Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Jamelle Bouie asks what freedom means in a country the fetishizes guns:

In Anthony Mann’s 1950 western “Winchester ’73,” a rare and much-desired Winchester rifle brings misery and death to the unlucky souls who manage to bring it into their possession. In the West as brought to you by Mann — and his star, a troubled and morally ambiguous Jimmy Stewart — the gun isn’t a symbol of freedom as much as it is a curse, destined to ruin everyone who covets its power.

It was a theme echoed that year in the Joseph H. Lewis noir “Gun Crazy,” a take of sorts on the story of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Our protagonists in this film are two young people so enamored of the power of guns — and the freedom they seem to provide — that they go on a wanton spree of theft and murder. It ends, predictably, with their own deaths.

In both films, guns become truly dangerous when they become a fetish: an object worshiped for its supposed power and symbolic meaning. Guns, Mann and Lewis seem to say, aren’t actually totems of freedom or liberty or youth; they are instruments of death and should be treated accordingly.

I thought of both movies last week during the manhunt for Robert Card, the 40-year-old suspect in a mass shooting that killed 18 people at a bar and bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine.

For nearly two days after the shooting, no one knew where Card was. He was armed and dangerous and on the run. To prevent any more loss of life, law enforcement authorities urged tens of thousands of residents of Southern Maine to shelter in place with their doors locked. He was found on Friday night, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot.

Card is believed to have used an AR-15-style rifle in the shootings. Introduced to civilian buyers in 1964, the Armalite Rifle 15 Sporter and its offspring are now some of the most popular rifles in the United States and a potent symbol of what guns mean to tens of millions of Americans. “It’s an icon,” one owner told The New York Times in a 2018 feature on the AR-15 and similar weapons. “It’s a symbol of freedom. To me, it is America’s rifle.”

That, in fact, is how gun manufacturers have promoted the rifle — not as a tool for hobbyists and sportsmen but as a lifestyle accessory that stands for freedom, individualism and masculine self-sufficiency. “Stand out and blend in all at the same time,” reads one 2011 advertisement for a camouflage-finished assault-style rifle.

It’s not just about the AR-15, of course. For many Americans, the right to own a gun is liberty itself — the very definition of what it means to live in a free country. But the question raised by the Maine shooting, and especially the lockdown that followed, is just how free that freedom is.

How free are you really when you know that a trip to the grocery store or a morning in prayer or a day at school or a night at the movies can end in your death at the hands of a gun? How free are you really when you protest on behalf of a cause you believe in and are met on the street by armed counterdemonstrators? How free are you really when state authorities have to lock down a city so that they can stop a mass shooter from striking again?

You are not free at all. Your speech certainly isn’t free when it means that any nut with a gun can point it at you and tell you to shut up. Your freedom of assembly isn’t free when you go to a protest and a bunch of gun-wielding zealots is standing to the side menacing you. Your aren’t free to exercise your religion when bigots and crazy men can enter your house of worship and gun you down. And you also aren’t free when you can’t go to school or a bowling alley or a nightclub or a movie theater or a grocery story without looking over your shoulder and being prepared to run and hide when you hear a loud pop because some insane person with a semi-automatic weapon might have decided that he needed to express his fealty to the constitution that day. That’s a funny definition of freedom.

This is not normal, people. The whole country is living in a state of subliminal terror all the time because greedy gun manufacturers and stupid asses with insecurities are holding us hostage with their need for dominance.

Wow Mayorkas just slammed Hawley pic.twitter.com/ctZnnGLxbS

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 31, 2023

That exchange was horrible. If you see the whole thing, Big Man Hawley hammers Mayorkas about an employee at DHS who apparently posted support for Hamas on October 7, demanding that he explain how this could happen and refusing to let him talk.  Hawley is a jackass but his attitude is reflective of this crude, macho attitude that’s fueling the rise of authoritarianism. 

I really hope most Americans understand this much at least:

Roughly 80 percent of Israelis blame Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition government for the Hamas catastrophe, according to a poll by the Hebrew newspaper Maariv. During the unfolding pogrom, and in the days and in the weeks after, the utter lack of effective, empathetic action by the government has left Israelis fuming. (Government inaction left a void that volunteers, including thousands who participated in pro-democracy protests, are now filling.)

After an announcement of a new phase in the Gaza military action (about which many Israelis have mixed emotions), Netanyahu declared at roughly 1 a.m. on Sunday, “Contrary to the false claims: Under no circumstances and at no stage was Prime Minister Netanyahu warned of Hamas’s war intentions.” He added, “On the contrary, all the security officials, including the head of military intelligence and the head of the Shin Bet, assessed that Hamas had been deterred and was looking for a settlement. This assessment was submitted again and again to the prime minister and the cabinet by all the security forces and intelligence community, up until the outbreak of the war.”

In saying so, Netanyahu is both crediting Hamas with the element of surprise and daring supporters to remain mum in the face of his self-serving comment. This was very much akin to four-times indicted former president Donald Trump’s declaration that Hezbollah was “very smart.”

The reaction was fierce and immediate. Benny Gantz, the leader of a major opposition party who agreed to be part of a special war cabinet, denounced the tweet. “On this morning in particular, I want to support and strengthen all the security forces and [Israel Defense Forces] soldiers, including the IDF chief of staff, the head of military intelligence, the head of the Shin Bet,” Gantz added early Sunday. “When we are at war, leadership must display responsibility, make the correct decisions and strengthen the forces in a way that they will understand what we demand from them …. [T]he prime minister must retract his statement.”

Likewise,“Netanyahu crossed a red line tonight,” said opposition leader Yair Lapid. “While IDF soldiers and officers are fighting bravely against Hamas and Hezbollah, [the PM] is trying to blame them, instead of supporting them. The efforts to evade responsibility and place blame on the security establishment weakens the IDF while it is fighting Israel’s enemies.”

Former intelligence and military leaders also weighed in. And, for a brief moment, it seemed that Netanyahu might be at risk of losing power during the war, as some foreign policy critics have urged.

Utterly cornered, Netanyahu did something he rarely does: He apologized. “Facing a barrage of criticism, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu deleted a controversial social media post on Sunday in which he blamed the defense and intelligence establishment for giving him faulty assessments before the deadly Hamas attack on Oct. 7,” Haaretz reported. “The prime minister then published a new tweet. ‘I was wrong,’ he wrote, adding that ‘the things I said following the press conference should not have been said, and I apologize for that. I fully support the heads of [Israel’s] security services.”

He did not, however, take full responsibility for the calamity.

Shortly after Netanyahu took down his tweet, I received an email from a trusted Knesset source: “Netanyahu’s tweet last night as a new low point. When you think it can’t get worse … it does.”

Boy, did that sound familiar to anyone who has witnessed Trump’s career. Just when you think Trump cannot do more damage to undermine democracy, debase political language, sow violence and enable racism, he, too, hits new lows.

The controversy of the Israeli prime minister’s tweet reminds us how much Netanyahu resembles Trump. These are men who continually insist only they speak for the country, only they can shield it from harm. They dehumanize and demonize any opposition and cannot display a modicum of empathy. And when their own incompetence leads to avoidable deaths (e.g., a Hamas attack, a raging pandemic), they deflect and cast blame elsewhere. Impulsive, afraid of humiliation and tone-deaf, they never learn their lesson, as Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) incredulously claimed Trump would do after his first impeachment. They never improve; they only get worse.

“Netanyahu displays the classic strongman attributes of prioritizing self-preservation,” historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat told me. “He was laser-focused on ‘judicial reform’ to the detriment of national security, and he allied with extremists such as Itamar Ben Gvir who were a destabilizing influence.” She continued, “Add in the strongman syndrome of not listening to experts (from intelligence and military sectors) who warned him of the consequences of his actions and we have another case of toll of autocratic models of leadership.”

These personality traits are not unique to Trump and Netanyahu. A psychology study in Nature journal found:

Given authoritarians’ general willingness to submit to traditional authorities, combined with their intolerance of ambiguity and need for closure, it is perhaps unsurprising that right-wing authoritarianism predicts tolerance for, and susceptibility to, misinformation. Authoritarianism also fosters conspiratorial thinking about politics, especially if the conspiracy supports the status quo. … [T]hose who are high in right-wing authoritarianism will go to great lengths to protect the in-group — including believing the unbelievable and other ‘alternative facts’ propagated by in-group authorities. The implications of right-wing authoritarianism thereby extend beyond out-group perceptions and into areas that impact public health and safety.

Consider another example: Russian President Vladimir Putin. Surrounding himself with flunkies unable to tell him he is wrong, cut off from objective sources of information, convinced of his own infallibility and lacking any empathy, he blundered into a brutal, bloody and unwinnable invasion of Ukraine. The ensuing war is bringing his country massive death, economic ruin, social implosion and international isolation.

Netanyahu’s outburst can serve as a warning to Israelis. Authoritarian figures of his ilk never learn, never reform and never take responsibility. If Israeli society wants to recover and avoid repeated errors perpetrated by strongmen, it must get new leadership — preferably before more damage can be done.

It is delusional to believe that narcissistic strongmen like Netanyahu and Trump can keep a nation safe. They only care about themselves. Since they literally believe “l’etat, c’est moi” everything they do is calculated for how it will affect them. This seems so obvious to me that I can’t believe it needs to be said. But it needs to be said.

Hate is on the rise

Good Lord. The FBI director testified in congress this morning and said that 60% of religious based threats are antisemitic. And that was before the war in Israel. I’ve never seen this in America. I’m not sure it’s ever been this bad:

History is flashing warnings to the world.

Outbursts of antisemitism have often been harbingers of societies in deep trouble and omens that extremism and violence are imminent.

So the wave of global hatred directed against Jews – intensified by Israel’s indiscriminate response in Gaza to horrific Hamas terrorist murders of Israeli civilians on October 7 – should not just be seen as a reaction to the Middle East yet again slumping into war.

It is also a reflection of destructive forces tearing at American and western European societies, where stability and democracy are already under pressure.

The Hamas attacks – a pogrom against Jews that killed 1,400, mostly civilians – have initiated a sequence of events that have left Jewish people around the world feeling threatened. And now that the Israeli government has sought retribution through air strikes and operations in Gaza targeting Hamas, the scenes of carnage in Palestinian communities threaten to further drain public sympathy for Israel abroad and, in some cases, contribute to an atmosphere that risks worsening harassment of Jewish people.

In the United States there is a climate of growing fear.

Jewish day schools have canceled classes. Synagogues have been locked. Social media has pulsated with hatred against Jews, leaving a community that can never escape its historic trauma yet again wondering where and when it can ever be safe.

Rising hate is tangible. The idea that Jewish Americans studying at Cornell University could so fear for their lives on their Ivy League campus in rural New York that they couldn’t even eat together in 2023 seems almost impossible to believe. Yet it’s the case after death threats were posted online. Tensions were already high after a Cornell professor said he was initially “exhilarated” over the Hamas attacks at a pro-Palestinian event because the group had changed the balance of power. He later apologized for his choice of words. Police Monday stepped up patrols and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, traveled to campus to vow that “we will not tolerate threats, or hatred or antisemitism.” But a feeling of fear pervades Cornell, said Molly Goldstein, co-president of the Cornell Center for Jewish Living. “Jewish students on campus right now are unbelievably terrified for their lives,” she told CNN. “I never would have expected this to happen on my university campus.”

The frightening online threats at Cornell, which are just part of the spate of antisemitism exacerbated by the fallout of the Gaza war, has many Jews wondering if their safety can be guaranteed in the United States — let alone in Israel where the attacks shattered illusion of security for the Jewish people. Pro-Palestinian protests at some universities have crossed over the line into antisemitism and prompted Republicans and some Democrats to warn campuses are in the grip of far-left radicalism.

Elsewhere, in one of many other incidents, a Beverly Hills home of a Holocaust survivor was daubed with antisemitic graffiti reading “F— Jews.” There have also been multiple cases of antisemitism in Europe, which was often criticized by US officials in years past for doing too little to crack down even as the scourge was metastasizing in America. In one of the most shocking scenes, a crowd of people stormed an airport in Russia’s mostly Muslim region of Dagestan, where a flight from Israel arrived on Sunday, chanting, “There is no place for child-killers in Dagestan.” These are scenes with chilling echoes of the 1940s – a decade of destruction and carnage that has already been evoked in the last 18 months by Russia’s onslaught against civilians in Ukraine.

Nearly a century after the rise of Nazism and the beginning of the Holocaust, which killed at least 6 million European Jews, descendants of the dead are yet again being threatened because of who they are, their history and how they worship. Nations that often vowed “Never Again” at Holocaust memorial events now face a responsibility to tackle antisemitism at home, just as they were forced to mobilize against anti-Muslim rhetoric, violence and prejudice after the September 11 terror attacks in 2001 by al Qaeda – which is also still a threat today, as President Joe Biden noted in his Oval Office address on October 20, after returning from a trip to Israel. “We reject all forms of hate, whether against Muslims, Jews, or anyone. That’s what great nations do, and we are great nation,” he said.

Biden on Monday unveiled new measures to tackle antisemitism on college campuses and senior officials underscored the need to combat anti-Jewish hate. “It’s dangerous, it’s unacceptable –- anywhere in the world, certainly here in the United States of America,” John Kirby, the National Security Council’s coordinator for strategic communications, said on “CNN This Morning.”

But efforts to combat the situation with added security may struggle while the horror in the Middle East continues to unfold. In an ideal world, criticism of Israel’s military response would center only on its government and not rebound against Jews around the world – many of whom oppose the country’s hardline government.

But in practice, antisemitism could grow more pervasive in the coming weeks.

A widening problem in the United States

In recent years, antisemitism has often been driven in the United States by far-right groups. The hate of White Nationalism was encapsulated by the haunting chant by marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 of, “Jews will not replace us.” Former President Donald Trump, meanwhile, played into an antisemitic trope by suggesting that American Jews were plagued by dual loyalties to the US and Israel and that they should be more grateful to him for his policies on the Jewish state. But reaction to the deepening crisis in Israel and Gaza has shown that antisemitism is also boiling on the far-left. Some pro-Palestinian protesters in the US, for instance, appeared to embrace Hamas, a Palestinian militant group categorized by the United States as a terrorist organization that itself has imposed repression on Palestinians in Gaza and perpetrated the Israeli massacres.

Academic studies have shown that antisemitism often spikes amid crisis points in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This suggests that it is a latent force below the surface in US society and only needs the spur of an event to erupt. The Anti-Defamation League, for example, has catalogued a 400% increase in antisemitic incidents in the US since October 7. That said, organizations like the ADL also charted rising hate toward American Jews in recent years during a comparative period of calm in the Middle East, suggesting that domestic forces and the rise of extreme rhetoric and violence-fueled hate are also driving the problem. The organization detailed 3,697 antisemitic incidents in the US in 2022, up 36% year-on-year and the highest on record.

Still, the increasingly fraught and divided politics in Western nations already rocked by extremism makes the nuanced handling of the Israeli-Palestinian issue nearly impossible. Toxic dialogue on social media and a flood of inaccurate information makes the problem worse while partisans predisposed to support Israel or Palestinians often equate the actions of Hamas and the Israeli government with civilians who have no control over them.

Alongside the threats and harassment experienced by Jews in recent weeks, Americans were also traumatized by the shocking fatal stabbing of a 6-year-old Chicago boy of Palestinian descent, allegedly by his family’s landlord, which is being investigated by the Department of Justice as a hate crime. The senseless killing was a reminder of the murderous reach of historic antagonisms in the Middle East and underscored the magnitude of the region’s massive human tragedy in which civilians — Israelis and Arabs — are often caught up in horrific events in which they have no role or responsibility.

Middle East history is a moral maze

The Israeli-Palestinian question is one of such historic, geographic and political complexity that it is easy for domestic politicians in the West to latch onto any one aspect of the conflict as they seek to advance their own political ends. Each murder, war, massacre or conflict sows the seeds of its successors in the region.

That reality is being reflected in the domestic politics spawned by the conflict in the US and Europe.

Since the attacks in Israel, protesters who back Palestinian rights and worry about civilian casualties in the packed urban areas and refugee camps in Gaza have often been accused in conservative media of supporting terrorists. In the past, Israel’s most committed supporters have often and inaccurately tried to paint any criticism of Israel by politicians or journalists as antisemitism. Some on the left, in calling for an immediate ceasefire in recent days, have appeared to question Israel’s right to defend itself at all after the appalling civilian carnage.

Antisemitic threats, meanwhile, often arise out of a conceit that all Jews, by definition, must somehow share responsibility for what is seen as the denial of Palestinian statehood or hardline settlement building policies on Palestinian land in the West Bank that have been pursued under successive Israeli governments.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Monday tried to pinpoint the moment at which opposition to Israeli policies crosses into antisemitism. “I’m sickened and frightened by the news that has come out of Cornell University,” the New York Democrat said, warning that the threats were “utterly revolting” but not isolated. “We must condemn all forms of hate. Nobody denies that people of goodwill can have disagreements about the conflict in the Middle East, but the red line is crossed when these disagreements lead to violence or threats of violence.”

One lesson Americans learned in recent years is their country is not immune from political turmoil and hatred that many thought had no place in the 21st century in a modern, democratic, developed country. After all, the United States recently suffered a mob attack on Congress fueled by false claims of a stolen election.

Antisemitism is no exception.

“Many of us did not expect to see these events unfolding right here America – but the fact of the matter is that it could happen here,” Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, told Kasie Hunt on “State of the Race” on CNN Max on Monday.

“A mob tearing through an airport in Russia searching for Jews to lynch is terrifying, but it is equally terrifying for a student from Cornell to find on the general message boards these posts to ‘slit the throat of Jews.’”

“This is antisemitism, this is threatening Jews worldwide.”

History does not end. It merely slumbers, then repeats itself.

I guess I’ve come to expect this from the fringe right. We’ve seen groups of Nazis marching around with torches in recent years chanting “Jews will not replace us.” Watching some elements of the left go that way makes me want to vomit. I know people feel passionate about this issue and there are legitimate reasons to be hostile toward the Israeli government. But this is something else. Celebrating terrorism, no matter who does it is grotesque. Celebrating war is grotesque as well. It inevitably leads to bigotry and racism, beliefs and behaviors the left tells itself it is against. Some people need to take a gut check.

Antisemitism and Islamophobia are two sides of the same coin and there’s no excuse for any of it. I think a lot of this is being fed by social media which is a total hellscape at the moment. It’s created a conduit for hate.

Matt Gaetz insists that the House can no longer combine different bills together and instead every issue must stand alone so it must be done. As you know, he’s the decider. It turns out that’s not exactly true. He’s fine with different issues being combined after all. As long as a bill contains GOP hobby horse spending cuts, combine away:

A few years ago, Representative Mike Johnson, now Speaker of the House, told an audience that democracy is bad. “By the way, the United States is not a democracy,” he explained. “Do you know what a democracy is? Two wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner. You don’t want to be in a democracy.”

This is an extremely common view among American conservatives, who — unlike right-of-center parties in most democracies worldwide — have largely refused to accept the legitimacy of democratic decision-making over economic policy. In particular, they regard the government’s tax-and-transfer power as an abusive and illegitimate infringement on the right of rich people to keep their income.

That belief is vital to explain Johnson’s new maneuver, which is to tie any new funding for Israel to a demand to reduce IRS enforcement of wealthy people’s tax compliance.

House Republicans have framed this demand for weakening the IRS as a deficit-cutting measure. Johnson “has said the new expenditure must be covered by other spending reductions to avoid adding to the debt,” reports the Washington Post. Representative Chip Roy, a right-wing Republican, claims, “I support Israel, but I am not going to continue to go down this road where we bankrupt our country and undermine our very ability to defend ourselves, much less our allies, by continuing to write blank checks.”

But cutting IRS funding does not avoid bankrupting our country. In fact, it hastens it. IRS funding is used to increase collection of tax payments. In theory, the IRS could be funded so lavishly that additional funding does not yield any net tax revenue, but reality is nowhere close to this level.

Research suggests that every additional dollar in IRS funding yields many times more dollars in revenue, through both direct enforcement and by deterring fraud. One recent paper estimates that a dollar of funding yields $12 in revenue.

The Congressional Budget Office, which issues official budget estimates, is required by law to use far more conservative estimates of the budgetary impact of IRS funding. Even so, its conservative methods would predict the GOP plan to reduce IRS funding will increase the deficit by about $30 billion.

So Republicans are saying this is a plan to “pay for” Israel aid. But that description is close to the opposite of the truth. It’s not a pay-for, it’s an add-on. Democrats and anti-Russia Senate Republicans want to add Israel spending to spending for defending Ukraine. Johnson and the House Republicans want to take out the Ukraine spending and throw in a big handout to rich tax cheats.

MAGA Mike is ready to start hostage taking. Did you expect anything else?

Brian Stelter cuts through the fog

“Carlson repulsed large swaths of the company he worked for.” Strip away the rumors and conspiracy theories. Tucker Carlson’s relationship with Fox News ended like most bad relationships, says Brian Stelter (Vanity Fair):

Let’s step away from the conspiracy cliff. Carlson was not a victim of the settlement. But Dominion did deserve credit for dragging some of Carlson’s intolerability out in the open. “It’s one thing to know about abusive language and angry emails. It’s another thing to have it all read back to you during a deposition,” a source observed. And to have the Fox board retain lawyers to read through his deepest, darkest texts. “People were telling Rupert and Lachlan, ‘This guy is not worth it,’ ” an insider said. That’s why Dominion’s wins were a tipping point, even though Carlson’s termination was not part of the settlement. So why was he removed, and what does it reveal about the network of lies?

Think, for just a moment, about the worst relationship in your past—and why it ended. Odds are, there wasn’t just one reason, it wasn’t one thing, it was everything: a book’s worth of fights and slights and resentments and grievances. Maybe there was a final indignity—an affair, a betrayal, the discovery of a derogatory text—but even if one party was blindsided, the other could list a dozen long-gestating reasons for the breakup. That’s why Fox dropped Carlson. It wasn’t one thing. It was everything.

The excerpt is adapted from Stelter’s upcoming Network of Lies. If you write about media figures for a living, I guess you have to do it. Hats off to Stelter for wasting breath and electrons on Tucker Carlson. I wouldn’t.

It was a tale as old as TV. Stardom is a potent and often destructive drug. Icarus flew too close to the sun; he got his wings melted. Carlson flapped away, higher and higher, until one day the Murdochs just couldn’t tolerate his flapping anymore. “He got too big for his boots,” Rupert told at least one confidant.

How about moving the middle?

October 31 is a good day for exploring magical thinking, eh?

We oh-so sensible American lefties look down our noses at QAnon loons and their belief that a cabal of adrenochrome-drinking, baby-eating pedophiles secretly run the world. When everyone knows “the private-equity industry is devouring” public companies at an alarming rate. In secret, “with almost no regulatory or public scrutiny,” Rogé Karma explains in The Atlantic:

A private economy is one in which companies can more easily get away with wrongdoing and an economic crisis can take everyone by surprise. And to a startling degree, a private economy is what we already have.

[…]

Across the economy, private-equity firms are known for laying off workers, evading regulations, reducing the quality of services, and bankrupting companies while ensuring that their own partners are paid handsomely. The veil of secrecy makes all of this easier to execute and harder to stop.

Investors hunt weak companies, consume them, and jobs disappear overnight with no Van Helsings stepping up to stop them. But I’m stretching the metaphor.

Brian Klaas explains (also in The Atlantic) that belief in magical forces resides in populations far beyond QAnon:

Roughly two-thirds of Latvians, half of Brazilians, a third of Spaniards, and a fifth of French people self-report a belief in witchcraft. In the United States, the figure is 16.4 percent—one in six Americans. And in the United States, unlike, say, in France, a subset of those who believe in demonic forces and witchcraft have become a potent political force, exerting significant sway on right-wing elected officials.

The reality-based community insists in the face of evidence that the crazies respond to logic, data and sound policy “rather than to the knock-on effects of widely held conspiracy theories or other nonrational beliefs.” Feelings trump facts. Sorry.

Klaas writes:

In other words, most of us who professionally study human societies—or try to explain political systems in the press—have a severe case of rationality bias: We think of ourselves as purely rational agents, and we too often wrongly assume that everyone else thinks about the world the same way we do. This assumption distorts our understanding of how people actually make decisions, why they behave the way they do, and, by extension, how and why big social and political changes take place.

Figures vary, but by most estimates, about 85 out of every 100 people in the world believe in God. And yet, an analysis of top political-science-research journals found that only 13 out of every 1,000 articles published were primarily about religion (a rate of just over 1 percent). That figure is absurdly low—professional malpractice for a field that attempts to explain political systems. But the scholarship is even thinner on disorganized but widespread belief systems, such as acceptance of the power of witchcraft. The analysis didn’t provide data on how many research articles focused on other forms of supernatural belief, including shamanism, animism, and the like, which we can safely assume have received even lower billing. The upshot is that we political scientists have an enormous blind spot. Pundits are even worse: When’s the last time you heard a serious cable-news discussion about the political influence of witchcraft and demonic forces? A serious rift divides the way professional analysts explain political systems and the way voters within those systems actually see the world, whether in the United States or in societies where such seemingly strange beliefs are more openly discussed.

The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last finds that beliefs about Joe Biden are wildly out of step with “Based Joe Biden.” Among a certain class of liberal pundit, the reason Democrats have lost ground with non-college voters has something to do with notions floating around the social media fringe: decriminalizing illegal immigration, defunding the police, transgender issues, etc.

In fact, Last argues, Biden’s administration resembles none of those:

Here are some actual policies Biden has enacted in the real world during his administration:

• Building a portion of Trump’s border wall
• Adding $37 billion in federal money to support local law enforcement
• Approving the Willow oil project in Alaska
• Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel

Too far left? How about these?

• Killed Ayman al-Zawahri
• Bitch-slapped Vladimir Putin back to the ‘70s
• Blew up a bunch of Iranian Revolutionary Guard troops in Syria
• Secured the release of U.S. hostages from Iran and then re-froze the ransom money
• Spent a bunch of money to kickstart semiconductor manufacturing as a way to (a) bring jobs back to the United States and (b) create a hedge against Chinese aggression
• Passed Joe Manchin’s bipartisan infrastructure law with tons of spending for red states and rural areas
• Passed gun reform so moderate that he got 14 Republicans in the House and 15 in the Senate to vote for it

So what’s the deal? Why do non-college voters perceive Biden and Democrats as out of step with mainstream America? Is Biden really too far left? Is the problem bad comms strategy (per Matt Yglesias) and Biden needs to punch more hippies? Or is it voters who are out of touch?

Last writes:

Voters literally believe that we are in an economic environment as bad as the Great Recession of 2008/2009. There’s no way to argue people out of their vibes; no policy or metric you can point to. My feelings don’t care about your facts.

If those feelings are stubbornly immovable, Last suggests, “Orange Man Bad might be Biden’s best strategy.” Emphasize all the ways in which Trump’s policies are the ones out of step.

Still, it’s somewhat magical to believe that what moves voters comes primarily from the top down. A reader asked the other day why, if he receives a dozen fundraising emails a day, Democrats don’t use those lists “to carefully explain what they intend to do in Congress, foreign policy, and, generally, for the good of the American people.”

Long story short, there’s no one in charge of coordinated messaging. Republicans aren’t any better. They just have billionaire-funded media outlets and a dozen right-wing think tanks to tell Republicans what their message is and to help disseminate it.

But an idea a friend posed has potential. There are tons of small, understaffed, rural weekly papers hungry for free content. When I peruse them, there are frequently op-eds from right-wingers and none from the left. (Letters to the Editor from far-flung readers are less like to see print.) It’s worth a try. I’ll be gathering their contact info here in N.C. I may have to get back into the op-ed business.

You can’t win if you don’t show up to play.

Happy Halloween.

This is big. Even if nobody’s talking about it.

Huzzah!

A six-week wave of strikes that hobbled the three largest U.S. automakers has resulted in tentative contract agreements that would give workers their biggest pay raises in decades while avoiding a protracted work stoppage that could have damaged the economy.

On Monday, General Motors and the United Automobile Workers reached a deal that mirrored agreements the union had reached in recent days with Ford Motor and Stellantis, the parent company of Ram, Jeep and Chrysler. The terms will be costly for the automakers as they undertake a switch to electric vehicles, while setting the stage for labor strife and demands for higher pay at nonunion automakers like Tesla and Toyota.

The tentative agreements, which still require ratification by union members, also appeared to be a win for President Biden, who had risked political capital by picketing with striking workers at a G.M. facility in Michigan last month.

“They have reached a historic agreement,” Mr. Biden said Monday after speaking with Shawn Fain, the U.A.W. president. The deals, the president said, “reward autoworkers who gave up much to keep the industry working and going during the global financial crisis more than a decade ago.”

The strike stretched longer than White House officials would have liked, but was resolved before causing significant shortages of new cars and trucks that might have frustrated voters already angry about inflation.

“The near-term impact of this strike will be relatively minor,” said Karl Brauer, executive analyst at iSeeCars.com, an online auto sales site.

But Mr. Brauer warned that, in the long term, Ford, G.M. and Stellantis would have to raise car prices to maintain their profits. Their competitors will follow suit to take advantage of the opportunity to earn more money, he said. “This is going to make cars more expensive,” Mr. Brauer added.

G.M.’s chief executive, Mary T. Barra, said in a statement on Monday that the tentative agreement “reflects the contributions of the team while enabling us to continue to invest in our future and provide good jobs in the U.S.”

Potentially the most far-reaching effect of the strike could be on manufacturing workers not represented by the U.A.W. The contracts the union negotiated are the latest in a series of prominent victories for organized labor, including Hollywood writers, UPS workers and even some university employees.

Mr. Fain has portrayed the tentative agreements as a signal for the union to begin organizing drives at Tesla, which dominates the fast-growing electric car business, and foreign-owned companies like Toyota, Honda and BMW that have large nonunion operations in the United States. The union will “organize like we’ve never organized before,” Mr. Fain said Sunday.

Companies without unions can expect the U.A.W. to deploy the same hardball tactics that Mr. Fain used against Ford, G.M. and Stellantis, including rhetorical attacks on multimillion-dollar executive pay and hourly wages that have failed to keep pace with high inflation.

Even if those union campaigns fail, as they often have in the past, they may prompt some employers to pre-emptively give workers raises.

“This agreement is going to have a trickle-down effect,” said Helen Rella, who specializes in employment litigation at Wilk Auslander, a New York law firm.

Ford agreed on a tentative pact on Wednesday. Stellantis followed on Saturday. Details of all the agreements had not yet been published, but they include a 25 percent pay increase over the next four and a half years and provisions to make sure the raises are not eaten up by inflation.

The top U.A.W. wage would rise to more than $40 over the life of the new contracts, from $32 an hour. That would allow employees working 40 hours a week to earn about $84,000 a year.

The agreements provide at least some protections to workers as electric vehicles replace gasoline models, and jobs at battery factories supplant jobs making components for combustion engine vehicles.

In Ford’s case, workers at battery factories that the company plans to build in Tennessee and Michigan would be covered by the terms of the union contract. (Ford suspended work at the Michigan plant in September, saying it was not sure it could manufacture batteries there at a competitive price.)

The U.A.W. said its new contract with G.M. would cover workers at Ultium Cells, a battery-making joint venture with LG Energy Solution. One Ultium factory, in Ohio, is up and running, and two others are under construction in Tennessee and Michigan.

Those Starbursts* are tasting very sour these days:

A self-proclaimed MAGA Republican plans to run against Kevin McCarthy for his House seat, a primary challenge that represents the latest fallout from his speakership ouster.

And David Giglio is praising the eight Republicans who voted to remove the former speaker, as the GOP challenger prepares to launch his run for California’s 20th District Monday morning.

“Kevin McCarthy was removed as Speaker by 8 courageous members of his own party for failing to keep his promises and capitulating to Joe Biden and the radical Democrats,” Giglio said in his press release, first obtained by POLITICO. “Kevin McCarthy must be defeated.”

McCarthy was booted from the speakership by those eight, led by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), nearly a month ago — a move that was widely criticized within the House GOP. That spiraled into a chaotic 22 days without a speaker, until Mike Johnson won the gavel last week, with a Nov. 17 shutdown deadline on the immediate horizon.

McCarthy, a Bakersfield native, has previously cruised to victory in his district. He’s a prolific fundraiser and would be difficult to beat, if he chooses to run for reelection, even after being stripped of the gavel. He has vowed that he plans to run again after POLITICO previously reported he was considering early retirement, but that hasn’t tamped down speculation about whether he stays through the rest of his term and beyond.

Giglio, who has a business selling sports cards and memorabilia online, according to his campaign website, previously ran for California’s 13th district, but he ultimately lost to Rep. John Duarte (R-Calif.). That district is more of a battleground than McCarthy’s, which former President Donald Trump won by 25 points in 2020.

McCarthy does not currently have any GOP challengers who have reported raising money with the Federal Election Commission, but more could join Giglio. California has a jungle-primary system, which means the top-two vote getters advance to the general election, regardless of party.

Trump won his district with 53% in 2020. Kev won by 65%. It seems unlikely that he’ll be beaten but you never know with this jungle primary system.

*In case you forgot, MyKev got Trump’s attention and favor when he noticed that he only liked the red and pink ones so he had an intern get rid of all the other flavors and put them in a jar for the Dear Leader. That’s how the puerile president and his faithful servant MyKev became close.

Meet Maga-Mike’s extremist wife

She’s a Christian “counselor” and it’s just scary:

Kelly Johnson, the wife of the newly elected House speaker, ran a Christian counseling service that is affiliated with an organization that advocates against abortion and homosexuality and whose practices are built on the teachings of the Greek physician Hippocrates.

It is not clear if Kelly Johnson will continue her practice. Not long after Rep. Mike Johnson became House speaker last week, Kelly Johnson’s website became inaccessible. Johnson, her husband of more than 24 years, rose overnight from a virtually obscure House lawmaker to the position that is second in line to the presidency.  The couple is deeply religious; both Kelly and Mike Johnson previously worked with religious organizations and causes the religious right advocates for. Along with her counseling, Johnson is also listed as an advisor to the Louisiana Right for Life, an anti-abortion organization. 

Kelly Johnson’s website listed a specialty in Temperament counseling, a specialty that she received training for from an organization founded in the 1980s by a Christian couple. According to the materials the organization provides, the National Christian Counselor’s Association is adamant that its offerings take place outside of more traditional state-licensed settings so that counselors and clients can be fully engaged through their faith.

“The state licensed professional counselor in certain states is forbidden to pray, read or refer to the Holy Scriptures, counsel against things such as homosexuality, abortion, etc,” a catalog of the organization’s offerings states. “Initiating such counsel could be considered unethical by the state.”

The temperament-based approach breaks people down into five types: Melancholy, Choleric, Sanguine, Supine, and Phlegmatic. Richard and Phyllis Arno, who established a test to identify people’s temperament, founded the National Christian Counselors Association in the early 1980s. They and their advocates prefer the term temperament over personalities as the term personality is characterized as a “mask” while temperaments are “inborn” and thus inherent to each individual regardless of outside influences such as parenting. Their work is largely based on Hippocrates’ view that there were four temperaments.

Tim LaHaye, a controversial and influential figure on the evangelical right, pointed to Hippocrates’ beliefs when he began his own work in the 60s and 70s. The Arnos cited LaHaye in one of their books. LaHaye was vehemently opposed to LGBTQ people, writing an entire book on why he believed gay people were depressed because homosexuality was immoral and antithetical to the Bible. According to The New York Times, LaHaye’s anti-Catholic and antisemitic writings led him to step down from an honorary position leading Congressman Jack Kemp’s 1988 GOP primary campaign. LaHaye later pushed President George W. Bush’s election in 2000 and worked with then-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in the 2008 presidential primaries. LeHaye became enormously popular and wealthy later in his life after he penned a series of apocalyptic novels. 

One post for an affiliated counselor on the organization’s website describes a deliverance ministry in addition to temperament testing. Using this approach to drive demons out of a client makes sure the person is “better able to receive and act upon godly counsel, including recommendations from the APS profiles.” (APS profiles are the abbreviation for the couple’s temperament testing system.)

Not all Christian counseling is created the same. Some more traditional counselors may add Biblical elements to science-based approaches, while others counseling might take the form of pastoral guidance, and some reject more science-based approaches in favor of a faith-based model that emphasizes the power of God and scripture. 

It’s not entirely clear where Johnson falls on this informal scale. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education from Louisiana Tech and a Master’s in Education from Centenary College. In a personal testimonial, Johnson wrote about “deliverance through extraordinary trials, including her recovery from a broken neck in a 2007 car accident and other serious health challenges.” Her counseling, which had a varying fee structure, was affiliated with Cypress Baptist Church in Benton, La., which according to Louisiana Baptist Message is where the couple attends services. Their church, in keeping with the denomination’s views, proclaims it is welcoming to all, but makes it clear it “recognizes only the biblical definition of marriage” and only sex through marriage.

The organization does advise counselors to follow some elements of more traditional counseling, including maintaining the confidentiality of what is discussed. Counselors are also advised to hold malpractice insurance.  A representative for the organization did not immediately return Insider’s request for comment.

The Johnsons have both publicly professed their “biblical worldview.” The future House speaker rose to fame in the 1990s when he and Kelly became de facto spokespeople for “covenant marriages,” a special agreement offered in some states that makes it more difficult for married couples to get a divorce. Johnson later cut his teeth as a litigator seeking to advance school prayer and defend bans on same-sex marriage. He also served in a leadership role with the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the US. Before his rapid political rise, Johnson wrote frequent guest columns for his local newspaper in which he questioned LGBT Americans, as CNN previously reported. At one point, he wrote in favor of criminalizing gay sex.

Johnson said on Thursday night that he now views the issue of same-sex marriage as settled law after the Supreme Court’s landmark Obergefell v. Hodges ruling. He said he has nothing personally against LGBTQ people, he just questions “their lifestyle choices.”

These people are Christian fundamentalist weirdos. But then recall that Amy Coney Barrett lives with some kind of fringe cult so this seems to be mainstream in the GOP these days.

DeSantis tried to pass Trump in his own lane and lost control

The cult wasn’t buying it. And neither was anyone else:

Some moderate Republican voters here recoiled at ads that Ron DeSantis’s allies started running last month broadcastingthe Florida governor’s vows to use deadly force at the southern border.

“I don’t like the fact that we’re going to start murdering people,” said Becki Kuhns, 71, who is eager for an alternative to Donald Trump and brought up the commercials unprompted.

Down the road at a cigar bar in Nashua, where regulars talk politics and watch debates together, a different DeSantis problem came into focus: Trumpsupporters were unmoved by DeSantis’s pitch that he’d deliver the former president’s agenda more effectively.

The people he’s targeting “belong to Trump,” said Howard Ray, 43, who went to a DeSantis event but wasn’t persuaded. “He comes across kind of hard right.”

He added:“Those types of people are in Trump’s camp, and they’re not moving.”

DeSantis began the year widely viewed as theRepublican with the best chance to build awinning coalition against theformer president — the Trump alternative who could entice Trump critics yet was alsoin many ways a continuation of Trump’s “America First” platform. But DeSantis’s support has shrunk dramatically since then, erodingon both ends of the party spectrum, interviews with dozensof early state voters, as well as pollsters and strategists, show.

The GOP minority that disapproves of Trump — and thatfavored DeSantis before he and most other candidates announced — has splintered to other hopefuls. Boosted by them and by independents, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley has surpassed DeSantis in New Hampshire and, in one poll released Monday, pulled even with the Florida governor in Iowa — where DeSantis has poured his resources.

At the same time, DeSantis has struggled amongTrump supporters, losing ground with those who approve of the former president, who has used his four criminal indictments to re-energize a base that once looked readier to move on from him. And DeSantis has struggled on both ends to make personal appeals that resonate, with a stiffer presentation than freewheeling Trump.

Now, DeSantis is left in a perilous position with just over two months until the first nominating contest, mired in a second tier of candidates well behind Trump.

Despite his appeals to the Trump base, DeSantis has at times tried to offer something for everyone, eliciting sometimes discordant descriptions of his candidacy from voters.

Tosome in Iowa and New Hampshire he was a “fresh voice” and a “true conservative” unlike Trump. To others he was “America First” or, to those who disdained him, a “Trump wannabe.” They said he stood for “freedom” and “families” and fighting wokeness in schools, with his record in Florida sometimes defining him despite his months-long efforts to talk in national terms.

DeSantis’s average support in national polls of the GOP primary dropped from more than 30 percent in March to 24 percent in May, when he officially joined the race, to 14 percent today.

Faced with that slide, DeSantis’s team has focused most of its attentionon Iowa, where it hopesintensive campaigning and a sophisticated ground operation will turn the tide against Trump. They note that a pro-Trump super PAC is resuming ad spending there against DeSantis — after earlier signaling that it was focused on the general election — and that polls show a growing share of voters considering candidates besides Trump, who holds a large polling lead.

But Haley, rather than DeSantis, has been gaining there, with a highly-anticipated Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom poll on Monday showing both Haley and DeSantis at 16 percent and Trump in the lead at 43. In a sign of Haley’s rise, a pro-DeSantis super PAC has started to air ads against her.

Advisers and allies argue that Haley appeals to the anti-Trump wing for stances that alienate the rest of the GOP and that DeSantis is still the only candidate who can bridge those camps — with most of his voters migrating to Trump if he drops out. Anti-Trump voters will eventually coalesce behind whoever can beat the former president, they say.

“The reality is this party is going to nominate somebody … that has a record of delivering on America First principles,” DeSantis said last week in New Hampshire, embracing that core identity even as he underlined moderate-friendly themes like “economic vitality.”

Speaking to voters at a bar in Creston, Iowa, this month, DeSantis said he would enact Trump’s ideas and take them further. He said he would “clean house” at the Justice Department, push to end the war in Ukraine and finish the wall at the southern border. He said that he would “make Mexico pay for it” by charging fees on remittances and that if drug traffickers tried to break through, they would wind up “stone cold dead.”

Trump backers ‘just not voting for him’

As DeSantis launched his campaign in May, adviser Ryan Tyson laid out the strategy to wealthy fundraisers who gathered at the Four Seasons Hotel in Miami. “Trump without the crazy,” was how supporters saw him, Tyson said.

The “Never Trump” voters in the party were saying DeSantis was too much like Trump, he added, but they made up about 20 percent of the GOP. Tyson was more focused on what he called “soft” Trump voters. “These voters here in this segment are gonna collapse to the governor,” he predicted.

Trump has instead consolidated support, surging back from a low point after last year’s midterm elections, when many Republicans blamed him for their losses and took note of DeSantis’s landslide reelection victory. Indictments on a slew of criminal charges, starting in March, galvanized the base and rallied the party back to Trump’s side, all as the former president attacked DeSantis. “I am your retribution,” Trump has told voters.

Some DeSantis allies debate whether he should have announced earlier, to capitalize on his post-midterms momentum. Maybe, they say, he should have hit Trump hard from the start. They lament certain comments — like DeSantis’s dismissive statement about a “territorial dispute” in Ukraine — as unforced errors. But mostly they view Trump’s resurgence as a force beyond DeSantis’s control.

“To this day he has a very high favorable rating among those favorable to Trump,” said Charles Franklin, who directs the Marquette Law School Poll. “They’re just not voting for him.”

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Dennis Martin, for instance, worries that Trump’s indictments will be a distraction and even says, “I don’t like Trump as a person.” The 57-year-old from a suburb of Des Moines is considering Trump, DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, a first-time candidate who has also embraced the Trump agenda.

But Martin is also outraged at the charges against Trump, thinks he did “a hell of a job as president” and says he’s leaning slightly toward supporting Trump again.

Heading to breakfast in nearby Ankeny, David Melssen said he’d been following DeSantis’s response to the war between Hamas and Israel. “Great man. He sent an airplane to bring back Americans,” he said immediately when a reporter mentioned DeSantis’s name.

Asked if he could vote for DeSantis, he said: “Yeah, if Trump decides that Ron DeSantis is the guy to back.”

The Trumpers are in cult and they aren’t abandoning their Dear Leader for a usurper. And the few Republicans who don’t like Trump aren’t going to vote for an extremist jerk like DeSantis because that’s exactly what they don’t like about Trump. What lane did he think he was running in anyway? His strategy was always flawed.

If he thought he was just doing it to be the fallback in case Trump falls over on the golf course and breaks a hip, he’s now revealed himself to be a creepy weirdo so I don’t think that would work either. And anyone who thinks Trump is going to endorse DeSantis is smoking something very, very potent.