up for some history, courtesy of Pew and National Journal:

Drink that in.

(1) Obama, Clinton, and Reagan were all < 50 percent on “should they run for reelect.”

(2) The only two presidents who were > 50 percent were the two who ultimately lost reelection.

It’s out of our hands. If Biden wants it it’s his no matter what. If he doesn’t want it then let the games begin. But there’s no point in wringing our hands over it.

*And yes, if he drops dead before the election then the deck is scrambled. But that’s true of any candidate of any age.

Narcissists claim both the victim and the hero roles, but never claim their proper role as the villain.

— Narcissist Facts 101 (@narcissistfacts) February 7, 2023

I think we can all name quite a few people like this. But it really does define the Republican party these days.

I don’t think that all narcissists are fascists but it’s almost certain that all fascists are narcissists.

Aaron says this is Trumpesque, which it is on one level. But really, this is Viktor Orban all the way:

DeSantis's schtick is such a Trump ripoff pic.twitter.com/MmZ6lFxDxz

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 7, 2023

Note the Orwellian “Truth” running behind him.It’s very creepy.

Orban’s method of media dominance probably wouldn’t work here in the US with our media system but the intent is the same. And I could easily see President DeSantis trying some of these tactics. If they can simultaneously weaken the judiciary some of them could work:

As Orbán has consolidated his grip on Hungary, his control of the media is now nearly absolute. In 2010, he cut all state advertising funds to critical news outlets and threatened to sever contracts with private advertisers that continued to support targeted media. The following year, he established a Fidesz-controlled media council with the power to levy bankrupting fines against news outlets that did not favor the Fidesz worldview. Hit on all sides by financial attacks, independent and opposition media began to fail just as news media across the globe were struggling financially to adapt to the online world. It was therefore not obvious outside Hungary that the country’s media companies were failing for different reasons. Once they were sufficiently weakened, however, these starved outlets could be bought for cheap. Orbán’s close friends snapped up many of them at the Fidesz fire sale—at which point state advertising resumed to sustain them. Rather than jailing journalists, engaging in blatant censorship, or simply shuttering hostile media, Orbán let economic pressure do the work.

A crack in the system emerged after the 2014 election, however, when one of Orbán’s most loyal oligarchs, Lajos Simicska, defected and briefly led his media outlets in an anti-Orbán campaign ahead of the 2018 election. Threatened with assassination, Simicska turned over his companies to Orbán loyalists and fled the country. After the 2018 election, Orbán established the Central European Press and Media Foundation, a foundation to which loyal oligarchs “donated” more than five-hundred media outlets to form a right-wing news conglomerate reliably loyal to Orbán.⁴

Having a pluralistic media landscape matters immensely to democratic health, especially at election time. In 2022, every broadcasting outlet and almost all print media regularly repeated government campaign slogans. The opposition, by contrast, had a hard time getting its message out through the few online news sites, handful of limited-circulation print media, one streaming radio station, and part of a Budapest-only cable-television outlet that covered its campaign. The opposition’s leader, Péter Márki-Zay, got all of five minutes on public television to present his program—on a Wednesday morning. If Hungarian voters wanted to understand what the opposition coalition stood for, they had to hunt to find out. It did not help that the opposition struggled to present a united front. Fidesz also spent ten times more on political ads than did the combined opposition. The ruling party broadcast a loud and clear message that drowned out the opposition’s fuzzy and muted one. And yet, during most of the campaign the united opposition matched Fidesz’s popularity, albeit with polls registering a large “undecided” vote.

Authoritarians need control of the media to function well. It takes time and effort to make it happen. But if anyone’s up to the task it’s Ron DeSantis.

You mean not start with hostility?

Efforts to reform policing in this country usually involve reworking the training, more of it, eliminating qualified immunity, or technical solutions like body cameras. Mona Charon offers a novel start at police reform that requires politeness.

The first thing the Memphis “Scorpion Unit” did when it stopped Tyre Nichols before beating him to death, Charon writes, was to curse at him. Over alleged reckless driving. Why?

In a society as gun-saturated as ours, I can understand an order like Let me see your hands, or if the police are planning a roadside sobriety check, a request to Step out of the car. But there is no reason that both of those orders cannot be preceded by Sir or Please or both. Our judicial system is founded on the principle of innocent until proven guilty. Yet our police interactions with citizens too often seem grounded in the opposite assumption.

Obviously, in the Nichols’ case, the profanity was the least of the offenses the cops (and others) committed, but it seems that some police lapse into profanity with citizens regularly. Some departments actually encourage cursing as a way of asserting control. They call it “tactical language.” A 2017 poll found that one in five Americans has been cursed at by a cop. That means, at the very least, that 20 percent of Americans were treated disrespectfully and given cause to dislike and suspect the police. We don’t get cursed at by firefighters, or clerks at the department of motor vehicles, or sanitation workers. And if we were, we’d be outraged.

They’d be reported and maybe fired. Not police officers.

Charon argues that profanity is a form of aggression that begins the interaction on the wrong foot. Or tongue, as the case may be.

That, in turn, can provoke a heated reaction from the citizen (especially if said citizen has alcohol, or, worse, testosterone coursing through his veins). Is it too much to ask that in normal interactions with citizens, police should not verbally assault the people they are paid to protect and to serve? Shouldn’t the template be one that assumes most people are law-abiding and the police are there to ensure everyone’s safety—including the person who might have been driving recklessly? Is it crazy to imagine a scenario in which police say, Sir, you were driving unsafely. We’re issuing you a ticket. Or if the person seems disoriented, Ma’am, you were driving erratically. Is there someone you can call to drive you home?

But no. Refraining from cursing at citizens is not just a matter of politeness. Cursing affects public perception of officers’ commitment to fairness and equal treatment under law. The latter has suffered eggregiously over the last 15 years, both from the lack of legal accountability for banking bigwigs after the financial collapse, and from the delay in seeing Donald Trump arrested for actions that would have landed the rest of us in handcuffs in a blink.

It turns out there is research that shows that the public views police profanity as a lack of self control.

Across the political spectrum, 77 percent of Americans (including high percentages of both Democrats and Republicans) believe police should not curse. Unsurprisingly, men were twice as likely as women to report that police swore at them (23 percent versus 12 percent) and young people more commonly experience this (22 percent) than those over 55 (13 percent). Blacks had more negative experiences (26 percent) than whites (15 percent) or Hispanics (22 percent).

This can change. Mayors, police commissioners, and other local officials can implement a courtesy policy for their police departments. They can do this tomorrow. No new laws are needed. No new funds required. They can explain it this way: Our job is to keep the peace. Foul language degrades and angers. Therefore we will set a good example of politeness, self-control, and respect.

Maybe it is the little things.

State of the Union preview. I go off on a tangent.

It’s tonight at 9:00  p.m. ET.

Pfeiffer:

Tonight, Joe Biden will stand before Congress and the nation to give what will almost certainly be his most important speech of 2023. Last year, 38 million people tuned in to watch President Biden deliver his constitutionally mandated report on the state of the union. A similar number will watch tonight’s speech. Absent a major national event on par with the Space Shuttle Challenger crash or the operation to take out Osama Bin Laden, the audience tonight will be more than ten times larger than that of any other speech Biden will give this year. The speech will also receive a ton of press attention. It has already been the subject of approximately one million thumb-sucking think pieces. The State of the Union really is a tradition like no other.

The State of the Union is also a weird speech. It’s a grand venue with a big audience in the room and across the nation. Even the least presidential Presidents look somewhat presidential giving the speech. In many ways, the State of the Union is a high-floor, low-ceiling speech. It’s hard to screw up, but it’s also hard to soar. The history, the moment, and the setting can be very restrictive.

Every year, President Obama walked into the first meeting on the SOTU and declared that he wanted to do something different — make it shorter; make it more visually interesting; fewer policies, more stories, etc. And every year, he gave a very traditional speech because of the gravitational pull of the convention of the format.

Tangent triggered by the Challenger reference:

I woke up to a news report about seismic codes in Turkey where we watched buildings collapse on a loop Monday from the earthquakes there. Yes, there are updated construction codes in Turkey, but some buildings predate them and a lot of illegal construction circumvents those rules.

Scientific data is often precise and experimentally repeatable. Like the kind NASA practices, usually. But the Challenger blew up because decision-makers ignored the advice of people who knew the data best. Cold temperatures made the booster O-rings brittle. They launched anyway. I was in the dean’s office at engineering school when it happened.

Data is often a poor model of reality. Or it measures what it measures and not what it doesn’t. We should have learned that already with opinion polling. And yet.

“Sometimes stories tell you what statistics can’t.”

Whenever I hear the phrase, “data-driven campaign,” I shudder. Obama’s winning 2008 campaign was data-driven. So was Hillary Clinton’s in 2016.

Young, presidential-campaign staffers fresh off primary races and with visions of West Wing jobs dancing in their heads are all about data. Data is how superiors evaluate their job performance. How many volunteers, how many calls, how many knocks today? Get those 9 p.m. numbers filed on time. Hit your targets whether or not those numbers are meaningful. In 2008, Obama’s staffers measured supporter engagement. In 2016, Team Clinton seemed to measure measuring. Coordinated campaign staffers here knew what they were sending up the chain-of-command was crap, but it was what superiors asked for: numbers.

Campaigns and organizers on the ground sometimes have a cargo-cultlike relationship with data. They believe in data — more is better — whether or not it’s really telling them what they think it’s telling them. Often, it’s just eyewash used to justify an educated guess or to satisfy superiors’ need to provide metrics to the client.

I was an engineer for 35 years. Trust me. I woke up to that earthquake report after dreaming about a mechanical joint failure on the 36″ vapor line of a 200-ft tall distillation column for which there was lots of computer-generated data and stacks of paper justifying the design. You still lose sleep.

When Trump returns to Facebook he will likely instantly violate their lax new “guardrails.” We know it will happen. Adam Schiff even pointed out what the violations will be in a letter to Meta on December 2022.

When it happens we should demand that Meta enforce their own rules. Will they?

If they do, they will lose engagement. In Zuckerberg’s mind more engagement, even engagement that violates their community standards, means more revenue. We know this from the Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen. We also know from the Jan 6th committee memo on Social Media (Link to gifted Washington Post article) that Zuckerberg overruled his staff who wanted to ban Trump for his multiple violations of their community standards before Jan 6th.

But engagement isn’t the only metric for Meta’s success. Meta’s stock price can be hurt in multiple ways. Stories about management making bad decisions hurt the stock. Stories about management supporting and enabling domestic terrorists can hurt the stock price. Big investors put pressure on management all the time when they see them making bad decisions (like they did on Zuckerberg for investing in the legless VR experience). Zuck thought it was going to be huge, he was wrong. Many investors think bringing Trump back to Facebook is a bad idea. It will be filled with controversy and advertisers don’t like controversy.

The investment community can punish Meta if it keeps Trump on OR if they kick Trump off. It all depends on how they see his return. A case can be made either way. Let’s help make the case that bringing Trump back on Facebook is reckless & wrong. And then make this decision hurt Zuckerberg financially.

When the violations happen the mainstream media will politely ask Nick Clegg, President of Global Affairs who announced the guardrails, what Meta is going to do about the violation.

I’ve watched Clegg in interviews on TV. The media isn’t going to pin him down and this pisses me off. He’s a trained spokesperson, so I’d push him harder about the past & his promises for the future and ask “You decided to let a man with a history of inciting violence and threats of violence on your platform. You created special guidelines and said you would act when he does violates them. Now that he has violated the new guidelines, where is that action?
Why won’t you tell us what is happening and who is making the decisions?
Where is the transparency you promised?”

The media typically only think about all the ways Trump coming back on Facebook can help Meta be profitable. They don’t look at the big picture. Here’s the thing, Facebook doesn’t operate in a vacuum. The Trump of 2016 – Jan 6th 2020 is not the same as today’s Trump. He has a history of inciting violence. He is not going to stop being who he is. He will keep inciting violence and spreading lies about the election. To ignore that history and bring him back on Facebook is a bad decision by the CEO. And investors should punish Zuckerberg for it.

Yes, there are a bunch of people who believe bringing Trump back on Meta is going to be profitable. But is that the only outcome? NO! Right now there are people talking to the instructional investors saying, “Trump’s return is going to have a negative impact on Meta.”

When I read the new guidelines and policies I saw that they are clearly designed to give Trump multiple ways to stay on the platform, no matter what he says. But some violations are clearly worse than others. THAT is what we should focus on.

Here are some of Meta’s community standards on violence and incitement. I’ve read them all. There are multiple ways that Trump has violated them and WILL violate them.

META Violence and Incitement Policies
Do Not Post:

• Threats that could lead to death (and other forms of high-severity violence) and admission of past violence targeting people or places where threat is defined as any of the following:
• Statements of intent to commit high-severity violence. This includes content where a symbol represents the target and/or includes a visual of an armament or method to represent violence.
• Calls for high-severity violence including content where no target is specified but a symbol represents the target and/or includes a visual of an armament or method that represents violence.
• Statements advocating for high-severity violence.
• Aspirational or conditional statements to commit high-severity violence.
• Statements admitting to committing high-severity violence except when shared in a context of redemption, self-defense or when committed by law enforcement, military or state security personnel.

Link to META Violence and Incitement Policies

The New Paper Mâché Guardrails For Trump

Meta’s previously bent the rules to keep TFG on the platform, ranging from their “newsworthiness allowance” to their creation of a Public Figures and Civil Unrest Policy for when there is a riot happening. They have a policy for restricting accounts of public figures during civil unrest and now they have a “Crisis Policy Protocol” which is a basically a black box of people who are supposed to “assesses the risks of imminent harm both on and off of our platform so we can respond with specific policy and product actions that will help keep people safe. ” The specifics on what the Crisis Policy Protocol contains are not made public and, as we have learned, the decisions made can be overruled by Mark Zuckerberg.

(BTW. they have this weird sanction/rule that what Trump puts up on his Facebook feed will be visible only to HIM, but nobody else will see it, even if they follow him. This is a blatant dodge designed just for Trump (as if his minions can’t figure out what is happening. “Hey we posted his Truth Social Murder Rant on Facebook and I can see it on his page, but when I look at my own personal account it doesn’t show up!” )

This policy will have NO impact on stopping the spread of his messages of violence, in practice they will be amplified. The policy was created just so Meta can say, “But we HAVE limited what he said! We removed the reshare button!!!” This is a lame sanction especially for someone who already starts with a massive audience for the original message.

What will happen is that the media will COVER what was made “invisible” to Trump’s followers thereby amplifying the message AND now making it “newsworthy” which allows Meta to keep it up because now it’s “News.” (It will likely be something that was already said on Truth Social that the Trump team didn’t bother to change for Facebook’s TOS.)

The followers will scream “They are censuring him!” They will cover it on Fox News, post if all over their platforms that have content moderation policies, but don’t enforce them. The followers don’t care that it was clear violation of Facebook’s defined policy, like incitement directed at a person. They just will scream CENSORSHIP! And what pisses me off is that there will be a bunch of woolly headed people who refuse to focus on the issue of Meta’s Community Standards and clear violations of them and talk about “The 1st Amendment.” and “Free speech.”

We have to stop giving TFG & his supporter the benefit of the doubt when they make threats! We now have multiple cases where threats were made, intent was the confirmed and action taken. And they are doing it again! Just last week, Trump promotes message from ‘locked and loaded’ supporter who vows to ‘physically fight’ for him

The minute Trump violates Facebook’s the media SHOULD dig into the evidence of how Trump and the right wing influencers used social media to incite violence and how they were protected by Zuckerberg–even when they clearly violated Meta’s own terms of service.

The right wing have been whining and complaining for years about how the “Woke Left” at Social Media companies are censoring them. It’s like how they worked the refs in the mainstream media. “The reporters are Democrats. They can’t be objective! They are covering us unfairly!” “The Social Media employees are Democrats. They are banning us for no reason! We need to be protected from being shadowbanned!”
Of course it’s all BS, but it worked on the media and it works on social media.

Here’s the deal, Meta EMPLOYEES created policies based on definitions of various types of comments people make, like threats of violence. They applied those policies in multiple areas. Meta is a private entity and can make decisions on what it allows to be posted. Employees created procedures to address what to do when there are violations. What we have learned from Frances Haugen (the Facebook Whistleblower written statement ) and the January 6th committee on Social Media, is that Zuckerberg consistantly overruled policies, decisions and the recommendations of his Trust and Safety employees.

But if there is one thing that I hope everyone takes away from these disclosures it is that Facebook chooses profit over safety every day — and without action, this will continue.

Congress can change the rules Facebook plays by and stop the harm it is causing.

Frances Haugen, Statement to Sub-Committee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security
October 4, 2021

The 122 page memo from the January 6th committee on Social Media covered the role they played before, during and after the insurrection. Big takeaways for me include:

• Popular right-wing figures are protected from enforcement of Meta’s terms of service.
• They can incite violence & intentionally spreading disinformation and get no “strikes”
• Trump had perpetual “Zero Strikes”

Another big takeaway is that Zuckerberg worries most about negative press and criticism from the right vs. criticism from the left. Right wing groups come to him complaining that they were being removed for no reason (even when the reasons are very clear) they are given “a person” to call to complain to when they are reported by humans. And if they trigger Facebook’s AI, they are given the chance of human review (Which is a HUGE deal at a company where it’s almost impossible to talk to a human.)

Bottom line is that there have been no negative financial consequences to Zuckerberg for his bad decisions about Trump on Meta, so we need to make them happen to him.

This is not simply a matter of some social media users being angry or unstable.
Facebook became a $1 trillion company by paying for its profits with our safety,
including the safety of our children. And that is unacceptable.

Frances Haugen statement to United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation
October 4, 2021

One month ago, he was leading the fifth-largest country in the world. These days, he is wandering around Florida supermarkets, eating fried chicken alone at fast-food restaurants, and holding court for supporters from the driveway of a modest home owned by a former ultimate-fighting champion in a gated community south of Orlando.

Jair Bolsonaro’s re-emergence in Florida is a bizarre spectacle, even for a state with a long history of providing haven to eccentric characters. The embattled ex-President of Brazil, who refused to concede his electoral loss in October, left the country for the U.S. on Dec. 30, two days before the inauguration of his successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. On Jan. 8, his supporters stormed the Brazilian Parliament, Supreme Court and Presidential Palace, violently threatening police and destroying property in an assault with eerie echoes of the attack on the U.S. Capitol carried out by supporters of Donald Trump

Meanwhile Bolsonaro, once dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics,” has been hanging out just a couple hours’ drive up the Florida Turnpike from his former presidential counterpart. While Trump is camped out at his own waterfront estate plotting the opening moves of his next presidential campaign, it’s still unclear what Bolsonaro is planning during his stint in the Sunshine State. His TikTok account broadcasts carefully curated videos to his 74 million followers— smiling families wearing Brazilian jerseys delivering baskets of bread, strawberries, flowers, and Nutella; time-lapse montages set to emotional music, showing Bolsonaro hugging children and long lines of people waiting to snap a photo with him.

What is the ex-President of Brazil doing in Florida with his country—and his own legal future—enmeshed in turmoil? His original visa, thought to be an A-1 designation meant for diplomats and heads of state, would have expired after 30 days. Bolsonaro has now applied for a six-month tourist visa to stay in the U.S. and is waiting for the “desired results,” Felipe Alexandre, a Brazilian-American attorney representing Bolsonaro, told TIME. “He would like to take some time off, clear his head, and enjoy being a tourist in the United States for a few months before deciding what his next step will be,“ Alexandre said in an email statement.

Yet the prevailing theory among both opponents and supporters is that Bolsonaro’s self-exile from Brazil is a maneuver to evade legal trouble. Bolsonaro, who, like Trump, blamed unfounded voter fraud conspiracies for his loss, is facing at least half a dozen investigations which could disqualify him from holding political office or result in a criminal sentence. These include allegations that Bolsonaro—who last year vowed “For God in heaven, I will never go to prison!”—leaked classified information, used “digital militias” to coordinate political disinformation campaigns, and attacked Brazil’s electoral system.

The Brazilian Supreme Court also said it would investigate his role in instigating the crowds on Jan. 8, and new allegations surfaced this week that Bolsonaro’s aides tried to persuade lawmakers to annul the results of the October elections. “He’s actually running away, huh?” Rogério Correia, a lawmaker who belongs to Lula’s Workers’ Party, tweeted Jan. 30.

“This is an individual that is basically trying to avoid criminal investigations by seeking shelter in the United States,” says Anna Eskamani, a Democratic state lawmaker who represents an Orlando-area House district. “He is hiding behind a U.S. tourist visa.”

Until this week, Bolsonaro has kept a relatively low profile since arriving in Florida. Now, one week before his successor is set to come to the White House to meet with President Joe Biden, Bolsonaro is ready to break his silence. “I am 67 years old and I intend to remain active in Brazilian politics,” he said Wednesday. On Friday, he’s scheduled to headline an event alongside Charlie Kirk, a right-wing activist, at Trump’s golf resort in Miami.

The connections between the two former presidents go beyond the uprisings committed on their behalves. Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo, has close ties to the Trump orbit, with former political strategist Steve Bannon, communications adviser Jason Miller, and Donald Trump Jr., among the MAGA figures who have joined him in pushing unfounded conspiracies about widespread voter fraud in Brazil. Eduardo Bolsonaro has spoken at American political events like the Conservative Political Action Conference and has been a frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago, posting photos of himself with Trump, Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner.

Experts say this isn’t the only reason Bolsonaro may have sought refuge in Florida. Many American right-wing activists have long been vocal Bolsonaro supporters. “There is a very strong connection between far-right groups and movements in Brazil and far-right groups in America, especially in Florida,” says Feliciano Guimarães, the academic director at the Brazilian Center of International Relations (CEBRI) in Rio de Janeiro. “Florida is a place where this connection with Brazilian far-right groups is strongest in the United States.”

American far-right influencers have long been popular on Brazilian social media, says Michele Prado, an independent analyst who studies the Brazilian far-right and digital movements. In some circles, Bannon, conservative activist Ben Shapiro, and Fox News host Tucker Carlson are well-known figures, their commentary frequently translated into Portuguese.

“The core of the Bolsonaro government was formed largely by individuals who were inspired and disseminated here in Brazil the concepts produced by the American far-right,” Prado says. Bannon, for example has lauded the Bolsonaro supporters who attacked the government buildings as “freedom fighters” and popularized #BrazilianSpring, a hashtag that “incited violent action and the rupture of the democratic order here in Brazil through a populist revolution [and] was one of the most disseminated” online, says Prado.

Bolsonaro has largely shied away from publicly commenting on the developments in Brazil during his stay, and issued lukewarm criticism of his supporters’ actions on Jan. 8. But experts say it would take little to incite them if he chooses to speak out. “Many people are still shaken by what happened in the elections,” Bolsonaro said Wednesday, calling himself “more popular than ever.”

In Washington, Democratic lawmakers have ramped up the pressure on Biden to revoke Bolsonaro’s visa. A letter to Biden on Jan. 12 signed by dozens of lawmakers, including senior Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, urged the President to “reassess [Bolsonaro’s] status in the country to ascertain whether there is a legal basis for his stay and revoke any such diplomatic visa he may hold” and said the U.S. should cooperate with Brazilian authorities in investigating the role he may have played in the attacks in Brasilia and any other criminal activity he committed in office.

It’s hard to square the seriousness of the actions of his supporters back home with the surreal scenes in Florida. At an event organized in his honor by a conservative Brazilian expat group on Wednesday, Bolsonaro sat under a spotlight on a small stage in a strip mall in Orlando, perched on a purple armchair next to a fuzzy ottoman and a single flower. Videos posted by people in a small crowd of mostly Brazilian-American fans who paid up to $50 to see Bolsonaro show him draped in the Brazilian flag, surrounded by people praying over him and being serenaded by musicians.

“I just want to say thank you so much for everything, in America we’re so grateful for you,” said Jimmy Levy, a former American Idol contestant who has become popular with the MAGA crowd in recent years, performing hits like “God Against the Government” at anti-vaccine rallies and other right-wing events. “Everyone who is a patriot in America is standing with the patriots in Brazil.”

The right, regardless of the country, is so damned weird …

The MAGA Republicans in Congress have replaced their American flag lapel pins with AR-15 pins. pic.twitter.com/CMm0TVufYF

— Ben Meiselas (@meiselasb) February 2, 2023

Apparently I’ve been triggering some of my Democrat colleagues… pic.twitter.com/3qJB1bRuBP

— Rep. Andrew Clyde (@Rep_Clyde) February 2, 2023

Will Bunch has some thoughts:

The sight in recent days of Santos and several of his Republican colleagues parading through the hallowed halls of the U.S. Capitol with a mini-celebration of a killing machine that serves no civilian purpose beyond mowing down large numbers of innocent people in the shortest possible time is perhaps the most hideous assault on human decency I’ve seen in more than 40 years of covering U.S. politics.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? The lapel pins — like those Christmas cards of their adorable blond kids armed to the teeth with high-powered weaponry or the right’s new love affair with the toxic fumes of gas stoves — are meant to “trigger the libs” and sustain a career arc that generates prime-time hits on Fox News and fund-raising emails without ever having to get anything done. Yes, you could argue this column, then, is a perfect example of what these cons want. But what a choice: playing along, or remaining silent while America sheds the skin of humanity.

It’s one thing to embrace the more extreme interpretations of what the Second Amendment means around the rights of individual citizens to buy or own a gun, for purposes like hunting or self-defense. It’s something else entirely to worship the AR-15 and similar assault rifles, which were invented in the 1950s for the military and weren’t meant for civilians until the lucrative gun manufacturers who also finance the National Rifle Association saw a gold mine in marketing them to men obsessed with their masculinity in an era of social change.

And so these AR-15 lapel pins appeared on the chests of Santos and his fellow newcomer Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida — even in the same week that back in Luna’s home state four gunmen in a sedan opened fire on a crowd of people in Lakeland, wounding 11. Even as the notorious list of deaths from mass shootings involving AR-15-style weapons — in now-infamous locales like Uvalde, Las Vegas, Orlando, Sutherland Springs, Parkland and Newtown — grows longer and longer.

Imagine members strutting around the corridors of Congress in late 2001 with a Boeing 747 lapel pin, or wearing a spiky replica of the coronavirus when New York City’s morgues were overflowing in the spring of 2020. Explain to me how worshiping an AR-15 — when the blood stains are still being scrubbed off a dance studio in Monterey Park, Club Q in Colorado Springs, or a bus in Charlottesville — is any different, really?

Yet while it’s about “owning the libs,” the GOP’s performance art is also about much more than that. It’s instructive to look at who has been handing out the AR-15 lapel pins: Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia. In the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up department, Clyde was born on Nov. 22, 1963 — the exact day that someone with a rifle gunned down President John F. Kennedy — and he has built his political career around the cult of firearms.

A Navy combat vet who before this week was best known for his declaration that the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection was like “a normal tourist visit,” Clyde was first elected in 2020 largely on his high profile in the north Georgia exurbs as the owner of the Clyde Armory gun store. He grew that operation from his garage into a $25 million business, marketing AR-15-style guns in the heart of Trump country. That’s because in the Donald Trump/George Santos GOP, grievance is highly profitable — and often a grift.

But Clyde’s career is also a tribute to the ways that today’s GOP has inherited the flag that Southern segregationists like Georgia’s Lester Maddox waved in the 1960s. The Georgia freshman was one of only three House members to vote against the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act and 14 who opposed the creation of the Juneteenth holiday. In doling out his AR-15 pins, Clyde reminds us that the NRA’s radical interpretation of the Second Amendment arose only after Black civil rights gains in the 1960s, and that for its true believers gun ownership is a surrogate for their core value, which is white supremacy.

For much of America’s history, white supremacy — enforced by everything from the bias baked into our laws and codes to the terror of lynching — has dominated. When the swings of social change and a more enlightened government advanced the rights of Blacks, women, the LGBTQ community and others, Republicans competed as the anti-government party backed by the new terror of their unbridled gun cult, but even that increasingly is a losing hand in a more diverse and better educated America. If the white supremacy-soaked far right can no longer rule our nation, today’s Republicans are all too happy to blow it all up, in a world of mass shootings, insurrections, and unchecked pandemics. Their nihilism — wittingly or not — has turned them into a death cult.

These people are beneath contempt. It’s one thing for immature randos to make fun of their enemies’ deaths. It’s quite another for congressional representatives to do it.

Bunch’s column is really good. You should read the whole thing.

A Trumper family goes down the rabbit hole

This is very sad. These people obviously had problems to begin with and ended up focusing on Trump’s Big Lie, leading to a suicide pact:

A Pennsylvania family found shot dead in their backyard last week in what police say appears to be a suicide pact, included a mother and daughter who loved bowling and were devout Christian conservatives, people who knew them said.

Morgan Daub, 26, and her parents, James Daub, 62, and Deborah Daub, 59, were found dead on the ground in the backyard of their home in York County, Pennsylvania, on the morning of Jan. 25, after police responded to a request for a welfare check from a neighbor. 

The West Manchester Township Police Department has since said that notes left inside the house indicate that the family recently made a “joint decision” to end their lives. Police believe Deborah Daub shot and killed her husband and then was shot and killed by Morgan, who died by suicide. Police said there were no signs of forced entry or struggle and no evidence that anyone else had been present.

An investigation into the deaths has been closed.

[…]

Stabley said the Christian, churchgoing family “was never shy about letting anybody know what their beliefs were” when it came to religion and politics. Morgan and Deborah “very, very huge” supporters of former President Donald Trump, Stabley said.

“They were just so hell-bent on Trump winning, like this could be in the end if he doesn’t,” Stabley said, referring to an instance when he saw them just before the 2020 election. He said he stopped seeing the two after that.

A neighbor, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of personal or professional retaliation in their town, said the family had a “preoccupation with religion, especially on the dad’s part.” The family’s front yard was also “littered” with Pro-Trump political signs during the elections, and anti-abortion signs when Roe v. Wade was overturned, the neighbor said.

Stabley said he was disturbed to see recent videos appearing to show Morgan on YouTube. In the videos, which the West Manchester Township Police Department has also said appear to show Morgan, the young woman speaks in stream-of-conscious fashion about God, the Antichrist and conspiracies about Trump and the 2020 election. Stabley said he is haunted by Morgan’s laughter in the videos.

It’s a death cult.