Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Some days it seems like we’re doomed

“I love these mountains,” said the workman driving the pickup truck as he admired the ridgetops. Then he tossed his empty drink cup out the window. The wife retells that anecdote now and then. She was in the passenger seat.

For a time in the 1990s, New Agers called this area the Sedona of the East. Others call it the Paris of the South. People in certain circles toss around words like mindful and intentional, whatever they mean. That’s aging hippie lingo to a lot of people just trying to pay their bills each week as expenses rise and paychecks don’t. Some people need to be whacked upside of the head for concerns like climate change to sink in, even when notice arrives at the front door.

Helene whacked a lot of people upside of the head here on September 27. And still the broader patterns may remain invisible to people like the guy in the truck.

Los Angeles got its own whacking last week. The question is will residents spared and who lost homes see the bigger picture, or like here in WNC will they be too busy rebuilding the lives they had to rebuild them differently.

“[E]ven in this place where there is little dispute that the danger is only getting worse due to climate change, we don’t leave,” explains David Siders at Politico. Even in “fire-gutted, heavily Democratic Altadena … climate change was nowhere near top of mind,” he found:

“When the wind gets like that, I’m sure that’s been happening since the beginning of time,” said David Allen, a writer whose own home was spared, but who was surveying a less fortunate neighbor’s. In this neighborhood full of doctors and professors and scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Allen said he suspected people here just might become more animated about climate change. He nodded to the darkened sky obscuring the daytime sun — a “toxic wasteland,” he said.

But everywhere else? The country had just elected Trump, who has called climate change a hoax, joked about rising seas creating “more oceanfront property” and promises to “drill, baby, drill.”

“We’re in a stage where half the country’s thinking magically about things,” Allen said. “They’ve allowed themselves that luxury to be anti-everything — the end of expertise.”

Another blast of wind. Another fire. Okay, this one was nastier than most. Apocalyptic, like the Helene winds and flooding that killed over 100 in Western North Carolina and altered the landscape. But were the Los Angeles fires apocalyptic enough to change minds?

“Blame?” said one resident Siders spoke with about the fire. “No,” he said, “We don’t know what started it.”

There’s an idea I’ve heard from many Democrats, especially in California, that more experience with natural disasters might spur more urgency around climate change. And in fact, polling suggests people affected by extreme weather do draw a link. California’s former governor, Jerry Brown, told me when we met last month in Sacramento that Trump might represent something of an opening for Democrats on the issue: “If the assault on the environment is as extreme as expected, then I believe the fervor for protecting the environment will increase far beyond what it is today.” Attitudes about climate might shift, he said, when “we get a big set of fires or floods, which we’re going to get.”

He was right, it turned out, about the set of fires. And the climate science was right there with it. The same day I visited Altadena, a group of researchers released a study describing how climate change had accelerated “hydroclimate whiplash” between wet and dry conditions, increasing the risk of fire. Its lead author, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California’s agriculture and natural resources division and UCLA, told me that one of the challenges when it comes to public opinion about climate change is that while people “correctly understand that climate change exists,” many “don’t feel it is viscerally or tangibly affecting them.”

Major catastrophes are relatively rare, and when they do happen, not everyone draws a connection to climate. He called it an “information crisis.”

And it is a political one, too. Even if people do accept the reality of climate change, and even if they are concerned about it, the issue tends to rank low on people’s list of priorities when it comes to electing politicians who can shape public policy.

There are dozens of cartoons picturing a pair of dinosaurs and the Chicxulub asteroid. “Maybe it isn’t going to be so bad,” says one from The New Yorker.

I imagine dinosaurs in MAGA hats sneering, “Cry more, asteroid.”

 

View on Threads

It’s even worse than the last time:

The Trump family business released a voluntary ethics agreement Friday that allows it to strike deals with private foreign companies, a move that could help outside actors try to buy influence with the new administration.

The so-called ethics white paper bars the Trump Organization from striking deals directly with foreign governments, but allows ones with private companies abroad, a significant departure from President-elect Donald Trump’s first term. An ethics pact that Trump signed eight years ago barred both foreign government and foreign company deals.

They’re also trying to buy back the lease on the Trump Hotel in DC which they let go a couple of years ago. Why give up all that easy money? Plus MAGA DC needs a club house.

Corruption is no longer an issue, at least until the Democrats take power again. Then the right wing scandal machine will rev up to a thousand and the Democrats will cower in fear. But right now, Trump can be photographed taking bankers boxes full of hundred dollar bills from an Afghan warlord and everyone would just shrug.

Max Read published an interesting piece today about Mark Zuckerberg’s move right. He reminds us that Zuck has changed up the moderation policies every election since 2016. He just rolls with flow of whatever he thinks is the political zeitgeist. But now it’s also happening at a very important time in Zuckerberg’s life. Read writes:

[This] is a useful corrective to the unfortunate framing that this announcement represents an “unapologetic” Zuck (if anything, the 2025 version is more “apologetic” than its 2021 or 2016 equivalents, just presented in a well-calibrated tone of defiance that casts his previous decisions as coerced). But I do think there’s an important and interesting difference between this video and Zuck’s previous post-election weathervane announcements: The gold chain.

It’s been clear for a while now that Zuckerberg has been Up To Something. Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal have described it as the “Zuckaissance”: Over the past eighteen months or so he grew out his hair; he replaced his hoodies with boxy tees; he got really into M.M.A. and wakeboarding. And, yes, he started wearing a gold chain. New Zuck is undeniably less off-putting than old, sweaty-hoodie, Caesar-cut Zuck. But he’s also unmistakably fratty, butch, and (to borrow an overused Twitter phrase) “right-coded,” partaking in the aesthetic and the hobbies of people you would expect to own crypto, listen to mindset podcasts, and vote for Trump (or, at least, refuse to vote for Biden).

It’s not exactly groundbreaking that a rich 40-year-old man has started wearing expensive streetwear. But usually this kind of personal journey culminates in divorce or hilarious/gruesome police body-cam footage or an announcement that you’re moving to Africa for a year, not in a video about new content-moderation guidelines. Zuck seems to have slowly transformed himself into a Dana White hanger-on who dresses like a Kick streamer in order to make to make this post-election right-wing turn seem authentic and deeply felt, rather than merely convenient.

Oh boy. But apparently friends are saying that Zuck’s hard turn right is genuine, which also isn’t too surprising considering his stage of life. And as I’ve been surmising, these allegedly machotech-bros are all engaged in a dick measuring contest, part of which is trying to get closer to power.

One answer, I think, is that Zuck’s new image is as much about a shifting political environment within Silicon Valley as it about the changing winds outside of the industry. A period of tech-industry labor unrest–walkouts and protests at tech megaplatforms over sexual harassment, racism, and defense contracts1–has given way to a “reset” marked by mass layoffs and corporate clampdowns. A looser tech labor market (and a general national atmosphere of reaction) has shifted power back to management, and a highly visible clique of tech workers with quasi-libertarian, open-to-the-possibility-of-race-science politics, clustered on Twitter in communities like “tcot” and “tpot,” has presented executives with the tantalizing (if still ephemeral) prospect of workforce free of Obama-era idealism and political consciousness.

News on Friday that Meta is ending its D.E.I. program should be seen in this context–as not just another way to cozy up to the Trump administration, but as another sally in a war against a workforce that tech management has come to see as dangerously left-wing. I’ve argued before that the hard-right turn of investors like Marc Andreessen should be seen in part as a kind of marketing strategy, an attempt to find founders and workers whose politics make them less likely to jeopardize profits with workplace action. I suspect that Zuck’s makeover functions at least in part in the same way. I don’t think Republican electeds much care if Zuck is cageside at M.M.A. matches or using right-wing slang like “legacy media” and “virtue-signaling”–but I think the kinds of employees he might like to attract probably do. (As do, from the other direction, the kinds of employees he would like to attrite)

Which leads, I think, to the other important function of Zuck’s new look. I think Roose is right that Zuck is “has clearly been studying Mr. Musk’s playbook”–not just in his rhetorical choices, but in his efforts to become more of a social-media main character in the same manner as Musk. (Note that Zuck is on Threads doing an uncanny imitation of Musk spamming single-emoji responses to Tweets thing.) For most of his career, Zuck has followed the general conventional wisdom around being a C.E.O. and attempted to appear generally nonpartisan (and when partisanship was unavoidable, to express it in the blandest ways possible). But Musk has, over the last few years, demonstrated that there are distinct advantages to aggressive and committed partisanship–specifically, the ability to command and direct swarms of protectors and apologists online.

Musk is the big kahuna but the other boys want to play too. Zuck (and Bezos to some degree) are among the richest tech bros and they’re all jostling for dominance. Part of that apparently requires licking Donald Trump’s boots which is not how I would have ever assumed such a game would be played.

It’s pathetic.

I am reliably told by virtually everyone that mentioning fascism is off the menu and that we need to only talk about kitchen table issues. But Jeff Sharlet makes a good point about how we have also decided to oppose Trump nominees on matters of character rather than ideology which doesn’t seem to be working:

Problems with Pete Hegseth ranked from very bad to way, way worse: 6. drunkenness (common); 5. incompetence (common); 4. corruption (common); 3. raving bigotry (common); 2. alleged rape (less common); 1. Proposing military attack on US cities to exterminate all enemies. (That’s a new one).

And yet focus has been winnowed down to drunkenness and incompetence, which probably describes a good 1/4 of cabinet secretaries in history. It’s framed as outrage—“he’s a drunk!”—but it functions as normalization.

Not normalization via some insidious media plot to sanewash fascism. Rather, a much broader subconscious desire to frame problems in a fashion that lets us belittle actual threats. Just a dumb drunk. Ha, ha, incompetent. Not existential risk.

When Hegseth was first announced there was a flurry of attention paid to the wildly violent fascist statements in his books; but that got pushed aside for his personal failings. Which are profound. But that provided fascism a very old path forward…

Hegseth’s defenders could deal with drunkenness and even alleged rape with the old story of “I was lost, now I’m found.” Some us noticed that story began for Hegseth after the allegations; and that his “found” involved far more violent Christian Reconstructionism.

But both the press and a public conditioned to understand the threats of fascism in individual terms preferred to make the case against Hegseth as those of bad character. As if a sober man w/ no assault allegations calling for civil war would be ok?

And surprise: the old methods haven’t worked to stop 8Hegseth and his defenders as they’ve used the familiar narrative designed long ago to defang such critiques. It shldnt work, no. But we shldnt be so witlessly naive to imagine it couldn’t. And yet here we are.

I don’t know if what I and others started proposing the night Hegseth was nominated—that we oppose his fascism by researching & talking about his fascism—would have worked any better. Maybe not. But, to quote Homer Simpson, “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.”

People don’t seem to care much about the threat of authoritarianism. Maybe that’s the way it always is — until it happens.

For some reason this makes me think of this article in this week’s Atlantic about how Hitler dismantled democracy in 53 days. (gift link)

Ninety-two years ago this month, on Monday morning, January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed the 15th chancellor of the Weimar Republic. In one of the most astonishing political transformations in the history of democracy, Hitler set about destroying a constitutional republic through constitutional means. What follows is a step-by-step account of how Hitler systematically disabled and then dismantled his country’s democratic structures and processes in less than two months’ time—specifically, one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes. The minutes, as we will see, mattered.

Hans Frank served as Hitler’s private attorney and chief legal strategist in the early years of the Nazi movement. While later awaiting execution at Nuremberg for his complicity in Nazi atrocities, Frank commented on his client’s uncanny capacity for sensing “the potential weakness inherent in every formal form of law” and then ruthlessly exploiting that weakness. Following his failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, Hitler had renounced trying to overthrow the Weimar Republic by violent means but not his commitment to destroying the country’s democratic system, a determination he reiterated in a Legalitätseid—“legality oath”—before the Constitutional Court in September 1930. Invoking Article 1 of the Weimar constitution, which stated that the government was an expression of the will of the people, Hitler informed the court that once he had achieved power through legal means, he intended to mold the government as he saw fit. It was an astonishingly brazen statement.

“So, through constitutional means?” the presiding judge asked.

“Jawohl!” Hitler replied.

Yes.

Update: If you want to know exactly what Sharlet is talking about with respect to Hegseth, his article about it is here. He is as extreme as it gets which I think I knew when he worked to persuade Trump to pardon war criminals. And, of course, Trump loved him for it. He’s a man of peace dontcha know.

I have posted that before with the caveat that at least America isn’t seeking external expansion. Well…

Can I get an ‘Amen’?

Mega money doesn’t necessarily go with megalomania. But one can find plenty of evidence for a correlation.

Josh Marshall unearths a fine example in “Donald Trump’s Greenland jones” originating perhaps with tech-bro Dryden Brown.

When money goes to your head, what does it do there? In Brown’s case, convince you you can fly into a poor country unannounced and try to buy it. In Peter Thiel’s case, prompt you to send an essay packed with “just asking questions” conspiracy theories and get the august Financial Times to print it.

Kieran Healy, a Duke University Professor of Sociology, read Thiel’s offering and commented:

This Thiel Op-Ed is really nuts. I mean, truly. His focus of attention is like a pinball careening around in a machine where every bumper and paddle is a noisy, flashing conspiracy topic. I get more measured and carefully-reasoned emails on these topics every other week from mentally-ill cranks.

It’s never clear just what Thiel’s point is. Something about the intersection of the internet and Donald Trump’s return to the White House representing the fall of the ancien regime (the reality-based community) and the revelation of dark secrets that for decades it’s concealed from truth suckers seekers.

Free speech in Elon Musk’s conception must be free, free of grounding in fact. Let the internet decide what truth is. In the Digital Dispensation, the truth about the Kennedy assassination, Jeffrey Epstein’s death, and Covid-19’s origins shall be revealed:

Did [Dr. Fauci and his advisers] suspect that Covid spawned from US taxpayer-funded research, or an adjacent Chinese military programme? Why did we fund the work of EcoHealth Alliance, which sent researchers into remote Chinese caves to extract novel coronaviruses? Is “gain of function” research a byword for a bioweapons programme? And how did our government stop the spread of such questions on social media?

Why does the porridge bird lay his egg in the air?

Our First Amendment frames the rules of engagement for domestic fights over free speech, but the global reach of the internet tempts its adversaries into a global war. Can we believe that a Brazilian judge banned X without American backing, in a tragicomic perversion of the Monroe Doctrine? Were we complicit in Australia’s recent legislation requiring age verification for social media users, the beginning of the end of internet anonymity? Did we muster up even two minutes’ criticism of the UK, which has arrested hundreds of people a year for online speech triggering, among other things, “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”? We may expect no better from Orwellian dictatorships in East Asia and Eurasia, but we must support a free internet in Oceania.

Do you walk to school or carry your lunch?

“Darker questions still emerge in these dusky final weeks of our interregnum,” Thiel declares in breathless prose. There will be no return to the “pre-internet past.”

I SEE JESUS!

With the help of the tech-bros, Trump finally has overthrown the ancien regime. He will ignore America’s unrectified historical failings to concentrate on prosecuting the malefactors of identity politics who’ve rendered America Not-Great, Thiel promises.

“The apokálypsis cannot resolve our fights over 1619, but it can resolve our fights over Covid-19; it will not adjudicate the sins of our first rulers, but the sins of those who govern us today.”

HALLELUJAH!

Blessed are the poor, for they are less prone to wealth-induced delusions.

Laboratories of election thievery

In the District of Columbia this week, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Donald Trump’s demand to delay his Friday sentencing in the New York hush money case. But in Raleigh, North Carolina, SCOTUS’s Mini-Me court accepted the demand by Judge Jefferson Griffin to delay certification of the race he lost in November. Griffin’s team hopes to have the state Supreme Court election overturned by the state Supreme’s Republican majority.

Basic fact: After multiple recounts, incumbent Associate Justice Allison Riggs (D) defeated NC Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin (R) by 734 votes.

I’ve already briefed you on this saga here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The New York Times contacted several citizens among the 60,000 whose votes the NC GOP proposes voiding in an “extraordinary effort“:

“Anyone who is trying to invalidate my personal vote as fraudulent — that’s a direct attack on the voters,” said Mr. Clay, who voted for Judge Griffin, who now sits on the North Carolina Court of Appeals. “It’s inexcusable to contest these legal ballots. He’s a sore loser. It is what it is, whether it be by one vote, 100 votes or 1,000 votes. We have spoken.”

Griffin and his backers won’t hear it.

In mid-November, after a final vote count showed Justice Riggs winning, Judge Griffin filed a protest with the State Board of Elections, which has a Democratic majority. Judge Griffin argued that the forms that tens of thousands of voters were given to fill out did not ask for some information that they should have under the law.

The board turned the protest down in a series of votes that went largely along party lines, noting that what were apparently clerical errors on the part of county election officials were not the fault of the voters.

The state Board of Elections asked a federal district judge to oversee the legal challenge Griffin launched based on the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA). When that Trump-appointed judge pitched the case back to the Republican-controlled state Supreme Court, the State Board filed an appeal with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. That’s still pending.

The Democratic National Committee on Friday jumped into the fray.

Democracy Docket adds:

The DNC filed a brief urging the court to reject the Republicans’ request, arguing that they “seek to delete the votes of tens of thousands of voters in every state and municipal election not because those voters are ineligible or did anything wrong, but because of an alleged record keeping problem.” The Democrats added that all of these voters singled out by the GOP provided ID information at one point, like when they first voted.

Also, the DNC cited state and federal laws that establish that once an eligible voter is added to the voter rolls, a minor issue with their registration application is not grounds to nullify their vote.

[…]

The DNC explained that the Republicans are not only seeking to remove votes in the court race but in all state and local races, “including elections that were completely undisputed.”

Meaning, if this HAVA-based challenge succeeds in North Carolina, they will sue to reverse any race Republicans lose narrowly anywhere in the country based on this precedent.

People once said what starts in California eventually works its way east. But when it comes to euthanizing American self-governance, not so much. Here in one of David Pepper’s “Laboratories of Autocracy,” Griffin is still trying to steal an election the way Donald Trump and Team MAGA tried to steal the presidency in 2020.

Pay attention. If they succeed here, your name could be next on the list of voters whose ballots they throw out in your state.

My concern is that Democrats will throw all their efforts behind Defense rather than playing Offense via outside-the-box thinking (à la Spocko) that puts Griffin (and his team of attorneys) on his back foot. Beating the bullies in court is not enough. They need their noses bloodied.

I would post something about the animals and the fires but I just don’t have the heart. I put up some links last night if you want to check out some of the various organizations that are working in that area. The devastation is going to be immense for them just as it is for the humans. It’s all bad.

Here are some zoo animals frolicking in the snow. It made me feel better, anyway.

They aren’t even waiting until their Dear Leader is inaugurated:

Acres of orange fields sat unpicked in Kern County this week as word of Border Patrol raids circulated through Messenger chats and images of federal agents detaining laborers spread on local Facebook groups. 

The Border Patrol conducted unannounced raids throughout Bakersfield on Tuesday, descending on businesses where day laborers and field workers gather. Agents in unmarked SUVs rounded up people in vans outside a Home Depot and gas station that serves a breakfast popular with field workers. 

This appears to be the first large-scale Border Patrol raid in California since the election of Donald Trump, coming just a day after Congress certified the election on January 6, in the final days of Joe Biden’s presidency. The panic and confusion, for both immigrants and local businesses that rely on their labor, foreshadow what awaits communities across California if Trump follows through on his promise to conduct mass deportations.

“It was profiling, it was purely field workers,” said Sara Fuentes, store manager of the local gas station. Fuentes said that at 9 a.m., when the store typically gets a rush of workers on their way to pick oranges, two men in civilian clothes and unmarked Suburbans started detaining people outside the store. “They didn’t stop people with FedEx uniforms, they were stopping people who looked like they worked in the fields.” Fuentes says one customer pulled in just to pump gas and agents approached him and detained him.

Growers and agricultural leaders in California and across the nation have warned that Trump’s promised mass deportations will disrupt the nation’s food supply, leading to shortages and higher prices. In Kern County this week, just the word of the deportations inspired workers to stay away from the fields.  

“People are freaked out, people are worried, people are planning on staying home the next couple of days,” said Antonio De Loera-Brust, director of communication for the United Farm Workers. De Loera-Brust said the Border Patrol detained at least one UFW member in Kern County as they “traveled between home and work.”  

They were stopping cars and asking for papers.

On social media, Gregory K. Bovino, the Border Patrol chief in El Centro, called the sweeps “Operation Return to Sender.” 

“We are taking it to the bad people and bad things in Bakersfield. We are planning operations for other locals (sic) such as Fresno and especially Sacramento.”

Sacramento would be the state capitol.

And so it begins.