Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Once upon a time there was a Trump toadie who wrote a fatuous children’s book about a good king being persecuted by an evil queen named Hillary Queenton until one day a virtuous wizard comes to his rescue and saves the day:

FBI Director nominee Kash Patel has published 2 children’s books that lionize Trump. “The Plot Against the King” features a thinly veiled Hillary Clinton as the villain going after “King Donald,” while Kash, a wizard called the Distinguished Discoverer, exposes a nefarious plot. pic.twitter.com/mdJshTpUKj

— John Tures (@JohnTures2) December 1, 2024

One might not think too much of such a silly little project except the “writer” of those books, Kash Patel, has been nominated to run the FBI in the new Trump administration. The story is a thinly veiled narrative of Patel’s original claim to fame, working for former congressman Devin Nunes’s House Intelligence Committee investigation into the origins of the Russia probe back in 2016. They weren’t written to entertain kids. They were written to cozy up to Trump and demonstrate his loyalty by literally portraying him as a king.

Trump hired Patel to join his National Security Council after the Nunes report came out where he quickly established himself as a direct conduit to Trump feeding him whatever he thought he wanted to hear. According to Trump’s Russia and Ukraine expert on staff, Fiona Hill, Trump even thought Patel was the man in charge of Ukraine in the White House when he had nothing to do with it at all. He insinuated himself into Trump’s inner circle so tightly that as the term was winding down and the coup attempt was getting going after the 2020 election, Trump named him as chief of staff to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller. Trump wanted to install him as either the Director of the CIA or the FBI the latter of which was met with Attorney General Bill Bar saying that he would do it “over my dead body.”

It looks like he’s finally going to get his wish, assuming the Senate goes along with the appointment. It’s always possible that they won’t. Considering Patel’s reputation for extremism and the threats he’s made during the time he was out of government, one would hope that at least a handful of Republicans would say it’s unacceptable. But it’s a very thin hope at this point.

All of this assumes that Trump fires the current director Christopher Wray, his own appointee, who still has three years to go on his term. That job is unique in that it was designed to be so above partisan politics that the 10 year term can extend even beyond an 8 year presidency. Presidents have the power to dismiss them but until Trump fired James Comey because he wasn’t “loyal” enough to drop the investigation into Russian interference, there had only been one other instance when it was a case of the Director facing serious ethical violations. Trump apparently plans to fire Wray for no reason at all except that he wants to install a personal henchman in the job. The idea of an apolitical FBI Director is no longer operative. From now on, they will always be seen as members of the president’s team, something that really was not true until Trump. It almost seems quaint to think about it now.

Patel has made the agenda clear with this clip that succinctly lays out what he believes his mission at the FBI would be:

Here is Trump’s nominee for FBI Director Kash Patel calling for “offensive operations” to jail Americans who they consider “the enemy.”

“We will go out and find the conspirators… Yes, we are going to come after the people in the media” pic.twitter.com/2PMNHWN5U7

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) December 1, 2024

A year ago, Trump appeared before a gala of young Republicans and he looked at Patel in the crowd, saying, “Get ready, Kash, get ready.” He’s ready.

During the Trump exile in Mar-a-lago Patel took advantage of the wingnut welfare racket and made himself some money. He worked for Trump, of course, along with various think tanks. But he also created a brand for himself (K$h) and sold those childrens books and another one called Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy  about his years fighting the against the evil cabal that wants to destroy America. He sold K$h wine, clothing, playing cards among other things. He endorsed products and even modeled them:

As history professor and author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present” Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote on X/twitter, “Note the K$H logo. I could update the masculinity chapter of #Strongmen with this image.”

The Atlantic published the definitive profile of Patel last year, a piece by Elaina Plott Calabro which delved deeply into his early years growing up in New York and time spent working as a lawyer. He was a public defender for a while and then became a federal prosecutor where early on he was apparently considered a bit of a showboating lawyer but generally a nice guy. But something happened along the way (beyond his burning ambition) when he found himself embarrassed in the courtroom one day and developed an intense grievance against the Justice Department for allegedly failing to defend him in the press. There were other perceived slights that followed and that resentment seems to have fermented into a poisonous hostility toward the institution and the goverment itself. Like Trump, he believes that he’s been persecuted and oppressed and is determined to wreak revenge on all those he believes have wronged him — and wronged the man to whom he has pledged his total fealty, Donald Trump.

That sense of persecution is what all of the Trump nominees for the law enforcement, intelligence and military institutions share. Their eagerness to burn it all down is what they have in common and I would imagine that after what they’re going to go through with the confirmation process and the media attention, those feelings will be even more intense. There is no reason to believe that any of them will moderate once they assume the mantle of responsibility.

Trump is drunk with power right now. According to Axios, he has Elon Musk beside him 24/7 whispering in his ear “pushing ‘radical reform’ of, well, almost everything. As he sits next to Trump discussing administration picks, Musk often asks if the person embodies “radical reform” — massive cuts and blow-it-up-to-rebuild instincts.” He’s no doubt telling Trump how he fired everyone at the companies he bought and rebuilt them from the ground up, something which Trump, with his little family business has never done having only played a real boss on a reality TV show. Trump wouldn’t want to look weak to the richest man in the world. He’s ready to blow it all up to impress him.

Kash Patel is a loyal true believer with a readiness to do whatever it takes to get revenge. Trump has finally found his Roy Cohn.

Kash’s Enemies List:

Salon

Hunter Biden was set to be sentenced and probably put in jail this week on a trumped up charge that was brought solely because he was Joe Biden’s son. He lied on a form about being on drugs and he paid his taxes late. He entered into a plea deal in which he would admit guilt and get probation, a fair sentence, and the prosecution blew it up in court. He could have faced years in jail for crimes that no one who hadn’t also committed much more serious crimes would have ever been prosecuted.

Biden pardoned Hunter tonight and he did the right thing.

HunterHere’s the reality. No USAtty would have charged this case given the underlying facts. After a 5 year investigation the facts as discovered only made that clearHad his name been Joe Smith the resolution would have been – fundamentally and more fairly – a declinationPardon warranted

— Eric Holder (@ericholder.bsky.social) 2024-12-02T01:08:38.641Z

There is a lot of discussion over on BlueSky decrying this saying that Biden has destroyed the argument that presidents shouldn’t use abuse the pardon power and Trump will now be able to say he can pardon all the J6ers.

First of all, Trump doesn’t need any excuse to pardon his henchmen. He already pardoned Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone and Jared Kushner’s father whom he just named to be the Ambassador to France! Even Dinesh D’Souza and Joe Arpaio! Roger Stone is his best friend. The others are close political allies and in laws.

Trump also pardoned every manner of criminal, some of whom gave his friends money for the privilege, many of whom have gone on to commit crimes again. It’s utter nonsense to think that pardoning Hunter changes anything when it comes to Trump.

In any case, if you want a precedent that Trump could use if he wanted to (he sees no need for such things) this is the one that is the most analagous:

President Joe Biden pardoned thousands of people who were convicted of use and simple possession of marijuana on federal lands and in the District of Columbia, the White House said Friday, in his latest round of executive clemencies meant to rectify racial disparities in the justice system.

The categorical pardon builds on a similar round issued just before the 2022 midterm elections that pardoned thousands convicted of simple possession on federal lands eligible. Friday’s action broadens the criminal offenses covered by the pardon. Biden is also granting clemency to 11 people serving what the White House called “disproportionately long” sentences for nonviolent drug offenses.

Biden, in a statement, said his actions would help make the “promise of equal justice a reality.”

Should Biden not have done it so that no one could say that it set a precedent for Trump?

The reason they brought the charges against Hunter was to break Biden, just as he said in the pardon statement:

No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong. There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.

I wrote about this a while back:

The right has attempted to turn Joe Biden’s care and concern for a son who was going through a major life crisis, which included substance abuse, wild partying and a range of self-destructive behavior, into a corruption scandal. No one can possibly read the emails from father to son that have been extracted from Hunter Biden’s laptop and see anything but compassion and love. In fact, I’m sure Republicans understand that: What they are really trying to do is push Joe Biden to break down and cry in public.

Seriously: It’s an old ratfucking trick from the Nixon years whose dastardly crew famously goaded Sen. Edmund Muskie, the Democratic frontrunner early in the 1972 campaign, into getting emotional over a fake letter impugning his wife. I have no doubt that the right-wing dirty tricksters of today are believing their own propaganda that Biden is a feeble old man who is overly sentimental about his family, and they think they can push him into doing the same thing.

We are a long way from 1972 and I suspect that even if Biden did cry about his son, the country would feel kinship with him, not disdain. There is hardly a family in America that is not touched by similar trauma.

He didn’t break. As Dave Weigel quipped on BlueSky:

Biden, wanting to Uphold the Norms, agreed to keep on a Trump-appointed prosecutor who was probing his son. Created a special counsel to probe his own post-VP document retention. Kept on Durham so he could finish a Trump-ordered probe of 2016.

What did he get? Nothing.

He got nothing. Nobody cared. It changed nothing. He realized that sacrificing his son to prison on the alter of the same “norms” that have been and will again be shat upon by Donald Trump and his henchmen at every turn would have been meaningless.

By the way, before anyone gets too excited about pardon “norm breaking” it pays to recall that George Bush Senior pardoned half the Reagan administration on Christmas eve before he left office on Iran Contra charges — they were culpable in selling arms to Iran in exchange for hostages and using the money to circumvent congress by sending it to the Nicaraguan contras in secret. Not THAT was a norm buster.

And then there’s this from one of our favorite Democrats, Jimmy Carter:

Everyone needs to get a grip. There have been political pardons since the beginning of the country and Trump would have pardoned his cronies and cult members no matter what Joe Biden did. He’s already proved that! All of our remonstrating about how Biden was pure and he is evil would have meant absolutely nothing unless we all want to see Hunter martyred over this nonsense just to prove a point (which woulodn’t be proven anyway.) Meanwhile, Kash Patel and Pam Bondi are on record saying they would go after Hunter Biden and the rest of the “Biden Crime Family” with everything they have. It’s probably a good idea to take that seriously right now.

A rule of law turned inside out

The whole world will watch Donald Trump and his gang of thieves defenestrate the “rule of law” in Putinesque style.

Michael Tomasky considers the implications of Trump nominating Kash Patel to run the FBI inside what Trump likes to call the Department of Injustice. Trump 2.0 aims to make the name a reality. Patel’s only real qualification is that he is a “one-thousand-percent Trump loyalist,” Tomasky writes:

We’re about to enter a world where the rule of law is going to be turned inside out—where everything is converted into its bizarro-world version. It’s a world the conservative movement has been building for 50 years. It took Trump to dare to say the things that no other Republican president would quite say—about how the entire legal apparatus of the United States government is illegitimate and corrupt. But Trump said those things, and he opened the floodgates. For the next four years, we will be living, assuming Patel’s confirmation and that of Pam Bondi as attorney general, under a justice system where the following black-is-white presumptions will hold true:

• Donald Trump, far from being the one-step-ahead-of-the-law hoodlum he’s been his entire adult life, is America’s last honest man, and every legal effort that attempts to say otherwise is, by definition, corrupt and a lie.
• Joe Biden’s near 50-year record of never having been attached to scandal (except a case of plagiarism) is not evidence that Biden has lived an unusually clean public life; it’s evidence of a broad conspiracy by the deep state to protect Democrats. Just wait and see.
• It’s axiomatic that the 2020 election was stolen, as the federal government, now that it is in honest hands, will prove.
• January 6, 2021, was not an insurrection; it was a patriotic outcry by citizens who know the truth, and the attempt to “get to the bottom of” it was the real insurrection—a conspiracy against truth of unfathomable proportions that will now be justly avenged.

Etc., etc.

For all the raising of alarms, the punditry is short on countermeasures. I’m reminded of the anti-nuclear movement’s Helen Caldicott and her rapid-fire, scare-them-straight speech about the horrifying effects of nuclear weapons. Even her allies grew weary of the scare tactics:

“We knew it was past when someone interrupted the speech one evening, actually interrupted it, and said, ‘We know all that, but what can we do?’”

From his remove in England, Brian Beutler recommends Democrats find some actual leaders, stat, while they still have time to define the incoming Trump regime.

“Instead, the spectrum of congressional opposition to Trump ranges from total silence to voluntary obeisance,” he writes. If not naive offers by Democrats to work together on progressive-ish policies toward which Trump made feints but will in no way deliver.

Beutler offers a model from the Obama-era, that used by Republicans against him:

When Barack Obama won a genuinely overwhelming victory in 2008, Republicans began plotting lockstep opposition before he’d governed a full day.

Voting was a component of their strategy, but far from the totality. Their rhetoric was defiant. Their procedural maneuvers were designed not to expose Democrats’ promises as hollow, but to mire them in legislative quicksand. When they proclaimed interest in bipartisan dealmaking, the bad faith was palpable. They might as well have crossed their fingers behind their backs and chortled.

They refused to help Obama revive the economy, then blamed him for the economic destruction they had caused. When the right-wing grassroots proved restive, Republicans and their allied groups egged them on and helped them organize.

The strategy was a wild success.

Maybe. It wasn’t enough of a success to prevent Obama’s reelection in 2012, but it launched the T-party movement that morphed into MAGA once Trump rode his golden escalator into history. That T-party opposition model could work for Democrats, Beutler argues, giving them something to offer voters in 2026 and 2028:

• If Republicans destroy the agencies that protect consumers, workers, and the environment from rapacious oligarchs, a new generation of Democrats will be prepared to reconstitute it, leaner and meaner, the moment they retake power.
• If Republicans rescind the federal health-coverage guarantee Democrats enacted under Obama, Democrats will restore it—this time by extending Medicare to all Americans, without hesitation.
• If Republicans dissolve the rule of law, Democrats will be prepared to re-establish a legitimate anti-corruption apparatus, and it will seek justice for any crimes committed between now and whenever that day comes.

But this is still more policy-speak, the sort that 77 million voters “in no mood for quiet professionalism” tuned out in 2024 while Democrats pursued their pet kitchen-table issues. The T-party protests were more visceral, and only nominally about being “taxed enough already.”

Benjamin Wallace-Wells argues in The New Yorker that perhaps the opioid crisis had as much of an impact in red areas of the country as economic conditions. A study by Carolina Arteaga, of the University of Toronto, and Victoria Barone, of Notre Dame, noticed the overlap in red areas among depopulation, job loss, cancer rates, and the opioid epidemic. Right-wing outlets wrapped the opioid crisis with border issues and made hay of it:

Many post-election op-eds have instructed the Democratic Party to move to the center, or to become more pragmatic, or to break with the neoliberal system more sharply. But the Democrats’ failure in the fentanyl case had little to do with political theory or economic systems. It was, much more simply, a failure of political attention. The history that Arteaga and Barone describe is not one that primarily apportions blame for the fentanyl crisis to more liberal immigration controls at the southern border. Bernie Sanders might look at this material and, not unfairly, call the ongoing suffering of the opioid epidemic a Purdue Pharma plot. But as with the other temporary crises that eventually came to doom the Biden Administration—the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the migrant surge at the southern border, and, perhaps most important, post-pandemic inflation—the Democrats were a little too ready to dismiss the hubbub over opioids as partisan hysteria, and a little too slow to notice that people were actually troubled.

The anxieties the right exploited were less about economic policy and more about people’s uneasiness about their own life circumstances.

Again, the GOP works people’s guts, not their heads. Democrats can’t seem to get out of theirs. Nor do they make enough fuss that earns enough press to improve their brand-image. Doing that will take some relearning. What I find is that teaching yellow dogs new tricks is a helluva challenge. It will be even more challenging in a world where the rule of law is a matter of caprice.

Now you see it, now you don’t

Before the 2024 election itself disappears down the memory hole, take a moment to consider the disappearance of voter fraud as a campaign issue. Democrats would cheat. There would be massive corruption in the election. Migrants Democrats were importing through Joe Biden’s open southern borders would tip the scales for Kamala Harris. Nearly 9 in 10 Trump voters believed voter fraud would play a major role in 2024. Etc.

Then Donald Trump won. Voter fraud vanished like ground fog at sunrise. It was morning in MAGAstan.

Politico and Morning Consult ran a poll:

In polling just days before the election, Trump supporters expressed little confidence in the election outcome, with a whopping 87 percent substantially or somewhat agreeing with the statement that voter fraud was a “serious issue” that could determine the outcome of the election. Among Harris supporters, roughly half expressed similar worries.

That partisan divide disappeared after Election Day.

Shocked?

Views on the economy flipped as well, considered a “very important” issue ahead of Nov. 5:

A week before the election, just 8 percent of self-identified Trump voters described the economy as on the “right track,” the polling found. But after Trump’s victory, that number swung to 28 percent — still a minority, but a substantial swing in a span of just a few weeks when economic conditions did not change dramatically.

Poynter examined election fraud claims and found that after Trump won “Republicans’ claims of chicanery mostly dissipated.” A few left-leaners picked them up, but not leaders among Democrats.

Politifact fact-checked multiple fraud claims (above). They mostly focused on swing states.

One pundit observed that for four years Donald Trump complained he’d been cheated and would be cheated again in 2024. It only took about four hours of election returns for voter fraud to disappear as an issue both for him and his base.

But he’ll always have 2020.

I used to see these t-shirts and hats that said “Free Melania” and I wondered why anyone would think she was being held prisoner. She didn’t care for the routine of being First Lady and has a separate life from Donald. But she is clearly one of them. Just another rich, creepy weirdo.

So, apparently, is Cheryl Hines:

Cheryl Hines posts video of Trump nominee RFK Jr in the shower to promote her line of “MAHA” branded candles, body sprays, and creams.

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes.bsky.social) 2024-11-30T00:26:00.573Z

Seriously, this is what it’s come to:

Actress Cheryl Hines, the wife of former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., posted a video promoting her beauty products featuring her husband showering half-naked in the background…

Hines held up a bottle of spray and a tin of body cream as she covered most of Kennedy, who President-elect Trump nominated to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

49% of America wanted a reality show instead of politics. It looks like they’re getting exactly what they asked for.

Trump: Wouldn't it be terrible to throw the president's wife and the former secretary of state into jail? Wouldn't that be a terrible thing? It's a terrible, terrible, path that they're leading us to. And it's very possible that it's going to have to happen to them. pic.twitter.com/P0bRL6jurF

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 5, 2024

Politico is really on a roll today:

Two members of Congress offered very different views Sunday morning of whether the Justice Department and FBI have been biased against Republicans in recent years.

In consecutive appearances on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) discussed President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of Kash Patel to lead the FBI. The agency is now led by Chris Wray, a previous Trump appointee whose term has yet to expire, but who will presumably be fired if he doesn’t resign.

“Obviously, in recent years, we have seen the FBI and the Department of Justice weaponize in a way that it has become completely political,” Lawler said in his interview, also discussing Trump’s pick of Pam Bondi to be attorney general. “That’s not good for the American people. It’s not good for our system of justice. The lack of confidence that Americans have in the Department of Justice and the FBI is terrible.”

Though Trump talked about “retribution” during the 2024 campaign, Lawler said he believed “revenge” was not the order of the day. “I don’t think the American people are interested in a revenge tour,” he told host Kasie Hunt. “But, obviously, if people did wrong in their official capacities, then that’s something they should be concerned about. But if they didn’t do anything wrong, if they upheld the law, then there shouldn’t be a problem.”

Hunt pointed out to Lawler that the FBI director he was so critical of had been appointed by Trump himself. She also asked him if Patel, who was highly critical of what he repeatedly blasted as “deep state” corruption, was not himself very “partisan.”

“Look, I’m not concerned about partisanship here. I think we have seen a DOJ and an FBI that have been weaponized,” Lawler responded.

Appearing afterward, Raskin was very skeptical of Lawler’s assertion that the Justice Department and FBI during the Biden administration had targeted Trump, given the recent prosecutions of some prominent Democrats. “I haven’t seen what the proof is that the FBI has been weaponized against a political party or the Department of Justice. Of course, this Department of Justice has brought charges against a Democratic U.S. senator in New Jersey, a Democratic congressman in Texas,” Raskin said, referencing former Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas).

“And so some people just seem to think that it should go only in one direction, and, if it doesn’t, then somehow it’s politicized.”

There is a reality here which we might want the media to try to help the public sort out. It’s fair enough to say that Republicans have taken the partisan position that the DOJ and the “Deep State” have been weaponized against Donald Trump. And, needless to say, Democrats and some Republicans know that Donald Trump is a criminal who has simply escaped accountability because we watched what he did with our own eyes. Ok.

But there is simply no question that Donald Trump is bent on revenge. He has said it over and over again. His future accomplices Patel and Bondi have said the same thing. This is not debatable. It should lead the story not be plopped in the middle like it’s some minor aspect of the story.

That was a long time ago, of course. But he’s got much more recent experience. Of course he’s going to exact revenge. It’s what he lives for.

I don’t know about you but that does not look good to me. In fact, I think this, from about 1965, actually looks better:

But it’s not all aboutthe food right? It’s about the company:

Elon Musk spent Thanksgiving with Trump instead of his family and Trump sat next to Musk during the feast instead of his wife Melania Trump. Musk hasn't left Trump's side since the election, questions are arising if he'll be living at the White House after January. pic.twitter.com/HD4yfGWf8r

— Anonymous (@YourAnonCentral) November 29, 2024

Politico published a fatuous piece today exhorting Democrats to stay with Elon’s hellhole because … well, I guess they think that hapless lefties battling an onslaught of Nazis and other assorted assholes all day will somehow convert people to their cause? Apparently, some Democrats I otherwise respect think this is true as well.

Two days after the election, Patrick Dillon, a longtime Democratic strategist and current Biden administration official, announced on X that he was leaving the platform… Dillon, who currently serves as adviser to Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, is of course not alone. You may well have seen it in your timelines already: a growing drumbeat of Democrats and left-leaning types announcing why they’re leaving the platform. In just the few weeks since the election, that has included former CNN anchor Don Lemon, basketball star LeBron James, author Stephen King, actress Jamie Lee Curtis and MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace.

But the situation is a bit more complicated for Democratic lawmakers, strategists and the like who might have come to dislike X but have also grown to depend on it to shape minds and win elections. It might seem a trivial matter, but the trend has prompted a larger debate that encapsulates the many other conversations the liberal ecosystem — elected officials, Hill staffers, administration aides, activists, lobbyists, opinion-shapers and beyond — is having in the wake of Trump’s election win: Should left-leaning people and Democratic voters wall MAGA off as much as possible and hope that eventually it suffocates? Or try even harder to meet those voters where they are, or at least understand them?

The reasons the leavers are giving are plentiful.

“There’s no pretend at this point,” said Dillon when I called to ask him about his decision to quit X. “This is a vehicle to support [Musk’s] political views and his candidates.” He also pointed to what he saw as a decline in quality of the platform — “trash ads and scammy replies and porn bots” — and the fact that, as he saw it, one of its core functions, reaching out to journalists, has become suspect given questions over whether Musk might be willing to violate the privacy of the site’s direct-messaging tools.

But key, said Dillon, is Musk’s hijacking of the site to his own political ends.

In conversations with a wide range of other left-leaning insiders, his concerns were fairly typical. Among those who were leaving or contemplating it, the most prominent reasons included Musk’s push to not just rollback the platform’s once robust filtering of what it judged misinformation and bullying but to what some researchers have said is tilting the site to boost Donald Trump’s chances.

Others, though, argue that the statistically significant dip in Democratic users over time is a worrying trend and that the so-called self-deplatforming of progressives is ultimately self-defeating.

“If we leave X, it will help Elon with his goal of making the platform void of any progressive ideology or the way we think about the world,” Maxwell Frost, a 27-year-old member of Congress from Florida, told me, “and leave it to the Charlie Kirks and Tim Pools of the world to fill it up with what they believe.”

“Democratic lawmakers, strategists and the like who might have come to dislike X but have also grown to depend on it to shape minds and win elections.”

How’s that working out for us?

If Democratic operatives and pugilistic types want to fight all day with creepy wingnuts and Russian bots, godspeed. But you cannot expect normal people to waste their time doing that when there is an alternative that instead provides actual information and respectful disagreement. (Believe me, there are plenty of the latter on Bluesky, it just isn’t with Trump cultists who are impervious to logic and fact.)

I mean, look at the bullshit that is crawling all over my twitter feed these days. And it’s endless. You can spend hours, days blocking it.

🇺🇸 First they jail him, now they try to end him
🇺🇸 Trump Keep Fighting Bobblehead
✅ Stand Strong & Show Your Support!

— Proud Patriots (@ProudPatriots1) November 11, 2024

I’m not going to share the Nazi garbage. The engagement is non-existent except for Trumper jackasses screaming in the replies about how stupid and ugly I am. Life is short.

I still go over there for the animals, which I love. And from time to time there’s something there that I can’t find on BS. But those times are getting more and more infrequent as more people migrate.

My Bluesky handle is @digby56.bsky.social

Thanks for dinner last night, President Trump. I look forward to the work we can do together, again. pic.twitter.com/lAWFMTtQt7

— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) November 30, 2024

Trudeau made the requisite pilgrimage:

During a surprise dinner at Mar-a-Lago, representatives of the federal government were told U.S. tariffs from the incoming Donald Trump administration cannot be avoided in the immediacy – as Trump voraciously believes in the effectiveness of tariffs – but solutions in the longer term are on the table particularly if the border is secured, two government sources who were at the meeting tell CTV News.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with Trump and members of his team on Friday evening in West Palm Beach, Fla., where sources say border security and trade were discussed.

The meeting comes just days after Trump threatened to impose a 25 per cent tariff on all Canadian imports unless Canada addresses his border concerns, which include illegal border crossings and drug trafficking.

According to sources, Trump and his team conveyed that they plan to balance their federal budget through tariffs, and then strike exemption side deals on a country-by-country basis.

What???

I guess that makes sense to people who want to go back to the 1890s but it’s twisted that world leaders have to pretend that makes sense and lick his boots to avoid having their countries destroyed.

It’s this:

Fighting for freedom itself

Sometimes lost in our strategizing on how to defeat authoritarianism is the need to strengthen liberal democracy itself.

Heather Cox Richardson references a Bluesky thread that makes that important point: “Cas Mudde, a political scientist who specializes in extremism and democracy, observed yesterday on Bluesky that ‘the fight against the far right is secondary to the fight to strengthen liberal democracy.’ That’s a smart observation.”

It is another way of saying that you don’t win games with defense alone.

The Dutch political scientist declined a recent offer “to speak about the upcoming Trump era and share some lessons and optimism.” It’s not that Mudde is pessimistic about the future so much as the lessons he’s offered over the last 25 years “were either wrong or not inspiring.” He needs some time to reflect before offering more.

“At the moment, I don’t so much think I underestimate the strength of the far right but rather significantly overestimated the strength of liberal democracy,” Mudde reflects. “I feel 100% certain that liberal democracy will prevail… just not sure when,” Mudde writes, echoing Ghandi:

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it–always.

Like Hari Selden’s plan for shortening a galactic dark age, we must not only work through crises but also build anew.

Richardson reminds us what’s fallen into disrepair:

During World War II, when the United States led the defense of democracy against fascism, and after it, when the U.S. stood against communism, members of both major political parties celebrated American liberal democracy. Democratic presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower made it a point to emphasize the importance of the rule of law and people’s right to choose their government, as well as how much more effectively democracies managed their economies and how much fairer those economies were than those in which authoritarians and their cronies pocketed most of a country’s wealth.

Those mid-twentieth-century presidents helped to construct a “liberal consensus” in which Americans rallied behind a democratic government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights.

The problem Richardson diagnoses (as does Mudde) is that we became overconfident that that consensus would endure on its own, could defend itself. That truth would be self-evident. Movement Conservatives I’ve described as (essentially) rump royalists had other ideas.

In their conception, government did not exist to protect from predation and exploitation our hard-won freedoms — four, in FDR’s telling — but inhibited the individual, as Richardson tells it:

But that image of the American government is not the one on which the nation was founded.

Liberal democracy was the product of a moment in the 1600s in which European thinkers rethought old ideas about human society to emphasize the importance of the individual and his (it was almost always a “him” in those days) rights. Men like John Locke rejected the idea that God had appointed kings and noblemen to rule over subjects by virtue of their family lineage, and began to explore the idea that since government was a social compact to enable men to live together in peace, it should rest not on birth or wealth or religion, all of which were arbitrary, but on natural laws that men could figure out through their own experiences.

The Founders of what would become the United States rested their philosophy on an idea that came from Locke’s observations: that individuals had the right to freedom, or “liberty,” including the right to consent to the government under which they lived. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Lincoln reimagined liberal government for the 19th century as one that guaranteed “that all men—not just rich white men—were equal before the law and had equal access to resources, including education” and a level playing field. Roosevelt imagined “an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.” That requires a government strong enough to stand up to the rich.

Rump royalists were having none of it. Reactionary conservatives since the New Deal era successfully undermined that conception of liberal democracy as a community project for expanding freedom and supplanted it with an atomized one that provided them the freedom to rule over the rest of society.

I recommend Timothy Snyder’s conversation with Michael Steele on how the right twisted our Founders’ conception of freedom into a radically different vision. It is our broader “freedom,” and liberal democracy’s mission as its guarantor, that we lose sight of when we spend most of our efforts on defense against authoritarianism and not on offense rebuilding the liberal consensus that’s been under attack for decades.