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Amanda Marcotte has written a fascinating deep dive report on online radicalization for Salon that I highly recommend. I’ll just excerpt this piece of it:
The same rabbit-hole phenomenon that can draw social media users deeper into the world of eating disorders or suicidal ideation also appears to be a factor in online radicalization. Lisa Sugiura notes that many of the men she interviewed while researching the “incel” community were first drawn into that world through unrelated or apolitical online material, before the algorithm turned their heads toward darker stuff. One interviewee, she said, had done a “simple Google search” about male pattern baldness and eventually ended up on “incel forums, which were heavily dissecting and debating whether being bald is an incel trait.”
That man became an incel “very much through the algorithm,” Sugiura said, and through online conversations with people who “showed him a different way to view the world.”
“Pathologies like eating disorders and suicidality exist on a continuum with radicalization,” said Brian Hughes, the American University scholar. “In a lot of cases, they’re co-morbid. Depression and radicalization are commonly seen together.” Just as online merchants hawking dangerous diet products exploit young women’s insecurities, he added, the world of far-right influencers displays “an obsession with an idealized masculine physique, which often leads to steroid abuse.”
The most famous example of that phenomenon is Andrew Tate, a British influencer currently being held by Romanian authorities on charges of rape and human trafficking. Tate’s alleged victims say he choked them until they passed out, beat them with a belt and threatened them with a gun. A former kickboxer, Tate has made a fortune by showing off his muscular physique and expensive toys, gizmos and gear to attract a massive online following of young men, promising that he can turn them into “alpha males.” Tate has become so popular with boys and young men in the English-speaking world that educators are organizing and sharing resources in an effort to combat his influence.
“There’s been a huge increase in rape jokes that the boys are making,” a seventh-grade teacher in Hawaii told Education Week.
“Pathologies like eating disorders and suicidality exist on a continuum with radicalization,” said Brian Hughes of American University. “Depression and radicalization are commonly seen together.”
Conspiracy theories and right-wing propaganda often hook people, as Tate does, by appealing to anxiety and insecurity, especially regarding hot-button issues like race, gender and status. In his legal brief in the case of Steven Carrillo, Hughes explained that the murderer “was gratified by the feelings of anger and indignation” from far-right videos he saw on Facebook and “was rewarded with more extreme, more angering content.” (Carrillo pleaded guilty to murder and eight other felony charges last year, and is serving a life sentence without parole.)
“Facebook algorithms would encourage Carrillo to join a Facebook group called ‘/K/alifornia Kommando,'” Hughes wrote. Once there, “his deterioration increased at a terrific speed. He fully embraced the new identity of Boogaloo revolutionary.”
Jason Van Tatenhove understands how that process works. A former member of the Oath Keepers, he offered dramatic testimony before the House Jan. 6 committee last year, explaining how leaders convinced their followers to join the insurrection on Trump’s behalf. In his book “The Perils of Extremism: How I Left the Oath Keepers and Why We Should Be Concerned about a Future Civil War,” Van Tatenhove details how he first got sucked into the group, and what it took for him to get out.
“There’s kind of a formula to what we were doing,” said Van Tatenhove, who was hired to do communications work by Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, who was recently convicted of seditious conspiracy and various other charges, and sentenced to 18 years in prison. “We were always watching the news aggregates. We would set up Google alerts on certain keywords,” in order to tailor recruitment content to what potential prospects were seeking out, especially on social media.
“What were the issues that really got people outraged and angry? Because that’s the low hanging fruit,” Van Tatenhove added. “We were looking for that outrage and that anger, because it seems to short-circuit our critical thinking centers.”
There are some possible solutions and she goes into them. It’s going to be a challenge but it’s not impossible.
If you think this stuff is just a fringe concern, here’s Paul Ingrassia, a Claremont fellow and Trump insider:
Or even Marge and Louis. Some lesser known House MAGA freaks to keep your eye on:
Scott Perry: Perry is the leader of the pack and has served as HFC chair since January 2022. The Pennsylvania Republican was elected to succeed the term-limited but still very active Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) in late 2021.
Despite leading the House’s most conservative caucus, Perry represents a purple district and is listed as a vulnerable Republican target by the DCCC. He’s also a U.S. Army combat veteran.
Notably, Perry raised some eyebrows when he initially voted in support of the Democratic-led “Respect for Marriage Act,” which would require all states to recognize interracial and same-sex marriages lawfully performed in other states. Perry later reversed his vote from “yes” to “no,” citing that he had rushed to the floor to vote on the legislation and had made the “wrong choice.”
Chip Roy: Roy is the HFC’s policy chair and is the fiscal hawk of the group. He often rails against the $31 trillion national debt and congressional spending.
The Texas Republican was one of the chief negotiators during the speaker’s fight. He helped foster what the HFC describes as a “power sharing” agreement between McCarthy and the conference’s right flank in January, including allowing just one lawmaker to push to remove the speaker.
Roy also sits on the Rules Committee, a position he got as part of his negotiations with McCarthy. Alongside him are other fellow conservative Reps. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.)
The GOP leadership considers Roy among the more serious and trustworthy HFC leaders. He will be a key conduit between McCarthy and the right going forward.
Dan Bishop: Bishop has made a lot of noise this year. He was the first House Republican to come out with a motion-to-vacate threat against McCarthy after the debt-limit compromise.
The North Carolina Republican has been front and center on many of the HFC’s press conferences and was one of a handful of conservatives in and out of McCarthy’s office during debt limit negotiations.
Bishop served in the North Carolina state Senate before being elected to the House in 2018. He spearheaded the controversial “bathroom bill,” which asserted that people could only use bathrooms in government facilities that matched their assigned sex at birth. Portions of the bill were later repealed.
It’s rumored Bishop has ambitions to run for North Carolina attorney general.
Anna Paulina Luna: This Florida freshman is one of the handful of congressional newcomers who voted against McCarthy in the speaker’s fight. But, she’s made even more headlines as of late over a push to censure Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).
Luna was able to strike deals with about two dozen of her Republican colleagues who originally voted against the censure due to what they said was constitutional issues related to a $16 million fine that would’ve been imposed on Schiff.
The Air Force veteran represents Florida’s 13th District on the state’s Gulf Coast.
Andy Ogles: Ogles introduced articles of impeachment against President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris over accusations that the office of the presidency has been “weaponized.”
The Tennessee Republican faced some controversy over embellishing parts of his resume, including claiming he was an economist. He later apologized for “misstating” elements of his college history.
It’s metastasizing.
… one cruel ruling at a time
Ian Millhiser takes this decision apart:
Let’s not beat around the bush. The Supreme Court’s decision in Biden v. Nebraska, the one canceling President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, is complete and utter nonsense. It rewrites a federal law which explicitly authorizes the loan forgiveness program, and it relies on a fake legal doctrine known as “major questions” which has no basis in any law or any provision of the Constitution.
If you were counting on loan forgiveness — and Biden’s loan forgiveness program would have forgiven $10,000 worth of loans for most student borrowers, and $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients — you will not receive it because of a decision the Court handed down on Friday, in a 6-3 vote entirely along party lines.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the Court’s majority of Republican-appointees. Justice Elena Kagan dissented on behalf of the Court’s Democratic appointees.
There are legitimate policy debates to be had over the Biden plan’s efficacy, fairness, and necessity. But one thing that should have been straightforward was its legality.
A 2003 federal law known as the Heroes Act gives the secretary of the Department of Education sweeping authority to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs … as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency.”
This is expansive language. While it only applies during a “national emergency,” when such an emergency (such as the Covid-19 pandemic) arises, the secretary may either eliminate (“waive”) or change (“modify”) student borrowers’ loan obligations “as the Secretary deems necessary.” So Congress clearly authorized the Education secretary to make modifications or waivers that are broad or narrow, or that apply to many or few borrowers. And it explicitly said that the secretary will have the final word on the scope of student loan relief within the context of a national emergency.
Roberts’s opinion in Nebraska effectively overrules the decision of both elected branches of government. It overrides Congress’s unambiguous decision to give this power to the secretary of Education. And it overrules the executive branch’s judgment about how to exercise the authority that Congress gave it. As Kagan writes in dissent, “the Secretary did only what Congress had told him he could.”
What the Nebraska case should have said
The Heroes Act was enacted in the wake of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, to ensure that student borrowers who are impacted by a “war or other military operation or national emergency” are “not placed in a worse position financially” because of that emergency. Initially it was enacted on a temporary basis, but Congress made the statute permanent in 2007, thus giving the secretary lasting authority to cancel or modify student loan obligations when new emergencies arose.
In addition to the broad language permitting the secretary to “waive or modify any provision” of the federal laws governing student loans, the law also includes several other provisions showing that Congress intended the secretary to be able to exercise this power in a national emergency without being bound by many of the procedural and substantive limits that normally apply to executive branch officials engaged in policymaking.
Often, for example, when a federal agency wishes to create a new policy, it must undergo a lengthy process known as “notice and comment” before that policy may take effect. But the Heroes Act explicitly permits the Education secretary to forgo notice and comment when exercising their loan modification and forgiveness powers under the Heroes Act.
Similarly, the law states explicitly that the secretary may dole out loan relief en masse, to every borrower impacted by an emergency. According to the statute, “the Secretary is not required to exercise the waiver or modification authority under this section on a case-by-case basis.”
And, on top of all of that, the statute explicitly instructs federal courts not to interpret other federal laws to limit the secretary’s authority to alter student loan obligations. The Heroes Act permits the secretary to exercise their authority “notwithstanding any other provision of law, unless enacted with specific reference to” the Heroes Act.
So Nebraska is an easy case. When Congress passed the Heroes Act, it made a very clear and explicitly articulated decision to give the secretary broad and flexible authority in national emergencies, to allow the secretary to bypass ordinary constraints on policymakers, to permit the secretary to provide loan relief to many borrowers at once, and to forbid the federal courts from reading other statutes to narrow this authority.
That’s the exact authority that Education Secretary Miguel Cardona used when he announced the student loans forgiveness program. Pursuant to his statutory power to waive or modify loan obligations en masse, Cardona determined that, because of the financial hardship caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the Education Department would reduce loans to borrowers who earned less than $125,000 in 2020 or 2021 by $10,000, and that Pell Grant recipients would receive $20,000 in loan relief.
Obviously, there are potential downsides to Congress’s decision to give him this authority. Any government official given broad authority by Congress might abuse that power. Or they might exercise it unwisely. But, as Kagan writes, Congress’s decision to preference flexible policymaking over constraining public officials “may have been a good idea, or it may have been a bad idea.” But, “either way, it was what Congress said.”
And it is not supposed to be the job of the courts to second-guess Congress’s decisions about how federal law should operate.
How Roberts tries to get around the Heroes Act’s clear statutory text
Roberts’s attempts to make the Heroes Act mean something other than what it says are at times confusing and difficult to parse. But it basically boils down to this: In order to provide for the particular mix of student loan relief prescribed by the Biden administration’s policy, the secretary had to both “waive” some student loan obligations and “modify” others. That is, the policy only works if the secretary has the power to outright eliminate some obligations, while merely making changes to others.
The chief’s primary attack on the Heroes Act’s statutory language is that he reads the word “modify” too narrowly to permit these changes. As he writes, the word “modify” “carries ‘a connotation of increment or limitation,’ and must be read to mean ‘to change moderately or in minor fashion.’” And then he faults the Biden administration for doing too much, attempting to “transform” student loan obligations instead of merely making “modest adjustments.”
As Roberts writes, quoting from a MCI Telecommunications v. American Telephone and Telegraph (1994) “the Secretary’s plan has ‘modified’ the cited provisions [of federal laws governing student borrowing] only in the same sense that ‘the French Revolution “modified” the status of the French nobility.’”
One problem with this approach, as Kagan writes in dissent, is that courts are supposed to read the words of a statute in context, rather than in isolation, to determine what they mean when they are used in a particular law. Indeed, the MCI Telecommunications decision itself, which warned courts to “not rely exclusively upon dictionary definitions, but also upon contextual indications” when interpreting laws, provides support for Kagan’s approach.
“In the HEROES Act,” Kagan notes, “the dominant piece of context is that ‘modify’ does not stand alone. It is one part of a couplet: ‘waive or modify.’” The word “waive” moreover means “eliminate,” so Congress explicitly gave the secretary the power to simply wipe away student loan obligations altogether.
But, if the word modify were read as narrowly as Roberts suggests it must be, that would mean the Heroes Act must be read to give “the Secretary power to wholly eliminate a requirement, as well as to relax it just a little bit, but nothing in between.” The secretary, in other words, might have the power to abolish many student loans altogether, or perhaps to change a minor paperwork requirement for student borrowers, but not to take any intermediate steps between these two extremes.
That makes no sense. As Kagan writes, “Congress would not have written so insane a law.”
Perhaps recognizing that his attempts to parse the text of the Heroes Act may not be entirely persuasive, Roberts’s opinion also offers an alternative reason to strike down Biden’s student loan forgiveness program — something known as the “major questions doctrine.”
Briefly, the major questions doctrine states that the Court expects “Congress to speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance.’” And, as Roberts writes, there’s little question that this student loans policy, which could forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans, involves matters of great significance.
But the most important thing to understand about the major questions doctrine is that it is completely made up. It appears nowhere in the Constitution, and nowhere in any statute, and was invented largely by Republican appointees to the Supreme Court. It is true that the Supreme Court has invoked this made-up doctrine several times in the recent past — mostly in opinions joined entirely by Republican-appointed justices who wished to strike down policies pushed by Democratic presidents — but, in relying on this fabricated legal doctrine one more time, Roberts effectively cites past power grabs by the justices to justify a new power grab.
And even if you accept the major questions doctrine as legitimate, it’s not clear why Biden’s student loans program still should not be upheld. The doctrine merely states that Congress must “speak clearly” if it wishes to delegate significant authority to a federal agency. And, for the reasons explained in the previous section, Congress spoke quite clearly when it wrote the Heroes Act.
So, let me end this piece as bluntly as it began. The Supreme Court’s decision in Nebraska is not rooted in law, and it barely even attempts to resemble a legal decision. The Court overrules both elected branches. It rewrites a federal law. And it roots its decision in a fake legal doctrine with no basis in any actual legal text.
You can be sure that these 6 Justices would find ample executive power to enact emergency measures — if they agree with them. It all depends on the circumstances. That’s not how any of this is supposed to work.
Kevin McCarthy’s not driving the clown car anymore
It’s been an eventful time in both national and international politics what with the attempted Russian coup, the details of which are still not fully understood, and another Supreme Court decision destroying decades of precedent. The weather is insanely hot in parts of the country and so is the presidential primary with candidates trading insults over their weight and vowing to invade Mexico and God only knows where else. It’s hard to keep up.
But it’s important to keep at least one eye on what’s going on in the US House because it’s even crazier than we anticipated. It’s very lucky that the Democrats managed to hold on to the Senate in the last election and President Biden is in the White House because I shudder to think of what would become of this country if these people had a monopoly on power. They have completely gone off the deep end.
First of all, there is the overwhelming obsession with the five years long Hunter Biden which has only accelerated with the announcement of his guilty plea to misdemeanor failure to pay taxes on time and a felony charge of lying on an application for a gun purchase. The fact that he was given probation instead of being immediately marched off to solitary confinement has resulted in shrill remonstrations from the House Republicans about “sweetheart deals” and “preferential treatment”, buttressed by an alleged IRS whistleblower who claims that the upper reaches of the Justice Department interfered in the case. This is disputed by the Trump appointed US Attorney David Weiss who ran the case as well as the Attorney General — both have said that Weiss had the ultimate authority to to dispose of the case however he saw fit.
This is typical of any investigation run by Republicans. They always turn up a “whistleblower” who almost always later turns out to have had an agenda. (To those of you who are old enough to remember, here’s a name for you: Notra Trulock.) I would expect there will be more of them as the investigations crank up.
Weiss and Garland have been called to testify before the House Judiciary Committee chaired by the fair and balanced Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan which should be quite the spectacle. But perhaps the most astonishing consequence of this little contretemps is the fact that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy appears to be seriously endorsing a possible impeachment of the Attorney General over this alleged interference. On Sunday he tweeted:
We need to get to the facts, and that includes reconciling these clear disparities. U.S. Attorney David Weiss must provide answers to the House Judiciary Committee. If the whistleblowers’ allegations are true, this will be a significant part of a larger impeachment inquiry into Merrick Garland’s weaponization of DOJ.
He repeated the same thing again on Monday and apparently Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has been strategizing with him about it and expects it to happen. McCarthy can’t stop talking about it:
Keep in mind that this latest threat comes on the heels of the House’s kookiest impeachment related action yet: a proposal by Greene and NY Congresswoman Elise Stefanik to “expunge” Trump’s two impeachments. (I’m not sure how they expect to “expunge” it from the internet, the newspapers and minds of everyone who knows it happened but maybe “Q” or RFK Jr have some ideas.) Stefanik issued a statement saying “it is past time to expunge Democrats’ sham smear against not only President Trump’s name, but against millions of patriots across the country,” McCarthy signed on to that as well.
Meanwhile, a week or so ago we had “LittleBitchgate” when Greene and Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert went at it on the floor over Boebert’s move to force a vote to impeach President Biden on the floor before Greene had a chance to do it. This didn’t go over well with the leadership which seems to want to impeach a few cabinet members before they get to the president so it was referred to committees until the time is ripe.
The question is why McCarthy is suddenly so gung ho when just last October he said “I think the country doesn’t like impeachment used for political purposes at all.” It seems to be related to his sudden loss of control a couple of weeks ago when the Freedom Caucus, smarting from the bipartisan debt ceiling bill negotiated by the Speaker, decided to block all legislation resulting in a so-called “power-sharing” agreement with the Speaker. As with the secret back room deals he made with them in order to get the gavel last January, nobody knows exactly what the terms were this time either but it sure looks as though impeachment was on the menu.
At the same time as all this is going on, you had the Freedom Caucus debating whether to kick Greene out of their group! Axios reported that two sources said there were complaints about he “unprofessional” behavior among other things that were not shared. Evidently, they decided to table the issue for the time being, probably because they were on a natural high from censuring California Democrat Adam Schiff for saying that Trump colluded with Russia (which he did.) This move was spearheaded by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., the newest showboating rightwinger making a name for herself.
And then there’s House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer who spends day and night doing hits on Fox news. He’s still chasing down the stale Burisma scandal, which continues to lead nowhere but he’s blowing so much smoke that he’s giving the Canadian wildfires a run for their money. His latest helping of hype is that they now believe Biden and his family may have accepted in excess of $40 million from foreigners in exchange for policy favors. No, he cannot show the money nor does he know which policies they are, but he’s working on it:
The Trumpers are getting restless:
It’s all performative Steve? Say it ain’t so!
This is just a partial rundown of the looney-tunes behavior going on day after day in the US House of Representatives under Speaker McCarthy. Aside from all the other preposterous maneuvers he’s endorsing,he won the week’s profile in courage award for the 18th week in a row when he stuck his neck out and said to a reporter that he wasn’t sure if Donald Trump would be the strongest candidate in the general election in 2024 and then immediately groveled like a beaten dog, begging for forgiveness from Dear Leader for uttering the unthinkable.
This is the person who is second in line to the presidency. We must all fervently hope that both President Biden and Vice President Harris remain in good health and stay safe so he can stay where he is and keep doing the important work of the Freedom Caucus and Donald Trump’s reelection campaign.
“The only thing that really matters is your ability to do the job”
Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg may have been a little green to occupy the Oval Office when he ran for president in 2020 as the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana. But, damn, he’s poised and quick on his feet. We noticed that again just the other day in his Charleston remarks on Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) trying to claim credit for infrastructure funds she voted against.
The media is determined to make President Biden’s age a 2024 campaign issue and not Donald Trump’s lies, criminality and weight. So when Biden misspoke twice this week in reference to the Russian war against Ukraine and said instead “in Iraq,” it was an “aha” moment the press — especially the right-wing press — pounced on.
Biden has a long history of verbal slips, but suddenly they are evidence for mental slippage. But watch Buttigieg pary CNN’s Kaitlin Collins’ question about Biden’s fitness:
BUTTIGIEG: All I say is I wish you could be in a room with him the way I often am, seeing how he is simultaneously focused on a big picture vision, and very focused on details.
I’ll tell you, we’ve had, for example, meetings on some of the work that we’ve been doing with rail infrastructure, where he winds up drilling in on questions so detailed. We have to go back and set up another meeting or pull in experts from Amtrak to help satisfy the president’s desire for detailed information and his focus on how that connects up into the bigger picture.
Look, this is an administration that has been extraordinarily effective. And, you know, one of — frankly, one of the cases that I made, back when I was running for president in an unusually young age, is that the only thing that really matters is your ability to do the job.
Right now, you have an administration that has delivered the strongest economic growth in terms of job creation of any president in American history, has delivered bipartisan infrastructure legislation, part of what we’re on the road working through right now, delivering great projects in places like Kentucky where I’ll be tomorrow, South Carolina where I was today, in ways that previous presidents, including the last administration said they were going to do but just couldn’t quite make happen, whether we talk about the CHIPS Act, the job creation that’s happening in manufacturing, the breakthrough for veterans that matters so much to my generation of post 9/11 veterans, in terms of dealing with burn pits.
At the end of the day, anybody in any job ought to be judged on the job that they are doing. And in just two and a half years, this administration, under President Biden’s leadership, has delivered more than many presidencies have been able to do in four or even eight years.
Buttigieg could be teaching a class.
Trumpism a half century in the making
A reference Rick Perlstein makes in “Reaganland” to a Senate speech made during 1978 debates over ratification of the Panama Canal treaty caught my attention recently. Sen. Thomas J. McIntyre (D-N.H.) decries the “ominous change” in American politics represented by “the bully boys of the radical New Right” and their “politics of intimidation.”
Long before the Freedom Caucus, McIntyre called out Conservative Caucus “ideologues” who demand that “we must see every issue as they see it – unless there is something sinister in our motivation.” If you want to see more reactionary acrimony and personal destruction, McIntyre warned his colleagues, “stand aside and be silent.”
It is instructive reading. Nearly a half century ago, movement conservatism in its nascency planted the seeds of Trumpism and MAGA extremism.
“And in the fullness of time,” as the saying goes….
THE CANAL TREATIES AND THE NEW RIGHT
(By Sen. Thomas J. McIntyre, D-N.H.) March 1, 1978 (as they appeared in the Washington Post of March 3 and Senate record of March 7)
I believe the techniques used to exploit the issue of the Panama canal treaties are the most compelling evidence to date that an ominous change is taking place in the very character and direction of American politics.
In his farewell broadcast several months ago, Eric Sevareid warned of the paradoxical rise of “dangerously passionate certainties” in a time of no easy answers.
One could speculate endlessly about the root cause of this development: a generation of disillusion and disenchantment with the lack of integrity and the misuse of power of leaders and institutions; the humbling experience in Vietnam; the unrelenting pressure of unfocused anxieties about national direction and purpose; and the all-too-human inclination to turn in frustration to the slogans and nostrums of a simpler time.
But whatever the cause, I see abundant evidence that these “dangerously passionate certainties” are being cynically fomented, manipulated and targeted in ways that threaten amity, unity and the purposeful course of government in order to advance a radical ideology that is alien to mainstream political thought.
Already we have seen the vigor of the two-party system sapped by this phenomenon. More and more Americans appear unwilling to abide by the essential ethic of the party system-that willingness to tolerate differing views within the party, and to accept the party platform, however unpalatable some at its provisions, in order to advance a general political philosophy.
As a result, the traditional role of the parties is slowly being usurped by a thousand and one passionately committed special-interest, splinter-faction and single-issue constituencies.
I believe in firm and outspoken commitment to principles and convictions. I would readily agree, as someone once said, that there are times when compromise offers little more than an “easy refuge for the irresolute spirit.”
But I would make a distinction between commitment that is rooted in reality – commitment, for example, that recognizes the linkage between problems and the consequences of ignoring that linkage when applying solutions – and commitment that denies reality and is, in truth, but the blind and obsessive pursuit of illusion.
Extremists who deny reality in the pursuit of illusion deny something else, something of fundamental importance in our republic of free men and women. They deny the differences that distinguish one human being from another.
They deny the indisputable fact that each of us is the result of a unique combination of genes and chromosomes, of influence and impressions, of training and of faith. and of the milieu from which we sprang. In short, they deny everything that science and simple observation tell us about human nature and individual capacities and limitations.
By proceeding from the flawed premise that all of us are alike, it is easy for ideologues to conclude that we must see every issue as they see it – unless there is something sinister in our motivation.
And they proceed from that premise with an arrogance born of the conviction that they and they alone have a. corner on patriotism, mortality and God’s own truths, that their values and standards and viewpoints are so unassailable they justify any means, however coarse and brutish, of imposing them on others.
I want to be fair about this. In the particular instance of the canal treaties, I’m talking about the kind of politics practiced by what has come to be known as the New Right. But I want to note that the record of extremists on the ideological left bears a remarkable, and regrettable, similarity.
There have been times when some of us have felt the wrath of the purist left. And. Now – today – many of us are feeling the wrath of the New Right because we will not bow to their threats and vote against ratification of the canal treaties.
Indeed, one element of the New Right – the Conservative Caucus – did not wait for me to announce how I would vote on the treaties. They launched their attack months ago.
Last summer the national director of the Conservative Caucus, Howard Phillips, said conservatives should make “a political sitting duck” of Tom McIntyre over the canal treaties, and the Conservative Caucus could “make it a political impossibility for McIntyre to vote for that treaty.”
On Dec. 4, 1977, the Conservative Caucus o! New Hampshire passed a resolution of censure and served it on me like a subpoena. I was “censured” for a speech I made last September, a speech in which I took neither side on the treaty issue but merely spelled out the pro and con arguments I would have to consider when I made my decision on how to vote.
Not only did the resolution censure me, it “required” me to appear before the Caucus in Wolfeboro, N.H., on Feb. 12, to justify why I should not vote against ratification and/or refute said censure.
Well, I did not go before the Caucus, so I have to assume I was tried in absentia and found guilty of a decision I had not yet made.
Hear the revealing words of Howard Phillips on other occasions: “We organize discontent. We must prove our ability to get revenge on people who go against us. . . . We’ll be after them, if they vote the wrong way. We’re not going to stop after the vote’s past.”
And hear the words of another spokesman for the New Right, Paul Weyrich, director of the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress : “We are different from previous generations of conservatives. We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of this country.”
These people are different from traditional conservatives. I know the traditional conservatives of my own state. I have competed with them in the political arena. I have worked with them in behalf of our state. They are people of honor, civility and decency.
The New Right cannot comprehend how people of opposing viewpoints can find common ground and work together. For them, there is no common ground. And this, in my judgment, is the best indication of what they truly are – radicals whose aim is not to compete with honor and decency, not to compromise when necessary to advance the common good, but to annihilate those they see as “enemies.”
And if “conservative” in the title “Conservative Caucus” is an ironic misuse of the word, it is doubly ironic that destiny would link the national chairman of the Conservative Caucus – the governor of New Hampshire – with William Loeb, the publisher of New Hampshire’s largest newspaper and the master practitioner of the politics of threat and vengeance.
In all of this nation, there may not be two more recklessly belligerent public figures than Meldrim Thomson and William Loeb…. I am certainly not sanguine about such powerful and ruthless opposition, but after 16 years of weathering the sustained attacks of Mr. Loeb and his ilk neither am I anguishing over the outcome.
[But] my political fate is not my concern here today. My concern is the desperate need for people of conscience and good will to stand up and face down the bully boys of the radical New Right before the politics of intimidation does to America what it has tried to do to New Hampshire.
So I say to my colleagues:
If you want to see the reputations of decent people sullied, stand aside and be silent.
If you want to see people of dignity, integrity and self-respect refuse to seek public office for fear of what might be conjured or dredged up to attack them or their families, stand aside and be silent.
If you want to see confidential files rifled informants solicited, universities harassed, “enemy hit lists” drawn up, stand aside and be silent. …
On two occasions in the past several years, we witness dramatic evidence that the American people desperately want to put acrimony and division aside, to heal the wounds, and to come together again as a people.
The first was the brief and shining moment on Independence Day of our Bicentennial celebration, a moment when all at once we were again united in the pride of our heritage, our esteem and affection for one another, our confidence in the future.
The second occurred but a few short weeks ago when the entire nation paused to pay its final respects to that most beloved of Americans, Hubert Humphrey.
In the long run, I am confident that the forces of decency and civility will prevail over the politics of threat and intimidation, just as I am confident that reason and commitment rooted in reality will prevail over extremism in the pursuit of illusion.
But if that does not occur in time to save the treaties – or those of us who support them – then I, for one, will go home to Laconia, N.H., sad to leave this office, but content in heart that I voted in what I truly believed were the best interests of my country.●
Nope. DeSantis takes after his mentor in that regard too
Gotta take care of the money men, amirite?
The administration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) steered $92 million last year in leftover federal coronavirus stimulus money to a controversial highway interchange project that directly benefits a top political donor, according to state records.
The decision by the Florida Department of Transportation to use money from the 2021 American Rescue Plan for the I-95 interchange at Pioneer Trail Road near Daytona Beach fulfilled a years-long effort by Mori Hosseini, a politically connected housing developer who owns two large tracts of largely forested land abutting the planned interchange. The funding through the DeSantis administration, approved shortly after the governor’s reelection, expedited the project by more than a decade, according to state documents.
Hosseini plans to develop the land — which includes a sensitive watershed once targeted for conservation by the state — into approximately 1,300 dwelling units and 650,000 square feet of nonresidential use, including an outdoor village shopping district. He has called the Woodhaven development, which has already begun construction, his “best project yet” and promised topull out all the stops for its success.
“With or without the interchange, we would have built Woodhaven there, but it certainly helps,” he told the Daytona Beach News Journal in March 2019.
Government documents obtained by The Washington Post through open-records requests show a steady relationship between DeSantis and Hosseini in recent years. The governor’s office occasionally received requests for DeSantis to attend events or support proposals from Hosseini, and DeSantis extended invitations to Hosseini in return for events in Tallahassee.
Hosseini helped DeSantis arrange a round of golf at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia in 2018, according to the Tampa Bay Times. A year later, Hosseini donated a golf simulator that retails for at least $27,500 to the governor’s mansion, according to records previously obtained by The Post. In the 2022 campaign cycle, companies controlled by Hosseini gave at least $361,000 to political groups that benefited the DeSantis reelection campaign, according to state campaign finance records. Hosseini’s plane has been repeatedly used by DeSantis, according to a Post analysis.
Trump, Clarence, Sam, Ron — all the big wingnuts just happen to have all these rich friends giving them gifts and there’s just no way that affects their policy decisions, right?
Right?
I hate Christie’s bullying bullshit but he seems to be willing to fight fire with fire and I’m glad to see a GOP bully give Trump some of his own medicine.
Sure, why not?
This piece from Melissa Gira Grant at TNR is a real head scratcher. How can this have happened? Will it matter at all?
Long before the Supreme Court took up one of the last remaining cases it will decide this session—the 303 Creative v. Elenis case, concerning a Colorado web designer named Lorie Smith who refuses to make websites for same-sex weddings and seeks an exemption from anti-discrimination laws—there was a couple named Stewart and Mike. According to court filings from the plaintiff, Stewart contacted Smith in September 2016 about his wedding to Mike “early next year.” He wrote that they “would love some design work done for our invites, placenames etc. We might also stretch to a website.” Stewart included his phone number, email address, and the URL of his own website—he was a designer too, the site showed.
This week, I decided to call Stewart and ask him about his inquiry.
The Supreme Court is expected to deliver its opinion in a case in which Stewart plays a minor role, a case that could be, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor stated by way of a question at oral argument in December, “the first time in the Court’s history … [that] a commercial business open to the public, serving the public, that it could refuse to serve a customer based on race, sex, religion, or sexual orientation.” It took just a few minutes to reach him. I assumed at least some reporters over the years had contacted him about his website inquiry to 303 Creative—his contact information wasn’t redacted in the filing. But my call, he said, was “the very first time I’ve heard of it.”
Yes, that was his name, phone number, email address, and website on the inquiry form. But he never sent this form, he said, and at the time it was sent, he was married to a woman. “If somebody’s pulled my information, as some kind of supporting information or documentation, somebody’s falsified that,” Stewart explained. (Stewart’s last name is not included in the filing, so we will be referring to him by his first name throughout this story.)
“I wouldn’t want anybody to … make me a wedding website?” he continued, sounding a bit puzzled but good-natured about the whole thing. “I’m married, I have a child—I’m not really sure where that came from? But somebody’s using false information in a Supreme Court filing document.”
Here is what we know—though, to be frank, I do not know what we have learned from this yearslong mystery, other than it looks like Smith and her attorneys have, perhaps unwittingly, invented a gay couple in need of a wedding website in a case in which they argue that same-sex marriages are “false.”
When Smith and her attorneys, the Christian right group Alliance Defending Freedom, or ADF, brought this case for the first time, it was to the United States District Court in Colorado in 2016, and they lost. Smith and ADF filed the case on September 20 of that year, asking the court to enjoin the state anti-discrimination law so that Smith could begin offering her wedding website design services to straight couples only. Up to this point, Smith had never designed any wedding website. (In fact, her website six months prior to the lawsuit being filed in 2016 does not include any of the Christian messaging that it did shortly afterward and today, archived versions of the site show.) The initial lawsuit did not mention the “Stewart” inquiry, which was submitted to Smith’s website on September 21, according to the date-stamp shown in later court filings, indicating that she received it the day after the suit was originally filed.
It is unclear exactly when—or if—the inquiry from “Stewart” was examined and verified in the course of this legal battle. (His phone number was, after all, right there.) In a motion filed by the defense on October 19, 2016, arguing that the case should be dismissed, they state that Smith has received no actual inquiries for services and therefore has suffered no injury. The following month, in its response, ADF did not mention the September 2016 “Stewart” inquiry to refute the defense’s claims. Rather, ADF merely stated that it was not necessary for Smith to have received an inquiry in order to challenge the law over her feared consequences of denying services to a same-sex couple.
Not until February 2017 did ADF include the text of the “Stewart” inquiry and argue its relevance to the case. “Notably, any claim that Lorie will never receive a request to create a custom website celebrating a same-sex ceremony is no longer legitimate because Lorie has received such a request,” the group wrote. “Even though she is not currently in the wedding industry, Lorie received an email inquiry on September 21, 2016.” Smith elaborated in a sworn statement that she “received a request through the ‘contact’ webpage on my website from a person named, ‘Stewart,’ reference number 9741406, to create graphic designs for invitations and other materials for a same-sex wedding (‘same-sex wedding request’).” She added that a “true and accurate copy” of the “same-sex wedding request” would be submitted with the statement. Why it took until possibly February 2017 to introduce the inquiry is not clear.
Whatever value the inquiry had, in September 2017, when the federal court ruled on the case, it seemed to dismiss it. The evidence presented as a whole, the ruling stated, did not allow the court to “determine the imminent likelihood that anyone, much less a same-sex couple, will request Plaintiff’s services.” Of the inquiry itself, the court said it was “too imprecise” and that “assuming it indicates a market for Plaintiff’s services, it is not clear that Stewart and Mike are a same-sex couple (as such names can be used by members of both sexes).”
ADF leapt on this. In response to its defeat, the group put out a press release claiming that “a federal judge ruled that Smith and her studio can’t sue to challenge a portion of Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act because a request sent to Smith by a couple, self-identified as ‘Stewart’ and ‘Mike,’ isn’t formal enough to prove that a same-sex couple has asked her to help them celebrate their wedding.” Their later appeal continued the theme, arguing that “according to Social Security Administration (SSA) data, only a nanoscopic number of women have been named Stewart or Mike since 1880. Lorie faces a 16 times greater chance of being struck by lightning than either name being female.”
All that may be true. But speedier, perhaps, than consulting SSA data would have been picking up the phone. According to Stewart, no one did until 2023, when I reached him.
“I’m not really sure where that came from,” he told me of the mysterious 2016 inquiry that used his name, email address, and cell phone number to request a wedding website for a same-sex marriage nearly a decade after he married a woman. He is a designer himself, something of a known quantity in design circles—he’s spoken at conferences and on podcasts, and has a “decent Twitter following,” he said. The design world is small. But not small enough, he said, that he had heard of Lorie Smith—not until her case was already before the Supreme Court, and the design community began discussing its potential fallout.
It didn’t make sense to him, he told me later via text message. Why would a web designer—as the website the inquiry referenced as his own made clear that he was—living in San Francisco, seek to hire someone in another state who has never built a wedding website, let alone a website for a same-sex wedding, to build his wedding website?
I don’t live inside Stewart’s computer—there’s a chance that he’s not telling me the whole story; that this is some elaborate prank he pulled years ago and doesn’t want to confess to now. But if he’s telling the truth—that this request was done completely without his knowledge—I don’t have any answers for him. None of this makes sense to me. And neither Lorie Smith nor ADF have responded to my inquiries. As late as 2020, ADF was maintaining that Stewart’s was a genuine inquiry. Speaking to “requests” for Smith’s services in a filing to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, their attorneys wrote, “Lorie already received one. A prospective customer named ‘Stewart’ contacted Lorie through her webpage, asking about custom graphics and a website to celebrate his wedding to his fiancé, ‘Mike.’”
Maybe it should not be a surprise, though, that this strange fake “request” popped up in a case in which the plaintiff’s main argument rested on the claim that someday, out there, a same-sex couple would want her to design a wedding website. The closest thing Smith had to an actual inquiry—the nonwedding of Stewart and Mike—arrived within 24 hours of her having filed a suit in which said inquiry would be potentially a helpful piece of supporting evidence. The inquiry floats through the filings only later, and still it remains. Despite the district court raising doubts about it representing a genuine inquiry from two men getting married—and the court didn’t even raise the real doubt that the couple does not exist—it is now part of the case history, a bit of fan fiction joining the other phantom gays the case invokes. ADF made no mention of Stewart and Mike specifically in their arguments before the Supreme Court this session, but they don’t need to: Their entire case, after all, is built around the idea of gay people doing something that they have not yet done, nor ever will do.
Despite its flimsiness, the “Stewart” inquiry remains there in the 303 Creative court filings submitted to the Supreme Court, part of a raft of exhibits including mock-ups of websites Smith claims she was prevented from making by Colorado’s law protecting people from discrimination based on sexual orientation. “I disagree with this, in the strongest possible terms,” Stewart told me. “I couldn’t disagree with her stance more.” And while he wants nothing to do with the spotlight of this case, he does want it to be known: He never asked for a website, let alone what may result.
Maybe this Stewart is a liar but it sure doesn’t sound like it. The fact that he was married to a woman at the time is verifiable.
I guess the Supreme Court is now entertaining cases about things that could hypothetically happen in the future. Good to know.