Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

I thought this from Politico playbook was actually pretty interesting:

 “The House has really abandoned the McCarthy CR strategy today and has embraced the MATT GAETZ strategy of single subject spending bills.”

That was Gaetz last night on a podcast, explaining what transpired in the House on Thursday. And he was not wrong.

The Florida Republican, who has been pilloried by Speaker KEVIN McCARTHY and his allies for the last two weeks, wakes up this morning as the architect of the House GOP’s newest legislative strategy.

Here’s how it happened.

Yesterday, five House Republicans voted down the rule to advance the GOP’s Pentagon spending bill — the third rule defeat McCarthy has suffered this year.

Voting down a rule used to be a rare event (the last speaker to lose a rules vote was DENNIS HASTERT). But McCarthy believed he had the votes yesterday because Reps. RALPH NORMAN (R-S.C.) and KEN BUCK (R-Colo.), who both opposed the same rule on Tuesday, agreed to support the rule on Thursday.

But what McCarthy and his whip team missed was that Reps. ELI CRANE (R-Ariz.) and MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE (R-Ga.), who voted for the rule on Tuesday, opposed the rule on Thursday.

Within two hours of this humiliating defeat, at the nadir of McCarthy’s awful week, a surprising visitor showed up at his office: Gaetz. He had a plan.

In another closed-door meeting, Gaetz huddled with a larger group of Republicans, including some moderates, and pitched them on the same idea.

Gaetz had spent the week proving to McCarthy that the speaker could not pass a continuing resolution to keep the government temporarily open, no matter how much the speaker refashioned it to appease the hard right. “#NOCR” has become a rallying cry for Gaetz and his crew that has hardened as a government shutdown approaches.

Making things worse for McCarthy was the fact that the never-CR Republicans and the no-on-the-rule Republicans are actually slightly different groups (though the former has more members). In fact, Gaetz voted for the rule for the Defense bill on both Tuesday and Thursday.

But the rule votes increased McCarthy’s desperation and strengthened his chief antagonist. “This opportunity has come to pass only because a handful of us had the stones to take down the defense approps rule today,” Rep. DAN BISHOP (R-N.C.) said last night.

Gaetz told his Republican colleagues that McCarthy should bring single subject appropriations bills to the floor one at a time. He dictated his list of the first four: Defense, Homeland Security, State-Foreign Operations, and the Agriculture-FDA bill.

A few hours later, the Rules Committee put out notice that it would be taking up four bills today at 1 p.m.: Defense, Homeland Security, State-Foreign Operations, and the Agriculture-FDA bill.

WHAT GAETZ FEARS: The premise of the Gaetz plan is to kill what he calls governing by CR. It assumes a government shutdown is inevitable. And instead of using a hard-right CR as the House’s opening move in negotiations with the Senate, the (lengthy) floor debates on the House GOP-crafted appropriations bills will serve that purpose.

Gaetz has a surprising partner in this plan: Rep. MARC MOLINARO, a New York moderate who is one of the 18 House Republicans representing a district carried by JOE BIDEN. Molinaro has been involved in various attempts to solve the shutdown crisis this week, including the bipartisan effort to use a discharge petition to force a vote on a CR. “It is absolutely an option,” he told NBC News yesterday even as he worked with Gaetz on the plan to kill the CR.

Now that his strategy has prevailed, Gaetz said last night that he sees one serious obstacle to keeping it on course and preventing a return to the CR.

“The threat is that five liberal or moderate Republicans say, ‘We don’t want to do the single subject bills,’” he said on the podcast last night. “So we’re just going to go sign what’s called a discharge petition and then just move that thing like shit through a goose.”

Since the Gaetz strategy assumes a shutdown, we suspect that Gaetz is right that there will be a backlash against this plan from plenty of House Republicans as the shutdown approaches and that the discharge petition will start to look like an increasingly appealing option. After all, McCarthy himself noted this week that his rebels have already crossed two of the three major red lines for a member of the House majority: (1) voting against the speaker candidate approved by a majority of the conference and (2) voting against a rule. He suggested that it may be inevitable that the third red line will soon be crossed: supporting a discharge petition.

MEANWHILE IN THE SENATE: The Molinaro-Gaetz plan did not look like a winner to CHUCK SCHUMER last night. As it was being crafted, he moved to begin debate on a bill that can be used to send the House the Senate’s version of a CR, which opens the possibility that McCarthy will have a bill in hand to avert a shutdown before next Sunday.

If you squint hard, you might see a possible scenario in which McCarthy allows a week to be wasted on the Gaetz plan but then — bowing to pressure from the Senate, the public and his own conference — passes the Senate CR with a bipartisan vote at the last minute or after a short shutdown. Of course, McCarthy passing any CR is an outcome that Gaetz and others have promised would trigger a motion to vacate.

THE PLAYBOOK INTERVIEW: KATHERINE CLARK — Speaking of the motion to vacate, we wanted to get a better idea of what Democrats might do if McCarthy faces such a vote, so we sat down with Democratic Whip Katherine Clark in her office yesterday afternoon and pressed her on what it would take to help McCarthy.

On her list: ending the impeachment probe of Joe Biden. The full interview is available here on Deep Dive. What follows are some key excerpts.

— When pressed on what Dems might want in exchange for helping McCarthy: “We want him to live up to the agreement that he made [with President Biden]. We want to get disaster aid out. We want to continue our support for Ukraine. And we want them to end this sham of an impeachment inquiry.”

— On the Dems’ role at this stage in the government funding standoff: “We respected the deal that the president made with Speaker McCarthy. And they signed that deal. And 314 of us voted — in an almost equal bipartisan fashion — to support it. And the ink was barely dry when Kevin McCarthy was back trying to placate the extremists in his conference. And he is just telling the American people what matters is him retaining his speakership and they don’t. And so when people come and say, Are Democrats going to help?, it is beyond frustrating.”

— On McCarthy: “When you have a leader whose sole focus has become remaining that leader, then bad things emanate from that. And that’s the situation where we are. … Nothing about Kevin McCarthy’s behavior as speaker gives me confidence that he is going to turn into the leader that this moment is calling for.”

— On what Dems will do if a motion to vacate comes to the floor: “It is going to be totally dependent on the actions of Kevin McCarthy. … [I] he comes back to [the bipartisan spending deal], we can talk about it, because our goal is to prevent a shutdown. … We’ve been here waiting to have Kevin McCarthy ask for help in governing responsibly. I haven’t gotten that call.”

— On her nicknames, which include “the quiet assassin” and “the velvet assassin”: “There is some sort of stereotype that if you’re friendly, if you’re nice, like, do you really have political strength, political acumen? … I think sometimes, people are uneasy with both of those things residing in a woman.”

I don’t think anyone knows how this is going to come out but I’m fairly sure that Matt Gaetz has delusions of grandeur. They’re trying to appease him, sure. But they loathe him with every fiber of him being and it’s not just the leadership. Even Byron Donalds hates him.

I have to say though that I love the idea that the Dems are going to demand that they rescind the Biden Impeachment inquiry. Hahahaha. How do you like ’em now, MyKev?

Last time there was a government shutdown, 800,000 Americans were furloughed or worked without pay.

But enjoy your weekend. https://t.co/wAz1SpInV5

— President Biden (@POTUS) September 21, 2023

Couldn’t happen to a nicer fascist:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is losing his clout in Florida.

College boards, stacked with DeSantis appointees, are rejecting job candidates with ties to the governor.

The chair of the Republican Party of Florida urged executive committee members to attend all GOP candidate events — giving cover to party faithful who want to attend a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with former President Donald Trump.

And the board that oversees many of Florida’s affordable housing programs this month placed on leave its executive director, who was helped into the job by a top DeSantis adviser.

Interviews with nearly two dozen lobbyists, political consultants and lawmakers revealed that DeSantis’ struggles as a presidential candidate have already eroded his influence in Florida. There is a widespread expectation that his candidacy will end in failure. His standing at home may depend on how long he slogs forward in the presidential campaign — and how he will manage his exit from the race if he eventually drops out.

Now, it may be just a matter of time before Florida Republicans, once unflinchingly loyal, seek distance from DeSantis and his hardball governing methods.

“You don’t get the assumption they are measuring drapes anymore — they are waiting for him to drop out,” one long-time Republican consultant in Tallahassee said of those working for the governor. The consultant, like others quoted in this story, was granted anonymity to freely discuss the sensitive situation.

State Rep. Daniel Perez, the Miami Republican in line to become the next state House speaker, urged his GOP colleagues this week to move more carefully in the future, saying that “the problem with wielding the power of government like a hammer is that the people start looking like nails.”

Perez insisted his comment was not a “message to the governor,” but added, “That being said, the Legislature can’t work alone, the Legislature works with the governor.”

And no matter how he framed his comments, Perez’s words were being viewed as a rejoinder to DeSantis. One Tallahassee lobbyist said it was a signal that the “conveyor belt” Legislature that passed whatever DeSantis wanted is coming to an end.

[…]

Yet some state lawmakers are still bitter that DeSantis’ campaign asked Florida lawmakers to fundraise for him ahead of the GOP debate in August, according to a former Republican officeholder who spoke with them.

“Few members of the Legislature have a relationship with Ron DeSantis,” the person said. “He’s like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. You can’t get to him. All you hear about is the great and powerful Oz.”

I guess being a cold, insular weirdo doesn’t really get you a lot of support when the campaign falters. But I won’t count DeSantis out. He’s very Nixonian and I could see him making a comeback in 2028. But if he decides to do it I would look for him to make a major change in political philosophy (if you want to call the “war on woke” a philosophy.) If he expects any kind of success in the future he much realize that there’s only one Donald Trump — and he isn’t it. Considering how inflexible he seems to be I’m not sure he can make the leap.

Here’s the latest from the 2016 Great Whitebread Hope:

Stallions are biological. I want to be a stallion! https://t.co/eTHIpYuhA8 pic.twitter.com/heiqL1KCeO

— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) September 22, 2023

Yeah… that’s the caliber of people these Republicans keep throwing at the American people.

Kevin McCarthy’s constituents watch Fox News

LA Times columnist Mark Z. Barabak went to Kevin McCarthy’s district and did some man-on-the-street interviews asking The People what they thought about impeaching Joe Biden.

Julian Perea doesn’t hate Joe Biden. If anything, he feels bad for him, given his age and what Perea regards as the president’s severe mental and physical impairment.

“The guy is out of it,” Perea said.

Even so, the retired Fresno police officer is glad the House of Representatives — led by his congressman, Speaker Kevin McCarthy — has taken the first step toward impeaching the president.

“We as conservatives need to fight back,” said Perea, who served more than three decades in the Army and sprinkled his views with several references to war and warfare. “You have to keep the enemy off balance at all times.” . . .

“I think it’s a great idea,” said Claudia Warkentin of Biden’s impeachment.

The 43-year-old political independent lives in Clovis, a Fresno suburb, and works in the waste-management industry. She voted for Trump in 2020 and may back him again in 2024.

Biden has “made a mockery of our country,” Warkentin said, pointing to the frailties she sees in the 80-year-old president. Impeachment “should have happened a long time ago.” . . .

“The battle is larger than just Biden,” said Perea, the retired police officer. Impeaching the president is “fighting for our way of life.” . . .

“What used to be abnormal is normal. What used to be normal is abnormal,” Perea said. “It’s abnormal to be a Christian. It’s normal to be a transgender woman who wants to be the first one to have an abortion.” . . .

Edmund Pascua, 61, is a bus driver in Bakersfield, McCarthy’s hometown. He was on a break from jury duty, sheltering from the 96-degree heat beneath a palm tree outside the Kern County Superior Court.

Democrats went after Trump “from the get-go,” starting the moment he launched his presidential candidacy, Pascua said, and they haven’t let up since, tormenting him with lawsuits and multiple criminal indictments now that he’s out of office.

“It’s only fair [Biden] should be impeached,” Pascua said.

Bizarro World is a strange place where everyone thinks exactly the same.

He hates Trump but he just couldn’t quit him

Michelle Goldberg read the new Michael Wolfe book about the malevolent Rupert Murdoch which was perfectly timed to coincide with Rupert’s retirement:

In his tortured enabling of Trump, Murdoch seems the ultimate symbol of a feckless and craven conservative establishment, overmatched by the jingoist forces it encouraged and either capitulating to the ex-president or shuffling pitifully off the public stage. “Murdoch was as passionate in his Trump revulsion as any helpless liberal,” writes Wolff. The difference is that Murdoch’s helplessness was a choice.

Few people bear more responsibility for Trump than Murdoch. Fox News gave Trump a regular platform for his racist lies about Barack Obama’s birthplace. It immersed its audience in a febrile fantasy world in which all mainstream sources of information are suspect, a precondition for Trump’s rise. (Many people have described losing loved ones to Fox’s all-consuming alternative reality.) After Trump lost in 2020, Fox helped spread the defeated president’s falsehoods about a stolen election, which both contributed to the Jan. 6 insurrection and cost Fox nearly $800 million in its settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. (It was as part of that settlement, Wolff writes, that Fox fired its biggest star, the demagogic troll Tucker Carlson.)

In Wolff’s telling, Murdoch is a sort of hapless Frankenstein, abominating the monster he set loose on the world but unsure how to fight him. This waffling, however, is a product of the same venality that has always undergirded Murdoch’s old-fashioned right-wing politics. In his farewell letter, Murdoch, the Oxford-educated son of a wealthy Australian media executive, poses as a populist, decrying a media that’s in “cahoots” with elites, “peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth.” This is pure projection: Fox exists to peddle self-serving political narratives, deceiving its audience under the guise of respecting it. In “The Fall” — a book that isn’t for anyone who doesn’t want to encounter casual slurs — Murdoch says of the celebrity anchor Sean Hannity, “He’s retarded, like most Americans.” The last thing Murdoch wants to do is risk lower ratings by leveling with the audience he looks down on.

Yes, Trump was briefly banished from Fox’s airwaves, and Murdoch championed Trump’s putative rival, Ron DeSantis. But with DeSantis’s star falling, Fox has slavishly defended Trump each time he’s been indicted, while ignoring or minimizing news putting Trump in a bad light. As of May 4, the liberal group Media Matters found, Fox had devoted a mere 13 minutes of airtime to Trump’s civil trial on charges of sexually assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll. “It was clear how much antipathy Murdoch had personally built up toward Trump,” writes Wolff. “But at the same time there was no change in his expectations as the owner of the country’s ratings-leading news channel.”

Though “The Fall” is peppered with references to HBO’s “Succession,” Murdoch comes off as the anti-Logan Roy, desperate for the approval of his mostly liberal children, with the hateful Fox News standing between them. “He just wants his kids to love him,” Roger Ailes is quoted saying. “And they don’t.” In a chapter set in the winter of 2022, Wolff describes Murdoch fantasizing about giving up Fox, which his friends urge him to do. They emphasize “how much better his relationship with his children would be without the curse of Fox News.”

But breaking that curse would have meant turning Fox over to his son James, who feels the stain of Fox especially acutely and longs to remake it into a “force for good,” a phrase Wolff repeats with contempt. “James had become the avenging Murdoch — avenging what his family had wrought,” writes Wolff. “It was not enough to save himself and his family and the Murdoch brand from Fox. He had to save the nation.” Wolff sneers at James’s grandiosity, but if Rupert Murdoch truly wanted a redemptive final act, his younger son was probably the only one who could have given it to him.

Instead, Murdoch has done the predictable thing and handed Fox to his son Lachlan, chief executive of the Fox Corporation, widely seen as the only true conservative among the Murdoch heirs. Wolff challenges the common perception of Lachlan as a right-wing ideologue, painting him instead as essentially apolitical and mostly interested in spear fishing. Nevertheless, of the Murdoch children, Lachlan is the one most likely to let Fox continue in its current groove. The network may keep boosting Trump’s Republican primary opponents, but once the primaries are over, we can expect it to once again be the lucrative propaganda arm of Trump’s presidential campaign.

As long as Murdoch is alive, the future of Fox is unwritten. Once he dies, his four oldest children will determine who controls it, and James may yet prevail. But Murdoch’s legacy is decided. We are hurtling toward another government shutdown, egged on by Hannity. The electorate that Fox helped shape, and the politicians it indulges, have made this country ungovernable. An unbound Trump may well become president again, bringing liberal democracy in America to a grotesque end. If so, it will be in large part Murdoch’s fault. “The Murdochs feel bad, about Tucker, about Trump, about themselves,” writes Wolff. Just not bad enough.

I doubt they actually feel “bad.” I suspect they may feel slightly embarrassed because they have to defend what they’ve done when dealing with people around the world. But that’s about it.

As soon as Rupert kicks the bucket, the fight will begin and I think the smart money is on the kids selling it off. Then, who knows what will happen? I would say it might be worse but it’s hard to imagine how that’s possible. When it comes to destructive capitalism, nobody puts Rupert in the corner.

Or can it?

What’s the most important issue in all of Washington right now? You just won’t believe it:

While the House struggles to fund the government, the Senate has spent the week bitterly debating John Fetterman’s cargo shorts. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s decision to loosen the dress code, which allowed the Pennsylvania senator to preside over the chamber in a short-sleeved work shirt, has prompted a wave of criticism from Republicans, nonstop coverage at Fox News, and now internal caucus divisions as well.

“I can’t understand exactly what he was thinking at that point,” Schumer’s top deputy Dick Durbin, D-Ill. said on SiriusXM. “I want to give him the benefit of the doubt until I speak to him, but I think the Senate needs to act on this.” They could get their chance soon: Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. is filing a bipartisan resolution next week to “ensure the Senate dress code remains consistent with previous expectations,” a spokesman told NBC News. As for Fetterman, he’s happily selling campaign merch with conservative criticism of his “disgusting” hoodies printed on it.

Sometimes I think they’re just doing this stuff to troll us. It just can’t be real.

When someone denies that the right wing sets the agenda point them to this.

(And WTF has happened to Dick Durbin?)

ProPublica is back with more

The deck on ProPublica’s latest expose on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas:

Thomas has attended at least two Koch donor summits, putting him in the extraordinary position of having helped a political network that has brought multiple cases before the Supreme Court.

Thomas flew into the weekend 2018 Koch summit in Palm Springs aboard a Gulfstream G200 jet. “A Koch network spokesperson said the network did not pay for the private jet.” Since Thomas never disclosed the trip, ProPublica cannot say who did.

Pay. To. Play. https://t.co/6n9z1AHsHM

— Dahlia Lithwick (@Dahlialithwick) September 22, 2023

“I can’t imagine — it takes my breath away, frankly — that he would go to a Koch network event for donors,” said John E. Jones III, a retired federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush. Jones said that if he had gone to a Koch summit as a district court judge, “I’d have gotten a letter that would’ve commenced a disciplinary proceeding.”

“What you’re seeing is a slow creep toward unethical behavior. Do it if you can get away with it,” Jones said.

It’s not clear how to read that last sentence, but U.S. Supreme Court Justices police their own behavior and do not have to abide by the code of conduct others in the federal judiciary must.

And, yes, the libertarian Koch has a case working its way to Thomas:

The Koch network is among the largest and most influential political organizations of the last half century, and it’s underwritten a far-reaching campaign to influence the course of American law. In a case the Supreme Court will hear this coming term, the justices could give the network a historic victory: limiting federal agencies’ power to issue regulations in areas ranging from the environment to labor rights to consumer protection. After shepherding the case to the court, Koch network staff attorneys are now asking the justices to overturn a decades-old precedent. (Thomas used to support the precedent but flipped his position in recent years.)

Two years ago, one of the network’s groups was the plaintiff in another Supreme Court case, which was about nonprofits’ ability to keep their donors secret. In that case, Thomas sided with the 6-3 conservative majority in the Koch group’s favor.

Charles Koch did not respond to detailed questions for this story. David Koch died in 2019.

Thomas has appeared at at least one dinner for top-tier donors, those who donate “in the millions” each year to the Koch network.

“These donors found it fascinating,” said another former senior employee, recounting a Thomas appearance at one summit where the justice discussed his judicial philosophy. “Donors want to feel special. They want to feel on the inside.”

It’s hard to be more inside than First of Nine. Unless it’s elite members of the Bohemian Grove, “an all-male retreat that attracts some of the nation’s most influential corporate and political figures. Thomas has been a regular at the Grove for 25 years as Harlan Crow’s guest, according to internal documents and interviews with dozens of members, other guests and workers at the retreat.”

Here’s another by-now familiar name associated with the Koch summits:

Thomas’ appearances were arranged with the help of Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society leader, according to the former senior network employee. “Leonard was the conduit who would get him,” the former employee said. During one summit, Thomas gave a talk with Leo in an interview format, the donor recalled.

“Justice Thomas attends events all over the country, as do all the Justices, and I was privileged to join him,” Leo said in a statement in response to questions about the Koch donor events. “All the necessary due diligence was performed to ensure the Justice’s attendance at the events was compliant with all ethics requirements.”

The network’s plans in 2018 were to “buy advertisements to push senators to vote for President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees.”

Thomas will just keep his head down and try to weather yet another round of unwanted scrutiny.

Biden preps for a rematch with the GOP’s might-be candidate

The New York Times informs readers that Team Biden is already assuming “Scranton Joe” Biden will face a rematch with Don “The Con” Trump. Cue the “Rocky” training music:

The sharpened focus on Mr. Trump isn’t happening only behind the scenes. Facing waves of polls showing soft support for his re-election among Democrats, Mr. Biden and his advisers signaled this week that they were beginning to turn their full attention to his old rival, seeking to re-energize the party’s base and activate donors ahead of what is expected to be a long and grueling sequel.

Team Biden wants to nudge Democrats past their handwringing phase, David Axelrod says, “into a shared sense of mission.” Because “We can’t live like this!” as Adrian told Rocky on the beach.

“Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans are determined to destroy American democracy,” the president said. “And I will always defend, protect and fight for our democracy. That’s why I’m running.”

Mr. Biden is planning to follow up those off-camera remarks with what he has billed as a “major speech” about democracy. The White House said the speech, in the Phoenix area the day after the next Republican debate, would be about “honoring the legacy of Senator John McCain and the work we must do together to strengthen our democracy.”

Real real America (not the proto-fascist movement backing Trump) gets that democracy is at stake, not anodyne kitchen table issues. Former GOP strategist Rick Wilson gets that democracy and liberty are at stake. “[A]lmost 600 retired Generals, Admirals, Ambassadors, cabinet and service secretaries, appointed leaders, elected officials, and Senior Executive Service leaders” understand that “Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy.” Voters knew it in 2018, 2020, and 2022. Those are the only polls that matter and will again in 2024.

What’s in question is whether Trump actually will be on the ballot next year. Even his critics are waffling on the 14th Amendment:

A little more than a month ago, a law professor who helped found the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, enthusiastically endorsed a new law review article arguing that Donald J. Trump was ineligible to be president.

Citing a Wall Street Journal opinion article by Michael B. Mukasey, Steven G. Calabresi has since had a change of heart.

I won’t bother you with Mukasey’s position on the 14th Amendment. Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale, on his podcast called it “a genuinely stupid argument.”

Adam Liptak of the Times:

Professor Calabresi is, of course, entitled to change his mind. As Justice Felix Frankfurter put it in a 1949 dissent, “Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.”

In an interview on Saturday, Professor Calabresi said his revised position was the product of study and reflection.

“I carefully reread the materials on whether Section 3 of the 14th Amendment applies to Trump,” he said, “and concluded that it most likely does not.”

He added that politics had not figured in his thinking. “I will support,” he said, “any Republican or Joe Biden over Trump in the 2024 election.”

Or perhaps Calabresi woke up with a horse head in his bed.

For now, Team Biden is training as if Trump will somehow manage to appear atop the GOP’s ticket in all 50 states. Best not to underestimate that slippery character.

Let’s not pretend otherwise

🚨 BREAKING: Our video has now been seen by over 1.8 million people.

We must stop MAGA fascism. Share this and chip in to help this ad get on air at the next GOP debate: https://t.co/8dvjb4tsxC pic.twitter.com/yEC8WdL9pk

— Mission: Democracy (@MissnDemocracy) September 20, 2023

Look what’s going on:

A Republican candidate for Missouri governor on Monday vowed to burn books if elected after he was criticized for a video showing him burning cardboard boxes with a flamethrower.

The video, which has gone viral on social media, shows state Sen. Bill Eigel, a Weldon Spring Republican who is running for governor in 2024, and state Sen. Nick Schroer, a St. Charles Republican, using flamethrowers to torch a stack of boxes at a fundraising event in Defiance in St. Charles County on Friday.

“In the video, I am taking a flame thrower to cardboard boxes representing what I am going to do to the leftist policies and RINO corruption of the Jeff City swamp,” Eigel said in a statement to The Star on Monday. “But let’s be clear, you bring those woke pornographic books to Missouri schools to try to brainwash our kids, and I’ll burn those too – on the front lawn of the governor’s mansion.”

Eigel’s remarkable comment promising to burn books comes as he embarks on a campaign for governor attempting to appeal to the staunch right wing of the Missouri Republican Party.

Public book burnings typically illustrate extreme censorship related to political, cultural and religious materials. They often invoke historic atrocities such as burning of Jewish texts in Nazi Germany or racist bonfires by the Ku Klux Klan. Eigel will face a primary that features two of the state’s top Republicans, Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft and Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe.

Photos and video of Eigel and Schroer using the flamethrowers have been shared hundreds of times on social media over the past two days. House Minority Leader Crystal Quade, a Springfield Democrat who is running for governor, in a statement criticized Eigel saying that he and his “extremist allies’ idea of campaigning for governor is using a flamethrower to burn whatever he doesn’t agree with.” “Watching lawmakers use flamethrowers to intimidate folks they disagree with is a jarring reminder of how they view their jobs as a joke, while real people suffer from their cruelty,” Quade said. “We deserve a government that’s going to work to solve real problems, not make political stunts.”

Schroer, reached by phone on Monday, said the video was taken during an event called Freedom Fest hosted by the St. Charles County Republican Central Committee. He and Eigel were burning empty boxes to help the committee raffle off a flamethrower, he said. The Republican state senator criticized those who said he was burning books, saying that they were spreading false information. Schroer on Friday shared a photo of himself using the flamethrower, saying he was “Burning down the swamp!”

Democrats and liberal activists on the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, also quickly condemned the video, accusing the Republicans of simulating the burning of books. Some incorrectly said the two lawmakers were actively burning books. “Next time, don’t forget your hoods…inhaling fumes from burning books and crosses is noxious business,” Jess Piper, the executive director of Blue Missouri, a group that fundraises for Democrats, wrote in response to one of the videos, drawing a comparison to burnings by the Ku Klux Klan.

Debbie McFarland, a committee member and organizer of the event, told The Star that the two Republican senators were burning empty boxes, including trash and empty wine boxes. She painted criticism of the video as a “liberal leftist narrative.” While the boxes that Eigel and Schroer burned were empty, criticism of the video comes as some Missouri Republicans have targeted book content. This year, House Republicans agreed to cut from the state budget $4.5 million for libraries in retaliation for a lawsuit on behalf of two library groups challenging a new state law that bans certain materials in school libraries. Those funds were later restored in the Senate this year. Eigel on Monday posted another angle of the video on social media, calling on people to visit his campaign’s website “to fight back against these woke radicals.”

I don’t know if that freak will actually burn books on the lawn of the Governor’s mansion. Lets hope he doesn’t win that election. But the sentiment is common on the right right now and it’s disgusting.

It’s been years since I raged at Joe Klein, mostly because I blessedly never come across anything by him anymore. Unfortunately, he has a substack and it came to my attention today. Nothing has changed. He’s still the hippie bashing piece of work he always was.

Get a load of this:

A metaphor that applies to my current political dismay: I am annoyed by Joe Biden but I am appalled by Donald Trump.

Why is that a metaphor? Because I am annoyed, chronically, by the Democratic Party but appalled, mortally, by the Republicans.

Which raises a question: I haven’t toted up the word count, but I suspect that I spend a lot more space criticizing Dems than GOPs. Why is that?

Well, because it seems in these DysTrumpian times, the Democrats are the only hope of saving our democracy, despite their idiot array of indulgences. They are misguided, but not fundamentally irrational. They believe in our institutions, even those—like the Supreme Court and the electoral college—that are weighted against them; even those—like the military—that they really don’t believe in. There is always the hope that a compelling argument made by the Sanity Caucus (which includes members of both parties) will have an impact on rational Dems. But rational Republicans I’ve known—I’m looking at you Lamar Alexander and Rob Portman—have been struck dumb, utter cowards in the face of Trump, even though they’ve retired from politics and have nothing to lose.

Why the silence in the face of an authoritarian who threatens our freedom? Their mute buttons are still turned on, impenetrable and irresponsible. They are a lost cause. So, I tend to write about Biden’s age more than Trump’s sociopathy, and about the Dems’ identity and woke obsessions more than the Republicans’ fundamental corruption. Because the Dems have to find a way to 51%, lest we lapse into Hungary or Russia.

That’s awfully helpful, don’t you think? Let’s pound the Democrats and make regular people hate them — so they will beat Donald Trump. How’s that supposed to work?

You know, if you can’t penetrate the right wing bubble then maybe just shut the fuck up.

I swear to God, this drivel is almost as responsible for how we ended up on the precipice of democratic catastrophe as the Republican descent into madness. Centrist jackasses like Klein’s annoyance at liberals is so bothersome to them they just have no choice but to help fascism by pushing “both sides” tropes suggesting that liberals are equally threatening. And then they blame the liberals for failing to stop the fascists.

This was once the dominant strain of thinking among the mainstream media and the Democratic party. Luckily most of them have wised up in the last few years. But Klein carries on, thankfully no longer as a star pundit on every cable news show as he once was, if only for the sake of my blood pressure.

Although supporters stood in the rain for hours to enter, Trump’s rally in Dubuque is not as well attended as past rallies have been. The venue can hold 3,000 people. From my vantage point in the back, accounting for the large press area, I would guess the room is about half full pic.twitter.com/bFWvG6ws8n

— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) September 20, 2023

Trump has been speaking for over an hour. His supporters are beginning to leave.

— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) September 20, 2023

CNN reports on what he’s selling in Iowa this year:

Trump largely focused his Dubuque speech on immigration and the border. While he did at times call out Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump largely focused on attacking President Joe Biden over what he referred to as the “nation-wrecking catastrophe” on the southern border, describing it as “an invasion.”

The former president also lauded his immigration policies while in office, saying he replaced “catch-and-release” with “detain and deport.” He also argued that Mexico paid for the wall because they supplied the US with soldiers at the border for free.

Trump said that if reelected, his administration would follow “the Eisenhower Model” and carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history, invoking the Alien Enemies Act to remove all known or suspected gang members, drug dealers, or cartel members from the US.

Trump said his administration would bring back his travel ban, expanding it further, and, without explaining how, he said it would deny “communists and Marxists” from entering the US.

That “Eisenhower model” was called “Operation Wetback.” This is a retread from his 2016 campaign. It won’t be long before he’ll be talking about bullets sipped in pigs blood and cutting off people’s heads. That was the winning message in his first race. He knows he lost the seconds so he’s going back to what works.