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Trump doesn’t think it is

Trouble in wingnut paradise?

Fox News was essential to Donald Trump’s success in both of his last presidential runs. Now, as the former president navigates another campaign through a tidal wave of indictments and legal problems, he’s facing a much frostier relationship with the cable giant—and that could be bad news for both of them.

In recent months, Trump’s inner circle has become convinced that Fox News is essentially sidelining the former president by restricting live appearances on the network.

“Trump is not allowed live on Fox,” a Trump operative told The Daily Beast, chalking it up to “fear” that Trump could level a baseless allegation that could leave the network in a legal mess.

A Trump adviser told The Daily Beast a similar story—that the former president isn’t allowed live on air anymore, and that Fox News prefers to have Trump in a pre-recorded setting.

“Fox sent down word from the top that they don’t want to ‘platform’ Trump like they did before,” a Trump adviser told The Daily Beast. “I find it hilarious. For one, it sounds like something MSNBC would do.”

After a lengthy hiatus last year, Trump re-emerged on Fox News in March, but in a diminished capacity in a string of interviews with Fox hosts and anchors including Sean Hannity, Bret Baier, and Larry Kudlow. Gone are the days when Trump could simply call in live and share his stream of consciousness.

According to a search by The Daily Beast and Media Matters for America, Trump last phoned in live to a Fox News program in April of 2022. And Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, told The Daily Beast the live freeze-out is no accident.

“Fox News’ record defamation settlement stemmed in part from its on-air Trump fanatics refusing to correct their guests’ election-denial conspiracy theories live, even when they knew their claims were lies,” Gertz said. “It’s wildly implausible to imagine the likes of Sean Hannity pushing back on Trump’s rigged-election fantasies, so it looks like Fox’s lawyers may have engineered a solution that doesn’t require its propagandists to perform journalism.”

One Trump confidant contrasted the apparent ban on Trump’s live appearances to earlier Fox News coverage, when they “used to go live at every single one of his rallies!”

As The Brookings Institution noted this year, Fox News’ “long-term influence may have paved the way for the power of Trumpism.” A poll conducted by The New York Times and Sienna College this year found that—as Brookings put it—the network can substantially impact viewers’ opinions by intensifying their already held right-wing beliefs.

In August, The New York Times reported that, before the first GOP presidential debate, Fox News executives pitched Trump on why he should attend their debate during a dinner at his Bedminster golf club. Trump played footsie with the idea of attending the debate, but ultimately never showed.

As Trump runs for president a third consecutive election—this time, with court appearances taking up much of his schedule—a direct line to Fox and its audience would be a convenient arrangement for him. But after Trump has made a sport of trashing Fox News, as well as that $787 million Fox News settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, Fox doesn’t seem interested in actively promoting Trump—at least not during the primary.

Fox News representatives did not return a request for comment on this story. And a Trump campaign spokesperson declined to offer on-the-record comment.

But a Trump adviser suggested that Fox News’ standoff with the former president risked alienating Trump’s base of MAGA-loving viewers.

“Trump and his supporters are the lifeblood of Fox’s business, so they’re shooting themselves, not in the foot, more like in the face,” this adviser said.

While most aides The Daily Beast spoke with believe Fox News is engaging in a strategic plan to bar Trump from live time, pinning down an official policy regarding Trump’s exclusion from live interviews is tricky. If the policy is explicit, Fox certainly isn’t spreading the word about it.

“I don’t know if it’s a black-and-white rule,” a second Trump adviser told The Daily Beast. “For Fox, they love a controlled environment. And remember, for a long time, they didn’t have him on, for months, so I think this was the next step.”

One of the sources argued that Trump prefers live Fox News interviews because of the lack of edits, something the former president seemingly confirmed at a campaign rally in Clive, Iowa, earlier this week.

“See, I love live television, because they can’t cut you off, or they’re gonna have a lot of open time, if they do,” Trump said.

Earlier this year, Semafor reported that the Trump operation believed there was a “soft ban” regarding Trump appearing on Fox News.

“Everyone knows that there’s this ‘soft ban’ or ‘silent ban,’” the news outlet reported, citing a source “close” to the former president. However, since then, Trump has made a number of appearances on Fox.

Only his appearances all have portions left on the cutting room floor.

Notably, the second Trump adviser said Trump had noticed Fox News editing his interviews—which, this source said, was intentional.

“The last few interviews he’s done, whether it’s been Hannity or [Mark] Levin, or others—they have come to Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster, so those cannot be live because they are a taped piece,” this Trump adviser said.

“One of the reasons they also do it is they are able to edit his words,” this adviser continued—specifically mentioning Trump’s false claims of a fraudulent 2020 election as a topic that’s left out of the final piece.

Following his 2020 election loss, the former president has frequently lashed out at Fox News and their respective executives, often in late-night rants on his social media site, Truth Social.

“FOX SHOULD EMBRACE MAGA,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post this past June. “DESPITE ALL THE FAKE LIP SERVICE, FOXNEWS [sic] IS PUSHING RON DESANCTUS, OR ANYONE ELSE FOR THAT MATTER, BECAUSE THEY HATE THE GREATEST ‘AMERICA FIRST’ PRESIDENT TO EVER PUT ON A SUIT AND TIE, ME.”

The former president has also claimed the network employs “globalists” and challenged the network’s parent company founder, Rupert Murdoch, to an “acuity test.”

Asked about Trump’s current thinking, a source close to the president told The Daily Beast that Trump’s words on Fox “speak for themselves.”

But the frustration hasn’t only been from the former president. His son, Donald Trump Jr., claimed that the network that once employed his fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, hasn’t welcomed him on air in “months.”

“I used to be on Fox three, four, five, six, 10 times a week. I haven’t been on in nine months. Not a call, not an invite, not anything,” Trump Jr. said back in May, as The Daily Beast reported at the time.

Trump’s other adult son, Eric Trump, appeared on the network in August to speak on his father’s ongoing legal problems. But when it comes to Trump’s relationship with Fox News, it’s long been complicated.

Trump, of course, has steadfast allies at the network—mostly in the form of Hannity and Levin. But both hosts are on the opinion side of the network. The news side, which uses a bit more discretion with fact-checks, has always been a little more oppositional to Trump, just by nature of Trump’s tortured relationship with the truth.

But the reality is, it’s not Fox that has taken up arms against Trump; it’s Trump that has taken up against Fox.

“Why is Rupert Murdoch throwing his anchors under the table, which also happens to be killing his case and infuriating his viewers,” Trump wondered on Truth Social in February.

Trump and his team seem to mostly blame Murdoch for the complicated standoff, touting his positive relationship with Hannity and some other anchors.

But whether Fox warms back up to Trump—or Trump warms back up to Fox—is an open question. Some Trump advisers seem to think both sides will thaw once they’re out of the GOP primary.

“The Murdochs are candidate shopping just like the rest of the donor class that hates Trump,” the first Trump adviser said. “They told their mouthpieces to push DeSantis. Now Haley. Who cares? They’ll go through the whole list and then Trump will still be the guy. It makes them look incredibly weak, which they are.”

While the immediate situation doesn’t seem to be getting any better, Trump allies are betting on the network coming back around.

“The fact is, they will all come and bend the knee soon and they will be begging and pleading,” a Trumpworld operative familiar with the standoff said. “‘Please can I come to dinner? Please will you come on the show?’”

So much winning. And that guy may very well be right. Once Trump officially secures the nomination their audience is going to want to see him constantly and he will be in a position to dictate the terms. They won’t want to leave money on the table.

Worth recalling Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre undermining the rule of law and DOJ independence; we have hardly advanced from that. Indeed, Trump is promising its return. https://t.co/KYprXck79l

— Andrew Weissmann (weissmann11 on Threads)🌻 (@AWeissmann_) October 21, 2023

Trump came close in the post-election period. He was going to fire the whole top layer of the DOJ and put in that coup-plotting toady Jeffrey Clark in as Attorney General in order to get the department to back his play to overturn the election. He was talked out of it when the White House lawyers convinced him that that entire executive team in the department would leave and it would affect his public standing.

He would not take that advice today.He’s learned by now that there is no price to pay for maximalism. Next time, he won’t hesitate.

It turns out that when the owner of the social media site is a narcissistic, control freak, troll the site ends up being a hellhole of lies and propaganda. Who could have guessed?

A handful of influential but unreliable accounts, some of which have been promoted by Elon Musk, are dominating the flow of news on X around the Israel-Hamas war and easily outpacing established mainstream news outlets, according to research published Friday by the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.

Researchers analyzed viral posts about the conflict during a three-day period starting from the beginning of the attack against Israel on Oct. 7. They concluded that the most popular posts about the crisis revealed how news on the platform is “faster, more disorienting, and potentially more shaped by Musk himself.”

The new work adds data to a swell of recent anecdotal accounts from researchers, academics and journalists who have noted a change for the worse in the way news and information moves and is incentivized on Twitter over the last year, especially since the start of the Israel-Hamas crisis. A separate analysis published Thursday by NewsGuard, a nonpartisan company that tracks false narratives online, found verified accounts were responsible for nearly three-fourths of the most viral misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war on Twitter. 

“That shift is real,” said Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington and lead author of the new report.  

“At its core what we’re looking at here is a different vision of what news is,” Caulfield said. “It’s fast, it’s unvetted, and it’s very often unsourced. And there’s every indication that the shift is not accidental and that it’s part of a vision of what news is going to be on X.”

“The people who are engaged, they probably buy into this vision, but we have doubts that it serves the public well,” he added.

The researchers branded seven high-performing accounts on X as “new elites,” because they have exercised “disproportionate power and influence” over Israel and Hamas news. The “new elites” include: Visegrád 24, a news aggregator run by a right-wing Polish social media marketing agency; Mario Nawfal, a Twitter celebrity known for hosting live audio chats focused on cryptocurrency who was the focus of an NBC News investigation; @spectatorindex, an account self-described as “News, media and data from around the globe,” reportedly operated by an Australian-Muslim medical doctor; @CollinRugg, a co-founder of the conservative site Trending Politics; and @CensoredMen, a 10-month-old account that before pivoting to the Israel-Hamas war primarily posted in support of the misogynist internet influencer Andrew Tate. 

Tweets about the Israel-Hamas war from these accounts outperformed popular news accounts belonging to CNN, The New York Times, the BBC and Reuters, despite having far fewer followers, according to the research (NBC News was not included). Across the research period, tweets about the Israel-Hamas war from well-followed traditional news sources garnered 112 million views over 298 tweets, while tweets from the seven newly influential accounts drew 1.6 billion views across 1,834 tweets. 

The researchers said that changes made by Musk to X had pushed the platform in a new direction.

“This occurs in an environment that has been shorn of many of the ‘credibility signals’ that served to ground users in the past — checkmarks that indicated notability, fact-checks distributed through Twitter Trends, and Twitter/X-based labeling of deceptive content,” the researchers wrote. “Even fundamental affordances of the web — such as simple sourcing through links — have been devalued by the platform, and, perhaps as a result, by the new elites that now direct its users’ attention.”

An emailed request for comment sent to X received an automated response: “Busy now, please check back later.”

Musk has been vocal in both his contempt for the mainstream press and his appreciation of nontraditional news sources. Musk has also called for more content creators to act as  “citizen journalists” and made changes to X that affected traditional news sources, including removing verification badges from journalists and news outlets and throttling the reach of tweets that include links to news websites. 

The researchers found that the “new elites” differed in political persuasion but shared several characteristics. They posted far more than traditional news outlets, used terms like “BREAKING” and emojis like sirens that suggested urgency, and often excluded sourcing for their claims. The most popular posts were often emotionally charged, including footage of the attacks and airstrikes as well as graphic photos and videos of the injured and dead. 

Researchers wrote that the volume of the tweets combined with a dearth of sourcing or context created “the sense of a constant stream of decontextualized anger and violence.”

Another commonality between these new elite accounts is their dramatic increase in followers over the last two years, which may be explained by Musk’s interactions with them. Through following many of these accounts, replying to them, and directly recommending them, researchers wrote, “Musk may be playing a significant role in the increasing prominence of these news-focused sources.”

On several occasions, Musk has interacted or specifically promoted the accounts identified by researchers. In a tweet seen more than 11 million times before he later deleted it, Musk praised two of the anonymous accounts noted by researchers. Both accounts had reputations for false tweets before the Israel-Hamas war.

All of the “new elite” accounts identified by researchers have blue verified badges, a designation that until recently signified an account was notable and authentic, but which now means they pay $8 per month to subscribe to X’s premium service. 

Joe Biden was a private citizen in 2018

Hold that thought (CBS News):

House Republicans released bank records of President Biden’s brother, James Biden, Friday, that they argue raise more questions about whether President Biden personally benefited from his family’s business ventures.

Bank records released by the GOP-led House Committee on Oversight and Accountability revealed a $200,000 personal check paid to Mr.  Biden from his brother, James Biden, and sister-in-law, Sara Biden. The personal check, which was labeled a loan repayment, was issued before Biden’s presidency, on the same date in 2018 when Americore Health LLC, a healthcare company that manages rural hospitals across the United States also wired a $200,000 loan into James Biden’s PNC bank account. 

In video remarks posted to X, Rep. James Comer, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee claimed, “Joe Biden’s ability to be paid back by his brother depended on the success of his family’s shady financial dealings.” 

In a bankruptcy filing last year, Americore Health LLC claimed James Biden received hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans from the company on the promise that his last name “could ‘open doors’ and that he could obtain a large investment from the Middle East, based on his political connections.”

There are close to 13,000 registered lobbyists operating in this country. Roughly half of former congressman (and who knows how many former Hill staffers) move from a government paycheck into the lobbying or consulting industry to trade on their political connections. Comer knows more than a few by now.

Most of the press has learned to ignore Comer.

The Comer committee’s mission is to “ensure the efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability of the federal government and all its agencies.” Shoehorn investigating private citizens into that mission statement if you can. Better yet, find a coherent thought in Comer’s statements.

Now watch Comer in action:

pic.twitter.com/mpXbMbBSGe

— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) October 20, 2023

Joe Biden was a private citizen in 2018.

This story is all over the far-right internet repeating Comer’s “shady financial dealings” smear of the Biden family. Comer does not elaborate; he need not. Innuendo is doing all the work here.

This from Comer’s “just asking questions” press release:

Did [Joe Biden] know that the same day James Biden wrote him a check for $200,000, James Biden had just received a loan for the exact same amount from business dealings with a company that was in financial distress and failing?

Since we’re “just asking questions,” how many money managers working for financially distressed and failing Wall Street banks received bonus checks far exceeding $200,000 in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse? How many had congressional committees investigating them?

THIS JUST IN: Area Man Repays Loan to Brother. https://t.co/nTzZexRIMr

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) October 21, 2023

If this statement from Comer is true to form for right-wing propaganda, the whole point is to get the large-font headline. That is, to generate “smoke.” Whether or not there is fire is beside the point. By the time the smoke clears and we find once again that there was never any fire, the news cycle will have moved on. Followup reporting debunking the original allegation appears on page A7 or later. But the memory that there was something-something about Biden and money and shady-shady lives on in people’s heads.

From Swiftboats to birth certificates to Benghazi and “but her emails,” that’s the whole game.

First the Kraken lady, then Kenneth Chesebro

As more dominoes fall, it might look something like this at Casa Insurrection. It won’t be Trump confessing, but one by one he’ll be seeing his friends evaporate. (I can dream, can’t I?)

Clip borrowed from Dave (1993).

Baby Sloth!

In the birdhouse of Schönbrunn Zoo, sloths are undoubtedly the big favorites among the audience. Those who visit them tomorrow, on the occasion of Sloth Day, will experience a small furry surprise. “For the 13th time, we have had offspring among our sloths. A young one was born on August 20th. Initially, it was hidden in the protective fur of the mother, but by now, you can observe the little one well,” announces Simone Haderthauer, zoological department head, with joy. The young one lies on its mother like in a hammock. It will only start hanging independently on branches at about six months old.

Sloth Day was established in 2010 to draw attention to these amazing animals and their habitat. Haderthauer says, “Two-toed sloths spend their lives hanging upside down in trees. Although they are not currently considered threatened, their habitat is steadily shrinking due to the ongoing deforestation of rainforests in South America.” Sloths’ main diet consists of leaves and buds. They spend much of their day dozing to save energy. Schönbrunn Zoo is committed to raising awareness among its visitors for nature and species protection so that sloths and all the other fascinating representatives of the animal kingdom do not disappear from our planet.

Zooborns

The judge in the NY case is big mad:

The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s bank fraud trial threatened to throw the former president in jail—and hit him with punishing fines—for “blatantly” violating a gag order by refusing to delete a website post attacking court staff.

Justice Arthur F. Engoron, striking a serious tone, began Friday at trial by laying out the high stakes and demanding that Trump’s lawyers explain themselves.

“In the current overheated climate, incendiary comments can and in some cases already has, led to serious physical harm and worse. I will now allow the defendants to explain why this blatant violation of the gag order would not result in serious sanctions, including financial sanctions and/or possibly imprisoning him,” Engoron said.

The case that Engoron is presiding over—Trump’s New York bank fraud trial—is a civil matter, meaning jail time wasn’t ever supposed to be in the cards, only stiff fines and a threat to ruin his real estate empire.

But now, Trump appears to be facing a very real threat of spending time in jail if his antics continue.

Defense lawyer Christopher Kise immediately apologized for Trump’s behavior, blaming the 2024 Republican presidential candidate’s bloated “campaign machinery” for simply forgetting to remove a webpage that mirrored the Truth Social post Trump had already deleted.

“There was no intention to evade or circumvent or ignore the order. I assure you that. I just know that this is a very large machine and this is one of the reasons, frankly, I don’t have social media,” Kise said, trying to deflect with some light humor.

“But that’s been taken down. And we don’t have any other… there were no subsequent postings,” Kise added.

The judge didn’t immediately accept that excuse.

“I will take that under advisement, but… Donald Trump is still responsible for the large machine,” Engoron reminded him.

Trump hasn’t said anything about this (yet) although he’s had a lot to say about the “riggers” who are going after him for his attempted coup and complaining about Biden allegedly causing WWIII. But then he’s very busy at the LIV golf tournament at Doral. He’s got a lot on his plate.

The wives of Republican congressmen aren’t the only ones MAGA is targeting with threats and intimidation

We already knew they liked to go after cops. But going after their families is a new frontier:

The federal prosecutors who have brought charges against hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters are seeing an uptick in violent threats and harassment directed toward their office, the office’s lead prosecutor told congressional investigators.

Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for Washington, said the threats come from around the country and have become “pervasive,” though he did not elaborate on their substance or whether any law enforcement agency is investigating them.

Graves’ comments, documented in a transcript obtained by POLITICO, came in a closed-door interview on Oct. 3 with the House Judiciary Committee about the Hunter Biden probe. In the interview, Republican investigators pressed Graves on allegations that his office refused to assist the U.S. attorney in Delaware who is leading the probe into the president’s son. Graves declined to answer some of the investigators’ questions about his personnel, citing threats to his office.

The threats he described appear to be part of a broader trend of law enforcement officials grappling with security concerns while working on politically charged cases.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s team, which is running two federal prosecutions of Donald Trump, spent nearly $2 million for U.S. marshals protection from November to March, according to a person familiar with the spending granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter. Fani Willis, the Georgia prosecutor leading a separate prosecution of Trump, reported receiving 150 personal threats in the two months following her indictment of the former president and his allies.

And Thomas Sobocinski, an FBI agent connected to the Hunter Biden probe, previously told congressional investigators that law enforcement personnel working on that investigation have faced threats — and that their families have, as well.

“People are trying to fuel the sentiment of stoking ire against these dedicated civil servants,” Graves said in the interview with the House Judiciary investigators. “And you really don’t even know the extent of it because it’s not group affiliated.”

Graves repeatedly declined to name subordinates in his office who were involved in the decision last year not to team up with David Weiss, the Delaware prosecutor who has long been investigating Hunter Biden on tax and gun issues. Linking his deputies to Weiss’ probe could put them at risk, Graves said.

“I’m already dealing with enough threats and harassment of my assistant United States attorneys who are career prosecutors,” he said.

He alluded to unspecified “mitigation measures” that he has put in place to protect himself and other people in his office.

Graves did not describe the source or the nature of the threats. But the most nationally prominent work he’s helmed — by far — stems from the violent breach of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The Justice Department has charged more than 1,100 people with crimes related to the Jan. 6 attack, and Graves’ office has played a central role in coordinating the nationwide undertaking. A spokesperson for the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, this is what Trump is posting today. And sadly, it’s probably pretty true:

The “adults” in the room unfortunately keep spitting up their formula

And listen to this hopeless drivel:

Raju: You think this looks good? pic.twitter.com/K7R7GfVmXO

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 20, 2023

Raju: How does it make the Republican party look?

Scott: I think it makes congress as a whole look very bad… The Democrats are not innocent in this. They’re not.

Raju: Matt Gaetz and the Republicans started this. pic.twitter.com/VcdbGDhv2f

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 20, 2023

They actually think people are going to believe that the Democrats should have saved the man who opented a bogus impeachment inquiry against Joe Biden and eagerly licks Trump’s boots every chance he gets (not to mention the years and years of grotesque lying and derision) from their own right wing freaks? Really? They believe this?

It would be nice is once, the reporters wouold ask them point blank why they believe the Democrats should have saved the Republican speaker from right wing Republicans. How would they explain that?

What’s happening in the House is taking us over the cliff

This post by Lee Drutman says it all:

The US House is now in uncharted territory.

Yes, you probably know this from following the ongoing drama over the vacated House speakership. As of this writing, we are now 17 days into this manufactured crisis.

But how uncharted?

And if we’re off the map, where are we headed? And are we off to “There be dragons” land? (Possibly, yes)

In the pixels ahead, I’ll visually map where we are.  As we’ll see, there are some historic parallels. But not enough to feel like we’ve really been here before.  

Here’s what’s distinct about this moment, based on the best metrics we have.

–Congress is more polarized than ever.
-The Republican Party is more far-right than ever.
–The share of House districts that are truly competitive is tinier than ever (less than 10 percent).
–The share of House districts splitting their tickets hit a 100-year low in 2020 (fewer than 4 percent).
–Partisan margins in the House are uniquely narrow.
–The dimensionality of voting in the House has collapsed into a single dimension.
–The Republican Party is growing more internally divided.

To close observers of politics, none of these findings may be that surprising. But I hope by seeing them all together, we can appreciate how unusual this moment is — and just how far we’ve sailed away from the “normal” patterns.

My simple takeaway is: We’re not going back.

So we need to ask: where do we want to head now?

If we are deliberate, we have possibilities. If we are not deliberate, the sea of dragons may chew us into pieces.

So come aboard. We’re going on a data journey.

(The data will cover only the U.S. House of Representatives. Similar patterns hold in the Senate, but since the House is in crisis right now, and the trends are clearer in the House, that is the focus of this piece, which is already long-ish)

He goes on to xplain all this in detail and I highly recommend that you read the whole thing if you’re interested in this subject. I’ll just include some of the charts he uses to illustrate his points here:

I have one final graph, and it describes some very uncharted territory.

Uncharted Territory means we have to invent our own chart of the future

The hard thing about Uncharted Territory is that, being uncharted, it’s really hard to know how where we are headed.

Some aspects of the current moment reflect Rarely Charted Territory. For example, the contentious parallels of 1910 (when insurgent Republicans stripped Speaker Joseph Cannon of his powers) and 1931 (when an evenly divided Congress agreed on a liberal discharge petition rule). To the extent history offers parallels, the most likely outcome would be an end to the strong Speaker model of Congress, and a move back towards a more decentralized, committee-based organizational structure.

However, in those earlier periods, politics was less nationalized, and voting was less one-dimensional. There was still some play in the joints, some flexibility in the coalitions. Today, that seems much less likely. Too many of aspects of this current period are unprecedented.

From my readings into the dynamics of complex systems, the trends (particularly the collapse of dimensionality) suggest a system on the verge of a significant transformation.  The current arrangements feel quite shaky because we are experiencing the tremors of an organizational arrangement that can no longer hold.

If we are truly in uncharted territory, the map of the past offers little advice.

It’s normal to fear the uncharted. This is our natural conservative instinct  —  however imperfect the status quo might be, it at least reflects the accumulated wisdom and traditions of years; most alternatives are likely worse.

 But in this uncharted territory, we are beyond the accumulation of traditions. We are in the unknown, whether we like it or not. And all the signals suggest big change ahead. There is only one option: start thinking creatively about how we might govern ourselves in the years to come. The future, after all, belongs to those who show up with a plan.

Here, of course, is where I cue my song and dance about the need for electoral system reform to Break the Two-Party Doom Loop: Fusion voting and proportional representation, people. We’re in uncharted territory. It’s time to take alternatives seriously while we still have time to consider them.

Again, I highly recommend you read his entire explanation of those charts. But even a cursory observation shows clearly that something is happeneing here. And it probably isn’t good.