Not that there was any question
He still has a constitutional right to testify in his own defense. Obviously. I have no idea why his lawyer is bobbing his head up and down in agreement.
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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
Ron DeSanctimonious is back!
This is completely ridiculous. The same people who are freaking out about the government pushing non-gas stoves is telling people they are not allowed to be vegetarians who like to eat impossible burgers at Burger King. FREEDOM!!!!
Today, Governor Ron DeSantis signed SB 1084 to prohibit the sale of lab-grown meat in the state of Florida. Florida is taking action to stop the World Economic Forum’s goal of forcing the world to eat lab-grown meat and insects, “an overlooked source of protein.” While the World Economic Forum is telling the world to forgo meat consumption, Florida is increasing meat production, and encouraging residents to continue to consume and enjoy 100% real Florida beef.
“Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” said Governor Ron DeSantis. “Our administration will continue to focus on investing in our local farmers and ranchers, and we will save our beef.”
“Florida is taking a tremendous step in the right direction by signing first-in-the-nation legislation banning lab-grown meat. We must protect our incredible farmers and the integrity of American agriculture. Lab-grown meat is a disgraceful attempt to undermine our proud traditions and prosperity, and is in direct opposition to authentic agriculture,” said Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Wilton Simpson.
Ron DeSantis remains one of the worst people in the world. He learned absolutely nothing.
Everything is rigged — unless he wins.
Donald Trump claimed the 2016 election was rigged and refused to accept the popular vote total.He established a commission to investigate it and claimed for years that illegal immigrants had tipped the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. (The commission was disbanded because they found no proof of it and they “turned the investigation over” to the DHS, which never found anything either.)
We all know what he did in 2020. He set up the whining excuse for his loss months in advance by claiming that mail in voting was fraudulent and the vote had been rigged in the swing states.
So what’s he saying today about the 2024 election?
Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday didn’t commit to accepting the results of Wisconsin’s presidential election in November if he does not win and again promoted the falsehood that he won the Badger State in 2020.
In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the former president said he would accept the results of the November election showing he lost “if everything’s honest.”
“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” Trump said in an interview Wednesday. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.
“But if everything’s honest, which we anticipate it will be — a lot of changes have been made over the last few years — but if everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results,” he said.
We all know that he believes no election can be fair in which he doesn’t win. He’s made that very clear. It will be no different this time.
Dan Pfeiffer’s newsletter today answers one big question:
The biggest divide in politics is not between Left and Right; it’s between political junkies and everyone else. There is a massive chasm between those who actively seek out political news and the vast majority of the country. The gap has been exacerbated by tectonic shifts in the media environment. I summarized the changes that led to this “News Gap” in a recent post:
It has never been more difficult for voters to follow the news or for politicians to get attention. The traditional political media is at its nadir in influence, reach, and credibility. Audiences are declining and becoming more ideologically homogeneous. All but the most engaged voters have tuned out political news altogether.
Social media used to be a major conduit for news — no more. Elon Musk rendered Twitter utterly unusable. Facebook, once the most dominant media platform in the world, moved away from news and politics. TikTok emerged as a major news source for younger voters, but the information on that platform is often present without context; and credibility can be impossible to divine.
Readers (and the writer) of this newsletter have barely noticed the changesy. We watch cable news, we download podcasts, subscribe to newsletters, and (some of us) still use Twitter to track current events. We are junkies. We seek out political news at every opportunity. But for the vast majority of Americans, who do not actively engage with politics and the news, these changes significantly altered their media diets and what they know about politics and politicians.
Pfeiffer says that 3 polls this week address that phenomenon and somewhat answer the question about why this race is so close. Navigator Research showed that people aren’t hearing about the Inflation Reduction Act — and if they do they support it:
A CBS poll found that people have no idea about all Biden has done on climate change:
As Pfeiffer makes clear, this isn’t just a matter of Democratic messaging, it’s a structural problem. People who pay attention back Biden:
The massive differences in news consumption may also be driving political support for the two candidates according to a fascinating NBC News poll:
Biden holds an 11-point lead among traditional news consumers in a head-to-head presidential ballot test, with 52% support among that group to Trump’s 41%. But it’s basically a jump ball among digital media consumers, with Trump at 47% and Biden at 44%.
And Trump has a major lead among those who don’t follow political news — 53% back him, and 27% back Biden.
The more news you consume, the more likely you are to back Joe Biden. I don’t want to make the classic causation/correlation mistake. Biden does better with older and college-educated voters and those cohorts tend to be more avid news consumers. Do people approve of Biden because they are more informed about politics or do people with similar value systems to Biden just pay more attention to the news? This is a “chicken or the egg” situation, so there is no simple answer but there are reasons to believe that the “News Gap” is shaping political opinions.
And this is relevant too:
This would explain why the Biden campaign remains on TikTok despit agreeing to ban the platform if they refuse to divest. They cannot afford not to.
Pfeiffer doesn’t seem to have any bright ideas about how to deal with this but is instead just making the point that the old style of communicating through ads, direct mail and earned media isn’t going to get it done. I have no idea either. Nobody wants to get thousands of emails or texts and I would guess that most people don’t read them anyway. Door knocking? Sky writing? I just don’t know.
Maybe people will tune in as the election looms but I wonder. People are so turned off that they just don’t want to think about politics anymore. Score one for Trump. He’s made it all so toxic that he’s made half the country recoil in horror.
As everyone wrings their hands over campus protests let’s take a look at the leader of the Republican youth movement’s top leader:
Yeah. I think we can all afford to take a deep breath and remember that campus protests are among America’s foremost liberal traditions and calm down about it. (I say that to myself as much as anyone.)
And we’re not yet over the PTSD from COVID-19
As if America needed another reason not to hand the White House again to Donald “88 Counts” Trump. Do we really want Dr. Bleach-and-Light Enemas recommending quack remedies and maskless Everydays should we face another deadly pandemic?
NPR:
Officially, there is only one documented case of bird flu spilling over from cows into humans during the current U.S. outbreak.
But epidemiologist Gregory Gray suspects the true number is higher, based on what he heard from veterinarians, farm owners and the workers themselves as the virus hit their herds in his state.
“We know that some of the workers sought medical care for influenza-like illness and conjunctivitis at the same time the H5N1 was ravaging the dairy farms,” says Gray, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
“I don’t have a way to measure that, but it seems biologically quite plausible that they too, are suffering from the virus,” he says.
Dr. Irwin Redlener (remember him from 2020?) is concerned:
The U.S. has two vaccines ready should the strain of bird flu circulating in dairy cows begin spreading easily to people, federal health officials said Wednesday. They could begin shipping doses widely within weeks, if needed.
So far, there’s no evidence that H5N1 is spreading person-to-person, although one dairy worker in Texas who worked closely with infected cattle had a mild infection and developed conjunctivitis, or pinkeye, in April.
At a briefing Wednesday, government health officials said they are preparing for a potential scenario of H5N1 jumping from animal to person — or person to person. The virus has taken off in dairy cows, infecting at least 36 herds across nine states, raising concerns that it could acquire mutations that would make it easier to spill over into humans.
Studies “suggest that the vaccines will offer good cross-protection against cattle outbreak viruses,” Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said on the call Wednesday.
I’m still running into friends I haven’t seen since COVID-19 hit.
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Antifa-da is comin’ ta git ya
At Dartmouth College Wednesday night, students holding a peaceful pro-Palestine protest on the college green were quickly met with …. well, let Prof. Jeff Sharlett (“The Undertow“) tell it:
It wasn’t as dramatic as the police breach of Columbia University carried live from New York.
Meanwhile, Brown University administrators reached a negotiated settlement with student protesters:
Northwestern did as well.
Which do you think will get more press? Which do you think will fuel the right-wing culture war? Okay, likely all of it.
Charlie Sykes recalls being a kid at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago when Mayor Daily unleashed his police against Vietnam War protesters. Those clashes helped Richard Nixon win the presidency. “[T]hey hastened the realignment of much of the American electorate. Republicans would hold the White House for 16 of the next 20 years. Indeed, the politics of the past six decades have been shaped by the divisions that sharpened that year.”
We are still suffering the hangover from that period, Sykes believes:
Donald Trump obviously hopes that history will repeat itself, and that the left-wing theatrics of the anti-Israel protests, on college campuses and beyond, will have an outsize effect on the 2024 election. Like Nixon and Wallace before him, Trump (and the congressional GOP) will seize on the protests’ methodology and rhetoric—this time to further polarize an already deeply polarized electorate. The irony, of course, is rich: Even as Trump stands trial for multiple felonies, he is trying to cast himself as the candidate of law and order. Even as he lashes out about the campus protesters, he is pledging pardons for the rioters who attacked the Capitol.
Before events Dartmouth, Brown and Northwestern, Paul Waldman predicted (irony being dead) Team MAGA will dial its law-and-order claxon up to 11. Never mind that these mostly peaceful camp-ins isolated to a few college campuses had no impact on 99.99% of Americans. You won’t be accosted by “antifa” at the McDonald’s drive-thru at breakfast. The right-wing media machine will insist They are coming for you in your bed with their long, curved knives:
Yet Republicans would have you believe that these protests are causing “chaos” from sea to shining sea, that the nation is on the verge of a complete breakdown of law and order that threatens every American. The solution to the protests is for the kids saying things conservatives don’t like to shut up, and if they won’t, some good old-fashioned skull-cracking is necessary to protect the rest of us from their anarchic criminality.
This has become the dominant theme of the right’s response not just to these protests but to the state of the country in general: America is in chaos. You hear that word repeated over and over; to take just one example, when Speaker of the House Mike Johnson went to Columbia University for a photo op, he demanded that the university’s president “resign if she could not immediately bring order to this chaos.” While Columbia students have since taken over a university building, that hadn’t happened at the time; they were just occupying the quad. On the other hand, one student did yell “Mike, you suck!” so it was probably pretty scary for him.
People who have actually reported from the protests (see here or here) have by and large found them to be well-behaved. Are there problematic things being said at some of them? Yes there are. Have there been antisemitic incidents around some of them? Yes there have. But nearly everything resembling “chaos” has come in the crackdowns. Scenes of violent confrontation you’ve witnessed on TV or social media have occurred when the police moved in, often in riot gear to remove and arrest students and sometimes faculty (and in at least one case, when counter-protesters stormed a protest). At the universities where the administrators had the sense to just let the students have their say, there has been almost no violence. But this is how Republicans portray what’s happening:
Are there a few students uttering noxious things? Sure. (Ever been to a hockey game?) But where administrators allowed student to “have their say,” there has been “almost no violence.” But, you know, skulls must be cracked. Donald Trump is itching for it.
Furthermore, the chaos narrative fits in with their broader claims about life in America today, which is supposedly a nightmare of economic misery and violent mayhem, where people have to dodge murderous gangs just to make it to the store to buy a gallon of milk for 25 bucks and immigrants are pillaging our communities.
Not where you live, of course, but everywhere else. This is the trick: convincing people that even as their own days proceed in an ordinarily mundane fashion, chaos awaits just a few miles away, particularly in American cities, which liberals and their permissive policies have turned into hellholes of crime. This is a regular feature of conservative rhetoric, whether it’s from politicians or Fox News hosts or “bro country” singers.
If you point out that in fact crime is dropping quite dramatically, Republicans will laugh in your face. How can you not realize that America is in chaos? After all, that’s what they see every night on “Hannity”! And sure, the only immigrants they know are washing their dishes or putting a new roof on their neighbor’s house, but haven’t you seen the hundreds of “CHAOS AT THE BORDER!!!” segments on Fox? It’s a jungle out there! If you doubt, just head over to bidenbloodbath.com, a website set up by the Republican National Committee to warn people about the immigrant “invasion” (another word repeated endlessly on the right). Or check in with your favorite Republican PR ghoul, who will tell you that we’re on the verge of a complete breakdown of the social order:
J.D. Vance insists 21st century hippies go home and “take a shower.” The 1950s weren’t the only good old days for Republicans. Chaos, real or imagined, sells papers and right-wing crackdowns, especially to red state residents completely cut off from reality.
The reaction to the protests, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes notes, is “out of proportion to the protests themselves.” But for the right, a shiny distraction from carnage in Gaza. And politically useful.
Waldman again:
While the campus protests will quiet when students return home for the summer, Republicans will continue to talk about them for as long as they can, spinning out a tale in which every college in America became the scene of berserker rioting that left half the country aflame. That’s the way they still talk about the summer of 2020; if you asked the average Fox News viewer, they’d tell you that in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, cities like Portland were literally burned to the ground, leaving nothing more than a pile of rubble. The fact that it’s not true is meaningless; those viewers will never visit the cities they’ve been convinced are something out of Mad Max, just as they’ll have no firsthand experience with the current atmosphere at the nation’s universities.
But they’ll know in their hearts that it’s madness out there. Bar the door, buy some more guns, prepare for the collapse of civilization if Joe Biden wins. The chaos is coming for you, and only voting for Donald Trump can stop it.
Madness! Antifa-da! Urban hellscapes! Somewhere I cannot find at the moment, a conservative visiting New York recently was shocked to find that the city was not awash with the homeless, with brown-skinned immigrants, bombed-out neighborhoods, etc.
George Hahn mocked that imaginary liberal Mad Max America during the pandemic, you’ll recall.
But as Waldman points out, the truth is not the point for Trump. Even his persona is a lie. Truth has never been what Trump is selling his marks.
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Tucker Carlson is just going for it these days. Chased off of mainstream media he’s now operating in the subterranean, alt-right propaganda world:
A far-right Russian philosopher who’s called for Russia to expand its borders and rise up against the West says his interview with Tucker Carlson shows Americans are ready to accept his fascist ideas.
Alexander Dugin, dubbed “Putin’s brain” for supposedly influencing the Russian leader’s geopolitical crusades, took to Telegram in the wake of his interview with the former Fox News host to note that he’d made it into the “American mainstream” by sitting down with Carlson, and that the “American public is a little ready for my ideas.”
He claimed there’d been a “defamation” campaign against him hatched by “globalists” and “left-wing liberals” who portrayed him as “Dr. Evil” and “the most dangerous philosopher in the world.” Of course, Carlson himself used precisely those descriptors in trying to hype the 20-minute interview on X, falsely claiming Dugin’s ideas are “so dangerous” that “Amazon won’t sell his books.” (In fact, several of his books are currently available for purchase on Amazon in Russian.)
[…]
In his interview with Carlson released this week, Dugin blamed the “Anglo-Saxon world” for the rise of liberalism, claimed films like The Terminator and The Matrix will become a reality in the West, and declared that Vladimir Putin is the one man who can save the world from such horror.
Writing about the right’s newfound love of all things Russian a few years back, I described Dugin as “the influential neo-fascist Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, who promotes what the Daily Beast describes as “the modern incarnation of ‘Eurasianism,’ a geopolitical theory positing Russia as the inheritor of ‘Eternal Rome.'” Dugin has ties to virtually every American white supremacist leader in one way or another.”
Indeed he does.
A smattering of commentary from the Trump right today:
Cool, totally cool.
Because Donald Trump must always be seen as wielding absolute mastery over his hapless, flailing opponents, he and his propagandists want you to believe his hush-money trial in Manhattan has proven nothing but a smashing political success for him.
On Monday night, Trump posted a video on social media featuring Fox personality Jesse Watters gushing that his trial may win him the White House. Trump also promoted a video of Fox’s Jeanine Pirro insisting that it showcases his ability to “withstand pressure.” Other Fox figures have spun Trump’s buffoonish outbreaks of narcolepsy in court as proof he’s Owning the Libs: Certain of acquittal, he can do some power-napping while showing the trial the contempt it deserves.
Greg points out that Trump doesn’t seem quite as sanguine. According to the NY Times he’s been talking trash about Todd Blanche, his previously favorite attorney, because he isn’t being aggressive enough. (He’s also not happy with attorney’s fees…) Apparently, he’s venting that he doesn’t have “a Roy Cohn” again.
He knows that this trial is making him look small and vulnerable even though stooges like Watters try to say that the trial is great for Trump because it’s denying the media “an opportunity to twist Trump’s words.”
The reality is that Trump looks tired (very tired!) weak and vulnerable and the trial exposes him for the despicable creep he has always been. But not on Fox:
That’s far from the fearsome, dominant figure depicted in MAGA propaganda about the trial. Note that both Watters and Pirro insist Trump is shining in the role of defendant. They are trying to depict Trump as simultaneously a victim and a formidable warrior, one who is fighting back against corrupt, powerful forces that are persecuting him. Similarly, as Media Matters’ Matt Gertz details, Fox figures praising Trump’s courtroom naps are practically painting them as acts of heroic defiance against an illegitimate prosecution.
I guess that goes without saying. According to Fox, Trump can do no wrong. But as Gregg points out:
Trump is not wielding absolute mastery over events. Trump’s own lawyers are not treating his trial as fundamentally illegitimate. Voters outside the MAGA information universe regard the charges against him as serious, and they see the other prosecutions against him in a similarly grave light. A whole lot of people will likely see Trump’s sneering dismissal of these proceedings—the dozing off, the attacks on jurors, the rage fits against the supposed unfairness of it all—as whiny entitlement, as contempt for the very notion that he should ever be held accountable for anything.
You’d think he’d just act confident and self-assured about the outcome and treat the whole thing as a minor inconvenience instead of turning his whining up to 1. But then I guess he knows his cult better than anyone and understands that they love his whining and complaining more than anything. I can’t imagine why that is, but he seems to be right.