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Month: June 2024

Motivated Unreasoning

Ashes, ashes

German concentration camp, Auschwitz I (the main camp), Poland (1940–1945). Photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

“Motivated ignorance,” writes Peter Wehner in The Atlantic,

refers to willfully blinding oneself to facts. It’s choosing not to know. In many cases, for many people, knowing the truth is simply too costly, too psychologically painful, too threatening to their core identity. Nescience is therefore incentivized; people actively decide to remain in a state of ignorance. If they are presented with strong arguments against a position they hold, or compelling evidence that disproves the narrative they embrace, they will reject them. Doing so fends off the psychological distress of the realization that they’ve been lying to themselves and to others.

This is why, as cognitive scientist George Lakoff suggests, the truth (facts) will not set them free. Or as his former student, Anat Shenker-Osorio, quips, truth for some people is more an “I’ll see it when I believe it” proposition and not the other way around. Motivated cognition, she told Lawrence O’Donnell, “is a helluva drug.”

Motivated ignorance is a widespread phenomenon; most people, to one degree or another, employ it. What matters is the degree to which one embraces it, and the consequences of doing so. In the case of MAGA world, the lies that Trump supporters believe, or say they believe, are obviously untrue and obviously destructive. Since 2016 there’s been a ratchet effect, each conspiracy theory getting more preposterous and more malicious. Things that Trump supporters wouldn’t believe or accept in the past have since become loyalty tests. Election denialism is one example. The claim that Trump is the target of “lawfare,” victim to the weaponization of the justice system, is another.

Wehner struggles, as do I, with how to assess the moral character of people who may otherwise present as decent people yet celebrate Trump’s lies and “defend his lawlessness and undisguised cruelty.” Political opinions are but one area of people’s intellectual lives. It’s one thing to embrace a conspiracy theory about faked moon landings that has little real-world impact. But it’s another “if the falsehood you’re embracing and promoting is venomous, harming others, and eroding cherished principles, promoting violence and subverting American democracy.” And getting people terrorized and killed.

Wehner cites the cases of two pro-segregation Baptist ministers from the 1950s and 60s.

Now ask yourself this: Did the fierce advocacy on behalf of segregation, and the dehumanization of Black Americans, reflect in any meaningful way on the character of those who advanced such views, even if, say, they volunteered once a month at a homeless shelter and wrote a popular commentary on the Book of Romans?

Readers can decide whether MAGA supporters are better or worse than Albert Garner and Carey Daniel. My point is that all of us believe there’s some place on the continuum in which the political choices we make reflect on our character. Some movements are overt and malignant enough that to willingly be a part of them becomes ethically problematic.

If not “grievously wrong,” perhaps as in joining Trump’s MAGA movement.

Many, Wehner adds, “are self-proclaimed evangelicals and fundamentalists, and they are also doing inestimable damage to the Christian faith they claim is central to their lives. That collaboration needs to be named. A generation from now, and probably sooner, it will be obvious to everyone that Trump supporters can’t claim they didn’t know.”

They will have ash in their feather dusters:

The villagers, he said, knew about the camp, and watched daily as thousands of prisoners would arrive by rail car, herded like cattle into the camp. Even though the camp never could have held the vast numbers of prisoners who were brought in, the villagers knew that no one ever left. They also knew that the smokestack of the camp’s crematorium belched a near-steady stream of smoke and ash. Yet the villagers chose to remain ignorant about what went on inside the camp. No one inquired, because no one wanted to know.

“But every day,” he said, “these people, in their neat Germanic way, would get out their feather dusters and go outside. And, never thinking about what it meant, they would sweep off the layer of ash that would settle on their windowsills overnight. Then they would return to their neat, clean lives and pretend not to notice what was happening next door.”

“When the camps were liberated and their contents were revealed, they all expressed surprise and horror at what had gone on inside,” he said. “But they all had ash in their feather dusters.”

MAGA cult members will too, let’s hope only figuratively. Vote like your safety depends on it.

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If They Vote

It’s still the Independents, stupid

Roughly 44% of all NC voters 45 and younger are registered unaffiliated and less-prone to vote. (Your state similar?)

Six in 10 key state voters turn out sporadically or are not firmly committed, Post-Schar poll finds. Let’s dig in:

In a nation where many voters have made up their minds, Denning [26] and Etter [age 48] are among the voters whose decisions about the presidential race are neither firmly fixed nor whose participation is wholly predictable. As a group, these voters do not exactly fit the description of being undecided. Some lean toward a specific candidate. Some even say they will definitely vote for that candidate. But age or voting history or both leave open the question of how they will vote in November — if they vote at all.

The Washington Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University surveyed 3,513 registered voters in the six key battleground states. The survey was completed in April and May, before a New York jury found Trump guilty on 34 counts in the hush money trial involving an adult-film actress. Of the 3,513 surveyed, 2,255 were classified as “Deciders” — those who fit into one or more categories: They voted in only one of the last two presidential elections; are between ages 18 and 25; registered to vote since 2022; did not definitely plan to vote for either Biden or Trump this year; or switched their support between 2016 and 2020.

They are also classified as Deciders because they will have enormous influence in determining the winner of what are expected to be another round of close contests in the battleground states.

Not spongeworthy

These look like the voters I’m working on (and not very successfully trying to get Democrats to target) for reasons of age and voting history. They don’t look like low-hanging fruit for turnout efforts per what comes out of the Dems’ computer. In Seinfeld terms, they’re not spongeworthy.

One factor in assessing how these Deciders might act in the fall election is their view of the current state of politics and their interest in the election. Although some say they will definitely vote for either Biden or Trump, their voting history leaves open the question of whether they will follow through. The fact that they are less focused on the election underscores that these voters are different from those who are firmly committed and have a history of regular voting.

Almost 8 in 10 Deciders say they feel “worn out by the amount of politics news there is these days,” compared with about 7 in 10 non-Deciders. Four in 10 say they have given “quite a lot” of thought to the election, considerably smaller than the roughly 3 in 4 voters who are locked in supporting Trump or Biden. And while 60 percent of Deciders say they are either “extremely” or “very” motivated to vote in November, that’s far lower than the more than 9 in 10 (96 percent) of locked-in Biden and Trump voters who are so motivated.

“There’s a sense that there’s something important happening but nobody is particularly motivated to do anything about it,” said Mark J. Rozell, dean of the Schar School. “That is an opportunity for either candidate to find something to mobilize the American public.”

It’s a single anecdote, I know. But at a neighborhood mixer on Thursday, a woman said her kid (F/M?) had called and chewed on her ear about Gaza and Biden. They called again later to say that of course they were voting for Biden. Excitement about the candidates may not be the measure of turnout articles like this make it out to be. Engagement is. So freakin’ engage.

People like Deciders, especially those 45 and under, “view themselves as proudly unmoored from any candidate or party.” They play hard to get when polled.

Younger voters often turn out in lower percentages than older voters and, beyond that, young voters are far less committed to one of the major parties than are older voters. Biden’s campaign is keenly aware of the need to find ways to motivate these younger voters, who in recent campaigns have strongly backed Democratic candidates.

Deciders are more likely to be Black or Hispanic than non-Deciders. One-third of Deciders are non-White compared with about a fifth of other voters.

Deciders are more likely than non-Deciders to live in urban areas and are more likely to have no religion. They are twice as likely as non-Deciders (17 percent to 9 percent) to get their political news from TikTok and somewhat more likely to turn to YouTube for political news.

That’s my point (It’s The Independents, Stupid). They reside in urban areas where it’s easier to do voter outreach.

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The Perfect Trump Spiritual Adviser

June 2020

Another one bites the dust:

The pastor of one of the country’s largest churches—and who Donald Trump once named as a spiritual adviser—has admitted to “inappropriate sexual behavior” with a woman who says he sexually abused her when she was just 12 years old.

On Friday, Cindy Clemishire told The Wartburg Watch, a religious watchdog blog, that Robert Morris, the pastor of Texas’ Gateway Church, asked her to come into his room when he stayed with her family for Christmas in 1982. She was 12 and he was 20 at the time. She said Morris molested her and then ordered her not to say anything about his behavior “because it will ruin everything.” The abuse continued for years before Clemishire confided in a close friend, prompting Morris’ wife to find out and Morris to step down from the ministry, according to the report.

He eventually returned to the church and founded Gateway Church in 2000, turning it into one of the country’s largest megachurches with an estimated weekly attendance of 100,000, according to the church. He serves as its senior pastor, prompting Trump to name him to a spiritual advisory board in 2016.

After Clemishire came forward, Morris acknowledged the claims in a statement to The Christian Post, admitting he engaged in “inappropriate sexual behavior” with a “young lady,” refusing to acknowledge Clemishire’s age at the time.

“It was kissing and petting and not intercourse, but it was wrong,” he said.

He claimed that, with the blessing of the girl’s father and church elders, he returned to ministry two years after the abuse was reported. “I asked their forgiveness, and they graciously forgave me,” Morris said.

She was 12.

Clemishire told the Dallas Morning News that her family never condoned Morris’ return to the ministry, despite Morris’ claim to the contrary.

“We don’t believe anyone that’s done anything like this should be an overseer to anyone in any industry, but especially in the church,” Clemishire said.

As for whether she found Morris’ public apology to be earnest, Clemishire struck it down.

“I don’t think that it’s repentant when someone calls a 12-year-old a young lady and tries to just dismiss what happened as just some heavy petting,” Clemishire said. “I don’t believe that’s repentance. There’s no child on earth that any person should ever do that to. It’s just unacceptable. There’s zero excuse.”

I guess we can understand why all the alleged Christians are so willing to believe that Hillary Clinton is running a pedophile ring out of a pizza parlor. It’s the kind of thing their conservative “spiritual advisers” do all the time. Why wouldn’t politicians?

It’s pervasive:

Herman Paul Pressler III of Houston died June 7, four days before the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting, where nothing was said about his passing.

Pressler, who had just turned 94, was the co-architect of the so-called “conservative resurgence” in the SBC.

He was a leading figure in the denomination for five decades. However, he has been credibly accused of sexual abuse of boys and young men over a period of years. Those allegations put his previous status as a champion of conservatism in a new light.

Ya think?

No wonder they don’t think Trump is any big deal. So he grabs women by the pussy and rapes one from time to time. And yeah, he’s been a philandering, married playboy his whole life and proud of it. But what powerful leader doesn’t have such peccadillos in his life, amirite? That’s just how they roll.

BTW, here’s mask-free Trump at Gateway Church in June of 2020:

It’s an honor to be at Gateway Church with the Attorney General — our great Attorney General, William Barr.  Thank you.  (Applause.)  And my friend, Ben Carson, who’s done a fantastic job at HUD.  Secretary.  (Applause.)  And a young star, Jerome Adams, General.  Where is Jerome?  Jerome?  (Applause.)  Along with a lot of my friends out in the audience.  In fact, a lot of the great political leaders from Texas, I see.  Some great, great friends.

And I want to thank you all for being here: faith leaders; members of law enforcement, so important.  We want law and order.  We have to have a lot of good things, but we have to have law and order.  (Applause.)

Got to have some strength.  You have to have strength.  You have to do what you have to do.  And you look at a Seattle — we just came in; we just see over the screen, and we’ve been hearing about it.  Bill and I were talking about it: the law and order.  Look at what happened in Seattle: They took over a city.  A city.  A big city — Seattle.  Took a chunk of it — a big chunk.  Can’t happen.  That couldn’t happen here, I don’t think, in the state of Texas, could it?  (Laughter.)  I don’t think so.  (Applause.)  I don’t think so.

So I want to thank Pastors Robert Morris and Steve Dulin.  They’re great people.  (Applause.)  Great people with a great reputation.  I have to say that.  Great reputation.  And Gateway Church — the team has been incredible in hosting us.

Actually, as the article says, it was well known at the time that Morris was a child molester.

If Only We Could Say The Same About Trump’s Conservatives

We’ve all heard about the resurgence of the far right in Europe (although the extent of it was very overstated at first) but the UKisn’t among them:

Sunak surprised many in his own party by announcing an early election on May 22, against widespread expectations that he would wait until later in the year to allow more time for living standards to recover after the highest inflation in 40 years.

Market research company Savanta found 46% support for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, up 2 points on the previous poll five days earlier, while support for the Conservatives dropped 4 points to 21%. The poll was conducted from June 12 to June 14 for the Sunday Telegraph, opens new tab.

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Labour’s 25-point lead was the largest since the premiership of Sunak’s predecessor, Liz Truss, whose tax cut plans prompted investors to dump British government bonds, pushing up interest rates and forcing a Bank of England intervention.

“Our research suggests that this election could be nothing short of electoral extinction for the Conservative Party,” Chris Hopkins, political research director at Savanta, said.00:08Majority of 90 countries at Ukraine peace summit sign declaration

A separate poll by Survation, published by the Sunday Times, opens new tab, predicted the Conservatives could end up with just 72 seats in the 650-member House of Commons – the lowest in their nearly 200-year history – while Labour would win 456 seats.

This is the double edged sword of Trump and our electoral system. We were able to oust him during the pandemic and empower the Democrats. In the UK they got rid of their blameworthy leader and his short-lived successor but the party was still in charge. As a result, they have not had the success Biden has had in pulling the country back from the brink but at the same time, they are at least being held responsible for it. Here in America Biden is getting the blame for the pandemic hangover even though he’s done more than any other industrialized country to create a strong recovery. Sigh.

And then there’s the fact that we’re dealing with a cult of personality here in the US and facts, truth and reality have little to do with what’s happening. It means that Biden is facing about 42% of the voters being completely unpersuadable no matter what happens. At the same time, many Democratic voters have understandably withdrawn from the batshit crazy political conversation so they aren’t hearing anything but snippets of news and casual whines about prices and how bad everything is. And even if they did it’s going to be mano a mano because of the numbers.

We are certainly an exceptional country.

About That Crime Wave

Matt Yglesias writes:

Sophisticates knno that the Trump Crime Wave has been reversed, but the 2024 data (so far, it’s early yet) is actually better than that and suggests we’re on pace for the lowest murder rate year since *2014* fully reversing the post-Ferguson rise in lethal violence.

And yet a majority of Americans are convinced that we are in the midst of an unprecedented crime wave. Why? Because Donald Trump and the Republicans are pathological liars and the mainstream media is apparently incapable of effectively countering their lies. We know this because large numbers of non-MAGA voters who don’t watch Fox believe this. Some of it is the hangover from the pandemic crime spike and it takes a while for people to absorb changes. But they would be aware of it if the media would be more assertive in challenging the lies. Instead, much of the time they frame it as a matter of opinion.

Trump 2.0 Will Replace Thomas And Alito

Their replacements will be even worse

Biden raises the alarm:

President Biden on Saturday night said he expects the winner of this year’s presidential election will likely have the chance to fill two vacancies on the Supreme Court – a decision he warned would be “one of the scariest parts” if his Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, is successful in his bid for a second term.

Biden made the remarks at a fundraiser that his campaign said raised a record $28 million. The event featured Hollywood stars like George Clooney and Julia Roberts, as well as former President Barack Obama.

Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel moderated a conversation with Biden and Obama, and the two presidents talked about the impact that Trump had on issues like abortion rights by naming conservative justices to the Supreme Court.

“The next president is likely to have two new Supreme Court nominees. Two more. He’s already appointed two that have been very negative in terms of rights of individuals,” Biden said. Trump named three justices during his term – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanagh and Amy Coney Barrett – cementing the conservative majority on the bench.

Biden, who flew to Los Angeles on the heels of attending the G7 summit in Italy, did not expand upon how the two vacancies on the court would come about.

I can expand on it. If Trump wins and they take the senate Thomas and Alito will happily retire. Thomas will make some real big bucks on wingnut welfare and Alito will openly embrace his fascist activism. Trump will replace them with young fascist jurists handpicked by Leonard Leo and they will rule the court for another generation.

Martha-Ann Alito made that pretty clear when she told Lauren Windsor that she told her husband that when he is “free of this nonsense” she plans to let her freak flags fly and nonsensically mentioned a five year statute of limitations on defamation. It sure sounds like she doesn’t think he’s going to be on the court all that much longer.

Until this court is re-balanced there will be no more progress. The only thing we can hope for is to keep a majority in the congress and hold the presidency to offset their worst impulses. Letting Trump put two young Nazis on it to replace the two old wingnuts would be a tragedy.

Here’s a list of possible replacements put together by Fox news. Oh. My. God.

More Evidence Of A Putin Back Door Deal

The only thing Trump gets in return is destruction of America’s alliances a nuclear arms race and possibly Europe. Win-win for both parties I guess:

Former U.S. President Donald Trump on Saturday blasted the scale of U.S. support for Ukraine and said that if he is reelected in November he would immediately “have that settled.”

At a campaign rally in Detroit, Trump criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, calling him “the greatest salesman of all time” for Kyiv’s push to secure U.S. support in its effort to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression more than three years after Moscow’s all-out invasion.

“He just left four days ago with $60 billion, and he gets home, and he announces that he needs another $60 billion. It never ends,” Trump said.

“I will have that settled prior to taking the White House as president-elect,” said Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee in the U.S. election.

Trump said again the other day that he would also have secured the release of Evan Gerskovich as president-elect. He’s very specific that he will do that and that he will force the end of the Ukraine war immediately upon his election. It’s hard to say if he’s signaling to Putin that he’s going to withdraw aid immediately or if an actual deal has already been struck but really, what difference does it make?

IIBDI

“imagine if Biden did it”

That wasn’t all. He did his weird schtick about shower heads too:

At least he doesn’t have a stiff gait because that would be a deal breaker.

Get In The Fight

The kitchen table is on fire

Lewis Rothschild People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they’ll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. 

Donald Trump steps up to the microphone a lot. But to Americans too busy to listen, too overworked to devote their precious free time to political news, they hear only the loudest voices and feel how the world feels. To them.

They’ll be asked this fall to hire leaders. From the president on down to the local school board. What they want in their leaders are people who will fight for them. It’s not just what you say. Words are cheap. It’s what you do. And voters need to see you doing it.

Anat Shenker-Osorio had a long essay in Rolling Stone yesterday, not so much about messaging (her specialty) but about voter attitudes she sees in her focus groups:

If my colleagues and I took a shot everytime someone in these groups decried the Democrats as doing nothing on the fascism front, we’d have cirrhosis.

As one disaffected Democratic white woman from Arizona said in April, “I don’t think any of them care really. Even if Democrats won the House, the Senate, the presidency, they’ve had it before — didn’t do anything then.” The video player is currently playing an ad.

Last month, a disaffected white Democratic man in Pittsburgh pointed out that “Biden ran in part on protecting Roe v. Wade,” and noted that Democrats stalled for weeks on legislation codifying federal protections for abortion, despite the early leak of a draft Dobbs decision overturning the landmark high court decision. “Not that I have a womb,” he went on to say, “but materially for me as an individual and as a voter, it doesn’t really matter whether the Republicans are actively taking the rights away or the Democrats are allowing them to be taken away because they’re being corroded regardless.” 

Joe Biden may go down in history as the most effective Democratic president since FDR. But people don’t remember what he and federal Democrats accomplished as much as what they didn’t. Failures they remember. “You’re only as good as your last picture,” as they say in Hollywood.

Like Lewis Rothschild said in The American President, people want leaders. Right now many are ready to elect a wannabe autocrat who plays one on TV. Frustrated others want nothing to do with him, but don’t see Democrats as prepared to fight for them with more than empty words.

“Democrats had a governing trifecta for two years and failed to codify Roe or pass voting rights legislation that would have combated state-based efforts to seize people’s most fundamental freedoms over our bodies and our ballots,” Shenker-Osorio says of her higher-information subjects.

Biden is rebuilding your bridge, but he’s only as good as his last win. Voters have longer memories for what they didn’t get, and what they had taken from them while Democrats seemingly stood by.

Is it any wonder there’s a lack of belief in the efficacy of voting, especially among disaffected Dems, who feel that they were told to turn out in 2020 to stop terrible things from happening, only to see those terrible things happen anyway? It’s challenging to sell voters on the same premise this year. 

Things could get far worse under a second Trump presidency, but that message is not getting to most voters, Shenker-Osorio finds.

The kitchen table is on fire

There’s a 900-page plan from the Heritage Foundation for Trump 2.0 called Project 2025. It calls for gutting the civil service and replacing it with MAGA toadies, “restricting contraception, dismantling the Department of Education, eliminating labor and environmental protections,” and more. But most people haven’t heard of it. When study subjects get briefed on Project 2025, they soundly reject it.

Where we run into problems is that when voters learn for the first time of these horrors, many wonder why Democrats don’t seem to be speaking out about them or fighting back. In an online group across battleground states on June 11, one swing Latina participant summed up these sentiments, saying that “the Democrats have to step it up. Where is the counter agenda?” More darkly, Asian-American disaffected swing men the same night didn’t like MAGA’s plan but noted that at least they have one. 

Democrats lack the messaging infrastructure that right-wing media owners provide gratis to Republicans. And the both-sides mainstream press offers more coverage of the Trumpist clown show because it’s more colorful and attracts eyeballs and clicks.

But that means Democrats running on kitchen-table issues, an idée fixe among old-guard Democrats like Rep. Nancy Pelosi [timestamp: 1:17:00], get little or no traction in the minds of a distracted electorate. A laundry list of accomplishments doesn’t lodge in people’s brains the way a good story with heroes and villains does. Democrats aren’t telling one. It’s not voters’ fault that they don’t know what they don’t know. It’s a challenge Democrats are struggling to meet. And the kitchen table? The kitchen table is on fire.

The widely reported fact of Biden bleeding support from key 2020 constituencies including young people and people of color merits a cold hard look at causation. Pundits pounced to attribute these drops to some sudden onset of Trump-attraction and insist Biden has to moderate. But in reality, most of those moving away from Biden are either utterly unaware of or refuse to credit MAGA’s well-laid plans to control our lives and our livelihoods. The erosion in support isn’t driven by the lure of Trump and cannot be cured by Biden adopting lite versions of his policies. It stems from lack of awareness of what Trump and the rest of the MAGA mob say and intend; thus the only way forward is to ensure voters hear the alarm bells and believe the emergency is real. 

It’s both accurate and entirely fair to lay much of public ignorance and incredulity at the media’s door. But we cannot expect voters to believe that the house is indeed on fire, that the threat of fascism is neigh, if the firefighters, that is our current leaders, aren’t attempting to put out the blaze. 

Once again:

How many Rocky movies did Stallone make? And they’re all the same movie. So why do people keep going? Because so many Americans themselves feel like underdogs. We want to root for the little guy with heart. Facing insurmountable odds. Risking it all. We want to feel the thrill up our spines and in the tops of our heads when Bill Conti’s trumpet fanfare introduces the training sequence. We want to hear that. Wait for it. Cheer for it. Pay for it. Over and over and over.

Say what you’re for, Shenker-Osorio insists. Paint the beautiful tomorrow. But words are not enough. They need to see you fighting for what you believe and for them. They’ll be inspired by it. That says leadership more than speeches. That’s what they’ll vote for.

You’re only as good as your last picture. Paint one.

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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.