Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) brought some heat to her stumping in Nevada for Joe Biden this week. This, this is what I’m talking about. Behold:
AOC: I have a message for this conservative court and Donald J. Trump. The women and people of this state do not consent. And the woman and people of this country certainly do not consent to Donald Trump nor this corrupt court that he has enabled. pic.twitter.com/I6MfefIrae
But what little coverage AOC’s appearance drew missed the fire. Las Vegas Sun:
“For women and gender diverse people, it is life and death,” said Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., during a discussion about reproductive rights Thursday in Las Vegas. Ocasio-Cortez later appeared in downtown Las Vegas for a rally to support Biden’s reelection campaign. “It’s not hyperbole. It’s reality.”
This is what Democrats fight in convincing progressive voices and younger voters that their vote is their voice, that their vote is their power, that their power matters, and that Democrats have their backs. If there is media bias, it is against progressives’ most powerful voices. Democrats themselves are uneasy about putting up a public fight. Several members of Nevada’s mostly Democrat Congressional delegation were absent fron the event.
“A Biden-Harris campaign spokeswoman acknowledged the absences and said ‘scheduling’ issues were to blame,” the New York Post reported.
This week, Rep. Jaime Raskin (D) of Maryland urged readers of The New Republic not to count out “self-deprecating” liberals. Don’t be fooled by their “essential modesty.” Except reticence in this environment is a liability.
“[B]attle-hardened post-Trump liberals have proved tough as nails and ready to fight all necessary battles for freedom and democracy in these days of resurgent authoritarianism,” Raskin wrote:
Ordinarily a live-and-let-live philosophy, liberalism fights hard when it’s up against the ropes. And here we are—in the fight of our lives ever since Florida Man came down the escalator to run a new nationwide grift. The good news is that the post–Donald Trump networks of liberals and progressives are ready for battle, strategically focused, and plentiful in the land.
“Tough as nails and ready to fight.” Is that Democrats’ secret weapon? The problem is few voters on the sidelines see a polite magazine essay as “fighting.” As Dr. Strangelove once said, “Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn’t you tell the world, EH?”
Dispirited and disengaged voters want to see Democrats fighting for them, as Anat Shenker-Osorio found in recent focus groups:
If my colleagues and I took a shot everytime someone in these groups decried the Democrats as doing nothing on the fascism front, we’d have cirrhosis.
As one disaffected Democratic white woman from Arizona said in April, “I don’t think any of them care really. Even if Democrats won the House, the Senate, the presidency, they’ve had it before — didn’t do anything then.”
Again,
A laundry list of accomplishments doesn’t lodge in people’s brains the way a good story with heroes and villains does. Democrats aren’t telling one. It’s not voters’ fault that they don’t know what they don’t know. It’s a challenge Democrats are struggling to meet. And the kitchen table? The kitchen table is on fire.
AOC preaches as though the table is on fire. More of that, please.
A casual friend introduced me to his buddy at a public concert last night. The usual. Tom works with the Democratic Party, etc. The buddy replied with the familiar “fed up with both parties” bit.
Cynicism is first of all a style of presenting oneself, and it takes pride more than anything in not being fooled and not being foolish. But in the forms in which I encounter it, cynicism is frequently both these things. That the attitude that prides itself on world-weary experience is often so naïve says much about the triumph of style over substance, attitude over analysis.
[…]
If you set purity and perfection as your goals, you have an almost foolproof system according to which everything will necessarily fall short. But expecting perfection is naïve; failing to perceive value by using an impossible standard of measure is even more so. Cynics are often disappointed idealists and upholders of unrealistic standards. They are uncomfortable with victories, because victories are almost always temporary, incomplete, and compromised — but also because the openness of hope is dangerous, and in war, self-defense comes first. Naïve cynicism is absolutist; its practitioners assume that anything you don’t deplore you wholeheartedly endorse. But denouncing anything less than perfection as morally compromising means pursuing aggrandizement of the self, not engagement with a place or system or community, as the highest priority.
One thing you can say for the [party] old boys, they are patient and persistent. (Okay, that’s two things.) Patience and persistence are not the first qualities liberal activists look for in their change agents, and qualities that not enough activists cultivate in themselves. Whenever an Obama flings the wheel hard over (or not hard enough) and the ship of state doesn’t turn like a speedboat, impatient activists abandon their posts and jump ship. Do that, and nothing changes. And the old boys get their club back.
One thing to be said for old and unexciting Joe Biden is he has been persistent. James Lardner writes in The New Yorker that a recent Times and Sienna College poll found that nearly seventy per cent of Americans thinks the system needs “either a major shakeup or (the preference of fourteen per cent) to be ‘torn down entirely.’ ” Donald Trump was just the sort of guy to do it, not Joe Biden.
The Times’ Nate Cohn found that, ironically, people saw the same appeal in Barack Obama, “another candidate who famously represented change, change we could believe in.” Only to be disappointed when the ship didn’t turn like a speedboat and that hnis response to the financial crisis was overly timid. “And I think that it’s not a coincidence that there are so many Obama/Trump voters out there.”
“The upshot was a fresh wave of outrage against the government and politicians, a growing perception of Democrats as the party of a self-absorbed élite, and an opening for the likes of Donald Trump,” Lardner writes.
So few of us saw Joe Biden, change agent, coming. Lardner provides an impressive list of first-term accomplishments. But Biden’s record recalls the title of Frank Zappa’s live album, “The Best Band You Never Heard in Your Life.” Biden’s is another band no one’s heard:
In a forbidding political environment, the Biden Administration has racked up an impressive record of impactful achievement; and yet even a goodly number of Biden’s 2020 voters are “surprisingly unaware of anything he has done as President,” according to Rich Thau, a public-policy researcher who runs regular focus groups with swing voters. The perception of Biden as ineffective has been a source of much vexation in the President’s camp, and the subject of many an op-ed column and blog post. Some commentators reason that the Administration’s policies need more time to prove their worth: most of the infrastructure projects, for example, have yet to reach the ribbon-cutting stage. Others blame a politically fractured media that tends to reinforce people’s biases. Ageism has been at work here, too: Americans could count themselves lucky to have a President who, after a lifetime in government, has shown a capacity to reflect on past mistakes—his own and his party’s—and a resolve to make the most of the opportunity belatedly granted him. But the polls suggest that, even among Biden’s supporters, his age is viewed almost entirely as a source of concern.
In one way, though, Biden has contributed to his own predicament. In his determination to sound the alarm against another Trump Presidency, he has had a lot to say about what Americans stand to lose: access to abortion, honest elections, civility, the rule of law. If Biden is seen as a system defender, it’s partly because he has spent so much of his campaign time on defense. He should say more—far more—about what his Administration and his party have done, and mean to do in the future, to make the economy and democracy more just.
His attacks on Trump could be more expansive, too. Trump is in some ways a sui-generis figure: the only convicted felon to be a major-party nominee for President, and the only candidate who has ever promised to be a “dictator” on Day One or spoken of using his office to exact “retribution” against his enemies. In the realm of economic policy, however, Trump has proved to be a conventional Republican of the modern era. His Administration, like those of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, was a fount of special favors for powerful industries and a trasher of regulations that cost corporations money; and its first and biggest achievement was an enormous tax-cut bill tilted in favor of the rich. What set Trump and his governing crowd apart, beyond their many crimes and indictments, was only the brazenness of their quid-pro-quo understandings with donors and their readiness to direct a stream of the benefits of their official actions to themselves. When it comes to the privileges of the wealthy and powerful, Trump has been the defender and Biden the threat. Biden and his team would do well to remind voters of that, again and again, from now to Election Day.
Democrats, Biden included, also need to demonstrate a commitment to change by showing they mean to fight for it. Visibly. Loudly. What doesn’t get attention might as well not exist.
Misdiagnosing why Dem base voters report moving away from Biden will absolutely lead to wrong cure. Despite pundit-land evergreen answer – "be less woke" – in reality these voters are getting turned off by lack of resolve & fight.https://t.co/qqpd8q9pJq
— Anat Shenker-Osorio 🟧 (@anatosaurus) June 17, 2024
I’m pretty sure the guy last night has no idea what Biden and his Democratic colleagues have accomplished because good-government types tend to do a poor job of advertising their accomplishments. They’re just doing what they’ve been hired to do, and shrug. Not being visible and loud about it in this “forbidding political environment” looks like lethargy. Biden shook things up with his Independence Hall speech in 2022. His debate performance next week is another chance to change the narrative.
Two beluga whales are rescued from war-ravaged Kharkiv, Ukraine and taken to an aquarium in Spain. Salma Abdelaziz has more on their remarkable journey. pic.twitter.com/Tnll5fryp9
In what experts said was among the most complex marine mammal rescue ever undertaken, the pair of beluga whales were extricated from an aquarium in the battered city of Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine and transported to Europe’s largest aquarium in Valencia, Spain, on Wednesday morning.
As Russian aerial bombardments of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, have intensified, the evacuation of Plombir, a 15-year-old male, and Miranda, a 14-year-old female, came just in time, marine mammal experts said.
“If they had continued in Kharkiv, their chances of survival would have been very slim,” said Daniel Garcia-Párraga, director of zoological operations at Oceanogràfic de Valencia, who helped lead the rescue.
Belugas, whose natural habitat is the Arctic, need cold water to survive. The devastation of the power grid in Kharkiv meant that the aquarium there had to rely on generator power, making it challenging to keep the waters cooled.
At the same time, the whales’ diets were halved recently amid shortages of the 132 pounds of squid, herring, mackerel and other fresh fish the pair needed daily, Dr. Garcia-Párraga said. Ukrainian caregivers were even considering using discarded fish from restaurants and markets.
And in recent weeks, bombs exploded close enough to ripple the waters of their home at the NEMO Dolphinarium. As the conditions grew more precarious, the Ukrainians decided the whales required evacuation.
Moving marine mammals can be risky in the best of circumstances. Transporting sick or stressed animals ratchets up the difficulty.
“You’d like to make sure that anybody that gets transported is as healthy as possible,” said Michael Walsh, a veterinarian who leads the marine animal rescue program at the University of Florida but was not involved in the operation.
In emergencies, he said, “you may not have as much of a choice.”
Dan Ashe, head of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and the former head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said it took “the world’s most elite team of marine mammal experts” to achieve what he said was “likely the most complex marine mammal rescue ever undertaken.”
Specialists from Oceanogràfic de Valencia, Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta and SeaWorld all assisted the Ukrainians in the operation, a 36-hour journey over more than 1,900 miles that started on Monday evening and was completed just before dawn on Wednesday.
This morning I wrote about the use of the Comstock Act and other zombie laws to help the right take America back to the 1890s. Get a load of this one:
A government watchdog group filed suit in Delaware federal court this week, seeking to compel the Justice Department to produce records that may determine whether Hunter Biden should be further investigated under a 1910 law relating to “prostitution or debauchery.”
The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project petitioned the same Wilmington bench where Biden was found guilty on gun charges this month, contending that there is a significant amount of evidence the first son was being probed on Mann Act grounds.
The law, stemming from a time when prostitution was more prevalent in urban areas, states it is a felony to “knowingly transport… in interstate or foreign commerce… any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery.”
The legal brief, obtained by Fox News Digital, includes part of a 2023 interview transcript from IRS whistleblower Joseph Ziegler before the House Ways & Means Committee.
Ziegler recounted efforts by the Justice Department to assess potential Mann Act violations, speaking of a “West Coast assistant” of Biden’s, whom “we knew … to also be in the prostitution world or believed to be in the prostitution world – and he deducted expenses related to her.”
An unnamed lawmaker then asks about Biden “paying for the travel of an individual to fly out to California or wherever,” to which Ziegler responds, “Or Boston or wherever he was at. [Washington, D.C.] I think one of them – he flew someone for the night.”
Ziegler said he understood the Justice Department to be “compiling” potential violation allegations that had been referred to them but that he did not know the ultimate outcome.
Oversight Project attorney Kyle Brosnan told Fox News Digital in a Thursday interview he believes the Justice Department, therefore, has the information and that it should be made publicly available.
Brosnan said the Oversight Project seeks records relating to Ziegler’s testimony, any communications with the probation office regarding the Mann Act, as well as “victim”-related inquiries.
“If you sort of peel back the layers of the onion, it’s absurd, because there is an overwhelming amount of information that already shows these records exist. [They’re] found on the Hunter Biden laptop, which was entered into evidence in his criminal case in Delaware,” Brosnan said.
These Trump bootlickers want to go after Hunter Biden for “debauchery.” You cannot make this stuff up.
This is where shamelessness really is a superpower. Anyone with a sense of shame would be too embarrassed to push this with all the rape and underage sex charges among Republicans politicians and evangelical pastors (just this week!) not to mention the presidential nominee’s own track record. But they won’t. Instead, they will no doubt hold hearings allowing Marjorie Taylor Greene to leer at big blow up pictures of Hunter Biden’s privates while screeching like a demented harpy about morality.
Trump keeps telling his fans that he doesn’t need any votes. He says he has more than enough. He says everything depends on stopping Democrats from “cheating” (by which he means voting.) So it makes sense that they wouldn’t be putting much effort into get out the vote. They figure they don’t really need it.
Bill Sher at the Washington Monthly discusses the Trump “ground game” here and it turns out that they’re outsourcing it to a grifter. Yep:
CNN reported that “Donald Trump’s campaign is taking a vastly different approach to 2024 compared with 2020, with plans for fewer staff and expenses [and instead] relying on wealthy conservative groups for data, infrastructure, and significant bank accounts.” It further noted that one of the most important of these groups is Turning Point Action, part of the Turning Point network that began with Turning Point USA.
Turning Point USA is a right-wing student group founded in 2012 by Charlie Kirk, an 18-year-old soon-to-be college dropout, and Bill Montgomery, an elderly Tea Party activist.
He’s grifted almost a quarter of a billion since 2016 and while he’s good at putting on drooling Trump fest events, other than that…
In 2022, the Turning Point network entered the ground game business, mainly in Arizona, where it is headquartered. As the Arizona Republic reported, “Turning Point PAC, the political action committee started by Turning Point USA, spent $494,105 during the 2022 election cycle, including the primary elections. The bulk of that, $377,201, went towards the general election races for U.S. Senate, governor, and Secretary of State in Arizona.” Turning Point’s candidates lost all of those races.
What did Turning Point do to help on the ground? Per the Arizona Republic:
Outside of money, Turning Point Action, the advocacy arm of the parent non-profit, Turning Point USA, held a string of rallies in key legislative districts. Volunteers who showed up were handed materials provided by Turning Point PAC and sent out to knock on doors and engage voters.
And, though it did not advocate certain candidates, Turning Point USA, the parent non-profit, started its Turning Point Faith initiative in August 2021 that aimed at persuading Christians to become more civic-minded.
At monthly events held at a Phoenix megachurch, Kirk would speak about current events and cast political involvement as a spiritual duty to protect the nation from falling under the control of Satan. Excerpts of those events played as part of a half-hour radio show that began airing on dozens of Christian radio stations.
None of this had any discernible impact. In the Arizona gubernatorial race, Turning Point’s preferred candidate, Kari Lake, led the Democratic nominee, Katie Hobbs, by 2.4 percentage points in the final FiveThirtyEight poll average. Yet Hobbs won by a 0.7 percentage point margin. Underperforming the polls by 3 points indicates that Lake and her Turning Point comrades got beat on the ground.
Undeterred, Turning Point last year began shopping around a $108 million get-out-the-vote plan, now called “Chase the Vote,” focusing on Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. Then-Chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, gave this plan the cold shoulder. Kirk launched blistering attacks on McDaniel, claiming she was a Democratic plant and urging Trump to dump her. According to Real Clear Politics, McDaniel told Trump that Kirk’s penchant for insulting African Americans, such as saying Martin Luther King, Jr. did not deserve a holiday, would hurt efforts with Black voters.
Kirk won the fight. McDaniel quit under pressure. Then Trump took Kirk’s suggestion to install his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as RNC co-chair.
This explains Kirk’s recent turn toward hyper Christian talk on his radio show and podcast. He’s targeting the evangelical base. Let’s just say that his professions of pious Christianity aren’t especially believable.
In today’s excellent newsletter, Brian Beutler is absolutely right about this. We know that most of the kvetching about the economy at this point is coming from Republicans and even then they are reporting that their own finances are fine it’s everyone else who is suffering terribly under the horrors of Joe Biden’s economy. There are some independents and Democrats who are complaining as well which is where the real problem lies.
Beutler points out that this phenomenon is asymmetric:
Every poll like this one from Monmouth will sweep in voters whose responses are tethered to facts, and others, mostly Republicans, whose responses are shaped by partisanship and tribalism. What we have here is evidence that Biden is fighting the issue to a draw despite that handicap. If people really just voted their pocketbooks, Biden would be winning handily. If Trump were to become president tomorrow, Republicans would experience catharsis, and economic sentiment would shoot above the waterline.
Political professionals should be able to see that coming miles away: Those same tribal poll responders will become big fans of the economy if Trump wins the election. They will outnumber their tribal opposites in the Democratic Party, and sentiment will invert before policy has changed at all.
Which means we know Biden doesn’t have a major economy problem—he has a Republican shit-talking problem.
Knowing that to be true, you would think that Democrats would not succumb to it but there is a raging debate among them about whether Biden should tell the truth about the economy or capitulate to these “vibes” that are telling people it sucks.
I’m with Beutler:
Conceding to the shit talkers can’t be right as a matter of strategy or basic self-respect. Biden’s domestic policy agenda should be a source of pride, not embarrassment. It’s also troubling in a larger sense: If we ever mean to become a society where politics is bound by empirical reality, it’s not good enough to recruit good-faith actors with solid epistemic habits who abhor fanning lies. We need the bad guys to pay a price for their deceptions. That can not happen if Democrats concede to living in a MAGA-inflected, topsy-turvy world, where prosperity is deprivation, “help wanted” signs are evidence of unemployment, and the most expensive gas station in America reflects the real price per gallon.
Democrats might still win the election from a defensive crouch. But they’ll have a much harder time winning the battle for consensus about the economy or Biden’s record if they accept conventional-wisdom pessimism. We’ll be told they won despite poor economic sentiment, not that Republicans lost because their campaign was based fundamentally on mass- and self-deception. And if this is the mindset Democrats have about Biden’s policy triumphs, they are not going to do much better when they have the power to impose real accountability, and all the contention it will stir.
This is why it was so jarring to hear Democratic strategists (and seemingly only Democratic strategists) respond to Trump’s felony convictions by cautioning that calling Trump a felon might backfire, because it would feed Trump’s false claims of “politicization.”
We obviously don’t know what will work. None of us are soothsayers or oracles. But as Beutler points out, if Biden wins a close election, which seems the likeliest positive scenario, “winning narrowly without popular appeal, and without the will or the mandate to fix what Trump and his loyalists have broken” would be a very bad outcome. The status quo is not sustainable.
All over cable news today are breathless reports about how “momentum” has shifted toward Trump because he collected $141 million last month compared to Biden’s apparently paltry $84 million. But they fail to mention that most of Trump’s money came from 3 billionaires, one of whom was this guy:
Timothy Mellon, a reclusive heir to a Gilded Age fortune, donated $50 million to a super PAC supporting Donald J. Trump the day after the former president was convicted of 34 felonies, according to new federal filings, an enormous gift that is among the largest single disclosed contributions ever.
The donation’s impact on the 2024 race is expected to be felt almost immediately. Within days of the contribution, the pro-Trump super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., said in a memo that it would begin reserving $100 million in advertising through Labor Day.
The group had only $34.5 million on hand at the end of April, and Mr. Mellon’s contribution accounted for much of the nearly $70 million that the super PAC raised in May. On Wednesday and Thursday, the super PAC began reserving $30 million in ads to air in Georgia and Pennsylvania around the Fourth of July holiday.
Mr. Mellon is now the first donor to give $100 million in disclosed federal contributions in this year’s election. He was already the single largest contributor to super PACs supporting both Mr. Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running as an independent. Mr. Mellon has previously given $25 million to both.
CNN actually said that Mellon had changed teams when it’s been obvious from the beginning that he was backing RFK on behalf of Trump.
Trump is out there selling himself to the highest bidder explicitly promising rich people that if they give him huge sums of money he will take care of them, if you know what I mean. He told the oil company execs that if they give him a billion dollars he’ll make sure their taxes are slashed and their regulations are reversed. It used to be that such explicit quid pro quos were considered to be liabilities. Today, not so much.
Biden collected big bucks from billionaires too, including Michael Bloomberg who gave 20 million. But the idea that these huge numbers reflect anything about the electorate is ridiculous at this point. It certainly says something about our campaign system and capitalism but that’s a different story.
Anyone with a passing knowledge of the history of reproductive rights in America had heard of the antediluvian Comstock Act but I doubt most of them ever thought it would actually be back in use in the 21st century. The notorious “anti-vice” laws from 1873 banned the shipment of “lewd” written materials, contraceptives and any “instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing” for the purpose of abortion, had not been in force for many decades since the passage of various laws and the recognition of a constitutional right to abortion in 1973’s Roe v. Wade. Nonetheless, it remained on the books and leave it to the radicals putting together Project 2025 to exhume it the minute Samuel Alito and company gave them the green light.
My Salon colleague Amanda Marcotte wrote about the Comstock Act in depth a few months ago in the wake of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Mifepristone ruling (access to which was thankfully affirmed (for now) by the Supreme Court this month.) The original decision relied heavily on the Comstock Act to justify the decision to ban the drug, an issue which was left unresolved by the Supreme Court when they threw out the lawsuit on the basis of standing rather than the merits. So the Comstock Act remains on the books and is now theoretically constitutional since the reversal of Roe v Wade, at least when it comes to contraception and abortion. Other aspects of the law regarding obscenity are still unenforceable as they are protected under other precedents.
The Comstock Act is what’s known as a “zombie law” which is a law that has been neutered by subsequent High Court decisions that have found a constitutional prohibition against enforcing them but they remain on the books sometimes for centuries lurking around like the undead (hence the name) waiting for a chance to be reanimated by the Supreme Court overturning one of its own decisions. There are a lot of them which we just saw in a number of states that had draconian 19th century laws go into effect when the Court handed down the Dobbs decision.
In Arizona after Roe was overturned, the conservative state Supreme Court revived a near-total ban on abortion, invoking an 1864 law that only allowed abortion to save the mother’s life and gave prison time to doctors who perform them. The state legislature went through tremendous gyrations to finally repeal that 1864 law but the status of the state’s abortion laws remain in limbo and doctors and patients remain confused and anxious about the law’s requirements. A similar story has played out in all the states that had these zombie laws on the books.
The Comstock Act is a federal law, however, and it is still in effect and is ripe for the picking by anti-abortion zealots and others who want to further restrict reproductive freedoms, including contraception. From the moment the Dobbs decision came down legal experts and activists recognized the danger it posed with this radical right wing judiciary and they immediately started to work on repealing it. At the time a number of abortion rights groups asked them to stand down because of cases already in the pipeline that would have been affected. As Notus reported:
“There’s a lot of litigation playing out that’s specific to this that many of the reproductive rights groups are in the middle of. They’re actually wanting to, they’re not wanting to see [the Comstock Act] change in the middle of that litigation. So that was at the request of Planned Parenthood and other reproductive freedom groups that have been fighting this for a long time,” Democratic Representative Pat Ryan said.
That came as something of a surprise but the Democrats in congress complied with the request. However with the Mifepristone case decided they have decided to make the move.
According to the Washington Post, Democrats are now introducing legislation to repeal the abortion provisions of the Act with the backing of those major abortion rights groups. (They will apparently leave in some of the obscenity laws on which bans on child pornography are based.) The Senate bill has 20 co-sponsors, including Sens.Tina Smith, D-Minn., Elizabeth Warren, D-Ma., and Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev. and Reps. Becca Balint, D-Vt. and Cori Bush, D-Mo. introduced the legislation in the House. Although they haven’t spoken out, the assumption is that the Democratic leadership is supportive.
The Post article suggests that there may be some reluctance by the White House but the reasons are unclear although other unnamed Democrats fear that it will somehow distract from other issues, which is typical but foolish. I hope that’s not the case. The Comstock Act is a 19th century monstrosity that should be repealed because is grotesque and we are watching it be used to roll back Americans’ basic human rights. I
Obviously, the very pious Christian Nationalist Speaker of the House Mike Johnson will not let this pass. The Comstock Act might have been written by him personally. (This is a man who participated in one of those bizarre purity balls with his daughter, after all. ) So there’s no hope of passage this year. But this should be part of the debate going into the election and the Democrats must repeal it the minute they get the chance because we know the Republicans are planning to use it the minute they get theirs.
There are a lot of zombie laws on the books that are likely to be used by the conservative judicial activists in the next few years now that they’ve secured the right wing Supreme Court of their dreams. For instance, there are existing, unenforced laws against adultery, atheism and sodomy which could easily be reanimated under some of the right’s current crusades. Discriminatory housing covenants and outdated draconian drug laws could rise from the dead as well.
They are setting up test cases all over the country with an eye toward overturning precedents to make that happen. Just this week Louisiana passed a new law requiring that all schools display the Ten Commandments in every classroom (using a large font!) They hope to get it to the Supreme Court which has shown every inclination to destroy the separation of church and state. Any zombies from the 1950s will immediately go back into effect if they uphold this law as constitutional.
Democrats in state legislatures and at the national level would be wise to survey all the laws and repeal these dead ones wherever they can as soon as possible. If they don’t, there’s every chance the right’s various culture crusades will end up bringing them back to life.
Gov. Tim Walz (D) of Minnesota on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” this morning gave a tight “elevator speech” contrasting Democrats’ approach as caretakers of these United States versus the grievance and retribution agenda of a second Trump administration (transcribed so you don’t miss any of it in the X condensation):
You’re seeing the contrast in this when you get a Democratic governor versus a Republican governor. We don’t have the Ten Commandments posted in our classrooms, but we have free breakfast and lunch. Those are policies that the Biden-Harris administration are talking about going nationally. It makes a huge difference. We use what we learned during the pandemic on the child tax credit. Minnesota’s going to reduce childhood poverty by a third. We already have one of the lowest numbers. Those are things that make a real difference in people’s lives, money back in the pockets of the middle class, policies that are making a difference in our schools. There’s a big contrast. What do you hear from the Trump administration other than grievance, retribution? “Esteemed epidemiologist” Donald Trump did nothing during COVID. Now he’s going to solve the Middle East crisis and climate change on the first day? Immigration? Not going to happen.
It’s not the first time you’ve seen twisted souls reject partaking in the fruits of this country’s bounty rather than share them with people they hate, even if it means their own children go without.
Trump and MAGA Republicans don’t want to govern. They want to rule. They don’t want Americans to flourish. They want the “wrong” kind to shut up, obey, and remain marginalized. They serve up grievance and retribution neither they nor their children can eat.
Listen to Mark Robinson, North Carolina Republican candidate for governor in 2024, scream, “Christian patriots of this nation will own this nation and rule this nation.” Share the video.
Check out this condensed quote from Stephen Wolfe’s “The Case for Christian Nationalism“: “The issue here centers on whether a Christian minority can establish a political state over the whole without the positive consent of the whole. I affirm they can. … Non-Christians living among us … are not entitled to political equality, nor do they have a right to deny the people of God their right to order civil institutions to God and to their complete good. … The Christian’s posture toward the earth ought to be that it is ours, not theirs, for we are co-heirs in Christ.”
The ideas behind Project 2025 and Christian nationalism are as old as feudalism and just as irredeemably un-American.
We can choose that or choose an America where schoolchildren have enough to eat and the opportunity to flourish, an America where freedom means freedom, not enforced religious conformity.
A yard sign I passed yesterday while canvassing read, “Dictatorship or Democracy. Choose wisely.”
Gov. @Tim_Walz: You're seeing the contrast when you elect Democrats over Republicans. We're not forcing the Ten Commandments to be posted in classrooms, we're feeding kids free breakfast and lunch. Those are policies the Biden-Harris administration wants to take nationally. These… pic.twitter.com/rhD4e68zcN
“They pointed me out with the N-word…. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”
Listen to “Mr. October” describe his experiences as a Black professional baseball player beginning in the mid-1960s after passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. As Elie Mystal tweets, this is history that many people want buried.
This is why Republicans work so hard to keep history out of schools. They don’t want white children to know what their parents and grandparents did. https://t.co/N63z2eJ8h0
Brought onto a set Thursday to share memories of playing at a historic baseball stadium in Alabama, MLB Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson expressed raw, unsparing thoughts about the racism he experienced decades ago.
“I walked into restaurants and they would point at me and say, ‘The [n-word] can’t eat here.’ I would go to a hotel and they would say, ‘The [n-word] can’t stay here,’” the 78-year-old told a Fox Sports panel that featured recently retired major league stars Alex Rodriguez, David Ortiz and Derek Jeter.
The comments came ahead of an MLB game between the St. Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants staged at Birmingham’s Rickwood Field. Billed as the country’s oldest ballpark, it was home to the Negro Leagues’ Black Barons as well as the minor league Birmingham Barons.
“I wouldn’t wish it on anybody,” Jackson said several times.
The former slugger for the A’s, Orioles, Yankees and Angels credited a number of White teammates, plus then-manager John McNamara, with helping him get through that period. Jackson said he spent several nights a week for many weeks sleeping on their couches until they received threats to “burn our apartment complex down” if he didn’t leave. Jackson added that his Birmingham teammates — including Rollie Fingers and Joe Rudi, who went on to win three World Series with him in Oakland — saved him from getting into physical confrontations with Southern racists.
“I’d have got killed here, because I’d have beat somebody’s a–,” Jackson said Thursday, referring to the history of lynchings of Black people by White mobs. “You’d have saw me in an oak tree somewhere.”
“If that doesn’t hurt to listen to, you’re missing something as a human being,” responded X-user Greg Cantwell.
The same sort of people who want this history disappeared fueled the Redeemer movement, enforced Jim Crow laws, and kept alive the Lost Cause for well over 100 years to keep from confronting the sins of their grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great grandparents. They gave a new meaning to the term “whitewash.” It continues to this day. The legacy of slave patrols continues to this day.
Should our republic survive the fascist movement spreading here and abroad, people now engaged in the MAGA movement will put equally strenuous efforts behind burying the history of their seditious participation and that of their parents and grandparents. Just as before.
