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Month: September 2024

Malevolence Is Contagious

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 26, 2024

So is courage and cowardice

Donald Trump wants Americans to help in his lifelong struggle to work out his daddy issues. Mr. Insecurity has complained for decades that the world (pretty much everyone) has been laughing at us (him). If there is a greater malevolent bundle of psychological maldevelopment walking this earth, we’ve never heard of them because they were not born into $413 million and into the family of a prominent (and crooked) New York City land developer.

Just ten days ago, Trump reprised his soul-cry: “THE WORLD IS LAUGHING AT US AS FOOLS, THEY ARE STEALING OUR JOBS AND OUR WEALTH. WE CANNOT LET THEM LAUGH ANY LONGER.” That is, give him the White House and he’ll make THEM all pay. He’ll show you. He’ll get even. He’ll deport anyone he doesn’t execute or jail. Just you wait!

Take him at his word.

Upon reading that Nazi-adjacent grievance-spew, Salon’s Chauncey DeVega referenced historian Richard Frankel, author of “States of Exclusion: A New Wave of Fascism.” Frankel writes:

Trump and Vance and their MAGA allies and other neofascists are erasing the distinction between the idea of deporting undocumented immigrants and those who are here legally. In their hysterical stories about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio stealing and eating household pets, they were talking about a group of people who came to this country legally with temporary protected status. But neither Trump nor Vance made any effort to note that. In fact, JD Vance went even further. After reporters informed him that the Haitians in Springfield were here legally, he responded by telling them, “I’m still gonna call them an illegal alien,” unconsciously echoing Karl Lueger, the notorious antisemitic Mayor of Vienna around the turn of the twentieth century, who famously declared, “I decide who’s a Jew.”

All this is to say that the idea that Trump is focused solely on deporting undocumented immigrants is absurd. His stormtroopers will round up anyone they decide does not belong in this country, whether they’re citizens or not. This is also something the Nazis did even before the 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of their citizenship. Only months after coming to power, the Interior Ministry stopped naturalizing Jews arriving from Eastern Europe and soon after that, they began removing the citizenship of Eastern European Jews who were granted citizenship between 1918 and 1933. Whatever their status, Trump means to remove anyone who does not fit within his particular vision of the American national/racial community.

DeVega warns that Trump’s eliminationist rhetoric is only ramping up:

Trump is also promising to make it illegal for undocumented immigrants to own homes in America. Historian Timothy Ryback, who is one of the world’s leading experts on the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany, highlights the historical precedent of such threats by Trump:  

All this anti-foreigner, anti-immigrant foment by Trump and Vance, the doubling down on hate speech and outright lies, reminds me of Hitler’s election campaign rhetoric leading up to the November 6, 1932, Reichstag elections, inflammatory rhetoric that had already resulted in a foreign worker being bludgeoned to death by a group of rightwing vigilantes in the village of Potempa that August.

The sheer brutality of the Potempa murder stunned a nation already reeling from a summer of Nazi street violence that saw newspapers publishing “casualty lists” from the country’s ongoing “civil war.” When the “Potempa Five” were sentenced to death for “political murder,” Hitler sent the killers a telegram of support. He called them heroes. He vowed that once in office, no foreign life would ever be placed above that of a blood German. Indeed, one of Hitler’s early acts as chancellor was to pardon the five killers.

Most troubling to my mind are Trump’s repeated references to immigrants as “rapists” and “vermin” who are allegedly “poisoning the blood of our country.” Hitler had a shorthand term for such vile rhetoric: Rassenschande, or “bastardization” of the German race. He also had solutions: successive acts of legislation that curtailed their rights to employment, education, marriage, etc., and ultimately the creation of a vast government-funded infrastructure of homicidal machinery that led to the extermination of millions of human lives.

Papa Fred Trump may be gone, but Vladimir Putin and others are Donald’s stand-ins, and they know it. But it’s not just Trump promoting malevolent rhetoric. He’s turned the entire Republican Party into an engine of his sad, desperate hunger for the respect of brutal autocrats.

Behold how leading Republicans have chosen time and again to pursue the path of cowardice, says Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark and leader of other anti-Trump organizations. Longwell told “Deadline White House” that their actions in tolerating Donald Trump’s “repugnant, morally horrible” behavior should be studied forever.

Courage is contagious, she believes. But so is cowardice. Republicans time again over the last decade chose the latter.

“My most fervent hope is that Donald Trump loses this election and that he does it because women turn out in droves to vote against him, including center-right women. Because that is just the kind of justice that Donald Trump deserves.”

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Republicans have for years (in the fashion of Karl Lueger) appointed themselves deciders of who is a Real American™ deserving of civil rights and the protections of the law. Lately, Trump campaign staff pass out at his rallies “Mass Deportation Now!” signs aimed at neighbors they deem less American than themselves. Many have come to “love the smell of ethnic cleansing in the morning.” Malevolence is also contagious.

There are those historical moments etched in memory not just for the events themselves but for where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news. In my case, it was the JFK assassination, the first moon landing, the attempted Reagan assassination, the Challenger disaster, and of course September 11. And perhaps significantly, the first reports of the Rwandan genocide.

VOTE on Day 1 of early voting. Bring a friend.

As Helene Bears Down

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 26, 2024

Project 2025 wants you caught by surprise

Streets in low-lying areas here are already flooded and Hurricane Helene isn’t even here yet. Public schools are closed preemtively. Emergency preparations are underway. But at least we had warnings as close as your TV or computer.

A writer some time back recounted an airplane conversation in which his seatmate remarked that the great thing about computers was that you could always turn them off. Considering that they and thousands of others were sitting in aluminum tubes in the air traffic pattern high above a major city, and that the only thing keeping them from colliding and dying was FAA air traffic computers, the writer was pretty sure he didn’t want them turned off. *

Project 2025 wants a lot of government turned off. Like the ones that warn us of impending weather disasters (Media Matters from May):

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that predicts changes in climate, weather, oceans, and coastlines and provides data that informs lifesaving forecasts such as tracking hurricanes, is in the crosshairs of Project 2025, the conservative battle plan for a potential second Trump presidency which describes NOAA as a “colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” But researchers have pushed back on these charges and defended NOAA’s climate data and meteorological work — while forecasters are predicting an “extremely active” Atlantic hurricane season and experts say this summer could rival last year’s record heat.

Project 2025’s call to dismantle NOAA by eliminating or privatizing key functions of the agency is the endgame of years of attempts by conservatives and right-wing media to attack the credibility of the agency and the veracity of the data it produces. It also illustrates that the conservative plan is not just to dismantle U.S. climate policy, but also to scrub the climate data that underpins it.

I live in one of those purple areas. I don’t want NOAA turned off, thank you very much.

* My father’s brother died in a midair collision over Manhattan in 1960.

Demagoguery For Dummies

Published by digby on September 25, 2024

I know you don’t want to watch a whole Trump speech. It’s very, very hard. But he’s escalating and you should probably hear a little bit of it:

There’s more of the same. He was all amped up this morning, obviously drank a six pack of diet coke already or Dr. Ronny gave him a little pick-me-up. He’s getting worse.

Politico reports:

Donald Trump was meeting privately in mid-September with one of his oldest friends, Steve Wynn, when the casino mogul and Republican mega-donor delivered the former president a blunt warning: You’re off message, and it isn’t helping.

Trump had been distracted, in Wynn’s view. The former president at the time was promoting a conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s cats and dogs in Ohio, among other things. To drive home his point, Wynn showed Trump polling and suggested the former president would be better off focusing on policy issues where Republicans see his opponent, Kamala Harris, as vulnerable, according to two people briefed on the meeting and granted anonymity to describe it.

The meeting underscored a key point of tension inside the Trump campaign. While polls show the race is incredibly close, some of Trump’s allies are concerned that his impulses and coarse approach to campaigning are undermining him against Harris, a rival who has proved far stronger than his previous opponent, Joe Biden.

In interviews, more than a dozen Trump allies described the former president as reaching a crossroads — faced with the choice of continuing with the missteps that have overtaken the past several weeks of his campaign or embracing a more calculated approach aimed at appealing to a small subset of undecided voters who are likely to sway the outcome of the election. In recent weeks, he has brought into his fold destabilizing forces like social media provocateur Laura Loomer and his controversial former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, plugged commemorative Trump coins, and asserted that if he loses, Jews would be partly to blame.

“It’s not that he’s going backwards,” said one Trump ally granted anonymity to speak freely. “But he should be doing better.”

He can’t change. He’s a 78 year old narcissistic megalomaniac who can’t admit that he’s wrong or that he’s ever lost. He believes his business and 2016 success were because he is a genius. Nobody can tell him anything.

Well, actually he does listen to some people. Like Laura Loomer:

Defending Harvey And Bill

Published by digby on September 25, 2024

“so-called sexual crimes…”

This was out there. North Carolina Republicans made him their Lt. Governor because of it, not in spite of it.

“Child-like Oppositional Disorder” describes so many people on the right. And yes, a fair number on the left as well, but fewer than there used to be.

Are You A Poll Addict?

Published by digby on September 25, 2024

Just say no

Hello. My name is digby and I am a poll addict. I really wish I wasn’t because I’m not equipped to deal with commentary like that above from the person who runs 538. I am an ordinary person caught in the vortex of a close election and I may just end up losing my mind over it. Don’t go there if you value your sanity.

Historian Rick Perlstein has a great column on polls today that you really should read. (And then go read some fiction or watch the game or do some phone banking. Anything but look at those damned polling averages.)

W. Joseph Campbell’s Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections demonstrates—for the first time, strangely enough, given the robust persuasiveness of its conclusions—that presidential polls are almost always wrong, consistently, in deeply patterned ways.

Unusual for any historical narrative, the pattern is almost unchanged for a good hundred years. First, someone comes forth with some new means of measuring how people will vote for president, and gets it so right it feels like magic. That was the accomplishment of a magazine called The Literary Digest between 1924 and 1932. They sent as many sample ballots as existing technological infrastructure would allow—in 1932, some 20 million—on postcards that doubled as subscription ads. Then, with the greatest care, they counted the ones that came back. For three straight elections, they got it so right the Raleigh News and Observer half-joked that it “would save millions in money and time” to “quit holding elections and accept the Digest’s poll as final.”

In 2008, that was the accomplishment of Nate Silver, who called 49 out of 50 states; in 2012, he notched 50 for 50, scored a best-selling book, and reportedly accounted in the run-up to the election for 20 percent of the traffic for his new employer, The New York Times.

In part two of the cycle, yesterday’s miracle suffers a spectacular failure—as in the poll-crazy year of 1936, when modern political polling was invented by the triumvirate of George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and Archibald Crossley, who all called it for Roosevelt over Alf Landon, where the Digest only gave him 41 percent of the popular vote. Their technical revolution (directly querying a representative sample of the electorate) seemed so obvious in retrospect, you wonder how nobody thought of it before. The same with Silver’s model of aggregating, then evaluating and weighting for accuracy, existing state polls.

They’re cocky about it; that’s a pattern, too. That’s what tends to proceed their most spectacular failures.

In early September of 1948, Elmo Roper announced that he wouldn’t publish further results, because “the outcome is settled.” Archibald Crossley vowed to stop counting because “there had been little late shift in 1936, 1940, and 1944.” Just like in 1928, people asked why we should even bother having an election. So confident were the experts that the famous Chicago Daily Tribune early-edition headline “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN” was only one of many. A German newspaper even described what it claimed was a raucous celebration of Dewey’s victory in Times Square.

Kind of like in 2016, when reporters saw Clinton associates popping champagne corks on Election Day in the campaign plane.

POLLSTERS NEXT DO WHAT ONE WOULD EXPECT: They adjust their methods—but to fight the last war. What else can they do?

Read the whole thing. It is fascinating and I had no idea. I particularly enjoyed his withering analysis of the Nate Silver phenomenon. It’s not the first time one of these guys has fallen from the heights but it’s the most recent and it’s very instructive.

They are all fighting the last war in this election season and we don’t even know which war it is! Most are re-fighting the last presidential campaign in 2020 but consider that it was one of the most unusual races in history with a global pandemic that had tons of people not working or working from home, glued to their TVs and computers and mass voting by mail. 2024 is nothing like that. Others are apparently using a method that combines 2020 results with 2022, which was not only a mid-term and therefore very different from today, but also one which came after the cataclysmic Supreme Court decision in Dobbs which may have actually realigned the electorate. (We’ll see about that.) Now we have the weird circumstances of a former president who was fired running again, against the first Black woman candidate who wasn’t even in the campaign until late July. It’s a little unusual!

You can see why fighting the last war might not be exactly accurate. Or it might. We just don’t know.

After reading Rick’s piece I became convinced that polling, especially in these days of daily updates and averages and non-stop coverage is really just a parlor game for political junkies. If you want to put yourself through it (or can’t help yourself like me) just be aware that nobody really knows nothin’.

We just have to hope our team knows what it’s doing and that more Americans do the right thing than the wrong thing this time. I soothe myself with the knowledge that they have done so in every election since 2016 — but then again, as these pollsters know but can’t admit, past elections can’t predict the future any more than your average carnival fortune teller can.

Six. More. Weeks.

Trump’s Creepy Paternalism Is About More Than Just Abortion

Published by digby on September 25, 2024

JD Vance and Project 2025 are all over his latest “I am your protector” rhetoric

As a politician, Donald Trump has always exhibited a very creepy form of paternalism. He often says things like “No one has done as much for the Black community as I did” or “I’ve been better for Jews than anyone in history.” It’s as if he’s bestowing on the people a special gift from the king and they should be grateful to him personally. Of course his boasts are always lies so they tend to fall on deaf ears, but it reveals how he sees himself as president.

Although he’s long exhibited this rhetorical tic, in recent days he’s really outdone himself. Sounding much more like a cult leader than a politician in a modern democracy, the passages in his speeches about women are downright disturbing. It started with a weird Truth Social post on September 20th:

The womenfolk are depressed but Big Daddy Trump is going to fix all that and they’ll be so happy they won’t even think about abortion. “THEY WILL FINALLY BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE AND SECURE. THEIR LIVES WILL BE HAPPY BEAUTIFUL AND GREAT AGAIN.” All that’s missing is “OR ELSE!”

You’ll note that he said he will “protect women at a level never seen before” as if women are abandoned children who are desperate for him to come and rescue them from all their travails. When is the last time you heard a major politician in America infantilize women like this? It sounds like something out of the 19th century.

He took this all a step further in his speeches over the weekend making it clear that this is an official campaign message delivered from the teleprompter (with a few off-the-cuff embellishments.) In this rendition, women are complete basketcases, barely able to function which, for some bizarre reason, is why they care about abortion rights.

It truly does have the tenor of a patriarchal cult leader speaking to his followers.

He went on like this for a while, complaining that all women are talking about is abortion (because they are so unhappy, unhealthy and depressed) but he’s going to make it all better. It’s beyond condescending, but as my colleague Amanda Marcotte points out [INSERT LINK] it betrays Trump’s frustration that women aren’t falling in line as they are supposed to do so he’s resorted to speaking to them as if they’re children.

It’s profoundly insulting although you cannot help but notice the wild cheering from the women in his audience ecstatic at the idea of Dear Leader “protecting” them. (Why anyone would believe that a man who is on tape bragging about assaulting women and has been found liable for it in a court of law is some kind of “protector” is beyond me.)

But at one point in the speech as he was defending the GOP’s record on IVF (even though the congressional Republicans just voted unanimously against a bill that would protect the right to the procedure) he made this comment:

We want beautiful babies in our country! We want you to have your beautiful, beautiful, perfect baby. We want those babies and we need them.

We want those babies and we need them? Who is we? And why do we need them?

Has he been chatting with JD Vance? Because while Trump may just be clumsily trying to finesse the abortion issue and shrink the massive gender gap with his creepy rhetoric, Vance has some very well developed thoughts on that issue.

As we all know, Vance has extreme contempt for childless women. In fact, in his view they are to blame for many of the problems in modern life because they are, you guessed it, so unhappy:

That wasn’t a one-off comment. This is something he has thought deeply about and (at least for the moment, until he changes his identity again) it’s something that very much informs his political philosophy. He believes that women who don’t bear children should not be full citizens and perhaps aren’t even fully human. Like his close pals at the Heritage Foundation who put together Project 2025, his platform is one which would give massive government incentives only to heterosexual couples with large families while also discouraging outside child care. (Who needs it when mom stays home and the otherwise useless post-menopausal grandma is forced to help?)

Vance’s contempt has caught on big in GOP circles. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Arkansas’ Aunt Lydia from the Handmaid’s Tale, made a snide comment the other day about Kamala Harris not having birthed her own children. (She’s a stepmother to two kids.) And Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno whined over the weekend about suburban women wanting to have abortion all the time — and wondering why any woman over 50 would care. It’s catching on.

Much of this is just good old fashioned sexism and patriarchal yearning but there is more to it than that. Vance has been pushing pronatalism for some time, which gets us back to Trump’s blathering about how he wants women to be happy and content so they can have beautiful babies because “we need babies.”

A couple of months ago the New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot wrote a long, definitive piece on Vance’s pronatalist views which she defined this way:

Pronatalism typically combines concerns about falling birth rates with anti-immigration and anti-feminist ideas. It champions not just having children but having many—large families for the sake of large families, reproduction for reproduction’s sake. Except that, in this world view, not all reproduction is equal. Pronatalism favors native-born baby makers.

Now it makes more sense, doesn’t it? Vance’s hostility to women who haven’t given birth fits right in with the rest of this pronatalist agenda, particularly when it comes to immigration and the Great Replacement Theory which pushes for native-born women to have more children to alleviate the need for immigrant labor which pollutes the culture. It also keeps women in their place which is just as important as keeping the bloodlines pure.

This is yet another example of the influence of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán on the politics of the far right in America. Vance is a big fan and has endorsed Orbán’s policies to raise Hungary’s birth rate (and marginalize non-traditional families, particularly those that are blended and LGBTQ+.) Vance may not be the only influential member of the far right pushing these views (Tucker Carlson is another) but he’s probably the most powerful elected politician in America to make it a central part if his philosophy.

I doubt seriously that Donald Trump has even the slightest awareness of the ideological underpinnings of the speeches he’s giving about being women’s “protector” and saying “we need babies.” He’s not exactly an intellectual. But whoever is writing them certainly is and that person is pushing a JD Vance/Project 2025 agenda whether Trump knows it or not.

Salon

“We’d be crucified … if we did that”

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 25, 2024

How far he’s come from humble beginnings

I lived for a stretch in Sen. Lindsey Graham’s one-stoplight hometown in South Carolina. He tended bar in the restaurant/bar/pool hall/liquor store his parents owned. A neighbor was converting an old church into a home and building a second floor out over the sanctuary (above). Checking Google Maps, there’s nothing left now of the decrepit “ghost house” we lived in but the foundation. They’ve moved the police department and post office out of “downtown.” Built some apartments for university kids. Not a lot else has changed.

But Lindsey Graham sure has. From The ReidOut blog:

Appearing on Fox News, Sen. Lindsey Graham tried his hardest to separate Donald Trump from the controversy surrounding North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson. The South Carolina Republican is predictably standing by his man Trump, but the irony in his excuses is too obvious to ignore.

CNN reported last week that Robinson, whom Trump has called “Martin Luther King on steroids,” had once described himself as a Black Nazi and longed for the return of slavery on a pornographic website’s message board; Robinson has denied making the posts.

Graham said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” over the weekend that Robinson must defend himself. Speaking with Sean Hannity a day later, he sounded ready to throw Robinson under the bus.

Democrats are “trying to make people believe that Donald Trump somehow’s involved with Mar— with the Robinson guy,” Graham said, obscuring Robinson’s name.

Of course, it’s not all that hard to make people believe Trump is somehow involved with Robinson, considering that the former president has endorsed him and repeatedly praised him — and even held a fundraiser for him at Mar-a-Lago.

Graham also told Hannity: “It would be unfair to say that somebody you wrote a letter about or even your own pastor — you own every stupid thing they did. We’d be crucified politically if we did that.”

Ja’han Jones continues:

Of course, Republicans did do what Graham described — to Barack Obama, when they attacked the then-presidential candidate in 2008 over remarks made by Jeremiah Wright, his pastor at the time.

Wright and Robinson are not one and the same. But it’s worth noting that Obama ultimately did denounce Wright. And Republicans still sought to use Wright as a cudgel to attack him years later.

It’s exhausting to even point out the hypocrisy anymore. They have no shame. In its place is breathtaking enmity towards immigrants.

(h/t BF)

They Love The Smell Of Ethnic Cleansing In The Morning

Published by digby on September 24, 2024

Trump has a new chant at his rallies: “Send Them Back!” Isn’t that great?

Former president Donald Trump continued attacking the immigrant population in an Ohio town during a campaign rally Monday in Pennsylvania, saying, “You have to get them the hell out.”

As Trump spoke in Indiana, Pa., the crowd chanted, “Send them back!”

For weeks now, Trump has singled out Springfield, Ohio, over its Haitian population, echoing baseless claims that immigrants are eating pets and calling the immigrants illegal, despite their legal status. His attacks have upended life in the small town, where the Republican mayor has pleaded for civility amid bomb threats and event cancellations for security reasons.

Trump made his latest comments about Springfield at Monday’s rally while accusing Democrats of wanting to “inundate Pennsylvania communities” with migrants, “changing the character of small towns and villages all over our country and changing them forever.”

We’ve collected Harris’s and Trump’s stances on the most important issues including abortion, economic policy, immigration and more.

“Do you think Springfield will ever be the same?” Trump said. “The fact is — and I’ll say it now — you have to get them the hell out. You have to get them out. I’m sorry. Get them out. Can’t have it. … They’ve destroyed it.”

Trump’s campaign promoted a video clip of Trump’s comments on X.

After the chants, Trump added: “It’s terrible to say, and it’s a tough thing to do.”

Trump has long promised mass deportations in his 2024 campaign for the White House, though he has not provided much detail. And his comments Monday appeared to continue conflating the situation in Springfield with concerns about illegal immigration.

“What’s going on in Springfield is just fundamentally different,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) said in a recent TV interview. “These people are here legally. They came to work. These are good people.”

Today he said:

The language is French but I don’t expect Trump has ever heard of it.

He wants to ethnically cleanse America of foreign born people from the countries he has deemed to be shitholes. (He won’t be hunting down Norwegian or German tourists or students who have overstayed their visas I’m quite sure.) Don’t kid yourself. That’s what his mass deportation plan is. And frankly, he doesn’t care about the citizenship status of any of these people, particularly not the minor American children of undocumented immigrants who he plans to deport along with their parents.

And don’t be sure the country will rise up en masse against this. Most Republicans think the constitutions shouldn’t provide citizenship for anyone born here in the first place. And according to at least one recent poll, a majority of Americans are in favor of the ethnic cleansing program.

This is a real threat, I hope people realize it. Most of the country has been brainwashed into believing that immigrants are the source of all their problems. They will enjoy seeing them suffer.