Sloths—the sluggish tree-dwellers of Central and South America—spend their lives in the tropical rain forests. They move through the canopy at a rate of about 40 yards per day, munching on leaves, twigs and buds. Sloths have an exceptionally low metabolic rate and spend 15 to 20 hours per day sleeping. And surprisingly enough, the long-armed animals are excellent swimmers. They occasionally drop from their treetop perches into water for a paddle.
The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser watched Trump’s rally last weekend and her mind was blown. If only we could get everyone to do this at least once:
[L]ike so much about Trump’s 2024 campaign, this insane oration was largely overlooked and under-covered, the flood of lies and B.S. seen as old news from a candidate whose greatest political success has been to acclimate a large swath of the population to his ever more dangerous alternate reality. No wonder Biden, trapped in a real world of real problems that defy easy solutions, is struggling to defeat him.
This is partly a category error. Though we persist in treating the 2024 election as a race between an incumbent and a challenger, it is not that so much as a contest between two incumbents: Biden, the actual President, and Trump, the forever-President of Red America’s fever dreams. But Trump, while he presents himself as the country’s rightful leader, gets nothing like the intense scrutiny for his speeches that is now focussed on the current occupant of the Oval Office. The norms and traditions that Trump is intent on smashing are, once again, benefitting him.
Consider the enormous buildup before, and wall-to-wall coverage of, Biden’s annual address to Congress. It was big news when the President called out his opponent in unusually scathing terms, referring thirteen times in his prepared text to “my predecessor” in what was, understandably, seen as a break with tradition. Republican commentators grumbled about the sharply partisan tone of the President’s remarks and the loud decibel in which he delivered them; Democrats essentially celebrated those same qualities.
Imagine if, instead, the two speeches had been covered side by side. Biden’s barbed references to Trump were all about the former President’s offenses to American democracy. He called out Trump’s 2024 campaign of “resentment, revenge, and retribution” and the “chaos” unleashed by the Trump-majority Supreme Court when it threw out the decades-old precedent of Roe v. Wade. In reference to a recent quote from the former President, in which Trump suggested that Americans should just “get over it” when it comes to gun violence, Biden retorted, “I say: Stop it, stop it, stop it!” His sharpest words for Trump came in response to the ex-President’s public invitation to Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to nato countries that don’t spend what Trump wants them to on defense—a line that Biden condemned as “outrageous,” “dangerous,” and “unacceptable.”
Trump’s speech made little effort to draw substantive contrasts with Biden. Instead, the Washington Post counted nearly five dozen references to Biden in the course of the Georgia rally, almost all of them epithets drawn from the Trump marketing playbook for how to rip down an opponent—words like “angry,” “corrupt,” “crooked,” “flailing,” “incompetent,” “stupid,” and “weak.” Trump is, always and forever, a puerile bully, stuck perpetually on the fifth-grade playground. But the politics of personal insult has worked so well for Trump that he is, naturally, doubling down on it in 2024. In fact, one of the clips from Trump’s speech on Saturday which got the most coverage was his mockery of Biden’s stutter: a churlish—and, no doubt, premeditated—slur.
He’s a pig and a lot of people have forgotten just how gross he really is. And yet, as Glasser points out, Karl Rove tok to the WSJ to complain that Biden had “lowered himself” by criticizing his predecessor. Maybe he should have insulted him personally, perhaps over his garish hair and make-up, which is now considered to be perfectly normal. As she says, the right completely ignores this (and the mainstream media does little better.)
Biden obviously met the low bar that Trump and the wingnuts had set for him and then high jumped over it. However:
Trump’s appearance in Georgia, by contrast, reflected a man not rooted in any kind of reality, one who struggled to remember his words and who was, by any definition, incoherent, disconnected, and frequently malicious. (This video compilation, circulating on social media, nails it.) In one lengthy detour, he complained about Biden once being photographed on a beach in his bathing suit. Which led him to Cary Grant, which led him to Michael Jackson, which led him back to the point that even Cary Grant wouldn’t have looked good in a bathing suit at age eighty-one. In another aside, he bragged about how much “women love me,” citing as proof the “suburban housewives from North Carolina” who travel to his rallies around the country. He concluded that portion of his speech by saying:
But it was an amazing phenomenon and I do protect women. Look, they talk about suburban housewives. I believe I’m doing well—you know, the polls are all rigged. Of course lately they haven’t been rigged because I’m winning by so much, so I don’t want to say it. Disregard that statement. I love the polls very much.
Makes perfect sense, right?
Glasser notes Trump’s infuriating “I know you are but what am I” habit of accusing the other side of what’ he’s doing. In this case it was the man whose inauguration speech was called “American Carnage” attacking Biden for giving an “angry , dark, hate-filled.” But this is where Glasser sees something that I hope everyone would see if they watched one of his rallies:
Get past the unintended irony, though, and what’s striking is how much of Trump’s 2024 campaign platform is being built on an edifice of lies, and not just the old, familiar lies about the “rigged election” which have figured prominently in every speech Trump has made since his defeat four years ago.
Trump’s over-the-top distortions of his record as President—“the greatest economy in history”; “the biggest tax cut in history”; “I did more for Black people than any President other than Abraham Lincoln”—are now joined by an equally flamboyant new set of untruths about Biden’s Presidency, which Trump portrayed in Saturday’s speech as a hellish time of almost fifty-per-cent inflation and an economy “collapsing into a cesspool of ruin,” with rampaging migrants being let loose from prisons around the world and allowed into the United States, on Biden’s orders, to murder and pillage and steal jobs from “native-born Americans.” Biden, in Trump’s current telling, is both a drooling incompetent being controlled by “fascists” and a corrupt criminal mastermind, “weaponizing” the U.S. government and its criminal-justice system to come after his opponent. His campaign slogan for 2024 might be summed up by one of the rally’s pithier lines: “Everything Joe Biden touches turns to shit. Everything.”
Indeed, Trump’s efforts this year to blame Biden for literally everything have taken on a baroque quality even by the modern-day standards of the party that introduced Willie Horton and Swift-boating into the political lexicon. Consider their latest cause célèbre, the tragic recent death of a young woman, Laken Riley, in which the accused is an undocumented migrant. Trump explicitly blamed Biden and his “crime-against-humanity” border policies for her death. “Laken Riley would be alive today,” he said, “if Joe Biden had not willfully and maliciously eviscerated the borders of the United States and set loose thousands and thousands of dangerous criminals into our country.” Against such treachery, Trump offers a simple, apocalyptic choice: doomsday if Biden is reëlected, or liberation from “these tyrants and villains once and for all.” Wars will be ended at the mere thought of Trump retaking power; crime will cease; arrests will be made; dissenters will be silenced.
I recognize that a speech such as the one that Trump delivered the other night is hard to distill into the essence required of a news story. His detours on Saturday included complaints about Jeff Zucker, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Martha Stewart, Megyn Kelly, “the big plagiarizer from Harvard,” Ron “DeSanctimonious,” the Washington Post, “Trump-deranged judge” Lewis Kaplan, “the fascist and racist attorney general of New York State,” “corrupt Fani Willis,” Merrick Garland, and the F.B.I., which, Trump claimed, “offers one million dollars to a writer of fiction about Donald Trump to lie and say it was fact where Hunter Biden’s laptop from hell was Russian disinformation.” What was he talking about? I don’t know. The man has so many grievances and so many enemies that it is, understandably, hard to keep them straight.
But whether or not it’s news in the conventional sense, it’s easiest to understand the threat that Trump poses to American democracy most clearly when you see it for yourself. Small clips of his craziness can be too easily dismissed as the background noise of our times. The condemnation of his critics, up to and including the current President, can sound shrill or simply partisan. The fact checks, while appalling, never stop the demagogue for whom the “bottomless Pinocchio” was invented.
She concludes with this piece of advice: Watch his speeches. Share them widely. Don’t look away.
She’s right. I know they’re horrible. I feel like I need to bleach my brain after watching them. But you owe it to yourself to see at least one. When I have shown them to friends(often against their will) they are once again galvanized to put a stop to this.
He claims that Trump isn’t planning to follow the “conservative agenda” he followed during their first term but that’s obviously nonsense. He’s gotten more fascist but he was fascist to begin with. But Pence not endorsing is a real rebuke to some of the other cowards like McConnell and Sununu who have decided to keep boot licking for no good reason. He was Trump’s adoring VP for four long years and he’s found the courage to just say no.
Congratulations Mike. After much soul searching and attempts to rationalize helping with the coup attempt, you finally did the right thing. And I guess you liked how that felt. Or maybe you just understand that your political life as a MAGA cultist is over so you might as well let your normal flag fly. Either way, welcome to the Resistance, You may find that it feels good to be able to look yourself in the mirror every morning.
My goal when asking book authors questions is to help them amplify the parts I see as important in a memorable way. Especially for an audience that needs to hear it, but will likely never read the book.
So when I heard Barb was going to be on the Nicole Sandler show I wrote Nicole and said, “I think the most important point Barb makes in the book is that with social media our old metaphors of speech & debate are out of date and they are being used against us. Please get Barb to repeat this, with examples! Go right to Chapter 5, Why America is Particularly Vulnerable to Disinformation”
Well, as it turned out there was a scheduling issue with Barb on Tuesday, so I called in and got to repeat some of her important insights and talk about what Barb identified as failures in law enforcement, legislation and business and her proposed solutions.
I’m a slow writer but fast talker, here’s a link to me calling into the show talking about all this, in my piece below I just cover a couple of key points.
This quote from Chapter 5 is the set up I still hear from people on the left. I call it the 1st Amendment, “Free Speech” platitude line.
First, our constitutional commitment to free speech is enshrined in the First Amendment and regarded by the left and the right with a near religious reverence. As a result, many of us embrace the view that we would defend the right of our neighbors to express even the most offensive ideas, because their right to express them is essential to democracy. And so with few exceptions people are free to say anything, even if their statements are factually incorrect or, worse, intentionally deceptive.
It’s the old, “I don’t like what they have to say, but I’ll fight to the death their right to say it!” line. Very noble! But does that mean you’ll defend to the death the “right” of 5,000 bots out of Russia to amplify intentional lies about our election? What if your “neighbor” is in Lubbock Texas and calls for the killing of election officials AND THEIR KIDS, who live in Arizona? (True story. Texas man sentenced to 3½ years for threatening Arizona election workers, officials)
In the book Barb talks about how disinformation can lead to political violence. She also gets into WHY actions aren’t taken by law enforcement in the section, titled, “Our Reluctance To Investigate” This was something that I knew about, from the great work by Reuters’ reporters Linda So and Jason Szep. U.S. election workers get little help from law enforcement as terror threats mount
McQuade points out how the history of the FBI abuses, as revealed by the Church Committee, led to the Domestic Investigation Operations Guide (DIOG) and how that led to FBI’s failure to investigate Jan 6th insurrectionists, EVEN THOUGHT THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN monitoring them on social media.
“The FBI’s shameful history of infringing on civil liberties, with its counterintelligence operation of the 1960s and ’70s that targeted civil rights leaders in Vietnam War protesters, makes the agency reluctant to investigate crimes that touch on Free Speech or assembly. “
Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America, by Barb McQuade. Chapter 5
If I was interviewing her I’d ask her to explain why serious criminal threats to judges, prosecutors, witnesses and jurors, as well as public health and election officials, aren’t prosecuted. I’ve read the excuses used by state & local law enforcement, as well as prosecutors. I’ve been writing about this for a long time. I wouldn’t just accept the standard answer I hear from the FBI or former prosecutors.
In the book she gives the excuse used by the FBI to NOT identify the January 6th threat online, despite social media posts openly indicating it was coming. Then she quotes the head of the FBI INCORRECTLY saying to the January 6th Committee that the FBI was “not allowed… to just sit and monitor social media and look at one person’s posts to see if maybe something would happen just in case That we’re not allowed to do.” Barb CORRECTLY says BUT THEY ARE! And she links to AG guidelines on assessments for protective purposes, for special events.
(BTW, the other group that failed here was the Secret Service. THEY were in charge of evaluating the groups at the January 6th event and they did NOT list The Proud Boys as a threat, despite a history of violence. )
As an activist and blogger I’ve learned over the years to follow up on the author’s suggested solutions, so I’d ask Barb: 1) Who is fighting against any positive change? 2) Who is spending big bucks and lobbying against change? 3) Do the people who WANT change have any political power? Leverage? 4) Who is fighting to BLOCK change from WITHIN? 5) What can the public do?
Barb’s book answered one of my questions: Who is fighting positive change from WITHIN? The FBI. And she explains some reasons why. 1) They are clinging to their old metaphors of who are the domestic terrorists. They don’t want to investigate cases of threats from the right wing, so they lump them all into “1st Amendment issues” and “protected political speech.”
2) They are under RW political pressure. When school boards were getting death threats, and school boards asked the FBI to investigate, the right wing LIED and said “The FBI is going after us for a difference of opinion!” Jim Jordan spread that disinformation by holding a bogus government weaponization committee. He subpoenaed FBI Director Christopher Wray about the FBI’s “misuse of federal criminal and counterterrorism resources” to target parents at school board meetings.
3) They are overwhelmed by the scale and scope of the disinformation and threats. If it’s not a priority and they don’t have the budget, they ignore the cases.
I get tired of “documenting the atrocities” as Atrios likes to say, so if I was interviewing Barb I’d get her to give some examples of her proposed solutions working.
BTW, when I coach book authors to prepare them for the media, I have them tell a story that illustrates a problem and a solution. Since Barb wasn’t on my call with Nicole I gave an example I knew of her solutions working.
The task force having the resources and the priority of prosecuting the case is great, and it helps with a change in attitude from law enforcement about what they CAN and SHOULD be doing. But of course the huge orange elephant in the room is the lack of action taken about the threats and harassments of elected officials made by Donald Trump.
I know that Barb has been asked many times, “Why can’t we do anything about the biggest spreader of disinformation and threats, Donald Trump?” It’s the same question I ask weekly to Glenn Kirschner. So instead I’d ask her about Chapter 9, how do we “Mitigate The Harms to Public Safety and National Security.”
She tells the story of the prosecution of the men who plotted to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. On the Sister’s In Law podcast she talked about working in national security at the US attorney’s office in Detroit. There she learned that the FBI refers to the time before an attack as, “left of boom.” The phrase connotes a visual image of a timeline, on which “boom” is the attack itself’ any point left of boom is a time before the attack.
What surprised me about that story was how there is no domestic terrorism statute that would allow “the FBI to act left of boom by using the same tactics they use in international terrorism cases.” This sounds like a good idea, help the FBI to investigate threats. But when I read that my mind jumped to “The FBI will use this power to go after LEFT wing groups! They will keep ignoring RIGHT wing groups!”
THERE ARE ALREADY ample laws on the books and tools available to police should they wish to take on extremist violence overwhelmingly perpetrated by the far right. But it is not for lack of capacity or resources that police in the state have regularly ignored these groups; there is a well-established pattern of police support for, and indeed membership of, civilian far-right organizations, including the Oath Keepers militia.
So it’s more than just having laws on the books, it’s about how we define terms, categorize people and groups and then who is actually prioritized for investigation and prosecution.
Think about how the right wing media and politicians are calling convicted insurrectionists hostages. The FBI has prosecuted people in right wing groups that clearly are domestic terrorists. There are hundreds of convicted insurrectionists with ties to known domestic terrorism groups. The FBI needs to keep an eye on these people with a history of threats and actual violence. It’s a threat to public safety if they don’t.
But if everyone is REPOSTING that phrase hostage, under the guise of reporting on Donald Trump, we are spreading that disinformation about who those people are and what those groups they belong to are doing.
So, since I always like to end on what we in the public do. I made a graphic to illustrate the point I learned from Marcy Wheeler about spreading disinformation, “Don’t be a Data Mule for Disinformation!“
Here’s an interesting little insight into the workings of the FBI. You know, the agency that the Republicans want to de-fund? Maybe they need to rethink that seeing as it’s filled with MAGA insurrectionists:
As news of the Mar-a-Lago raid unfolded on the morning of Aug. 8, 2022, it unsurprisingly drew fierce reaction from Trump, his biggest backers, and many Republican members of Congress. But a cache of documents I recently obtained from the FBI shows just how much the historic event roiled some of the bureau’s rank and file, forcing FBI Director Christopher Wray to engage in damage control.
“Did this really just happen? Am I dreaming? The FBI served a Search Warrant on a former president?” wrote an incredulous bureau employee in an email that was sent to the FBI’s acting ombudsman, Chauncenette Morey, shortly after the Mar-a-Lago search. “If he took documents, give him a call and ask for them back. Like … Seriously? My own agency …. A bunch of democrat political hacks up top…I’ve lost just about all faith in our leadership.”
Of course they did ask … and ask … and ask again for him to give them back and he refused. And then he lied. And then he tried to hide them. And now we’ve learned he may have removed some of them from the premises. But sure, he’s innocent as a newborn babe. I feel so safe knowing people like this are in the FBI looking out for our democracy.
It gets worse:
A handful of records came from the FBI’s little known Office of the Ombudsman, the division within the bureau where employees can confidentially raise concerns. That partially explains why the FBI cited a privacy exemption under the FOIA to justify redacting the email sender’s name. Still, the documents showed that Morey forwarded the email to Paul Abbate, the FBI’s deputy director.
“Just wanted you to be aware of the concerns/comments our office has received regarding the search of former President Trump,” Morey wrote.
Another FBI employee was even harsher, characterizing the bureau as a “Banana Republic” and an “embarrassment,” and demanding answers to a series of questions.
[…]
Rumors have long swirled that FBI agents at various field offices had been sympathetic to Trump even as the bureau launched investigations into his campaign and his business dealings. The claims were always attributed to anonymous sources. An email I obtained last year after a separate FOIA lawsuit related to the Jan. 6 Capital riots backs up those assertions.
“There’s no good way to say it,” read the email to deputy director Abbate. “So I’ll just be direct: from my first-hand and second-hand information from conversations since January 6th there is, at best, a sizable percentage of the employee population that felt sympathetic to the group that stormed the Capitol and said it was no different than the BLM protests of last summer,” the person wrote a week after the riots.
[…]
The FBI agent went on to summarize his view of the climate at FBI offices based on his conversations with his colleagues. Agents, especially those who work counterterrorism cases, he said, sympathized with the insurrectionists’ “frustration” and chalked it up to “everyone having been quarantined at home for months” due to COVID, losing their jobs and “fake news,” for example.
“A senior analyst from my first unit who retired less than 2 years ago has a Facebook page full of #StoptheSteal content. These are not one-off events – they are representative of a larger group within” the FBI, the agent wrote.
This agent sounds like he was concerned about these MAGA FBI types but maybe I’m misinterpreting it. I’d guess there are many Trumpers in the DOJ in general. The emails also showed that people were upset about the threats against the FBI after the search warrant but it’s unclear to me who they blamed, the people who were threatening them or the FBI for issuing the search warrant.
Do you feel secure knowing that people like this are in the FBI protesting that the government is trying to keep nuclear secrets from being stolen and left lying around in a social club where thousands of unvetted people wander unsupervised night after night? Is that ok with them simply because they worship a dangerously ignorant cult leader?
I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel all that good about it.
So many people have tuned out of politics over the past three years because of the trauma of the Trump years, the pandemic and simple exhaustion and relief. As a result they are uninformed. Will Bunch writes:
The biggest reason for the missing alarm about the prospect of Trump 47 might simply be a lack of information. The New Republic’s Greg Sargent recently reported on a poll of 1,200 voters deemed gettable for Biden in three swing states, including Pennsylvania, and found the vast majority didn’t know about Trump’s “dictator for a day” comments, or that he’d echoed Adolf Hitler in calling enemies “vermin” and claiming migrants are “poisoning the blood” of America. The pollster said only 31% of persuadable voters had heard much about these statements. You can call it voter apathy, but a lot of the blame belongs to a mainstream media that’s not banging the pots and pans like it should be and remains much more obsessed about the horse race odds of who wins the election than the stakes of an undemocratic presidency.
That’s maddening for obvious reasons. But it also presents the Biden campaign with an opportunity. If voters are unaware of all these statements, there’s plenty of time to make voters aware of them—and the polling also finds that these statements, when aired to respondents, shift them against Trump.
The survey—which was conducted by veteran Democratic pollster Geoff Garin for the group Save My Country and shared with The New Republic—did something novel. It polled 400 voters in each of three swing states—Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—and weighted them in proportion with each state’s Electoral College votes. It omitted respondents who voted for Trump in 2020 and also said Biden didn’t legitimately win.
In short, the poll was designed to survey voters who are genuinely gettable for Biden. The poll asked them about 10 of Trump’s most authoritarian statements, including: the two mentioned above, Trump’s claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” his vow to pardon rioters who attacked the Capitol, his promise to prosecute the Biden family without cause, his threat to inflict mass persecution on the “vermin” opposition, and a few more.
Result? “Only 31 percent of respondents said they previously had heard a lot about these statements by Trump,” the memo accompanying the poll concluded.
The good news for Biden is that when respondents were presented with these quotes, it prompted a rise in Trump’s negatives. For instance, after hearing them, the percentage who see him as “out for revenge” jumped by five points, the percentage who see him as “dangerous” rose by nine points, and the percentage who see him as a “dictator” climbed by seven points.
“This is an opportunity to move voters and change the race,” Garin told me, noting that this shows that current public polling, which has Biden down to Trump, is “not set in concrete.”
I know this may be boring to people like us who keep up with politics. But it’s important to keep it in circulation even among ourselves. It’s very easy, even for engaged, informed voters, to lose the sense of urgency that’s going to be necessary to save us from another round of Trump insanity. So pass this stuff around. It’s important.
One of Donald Trump’s most famous quotes is from the 2016 campaign when he said,” I could shoot someone on 5th avenue and not lose any voters.” He seems to have convinced himself that it’s true. Despite the fact that he has been losing between 20 and 40 percent in most of the Republican primaries this year, he insists that they will all vote for him in the fall and anyway, he says, “I’m not sure we need too many.”
— American Bridge 21st Century (@American_Bridge) March 5, 2024
And why wouldn’t he say that? After all, as he told Newsmax again on Thursday night, “We won in 2016, we won even bigger in 2020 , we won by a lot more” so he’s certain to get as many votes this time. Or, at least, that seems to be his logic.
But if he was really so sure of himself you’d think he wouldn’t need to ensure that the election is going to be a nightmare that makes 2020 look placid and serene by comparison, wouldn’t you? But that looks like what he has in mind. Now that he has managed to install his daughter-in-law Laura Trump, MAGA henchman Michael Whatley in the RNC, along with his defacto campaign manager (and underhanded operative) Chris LaCivita, and immediately purged the RNC staff to make room for loyalists, the takeover of the party is complete. And from what we hear from Lara Trump, who has been all over TV discussing their agenda, they plan a full fledged assault on the election process in November.
Although she has said repeatedly that they planned to encourage early voting in this election, according to the Washington Post, they’ve actually ended their “Bank Your Vote” program and replaced it with a “Grow The Vote” outreach to less likely Trump voters (which must mean white voters since they are also reportedly shutting down their minority outreach centers.) Trump has made it clear that if her father-in-law is elected they will immediately put in place laws to return to one day voting, with paper ballots, voter ID and requirements that the count to be finished by the end of election day, so that’s something to look forward to.
In the meantime, they plan to train actual MAGA poll workers apparently, something the RNC was not allowed to do for decades because of a consent decree from 1981 when they got caught intimidating minority voters as they are wont to do. (In reality, this plan was already announced last fall under the auspices of former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, but like all Trumps she’s taking credit for others’ work.)
Lara Trump told Sean Hannity, “we have to fight fire with dynamite” and announced that they are putting “massive resources” toward a newly created “election integrity division” claiming “we currently have 78 lawsuits out right now in 23 states across this country to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat. And here’s what I want to say. To anyone out there who is thinking about cheating in an election, we will go after you. You will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.” (Actually that’s already happening — to her father-in-law and his cronies.)
But you won’t believe who they’ve hired as the “senior counsel” for the new election integrity division. It’s almost as if they are trolling the media and the Democrats by putting one of the most dishonest, hyperbolic purveyors of The Big Lie in all of MAGA world, Christina Bobb, the author of the book “Stealing Your Vote: The Inside Story of the 2020 Election and What It Means for 2024.” She’s the former Trump DHS official and OAN commentator who promoted the daft idea that Trump would be reinstated after Joe Biden was inaugurated on the basis of the absurd “audits” that took place in various close states and came up with nothing.
Bobb is probably best known to mainstream America as the attorney who signed the affidavit attesting to the fact that Trump had turned over all the classified material at Mar-a-lago which was later found to be untrue. But she’s been part of the Trump inner circle since November of 2020 as an energetic election denier, as this NY Times profile from 2022 illustrates:
Ms. Bobb was present in the pro-Trump “command center” at the Willard Hotel in Washington before the Capitol attack, along with Rudolph W. Giuliani and other Trump stalwarts. She acted as Mr. Giuliani’s go-between with state officials in Arizona and helped fund-raise for a recount in Maricopa County that Republican leaders called a “sham.” She drafted a memo and participated in meetings to discuss a plan to appoint alternate slates of electors to reverse legitimate state election results. And Ms. Bobb created the computer file used to draft a proposal, never carried out, for Mr. Trump to issue an executive order for the federal government to seize voting machines.
She’s had quite a trajectory. She went to law school and then joined the marines for two years after which she ran for office and came in last in field of 8. Then she went to DC and joined the Trump administration, then decamped to OAN where she became a “Stop The Steal” cheerleader and became “a fixture at meetings” with the likes of John Eastman and Sidney Powell. She finally quit OAN and moved to Florida where she took a staff job at Trump’s Save America PAC and somehow was tapped to be the lawyer who had to sign that affidavit when the FBI came calling.
Her devotion to Trump is limitless. I saw her on Right Side Broadcasting at a Trump rally where she extolled Trump’s impeccable musical taste and fantastic dancing abilities. I’m not kidding. According to the Times, even Trump himself has recoiled at her cloying sycophancy (which, frankly, is hard to believe.) But in MAGA world she is an expert on the Big Lie and the truest of true believers. Of course they’re making her “senior counsel for election integrity.” Who else could it possibly be?
Al Jolson telling the audience, “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet,” in 1927’s The Jazz Singer marked the end of the silent film era. Well, buckle up. The North Carolina that brought you Jesse Helms, the state that elected Christian nationalist Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson and made him the 2024 Republican nominee for governor, isn’t done yet.
The state’s Republican primary voters upset their own incumbent superintendent of public instruction, Catherine Truitt, on March 5 and replaced her on the ballot with Michele Morrow.
“Every sign we had said that Catherine Truitt was going to win this election,” political scientist Dr. Chris Cooper told reporters.
Jake Tapper and Andy Kaczynski introduced CNN viewers to Morrow Thursday night (via WRAL):
Michele Morrow, a conservative activist who last week upset the incumbent Superintendent of Public Instruction in North Carolina’s Republican primary, expressed support in 2020 for the televised execution of former President Barack Obama and suggested killing then-President-elect Joe Biden.
Morrow responded here, but has turned off replies and also hidden many.
She appears to be doubling down on her claim Obama should be executed — but has not responded on her tweet suggesting that celebrities harvest the blood of children. https://t.co/jZ67bPcYLE
“Wait a minute, I tell ya,” Jolson said. “You ain’t heard nothin’.”:
In other comments on social media between 2019 and 2021 reviewed by CNN’s KFile, Morrow made disturbing suggestions about executing prominent Democrats for treason, including Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Hillary Clinton, Sen. Chuck Schumer and other prominent people such as Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates.
WRAL previously reported many of Morrow’s statements. She faces Democrat Mo Green, a career school system administrator, in the statewide superintendent race.
“I prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of the firing squad,” Morrow wrote in a tweet from May 2020, responding to a user sharing a conspiracy theory who suggested sending Obama to prison at Guantanamo Bay. “I do not want to waste another dime on supporting his life. We could make some money back from televising his death.”
In another post in May 2020, she responded to a fake Time Magazine cover that featured art of Obama in an electric chair asking if he should be executed.
“Death to ALL traitors!!” Morrow responded.
In yet another comment, Morrow suggested in December 2020 killing Biden, who at that time was president-elect, and has said he would ask Americans to wear a mask for 100 days.
“Never. We need to follow the Constitution’s advice and KILL all TRAITORS!!! #JusticeforAmerica,” she wrote.
And QAnon. And adrenochrome.
Morrow has espoused a wide range of extreme views on social media in recent years. Many of her past extreme comments were made on her now-dormant personal Twitter account — which is separate from her campaign account.
Morrow also promoted QAnon slogans and tweeted that the actor Jim Carrey was “… likely searching for adrenochrome” – a reference to a conspiracy theory shared by QAnon believers that celebrities harvest and drink the blood of children to prolong their own lives. Media Matters, a left-leaning publication, was first to report the QAnon tweets.
All together, Morrow tweeted “WWG1WGA” – the slogan that stands for “where we go one, we go all” and is commonly associated with the QAnon conspiracy – more than seven times in 2020.
Oh, yeah. There’s more.
In other comments, Morrow repeatedly shared the false claim that Obama was Muslim, called Islam evil, and expressed belief in a conspiracy theory that tens of thousands of Chinese troops were stationed in Canada to invade the United States to help Joe Biden become president.
“Tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers are already in Canada and probably Mexico waiting for orders to invade,” she wrote on January 8, 2021.
Years ago, Charlie Pierce named us “the newly insane state of North Carolina.” We’ll find out just how insane this November.
“There exists no more sordid and unlovely type of social development than a plutocracy,” Teddy Roosevelt insisted in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1907. Roosevelt saw the harms of the first Gilded Age and sought, with public support, to end them:
The utterly changed conditions of our national life necessitate changes in certain of our laws, of our governmental methods…. National sovereignty is to be upheld in so far as it means the sovereignty of the people used for the real and ultimate good of the people; and state’s rights are to be upheld in so far as they mean the people’s rights. Especially is this true in dealing with the relations of the people as a whole to the great corporations which are the distinguishing feature of modern business conditions.
One hunded plus years later, we are in a second Gilded Age. Or haven’t you noticed?
Robert Reich has:
Folks, we're living in a Second Gilded Age.
It can be easy to feel discouraged, but the First Gilded Age teaches us lessons on how we can fight back. Watch. pic.twitter.com/to7ISs45QA
Billions in campaign contributions. Jim Crow 2.0. Workers exploited. Child labor has returned. Staggering inequality.
Oh, and facsism.
We beat back the first five at the beginning of the 20th century. Reich believes we can do it again. (I wish I had his confidence.)
Teddy Roosevelt did not hesitate to go after the masters of passive income.
Many men of large wealth have been guilty of conduct which from the moral standpoint is criminal, and their misdeeds are to a peculiar degree reprehensible, because those committing them have no excuse of want, of poverty, of weakness and ignorance to offer as partial atonement. When in addition to moral responsibility these men have a legal responsibility which can be proved so as to impress a judge and jury, then the Department will strain every nerve to reach them criminally. Where this is impossible, then it will take whatever action will be most effective under the actual conditions.
In the last six years we have shown that there is no individual and no corporation so powerful that he or it stands above the possibility of punishment under the law. Our aim is to try to do something effective; our purpose is to stamp out the evil; we shall seek to find the most effective device for this purpose; and we shall then use it, whether the device can be found in existing law or must be supplied by legislation. Moreover, when we thus take action against the wealth which works iniquity, we are acting in the interest of every man of property who acts decently and fairly by his fellows; and we are strengthening the hands of those who propose fearlessly to defend property against all unjust attacks. No individual, no corporation, obeying the law has anything to fear from this Administration.
But for “malefactors of great wealth” Roosevelt promised to bring the law to bear.
The rich man who with hard arrogance declines to consider the rights and the needs of those who are less well off, and the poor man who excites or indulges in envy and hatred of those who are better off, are alike alien to the spirit of our national life…. There exists no more sordid and unlovely type of social development than a plutocracy, for there is a peculiar unwholesomeness in a social and governmental ideal where wealth by and of itself is held up as the greatest good. The life of a man who accumulates a vast fortune in ways that are repugnant to every instinct of generosity and of fair dealing… [and] the vapidly useless and self-indulgent life of the inheritor of that fortune… [are] contemptible in the eyes of all….
The UAW President Shawn Fain agrees 117 years after TR’s speech.
Wow. UAW President Shawn Fain isn’t mincing words.
“People just don’t want to work…I agree…The people I’m talking about are the Wall Street Freeloaders: The Masters of Passive Income.”
Where the power of the law can be wisely used to prevent or to minimize the acquisition or business employment of such wealth and to make it pay by income or inheritance tax its proper share of the burden of government, I would invoke that power without a moment’s hesitation….
You sure can see the tiny hands of Donald Trump on the party apparatus. Most Republican officials, even MAGA, do not want any of this. They know that people like to vote early and they know that it can benefit them. But no, “Honest Don” wants people to only vote on election day because he’s so stupid he thinks that allows him to win. He also wants all counting of all the (paper) ballots to stop on election night. Did I mention that he very stupid?
