Bats!
Statler, an Indian flying fox, was born at a zoo in 1987. Since then, he’s moved from facility to facility. For many years, he was kept in a small space and used for “education.” When he arrived at Bat World Sanctuary in 2018, his caretakers made sure he’d have a happy and peaceful retirement. To help save more bats like Statler, you can support Bat World Sanctuary here: http://thedo.do/batworld, and check them out on Facebook: http://thedo.do/batworldsanctuary.
I have to assume that Republicans think these are the issues people really care about and are demanding the GOP House of Representatives deal with immediately. It’s that important…
I wrote yesterday about the Steve Bannon plot to activate young environmentalists against Biden over the huge increase in American oil production during his administration (even as they lie to the MAGA cultists, telling them that Biden has shut off the spigot and Trump will come in an drill, baby, drill.) They figure they can get the young vote to turn on the Democrats and vote 3rd Party, whether it’s RFK or Jill Stein.
Biden just put a monkey wrench in that plan:
The US set aside 23 million acres of Alaska’s North Slope to serve as an emergency oil supply a century ago. Now, President Joe Biden is moving to block oil and gas development across roughly half of it.
The initiative, set to be finalized within days, marks one of the most sweeping efforts yet by Biden to limit oil and gas exploration on federal lands. It comes as he seeks to boost land conservation and fight climate change — and is campaigning for a second term on promises to do more of it.
The changes wouldn’t affect ConocoPhillips’s controversial 600-million-barrel Willow oil project in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. But oil industry leaders say the plan is more expansive than initially anticipated and threatens to make it nearly impossible to build another megaproject in the region.
That’s spooking oil companies with holdings in the National Petroleum Reserve, which — along with the rest of Alaska’s North Slope — was viewed as a major growth engine for the industry before the shale boom. Interest has surged again in recent years, fed by mammoth discoveries. Tapping the region’s reservoirs could yield decades of production.
There is no reason to tap that reserve. If an emergency comes up down the road then it will be there. But that land should be protected and we should do everything we can to make sure it is.
I don’t know if Biden will get anything but grief for this but he should be given credit. Instead, I’m sure the headlines will all be that it’s more bad news for him because well .. what isn’t?
It’s been reported that he doesn’t like his voters. Of course he doesn’t, he’s a rich guy who really only values important, powerful, rich people. He can’t stand his voters. They are marks to him, just like the rubes who bought his Trump University courses.
He posts “something horrible” every day so I don’t know what he might be talking about but if he’s thinking of something else that Scavino might know about that’s “very sexually oriented” —
We already know too much. Much too much.
There has been something of a brouhaha this past week over a new book by Paul Waldman and Thomas Schaller called White Rural Rage. Evidently some political science scholars in the field felt that it was unfair to the rural voters by characterizing them as feeling rage instead of righteous anger. We urban types are mean as always and need to be more understanding of some people’s racism, xenophobia, misogyny and fetishistic Trump worship because well … they’re unhappy.
Waldman and Schaller responded. Here are some extended excerpts. You can read the whole thing here and you should.
When we wrote White Rural Rage, we knew that our provocative argument and book title would arouse ire on the far right. We were not disappointed. But we have been surprised by the ferocity of the criticism we have received from scholars of rural politics. Their response has made clear that there are unspoken rules about criticizing certain Americans—rules that get to the heart of the very case we have tried to make about the deep geographic divisions in our politics at this fragile moment in our nation’s history.
Pillorying Donald Trump is fine. Thundering against the MAGA movement is acceptable. Deep-dive analyses of the votes and voices of “downscale” whites? Sure. But if you dare to criticize the rural whites who are among Trump’s most devout followers, you’ll be met with an angry rebuke.
And so we have, in an article in Politico by Nicholas Jacobs, a political scientist who co-authored his own book, The Rural Voter, that was released a few months before ours; and another in The Atlantic by Tyler Harper, an environmental studies professor who has made it a personal crusade to attack us and our book. These pieces illustrate some of the very pathologies so common in the way scholars and pundits alike treat rural whites.
In recent years, research from political scientists showing some disturbing patterns of opinion among rural voters, especially rural whites, has begun to accumulate. But there is a clear discomfort with the implications of that research, even among some of these researchers. For instance, consider this quote: “Clearly, though, even when we account for composition effects related to race [i.e., the fact that rural America is whiter than the rest of the country], we see that racial resentment is higher in rural than in urban America.” That appears not in our book. It’s found on page 296 of Jacobs’s The Rural Voter.
Soon after, Jacobs and his co-author write, “On a range of race-related questions, responses from rural residents veer from those of other Americans—and even from other Republicans—in significant ways.” As you might have guessed, “veer from” is the euphemism they deploy to say that rural whites express more racist attitudes. “And yet,” they go on, “for many rural residents, attitudes about races are intimately linked to perceptions of hard work, self-reliance, a disdain for government handouts, and the dangers of elites.” What they’re arguing, then, is that it’s not that many rural whites (to reiterate, not all, but many) are racist per se, it’s just that they think nonwhites don’t work hard, aren’t self-reliant, and are the clients of nefarious “elites.”
Right. They’re just a little bit resentful of all those lazy … ahem ... welfare queens who are living on the government teat. It has nothing to do with their color, nothing at all. If anything it’s racist to suggest it does.
Given the important place hard work holds in the rural ethos, we find that result to be troubling, and we believe it deserves further discussion. In fact, as Katherine Cramer, author of The Politics of Resentment, the most oft-cited book about rural politics of recent years, told us when we interviewed her, if she were to write her book over again, “I would have written more about how racism is present even when people aren’t talking about it.”
Here is another quote, from a journal article that appeared after our book was finished: “We find that, contrary to popular belief, rural Americans may actually be less likely to support political violence [i.e., against fellow citizens] than their non-rural counterparts. Importantly, however, we find that some rural individuals—namely those who harbor higher levels of rural resentment—are more likely, on average, to support violence against the state.” The lead author of this piece is Kal Munis, another of our vocal critics. To our knowledge, nowhere outside this journal article has Munis mentioned this finding about rural support for violence against the state. With Donald Trump making clear once again that he will not accept an election he does not win, a position that led to a rather notable incident of violence against the state that took place on January 6, 2021, this seems highly relevant.
We call this phenomenon the “shouts and whispers” approach to social science discourse about rural whites. Find no difference between the political attitudes of rural whites and other Americans, or show that they have admirable values? Shout it from the rooftops. Uncover transgressive political beliefs among rural whites? Whisper it at a conference panel with a dozen people in attendance and no media to be found.
We wonder what would happen if rural politics scholars took to the online pages of places like Politico and The Atlantic to describe their more troubling findings. Actually, we don’t have to wonder: Their inboxes would be filled with the hateful and threatening emails we are receiving.
When it comes to rural resentments, again and again these scholars insist that if rural whites are mad, it’s only because they have good reason to be. We are hardly unaware of the sufferings of rural America, many of which are born from late-stage capitalism. In fact, we dedicate the second chapter of our book to the causes and consequences of declining economic opportunities, outmigration of ambitious young people, hospital and pharmacy closures, and other very serious problems that pervade rural American communities, white and nonwhite alike. In our reporting, we heard many moving stories about the challenges rural communities face.
What isn’t said enough is that rural whites are being told to blame all the wrong people for their very real problems. As we argue in the book, Hollywood liberals didn’t destroy the family farm, college professors didn’t move manufacturing jobs overseas, immigrants didn’t pour opioids into rural communities, and critical race theory didn’t close hundreds of rural hospitals. When Republican politicians and the conservative media tell rural whites to aim their anger at those targets, it’s so they won’t ask why the people they keep electing haven’t done anything to improve life in their communities.
And yet, the response to our book has been not just angry but personal at times. Harper delivered a torrent of abuse at us on social media, calling us “idiots” and “intellectual lightweights who wrote a dumb screed.” He also called us “soft-handed elites” and claimed that our book says that “white rural people are evil scum,” which of course it does not; that was one of many distortions of what we wrote that he sent out to his followers before penning his Atlantic article.
You are just not allowed, ever, to criticize Real Americans — and you know who I’m talking about. There will be hell to pay and not just from those people but from members of the left as well who immediately launch into paroxysms of self-righteous defensiveness on behalf of the poor downtrodden whiners.
The unwillingness to define and confront what’s going on in the nascent fascist movement in this country is downright shameful:
Most importantly, our critics refuse to seriously grapple with rural whites’ place in Trump’s movement as it grows increasingly authoritarian. In rising to the defense of their subjects, the scholars discount or ignore the disturbing beliefs many (though not all) rural whites hold and work hard to justify and validate their resentments. Not unlike how journalists trooped to “the heartland” after the 2016 election to give a respectful hearing to every Trump voter they could find, scholars of rural politics bend over backward to avoid saying anything that might reflect poorly on rural whites—even when it means downplaying their own research.
Rather than explore Trump’s rural white support, they offer facile explanations for it, preferring instead to blame liberals for rural resentments whose roots date back decades. They insist that Democrats must do more to cater to rural whites, while giving Republicans compliments for their political skill (“Republicans are the political party that has figured out how to speak to that rural identity effectively,” writes Jacobs). And they don’t acknowledge one of our core arguments: Republicans are winning rural votes but doing almost nothing to improve rural Americans’ lives.
[…]
What’s really going on here? Our critics claim they’re critiquing our methodology, but their real objection is to our message. We anticipated this defense of rural whites and their virtues, knowing that they are routinely described as more “real” than other citizens and therefore deserving of greater deference. In fact, Jacobs reports in The Rural Voter that 80 percent of rural citizens say they’re more likely to encounter the “real” America in rural spaces; so pervasive is this insult to other Americans that even 66 percent of suburban and urban dwellers say the same thing. To his credit, Jacobs agrees with us that no group of Americans is more “real” than any other. If only the conservative politicians and media figures who work so hard to stoke rural resentment concurred.
Our critics also say we “misrepresent” their work. We do not; we’re guilty only of assembling in one place a composite picture of rural white politics that shows worrying strains of opinion. Our critics want to believe—and worse, want others to believe—that sentiments in the places Trump enjoys his most overwhelming following have nothing to do with his racism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, and valorization of violence, despite a growing body of evidence to the contrary. The more charitable view is that our critics failed to pull back the lens to notice that larger picture; the less charitable view is that they’ve seen it but prefer to obscure it from public view.
And guess what? There are plenty of people of color who live in rural American and for some crazy reason that these critics are unable to explain, they don’t have the same attitudes. I wonder why?
Those nonwhite rural Americans are almost invisible in the national media, as well as in the work of many scholars. Because we thought their stories are important, we traveled to rural communities with large nonwhite populations, including in the Albemarle region of North Carolina and Arizona’s “Copper Corridor.” The experience of people in those places—who are mostly ignored and enjoy little of the deference and political power their white counterparts do—only highlights the privileging of the white rural experience.
We would ask rural scholars to confront this question: How is it that rural minorities, who by most measures face even greater challenges in health care access and economic opportunity than their white counterparts, do not express weakened commitments to our democracy, or the anti-urban, xenophobic, conspiracist, and violence-justifying attitudes so many rural whites do? The Rural Voter dedicates just five of the book’s 414 pages to examining rural minorities, and it spends most of that limited space comparing the attitudes of rural minorities with urban minorities, thereby avoiding any deep consideration of how rural whites and nonwhites differ in their views or their experiences.
Those who have risen to defend the honor of rural whites insist that they have good reason to feel resentful; Jacobs even elevates resentment to a kind of virtue (“Resentment is rational, a reaction based on some sort of negative experience,” he writes). But if the rural experience justifies resentment, should not rural minorities be equally if not more resentful than rural whites? Why aren’t they threatening their local elected officials, or marinating in conspiracy theories, or supporting demagogues eager to tear down American democracy? Too few scholars of rural politics confront these questions.
They go on to recount some of the more hysterical claims in these critical articles. It might as well be the early 2000s without any reevaluation of that stale old trope, “economic anxiety.”
Since our book came out, we’ve had many conversations with rural Americans—journalists, activists, and ordinary people—who have told us that it accurately reflects what they see in their communities. Christopher Gibbs is a case in point. A Maplewood, Ohio, farmer who raises corn, soybeans, and alfalfa hay and supervises an 85-head cow/calf operation, Gibbs is the board president of Rural Voices USA. A former Shelby County Republican Party chair who, remarkably, is now the county’s Democratic Party chair, Gibbs interviewed us for his podcast. He doesn’t agree with everything we write, but he told us that he “lives this book every day” in his rural county. He concluded our interview by saying our book may not provide an easy foldout “road map” to revive rural America, but “it’s chock full of clues” for those interested in “helping rural folks get what they deserve in policy.”
As we confront a presidential election in which one of the candidates is counting on white rural support to return him to the Oval Office so he can begin dismantling our democratic system, we can’t turn away and say everything in rural politics is fine.
Personally, I think those who rush to the defense of these folks are the ones talking down to them. They’re all adults. They have agency and they know what they’re doing. Coddling those who are eagerly rushing headlong into fascism doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
There are many rural whites who do not share these views but they are a minority. Donald Trump massively dominates among this cohort and they are his most ardent followers. We know what that means. I’ve ordered the book and will probably have more to say about it once I read it. This is an important subject and I trust these two people, whose work I’ve followed for years, more than any of those others to get it right. They understand the stakes.
If there’s one thing that characterizes this election season so far it’s the fact that the country remains as polarized as it’s been these last few years and both sides are very upset. But nobody seems to be able to figure out exactly why. Is it inflation or the media or the pandemic or too much doomscrolling or something else? There are plenty of theories but no consensus, at least not yet.
The most common explanation is that the economy is bringing everyone down. It’s hard to explain why people are so negative about it since the numbers are actually quite robust with the job market being the best it’s been since the 1960s and wages rising rapidly, especially for the people in the middle and working classes. For the first time in decades the gains in this economy are flowing to them instead of the upper 1%.
Here’s Sen. J.D. Vance lying about this on Fox News along with a graph showing the reality (which Fox viewers will never see.)
Inflation is often cited as the main reason for Americans’ dissatisfaction, mainly because only the older folks have ever experienced a sharp rise in prices before (the last time was in the late 70s and early 80s) so it came as a shock when the pandemic introduced it. People seem to have expected that when inflation eased prices would go back down to where they were before but that’s not how it works and it wouldn’t be a good thing if it did. Deflation would result in those wage gains and new jobs going back down as well. Still, people remember what the prices of eggs were before the pandemic and are angry that they are more expensive today. But is that enough to cause this overwhelming despondency in the culture at large?
This economic discontent expressed by many Americans these days has been called a “vibecession” defined by economics writer Kyla Scanlon as “a disconnect between consumer sentiment and economic data and why people feel bad about the economy, despite the economic metrics telling them that the economy is doing OK.” As this chart points out, most people are actually feeling pretty good about their own personal finances. They just think everyone else’s are getting worse.
That disconnect isn’t just about economics. Gallup routinely polls people about their sense of satisfaction in their personal lives and the direction of the country and the same weird phenomenon exists on that question. 78% of people say they’re satisfied with the way things are going personally, a number which has been more or less steady for two decades. Only 20% express satisfaction with the direction of the country.
Since people generally seem to feel pretty good about their personal situation, this leads one to take a hard look at the media since that’s mostly where people get their view of the country at large. I think it’s fair to say that the “vibecession” was pushed pretty hard in the press for the first two years of Biden’s term which has only recently begun to present a more balanced view of the economy. And when you add that to constant stories about people being dissatisfied and despondent, it created a negative feedback loop. Even as people were feeling pretty good about their own lives they were still depressed by what they perceived as other people’s despair.
Another plausible explanation for this national funk is the fact that the whole country just went through a once in a lifetime trauma that ended up with the deaths of well over a million people from COVID-19. Psychiatrists George Makari and Richard A. Friedman wrote in the Atlantic that we’re all dealing with unprocessed grief:
Almost overnight, most of the country was thrown into a state of high anxiety—then, soon enough, grief and mourning. But the country has not come together to sufficiently acknowledge the tragedy it endured. As clinical psychiatrists, we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when it’s not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and anger—exactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.
I’m sure this has contributed greatly to this feeling of doom and gloom that seems to define this era of bad feelings. How could it not? But it’s hard to imagine how we could have come together to acknowledge what happened when we couldn’t even rally ourselves as a country in the midst of a major global crisis. We pretty much fell apart.
And that brings me to my own personal hypothesis about what’s bringing everyone down: it’s Donald Trump. From the moment he won the election in 2016, this country has been in a state of high anxiety. Recall that even in victory, Trump’s supporters were angry and aggressive and Trump immediately doubled down on his hostile rhetoric toward his opponents, stoking that rage. The other side reacted with the massive Women’s Marches that took place all over the world the day after the inauguration and that made them even angrier.
From that day until the insurrection on January 6th almost four years later there was never a day in which the country wasn’t on high alert because of what the president was doing whether it was a source of unmitigated joy for his followers or a source of barely restrained panic from everyone else. Scandal after scandal, bizarre embarrassing behavior in foreign capitals, reckless half-baked, inhumane policies were received by half the nation as brilliant creative destruction and the other half as careening toward disaster every single day. It culminated in a presidential performance during the pandemic that was like something out of a surreal horror film and a riot in the US Capitol.
When he finally flew off to his exile in Mar-a-Lago, I think most people, maybe even some of his followers, breathed a sigh of relief that maybe we could all take a breather. But he never went away. The angst and unease has never let up for eight long years and it’s taken a toll.
Trump and the right wing media spend all day, every day, working Republicans into a frenzy over one thing or another. Trump has made his crimes into a spectacle with him at the center of a great passion play as the Nelson Mandela of America. They have been convinced that unless Donald Trump is president this country is doomed. Most everyone else either doesn’t want to hear about it anymore or knows very well that the opposite is true.
America is in deep, deep distress right now and there’s no real mystery as to what’s causing it. It’s because of Donald Trump and the culture he created when he came down that escalator in 2015. It’s not going to get any better until he is defeated. If he isn’t, it’s going to get much, much worse.
Conservaytibes feel bad because their dear leader tells them its bad, liberals feel bad because Trump exists. It’s Trump.
Democrats regularly say three things that set my teeth on edge. It’s an ingrained cultural tic, I guess, and they recite them like the catechism without thinking.
First, they complain that conservative voters, particularly rural ones, vote against their best interests. See “Thank you for not voting your best interests” for what I think about that.
Second, they insist that every election is the most important of our lifetime. They seem to think this alarmist message is somehow motivating for their base. But is it? Really? When every damned election is the most important election of our lifetime, what happens instead is Democrats go into a defensive crouch. Innovation is off the table. They take no chances. Find another gear? Hell, no. For most campaigns, their idea of finding another gear is to do what they’ve always done, the way they’ve always done it, just more of it. That’s a dinosaur’s recipe for losing.
Finally — and I heard this again at an event last night — Democrats of a certain age love to joke that you should vote early and vote often. IN THIS POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT, they still say that. It’s the tired (and tasteless) political equivalent of Henny Youngman’s “Take my wife — Please!” Said tongue-in-cheek, the expression is variously attributed to corrupt Chicago politicians from a hundred years ago, but likely dates from earlier. Just stop.
Friends may get tired of hearing me say it’s a challenge to teach yellow dogs new tricks, but it’s true.
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“If you smell what the Rock is cooking,” so to speak, it’s long been clear that MAGAstan is more about posturing than policy. It’s about Trumpish attitude aided and abetted by his fans’ poor short-term memory. Donald Trump can say one thing on Monday and the opposite on Friday and fans couldn’t care less. Just as long as whatever he says is delivered loudly and proudly with the same shameless, in-your-face insincerity. Wrestling fans eat that shit up. They pay good money for it week after week. It’s not Sondheim or Shakespeare, but it’s theater.
Digby yesterday mentioned the “stale sameness” of the Trump rally and “the weird hypnotic nature of his speeches.” But it’s that sameness that mesmerizes, like endless Grateful Dead improvs, like the old Latin mass and Gregorian chants. People can lose themselves for a while in the rhythms and harmonies before returning to the real world. The attraction of sameness, of pithy catchphrases, of the anticipation of the all-too-familiar you know is coming, is something the left, with its demand for novelty, has never appreciated. As Anat Shenker-Osorio says, repetition is important. And so is repetition.
Donald Trump’s problem now is the novelty of not being in control. In a courtroom, he’s not in charge. His accustomed delaying tactics are failing him. His raging won’t be tolerated. He’s sweating. He’s flailing. He’s all over the place on abortion now that it’s clear the backlash from this week’s Arizona ruling threatens his reelection, the reelection he was counting on to keep him from ending his life in the slammer.
Behold. He’s backpedaling as fast as he can.
His cult won’t care. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hit him over the head with it like the folding chair conveniently left beside the ring.
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His middle of the night tantrums are getting worse and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s because his campaign has polled this too:
A majority of U.S. voters consider the criminal charges in New York related to a hush money payment against former President Trump to be serious, per new polling.
Trump is days away from the start of the first trial out of the four criminal cases against him, while electioneering for the presidency.
The New York trial, set to start on April 15 with jury selection, concerns a 2016 payment allegedly made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.
About 4 in 10 Republican respondents considered the hush money charges to be serious.
Two-thirds of independents also deemed the charges serious.
64% of registered voters described the charges as at least “somewhat serious,” according to Reuters/Ipsos poll data published Wednesday.
34% said the charges lacked seriousness.
The rest were unsure or didn’t answer.
Appeals courts twice this week denied attempts from Trump’s legal team to delay the start of the trial.
Trump’s legal team has employed delay tactics in proceedings across the four jurisdictions where he faces criminal charges — and it’s currently not clear whether the three other cases will go to trial before the election.
Voters, already disillusioned with their candidate options in the 2024 election, considered charges in the other ongoing cases more serious, per Reuters/Ipsos.
About 74% of respondents said the charges of election fraud in Georgia against Trump were serious.
Does this guarantee that the trial will move numbers away from Trump? Not necessarily. But I think an awful lot of people have concluded that Trump will never have to face a jury for his criminal offenses and yet here he is. It may make some of them think a little bit. Maybe.
President Biden’s campaign on Thursday launched a seven-figure ad buy in Arizona, focusing on abortion on as the state grapples with the fallout from a state Supreme Court decision earlier this week that enabled an 1864 law that bans nearly all abortions.
The Biden campaign has sought to link former President Donald Trump to near-total abortion bans since Trump appointed three conservative judges who were instrumental in the 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Trump has touted his role in the effort to “kill” Roe v. Wade, although he has sought to distance himself from the Arizona decision.
“Because of Donald Trump, millions of women lost the fundamental freedom to control their own bodies,” Mr. Biden says direct to camera in the ad. “And now, women’s lives are in danger because of that. The question is, if Donald Trump gets back in power, what freedom will you lose next? Your body and your decisions belong to you, not the government, not Donald Trump. I will fight like hell to get your freedom back.”
Yes. Freedom. That’s the message.