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Month: October 2024

This Is What You’ll Get America

Published by digby on October 11, 2024

Vance is interviewed by the NY Times and he will still not say if the 2020 election was stolen. Instead he carries on about censorship again.

Even the dumbest cultist can see that this weird dodge doesn’t make sense. But he’s committed.

I wish they would have asked him about this, however. It’s in their own paper:

After a reporter’s publication of hacked Trump campaign information last month, the campaign connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the platform, according to two people with knowledge of the events. X eventually blocked links to the material and suspended the reporter’s account.

That’s right. Elon Musk censored material about Trump in coordination with the Trump campaign.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Suddenly, It’s Not The Economy Anymore

Published by digby on October 11, 2024

Are people talking about it much? Not really. But the good news does seem to have caught up with some voters at least.

Cathrine Rampell at the Washington Post writes:

How good is the U.S. economy these days? So good that Republicans are pretending the numbers are fake.

GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump has long held a lead over his Democratic rival on economic issues, but lately the gap has narrowed. In the spring, when President Joe Biden was still on the ticket, Trump held a roughly 12-point edge on the economy. Today, Trump remains ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris, but she’s cut that margin in half.

Some recent surveys have even found the candidates in a dead heat on economic issues. A recent Cook Political Report poll of swing state voters, for instance, found Trump’s advantage on “inflation and the cost of living” had evaporated completely.

This is remarkable. For most of the past decade, voters overwhelmingly trusted Republicans more on economic issues. They’ve been bummed about the economy during the Biden-Harris administration, often citing the economy or inflation as their top issue.

So how has Harris narrowed the gap?

Trump probably hasn’t helped his case by pitching ever-higher global tariffs, which would probably be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. Independent economic analyses have also found that the rest of his agenda (mass deportations, politicizing the Federal Reserve, etc.) would probably worsen inflation and depress growth. The downstream consequences of these policies are not always intuitive, however, so they might not have influenced voters’ perceptions of Trump’s economic agenda all that much.

Trump’s struggles to remember his pitch might have played a role, too. At a recent Michigan event, for instance, a voter asked how he’d keep auto manufacturing jobs in the state. He responded with a rant about a nonexistent “Michigan man of the year” award he apparently hallucinated receiving.

Meanwhile, Harris has managed a “pivot” on the economy. Her policy approach has been directionally similar to Biden’s (she has proposed higher taxes for the wealthy, manufacturing subsidies, a more generous child tax credit, punishing greedy corporations, and so on). Her tone or word choices so far appear more successful than Biden’s, though. As Ben Mathis-Lilley recently wrote in Slate, Harris has subtly shifted public discourse away from past “inflation” and toward a more forward-looking discussion of the “cost of living.”

But the biggest reason for Trump’s shrinking lead on the economy may have little to do with either candidate: The U.S. economy is just doing spectacularly well.

According to the polling, most people still believe it’s terrible even if more people think that Harris will be acceptable as the steward of it over that failed, orange ignoramus. But I think we know that if the orange ignoramus wins, it will suddenly be great because he will take credit for everything that’s happened. He always does.

In 1984, Reagan declared that it was morning in America with much worse numbers than we have now. The inflation we had just been through had been truly horrific with high unemployment on top of it. But people were sick of feeling bad after the years of Vietnam and Watergate and oil shocks and cultural turmoil. Maybe we’re running a little late on that but are getting there. God, I hope so because if Trump wins, the whole thing is going to fall apart.

Trump’s Plan B

Published by digby on October 11, 2024
YT

In every losing campaign’s postmortem the analysts insist that the candidate should have gone where he or she did not. There were many complaints about Vice President Al Gore spending time in California late in the race when he should have been stumping in Florida and I’m sure everyone recalls that Hillary Clinton was excoriated for taking Wisconsin and Michigan for granted in 2016 by failing to hold events there in the closing days of the campaign. Certainly, it’s a general rule of thumb that in close elections, the candidates are supposed to live in the battleground states, especially in the final weeks to eke out every last vote in the electoral college.

So why in the world is Donald Trump holding rallies in the blue enclaves of California, New York and Colorado in the month of October? As far as we can tell, the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada are all close and various combinations of those states will be required to get to 270 electoral votes. And yet Trump will be wasting time in these other states for reasons that are obscure.

One explanation that’s been offered is that Trump just wants to have rallies in highly populated areas because he gets bigger crowds simply because of the population density and he just loves those bigger crowds. After all, he’s not going to win New Jersey but he had a giant rally there last summer that he can’t stop bragging about. (I think the size of the crowd in his mind is probably up to a million people by now but it was actually about 30-40,000.)

As New York boy, Madison Square Garden has no doubt always been on his bucket list. And it is a natural choice since it was the site of a famous America First Nazi rally in 1939 featuring a huge picture of George Washington surrounded by Nazi flags. It’s the perfect place for a sequel. I’m sure very fine people will be in attendance.

Coachella is renowned as a major music festival and Trump likes to say he draws more than Elvis or Springsteen so if he manages to get a good crowd he can brag about that on a loop too. And Aurora Colorado is the site of the alleged migrant “invasion” taking over the town and threatening everyone with MK47 Mutant rifles so he figures the optics will be awesome.

A Trump advisor told NBC News:

“Choosing high-impact settings makes it so the media can’t look away and refuse to cover the issues and the solutions President Trump is offering. We live in a nationalized media environment and the national media’s attention on these large-scale, outside-the-norm settings increases the reach of his message across the country and penetrates in every battle ground state.”

Maybe they’re right. But a whole lot of money, time and effort will go into those three events, things that are precious resources in the last weeks of the campaign all for what amounts to an experiment. Sometimes you get the feeling that Trump is just in a YOLO frame of mind and nobody can stop him.

After all, Trump may just see himself in a win-win situation. If he manages to eke out an electoral victory, it will naturally be the greatest victory the world has ever seen. And if he loses, it will also be the greatest victory the world has ever seen except it will have been stolen by the Democrats. Everyone in America knows that he believes these are the only two possibilities.

And he has persuaded the official Republican party to parrot his fatuous disclaimer that he will accept it if it’s “free and fair.”

And who decides that it was a free and fair election, one might ask? Well, first it will be Donald Trump and we know it can only be free and fair if he wins. He has said that outright:

Trump and his henchmen are working overtime to suppress the vote and may have enough saboteurs in place in some places to delay the counts and disallow some legal votes if things don’t go their way. But it’s is inevitable that he will contest the results regardless of the evidence. .

The Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA) foreclosed some of the shenanigans from 2020 and put in place some other procedures that will make the casesgo quickly and fit within the deadlines. Even the Supreme Court is required to comply within a certain period of time if they’re dragged into it, which is not unlikely.

But there may be ways that Mike Johnson, if he remains Speaker of the House, can have some input into this as well which may also explain why Trump is doing the two big rallies in New York and California. There are some very tight House races in those two states that may very well be decisive as to whether the Republican Mike Johnson or the Democrat Hakeem Jeffries, currently the minority leader, will be the speaker in the next Congress.

The Manhattan Borough President posted the following on Thursday:

The new congress is always sworn in on January 3rd so the speaker will be seated before the day the electoral votes are counted on January 6th. And that day could unfold in very different ways depending on who has the gavel.

You’ll recall that Mike Johnson, then just another GOP congressman, wrote a Supreme Court brief in 2020 that had the court agreed to take it up could have overturned the election results. When asked if he would do the same this time, he told Politico that his narrow concern at the time had to do with legislatures being usurped by officials who changed the rules to accommodate the pandemic and that it was no longer operative since the legislatures have made all the rules this time.

That does not answer the question as to whether he would file a different amicus brief on another issue such as the hysterical complaints this cycle that undocumented immigrants are voting, which they are not. But if the Trump people are able to gin up enough chaos around this issue, it’s possible that Johnson could decide to take some action.

But Politico asked the big question to which they had no answer: “Does Johnson believe that the Electoral Count Act itself is constitutional and binding on Congress? Trump’s allies in 2020 said it was not, and Johnson has not made his position clear.” Once could also ask if Johnson thinks the ECRA, which reformed the original and somewhat archaic law, is as well. Can any of us feel confident that he won’t say it isn’t?

All of this is to say that Trump seems to have a Plan B in mind if he loses the election again and he wants to make sure he’ll have a Republican House and Senate on January 6th, 2025 just in case they want to contest the transfer of power again. It’s almost as if he’s looking forward to it.

Remember, his campaign manager Chris LaCivita made it clear that they were prepared to contest all the way. He said, “It’s not over until he puts his hand on the Bible and takes the oath…. It’s not over on Election Day. It’s over on Inauguration Day, ‘cause I wouldn’t put anything past anybody.” I assume the Democrats understand this and are prepared for everything, right?

Salon

They Burn Witches, Don’t They?

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 11, 2024

It’s only a matter of time

Charlie Warzel is feaking out over the “depravity and nihilism” of MAGA’s hurricane lies:

Even in a decade marred by online grifters, shameless politicians, and an alternative right-wing-media complex pushing anti-science fringe theories, the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. As two catastrophic storms upended American cities, a patchwork network of influencers and fake-news peddlers have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment, and interfere with relief efforts. But this is more than just a misinformation crisis. To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.

This is nothing new. For the right, truth is no longer an American value. It hasn’t been for decades. MAGA types know spreading propaganda and lies is wrong and they don’t care. They simply have more channels for spreading it, and they’ve done so with glee since the days of pass-it-on emails.

It is difficult to capture the nihilism of the current moment. The pandemic saw Americans, distrustful of authority, trying to discredit effective vaccines, spreading conspiracy theories, and attacking public-health officials. But what feels novel in the aftermath of this month’s hurricanes is how the people doing the lying aren’t even trying to hide the provenance of their bullshit. Similarly, those sharing the lies are happy to admit that they do not care whether what they’re pushing is real or not. Such was the case last week, when Republican politicians shared an AI-generated viral image of a little girl holding a puppy while supposedly fleeing Helene. Though the image was clearly fake and quickly debunked, some politicians remained defiant. “Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter,” Amy Kremer, who represents Georgia on the Republican National Committee, wrote after sharing the fake image. “I’m leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right now.”

Kremer wasn’t alone. The journalist Parker Molloy compiled screenshots of people “acknowledging that this image is AI but still insisting that it’s real on some deeper level”—proof, Molloy noted, that we’re “living in the post-reality.” The technology writer Jason Koebler argued that we’ve entered the “‘Fuck It’ Era” of AI slop and political messaging, with AI-generated images being used to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment, regardless of truth.

Truthiness captured the ethos back in 2005. But its accelerant is the creation of infotainment platforms

… that offer financial and attentional incentives to lie and enrage, and to turn every tragedy and large event into a shameless content-creation opportunity. This collides with a swath of people who would rather live in an alternate reality built on distrust and grievance than change their fundamental beliefs about the world …

So much of the conversation around misinformation suggests that its primary job is to persuade. But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”

There’s little new about this phenomenon since the days when my father forwarded conservative pass-it-on spam with as many as 75 non-blind-copied addresses attached from multiple forwards. What’s changed is the reach of the lies. Their purpose is the same as 20 years ago:

Pass-it-on spams don’t ask people to write their congressman or senator. They don’t ask people to get involved in or contribute to a political campaign. Or even to make a simple phone call. No. Once you’ve had your daily dose of in-box outrage, conservative reader, all these propaganda pieces ask is that you “pass it on” to everyone you know. So now that you’re good and angry — and if you’re a Real American™ — you’ll share it with all your friends so they’ll get and stay angry too.

Warzel concludes:

What we’re witnessing online during and in the aftermath of these hurricanes is a group of people desperate to protect the dark, fictitious world they’ve built. Rather than deal with the realities of a warming planet hurling once-in-a-generation storms at them every few weeks, they’d rather malign and threaten meteorologists, who, in their minds, are “nothing but a trained subversive liar programmed to spew stupid shit to support the global warming bullshit,” as one X user put it. It is a strategy designed to silence voices of reason, because those voices threaten to expose the cracks in their current worldview. But their efforts are doomed, futile. As one dispirited meteorologist wrote on X this week, “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes.” She followed with: “I can’t believe I just had to type that.”

Burning witches didn’t stop people from experiencing misfortune or illness, but that’s where this is headed. The explanation for the behavior is as I’ve written before (in fact, over 30 years before). The New York Times is finally on the same page:

“It helps them to regain some measure of control and sense of order at a time when everything feels quite bleak and hopeless,” said Jennie King, who oversees climate disinformation research and policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that studies online platforms.

The intensity of Helene and Milton’s one-two punch has been difficult to fathom. For many, it has been easier to blame human villains.

Having a diabolical someone to blame is more comfort than admitting shit happens.

Welcome to Salem.

What The Hell, Indeed

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 11, 2024

Amplify what moves people

You all know about The Lincoln Project. Unlike traditional Democratic messaging, these former Republicans go for the gut, not the head. They released an ad this morning voiced by actor Ed O’Neill that caught me by surprise. See what I mean.

Like Barack Obama said last night (I’m paraphrasing), when did nonstop shitposting about America become a Republican campaign theme? When did lying to hungry, desperate hurricane victims become okay?

I’ve also mentioned the messaging team behind Amplify ads, tested for being able to move voters and free for you to customize. On Thursday, they sent the ad below. Here’s their description:

Hi Friends,

Tuesday marked 4 weeks until Election Day! Forget PSL. It’s all about GOTV!  To mark that milestone and power together for the homestretch push…

📲 Announcing our new 30 Day Content Countdown– join our Signal chat and check out the calendar here to make sure our message-tested content is visible to voters in this home stretch!  Invite your communities to join the Signal chat, let’s get LOUD!

💸 This week’s video draws a contrast between Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz on our economic wellbeing – and is strongly effective at moving vote choice and increasing Harris favorability among Spanish speaking voters. Share Antonio – available with English and Spanish captions.

It’s not their only Spanish/English ad.

This is an opportunity for you to be more than spectators in this last month. It’s why (confusingly) I’m on about a half dozen social media platforms. (I’m barely on Instagram.) Make your presence felt. Spread a progressive message widely. (You know the RW bots will spread theirs.)

And thank you for all the kind thoughts and your concern while I was on what felt like Planet Offline for a week after Hurricane Helene. In our connected world, disconnection was disorienting.

(Two weeks later, signal is still sometimes dodgy.)

“When Did That Become Ok?”

Published by digby on October 10, 2024

Barack Obama gave a barnburner of a speech in Pittsburgh tonight. It’s funny and pointed and very inspiring. This is the part Dan Pfeiffer calls the closing argument of the campaign.

I like it.

I thought this part was the most important, however. It seems so obvious but apparently it isn’t relevant to tens of millions of our fellow Americans. It’s a simple call for common decency.

You can watch the whole event here.

Checking In With Trump’s Oldest Pal

Published by digby on October 10, 2024

Interesting that Trump was just in Detroit today talking about how terrible Detroit is. I guess he’s just seeding the ground.

Bawk, Bawk, Bawk!

Published by digby on October 10, 2024

Trump the coward said today that there would absolutely be no debate because he knows that she wiped the floor with him and will be humiliated again. At this point he’s avoiding anything but his safe spaces. (Check out today’s Detroit Economic Club Q&A fluffing, for instance.) Harris, on the other hand, is everywhere:

Vice President Kamala Harris will participate in a town hall with CNN on Oct. 23, her campaign announced Thursday.

Harris’ participation comes after former President Donald Trump has declined to face the vice president in another debate before the Nov. 5 election. CNN also offered Trump a town hall, and his campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from POLITICO.

“Trump may want to hide from the voters, but Vice President Harris welcomes the opportunity to share her vision for a New Way Forward for the country. She is happy to accept CNN’s invitation for a live, televised town hall on October 23 in Pennsylvania,” Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement.

Trump recently declined an interview with “60 Minutes” and has been attacking CBS for its editing of a recent interview with Harris. Harris has done a slew of interviews with both traditional and non-traditional media in recent days, including an appearance on the podcast “Call Her Daddy.” Trump is also making the rounds, including a recent appearance on comedian Andrew Schulz’s podcast as well as spots on Fox News and other conservative media outlets.

I would be shocked if he agrees to do a CNN town hall. He’s obviously just trying to juice the base, period and may gather a few bros from podcasts that Don Jr listens to.

The alpha leader is actually a late Liberace weirdo who may not even care anymore if he wins legitimately. If he does, great. If he doesn’t he’ll contest the outcome and get his cult riled up. He sees it as win-win.

“Delinquent”

Published by digby on October 10, 2024

He did it again:

Can a reporter please, please please ask Trump to explain what he means when he says that NATO countries are “delinquent?” He clearly believes they are supposed to pay money to the “club” or maybe to him and doesn’t understand that the financial commitment is actually to commit a certain percentage of GDP to defense.

The truth is that he is hostile to Europe and has been for decades. They’re “laughing at us” and they gave him trouble with his golf courses. Europeans make him feel inferior. But clearly “NATO has to pay its dues” is the only policy idea he’s ever had so that’s what he’s gone with and nothing has changed in 8 long years.

And, it’s also clear, that his phone pal Vladimir Putin, has been telling him for years now to withdraw from NATO. As we know, Trump believes him over his own experts and staff.

BTW, only 8 out of the 31 countries are not currently meeting or exceeding their commitment and all of those are very close. When they fell short in the last decade it was largely due to the Great Recession caused by the financial crisis. Of course they should meet their commitments but Trump’s claims that they’ve always just been free riders is BS. It’s just that he’s is so ignorant about foreign policy and the world generally that it’s the only thing he can think of.

Yes, It’s A Cult

Published by digby on October 10, 2024

Today we have yet another GREAT piece by Rick Perlstein about our weird political culture. He takes a look at America’s current obsession with “cult-culture” as a way people are trying to explain our politics to themselves. Boy, do I relate to that. I’ve been reading books and studies and psychology papers as well as watching the movies and series Perlstein outlines in his piece. (He notes a few that I haven’t seen which I excitedly made note of for weekend binging.) I have been obsessed with this subject for the past few years for obvious reasons.

Here’s an excerpt but do read the whole thing if you’re as concerned about this phenomenon as I am:

THE ASSOCIATION OF TODAY’S REPUBLICAN PARTY and its luminous god-king Donald J. Trump with cults began almost as soon as his first presidential campaign did. But what would a docuseries about MAGA-as-cult—the one Netflix, Hulu, Max, or CNN would never produce, because that would make them unduly “partisan”—look like?

It could start with the truism that cult formation, as my binge-watch last week makes clear, works best among a population already primed for it: prosperity gospel evangelicals, psychedelic searchers, woo enthusiasts.

Or the modern Republican Party, since its capture by the conservative movement.

Amanda Montell, author of the bestseller Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, has a fun podcast called Sounds like a Cult, each weekly episode devoted to a phenomenon along a spectrum from obviously sickeningly and terrifying (the sex-slaver Keith Raniere; two documentary series about him, Max’s The Vow and Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult on Starz, both from 2020) to, well … really? (Though the episode on pickleball is surprisingly convincing.)

The episode on conservative youth activism is somewhere in between. It’s centered on an interview with an apostate, journalist Tiffany Nguyen, who got me thinking about one of those things us adolescents learned in our cult awareness trainings in the 1980s: Be wary of innocent-seeming, attractive-sounding inducements. Like a free vegetarian meal, which was how the Hare Krishnas got you, or a psychological reading, in the case of Scientology. Or a free journalism training summer camp. That is how aspiring scribes like Nguyen got hooked.

The name of the sponsor, the “Leadership Institute,” sounded no alarm bells; they’re usually bland. They advertised their value neutrally as well, noting their alumni who’d gone on to big print gigs (Malcolm Gladwell!) or the network news. The inducements into a world of us-vs.-them thinking come slowly, embedded in useful tips like what a lede is and how to do an interview. Dropping claims that only the right values free speech, and the left subverts it, might serve as a red flag, if you’re sophisticated—which is why, like so many cultish formations, the right prefers to scoop them up when they’re too young to know better.

In another cultish hallmark, novitiates move up a ladder of engagement, each new step a marker of trust that allows them to glimpse the entirety of the project. For Nguyen, that meant being placed with a mentor—who happened to be a white nationalist. Then, by the time they’re placed with a conservative organization, they’ll have accepted certain principles on faith: that they’re not merely reporting on the world but fighting evil, so the ends justify the means. They’ll be armed with an arsenal of what the pioneering scholar of coercive thought Robert Jay Lifton calls “thought-terminating clichés”—like, when in doubt, to ask a Democratic official what they think the definition of “woman” is.

Perlstein shows that the cultishness existed long before Donald Trump came along, which is super important. As with everything else in his life, he exploited something that was built by others, he didn'[t create it himself. It finally found its full potential when he showed up.

THE QUALITATIVE SHIFT THAT SIGNIFIES the post–Tea Party Republican Party as having finally passed into the realm of what I call fascism was the arrival of that missing piece, a leader taken as worthy of being worshipped, as if a prophet or saint or even God in the flesh. His “followers” experience him as a charismatic presence with mystical powers far beyond those of a normal being. Not merely someone who administers a government; someone who smites demons instead, cheating death through the grace of the Almighty.

The very stable genius said this just yesterday:

As Perlstein points out, these cult leaders always take their followers’ money, isolate them from their families, and their sexual exploitation and violence is always ignored or forgiven by the faithful flock. Sound familiar? It sure does to me.

Is this too much, roping together January 6th and the mass suicide at Jonestown? Well, one of the attractive things about Amanda Montell’s book and podcast is that she understands the word “cult” as a heuristic, that cultishness is a continuum, and always context-dependent. In the case of MAGA, Tina Nguyen and Montell point to its “very specific plan to effectuate a vision that makes no sense to outsiders.” Cults have a built-in sunk cost dynamic: They depend upon ingraining people so deep within them that they feel like nothing without the cult.

This is what I worry about. If Trump finally shuffles off to Mar-a-lago, what happens to the cult? Does it continue under other leaders? Sometimes they do.

Just read the whole thing. It’s important to know what we’re really dealing with here. It’s not politics, at least as we have understood them in the past. It’s got all the hallmarks of one of the all-American cults but it’s fascist at its core. And as Perlstein notes, all of that has been inexplicably normalized and those of us who are watching this with increasing horror are left sounding like the crazy people for pointing out.