Image of Brooklyn subway flooding from Sept. 29 via Twitter/X.
Brooklyn flooded on Friday. Again. Subway lines shut down as water poured off streets, down stairways and into stations. A niece reported she had to take cabs into the city for work and the basement entry was knee-deep.
New York City’s sewer system is built for the rain of the past—when a notable storm might have meant 1.75 inches of water an hour. It wasn’t built to handle the rainfall from Hurricane Irene, Hurricane Sandy, or, more recently, Hurricane Ida—which dumped 3.15 inches an hour on Central Park. And it wasn’t built to handle the kind of extreme rainfall that is becoming routine: The city flooded last December, last April, and last July—an unusual seasonal span. “We now have in New York something much more like a tropical-rainfall pattern,” Rohit Aggarwala, New York City’s environmental-protection commissioner, said yesterday at The Atlantic Festival. “And it happens over and over again.”
It happened today. Less than 24 hours after Aggarwala’s statements, rain arrived in New York City—the kind that sends waterfalls through Brooklyn subway ceilings, dangerously floods basements, and floats carson the road like rubber ducks. Mayor Eric Adams said earlier today that the city could receive up to eight inches of rain today; parts of Brooklyn saw a month’s worth of rain in just three hours. New York State Governor Kathy Hochul has declared a state of emergency, and New York City residents received emergency alerts cautioning them to avoid travel (unless, ominously, they were evacuating), seek high ground, and avoid driving.
“That’s not a pattern New York City is accustomed to,” Aggarwala told the audience. “That’s a pattern that Miami might be accustomed to, maybe Singapore.”
Donald Trump could solve New York’s problem quickly and easily. He’d send the free water to California to dampen the forests and prevent wildfires. People would have enough to wash their hair. Rich people from Beverly Hills could shower and smell good again. “You’re going to be happy and I’m going to get it done fast,” Trump promised California Republicans the same day Brooklyn flooded.
Maybe he can get it done while he’s in New York for his civil trial.
Crisp fall air on the first Monday in October is perhaps a reminder to take a moment
Yes, the ethics-challenged U.S. Supreme Court begins its new term, God help us. Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern do some teeth-grinding over having to write the obligatory journalistic “curtain-raiser” as the new term opens. The question “is not if we should be worried, but exactly how worried we should be.” What will the Roberts court do next with “the most dangerous and radical ideas to emerge from the conservative legal movement” courtesy of Donald Trump and Leonard Leo?
Yes, despite all the oddsmakers’ bets on which elected Black woman California Gov. Gavin Newsom, would appoint to fill out the term of the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, he chose instead Emily’s List president Laphonza Butler. The Washington Post reports, “She will become the second Black woman after Harris to represent California in the Senate and the first Black lesbian to openly serve in Congress, a statement from Newsom’s office said. In picking Butler, Newsom kept his 2021 promise to appoint a Black woman to the chamber.” Newsom had suggested his appointee would serve an interim role so as not to shake up the primary field of Democrats already vying for the seat. At this late date, it would be difficult for Butler to launch and staff a Senate campaign even with her Emily’s List fundraising base.
Yes, Donald Trump’s civil trial begins today in New York City. The very unstable former and would-be president faces the judge who has already given his family business the corporate death penalty. He faces prosecution by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, who accuses Trump, “his adult sons and their family business of inflating the value of Mr. Trump’s assets to secure favorable loan terms from banks.”
And yes, with Halloween still weeks away, MAGA maniacs inside the House still mean to slash the throats of key government programs, Ukraine funding, and Kevin McCarthy’s speakership.
But take a breath. There remain islands of sanity even among Republicans, former Rep. Bob Inglis of South Carolina reminds us in the New York Times.
Inglis, who lost his Fourth District seat to T-party Trey Gowdy in the 2010 GOP primary, has had plenty of time to reflect on his years in Congress. He has regrets. Both for the small-mindedness of positions he took in office and for what has become of the Republican Party to which he still belongs. He still holds many conservative positions, but with a softer edge now. MAGA extremists who demonize their opponents and threaten to blow up the government if they don’t get their way? Inglis sees them making the same mistakes he made.
When politicians grow up, they search their careers for substantive accomplishments. The temporary affections of the political crowd, the petty disagreements, the party rivalries are lost in a quest for greater significance. “Am I/was I about something big enough to be about?” the grown-up politician wonders. “Am I/was I about leading or following — the wandering crowd, the party leader presenting a clear danger to the Republic, the aging colleague needing to leave the stage?” “Was I an agent of chaos in a house divided, or did I work to bring America together, healing rifts and bridging divides?”
Former members like me need to be careful not to write revisionist histories. Our times involved plenty of small-mindedness. In the retelling, we often sanitize our stories, removing some of the smallness. Even the irksomeness of the other side is omitted. The vitriol subsides. Former members of Congress even speak of the “others” with newfound fondness.
When I was in Congress, I butted heads with Representative Pat Schroeder, a Democrat from Colorado who served from 1973 to 1997. She was pro-choice; I’m pro-life. She supported nearly every progressive cause; I opposed nearly every progressive cause. The record of our exchanges in the Judiciary Committee will show real acrimony, but when I read the news of her passing in March, I was truly saddened. Someone with whom I had served was no more. A milepost was gone. I had seen Ms. Schroeder several years after we had both left Congress. We were in an elevator at the Capitol. The struggle was gone. The harsh, competitive looks had vanished. I might have even joked with her about using a line I’d heard her say before: “Don’t tell my mother I’m a member of Congress; she thinks I’m a prostitute!” I wish I had asked her if we could be friends.
Conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who is a close ally of Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, hosted a social media debate in which one participant argued that conservatives should cooperate with a hypothetical white nationalist dictator “in order to destroy the power of the left”.
Rufo, a Manhattan Institute fellow who has been a hugely influential figure in DeSantis’ culture war policies in Florida, did not disagree with the sentiments. Instead he commended speakers for their “thoughtful points” and presenting the discussion as a model for engagement with “the dissident right”.
Rufo is a high-profile conservative activist who in books, columns, media appearances and a Substack newsletter has encouraged conservatives to oppose “wokeness”. He has been credited with mobilizing conservatives against communities of color, first with a distorted version of critical race theory; then by linking LGBTQ-inclusive education practices to pedophilic “grooming”.
Rufo has exercised a particular influence on DeSantis. Rufo reportedly consulted on the drafting of DeSantis’s “Stop Woke Act”, which bans schools and workplaces from teaching that anyone is inherently privileged due to race or sex, and was invited by DeSantis to witness the bill’s signing in April 2022.
Later, DeSantis appointed Rufo to the board of trustees of Florida’s New College in January. New College was a traditionally liberal college, but under Rufo is now transforming into a more conservative institution – a move that many say heralds DeSantis’ view of the future of academia in Florida and the US.
Rufo hosted the debate on X, the social media network formerly known as Twitter.
Participating in the debate was Charles Haywood, a former shampoo magnate who the Guardian previously reported is a would-be “warlord” who founded a secretive, men-only fraternal society, the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR).
The debate concerned Haywood’s promotion of a strategy he calls “no enemies to the right”, which urges people on the right to avoid any public criticism of others in their camp, including extremists.
Early in the Rufo-hosted discussion last Tuesday, Haywood raised the hypothetical possibility early in the discussion: “Let’s say a real white nationalist arose who had real political power … and therefore [could] be of assistance against the left.”
Responding to the hypothetical, Haywood said: “I think that the answer is that you should cooperate with that person in order to destroy the power of the left.”
Later in the broadcast, Haywood responded to concerns about rightwing authoritarianism by saying: “When we’re talking about people like Franco or Pinochet or even Salazar … they did kill people. They killed people justly, they killed people unjustly, and that’s just a historical fact.”
“But,” Haywood added, “they saved a lot more people than they killed.”
Augusto Pinochet was military dictator of Chile from 1971 to 1990, and after coming to power in a coup he tortured, exiled or killed tens of thousands of his regime’s opponents.
Francisco Franco was dictator of Spain from 1936 until his death in 1975, and his regime killed 100,000 to 200,000 people during the so-called “white terror”. António de Oliveira Salazar was the head of Portugal’s authoritarian, one-party state from 1932 until 1968; his regime repressed domestic opposition and oversaw brutal colonial policies in Africa that permitted forced labor and other abuses.
In closing the discussion, Rufo credited speakers with raising “some provocative points on all sides, some thoughtful points on all sides”, and told listeners: “I think there is a room for engaging the dissident right and the establishment right. I think we need to have a bridge between the two and engage in thoughtful dialogue.”
I’ve written a bunch about Rufo in the past. He’s a young arriviste on the MAGA right who has turned the “anti-woke” culture war into his personal brand. DeSantis especially loves him but he’s popular all over the right wing. His influence may wane a bit now that DeSantis’ campaign,based almost entirely on his ideas, has floundered so badly but he’ll be around a while. And you can see by this article where he’s headed. Funny how that always seems to be the case, isn’t it?
I’m sure you’res sick of seeing all these demented Trump clips but I wanted to post this just so that we could have it on record for when the right wingers try to claim Joe Biden is senile. Please…
Montage of 33 clips of the stupidest, most vile, insane, weirdest, addled dementia-ridden, psychotic statements made by Trump over the past two weeks. pic.twitter.com/iCbt5PtzBX
Sarah Huckasanders honors her mentor with some idiotic corruption
Photo of the $19,029.25 lectern purchased by the Sanders administration in June. The expense was reimbursed by the Republican Party of Arkansas, according to records. #arpx#Arkansas#ARNewspic.twitter.com/mERP6QvHHP
Here’s some good-old Arkansas gothic politics. I hadn’t allowed myself to hope that Sarah might find herself in the middle of one of these but it looks like she’s going to:
An anonymous former state employee came forward Friday claiming to have evidence that the Arkansas governor’s office doctored documents and unlawfully withheld financial records that should have been made public under the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA.
Attorney Tom Mars, who is representing the whistleblower, sent a letter today to Sen. Jimmy Hickey (R-Texarkana) offering to have his client speak to auditors. Hickey yesterday requested that Legislative Audit, a nonpartisan agency independent from the executive branch, look into what’s come to be known as “podiumgate.”
Sanders recently pushed the state legislature to write a new exemption into the Arkansas FOIA in an attempt to prevent Matt Campbell, the Little Rock lawyer behind the Blue Hog Report blog, from accessing those records. Campbell’s FOIA requests uncovered the lectern purchase to begin with.
In the letter, Mars said his client can prove that someone in Sanders’ office altered documents that Campbell had requested through the Arkansas FOIA and that Sanders’ office pressured another government agency to withhold from the public documents that should have been made available.
His client is willing to give a statement to legislative auditors under oath, Mars said, and can provide documents for them to review.
“These documents will substantiate my client’s firsthand knowledge of how certain persons in the Governor’s Office, including the Governor’s Communications Director, interfered with the production of non-exempt FOIA documents TSS intended to produce to attorney Matt Campbell, to wit:
a) by altering a non-exempt document to give it a different meaning and directing TSS not to produce the unaltered original document to Mr. Campbell;
b) by withholding other non-exempt documents, including documents reflecting some of the Governor’s Amazon purchases;
c) by removing portions of non-exempt e-mail threads; and
d) by directing the TSS lawyer who was responsible for responding to the FOIA requests to deliver a “flash drive” to the Governor’s Office with TSS’s proposed responses and thereafter returning the sanitized version to TSS on a “flash drive” – all for the purpose of concealing that the Governor’s Office had altered an invoice from Beckett Events LLC and deliberately omitted from the production of responsive documents a number of documents that were not even arguably exempt from the FOIA or subject to any legal privilege.”
Mars, a former Arkansas State Police director under Sanders’ father, former Gov. Mike Huckabee, has become a loud critic of the Sanders administration. A bombastic social media presence, he’s also a high-profile attorney for college sports figures. He’s previously represented Arkansas parents who sued over the state’s prohibition on mask requirements in public schools.
Cortney Kennedy, chief counsel for the governor’s office, was sent a copy of Mars’ letter. Sanders spokeswoman Alexa Henning has not yet responded to an email seeking comment. Henning is the “Governor’s Communications Director” referenced in Mars’ letter.
Upon reading Mars’ letter about the anonymous whistleblower, Campbell said it “matches exactly what I have seen and what I’ve expected was happening from the start.”
Campbell’s quest to uncover documents about government spending, and his subsequent lawsuit when Arkansas State Police attorneys denied him access to those documents, drove the governor and her supporters to seek a rollback of Arkansas’s longstanding government transparency law earlier this month.
Meanwhile, Campbell said he plans to refile a lawsuit today against the state police. Campbell dropped his suit the night before a Sept. 14 court hearing after testing positive for covid.
Hickey also wants an audit on records and information newly removed from public purview thanks to a change in the FOIA. Earlier this month, lawmakers voted to shield the governor’s travel- and security-related receipts and records in perpetuity. The new exemption to the FOIA is retroactive to June 2022, six months before Sanders took office.
The governor’s retroactive power to withhold what’s always been public information, combined with the controversial lectern purchase, bear looking into, Hickey said yesterday.
While the invoice was paid in June, the lectern didn’t arrive for months.
Fanning the flames was news that Beckett and her business partner, Hannah Stone, helped organize the Jan. 6 rally at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., which was basically the pep rally for a rebellious rightwing horde to mob the U.S. Capitol.
Beckett’s and Stone’s presence in Paris in June, at the same time Sanders was there, ostensibly on state business, sparked speculation that the $19,000 paid not for a lectern, but for a European trip. (With the governor’s travel records now retroactively off the table for journalists and the public to review, it’s hard to know.)
Earlier this week, Sanders’ office allowed the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette to take pictures of the mysterious lectern, which turned out to be pretty basic. You can get the same thing online for a few thousand dollars, so the huge price tag Beckett Events LLC charged the state of Arkansas remains a mystery.
Yeah, I don’t think there’s a mystery do you?
This is MAGA ethos meeting the Arkansas political culture which, as those of us who followed the Clinton scandals are aware, is vicious and rancid to the core. Lol!
We’ve often noted that the GOP (and in some respects out culture in general) is suffering from a massive case of arrested development:
Former President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign early Sunday left a birdcage and bird food in front of GOP presidential hopeful Nikki Haley’s hotel room door in Des Moines in reference to his new nickname for her, “Birdbrain,” per a photo shared with The Messenger.
The Trump campaign shared the photo early Sunday with The Messenger and later posted the picture on Twitter.
Trump debuted the moniker prior to Wednesday’s debate on his social media platform Truth Social. It’s unclear why he came up with that nickname in particular.
“MAGA, or I, will never go for Birdbrain Nikki Haley,” Trump wrote in the post. “Birdbrain doesn’t have the TALENT or TEMPERAMENT to do the job. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
“Strength and stamina” as he said about Hillary Clinton and now “talent and temperament” he’s always got a reason why a woman can’t be president doesn’t he?
Haley says it’s pathetic and she’s right. But then again, maybe she could have seen what a demented narcissist Trump was when she was working with him and extolling him as a great president. Did she believe that? If so, she has no judgement and is unqualified to be president. If she knew what he was and she praised him anyway then she is cynical and cowardly. Either way, Haley has already demonstrated that she had no character. Haven’t we had enough of that from GOP presidents?
Rep. Matt Gaetz is planning to attempt to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy from the role this week after the House leader worked with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown on Saturday.
Speaking with CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union,” the Florida Republican said he intends to file a motion to vacate this week, which would force a vote on whether McCarthy will keep his job.
“Speaker McCarthy made an agreement with House conservatives in January and since then he’s been in brazen, repeated material breach of that agreement,” Gaetz said Sunday. “This agreement that he made with Democrats to really blow past a lot of the spending guardrails we set up is a last straw.”
e added, “I do intend to file a motion to vacate against Speaker McCarthy this week. I think we need to rip off the Band-Aid. I think we need to move on with new leadership that will be trustworthy.”
That promise from Gaetz is an escalation in the monthslong standoff between McCarthy and the right flank of his conference, which forced him to go through 15 rounds of votes in January to finally win the speaker’s gavel. As part of winning the top job in the House, McCarthy made a deal that would allow just one member to advance a motion to vacate. That deal has kept the California Republican walking a tight rope with his conference throughout the year as he tried to appease the right-wing of his caucus while also attempting to do the basic work of governing.
McCarthy’s response to Gaetz later on Sunday was straightforward, telling the Floridian to “bring it on.”
“That’s nothing new,” McCarthy said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
“Yes, I’ll survive. You know, this is personal with Matt. Matt voted against the most conservative ability to protect our border, secure our border. He’s more interested in securing TV interviews than doing something.”
90 Republicans voted against that continuing resolution yesterday. Assuming Democrats don’t come to McCarthy’s rescue, Gaetz only has to get 4 of them to vote to oust McCarthy.
I heard Rep. Debbie Dingel. D-Mi., say on TV yesterday that she was inclined to help McCarthy keep his seat if this happens. Oy. If they do it, they’d better extract some major concessions. MAJOR concessions.
The lights are still on. Federal Trade Commission headquarters. Photo by Postdlf (2005) via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
It’s not clear if Matt Stoller’s brand has been tainted by his brief late-night association with Russell Brand a decade ago. Stoller has nonetheless plunged ahead with his blog, BIG, where he covers “the politics of monopoly power.”
Stoller reports — will wonders never cease? — that federal enforcement actions against monopolies is on the upswing:
Before the Biden administration, antitrust was mostly dead. It had picked up a bit under Trump, but mostly no one thought much about this area of law. And the reason was pretty simple. Nothing was happening. The FTC was using its authority to go after powerless actors, such as Uber drivers, church organists, bull semen traders, and ice skating teachers.
The changeover has been absolutely stark, and it’s accelerating. Many of my sources in the competition policy world are giving me the same message, which is that this is the most extraordinary month they have ever seen in antitrust.
There are the big fights, the cases against Google and Amazon, the suits against private equity and meat price-fixing. There is also smaller stuff, the behind-the-scenes institutional changes, like funding levels for antitrust enforcers and newly populist conservative nominees for regulatory agencies that could make a more assertive competition agenda part of a new bipartisan consensus. The rearguard opposition to change is immensely powerful, but the forces of the status quo are actually losing.
What’s also fascinating is that public interest and attention is going up, and that it matters. Practitioners in antitrust used to have to explain what they do, now they are being pestered with questions by friends and family. We’re also getting hints, ever-so-slight ones, that judges themselves are starting to think about corporate power.
If you’ve been gasping for a breath of fresh air in this political climate, take a big gulp of it (and some sanitizing sunshine) here:
September 12: The $2 trillion Google antitrust trial begins. This is the first major monopolization case to hit the courts in 25 years, since Microsoft in 1998. Google’s 90% market share in search has allowed it to control not only the gateway to the internet, but also the future of technological deployment, including generative AI. The key question at trial, which I laid out back in August, is as follows. Why does Google have this monopoly? Google argues it’s because it’s a great search engine, the government argues it’s because Google pays everyone who preloads search to block rivals from access to the market.
We set up a site, Big Tech on Trial, and hired reporter Yosef Weitzman to write a daily recap from the courtroom. The trial has generally gone well for the government, with good evidence that Google thwarted competition from small firms (Branch Technologies) and big ones (Microsoft and Apple), using payoffs. Google has scored some wins as well, so it’s hard to know the outcome. Interestingly, the judge in the case, Amit Mehta, started off by deferring to Google’s demands for secrecy. But we’ve been advocating for more openness, and our pressure worked.
On Friday, Judge Mehta actually demanded lawyers do more questioning in open court, and not closed session. He’s also going to be unsealing testimony, and he told both parties that “he wants Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s testimony next Monday to be as open as possible.” It’s rare to have a judge change his mind, but that seems to be happening. A bit.
Here are a couple more items from just September:
September 20: Attorney General Merrick Garland advocates against a $50 million cut to the Antitrust Division’s budget. This was a seemingly tiny but very significant moment in a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee this week. Republican Congressman Ken Buck asked Attorney General Merrick Garland about funding for the Antitrust Division. There has been an attempt to cut $50 million from the Division, which is an 18% cut. This cut is largely coming from Senate Democratic staff who are annoyed that antitrust enforcers are getting a boost. Garland explicitly said he wants this money to go to the Antitrust Division, which will make it much harder to deny the funding.
This funding matters. The Antitrust Division is smaller than it was in the 1970s, and without the extra funding, it will have to cut the amount of investigations and cases it can bring. It is these kinds of institutional levers, more money for agencies, and GOP commissioners who actually want to tackle monopolization, that can meet the increasing anger coming from the public.
September 21: FTC goes after Amazon executives personally for deception of customers involving canceling one’s Prime subscription, which internally Amazon officials returned to as the Iliad, referencing the Greek poem about the lengthy Trojan war. Charging individual executives is making waves among corporate lawyers, who are very angry that the FTC is now targeting individuals at large powerful firms, instead of its historical track record of targeting the powerless
Having recently read David Dayen’s chilling, pre-insurrection “Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power” (2020), it’s nice to see some pushback against the giants whose faith in competition is as hollow as our oligarchs’ support for our democratic republic.
“Sometimes, you have to write when you’re angry,” Brian Klaas begins. Works for me.
Klaas also hates writing about Donald Trump. The orange train wreck gets too much free press as is. But sometimes you just gotta. The banality of evil in the Trump age has become the banality of crazy.
A Democratic congressman (Jamal Bowman) does something stupid in a rush to get from the Cannon Office Building to a snap vote in the House chambers and … what you’d expect to happen happens:
It’s telling that Republicans aren’t even slightly concerned about the absurdity of calling for Bowman’s expulsion while harboring enablers of Trump’s alleged criminality in their ranks. They know they’re pointing the camera away from themselves and at Dems. That’s the ball game. https://t.co/DctUVOzadF
Meanwhile, the leading Republican candidate for the presidency in 2024 is a man was “found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection aimed at overturning a democratic election, who has committed mass fraud for personal enrichment, who is facing 91 separate counts of felony criminal charges against him, and who has overtly discussed his authoritarian strategies for governing if he returns to power.”
On top of that, the accused felon appears to be losing marbles he can’t afford to lose. Klaas is upset that the press still dances around saying so while issuing endless takes about why the incumbent president just three years older should drop out for being too old.
I posted on how insane the situation is on Saturday. Klaas covers much of the same Trump babbling, threats, and cruelty.
“The United States is not just careening toward a significant risk of political violence around the 2024 presidential election. It’s also mostly oblivious to where it’s headed,” he wrote in The Atlantic.
Montage of 33 clips of the stupidest, most vile, insane, weirdest, addled dementia-ridden, psychotic statements made by Trump over the past two weeks. pic.twitter.com/iCbt5PtzBX
What is going on? How is it possible that the leading candidate to become president of the United States can float the prospect of executing a general and the media response is…crickets?
How is it possible that it’s not front page news when a man who soon may return to power calls for law enforcement to kill people for minor crimes? And why do so few people question Trump’s mental acuity rather than Biden’s, when Trump proposes delusional, unhinged plans for forest management and warns his supporters that Biden is going to lead us into World War II (which would require a time machine), or wrongly claims that he defeated Barack Obama in 2016.
On the political left, there has long been a steady drumbeat of admonishment on social media for those who highlight Trump’s awful rhetoric. Whenever I tweet about Trump’s dangerous language, there’s always the predictable refrain from someone who replies: “Don’t amplify him! You’re just spreading his message.”
The press, to an astonishing extent, has followed that admonishment. I looked at the New York Times for mention of Trump calling to execute shoplifters, or water the forests, or how he thinks an 82 year-old man getting his skull smashed in his own home by a lunatic with a hammer is hilarious. Nothing. I couldn’t find it.
The “Don’t Amplify Him” argument is not working. Trump will continue to radicalize supporters as he campaigns. How many more Cesar A. Sayocs are out there building pipe bombs or planning worse?
Those of us who follow politics closely know how nuts this situation is. But how many Americans who show up to vote for president once every four years do, Klaas asks. How many know Trump called for the execution of a four-star general? “Five percent? Less?”
The “Banality of Crazy”
There’s a puzzle at the heart of Trump news and it’s this: why doesn’t the press go FULL BLOCK CAPITALS when a leading presidential candidate, yet again, incites violence?
If Joe Biden called to execute shoplifters, do you think there’d be a big headline in the New York Times, or do you think you’d have to scroll well past the articles on pumpkin spice lattes and DogTV to find out about it?
We all know the answer.
When Joe Biden didn’t trip but nearly tripped last week, it was headline news. How absurd is that? A candidate who didn’t quite fall over is a bigger news story than a candidate calling to execute shoplifters? (For the record, roughly ten percent of the US population shoplifts, so millions would face potential execution under Trump’s proposal).
This is what I call the Banality of Crazy—and it’s warping the way that Americans think about politics in the Trump and post-Trump era.
“American journalists have become golden retrievers watching a tennis-ball launcher. Every time they start to chase one ball, a fresh one immediately explodes into view, prompting a new chase,” Klaas wrote in The Atlantic.
By breathlessly covering every minor gaffe by Joe Biden while ignoring unhinged incitements to violence by Trump, most voters never see the sides of Trump that should most worry them. This creates plausible deniability for voters, where they can say “He doesn’t seem too bad — both candidates are flawed, but I’m going with Trump.”
My view is this: if someone wants to vote for a cruel sociopathic authoritarian, they should do so without being able to pretend they don’t know what they’re supporting. There should be a social stigma for voting for Trump, because what he stands for is so far outside the bounds of acceptable democratic politics anywhere else in the world. But that can’t work unless everyone is aware of Trump’s increasingly violent, deranged insanity.
Instead, the press has succumbed to the numbing effect of the Banality of Crazy, once reporting on every single Trump tweet in early 2017 because it was unusual, but now ignoring even the most dangerous policy proposals by an authoritarian who is on the cusp of once again becoming the most powerful man in the world—precisely because it happens, like clockwork, almost every day.
Klaas provides a taxonomy of voters who support Trump with “decreasing levels of devotion,” basically:
The MAGA Mob
Vote Red Until I’m Dead
Anti-Bidens
Fence Sitters
This four-part breakdown also helps us understand why the Don’t Amplify Him or the Banality of Crazy approaches haven’t worked. Much of what Trump says and does is objectionable to the vast majority of Americans who are decent, compassionate people. But right now, it’s the MAGA Mob and the Vote Red Until I’m Dead folks who are getting a constant saline drip of Trumpism into their veins. It’s not changing their minds; it’s just solidifying their devotion.
Meanwhile, the persuadable voters are being given the chance to forget the horrible stuff Trump did that they once knew about, all while reading blaring headlines about how Biden is old. (Biden is three years older than Trump — but, and I can’t believe I need to say this, elevated age is not remotely the same as being an authoritarian fraudster, found liable for rape, who stole the government’s nuclear secrets and sought to overturn an election to stay in power by inciting a violent attack on the US Capitol).
The Trump trials may help erode his support, but their non-crazy structure and Trump avoiding tesifying may not highlight how insane this situation is. Or else his acceding to trial in a Fulton County courtroom is because he thinks he can manipulate live TV coverage to titilate and further enrage a follower or three to perpetrate violence in his name. We know that was his plan on Jan. 6. He’d do it again.
Klaas insists:
The press has an obligation to convey magnitude, not just novelty. Newspapers and TV channels have limited time and space to discuss political events. In a political world in which an authoritarian contender for the presidency is floating the idea of shoplifting executions and killing generals, maybe, just maybe it’s not worth the space or time to discuss a brief stumble or a dog bite?
Don’t hold your breath.
Update: Making Klaas’s point (and mine) about the press failing to expose voters to “the sides of Trump that should most worry them.” Behold this pair who don’t know who their governor is/was.
Two women at Trump rally in Iowa say they recently moved there from California. They were asked about the possibility of Gavin Newsom running for president. Both said they had never heard of Gavin Newsom so they can’t say. pic.twitter.com/oGMRTpPRiS
“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” – Johnny Rotten
In my 2015 review of Danny Tedesco’s documentary The Wrecking Crew, I wrote:
“The Wrecking Crew” was a moniker given to an aggregation of crack L.A. session players who in essence created the distinctive pop “sound” that defined classic Top 40 from the late 50s through the mid-70s. With several notable exceptions (Glen Campbell, Leon Russell and Mac “Dr. John” Rebennack) their names remain obscure to the general public, even if the music they helped forge is forever burned into our collective neurons. […]
Tedesco traces origins of the Wrecking Crew, from participation in co-creating the legendary “Wall of Sound” of the early 60s (lorded over by mercurial pop savant Phil Spector) to collaborations with seemingly any other popular artist of the era you could name (The Beach Boys, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, The Righteous Brothers, Henry Mancini, Ike & Tina Turner, The Monkees, The Association, Nancy Sinatra, The Fifth Dimension, The Byrds, Sonny & Cher, Petula Clark, The Mamas and the Papas, etc.). […]
Tedesco assembled a group of surviving members to swap anecdotes (and as you can imagine, they have got some great stories to tell). […]
One of my favorite reminiscences concerned the earliest recording sessions for The Monkees. An apparently uninformed Peter Tork showed up in the studio, guitar in hand-and was greeted by a roomful of bemused session players, giving him a “WTF are YOU doing here?!” look before he slunk away in embarrassment.
That said, The Monkees were a “manufactured” pop act from the get-go; it was certainly no big secret that all four members were actors, hired to portray a fictional band in a TV series (fans couldn’t exactly claim that they were duped). And to their credit, band members did (eventually) write a few of their own songs, did all their own singing, and for live performances they played their own instruments as well.
Not surprisingly, the success of The Monkees spawned a number of TV musical sitcoms built around fictional bands, like The Archie Show (animated), Josie and the Pussycats (animated), and The PartridgeFamily. The Archies “band” scored the number one Billboard hit of 1969 with “Sugar Sugar”, selling 6 million copies (Ron Dante and Toni Wine were the studio vocalists). The Partridge Family (with vocals by actors Shirley Jones and David Cassidy, backed by members of The Wrecking Crew on the studio recordings) released 5 albums, even scoring a #1 hit in 1970 with “I Think I Love You”.
So it would appear that the majority of music consumers didn’t feel compelled to investigate “who” wrote, sang, played on, or (for that matter) produced the record; they liked something they heard on the radio, bought a copy, and didn’t give it much more thought.
Of course, there have always been music snobs:
“I just wanna hear the music…that’s all.”
Keep in mind, this was all pre-MTV. To be sure, music acts had been performing on variety shows since television’s inception (sometimes live, sometimes lip-syncing). Even pre-dating television, there were the “soundies” – short films containing single performances (filmed in 35mm and printed in 16mm for easier distribution to clubs, bars, eateries and other businesses outfitted with “movie jukeboxes”).
But once MTV signed on in 1981, there was a paradigm shift in record company marketing strategies. To MTV execs, the music videos were “content”, but to the record company execs, the videos were “free ads” to push product sales. As for viewers, it became more about the artist’s image and/or the clip’s entertainment value; one could argue that the music was secondary (I could name a lot of MTV “hits” from the 80s wherein, had I heard the song before seeing the video play on a continuous loop, I might have thought “meh”).
Hence, the artists who most quickly ascended to the top of the music video heap tended to be those who knew how to “make love to the camera”, (as opposed to the ability to hit a high ‘C’ or display mastery of an instrument). As a result, ripped physiques, fashion and choreography ruled the day…stagecraft over song craft. But hey…as long as it moved units and kept shareholders happy-[*chef’s kiss*]
Thus it was, in this milieu, that the curious case of Milli Vanilli unfolded…as recounted in Luke Korem’s documentary, simply entitled Milli Vanilli (streaming on Paramount+ October 24th).
If any act was tailor-made for the MTV fast track in the late 80s, it was Milli Vanilli. Robert Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan (who hailed from Munich, Germany) were impossibly good-looking dancers and singers* (*I’ll get to that in a moment) with undeniably charismatic stage presence. The duo seemingly zoomed in out of nowhere in 1989 with a debut album (Girl You Know It’s True) that went platinum 6 times and sold over 30 million singles. Heavy MTV rotation of their songs certainly contributed to their meteoric rise.
But alas, what the lords of MTV giveth…in July 1989, Milli Vanilli was performing at a Connecticut theme park, when something went horribly awry. In the midst of performing “Girl You Know It’s True”, a disconcerting hard drive glitch left no doubt in the minds of concert attendees and viewers watching the live MTV broadcast that Pilatus and Moryan were lip-syncing. Embarrassed and flustered, Pilatus fled the stage in a panic, leaving Moryan and the band to vamp until he was coaxed back by emcee “Downtown” Julie Brown.
Weirdly, while the incident undoubtedly raised questions regarding the act’s artistic integrity, the show resumed and the crowd stuck with them, cheering and having a grand old time. And the duo still snagged a Grammy in 1990 for “Best New Artist”. Go figure.
Although public sentiment gradually turned against them (they became the butt of jokes, one of the vocalists on the records exposed them, and at one point the duo offered to give back their Grammys to quell the backlash), it wasn’t until late 1990 that the “mastermind” behind the act, manager/producer Frank Farian publicly admitted the con-and then promptly fired Pilatus and Moryan. While he appears in archival clips, Farian-who comes off as a cross between Phil Spector and Colonel Tom Parker-declined to appear in the documentary.
One of the declared aims of the film is to “pull back the curtain on the story that we thought we knew, but didn’t”. I’m not sure Korem quite achieves that goal (after all, this is an oft-told tale). The film works best in its moments of emotional resonance, largely provided by Morvan, particularly when he speaks of his challenging friendship with Pilatus (who sadly died in 1998 of a suspected accidental prescription drug and alcohol overdose at age 32).
Were they victims of Farian’s Svengali-like sway, easily preyed upon and exploited…or were they willing participants in a con, seduced by the trappings of fame and success? Also worth contemplation-as someone in the film offers, “nobody involved in this committed a crime”.
Which brings us to the elephant in the room (briefly touched on in the film)-a story as old as rock ‘n’ roll-the exploitation of artists of color. I once had the privilege of interviewing the great Bo Diddley. He spoke at length about how white artists brazenly co-opted the Black artists’ innovations in the 1950s. I’ll never forget how he framed it-he said “Elvis and those other guys took everything I did, threw it on the rock ‘n’ roll truck and drove it through town.” He also pointed out that he performed his signature tune “Bo Diddley” on The Ed Sullivan Show several months before Elvis’s first appearance on same. But historically, which appearance gets lauded as seminal?
While the Milli Vanilli story isn’t exactly that same scenario-you could say it’s “Elvis in reverse”. Producer Sam Phillips famously (or infamously) once said, “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars!” Then one day, Elvis Presley walked into his Memphis studio (and the rest is history-although it was Colonel Parker who made the lettuce). At any rate, Farian saw two charismatic black performers (and dollar signs), and the rest is…well, you be the judge.
One of the most fascinating revelations in the film is that on the original 1989 European pressing of Milli Vanilli’s debut album (titled All or Nothing), Pilatus and Moryan’s names do not appear in the musician credits; whereas they are (falsely) credited in the subsequent U.S. release (re-titled Girl You Know It’s True). As I pointed out earlier, there are those who bother to read all the liner notes…and there are those who just want to hear the music. Caveat emptor.
