Month: May 2023

Will Trump show up?

Poor Fox News. They just can’t catch a break. First they found themselves on the hook for over three quarters of a billion dollars because they lied about the 2020 election. Then they fired their popular bomb-throwing white nationalist celebrity anchor Tucker Carlson and their ratings went into the toilet. And now, after spending months boosting Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (years, actually) angering their audience’s Dear Leader Donald Trump in the process, DeSantis slapped them in the face by deciding to formally announce his candidacy on Twitter instead of the network.

This is a man who actually signed election suppression legislation in a live exclusive on Fox News so you can be sure they expected they would get the long awaited big event. Instead, like their cashiered bomb thrower Carlson, DeSantis raced into the arms of the right’s new “it boy” Twitter owner, Elon Musk. The best he could offer Fox was an appearance with D-List has-been Trey Gowdy later in the day. Rupert Murdoch must be fit to be tied. Don’t any of these people know the meaning of gratitude?

I hope everyone can contain their excitement until 6PM EST when DeSantis will be joined by Musk and Silicon Valley venture capitalist David Sacks (a member of what the Wall St. Journal calls Musk’s “shadow crew” of friends and consiglieri) to make the announcement nobody on earth didn’t know was coming. They will be on Twitter Spaces which, for those of you who are not as tuned in to the latest in online innovations as Ron DeSantis, is a platform “where users can have live audio conversations” in a “space.” Doesn’t that sound like fun?

Some of you may be a bit confused by all this and for good reason. After all, Elon Musk has sold himself as a “free speech absolutist” who ostensibly bought the platform for the purpose of opening it up to ideas across the spectrum and Ron DeSantis is the governor who is censoring educators, banning books, and retaliating against individuals, institutions and businesses that oppose those policies. You would think they would be enemies not comrades in arms.

As it turns out, Elon Musk may be a free speech absolutist in that he absolutely does allow every manner of freak, conman, porno hustler, liar, propagandist, goon, thug and saboteur free rein on the platform, but he will graciously allow foreign governments to censor their political opposition, something he tried and failed to prove the US Government had done against Donald Trump. And Musk has openly expressed his loathing for anyone and anything to the left of well… Ron DeSantis, so there is no doubt where he stands politically. Yes, he’s a tad incoherent, somehow believing that he’s non-ideological, but his prolific tweeting says otherwise.

Musk was always a troll on twitter and said many stupid things. But like so many politically naive people who seem to have never developed any kind of bullshit detector, after wallowing in his newly created right wing twitter fever swamp, he’s gone full blown, racist wingnut conspiracy monger and anti-semite. And as the owner of the company with the most followers on the platform — 140 million people — he has quite a reach.

You can see why Tucker Carlson and Ron Desantis are eager to get onboard. And they aren’t the only ones. It was just announced that the vastly successful right wing radio and podcast company The Daily Wire will be simulcasting some of its premium content on Twitter starting at the end of the month. (Apparently, the company has been penalized and suspended by other platforms such as Youtube and Facebook over misrepresentations and lies so they are going to the platform where nobody cares about such trifles.)

As for DeSantis, there is no politician on the planet more tuned into the online right than he is. In fact, his governorship and campaign are entirely based upon it. Every day he assails another aspect of the “woke” left by tuning into the latest obsessive outrage being passed around crazytown. At one point he even invited the noxious trans-hating “Libs of TikTok” tweeter to come stay in the Florida Governors mansion. I don’t know if he’s personally engaged online or has hired someone else to do it but his knowledge of arcane internet wingnuttia is impressive.

However, he’s so immersed in this stuff that online is really the only place he makes sense — in front of real people he sounds like he’s speaking in some sort of extra-terrestrial corporate patois. As Tim Miller of the Bulwark pointed out, this is a problem:

He’s tied himself to policies such as a six-week abortion ban and “constitutional carry” that even many Republicans don’t support. On top of that, his current stump speech requires a Ph.D. in based online discourse to have any idea what he’s talking about.

To wit: At a convention in Utah last week, DeSantis went off on wokeness, DEI, and ESG without even bothering to define these terms for his audience. Here are a few examples from DeSantis going over his policy objectives for this session.

“We are going to kneecap ESG in the state of Florida. . . . We are also going to be the first state to eliminate DEI. . . . We are going to prohibit the implementation in Florida of any central bank digital currency.”

Sure, your super online MAGA, Qanon, anti-vaxxer may know what those acronyms mean but does the average working, rural, white Republican voter have the vaguest clue what he’s talking about? It’s not as if he has the sort of charismatic personality that could turn that dull jargon into a rallying cry as Trump did in 2016 when he adopted much of the talk radio issue agenda that had been pumped into the right’s homes and workplaces for decades. DeSantis’ lack of personality just makes all of that “anti-woke” blather sound, dare I say, boring. And I suspect that is exactly what tonight’s meeting of the warriors against the “woke mind virus” is going to be.

Remember DeSantis is really second choice. Musk begged Trump to come back to Twitter with vulgar memes like this designed to entice the libertine ex-president:

And lead us not into temptation … pic.twitter.com/8qNOXzwXS9

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 21, 2022

Trump declined, preferring to stay with his sad Twitter clone, Truth Social. But who knows? Twitter Spaces is open to anyone. Maybe he’ll turn up tonight and throw a few insults DeSantis’ way at his big announcement. After all, Twitter is a free speech zone for lying, right wing blowhards. Who’s going to stop him?

You have to love the “cc: Representatives of Congress”. Lol.

I hope they got their money up front and it’s a lot because their reputations as lawyers are trashed forever. Letting your client dictate a letter like this to the Attorney General of the United States and then signing it is either desperate act or a very stupid one. Maybe both.

My, aren’t they delicate flowers?

Book banners gonna ban books (NBC News):

Amanda Gorman, the nation’s first National Youth Poet Laureate, spoke out Tuesday against what she described as a book ban after access to the poem she recited at President Joe Biden’s inauguration was limited at a Florida school.

Miami-Dade County Public Schools moved “The Hill We Climb” to the middle school section of the library after a parent filed a formal objection to the work, according to documents obtained by the Florida Freedom to Read Project and shared with media. The Miami Herald first reported the story.

“Unnecessary #bookbans like these are on the rise, and we must fight back,” Gorman said in a post on Facebook that accompanied a one-page statement in which she said her book had been banned from an elementary school.

“I’m gutted,” Gorman reacted in a tweet.

School officials pushed back, saying that “‘The Hill We Climb’ is better suited for middle school students and, it was shelved in the middle school section of the media center.”

A review of five titles available at the library at Bob Graham Education Center in Miami Lakes was triggered after a parent of two students filled out forms requesting the titles be removed “from the total environment,” according to the documents obtained by the Freedom to Read Project, a group founded by public school parents and dedicated to fighting what it calls book bans in the state.

pic.twitter.com/u5j2TamadM

— Amanda Gorman (@TheAmandaGorman) May 23, 2023

A review by the Washington Post of complaints in 153 school districts for the 2021-2022 school year found that a “majority of the 1,000-plus book challenges analyzed by The Post were filed by just 11 people.”

Each of these people brought 10 or more challenges against books in their school district; one man filed 92 challenges. Together, these serial filers constituted 6 percent of all book challengers — but were responsible for 60 percent of all filings.

“In some cases,” the Post reports, “these serial filers relied on a network of volunteers gathered together under the aegis of conservative parents’ groups such as Moms for Liberty.”

One of the serial filers, not surprisingly, is Daily Salinas. Salinas alleged that The Hills We Climb “included references of critical race theory, ‘indirect hate messages,’ gender ideology and indoctrination, according to records obtained by the Florida Freedom to Read Project and shared with the Miami Herald.”

These are the pages of my inaugural poem that an objecting parent cited as "not educational and have indirectly hate messages". And now because of that one complaint, my poem is now banned for elementary school students at a school in @MiamiDadeCounty. https://t.co/x7R4mXk8BL

— Amanda Gorman (@TheAmandaGorman) May 23, 2023

We’ve braved the belly of the beast.
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace,
And the norms and notions of what ‘just is’
Isn’t always justice.

And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it.
Somehow, we do it.
Somehow, we’ve weathered and witnessed
A nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.”

Miami Against Fascism alleges in a tweet thread supported by video that Salinas is associated with Moms for Liberty Miami-Dade as well as the Proud Boys and County Citizens Defending Freedom USA (CCDF), a Christian nationalist group.

L.A. Times:

When asked if she was aware of professional reviews of the National Youth Poet Laureate’s poem, Salinas wrote, “I don’t need it.” And when asked to list the author, she wrote Oprah Winfrey. (Winfrey wrote the forward for the book version of the poem published in March 2021.)

[…]

“So they ban my book from young readers, confuse me with Oprah, fail to specify what parts of my poetry they object to, refuse to read any reviews, and offer no alternatives,” [Gorman] wrote. “We must fight back.”

Fight or be beaten.

“If we saw this in another country …”

Maybe you’ve noticed. The U-S-A chanters bedecked in red, white and blue? The “we’re a republic, not a democracy” crowd? Those Real Americans™ with pocket Constitutions who, like the hypocrites Jesus warned about, make a public show of their political piety? They’re not really into the whole “consent of the governed” thing in the Declaration of Independence. You’re hardly shocked.

Neither is David Pepper, the former Ohio Democratic Party chair.

Right now in Ohio, Republicans firmly in control of the mechanisms of state governance are racing to hold a special election in August to pass a constitutional amendment that heads off a citizen-led ballot initiative in November. With it they hope to use a low-turnout August election to raise the threshold for passing a constitutional amendment in Ohio from 50% to 60%. The 50% threshold has been in place for 100 years, say critics.

The citizen initiative would place an abortion rights guarantee in the state constitution. Revanchists cannot have that, so they want to raise the bar for passage ahead of November.

That’s not only bad form, says Pepper, an August special election is illegal. Legal experts agree. The General Assembly voted in December to ban August special elections. They are not only costly but interfere with preparation of ballots for the fall elections which go the printer in August.

Democracy Docket reports that on Tuesday “a group of Ohio voters and the group One Person One Vote filed a lawsuit in the Ohio Supreme Court” challenging the legality of the August election.

Pepper spoke with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Tuesday evening about the Republican effort to thwart the will of Ohio voters. The GOP-led effort is yet another attempt to undermine self-governance in the U.S. Pepper’s new book, “Saving Democracy: A User’s Manual for Every American” was released Tuesday.

“If we saw this in another country, we would be saying, ‘My God, you have no rule of law.'” Pepper said of Ohio Republicans’ flouting of law and court rulings. Republicans in Wisconsin, North Carolina and other states are working to undermine democracy.

“If this passes in Ohio, they do operate as laboratories of autocracy,” Pepper warns. “Other states will do it.”

To fight back, Americans committed to rule by the consent of the governed must quit placing all their political activity in the Beltway basket, Pepper told Vanity Fair:

As much as you want to win in DC, the front line of the attack on democracy is not far from where you live. I don’t care if you’re in a blue state or a red state. It’s in your local area. That’s what the other side figured out a long time ago. And that’s a negative thing to discover, of course. But my hope is, it also shows people, Guess what: There’s something you can do about it right where you live.… The battle against democracy is succeeding because they don’t see that they can. And if we’re going to fight back, it’s going to start with people recognizing that they have a lot more agency. 

Are local elections more boring than the marquee federal races? Maybe. But that’s why Republicans have been able to erode democracy right under our noses, says Pepper.

I think the other side has been very clear-eyed on what institutions really impact power in American democracy. And they’re willing to support people in those institutions, even if they’re the most boring, unimpressive, uninspirational figures you can imagine. They don’t care about who these people are. They care about the institutions, because those institutions can exert power, push through an agenda, and suppress democracy.

While you are waiting to “fall in love,” as the critique of the left goes, the extremist right is backing authoritarians for office. It’s how the right builds its antidemocratic bench. The left has to be running everywhere if it expects to survive. Because, says Pepper, “if we don’t even run in half the seats, the damage is so much worse than if we’re running in all those seats every single cycle to, over time, make gains.”

Here in North Carolina, Anderson Clayton became the new state chair at 25 after Democrats’ recruiting efforts collapsed in 2022 leaving a quarter of legislative seats uncontested. She pledges to not let seats go uncontested on her watch. It’s not a democracy if people do not have a choice.

“So many people across the state are fed up. I don’t know about y’all, but I’m tired of losing,” Clayton told Union County Democrats shortly after she defeated the governor’s pick. “I’m tired of Republicans coming in and threatening my rights.”

Pepper agrees:

We create that problem. Once you don’t have an opponent and your November election is canceled, the democracy is canceled; you’re not a public servant anymore. You have no accountability to the public. And that’s why the behavior has gotten so extreme in the states. They’re not public servants when so many don’t face opposition. If you’re only worried about a few swing areas for a federal election, you actually don’t see that damage. You think it’s okay because it doesn’t change the outcome of that swing suburban House district or that Senate race. But once you see this lack of accountability in state Houses and all these districts that’s fueling this downward spiral of extremism, then you realize, My God, by not running in all these places, we are leading to those incentives being all screwed up. We have to run everywhere. 

MAGA Republicans and their billionaire backers are playing a longer game. Democrats need to get in it. And (as I’m agitating to get candidates here to see) they have to play it differently.

Pepper concurs, telling Vanity Fair, “A lot of the strategies that we are still basically undertaking are the strategies that were built when we assumed democracy was just fine.”

Now it is not.

Look what they’ve done

There is no doubt in mind what’s causing that bizarre disconnect:

Last year, the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson summarized the national mood succinctly: Everything is terrible, but I’m fine.

He was reacting to research published by the Federal Reserve evaluating how confident Americans were about their own finances and the nation’s more broadly. What the data suggested was that there was a gap, that while three-quarters of Americans said their own finances were doing all right, only a quarter said the national economy was doing well.

On Monday, the Federal Reserve released the 2022 iteration of those same numbers. When Thompson was writing, there was a 54-point gap between confidence in Americans’ own finances and those of the nation generally and a 30-point gap with perceptions of the local economy.

Now, the gap with the local economy is 35 points, with fewer than 4 in 10 Americans saying their local economies are doing well. Only 2 in 10 Americans say the same of the national economy.

I include social media in that indictment. There is no material reason that Americans should be so sour about the economy. It’s because the media can’t stop saying things like “Inflation is down and jobs are up, sure —- but look at the price of celery! Where will it all end!” They can’t stop doing this. And it’s not just the economy:

[T]his pattern emerges elsewhere, too. Consider crime. In October, I noted the gap in perceptions of crime locally and nationally. Gallup recorded concern about increased crime at its highest level on record, but it was nonetheless the case that concern about rising crime nationally still easily outpaced it.

Crime is not up from a year ago:

A report, by the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice, examined trends in 35 cities and found that while homicides, gun assaults and reports of domestic violence declined slightly in 2022 compared with the year before, some property crimes have worsened. In some cities, car thefts in particular have spiked, the report found.

Nationwide, crime has been steadily declining for most of the last quarter century, starting in the early 1990s. And while the full picture on crime rates is nuanced, interpretation of the data has often become deeply politicized.

It’s also the case that there is more crime per capita in red states and rural areas but Republicans insist that this is a Blue State and urban problem. And that’s because their propaganda networks present it that way.

And then there’s this:

Bump’s analysis:

What’s interesting is that the timelines don’t always line up. Personal satisfaction has been diverging from satisfaction with the country since at least 2001. The gap between personal finances and the national economy widened in 2020. The gap in approval between Americans’ own members of Congress and Congress in general began to open dramatically after 2004.

One thread between these effects, though, is partisan polarization. Partisan satisfaction with the direction of the country is heavily dependent upon the party of the president. So is sentiment about the national economy. When I wrote about crime in October, I noted that much of the surge in concern about crime was driven by Republicans.

To this idea we can add the scale of the polarization. Consider that presidential approval ratings no longer measure approval in the way they once did because partisans tend to land at the extremes in their evaluations. Since the first term of Barack Obama, members of the president’s party have been strongly supportive of him, and members of the opposition strongly opposed. Approval ratings now move in narrow ranges, often driven mostly by the views of independents.

Perhaps, then, Thompson’s aphorism is better phrased as “I’m fine, but everyone else is terrible.” My bank accounts are holding up, but President Biden is ruining the economy. My member of Congress is effective, but the Republican majority in the House is destroying America. Crime here is fine, but Democratic mayors are letting criminals run amok. That sort of thing.

This depends not only on partisanship but on the nationalization of news. Local news outlets have shriveled in favor of large national ones. (Ahem.) Candidates for local office are as likely to be asked their opinions on national events and movements as they are about potholes. Attention has turned to the communal conversation, as have critiques. Given how unlikely Americans are to know people who disagree with their politics, the moderating effects of personal relationships play much less of a role.

There’s an unhappy implication if we assume these causes are to blame: Fixing the gap between personal and national perceptions means fixing America’s broader divides. In other words, it means probably not fixing the gap any time soon.

One step would be for the right to wake the fuck up and realize they are being lied to.

Sounds stone-cold sober to me. pic.twitter.com/l4JucbID5j

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 23, 2023

BY the way, Texas Attorney General Paxton is under indictment for fraud. And there’s this mysterious activity, also from today

House General Investigating authorizes subpoenas for John Doe #6 and entity A: the Office of the Attorney General.

Says the AG is the state agency that is “the subject matter of matter A.” #txlege pic.twitter.com/q4EAXrlzZ7

— Lauren McGaughy 🎧 (@lmcgaughy) May 23, 2023

These Texas Republicans are very busy upholding the traditional values to which we all wish the country would return: drunken, corrupt white men running everything. That’s just how God intended it.

Apparently, they just convey quite enough hate and bigotry toward LGBTQ people:

On air, Fox News personalities have been endlessly attacking so-called “woke corporations.” But now, Fox News finds itself in the right’s cultural crosshairs — with conservatives accusing it of promoting “trans ideology” in its own workplace.

The inciting incident is a Monday morning story in the Daily Signal, the media arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank. In the story, reporter Mary Margaret Olohan writes that Fox’s employee handbook allows employees to use “bathrooms that align with their gender identity, rather than their biological sex,” permits them to “dress in alignment with their preferred gender,” and requires that their coworkers use “their preferred name and pronouns in the workplace.”

Many of Fox’s rules in this area appear to be in line with state law: The company’s headquarters are in New York, where state law explicitly prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity (something Olohan notes in passing but doesn’t dwell on). Fox told me in a written statement, “FOX News Media is compliant with all Human Rights laws mandated by the cities and states in which we operate, including New York and California.”

That there’s less to the Daily Signal’s exclusive than meets the eye didn’t stop many on the culture war right from blasting Fox as a sellout.

Matt Walsh, an influential anti-trans podcaster at the Daily Wire, led the charge. According to Walsh, Fox is “actively working to suppress conservative voices” — an apparent reference to the network’s ouster of Tucker Carlson — “while promoting leftism in its most radical form” and thus “needs to get the full Bud Light treatment.” (Bud Light has been targeted by a boycott campaign on the right after partnering with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney.)

Geoffrey Ingersoll, the editor-in-chief of the Daily Caller, tweeted that he “personally [knew] several employees, some very senior, who hate their [house] style going along with far-left activists and their propaganda terms.” You can find several other popular conservative Twitter accounts saying similar things.

Fox’s ratings are in the toilet too.

By the way, I noticed that the right is starting to go after Pride events in general:

You didn’t think they would stop at transgender bashing did you?

Trump is hard at work trying to woo voters

Trump backed out of the recent campaign event in Iowa and it doesn’t appear that he is planning to leave his beach club any time soon (unless it’s to decamp to his Bedminster club for the summer.) But that doesn’t mean he isn’t campaigning. Here’s what it looks like:

Some interesting commentary on all this:

(2/2) You see it in Trump's continued attacks against E Jean Carroll, despite having lost, adding damages, and his counsel no doubt imploring him to stop. He is at the stage where forcing his reality is everything now. Narcissistic collapse isn't here yet, but it's approaching.

— The Shallow State (@OurShallowState) May 23, 2023

“Forcing reality” is a great term. All that bullshit about great polling is nonsense. He posts polls from fly-by-night partisan pollsters and some with no attribution at all that show him winning. The thing is that it works. If he pushes it hard enough and with the back-up of sycophants and partisan opportunists, millions of people will believe him. He has good reason to believe that he can “force reality” on a whole lot of Americans. He’s made tens of millions of them believe that the election was stolen and he is the rightful president. He had help, of course, from the right wing media but really it was almost all him. He “forced reality.” Can he do it again?

The debt limit talks are still roadblocked by Republicans insisting that the government cut all programs that help children and other vulnerable people to the bone while protecting the tax cuts for the rich.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of those rich people:

House Republicans are bidding for steep spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. First, though, they paused during their private weekly meeting on Tuesday to bid for something else: Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s used chapstick.

Really.

The fundraising auction of McCarthy’s used cherry lip balm ended when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) placed a winning $100,000 bid, as confirmed by her spokesperson.

That’s adorable isn’t it?

For some reason it makes me feel like crying.

The ratings are … bad

Contrary to some certain beliefs, not everyone in this country wants right wing propaganda instead of news. And if they do, they have Fox, Newsmax and OAN to give it to them.

CNN made a mistake:

More than a week after CNN’s disastrous town hall with former President Donald Trump, the negative impact the fiasco had on the network’s ratings is coming into clearer focus. Last week, the cable news pioneer suffered its lowest-rated week since June 2015, averaging just 429,000 total daily viewers from Monday-Friday.

CNN was also down double digits compared to the same week last year in both total viewership and in the key advertising demographic of viewers ages 25-54.

MSNBC more than doubled CNN’s daily audience, drawing 976,000 total viewers, while Fox News averaged 1.4 million.

Fox News was down 41 percent in the key demo year-to-year and 24 percent in total viewers, having seen its ratings plummet as angry right-wingers flee after Tucker Carlson’s shock firing. In fact, Fox’s post-Tucker weekday demo audience is the lowest its been since the first week of September 2001.

Ratings data shows that primetime is where both Fox and CNN are suffering the most. Since the town hall, CNN has seen several of its weeknight hours—including Anderson Cooper—fall behind Newsmax, the fringe-right channel that has surged since Carlson’s ouster. And on Friday night, the channel’s much-hyped interview show hosted by Chris Wallace averaged only 224,000 total viewers at 10 p.m., drawing 60,000 fewer viewers than Newsmax’s offering.

While Fox News still led in both total and demo viewership in weeknight primetime last week, the conservative cable giant’s overall audience was down 38 percent and the demo viewership dropped an eye-popping 60 percent. MSNBC, on the other hand, saw its demo audience shoot up 44 percent.

I know that the conventional media wisdom is that liberals are completely useless and not worth caring about. But they do actually watch TV. CNN, where some of them used to fo to get their news, has been featuring a lot of right wingers, including Donald Trump, and they prefer not to be lied to. So they’re going elsewhere. Meanwhile, the right wingers don’t like them either.