Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Chesebro has admitted what he did and has been sanctioned numerous times, even pleading guilty in the Georgia case. But in the end it was a tiny price to pay and he was one of the few has paid anything.

What a slap in the face to honest people everywhere that these people have been put back in power. It’s a shocking indictment of our country one from which I wonder if we’ll ever be able to recover.

You know that Elon Musk is sitting next to Donald Trump every night at Mar-a-Lago, talking to foreign leaders, kibitzing with fellow billionaires and whispering in the ear of the soon-to-be most powerful man on earth. You may have also heard that he’s exercising his own power on the internet to influence congressional leaders and fight for dominance over MAGA.

He’s branching out. He wrote an op-ed in a conservative German newspaper endorsing the neo-Nazi right party, saying they are Germany’s only hope (and causing the editorial editor to resign from the paper.) And now there’s this:

In the first three days of 2025, Elon Musk commandeered global politics through dozens of rapid-fire,often inflammatory posts to his 210 million followers on X.

The world’s richest person called for the release of a jailed British far-right extremist. He shared a post pressing King Charles III to dissolve Parliament and order a new general election, as he posted memes and a flurry of attacks directed at Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Musk accused Starmer of failing to prosecute “rape gangs” more than a decade ago, achild exploitation scandal that has prompted Britain’s Conservative Party to call for a full national inquiry.

Musk reposted a message from Rupert Lowe, a politician in the Reform UK party who serves in Parliament and who said he spent Friday talking to rape gang victims.

“Victims, past and present, don’t need ‘thoughts and prayers’ from politicians, they need justice,” Lowe said. “We will fight for that in Parliament.”

Musk also briefly turned his attention to the United States’ northern neighbor and praised an interview with Pierre Poilievre, a populist firebrand who leads Canada’s Conservative Party. Musk said that next week he would live-stream a conversation with Alice Weidel, the chancellor candidate for the Alternative for Germany, a far-right political party he has endorsed ahead of that country’s snap elections in February.

That rape gang story is from 2014 and has been fully adjudicated. I don’t know if Musk just heard about it or has decided that it’s a good way to rile up the wingnuts against immigrants again to obtain political power but he’s clearly making a move on UK politics.

Interestingly, he’s already stirred up a hornets nest inside the anti-immigrant far-right Reform party there, turning on its leader Nigel Farage. He posted today, “The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.”

Farage has been a huge Trump supporter and recently has been cultivating Musk who was reportedly planning to help finance the party. But even Farage can’t stomach supporting Tommy Robinson, a grifter extremist who was jailed for contempt of court:

But things took a turn after Musk called for the release of Tommy Robinson, a jailed far-right anti-immigration activist. Speaking at a Reform UK event earlier this week, Farage said Robinson was “not what we need,” The Telegraph reported.

“There are people in Britain who think that Robinson is a political prisoner. That’s the narrative that he’s pushed out. That’s how he earns his living but it isn’t quite true,” he said.

On Sunday, Farage responded to Musk, calling the billionaire a “remarkable individual” but saying that he disagreed with his view on Robinson.

“Well, this is a surprise! Elon is a remarkable individual but on this I am afraid I disagree,” he wrote. “My view remains that Tommy Robinson is not right for Reform and I never sell out my principles.”

Robinson is a disgusting figure who openly calls for violence against immigrants. Naturally Musk is a fan.

Why is he doing this? I suspect it’s largely because he can. He’s a megalomaniac, obviously, who believes that as the richest man in the world he has a right to run it. But it’s also because he knows that this level of influence makes his businesses downright impermeable from regulation and government interference and will make him even richer.

He’s also a monumental kook:

Yes, that’s a real tweet. God help us.

Rolling back your voting rights

Michael Podhorzer finds, as Digby posted on Saturday:

the defining feature of American politics this century is that neither party can “win” elections anymore; they can only be the “not-loser.” 

Donald Trump was the not-loser in November. (It’s just what he wanted for Christmas.) Trump “won the same share of the eligible population” in 2024 as he did in 2020 while the Democrats’ share dropped 3.5% from 2020.

Hurrah!The country did not turn more MAGA. That’s little consolation for the left and doesn’t change the facts on the ground. In an age where facts don’t seem to matter, those facts nevertheless could get suckier under Trump 2.0, writes Sam Levin for The Guardian:

Donald Trump could use a second term atop the justice department to gut enforcement of US federal voting laws and deploy an agency that is supposed to protect the right to vote to undermine it, experts have warned.

Trump has made no secret of his intention to punish his political enemies and subvert the American voting system. His control of the justice department could allow him to amplify misleading claims of voter fraud by non-citizens and others, as well as investigate local election officials.

It could also cause the department’s voting section to largely scale back its enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, returning it to the approach that it took under Trump’s first term.

Enter Pam Bondi of Florida fundraising infamy and Trump’s current nominee to lead the Department of Injustice. (Or has he now dropped that moniker?)

Trump harbors a gnawing need to prove somehow that he won the 2020 election and will task Bondi with delivering a verdict that contradicts all previous findings. He will endeavor to his dying day to bend objective reality to his will, no matter what he told “Meet the Press.”

Much of the discussion about Trump’s justice department has focused on the fate of its voting section, which is charged with enforcing the nation’s federal voting rights laws. Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally who sought to overturn the 2020 election and has become a key figure in the election denial movement, has called for all of the lawyers in the voting section to be fired.

“They are all leftist activists and use taxpayer dollars and the power of the federal government to advance their leftwing legal theories,” she said in an email. “Their loyalty is not to the constitution and the rule of law. They should go back to the leftist advocacy groups they came from.”

Again, objective reality be damned. Levin continues, “Career attorneys in the justice department have apolitical jobs in which they are charged with representing the position of the United States, regardless of the administration.”

In the AfterBiden, you’re on your own

Trump has nominated “a sycophant loyalist to head the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division,” warns Democratic voting rights attorney, Marc Elias.

Buckle up. Losing the election sucked for Democrats. Things are about to get suckier still. Trump will likely see to it that Bondi et al. launch investigations “to help build the narrative that voter fraud is a problem in the US” despite failing in his first administration.

Among voter fraud theorists, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Compare and contrast

On this Sunday morning, a question springs to mind: How much of an idiot is “Captain Underpants“?

Elon Musk is beside himself that President Biden awarded philanthropist George Soros the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his pursuit of “global initiatives that strengthen democracy, human rights, education, and social justice.” (Biden gave the award to 18 others, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.) Musk posted a meme mocked up to show Biden handing the medal to the evil Emperor Palpatine. “Must be the lighting,” he quipped.

Naturally, the right is as incensed that their liberal bogeyman received the award as it wasn’t when Donald Trump awarded one to Rush Limbaugh during a State of the Union Address in recognition of Limbaugh’s Three Decades Hate.

What draws attention to Musk besides his infantile sense of humor, his inability to string more than 10 words together in most of his tweets, and his turning Jack Dorsey’s world forum into a MAGA cesspool, is the contrast with a real genius. One of Musk’s users (a bibliophile, believe it or not) posted a delightful thread about physicist Richard Feynman:

I thought I was crazy until I found Richard Feynman.

Feynman was not only among the most brilliant people on earth, but he transmitted something I’ve never seen in others.

Thread with some lessons from his peculiar way of being:

Feynman never did anything for the prestige he might get out of it.

He didn’t even want to receive the Nobel Prize.
Richard felt he had already gotten what matters.

The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out.

People think beauty is only about aesthetics.

But Feynman believed that there’s something beautiful in depth, in understanding processes.

Knowledge contributes to beauty. It doesn’t subtract from it.

Richard Feynman embodied deep curiosity.

You don’t understand what “first principles” really mean until you listen to a physicist reasoning.

It’s about going to the end of the world chasing a chain of ‘whys’.
“Where does fire come from?”

You have enough time to pursue other interests.
Don’t listen to people who say you need to do only one thing to excel at it.

Feynman got a Nobel Prize in physics, but he still pursued other interests to a state worth of admiration.

Let’s explore a very peculiar one. 

Richard didn’t know how to express a profound feeling about the beauty of the world through a set of equations, so he began drawing.

“It’s a feeling of awe — of scientific awe .. which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had that emotion. I could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe”

Feynman drew for over 20 years and even sold some of his work.

Charles Darwin was a giant of a man who greatly advanced mankind.
But he had one huge regret:

Not cultivating his appreciation for poetry and music.
“The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness.”

It might be more about imitating Feynman in this aspect.

There is another real loss in life: The loss of one’s sense of humor.

It doesn’t matter how many labels, prestige, and wisdom you may have.
You don’t want to go through life without laughing.

Feynman was especially known for this.
This book compiles some of his funny anecdotes.

How did he get away with all of this?

Feynman’s ethos was rooted in independent-mindedness.
He developed great respect towards his mind and heart.

Not caring about what others think is a superpower.

Feynman was the real deal.

Update: VP-elect marked safe from being mistaken for a genius.

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?