Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Time to wake up people. After a month recuperating from the grueling campaign Donald Trump is back in our faces.

The presidential election last month was a disappointment to say the least. And ever since then it’s felt as if the air has just been slowly leaking out of the opposition. Much of the mainstream media seems to be attempting to change course and curry favor with the new administration while Democratic officials appear to be in shock. In some ways it’s reminiscent of the days in the lead up to the Iraq war, with a quiet resignation taking the place of the febrile excitement that characterized the push to rally around the flag. People just seem enervated and spiritless. Sometimes it’s hard to remember why we fight when it all seems so futile.

Well, I think the opposition is about to get its mojo back. And that’s because for the last month all we saw (to the extent we were even paying attention which many of us couldn’t bring ourselves to do) was the news telling us about what Trump is doing, who he’s nominating and what he’s planning. And that’s all bad! In fact, it’s worse than many of us thought it would be.

But all that has a sense of unreality because Trump himself, for the first time in years has been scarce. It’s been reported that he was completely exhausted at the end of the campaign, which is to be expected for a man pushing 80 years old. So he was happy to spend the last month holding court down at Mar-a-Lago with his new best bud, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, and basking in the adoration of his many fans and sycophants. He has not been in front of us and that absence has led to the sense of ennui among the opposition. Unless he’s out there I think many people understandably put him at the back of their minds and forget how crazy it is that such a man is going to be the leader of the most powerful nation on earth. Again.

In the last few days he emerged from his Florida lair and flew to Paris for the reopening of Notre Dame. And it all came flooding back:

This is my normal very normal handshake 😂 pic.twitter.com/wuhNyq1nEg

— Luke Zaleski (@ZaleskiLuke) December 7, 2024

I don’t think anyone really knows why Trump shakes hands with Macron like that but it’s just weird. So is the fact that instead of Melania, he brought along his new BFF Elon Musk whom he apparently can’t be without even for a minute. At some point just before the ceremony, Musk walked up to Trump who was seated with the dignitaries, they had words and Trump, appearing annoyed pointed his finger at Musk who retreated back to the seat he was assigned.

Here’s what must have really happened. Mrs. Marcon was sitting between Jill Biden and Trump. Musk must have tried to sit to Trump’s left, which was reserved for President Macron. There’s even signage on the chair. So Trump directed Musk to make himself scarce.😂 pic.twitter.com/aTMOS6ofPi

— Hey, Dave! (@davegreenidge57) December 8, 2024

Why is it that these scenes only happen when Donald Trump is on the world stage? He makes a fool of himself and the country everywhere he goes.

While it was a relief not to have to see or hear him for the last month it made it easy to chalk up the horror of his campaign rhetoric to the heat of the moment and his desire to win at any cost. His appearance on Meet the Press on Sunday put any such thoughts to rest. He’s just as angry, vengeful and batshit crazy as he was on the campaign trail.

In a wide ranging interview Trump defended his tariff scheme saying that he doesn’t believe tariffs cost the consumer more but he can’t guarantee that they won’t. Insufferably blathering on forever about his supposedly historic first term’s massive economic success he said:

 I think they’re beautiful. It’s going to make us rich. We’re subsidizing Canada to the tune over $100 billion a year. We’re subsidizing Mexico for almost $300 billion. We shouldn’t be — why are we subsidizing these countries? If we’re going to subsidize them, let them become a state.

That is insane. The US is not subsiding Canada and Mexico and this trolling about them becoming a state is simply insulting. He told Welker that when he spoke with the president of Mexico on the phone and threatened her with a 25% tariff:

[W]ithin ten minutes after that phone call, we noticed that the people coming across the border, the southern border having to do with Mexico, there was at a trickle. Just a trickle. In fact, I called the border. See, unlike my opponent, I do call the border a lot. And I said, ‘How’s the border looking today?’ They said, ‘There’s nobody here.’ They couldn’t believe it.”

He “called the border?” Is there a central switchboard or something? And the “invasion” stopped within 10 minutes of his threat to impose tariffs? Were they all vaporized? That he could think anyone would believe such an absurd fantasy is delusional.

That was the tip of the iceberg. He said he thought the entire January 6th Committee should be put in jail. He insisted he would leave it up to his FBI nominee Kash Patel and Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi to ultimately decide whether his enemies should be prosecuted though, so I suppose we can always hope they weren’t watching TV on Sunday morning. He also says he will likely pardon all the January 6th insurrectionists unless it turns out some were actually Antifa or perhaps FBI plants.

He says he will end birthright citizenship on the first day, that American citizens of undocumented immigrants can be deported with them, that the Biden administration allowed 13,000 murders into the country when the statistic actually represents the past 40 years, and that he thinks RFK Jr should look into whether vaccines cause autism (they don’t.) There is so much more.

But just writing down that brief synopsis sane-washes him. The best thing you can do is either watch the whole interview, which is painful, or read the transcript which is simply mind-boggling. He literally makes no sense half the time and the rest of the time he’s filibustering, lying, bullying and deflecting. It’s not new but it’s worse than before.

He’s mentally a complete mess and it’s fair to speculate that there’s a reason that Elon Musk is stuck to his side like superglue these days. Is Musk is his Rasputin? Perhaps it would be smarter for Meet the Press to interview him instead of this man who has completely lost the thread.

Once the country sees him as president again I suspect that the disconsolate lethargy so many have been feeling will lift and we’ll see some energy return to the opposition. It had better. Hiding our heads in the sand isn’t going to make him go away.

Salon

On Democrats freshening up the brand

Thank goodness Syria’s autocratic regime collapsed before Bashar al-Assad “suck-up,” Tulsi Gabbard, had a chance to prop him up as Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, quips Michael Tomasky. Our unstable world is about to become more so.

Here at home, Democrats still smart at losing the presidency to a criminal imbecile and walking advertisement for the Dunning-Kruger effect. How they pull the country and the world back from the brink of Idiocracy will occupy them until the next general election, if that long.

Perhaps Democrats’ biggest obstacle to freshening up their brand, aside from institutional lethargy, is a media ecosystem owned and operated by reactionary billionaires. Democrats’ post-mortem spitballs over how to regain market share with the American electorate are so many trees falling in the forest if no one hears the sound. Perhaps more star power could break through?

Vanity Fair‘s Chris Smith suggested last week that perhaps “Democrats need their own demagogue,” to break through the right-wing noise. The good kind, of course. He admits to twisting the definition for didactic purposes:

Trump, twice now, has demonstrated the importance of choosing a compelling character as your party’s nominee. Yes, the substance of what that nominee is selling matters. But being able to generate attention in an ever-more-fragmented media world and reaching the crucial, growing population of low-information voters matters more all the time. That’s something Trump, a 78-year-old creature of old media, grasped in 2024.

But Democrats typically are more interested in governing and making the world a better place for people. They’re less focused on the show. Trump’s emphasis on showmanship represents a kind of “genius,” says Ashley Etienne, a sometime a top communications aide top-tier Democrats. Savants often do one thing spectacularly well.

Smith proposes New York’s Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a Democrat who fits the bill:

Inside-the-Beltway types tend to dismiss her as having peaked in 2020. But Ocasio-Cortez, more than any other young Democrat right now, is a brand. She has a gift for social media, with more than 8 million followers on Instagram and 1 million on TikTok, and a talent for generating polarizing reactions. The second quality is highly useful in the current and foreseeable information age. David Hogg, the anti-gun-violence activist, recently posted a smart take on the importance of Democrats having a facility for direct-to-camera online video. Hogg’s prime example, 26-year-old Brooklyn city council member Chi Ossé, won’t be old enough to run for the White House in 2028, but Ossé has clearly learned from AOC. Sure, Republicans would vilify Ocasio-Cortez as a radical lefty, but they do that to all Democratic presidential candidates anyway, including Harris, who was solidly centrist. And maybe it’s time for the Democrats to lean into the party’s liberal base; eagerly embracing Liz Cheney in pursuit of moderate Republicans sure didn’t work.

A friend who’s written for Hollywood has for years rent his garments over Democrats relying on chummy, inside-the-Beltway consultants for messaging rather than people who tell compelling stories for a living. Smith consults Billy Ray, the talent behind the Hunger Games script. His Captain Phillips screenplay earned an Oscar nomination:

“Stop any American on the street and say, ‘What does the Democratic Party stand for?’ The only answer you can come up with is, ‘They are the party that hates Trump,’” Ray says. “That is a failure of storytelling.”

But Democrats need more than a left version of Trump or better storytelling to build brand identity. There’s that nagging trees-and-forests problem.

Mike Lux believes the next Democratic National Committee chair needs a way to win back the two-thirds of the electorate with blue collars. Lux recommends several excellent structural reforms that might help with that, but leads with addressing the party’s “Jupiter-sized” media problem:

But the biggest reason by far that voters didn’t know about our accomplishments is the utterly ravaged media landscape outside of the biggest cities. Newspapers are gone or are shells of their former selves. Local radio stations are gone or part of big media conglomerates that don’t cover the news much. Half of local TV stations are owned by far right media companies like Sinclair.

Meanwhile, more and more people are getting most of their news through social media, which is awash in rightwing disinformation.

This Jupiter-sized problem will not be solved overnight, and can’t be solved by the DNC alone. Democratic investors should be buying up media properties so that rightwingers don’t own such a high percentage of them …

But there is plenty the DNC can and should be doing in the media space beyond buying ads two months before Election Day. The new DNC Chair should appoint a task force and give it some serious money to build a media strategy that reflects the modern media era. The Chair should be pulling key Democrats together to get them to invest in some of these other efforts.

That’s a fine idea, if not an original one. Progressives have advocated for left-leaning billionaires to jump headfirst into the media pool for decades. But the deepest pocketed won’t commit to that long-term investment the way a Rupert Murdoch will, nor the way right-wing ideologues of the Koch variety fund think tanks that manufacture talking points like widgets for their media allies to traffick.

If there are among the wannabe DNC chairs a candidate with the gravitas to persuade left-leaning billionaires to do that, please! But the rotating DNC chair has no more ability to finagle left-wing billionaires into undertaking the purchase of major media outlets for a decades-long branding project than RNC chairs did. The most party heads can do is ask pretty please.

Plus, lefties’ fondness for novelty means getting them to get on and stay on the same page, message-wise is their Achilles heel. The left first must craft a message the party faithful will repeat and persuade them to sing it together long enough for it to lodge in voters’ brains. But without a delivery system for that, it’s another tree falling in the forest. President Biden accomplished more for working-class Americans in his four years than perhaps any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson. Voters heard little about it.

Robert Kuttner profiles the two DNC chair front-runners, “Ken Martin, 51, Minnesota party chair, and his neighbor, Ben Wikler, 43, who chairs the Wisconsin state party.” Kuttner writes, “If ever there were a moment for both a strong Democratic Party and a compelling face of the party, it’s now.”

Which takes us back to screenwriter Ray’s free advice for what Democrats’ storytelling ought to be:

“Whoever is going to be our next presidential candidate needs to look to the American people and say, ‘You matter. Not me, not Trump. You matter. You matter to your family, you matter to your community, you matter to your country,’” he adds. “‘You matter to our collective future, and you matter to me. And what I’m going to do for the next four years is just work for working families. I’m going to do the things that made the Democratic Party your party for so long.’”

That’s a terrific start on a message. Finding a riveting messenger—someone who can stir passion in millions of voters as Trump has, only for good instead of evil—will be a little trickier.

Yeah. Good luck with that.

Set down your coffee

 

 

View on Threads

 

What???

Trump has so many weird friends:

As Donald Trump gathered his supporters, family and friends at Mar-a-Lago on US election day last month to wait for the results to trickle in, a small group of far-right Germans went largely unnoticed.

Among them was the purported semi-professional, one-time porn actor, self-confessed former cocaine user, convicted thief and hard-right candidate for the German parliament Phillipp-Anders Rau. Together with a compact delegation of young political activists and influencers, Rau posed for the cameras with the American president-elect at his invitation, chanting “Fight! Fight! Fight!” in English and German.

Members of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party had already been making inroads with the Trump camp for several months before the US vote, as Europe’s populist anti-migration forces attempt to harness Maga’s momentum before Germany’s general election in February.

Alice Weidel, the AfD leader, became one of the first politicians abroad to welcome Trump’s victory, and party members say they are cultivating proximity to the incoming administration, with a few planning to attend next month’s inauguration in Washington.

Rau, an AfD candidate for the Bundestag from Saxony-Anhalt state, posted snapshots on Instagram of his brief encounter with Trump in Florida on 5 November, with voting still under way.

“It will remain an everlasting memory, being allowed as the first and until now only member of the AfD to shake the hand of @realdonaldtrump on the day of his victory,” he wrote. “We hope that Donald Trump will create the renewal for his country that we as the AfD plan for our country.”

They all chanted “Fight, Fight, Fight” in both English and German, so that was nice.

[T]he young men’s enthusiasm for Trump, 78, and giddy bewilderment at their arrival at his private club are less surprising than how they ended up at his side in the first place, with the meeting’s origins remaining murky.

Rau is a divisive figure even within the anti-migrant, anti-Islam AfD. He belongs to a state chapter that the domestic security agency has classified as confirmed rightwing extremist, while the national party has been deemed suspected rightwing extremist.

The 41-year-old has taken legal action against the Magdeburger Volksstimme newspaper, which published a series on a number of suspected scandals in Rau’s past.

He denies being a “paid porn actor” but the courts have ruled that he was. He was also convicted of fraud and theft so you can certainly see why Trump likes the guy. They have a lot in common. And according to the articcle, these aren’t the only German neo-Nazis Trump has been seen with in recent years. They seem to be very welcome in the Trump inner circle.

This particular group has ties to the New York Young Republicans, which figures:

Last April, in exchange, young New York Republicans were invited by the AfD to Berlin and Magdeburg, the capital of Saxony-Anhalt state – while Rau, Schmidt and other AfD officials later photographed themselves volunteering with Trump’s campaign in Florida. “As a thank you there was a handful of tickets for Trump’s election party,” said Bild, which quoted Schmidt as saying he and an entourage would be at the inauguration in January.

The new Fugitive Slave Law

I suppose it was only a matter of time before this entered the conversation:

New plans are being discussed in Jefferson City [Mo.] this week, including a proposed bounty hunter program for illegal immigrants. The proposed bill would pay people to catch those they believe to be in the United States illegally.

Senate Bill 72 was pre-filed to the Missouri legislature. It is sponsored by House Representative David Gregory. Gregory wants to pay Missourians $1000 to find and detain illegal immigrants in the state.

The first part of the bill reads that someone in Missouri illegally is “prohibited from voting in any election, receiving any permit or license to drive, receive any public benefit, and becoming a legal resident of this state.”

It’s important to note that it is already illegal to vote if you are not a citizen.

It also states the Department of Public Safety should develop an information system for people to report violations.

Civil rights attorneys are alarmed of course. But honestly, they’re already going so far with this already that I can’t see why they wouldn’t propose this and if the courts are going along with everything else they’re doing it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t see this as perfectly reasonable. After all, they’re talking about ending birthright citizenship. Why would a little law that helped precipitate the civil war be a problem?

Here’s a piece by Harold Meyerson from 2018 on this subject:

In case you don’t remember your U.S. history: An 1842 court ruling absolved states of any duty to cooperate in the recapture of former slaves who’d freed themselves by fleeing to the North.

In response, as part of the Compromise of 1850, the Congress passed and President Millard Fillmore signed the Fugitive Slave Act, which not only required state and local governmental officials to aid owners and their agents who’d come North to capture and re-enslave the runaways, but also required the same level of cooperation from all citizens. If a slaver was in the act of recapture, bystanders were required to help out.

Not surprisingly, the North greeted the new law with fury and resistance. Vermont, Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Michigan and Wisconsin all enacted “personal liberty laws” — the 1850s equivalent of California’s sanctuary state law — forbidding public officials from cooperating with the slave owners or the federal forces sent to back them up, denying the use of their jails to house the captives, and requiring jury trials to decide if the owners could make off with their abductees.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the Fugitive Slave Act violated the Constitution’s 10th Amendment, which gave states the power to enact laws not specifically preempted by federal authority. (The Southern-dominated U.S. Supreme Court overturned that ruling on the eve of the Civil War).

Opponents of the Fugitive Slave Act also took to the streets (and jury rooms, where verdicts were rendered that freed some of the captives). Crowds would form to oppose and resist, sometimes forcibly, the apprehensions of African Americans.

According to H. Robert Baker, a historian at Georgia State University, “Whole sections of Milwaukee, Chicago, New York City and Boston became no-go zones for slave catchers.” Confronted with this level of resistance, Fillmore sent in federal troops to assist and protect the slave catchers.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but in our dispute over immigrants in the country illegally and our predecessors’ dispute over fugitive slaves, it takes no leap of logic or imagination to find the rhymes. Now, as then, one part of the country (President Trump’s disproportionately rural, white nationalist base) has enlisted federal power to enforce a legal regime in a different part of the country (racially diverse, immigrant-heavy cities) that views the law as morally repulsive and destructive of the social fabric.

Just as the slave catchers argued, speciously, that freed Negroes imperiled the antebellum North, today’s anti-immigrant forces, beginning with Trump, argue that immigrants pose a threat to public safety, though crime has fallen precipitously during the past quarter-century.

The only “crime” that most undocumented immigrants have committed — and the only one that places them in federal legal jeopardy — is that of being undocumented. Likewise, the only “crime” that most escaped slaves had committed — and the only one that placed them in federal legal jeopardy — was escaping.

Meyerson suggested at the time that there should be civil disobedience to protect undocumented immigrants, even sit-ins at ICE offices. I haven’t heard word of anything like that. I suppose everyone’s waiting to see what actually happens.

Trump said this morning that all undocumented people, not just criminals, have to be deported. And he also said that their American children will have to go with them because he “doesn’t want to break up families.” He did seem to make some exception for DREAMers, saying that he’ll talk to the Democrats about that. (I’m sure that just about putting together some proposal with a heinous poison pill the Dems can’t vote for so they can blame them for refusing to help the DREAMers.)

He once again declared that there will be a moment when a “beautiful young woman is being dragged out crying” and everyone will be upset but “we have to do it.” I think he’s looking forward to it.

And a true leader

Hegseth talking about his favorite alcoholic beverage. 4/7 pic.twitter.com/gBxij62Y2a

— Decoding Fox News (@DecodingFoxNews) December 6, 2024

Pete Hegseth on women in combat positions. Please show this one to your Senators especially the Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) she’s a combat veteran. Thank you for your service Sen. Ernst. I mean that sincerely. 7/7 pic.twitter.com/kCoZGgr3iH

— Decoding Fox News (@DecodingFoxNews) December 6, 2024

What an excellent choice to lead the military.

I sill leave it to others to analyze what’s happening in Syria and the ramifications for the region and the rest of the world. I’ll link to good ones I run across later. But one thing does seem clear. The Russian government is on a losing streak and for good reason. Charlie Sykes offered this concise take:

Let’s start with V. Putin’s crappy weekend, shall we? The fall of Vlad’s Syrian bitch extends a remarkable run of reverses for the Russian czar-manque.

Phillips P. OBrien notes that since his invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s actions have “caused Sweden and Finland to join NATO and it looks like Russia [is going] to lose its base in Syria because it can’t keep enough forces in the area.” And since we’re toting up the butcher’s bill, Putin has managed to seize only “a relatively small part of Ukraine,” while Russia has “suffered more than 750k casualties and seen millions of young, educated people flee the country. Oh, and they squandered billions and billions of dollars and dislocated their economy.”

Another commenter put this into context: Since invading Ukraine, Putin has lost:

1. Black Sea Fleet, and Sevastopol;

2. Kursk region;

3.Finland and Sweden ending neutrality, joining NATO;

4. Syria, navy port in Tartus;

5. Georgia in process of decoupling;

6. Romania drifting away.

As he says,

And yet, Vlad always has Donald, Tulsi, and Pete…

On Meet The Press this morning, Trump was very weird when asked about whether he had spoken to Putin:

Welker: You said you could end the war in 24 hours.

Trump: I'm trying to.

Welker: Have you talked to Putin?

Trump: No

Welker: You haven't talked to president Putin since you've been elected?

Trump: I don't want to say that, but I haven't spoken him recently. pic.twitter.com/J41fAuRo66

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 8, 2024

This continues to be very weird. In his comments yesterday on Truth Social he didn’t mention his good pal Erdogon and his interests in Syria and neither did he seem to understand that the US has been involved there for years, including when he was president. But then he doesn’t really care about any of that either so it’s not surprising. He did seem to be directing his Truth Social post to Putin saying something about how now is the time for the Ukraine war to end but it was incoherent. The whole thing is very odd.

He appeared on Meet The Press this morning. I’m sure it’s the last thing many of you want to see. But here are a few highlights you should probably watch.

Trump, “Liz Cheney and the entire J6 Committee need to go to jail” pic.twitter.com/HafUlDBVAC

— donkeydoo 💩 (@JayZee1745) December 8, 2024

Trump confirms that he plans to deport US citizens who have undocumented parents pic.twitter.com/fsmjwH1KAT

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 8, 2024

Trump’s evidence for his lie that migrant gangs are taking over parts of Colorado is that he says it all the time at his rallies pic.twitter.com/LnPMt3Tr03

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 8, 2024

Trump declines to guarantee that his tariffs won’t spike inflation pic.twitter.com/28GEzdEc7a

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 8, 2024

Welker: Do you have an actual plan at this point for health care?

Trump: Yes. We have concepts of a plan that will be better.

Welker: Still just concepts? Do you have a fully developed plan? pic.twitter.com/bIgzXdaYe5

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 8, 2024

I don’t know about you but I felt my energy and anger return at seeing that miscreant say that he’s going to deport American citizens and well … everything else. He’s feeling his oats and he clearly wants revenge. And he’s obviously is counting on his henchman and hencwoman Patel and Bondi to help him get it. There is simply no doubt about it.

(By the way, I still have to use twitter for these because Blue Sky videos don’t render properly on this platform. Yet.)

WTF is he talking about?

Huh???

He’s right that Assad has been deposed and that Russia and Iran basically said “we’re out” and let it happen. Other than that, this is the usual contradictory, puerile nonsense he spews when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s over in Paris acting like the president so he’s putting out statements like they are official US policy. They are not, at least not yet. He should just keep his mouth shut but he is incapable of that.

BTW, the US has almost a thousand troops in Syria but whatever…

Celebrating a murder

This story sent chills (TMZ):

Internet sleuths believe they have found the jacket worn by the gunman who killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson … and now it is morbidly flying off the shelves.

On Reddit, a user speculated the suspect’s jacket was a Sherpa Lined Two Picket Hooded Trucker Jacket by Levi’s … sold at Macy’s for the retail price of $225.

The jacket’s popularity has since spread like wildfire on the company’s website … where more than 6,000 people were viewing the jacket at the same time — and nearly 700 were sold in the past 48 hours, according to an item popularity tool on Macy’s site.

UnitedHealthcare CEO Shooter's Possible Jacket Flying Off Shelves After Sleuth Speculation | Click to read more 👇 https://t.co/8k5KQpeZbz

— TMZ (@TMZ) December 7, 2024

The New York Times follows up (Gift link):

A grainy image of his face drew comparisons to Hollywood heartthrobs. A jacket similar to the one he’s wearing on wanted posters is reportedly flying off the shelves. And the words written on the bullets he used to kill a man in cold blood on a sidewalk on Wednesday have become, for some people, a rallying cry.

Three days after a gunman assassinated a top health insurance executive in Midtown Manhattan and vanished, the unidentified suspect has, in some quarters, been venerated as something approaching a folk hero.

The authorities have pleaded for help from the public to find the person who killed the UnitedHealthcare executive, Brian Thompson, who was a husband and father of two children. But in a macabre turn, some people seem to be more interested in rooting for the gunman and thwarting the police’s efforts.

Look, we’re all traumatized by what the Second Coming of Trump represents. Yes, wealth inequality that was bad got worse over the Reaganomics decades. Venture capitalist and early Amazon investor Nick Hanauer is famous for his almost-banned TED talk and his caution a decade ago to “Fellow Zillionaires” that pitchforks are coming for them. His message then:

Wake up, people. It won’t last.

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

Hanauer has been preaching that message ever since, including in his Pitchfork Economics podcasts. But until this week the pitchforks always seemed metaphorical. Vivid imagery harkening back to 1931’s pre-Code Frankenstein, but metaphorical.

The celebration of a health insurance company CEO’s murder, even if a fringe phenomenon, lifts the lid on a submerged mood in the country that Hanauer saw ten years ago. It’s not unrelated to the racial and xenophobic animus that peeked out from under the sheets with the T-party after the election of Barack Obama. Donald Trump identified that mood and exploited it to get himself elected in 2016. Then after losing reelection in 2020 he threw accelerant onto it and loosed a MAGA mob against the seat of government in Washington, D.C. I’m still traumatized by that.

I’m as big a critic of the modern corporation as anyone. We make Douglas Adams-inspired jokes about corporate bozos being “the first against the wall when the revolution comes.” But calling forth a real revolution with guns or guillotines and targeted murder against elites is a path this country should try to avoid.

It is as chilling as pitifully ironic to see blood lust for corporate moguls bubbling up on the website of Macy’s.