Month: October 2023

Now what?

In a 45-minute roll call vote, the House moved to oust McCarthy as speaker. The final vote was 216 to 210 in favor of Matt Gaetz’s motion to vacate, with eight Republicans joining Democrats.

The rest of the Republicans are pissed.

Patrick McHenry (R-NC), now the Speaker Pro Tempore, emphatically gaveled the House into recess subject to the call of the chair. pic.twitter.com/VfQWzIqMQZ

— Greg Giroux (@greggiroux) October 3, 2023

Earlier today Matt Gaetz said he would support Steve Scalise for Speaker but I don’t see him taking it. He’s got a recent cancer diagnosis and is on chemotherapy. I doubt his doctor would recommend taking one of the most stressful jobs in the world right now. Who else? Nobody knows.

This is the first time in history that a speaker has been ousted with a motion to vacate the chair. It was only tried once before back in 1910 and the speaker survived. And it divided the Republican Party for many years after:

The House has never removed a speaker and hasn’t held a floor vote on removing a speaker in well over a century. In 1910, Speaker Joseph G. Cannon (R-Ill.) faced an intraparty revolt that, while unsuccessful, hardened divisions that paved the way for a Democratic takeover.

Unlike McCarthy, whom lawmakers on both sides of the aisle seem to delight in calling “weak,” Cannon was accused of being a tyrant, according to writer Booth Mooney in “Mr. Speaker: Four Men Who Shaped the United States House of Representatives.”

As a young Illinois lawyer, Cannon had been inspired to pursue a life in politics after hearing Abraham Lincoln speak in 1860. Over his many years in the House, he served Republican leaders loyally, so when he finally ascended to the speakership in 1903, he expected the same kind of fealty.

He doled out committee chairs to friends and controlled what legislation — and what amendments to that legislation — could be debated on the floor. If a House rule didn’t work in his favor, he simply changed it, since he was also the chairman of the House Rules Committee. If a Democrat or insufficiently loyal Republican asked to speak, Cannon would ignore him until he gave up.

Some of his colleagues called him “Czar Cannon,” though he preferred the nickname “Uncle Joe.” Yes, Uncle Joe.

During one meeting where lawmakers complained about his iron grip, Mooney wrote, Cannon dramatically opened his jacket and shouted, “Behold Mr. Cannon, the Beelzebub of Congress! Gaze on this noble manly form — me, the Beelzebub! Me, the Czar!”

He also sometimes compared himself to Jesus.

All of this happened before the party realignment of the mid-20th century, so Democrats were considered the more traditional party and Republicans the more modern one. Plus, a wing of the Republican Party, led by President Theodore Roosevelt, was increasingly liberal, pushing for radical stuff like income tax, food regulations and allowing women to vote. Cannon was not among them. Sure, he was happy to reduce postage costs for the common man, but making sure food wasn’t poisoned was a bridge too far.

By 1910, with Roosevelt out of the White House and his successor, William Howard Taft, proving powerless against Cannon, Democrats and liberal Republicans became so frustrated that they briefly united.

The plan was complicated and, unless you’re one of those folks who reads Robert’s Rules of Order for fun, kind of boring. Basically, they used procedural moves to trick Cannon into allowing “progressive” Republican Rep. George Norris (R-Neb.) to speak, and when he did, he made a motion that would have stripped Cannon of his seat on the Rules Committee.

For days, Cannon and his allies used every parliamentary trick they could to delay the vote, and for days, the alliance of “insurgent” Republicans and Democrats beat them back. Finally, on March 19, 1910, the House voted to strip him of his Rules power by a vote of 191 to 156. More than three dozen Republicans voted against him.

Cannon told the lawmakers that despite the humiliation of losing the vote, he would not resign unless a “motion to vacate the speakership” passed. It was the legislative equivalent of “say it to my face.”

Even Norris, saying he had already achieved his goal, lost his stomach for confrontation. The motion to vacate was defeated, 192 to 155.

Cannon continued as speaker, and Republicans remained split, helping Democrats seize control of the House in the midterm elections a few months later. Then, in 1912, Roosevelt ran as a third-party presidential candidate to oust his own successor, Taft, splitting the Republican vote and handing Democrats the White House, too.

Norris, the leader of the revolt, went on to a storied career in the Senate, generally regarded as one of the best ever. Cannon’s name, if not his reputation, has also survived the passage of time; the Cannon House Office Building is named after him.

I’m going to take a wild guess and predict that nobody will ever name an office building in Washington DC after Kevin McCarthy. Well, maybe a lobbying shop on K Street which is where he may well be headed.

There is big trouble in paradise. Here’s Chip Roy, hard right congressman, former chief of staff to Ted Cruz and member of the Freedom Caucus. He’s not happy:

Chip Roy goes after Gaetz: “You want to come at me and call me a RINO you can kiss my ass! You go around talking your big game and thumping your chest on Twitter. Come in my office and have a debate mother —-!” pic.twitter.com/mk6Qv6PfC6

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 3, 2023

McCarthy faced this choice in 2021. He chose to suck up to Trump and the insurrectionists pretending 1/6 was Pelosi’s fault, so he could become speaker. Tough to go back now and claim he got ousted over principle, rather than just being a liar and mediocre politician. https://t.co/svfPlGeOj2

— Dan Friedman (@dfriedman33) October 4, 2023

Trump got a gag order in his NY trial today after tweeting out lies and personal information about the judge’s clerk. He took down the tweet but his followers screenshot it and are passing it around and apparently there is some fundraising going on. It was a warning that he would be sanctioned if he does it again. The judge didn’t say anything about disparaging himself or the prosecutor which Trump has been doing every day during breaks in the trial. I guess he figures they are fair game. He shouldn’t. Trump is literally telling his followers to “go after” the prosecutor. And that’s the tip of the iceberg:

Former President Donald J. Trump had a lot to say on the first day of the fraud trial against him and his company. Speaking to reporters at a Manhattan courthouse on Monday, he dismissed the judge as a “rogue” justice and said he did not “think the people of this country are going to stand for it.” And he focused on the official who filed the lawsuit against him, New York’s attorney general, Letitia James.

“This is a disgrace,” he said, “and you ought to go after this attorney general.”

The remark urging people to “go after” a top elected official in New York, by a former president whose invective has become a familiar backdrop of American life, was part of a pattern of increasingly sharp language from Mr. Trump.

Days earlier, he told hundreds of Republican activists in California that shoplifters should be shot. Not long before that, he insinuated that the military general he personally appointed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed for treason.

Since he first became a political candidate in the 2016 presidential race, Mr. Trump has glorified violence, suggesting he wanted to hit a protester and offering to pay the legal fees if his supporters struck protesters at his rallies. But as Mr. Trump has been indicted four times in four jurisdictions in the last five months, and now faces a civil fraud trial in New York, his violent speech has escalated.

Mr. Trump’s public remarks, whether online, in interviews or at rallies, have always had the potential for incendiary effects. A number of defendants prosecuted over the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, said they believed they were acting on Mr. Trump’s orders.

Part of what has changed is that his violent remarks now come at a time when the indictments have already stoked anger among his supporters and when attacks against institutions, judges and prosecutors around the country have increased. The special counsel, Jack Smith, has asked the federal judge overseeing the case in which Mr. Trump was charged with trying to subvert the democratic process in 2020 for a limited gag order because of his threatening statements against witnesses, prosecutors and others.

If the judge grants the gag order, it may only increase Mr. Trump’s appeal with his supporters: The former president, who claims to be a victim of political persecution, is finding a receptive audience for his increasingly menacing language at campaign appearances. Mr. Trump has always leavened his sharpest words with humor, which can have a softening effect, a pattern that has continued with his recent appearances.

At the G.O.P. convention in California last week, Mr. Trump mocked Paul Pelosi, the husband of Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker. Last year, Mr. Pelosi was brutally attacked in his home by a man who was wielding a hammer and who was motivated by right-wing conspiracy theories. “We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco,” Mr. Trump said, before pausing and looking out at the crowd.

“How’s her husband doing, by the way, anybody know?” he deadpanned, drawing laughter and a smattering of applause. “She’s against building a wall at our border even though she has a wall around her house, which obviously didn’t do a very good job.”

Mr. Trump also talked about mass shoplifting incidents at stores in major cities. Republicans have focused on the shoplifting sprees as examples of lawlessness, saying the punishment should be severe.

“Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store,” Mr. Trump told the crowd at a hotel ballroom in Anaheim. The audience cheered wildly. “Shot!” he added for emphasis.

The moment was Mr. Trump’s biggest applause line of the night. Attendees rose to their feet and chanted: “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

A spokesman for Mr. Trump declined to comment.

Mr. Trump holds relatively few campaign appearances compared with his rivals running for the Republican presidential nomination. And several of his recent public appearances have been connected to his indictments and court-mandated appearances.

That reality, in which his legal travails and his political campaign are merging into one, has meant that Mr. Trump’s defenses of himself — and his calls for supporters to refuse to “stand” for what he insists is a broad miscarriage of justice — are front and center in nearly every statement he makes.

Mr. Trump voices most of his anger these days in a far less visible forum: Truth Social, the social media website he started in early February 2022, just over a year after he was barred from X, formerly known as Twitter. His X account was reinstated by the new owner, Elon Musk, but he has used it only once: to post the mug shot that officials took when he was arrested in Fulton County, Ga., in connection with his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state.

On Truth Social, he criticizes the prosecutors, reposts videos and memes attacking his critics and rivals, and blasts out clips from his own speeches. In one recent clip of a speech he gave in Michigan, he complained that if he hadn’t run for president, he “would have had the nicest softest life” but that “instead, I have to beat these lunatics up all day long.”

It was on Truth Social where Mr. Trump made the comment about the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley. The general was increasingly critical of Mr. Trump as his role came to an end, an extraordinary rebuke of a former president by a senior military leader.

In a Truth Social post, Mr. Trump wrote of the general’s calls with his Chinese counterpart, “This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”

And then he said… “to be continued.”

I don’t think any gag order is going to stop him. And he knows the chance of him being jailed for contempt is less than zero. So, maybe he won’t attack that clerk again. But he’ll keep attacking people, riling up his cult to violence and even if it happens, he won’t stop. He believes that he must win the presidency by any means necessary in order to prove he didn’t lose the last one and keep himself out of jail. He will push it to the limit.

Maybe …

Ian Millhiser watched today’s first Supreme Court arguments and they were apparently as nutty as the shenanigans taking place on the House floor today, where the MAGA kooks have decided to oust their own speaker and the NY Courthouse steps where Trump is babbling incoherently during every break.

Imagine that the Supreme Court of the United States spent an entire morning debating whether penguins are the primary cause of colon cancer or whether John F. Kennedy was assassinated by aliens from the planet Venus.

That’s more or less the quality of arguments that former Trump Solicitor General Noel Francisco presented to the Court on Tuesday, as part of a quizzical effort to convince the justices to declare an entire federal agency unconstitutional.

The good news is that the Court appears unlikely to buy what Francisco is selling. All three of the liberal justices took turns beating up Francisco, with an exasperated Justice Sonia Sotomayor telling Francisco at one point that she is trying to understand Francisco’s argument and is at a “total loss.”

Sotomayor appeared to be joined in her frustration by Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, two Trump appointees who showed little patience for Francisco’s attacks on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the agency that Francisco is urging them to strike down. Like Sotomayor, Barrett also repeatedly pressed Francisco to explain how, exactly, his proposed interpretation of the Constitution would actually work.

By the end of the argument, even Justice Clarence Thomas — ordinarily the most conservative member of the Court — appeared fed up with Francisco’s inability to articulate a coherent argument.

The 2023-2024 SCOTUS term will feature a growing list of cases that could transform the US, its government, and our right to free speech and public safety. We’re tracking them here.

Ian has covered the Supreme Court extensively as a senior correspondent for Vox. Read more of his reporting here.

It seems very unlikely, therefore, that the Court’s decision in Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association will end in the CFPB being struck down — and that’s a very good thing. As the banking industry warned in a brief to the justices, striking down the CFPB would mean striking down the agency that writes the rules telling them how to comply with federal laws governing mortgages. Without these rules in place, the entire US mortgage market could seize up — taking out about 17 percent of the US economy in the process.

A decision against the CFPB, in other words, could usher in the kind of economic ruin that hasn’t been seen in the United States since the Great Depression.

Francisco also spent much of the Tuesday morning argument reiterating positions he took in his brief, which could invalidate a wide range of federal programs — including Social Security and Medicare.

At various points, for example, Francisco seemed to argue that the CFPB is unconstitutional because a federal law gives it “perpetual” funding, meaning that it is funded until Congress passes a new law withdrawing that funding. But nearly two-thirds of all federal spending is perpetual, including major social programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

The Community Financial case is before the justices because the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, an increasingly rogue court dominated by far-right Republicans, last year bought the argument that the CFPB is unconstitutional. The one good thing that can be said about that decision is that it now appears very likely to be reversed.

Even the current very conservative Supreme Court appears to recognize that the Fifth Circuit’s approach would sow far too much chaos and that it would give far too much power to judges.

Click the link to read the details of what these nuts were trying to accomplish. Obviously, we won’t know for some time if they got any traction but if even Clarence Thomas sounds skeptical I think it’s probably unlikely.

The next few years are going to be filled with lousy cases like this and adjudicated in the lower courts that have been filled with unqualified Trump nominees. The Federalist Society isn’t sending their best.

There’s been much less coverage of this actual thing that happened than there was of Trump’s various suggestions that he would do it (followed by him not doing it). https://t.co/qU9h9AWR8Y

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 3, 2023

President Joe Biden announced Tuesday that the manufacturers of all of the first 10 prescription drugs selected for Medicare’s first price negotiations have agreed to participate, clearing the way for talks that could lower their costs in coming years and give him a potential political win heading into next year’s election.

The drugs include the blood thinner Eliquis, which the White House said was used by more than 3.7 million Medicare enrollees from June of last year through this past May and had an average out-of-pocket cost of $608 per enrollee for 2022. Also included is diabetes treatment Jardiance, which was used by nearly 1.6 million Medicare enrollees and had a 2022 out-of-pocket cost per enrollee of $490.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced in August the first 10 drugs selected for the negotiation process and said manufacturers had until Monday to agree to participate and submit manufacturer-specific data. In all last year, 9 million seniors and other Medicare beneficiaries paid more than $3.4 billion on these 10 drugs alone, the White House said.

“For decades, drug companies in America made record profits while big pharma worked to block Medicare from being able to negotiate lower drug prices for seniors. In fact, Americans now pay two to three times more than people in other countries for the exact same prescription drug made by the exact same company,” Biden said in an online video from the Oval Office. “So, my administration finally took a step to change that.”

But sure, let’s put the Republicans back in charge. They’ll roll this back immediately.

QOTD: John Kelly

CNN reports:

“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, when asked if he wanted to weigh in on his former boss in light of recent comments made by other former Trump officials.

“A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.

“A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women,” Kelly continued. “A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.

“There is nothing more that can be said. God help us.”

Of course we knew all this. Kelly has now confirmed it.

MAGA cultists believe that all these people who worked for Trump are liars. All of them Tens of millions of deluded people believe it. As Kelly says, “God help us.”

As GOP-gerrymandered legislatures vie for Most Authoritarian

North Carolina Republicans held the state budget and Medicaid expansion hostage to a failed attempt to expand casino gambling for three months. They finally passed the budget on September 22. Gov. Roy Cooper allowed it to become law without his signature. A veto and inevitable override vote would have been a pointless additional delay.

We sounded the 🚨 on this when the NC budget dropped with this hidden language.
Now the national media are paying attention.
Thanks to @JuddLegum and @tesszeeks for putting some ☀️on what’s happening here in NC. https://t.co/vnl6425yhP

— Sen. Graig Meyer (@GraigMeyer) October 2, 2023

There was one teensy rider added. Judd Legum reports in a thread:

1. Buried in North Carolina’s 600+ page budget is a little-noticed provision that creates a secret police force, controlled by Republicans, with extraordinary powers

🧵 

2. The budget grants the Gov Ops Committee the right to seize “any document or system of record” from anyone who works in or w/state & local government

This includes contractors or any entity that directly or indirectly receives state funds, including charities and colleges 

3. It gets worse. Gov Ops staff will be authorized to enter “any building or facility” owned or leased by a state or non-state entity without a judicial warrant.

This includes private homes, if it includes a home office of a contractor

North Carolina Republicans create “secret police force”North Carolina’s new $300 billion state budget contains a provision that gives extraordinary investigative powers to a partisan oversight committee co-chaired by Senate Leader Phil Berger (R) and Hous…https://popular.info/p/north-carolina-republicans-create

4. Alarmingly, public employees under investigation will be required to keep all communication and requests “confidential.” They cannot alert their supervisor of the investigation nor consult with legal counsel.

Those who refuse to cooperate face jail time and fines of up to 1K 

In other words, something like National Security Letters provided for in the Patriot Act (for those who ain’t).

5. Gov Ops is dominated by Republicans and pursues partisan investigations. It is co-chaired by Senate Leader Phil Berger (R) and House Speaker Tim Moore (R).

Gov Ops launched an inquiry into diversity training programs at the University of North Carolina earlier this year. 

6. Berger and Moore claim this is all about oversight and transparency. But a separate provision of the budget allows them to reject any public records requests concerning the operation of Gov Ops.

7. This is part of a broader effort to restrict public access to public records. The budget also repeals a law that required “communications regarding redistricting” be made publicly available when new legislative maps were adopted. 

8. North Carolina is one of the most gerrymandered states in the country. In 2022, a gerrymandering trial exposed a top Republican redistricting official for using “secret maps to help draft the state’s redistricting plan.”

The Raleigh News and Observer reported in that September 21 story, “Plaintiffs in the lawsuit requested copies of those maps, but were told by the legislature that they no longer existed…. Previous legal challenges to redistricting, including some brought by the North Carolina NAACP, have used draft materials as evidence.”

Furthermore, another section of the new public records restrictions, “broadly exempts legislators from the state’s public records law, stating that lawmakers, even those who are no longer in office, ‘shall not be required to reveal or to consent to reveal any document, supporting document, drafting request, or information request made or received by that legislator while a legislator.’”

We’ll see y’all in court. As we have again and again and again ever since 2010.

A time for “calling in”

If the threat posed by the authoritarian right is as existential as it seems, some of us might want to unhunch our shoulders and not be as reflexive about running off potential allies. If Digby’s Monday post about Red Caesarism was not a wake-up call, you just ain’t woke.

About that. A repeated theme in Anand Giridharadas’s “The Persuaders” is “Is there room among the woke for the waking?” Do those on the left edge of the left — at the cutting edge of consciousness, if you prefer — possess enough critical mass to achieve the progressive goals they seek:

Veteran activists Giridharadas profiles have decided they do not. Success means expanding their movements without compromising them. They’ve learned to “call in” progressives with whom they mostly agree rather than just calling them out for their failings, to focus more on conversion than on hunting heretics. They walk a fine line seeking to coalition with more moderate allies without watering down their own goals.

A listserv I once enjoyed blew up when the “call out” fad hit the progressive movement. Where there had been months of friendly banter, meet-ups, networking, and idea exchanges there were suddenly micro-aggressions to be called out, privileges to be checked, and demands for self-criticism reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. What seemed more like online Esalen turned overnight into Salem. A liberal desire for purification became Puritanism. Community collapsed.

It’s a critical flaw on the left that could prove fatal in the face of a gathering authoritarian movement. We need more room among the woke, etc.

Back in high school, fundamentalists from Bob Jones University (always men) had a shtick when they were street evangelizing. They’d approach, bibles in hand, and ask if you were “saved” or “knew Jesus” or whatever. (Of course, if they approached you they’d already sized you up and decided you were unclean.) If you answered in the affirmative, they’d say, “Praise the Lord,” then pivot to a 20 Questions game I called “Unmask the Heretic.”

They’d interrogate where you went to church, how often, what Bible translation you preferred, etc. Because if you didn’t check all the right boxes, you were a Christian in name only with one foot in Hell. Unclean! You needed saving. Again. By them. By joining their cult … um, church. If you didn’t practice their style of Christianity, woe be unto you.

This is a behavior where fringes of both sides really do do it.

Sure, there have been too many progressive disappointments, too much hippie punching, too many trojan moderates sold as lefties. Perhaps what’s nagging me now, though, is Bob Inglis’ experience with the T-party and his Times op-ed about his regrets about the political small stuff he wasted time on in Congress when there were more serious problems needing attention.

Perhaps it was Gov. Gavin Newsome choosing EMILY’s List President Laphonza Butler to serve out the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s unexpired term. Butler checks a lot of boxes. There are plenty of reasons why she’s a good pick. But not enough for the picky.

Look! For a time, Butler consulted for a firm whose corporate clients included Uber and PG&E, writes Lee Fang. Unclean!

CNN reported Monday night that former Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly has spoken out against his former boss. Here’s just a portion. Trump is:

A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women,” Kelly continued. “A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.

“There is nothing more that can be said,” Kelly concluded. “God help us.”

Yes, but.

“Interestingly, in this statement from Gen. Kelly excoriating Trump, he mentions awful things Trump did during the 2016 election and yet… Kelly happily went to work for Trump after 2016, first at DHS and then at the White House, as chief of staff,” tweeted the estimable Mehdi Hasan. He added, “By the way, has Gen. Kelly apologized yet to Congresswoman Frederica Wilson for lying about her?”

Unclean!

I can’t understand the need on the left to dredge up past sins of people willing to help when democracy is on the line. God help Cassidy Hutchinson, Michael Cohen, Rick Wilson, Stuart Stevens, and too many more to count.

Over the weekend, Adam Serwer pointed Chris Hayes to a related blog post on the attention economy online. It’s reminiscent of call-outs I saw on that listserv and among evangelical interrogators. Venkatesh Rao of Ribbonfarm identifies as a driver of the attention economy beef-only thinking:

A beef-only thinker is someone you cannot simply talk to. Anything that is not an expression of pure, unqualified support for whatever they are doing or saying is received as a mark of disrespect, and a provocation to conflict. From there, you can only crash into honor-based conflict mode, or back away and disengage.

Ours is not a time for disengaging, not a time for calling out but for calling in to a movement to preserve our imperfect democratic republic. Are we really going to purity-police our friends and potential allies while MAGA works at burning the place down?

Look again at the Guardian article on Red Caesarism incubating in right-wing think tanks like the Claremont Institute:

Their calls for a “red Caesar” are now only growing louder as Donald Trump, whose supporters attempted to violently halt the election of Joe Biden in 2020, has assumed dominant frontrunner status in the 2024 Republican nomination race. Trump, who also faces multiple criminal indictments, has spoken openly of attacking the free press in the US and having little regard for American constitutional norms should he win the White House again.

The idea that the US might be redeemed by a Caesar – an authoritarian, rightwing leader – was first broached explicitly by Michael Anton, a Claremont senior fellow and Trump presidential adviser.

They want a dictator. Their “think tank thinked it up.” Heard that somewhere before? It was funny when Ben Kingsley said it as a fictional “custom-made terror threat” controlled by a puppet master. Not so funny when there are real autocrats-in-waiting.

What was it Damon Linker said? “Thirty years ago, if I told you that a bunch of billionaires and intellectuals on the right are waiting in the wings to impose a dictatorship on the United States, you would have said that I was insane.”

Look, I fully expect many Never Trumpers from the Lincoln Project, The Bulwark, and others to return to their conservative fetishes once we defeat rising fascism together. But for now, we need each other.

I will be eternally grateful to all the scientists who made the mRNA vaccines that have saved millions of lives during he COVID pandemic. Today two of them received the Nobel Prize for medicine:

Two scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries that enabled the creation of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 that were critical in slowing the pandemic — technology that’s also being studied to fight cancer and other diseases.

Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman were cited for contributing “to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health,” according to the panel that awarded the prize in Stockholm.

The panel said the pair’s “groundbreaking findings … fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system.”

Traditionally, making vaccines required growing viruses or pieces of viruses and then purifying them before next steps. The messenger RNA approach starts with a snippet of genetic code carrying instructions for making proteins. Pick the right virus protein to target, and the body turns into a mini vaccine factory.

In early experiments with animals, simply injecting lab-grown mRNA triggered a reaction that usually destroyed it. Those early challenges caused many to lose faith in the approach: “Pretty much everybody gave up on it,” Weissman said.

But Karikó, a professor at Szeged University in Hungary and an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Weissman, of the University of Pennsylvania, figured out a tiny modification to the building blocks of RNA that made it stealthy enough to slip past immune defenses.

Karikó, 68, is the 13th woman to win the Nobel Prize in medicine. She was a senior vice president at BioNTech, which partnered with Pfizer to make one of the COVID-19 vaccines. Karikó and Weissman, 64, met by chance in the 1990s while photocopying research papers, Karikó told The Associated Press.

Dr. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at Britain’s University of East Anglia, described the mRNA vaccines made by BioNTech-Pfizer and Moderna Inc. as a “game changer” in shutting down the coronavirus pandemic, crediting the shots with saving millions of lives.

“We would likely only now be coming out of the depths of COVID without the mRNA vaccines,” Hunter said.

John Tregoning, of Imperial College London, called Karikó “one of the most inspirational scientists I have met.” Her work together with Weissman “shows the importance of basic, fundamental research in the path to solutions to the most pressing societal needs,” he said.

The duo’s pivotal mRNA research was combined with two other earlier scientific discoveries to create the COVID-19 vaccines. Researchers in Canada had developed a fatty coating to help mRNA get inside cells to do its work. And studies with prior vaccines at the U.S. National Institutes of Health showed how to stabilize the coronavirus spike protein that the new mRNA shots needed to deliver.

Dr. Bharat Pankhania, an infectious diseases expert at Exeter University, predicted the technology used in the vaccines could be used to refine vaccines for other diseases like Ebola, malaria and dengue, and might also be used to create shots that immunize people against certain types of cancer or auto-immune diseases including lupus.

I won’t go into my usual rant about how the nihilist MAGA death cult has killed massive numbers by brainwashing their followers to refuse the vaccines. If we manage to get past this bizarre period in our history, the record of this chapter will not be kind to them Luckily some of the good guys are being recognized in their own time. And most of us are very, very grateful for their work.

Women in science can cheer just a little bit today:

This is how you quit a jobhttps://t.co/dynqquOuTz pic.twitter.com/6cksl7gA9I

— Liz Hoffman (@lizrhoffman) October 2, 2023

It’s just as bad as you thought

The Guardian reports on the latest “intellectual” vomit spewing forth from the centers of right wing academia:

 June, rightwing academic Kevin Slack published a book-length polemic claiming that ideas that had emerged from what he called the radical left were now so dominant that the US republic its founders envisioned was effectively at an end.

Slack, a politics professor at the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan, made conspiratorial and extreme arguments now common on the antidemocratic right, that “transgenderism, anti-white racism, censorship, cronyism … are now the policies of an entire cosmopolitan class that includes much of the entrenched bureaucracy, the military, the media, and government-sponsored corporations”.

In a discussion of possible responses to this conspiracy theory, he wrote that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people”.

For the last three years, parts of the American right have advocated a theory called Caesarism as an authoritarian solution to the claimed collapse of the US republic in conference rooms, podcasts and the house organs of the extreme right, especially those associated with the Claremont Institute thinktank.

Though on the surface this discussion might seem esoteric, experts who track extremism in the US say that due to their influence on the Republican party, the rightwing intellectuals who espouse these ideas about the attractions of autocracy present a profound threat to American democracy.

Their calls for a “red Caesar” are now only growing louder as Donald Trump, whose supporters attempted to violently halt the election of Joe Biden in 2020, has assumed dominant frontrunner status in the 2024 Republican nomination race. Trump, who also faces multiple criminal indictments, has spoken openly of attacking the free press in the US and having little regard for American constitutional norms should he win the White House again.

The idea that the US might be redeemed by a Caesar – an authoritarian, rightwing leader – was first broached explicitly by Michael Anton, a Claremont senior fellow and Trump presidential adviser.

Anton has been an influential rightwing intellectual since in 2016 penning The Flight 93 Election, a rightwing essay in which he told conservatives who were squeamish about Trump “charge the cockpit or you die”, referencing one of the hijacked flights of 9/11.

He gave Caesarism a passing mention in that essay, but developed it further in his 2020 book, The Stakes, defining it as a “form of one-man rule: halfway … between monarchy and tyranny”.

The Guardian contacted Anton at his Claremont Institute email address, but received no response.

Anton and others in the Claremont milieu are not simply hypothesizing about the future: their dreams of Caesar arise from their dark view of the US.

Anton wrote the scene-setting essay in Up From Conservatism, an anthology of essays published this year and edited by the executive director of Claremont’s Center for the American Way of Life, Arthur Milikh.

In that essay Anton writes baldly that “the United States peaked around 1965”, and that Americans are ruled by “a network of unelected bureaucrats … corporate-tech-finance senior management, ‘experts’ who set the boundaries of acceptable opinion, and media figures who police those boundaries”.

His diagnosis of US social and cultural life unfolds under a series of subheadings that are almost comical in their disillusionment: “The universities have become evil”, “Our economy is fake”, “The people are corrupt”, “Our civilization has lost the will to live”.

Damon Linker, a senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of several books on the American right, was early in noticing the extreme right’s drift towards Caesarism.

Linker told the Guardian that Anton and others in the Claremont milieu “have convinced themselves thoroughly that the current order is decadent, corrupt and far removed from the proper, admirable origins of American government”.

“The current order is decadent, corrupt and far removed from the proper, admirable origins of American government” explains why Anton worked in the Trump administration in the National Security Council. It must have been so refreshing to work for such an upstanding, principled, moral leader.

This seems very logical to me. After all, Trump’s best nickname is Orange Julius Caesar.

They aren’t trying to hide it people. It’s right out there. And they have happened on to a demagogue cult leader who can persuade almost half the country that this is exactly what they need. And it might even work if we don’t make sure they lose before they finally succeed in destroying the democratic republic.

Democrats are being pouty because they don’t have a young, dazzling superstar like Barack Obama to fall in love with. But they will vote and they will vote for Biden because they hate Trump. Negative partisanship is as powerful a motivator as 2008 style adoration.