Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Maybe they mean to repeat history

When was America great the first time? Someone go ask Donald Trump. Maybe Jordan Klepper should query Trump rally attendees what “great again” means again.

I’m guessing they really mean 1859.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905. From the series Great Ideas of Western Man.

Historian Seth Cotlar (Rightlandia) will be in Seattle on Tuesday interviewing Rachel Maddow about her new book Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism. Those who listened to her latest podcast, Ultra, know the basics. She traces the America fascist movement of the 1930s and 40s in more detail. What Cotlar finds interesting is how this history disappeared down the collective memory hole for most Americans in subsequent generations:

One thing we learn from Maddow’s book is that almost all of the seditious American fascists from the 1930s and 40s—people who literally wanted to work together with the Nazis to eliminate or deport the nation’s Jews and turn the country into an authoritarian homeland for white Christians—got off scot free after WWII and went on to live fairly normal lives as people who their neighbors generally thought of as “Commie-hating Christian Patriots,” if perhaps slightly eccentric or kooky ones.

Likely, history will once again consign people like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Steve Bannon, convicted insurrectionists from the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, et al. to the slightly eccentric or kooky category. Those who don’t go to jail will return to their normal lives, their yards, and their pet goldfish.

Cotlar continues:

Let’s take Charles Lindbergh as our first case study. I vividly remember, as a teenager visiting DC for the first time in 1983, staring up in awe at The Spirit of St. Louis hanging from the rafters of the Air and Space Museum. As far as I can remember, Lindbergh’s pro-Nazi sensibilities were not part of what I learned about him on that day. Had that come up, I suspect I would have dismissed it as a fairly unimportant aspect of who that brave aviator was.

It appears that Lindbergh had kind of a cultural moment in the mid-1980s, because in 1985, Minneapolis made the decision to name one of its airport terminals after Mr. “Let’s Put America First Because the Jews are Trying to Drag us into a War” and Mr. “aviation technology was a gift to the white people of the world so we can maintain our dominance over the world’s savage hordes of non-whites.” I blithely flew in and out of Minneapolis’s Lindbergh terminal many times in the 1990s and 2000s, DURING and AFTER my PhD work in US History, and I swear it was not until the mid-2010s that I first thought to myself “hey, wait a minute, why the hell is that Hitler-lover Lindbergh’s name on this terminal?”

I was just as ignorant of the fascist proclivities of Henry Ford, who had a framed picture of Hitler on his desk in the 1930s which was reciprocated by Hitler who had a framed picture of Henry Ford on his desk. I vaguely remember hearing some relatives talk about how Ford was an antisemite, but I imagined that meant he was personally rude to individual Jewish people. I did not know that aside from innovating the Model T and the assembly line (factoids I dutifully learned in history class), he also was responsible for producing and disseminating an enormous barrage of lying, antisemitic propaganda that fueled a violently fascist movement in the pre-WWII era. Many Ford dealerships in the 1920s and 30s placed copies of Ford’s publication (a representative sample below) on the seat of every new Ford they sold. So it’s not that Ford’s antisemitism simply made him guilty of private “wrongthink.” He’s not just “a man of his time” who’s been subjected to unfair cancellation these days by the woke mob and “revisionist historians.” He poured a large chunk of his wealth into building a robust fascist movement that talked openly about eliminating Jewish people from America and the earth. The pro-democracy Americans who fought against fascism in Ford’s time understood that quite well.

The problem is that by not teaching that inconvenient history, the “buffoonishly illiberal bigotry” of the past has a way of slip-sliding its way largely unnoticed into the present. Cotlar presents a list of forgotten minor figures from the fascist movement now resurrecting nearly a hundred years later.

Normalizing such people as mere “anti-communists” or “fundamentalist Christians” or “ultraconservative patriots” or “principled isolationists” was a mistake. So was minimizing them as irrelevant “kooks” or “crackpots.” Both impulses did a real disservice to the nation’s political memory by weakening our antifascist defenses and atrophying our pro-democratic muscles. Gerald LK Smith, for example, had a mailing list of over 3 million names in the 1960s. The Liberty Lobby’s neo-Nazi radio show could be heard on over 470 AM radio stations in that decade. Calling these folks “crackpots” did nothing to stem the torrent of fascist bile they poured into the reservoir of our political culture on a daily basis, bile that was generally ignored as irrelevant by the vast majority of Americans and interpreted as perfectly normal, “patriotic, pro-Christian, anti-Communist Americanism” by the millions of people to whom it appealed.

One of my takeaways (IIRC) from Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind,” is how Americans with no knowledge of the history of ideas naively believe the ones in their heads are original, theirs. Those who don’t know the difference are doomed to repeat the same historical mistakes of their forebears. Unless our resurrected fascist movement footsoldiers see them not as mistakes but missed opportunities.

America has a rich history of racism, and it also has a rich democratic history of people and movements that pushed against that racism. America has a rich history of fascism, and it also has a rich democratic history of people and movements that sought to blunt the power and influence of those fascists. In passing down such histories to the rising generations, there’s no need for us to bothsides them as if we should honor them as equally valued and respected parts of our national tapestry. To a great extent, nations are the stories they tell themselves about themselves. One way we can hopefully move toward a more democratic future is by more fully and truthfully telling the history of fascism and those who resisted it in the American past.

Threatening the nation that protects them

Sometimes in grazing the net, a theme appears in otherwise disconnected bits of internet flotsam. The current of electrons this morning delivered several random entries pointing toward the cultural degradation of the very people in this country who decry cultural degradation the loudest. This is the real American carnage, to borrow a phrase.

The meme at the top is one example.

The man who entered American carnage into the lexicon spoke of “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories, scattered like tombstones across the across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge.” His most ardent followers are working at this very moment to decimate public education, to proscribe what children can learn, and to ensure children remain in poverty. Violent crime is rampant, he suggested, and does to this day. People believe him.

In fact, violent crime is down. Yes, property crimes are up, but along with hate crimes targeting Blacks, Latinos, and LGBTQ+ Americans. Antisemitic crimes are up as well.

Another bit of flotsam this TikTok video by comedian John Fugelsang, riffing on a theme familar to fans of this son of a former nun and former Fransiscan brother. His targets are the very “people of faith” most devoted to the former president.

Post by @johnfugelsang

View on Threads

The Liberty Way

Perhaps the most damning bit this morning comes from conservative columnist David French. The “most consequential education scandal in the United States,” he writes is not what’s taught at Ivy league schools or your neighborhood schools, but “the moral collapse at Liberty University in Virginia.” You know the one, the religious school founded by Rev. Jerry Falwell.

“Liberty’s misconduct both symbolizes and contributes to the crisis engulfing Christian America. It embodies a cultural and political approach that turns Christian theology on its head,” French writes, unintentionally echoing Fugelsang (New York Times):

Last week, Fox News reported that Liberty is facing the possibility of an “unprecedented” $37.5 million fine from the U.S. Department of Education. The education department has been investigating violations of the Clery Act, a federal statute that requires federally funded colleges and universities to publicly report data about campus crime. To put that number into perspective, consider that Michigan State University paid $4.5 million for its own “systemic failure” to respond to the infamous Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal, in which Nassar was convicted of sexually abusing dozens of women in his care. While Liberty’s fine is not yet set, the contents of a leaked education department report — first reported by Susan Svrluga in The Washington Post — leave little doubt as to why it may be this large.

The report, as Svrluga writes, “paints a picture of a university that discouraged people from reporting crimes, underreported the claims it received and, meanwhile, marketed its Virginia campus as one of the safest in the country.” The details are grim. According to the report, “Liberty failed to warn the campus community about gas leaks, bomb threats and people credibly accused of repeated acts of sexual violence — including a senior administrator and an athlete.”

A campus safety consultant told Svrluga, “This is the single most blistering Clery report I have ever read. Ever.”

If this was the only scandal at Liberty, it would and should be a national story. But it’s not the only scandal. Far from it. I’ve been following (and covering) Liberty’s moral collapse for years, and the list of scandals and lawsuits plaguing the school is extraordinarily long. The best known of these is the saga of Jerry Falwell Jr. Falwell, the former president and son of the school’s founder, resigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct involving himself, his wife and a pool boy turned business associate named Giancarlo Granda.

Falwell is nationally prominent in part because he was one of Donald Trump’s earliest and most enthusiastic evangelical supporters. Falwell sued the school, the school sued Falwell, and in September Falwell filed a scorching amended complaint, claiming that other high-ranking Liberty officers and board members had committed acts of sexual and financial misconduct yet were permitted to retain their positions

But that’s not all. In 2021, ProPublica published a comprehensive, gut-wrenching report describing how Liberty mishandled claims of sex abuse and sex harassment on campus and used its strict code of conduct, the Liberty Way, against victims of sex abuse. If, for example, a victim had been drinking or engaged in any other conduct prohibited by Liberty policies, those details in their sex abuse complaint could be used against them in school disciplinary proceedings.

Too many Christians, too many Christian institutions, French believes, have gotten Christianity “exactly backwards.” The biggest threat to Christianity is not secular America. Christianity is, as Fugelsang suggests, under attack by fake Christians.

“For a lot of right-wing America, the Bible consists of the Book of Leviticus and the Book of Revelation duct-taped to the entire Left Behind series.” Sad, but true.

French concludes, “Liberty University is consequential not just because it’s an academic superpower in Christian America, but also because it’s a symbol of a key reality of evangelical life — we have met the enemy of American Christianity, and it is us.”

The overlap between French’s targets and MAGA Republicans is substantial. The sadder irony is that the people I now think of as Antide are not only a threat to their own ostensible faith, but to the democratic republic that protects their right to practice it so badly.

This is the test

Ron Brownstein with a typically astute analysis of Biden’s current challenges and whether his long experience will now be seen as an asset:

The escalating confrontation between Israel and Hamas is offering President Joe Biden a crucial opportunity to begin flipping the script on one of his most glaring vulnerabilities in the 2024 presidential race.

For months, polls have consistently shown that most Americans believe Biden’s advanced age has diminished his capacity to handle the responsibilities of the presidency. But many Democrats believe that Biden’s widely praised response to the Mideast crisis could provide him a pivot point to argue that his age is an asset because it has equipped him with the experience to navigate such a complex challenge.

“As you project forward, we are going to be able to argue that Joe Biden’s age has been central to his success because in a time of Covid, insurrection, Russian invasion of Ukraine, now challenges in the Middle East, we have the most experienced man ever as president,” said Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg. “Perhaps having the most experienced person ever to go into the Oval Office was a blessing for the country. I think we are going to be able to make that argument forcefully.”

Biden unquestionably faces a steep climb to ameliorate the concern that he’s too old for the job. Political strategists in both parties agree that those public perceptions are largely rooted in reactions to his physical appearance – particularly the stiffness of his walk and softness of his voice – and thus may be difficult to reverse with arguments about his performance. In a CNN poll released last month, about three-fourths of adults said Biden did not have “the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president” and nearly as many said he does not inspire confidence. Even about half of Democrats said Biden lacked enough stamina and sharpness and did not inspire confidence, with a preponderant majority of Democrats younger than 45 expressing those critical views.

But the crisis in Israel shows the path Biden will probably need to follow if there’s any chance for him to transmute doubts about his age into confidence in his experience. Though critics on the left and right in American politics have raised objections, Biden’s response to the Hamas attack has drawn praise as both resolute and measured from a broad range of leaders across the ideological spectrum in both the US and Israel.

“Biden is in his element here where relationships matter and his team is experienced (meaning operationally effective) and thoughtful (meaning can see forests as well as trees),” James Steinberg, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and deputy secretary of state under former President Barack Obama, wrote in an email.

Similarly, David Friedman, who served as ambassador to Israel for then-President Donald Trump, declared late last week, on Fox News Channel no less, that “The Biden administration over the past 12-13 days has been great.”

These responses underscore the fundamental political paradox about Biden’s age, and the experience that derives from it. On the one hand, there’s no doubt that his age is increasing anxiety among Democrats about his capacity to serve as an effective candidate for the presidency in 2024; on the other, his experience is increasing Democratic faith in his capacity to serve as an effective president now.

While more Democrats have been openly pining for another, younger alternative to replace Biden as the party’s nominee next year, many party leaders argued that there was no one from the Democrats’ large 2020 field of presidential candidates, or even among the rising crop of governors and senators discussed as potential successors, that they would trust more at this moment than Biden.

“No one – not a one,” said Matt Bennett, executive vice president for public affairs at Third Way, an organization of centrist Democrats. “That is genuinely the case. And I get people’s uneasiness about him both because he’s old and he has low poll numbers. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t the best person for the job.”

Familiarity with an issue is no guarantee of success: Biden took office with a long-standing determination to end the American deployment in Afghanistan but still executed a chaotic withdrawal. But in responding to global challenges, Biden, who was first elected to the Senate in 1972, is drawing on half a century of dealing with issues and players around the world; even George H.W. Bush, the last president who arrived in office with an extensive foreign policy pedigree, had only about two decades of previous high-level exposure to world events.

This latest crisis has offered more evidence that Biden is more proficient at the aspects of the presidency that unfold offstage than those that occur in public. It’s probably not a coincidence that the private aspects of the presidency are the ones where experience is the greatest asset, while the public elements of the job are those where age may be the greatest burden.

Biden’s speeches about Ukraine, and especially his impassioned denunciations of the Hamas attack over the past two weeks, have drawn much stronger reviews than most of his addresses on domestic issues. (Bret Stephens, a conservative New York Times columnist often critical of Biden, wrote that his first speech after the attack “deserves a place in any anthology of great American rhetoric.”) In Biden’s nationally televised address about Israel and Ukraine on Thursday, he drew on a long tradition of presidents from both parties who presented American international engagement as the key to world stability, even quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt’s call during World War II for the US to serve as the “arsenal of democracy.”

But even when Biden was younger, delivering galvanizing speeches was never his greatest strength. No one ever confused him with Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama as a communicator and his performance as president hasn’t changed that verdict. Instead, Biden has been at his best when working with other leaders, at home and abroad, out of the public eye.

Biden, for instance, passed more consequential legislation than almost anyone expected during his first two years, but he did not do so by rallying public sentiment or barnstorming the country. Rather, in quiet meetings, he helped to orchestrate a surprisingly effective legislative minuet that produced bipartisan agreements on infrastructure and promoting semiconductor manufacturing before culminating in a stunning agreement with holdout Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia to pass an expansive package of clean energy and health care initiatives with Democrat votes alone.

“He’s showed a degree of political dexterity in managing the coalition that would have been very challenging for anyone else,” said Rosenberg. “His years of actually legislating, where he learned how to bring people together and hash stuff out, was really important in keeping the Democratic family together.”

To the degree Biden has succeeded in international affairs, it has largely been with the same formula of working offstage with other leaders, many of whom he’s known for years, around issues that he has also worked on for years. In the most dramatic example, that sort of private negotiation and collaboration has produced a surprisingly broad and durable international coalition of nations supporting Ukraine against Russia.

Biden’s effort to manage this latest Mideast crisis is centered on his attempts through private diplomacy to support Israel in its determination to disable Hamas, while minimizing the risk of a wider war and maintaining the possibility of diplomatic agreements after the fighting (including, most importantly, a rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia meant to counter Iranian influence). Administration officials believe that the strong support that Biden has expressed for Israel, not only after the latest attack, but through his long career, has provided him with a credibility among the Israeli public that will increase his leverage to influence, and perhaps restrain, the decisions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The president “wisely from the very moment of this horror show expressed unfettered solidarity with Israel and that allowed him to then go to Israel and behind closed doors continue the conversation, which I’m sure Secretary [Antony] Blinken started,” said one former senior national security official in the Biden administration, who asked to be anonymous while discussing the situation. That credibility, the former official said, allowed Biden to ask hard questions of the Israelis such as “‘Ok, you are going to send in ground troops and then what? We did shock and awe [in the second Iraq war] and then we found ourselves trapped without a plan. What are you doing? What’s the outcome? Who is going to control Gaza when you’re done whatever you are doing? At least stop and think about this.’”

In all these ways, the Israel confrontation offers Biden an opportunity to highlight the aspects of the presidency for which he is arguably best suited. In the crisis’ first days, former President Trump also provided Biden exactly the sort of personal contrast Democrats want to create when Trump initially responded to the tragic Hamas attack by airing personal grievances against Netanyahu and criticizing the Israeli response to the attack. For some Democrats, Trump’s off-key response crystallized the contrast they want to present next year to voters: “Biden is quiet competence and Trump is chaos and it’s a real choice,” said Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, vice president and chief strategy officer at Way to Win, a liberal group that funds organizations and campaigns focusing on voters of color.

Ancona said Biden’s performance since the Hamas attack points to the case Democrats should be preparing to make to voters in 2024. “He’s been a workhorse not a show pony, but that’s something we can talk about,” she said. “You can show a picture of a president working quietly behind the scenes, you can tell a story of how he has your best interests at heart. It is what it is: he’s, what, 80? You can’t get around that. But I do think he has shown he has the capacity and strength and tenacity to do this job. He’s been doing it. So why shouldn’t he get a chance to keep doing it?”

Likewise, Rosenberg argues, “In my view you can’t separate his age from his successes as president. He’s been successful because of his age and experience not in spite of it, and we have to rethink that completely.”

Other Democrats, though, aren’t sure that Biden can neutralize concerns about his age by making a case for the benefits of his experience. One Democratic pollster familiar with thinking in the Biden campaign, who asked for anonymity while discussing the 2024 landscape, said that highlighting Biden’s experience would only produce limited value for him so long as most voters are dissatisfied with conditions in the country. “The problem with the experience side is that people feel bad,” the pollster said. “If people felt like his accomplishments improved things for them, they wouldn’t care about his age. … The problem with the age vs. experience [argument] is that experience has to produce results for them, but experience isn’t producing results.”

William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and long-time Democratic strategist, sees another limit to the experience argument. Like most Democrats, Galston believes that Biden’s response to the crisis has, in fact, demonstrated the value of his long track record on international issues. “This is where all of his instincts, honed by decades of experience, come into play,” Galston said. “He knows which people to call when; he knows whom to send where. As was the case in [Ukraine], this is the sort of episode where Biden is at his best.”

The problem, Galston argues, is that voters can see the value of Biden’s experience in dealing with world events today and still worry he could not effectively handle the presidency for another term. “It’s not a logical contradiction,” Galston said, for voters to believe that “‘Yes, over the first four years of his presidency, his experience proved its value, and he had enough energy and focus to be able to draw on it when he needed it’ and at the same time say, ‘I am very worried that over the next four years, in the tension between the advantages of experience and disadvantages of age, that balance is going to shift against him.’”

To assuage concerns about his capacity, Biden will need not only to “tell” voters about the value of his experience but to “show” them his vigor through a rigorous campaign schedule, Galston said. “The experience argument is necessary, but not sufficient,” Galston maintains. “In addition to that argument, assuming it can be made well and convincingly, I think he is going to have to show through his conduct of the campaign that he’s up for another four years.”

Biden’s trips into active war zones in Ukraine and Israel have provided dramatic images that his campaign is already using to make that case. As Galston suggests, the president will surely need to prove the point again repeatedly in 2024.

But most analysts agree that what the president most needs to demonstrate in the months ahead is not energy, but results. His supporters have reason for optimism that Biden’s carefully calibrated response to the Israel-Hamas hostilities will allow them to present him as a reassuring source of stability in an unstable world – in stark contrast to the unpredictability and chaos that Trump, his most likely 2024 opponent, perpetually generates. But Biden’s management of this volatile conflict will help him make that argument only if its outcome, in fact, promotes greater stability in the Middle East. If nothing else, Biden’s long experience has surely taught him how difficult stability will be to achieve in a region once again teetering on the edge of explosion.

I can tell you one thing unequivocally. Whatever Biden’s management of this crisis may end up being judged, it’s bound to be a million times better than if his opponent Orange Julius Caesar was in charge. As far as the next election is concerned, that’s all you need to know.

This latest moral panic is even dumber than usual

Greg Sargent on the latest:

Kim Reynolds, Iowa’s Republican governor, signed a law in May that, among other provisions,requires schools to remove books that depict a “sex act.” That statutory phrase has now helped unleash a frenzy of book-banning across the state, one that illustrates a core truth about these types of censorship directives.

Their vagueness is the point.

When GOP-controlled state legislatures escalated the passage of laws in 2022 and 2023 restricting school materials addressing sex, gender and race, critics warned that their hazy drafting would prod educators to err on the side of censorship. Uncertain whether books or classroom discussions might run afoul of their state’s law, education officials might decide nixing them would be the “safer” option.

What’s happening in Iowa right now thoroughly vindicates those fears. This week, the Iowa City Community School District released a list of 68 books that it removed from schools to comply with the law. Among the titles: “Ulysses” by James Joyce, “Nineteen Minutes” by Jodi Picoult, “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood and “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison.

The Iowa law requires K-12 schools to remove materials that depict any one of a series of sex acts that include intercourse and other types of genital contact. The law also bans instruction on gender identity or sexual orientation before seventh grade.

Beyond Iowa City, the Des Moines Register reports that school districts across the state have removed hundreds of books from their school libraries, also in response to that law. Among these titles: “1984” by George Orwell, “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley, “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut and “Forrest Gump” by Winston Groom.

To be clear, what’s happening here is not necessarily the fault of the districts themselves. Their administrators have worked for months to determine which books must be removed to comply with the law. They’ve asked the state for guidance, but it has mostly not been forthcoming — leaving them in the tough position of navigating the law on their own.

That has led districts to flag books with depictions of “sex acts” that aren’t lascivious or lewd and often aren’t important parts of their content, said Margaret Buckton, a lobbyist for the Rural School Advocates of Iowa. As Buckton told me, “fear” is “motivating districts to interpret even vague descriptions of a ‘sex act’ that aren’t pornographic as meeting this definition.”

No one disputes that in plenty of cases materials depicting such acts should be removed. Nonetheless, the law and the subsequent lack of state guidance are plainly causing officials to cast a wide net. “Many literary classics have sex in them,” said Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education programs at PEN America. “But now the term ‘sex act’ is turning into a blunt instrument to remove scores of books that have all kinds of literary merit and cultural significance.”

Variations of this are proliferating across the country. In Spotsylvania County, Va., school officials removed14books because of a state law concerning “sexually explicit” material, and it included two by Toni Morrison. In Missouri, a similar law prompted school librarians to pull dozens and dozens of titles, including “1984” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

And just this past week, children’s publisher Scholastic declared that it has created for its book fairs a separate category for some titles about sexuality, gender and race. That is meant to alert organizers of fairs in states with onerous laws such as Iowa’s to books that might constitute violations without forcing them to sift through the entire Scholastic collection to determine which could be unlawful.

But that separate batch also includes uncontroversial books that merely display tolerance for LGBTQ+ people or tell the life story of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, as Judd Legum reports on his Substack. Putting such books in that cordoned-off category could risk making them more likely to be excluded from fairs.

Scholastic spokeswoman Anne Sparkman told me that thousands of bookfairs have opted not to include that separate category of titles, which is highly unfortunate, but she also noted that thousands have included them. As Sparkman rightly pointed out, the haziness of many laws already has many local educators guessing at which books to exclude to avoid self-incrimination, and Scholastic — which opposes such laws on principle — understandably feels obliged to help them navigate this “ambiguity,” even if there’s no easy way to do so.

Just as critics predicted, all this vagueness and uncertainty is actively encouraging local education officials to sweep ever more broadly, undertaking more and more book removals in a kind of ever-expanding vortex. In this, one might argue, those laws are functioning exactly as intended.

Great. maybe the kids should just spend all their time reading the Bible. Nothing sexual in that….. oh wait.

I wonder if any of these parents have heard of the internet. Do they think their kids are spending all their time looking at cat videos and cookie recipes? I have news for them.

Trump doesn’t think it is

Trouble in wingnut paradise?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe Biden was a private citizen in 2018

Hold that thought (CBS News):

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

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

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

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

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

Most of the press has learned to ignore Comer.

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

Now watch Comer in action:

pic.twitter.com/mpXbMbBSGe

— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) October 20, 2023

Joe Biden was a private citizen in 2018.

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

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

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

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

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

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) October 21, 2023

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

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

First the Kraken lady, then Kenneth Chesebro

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

Clip borrowed from Dave (1993).