Democrats made a “catastrophic mistake” by ceding freedom as an issue to Republicans, Anand Giridharadas told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Tuesday night. From Ronald Reagan on they added “freedom” like sugary sprinkles to everything from busting unions to French fries.
Republicans came to “own” freedom through relentless branding, Giridharadas said, until Donald Trump came along with “American carnage.” In his wake, Republicans have abandoned freedom for control.
Control of womens’ bodies. Control of what we can read. Control of what we can learn. Control of whom we can marry. Control of our health care. Control of the country itself. Especially that.
Republicans have abandoned freedom for control, for authoritarians like Trump, Putin, Orbán, DeSantis, and (OMFG) Tommy Tuberville. (“He should just move to Russia. Suits him better,” tweeted Paul Rosenberg.)
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) tries to sell the Durham FBI report about the Trump-Russia investigation as a smoking gun:
“If people don’t go to jail for this, the American people should just stand up and say, ‘Listen, enough’s enough. Let’s don’t have elections anymore.’” pic.twitter.com/D4Qrd1Iav1
“All of these fights are fights for freedom,” Giridharadas adds. “And often, they are reframed in these wonky policy terms by folks on the left. And we have to go guttural, and we have to remember people don’t understand what Medicare for All means except people who really focus on this issue. But they know what it means to be free.”
Freedom is something people can feel.
Republican abandonment of freedom gives Democrats a golden opportunity to reclaim it, as Giridharadas sees it. Joe Biden is trying, pushing against the tide of policy wonks.
“Freedom has always been a contested value,” says Anat Shenker-Osorio. Freedom is a winner with Americans across the political spectrum, Shenker-Osorio says of her messaging research. “It is not coincidental that freedom to vote is the name of the newer form of what was the For the People Act. That name was very deliberately chosen.”
Say it like you mean it, like your freedom is at stake. Because it is.
The North Carolina legislature banned most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy Tuesday evening, voting to override the veto of Gov. Roy Cooper (D), while a similar measure heads to a final vote in Nebraska in the coming days.
“It won’t stop here. NCGOP has repeatedly referred to this legislation as a ‘first step’. Stay engaged. And thank you to everyone who came today and sent messages of support. It means more than you know,” tweeted Rep. Lindsey Prather, a Buncombe County Democrat.
after the vote was taken tonight, folks in the gallery were loud. our right to our own bodies was just voted on. and tonight, the people just yelled. we’re tired, that’s for sure, but more than that, we’re angry. we’re motivated. and there’s a movement behind us. ✊ pic.twitter.com/CEOtlckMG9
— Anderson Clayton☀️ (@abreezeclayton) May 17, 2023
North Carolina Republicans mustered the bare minimum of votes needed for the three-fifths override with the help of “partisan gerrymandering and an inexplicable recent party switch by a previously pro-choice lawmaker,” writes Stephen Wolf at Daily Kos:
North Carolina’s legislative districts have been gerrymandered to favor Republicans to varying degrees ever since the GOP swept into power in the 2010 midterms. Because the governor lacks veto power over redistricting, the courts have been the only bulwark against Republican gerrymandering, leading to an endless cycle of litigation as the GOP’s maps would get struck down, replaced, and challenged once again.
While the courts blocked the initial maps Republicans passed after the 2020 census, GOP lawmakers responded by adopting slightly tamer gerrymanders that were used in 2022 while litigation proceeded. Despite Republicans’ modest victories in last year’s statewide elections for the U.S. Senate and other contests, Republicans came close to winning veto-proof majorities in the legislature under these revised lines, securing three-fifths of all seats in the Senate and one shy of that mark in the House.
Democrats had reason to hope the future might look different, however, after the state Supreme Court issued a landmark opinion in December ruling that partisan gerrymandering violated North Carolina’s constitution. The court consequently struck down the GOP’s state Senate map, ordering it to be redrawn for 2024. (It did, however, uphold the state House map, where the GOP’s gerrymander was more subtle.)
But that ruling did not stand for long. After flipping control of the court last year, the new Republican majority issued an unprecedented decision last month that reversed the court’s four-month-old ruling and decreed that state courts could not police partisan gerrymandering. That now gives GOP lawmakers a blank check to re-gerrymander the state from top to bottom.
The vote was entirely on party lines. Rep. Tricia Cotham, who promised her voters in November she'd vote to codify Roe., and Rep. Ted Davis, who told his voters he had no interest in weakening the 20 week ban, voted to override Cooper's veto.
North Carolina Democrats are hardly blameless. The Democratic legislative caucuses’ and state party’s candidate recruiting efforts that (as I explained previously) “were robust in 2018 and 2020 fell apart in 2022 …. They left 14 of 50 state Senate seats and 30 of 120 state House seats uncontested, likely harming turnout for the U.S. Senate and down-ticket races.” Turnout by younger voters that was solid in other states flagged in North Carolina in 2022. Democrats lost control of the state Supreme Court to Republicans. They failed to retain enough seats to sustain a Cooper veto with a cushion. Cotham happened. And here we are.
N.C. Democrats’ new state chair, Anderson Clayton, was in the building with activists Tuesday night. “Abortion activists were denied access to the gallery because anti-abortion folks had the galleries ‘reserved’ for them,” Clayton tweeted.
After the vote, Clayton, who ran on reversing the recruiting failures of 2022, launched a tweet thread:
In 2024, North Carolina Democrats will ensure every voter knows where their leaders stand on the issue of choice, bodily autonomy, and health care. We will continue to fight to elect candidates that stand up for reproductive freedom in North Carolina. #ncpol
Tonight, Republicans sent a message to North Carolinians that they don’t trust them to make their own health care decisions. SB20 is dangerous legislation that puts politicians in the middle of deeply personal health care decisions.
It abandons the medical advice of doctors who urged lawmakers to stop this ban. It will have devastating impacts on abortion access, putting up medically unnecessary barriers to reproductive care and for many – it may impact their access altogether.
It is shameful to see Republicans flip-flop and betray their constituents to toe the party line. It’s even more shameful to see their gloating faces as folks exited the gallery knowing that this bill will kill people in our state. They should be ashamed.
They won’t be. This legislation is unpopular, as the New York Times reported Monday:
A Meredith poll in February showed that 57 percent of respondents supported the state’s current 20-week ban, or would expand it. Another 35 percent wanted the procedure restricted to 15 weeks or less.
This is what minority rule looks like. Donald Trump won North Carolina in 2020 by 1.3 points. The current congressional delegation is 7-7 Republicans and Democrats. To maximize their advantage, the NCGOP will hold off revealing their re-gerrymandered 2024 maps (already drafted, to be sure) until the filing period opens in December. Expect a 10-4 Republican congressional majority (at best) and even harsher state district maps.
Since her election, Clayton has been barnstorming the state generating excitement among younger voters. Daily Kos is already raising money for the state Democratic Party to help with field organizing. Clayton will need the financial help to support candidates and local committees stop the state from becoming North Florida.
“Unless better people get involved with politics, politics doesn’t get any better,” Clayton told Pod Save America this week.
"Unless better people get involved with politics, politics doesn't get any better."
Here’s a short thread from Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post spelling it out in a nutshell:
What’s in this supposedly commonsense bill McCarthy is demanding in exchange for not destroying the global economy?
Here’s my handy guide, for those interested in the substance of the legislation and not just political gamesmanship.
1. Unspecified across-the-board cuts to nondefense discretionary spending, down by one-third on average in 2024, after inflation. The cuts would then expand to roughly 59%, on average, by 2033
Does this mean WIC? Border security? Pells? FBI? No one knows
2. Defund the tax police – make it harder for IRS to collect taxes legally owed by wealthy/corporate tax cheats, and set back the agency’s other IT upgrades.
(Would also increase deficits)
3. Medicaid work requirements – which sound nice, but are a solution in search of a problem. See Arkansas’s disastrous experiment, which did not boost employment but did cause a lot of poor working people to lose their healthcare.
4. Provision to grind entire regulatory system to a halt, by requiring Congress’s approval for all major regs. That includes deregulatory action too btw
Congress can barely do the things it’s responsible for now. Like, say, paying our existing bills
Here’s a separate thread on what happens if Republicans don’t get their way, and instead force a default.
"Financial armageddon" “Global margin call” “Bankruptcies that rival those in the Great Depression” These were some phrases used by former Treasury/Federal Reserve officials when asked about a US default. The likely fallout, in 7 terrifying steps: https://t.co/elW9YJv37L
What would “meeting in the middle” actually mean? Only 20% cuts in all discretionary spending across the board and maybe bringing the regulatory system to a partial stop? Even if that was acceptable to anyone with a brain, which it isn’t, the wingnuts won’t accept it. They are irrational. They have been told by their God Donald Trump that default is just ‘a perception” and maybe it would be good for the country!
There are three possibilities in my view. Biden gives them every last thing they want and more. Kevin McCarthy decides to fall on his sword for the good of the country and brings something to the floor over the Freedom Caucus’ objections — and loses his seat.
There’s actually a fourth possibility and that’s that they follow the 2013 model and the Treasury Dept. moves the drop dead dates back, they do some extensions with a lot of back and forth and they end up passing a clean debt ceiling next year some time because the Republican approvals are in the dirt and they’re running for re-election. Is that likely? I don’t know. But hope is not a plan…
These Republicans are too much. You wonder if they really think they can win this way and then realize they don’t. They’re just hoping he ends up in jail or embalmed:
The leading pro-DeSantis PAC surprised the political world with a single tweet after Donald Trump’s CNN town hall last week. It bluntly called out the former president for his answers on January 6th, his “rigged” election claims, “the sex abuse case” he was found liable for damages over, “his defense of his comments about grabbing women by their genitals,” and investigations into “his stash of taxpayer-owned classified documents.”
“How does this Make America Great Again?” the tweet from the official account of Never Back Down concluded.
This was the kind of all-out critique of Trump that Ron DeSantis — and most of the 2024 field — have never made themselves.
Don’t expect to hear it again, though: The tweet generated some heated internal pushback at Never Back Down, while multiple prominent conservativecommentators piled on publicly.
One DeSantis ally familiar with their thinking told Semafor that the group’s leadership “100%” recognized it as an error. A second source familiar with the situation added that they were told the tweet was sent without the approval of the PAC’s senior communications team.
AD
“That post was a massive mistake,” the first ally said. “It sounded like it came from CNN, and I think people inside realized that that was a massive mistake, and I hope it won’t be repeated again.”
In perhaps a sign of concern around how it had been received, Never Back Down also added a reply to the tweet the next morning: This one focused on DeSantis’ “impressive accomplishments” in Florida and his dedication to discussing his “great vision” for the country.
In a statement, a representative from Never Back Down called the sources’ version of events “false,” but did not name any specific errors.
“This inaccurate gossip based reporting about internal conversations and strategy at Never Back Down is false,” Steve Cortes, a spokesperson for the PAC, said in a statement. “Never Back Down remains focused on telling the incredible story of success and service of Governor Ron DeSantis and amplifying the growing grassroots calls for him to become president.”
The reporter weighs in with her analysis:
Never Back Down’s aborted attack gets to a core obstacle for DeSantis and indeed all of Trump’s Republican challengers: How do they attack him without sounding like Democrats to Republican voters?
Entire categories of what would be go-to attacks against any other candidate are effectively forbidden. DeSantis backed off almost immediately after a brief mention of Trump’s hush money payments to an adult film actress. He strongly defended him from his indictment in New York, from an FBI search on his Mar-a-Lago home that turned up hundreds of classified documents, and has avoided getting into topics related to other investigations. Even as DeSantis boasts on the pre-campaign trail that he’s a “winner,” he still hasn’t taken a clear stance on the most fundamental part of any electability argument: That his opponent lost the previous election.
Primary voters have long been conditioned to see discussion of Trump’s issues with the law, or January 6th, or women as liberal obsessions designed to drag down the party, not issues to be litigated in a contest between Republicans. After CNN’s town hall, for example, the network’s focus group of attendees bemoaned that the hosts kept bringing up his 2020 election claims: “Couldn’t the media ask him a question about 2024?” one voter asked.
This reflects my own experience on the trail in recent months: Republican voters rarely cite Trump’s personal or legal issues as prime arguments against him or even topics that they’re concerned about (the furthest they’ll usually go is to note that they’re tired of the “drama”). Issues like the economy, parental control over what’s taught in schools, or the border are much more likely to come up first.
Right. They just care about “the issues” because they are very serious people. Just build the autobahn Adolph! That’s all that matters.
She asks what’s left to criticize Trump over if you take all that off the table. It’s pretty this gruel:
DeSantis and his supporters have telegraphed some likely lines of attack aimed at hitting him solely from the right.
There’s electability, where DeSantis has recently criticized a “culture of losing” in the party without naming Trump, while warning Republicans will lose again if they “get distracted and focus the election on the past or on other side issues.”
And then there’s competence: DeSantis has hinted at attacking Trump from the right on COVID-19, in particular, saying repeatedly that he would have fired Dr. Anthony Fauci and resisted health guidance from CDC officials.
DeSantis has tried to call out Trump for attacking fellow Republicans as well, saying his criticisms of his record on Social Security and Medicare amount to “Democrat attacks” that damage the party.
Yeah, that’s really hitting him where it hurts. He’s damaging the party. Because Republicans really give a damn about that. And as far as the electability argument goes, I’m afraid they are overlooking something important: the vast majority of the GOP thinks Trump actually won! And these morons won’t tell them any different. So, the “culture of losing” argument is just a tad dissonant, don’t you think?
Probably not. They are clearly rooting for a horse race and frankly, they seem to want to take Biden down a peg for reasons that elude me. (He doesn’t abuse them to their faces the way they like it?) Whatever he case they went crazy over that poll that showed Trump Beating Biden even though it’s conclusions were called into questions and they polled “adults” which is a very sloppy way to poll a presidential race.
Anyway, a number of polls have come out since and they haven’t said much about them. I suppose it’s because
Jon Schwarz with a review of Hawley’s new book is headlined “Josh Hawley won’t let go of his manhood.” Lol:
ACROSS THE AGES, right-wing politics has had an enduring fixation: manliness, whatever that means exactly.
You may remember that Hogan Gidley, the press secretary for former President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign, declared that Trump was “the most masculine person ever to hold the White House.”
Before that, there was Trump’s runner-up in manliness, George W. Bush. When Bush delivered his “Mission Accomplished” speech on an aircraft carrier, convicted Watergate felon G. Gordon Liddy said Bush’s flight suit “made the best of his manly characteristic.” Bush’s one-time chief speechwriter Michael Gerson described him as possessing “a manly humor.”
Then there was the Vietnam War, a manly endeavor prosecuted by the Nixon administration’s manly men. When Henry Kissinger’s assistant Anthony Lake objected to the intense U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, Kissinger told Lake he was “not manly enough.”
Practitioners of this politics perceive themselves as exemplars of masculinity, even as they fear manliness in general is being sapped from society by the forces of darkness. For example, Kissinger once told Gerson that radical Islam was trying to humiliate us, “and we need to humiliate them.” Nixon referred to our Vietnamese enemies as “little cocksuckers.”
A few years before, in 1965, the U.S. had supported a massive bloodbath in Indonesia in which at least 500,000 people were slaughtered. The Indonesian military justified this by claiming that communist witches had castrated several army generals. This fear goes back as far as humans do: The 1486 exposé of witchcraft “Malleus Maleficarum” proved that witches can, via sorcery, “truly and actually remove men’s members.”
“Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” a new book by Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, is a worthy heir to this tradition.
BEFORE YOU ASK, the answer to your question is no. In a book titled “Manhood,” Hawley literally never mentions the most famous act of his life: running away from the protesters in the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the protesters he had earlier that day saluted with a raised fist of solidarity.
Your guess is as good as mine. My assumption is that it’s because the U.S. right has created an entire self-contained fantasy world, one in which GOP politicians like Hawley can thrive without ever facing the most obvious questions, so he doesn’t feel the need to bother. Notably, “Manhood” is published by the conservative Regnery, where editors presumably understand Hawley’s readers won’t want any intrusions from unpleasant reality.
“MANHOOD” IS SOMEHOW both short and long: Short because it’s an op-ed stretched out to barely 200 pages, and long because it is preternaturally boring. There are zero jokes, not even a single wry remark. Consuming it is like eating a small but dense log of suet.
Hawley’s thesis is that America’s men are in crisis: fathering children out of wedlock, failing to get jobs, committing crime, and playing video games. Why? The problem is the Greek philosopher Epicurus and his modern descendants, liberals.
Epicurus taught us, Hawley summarizes, that “the universe is neither planned nor orderly. … Mankind should put the gods aside and focus on what really matters, which is, he said, pleasure, happiness. … The trick was to arrange one’s life, and society in such a way to allow maximum choice for pursuing pleasure.” (This is actually not at all what Epicurus said; he wrote that “pleasure is the end” but emphasized the pleasure of “living prudently and honorably and justly.” But who cares, I guess.)
However, there is another philosophy of life, as found in the Bible: “It says man was created as God’s image and called to perform God’s work.” In Genesis, the Garden of Eden “is the only place of order and flourishing. … When we learn anything of the land beyond Eden’s borders, it appears untamed, wild. Dark forces lurk there.” The job of men is not to give into their hedonistic yearnings but assume the yoke of manhood and “subdue what is yet wild.”
The problem is that “there are dark forces that resist this mighty work,” i.e., the Epicurean liberals. Because the Epicureans believe only in base sensuality and giving no thought for the morrow, they are naturally hostile to God and the role he has given man and therefore proclaim that manhood is a wholly negative force that must be destroyed.
Hawley turns this idea into a book by repeating it at you 700 times. In addition, there are a smattering of statistics and a few charming anecdotes about Hawley’s sons Elijah and Blaise. But that’s pretty much it. “Manhood” is striking because it is fundamentally a work of airless theology. It’s just a dreary debate between Hawley’s interpretation of the Bible and his straw man Epicureans, all with the intellectual rigor of what he tells us in the last chapter: “The Bible is right. The Epicurean liberals are wrong.” Case closed.
Even Hawley’s conception of manhood is a shallow mess. The liberal Epicureans, he informs us, want to abolish masculinity altogether. But this would be a horrible mistake. To illustrate this, he relates a tale from his wife’s family, who had a homestead in New Mexico in the 1860s. It was occasionally menaced by “the region’s most notorious outlaw, Captain William Coe,” known for murder and pillage. On one occasion, Coe arrived while being chased by federal soldiers. Hawley’s wife’s widowed ancestor Susan fed Coe and then waited for him to fall asleep. She then sent her son Bud, then in his early teens, to search for the soldiers and bring them back to the homestead, even though she knew that if Coe woke while Bud was gone that Coe might kill her.
Bud succeeded, and Coe was captured. For Hawley, this means various things, but it is foremost “the story of a young man becoming something every man is called to be — a warrior.”
Yet as Hawley tells it, the most courage was shown by Susan. She was the one directly at risk. Moreover, Coe himself was a warrior, a Civil War veteran who was a “charismatic leader, in a malevolent sort of way.” So que es mas macho here? When Hawley writes elsewhere that “men are part of God’s solution to danger in the world,” shouldn’t he emphasize that a great deal of this danger is also created by men?
Another example Hawley provides of manliness is his uncle Gene, who served with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam. “That’s part of what it meant to be a man — to go stand on the line, to go and defend,” says Hawley. “To confront evil and do something about it.” Hawley does not mention the Tiger Force unit of the 101st, which carried out a voluminous spree of rape and murder of Vietnamese civilians. Nor does he ask whether any masculinity was demonstrated by the men who refused to go 7,000 miles as agents of the most powerful empire that’s ever existed to dump napalm on a peasant society.
HAWLEY’S CORE UNSERIOUSNESS is especially pernicious because America should be considering the issues he raises — just not like this. Hawley tells us that “the corporations [want] a nation of androgynous consumers who don’t rock the boat and don’t question much but buy plenty of cheap paraphernalia to keep the corporations profitable.” This is essentially accurate, but it’s also obviously the basic characteristic of our economic system, not the philosophy of elusive modern-day “Epicureans.” Ferocious 21st century capitalism and the society it’s created is clearly a bad fit for humans in general — and young men in particular. All you need to understand this is to witness how many of them are carrying out random massacres with AR-15s (something that goes unmentioned by Hawley).
The funniest part of all is that Hawley tells us that “America’s most urgent need politically is not for this or that piece of legislation. It is for men to embrace a call to character.”
So … WHY IS HE A SENATOR? By Hawley’s own estimation, he is the weakest, most unmanly man imaginable. His entire life is what he did on January 6: succumbing to his own desire for power, running away as fast as possible from the consequences, and refusing to acknowledge any of it.
Hawley is obviously preparing for a career as America’s most important motivational speaker for the Mens Rights/Incel movement. There’s some real money in that sector.
A great way to get cooperation from a neighbor is to call him a primitive loser. Works every time:
Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy went on a racist tirade against Mexicans this week and demanded the Biden administration engage in mafia-style tactics to force the Mexican government to allow an invasion of its country by the U.S. military and law enforcement agents to fight drug cartels.
His comments enraged Mexican officials who have condemned Kennedy and even gone so far as to openly urge Latinos in the U.S. to not vote for Republicans as a result.
Kennedy unleashed his racist rant during a Senate hearing on the FBI and DEA’s budget Wednesday. In comments to DEA Administrator Anne Milgram, Kennedy derisively argued that without the United States the people of Mexico “would be eating cat food out of a can and living in a tent behind an Outback.”
More than 37.2 million Americans — more than 10 percent of the total population — are of Mexican descent, according to the Pew Research Center.
Kennedy then went on to demand that Milgram and President Joe Biden engage in mafia style tactics to force Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to essentially cede his nation’s sovereignty. “Call President López Obrador and make him a deal he can’t refuse to allow our military and our law enforcement officials to go into Mexico and work with his to stop the cartels.”
Kennedy made his comments in his signature faux Southern drawl. Although the accent is widely considered to be an affectation designed to give off a bit of folksy “charm,” it often ends up sounding more like an Englishman doing a bad impersonation of Foghorn Leghorn, rather than an average Louisianan.
Which makes some sense: Kennedy has a law degree from Oxford. As in, Oxford in the United Kingdom, not Mississippi — though Kennedy was born in that state. He also has degrees from Vanderbilt and the University of Virginia. According to Open Secrets, in 2016 his estimated net worth was $12.14 million, making him among the wealthiest members of the well-heeled United States Senate.
Predictably, his comments didn’t sit well with Mexican officials. Mexico’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs Marcelo Ebrard condemned Kennedy, arguing that “what is behind these ideas and those who promote them … racism against Mexicans, and in general all Spanish-speakers,” according to the Daily Mail.
The newspaper also reported that Mexico’s President also weighed in, saying “tell our countrymen, Hispanics, our American friends, not to vote for people with this very arrogant, very offensive and very foolish mentality.”
Invading Mexico is the big new idea on the right. Kennedy says that we should send in the military and the police to “work with” the Mexican government but the plan being put forth by Trump and others is to just bomb the cartels. Some are even talking full-scale invasion. You can imagine how that makes the Mexican government want to cooperate.
And then there’s the rank bigotry. The Mexican government did not like it one bit:
📄Ambassador @emoctezumab sends a letter responding to insulting comments made by @SenJohnKennedy about Mexico.
1 Durham Report is in. After four years, review of 1 million documents, 490 interviews, his conclusion is that FBI should have opened a preliminary investigation (PI) instead of a full investigation (FI) in 2016. THREAD
2 The only difference between FI and PI is the duration and the authorities that may be used. This is a hairsplitting quibble, and one on which FBI officials routinely disagree.
3 Durham also minimizes the reasons FBI was alarmed enough to open a FI in 2016 based on information received from Australian diplomats about Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos.
4 According to Aussies, Papadopoulos said, “Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist this process with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to Mrs Clinton.”
5 Papadopoulos’s statement came right after the DNC hack. FBI was properly concerned about Russia’s efforts to influence the presidential
election. This was an investigation into RUSSIA.
6 Trump had other concerning ties to Russians: real estate deals, Miss Universe Pageant, loans from Russian lenders, Trump Tower Moscow project. Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort had lobbied for pro-Russian oligarchs.
7 Trump campaign members also had ties to Russia. Mike Flynn was paid $45,000 by Russia Today in 2015 for a speech he gave at a banquet where he sat next to Putin. He later lied to FBI about his calls with the Russian ambassador about sanctions during the transition.
8 Carter Page had been seen meeting with Russian intel officers. It now appears that he was unaware that they were trying to recruit him. Papadopoulos worked to set up a meeting with Putin.
9 Durham criticizes the FBI for relying on the Steele Dossier for the Carter Page FISA. Steele Dossier was not the basis for opening the investigation, but it makes for a useful scapegoat to blur that fact.
10 We now know FBI was unable to corroborate the Steele Dossier, which contained explosive details about Russian kompromat on Trump. That’s 20/20 hindsight. And, importantly, Durham never says the information in it was false, just unconfirmed.
11 In fact, some aspects of Steele Dossier were confirmed by Mueller and DNI: Putin favored Trump and was working to influence the election in Trump’s favor and against Clinton. It also contained unconfirmed information that could have seriously compromised Trump as president.
12 Failing to investigate these ties would have been a breach of duty by FBI. This was an investigation into RUSSIA. Russia was the threat and the focus. Trump was just Russia’s useful idiot.
13 Page FISA also was based on an e-mail altered by an FBI lawyer. That lawyer was identified by IG, not Durham, and he was properly convicted for making false statements. Mueller disregarded all aspects of Page FISA.
14 In addition to criticizing the FBI for opening a FI instead of a PI, Durham also ignores other facts and helps advance the narrative that the Russia investigation was a hoax.
15 Like Barr, Durham says Mueller found no conspiracy between Trump and Russia but fails to mention the 2016 Trump Tower meeting to receive dirt on Clinton, sharing of polling data with Russian intel officer Konstantin Kilimnik, and coordinating of messaging with Wikileaks.
16 Durham also ignores Trump’s public statement, “Russia, if you’re listening …” asking them to find Clinton’s missing emails, and the subsequent release of hacked emails hours after the release of the Access Hollywood tape.
17 The result of Durham’s four-year investigation is two failed prosecutions of bit players outside of government and a recommendation for FBI to hire someone to oversee their FISA work.
18 But the Durham Report provides fuel for the false claim that the Russia probe was a hoax. Don’t fall for it. While Mueller found no conspiracy, he concluded that Russia worked to help Trump become president.
19 And rather than report Russia’s overtures to FBI, Trump’s campaign was willing to accept the help.
20 The only winner here is Russia, which succeeded in its mission to get its favored candidate elected, sow discord in the United States, and undermine public trust in American institutions.
Talking Points Memo reports that two staffers in Rep. Paul Gosar’s office have close ties to Nick Fuentes’ white-supremacist “Groyper” movement:
TPM has uncovered an extensive digital trail of interconnected Groyper social media pages using variations of the “ChickenRight” and “Chikken” handles that can be linked to Wade Searle, who works as the digital director for Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), one of the most extreme, far-right members of Congress. ChickenRight’s posting on far-right websites and Searle’s alleged involvement with Fuentes occurred before and after he started working in Gosar’s Capitol Hill office. Gosar, his chief of staff, his press secretary, and Searle have not responded to multiple detailed requests for comment.
Well. You could have knocked over MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan with a feather. Not to mention his being “shocked” by Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-Ala.) “conflation of white supremacists and Nazis with MAGA supporters and Trump supporters.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat (“Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present“) commented, “What we’ve got now is [Donald] Trump is openly appealing to people as a violent cult leader. He’s not a conventional politician. He’s a cult leader.”
“You got neo-nazis. You’ve got fascists. You’ve got people who love Pinochet and the military juntas … All the way up to the new right … Orbán and Putin” grouped around Trump, not to mention “historical racism and white Christian nationalism.”
I once explained the resurgence of medieval spirituality, mysticism and superstition (even as technology accelerated) as resulting from people trying to navigate a 21st century world with a medieval collective unconscious.
Our inability to recognize a threat to the republic today stems, perhaps, from a similar cultural reflex, one that dates at least to the Silent Generation. Americans are “nice.” We are the “good guys.” God’s chosen. Whatever. Other people have “problems” we do not speak aloud for fear that in naming them we make them real. Like “Voldemort” that way.
Faced with ugly truths — Christian nationalism, resurgent white supremacy, daily gun slaughter, xenophobia, and more — we tell ourselves “that’s not who we are.” And yet, that’s who we are. Frogs slowly boiling.
Sublimation: a feature or a bug? One has to wonder with the obsessive attention Americans pay to the sex others are having, to gender nonconformity, and especially to extrajudicial punishment.
Brandon Garrett and Gregory Mitchell ponder findings that suggest Americans’ adherence to Sir William Blackstone’s principle that it is “better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer” is slipping. If their faith in due process was ever there.
Researchers asked if at trial it was worse if an innocent was convicted, a guilty person went free, or if both were equally bad. (Slate):
Most respondents answered that the errors were equally bad. Our first results showing widespread rejection of the Blackstone ratio were so surprising and potentially disruptive that we tested their robustness multiple times, using a series of large samples drawn from the entire U.S. population and multiple measurement methods.
Across multiple national surveys sampling more than 12,000 people, we have found that a majority of Americans, more than 60 percent, consider false acquittals and false convictions to be equally bad outcomes. Most people are not Blackstonians. They are unwilling to err on the side of letting the guilty go free to avoid convicting the innocent. Indeed, a sizeable minority viewed false acquittals as worse than false convictions; this group is willing to convict multiple innocent persons to avoid letting one guilty person go free. You would not want those people on your jury if you were charged with a crime.
Democrats? Republicans? It did not matter. “Convicting the wrong person is not just a fairness concern but also a public safety concern,” the pair write. “When an innocent person languishes in prison, a guilty person goes free.”
So what? Give me that old-time retribution, you know?
The findings suggest to me an inability of more Americans to ever see themselves as unfairly charged or guilty of anything. “Stand your ground” has been codified across the country, as Digby noted on Monday: “Self-defense has been redefined to mean you can kill if you simply feel threatened. There’s no responsibility to retreat and there doesn’t have to be an actual threat. Kill first and ask questions later.”
Conservatism, especially these days, is an ideology of perpetual innocence.
Michelle Goldberg examines the ReAwaken America Tour, the “Christian nationalist roadshow co-founded by the former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.” The issue for Republicans in 2024 “isn’t whether the next Republican presidential candidate is going to be a Christian nationalist,” but “what sort of Christian nationalism will prevail: the elite, doctrinaire variety of candidates like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, or the violently messianic version embodied by Flynn and Trump.”
If DeSantis treats Christianity as a moral code he’d like to impose on the rest of us, Trump treats it as an elevated status that should come with special perks. That’s how he can slam DeSantis for being “sanctimonious” even as he wraps his own campaign in biblical raiment. If a Republican wins in 2024, the victor will preside over a Christian nationalist administration. The question is whether that person will champion an orthodoxy or a cult.
But Christian nationalism is more like the old Reese’s commercial about peanut butter and chocolate. You got nationalism in my Christianity, etc. Happy accident?
People with a taste for punishment are like Alex of A Clockwork Orange, mimicking godliness while fantasizing about whipping Jesus up the hill. Or about gunning down (or choking to death) perceived evil doers before they’ve done anything evil. Making white people uncomfortable is enough to merit death these days. They cannot imagine themselves wrongly accused or killed.
Give them access to power and they’ll find out soon enough once they’ve run out of the obvious heretics to punish.
