Month: March 2023

Here’s an interesting leftist perspective on the current crisis:

A number of American friends have been asking about my thoughts on Israel so I figured I’d just do a thread. This isn’t some academic analysis or anything, just some things I’ve noticed as someone who follows the news closely and has been to probably a dozen protests. Here we go:

1. The threat was real. American Left is (rightfully) wary of anyone that leans on unelected Supreme Court, but in this case they were final line of defense before dictatorship. Israel has no other checks or balances. No constitution, no separation between exec. and legislature

2.Bibi’s extremist coalition was trying to push reforms that would turn supreme court into rubber stamp. First to suffer would be Palestinians, LGBT and unions. Imagine Trump (who couldn’t even cancel Obamacare) with no obstacles, no challengers. What would he do?

3. If the reforms would have passed, many of the Palestinians with Israeli citizenship would have been disenfranchised because they have become the crucial piece in any non-Netanyahu coalition. As a result, Bibi would never lose an election ever again. Game Over.

4. The protests were driven by elites. Capital, PMC, academics, tech workers, military pilots, etc. This led to some cringe moments for me at protests. I met some Druze at Haifa protests but Palestinians mostly stayed out of this. Radical Left was present but its small.

5. In the end Bibi was forced to stop reform (for now) for 3 reasons: A. Millions of people took to the streets over the past few weeks. B. Elite military reserves said they would not serve . C. The biggest unions in Israel joined in the 11th hour and called a general strike.

6. The big unions are mostly part of the Likud now that the center-left parties have gone full neoliberal. Also, they have been burned by neolib supreme court in the past 30 years, who have curtailed their right to strike. Having them join was a huge deal. Real game-changer.

7. I understand those who sneer at protests. So long as there is apartheid in occupied territories, Israel can never be a democracy. Supreme Court has been key player in legitimizing occupation. But if Bibi had his way, the lives of Palestinians would have gotten so much worse.

8. Yet as someone who often went to the protest with an anti-occupation sign, I can tell you the elite PMC crowd never once yelled at me. I felt that slowly but surely the protests were normalizing the anti-occupation agenda. I saw an alternative path for the first time in years.

8. More Israelis are realizing that the occupation was the root cause of all of this. It had bred the right wing autocrats who were now going after them. As an American historian, it reminds me of the middle-class northerners who, in the end, joined forces with the abolitionists

9. Slavery ended in part because these middle class elites realized that slavery – and the slaveholders it empowered – were a threat to their way of life. Hopefully more and more will realize that if Israel doesn’t end the occupation, the occupation will end Israel.

Originally tweeted by Eli Cook (@Eli_B_Cook) on March 28, 2023.

A lot of leftist types have been understandably cynical about the protests, noting that Israel isn’t a true democracy because well … apartheid. This struck me as a possible glimmer of hope on that count. Maybe it’s too pollyannaish, but but it’s always wise to keep hope alive.

It’s looking dicey for the latest Great Whitebread Hope

Nobody has ever absorbed the right-wing politics of grievance as eagerly as Donald Trump.

In anticipation of his possible run for president in 2016, one of Trump’s smartest moves was to deploy aide Sam Nunberg to listen to talk radio for him and give him a rundown on all the talking points floating around in the right-wing fever swamp. He was a CNN guy but he knew that whatever Fox News and Rush Limbaugh were talking about was what the base of the Republican Party was interested in and that’s where he would aim his candidacy. As it happened, Trump found that he and they were very much on the same wavelength. He didn’t even attempt to please the political establishment or cater to their needs.

Trump runs almost entirely on instinct. He’s bragged openly that he doesn’t need to learn anymore because he already knows everything he needs to know. In business, he refused to look at marketing data and analyses because he trusted his personal vibes over a bunch of pointy headed numbers crunchers. He hired people because they genuflected to him, not because they had any expertise. And he always leaned heavily on nepotism. His showboating celebrity style gave him his television show and resulting branding deals that kept him successful long after his father’s money ran out.

Trump’s main 2024 rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, is taking a more systematic approach to figuring out what the base wants.DeSantis is notoriously stiff and unspontaneous, without any of Trump’s rhetorical flourishes that make him sound like the guy at the end of the bar to the MAGA crowd. But just as Trump listened in on the talk radio jungle drums to understand what the GOP base wanted to hear, DeSantis is hiring right-wing propagandists who have gained prominence during the Trump years for trolling, shitposting and memes. Some of them, like Chris Rufo, are affiliated with right-wing think tanks despite being little more than Trump-era internet stars, while others, such as his press secretary Christina Pushaw, are simply hard core online warriors, highly tuned in to that zeitgeist. He’s even gone deep diving into the dark waters of the fever swamps, hiring a new staffer ( and possible speechwriter) who has cavorted with the Nazi Nick Fuentes. And it was announced this week that the think tank from which the legal justification for Trump’s coup attempt was hatched, the Claremont Institute, has jumped aboard the DeSantis campaign. He’s covering all his bases.

It’s not that Trump didn’t do the same thing in some very specific instances. The most obvious comparison to Rufo, who specializes in domestic culture war combat and is likely responsible for DeSantis’ tiresome, obsessive focus on “woke,” would be Trump’s selection of the odious Stephen Miller as his senior adviser on immigration. And by all accounts, DeSantis is heavily reliant on his wife as his main adviser much as Trump leaned on son-in-law Jared Kushner and eldest daughter Ivanka. Now Trump’s campaign is warning potential DeSantis staffers will be ineligible to join the Trump campaign or another Trump White House.

Whatever their differences and similarities in style and approach, it’s clear that both Trump and DeSantis are joined at the hip with the most ideologically extreme elements of the Republican Party. Trump has used his rhetorical power to make people believe what is demonstrably false and DeSantis has found ways to leverage the power of government to change the system on the ground. They are two sides of the same coin. The question now is whether the Republican base understands the difference — or if they care. They always say they loved Trump’s “policies” but when asked to name them it’s usually something amorphous like “he made America respected again” or “the economy was great.” What they really loved about him is the “own the libs and the foreigners” circus. Can DeSantis’ laundry list of “anti-woke” accomplishments compete with that?

The early reviews aren’t great. Despite all the hoopla around DeSantis’ campaign, the latest polls show that whatever momentum he had coming out of his 2022 re-election victory has slowed significantly. And part of the reason is that that victory was overrated as a selling point anyway. As former GOP strategist Stuart Stevens pointed out on Twitter:

Bill Weld won Ma. by 30. Pete Wilson won Ca. by 10. Rick Perry won Tx by 12. How’d they do? It means nothing in a presidential race.

More important than that, however, is the fact that DeSantis seems to be one of those politicians who doesn’t make a great first impression. He sounds good on paper but when people get a closer look they’re left kind of meh. This is a person who doesn’t really benefit from too much hype.

But DeSantis is flailing a bit for the same reason there’s a trail of dead presidential hopes in Trump’s wake: nobody knows how to deal with him. The early skirmishes in the primary campaign have been less than impressive. Trump has given him a stupid nickname, Ron DeSanctimonious, which the Harvard and Yale grad DeSantis fatuously tried to claim he couldn’t pronounce (because he’s just a good ole country boy, dontcha know?) And Trump grossly insulted him by suggesting he “groomed” high school girls during the prep school teaching year DeSantis never mentions. In other words, Trump is letting loose the beast.

But he also released a pretty good serious critique which DeSantis is also going to have to grapple with:

TRUMP-DESANTIS — In scathing statement, @realDonaldTrump lobs insults at potential 2024 rival, @GovRonDeSantis.

“Ron is an average Governor, but the best by far in the Country in one category, Public Relations, where he easily ranks Number One—But it is all a Mirage.”@wusa9 pic.twitter.com/eZUNLTnOuR

— Evan Koslof (@ekoslof) March 23, 2023

It turns out that DeSantis’ Florida isn’t all that. Nobody in the world knows more about dishonest PR than Donald Trump. His super PAC, MAGA Inc., has even filed an ethics complaint against DeSantis.

DeSantis has been all over the place in response to all this. He ignored him and then tried to be cutesy and then tried to piggyback on his disastrous Ukraine policy only to flip-flop days later. It’s obvious that his numbers started slipping when Trump engaged. His fellow Florida Republicans, former Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio, could have told him all about that.

Now there are reports that donors are getting antsy with some allies suggesting that he should wait until 2028 when the big orange monster is finally out of the game. It’s probably too late for that, however. He’s gone too far to back out now. He’s just going to have to fight it out for a while and see if he can survive.

Like Trump, DeSantis understood that the extreme wing of the GOP is now at the helm and he has carefully calculated a campaign aimed at winning them with demonstrations of his ability to bring their wish list into reality. The problem is that they don’t actually want that — they want the show. And Ron DeSantis just isn’t a very good entertainer. 

Salon

Fox is NOT a journalistic entity, it’s a political operation.
A person working for a PAC wouldn’t get congressional press credentials, but Fox does.
It’s time to revoke the congressional press credentials for anybody from #Fox.

I’m happy Marcy started the conversation. I want to move it forward. I think that de-credentialing should be one result following the resolution of the Dominion case in favor of Dominion.

Why Bother To Revoke Fox’s Credentials?

Press credentials have VALUE to Fox. It allows them, as a political operation, to masquerade as a news organization. I’m making the case that Fox is like the RNC or a Political Action Committee and not a journalistic entity, therefore they are not entitled to the benefits and protections we offer journalistic entities in America. Having Congressional Press credentials is a sign of legitimacy. Not having them wouldn’t mean they couldn’t still do stories about congress, but NOT having them, and the REASON they don’t have them sends a message to everyone.

I’m already hearing all the defeatist responses from the left about trying to do this. And the predictions that journalists and media organizations will defend Fox and won’t even TRY to revoke the credentials. We know how the RW would spin this. “Liberals Hate Free speech! Censorship! They hate the 1st Amendment!” So I propose we set up some test cases we can use to raise the issue:

What if the Democratic PAC set up a new company called Donkey News to do “electronic newsgathering and the daily dissemination of news.” and that Donkey News hired “bona fide newsgatherers and/or reporters of reputable standing in their business to cover congress.”
Would the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association accept or reject Donkey News?

(BTW, those phrases are from the membership rules for the House and Senate Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association.) At the hellsite they are @HouseRadioTV @SenateRadioTV @RTCACapitolHill.

I’m hoping they would reject them using the same criteria that the Periodical Correspondents’ Association uses to reject a periodical based on what the organization can’t do.

“The Periodical “does not engage, directly or indirectly, in any lobbying or other activity intended to influence any matter before Congress or before any independent agency or any department or other instrumentality of the Executive branch.”

Periodical Correspondent’s Association rules. Link to Periodical Correspondents’ Association rules.

What if the person under consideration for Donkey News is questioned about his parent organization, the Democratic PAC? Can they use the line, “The reporter works for the news side, not the political lobbying side opinion side.”?
(Here is what the Periodical Correspondents’ Association rules say:)

“No part of your publishing family or parent organization may be involved in providing representation services, feasibility or marketing studies, nor be engaged in research or analysis not available to all subscribers. “

Periodical Correspondent’s Association rules. Link to Periodical Correspondents’ Association rules.

As you read about the Dominion case ask yourself, “Do we have evidence that the parent company, “News Corp” and its directors “engage[d], directly or indirectly, in any lobbying or other activity intended to influence any matter before Congress?” Ask if there is evidence that the parent organization was involved in any activity intended to influence “the instrumentality of the Executive branch?

Will any journalistic entity bring up this issue to RTCA? I doubt it. Marcy suggested that a “good government group” do it. I would like to think that journalistic organizations WOULD want to do this, then I read an article “Why journalism schools won’t quit Fox News” in Nieman Lab where they talked to a lot of J-school professors. They didn’t want to attack Fox because it might hurt their student’s chances of getting a job.

Fox weaponized 1st Amendment protections to gain political power

I’ve written to some journalism professors and asked, “What would it take to convince reputable journalists and bona fide newsgatherers within RTCA to decertify Fox?”

When I bring up this topic I see people on the left doing the work to validate the excuses for Fox to keep their credentials. I welcome those because then I can see objections from our side. If I can get them to see that it IS a possibility, then some ask, “What’s the point?” I believe doing this is one more way to weaken a massively destructive force in our country.

I’m an activist and blogger. I see myself as journalism adjacent. I know that I could not get Congressional press credentials, just like Marcy couldn’t when she worked for FireDogLake.

I’m writing about this because Fox has abused the protections we give journalists. Journalists use those protections in the quest to get to the truth. The public rightly supports journalists using their power for that purpose. But that is NOT how News Corp & Murdoch have been using those protections.

Jon Stewart described it this way, the right has weaponized the 1st Amendment protections. Listen to him and his guest RonNell Anderson Jones, Professor of Law at the University of Utah discuss the Dominion Fox case. It is clear that Fox execs knew the truth & lied anyway.

They are knowingly exploiting the cracks in a system that believes in the 1st Amendment

They’re gaming a system designed to give journalists broad leeway in trying to expose truth.

They’re reverse engineering it to create falsehoods–then exploit those falsehoods–which appeal to the basest instincts of their audience, to gain political power.

If you think losing credentials doesn’t matter, ask yourself, “What if the congressional press credentials for ABC were revoked? What if Mark Parker, the head of Disney was deposed with the same kind of clear evidence we are seeing in the Dominion case from News Corp management?”

The DISCUSSION about Fox losing congressional press credentials is about consequences for a political organization using the benefits and protections we offer journalistic entities in America for a corrupt purpose. There should be a price to pay.

I think this masquerade needs to end and it needs to cost “News Corp” money. Losing money is one of the few ways we drive change in corporate media in America. A damaged brand is another.

I do not expect actual broadcast journalistic entities to do this work, even though it would benefit them and the profession. They are gatekeepers. They can revoke credentials. In the past when the Congressional Periodical Correspondents’ Association found out that someone who got press credentials worked for a lobbying firm, they asked them to resign. The person resigned.

The Dominion case is hurting News Corp. There has never been a better time to hurt News Corp and Fox “News”.

I’ve heard lots of ways that Fox will fight this or why this is a waste of energy, so help me out here folks, start thinking of all the ways to USE what we are learning in the Dominion case, the Smartmatics case and the Jan 6th stories to hurt News Corp and Fox.

There is an old Klingon saying, “When your enemy is drowning, throw them an anchor.”

Cross posted to Spocko’s Brain Follow me at @spocko@mastodon.online or at the hellsite @spockosbrain

“any reasonable method to promote peace”

“The first militia church I went to I thought was a fluke,” Jeff Sharlet (The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War) told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Tuesday evening. “And then I started to realize that churches were arming up with the expectation of civil war.”

“The doomsday prepper of the past has become a mainstay of rightwing culture,” Sharlet found in his research travels.

Sharlet writes about Ashli Babbitt, shot and killed by Capitol security as she tried to climb through broken glass into the Speaker’s Lobby on Jan. 6. I did not know law enforcement had found a weapon on her body inside the ambulance. Babbitt’s knife appears on the cover of Sharlet’s new book.

It’s one of those details that the MAGA right does not want or need to know. It detracts from the near-virginal image MAGA Republicans have built up around her since the insurrection.

“They were aging Ashli back” within days, Sharlet says, making her “smaller, younger, as if whiter.” A young white girl. (Babbitt was 36.)

People speak of the right as a death cult, Sharlet says, but in some ways it’s “an innocence cult. They want to be innocent of history, innocent of race, and Ashli Babbitt served as this whiteness martyr.”

Sharlet spoke with several men at Rep. Lauren Boebert’s since-defunct Shooters Grill in a book excerpt at Vanity Fair. Things in this country are fast “going down the hole,” said David G who imagined he’d once met Babbitt.

The man was unfashionably unarmed inside Boebert’s “Hooters, but with guns” Colorado diner. He kept his “serious firepower” secretly stashed at his grandmother’s for when the time comes:

“How will I know when things are going down the hole?” I asked.

“You get into the city areas, you will see the people.” Which people? The “instigators.” I’d see them fighting in the streets. “When I say it’s going down the hole fast, I’m talking about that. I’m talking about those of us who have less tolerance for the instigators.” The instigators. “So some will resort to, let’s just say, other methods.” Militia? He smiled. “I’m not saying I’m not militia.” He would say he was a man of peace. The militia movement, he said, stands for “any reasonable method to promote peace.” Like guns. He offered his favorite quotation: “‘People who know violence and are capable of violence are always the persons to pick peace.’” He didn’t know who said this.

Sharlet knew it was time to leave when the manager approached disapprovingly, gun on his hip. It wasn’t a threat. That’s the point of the gun. “The point of the gun was the promotion of peace.”

Who needs a “heckler’s veto” when the sidearm does the talking?

That book is banned, comrade

MAGA Floridians fear ideas they find mildly threatening. Heads are not rolling yet, but it’s open season on books. At the slightest objection — outrage-addicted MAGAs are drunk on the power of it — Florida is removing books from its schools.

A new measure in the Florida legislature would allow any person raising any objection to any book to disappear it as quickly as an East German neighbor turned over to Stasi.

Greg Sargent writes that while the bill seems to have support from Republican presidential hopeful Gov. Ron DeSantis, passage could backfire:

“If Florida passes this bill, it may be the first state in the country to institute in every public school a rule requiring the immediate removal of materials following an objection,” Jeffrey Sachs, a political scientist who closely tracks these proposals, told me. “For activists on the right, this is a new strategy that will greatly speed the process of censoring materials.”

Lawmakers wrote the provision into a bill expanding the state’s “don’t say gay” law, It expands the prohibition on classroom discussion of sex and gender from third grade up to high school. But this section, Sargent writes, mandates that books containing material deemed “sexual” or “pornographic” (in the eye of a citizen censor) be “unavailable to students until the objection is resolved.” Any resident of the county could strip books from school shelves on a whim. Or a rumor.

The bill’s sponsor harbors no reservations:

The bill’s chief sponsor, Republican state Sen. Clay Yarborough, doesn’t deny this. He holds it up as a positive. In a statement emailed to me, Yarborough cited the bill’s targeting of sexual material and said he will always “err on the side of protecting children.”

“I do not have any concerns with the materials being removed until an objection is resolved,” Yarborough added.

Be the first on your block to inform on a book! It’s not exactly the Order of Lenin, but perhaps a Florida Man version is coming.

If the new bill passes, it would become statewide policy that this book — or others with similarly peripheral “sexual conduct” — must be banned from a given district’s schools immediately upon the objection of one resident of that county, says Kara Gross, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.

“It grants enormous power to a single bigoted individual to dictate and control what books other parents’ kids have access to,” Gross told me.

Sachs is sure that “the automatic removal provision will be abused and lead to widespread censorship.”

Of course, it will. The MAGA movement is filled with people feeling disempowered by demographic shifts weakening traditional white-Christian social dominance. What better way to earn their loyalty by granting them a unilateral veto over what others may read?

Sargent adds:

Right-wing activists in Florida are already lodging objections on vaguely sexual grounds to an extraordinary range of books, as the Popular Information newsletter demonstrated. In some cases, dozens of books are getting banned in counties because of the objections of one parent, as happened when a member of the right-wing “Moms for Liberty” orchestrated the removal of 20 Jodi Picoult novels from school libraries in Martin County.

It may win DeSantis some primary votes, Sargent believes, but backfire with elites hoping he can “win back suburban voters alienated by Trump.”

So, DeSantis can keep incentivizing these self-deputized local book-purging czars to go on their rampages if he must. Yet it’s likely he will have to answer for the whims of these petty functionaries when their efforts run off the rails.

Soon in DeSantisland you’ll need a permission slip to check out books.

This piece by David Lauter makes a point I hadn’t heard before. Trump’s been famous for a very long time and his “approval” rating has been pretty much the same. Since the 80s.

There’s a fact about Donald Trump that both devotees and detractors often ignore, and it’s key to understanding what likely will happen politically — and what won’t — if any of the several criminal investigations of him lead to an indictment:

Few people have ever been known so widely for so long.

How widely? In 1999, 16 years before he launched his campaign for president, almost 9 in 10 Americans already knew enough about Trump to have an opinion of him, Gallup found.

That year, Trump was as widely known as Al Gore, the sitting vice president, who was about to launch his fourth national campaign. Slightly more people had an opinion about Trump than about George W. Bush —the governor of Texas and son of a former president — who would defeat Gore in 2000.

By contrast, only about a third of Americans that year had an opinion of John McCain, who was already in his third term as a U.S. senator from Arizona and would be the GOP nominee in 2008.

As for the president at the time, almost all Americans had an opinion of Bill Clinton in 1999, the seventh year of his presidency. But as late as January of 1992, when he was already running for the job, a majority of Americans said they had never heard of him.

Trump’s celebrity dates back at least to 1987 and the publication of the “Art of the Deal.” He has been among the nation’s most widely recognized people for four decades — longer than a majority of Americans have been alive.

Among presidents in the past half a century, only Ronald Reagan approached Trump’s level of near-universal name recognition before winning the White House. To find someone as widely known without a prior run for president, one would have to go back to Dwight Eisenhower.

And unlike Eisenhower (and most other celebrities), Trump has almost always inspired sharply split opinions — “master builder” versus “thick-fingered vulgarian.”

The 1999 Gallup survey, for example, found opinion about Trump divided pretty much as it’s split today: 47% of Americans viewed him unfavorably, 41% favorably. (Currently, 55% have an unfavorable view of him, compared with 41% who see him favorably, according to the average of polls maintained by FiveThirtyEight.)

If an indictment happens — a New York grand jury considering charges against Trump meets again on Monday — the long familiarity that Americans have with him will shape the political impact. The same is true of the other cases in the list of criminal investigations he faces.

The political environment around Trump has two central realities: He remains unpopular among most Americans. And he remains very popular among a large segment of the Republican Party.

The latest Monmouth University poll, released Tuesday, found that among Republican voters, 71% had a favorable view of Trump, compared with 21% who had an unfavorable one.

Like several other recent polls, the Monmouth survey also showed Trump widening his lead over his main 2024 GOP rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who appears to have faded as attention has focused back on Trump. Among all Republicans in the survey, 41% picked Trump as their favorite and 27% chose DeSantis.

Trump’s lead was especially large among the roughly 4 in 10 Republican voters who identify as strong supporters of the MAGA movement, named after Trump’s “Make American great again” slogan. MAGA backers supported Trump over DeSantis by almost 50 points, the survey found.

If New York prosecutors announce charges against Trump in their case involving hush-money payments to a porn star, that Republican viewpoint isn’t likely to shift.

The same goes for the other investigations Trump faces, including a grand jury probe in Atlanta involving alleged interference in Georgia‘s 2020 election, and two federal investigations being handled by special counsel Jack Smith into Trump’s involvement in the Jan. 6 riot and his failure to turn over documents held at Mar-a-Lago that were subpoenaed by the government.

Most Republican voters don’t trust officials of big, Democratic cities. Nor do they trust the Justice Department. And they’ve mostly made their peace with Trump’s behavior.

At least in the short term, an indictment could cause Trump’s current advantage among Republicans to grow, Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist and longtime Trump critic said this week on her podcast.

“It centers all the media attention on him,” she said. “It forces all of the other candidates to rally around Trump. The whole of the Republican Party may not be in agreement that Donald Trump is the best candidate for 2024, but there is going to be broad agreement that ‘he’s being persecuted by members of the deep state and our political enemies, and therefore we must defend Trump.’”

Over time, however, the outcome of the primaries will turn on how many GOP voters say that they admire the former president but feel that it’s time for the party to move on to a leader with less baggage.

The challenge for DeSantis, as well as Trump’s other rivals, including former Vice President Mike Pence and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, remains what it has always been — to convince enough GOP voters that nominating Trump will simply hand the election to President Biden.

There are clearly some voters in the party receptive to that argument. As Amy Walter, editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, recently noted, multiple polls have shown a slow decline since Trump left office in the share of Republicans who view him positively — not a major shift, but a steady erosion.

No one knows whether the instinct to rally around Trump will outweigh the fear Republicans have of another lost election. We probably won’t know until the campaign is more fully engaged.

The consequences for a general election are clearer: Most Americans dislike Trump, and an indictment will not make that better.

Winning the presidency with majority disapproval is possible — Trump did it in 2016 because most Americans also disliked his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. He beat her among those who disliked both of them, and that allowed him to carry just enough states to win the presidency despite losing the popular vote.

Maybe he can do that again. But counting on that lightning to strike twice didn’t work in 2020, and barring an economic collapse or other calamity, there’s no strong reason to think it would work any better in 2024 — Biden’s current mediocre poll ratings notwithstanding.

What Trump needs in order to increase his chance for a win is to pick up new voters. An indictment might increase the enthusiasm of his core supporters, but being enthusiastic doesn’t give anyone an additional ballot, and turnout among his base is already very high.

Since the start of Trump’s political career, people on the left and the right have held mirror-image fantasies of a dramatic event causing a sudden shift in how Americans look at him.

On the left, it’s the fantasy of the silver bullet — the circumstance so damning that it causes Trump’s supporters to abandon him en masse. On the right, it’s the belief that Trump’s opponents will overstep so egregiously that Americans will rally around the former president, propelling him to majority support.

The Access Hollywood tape, Charlottesville, Jan. 6 and two impeachments should have disabused people of both ideas, but both have resurfaced as speculation about an imminent indictment has mounted.

I can’t speak for the left but I stopped believing the big “scandal” would separate him from his cult sometime around the Access Hollywood tape. If that didn’t do it, nothing will. By now anyone who thinks that will happen just isn’t paying attention.

What I do think is that he’s a weak general election candidate. He’s been weak since 2016,k 2020 was even weaker and I suspect he’ll be even weaker still in 2024. He’ll still have at least his 40%. After all, Herbert Hoover got 28% in the middle of the Great Depression. Partisanship has always been powerful. But I think he’s the weakest of the lot and the next generation of weirdos they’ve created have some skills I wouldn’t want to see put to use.

Only 21% of Republicans don’t want Trump to be president again

I don’t know why so many Republicans still refuse to believe that their voters actually like this guy. More proof from the Maris Poll:

A majority of Americans (56%) think the investigations into former President Donald Trump are fair. 41%, though, consider the probes to be a “witch hunt.” Perceptions align closely with partisanship with 87% of Democrats and 51% of independents reporting the investigations are above board. Nearly one in five Republicans (18%) agree. Most Republicans (80%), though, think the investigations are a “witch hunt.”

Most Americans perceive Trump has engaged in improper behavior. A plurality of Americans (46%) think the former president has done something illegal, and an additional 29% consider Trump to have done something unethical but not illegal. Only 23% of Americans say Trump has done nothing wrong.

Most Democrats (78%) consider Trump’s actions to be illegal. While majorities of Republicans and independents perceive wrongdoing by Trump, there is less consensus about the criminality of his actions. 41% of independents say Trump did something illegal, and 33% consider his actions to be unethical but not criminal. While 45% of Republicans think Trump did nothing wrong, 10% say Trump broke the law, and 43% believe he engaged in unethical behavior.

More than six in ten Americans (61%) do not want Trump to be President, again. 38% want him to be elected to another term. 89% of Democrats, 64% independents, and 21% of Republicans do not want Trump to return to the White House. 76% of Republicans want Trump to be president, again. Of note, 41% of white Evangelical Christians are against a second Trump Administration.

39% of Americans, notched down from 42% in November of 2022, have a favorable opinion of Trump. 51% have an unfavorable view of the former president.

He is not popular with most Americans but he’s very popular among Republicans. That’s the dilemma for them and it’s not getting any better.

This poll shows some major among conservative evangelicals, however, which could end up being a problem for him. Keep your eye on that…

I don’t know exactly what this guy is grooming kids for but it’s obviously not something we would normally associate with religious right family values. And yet:

the nearly naked guy on the left of your screen who appeared multiple times like this on pro wrestling TV shows that your children watch now works for Turning Point USA and ostensibly wants to warn you about drag queens reading to your kids https://t.co/6y3vJPUrnB pic.twitter.com/UrL5qO3lOi

— Matt Binder (@MattBinder) March 27, 2023

Some people might say that’s just a tad homoerotic. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

In case you were wondering, Turning Point USA is adamantly opposed to LGBTQ rights:

Turning Point UK too:

(Again?)

I’m unclear about the unique national security risk Washington believes Tik Tok to be. The questioning from members of congress last week showed they are clueless about social media so I’m not convinced. (Emptywheel has some thoughts on that question.)

Be that as it may, I am very sure of the political risk that banning tik-tok will bring to the Democratic Party and I don’t know if these people are savvy enough to realize it. This article spells it out:

For Chris Mowrey, a TikTok creator who posts popular videos focused on politics, the app represents more than just a platform: It provides a sense of community for his generation, connecting like-minded users and motivating them to take action.

TikTok had a “massive influence on young people getting out to vote” in the 2022 midterm elections, Mowrey argued to me in an interview, particularly for those Democratic-leaning voters who may have felt isolated in a red state or area. “When you can connect in a short-form video in a community, where you have all these comments of people saying, ‘It’s not pointless, I live here,’ or ‘I agree,’ it almost gives you this sense, like, OK, maybe we can get this thing done. And it drives you to make a decision, like going to the voting booth,” he said.

Mowrey, a 21-year-old student at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, is one of many TikTok creators who have carved out a place for themselves on the app; he’s amassed more than 61,000 followers on his account since September. His posts offer short bursts of earnest yet frenetic commentary, blond hair flopping into his eyes as he rants about Republican priorities or touts progressive policies, directly appealing to the camera in videos staged from his car or bathroom. The videos have the feel of a conversation with a particularly energetic and politically attuned friend, one who encourages others to care about the worldas much as he does.

But Mowrey could soon lose his platform, and millions of young TikTok users their primary source of news and information, as Congress and the Biden administration mull taking steps to ban TikTok over growing national security concerns. Evenif such drastic action is deemed by the federal government to be necessary, there will likely be significant political repercussions, potentially alienating young voters ahead of the critical 2024 elections.

Those security concerns aren’t unfounded. TikTok is owned by Chinese parent company ByteDance; the Biden administration and various members of Congress fret that user data can be accessed and shared with the Chinese government. The FBI and the Justice Department are reportedly investigating ByteDance’s use of TikTok to surveil U.S. citizens, including journalists. TikTok has also been a hotbed for misinformation.

Nevertheless, TikTok has 150 million active users in the United States, NBC News reported, with around 138 million of voting age. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that while 49 percent of Americans overall support banning TikTok, 63 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 oppose a ban.

TikTok is not the only social media app that has proliferated misinformation and disinformation about politics and elections, nor is it the only company that may be playing fast and loose with user data, although the U.S. government’s concern stems largely from whether that data is then being accessed and utilized by the Chinese government. Annie Wu Henry, who served as a social media producer on Senator John Fetterman’s campaign and ran its popular TikTok account, told me that Gen Zers might feel particularly targeted by a ban.

“I think that they are going to view it as if they’re getting their voices stifled in a medium that they as a generation have really owned,” Henry said. “There’s problems on every social media app, and taking the one away that Gen Z has really utilized—they’re the largest demographic on the platform. I think it’s very much going to be taken personally.”

I think so too. This is the platform of the young and the idea that a bunch of old people in Washington would ban their dance videos and recipes and all the other innocuous stuff (which makes up the vast majority of posting) will look like specific punishment to them, especially when all the geriatrics’ platforms like Facebook and twitter are allowed to carry on.

Everyone would be fine if we banned all social media, of course. Instagram can be a very reasonable substitute for TikTok. But it’s very difficult to build a following online and those who make money on the platform will be shit out of luck. These Washington pols may not understand how these platforms work (and maybe they don’t care) but the young demographic that uses TikTok are a major Democratic party demographic and they should think long and hard about offending them.

This kind of thing is nothing new for the forced childbirth crowd. But it’s even more reprehensible in the wake of Dobbs as desperate women from other states are having to travel long distances to obtain an abortion:

Florida regulators over the last year punished more than a dozen abortion providers for violating a nearly decade-old law that requires pregnant patients wait 24 hours before getting the procedure.

Florida legislators approved the law in 2015, but it remained in limbo after the American Civil Liberties Union challenged it. After a judge upheld the law in April, Florida’s abortion regulator, the Agency for Health Care Administration, almost immediately began issuing fines.

Abortion-rights advocates say providers were given little chance to prepare for the law, which requires patients to wait 24 hours between clinic visits. In some instances, clinics were not in compliance with the “24 hour” law because of paperwork issues or computer problems.

Florida has become a hub for abortions since the fall of Roe v. Wade last year, despite a new law limiting abortions after 15 weeks. Thousands of people have come to Florida from across the southeast to get abortions as other states in the region impose even stricter limits on access, and abortion rights groups say the “24 hour” rule will further burden people traveling to Florida who will be forced to stay in the state longer.

“We have a lot of independent clinics in this state that are working hard to provide women with access, so it’s a shame,” Laura Goodhue, executive director of the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, said in an interview. “And women are getting hurt in the process, especially the ones coming from out of state.”

So far, the agency has issued almost $500,000 in fines to 14 of Florida’s 52 abortion clinics. While Planned Parenthood has an advocacy arm that helped prepare its 38 Florida clinics for the “24 hour” law, smaller independent clinics couldn’t afford the same luxury, Goodhue said.

The “24 hour” rule is another example of Florida restricting abortion access, though it’s not has high profile as the 2022 law banning abortion at 15 weeks that the Republican-controlled Legislature approved last year. The law doesn’t include exceptions for rape or incest.

Once they pass their 6 week ban, there won’t be any further worries since most women don’t even know they’re pregnant before then. Very few people will be making that trek to Florida.

The idea that DeSantis thinks it’s a good idea to sign a 6 week ban does reinforce the idea that he isn’t ready for prime time. A general election candidate who takes that stance is toast. I’m not even sure all of MAGA is onboard with that. Trump once said that a woman who has an abortion should be punished but he backtracked soon after, so who knows what they really think? But further restricting abortion rights is a huge loser beyond the religious right.

But hey, maybe DeSantis is a true believer on this one. After all, he backed his quack surgeon general refusing to wear a mask when in the presence of a legislator who was undergoing chemo for breast cancer. And that was just shortly after his own wife had undergone treatment for breast cancer. He’s not stupid and he knows the science showed that it was prudent to wear masks around people who are immunosuppressed . He just thought that it was more important to show COVID machismo.

So let’s just say that women’s lives aren’t of paramount importance to him.