Month: May 2023

Or get busy watching freedom die

Blue America‘s Howie Klein (Down With Tyranny) points to an old idea still current and still popular: FDR’s proposed Economic Bill of Rights (1944). Our political bill of rights, FDR saw, was inadequate for assuring “equality in the pursuit of happiness.”

“I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
January 20, 1937

As a record number of people die on America’s streets, Abdul Curry fights to stay alive.

Howie excerpts FDR’s speech:

It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people— whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth— is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights— among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however— as our industrial economy expanded— these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all— regardless of station, race, or creed.

Howie adds:

Yesterday, DATA For Progress released a poll showing that most Americans are still waiting for our political elites to carry out what FDR asked for around 8 decades ago. Their results show that 69% of likely voters support an Economic Bill of Rights— and not just normal people. Even 51% of Republican voters favor it! That includes 87% of voters who agree that Americans have a right to healthcare (including 82% of Republicans). Next week, Bernie and Pramila are going to roll out a Medicare-for-All proposal. Although Republicans have been brainwashed by Fox to oppose those words, 56% of Americans support it, including a third of Republican voters.

Other findings:

• 74% of voters support a federal jobs guarantee.
• 81% of voters support the right to a preschool education and 72% support the right to a college education.
• 72% support the idea of building enough housing that would ensure all Americans a decent place to live.
• 79% support the right to a basic income (including 71% of Republicans).
• 63% support the right to basic banking services (through the post office)
• 66% support the right to unionize (including even 44% of GOP voters)

Like efforts to stop the daily mass slaughter, these ideas enjoy solid majority support. That 80 years after FDR we still cannot muster the political will to deliver on them Roosevelt condemns from his grave. They won’t be remedied by surrendering our liberties to strongmen or to oligarchs.

“We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all our citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.”
January 9, 1940

“They [who] seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers…call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order.”
March 15, 1941

So much happens at the margins

The authoritarian right takes an Everything Everywhere All at Once approach to undermining, well, most everything that undergirds this democracy.

A friend at Daily Kos pointed to this notice from the League of Women Voters:

HARRISBURG, Pa. — Today voting rights advocates agreed to dismiss a lawsuit that pitted them against conservative activist group Judicial Watch, in a lawsuit Judicial Watch originally filed in 2020 to force three Pennsylvania counties to remove thousands of voters from the rolls ahead of the 2020 election. 

The settlement agreed to by the parties simply requires the Department of State to separately publish online data it already collects and publishes under Pennsylvania law. Under the settlement, the Department will carve out the data for five county defendants and publish it separately. The lawsuit did not show any failure of the state of Pennsylvania to comply with either federal or state law governing voter roll list maintenance. Judicial Watch was unsuccessful in forcing any purges of the voter rolls.

“This is undeniably a victory for voters,” said Samantha Apgar, president of the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania. “We are proud to have joined this case to prevent voters from being wrongfully purged from the voter rolls. The League will continue to fight for Pennsylvanians and prevent anti-voter groups like Judicial Watch from bullying states and counties into excessive purging and voter disenfranchisement.”

“Today, we put Judicial Watch’s false claims about the security of our elections to rest. This settlement confirms what the vast majority of Pennsylvanians know: our elections are free and fair,” said Jill Greene, voting and elections manager at Common Cause of Pennsylvania. “We’ll continue to protect our neighbors from attempts by outside groups to rob them of their right to vote.” 

Judicial Watch, an organization known for disenfranchising voters, filed a lawsuit in 2020 against three Pennsylvania counties and then-Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar. It then amended the suit in 2021 to sue five other counties instead – Luzerne, Cumberland, Washington, Indiana, and Carbon Counties. The group sought to enforce a purported violation of the National Voter Registration Act based on unverified, self-generated data. The case followed similar lawsuits filed by other anti-democratic organizations in the lead up to the 2020 election seeking to purge voters in Allegheny County, as well as heavily-populated counties in Michigan and North Carolina.

Despite gerrymandering efforts, many elections turn on what happens at the margins. “Heads I win, tails you lose” efforts to ensure Republicans (and increasingly white Christian nationalists) maintain a grip on this country no matter what the majority wants have escalated from bogus voter fraud claims and fudging census results to voter roll purges and insurrection.

New poll of 18-29 year olds:

Biden 52 – Trump 24 (+28)
Biden 49 – DeSantis 15 (+34)

Top issues – Jobs/Economy, Abortion, Gun Safety

If this holds this bad f-ing news for Rs. https://t.co/zLj2bnYWFf

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) May 12, 2023

So much happens at the margins. Efforts to eradicate public education range from intimidating school boards to promoting charters, vouchers, and opportunity scholarships, to demonizing public employees, to eliminating tenure for college faculty. There is never one strategy afoot, but several, and new ones all the time.

Efforts to re-exile women to kitchens, barefoot and pregnant, take too many forms to ennumerate. From state legislatures to federal courts, there is a multi-pronged on the right effort to roll back women’s freedoms.

Get busy fighting back on multiple fronts yourselves. There’s plenty of fight for everyone.

(h/t BF)

This cat rides shotgun with her truck driver dad every single day 💞 pic.twitter.com/fR50zr88SB

— The Dodo (@dodo) May 10, 2023

That’s sweet. My cats turn into Tasmanian Devils in the car, screaming non-stop and bouncing around like Mexican jumping beans in their carriers. And what a pretty kitty.

And then there’s this story about a very big pretty kitty:

Before P-22 died in December, I’ll admit I was only vaguely aware that there was a mountain lion living in Griffith Park.

I had heard the name and was familiar with some of the many perils that pumas in the Los Angeles area were facing — shrinking territory and an attendant lack of genetic diversity, speeding freeway traffic and exposure to rat poison — but I didn’t know much about what made P-22 singular.

Then, late last year, P-22, who had made an unlikely home in Los Angeles’s biggest municipal park for more than a decade, started behaving more aggressively. Wildlife officials took it as a sign that after a long, difficult life, his health had deteriorated and that he should be euthanized. After his death, he became inescapable.

There was his feline face on a giant yellow mural at a fitness studio where I sometimes take classes. There was a memorial at the Greek Theater, attended by thousands of locals, including celebrities. The Los Angeles Public Library hosted a reading of “love letters” to honor him, and issued a limited edition library card. Representative Adam Schiff emailed constituents to say that he was hard at work pushing for a P-22 postage stamp.

Last week, the Los Angeles City Council approved a motion to build a permanent memorial to him at Griffith Park, which would put the puma in league with James Dean, whose bust is on display near Griffith Observatory.

All this had me wondering: What was it about this wild animal, living in a city full of human celebrities, that inspired such fervent adoration?

What I found while reporting my recent article about P-22’s legacy is that his star potential was recognized years ago and magnified by wildlife conservationists like Beth Pratt, the National Wildlife Federation’s executive director for California, who became the cat’s unofficial agent.

She helped make him the face of a successful campaign to raise money to build the world’s largest wildlife crossing, which is under construction over Highway 101 in Agoura Hills.

But his story of isolation — he was a bachelor who never mated — and survival in a city that has a tendency to grind down individuals also resonated with Angelenos.

To Warren Dickson, a hip-hop artist who tries to get students from South Los Angeles engaged in environmentalism, P-22 is at once a kindred spirit and a vexing point of comparison.

He recalled meeting Pratt by chance after he was hired to drive her to a wildlife conservation fund-raiser. She invited him into the event, and he was struck by the level of concern even for predators.

“Black people just want you to love them like you love mountain lions,” he recalled telling the mostly white guests.

Rather than turn away, Pratt was appreciative of Dickson’s honesty, he said, and the two struck up a productive friendship. She eventually helped him record and make a music video for his song “If I Was Wild.”

Dickson believes that fostering a connection with P-22’s story can help build empathy for marginalized human communities like his own. He hopes to make a full-time career out of wildlife conservation.

Some of P-22’s appeal was more instinctive. At the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, where there is an exhibit dedicated to his “hero’s journey,” I found Michelle Davis pointing at a big map, showing the cougar’s territory while her 5-year-old son, Benjamin, poked at buttons to represent other known pumas.

Benjamin, she explained, had been assigned a “passion project” through his school. Last year, he tackled Metro trains. This year, he planned to learn about the big cat.

“Why did you pick P-22?” Davis gently prodded her son.

He squirmed shyly, his eyes downcast.

“I miss him,” he said. Then he bounded away.

I miss him too.

Not exactly

Philip Bump take a look at that question because of Anderson Cooper’s assertion last night on his show that it’s important the CNN audience reckon with the fact that half the country supports Trump:

In recent YouGov polling conducted for the Economist, about 45 percent of respondents said they viewed Trump strongly or somewhat favorably, getting us near that half-of-Americans mark.

But that “somewhat” is hazy. When Quinnipiac asked the same question in March, without the “somewhat” option, only about a third of respondents said they viewed Trump favorably — more than YouGov’s “strongly favorable” but less than the combined “strongly/somewhat.” It was the same percentage as said they considered themselves supporters of the “Make America Great Again” movement.

Of course, we’re only talking about American adults here, not younger people among whom, it’s safe to assume, Trump is generally even less popular. Even within the universe of adults, however, extrapolating from “didn’t lose by that much in 2020” to “half the country supports him” is a stretch.

First of all, there’s that issue of anti-Biden vs. pro-Trump votes, as above. Second, more adult citizens of the United States didn’t vote at all in 2020 than voted for Trump. If we’re looking only at votes as a measure of support, Trump was supported in 2020 by only about 30 percent of adults who might have been able to vote.

This is not to say that Biden is far more popular; his numbers aren’t much different. But there’s no call for more coverage aimed at understanding Biden and his views — largely because there would be no controversy over airing a similar conversation with Biden.

The exotic “The Trump voter” remains an object of fascination for the mainstream media and it ends up presenting them as a much larger faction than they actually are. If there is such a thing as the bandwagon effect this probably helps Trump with the sort of weak-minded GOP leaners and Independents who don’t really follow politics and basically just run with the crowd.

Kaitlin Collins:You once said that using the debt ceiling as a negotiating wedge just could not happen. You said that when you were in the oval office.

Donald Trump: That’s when I was president

Collins: So why is it different now, when you’re out of office?

Trump: Because now I’m not president

Raucous laughter and applause from the cult.

I’ll just leave that there for you to ponder. This is what passes for serious political discourse on the right. Here;s a member of Trump’s braintrust pretty much saying the same thing:

Former Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow says, “I just don't buy these horrific scenarios” about the debt ceiling. “If, you know, if an interest rate payment was 10 days late, and the price of that would be a major, major spending reduction, it probably would be a good idea.”

This is drastically different from where Kudlow was back when he was in government, and told Fox News Radio in 2019: “We can’t have a default, Brian [Kilmeade]. That would just a monkey wrench into the financial world and the economy.”

White House Economic Adviser Larry Kudlow On The Bipartisan Spending Bill Increasing The Debt Ceiling: We Can?t Have A Default Because It Would Throw A Monkey Wrench Into The Financial World & The Economy

This is the perfect encapsulation of Trump’s statement about debt ceiling hostage-taking at his CNN rally/town hall on Wednesday: “Because now I’m not president.”

When MAGA is in office, they want deference. When not in office, they will gladly act as national saboteurs.

Originally tweeted by Eric Kleefeld (becoming a parody of myself) (@EricKleefeld) on May 12, 2023.

The worst story you will hear today

It’s a fact that serial killers almost always start off torturing and killing animals for fun. Elon Musk has been giving kids the idea:

Graphic videos of animal abuse have circulated widely on Twitter in recent weeks, generating outrage and renewed concern over the platform’s moderation practices.

One such video, in which a kitten appears to be placed inside a blender and then killed, has become so notorious that reactions to it have become their own genre of internet content.

Laura Clemens, 46, said her 11-year-old son came home from his school in London two weeks ago and asked if she had seen the video.

“There’s something about a cat in a blender,” Clemens remembered her son saying.

Clemens said she went on Twitter and searched for “cat,” and the search box suggested searching for “cat in a blender.”

Clemens said that she clicked on the suggested search term and a gruesome video of what appeared to be a kitten being killed inside of a blender appeared instantly. For users who have not manually turned off autoplay, the video will begin rolling instantly. NBC News was able to replicate the same process to surface the video on Wednesday.

Clemens said she is grateful her child asked her about the video instead of simply going on Twitter and typing in the word “cat” by himself.

“I’m glad that my child has talked to me, but there must be lots of parents whose kids just look it up,” she said.

The spread of the video as well as its presence in Twitter’s suggested searches is part of a worrying trend of animal cruelty videos that have littered the social media platform following Elon Musk’s takeover, which included mass layoffs and deep cuts to the company’s content moderation and safety teams.

Last weekend, gory videos from two violent events in Texas spread on Twitter, with some users saying that the images had been pushed into the platform’s algorithmic “For You” feed.

The animal abuse videos appear to predate those videos. Various users have tweeted that they have seen the cat video, with some trying to get Musk’s attention on the issue — some dating back to early May. Clemens said she flagged the video on May 3 to Twitter’s support account and Ella Irwin, the vice president of trust and safety at Twitter and one of Musk’s closest advisers. 

“Young children know this has been trending on your site. My little one hasn’t seen it but knows about it. It should not be an autofill suggestion,” Clemens wrote.

Neither Irwin nor Twitter safety responded to the tweet, Clemens said.

Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, told NBC News that he believes the company likely dismantled a series of safeguards meant to stop these kinds of autocomplete problems.

Roth explained that autocompleted search results on Twitter were internally known as “type-ahead search” and that the company had built a system to prevent illegal, illicit and dangerous content from appearing as autocompleting suggestions.

“There is an extensive, well-built and maintained list of things that filtered type-ahead search, and a lot of it was constructed with wildcards and regular expressions,” Roth said.

Roth said there was a several-step process to prevent gore and death videos from appearing in autocompleted search suggestions. The process was a combination of automatic and human moderation, which flagged animal cruelty and violent videos before they began to appear automatically in search results.

“Type-ahead search was really not easy to break. These are longstanding systems with multiple layers of redundancy,” said Roth. “If it just stops working, it almost defies probability.”

Autocomplete suggestions in search bars are a common feature on many social media platforms, and they can often surface disturbing content. The terms for “dog” and “cat” autocompleted viral animal cruelty videos in Twitter’s search box Thursday, when NBC News contacted the company for comment. Twitter’s press account automatically responded with a poop emoji, the company’s standard response for the last month.

As of Friday afternoon, Twitter appeared to have turned off its autocomplete suggestions in its search bar.

I can think of a couple of prolific tweeters who probably checked it out:

If he can’t even hold Florida…

Amidst massive legal battles involving former U.S. President Donald Trump and jockeying for control of the GOP that puts Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the public light, 69 percent of registered Republican voters in Florida still say they support Trump as the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, while another 18 percent say they “somewhat support” him, according to a recent poll conducted by Florida Atlantic University, in collaboration with Mainstreet Research.  

According to the poll, Trump would win over DeSantis by a significant margin if the primary were held when the poll was completed between April 13-14. When the same group of voters was asked about their choice for the upcoming Republican presidential primary, approximately 6 out of 10 (59 percent) chose Trump, while about 3 out of 10 (31 percent) chose DeSantis.

That’s just plain pathetic.

President Trump’s CNN town hall was so masterful that many are now saying CNN should be renamed TNN – the Trump News Network.

ORDER YOURS TODAY: https://t.co/NG8r99omnF pic.twitter.com/FAOQxmtfBE

— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) May 11, 2023

I think everyone knew that CNN’s very special episode of The Trump Show on Wednesday night was going to be a fiasco. How could it not be? Donald Trump lies as easily as he breathes and he was going to be given a live platform to do that. We’ve seen him do these events for years now and there was no reason to believe this one would be any different.

If there was anything startling about it was the friendly audience that cheered and jeered as if they were at a Trump rally. But we should have expected that too. CNN said the town hall was for Republican primary and “undeclared” voters and there’s no mystery about what kind of people show up for campaign events with Donald Trump. All that was missing were the red hats and the awkward line dancing to “YMCA.”

I won’t go into the full litany of rhetorical atrocities. You can read more about them in these pieces by Amanda Marcotte [need link], Brian Karem and Igor Derysh. Suffice to say that he was as obnoxious and crude as always reminding anyone who’s forgotten, just how unfit he is for the office of president of the United States. If anything, his vocabulary seems to have shrunk even more than before with him resorting to repeatedly saying everything and everyone is “stupid.” But the crowd loved it and he loved the crowd, as always, and they fed off each other the whole night.

So, what did CNN do wrong on Wednesday? The most important thing was they did it live. The first rule of covering Trump is that it absolutely has to be on tape or you cannot competently fact check him. Trump’s adviser Steve Bannon famously told author Michael Lewis, “the real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” And that is exactly what Donald Trump did in prime time.

The moderator Kaitlin Collins was well prepared and corrected him repeatedly but in those situations Trump just behaves as if he hasn’t heard the other person and the truth doesn’t matter. His tsunami of lies just crashed over her head. Any respectable news organization that has to cover him should always do it with the ability to contextualize what he says and you can only do with a taped interview. CNN knew that. They’ve been covering him for eight years now.

Barring something unpredictable happening to him before the RNC convention next year, the town hall was just more evidence that Donald Trump is going to be the GOP nominee for president in 2024. And it’s clear that CNN has decided that they are going to chase the ratings that Donald Trump has promised them and hopefully attract some of those disaffected Fox viewers. They are going back to the 2016 playbook.

It’s a shame. One of the more edifying consequences of Trump’s bizarre tenure and the damage he has done to our politics was the fact that most of the mainstream media stopped treating him as if he were a normal politician. Sure, it took them far too long to do that and they failed in many respects, but they largely left behind the tropes and conventions that had empowered Trump’s rise, such as “both sides” journalism and a phony attitude of objective neutrality which was impossible to sustain in the face of his outrageous behavior.

Over time they became comfortable with covering Trump as honestly as possible, certainly more honestly than they’d covered politics before. And his response to any criticism or honest portrayal of his campaign and presidency was to lash out. They learned that there was no way to avoid that short of total servility and deference. Even the venerable right wing propaganda arm for the Republican party, Fox News, was held to that standard (to which they happily capitulated.) Any media institution or individual journalist who didn’t became an “enemy of the people” and were treated as such.

We’ve all seen what happened to Fox, as Trump’s vassal network, when they dared to report that the election was not stolen by the Democrats and their frantic attempts to contain the damage. It has cost them 787 million dollars and counting. It makes you wonder why in the world CNN would seek to attract an audience that makes such demands, but that’s exactly what they are trying to do. This town hall was clearly designed to appeal to the disaffected Fox viewers who are angry about the network’s alleged abandonment of Trump and the firing of Tucker Carlson. And that is a fools errand.

But then, CNN’s been moving to the right ever since the change in corporate ownership of the network last year. They claim they are simply reverting to “objective” journalism but since the only objective way to cover politics in America right now is to acknowledge that the Republican Party is batshit insane, it’s clear that they are leaning as far right as they can without losing their entire staff.

The new CEO, Chris Licht, fired some voices who were outspoken critics of Trump last fall, including media reporter Brian Stelter, clearly at the behest of the CEO of Warners/Discovery, David Zaslov. He happens to have been a huge proponent of the Trump town hall disaster, telling CNBC last week “he has to be on our network … we’re happy he’s coming here.” But it’s really the company’s largest shareholder and Zaslov’s mentor who is pulling the strings, the billionaire pay TV pioneer, and hardcore right wing Republican, John Malone. He hasn’t exactly been quiet about what he expects:

“I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing. Fox News, in my opinion, has followed an interesting trajectory of trying to have ‘news’ news, I mean some actual journalism, embedded in a program schedule of all opinions.”

Good luck. The right wingers won’t let it happen because it’s all or nothing with them. Look at what they’re doing to Fox, which gave them everything they could possibly want. Trump voters, which means most of the Republican party, are not going to start watching CNN because they gave Trump a platform. They have to give him the entire network and even that may not be enough.

CNN is and always will be the right’s whipping boy, the network they love to hate. Watching their Dear Leader roll over CNN’s newest star, a serious female journalist, call her nasty on network TV in front of an ecstatic crowd is their dream come true. He made a fool of the network and his followers love him for it.

Let’s just say that when this happens, it’s pretty clear you’re losing:

I enjoyed congratulating President Trump on his outstanding town hall and undefeated record against CNN.

They had to air him telling the truth about how the 2020 election was rigged and stolen.

We laughed and laughed. pic.twitter.com/0I0th1SGTm

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) May 11, 2023

“Merely rearranging their prejudices”

Day-laborers like Joey on the construction site were not an educated bunch. But they had opinions. Lots of them. When Joey began a sentence with, “Now, I’ll tell you what’s the truth …”, it was time to buckle up. Here it comes.

Brian Klass does not invoke truthiness in writing this morning about knowingness, but the two are cousins. An essay by Jonathan Malesic at Aeon provoked Klass to explore the latter. “We know there is something wrong with the way we know,” Malesic explains:

 Knowingness, as the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear defines it in Open Minded (1998), is a posture of always ‘already knowing’, of purporting to know the answers even before the question arises. When new facts come to light, the knowing person is unperturbed. You may be shocked, but they knew all along.

In 21st-century culture, knowingness is rampant. You see it in the conspiracy theorist who dismisses contrary evidence as a ‘false flag’ and in the podcaster for whom ‘late capitalism’ explains all social woes. It’s the ideologue who knows the media has a liberal bias – or, alternatively, a corporate one. It’s the above-it-all political centrist, confident that the truth is necessarily found between the extremes of ‘both sides’. It’s the former US president Donald Trump, who claimed, over and over, that ‘everybody knows’ things that were, in fact, unknown, unproven or untrue.

When evidence becomes meaningless

Some of us exist in a parallel dimension, an Upside Down in which the epistemological analog of Newton’s Laws does not apply. It’s that, not polarization, at the heart of our republic’s ills, Klass argues. Even if knowingness is politically asymmetric.

Klass writes:

When evidence becomes meaningless, as it does in the intellectually incurious vortex of knowingness, well, then we’re screwed.

There are two distinct subsets of knowingness in modern society.

Type 1: People who think they know but they don’t; and

Type 2: People who don’t want to know.

Often, unfortunately, they overlap, with the person moving from Type 1 to Type 2 when inconvenient facts clash with their incorrect certainty. This case study was a classic example of moving from one form to the next, making it the most persistent and dangerous form of knowingness there is. Type 1 Knowingness can be cured. When someone also has Type 2, it’s much more stubborn.

Guys like Joey were Type 1 back in the 1970s before movement conservatism invested in a cottage industry of misinformation that by 2000 elected a dimwit to the presidency and in 2016 its patron saint. Now, no amount of new information can dislodge misinformed certainty. Today’s Joeys are militant Type 2s about “what’s the truth.” They “think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices,” as “an obscure New England bishop” wrote in the early 1900s.

Knowingness is why, Malesic laments, “present-day culture wars are so boring. No one is trying to find out anything. There is no common agreement about the facts, and yet everyone acts as if all matters of fact are already settled.”

There is joy in learning that fundamentalism, religious or political, seeks to destroy like the Buddhas of Bamiyan. One of the most important things to know in life is what you don’t know. Some of us would rather wrap ourselves in an ill-informed cocoon that misidentifies certainty as faith.

Sometimes with legislation. Sometimes with guns.

Pundits and news sites are still analyzing fallout from CNN’s Trump “town hall” spectacle. We learned nothing about the former president we did not already know. The fiasco changed no minds. James Fallows invoked “shocking but not surprising” to summarize the show. “Don’t say you haven’t been warned” sits atop Susan Glasser’s review. The jeers and laughter from the Trump mob, she writes, “was the tell, the most revealing part of the whole exercise.” Without “the approval of the mob, his mob,” Trump “would be just another angry old American man” shouting at his TV instead of being on TV.

It is the audience for his shtick that gives it power, and us pause. The relationship is symbiotic, but Trump is not telling them anything they don’t want to hear. Trump has his grievances, but he validates theirs, gives them permission to wear “Fuck Your Feelings” tee shirts in public. He reads the room. He sees them and makes them feel seen in all their dark seething. He is their retribution.

Whatever other mind-altering substances he abuses, Trump is famously a teetotaler. A therapist friend once commented that Baptist teetotaling culture produces a slew of closet drinkers. Fundamentalists oversell their product. They make unrealistic claims for how much better life goes with Jesus (or whoever). When those extravagant claims don’t pan out, believers hide their troubles for fear of appearing of weak faith. They repress their feelings. Stuff them down deep.

I’m going to butcher this, but here goes. The late Huston Smith (“The Religions of Man”) gave a lecture at my university in which he explained that mankind has several basic needs: personal, physical, social. The major religions of the world address those to differing degrees, emphasizing some, downplaying others, and the cultures those religions inform reflect both their benefits and deficiencies. Where strict social conformity is valued most strongly, personal expression tends to take a back seat. Until in situations like war where normal social restraints no longer apply. That’s when things get really ugly. (Or at least that’s what I remember taking away.)

The American right sees itself fighting a culture war. The rest you can figure out. Trump has freed the repressed Unfreedom Caucus to vent its collective spleen at anyone and everyone it’s hated for years. Sometimes with insults. Sometimes with legislation. Sometimes with guns.

Bill Lueders, editor-at-large of The Progressive, writes at The Bulwark:

Trump has always been animated by a longing to punish his enemies. But now this desire for vengeance seems to be catching on across the Republican spectrum. Retribution is all the rage, not just to punish political opponents but to crack down on internal dissent. The good news is that, in many of these cases, retribution appears to be backfiring thanks to both public aversion to tyrannical overreach and this crazy little thing called law.

Lueders lists recent instances in which Republican attempts at retribution went wrong. But that does not mean people did not or will not get hurt. They mean to bring it. With Trump’s encouragement and blessing.