Author: Tom Sullivan

“Drones the size of cars”

Yes, that’s your next Commander in Chief. “And that’s how MAGAts started shooting down small private airplanes all over America,” a friend quips.

Forbes:

For weeks, citizens across New Jersey — as well as New York, Pennsylvania and Connecticut — have reported seeing clusters of drone-like objects flying low in the sky at night, yet information remains scarce, even as state officials now say they’ve seen the drones firsthand, received mixed information from federal agencies and pushed the FBI for answers.

Citizens report seeing “drones the size of cars” overhead.

With those red and green lights, I suspect we’re simply seeing those giant flying cats The Weekly World News told us years ago were terrorizing New Jersey. The flying kitties are just showing off their Christmas spirit.

Donald Trump has none. And he hates pets. Especially oversized flying ones.

Guess what he’ll do there?

Election rigging has been Republican SOP at least since their REDMAP project in 2010. The gerrymandered districts they drew in 2011 continue to pay dividends a decade and a half later.

Republicans are now so brazen about their intentions to seek power above all else that they’ve said so into microphones in state after state. Thomas Mills of Politics NC that the latest comes from (you guessed it) North Carolina:

On Wednesday, the state house overrode Governor Roy Cooper’s veto of the bill that strips power from the in-coming Democrats elected to executive branch offices. Out-going Speaker and Congressman-elect Tim Moore told Steve Bannon, “This action item today is going to be critical to making sure North Carolina continues to be able to do what it can to deliver victories for Republicans up and down the ticket.”

Yes, you read that right. The bill was not about disaster relief. It was not about good government. It was not about the people of North Carolina. It was about consolidating power and rigging elections for Republicans.

Bolts reminds us that Moore is headed to Congress from the district he gerrymandered for himself. I’ll remind you that it was Moore who brought the independent state legislature theory, “probably the most intractable constitutional con in history,” before the U.S Supreme Court.

Mills again:

Republicans have rigged the state by subverting democracy. They used extreme gerrymandering to give themselves almost veto-proof majorities in both houses of the legislature. With a partisan and complicit state Supreme Court, they have few restraints on their power. Now, they are trying eliminate the checks and balances of the executive branch to further consolidate their power. As one friend wrote, “They’re now using all three branches to guarantee their hold on power.”

What do you think will be Job One for a guy like Tim Moore in his new Capitol Hill job?

Watch this guy closely. You’ll be hearing his name moore soon.

Dana Perino is a “comedian”

The New York Times offers one of its regular “Best of Late Night” installments this morning, “a rundown of the previous night’s … comedy.” Perhaps I’ve missed it before, but the Times suddenly considers Dana Perino funny and the Fox News Channel’s “Gutfeld!” a “comedy” show.

Trish Bendix includes the regular set of quotes from last night’s late-night. Nestled among quotes from Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, and Stephen Colbert are three from George W. Bush’s former press secretary regarding Donald Trump being named Time magazine’s Man of the Year:

“Trump said the honor feels just as exciting as the birth of his child, except he was present for the award.” — JIMMY FALLON

“So it’s the second time he’s had the honor, with the first coming after his presidential win in 2016. That was also the same week Hillary Clinton canceled her subscription and smashed her server with a hammer.” — DANA PERINO, guest host of “Gutfeld!”

“The editorial board mentioned Trump’s historic comeback, his impact on global politics and how we increased his votes from Blacks, Latinos and people named Biden.” — DANA PERINO

“The difference: In 2016, the cover called him ‘President of the divided states of America.’ This year, it’s simply his name, even though there was plenty of room for ‘Cry harder, losers.’” — DANA PERINO

It’s not simply three quotes from Perino, but three in a row, up top, so readers who click away won’t miss their inclusion. A cursory search of past “Best of Late Night” installments suggests including Perino and “Gutfeld!” is something new. Trump 2.0 is coming. The Times is obeying in advance.

See you down at the bar.

Trump’s plague czar

If you’re feeling this morning like Alan Bates at the end of King of Hearts, join the club.

There is a nugget of what I’m looking for in the terms below, but none of them quite captures it. I’m not the only one looking for a word to properly describe government by the insane.

plutocracy? : government by the wealthy
kakistocracy? : government by the worst people
oligarchy? : government by the few
kleptocracy? : government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain at the expense of the governed
autocracy? : the authority or rule of an autocrat (such as a monarch) ruling with unlimited authority
idiocracy? : a society governed or populated by idiots

When pre-MAGA conservatives like Grover Norquist mused about rolling back the 20th century to the McKinley era, they imagined rule by Gilded Age plutocrats. I don’t think they considered it might mean a return to an age of crippling and disfiguring disease.

But with the Second Coming of Trump, that’s just what they may get (New York Times):

The lawyer helping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pick federal health officials for the incoming Trump administration has petitioned the government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine, which for decades has protected millions of people from a virus that can cause paralysis or death.

That campaign is just one front in the war that the lawyer, Aaron Siri, is waging against vaccines of all kinds.

Mr. Siri has also filed a petition seeking to pause the distribution of 13 other vaccines; challenged, and in some cases quashed, Covid vaccine mandates around the country; sued federal agencies for the disclosure of records related to vaccine approvals; and subjected prominent vaccine scientists to grueling videotaped depositions.

WTF? Remember polio? A friend who’s walked with a limp since childhood does. At least she survived hers.

We covered this ground a few weeks ago, but let’s hit it again with this quote from Star Trek graphic designer Michael Okuda:

Go to an old cemetery. See all the baby graves from before the 1950s & 60s? After that, hardly any. That’s when people started vaccinating their children against deadly childhood diseases. If you’re unsure what to do to protect your kids, the answer is literally written in stone.

The vaccine Luddites Trump proposes entrusting with your family’s health are something out of a zombie apocalypse film or 1950s science fiction, maybe A Worm Ate His Brain.

RFK Jr. is now an extinction-level threat to federal public health programs and science-based health policy – Science-Based Medicine, Nov. 4, 2024

Us oldsters grew up with required vaccinations, some at ages so young we don’t remember getting them. What we also don’t remember (like the Great Depression) are the scourges of plagues modern medicine all but eradicated, like smallpox.

Apologies in advance, but this is smallpox:

You may not remember your smallpox vaccination, but Samoans remember when Trump’s proposed plague csar visited their islands:

In the small island country of Samoa, lives have been forever altered by an outbreak of the disease in 2019 that caused at least 83 deaths and 1,867 hospitalisations, mostly of babies and young children. Thousands more fell sick. The preventable illness was able to spread through the small, closely knit population of about 200,000 due to record low vaccination rates – stemming from a medical vaccination error, the Samoan government’s public health mismanagement, and fuelled by anti-vaccination sentiment, including by Donald Trump’s pick to lead the US health department, Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Norquist meant to roll back 20th century. Trump and his acolytes mean to take a wrecking ball to it, and not just around vaccines. Federal deposit insurance? What do you need with that Depression Era protection?

UPDATE: Emily Baumgaertner at the Times reminds readers (gift link) of six childhood scourges we’ve forgotten about because vaccines virtually eliminated them.

Following up on my earlier post

Journalism is not how I describe to people what we do here at ye olde blog. At best, it’s advocacy journalism.

Somehow (with your help and indulgence) we’ve managed to hang on since the aughts, post-Facebook and post-Twitter, while traditional journalism has lost ground to propaganda-inflected social media and cultural influencers. I wince at “influencers,” but suppose they get traction the same way Digby explained bloggers did in our heyday (2007):

If you have something to say you can say it–and if it touches a chord, people will return time and again to read what you’ve written and discuss the issues of the day with others who are reading the same things.

[…]

Each of us finds their niche. I’m a blogger pundit, a role for which I am eminently qualified, since, exactly like pundits on television and in newspapers, I have opinions, I write them down, and a lot of people read them.

(Yes, that’s all there is to it. Sorry Mr. Broder.).

But with fascism American-style on the rise and newspapers going the way of the dodo, traditional journalists need to ply their trade in the world as it is, not as they’d prefer it to be. Same with Democrats.

Gideon Lichfield at Nieman Labs argues that “It’s time for American journalism to rewrite its own job description” in an age where drawing eyeballs means eating.

Accountability journalism has faltered in this political environment, warped the way “a black hole distorts spacetime.” It’s been supplanted by access journalism and, worse, stenography without context, facts without underlying meaning. “Something more is required,” Lichfield insists.

“Reporting on threats to democracy does not empower the public unless you also give them ideas about how to counter those threats. What would it look like to provide those ideas, and inspire them to act?”

It might look like an older model of newspaper that championed public issues 100 years ago. Was it biased? Yes, but people knew where this or that outlet stood. Isn’t that what MAGA likes about Donald Trump? The congenital liar “tells it like it is”?

“If some of this looks to you like crossing the line from journalism into activism, you’re right,” Lichfield argues. “We cannot be neutral about this, by definition. A free press that doesn’t agitate for democracy is an oxymoron.”

This is as much about saving the country as it is about saving the fourth estate:

But activism is different from partisanship. Partisanship is defining democracy as that which Democrats want and Republicans don’t. That would be a mistake. Rather, we should use this as an opportunity for a big conversation about what democracy really is, or could be.

And I’m not saying we should stop doing accountability journalism either. If nothing else, future generations will need our first draft of history to understand what went wrong. But it’s no longer enough on its own.

Adapt or die.

That’s as true for journalism as it is for Democrats.

No defense except offense

A call for a lefty demagogue has popped up for the second time in a week. This time from Jonathan Last at The Bulwark. Trumpism represents a break from the old politics for which America has few defenses. Trump has “extrapolated existing dynamics while also transforming the public’s attitudes toward violence, democracy, and the rule of law,” he writes. So now what?

Setting aside his ‘druthers (and morality, for the moment), how do we win elections in this environment?

Joe Biden’s (and Democrats’) theory of the case was, as I’ve complained, same-old, same-old. Govern and run on kitchen tables issues, insists Nancy Pelosi’s generation. Democrats did, and delivered for red, rural areas in particular where Democrats have bled support. Who noticed?

And Trump?

The 2024 Trump campaign was not posited on ideas about growth, prosperity, or progress. It was posited on the infliction of pain.

• Deporting immigrants who “poison the blood” of the nation.
• Retribution against Trump’s domestic political enemies.
• Inflicting tariffs on disfavored countries.

Trump did not promise to improve the lives of his voters. He promised to punish the people his voters wanted to hurt. That was the entirety of his electoral proposition and it was not subtext. It was the explicit, bold-face, ALL CAPS text.

Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty are museum pieces, not guideposts, these days. A plurality of Americans is now more interested in pulling up the ladder behind them, Last suggests. (I’m reading between his lines.) They’d rather kick down than lift up latecomers to the threadbare American Dream. Making the pie higher is out. Zero-sum is in. Even undocumented immigrants are in on the game. YOU! Keep out!

Remember the Biden COVID stimulus? People were unhappy with it because they thought money was going to those who didn’t need it.

Remember Biden’s Child Tax Credit? People didn’t like that it was helping “other” families.

Remember Biden’s student loan forgiveness program? ’Nuff said.

You can go further back: Democrats and Barack Obama had to drag voters kicking and screaming to the ACA because people were furious that this new program might help some other group.

There’s always been xenophobia and a kind of national hazing of the last wave of immigrants (my maternal grandmother never forgot discrimination against the Irish). But the trending negative mood for the last generation, say, post-Sept. 11 is something new. “[T]he cumulative effect of this unhappiness has been to reorient people away from a desire for progress for themselves and toward a desire for retribution against others.”

Again, what now?

Last offers a thought experiment. What’s more likely to get more traction in 2028, offering improved access to better healthcare or promising to bring the hammer down on “health insurance companies, their CEOs, and oligarchs”?

It’s not that Last wants to see that kind of demagoguery from the left, but “it is not clear to me that Democrats can succeed in 2028 with a positive, forward-looking vision in which they propose to improve the lives of voters.”

Ho-kay. It strikes me that what Last thinks will win votes in this environment is something akin to what Bernie Sanders has been selling for years with his “millionaires and billionaires” rants. He got quite a lot of traction with that in Appalachia in 2016, but Democratic Party primary voters were not ready for it. He won the presidential primary in my WNC district that sent Mark Meadows back to Congress that fall.

I’m not sure how much stomach Democrats have for the kind of feistiness Last is suggesting, but they need some. Sanders’s pitches resonated with younger voters but felt a little one-trick-pony to me. But it’s fer damn-sure that same-old (and I mean old) won’t cut it. And thank God there is at least some movement among “younger” Democrats on the Hill to challenge the party’s gerontocracy.

Chris Smith at Vanity Fair suggested days ago that New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the kind of Democrat to bring the heat and perhaps a new, Bernie-friendlier, working-class narrative, and more social media savvy to their sales pitch. I just don’t know. There’s still the extant media environment hostile to the left. But same-old ain’t cutting it.

Do Republicans build anything?

Temperatures here are expected to fall steadily over the next 24 hours. There is also a wind advisory.* How do I know? The National Weather Service. Where do you think The Weather Channel and other weather information sites get their information? From a bevy of satellites owned or operated by NOAA, NWS’s parent organization.

I rather like having that info free and at my fingertips. I rather like that air traffic controlers from the FAA keep my flight from colliding with others in the sky nearby.

But our Republican friends are not into that so much. Nor into public education, as we’ve long known:

Cultists’ push to charterize, voucherize, or tax-credit scholarship public education out of existence — supported by a religious right profiteers have co-opted — is a betrayal of the country’s founding vision. Public education is the largest portion of annual budgets in all 50 states. The cult sees public schools (and children) as resources to strip-mine.

Donald Trump nominating vaccine skeptic RFK Jr. to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is another brick knocked out of the schoolhouse wall.

Casey Quinlan writes at The New Republic that Kennedy’s opposition to childhood vaccinations will further undermine public support for public schools and advance right-wing efforts to shrink systems until they can be drowned in the bathtub:

Anti-vax movements align well with conservative designs for public education. Under Project 2025, which is essentially the agenda of Trump’s second term, concocted by the Heritage Foundation, the Trump administration plans to greatly weaken the public education system through several policy changes, such as having states eventually take over Title I funding, which provides financial assistance to school districts with a high concentration of low-income students.

Trump has said he would dismantle the U.S. Department of Education—though it’s unclear how long this planned deconstruction will take. In the meantime, his choice of Linda McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, is at the very least a demonstration of Trump’s commitment to reducing education funding. She is the chair of the board at the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank that supports a “cut in federal education spending and redirected resources toward school choice.”

[…]

The movement for parental rights is no grassroots campaign. It’s spawned wholesale from conservative think tanks and advocacy groups such as the Heritage Foundation and American Principles Project, which have helped power legislation opposing all mention of LGBTQ people and people of color in schools. Some of the groups and activists involved in stoking the parental rights movement have been vocal opponents of public schooling more broadly. This lines up well with long-standing conservative pushes for more school privatization and less support for public schools.

I’ve said it before, the end game is to divert all education funding mandated by state constitutions to private, for-profit actors for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: it’s where the money is in the budgets of all 50 states.

Do these people build anything?

* Wind events here these days induce PTSD among some survivors of Helene.

And spaghetti against the wall

Political skulduggery is born here and raised elsewhere. The North Carolina GOP should advertise.

When Republicans won control of North Carolina’s state Supreme Court in 2022, the new 5-2 court quickly reversed a previous ruling and ordered a new redraw of the state’s congressional districts. The new map turned a 7-7 partisan balance in this evenly divided state into an 11-3 split favoring Republicans. Results borne out on Nov. 5 will be felt on Capitol Hill and across the nation. Down-ballot races matter. A lot.

A month after Election Day, political power struggles continue in North Carolina. The GOP supermajority in the state House will attempt today to override Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of a bill marketed as “disaster relief” for western North Carolina. Branded “a sham” by Cooper, the bill “appropriated no new money for areas hit by Helene, nor created the small-business grants requested by local business leaders and Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat.” But the measure does strip powers from Democrats elected on Nov. 5 to the state’s executive branch. The veto override hangs on the votes of three WNC Republicans who voted against bill.

Also today, the state’s Board of Elections is expected to hear election protests by Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin in his race for a seat on the state Supreme Court. The Board on Tuesday issued a press release denying Griffin’s request for a statewide hand recount. After multiple recounts, Griffin trails incumbent State Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs by 734 votes.

Griffin has challenged the validity of 60,000 votes cast across the state, nearly 1,600 in my county alone, four of them my friends. Griffin alleges those voters, some of whom have voted for decades, are ineligible to cast ballots.

Chris Cooper, a political science professor at Western Carolina University, believes Griffin’s “incentive is to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.”

End game

The Raleigh News & Observer reports:

The final count of votes in the race on Tuesday upheld Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs’s victory, reports Kyle Ingram. That means Griffin’s protests, which the North Carolina Democratic Party has challenged in federal court, may be his only avail. If they’re accepted, it could change the race’s outcome.

[…]

If the board rules against Griffin, he could appeal to the Wake County Superior Court. From there, he could eventually appeal the case to the state Supreme Court.

This is the GOP’s end game, suggests a former Democratic consultant:

“The question is, can the Republicans take what’s going on here and turn it into a semi-legitimate case?” said Pope McCorkle III, known as Mac, a former Democratic political consultant and professor of public policy at Duke University. “If they can, Riggs might lose.”

The odds are stacked in a North Carolina court that’s already handed control of the U.S. House of Representatives to Republicans.

“What’s happening in North Carolina is sinister, and it will have a chilling effect on our democracy and our country if they’re able to get away with what they’re trying to achieve,” said N.C. Democratic Party chair Anderson Clayton at a Tuesday news conference.

But there is something more sinister going on than Griffin’s challenge to 60,000 voters in his race. If state Republicans can make their ineligible voter allegations stick in court, they might trigger a state provision for holding new elections in multiple races, not just in his. By triggering a do-over, they could get a second chance to hold onto the veto-proof majority they lost in the House on Nov. 5.

§ 163-182.13.  New elections.

(a) When State Board May Order New Election. – The State Board may order a new election, upon agreement of at least five of its members, in the case of any one or more of the following:

(1) Ineligible voters sufficient in number to change the outcome of the election were allowed to vote in the election, and it is not possible from examination of the official ballots to determine how those ineligible voters voted and to correct the totals.

(2) Eligible voters sufficient in number to change the outcome of the election were improperly prevented from voting.

(3) Other irregularities affected a sufficient number of votes to change the outcome of the election.

(4) Irregularities or improprieties occurred to such an extent that they taint the results of the entire election and cast doubt on its fairness.

Utterly specious

Republicans in the state have long loathed Gene Nichol, a UNC-Chapel Hill law professor and News & Observer columnist. NC Republicans are “trying to break down the fundaments,” he argued in his 2020 book, “Indecent Assembly.” Nichol adds, “That’s a bigger transgression than being wrong or being stupid. It’s a rejection of what it means to be a North Carolinian, what it means to be an American.”

Nichol writes in Tuesday’s News & Observer:

Jefferson Griffin thinks his fanciful, already judicially-rejected, election-busting ideological claim counts more than the personal franchise of tens of thousands of Tar-Heel citizens. He also likely has a quiet confidence that the most partisan state supreme court in the United States — which he is anxious to join — will ignore the law and sweep him in. Though it now appears Democrats are trying to head this off in federal court.

In embracing the North Carolina Republican “politics of façade,” Griffin shows he shouldn’t become a justice.

We’re awfully familiar with “façade” politics in Carolina. When Republican lawmakers used “surgical precision” to disenfranchise Black voters with a “monster” voter ID bill, federal courts found the proffered interest in “ballot integrity” was mere ruse, since no evidence of voter fraud could be produced.

Mere ruses and voter fraud smoke bombs are SOP for the GOP everywhere.

Utterly specious justification takes one a long way in North Carolina Republican politics. The first Republican president Abraham Lincoln advised: “Tell the truth and you won’t have so much to remember.” They must have dropped that from the platform.

Oh, decades ago.

Ben Wikler on “The Daily Show”

Ben Wikler, Democratic Party of Wisconsin chair, appeared Monday night on “The Daily Show” and made an impression on host Jon Stewart. That’s not easy to do for a political operative. Wikler, 43, a founding producer for Al Franken’s Air America radio show and former national adviser to MoveOn, is running for Democratic National Committee chair.

“The passion that you’re bringing, that feels like what it needs in this moment,” Stewart said, remarking that DNC chairs he’s interviewed before felt much more corporate.

“You are approaching [politics] from a much more populist, bottom-up standpoint than I’ve heard in the past. Other than Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy.” At that Dean reference, the audience applauded.

I’ve mentioned Wikler in the context of the DNC chair’s race twice already. The two front runners for the position are Wikler and Minnesota’s DFL chair Ken Martin. I met Martin in passing this year at a North Carolina party meeting. He’s known, experienced, impressive, and connected. But indulge me. How I met Wikler says worlds about the man.

Netroots Nation held its 2019 conference in Philadelphia. A few weeks earlier, I’d sent Wikler a link to For The Win via IM. At an after-hours party in a hotel suite packed elbow-to-elbow, I’d slipped into an adjacent bedroom for a conversation where the din was somewhat less. While attendees in the main room sipped beers, ate cheesesteaks, and traded political gossip, a guy sat in the corner of the bedcoom in a cushioned chair with his nose in a laptop: working. Seriously, working. I caught a glimpse of his name badge: Ben Wikler.

When he came up for air, I walked over and introduced myself. He recognized my name.

“Didn’t you send me a message recently?” Wikler asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Did I respond to it?” Wikler asked, recalling what I’d messaged about.

No, he hadn’t.

“I’m putting you in touch with my training director,” Wikler said, pulling up an email form and e-introducing us on the spot. I had a 45-minute call with her the next week.

That’s the kind of chair Democrats need running their national party. A guy who understands and appreciates field work and is passionate about boots on the ground work. It’s what Stewart saw across the table last night.

Update: Let me say again, There is no The Democratic Party. A lot of the negatives Stewart reacts to as “the Democratic Party” are more a feature of the Beltway caucus fundraising arms — the DCCC and DSCC — than activists farther down the food chain. But the DNC chair gets more media face time than the heads of those groups and can set a new tone and agenda, as Howard Dean did and caught grief for inside the Beltway:

“We’re going to be in places where the Democratic Party hasn’t been in 25 years,” Dean likes to say. “If you don’t show up in 60 percent of the country, you don’t win, and that’s not going to happen anymore.”

50-state worked while Dean lasted.

The anger of the crowd and the pettiness of plutocrats

Princeton economist Paul Krugman just published his final New York Times column in a body of work begun in January 2000. He considers how the world has changed over 25 years. It’s a grimmer place:

What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. And I’m not just talking about members of the working class who feel betrayed by elites; some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now — people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the incoming Trump administration — are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired.

Krugman doesn’t mention Trump again, but he’s the most prominent of those resentful billionaires.

In early 2000, Krugman writes, “Polls showed a level of satisfaction with the direction of the country that looks surreal by today’s standards.” One could point to many reasons for the public mood, but the collapse of public faith in elites features prominently. “The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest.”

Krugman touches on the financial crisis of 2008 as one reason, eliding the crisis of confidence in American invulnerability that was the fallout from the September 11 attacks. Still, the Great Recession hit more Americans where they live, and their resentments swelled.

Wall Street’s  Masters of the Universe were uncontrite and escaped well-earned criminal prosecutions, adding to public cynicism. They kept their bonuses but lost stature in the public eye. They responded with “Obama rage” to the 44th president’s suggestion that they were, you know, in some small part to blame.

These days there has been a lot of discussion of the hard right turn of some tech billionaires, from Elon Musk on down. I’d argue that we shouldn’t overthink it, and we especially shouldn’t try to say that this is somehow the fault of politically correct liberals. Basically it comes down to the pettiness of plutocrats who used to bask in public approval and are now discovering that all the money in the world can’t buy you love.

There is not enough money on the planet to fill an empty soul. So not to overthink things, then, it is clear that the incoming 47th president has been trying to buy love his entire career. As have many of the billionaires with which he plans to populate the White House next year. Trump chief among them demands worship. Wealth equals worth in the billionaire universe, and in the country club of the gods.

Venture capitalist Nick Hanauer famously deconstructed billionaire’s mythmaking in a 2012 TED talk. He told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell:

“When a capitalist like me claims to be a ‘job creator,’ it sounds like we’re describing how the economy works, but what we’re doing is something far more interesting. What we’re doing is making a claim on status and privilege. Look, there’s a small leap from ‘job creator’ to ‘The Creator’ — someone at the center of the economic universe…

But elites in general have taken it on the chin over the last 25 years, not just the One Percent. The public mood has curdled, in Krugman’s view, towards elites in particular, and of any kind.

The Washington Post reports this morning, “University leaders are bracing for an onslaught of aggressive legislation and regulations amid growing hostility from an ascendant Republican Party that depends less and less on college-educated voters.”

This is not a new trend. Attacks on elite academies by state legislatures have taken place in the last decade in North Carolina and Wisconsin. Only now they may come from Washington, D.C.:

For years, conservatives have seen colleges and universities as unwelcoming and disdainful of their values. Tensions between Republicans and higher education have been rising over questions of free speech, the cost of college, diversity, race and more.

Now that rift has become a rupture.

In a “Morning Joe” interview aired Monday, President Bill Clinton commented on how “deeply and yet closely divided” the U.S. is as a country.

That divide, distrust of learning and expertise is both organic and cultivated, seeded and nurtured by the very petty plutocrats whose wealth can’t buy love.

Commenting on the Clinton interview, a Bluesky commenter notes, “Since Reagan, the GOP has worked to increase citizens’ cynicism about government, and then campaigned against government. Now, under Trump, the GOP is working to increase citizens’ cynicism about democracy, and then campaigning against democracy.”

Is there a way out? Krugman offers:

We may never recover the kind of faith in our leaders — belief that people in power generally tell the truth and know what they’re doing — that we used to have. Nor should we. But if we stand up to the kakistocracy — rule by the worst — that’s emerging as we speak, we may eventually find our way back to a better world.

May you all live to see it.

For now, the satire of Idiocracy (2006) bites deeper than ever and we seem a long way from the corner Joe Bowers turned in his inaugural speech:

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