Lately I’m just seeing very little coverage at all which still benefits Trump. There are exceptions thank goodness:
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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
The Anti Vaxxers are no longer on the fringe
I guess this figures. We can only hope that he doesn’t manage to get on the ballots in the swing states or if he does that he’ll only appeal to the right wing anti-vaxxers:
Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Tuesday unveiled his new campaign communications director: Del Bigtree, one of the country’s leading anti-vaxxers.
Bigtree, who serves as the executive director of the Informed Consent Action Network—one of the nation’s largest anti-vaccine organizations—announced his new role in a letter that blasted presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden for their roles in distributing the COVID-19 vaccine.
“In January 2020, we witnessed what the dark forces of medical tyranny are capable of when they launched the greatest psychological operation the world has ever experienced,” Bigtree wrote. “we watched in sick astonishment as both President Trump and President Biden put the fate of our nation into Dr. Anthony Fauci’s hands.”
This is so outrageous. And he’s nothing compared to this nutcase:
Florida’s top health official called for a halt to using mRNA coronavirus vaccines on Wednesday, contending that the shots could contaminate patients’ DNA — aclaim that has been roundly debunked by public health experts, federal officials and the vaccine companies.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo’s announcement, released as a state bulletin, comes after months of back-and-forth with federal regulators who have repeatedly rebuked his rhetoric around vaccines.Public health experts warn of the dangers of casting doubt on proven lifesaving measures as respiratory viruses surge this winter.
“We’ve seen this pattern from Dr. Ladapo that every few months he raises some new concern and it quickly gets debunked,” said Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s public health school who led the White House’s national coronavirus response before stepping down last year.“This idea of DNA fragments — it’s scientific nonsense. People who understand how these vaccines are made and administered understand that there is no risk here.”
Ladapo issued the bulletin as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), his political patron, fights to stay alive in the Republican presidential primary, in which he trails former president Donald Trump by more than 40 percentage points in head-to-head polls. The Iowa caucuses, the first nominating contest, are slated to be held Jan. 15.
“Providers concerned about patient health risks associated with COVID-19 should prioritize patient access to non-mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and treatment,” Ladapo wrote.
Florida’s health department did not immediately respond to questions about whether Ladapo’s new stance would affect vaccine access for the state’s patients and health providers, or whether his decision to repeat debunked claims could create doubts about other routine vaccinations. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows that Florida lags far behind most states when it comes to the percentage of its population that has received an updated booster dose. Meanwhile, covid hospitalizations have been on the rise nationally, with almost 30,000 Americans newly hospitalized the week of Dec. 23.
Scott Rivkees, a DeSantis appointee who preceded Ladapo as Florida surgeon general before stepping down in September 2021, called Wednesday’s announcement “surprising and disappointing” and at odds with settled science about the safety of coronavirus vaccines. But current DeSantis officials praised the announcement.
“Grateful to live in a state where Big Pharma does not dictate health policy recommendations,” Christina Pushaw, a DeSantis campaign official, posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, where she thanked Ladapo “for standing up for scientific integrity.” The DeSantis campaign did not respond to questions about whether the governor coordinated with Ladapo on the announcement or whether he would adopt a similar position if elected president.
All those seniors who live in Florida are having their health put at risk because Ron DeSantis wanted to out-Trump Trump on the vaccine issue so he appointed this quack as Surgeon General.
At least 200 million people worldwide have struggled with long COVID: a slew of symptoms that can persist for months or even years after an infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. But research suggests that that number would likely be much higher if not for vaccines.
A growing consensus is emerging that receiving multiple doses of the COVID vaccine before an initial infection can dramatically reduce the risk of long-term symptoms. Although the studies disagree on the exact amount of protection, they show a clear trend: the more shots in your arm before your first bout with COVID, the less likely you are to get long COVID. One meta-analysis of 24 studies published in October, for example, found that people who’d had three doses of the COVID vaccine were 68.7 percent less likely to develop long COVID compared with those who were unvaccinated. “This is really impressive,” says Alexandre Marra, a medical researcher at the Albert Einstein Israelite Hospital in Brazil and the lead author of the study. “Booster doses make a difference in long COVID.”
These anti-vaxxers and their enablers are making people very sick with this nonsense. DeSantis should be held responsible for what he’s done to the people of his state. I don’t eve know what to say about RFK Jr except that he’s a lunatic.
Have we always been this crazy?
Such profiles in courage. There hasn’t even been one primary and they’re already crawling on their bellies to lick Donald Trump’s boots. It’s sickening.
Scalise is predictable. He’s the guy who said he was running as “David Duke without the baggage.” Of course he’s with Trump. Hard core Christian theocrat Mike Johnson is backing Trump despite the fact that Trump is a Jeffrey Epstein pal recently found liable for sexual assault (among dozens of other “ungodly” behaviors.) He’s quite the moral man of faith.
I listened to the Bulwark podcast last night while cooking dinner and Tim Miller reminded me about Emmer. This happened just 10 weeks ago:
Just hours after Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) won the Republican Conference’s nomination to be House speaker on Tuesday, former President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to deride the congressman as “totally out-of-touch with Republican Voters” and a “Globalist RINO.”
He then got on the phone with members to express his aversion for Emmer and his bid for speaker.
By Tuesday afternoon Trump called one person close to him with the message, “He’s done. It’s over. I killed him.”
Just minutes later, Emmer officially dropped out of the race.
Now, Emmer says “thank you sir, may I have another” and endorses him.
Republican cowards, cynics and opportunists are the only people in the world who bow down to Trump and it convinces his brain dead cult that he is the strongman they’ve been waiting for. What an incredible con this is.
Miller wondered why Emmer would bother because he really has no future in politics beyond what he already has. But that answers itself. He’s afraid that Trump will make them take it away and apparently there is no amount of personal pride or integrity that is worth more than that silly job.
Republican politicians, all of them, are eager to humiliate themselves before the Orange Julius Caesar. It makes them feel safe.
It makes me feel nauseous.
Update:
Former President Donald Trump has reportedly delighted in how even lawmakers that he’s crossed are backing his 2024 presidential bid.
According to a New York Times report, Trump has bragged about how Rep. Tom Emmer, the No. 3 House Republican, endorsed his presidential campaign even after Trump derailed Emmer’s effort to become speaker of the House in the wake of Kevin McCarthy’s historic ouster.
“They always bend the knee,” Trump said privately of Emmer.
There’s a word for this but I’m too civilized to use it.
Only 13% say Joe Biden is. And yet:
Meanwhile, here’s the very pious Donald Trump:
From the outset of his brief political career, Trump has viewed right-wing evangelical leaders as a kind of special-interest group to be schmoozed, conned, or bought off, former aides told me. Though he faced Republican primary opponents in 2016 with deeper religious roots—Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee—Trump was confident that his wealth and celebrity would attract high-profile Christian surrogates to vouch for him.
“His view was ‘I’ve been talking to these people for years; I’ve let them stay at my hotels—they’re gonna endorse me. I played the game,’” said a former campaign adviser to Trump, who, like others quoted in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
It helped that Trump seemed to feel a kinship with prosperity preachers—often evincing a game-recognizes-game appreciation for their hustle. The former campaign adviser recalled showing his boss a YouTube video of the Israeli televangelist Benny Hinn performing “faith healings,” while Trump laughed at the spectacle and muttered, “Man, that’s some racket.” On another occasion, the adviser told me, Trump expressed awe at Joel Osteen’s media empire—particularly the viewership of his televised sermons.
In Cohen’s recent memoir, Disloyal, he recounts Trump returning from his 2011 meeting with the pastors who laid hands on him and sneering, “Can you believe that bullshit?” But if Trump found their rituals ridiculous, he followed their moneymaking ventures closely. “He was completely familiar with the business dealings of the leadership in many prosperity-gospel churches,” the adviser told me.
The conservative Christian elites Trump surrounds himself with have always been more clear-eyed about his lack of religiosity than they’ve publicly let on. In a September 2016 meeting with about a dozen influential figures on the religious right—including the talk-radio host Eric Metaxas, the Dallas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress, and the theologian Wayne Grudem—the then-candidate was blunt about his relationship to Christianity. In a recording of the meeting obtained by The Atlantic, the candidate can be heard shrugging off his scriptural ignorance (“I don’t know the Bible as well as some of the other people”) and joking about his inexperience with prayer (“The first time I met [Mike Pence], he said, ‘Will you bow your head and pray?’ and I said, ‘Excuse me?’ I’m not used to it.”) At one point in the meeting, Trump interrupted a discussion about religious freedom to complain about Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska and brag about the taunting nickname he’d devised for him. “I call him Little Ben Sasse,” Trump said. “I have to do it, I’m sorry. That’s when my religion always deserts me.”
And yet, by the end of the meeting—much of which was spent discussing the urgency of preventing trans women from using women’s restrooms—the candidate had the group eating out of his hand. “I’m not voting for Trump to be the teacher of my third grader’s Sunday-school class. That’s not what he’s running for,” Jeffress said in the meeting, adding, “I believe it is imperative … that we do everything we can to turn people out.”
Trump’s resemblance to a prosperity preacher is striking. They’re all scam artists and so is he. It’s not surprising, when you think about it, that the people who send them money would fall for a demagogic cult leader like Donald Trump. They’ve been conditioned to do so for years. What’s more disturbing is the fact that those same scam artists are in on Trump’s con. They want real power now, not just money.
As I’ve said a million times, the best part of all this is that the Christian Right has fully been exposed now. We don’t ever have to take their moral posturing seriously again.
Joe Biden will be giving a big speech on the anniversary of January 6th. Its themes could not be more important. And yet, we have every reason to anticipate the media covering it by discussion whether or not it actually helps Trump in the opinion polls for Biden to lay out the stakes in this campaign. It’s what they do. They’ll poll the speech and then spend hours and hours and spill buckets of pixels on whether or not “it works.”
Margaret Sullivan explains why that’s wrong and what they should do instead:
When Joe Biden talks on Friday about US democracy on the brink, there’s no doubt that it will be a campaign speech. Maybe the most important one of his life.
But the speech will be more than that. It’s intended as a warning and a red alert, delivered on the anniversary of the violent January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
The date was chosen for good reason – to make the point that more mayhem and more flagrant disregard for the rule of law and fair elections, are just around the corner if Donald Trump is re-elected.
Can the political media in America get that reality across? Or will their addiction to “horserace” coverage prevail?
So far, the signs aren’t particularly promising.
A line high up in the New York Times’ advance coverage of what Biden plans to say is typical of the mainstream media’s tone and focus: “The two speeches are part of an effort to redirect attention from Mr. Biden’s low approval numbers and remind Democrats and independent voters of the alternative to his reelection.” (Biden is speaking on Saturday at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and Monday at the South Carolina church where a young white supremacist murdered nine black parishioners in late 2016.)
CNN offered an advance headline that emphasized the presidential race, not the message: “Biden opens campaign push …”
USA Today did better, putting the emphasis where it belongs: “Biden will mark Jan 6 anniversary with speech warning Trump is a threat to democracy.”
We all know there’s a campaign happening. And remember, many readers don’t get beyond the headlines or news alerts. Those bulletins have to be short, true, but they also have to get the larger job done.
I’m not suggesting that Biden’s speech be covered as something separate from his presidential campaign. It’s obvious that November’s election and the fragility of American democracy are intertwined.
Even Biden campaign officials are making that point. “We are running a campaign like the fate of our democracy depends upon it. Because it does,” campaign manager Julia Chavez Rodriguez has said.
But there is another element that is more subtle.
“The choice for voters,” Rodriguez said, “will not simply be between competing philosophies of government. The choice will be about protecting our democracy and every American’s fundamental freedom.”
That’s where the media gets tripped up. In a constant show of performative neutrality, journalists tend to equalize the unequal, taking coverage down the middle even though that’s not where true fairness lies.
She goes on to discuss how the media is always afraid of being accused of liberal bias etc. etc. But she ends the piece with a quote from a media figure that actually tells it like it is:
In an NPR interview, former Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron laid out the facts clearly:
“He’s the only politician I’ve heard actually talk about suspending the constitution. He’s talked about using the military to suppress entirely legitimate protests using the Insurrection Act. He’s talked about bringing treason charges against the then-outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. He’s talked about bringing treason charges against Comcast, the owner of NBC and MSNBC. He’s talked explicitly about weaponizing the government against his political enemies. And, of course, he continues to talk about crushing an independent press.”
And, as Baron concluded, no editorializing is necessary because “all of those [threats], by nature, by definition, are authoritarian”.
That’s what’s going on here. It’s not a “both sides issue.” As she says:
Reporters and their bosses – both in newsrooms and in glossy corporate offices – should remember that being in favor of democracy isn’t a journalistic crime. In fact, it’s a journalistic obligation.
I know that there are some who are trying very hard to do this. But it has to be consistent and it has to be relentless. This message won’t break through the noise unless they make a commitment to doing that.
Campaign business as usual won’t cut it in 2024
If you live in a blue county, you probably think independents lean your way. And maybe they do. Inside city limits. But outside? Nationwide, independent voters lean red, and did in November 2022 even if the split looked closer in December 2023.
Plus, the segment of the electorate that identifies as independent is growing steadily (below). There are more of them than there are Democrats or Republicans.
Over half of voters roughly 45 and younger identify as independents.
Not all states register by party (including some key swing states), so there this is harder to parse out. But here are two 2024 swing states that do.
In North Carolina (16 electoral votes), for example, the current registration breakdown is:
Independents: 36%
Democrats: 33%
Republicans: 30%
In Arizona (11 electoral votes), the registration breakdown is:
Independents: 35%
Republicans: 34%
Democrats: 30%
Good News, Bad News
Democrats cannot win without earning the votes of a sufficient number of independents and that could be a challenge, especially for candidates running statewide.
The good news is that even if independents have a significantly unfavorable view of both major parties, voters 49 and younger have a significantly more favorable view of Democrats than Republicans (below).
The bad news is that those younger independents who most lean Democrat actually vote far less than those who bleed red. See Nonvoters under “AGE” below. In 2022, nearly 2/3 of nonvoters were 49 and younger, per Pew. See Millennials and Gen Z, above.
Regular readers already know the next chart. Where’s the most potential for Democrats to increase voter turnout?
Millennial and Gen Z independents are exactly the Democrat-leaners Democrats need voting more. But they don’t, not enough. Why not? (This gets technical, but I’ll try to simplify.)
To target prospective voters for get-out-the-vote efforts, Democrats rely on their national voter database, VoteBuilder, a product of NGP VAN. The tool’s premise is microtargeting: each voter gets assigned a Democratic Support score based on a variety of factors. For example: 1) Are they registered Democrats? 2) If unaffiliated, have they ever voted a Democratic ballot in a primary (as in Arizona and North Carolina)? 3) How often do they vote? Included are minor weighting factors for income, education, consumer preferences, etc. Based on those scores, campaigns decide which voters look like low-hanging fruit for voter outreach. Many campaigns start contacting voters with scores of 70 and higher. Independents less-prone to vote start with three or more strikes against them, and there are more of them than there are of us (Democrats).
Lower down the scale, warns the Michigan Dems help desk, “while only 50% of voters with a score of 50 are expected to support Democrats, that group could be 50% left wing activists, 50% Tea Party Republicans.” Few campaigns in this political environment want to dispatch door-knockers to homes with scores that low. Too risky.
Michah L. Sifry commented on the recent report “The Experience of Grassroots Leaders Working with the Democratic Party.” One complaint stood out: A majority of respondents said the party does a terrible job targeting voters, saying that its lists are far too narrow.
Now you know why. Democrats are policy liberals and campaign conservatives.
Multiple precinct chairs and field organizers balked when asked about outreach below their accustomed arbitrary Democratic Support score. If canvassers knock doors where VoteBuilder does not indicate firm Democratic support and volunteers get their heads bitten off a couple of times, they said, they’ll go home and organizers lose their volunteer base. That’s a reasonable concern. But it’s hardly a campaign-winning strategy.
The problem Democrats face in North Carolina, for example, is that, statewide independents vote 58% against Democrats. What helps keep statewide margins narrow here is that while independents outnumber Democrats by 3%, they turn out at 6.5% less than Democrats. But in hundreds of urban precincts in the largest, bluest counties where independents (in the aggregate) vote 60, 70, 80-90% for Democrats, they vote at roughly 12% less.*
Chicken or egg? Are these lower-propensity voters not turning out like their independent neighbors because they are simply less-engaged? Or because Democrats are not engaging them?
Buckle up. Let’s win this thing.
This is microtargeting’s Achilles’ heel. In neighborhoods where independents who do vote choose Democrats by 60, 70, 80-90%, campaigns bait individual hooks for high-scorers instead of casting nets. Many of these voters reside in neighborhoods campaigns deprioritize for outreach because they consistently vote blue and heavily. Just not the independents in them.
Pie-in-the-sky? If turnout for independents in these canvassable neighborhoods matched Democrats’ turnout there, I estimate in ten counties an additional 56,000 votes for the Democrat at the top of the ticket. That’s unrealistic. But even if campaigns could boost independent turnout there up to the state average (6.5% below Democrats), that’s still over 25,000 extra votes.
Democrats and allied 501s can mitigate risks of canvassers and phone bankers encountering hostile (read: MAGA) independents by expanding outreach in specific precincts where independents vote Democrat by 60, 70, 80-90%. (Talk about low-hanging fruit.) As Billy Beane said in Moneyball, “We are card counters at the blackjack table. And we’re gonna turn the odds on the casino.”
But not using a partisan message. 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.
But this requires campaigners in North Carolina, in Arizona, and maybe Pennsylvania to change the way they are accustomed to doing business, so maybe forget it.
Of course, if I were former N.C. Chief Justice Cheri Beasley who lost her seat by 401 votes in 2020, I’d settle for any fraction of 25,000 extra votes.
* My own estimates from 2022 precinct results across almost 50 N.C. counties. Hello, Arizona? There are over 900 precincts in blue Maricopa alone. What I’ve estimated here, activists could estimate there.
Bidenomics delivers. Trump blows smoke.
The EPC market (Engineering, Procurement and Construction) tends to be counter-cyclical. Spending there leads to jobs and increased manufacturing later. When engineers (moi) and construction workers (later) start looking for work, others are getting jobs in factories we’d just completed designing and building. As new factories come online, our work might slow down. Know the difference. So here are two stories about that.
America’s spending on the construction of new factories is surging.
Why it matters: The Biden administration’s signature legislation — particularly the CHIPs Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — has spurred a surge in construction spending that’s buoyed the economy, as Axios’ Neil Irwin reported.
By the numbers: Manufacturing-related construction hit a $210 billion annual rate in November, more than triple the average rate in the 2010s, according to Census data out this week.
- All that spending is driving an increase in construction hiring. Job openings in construction increased by 43,000 last month, according to BLS data out yesterday — and are up by 111,000 from last year.
- Contractors are even facing labor shortages in areas with industrial mega projects, Anirban Basu, the chief economist of the Associated Builders and Contractors, said in a release Wednesday.
Bidenomics naysayers will focus on tales of a manufacturing “contraction” (Bloomberg):
The Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing gauge edged up 0.7 point to 47.4 last month, helped by a pickup in production, according to data released Wednesday. Readings below 50 indicate contraction, and the figure was near economists’ expectations.
The December result extends the longest stretch of shrinking activity since 2000-2001, when the dot-com bubble burst and sparked a recession.
High borrowing costs, waning demand, etc., etc.
However (Industry Week):
To many investors and observers, the Dec. 13 signal from the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate setting Federal Open Market Committee that it might cut three times this year was a reason to move to a more optimistic stance about continued growth in the U.S. economy.
It looks like many corporate executives were already there.
A handful of recently published surveys, reports and forecasts have shown that leaders in manufacturing and beyond are pretty upbeat about what lies ahead in 2024. The “vibecession” that writer and financial educator Kyla Scanlon coined to sum up persistent negativity in the face of improving economic data looks to be leaving C-suites.
Affirmation
The report continues with half a dozen bullet points making that case then turns to Joey Politano of Apricitas Economics (who generated the chart at the top):
“American businesses’ economic uncertainty has also dropped to the lowest levels since early 2020,” he wrote. “Firms have more confidence in their year-ahead employment and revenue forecasts than at the start of either 2021 or 2022.”
By no means do these data points suggest an attitude among business leaders that it’s green lights all the way for 2024. It appears to be more an affirmation that things are generally in solid shape and that important macro factors are, as suggested by our most recent Tales From the Transcript analysis of publicly traded manufacturers, finding a level of balance many businesses have been yearning for since 2019.
Meanwhile, at a federal courthouse near you (Washington Post):
Prosecutors have repeatedly described Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in 2020 as effectively manufacturing a pretense for illegally overturning the election. Special counsel Jack Smith said in his indictment of the former president that fake electors were meant to “create a fake controversy” that could be used on Jan. 6, 2021.
In a new filing, Trump’s legal team appears bent on helping prosecutors make that case.
Everything but the spaghetti
And the Trump report is a “doozy” says the headline on Aaron Blake’s report, a real “mess”: false claims, debunked claims, irrelevant claims, and “multiple accounts of alleged fraud that don’t appear to be publicly available.” Without links or named sources, as we’ve come to expect.
Trump’s legal team throws everything against the wall except the spaghetti and their licenses to practice law.
But it’s one thing to say these things in public; it’s quite another to include them in a legal filing. Trump’s attorneys have been careful not to actually vouch for his wildest claims, because doing so involves trying to substantiate them, and legal scrutiny has been unkind — to put it mildly.
Trump’s lawyers do not say that the claims in the report are true, instead using the document in an effort to substantiate the idea that there remain “vigorous disputes” and “questions” about the results. The aim is to apparently cite the smoke without actually claiming there’s fire.
But what it demonstrates is how much this entire effort was about manufacturing smoke. And in that way, the Trump lawyers in effect just proved the prosecutors’ point.
The Biden economy is building factories for manufacturing consumer goods. Donald Trump has cornered the market in manufacturing smoke with which to cover his considerable ass.
And it is awesome
Perlstein will be writing his for the American Prospect. You can subscribe to it here and I highly recommend you do it. I don’t think that he or the folks at the American Prospect will mind if I reproduce this first introductory column in its entirety. It’s just so good. (I’ll follow the rules in the future, I promise.)
You Are Entering the Infernal Triangle
Authoritarian Republicans, ineffectual Democrats, and a clueless media
As a historian who also writes about the present, there are certain well-worn grooves in the way elections get written about by pundits and political journalists from which I instinctively recoil. The obsession with polling, for one. Polls have value when approached with due humility, though you wonder how politicians and the public managed to make do without them before their modern invention in the 1930s. But given how often pollsters blow their most confident—and consequential—calls, their work is as likely to be of use to historians as object lessons in hubris as for the objective data they mean to provide.
Pollsters themselves are often the more useful data to study, especially when their models encode mistaken presumptions frozen in place from the past. In 1980, for instance, Ronald Reagan’s landslide was preceded by a near-universal consensus that the election was tied. The pollster who called it correctly, Lou Harris, was the only one who thought to factor into his models a variable that hadn’t been accounted for in previous elections, because it did not yet really exist: the Christian right.
Polling is systematically biased in just that way: toward variables that were evident in the last election, which may or may not be salient for this election. And the more polls dominate discussions of campaigns and elections, the more they crowd out intellectual energy that could be devoted to figuring out those salient, deeper, structural changes conditioning political reality: the kind of knowledge that doesn’t obediently stand still to be counted, totted up, and reduced to a single number.
Another waaaaay too well-worn journalistic groove is prediction. I have probably read thousands of newspaper opinion column prognostications going back to the 1950s. Their track record is too embarrassing for me to take the exercise seriously, let alone practice it myself. Like bad polls, pundits’ predictions are most useful when they are wrong. They provide an invaluable record of the unspoken collective assumptions of America’s journalistic elite, one of the most hierarchical, conformist groups of people you’ll ever run across. Unfortunately, they help shape our world nearly as much, and sometimes more, than the politicians they comment about. So their collective mistakes land hard.
Just how hierarchical are they? How conformist? Well, one reason Timothy Crouse was able to write the most illuminating book about political journalism ever, The Boys on the Bus (1973), was because he was a playwright, who recognized what he was observing among campaign journalists as a collection of highly ritualized scripts. Like the time, after a contentious candidate debate, when members of the traveling press corps crowded around the man referred to as their “dean,” the Associated Press’s Walter Mears, as he hacked away at his typewriter. One asked, “Walter, what’s our lead?” The rest awaited his answer on tenterhooks. They needed him to tell them what they had just seen.
And how ritualized? Consider one of elite journalism’s most deeply worn grooves: the morning-after declarations, should any Democrat win a presidential election, that the Republican politics of demagogic hate-mongering has shown itself dead and buried for all time—forgetting how predictably it returns in each new election, often in an increasingly vicious form.
In 1964: When the author of the Civil Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson, defeated a Republican who voted against the Civil Rights Act, Barry Goldwater, one of the most distinguished liberal newspaper editors in the South, Sam Ragan of the Raleigh News & Observer, pronounced that all future American elections would be decided “on issues other than civil rights.” His essay quoted the Los Angeles Times’ Washington bureau chief, who affirmed that conventional wisdom by observing that henceforth, whichever party takes the Black vote would be no more predictable than who would win “freckle-faced redheads and one-armed shortstops.”
In 1976: When Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford, Washington’s most respected public-opinion expert, Everett Carll Ladd, said that the GOP was “in a weaker position than any major party of the U.S. since the Civil War,” because it had turned itself into an “institution for conservative believers.” He wrote that in a magazine article published in 1977. It came out in book form—poor guy—the week of the opening klaxon of the Reagan Revolution: the 1978 congressional elections, when a passel of New Right Republicans and conservative Democrats upset many of the longest-serving and beloved liberals in Washington.
In 2008: That year, I published a book called Nixonland, an account of Nixon’s brand of demagogic hate-mongering and the resistance to it in the 1960s as a crucible of our own contemporary political divisions. A Clinton White House adviser, Howard Wolfson, auditioning as a centrist pundit in The New Republic, wrote of how Obama’s imminent victory over a pol who “calls Senator Obama a socialist, trots out a plumber to stoke class and cultural resentments, and employs his Vice-President to question Obama’s patriotism by linking him to terrorists” proved that “Nixonland is dead.”
And in 2012, when Michael Lind wrote of Barack Obama’s re-election victory, “No doubt some Reaganite conservatives will continue to fight the old battles, like the Japanese soldiers who hid on Pacific islands for decades, fighting a war that had long before been lost … Any competitive Republican Party in the future will be to the left of today’s Republican Party, on both social and economic issues.”This particular bias is rooted into elite punditry’s deepest, most dangerous groove of all: a canyon, if you will. On one side of the yawning gulf is the perennial fantasy that America is a nation fundamentally united and at peace with itself, “moderate,” “centrist,” where exceptions are epiphenomena entirely alien to settled American “norms.”
On the other side of the gulf is, well, reality.
The media habits that make it so hard to grasp that reality—that made Trump and his merry band of insurrectionists such a surprise to us—are perhaps as systematic as any foisted upon the public by state media in authoritarian nations. A little more innocent than, say, Pravda, however, because one wellspring of this stubborn fantasy, and why audiences are so receptive to it, is simple psychology. To acknowledge the alternative is to stare into a terrifying abyss: the realization that America has never not been part of the way to something like a civil war.
But suddenly, in 2024, no one can avoid acknowledging that abyss anymore. And that leaves journalism in a genuine crisis.
Generations of this incumbent, consensus-besotted journalism have produced the very conceptual tools, metaphors, habits, and technologies that we understand as political journalism. But these tools are thoroughly inadequate to understanding what politics now is.
According to polls (which, yes, have their uses, in moderation), something around half of likely voters would like to see as our next president a man who thinks of the law as an extension of his superior will, who talks about race like a Nazi, wants to put journalistic organizations whose coverage he doesn’t like in the dock for “treason,” and who promises that anyone violating standards of good order as he defines them—shoplifters, for instance—will be summarily shot dead by officers of the state who serve only at his pleasure. A fascist, in other words. We find ourselves on the brink of an astonishing watershed, in this 2024 presidential year: a live possibility that government of the people, by the people, and for the people could conceivably perish from these United States, and ordinary people—you, me—may have to make the kind of moral choices about resistance that mid-20th-century existentialist philosophers once wrote about. That’s the case if Trump wins. But it’s just as likely, or even more likely, if he loses, then claims he wins. That’s one prediction I feel comfortable with.
Journalistically, this crisis could not strike more deeply. The tools we have for making sense of how politicians seek to accumulate power focus on the whys and wherefores of attracting votes. But the Republican Party and its associated institutions of movement conservatism, at least since George and Jeb Bush stole the 2000 election in Florida, has been ratcheting remorselessly toward an understanding of the accumulation of political power, to which they believe themselves ineluctably entitled as the only truly legitimate Americans, as a question of will—up to and including the projection of will by the force of arms.
Ain’t no poll predicting who soccer moms will vote for in November that can make much headway in understanding that.
Thus the challenge I have set for myself with this column: to conceptualize and practice journalism adequate to this extraordinary state of affairs.
I should say, the challenge I set for ourselves: This project must be plural, or nothing at all. Email me ideas, complaints, corrections, criticisms—and suggested role models, for there are plenty of heroic ones to discover out there; have always been plenty of heroic ones out there—at infernaltriangle@prospect.org.
A political journalism adequate to this moment must throw so many of our received notions about how politics works into question. For one thing, it has to treat the dissemination of conventional but structurally distorting journalistic narratives as a crucial part of the story of how we got to this point.
For instance, the way mainstream American political journalism has built in a structural bias toward Republicans. If one side in a two-sided fight is perfectly willing to lie, cheat, steal, and intimidate without remorse in order to win, and journalists, as a matter of genre convention, must “balance” the ledger between “both sides,” in the interest of “fairness,” that is systematically unfair to the side less willing to lie, cheat, steal, and intimidate. Journalism that feels compelled to adjudge both “sides” as equally vicious, when they are anything but, works like one of those booster seats you give a toddler in a restaurant so that they can sit eye to eye with the grown-ups. It is a systematic distortion of reality built into mainstream political journalism’s very operating system.A recent example was one of NBC News’s articles in response to Donald Trump’s new turn of phrase in describing immigration. It was headlined: “Trump Sparks Republican Backlash After Saying Immigrants Are ‘Poisoning the Blood’ of the U.S.”
It took exceptional ingenuity for someone at NBC to figure out how to wrench one side’s embrace of race science into the consensus frame, where “both sides” “agree” that major presidential candidates should not imitate Nazis. That frame squeezes out any understanding of how Trump’s provocations rest along a continuum of Republican demonization of immigrants going back decades (“Build the dang fence,” as John McCain put it in 2010), and that most Republicans nonetheless support Trump (or candidates who say much the same things) down the line.
Pravda stuff, in its way. Imagine the headache for historians of the United States a hundred years from now, if there is a United States a hundred years from now, seeking to disentangle from journalism like that what the Republican Party of 2024 is actually like.
There is, simultaneously, another force that functions systematically within our deranged political present to render genuine understanding of encroaching authoritarianism so much more difficult. It is the opposition political party’s complex and baffling allergy to genuinely opposing.
These traditions include Democratic “counterprogramming”: actions actively signaling contempt for the party’s core non-elite and anti-elitist base of support. That’s a term of art from the Clinton years, but it has its origins as far back as the early 1950s, when Adlai Stevenson Sister Souljah’ed a meeting with party liberals by announcing himself opposed to Truman’s goal of a national health care program, derided federal funding of public housing, and came out in favor of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act.
Another Democratic tradition associates political surrender with moral nobility. Al Gore, for example, had wanted to concede on Election Night 2000, based merely on network projections that had Bush up by 4,600 votes in Florida—and not even wait for the actual initial count, which ending up having Bush ahead by only a few hundred.
A third Democratic tradition imagines that reactionary rage can be sated with technocratic compromise. Like the response from Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer, a Jew, to Donald Trump’s incessant avowals that what Schumer and his party are really after is poisoning true America’s purity of essence: “What Donald Trump said and did was despicable, but we do have a problem at the border and Democrats know we have to solve that problem, but in keeping with our principles.”
Or like what Bill Clinton said upon signing into law Temporary Assistance for Needy Families: “After I sign my name to this bill, welfare will no longer be a political issue.” Leaving office, he told a reporter, “I really believed that if we passed welfare reform we could diminish at least a lot of the overt racial stereotypes that I thought were paralyzing American politics.”
This is the infernal triangle that structures American politics.
In one corner, a party consistently ratcheting toward authoritarianism, refusing as a matter of bedrock principle—otherwise they are “Republicans in Name Only”—to compromise with adversaries they frame as ineluctably evil and seek literally to destroy.
In the second corner, a party that says that, in a political culture where there is not enough compromise, the self-evident solution is to offer more compromise—because those guys’ extremist fever, surely, is soon to break …
And in the third corner, those agenda-setting elite political journalists, who frame the Democrats as one of the “sides” in a tragic folie à deux destroying a nation otherwise united and at peace with itself because both sides stubbornly … refuse to compromise.
And here we are.
All three sides of the triangle must be broken in order to preserve our republic, whichever candidate happens to get the most votes in the 2024 Electoral College. I have no prediction on offer about whether, or how, that can happen. All I know is that we have no choice but to try.
I will just add that I think the chances of us being able to break anything are probably nil if Trump and the Republicans win power in 2024. They will break us. But yes, we have no choice but to try either way.
Politico interviewed Christopher Rufo the new propaganda monister of fascist America. He’s very proud of himself for taking out a Black woman president of Harvard. What a coup.
Rufo isn’t shy about revealing the true motives behind his influence operations. Last month, he told me that his efforts to rehabilitate Richard Nixon’s legacy are part of broader ploy to exonerate former President Donald Trump. When I spoke to him on Tuesday afternoon, he was equally frank about what motivated his efforts to get Gay fired.
The following has been edited for clarity and concision.
How much credit do you think you deserve for Gay’s resignation?
I’ve learned that it never hurts to take the credit because sometimes people don’t give it to you. But this really was a team effort that involved three primary points of leverage. First was the narrative leverage, and this was done primarily by me, Christopher Brunet and Aaron Sibarium. Second was the financial leverage, which was led by Bill Ackman and other Harvard donors. And finally, there was the political leverage which was really led by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s masterful performance with Claudine Gay at her hearings.
When you put those three elements together — narrative, financial and political pressure — and you squeeze hard enough, you see the results that we got today, which was the resignation of America’s most powerful academic leader. I think that this result speaks for itself.
How closely have you been coordinating with the other people in those three camps?
I know all the players, I have varying degrees of coordination and communication, but —
What does that mean, “various degrees of communication and coordination?” Have you been actively working together?
Some people I speak to a little more frequently, some people a little less frequently. But my job as a journalist and even more so as an activist is to know the political conditions, to understand and develop relationships with all of the political actors, and then to work as hard as I can so that they’re successful in achieving their individual goals — but also to accomplish the shared goal, which was to topple the president of Harvard University.
On December 19, you tweeted that it was your plan to “smuggle [the plagiarism story] into the media apparatus from the left, which legitimizes the narrative to center-left actors who have the power to topple [Gay].” Can you explain that strategy in more detail?
It’s really a textbook example of successful conservative activism, and the strategy is quite simple. Christopher Brunet and I broke the story of Claudine’s plagiarism on December 10. It drove more than 100 million impressions on Twitter, and then it was the top story for a number of weeks in conservative media and right-wing media. But I knew that in order to achieve my objective, we had to get the narrative into the left-wing media. But the left-wing uniformly ignored the story for 10 days and tried to bury it, so I engaged in a kind of a thoughtful and substantive campaign of shaming and bullying my colleagues on the left to take seriously the story of the most significant academic corruption scandal in Harvard’s history.
Finally, the narrative broke through within 24 hours of my announcement about smuggling the narrative into the left-wing media. You see this domino effect: CNN, BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications started to do the actual work of exposing Gay’s plagiarism, and then you see this beautiful kind of flowering of op-eds from all of those publications calling on Gay to resign. Once my position — which began on the right — became the dominant position across the center-left, I knew that it was just a matter of time before we were going to be successful.
Why is it so important to get the story into the center-left media?
It gives permission for center-left political figures and intellectual figures to comment on the story and then to editorialize on it. Once we crossed that threshold, we saw this cascade of publications calling on her to resign.
Do you think that playbook works on any issue, or do you think that the Israel-Palestine issue is unique, insofar as it’s already dividing elite liberal organizations?
I’ve run the same playbook on critical race theory, on gender ideology, on DEI bureaucracy. For the time being, given the structure of our institutions, this is a universal strategy that can be applied by the right to most issues. I think that we’ve demonstrated that it can be successful.
Why do you think you can be so open about your strategy and still have it work? Why don’t you feel like you need to be covert about it?
First, and most simply, because I’m telling the truth — and the truth has an inherent and innate power. I believe that if it’s propagated correctly, it has the power to defeat lies.
The reason that I announced my strategy in advance is both to demoralize my opponents — and it certainly does a good job at that — but also to teach my potential friends and allies how the game works. Machiavelli wrote The Prince not to teach people who already knew the principles of how power works, but to teach people who need to know — and in reality, the people who need to know about how politics works are American conservatives. So I tried to publicly narrate what I’m doing in order to teach my friends how to do it themselves. I think that this is a big service — with the added benefit that it demoralizes and deranges my enemies.
Do you think you understand how the left-wing influence ecosystem works better than the people inside it do?
Well, I spent 10 years directing documentaries for PBS, lived in large, left-wing American cities, and I’ve studied how the media, NGOs and universities circulate and legitimize information regimes. I’ve just applied that knowledge — and in some senses, I’ve stolen some of the earlier tactics from previous generations of the American left and weaponize them against the current regime.
What I’m doing is teaching conservatives how to hack that system and to use our asymmetrical disadvantages to our strategic advantage. We need to be very lightweight and very aggressive, and we need to be faster and smarter and rhetorically more sophisticated than our opponents — who, unfortunately for them, have grown complacent, lazy, entitled and ripe for disruption.
What is your broader objective here, beyond forcing the president of Harvard to resign?
My primary objective is to eliminate the DEI bureaucracy in every institution in America and to restore truth rather than racialist ideology as the guiding principle of America.
In her letter of resignation, Gay said that she was troubled by “threats fueled by racial animus.” How do you respond to that?
It was absolutely not fueled by racial animus. It was fueled by Claudine Gay’s minimization of antisemitism, her serial plagiarism, her intimidation of the free press and her botched attempts to cover it all up. It had nothing to do with her race or sex and everything to do with her merit, her competence and her failure to lead.
How significant of a victory do you consider this campaign for the conservative movement?
I worked on critical race theory for a very long time before it yielded fruit, but this Claudine Gay story has shown that we can drive major, paradigm-shifting victories over a compressed timeframe. I’d like to engage in more experimentation on how we can cycle up some of these campaigns very quickly.
The amount of media devoted to this campus scandal is unbelievable. I can guarantee that the majority of Americans don’t actually give a shit.
Rufo is a propagandist and he admits it. Apparently, them media knows it and is perfectly fine being led around by the nose by him. It’s unbelievable.
Look at this:
Those are each different articles from the last two days about this “scandal.” I feel like I’m losing my mind.
I’m going to share this twitter thread from Dave Roberts who nailed this issue better than I can:
I just want to describe a certain pattern/dynamic that has replicated itself over & over & over again, as long as I have followed US media and politics. I have given up hope that describing such patterns will do anything to diminish their frequency, but like I said: compulsions.
The center-left pundit approach to these things is simply to accept the frame that the right has established and dutifully make judgments within it. In this case, they focus tightly on the question of whether particular instances qualify as plagiarism as described in the rules.
Inevitably, this is done with a certain air of self-congratulation. “Look at me, I’m making a tough call that goes against my side! I’m so judicious nonpartisan and independent!” And all the other center-left pundits nod soberly, noting — more in sorrow than anger! — how lamentable it is that all the left partisans out there lack this protean ability rise above it all and see clearly and apply standards equally to all sides.
And — the part that really chaps my ass — they refuse, almost as though it’s a matter of principle to ask the larger questions: Why are we talking about this? Is there any reasonable political or journalistic justification for *this* being the center of US discourse for weeks on end? Who has pushed this to the fore, and why, and what are they trying to achieve?
It is as though these questions are evasions or cheats or something, as though intellectual integrity demands only heeding those questions that the right has put into the frame. It is a kind of bizarre, proud naivete — gormlessness posing as wisdom.
“We must only discuss whether plagiarism is ok or not; those are the rules.” But why are those the rules? Why should the media and pundits ignore context here? It’s not like that context is secret –Rufo goes out bragging about it on social media frequently!
You could cite hundreds of examples of this kind of thing, but one I frequently think about is “Climategate.” Right wing shitheads stole a bunch of emails from a climate research org, sifted through them, plucked sentences, phrases, and even individual words out of context …
… and then demanded that the climate community defend these contextless bits. Of course the media chased the shiny ball and of course center-left pundits dutifully scratched their chins and said, “well maybe they have a point about this one, or this one.”
Then, as now, it was treated as some sort of partisan cheat to draw attention to the fact these were emails stolen by explicitly malicious actors who explicitly were trying to destroy climate science. “Sir, please focus on the contextless bits.”
Of course, after multiple extensive investigations, it all turned out to be bullshit. But the damage was done. Climate science was smeared and suffered reputational damage that dogged it for years.
In other words, the malicious actors got exactly, precisely what they wanted.
No journalist or pundit ever apologized for, or even acknowledged, the fact that they were used as instruments by bad people to achieve bad things. To my knowledge there was absolutely zero reflection from any journalistic outlet about it. They just went on to the next thing.
To return to the Harvard thing: why are we talking about this? Corruption is endemic in virtually every conservative Institution –the NRA, CPAC, the Supreme Court, you name it. Why aren’t we talking about them?
Antisemitism is endemic in RW spaces and has been for decades. Why aren’t we talking about that? House Republicans are trying to cut off aid and leave Ukraine stranded. Why aren’t we talking about that? The economy is booming. Why aren’t we talking about that?
There are a lot of important things going on right now. Why are we talking about this and not any of those?
We know why: the right is expert at ginning up these artificial controversies and manipulating media. Again, they brag about it publicly!
What I don’t understand is why media and center-left pundits are so *passive* in the face of this obvious, explicit manipulation. They just dutifully follow the right around, shrugging their shoulders: “I guess we have to talk about this now.”
I guess we have to talk about the “border crisis” now. I guess we have to talk about trans people in girls’ high school sports now. I guess we have to talk about Bud Light and Target now. I guess we have to talk about whatever the fuck they want to talk about. [shrug]
Equally maddening is the fact that the left, broadly speaking, and the D Party in particular, are also just as passive! They’ve watched this go on for decades, one fake scandal after another, one BS distraction after another, & they seem utterly helpless to do anything about it.
For as long as I’ve been alive, left pundits like @brianbeutler have been begging & pleading with Dems to do what the right is doing: take control of the discourse. Create controversies that focus attention where they want it. Create moments, create memes. Do politics FFS!
But no, they just drone on about policy and kitchen tables. They sniff with disdain at the idea of engaging in purposeful acts of symbolism. “There’s no point holding hearings about Clarence Thomas’s corruption because there’s no obvious policy recourse” kind of shit.
And so here we are, all of us, talking about what the right wants us to talk about, actively doing its bidding, actively helping it destroy higher education & smear black scholarship & distract from its institutional antisemitism. We are all Rufo’s bitches.
This exact same kind of cycle has now happened so many times that I frankly can’t believe anyone is unaware of how it works. It really looks like everyone — right, journalists, pundits — is happy with their role in these things. They feather everyone’s nest quite nicely.
Anyway, this went on longer than I intended and I should shut up now. My one, futile plea to everyone is simply: before you jump in with an opinion on the discourse of the day, ask yourself *why* it is the discourse of the day and whose interests the discourse is serving.
And maybe, just on occasion, have the courage to *talk about something else*, something *you* deem important, not just whatever the puke funnel has served up for you. </fin>
It’s maddening.
Secretary Mayorkas will be impeached
Marjorie Taylor Greene has been pushing for this from the moment Mayorkas was confirmed. It’s her personal crusade and they are all afraid of her so it is happening:
House Republicans will forge ahead with steps to impeach Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas over his handling of the border crisis, a GOP source tells CNN.
In a statement provided to CNN, a committee spokesperson said “the House Committee on Homeland Security has conducted a comprehensive investigation into Secretary Mayorkas’ handling of, and role in, the unprecedented crisis at the Southwest border” for nearly a year.
“Following the bipartisan vote in the House to refer articles of impeachment against the secretary to our Committee, we will be conducting hearings and taking up those articles in the coming weeks,” the statement said.
The announcement of the impeachment proceedings comes as immigration is shaping up to be a top issue in the 2024 presidential election, with Republicans slamming President Joe Biden’s immigration policies. On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, along with some of his Republican colleagues, will visit one of the busiest sections of the US-Mexico border, where only a few days ago border authorities wrestled with a fresh surge of migrants.
It’s part of a long-running dispute between Republicans and the Biden administration over the handling of the southern border that’s culminated in impeachment proceedings against the DHS chief who’s charged with border security.
The committee spokesperson told CNN the hearing will begin next week. “The Committee will ensure that the public is aware of the scope of Secretary Mayorkas’ egregious misconduct and refusal to enforce the law, but also that this process is completed promptly and accountability is achieved swiftly—as the American people have demanded,” the statement said.
The Department of Homeland Security responded in a statement Wednesday, arguing House Republicans are “pursuing a baseless political exercise that has been rejected by members of both parties and already failed on a bipartisan vote.”
“There is no valid basis to impeach Secretary Mayorkas, as senior members of the House majority have attested, and this extreme impeachment push is a harmful distraction from our critical national security priorities,” DHS spokesperson Mia Ehrenberg said.
“Secretary Mayorkas and the Department of Homeland Security will continue working every day to keep Americans safe.”
The government is about to shut down and the GOP clown show is putting on pageants at the border (by the way, crossings are down right now) and impeaching Biden and Mayorkas to appease Marge and the Trump cult. I guess they think this will get them re-elected. I’m not so sure. This stuff looks ridiculous to anyone who isn’t a die hard Trump loving wingnut.