We know now that he was a white supremacist incel. Here’s one of his posts on social media:
It sounds like some kind of joke. (He even mentions that Hitler got Germany out of an economic recession!) But it’s not. This guy’s social media is full of stuff like this. He hits all the talking points.
I hope that monster “Libs of Tik Tok” feels good about herself today. She really helped save the children last weekend.
The right has been attacking public education as long as anyone can remember. It’s usually about unions or dumbing down and losing to the Chinese or something like that. But as Jonathan Chait writes in this excellent article about what’s actually happening in today’s right wing assault on education, they have now decided that academic freedom is for losers — they are convinced that it’s time to completely take over American education and indoctrinate children into right wing ideology.
The article is long so I’d recommend that you read it in full if you can but suffice to say that Chait makes many good points about the historical antecedents of various attempts to dominate education and points out that there are excesses on the left as well as right. (Of course he does.) But he seems to have taken a hard look at this and finally realized that enemy in this war isn’t the kids who want trigger warnings and safe spaces but the authoritarian extremists who have decided it’s time to use state power to force educational institutions, even private ones, to carry their party line — or else.
An excerpt:
Republicans have begun saying things about American schools that not long ago would have struck them as peculiar, even insane. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has called schools “a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.” Former secretary of State Mike Pompeo predicts that “teachers’ unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids,” will “take this republic down.” Against the backdrop of his party, Donald Trump, complaining about “pink-haired communists teaching our kids” and “Marxist maniacs and lunatics” running our universities, sounds practically calm.
More ominously, at every level of government, Republicans have begun to act on these beliefs. Over the past three years, legislators in 28 states have passed at least 71 bills controlling what teachers and students can say and do at school. A wave of library purges, subject-matter restrictions, and potential legal threats against educators has followed.
Education has become an obsession on the political right, which now sees it as the central battlefield upon which this country’s future will be settled…
In the spring of 2021, Richard Corcoran delivered a fire-breathing speech at Hillsdale, a right-wing Christian college in Michigan, touting the agenda he had helped implement as education commissioner in Florida. When an audience member asked how he had been able to find common ground with people who disagreed with him, Corcoran responded, “I have fought … There’s no negotiation. I don’t think antifa wants to sit down and have a conversation with me about how can we make this society better.” Corcoran went on to compare America’s disputes over education to “the warring in the streets” in Germany before World War II between the Nazis and the communists. “The war will be won in education,” he vowed. “Education is our sword. That’s our weapon. Our weapon is education.”
[…]
Media coverage of the Republicans’ education crusade has largely treated it as a messaging exercise. A New York Times headline from earlier this year, “DeSantis Takes On the Education Establishment, and Builds His Brand,” reflects the cynical assumption that this is mostly a way for him to rile up the Fox News audience. One progressive pollster recently told The Atlantic that for Republican voters, liberal control of schools “is a psychological, not policy, threat,” even as their elected officials strike back with policy. Some Democrats have mocked Republicans for pursuing arcane obsessions that fail to connect with voters’ concerns. And it’s true the voters are not driving this crusade: A recent poll found only 4 percent of the public lists education as the most important issue. Politico reports that “mounds of research by Democratic pollsters over the last several months” have found Republican book bans to be utterly toxic with swing voters.
You might wonder why Republicans would throw themselves into such a risky venture. The answer is that they aren’t looking to enrage their base or get their face on Fox News. They have come to believe with deadly seriousness that they not only must but can seize control of the ideological tenor in American schools, from the primary to the university level. If accomplishing this social transformation carries a near-term political cost, they are willing to pay it. And to imagine that they will fail, or grow bored and move on, and that the education system will more or less remain the same as it ever was, is to lack an appreciation for their conviction and the powers they have at their disposal to realize their goal.
[…]
The Republican Party emerged from the Trump era deeply embittered. A large share of the party believed that Democrats had stolen their way back into power. But this sentiment took another form that was not as absurd or, at least, not as clearly disprovable. The theory was that Republicans were subverted by a vast institutional conspiracy. Left-wing beliefs had taken hold among elite institutions: the media, the bureaucracy, corporations, and, especially, schools.
This theory maintains that this invisible progressive network makes successful Republican government impossible. Because the enemy permanently controls the cultural high ground, Republicans lose even when they win. Their only recourse is to seize back these nonelected institutions.
“Left-wing radicals have spent the past 50 years on a ‘long march through the institutions,’” claims Manhattan Institute fellow and conservative activist Chris Rufo, who is perhaps the school movement’s chief ideologist. “We are going to reverse that process, starting now.”
Many institutions figure in Republicans’ plans. They are developing proposals to cleanse the federal workforce of politically subversive elements, to pressure corporations to resist demands by their “woke employees,” and to freeze out the mainstream media. But their attention has centered on the schools. “It is the schools — where our children spend much of their waking hours — that have disproportionate influence over American society, seeding every other institution that has succumbed to left-wing ideological capture,” writes conservative commentator Benjamin Weingarten.
Or, as Florida governor Ron DeSantis has said in his most revealing comments on the issue, “Our K–12 schools are public institutions that are funded by our taxpayers. And so that line of thinking is saying, even though they’re public institutions, the people that are elected to direct those institutions have no right to get involved. If the left is pursuing the agenda. So basically, we can win every election and we still lose on all these different things. That is totally untenable. So these are public institutions, and they have to reflect the mission that the state of Florida has in our case, not just K–12, but also higher education.”
In other words, they are once again diving into the conspiracy theory rabbit hole to keep their rubes aggrieved and engaged. The ultimate goal of these authoritarians is obvious. As Chait says elsewhere “seizing political control of the schools is not a campaign slogan. It’s a plan to turn power into more power.”
He goes on to list some of the absurdities in the bills the Republicans are rushing to pass. You can see one example of their thinking in the video at the top. This extends to the university level where they are now threatening institutions with defunding, and replacing administrations with far right ideologues if they fail to toe the line.
Chait also discusses the Orbán connection which is real and dangerous. DeSantis has been following that playbook to the letter and now Trump and the rest of the Republicans are on board. They will take it national the first chance they get:
Orbán’s example has shown the government’s power over the academy can be absolute. DeSantis is simply the first Republican to appreciate the potential of this once-unimaginable use of state power to win the culture wars. Even before DeSantis’s plan has passed, Republicans in North Carolina, Texas, and North Dakota rushed out bills to eliminate tenure for professors.
Trump, racing to catch up with DeSantis on the education issue, has vowed to eliminate federal funding for any school promoting critical race theory, “transgender insanity,” or “any other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.” He promises to fire existing college accreditors and appoint new ones who will implement his ideological dictates, and to back up this threat by imposing confiscatory taxes on the endowment of any university that resists.
Conservatives as a whole have fled from any pretense of respecting academic freedom. “To complain that the governor and the state legislature are interfering with” public universities “is, in effect, to complain that the governor and the state legislature are interfering with the government that they run,” editorialized National Review, neatly sweeping away any concern that a Republican state could ever go too far in dictating content to its universities.
With DeSantis and Trump now vying for supremacy with a boot on the neck of American education, the Republican Party appears to have quickly settled on this strategy. There is not any assurance that the campaign to control the ideology of the schools will remain confined to the public sphere. Representative Dan Bishop of North Carolina and Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas have put forth a bill that would deny federal funding to public and private universities that promote CRT concepts.
And what has been revealed in these early days of the Republican plan to conquer the academy merely represents the powers of state governments. Should Republicans win control of the White House and Congress, they would have far more authority at their disposal. Federal research dollars and tuition subsidies give the federal government leverage over every institution of higher learning, public and private alike.
There is little sign Democrats have grasped the ultimate ambitions they are confronting. When DeSantis began pushing through yet another expansion of his restrictions on gender instruction — a bill that would, among other things, require “certain materials” facing objections by any parent to be removed before they were vetted — his opponents dismissed it as mere pandering. Democrats “see it as an attempt by DeSantis to excite the conservative base and, ultimately, win the GOP 2024 presidential nomination,” reported Politico.
This pat assumption fails to appreciate that seizing political control of the schools is not a campaign slogan. It’s a plan to turn power into more power.
When Republicans last had control of government, admiration of Orbán was confined to a marginal fringe of right-wing intellectuals, and the whole idea of imposing their will on schools had yet to be invented. It was well into his final year in office before Trump glommed onto the issue. Trump called the George Floyd demonstrations “the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools.” That is when he brought Rufo in for a visit and began ranting on the campaign trail about the “wokes” in the classroom. In November 2020, to counter the narrative of “The 1619 Project,” Trump created a “1776 Commission,” which released its report on Trump’s penultimate day in office.
This futile departing gesture seemed at the time to signify the superficiality and ridiculousness of the Republican interest in the subject. But now members of the party elite have fully invested themselves in this objective. They have only just begun to explore their powers, and their statements on the matter recognize no theoretical limit as to how far they might go. In retrospect, Trump’s late embrace of the crusade to purify the schools was not a fleeting interest but a new turn, the first shots fired in what we now see is a full-scale war.
Democrats had better wake up. Yes, much of this is a cynical power grab but some of it is a true believers desire to ensure their worldview is dominant. And at this point it doesn’t matter which is which. Education is just the first step.
I haven’t really done justice to the piece so you need to read it to get the full gist. The fact that it’s Jonathan Chait, a writer who has been wringing his hands over left wing excesses, particularly in education, for years just makes it more powerful. It’s important that people understand the real stakes in this culture war. The right’s offensive could be catastrophic and that’s mainly because they are treating the culture war as a real war while the left sees it as some form of therapy. I wouldn’t bet on the latter beating the former.
It was another bloody weekend in America’s sick and twisted shooting gallery. A man dressed in full tactical gear and carrying an assault rifle got out of his car at a shopping mall in Allen Texas and started randomly shooting people on the sidewalk. A police officer who was coincidentally on the scene for another call took down the shooter after he had shot 16 people, killing at least 8 and possibly more. (Several people are reportedly still in critical condition.) This is seen as a huge success story among the gun fetishists because it shows that a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun with only a dozen and half casualties. It’s what we call “good news” these days.
Last week we had two other major shooting incidents before this one. One, in Atlanta, caused the whole downtown area to be shut down for hours after a man shot five women in a doctor’s office and then disappeared into the labyrinth of office buildings. Before that, in Texas again, a man who was upset because his neighbors asked him to stop shooting his gun in the front yard at 11 o’clock at night decided to execute five of them in their home moments later. Both men were apprehended after massive manhunts.
All three of these cases appear to have different motivations. The Atlanta shooter was diagnosed with mental illness and was reportedly angry that he didn’t get the prescription he wanted. The man who shot his neighbors was a drinking man with a hot temper and a penchant for guns. We don’t know for sure what motivated the mall shooter — the Texas authorities are refusing to brief the public about virtually anything to do with this mass killing for some reason — but according to Rolling Stone and other media reports, it appears the man was a white supremacist:
The suspected mass shooter who killed at least eight people at an Allen, Texas mall on Saturday frequently posted pro-white supremacist and neo-Nazi materials on social media, according to an FBI bulletin reviewed by Rolling Stone. The FBI’s “review and triage of the subject’s social media accounts revealed hundreds of postings and images to include writings with racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist rhetoric, including neo-Nazi materials and material espousing the supremacy of the white race,” the bulletin reads.
Rolling Stone also reports that according to an internal email, investigators believe the shooter was a neo-Nazi and an “incel.” (And yes, he has a Hispanic last name which means nothing despite right wing commentators insistence otherwise — two of the most famous white supremacists in the country are a Nazi named Nick Fuentes and a Proud Boy named Enrique Tarrio.) In other words this particular mass shooter appears to be another right wing terrorist but we don’t have official confirmation of that because again, Texas authorities aren’t bothering to brief anyone.
So we have three mass shooters in the course of a week who seem to be motivated to kill a large number of people for a variety of reasons. According to Republican politicians the common thread is that mental illness is causing all of this bloodshed or it’s an act of God and there’s nothing we can do about it. Here’s one Texas legislator making both claims simultaneously:
The Governor of Texas, as he is wont to do after every mass shooting that takes place in his state, also claims that the “real” problem is mental illness which we really should do something about:
Newsom is correct about the fact that Texas has a 73% higher gun death rate than California so Abbott is being disingenuous when he makes that claim. There is simply no doubt that states with looser gun laws have higher rates of gun violence. And the gun laws are getting looser by the day with both Texas and Florida recently just letting their gun-freak flags fly and allowing unlicensed carry pretty much everywhere.
As it happens, Texas also has very high rates of mental illness and the lowest rate of access to mental health care in the country so he needs to stop cutting mental health services in the state if wants to have any credibility on that issue. We go over this every time there is a mass shooting but it’s apparently necessary. As this survey shows, mental illness is prevalent all over the world with estimates of more than a billion people suffering from one form or another. It’s obvious that mental illness is universal across all humanity. Yet we are the only country that has this problem with constant mass shootings. It is intensely frustrating to have to make this point over and over again but there’s no choice. An average 6th grader can look at those facts and determine that while we all have mental illness in our societies the reason only America is awash is gun violence is because we are awash in guns. No other country is suicidal enough to allow this.
We can all agree that mental illness is at least a real problem for many reasons and should be addressed by government. If the Republicans would agree to actually do that it could be helpful but generally speaking they pay lip service to it the same way they pay lip service to “thoughts and prayers” and then try to change the subject.
But there is another right wing school which says that gun violence is like the weather, there’s nothing we can do about it so best accept the fact that you may have to kill people if you want to go out in public. Here’s a gentleman on Fox news making that case:
That’s a little extreme even for Republicans but it really isn’t that far off from the common cry for “hardening soft targets” which basically means turning our entire society into armed camps with all public places under guard, doors locked and people with weapons and body armor, civilian and government alike, as if we are all supposed to live as if we are in a war zone ready to shoot at the first sign of danger. Here’s what that looks like:
They’re right about one thing. The sickness in this vision isn’t the guns themselves. Those are just mechanical objects. The poison that’s killing us is gun culture. These fetishists are prescribing a dystopian future, all so they can own the lethal weapons that are perpetuating the violence from which they then claim they need to defend themselves.
And they have the gall to call that freedom.
An interesting article in Politico this weekend about recent events in which some left writers and thinkers extolled the virtues of Tucker Carlson because he claims to be a populist, anti-globalist. In my view, even if one were to overlook his blatant racism, misogyny and general adherence to batshit far right nonsense, you really shouldn’t overlook this when you’re taking the position that he’s a populist:
“Please get her fired. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
That was in response to a reporter acknowledging the results of the 2020 election. His concerns were not about the working people of America.
Or this. After he was fired by MSNBC:
Mr. Carlson eventually snagged a pundit contract at Fox and an unpaid fellowship at the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank. But his days as a TV star seemed at an end. With four school-age children, the Carlsons sold their $4 million Washington home, and he had what he later described as a kind of meltdown. “I was living in that world, and I was not succeeding,” he said. “It forced me to think about what I had done wrong, because I had no choice, because I had no money.” ...
His media career had given him adventures and an exciting life, he told a Caller colleague in 2015, but it had been hard to earn the kind of living he aspired to. “I’ve sweated a lot about money, a lot,” he said. “And continue to, probably more than a 45-year-old should.”
At the time, Mr. Carlson was locked in an increasingly bitter inheritance battle. His mother had died a few years earlier in France, apparently without a will, leaving her sons and her second husband, Michael Vaughan, to divide up her estate. Alongside her paintings and jewelry were the dregs of the Miller ranching fortune — a share of mineral rights sprinkled over 68,000 acres of inland Central California and valued at around $37,000.
The orderly disposal of the estate was interrupted in the fall of 2013, according to court records in California, when one of Mr. Vaughan’s daughters from a prior marriage discovered a handwritten will that left everything to him. It also included a one-sentence codicil: “I leave my sons Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson and Buckley Swanson Peck Carlson one dollar each.”
Mr. Carlson and his brother sued, alleging that the will was a forgery; a forensics specialist brought in to examine it stated that it was probably authentic. Mr. Carlson’s uncle asserted that the “discovery” of his sister’s will occurred only after a new well on the family’s California property began pumping out hundreds of barrels of oil. In court filings, the Vaughans now valued the estate’s mineral assets at $2.6 million. The litigation was still going on years later when Mr. Carlson showed up on Mr. Carolla’s podcast to hawk “Ship of Fools,” his Fox-era jeremiad about America’s selfish elites. “She didn’t raise us, she was horrible, and then she dies and causes all these problems,” Mr. Carlson told the host, describing a conversation with his brother. “And he goes, ‘It’s just perfect — she’s a bitch from the grave.’”
Yeah, he’s a real man of the people.
He’s a demagogue who will say anything. His usefulness is limited to how much money he can make which he learned is easy when you’re spouting right wing “populism” which he clearly doesn’t believe in and will abandon the moment it ceases to be profitable. But, of course, this argument isn’t really about Tucker Carlson, it’s about whether or not it’s a good idea to make common cause with fascists if they are also hostile to corporate power or want America to withdraw from involvement in foreign affairs. (They never seem to notice that they rarely want to defund the military but whatever.) It’s an interesting question. The Politico article offers this:
In a way, it’s an argument on the left that goes back to the popular front period of the 1930s, or further (in the Russian civil war, the Bolsheviks argued about making common cause with Islamic fighters from Central Asia, whose embrace of religion was distinctly non-Marxist).
Michael Kazin, the historian of American populism, says there’s a long history of fuzziness about what constitutes left and right, which complicates the question of just who you’ll deem acceptable. Prominent opposition to big business in the Great Depression, he says, also included the likes of the antisemitic radio priest Charles Coughlin and the segregationist Louisiana Gov. Huey Long.
Kazin, whose newest book is a history of the Democratic Party, says he’s sure Carlson is no fellow traveler — and also thinks coming up with a standard for how people like Hawley should be embraced or rejected might also be a little premature given the political realities: “Do you really think that Hawley’s going to support anything Biden wants? There’s a wish to have a broad anti-corporate alliance, but in the end the constituencies are very different.”
David Duhalde, chair for the Democratic Socialists of America Fund, told me that one way to slice it is a function of where you sit. A Senator like Bernie Sanders working with the libertarian Utah Republican Mike Lee to curb presidential war powers? With 100 voters in the Senate, he doesn’t have much choice. A think tanker or essayist trying to be clever? Not so much. “I’m more sympathetic to what the pols are trying to do than to media figures trying to find nuance where there isn’t any,” he says.
And for at least some people closer to the grassroots, the tendency to police against associating with ideological undesirables is a sign of a bigger sickness in elite circles. Amber A’Lee Frost, a writer and longtime fixture of the far-left Chapo Trap House podcast, once wrote about giving a talk about the importance of union organizing before an audience of tech workers. During the question and answer session afterwards, a woman approached the mic to ask what they should do if someone from the alt-right wanted to join their union.
If that happens, Frost replied, it means you’ve won.
“It was kind of a dead silence,” she told me this week, a sign that she’d said something deeply troubling.
Frost, unsurprisingly, was dismissive of both sides of the Carlson contretemps — “right wing populism is largely a cynical brand of lip service from a bunch of professional hucksters” — but says she finds the one tic in the debates about potential left-right overlap disappointingly familiar.
“They’re more invested in who’s on their side than what’s going on,” she said of the people who take umbrage at the idea that left politics might someday lure people with dubious records. “There’s this fear of contamination from the right, which betrays that these people are scared of the general population.”
I guess these people have never heard of the concept of “co-option.” But then there are suckers born every minute.
People are rightly scared of the ideas that are being pumped into the general population by these hucksters and yes, frankly, a large number of my fellow Americans terrify me because they are living in an alternate universe where science is fake and Donald Trump is a truth teller.
Be that as it may, I think the relevant point in that excerpt is this:
“Do you really think that Hawley’s going to support anything Biden wants? There’s a wish to have a broad anti-corporate alliance, but in the end the constituencies are very different.”
This is correct. Republicans are organized by one thing and one thing only: opposition to the Democrats, owning the libs. They even have a rule in the GOP led House, called the Hastert Rule, which says that they won’t bring legislation to the floor unless a majority of the Republicans support it even if they have a majority in the full House to pass it. If some people in the legislature can overcome that to pass agreeable bipartisan legislation, have at it. But people like Hawley are not temperamentally or ideologically positioned to be that sort of legislator — his constituency is a bunch of far right wingnuts. It’s always the Mitt Romneys and Susan Collins’ not the firebrands who fist bump an insurrection who cross the lines in our current politics.
More than that is the fact there are just some people you cannot ally with even if some of their agenda can line up with yours for different reasons. Hitler built the autobahn, Mussolini made the trains run on time, after all. Some things are bigger than your pet issue and empowering fascists is one of them. The poison that the phony, money grubbing, cynical bigot Tucker Carlson spreads is an urgent problem — they’re attempting coups now, largely because of it. People need to focus. This is no drill.
When is today’s mass murder scheduled? Is there an online calendar of coming tragedies for those wishing to be elsewhere when the shooting starts?
This article from the Miami Herald is a week old, but These countries have issued travel advisories for their citizens towards the United States is timely nonetheless:
Due to a rise in crime and fatalities, travel advisories are not uncommon. Travel advisories are the most efficient way for officials to provide safety information to their citizens about potential risks when visiting other countries.
Despite the media portrayal and opinions of others, the U.S. is not immune to travelers questioning their safety. Several countries have advised citizens to take standard safety precautions when entering the U.S., but some have increased the level of alarm. Increased hate crimes, violence, sexual assault and other forms of criminality, have countries warning their citizens about travel to the United States.
Travel Noire revealed why New Zealand, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, Venezuela and Uruguay encourage their citizens to stay diligent when visiting America.
Where do foreigners get such ideas? Study up on active shooter drills and prepare your customs declaration before entering U.S. airspace, countries advise.
More on the advisories in the Herald article. More shootings to come. More headlines, more blood, more bodies.
Jeff Sharlet over the weekend posted a series of photos he collected during and after writing “The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.” Subtle hints that inform those travel advisories.
Mass insanities usually pass with time, but how much time?
A: When it’s dressed up as a 12-week limit.
“They’ve dressed this up as a 12-week ban, but it’s really not,” North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. The GOP-controlled legislature, suddenly with supermajorities in both houses can, with no defections, pass SB 20 over Cooper’s expected veto.
“It will effectively ban many abortions altogether because of the obstacles they have created for women, for clinics, and for doctors,” Cooper told host Margaret Brennan. “This bill has nothing to do with making women safer.”
No more than Republican-sponsored “election integrity” measures are about safeguarding elections.
“North Carolina has become an access point in the Southeast,” he told Brennan. “And what this legislation is going to do is going to prevent many women from getting abortions at any time during their pregnancy, because of the obstructions that they had put here. Many of these clinics are working very hard to treat women, and now they’re going to have many new medically unnecessary requirements that I think many of them are going to have to close.”
The devil is in the details. Under SB20, “patients who discover at 25 weeks that their fetus is developing without lungs or a brain, for example, would be forced to carry a non-viable fetus to term – an utterly barbaric barrier,” warns the nonpartisan advocacy group Carolina Forward:
Moreover, for women who do encounter abnormalities before 25 weeks, SB 20 dictates a long series of condescending and moralistic requirements euphemistically termed “informed consent.” Section 90-21.81D of SB 20 stipulates that doctors must tell women about the “unpredictable and variable lengths of life” with the abnormalities at stake, even if this is not medical fact. The doctor must offer referrals to multiple forms of (expensive) care to encourage her to continue with the pregnancy. The doctor must make a full report to the state Department of Health and Human Services.
Carolina Forward counts off the bureaucratic hurdles Cooper referenced:
- Requiring a consultation with a physician 72 hours before an abortion to be in person, not over the phone or remote.
- Requiring 3 separate visits to a doctor’s office for obtaining a medication abortion. Only 1 of these actually involves giving the medication.
- Requiring any abortion after the 12th week of pregnancy to take place in a hospital, instead of any outpatient facility. (This involves much higher costs and additional staffing and scheduling issues.)
- Inventing brand new licensure requirements for abortion facilities, with a long list of onerous fees, and a requirement that they be annually renewed. Those requirements will likely match those for ambulatory care centers, like emergency rooms, and would effectively close every abortion clinic in North Carolina.
We’ve seen this “find the ban” shell game before in other states. It’s not in the 12 weeks. It’s elsewhere in the bill. Originally the “Safe Surrender Infants/Safe Sleep Prog. Funds” bill, SB 20 became the “Safe Surrender Infants” bill, then the “Care for Women, Children, and Families Act,” then finally just “Abortion Laws” as it grew from 11 to 47 pages.
I’m not entirely sure what Abbott was talking about when he claimed that California has more gun deaths (recent mass shootings? total deaths?) but perhaps he doesn’t realize that California has a much bigger population than Texas. The statistical difference in gun deaths between California and Texas is quite large. California’s death rate per capita is 9 per 100,000. Texas’ is 15.6. California has the 8th lowest rate of gun deaths in the country. Texas has the 25th.
As for he general point that both blue states and red states have gun violence, it’s absolutely true. But it’s the red states that really get the bang for the buck:
A new study published in Journal of the American Medical Association’s Surgery found that firearm deaths are more likely in small rural towns than in major urban cities, adding to research that contradicts common belief that Democratic blue areas have higher incidences of gun-related deaths than do Republican red districts.
Researchers from Children’s Hospital Philadelphia, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the University of California examined two decades of mortality rates and cause-of-death data from the National Center for Health Statistics’ National Vital Statistics System to compile the study.
A Third Way report found that between 2000 and 2020, Trump-voting states had 12% higher murder rates than did Biden-voting cities.
Data shows that in 2020, eight of the ten states with the highest murder rates voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election in this century.
In the past, Republicans have made crime a major campaign talking point—in October 2022, one quarter of attack ads on Democrats focused on crime, and in the two months leading up to the midterms, Fox aired about 141 crime segments on weekdays, according to the report.
A report published in the New England Journal of Medicine found guns became the leading cause of death for children starting in 2017—motor vehicle-related deaths held the number one spot for 60 years prior.
And yes Abbott does make the case for federal gun control since people can walk into any store in Texas, buy an AR-15, drive to California and mow down innocent people with it. It’s true that people get guns in all sorts of different ways but it would be really nice if the laws were uniform and they were strict enough to keep dangerous people from getting those of us who like to not live with bloody gun violence.
Speaking of which, Abbott’s very, very concerned about mental health. In 2022:
Abbott slashed nearly $211 million from the Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC), which oversees mental health services in Texas.
Abbott diverted the funds to add to his effort to send National Guard to the Texas-Mexico border, currently known as Operation Lone Star.
No other Texas agency received a more significant cut than the HHSC when Abbott slashed funding.
The massive cut comes as Texas ranks 44th in the U.S. for an overall ranking of mental health measures and last out of all 50 states in access to mental health care, according to the 2022 State of Mental Health in America report.
He says they’ve raised the spending in the last three sessions but if they’ve raised it it’s only been this year. Here’s where Texas stands relative to the rest of the country:
And this study showed that Texas ranks last in the whole country in access to mental health care.
But sure, let’s have more mental health care. For the people who have to deal with things like this:
Despite being an American with no interest in living under a monarchy, I confess that I spent some time watching that astonishing medieval ritual of the coronation yesterday. It’s fascinating, although I resent the fact that the commentary was almost all blabbing about Harry and the balcony and almost none of it was devoted to discussing the historical context of the ceremony and explaining what it all meant, which I would have been interested to know.
However, all of that is basically an entertainment pageant and as fun as it is to watch, there’s something much more important happening in Britain as this piece by David Frum points out:
If you walked into a British supermarket this past winter, you were likely to see bare shelves in the salad aisle. Customers might have been limited to purchasing lettuce and tomatoes, if there were any lettuce or tomatoes to be found in the first place. Ask the grocers, and you’d hear technical explanations for the scarcity. High energy prices raised costs at British greenhouses; imports from warmer countries were curtailed by bad weather in Southern Europe. Behind all of these situational explanations, however, loomed a larger problem.
From the time a tomato is harvested, every minute counts en route to the purchaser’s table. In March, the BBC reported that Britain’s departure from the European Union has added 10 to 20 minutes of additional paperwork to every truckload of tomatoes shipped from Spain—longer if the truckload mixes different produce varieties. Ten to 20 minutes may not sound like much. But multiply that burden by thousands of trucks, squeeze the trucks through the bottleneck of the single underwater tunnel that connects Britain to freight traffic from Europe, and costs and delays accumulate. The result: winter tomato gluts on the continent, winter tomato shortages in the United Kingdom.
The temporary disappearance of some fresh fruits and vegetables for a few weeks in winter may be only a nuisance. Yet such nuisances are ramifying throughout the British economy, signals and symptoms of larger, system-wide trouble. British consumers are spending less on new clothes and shoes than they did in 2018 and 2019. The British are holding on to their cars longer: The average age of the vehicles on British roads has reached 8.7 years, a record. The British made about 2 million fewer trips abroad in 2022 than they did in 2018 and 2019, an almost 20 percent decline. Lingering COVID concerns offer a partial explanation. But the UK and most of its European Union neighbors had dropped most travel restrictions in January 2022 and the remainder by March.
Altogether, Britain is expected to be the worst performing of the world’s 20 biggest economies this year. The British government’s official forecaster predicts that after-inflation household incomes will decline by an average of 7.1 percent over the three years ending in spring 2024. On the present trajectory, Britain will not return to 2019 levels of disposable income until 2027. By 2024, the average British household will likely have a lower living standard than the average household in Slovenia. On present trends, the average British household will be poorer than the average in Poland by 2030.
The pandemic has not helped, but the slowdown of the British economy cannot be explained by COVID. Italy has suffered more deaths from COVID than any other major European country has, yet its economy had mostly recovered to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2021.
Britain is now paying the price for its decision to leave the European Union. Britain voted to exit in the summer of 2016. The departure was formalized on December 31, 2020. Since then, new barriers to trade, investment, and movement have risen between Britain and its nearest neighbors. Investment in Britain has tumbled, and the British economy has shrunk. By one authoritative estimate, Britain is 4 percent poorer today than if it had stayed in the EU.
Many in the British government are reluctant to acknowledge this reality. Huw Pill, the Bank of England’s chief economist, lamented in a recent podcast interview, “What we’re facing now is that reluctance to accept that, yes, we’re all worse off.”
These costs don’t necessarily make Brexit a “mistake.” Brexit was a trade: less prosperity for more sovereignty. Countries reasonably make such trades all the time. My native Canada would dramatically increase its prosperity if it abandoned its sovereignty and merged with the United States. By their continued independence, Canadians implicitly choose otherwise, and nobody criticizes them for “Canxit.” They know the cost, and they accept the cost as worth it.
But the British were not honestly alerted to the cost of their choice. In 2016, future Prime Minister Boris Johnson campaigned for Brexit in a big red bus carrying a huge printed message: we send the eu £350 million a week. let’s fund our nhs instead.
The British were promised that Brexit meant more: more resources for public and private consumption. Instead, Brexit has predictably turned out to mean less, and the British are surprised, baffled, and angry.
The British health service is now threatened with waves of strikes by nurses and junior doctors. With the country’s finances in a post-pandemic, post-Brexit mess, the British government has squeezed the pay of health-care providers. Between 2010 and 2022, nurses have suffered a nearly 10 percent decline in their pay after adjusting for inflation; junior doctors have lost much more, according to some estimates. Many have emigrated: One in seven U.K.-trained doctors now works abroad, according to a Financial Times analysis.
Britain is compensating by importing health-care providers from Africa and Asia. Yet this contradicts another central promise of Brexit: less immigration. British immigration numbers are very tangled, partly because Brexit has induced large numbers of EU citizens living in Britain to seek British citizenship. These status changes register in the statistics even if the actual human beings have not moved at all. Still, as best as one can tell, migration into Britain has genuinely accelerated since the end of 2020, driven by asylum seekers from outside Europe and from Ukraine.
The British will vote in a national election probably sometime in 2024. You would think this coming election would be the appropriate time to assess the country’s choices and consider whether to choose a different path. You’d think wrong.
Brexit rearranged British politics in surprising ways. Brexit was backed by the Tory right and the Labour left. The Leave vote was highest in the Labour strongholds of the Midlands and northeastern England; Remain was strong in the affluent areas of London and the Tory south of England. The far left of the Labour party had always disliked the European Union as an impediment to schemes to protect and subsidize British industry from foreign competition. Jeremy Corbyn, then the Labour leader, declined to join then-Prime Minister David Cameron on the Remain side. Indeed, Corbyn has been described by one of his closest political allies as a Brexiteer “in his heart of hearts.”
Corbyn resigned in 2020. His successor as Labour leader, Keir Starmer, campaigned against Brexit in 2016. To win the next election, however, Starmer must recover northern English seats lost to the Conservatives in 2019. And so, even as polls show that a big majority of British voters now regard Brexit as a mistake, Starmer has pledged not to reverse course.
In a major speech in July 2022, Starmer dismissed criticism of Brexit as “arguments of the past.” He embraced the old Brexit slogan “Take back control” and vowed, “So let me be very clear: With Labour, Britain will not go back into the EU. We will not be joining the single market. We will not be joining a customs union.”
But if Britain can’t vote for a new approach to Europe, how does it meet the costs imposed by its present approach to Europe?
The short answer to that is more of the denial that Pill denounced.In economic terms, Brexit means that British people must work harder and consume less. But Starmer’s 10-point manifesto for 2024 promises more consumption: more spending on health and public services. That would be a difficult-enough promise for today’s Brexit-hobbled British economy. Starmer undertakes to make the future British economy even less efficient than today’s, by joining more spending to more government management of key industries, specifically railways, energy, and public utilities.
Britain is a society of tremendous capabilities: deep political stability and rule of law, a highly educated and skilled population, a world-spanning language, the planet’s most recognized and admired cultural institutions. The whole world will watch the coronation of King Charles III as carried by the BBC, as styled by British designers, as celebrated by British musicians—and as mocked by British comedians. But developing those assets means accurately assessing Britain’s liabilities, and fearlessly developing plans to overcome them. That assessing and planning will require honest communication with Britain’s voters.
The next government of Britain will likely be a Labour government led by Keir Starmer. It fell to Starmer’s greatest Labour predecessor, Clement Attlee, to explain to the British people where they stood after the Second World War. Addressed as public-spirited adults, the British people met the challenge, shouldered the burden, and built new prosperity. They can do it again—if led in the same forthright way.
What a mess. And it ties into what I was talking about in the post below. What happens when the left and the right converge on an issue that turns out to be a bad idea? This would seem to be a good example of just how hard it is to fix that error.
Brexit was always about nationalism, anti-immigration and a perverse form of populism that never made a lot of sense to me. The fact that it was something of a political pageant sold on lies should have been a tip-off that something was wrong. But everyone was running on emotion and you can see the result. And apparently they’re stuck with it.
IN THE WAKE of yet another mass shooting — this time at a mall in Allen, Texas, where a gunman killed at least eight people — a Fox News guest recommended that Americans who fear they may be a victim of the next shooting should “be polite and professional, but plan to kill everyone you meet.”
Alex Coker, a television host and former police officer, was quoting a line that General James Mattis reportedly told troops in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. But Coker now thinks that this kind of mindset is healthy for people in America.
“What do you say to folks who live in neighborhoods maybe like Allen, Texas, where they don’t think crime will ever hit them, and they don’t need to prepare? What would you tell them?” host Lawrence Jones asked Coker on Saturday night’s episode of Lawrence Jones Cross Country.
“Run away like your life depends on it. You need to be physically fit, and run fast,” Coker said. “So move move, move. Second thing is to barricade. Try to put something between you and that gunman. And the third is prepare to defend. Like a hornet’s nest, everyone comes together. And go ahead and tag the guy. Enough people coming together at once will take out that armed gunman. You can take him out and override them whether it’s even a plane or a Walmart.”
Gun nuts see this as a totally rad way to live. They love it. They think it’s all a game. The rest of us would prefer to be able to go to the mall or the doctor’s office or even just live in our own homes without having to wear full body armor and be prepared to kill everyone in sight at every moment of the day. That’s the prescription these sociopaths are offering. Oh, and prayers and complaints about mental health, (which they refuse to do anything about either. )
By the way, Texas is pulling another Uvalde, refusing to release information except to valorize the cop who took down the shooter and basically trying to cover up what happened which is that some nut mowed down a bunch of shoppers with an AR-15 yesterday. They want to alk about mental health — like they actually give a fuck.
Three mass shootings in Texas in one week. And yet they just keep doubling down.
ABC obtained recordings of DeSantis’ debate prep in 2018. DeSantis. It’s clear he hasn’t improved in the last five years. The man is, as we’ve seen, unlikable and thin-skinned. It’s interesting though, that he’s always been very concerned about not “pissing off” Trump voters. He’s not alone, of course. Every Republican office holder is almost incontinent at the mere idea of such a thing.
Anyway, here was Ron DeSantis getting ready to debate Andrew Gillum in 2018. Note that the two Florida Republicans helping him have already endorsed Donald Trump:
During his first bid for statewide office in 2018, Ron DeSantis was grappling with a key issue that he could soon face again during his potential 2024 bid for the White House: how to not alienate Donald Trump’s base.
“Is there any issue upon which you disagree with President Trump?” DeSantis was asked by Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz in footage exclusively obtained by ABC News of the team’s mock debate sessions during DeSantis’ 2018 run for governor.
“I have to figure out how to do this,” then-Congressman DeSantis replied, while letting out a deep sigh.
“Obviously there is because, I mean, I voted contrary to him in the Congress,” DeSantis continued. “I have to frame it in a way that’s not going to piss off all his voters.”
DeSantis goes on to suggest that he would respond by saying he would “do what I think is right,” and “support [Trump’s] agenda.”
“If I have a disagreement, I talk to him in private,” he said.
ABC News obtained nearly two and a half hours of raw internal tapes of DeSantis’ 2018 debate prep sessions that have not previously been made public. His comments in the videos provide a rare glimpse into how the Florida governor, who is now poised to enter the 2024 Republican primary, had previously calculated how to effectively appeal to Donald Trump’s fiercely loyal base while also working to carve out his own lane as a candidate — a balance that DeSantis may need to hone if he is to secure the party’s nomination in 2024.
A representative for DeSantis declined to comment when contacted by ABC News.
These new videos come amid ABC News’ recent reporting that DeSantis’ team has already quietly begun debate prep for the upcoming GOP primary, including reviewing past debate performances, sources familiar with the preparations have said. DeSantis is now likely to skip announcing an exploratory committee, despite previous reports, and instead is expected to launch a full campaign next month, sources said.
In the 2018 tapes, DeSantis at times stands behind a podium sparring with his advisers — which include Gaetz and then-state representative Byron Donalds — as they role-play DeSantis’ opponent and work through issues and possible responses to a range of questions, including whether he would accept funding from the NRA.
“Has the NRA donated to me?” DeSantis asks his team at one point.
“I don’t think the NRA is quite the boogeyman the Democrats think it is,” he says later.
Gaetz and Donalds, now both Republican members of Congress from Florida, have both endorsed Trump’s third bid for the White House in 2024.
The tapes, which depict two separate debate prep sessions during DeSantis’ 2018 gubernatorial campaign against Democrat Andrew Gillum, also show DeSantis’ team privately working through what they raise as the governor’s likability issues.
During one session captured on video, an adviser suggests that DeSantis should immediately write the word “LIKABLE” in all caps on the top of his notepad when he gets to the podium on debate night.
“I do the same thing, ’cause I have the same personality, we’re both aggressive,” the adviser, who is off camera, tells DeSantis.
“You want to have that likable, dismissive tone, and not condescending,” an adviser tells DeSantis during an off-camera exchange at another point in the video, to which DeSantis responds: “Yeah, definitely.”
At another point in the session, DeSantis dismisses some of his team’s suggestions regarding how to hit at his opponent.
“Some of the ones that are digs, I don’t think they work,” DeSantis, who is off camera, can be heard saying. “I think it makes me look like an ass—-.”
Sources tell ABC News that during DeSantis’ primary debate prep in recent weeks, his team has been paying close attention to how to help manage the governor’s facial reactions.
DeSantis’ facial expressions were on display during his recent trip to Japan when he was asked a question about trailing behind Trump in polls. His animated answer to the question went viral, with one clip garnering nearly 20 million views.
“Ron always had a problem with letting attacks get to him and getting visibly shaken by them,” one former adviser, who was previously involved in debate prep with DeSantis, told ABC News. “Not sure how that would play with Trump standing across from him.”
The following is one of the memes that he cannot shake, just like the helmet picture above. Note that the tweet is from a rabid Trump supporter…