Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

N.C. Republicans to write Americans out of America

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow opened her show Monday night with how North Carolina Republicans in the lame-duck session retooled a dentistry bill into one that would strip power from incoming Democrats who defeated GOP candidates for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, and superintendent of public instruction. The ploy is an obvious power grab, N.C. state Senator Dan Blue told Maddow. But there is more to it.

N.C. Republican legislators have among other things voted to strip the power to select State Board of Elections members from the incoming governor, Democrat Josh Stein, and reassigned it (and BoE budget control) to the incoming state auditor.* What’s the state auditor got to do with controlling the Board of Elections, you ask?

Dave Boliek is a MAGA Republican who won a seat in North Carolina’s executive branch. When in 2016 the lame-duck GOP legislature passed a series of bills to transfer executive powers to itself from the incoming governor, Democrat Roy Cooper, the state Supreme Court struck them down for violating the state constitution’s separation-of-powers provisions. But Boliek the auditor was elected on Nov. 5 to the executive branch. Problem solved!

Among the key state races North Carolina Republicans lost to Democrats this fall is the state Supreme Court seat held by Justice Allison Riggs, a former voting rights attorney who’s argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Her GOP opponent, Jefferson G. Griffin, led on Election Night by over 7,000 votes. But after counting absentee and provisional ballots in the days after Nov. 5, Riggs led by ~622 votes. Her statewide lead shrank minimally after a majority of counties completed their machine recounts on Monday. A hand recount is expected to begin the first week in December.

But Griffin is not done. In over 300 protest documents he filed a week ago, he demanded more:

Griffin requested a recount, which the State Board of Elections granted on Tuesday, saying it should be finished up by Nov. 27, the day before Thanksgiving. The results could change if state officials decide there’s merit to formal protests Griffin also filed on Tuesday, alleging that more than 60,000 people’s votes should not have been counted at all.

Votes by felons and voters who died before Election Day or who had registrations denied, Griffin argued, had been counted improperly, reports the Raleigh News and Observer:

While some of Griffin’s protests fall under more traditional categories for challenging voter eligibility, a substantial portion of them rely on legal theories put forward by Republican lawyers that have so far been rejected by state and federal courts.

But wait! There’s still more. Attorneys for Griffin on Monday filed public records requests with local Boards of Elections demanding “a list of voters who self-identified as having never lived in the United States” and who submitted “a Federal Write-in Absentee Ballot.” (I obtained a copy of the letter.)

Let’s be clear. North Carolina Republicans want these Americans’ votes thrown out, whatever black-letter law says about their eligibility to cast them and have them counted.

Some background:

North Carolina

A U.S. citizen who has never resided in the U.S. and has a parent or legal guardian that was last domiciled in North Carolina is eligible to vote in North Carolina.

The NC state statute is 163-258.1. Griffin and state Republicans are fishing for a loophole so they might disenfranchise enough expats — American citizens — to win the state Supreme Court seat Griffin just lost.

For reference: OUT OF THE 2.8 MILLION OVERSEAS CITIZENS ELIGIBLE TO VOTE, 3.4% VOTED IN 2022. That’s over 95,000 votes. North Carolina is the 9th most-populace state, 3 percent of U.S. population. If the percent of Americans living overseas and voting in N.C. is proportional to N.C. population, that’s potentially almost 2,900 votes. I don’t know how many expat voters claiming N.C. have never lived in the U.S., but Griffin and his colleagues are not above robbing them of their votes. Griffin trails Riggs by ~622 votes.

Democracy Docket:

The state’s Uniform Military and Overseas Voters Act (UMOVA) grants voter eligibility to voters who may not already be protected by Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA), a federal law granting some U.S. citizens overseas the right to vote. One provision of UMOVA allows individuals born overseas to parents or guardians who were North Carolina residents to vote in the state. These overseas voters are not required to have lived in North Carolina or the United States themselves. The plaintiffs argue this provision grants non-residents the right to vote, in violation of the state constitution, which grants the right to vote only to residents of North Carolina. They ask the court to permanently block the provision of UMOVA and declare it unconstitutional. They also request an order requiring election officials to stop processing ballots from any UMOVA voters suspected of non-residency, remove the option for these voters to request an absentee ballot, reject any new registrations from them and ensure none of their ballots are counted in any future elections unless they can provide identification that proves their residency. On Oct. 21, 2024, the trial court denied the plaintiffs’ motion for preliminary injunction. On Oct. 22, the plaintiffs filed their notice appealing this decision to the North Carolina Court of Appeals.

STATUS: On Oct. 29, 2024, the North Carolina Court of Appeals denied the plaintiffs’ petition for writ of supersedeas appealing the trial court’s denial of their motion for preliminary injunction. Individuals born overseas to parents or guardians who were North Carolina residents will be allowed to vote in North Carolina in the November election.

On Nov. 1, the Republican plaintiffs asked the North Carolina Supreme Court to pause the lower court’s ruling pending appeal and take up the case for review.

The conservative Carolina Journal adds:

“If Plaintiffs prevail on appeal, their constitutional claim threatens to strip untold numbers of voters — including military service members serving outside the State — of their right to participate fully in our State’s elections,” the elections board’s court filing continued. “This Court should reject Plaintiffs’ damaging request, just as the Court of Appeals did last week.”

“Plaintiffs’ petition asks this Court to throw out the ballots of U.S. citizens who cast their votes in compliance with the Uniform Military and Overseas Voters Act (UMOVA), a state statute passed unanimously by our General Assembly in 2011,” lawyers representing the state elections board wrote Monday. “Plaintiffs insist their challenge is limited to a small group of U.S. citizens who have never actually lived in the United States. But Plaintiffs’ legal argument cannot be so easily contained.”

DNC lawyers also asked the state Supreme Court to reject Republicans’ request.

The NC GOP means to win by any means necessary, no matter whose rights they violate.

Watch your backs, Dear Readers. They will stop at nothing.

* Sitting Gov. Roy Cooper will likely veto the measure just as surely as Republicans will try to override that veto before they lose their veto-proof majority in January.

Brian Stelter has the story:

Elon Musk has called MSNBC “the utter scum of the Earth.” He has said the channel “peddles puerile propaganda.” Just a few days ago he said, “MSNBC is going down.” And now he is posting memes about buying the channel.

Conventional wisdom holds that Musk — the world’s richest man and key Donald Trump ally — and his friends are just joking. But Musk’s posts are adding to the anxiety that MSNBC staffers are feeling about the reelection of Donald Trump and the recently announced spinoff of Comcast’s cable channels.

I spent Sunday on the phone with sources to gauge what might be going on. I learned that more than one benevolent billionaire with liberal bonafides has already reached out to acquaintances at MSNBC to express interest in buying the cable channel. The inbound interest was reassuring, one of the sources said, since it showed that oppositional figures like Musk (who famously bought Twitter to blow it up) would not be the only potential suitors.

But contrary to claims that Trump’s allies are posting on X, Comcast has not put a “for sale” sign on MSNBC’s door. If Comcast chief Brian Roberts really wanted to sell the liberal cable news channel, he could have done that already. Instead, he is moving MSNBC and a half dozen other cable channels into “SpinCo,” a pure-play cable programming company. The hope is that spinning off the pressured-but-profitable channels will boost shares of both Comcast and “SpinCo.”

Comcast says the transaction will take about a year. At that point, could someone swoop in with a bid for MSNBC? It’s complicated. “SpinCo” is structured as a tax-free spinoff, and immediately divesting an asset would have tax implications that could forestall any such sale.

“Typically, we would expect a two-year waiting period before any potential further strategic action by the SpinCo to preserve the tax-free nature of the spin although we believe there are scenarios where industry consolidation including SpinCo could happen earlier,” analyst Benjamin Swinburne of Morgan Stanley wrote in a note to investors last week. (Morgan Stanley is a financial advisor to Comcast.)

Plus, “SpinCo” executives may well conclude that offloading MSNBC is not in the best interest of shareholders, since the channel’s loyal audience is a form of leverage in negotiations with cable distributors. Executives involved with the spinoff say they intend to be predators, not prey – buying new channels, not selling off old ones bit by bit.

According to Stelter, a lot of people at MSNBC are excited about the possibilities which comes as a relief to me because whatever your thoughts about it are, they are one of the only bulwarks against the onslaught of right wing television dominance.

He also reports on the right’s trolling about this including dumbro Joe Rogan saying he’d like Rachel Maddows job: “I will wear the same outfit and glasses, and I will tell the same lies.” Jackass… And Trump Jr is all in on this as well, of course.

Stelter talks about the bigger problem of media capture:

While Musk and his friends trade memes and crack each other up, there’s a serious undercurrent here. It’s known as “media capture.” This happened in Hungary when far-right prime minister Viktor Orbán’s “close allies also purchased private television and radio outlets to convert them into pro-government outlets,” CNN reported earlier this month.

“Media capture” is a subset of what Protect Democracy executive director Ian Bassin calls “autocratic capture,” where “the government uses its power to enforce loyalty from the private sector.” On a recent episode of Vanity Fair’s “Inside the Hive,” Bassin said “I think we are in danger of seeing that happen across the American marketplace in all sorts of sectors.”

Gábor Scheiring, a former member of the Hungarian parliament, wrote in a new essay for Politico Magazine that Orbán “consolidated media control through centralized propaganda, market pressure and loyal billionaires.” In the US, he wrote, “liberal-minded billionaires should not sit idly by as they did in Hungary, watching the right take over the media.”

Stelter spoke with Mark Cuban about that who said he doesn’t think it’s a good investment. Thanks a lot.

The truth is that we’ve already seen that happen in radio and terrestrial TV (Premiere, iHeart, Sinclair…) Newspapers are dying and from the looks of it the ones that are hanging on have decided to play ball. So I don’t know where any of this is going. My hope is that the new media and the internet, including streaming, will provide some counterbalance. In the meantime, we realy can’t afford to lose MSNBC. It’s all we’ve got in that part of the media ecosystem and abandoning it would be a very big mistake.

Via CNN:

“Tariffs can’t be inflationary because if the price of one thing goes up, unless you give people more money, then they have less money to spend on the other thing, so there is no inflation.”

As James Fallows explained:

This is from the guy who is supposedly “the smart one” in the new Trump lineup. To spell this out: By the “logic” of future Treasury Secretary, by definition NOTHING can ever be inflationary. Gas goes to $15, you just spend less on … eggs.

So it’s no biggie?

It appears that Besset believes in the creed of Milton Friedman that “inflation” can only happen because of increases in the money supply. Ok. But that assumes that when prices go up from these tariffs, people will understand that it isn’t inflation so they will happily stop spending money on the things they want and simply substitute for things they don’t want. Good luck with that. If there’s one thing we have learned over the past couple of years it’s that people are freaked out by price hikes, period. I don’t think anyone’s going to care whether that fits the academic definition of inflation.

*needless to say, Trump’s cult will believe that the economy is fantastic no matter what happens. The only question is whether there is a majority that will be upset about it.

This is what happens when people think politics is just another Reality TV Show and they were just voting someone off the island.

I don’t know who people think will be compelled to do these jobs that nobody wants to do. But these are the same people who think slavery was no biggie so perhaps prison labor? What else can they do? Otherwise, wages are going to have to go up if there’s a labor shortage. That’s how this works. Housing costs are already too high for most people.

Good plan, Republicans. Excellent.

“The prosecutors will be prosecuted”

The Special Prosecutor’s office in the Trump federal cases moved to dismiss both cases today. They say that the DOJ policy against prosecuting a sitting president so that’s that. TV pundits are sayhing that he will write a report which Merrick Garland can make public but that even if he does it probably won’t say much we don’t know because the intelligence community will not have had time to vet the sensitive information. How lucky.

Trump and his henchwoman above have made it clear that they plan to seek vengeance against the prosecutors. I see no reason to believe they won’t do it. Trump had his DOJ fire Andrew McCabe on the day before he hit his 20 years in the bureau to deprive him of his pension. (The courts agreed that was unlawful and reinstated the pension.) The IRS audited James Comey and McCabe. He demanded prosecutions against his enemies including Hillary Clinton and was only thwarted because of the so-called “guardrails” that are no longer there. Pam Bondi sure as hell isn’t going to be one.

Will Bunch points out that she was at the most notoriously absurd moment of the 2020 coup attempt:

The long, strange trip of the United States of America has taken a wild and dangerous right turn, and you can see the exact moment that Pam Bondi — Donald Trump’s newest pick to become the nation’s 87th attorney general — jumped aboard the crazy train: in the parking lot of Northeast Philly’s Four Seasons Total Landscaping, on the unforgettable morning of Nov. 7, 2020.

Record scratch … yep, that’s her, the former chief prosecutor of Florida, at the end of a row of all the 45th president’s men in her bright Republican red blazer and COVID-era mask in the parking lot at the most notorious news conference in American political history.

Reporters looked on in amused befuddlement as Bondi and Trump insider Corey Lewandowski erected a podium in front of a garage that Trump himself mistakenly thought would be a Four Seasons luxury hotel, not a parking lot facing a sex shop and a crematorium. The ex-Florida AG stoically stood by as the later-to-be-indicted Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani stepped up to that podium to make false claims of voter fraud — rendered even more absurd by news that every TV network had just called the race for next President Joe Biden. “Networks don’t get to decide elections, courts do,” Giuliani insisted that day, even as some of the TV crews were quickly packing up their equipment.

That hilarious day of political infamy is exactly why Thursday’s surprise news that Trump, now the 47th president-elect, was naming Bondi as his choice to run the U.S. Justice Department — after the rapid implosion of her fellow Floridian and alleged teen sex creep ex-Rep. Matt Gaetz — is no laughing matter.

As you can see in the video above, she has declared that Trump’s prosecutors must be prosecuted and that the DOJ needs to “clean house.”

There will be show trials, don’t kid yourself.

We survived it.

Sixty-one years ago today: pic.twitter.com/ldWxBf4ndh

— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) November 24, 2024

A couple of days after the election this year I wrote that I thought a lot of the anti-incumbent movement these past couple of years had to do with unprocessed trauma from the global pandemic. Here in America we lost over 1.2 million people in a very short time from a deadly disease that humans had never seen before. Within just a few weeks in the spring of 2020, New York City alone had lost more than 15,000 people. All of our medical systems were strained, supplies were unavailable and the whole country, the whole world, was in a state of barely suppressed panic. I don’t think we’ve ever really dealt with exactly what happened and we are now in danger of doing it all over again.

President Trump failed miserably at the most important thing he was tasked with doing — reassuring the public. Instead he lied, complained, pushed snake oil cures and worried more about the effects of the pandemic on his re-election prospects than the health of the American people. Bob Woodward’s book “Rage” lays out a terrifying narrative, from taped interviews with Trump himself, of just how inept and dishonest he was.

Mother Jones’s David Corn reported on the findings of The Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis which found that senior Trump officials tried to block CDC scientists from warning the public and barred them from holding press conferences as would be the usual protocol, subsitituting those demented Trump TV briefings instead. The White House listened to conspiracy theorists and unorthodox quacks with little experience in the field and leaned on the CDC to change its recommendations. The result of Trump’s mismanagement of the crisis is estimated to have resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the days before the vaccines became widely available.

We all recall Trump’s cult followers’ reaction to the government guidelines to try to save as many lives as possible. They rebelled like wild-eyed teenagers, burning facemasks, staging protests, indulging in conspiracy theories and Trump followed their lead, especially since it dovetailed with his own political needs to get out on the campaign trail. The consequences were grave. Vaccine refusal caused over 200,000 more unnecessary deaths.

Trump has not forgotten about any of that even if the rest of us have tried to suppress the sense of insecurity and chaos that crisis left us with. He is a man who bears grudges and the scientific community that disagreed with him is in his crosshairs. He cannot accept that they were right and he was wrong and he’s going to make them pay.

He found the perfect instrument for his revenge in Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a conspiracy theorist with a whole lot of crackpot ideas but who, like Trump, believes that he knows better than scientists. He apparently was responsible for some of the funding for the dangerous documentary called “Plandemic” which brainwashed a whole lot of people and probably contributed to many deaths.

Not only did RFK Jr suggest COVID was planned by the government as some are just now finding out, he also revealed that his group, Children’s Health Defence, financed Plandemic, a conspiracy “documentary” about the COVID-19 pandemic.
pic.twitter.com/f9Utqyhs3d

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) November 20, 2024

His left field theories about vaccines and other standard life-saving medical treatments are well documented and despite his alleged commitment to changing the food Americans eat to make them more healthy (good luck with that) it’s fair to assume that his lack of ability at being anything but a gadlfly will likely result in chaos rather than reform. His previous efforts have been deadly.

To the extent there are any scientists he or Trump respect they are all heretical and eccentric. Trump named a group of those very scientists this week to top posts at the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers For Disease Control. They were all opponents of the standard COVID guidelines and are all opponents of mainstream medical science, notably in opposition to vaccines.

Trump has nominated Dr. David Weldon an internist and former congressman from Florida to head the C.D.C. He is best known for pushing the thoroughly discredited theory  that thimerosal, a preservative compound in some vaccines, causes autism. He’s a fanatic who tried ,as a congressman, to pass a “vaccine safety bill” in 2007 to create a separate agency for vaccines within HHS.

Dr. Martin Makary a pancreatic surgeon at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine is Trump’s choice to head the F.D.A. He questions some of the vaccines routinely given to children and in his Fox News appearances he’s made it clear that he’s opposed to the COVID policies. He wrote in the Wall Street Journal that it would be gone by April of 2021 due to natural immunity and vaccines. He was very wrong. More than 450,000 people died in 2021.

For Surgeon General he’s named Dr. Janette Nesheiwat a frequent Fox News contributor and supplement salesperson who also happens to be married to his new National Security Adviser, Florida Rep. Michael Walz. She has a book coming out called , “Beyond the Stethoscope: Miracles in Medicine,” which shows the “transformative power of prayer.” The good news is that she doesn’t seem to be hostile to vaccines which makes her an island in a sea of anti-vaxxers.

Trump hasn’t formally nominated anyone to the National Institute of Health but the smart money is on Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University-trained physician and economist. Apparently RFK Jr vetted him this week and really liked the cut of his jib. Of course, he would. Battacharya is one of the lead authors of the notorious Great Barrington Declaration, which argued against lockdowns during the pandemic. It was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), a libertarian free-market think tank associated with climate change denial, which gives you some idea of the kind of “scientific” analysis went into it. The Washington Post reported:

Bhattacharya has called for rolling back the power of some of the 27 institutes and centers that constitute NIH, saying that some career civil servants wrongly shaped national policies at the height of the pandemic and did not tolerate dissent. Bhattacharya and other critics have singled out Anthony S. Fauci, the infectious-disease expert who led one of NIH’s centers for 38 years and helped steer the nation’s coronavirus response before leaving the federal government in December 2022. […]

Bhattacharya and Makary collaborated on a blueprint for a proposed commission to investigate the nation’s coronavirus response.

They have friends in high places:

🤨 https://t.co/OJDz283WAJ

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 19, 2024

It appears that Trump is intent upon stacking the nation’s most important health agencies with people who are hostile to modern public health science and vaccines, which is exactly what you would expect from a vengeful megalomaniac who’s put an anti-vaxx conspiracy nut in charge of them.

The pandemic did an immeasurable amount of damage and caused endless heartache for millions of families around the world. Here in America it was taken up as a political weapon by the right wing and will be the catalyst for the destruction of our public health system. We may be through with COVID but it still isn’t through with us.

Good news, bad news this morning

First, good news courtesy of E.J. Dionne. Conservatives (with the most clout) have abandoned their opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. Why? They won’t admit it, but they caught that car and lost that fight:

After gyrating from one position to another, Donald Trump simply gave up on being a pro-life candidate. The states, he said, would settle the issue, and he didn’t give a damn how they did it. The Republican Party followed along, drastically weakening the antiabortion provisions in its platform because it recognized that opposing reproductive rights after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision was an electoral loser.

And it is. Abortion rights prevailed in 7 out of 10 states where voters had a choice this year — in three carried by Vice President Kamala Harris (New York, Maryland and Colorado) but also in four won by Trump (Missouri, Arizona, Montana and Nevada). Reproductive rights won 57 percent of the vote in pro-Trump Florida, but the state had a 60 percent threshold for the referendum to pass. Opponents of abortion rights fully prevailed only in Nebraska and South Dakota.

So the right ginned up other bogeymen with which to frighten and activate their base and drive them to the polls: immigrants and transgender people. Even so, Trump’s narrow popular-vote margin wasn’t enough to justify “apocalyptic electoral analysis,” Dionne argues.

The right will, of course. And a left still licking its wounds over the election outcome doesn’t exactly feel celebratory. The economy and immigration worked better for Trump than the defense of democracy and women’s rights worked for Kamala Harris. Immigration and trans issues simply lit a hotter, brighter fire under Trump voters even if, as my post below explains, trans people are but 1% of the population. People perceive them as scary Others constituting a threatening 20-plus percent of the population.

The bad news comes from Jason Statler (LOLGOP):

“We can have democracy, or we can have billionaires. Not both. At least with these campaign finance laws,” he writes. The problem is that the billionaires are winning. They are drowning democracy in a flood of dollars:

Just 400 mega-donors outspent every other contributor to the Republican Party based on what we know about the spending in the 2024 campaign. Elon Musk alone appears to have outspent every small donor to the Trump campaign. And that’s if you don’t count the multiple billions of dollars he put into the $44 billion he wrangled to purchase Twitter and turn it into a Trump campaign website. In return, Tesla has skyrocketed 40% since Trump’s election, making Elon about $70 billion he can blow on future elections.

And the way that Elon spent degraded democracy itself. His PAC drowned targeted voters with disinformation of the sort tens of millions are now fleeing from on Twitter.

It’s not a fair fight. But then, the right doesn’t believe in fair:

It’s the billionaires versus the people, and the billionaires are kicking our ass with Elon—and his grudge against his daughter and the culture that accepts her in a way he never can—leading the way. His Phishing Scam Approach to politics has helped him, officially the richest human being ever to live, to become significantly richer.

Many factors have made America the most unequal country in the OECD and now threaten our ability to govern ourselves.

He continues:

There is an obvious solution. We need to take our own side against the billionaires. We must stop behaving like “temporarily embarrassed billionaires” who are just one video or startup from getting high and playing Halo II with Elon.

There are more of us than there will ever be of them. But that only matters if we have a democracy where it’s even possible for us to fight for our interests.

A massive barrier in this fight is that Democrats feel they need their billionaires to fight the other billionaires. This “choose your fighter” strategy has proven to be a failed one. We will never be able to offer these moguls what they want—minimal taxes on the rich, no consumer protections, and an end to our votes mattering.

So, we need a progressive movement that can take the people’s side. The billionaires are activated. We no longer need to fear them turning on us and our Constitution. It’s happened. They sided with an insurrectionist who has made it clear he intends to rule as a dictator and will refuse ever to leave office peacefully. That’s done.

Now, we need to have the debate that matters most: do we want a democracy or billionaires? Because we can’t have both. Not like this.

I’d quibble some with taking our own side against billionaires being an obvious solution. Poorer people believing themselves “temporarily embarrassed billionaires” is a cultural myth dating from before Horatio Alger. It’s sustained by the monied class to keep the poors supporting nonsense like trickle-down economics and buying state lottery tickets in lieu of their organizing unions to rebalance the power dynamics in this country.

It’s not a viewpoint one can just turn off by telling the poors there are more of us than there are of them. Why do you think the less-well-off adopted as their champion a billionaire who would never admit them to his country club?

They don’t hate him. They want to be him. Immune from prosecution, unbound by any rule, truly free to be the biggest asshole in any room and to kick away the ladder behind you. Kicking the downtrodden and making money from it? That’s real freedom, baby.

They learned more from a four-hour Trump rally than they ever learned in Sunday school.

Are they out to get you? Who they?

During the runup to Nov. 5, there was a lot of talk about “vibes.” This was a vibes election more about what people felt than about what they think (or think they know). Jonathan V. Last has a Bulwark post about how out of synch people perceptions are with reality. It’s rather instructive. First, the results of a YouGov poll on how people perceive what percentage of the population various groups constitute:

The results were hilarious. Here are some of the percentages that Americans (on average) think their fellow citizens are:

• Transgender: 21 percent
• Muslim: 27 percent
• Jewish: 30 percent
• Black: 41 percent
• Live in New York City: 30 percent
• Gay or lesbian: 30 percent

We’ll get to the actual, in vivo percentages in a moment. First I want to point out the absurdity: 1-in-3 are gay/lesbian? Muslims and Jews make up 57 percent of the country? Blacks are 40 percent of the population?

Now, the actual numbers:

• Transgender: 1 percent
• Muslim: 1 percent
• Jewish: 2 percent
• Black: 12 percent
• Live in New York City: 2 percent1
• Gay or lesbian: 3 percent

We are talking about errors of perception measured by orders of magnitude. On the trans population, the average American’s estimation is off by 2,000 percent.

People make a consistent mistake in the same direction, Last observes. They wildly overestimate the number of people from recognized minority/interest groups of every kind and underestimate how numerically common their own group is. He dubs it “a particularly American cognitive bias.”

I wonder how much it has to do with the evangelical perception that there’s a secret war going on just below the surface of observable reality that Christians wage daily against spiritual principalities and powers, “against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” They learn that the Devil and his demons lurk around every corner waitin’ to git ya.

These perceptions are conclusions drawn from little or no actual encounters in real life with trans people, gay people, Muslims, etc. Yet people assume these Others are everywhere.

Like imaginary Satanic pedophile cults that way. It’s this learned paranoia that perhaps says something fundamental about Americans’ psyche, long haunted by paranoid fantasies, whether it’s savages in the woods or commies in woodpiles.

This distorted perception leads people in majorities to a combative, oppositional politics. They worry about being displaced by minorities they rarely encounter but fear are lurking somewhere, out there, in great masses.

Richard Hofstadter wrote about the paranoid style in American politics in 1964 and he was looking at both the contemporary and the historical. Developments since then have mostly confirmed his thesis. I think we can take it as read that paranoia is an important component of American social and political life.

And if this is the case, then I would say that our bizarre perception bias is both symptom and cause. People are paranoid about The Other, which is why they believe that hordes of The Other must exist. And the belief that their own majority group is small while The Other is large feeds the underlying paranoia.

“I’m not sure how democracy is supposed to work with a population that is this paranoid, confused, and oblivious to reality,” Last concludes.

I’m not sure either. But this misperception of threats that the poll reveals is nothing new. I noticed that decades ago after the Three Mile Island accident when nuclear power was more on people’s threat radar:

I have a 1982 Scientific American article here (Xeroxed. Remember kids?) in which study subjects were asked to rank a sampling of 30 sources of risk. Nuclear power topped the list for the League of Women Voters and college students, although it ranked 20 in terms of attributable deaths. Business professionals ranked nuclear power No. 8. Pesticides also made the top ten for the League and college students. It showed up at 28 on the researchers’ list. At the bottom of list of risks for all three groups? Vaccinations. Where would they rank today? We’re not very good at this.

The dangers from vaccinations may leapfrog ionizing radiation as a perceived risk after Jan. 20. Getting them or not getting them.

Update: shortened for brevity, fair use.

James Fallows has written a fascinating piece for Wired (temporarily out from under the paywall)about California and the future that I hope you will read with an open mind. An excerpt:

California has at many points been held up as an American paradise. Now it’s widely seen as closer to hell. Runaway housing prices, tax burdens, homelessness, congestion, fire, drought, flood. The best sides of tech innovation, and the worst of tech-bro greed and narcissism. These are the state’s hallmarks. This perception is particularly rampant among Republicans: Polls show that two-thirds of Republicans say this one US state has done more damage than good for the country, and that almost half of them don’t consider it “American” at all. Beyond political party, fully half of adult Americans say in polls that California is in decline. As a recent headline put it shortly before Harris became the Democratic nominee, “California’s image will be a weapon” against her as a candidate.

Never mind that one in every eight Americans still lives in California—a population larger than 21 other US states combined—and that its economic output is bigger than any entire non-US country except China, Japan, or Germany, and that it’s the birthplace of an disproportionate share of the world’s most familiar and valuable brand names. The overwhelming sense is that the California miracle is over, its reservoirs of dynamism as tapped out as the Central Valley’s aquifers during recent years of drought.

As a Californian who has spent most of his life in other parts of the United States, and as an American who has lived for more than a dozen years in other parts of the world, I’ve often been struck by the ways declinist alarmism about my home state can feel like a displaced version of declinist alarmism about my home country as a whole.

“California is America, but sooner,” the USC sociologist Manual Pastor has said. That goes for huge cultural and demographic shifts (California was the first mainland US state whose diverse population became “majority-minority,” back in the 1990s, a full generation ago) and for era-defining crises, self-inflicted and not. And most importantly, it also goes for solutions—the kind that can redirect the momentum of American life, and life around the world, with a leverage no other state possesses.

Just take the area of gasoline-powered transportation. After World War II, when American car culture was famously getting minted in Southern California, the state used a gas tax hike to build out one of the first modern freeway networks. In the ’50s, the US federal government borrowed that same model to construct the interstate highway system. Then, starting in the 1980s, California led the fight against leaded gasoline, eventually banning its sale in 1992, four years before the US as a whole did the same. In 2019, after Donald Trump’s administration rolled back emissions standards for cars, California struck a deal with the world’s leading carmakers, from Ford to Honda to VW and BMW—to make existing standards even tougher in the face of climate change. The size of the California market made this a de facto national standard (which the Biden administration later ratified).

It would be one thing if this were just a history lesson. But the same kind of dynamic is playing out right now in a few crucial arenas that virtually no one beyond California is talking about. And I’m happy to report that the America taking shape on its Pacific coast is again inventing solutions far more rapidly than conventional wisdom has accounted for.

[…]

California deserves new attention as the “reinvention state” rather than a “resistance state.” Even under Trump, there’s still a good chance that as California goes, so eventually goes the country, and eventually much of the world. Here are a few illustrations of where it’s headed. None of these is “the” solution to California’s many problems. But each of them illustrates the creative spirit from which solutions have always come.

I urge you to read the whole thing while it’s still beyond the paywall. It’s really good and should provide at least a modicum of hope that despite the destruction Trump is about to unleash there is another vision.

It’s not that California doesn’t have problems. It has all the problems everyone else has and often shows the new problems before the rest of the country. It’s spawned the era of the tech bro libertarians that has become a blight on all of us. But because of its massive population, resources, wealth and talent, it also often shows the path out of it.

I live here and I didn’t know the half of it. It’s reassuring. If we can get through this perilous period without an unrecov erable catastrophe, there is hope.

Fallows concludes:

The story of America involves continued rediscovery of its potential. That is the story of the most American state as well. “I’d give anything to trade for America’s problems,” a senior Chinese bureaucrat told me in 2008, when I was living in Beijing and the United States seemed to be in free fall. America had emergencies; China, he explained, had more threatening long-term weaknesses—as has become clear in the years since then. As I write, America’s immediate political prospects are uncertain. But however this year’s election turns out—with a president who was born in California, or with a California girding itself to show that it still represents the future—the state demands attention for its many innovations, and not just its travails.