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.
In 2013, Joseph Roberts was accused of verbal and online sexual harassment and suspended from Savannah State University. He claimed he was suspended from school and “denied due process.”
Five years later, he’d go on to share his story with Betsy DeVos, then former President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education, as an advocate for men who were wrongfully accused of sexual misconduct on college campuses.
In 2020, Roberts appeared on YouTube’s The Exceptional Conservative Show, where he recalled the day he was expelled from campus after three unidentified female students reported him.
“They said things like they were afraid for their lives,” Roberts, who left the school just three weeks before graduation, claimed. “It was just total lies.”
More than a decade later, Roberts, 42, was arrested on Sept. 7 in a separate incident for the gruesome death of his girlfriend, Rachel Imani Buckner, a recent law school grad whose dismembered body was discovered wrapped in plastic with duct tape along the shore in California’s Alameda County.
[…]
In 2018, when the #MeToo movement was exploding and the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing played on TVs across the nation, a debate was roiling about whether men could be wrongfully accused of sexual misconduct.
Roberts appeared on ABC’s Nightline and shared his story, claiming that he was presumed guilty.
He said sharing his story with DeVos in 2018 was a “big deal,” according to ABC News.
Roberts also joined forces with Families Advocating for Campus Equality, a nonprofit that assists the accused who say they’re not being treated fairly.
“The mission of FACE is to support and advocate for equal treatment and due process for those affected by inequitable Title IX campus disciplinary processes, and influence campus culture through outreach and education,” according to the group’s site.
A staunch supporter of Trump, Roberts would enter the political fray while living in San Francisco and attending law school at Golden Gate University — the same school Buckner graduated from before she was killed.
In 2020, Roberts was elected to serve on the San Francisco Republican Party County Central Committee.
A member of the Federalist Society, his main goals were “to bring diverse leadership, primarily conservative thought,” “support the local police department,” and “contribute to a local San Francisco government that promotes policies to unlock individual potential and unleash economic growth,” according to a voters’ website.
You can see why a guy like this would be attracted to the GOP and why they welcomed him with open arms.
Environmental lawyer and 2024 presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Friday teased a “major announcement” in upcoming weeks amid speculation he is considering dropping his bid to primary President Joe Biden as a Democrat and instead running for president as an independent or on a third-party ticket.
“I want to tell you now what I’ve come to understand after six months of campaigning: There is a path to victory,” Kennedy said in a video announcing an October 9 event in Philadelphia. “We all recognize that there’s a genuine possibility of national transformation and its source is the goodness in the American people.”
News of the upcoming event, first reported by Mediaite, comes as the super PAC supporting Kennedy’s presidential bid has conducted national polling to gauge his viability in a hypothetical three-person race against Biden and former President Donald Trump, a person familiar with the polling told CNN.
In the two-minute video announcing the event – which was shared with CNN in response to questions about the possibility of Kennedy running as an independent – the presidential candidate criticized corruption in government and on both sides of the aisle. He also called out the “established Washington interests” and said his campaign will “change the habits of American politics.”
“I understand that deeply felt concern that people have about the way corruption has overtaken our government. It’s in the executive branch. It’s in Congress. It’s in the leadership of both political parties,” he added.
In July, Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist, met Libertarian Party Chair Angela McArdle at an event in Tennessee. They discussed their shared beliefs, including around vaccine mandates and pandemic-era shutdowns, and the two have been in touch since, McArdle told CNN Friday. She said she has not received a commitment from Kennedy to run as a Libertarian Party candidate.
The American right’s efforts to elevate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were as transparent as they were cynical. The idea, as advanced by Stephen K. Bannon and the like, was clearly to try to embarrass President Biden in the Democratic primary. So they used Kennedy’s inflated early poll standing as an excuse to treat the primary challenge from a fringe figure as something real and threatening.
Fox News picked up the ball and ran with it, publishing many dozens of stories and featuring him regularly on-air. House Republicans even invited him to testify on Capitol Hill.
It hasn’t worked. And now, it’s looking as if the whole thing could backfire.
The latest indications are that Kennedy will end his Democratic primary challenge against Biden and instead run in the general election. Mediaite reported Friday that he will declare an independent bid on Oct. 9, and Kennedy is now teasing a major announcement on that date, while saying and doing the kinds of things that suggest Mediaite’s report is accurate.
(Asked to comment on whether the report was true, Kennedy’s campaign merely responded with a link to a video previewing his Oct. 9 announcement.)
And while Kennedy is a lifelong Democrat from the country’s preeminent Democratic family, there is plenty of reason to believe that a third-party bid could hurt Donald Trump more than Biden.
There is no good polling that tests a Kennedy third-party bid. What we do know is that Republicans like Kennedy a heck of a lot more than Democrats do. That was true pretty shortly after he launched his campaign in April, and the gap has now grown into a chasm.
The latest polling from Quinnipiac University shows that Republicans like Kennedy by a 30-point margin, 48 percent favorable to 18 percent unfavorable.
Democrats, meanwhile, have developed an overwhelming distaste. The Quinnipiac poll shows just 14 percent have a favorable opinion of him, compared with 57 percent who have an unfavorable one.
The anti-vax faction doesn’t love Trump. And a whole bunch of QAnon people are so addled that they think JFK and JFK Jr are still alive so I could see them voting for Bobby Jr thinking it’s some kind of a sign.
Speaking at a festival hosted by a libertarian group in New Hampshire, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. railed against the “mainstream media” for serving as “propagandists for the powerful.” Each time he mentioned the perfidy of the press — for silencing dissent, for toeing the government line, for labeling him a conspiracy theorist — he drew a supportive hail of jeers.
It was a page out of the playbook of Donald J. Trump. But for Mr. Kennedy, who is running a long-shot challenge to President Biden for the Democratic nomination for president, it was more than a rhetorical flourish.
Censorship is a central theme of his campaign, uniting an unlikely coalition that includes longtime acolytes in what is known as the “health freedom” movement; donors from Silicon Valley; and new admirers from across the political spectrum.
“The mainstream media that is here today is going to report that I, you know, have paranoid conspiracy theories, which is what they always say, but I’m just going to tell you facts,” Mr. Kennedy said at the event last week. He added, “When the press believes it is their job to protect you from dangerous information, they are manipulating you.”
Indeed, Mr. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and scion of the storied Kennedy Democratic clan, is now a leading vaccine skeptic and purveyor of conspiracy theories. He has twisted facts about vaccine development by presenting information out of context; embraced unsubstantiated claims that some clouds are chemical agents being spread by the government; and promoted the decades-old theory that the C.I.A. killed his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy.
The idea that the press has a stranglehold on public information is a core, animating belief in the health freedom movement, which broadly opposes regulation of health practices, including vaccinations. Two political action committees supporting Mr. Kennedy were formed by people who knew him through this movement, which accounts for some of his most ardent support.
This whole thing is a Steve Bannon special by the way.
Per several people familiar, Steve Bannon had been encouraging this for months and believes RFK Jr. could be both a useful chaos agent in 2024 race and a big name who could help stoke anti-vax sentiment around the country… https://t.co/Xfrqei2qea
He’s just sure that the Kennedy name is going to draw millions of Democrats who don’t like Biden. He may have made a big mistake. Couldn’t happen to a nice bunch of fascists.
A regular reader asks if I can post a chart of gasoline prices over my lifetime. Of course. In fact, I can do better:
I was born right in the middle of that warm postwar summer of ever-declining gasoline prices—which ended abruptly in 1973 with the first oil embargo. And then again in 1979 with the second oil embargo. And again in 2002-08 during the Iraq War. And again in 2011 because of turmoil in the Middle East. And then finally yet again in 2022 thanks to the Ukraine War.
Will gasoline ever get down to $2 again? Probably not. OPEC countries need a higher price than that to avoid bankruptcy. But it will probably recede to $3 one of these days.
I feel as if my whole life I’ve been aware that we are running out of oil and part of that was assuming that the price was going to go up. Obviously, we are now dealing with the crisis of climate change and have an obligation to drastically reduce our use of fossil fuels so we have even more incentive to end our dependence on gas. But throughout the period that Kevin points to I’ve also been listening to people bellyache about the price of gas over and over again when the price goes up due to a shock or a disaster of some sort. It’s tiresome. It’s never been the huge crisis people always say it is and even so it should motivate people to support the use of alternative energy. And that chart shows that the price of gas has been remarkably steady, adjusting for inflation, ever since 1930.
Tom Sullivan already did a great post on the Trump speech in California yesterday and I can’t think of anything to add. But I do think you should see some more of what he said. It’s truly unbelievable:
Trump’s charisma rests in this: He invites every one of us to liberate the worst version of ourselves from the shackles of decency and convention; to let the id trample our ethics.
Gleefully.
It’s an intoxicating and irresistible opportunity for tens of millions of Americans. https://t.co/zw3zqizJ9F
It’s not just the classlessness of this, it’s that he’s telling his supporters how much he likes it when they commit violence for him and encouraging them to commit more. https://t.co/VIjohW3Acc
Betraying Ukraine is her issue. It’s all she’s been talking about and she told her boy MyKevin that there was no way she would ever vote for a bill that contained funding to support it. And as I write this, the only continuing resolution MyKevin believes may pass with all GOP votes is one that keeps everything going except her pet issue — abandoning the Ukrainian people:
Just hours before a government shutdown, the House planned to vote on a measure to keep the government open for 45 days at current spending levels, adding money for U.S. disaster relief but none of the billions of dollars for Ukraine that the White House has sought, Rules Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) told reporters. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the bill would pass the House or what its fate in the Senate would be. The government will shut down at 12:01 a.m. Sunday if a deal is not reached.
She is evil. And she is very powerful in the Republican Party right now. She’s no gadfly like Michele Bachman. She’s the real thing.
I don’t know if this will pass. Who know, even some Democrats may vote for it just to keep the government open for 45 days in the hope they can get it back into the spending bills in conference. But appeasing Marjorie Taylor Greene is a mistake. This woman is dangerous and she’s learning how to get what she wants very quickly.
Politico Playbook took a look at the feud between McCarthy and Gaetz. Nobody really knows why they’re so hostile but whatever it is, it’s definitely personal:
To hear him tell it, Rep. MATT GAETZ is on a good-government crusade. The 41-year-old Florida Republican has railed against continuing resolutions, the short-term spending stopgaps that he blames for Washington’s fiscal dysfunction. He has insisted on regular order for appropriations bills and the devolution of power to the House rank-and-file.
That’s why, he says, he’s spent months relentlessly hounding House Speaker KEVIN McCARTHY — to the point that he’s almost certain to lead a charge to remove him in the coming weeks.
Most other House Republicans watching as Congress lurches toward a federal shutdown see something else entirely: “This isn’t a function of him being concerned about process,” Rep. MIKE LAWLER (R-N.Y.) told Playbook. “This is a function of personality.”
“He wants Kevin,” added a Gaetz friend. “That’s it, and everything else revolves around that.”
With less than 48 hours until the shutdown deadline, we thought we’d step back and dive deep on how this one deeply chaotic relationship has evolved and helped shape the present standoff.
Gaetz has by no means done it by himself. But he has harnessed the anti-establishment fervor inside the House GOP like no other member, setting trap after trap for a speaker desperate to please his detractors and keep his job.
Past government shutdowns have been organized around a demand — reversing the Affordable Care Act, for instance, or building a border wall. This one, should it come to pass Sunday, is better understood as being centered on a long, nasty grudge.
The tensions spilled out again yesterday, with Gaetz angrily confronting McCarthy in front of the entire GOP conference, rekindling the question that our Olivia Beavers closely examined yesterday: “What does Matt Gaetz really want?”
As Olivia writes, there’s certainly layers to Gaetz’s recent behavior. He’s reportedly exploring a run for governor, which might compel him to turn his antics up a notch. And he has been persistent in his policy demands of late — never mind that he voted repeatedly for CRs under President DONALD TRUMP.
But the real throughline is Gaetz and McCarthy’s mutual antipathy, according to those who have watched the two men closely in recent years.
“There is something between them, and I don’t know what it is,” Rep. MIKE ROGERS (R-Ala.) told Playbook. “And that’s the impression I’ve gotten from McCarthy, too: It’s not policy-driven; it’s personal.”
COMPETING FOR ATTENTION: Both men brush off the suggestions of animosity. “Matt is Matt,” McCarthy has said. Gaetz says he’s more concerned about McCarthy’s broken promises than any personal issues.
Yet the two have persistently clashed, dating back to Trump’s presidency, when they were engaged in what might be best described as a political love triangle, competing for Trump’s attention and affection. As one former House leadership aide put it to us, “I wouldn’t underestimate the jealousy factor.”
Gaetz would often float ideas to Trump, only to see McCarthy intervene and kill them, according to senior GOP aides on the Hill and in Trump’s White House. During Trump’s first impeachment, for instance, Gaetz publicly pressured McCarthy to name MAGA-minded members to the House Intelligence Committee, which was leading the public hearings.
McCarthy phoned Gaetz and excoriated him for launching a public campaign without a heads-up, according to a lawmaker with knowledge of the situation. McCarthy then convinced Trump that he’d be better served with the members already on the panel, though he ended up subbing in Rep. JIM JORDAN (R-Ohio), a Trump loyalist.
Another incident from that era was captured in a new memoir written by former Trump White House aide CASSIDY HUTCHINSON. Late at a 2019 Camp David retreat, Hutchinson says Gaetz followed her to a cabin he thought was hers — only to find McCarthy, who had gathered a bunch of Republicans for drinks and conversation.
Gaetz said he was lost, she writes, and prodded Hutchinson to escort him back to his cabin. “Get a life, Matt,” McCarthy said, shutting the door. (Gaetz denies the exchange.)
PUTTING KEVIN IN A BOX: McCarthy has offered olive branches over the years, according to people close to the speaker. He helped Gaetz land seats on the House Armed Services and Judiciary committee, which the Floridian was pining for, according to one senior GOP aide.
But when it came time for McCarthy to fulfill his own ambitions and claim the speaker’s gavel, Gaetz quickly emerged as his fiercest critic — mocking him publicly and leading a conservative revolt that was settled only after four days, 15 ballots and a series of tense episodes on the floor (including one where Rogers lunged at Gaetz).
While other conservatives flipped their votes to McCarthy in exchange for a suite of policy and process promises, Gaetz never once voted for him — agreeing only to vote “present,” passively allowing him to secure the gavel.
Meanwhile, those promises — which reportedly included allowing regular order for the 12 yearly appropriations bills — set the stage for the present showdown. Now McCarthy’s only way out will be to pass a bipartisan CR, reneging on his January deal and empowering Gaetz to seek revenge.
“Gaetz has boxed McCarthy in,” said one senior GOP aide close to McCarthy world. “People think Gaetz is dumb, but he’s fucking smart — he’s really smart.”
But should Gaetz take the next step and move to oust McCarthy from the speaker’s chair, it will not be without risks. Actually removing McCarthy will require Democrats to join the band of rebels, and some Republicans believe that will never happen — instantly rendering Gaetz irrelevant.
“If he wants to, he can keep the attention … and that keeps people asking about him,” said one senior House GOP aide who predicted Gaetz might flinch. “The moment he calls the motion to vacate, the charade is up. It’s put up or shut up.”
Gaetz is probably smarter than McCarthy but that isn’t saying much.
