Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

If you want to know what’s causing all the pessimism look no further than him

I am loathe to discuss the polls right now because they’re all over the place and mostly within the margin of error which means the snapshot of the electorate we are seeing may be a mirage either way. There are arguments going on throughout the commentariat over whether the polling methodology is accurate and whether they are modeling the electorate correctly. I have no idea about that and frankly I don’t really care. It’s enough to know that the election remains close which I suspect is intensely frustrating to everyone in both parties at this point. It seems as though we are destined to re-enact this polarized groundhog day election every four years and it’s tiresome.

It’s especially difficult for Democrats to deal with this considering that the Republican opponent is once again the most odious candidate in American history, a crude brute currently facing 88 felony counts and a record that includes two impeachments and an attempted coup. It’s as if the world has suddenly tilted off of its axis and nothing makes sense anymore.

How is it possible that the Republican Party and its voters would support such a man running for president again, and how can we explain that he’s easily within striking distance of winning it? And how can it be possible that this would be happening in the face of what anyone in the past would have considered the successful presidency of Joe Biden, a man who brought us through the pandemic and the economic upheaval it caused without any of the scandal and drama of Trump’s chaotic four years?

So while I may not be reading the election polls closely right now, I am keenly interested in the surveys that may lead to an answer to those questions. Unfortunately, the data is downright disorienting.

This week The Guardian reported on a new Harris Poll survey of people’s attitudes about the economy which suggests that well over half the country is delusional. It showed that 55% of Americans believe the economy is shrinking, and 56% think we are in a recession. Neither of those things are remotely true. 49% believe the stock market is down for the year even though it’s at record high. Even more bizarre, 49% believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high, though the unemployment rate has been under 4%, a near 50-year low.

The people who believe this blame Joe Biden for the allegedly bad economy with 58% saying that his mismanagement will only make it worse in the coming year. They think Donald Trump the failed businessman who just got dinged for almost half a billion dollars in fines for his fraudulent business practices will be better. Sadly, these numbers include around 40% of Democrats, so this isn’t solely a partisan response.

That’s just crazy. The American economy is the envy of the world right now, the only industrialized country that’s actually doing well. But Americans are so mired in negativity that they believe it’s terrible. At least they think it’s terrible for people other than themselves. Survey after survey shows they actually feel pretty good about their own finances and when asked how they think their local economy is faring they say that it’s doing well. It’s the rest of the country that’s in a recession.

Consumer spending is way up. AAA said this week that they predict this is going to be the busiest memorial day travel weekend since 2005 and tourism is booming. So while 72% of respondents in that Harris poll said inflation is increasing (even though it’s fallen sharply in the past year) it isn’t stopping people from spending. And there’s a good reason for that. Higher wages have outstripped inflation and have put more money in people’s pockets.

This phenomenon even has a name: vibecession which says people’s beliefs about the economy are based on vibes, not reality. And the vibe is that the economy is terrible, we have out of control inflation, job losses and a general economic crisis. This seems odd considering that we actually went through a real economic crisis that lasted for years just recently with the Great Recession of 2008 but people’s memories are short.

That’s not to say that there aren’t many people who are still living paycheck to paycheck — a perennial issue that isn’t caused by current circumstances but is a huge problem for those who experience it. And it’s certainly true that the economy was turned upside down during the pandemic with sharp increases in unemployment and inflation from all the supply chain disruption. But the government provided unprecedented support and the country came through it without the kind of massive economic suffering we normally would have had. And yet Joe Biden is widely considered a massive failure on economics.

Recall that in 1984, Ronald Reagan ran on a campaign of “morning in America” and he won a historic landslide victory. Here’s what the economy looked like at the time. There was 7% unemployment, 4% inflation, and the average 30-year mortgage had a 13% interest rate. Compare that to the numbers I cited above.

So why are Americans so negative about a much better economy 40 years later?

I think there are a number of possible reasons. The first, which is backed up by the fact that people say their own finances are fine, is the media coverage of the economy. It has been relentlessly negative far beyond the point where it was justified and now that it’s focused on the horse race it flogs polls like this one which creates a negative feedback loop wherein people think since everyone else believes the economy is bad so it must be. This is where much of the “vibes” are coming from.

There’s also the toxic social media which is being manipulated from many different directions and distorting reality across the board. Whether people participate in it directly is immaterial. It seeps out into the broader culture and makes everyone less informed (or, at least, confused) in the process.

But I think there’s more to it than just that. The whole culture is caught in a negativity spiral that isn’t really about the economy at all. It’s about impotence. The public sees a whole host of institutions, norms, rules and laws disintegrating before its eyes and the feeling that there are no mechanisms that work to hold people accountable or reform the system, is creating pessimism and apathy.

But mostly, it’s just Trump. His followers hear nothing but a non-stop litany of lies, angry grievances, denunciations and resentments so it’s no wonder they’re enraged about everything. And Democrats are simply worn out. The effort it takes to oppose him is overwhelming and watching the entire Republican establishment willfully deny reality and supplicate themselves to this con man in order to achieve power for themselves is profoundly dispiriting.

He was supposed to be vanquished three and half years ago. And yet, like a zombie, he simply won’t go down. For all of Biden’s successes, he couldn’t put an end to the single biggest problem we face and a lot of people hold him responsible for that failure however unrealistic it may have been. He’s in charge and this abominable presence just looms over American society spreading poison day in and day out.

I suspect that phenomenon is what’s expressing itself in these economic opinions. Polls can’t really capture the Trump “vibe” very well and I’m sure most people don’t consciously know why they are feeling what they feel. The vocabulary that’s offered to them from the media and the pollsters is the vocabulary of “issues”, particularly the economy which is the one that’s used most often to define Americans’ sense of well-being. It’s not “the economy, stupid.” It’s Trump. I don’t think this will turn around for most of us until he is out of politics. We have to make sure that happens sooner rather than later.

Salon

Have a voice in your own future

Brian Beutler cautions against lefties shooting themselves in the foot in 2024:

The 2000 election turned out as it did in part because a small but decisive number of voters convinced themselves the major parties were fundamentally similar and similarly unappealing. (Plus the whole Supreme-Court-stopping-the-count thing.)

The consequences have shaped the entirety of my adult life; for people of a certain age—my age and just a bit older—the lessons against complacency and collapsing important distinctions have proven lifelong. 

To see something very similar happen based on similarly lazy thinking in 2016 was a history-repeating trauma. One fateful hinge point ought to have been enough to create a whole oral tradition and stigma against falling into the same traps. Casting enough protest votes to hand Republicans a slim electoral-college victory against the popular will, only to watch them wreck the country, ought to be prime Fool Me Once material—the kind of thing that should be off the table for decades, to say nothing of twice more in two decades. 

“Is our children learning?” is now folklore as a result of 2000, and still an operative question for the left.

But here we are in 2024 staring down the real possibility that it will happen again just like it did eight years ago, and 16 years before that. It’s even possible to imagine that enough Biden-2020 voters will defect or stay home to hand Trump outright victory. 

Part of the reason this madness is on the table is that as the progressive movement has matured, it has overtrained activists to think of politics as little more than a series of high-stakes leverage standoffs: Condition support for candidates on a particular set of policies, threatening their electability if they dissent, and discipline officeholders by leveling similar threats whenever they veer from those priorities. 

Beutler is referencing Joe Biden and Gaza. He’s appalled by what’s happening there and by his veering from “strong-if-wary support to reluctant or resigned support.” But:

I thus align myself with politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and thinkers like Mehdi Hasan, who dispense withering criticism, but also consider the whole picture, and prioritize harm reduction above all else.

Strategy on the activist left sometimes feels to me like a self-defeating “until your face turns blue” or “hasten the revolution” arrangement. Beutler concurs:

In American elections, progressives threatening to withhold their votes for Biden are playing the spoiler just like Manchin—except instead of coming up empty on an infrastructure bill, we’ll get Donald Trump. Some leftists will claim to prefer that outcome and were just waiting for a pretext to oppose Biden. They imagine, wrongly, that they’ll have more clout in the political system if he loses. Others are happy to let Trump burn the whole place down, “after Hitler, our turn”-style. This essay is obviously not for them.

People canvassing our neighborhood are over-concerned with having a doorstep response to the Gaza War. This week, one father lamented that his kids say they won’t vote because Biden-Gaza. Being lefties, canvassers want to arrive armed with a curated set of talking points for beating back that argument. That’s a waste of time and effort.

My response? Fine. Don’t vote for Joe Biden then. Go to vote the rest of the ballot. There will be over three dozen Democrats running on our fall ballot, from governor down to the school board. The GOP council of state slate in North Carolina is a cavalcade of Christian nationalists and MAGA election deniers crazier than any I’ve seen. Standing up to them are Democrats committed to public service, to equality and justice for all, to preserving the environment and ending gun violence. They are making personal sacrifices to serve their communities. There are a state supreme court seat and district court seats on the ballot, state legislative seats and city council and county commission races that will impact your life and your children’s for years to come. Don’t abandon your advocates because you’re pissed off about Gaza and Joe Biden.

What will objectors really do with the presidential race when they get into the voting booth? Guess.

And remember the dedicated election officials putting their necks on the line in the face of extremist threats so you can have a voice in your own future.

There are quite a lot of them. Hundreds of thousands, in fact.

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So say those working to steal it

So this is what it’s like to live history. You may have read about the Civil Rights movement and watched coverage of Vietnam, the first moon landing, and the Watergate hearings as they happened. But in this century, American history is more personal. A friend who lost her fiancé on Sept. 11 and dreads every anniversary. We participated in electing the first Black president, lived through the Great Recession, and sheltered from COVID-19. We watched the Trump insurrection unfold live. At a remove like past events, yes, but the feeling is more visceral.

This week, we found out that key actors in our national drama fly flags representing support for unmaking our democratic republic and constructing in its place a white Christian theocracy. Heather Cox Richardson reminds us that the Appeal to Heaven flag has been on display “in front of the office of House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and over the houses of Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito and the architect of the right-wing theocratic takeover of the federal courts, Leonard Leo.”

“Slow-motion train wreck” may be overused but feels right here. The Supremes led by Alito overturned Roe. Plans like Project 2025 are public. “Baby Don” Trump broadcasts his revanchist plans for a second term. Half the country believes the country is in recession, unemployment is at record highs, and the stock market is in decline when the opposite is true.

Richardson references how Abraham Lincoln, in his June 16, 1858 “House Divided” speech, spoke of the actors at work to destroy democracy in his day:

Lincoln outlined the steps that the United States had taken away from freedom toward tyranny, and noted: 

“[W]hen we see a lot of framed timbers…which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance—and we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house… we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.”

Lincoln did not choose the names of his workmen at random. Stephen was Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, who had popularized the idea that local voters should be able to decide whether their territory would permit slavery, no matter what the majority of Americans wanted; Franklin was Franklin Pierce, who had presided over the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act permitting enslavement to move into the western territories; Roger was Roger Taney, chief justice of the Supreme Court that decided Dred Scott v. Sandford, saying that Congress could not keep slavery out of the territories; and James was President James Buchanan, who urged Americans to accept the judgment of the Supreme Court. By spreading enslavement westward, that judgment would create new slave states that would work with the southern slave states to make slavery national.  

Together, Lincoln said, these four workmen had constructed an edifice to support human enslavement, an edifice working against the nation’s dedication to freedom established by the Declaration of Independence. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln said. “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved,” he said. “I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”

One step at a time, revanchist officials are turning back the clock on more Americans enjoying the fruits of liberty, unwinding what’s become a more perfect union since the end of World War II. They are shocked, shocked to find a majority of Americans took the founders’ “created equal” and “pursuit of happiness” vision seriously and expect the United States to live up to it. Appeal to Heaven flyers believe this land was bequeathed by Jesus as a Christian patriarchy led by white males, and damn the Constitution to which they swore oaths.

If democracy cannot deliver their theocracy, then democracy must go. Andy Kroll of ProPublica examines the “America First” movement’s red, white, and blue war against it. The Republican Party is its own “house divided“:

What divides the Republican Party of 2024 is not any one policy or ideology. It is not whether to support Donald Trump. The most important fault line in the party now is democracy itself. Today’s Republican insurgents believe democracy has been stolen, and they don’t trust the ability of democratic processes to restore it.

This phenomenon is evident across the country, in Georgia and Nevada, in Arizona, Idaho and Florida. But it’s perhaps the starkest in Michigan, a place long associated with political pragmatism and a business-friendly GOP, embodied by governors George Romney, John Engler and, most recently, Rick Snyder. It was a son of Michigan, former President Gerald Ford, who once said, “I have never mistaken moderation for weakness, nor civility for surrender.”

That wimp? That RINO? Ford would be drummed out of today’s GOP.

Kroll explains that several years ago, his home state of Michigan “stopped making sense to me.”

“We can’t keep going through election after election like this where a large plurality of the country just does not accept the outcome of the majority and refuses to abide by it,” said Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party who now works with the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. “That’s when the system falls apart.”

But that’s the America First plan, Jeff. Did you not get the memo?

Kroll maps out how America Firsters took control of the Michigan party. Washington, D.C. has Johnson, Alito, and Leo. In Michigan, America First has infiltrated down to the precinct level. Political fratricide is the name of the game.

Yet Richardson reminds readers that Democrats do not lack agency in this renewed fight to preserve the union:

Instead of sympathizing with the extremists, as Buchanan did, President Joe Biden has worked to undermine the sense of grievance that has permitted them to amass power. In the 1850s the  federal government had few ways to weaken the ties of ordinary people to the state leaders who were determined to spread the institution of slavery that had made them enormously wealthy, but the modern administrative state has given Biden more options. 

The administration has used the power of the federal government to begin to unwind the trickle-down economy that between 1981 and 2021 transferred $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of the U.S. to the top 1%, hollowing out the middle class. The result has been solid economic growth of  5.7% in 2021, 1.9% in 2022, and 2.5% in 2023. 

The unemployment rate has been at record lows of under 4% for more than two years, the strongest run since the 1960s. Inflation is not rising; it is falling and is now at 3.4%, higher than the Federal Reserve’s preferred mark of 2% but down significantly from its high of 9.1% in June 2022, just after the worst of the pandemic eased. At 4.5% growth over 2023, wage growth outpaced inflation, meaning that although prices have risen, workers have come out ahead. The S&P stock market index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year. 

None of that will make an impression if people don’t know about it. And they don’t, as recent polling shows. Shout louder.

Update: Leo’s statement on why he flies the Tree of Heaven flag doesn’t exppain why he flies it from a tree along the road the way some Klansmen fly theirs, as a signal.

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He is against birth control and been for years

Speaker Mike Johnson is one of the most extreme anti-abortion zealots in the US Congress. And he’s just as extreme on contraception:

Johnson is known for being among the most anti-abortion lawmakers in Congress, and for railing against the use of “abortion as a form of birth control” before he was in office. But his statements and actions suggest he does not see much difference between abortion as a form of birth control and birth control as a form of birth control. 

As a lawyer, Johnson worked on multiple cases representing plaintiffs who refused to dispense, counsel, or provide emergency contraception, which they considered to be abortion-inducing drugs. And as a congressman, Johnson has repeatedly voted against efforts to expand, fund, or protect access to birth control and other family planning services — including for members of the military. 

While a certain, largely female segment of the Republican party has undertaken efforts to expand access to birth control in the wake of Dobbs, Johnson has not joined those efforts. 

His position places Johnson outside the mainstream: According to an Economist/YouGov poll conducted last year, 91 percent of voters believe birth control should be made free and widely available if abortion is not — including 61 percent of voters who oppose abortion. Earlier this year in Kentucky, Daniel Cameron, the Republican candidate for governor, was forced to clarify his position on birth control, after an outcry over his answers on a candidate survey suggested he believed some methods of birth control were forms of abortion that should be punishable with criminal penalties.

But as Abortion, Every Day has reported, the misconception that certain types of birth control are essentially abortion has in recent years gained a foothold among some of the country’s most strident anti-abortion groups. The prominent anti-abortion advocacy group Students for Life maintains that IUDs, emergency contraception, and hormonal birth control all qualify as “abortifacients.” (When Johnson was elevated to House speaker, Students for Life proudly announced that he holds an A+ rating from the organization.) Concerned Women for America, meanwhile, holds that abortion “is the termination of the development of life in the womb at any time from the moment of fertilization.”

At the time Johnson equated emergency contraception with abortion at the Louisiana Right to Life Forum, he was part of the legal team representing Louisiana College. The small Christian college, based in Pineville, was suing Kathleen Sebelius, then secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, over the ACA requirement that the college provide birth control coverage for its employees. The school, according to the lawsuit, objected to providing “so-called ‘emergency contraceptives’” that they claimed “cause early abortions.”  

Years earlier, Johnson was a lawyer for the right-wing religious litigation shop Alliance Defense Fund, later rechristened the Alliance Defending Freedom. While working for the ADF, Johnson represented Toni Lemly, a Louisiana nurse who refused to dispense emergency contraception — or even tell patients about the medication. 

Lemly, who worked in the family planning clinic at St. Tammany Parish Hospital’s community wellness center, had her hours reduced from full time to part time after she refused to counsel patients about their birth control options. At the time, Johnson said, “All that she asks of the hospital is to respect her freedom in choosing to not participate in the taking of a human life.”

Since he’s been in congress he’s enthusiastically backed every anti-birth control measure in the House and voted against the the Right to Contraception Act.

Trump tried to get out of his comment yesterday that he’s “looking at” what to do about contraception and will announce his policy any day now by taking to Truth Social and screaming in all caps that he will never support restricting birth control, how dare anyone suggest such a thing. That suggests that he will either go for the “states’ rights” argument he uses for abortion or he will adopt Mike Johnson’s religious extremist argument that most birth control is actually abortion. I don’t think he can afford to just support all birth control and wink and nod at this followers that he doesn’t really mean it. He has to try to split the difference somehow.

As with the abortion line, I think he’s convinced himself that he can convince enough people in this country to believe his “alternative facts” and accept that his version of reality is correct. He’s counting on the stupidity of the American people and at this point I’m not sure he isn’t on to something.

By the way:

Louisiana lawmakers on Thursday approved legislation making the possession of abortion pills without a prescription a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

It now heads to the desk of GOP Gov. Jeff Landry, who has not publicly weighed in on the legislation but is expected to sign it.

The Washington Post did a fact check on this absurd brouhaha about the FBI instructions when they served the warrant on Mar-a-Lago. He points to a particular right wing reporter, Julie Kelly, as the source of the hysteria and laid out the timeline:

1:28 p.m.

To her first tweet, Kelly attached another tweet in which she highlighted another document: “Oh my God. Armed FBI agents were preparing to confront Trump and even engage Secret Service if necessary. They were going to go door to door to terrorize MAL guests and even pick the locks. Gestapo.”

This page from the filing, titled “contingencies,” laid out procedures in the event the media or Trump unexpectedly arrived at the scene. The document, laden with abbreviations, says that if Trump were to appear, the Miami FBI executive manager and the on-scene coordinator “will be prepared to engage with FPOTUS [former president of the United States] and USSS [Secret Service] Security team.” In this context, “engage” means talk and coordinate. If the Secret Service agents on the ground were to resist, then the document directed that the discussion would be elevated to more senior officials, including “points of contact” that the FBI has with Secret Service through existing liaison relationships. (Two names are redacted.)

In an interview over the summer with the House Judiciary Committee, former FBI assistant director in charge Steven D’Antuono described what was planned. D’Antuono had disagreed with the decision to send the FBI to Mar-a-Lago, believing that Trump’s attorneys should have been given another chance to provide missing documents. But he said he lost the argument because there was concern that without quick action these highly classified documents could leak out, given the poor security at Trump’s estate.

In the interview, he disputed the idea that it was a raid. Officials knew that Trump was not in the state, residing at the time at his estate in New Jersey. (During the operation, he was visiting Trump Tower in Manhattan.)

“It wasn’t even a show of force, right, because we were all in agreement,” D’Antuono said. “We didn’t do a show of force, right. I was adamant about that, and that was something that we agreed on, right, the FBI agreed on, right. No raid jackets, no blazed FBI. We interact. We made sure we interacted with the Secret Service to make sure we could get into Mar-a-Lago with no issues. We’re not banging down any doors. We weren’t bringing any like FBI vehicles, everything that was reported about helicopters and a hundred people descending on, like a Die Hard movie, was completely untrue, right. That is not how we played it.”

He added that executing a search warrant was “not against policy or against the law.” During the search, the FBI seized 102 additional classified documents. Seventeen were marked top secret, 54 secret and 31 confidential.

1:54 p.m.

Kyle Becker, who has bounced around conservative media and now has his own news site, became the first to use the “assassin” language in a post for his nearly 500,000 followers.

“NEW: The FBI was basically authorized to assassinate Trump if necessary in Mar-a-Lago raid,” he wrote over Kelly’s original tweet.

3:08 p.m.

Mike Cernovich, a right-wing social media personality with 1.2 million followers, weighed in with his own take on Kelly’s tweet: “The FBI raid was designed to provoke a response. This was an assassination attempt on President Trump.”

Again, when the FBI agents went to Mar-a-Lago, they knew Trump was not in the state.

3:19 p.m.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), with 3.2 million followers, quickly elevated the stakes, also with a post over Kelly’s first tweet. “This is grounds for impeachment of Wray and Garland,” she wrote, referring to FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland. “Trump and team was cooperating the entire time with the FBI. Was deadly force authorized against Biden for his docs? Were they going to shoot SS then Pres Trump, Melania, and Barron too???”

Other Republican lawmakers follow up with their own posts.

4:13 p.m.

Trump’s Truth Social account posts an image of Biden with the headline: “Biden’s DOJ authorized use of deadly force against President Trump in the Mar-a-Lago raid.”

5:21

Trump posts his own comment on his Truth Social Account: “WOW! I just came out of the Biden Witch Hunt Trial in Manhattan, the ‘Icebox,’ and was shown Reports that Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE. NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE, THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. HE IS MENTALLY UNFIT TO HOLD OFFICE — 25TH AMENDMENT!”

As noted, the “reports” came from Trump’s own legal filing, so this should not have been a surprise to him.

6 p.m.

Trump issues a fundraising appeal: “BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME! It’s just been revealed that Biden’s DOJ was authorized to use DEADLY FORCE for their DESPICABLE raid in Mar-a-Lago. You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable.”

7:11 p.m.

Christina Bobb, who was on Trump’s legal team at the time of the search, posted: “WTF?!! They were prepared to kill me?! A few dozen FBI agents v. me and they were ready to kill me?!!! What in the world happened to the United States of America?!”

Months before the FBI search, Bobb had signed a document swearing that she had been told that “a diligent search” was conducted of boxes of records shipped from the White House to Florida when Trump left office, The Post reported.

8:17 p.m.

Former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon, on his war room podcast, declares: “This was an attempted assassination attempt on Donald John Trump or people associated with him.”

The right is now totally bought into the lie that Biden tried to have Trump assassinated. It’s all over their social media and propaganda networks.

This is just a way to turn the creepy immunity argument that a president has the right to order Seal Team Six to kill his political opponent inside out — the “I know you are but what am I” tactic they love so much. But it’s also dangerous. This ratchets up the lie that Biden is the extremist who threatens democracy and the rule of law but the difference is that MAGA is full of violent, gun toting weirdos who have already shown a willingness to take matters into their own hands. It’s as irresponsible as it gets. But then, what else is new?

Trump has his people fanning out all over the world meeting with foreign leaders making god-knows-what promises. I’m sure there’s an understanding between him and Vlad over this just as the Iranians released the hostages on the day Reagan was inaugurated. (It was no a coincidence.)

Trump doesn’t even have to try to hide his cozy relationship with Putin. Nobody even comments on it anymore. Selling out Americans has been completely normalized.

It's not just Justice Alito.

Here's the "Appeal to Heaven" flag flying outside of conservative powerbroker Leonard Leo's home in Maine.

Photo taken by a nearby resident who shared it with @ProPublica and gave us permission to publish it. 1/x pic.twitter.com/dmwRAvNkMM

— Andy Kroll (@AndyKroll) May 23, 2024

As you know, Leonard Leo is the mastermind of the right wing legal assault on democracy. And he and his good buddy Samuel Alito are obviously part of an insurrectionist cabal. Some might even call them traitors.

As Tom discussed this morning, Dahlia Lithwick has a great piece today on this subject over at Slate and I want to highlight the same conclusion he did:

No, I have come to conclude that this is an us problem. Because rather than hurling ourselves headlong into the “Alito Must Recuse” brick wall of “yeah, no,” we need to dedicate the upcoming election cycle, and the attendant election news cycle, to a discussion of the courts. Not just Alito or Thomas, who happen to go to work every day at the court, and not just Dobbs and gun control, which happen to have come out of the very same court, but the connection between those two tales: what it means to have a Supreme Court that is functionally immune from political pressure, from internal norms of behavior, from judicial ethics and disclosure constraints, and from congressional oversight, and why that is deeply dangerous. More so, why justices who were placed on the court to behave as well-compensated partisan politicians would do so in public as well as on paper. Until we do that, Alito will continue to fly around the world, giving speeches about his triumph in Dobbs and Thomas will keep taking gifts and failing to disclose them. That won’t be the end of the Supreme Court story; it will be just the start of it.

I could not agree more. I am more convinced than ever that part of our current MAGA funk is directly due to our inchoate feeling of impotence over what to do about it. We must have this bigger conversation so that we can at least begin to define the problem in order to somehow dredge up the strength to fix it.

The judiciary has been completely corrupted by Leo and the far right billionaires who fund him. And Leo has entered the larger culture war in a big way:

With success has come public attention. Leo’s summer home in Maine has become the site of regular protests. He’s also attracted legal scrutiny. Last summer, Politico reported that the Washington, D.C., attorney general launched an investigation into whether Leo has misused nonprofit laws for personal enrichment, following a watchdog complaint pointing out that nonprofits under Leo’s control have paid tens of millions to his for-profit firms.

In November, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to authorize a subpoena after Leo refused to provide lawmakers with a full accounting of all gifts and payments that he has directed to Supreme Court justices and their spouses. The vote followed reports that Leo steered secret consulting payments to Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife, and arranged Justice Samuel Alito’s seat on a private jet — paid for by a billionaire hedge-fund chief — as part of an undisclosed luxury fishing trip in Alaska in 2008. 

Leo has publicly refused to cooperate with the reported D.C. probe, with his lawyer arguing that the district’s attorney general, Brian Schwalb, has “no legal authority to conduct any investigatory steps or take any enforcement measures.” Leo has also refused to comply with the promised Senate subpoena, saying in a statement: “I will not cooperate with this unlawful campaign of political retribution.” (The subpoena has not yet been issued.)

A devout Catholic, Leo is one of the most powerful political operatives in the United States. In 2021, he was gifted an unprecedented $1.6 billion dark money fund, with the purpose of shifting American society further to the right. 

He’s way beyond MAGA and Trump. He’s playing a very long game and he has the resources to do it:

In a recent report on the strained relationship between Leo and Trump, The Washington Post wrote that Leo “has told others he no longer talks to Trump’s advisers and is largely focused on spending billions to reshape the country in a more conservative direction with a focus on non-election issues.” 

Constant, serious scrutiny of this man would be one way to start. Make him the “George Soros ” of the right wing.

Look for more of this. Using civil rights laws to crack down on diversity hiring is just *chefs kiss*

Florida’s top legal officer on Wednesday said the state will investigate Starbucks, the multinational chain of coffeehouses, for its diversity, equity and inclusion practices.

“So many of these DEI policies that have been pushed in corporate America that were meant to address and prevent discrimination are now pushing policies and programs and initiatives that may in fact be unlawful employment practices, in fact becoming discriminatory themselves,” Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody said, while appearing on Sean Hannity’s radio show, which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis guest hosted.

Moody filed a complaint with the Florida Commission on Human Relations, which she said would launch a “full investigation.” The decades-old commission is meant to enforce the Florida Civil Rights Act and address discrimination issues.

[…]

The governor, an opponent of DEI programs who signed a bill last year banning such initiatives at state universities, thanked her for the work: “You should treat people as individuals, judge them based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin or their ethnicity or anything like that.”

Uh huh.

As the majority becomes a minority in this country over the next few years they’ll undoubtedly bring these law back in order to enforce hiring of more white people. They know how to work the system.

With Haley endorsing Trump it’s now up to Trump and his surrogates to follow up and convince her voters to do the same. Marge Green has a strategy to get that done:

I’m sure that will persuade them.

Tomorrow belongs to them

CNN’s Abby Phillip ran through Donald Trump’s plans for his next administration. He may be a basket case, but he has a cadre of extremists ready to step up to help him implement his plans and theirs.

Phillip: Trump has given the country plenty of new evidence about what he plans to do if he captures the oval office… so let's go headline by headline pic.twitter.com/gSPSn5wnZz

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 22, 2024

Let’s talk about projection. What we see blossoming more boldly than ever among the authoritarianati is entitlement. Unspoken, mostly, but present. When the conservative elite speak derisively of the social safety net, they insist that entitlements must be cut. Just not theirs, naturally.

An ‘us’ problem

What we see displayed by Supreme Court Justices Thomas (with his undeclared gifts) and Alito (with his insurrectionist flags) is the sense that they are untouchable, writes Dahlia Lithwick. And their behaviors are not anything Chief Justice Roberts seems inclined to address by imposing a strict code of ethics. The justices stand imperial:

We have a judicial enterprise that rules over us with absolutely no one ruling over them. Nobody should be all that surprised that Sen. Dick Durbin has announced that the Senate Judiciary Committee will not launch a probe into Alito’s recent conduct. The Senate has also been trying to unearth the financing for Thomas’s quarter million dollar salt-of-the-earth RV amid other ethics violations, and Leonard Leo has declined to comply with subpoenas related to it. Yes, the Senate should be acting to resolve this problem, but that seems to have largely stalled at “asking them to recuse.”

So just to review, this isn’t really a Sam Alito problem, or a Clarence Thomas problem, or a John Roberts problem—but it also isn’t even a Senate-Dems-who-can’t-muster-the-energy-to-close-the-deal problem.

No, I have come to conclude is that this is an us problem. Because rather than hurling ourselves headlong into the “Alito Must Recuse” brick wall of “yeah, no,” we need to dedicate the upcoming election cycle, and the attendant election news cycle to a discussion of the courts. Not just Sam Alito or Clarence Thomas who happen to go to work every day at the court, and not just Dobbs and gun control, which happens to have come out of the very same court, but the connection between those two tales: what it means to have a Supreme Court that is functionally immune from political pressure, from internal norms of behavior, from judicial ethics and disclosure constraints, and from congressional oversight and why that is deeply dangerous.

As I said: imperial.

Margaret Brennan recently confronted Sen. J.D. Vance (R) of Ohio with his suggesting the government emulate Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban’s crackdown on alleged “left-wing domination” of universities. They must be given a choice, Vance had said, “between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching.”

Q: Viktor Orbán seized control of universities and put them in foundations that were run by his allies. He rewrote the Constitution, he neutered the courts, and he has tried to control the media. Is that what you're advocating for in the US?

Trump VP contender Vance: I think… pic.twitter.com/1DOl2z69yL

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) May 19, 2024

That isn’t a choice. It’s an ultimatum. An ultimatum Vance feels his fringe is entitled to enforce. He answered with word salad about universities being “part of a social contract in this country” and, since taxpayers help finance college educations, taxpayers should exercise more control over how that (loan?) money is spent.

(I look forward to Vance working with Sen. Elizabeth Warren on seeing to it that corporations receiving government contracts and subsidies uphold their end of the social contract.)

What we see among the Supremes, among federal legislators like Vance, and among state Republican legislators angling to impose permanent minority rule is an attitude that they can do what they please with impunity. Where could they have gotten that idea?

That sense of inevitability is spreading. See the story of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman vs. actress Scarlett Johansson. After Johansson declined to allow OpenAI to use her voice for its new digital assistant, Altman released it nonetheless with a voice remarkably like hers. She threatened to sue:

On the day that OpenAI released ChatGPT’s assistant, Altman posted a cheeky, one-word statement on X: “Her”—a reference to the 2013 film of the same name, in which Johansson is the voice of an AI assistant that a man falls in love with. Altman’s post is reasonably damning, implying that Altman was aware, even proud, of the similarities between Sky’s voice and Johansson’s.

The Atlantic‘s Charlie Warzel writes:

On its own, this seems to be yet another example of a tech company blowing past ethical concerns and operating with impunity. But the situation is also a tidy microcosm of the raw deal at the center of generative AI, a technology that is built off data scraped from the internet, generally without the consent of creators or copyright owners. Multiple artists and publishers, including The New York Times, have sued AI companies for this reason, but the tech firms remain unchastened, prevaricating when asked point-blank about the provenance of their training data. At the core of these deflections is an implication: The hypothetical superintelligence they are building is too big, too world-changing, too important for prosaic concerns such as copyright and attribution. The Johansson scandal is merely a reminder of AI’s manifest-destiny philosophy: This is happening, whether you like it or not.

They are the elite. They are in charge. They make decisions for you.

This is the unvarnished logic of OpenAI. It is cold, rationalist, and paternalistic. That such a small group of people should be anointed to build a civilization-changing technology is inherently unfair, they note. And yet they will carry on because they have both a vision for the future and the means to try to bring it to fruition. Wu’s proposition, which he offers with a resigned shrug in the video, is telling: You can try to fight this, but you can’t stop it. Your best bet is to get on board.

[…]

When your technology aims to rewrite the rules of society, it stands that society’s current rules need not apply.

Tomorrow belongs to them. So, whether we’re talking about the Supreme Court’s entitled MAGA faction, or MAGA Republicans, or Silicon Valley’s tech bros, here’s their offer: Accept their future. It’s coming anyway. Resistance is futile.

What they’re entitled to is a whupping. Delivering it, as Lithwick suggests, “is an us problem.”

Update: A SCOTUS ruling just dropped. Guess how it went?

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