Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

If you’re in the mood to read something a little bit heavy tonight (I understand if you aren’t) I recommend this interesting piece by JV Last at the Bulwark. Unfortunately, they don’t offer a gift link option but I’ll give you an excerpt that I hope gets the point across:

The dream of the internet was that it would create a high-information, high-trust society. Technology was supposed to make facts and primary sources immediately available to everyone, thereby ushering in an age of rationality and data-driven decision-making.

If you lived in Bumblefuck, Missouri, the internet meant that you were no longer beholden to the limited stream of news provided by your local paper, three broadcast networks, and assorted cable news players. You’d be able to see the information with your own eyes.

Instead of relying on a small number of information gatekeepers, you now had direct access to data. So you no longer had to rely on what the media told you about, say, crime. You could pull up the FBI crime stats and look at the numbers with your own eyes.

But it hasn’t worked out that way.

The internet has made all of that data readily available to people. And it turns out that often there is too much of it and it is too complicated for normal non-experts to understand. But the bigger problem has been the sheer volume of noise that the internet gave rise to. The noise overwhelmed the information, accelerating the decline in trust in institutions. The net effect was to make the populace as a whole less tethered to facts and data—and more animated by folk stories and something like an oral tradition.

[…]

This Matt Pearce essay brought me up short because it hits on a truth so profound that I can’t believe it never occurred to me before:

The result of all of this [changing economics of media] is a growing consumer alienation from the actual sources of information, a return to a kind of folk-story society ripe for manipulation by demagogues who promise simplicity in an increasingly complex world.

This. This is it, right there.

We are now a folk-story society. The drones. The immigrants eating cats and dogs. The crime wave and “economic hardships” that haven’t been real since 2022. It’s all folklore. Stories that a post-literate people pass on to one another in the oral tradition.

I cannot recommend Pearce’s essay enough. You should read it all.

Basically, the vast majority of what we come across on the internet is bullshit.

I think is also probably correct:

Pearce’s big insight is that this new world is ripe for demagogues because they thrive in societies that run on folk stories. The demagogue’s lies spread from person to person and even if the demagogue is conclusively exposed as a liar, no one believes the exposure

If liberal society is an organism, a demagogue is a virus. The demagogue takes advantage of the freedoms afforded by liberalism to attack the host. Sometimes, if the demagogue is virulent enough, it can kill the society.

Over time, liberal societies build up antibodies to demagogues. The accumulation of such antibodies are one reason that the longer a liberal society endures, the more likely it is to survive challenges. Relatively new liberal societies are vulnerable because they have not had the time to build up antibodies. Old liberal societies are more robust. These antibodies come in many forms: laws, traditions, institutions, civil society, an independent media.

We once hoped that the technological revolutions of the information age would become another antibody; another layer of protection. But it hasn’t worked out that way. Instead, it’s clear that the current state of technology has been like a radiation dose that kills off antibodies and compromises the organism’s immune system—in this case, leaving our society more vulnerable to demagogues than it has been in generations.

The one thing I think might be a factor here that Last doesn’t mention is the power of celebrity in all this. I have to wonder if that isn’t fuelling this demagoguery as much as anything. If that’s so, there might be a way to challenge the demagogues. Celebrity comes in many different shapes and sizes.

I’ll admit that when I heard about these people taking videos of constellations and planes and freaking out because they thought they were alien drones made me think of primitives looking up at the sky and seeing god’s and monsters in those lights. We really are going backwards.

Since it’s Saturday, I thought I would take a few minutes to talk about my pal Dennis Hartley who’s been holding down Saturday nights here at Hullabaloo for the last 18 years. I’ve actually known Dennis since I was a teenager and we were growing up in Fairbanks Alaska. We (mis)spent some of our 20s in San Francisco whiling away hours and hours in the fantastic repertory movie theaters that were numerous in all the big cities in those days. (This was before you could pretty much find every film ever made just by asking Mr Google.) In those days they had film addict types curating the bookings, which changed every day, and you could see classic film programs, foreign films and offbeat independents on huge screens in big, old movie palaces any day of the week. We devoured them. It was an incredible education in the art of film.

Dennis went on to pursue a career in comedy and radio in Seattle and I ended up in LA working in the movie business but we’ve stayed in touch and Dennis has remained a film hound on a level I couldn’t keep up with. His personal collection is probably bigger than most film schools at this point.

Anyway, back in 2006 I had been reading Dennis’s film reviews on film forums online for a while and the bright idea occurred to me that he should write them for my readership who might like to have a break from politics on the weekend. Saturday Night at the Movies was born.

He’s become well-known for his “lists” of films which he curates in much the same way those film bookers used to do the programs in the old repertory houses back in the day. And as it happens, he’s also a musician with a huge music collection which he has often shared as his “mixtapes” (or as the kids say “playlist.”)

One of my favorite blog stories is about the time Dennis was trying to get accredited for a film festival, as he does every year, and one of them denied him entry. He told me about it and I asked him, “should we sic the readers on them?” He said sure and I put out the word. Some very important people in the film business who happened to be readers wrote to the festival asking them to let Dennis attend. The next morning they contacted him and suddenly they just couldn’t be more accommodating.

The running joke between us has been that people came into the office that morning, opened up their emails and all exclaimed in unison, “who the fuck is Dennis Hartley?” He’s never been denied since.

Anyway, it’s been a privilege sharing this space with him all these years and I’m so happy that I could share his film and music knowledge with all of you.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

Imagine that.

Will Stancil wrote on Bluesky:” Look either the entire US economy turned around sometime in the month of November, or the economy really was great and we’ve just been mainlining media doomerism all along.” Uh yeah.

Paul Krugman:

…Anyway, there has been a running debate over why Americans were giving the economy negative reviews. One side argued that it was about perception rather than reality — that we were in a “vibecession,” Kyla Scanlon’s brilliant coinage. After all, wages for most workers have significantly outpaced inflation since the eve of the pandemic:

The other view was that the data were missing important ways in which Americans’ economic position had worsened. For example, interest rates, say on car loans, aren’t included in the CPI.

And of course there are many families in America struggling to make ends meet. But that has always been true. I mean, almost 22 million workers were laid off in 2019, which most people remember as a good year, and not all of them landed on their feet.

The vibes guys, a group that included yours truly, pointed to a lot of evidence suggesting that while Americans had a negative view of the national economy, they had a much more positive view of their own financial situation, while rating their local economy, which they could some extent observe directly, much more positively than that of the nation as a whole. You could see this, for example, in the Federal Reserve’s survey of the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households:

You could see it even more clearly in a Wall Street Journal survey reported by Greg Ip:

You could summarize public opinion as being “I’m doing OK, people I know or see around me are doing OK, but I hear that really bad things are happening somewhere out there.”

One sticking point for the vibes story, however, has been that while people have generally told pollsters that they’re doing OK, many surveys — notably the venerable Michigan Consumer Survey — have shown at least a plurality of Americans saying that they’re worse off than they were five years ago.

Now, I’ve always had my suspicions about these results. Are people answering this question reliable narrators? Obviously people who have gotten either much richer or much poorer over the past five years know it. But if you don’t fall into those categories, do you really know without looking it up how much money you made in 2019? You know that prices have risen, but have you kept a diary that lets you compare that price increase with the wage increase you’ve also probably experienced?

So I was curious to see what the first post-election Michigan survey would say. We know that there are strong partisan effects on overall consumer sentiment; supporters of both parties feel better about the economy when their party is in power, but Republicans swing much more strongly than Democrats.

Does the same effect apply to people’s assessment of their own financial condition?

Oh yes it does. The economy now isn’t significantly different from what it was just before the election; economic conditions were fairly stable in late 2019. Yet suddenly a plurality of respondents to the Michigan survey say that they’re better off than they were five years ago.

Yep. That’s the survey featured at the top of the post. To me that just shows that the “vibes” were mostly created by the endless pessimistic media feedback loop that turned into conventional wisdom.

I will never understand it but Trump just makes some people feel good. I have my suspicions about why that is but it’s so misanthropic that I don’t feel like going there right now. It’s not a very nice observation about my fellow Americans and it’s Christmas time.

Good, good, good, good vibrations…

And yes he should

I’ve been hoping he would do this since the day he got elected:

President Biden is considering commuting the sentences of most, if not all, of the 40 men on the federal government’s death row, people familiar with the matter said, a move that would frustrate President-elect Donald Trump’s ability to resume the rapid pace of executions that marked his first term.

A broad coalition of religious and civil-rights groups has been pressing Biden to take the step, and the effort gained momentum earlier this month after Pope Francis, in his weekly address, prayed for the commutation of America’s condemned inmates. If their death sentences were commuted, the prisoners, all convicted of murder, would serve life without parole. Biden, a devout Catholic, spoke with Francis on Thursday and is scheduled to meet with him at the Vatican next month, the White House said. 

A decision from the president could come by Christmas, some of the people said. A principal question is whether the president should issue a blanket commutation of all the condemned men, or whether death sentences should remain for the most heinous convicts, these people said. 

A White House spokesman said that no final decision had been made. 

Attorney General Merrick Garland, who oversees federal prisons, has recommended that Biden commute all but a handful of the sentences, the people familiar with the matter said, excepting a few terrorism and hate-crimes cases. The Justice Department had no immediate comment.

Possible exceptions could include Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing that killed three and wounded more than 250 others, Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people in the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and Dylann Roof, who in 2015 killed nine at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.

On his way out of office Trump executed a whole bunch of federal prisoners within just a couple of weeks. It was one of the most grotesque parting shots he made and that’s saying something when you consider the Big Lie and January 6th. Biden needs to save the rest of them.

I actually think he should give clemency to all of them, even those hideous mass murderers. The reason is that the death penalty is immoral and it is immoral for the state to execute those murderous sociopaths who cannot be allowed to walk among us.

Biden is a very committed Catholic and he is close to meeting his maker. He will never run for anything and he has no offspring or other family that is set to follow in his footsteps. He has no reason to care about the political ramifications. This is purely a matter of principle and he needs to save those people from the bloodthirsty Trump regardless of the criticism he will almost certainly get from the right (and probably establishment Democrats who are desperate for Real American credit.)

It’s the right thing to do. Just do it Joe!

Thank you once again for your support for this old blog this year. I am so very grateful for all my readers and truly appreciate those of you who are able to put a few bucks in the kitty. It means everything, especially in tough times like these.

So they managed to avoid a shutdown at the last minute and everybody got to go home for Christmas. But their hiccup at the end exposed the glaring fact that the Republican legislative majority is going to be an even worse shitshow than we might have thought.

We knew they’d be incompetent and extreme. But I don’t think any of us understood that Elon Musk would be the new leader of the party and would take to his massive platform to threaten Republicans with his massive fortune. But it was entirely predictable that the Freedom Caucus weirdos would just say no. They always do.

Apparently, they were finally able to appease President Musk and his assistant Donald Trump with a promise to raise the debt ceiling while simultaneously making massive cuts to the safety net:

House Republicans have a new plan for their agenda next year — one that might even satisfy tech billionaire Elon Musk. They claim they’re going to cut $2.5 trillion in government spending, in return for raising the debt ceiling.

Specifically, this handshake deal — part of Speaker Mike Johnson’s plan to avert a government shutdown — is to cut mandatory spending, which includes major social safety net programs like Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and veterans benefits.

It would satisfy far-right lawmakers who have been pining for cuts for years. The only problem? Figuring out how to do that with a barely there majority.

I hope they aren’t counting on Democratic votes to do it. (Of course, you never know….) You have to love this, though:

Members are aware they’re on tricky political ground, with many Americans opposing cuts to most entitlement programs. Some lawmakers suggested they aren’t talking only about cuts — but really savings.

“There’s lots of places over 10 years that you can find opportunities,” Rep. G.T. Thompson of Pennsylvania said. “There are places where you can reduce spending and, quite frankly, things that we can do to increase economic activity, which brings in additional revenue.”

They’re going to slash the safety net and give massive tax cuts to the wealthy but they somehow think that (as well as tariffs and deportations) will result in additional revenue? I’ll have what he’s smoking.

As I said, it’s going to be a shitshow. Trump is weak. He let Musk outflank him by successfully strong arming the GOP into rejecting the negotiated bipartisan CR and knee-capping Speaker Johnson. That made Johnson look very bad and spawned the “President Musk” meme that’s going to haunt old Donald. But that’s not all:

On Thursday, in coordination with Trump, the House GOP unveiled a new funding bill, one shorn of all Democratic priorities. Over social media, the president-elect instructed his party to “vote ‘YES’ for this Bill, TONIGHT!” Then, 38 House Republicans voted against the legislation, which was more than enough to sink it amid nearly unified Democratic opposition.

House conservatives’ defiance of Trump is partly attributable to ideological differences. The president-elect’s objections to Wednesday’s bipartisan agreement were distinct from those of his donor Elon Musk or the House GOP’s hardliners. The latter disdained the spending bill’s page count and fiscal cost. Trump, by contrast, appeared more preoccupied with the legislation’s failure to increase — or eliminate — the debt limit. [,,,]

It is not surprising that some House Republicans would prize conservative purity above fealty to Trump. That nearly 40 of them would harbor such priorities is a revelation, however. During the 2024 campaign, Trump demonstrated a remarkable capacity to dictate ideological terms to his party, officially forswearing a national abortion ban without provoking any sustained attacks from his right. Combined with his apparent success in revising conservative orthodoxy on trade, entitlement spending, and US-Russia policy, Trump’s pivot on abortion raised the possibility that the modern right was a personality cult first and an ideological movement second.

It’s now clear that for a substantial portion of House Republicans, this is not the case. And that is going to raise serious challenges to Trump’s agenda next year.[…]

It is worth recalling that Trump is a 78-year-old lame duck. If you are an up-and-coming conservative House member with aspirations to run for higher office a decade from now, a reputation for conservative ideological purity might eventually prove more useful than a record of perfect fealty to an elderly man whose interest in the Republican Party is liable to evaporate the moment he forfeits the presidency.

The article doesn’t mention that Elon Musk is the new leader of that rump faction and he wields a mighty checkbook.

By making Musk the face of fiscal austerity, Trump anointed his successor as leader of the Republican Party. I doubt he realized he was doing that and he certainly didn’t realize that he would be taking over before Trump even took office. It was a YUGE mistake.

They’re making Google eyes at each other publicly for now.

Fergawdsakes. But you know Trump has got to be fuming…

This is going to be a crazy year, folks, wilder than I think we could have anticipated just a month ago. So I hope you’ll check in over here from time to time. Tom and I and other occasional contributors will be watching all this very closely and trying to make some sense of it as best we can. (It’s a dirty job but somebody’s gotta do it.) Anything you can spare to help in that task is much appreciated.

That came after his earlier endorsement and a flood of criticism.

Then the VP-elect also endorsed German neo-fascists and threatened a woman who works for a think tank called The Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He may think his sarcasm masks the fascism but he’s wrong.

This is unamerican, obviously.

These are the people who will be running our country for the next four years openly aligning with Nazis and deploying Nazi tactics.

By the way, the man who ran his car into that crowd in Germany is a big fan of Elon Musk:

Taleb A. apparently shared the resentment of conspiracy ideologists and agitators such as the US podcaster Alex Jones or the British right-wing activist Tommy Robinson. The entrepreneur Elon Musk, who has increasingly openly expressed his sympathies for right-wing parties, was also one of his role models: “If you listen to someone like Tommy Robinson or even Elon Musk, and even if you are ignorant of the process of Islamization, you will think that they are both conspiracy theorists,” said A. in an interview. “But I can say from experience that everything Robinson says, what Musk says, what Alex Jones says, or anyone who is described by the mainstream media as a radical or right-wing extremist – they are telling the truth.”

They do have a lot in common.

Coal-rolling Trump’s enemies

The old, red-brick Memorial Auditorium where the spouse as a tween saw The Monkees is long gone. Its replacement sports a plaza in front, a modern, electronic marquee, and a name that expires with its corporate sponsorship. Before pyrotechnics, before Vince McMahon made professional wrestling professional and a media empire, the old joint is where Monday Night Wrestling was as much local culture as ambulances and cop cars outside west-end beer joints on Saturday nights. What the hell, I thought. A friend and I went out for pizza and beer, then took in the show once. Once.

Wrasslin’ wasn’t the spectacle it is now. It wasn’t even mildly entertaining. But for fans it was a weekly morality play of “The Drunkard” sort. Clean-cut heroes. Snidely Whiplash villains (heels) to hiss, and The Foreign Menace. Like McMahon’s empire, Donald Trump’s MAGA show offers obvious heroes and dastardly, America-hating villains. It’s more mildly threatening than mildly entertaining. But it’s a kind of theater with similar morality-play charm for a similar audience. As my high school journalism teacher said of supermarket tabloids, at least people are reading.

David Kurz of TPM sees the wrestling parallels in the just-averted budget showdown:

This week’s debacle is not your grandpappy’s horse-trading in a smoke-filled room or LBJ dishing out the Johnson Treatment. The only arm-twisting going on is the kind you see in pro wrestling, which is probably the best parallel for what the GOP’s performative politics amounts to. Spending bills, speakership elections, and other real and pressing matters of government put the GOP’s kayfabe under extreme duress. When that happens, we get eruptions like this one that periodically pull the curtain back on what is really up.

We’re more than a decade now into the GOP’s performative politics of destruction. It gains power by touting its aim to break stuff and then runs into a brick wall when it’s forced to make the hard choices that come with holding power. Any GOP effort to govern at least temporarily is susceptible to being undermined by its many bombthrowers, who can exert leverage by striking a purer “blow it all up” posture.

Performatively breaking “the rules” is part of the show in the wrasslin’ world. The bad guys become good guys and vice versa, just to keep things interesting. Performers getting even for “done me wrongs” sells tickets to the next event.

The financially struggling news media hasn’t caught on to that. Kurz provides examples of anodyne headlines from media outlets that while “literally true … fail to capture the true dynamic.” I’m not arguing that headlines should be as sensational as the tabloids, but if you want to sell papers and draw public attention to events that impact people’s for-real lives, perhaps a little more showmanship is in order. Republicans are hanging truck nuts on America’s trailer hitch fergawdsakes. MAGAs in Congress are coal-rolling Trump’s enemies. Maybe say so.

When is revenge not revenge?

The Bulwark’s Tim Miller spoke with recently incarcerated Steve Bannon, “Trump’s on-again-off-again adviser,” about plans for not-revenge against Trump’s enemies (and Kash Patel’s). The law firm of Bannon, Patel, Musk, and Trump will instead attempt “cleansing of institutions that Trump and the MAGA movement believe are fundamentally broken,” Miller explains, and break them some more. There will be a heavy focus on the January 6 “fedsurrection” plot by the FBI to pin the Capitol assault on MAGA “patriots“:

“I think there will be a massive investigation. The vast criminal conspiracy, including the media’s—what was it, Andrew Weissmann and all those FBI guys that work on MSNBC—I think there will be big investigations into all these people, I just do. I think there is going to be a huge investigation, I believe, into 2020. I think it’s going to be a huge investigation on January 6th, the fedsurrection, I think it’s going to be a huge investigation about the vast criminal conspiracy against President Trump.”

The facts won’t matter. The play’s the thing that will catch the attention of the MAGA king and his rabid fans. They want a show. He’ll give them the circuses if not the bread. The press will dish up bland.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (@sensanders)

Thank you for coming to our “show” each day.
Happy Hollandaise!

Does Musk own a hollow volcano somewhere?

Our oligarch overlords have long treated the land of the free as the home of the knave. Now that President Musk, our first non-native-born chief of state is calling the shots, that state of affairs is even more apparent, if less publicized.

“Why is corporate media not covering this more?” asks Dean Obeidallah. Mediaite:

Democratic Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) accused Elon Musk of working to kill Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) initial bipartisan spending proposal because it would have regulated his investments in China.

DeLauro said in a statement Friday she “sent a letter to congressional leadership raising concerns that Elon Musk may have upended the government funding process to remove a provision that would regulate U.S. investments in China.” Her statement added:

“The four corners of the Appropriations Committee and Congressional leadership reached a government funding deal earlier this week that included a key provision that would screen U.S. investments in critical sectors in China,” said DeLauro. “Musk’s investments in China and his ties with the Chinese Community Party have only grown over the last few years with Tesla’s Shanghai plant producing about 50 percent of Tesla’s global automobile output. It is no surprise ‘President’ Musk does not want to see a funding deal containing this provision be signed into law.”

In the letter she wrote, “ It is particularly disturbing that Musk may have sought to upend this critical negotiated agreement to remove a bipartisan provision regulating U.S. investments in China in order to protect his wallet and the Chinese Communist Party at the expense of American workers, innovators, and businesses.”

Disturbing? Yes. Surprising? No.

Why is corporate media not covering this more? "House Dem Accuses Musk of Killing Initial Spending Deal to Protect His Investments In China." No debate that the second GOP budget bill took out the ban out on China investments and China is Musk's second biggest market www.mediaite.com/politics/hou…

— Dean Obeidallah (@deanobeidallah.bsky.social) 2024-12-21T12:24:34.969Z

Musk responded with his characteristic panache.

Musk responded to DeLauro’s accusation by ridiculing the 81-year-old lawmaker’s appearance. Musk posted an AI-generated image of DeLauro as a kind of monster and wrote, “Turns out that Washington DC swamp creatures are real.”

Musk really is an Octopussy-level Bond villain.

Thank you visiting with us each day. And look! You’ve even taken time out from last-minute shopping to be here! Know we appreciate your support.

Happy Hollandaise!

Christmas Lights at the zoo!

I had no idea this was a thing. I might just go check out the LA Zoo lights this weekend. It looks magical.

December 20, 1924, the NY Times published this:

That didn’t work out any better than letting Trump off the hook for staging a coup and sending him into exile at Mar-a-Lago. I guess the fascist heart wants what the fascist heart wants.

I thought of that when I read this today:

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a close adviser to President-elect Donald J. Trump, on Friday endorsed Germany’s far-right party, a group with ties to neo-Nazis whose youth wing has been classified as “confirmed extremist” by German domestic intelligence.

“Only the AfD can save Germany,” Mr. Musk posted to X, referring to the anti-immigrant party, the Alternative for Germany, by its German initials.

In doing so, he is wading into German politics at a moment of turmoil, and at the very same time that he has wielded his influence in Washington to help blow up a bipartisan spending deal that was meant to avoid a government shutdown over Christmas. The German government recently collapsed, resulting in early elections, which are planned for next year.

Mr. Musk’s post was in response to an English-language video by a 24-year-old German far-right influencer, Naomi Seibt. She harshly criticized Friedrich Merz, whom polls show leading the race, for dismissing a rival’s suggestion that Germany look to Mr. Musk and another firebrand, President Javier Milei of Argentina, for ideas about reforming the country.

What a huge liar.

The AfD policies are identical to those of the US Democratic Party when Obama took office! I don’t think there is a single difference. https://t.co/b6daIRijPH

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 20, 2024

No, it’s nothing like Barack Obama’s Democratic Party:

The AfD is controversial even among other European far-right parties because many of its leaders are not shy about expressing Nazi sympathies. In May, France’s far-right party led by Marine Le Pen split from the AfD in its European Parliament coalition after the German party’s top candidate, Maximilian Krah, said that a person was “not automatically a criminal” just because they had been a member of the SS, Adolph Hitlter’s paramilitary organization. 

Reports that AfD members held a covert meeting regarding the mass deportation plan led to protests earlier this year, but despite this, the party is polling in second place at 19 percent —behind Merz’s CDU/CSU political alliance at 31 percent—in the lead-up to Germany’s snap election in February 2025. 

Right. The party that’s too Nazi for Marine LePen is just like Democratic Party in the US. That’s so dumb I can’t even believe I’m typing it.

We have a huge problem with billionaires and this billionaire in particular. I don’t know where it’s going but I have a sneaking suspicion he sees himself as this guy: