Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

They’re ba-ack

Militia groups went quiet after Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 insurrection. But not for long, Tess Owen writes at Wired:

“JOIN YOUR LOCAL Militia or III% Patriot Group,” a post urged the more than 650 members of a Facebook group called the Free American Army. Accompanied by the logo for the Three Percenters militia network and an image of a man in tactical gear holding a long rifle, the post continues: “Now more than ever. Support the American militia page.”

Other content and messaging in the group is similar. And despite the fact that Facebook bans paramilitary organizing and deemed the Three Percenters an “armed militia group” on its 2021 Dangerous Individuals and Organizations List, the post and group remained up until WIRED contacted Meta for comment about its existence.

Free American Army is just one of around 200 similar Facebook groups and profiles, most of which are still live, that anti-government and far-right extremists are using to coordinate local militia activity around the country.

After lying low for several years in the aftermath of the US Capitol riot on January 6, militia extremists have been quietly reorganizing, ramping up recruitment and rhetoric on Facebook—with apparently little concern that Meta will enforce its ban against them, according to new research by the Tech Transparency Project, shared exclusively with WIRED.

Individuals across the US with long-standing ties to militia groups are creating networks of Facebook pages, urging others to recruit “active patriots” and attend meetups, and openly associating themselves with known militia-related sub-ideologies like that of the anti-government Three Percenter movement. They’re also advertising combat training and telling their followers to be “prepared” for whatever lies ahead. These groups are trying to facilitate local organizing, state by state and county by county. Their goals are vague, but many of their posts convey a general sense of urgency about the need to prepare for “war” or to “stand up” against many supposed enemies, including drag queens, immigrants, pro-Palestine college students, communists—and the US government.

These cosplayers are often dismissed at Meal Team Six or Gravy Seals, but as Jan. 6 demonstrated they can still do damage. Enough have military training and skills that make them a threat. Maybe not as much of a threat as they imagine while they’re running around with AR-15s at secluded training camps.

Wired being Wired, it focuses heavily on Meta’s failure to police its own policies against this use of its online platform. Facebook remains “a go-to hub for militia organizing.”

Polling conducted earlier this year of more than 1,000 Americans found that one in five Americans “strongly agree” that violence is the only viable solution to get the country back on track. Although the societal conditions heading into this year’s election are not the same as those in 2020, a newly emboldened militia movement could add a dangerous dimension to potentially fraught future events, such as a judge handing down a prison sentence for Trump or Trump losing another close presidential election.

So far, Trump’s calls for MAGA to rise again to show its support outside his Manhattan trial have come up all but empty. Doesn’t mean they can’t still do damage. The Department of Justice is still not done prosecuting the lot from Jan. 6.

Comedian Neal Brennan thinks we should test out militias’ “watering the tree of liberty” theories with live fire.

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What a joke

Either Ted Cruz is so assured of winning that he believes he has the room to try to present himself as a human being or he’s seeing something in his polling that has him nervous. Whatever it is, it isn’t going to work:

There are two sides to Ted Cruz, the Republican senator says.

The self-described conservative warrior has opposed most big compromise legislation. He voted against the infrastructure law, the Chips Act and the recent Ukraine-Israel aid package. He has also opposed many of President Biden’s nominees, including almost all of his cabinet picks and his choice for the Supreme Court. 

On his popular podcast, he regularly rips into Democrats, particularly on immigration issues and Israel. His latest book was called “Unwoke,” which charges that the Democratic Party is “controlled by Cultural Marxists.”

Yet here in Cypress, over sub sandwiches and cookies in a community clubhouse northwest of Houston, Cruz is rolling out a softer, bipartisan side to try to appeal to independents and Democrats as he faces a competitive challenger this fall in the red-leaning state. His so-called Cul-de-Sac Tour, with 10 planned stops in suburban communities, aims to recast his image as a dealmaking lawmaker who wants to bring jobs to Texas. His campaign even shot ads featuring “Democrats for Cruz.”

“I try very much to have my focus be on the policies and substance rather than going into the gutter with personal or character attacks,” Cruz said in an interview after the event. 

There isn’t a Democrat on Planet Earth who doesn’t know what a despicable, right wing demagogue this creepy liar really is. In fact, you don’t even have to have any information about his politics to know it. He just oozes it. Even the MAGA cultists hold their noses to vote for him.

As Matthew Yglesias pointed out this probably isn’t being shared on Tik Tok but young people should know about it if they care about the plight of oppressed people around the world:

Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton writes in his book that Trump encouraged the Chinese dictator to continue building concentration camps used to detain millions of Uighur Muslims:

“At the opening dinner of the Osaka G-20 meeting in June 2019, with only interpreters present, Xi had explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang. According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do. The National Security Council’s top Asia staffer, Matthew Pottinger, told me that Trump said something very similar during his November 2017 trip to China.”

I feel pretty confident that Trump will be much, much worse on every level than the current administration. But it appears people have forgotten how bad he was and aren’t aware of how bad he’s planning to be.

As for the Uighur camps, Trump seems to be taking the idea and running with it. He’s open about rounding up millions of immigrants. And frankly, I’m not sure it’s going to be just undocumented workers. Here he was last week:

The NY Times writes today that young voters don’t know anything before Trump and they think he’s normal.

Mr. Trump’s victory, to supporters and detractors alike, represented a profound break with politics as usual in the United States. People who voted against him feared he would turn the American presidency upside down. People who voted for him hoped he would.

But for the youngest Trump supporters participating in their first presidential election this year, Mr. Trump represents something that is all but impossible for older voters to imagine: the normal politics of their childhood.

Charlie Meyer, a 17-year-old high school student who volunteered at a Trump rally in Green Bay, Wis., last month, said he was first drawn to Mr. Trump at 13, during his presidency, because of his views on abortion, which resonated with his own as a Christian.

He has little memory of pre-Trump politics. “I was too young at the time,” he said.

Although President Biden continues to lead among 18- to 29-year-olds in most polls, several surveys in recent weeks show Mr. Trump performing much more strongly with young voters than he was at the same point in 2020, and more strongly than he was against Mrs. Clinton at the same point in 2016.

In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, from last month, Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden were neck and neck among 18- to 29-year-olds. In the latest Harvard Youth Poll, conducted in March by the Harvard Institute of Politics, Mr. Trump trails by eight points.

Biden won that cohort by 24 points in 2020.

I suspect that most of these young folks are the children of conservatives who love Trump. But quite a few have been told on social media that Biden is worse and they simply don’t know what Trump really is because they haven’t known a time when he wasn’t just another politician. Someone should tell them.

That cover is a perfect illustration of Trumpian projection. The Enquirer claimed that it was Hillary Clinton who was doing exactly what he and David Pecker had conspired to do.

“Explosive story that will change the election” “Bribe reporters to bury the truth” “Pay hush money to hookers” “Hide her sleazy affairs”

It’s never a bad idea to assume that anything Trump accuses his opponent of doing is what he’s doing himself.

The last 4 hours of psychic breakdown:

Does he post anything else? Yes. He reported some of those 12 hours later. He also posts “polls” showing him beating Biden by 10 points, memes of him as Hercules, 007 and Jesus and the like, endorsements of fringe MAGA candidates and articles by right wingers saying Biden is senile. But these psychotic bleats are what he writes in his own words.

Yes, they are an illustration of a very disturbed mind. But they are also cult leader propaganda messages to his flock, emotional and relentlessly repetitive. I don’t know how many of them are actually reading this stuff but I think it penetrates their minds when you combine it with his rallies, the right wing media and their constant campaign fundraising messages. It’s insane. And it’s powerful.

I think this is yet another piece of evidence that people are just not paying attention —- to anything, apparently. I’m fairly shocked at the age breakdowns but the rest seems predictable under the circumstances. This is such an ugly situation.

Pray for a ceasefire and the toppling of Netanyahu. Nothing good can happen until that does.

Play it safe or go for broke?

Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden are in pursuit of “double hater” voters who dislike them, Axios reports. Whether this bloc stays home or turns out to vote this fall is a serious wildcard. Double haters “represent an extraordinarily broad range of views,” including Old-guard Republicans, Pro-Palestinians, and Techno-optimists (Elon Mush and fellow travelers).

Plus, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “independent campaign has collected enough signatures to appear on at least three swing-state ballots, could win as much as 38% of the double hater vote, according to a Monmouth poll out this week.”

Axios:

Between the lines: Biden’s campaign believes the president has an advantage with the double haters, even as his unpopularity has soared amid questions about his age, illegal immigration and persistent inflation.

• The campaign is running ads explicitly targeting Haley voters, who continue to turn out as a sizable protest vote against Trump in GOP primaries nearly two months after Haley exited the race.
• Trump has done little to mend bridges with his former UN ambassador or other jilted allies, and has even mocked conservative critics like former Attorney General Bill Barr who decided to endorse him.
• Trump is instead counting on expanding his appeal elsewhere — including with an address to the Libertarian National Convention later this month and ads targeting disaffected Black voters.

What they’re saying: “If Trump’s extreme agenda of banning abortion nationwide and gutting Security Security wasn’t repellent enough to these voters, he is also doing nothing to reach them — a surefire losing strategy,” Biden campaign spokesman Charles Lutvak said in a statement.

Axios fails to mention independent voters (unaffiliateds, no party preference, etc.). My estimates here show a sizable group from hundreds of precincts where indys lean heavily blue but turn out far less than their country cousins out in red counties. Those are votes Democrats leave on the table. Many of them, too, are “a plague on both your houses” voters Democratic campaigns ignore at their peril. I give reasons why they do here:

Volunteers’ pitch to these untapped, young independents is not to evangelize for Democrats. Independents don’t like them. They don’t pay close attention to party politics. Independents “view themselves as proudly unmoored from any candidate or party.” Voting in 2024 has to be about them, about local/state issues to be decided in the election that may impact them or people they love. The ask is: Vote this fall for them.

Are there issues about which they care strongly? Do they know they’ll need a photo ID in 2024 because THOSE GUYS don’t want them voting? Offer nonpartisan information on the where, when, and how of casting their fall ballot. Will you exercise your freedom this fall? Save democracy? Make history?

In these precincts, we don’t care what indys’ support scores are. If they vote, Democrats score. Those are the odds.

Or Democrats can just play it safe.

Women’s reproductive freedom is on the ballot this fall, as is the environment and gun violence. What are the odds that Israel’s noxious conduct in Gaza will be the hot issue in two-to-four years, even as entire coastal communities disappear under swiftly rising seas and tornadoes grow in frequency and intensity, even as women die from complications from untreated, failed pregnancies in states where abortion is banned?

Whether or not double haters vote (young indys among them), the next president may appoint two to three new Supreme Court justices whose views may define the rest of their lives and the rest of this century. They may decide whether mass shootings continue and if women get to control their bodies. The next president, may decide whether the courts, the law, and personal freedoms even matter anymore.

Even if both your choices are distasteful, they are still your choices to make. Even abstaining is a choice for which any of us bear repsonsibility. Best make them good ones. And Democrats? Best not to play it safe.

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Hope Hicks testifies

It seems the news has already moved on from Hope Hicks, judging by the headlines. But there were gasps in the overflow room when she enterered the Manhattan courtoom Friday to testify under subpoena in Donald Trump’s criminal trial. When she briefly broke down on the stand and the judge called a pause, newsies scrambled to report the drama.

But ahead of that, Olivia Nuzzi of New York Magazine posted a thread with observations on Hicks worth noting:

Some things to know about the prosecution’s next witness, Hope Hicks: her relationship with the Trump family began in 2012 when she began doing PR for Ivanka from an outside firm. She joined the Trump Org. By the winter of 2014, when Donald Trump was preparing to run for the GOP nom, she was part of a tiny circle of his trusted advisers.

For most of the 2016 campaign, the staff was the Island of Misfit Toys. Hardly anyone had traditional political experience. At least half the staffers were possibly literally, clinically insane. Her general competence and normal-ness and likability made her an outlier.

She was good at managing the principal. She was good under pressure. And she maintained good relationships with the mainstream press. She entered the WH as a senior adviser and kept a small office within earshot of the Oval. Close enough that Trump would just yell out for her.

Unlike most who stayed in the Trump orbit through the administration, she never really succumbed to a bunker mentality. She never got stuck in their information bubble. She maintained connections to and perspective from the world outside MAGA. She was not an ideologue.

But for a long time she was inclined to make excuses for her boss. How else do you wake up and go to work each day and spend your working hours putting out the fires he seemed to have a pathological impulse to spark? For anyone who stayed, there was a lot of self deception.

Hope Hicks is not Fawn Hall. She was genuinely powerful and central to the Trump operation. But she’s also not John Dean. She was compelled to testify, just as she was compelled to take part in various hearings and investigations over the years.

She is a powerful witness for the prosecution because the public is so familiar with her image and the perception of her closeness to the former president, though they have not been close in years and have only spoken a few times in passing since 2021.

She has a long and near-photographic memory and she witnessed more than most, but anyone expecting her to offer some sort of operatic betrayal of her former boss will probably be disappointed. That’s not her style.

Aside from hearings or investigations, she has never spoken on the record. She will do what the prosecution requires & then she will return to private life. She does not want a book or cable contract. She does not seek forgiveness or understanding from the Trump-critical public.

Nuzzi profiled Hicks for GQ in 2016 and later for New York Magazine and provides links.

The Trump campaign grew frantic at the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape in October 2016 and went immediately into damage-control mode that might have been pointless. “The tape was damaging. This was a crisis,” Hicks said. “I think [Trump] felt like it was pretty standard stuff for two guys chatting with each other,” she added.

Jurors received only a transcript.

Hicks had one response: “Deny, deny, deny.”

Hicks claimed not to have been privy to any of Trump’s hush-money efforts involving Trump affairs with former Playboy model Karen McDougal and porn star Stormy Daniels.

In testimony on Trump’s state of mind in 2018 when the Daniels payments became public, Hicks told the court, “I think Mr. Trump’s opinion was it was better to be dealing with it now, and it would’ve been bad to have that story come out before the election,” Hicks said.

It was a “mic-drop moment,” Greenberg told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, a “nail in the coffin moment” for Trump.

Regarding Cohen telling the New York Times he’d paid hush money to Stormy Daniels on his own, Hicks testified:

“I’d say that would be out of character for Michael,” Hicks responded. “I didn’t know Michael to be an especially charitable person or selfless person.”

Of Cohen, Hicks said on cross-examination:

“He liked to call himself a fixer, or ‘Mr. Fix it’ – and it was only because he first broke it that he was able to then fix it,” Hicks said, laughing.

Now we wait for Michael Cohen to testify. Mic-drop or not, Trump’s defense only needs one juror to vote to acquit. To be continued.

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Baby tiger time:

Sandstone, Minnesota – The Wildcat Sanctuary was called upon in late November 2020 to help two adult tigers and two elderly lions in Indiana after one of their caretakers passed away. Staff and volunteers made the 14-hour journey from Minnesota with vehicles, trailers and transport crates to rehome the cats and bring them back to the sanctuary. As they were loading the big cats from the hillside private breeding facility in a rugged, remote area of rural Indiana, they were stunned to find that tigress Winona, approximately 3-5 years old and missing her tail, had given birth to a cub just hours earlier. Sanctuary staff named the 4-pound male newborn Dash.

The Wildcat Sanctuary’s Founder Tammy Thies explained, “The facility had bred tiger cubs for years to be sold on the Internet or used for cub petting profit. We had been told tiger Winona had given birth only 5 months ago, so we were shocked to find a cub born just four hours earlier lying next to Winona, the umbilical cord still attached. Marcus, the male tiger housed with Winona and father of the cub, noticed the cub at the same time our staff did. For little Dash’s safety and wellbeing, we had to remove him from his mother.

“We were devastated to make that decision, but comforted to know Dash would never be sold into the cub petting trade or used to breed more captive tigers. Dash is the youngest big cat I have ever rehomed to our sanctuary.

He will live his entire life ‘wild at heart’ in a large, natural habitat at The Wildcat Sanctuary, where he will be loved and receive proper vet care, nutrition and enrichment.

He lives at the Wildcat Sanctuary today