Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Here is another piece of Michael Podhorzer’s in-depth analysis of the election using some of the very reliable vote cast data. He finds that the problem is not that voters moved right — Trump got essentially the same proportion of the electorate he got in 2020 — it’s that a lot of Democrats decided not to vote, especially in Blue states. There may have been many reasons for the loss but it does not appear that it was a rousing endorsement of Trumpy fascism.

One reason this happened is because Trump the pathological liar has the benefit of people not believing anything he says, which I would never have thought would be an asset for a politician but here we are:

The Credulity Chasm

Anat Shenker-Osorio coined the term “credulity chasm” to describe the consistent finding that what separated Harris voters from those who made a different choice – whether sitting out the election, selecting Trump, or voting third party – was not an attraction to the Project 2025 MAGA Agenda. Rather, it was the presence or absence of alarm around what a second Trump administration would portend – more specifically, whether or not voters believed the MAGA Agenda would actually come to fruition, as Anat detailed in her post-election analysis.

In Navigator’s large sample election survey, respondents were asked whether each of six claims about a second Trump Administration “raised legitimate concerns,” were “over the top and exaggerated,” or were criticisms that the respondent hadn’t heard before: 

• Trump would only cut taxes for the wealthy and big corporations
• Trump would implement the Project 2025 agenda
• Trump would ban abortion nationwide
• Trump would cut Social Security and Medicare
• Trump would act like a dictator and ignore the Constitution
• Trump would put our national security at risk, as respected military and national security leaders have said

Those who had heard any of those criticisms – whether they believed them or not – favored Harris by an average of 8 points, while Harris lost those who had not heard the criticisms by an average of 49 points. Moreover, specific groups that moved the most away from Democrats, such as blue collar workers, young men, moderates, etc., were all much more likely to have not heard those criticisms. That’s likely the tip of the iceberg, though. Since we don’t have surveys of those who didn’t vote, we can only speculate on how much more unlikely it might be that non-voters in those Democratic-leaning demographic groups heard those critiques, let alone took them seriously.

The Post-election Research Collaborative/ASO Communications findings confirm that what separates Harris and Trump voters is their willingness to believe Trump will carry out his plans on abortion, Social Security, oligarchy, suppression of speech, and so on.

As Anat tells it: “Consider the following post-election survey results. At minimum 71% and up to 82% of Harris voters believe a host of negative things await us, from a national abortion ban to cutting Social Security to slashing public school funding. In contrast, under a third to as few as 16% of Trump voters think these things are likely. Note that if these Trump voters were actually excited about these plans, far more of them would credit them as likely to come to fruition. Folks in this sample who didn’t vote are more clued into the dangers the Trump administration now poses, but they are a minimum of 30 points under Harris voters on every question in this vein.”

Anat adds: “Further, as we heard from this cohort across focus groups, they’re skeptical that electing Democrats would actually prove an effective check on MAGA’s power.”

This is the one-two punch that knocked out Harris’s chances this year: disaffection with Democrats, combined with incredulity at the idea that Trump might actually implement the worst parts of the MAGA agenda.

Why did they think the Democrats would be an ineffective check? Podhorzer doesn’t offer a lot of speculation but I think it is probably a combination of people not hearing about Democratic accomplishments (any more than they heard about Trump threats) and the fact that the Party was led by an old man and a Black woman which, for far too many people, translates into weakness. I could be wrong about that but sadly, I doubt it.

The full piece is well worth reading. It challenges some of the current thinking in unusual ways.

I’ ve been reading some of the reporting on the Las Vegas Tesla suicide attack and it just gets weirder and weirder. I won’t go into all the crazy stuff out there right now about Chinese drones and Afghan war crimes because it all seems way too out there to even analyze at the moment. You can click that link if you’re curious.

But there is some easily verified stuff in the attacker’s “manifesto” that’s been released that isn’t getting any coverage and it’s ridiculous. Yes, he was obviously a disturbed man who suffered from PTSD after many deployments. He needed mental health help that he reportedly didn’t obtain from the military for fear of losing his position as a special forces specialist.

But he was also a radicalized, red-pilled MAGA cultist little different than the ISIS radicalized former vet who killed all those people in New Orleans. Josh Marshall writes:

[A]t least for the moment there is a pretty striking lack of attention to the political motives he expressed in at least two documents or what I guess we might call minifestos that investigators found on his iphone.

They denounce Democrats and demand they be “culled” from Washington, by violence if necessary, and hopes his death will serve as a kind of bell clap for a national rebirth of masculinity under the leadership of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy Jr.

Did you miss that stuff? Yeah, me too!

In the headlines the latest news has only been that he warned of national decline and bore “no ill will toward Mr. Trump” in the words of one of the investigators. That gloss on Donald Trump is, shall we say, a bit of an understatement as you can see in these excerpts.

Military and vets move on DC starting now. Militias facilitate and augment this activity.
Occupy every major road along fed buildings and the campus of fed buildings by the hundreds of thousands.
Lock the highways around down with semis right after everybody gets in. Hold until the purge is complete.
Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary. They all must go and a hard reset must occur for our country to avoid collapse.

We must end the war in Ukraine with negotiated settlement. It is the only way.
Focus on strength and winning. Masculinity is good and men must be leaders. Strength is a deterrent and fear is the product.

Stop obsessing over diversity. We are all diverse and DEI is a cancer.
Thankfully we rejected the DEI candidate and will have a real President instead of Weekend at Bernie’s.

Consider this last sunset of ‘24 and my actions the end of our sickness and a new chapter of health for our people. Rally around the Trump, Musk, Kennedy, and ride this wave to the highest hegemony for all Americans! We are second to no one.

I encourage you to read the two minifestos all the way through. They’re not long. I excerpted at least half above. You can find them here.

I cannot see how that is any less newsworthy because the man may have had mental health problems than the New Orleans killer’s ISIS inspiration. He obviously had mental health issues too, as do many mass killers and suicide bombers. Ideology is relevant in these stories or it isn’t. In this case it seems pretty clear that among other things, he believed he was striking a blow for Donald Trump and Elon Musk — the symbolism was obvious.

Marshall reports:

I should note they capture what we might call the ideologically polyglot – or what appears to many of us as ideologically polyglot – thinking of many of these people. He also rails against the 1%, excessive screen time for kids, wars with no clear strategic purpose, obesity. We should also note explicitly that Livelsberger can both be a violent extremist and a victim of PTSD and in a broader sense part of the human collateral damage of the wars that occupied the US military through the first two decades of the 21st century. Our minds should be big enough for both those realities. But the through-line is pretty clear: If you’re a Democrat or someone who is Democrat-coded Livilsberger’s version of national rebirth probably isn’t a fun one for you.

At least when I looked last night the only places I saw these parts of Livelsberger’s writings in any detail were relatively obscure publications. I was worried that maybe they were hoax documents that had somehow found their way into a few publications. So I traced them back to yesterday’s police press conference. They are indeed real.

As a final point let me return to the question we’ve discussed over the last few days: what was the political message of torching a Cybertruck in front of a Trump hotel? He actually answers that more or less clearly in the second minifesto: “This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wake up call. Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence. What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives?”

He was making a statement. He says so. There is no good reason why the media is refusing to make that clear.

In this video, Tulsi Gabbard pledges her undying love and devotion to her guru Chris Butler who, as reported in the New Yorker, asks his followers to eat his toenails as a gesture of devotion. pic.twitter.com/GMjO26TBNI

— I was warning about this back in 2005. (@brucewilson) January 3, 2025

Wonkette took a look at Gabbard’s cult in its inimitable fashion:

The group is called Science of Identity Foundation (SIF), founded by an acid-dropping white surfer guy named Chris Butler, AKA Guru Dev Srila Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, AKA Jagad Guru, AKA Sai Young, in the 1970s, as an offshoot of the Hare Krishnas, AKA the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. 

Butler got his start as a guru teaching mediation and yoga, and was drawn to the Krishnas, but he didn’t want to shave his head or wear robes or do other Hare Krishna stuff. So he founded his own thing, which involved him living with two dozen 18-to-22-year-olds in a Quonset hut under a freeway, beating bongos and arranging his followers’ marriages.

Two of his hut-dwellers were Tulsi Gabbard’s parents, Mike and Carol, who joined the group in 1983. After they got married they built an altar to him in their house. According to Mike’s sister, they were “bowing and prostrating to this white surfer guy — it was bizarre.” Butler taught the group that outsiders were not to be trusted, and was paranoid that the mainstream Hare Krishnas were trying to kill him. Like Chuck McGill in “Better Call Saul” he had a fear of electromagnetic radiation, and places he stayed when he traveled were lined with tinfoil. He was a hypochondriac, and at one point he accused disciples of poisoning him through light bulb fumes. 

Followers were not allowed to learn from any other guru but him, and children in the group were homeschooled. Later SIF created schools in the Philippines, which Gabbard attended for two years. There the day began at 4:30 a.m. with a cold bucket shower, and the curriculum included “sexually graphic, deeply homophobic lectures,” and encouragement to worship Butler and his wife Wai Lana as messengers of God. Name sound familiar? She’s the yoga lady from public television! Maybe you’ve seen her videos before.

[…]

Here’s a description of the group from the New Yorker:

Defectors tell stories of children discouraged by Butler from attending secular schools; of followers forbidden to speak publicly about the group; of returning travellers quarantined for days, lest they transmit a contagious disease to Butler; of devotees lying prostrate whenever he entered the room, or adding bits of his nail clippings to their food, or eating spoonfuls of sand that he had walked upon. 

Ew. A former follower wrote on Medium:

I was raised to believe Chris Butler was God’s voice on earth, and if you questioned him or offended him in any way, you were effectively offending God, and because we believed in reincarnation, that meant that you would be reborn as the lowest lifeform imaginable and then have to spend eon’s [sic] working your way back into God’s good graces. 

Reported another former follower, Robin Marshall: “They told us: ‘We don’t associate with f**s’,’ using a homophobic slur. The hatred, the degrading language, it was just one thing after another.. […] They said he could read your mind. They were wholly and fully indoctrinated into this idea that Chris Butler was basically God.”

The group had financial ambitions: in Hawaii, group members worked on the group’s farm for free, and its financial arm, QI Group, runs the Hawaiian Down to Earth grocery store chain, which is registered as a 501(c)(3) religious charity. Internationally, member have been accused of ripping people off in illegal pyramid schemes in at least 10 countries.

And the group had political ambitions, running candidates for local office. Tulsi’s father Mike became a state senator, and an anti-gay-rights activist. Mom Carol was on the Hawai’i State Board of Education, even though Tulsi never attended public school.   

[…]

In 2019, writer Christine Gralow showed up to a Gabbard town hall and asked her some questions about Syria, and the sect members in attendance did not like that. Her site was bombed with DDOS attacks, and members of the group showed up at her home, taking pictures. Gralow’s reporting on the group is fascinating, and if you want more details, you should totally read it. 

Read the whole Wonkette story for the full rundown. Gabbard is a true weirdo, and not just because she belongs to a fringe cult, although that’s plenty weird. (It’s not a real Hindu sect, it’s a cult run by an American con man who is grooming people for political power.)

I just can’t get past the fact that a totally unqualified gadfly who also happens to be a serious member of a cult has been nominated to a job that oversees all of America’s intelligence agencies. It’s mind boggling.

Via Raw Story:

Politico reported Friday evening that Johnson securing the 218 votes necessary to be speaker came with conditions. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who is a member of the arch-conservative House Freedom Caucus, told the outlet that there would be potential “consequences” for the speaker if he failed to uphold his end of the bargain on certain sticking points

“Let’s make no mistake about it. There will be things that are, in fact, red lines that we need to deliver,” Roy said, referencing Johnson’s reliance on Democratic votes to push a must-pass government funding bill across the finish line in late December. “We can have no more of the nonsense that happened before Christmas.”

They changed the rule on the Motion to Vacate to require 9 votes to take out the Speaker. Roy pointed out that there were 9 votes that objected in one way or another to the speaker yesterday. He said there were more ready to join in if Johnson didn’t do exactly what they wanted him to do.

It’s not going to be pretty. But nobody deserves it more than this wrecking crew.

Whiny baby actually induced someone to ask if Biden would rescind the order:

And then … what the hell? Is he on drugs?

On serving honorably

With deep irony, Phil Klay, a novelist and a Marine Corps and Iraq war veteran, describes Donald Trump as “the least hypocritical president of my adult life.” The flag-hugging con man holds nothing sacred, defends no American values or principles. Asked about the nation’s military policy in Iraq, Trump’s response was “take the oil.” Twice.

“A dumb answer, but a clear one,” Klay observes. “What a thing to ask soldiers to fight for.” But it was “bracing cynicism” that was “almost refreshing.” Even if it repudiates Americans’ belief, despite our failings, that when the country goes to war it must conduct itself and fight honorably.

Trump famously considers those who serve honorably “suckers.”

Klay recalls his Marine training (gift link):

When I started Marine training, our instructors constantly harangued us candidates about the core military virtues and told story after story of past heroes who had lived them. For men and women to trust their lives to one another in combat, you need a shared set of values and commitments, which is why all great militaries teach their recruits something closer to religious devotion than business calculation.

[…]

So the incoming Trump administration isn’t offering our military a moral purpose. “People will not fight for abstractions,” Mr. Vance claimed at the Republican National Convention; they’ll fight only to defend their homeland. It’s a smaller vision, fitting for a country that has lost faith in itself.

Naturally, Trump’s Fox News choice for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, troubles Klay. Especially Hegseth’s advocacy with Trump on behalf of “three men accused or convicted of war crimes.”

Klay provides details you can read for yourselves about the case of Clint Lorance, whom Trump pardoned. Seeing Lorance’s depravity celebrated by right-wing media broke the faith of another veteran from his unit. Some of Trump’s skepticism of overseas military adventurism is justified, Klay believes, but “a military with neither moral purpose nor a commitment to moral conduct is a military that fights without honor.”

But what deepened the unsettled feeling in my stomach was a Klay statement that recalled the dystopian comedy Idiocracy (2006).

Yes, we’ve often betrayed our faith, “but that’s not the same as saying that it should be or that it always will be,” Klay explains:

I choose to believe in an America that might honor that faith…. How else to respond to an age of cynicism than to point out, steadily, without undue histrionics, that Americans have proved capable of more in the past and they can prove capable of more in the future?

Idiocracy :

Pvt. Joe Bowers: [addressing Congress] … And there was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn’t just for fags and neither was writing. People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting, and I believe that time can come again!

God help us. Yes, we can and should do better. But we’ll never get better without a reckoning over the Jan. 6 insurrection and other structural –isms, without a truth and reconciliation commission process, as some recommend (and not the sort Trump wants), that comes to terms with the dark place where Trumpism and its cultural underpinnings have led us.

What will you see?

Perhaps you noticed?

C-Span operator swept their cameras about the U.S. House chamber on Friday during the vote to reelect Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) as Speaker. A huddle of white Republican men gathered here. A diverse cluster of Democractic women gathered for a selfie there. The cameras opened up the proceding, untethered from their normally fixed gaze. This is typical during a State of the Union Address but not House business as usual.

Heather Cox Richardson took note in her Letters from an American substack:

Today a new Congress, the 119th, came into session. As Annie Karni of the New York Times noted, Americans had a rare view into the floor action of the House because the party in control sets the rules for what parts of the House floor viewers can see. Without a speaker, there is no party in charge to set the rules, so the C-SPAN cameras recording the day could move as their operators wished.

They did. Limiting what the public can can see of the House chamber will return soon enough. Limiting what you can see is already happening elsewhere.

Over at The Washington Post, editors were deciding what their subscribers would see. Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes announced her resignation after the opinions page rejected a cartoon depicting Post owner Jeff Bezos genuflecting with a sack of money before a statue of President-elect Donald J. Trump. She’d worked at The Post for 16 years.

Telnaes writes on her substack:

I’ve worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations—and some differences—about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.

The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump.

Figures in the sketch represent Meta founder, Mark Zuckerberg; Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of The Los Angeles Times; Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI; Mickey Mouse, the official spokesmouse of the Walt Disney Company; and Jeff Bezos, The Post’s owner.

David Shipley, The Post’s opinions editor, told reporters he disagreed with her interpretation of events (The New York Times):

“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” Mr. Shipley said in the statement. “My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition.”

Owners of press outlets “are responsible for safeguarding that free press— and trying to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting will only result in undermining that free press,” Telnaes counters:

While it isn’t uncommon for editorial page editors to object to visual metaphors within a cartoon if it strikes that editor as unclear or isn’t correctly conveying the message intended by the cartoonist, such editorial criticism was not the case regarding this cartoon. To be clear, there have been instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary. That’s a game changer…and dangerous for a free press.

Efforts are already afoot by Trump and MAGA Republicans to rewrite recent history the way Sourtherners spread the Lost Cause myth. The proliferation of disinformation via social media and gimlet-eyed lying into cameras by “Christians” like Johnson further threaten to dissolve external reality under Americans’ feet until “Democracy dies in darkness.”

Men like those Telnaes depicts are lining up to be accessories.

A new internet star is born: Tupi the baby capybara!

I co-sign this:

To all of you internet addicts like me, I hereby gift you with this marvelous piece by Chris Hayes in the NY Times. He talks about The Attention Economy”, which is the subject of his new book.

An excerpt:

In the wake of Donald Trump’s second electoral victory, a viral tweet from October 2016 once again started circulating: “i feel bad for our country. But this is tremendous content.”

That probably seemed funnier before child separation and Covid. (Indeed, in 2020 Darren Rovell, who wrote it, posted, “Four years later. There is nothing tremendous about this content. I’m just sad.”) But for many millions of Americans, perhaps including the crucial slice of swing voters who moved their votes to the Republican nominee in 2024, Mr. Trump is the consummate content machine. Love him or hate him, he sure does keep things interesting. I’ve even wondered if, at some level, this was the special trick he used to eke out his narrow victory: Did Americans elect him again because they were just kind of bored with the status quo?

I have no doubt about it! Yes, Trump voters are bored with normal politics (I think we all are to some extent, but most of us kind of like it that way.) That’s especially true of the “inconsistent” ones who only come out to vote for him, see him as a celebrity and they vote for him the way they would vote for “American Idol” or “Dancing With The Stars.” His star status is definitely a huge part of his special sauce.

But that’s not Hayes’ point. He’s talking about the feeling of boredom in modern life and I confess that I have never felt it in my life until the last few years and I think it’s solely a result of my massive amount of time spent on the internet. I can almost feel the neural pathways in my brain changing.

Yet we feel this restlessness; we lament our shrinking attention spans. But to focus on a relatively narrow question of technical measures of our attention span misses a deeper truth. The restlessness and unease of our times aren’t simply, in my experience, the vertigo of distraction and distractibility. No, that experience is itself a symptom caused by some deeper part of the unsettled self. The endless diversion offered to us in every instant we are within reach of our phones means we never have to do the difficult work of figuring out how to live with our own minds.

What follows is a rather beautiful, philosophical observation about the power that boredom has over us (and has had long before the advent of smartphones) and the benefit of learning how to find ways to feel comfortable inside your own head. Highly recommend. And I can’t wait to read the book. I have a feeling he has some interesting thoughts on how this relates to our current political predicament…