Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Coming soon to a roadside near you?

This quaint little emporium just north of Travelers Rest, SC is identified as run by a neo-confederate hate group associated with The League of the South and “The Lost Cause.”

How is that even a thing 160 years after the South lost the Civil War? Paul Waldman explains:

The answer, of course, is an extraordinarily successful decades-long propaganda campaign known as the Lost Cause, which sought to recast the Civil War as having nothing to do with slavery; instead, it was presented as a principled crusade by virtuous Southerners to defend their land and way of life.

The damn Yankees were to blame for the South firing the first shots, dontcha know?

Today, Donald Trump and his party are waging a new Lost Cause, over the history and meaning of the January 6 insurrection. Now they have the power of the federal government behind that effort, and they are using it with a vengeance.

The lie that the 2020 election was stolen — which all Republicans are still required to pledge allegiance to, either in full or in its supposedly more moderate “There are lots of questions about what happened” form — is the wellspring from which the insurrection itself flowed, and the fuel that sustains the effort to undo history. After all, if the presidential election really was stolen by a sinister cabal of conspirators, wouldn’t violence be a reasonable response in order to keep the rightful winner in office?

It’s the same playbook the United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded three decades after Appomattox, ran successfully — nay, very successfully — to whitewash treason as honorable and owning other human beings as “heritage.” So successfully that Jim Crow did not fall for a hundred years after the South’s surrender.

Which should have us asking: When a high school student in U.S. history class opens up a textbook 20 or 30 years from now (or turns on their tablet, or dons their VR goggles), what are they going to be taught about January 6? Will they learn about the lies and the violence and the fundamental fact that a crowd of thugs tried to overthrow an election at the behest of the biggest thug of all? Or will they get a sanitized, both-sides version of the insurrection?

That’s why it’s hard not to think about the Lost Cause, which put propagandizing to children at the center of its mission. As one official from the United Daughters of the Confederacy said in 1909, “We must see that the correct history is taught our children and train them…until the whole civilized world will come to know that our cause was just and right.”

Their fake history was indeed taught to children, generations of whom were given history textbooks that presented a version of the Civil War story in which the Confederacy was not a group of traitorous enslavers willing to plunge the nation into its bloodiest war in order to preserve their ability to own other human beings, but noble gentlemen wanting nothing more than to preserve their “heritage” and their homes. The Lost Cause story began in Southern textbooks, but before long it spread to textbooks used by students in the North as well.

The thing about such efforts, like Trump’s “Stop the Steal” program, is that the very lack of attempts to conceal them prompts us not treat them seriously, like Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential run or his 2024 run as a twice-impeached, convicted felon. When they show you who they are, etc.

Waldman continues:

So the right is practiced at this sort of thing, and committed to the idea that history is never settled if it makes them and their ideas look bad. Their own rhetoric about January 6 is all over the place — sometimes they say there was no violence at all, sometimes they say all the violence was committed by antifa — but that fits right in with our chaotic media age, in which the maintenance of a single coherent narrative is less important than creation of chaos and uncertainty. And don’t be surprised if a half-dozen of the insurrectionists run for Congress in 2026.

You might think that in our age of surveillance, you couldn’t pull off this kind of lie. After all, the whole thing was caught on video — every smashed window, every cloud of bear spray, every cop getting pummeled with batons and flagpoles and whatever else the mob had at hand. But one of the key lessons of the Lost Cause is that the fight over history is never over; even when it looks like the liars have lost, with the proper timing, organization, and power they can renew arguments we thought had been settled.

The UDC was as relentless as a Jack Russell terrier with a knotted rope: “The thing is, conservatives often beat the left, not simply with money, but with sheer relentlessness. They play tortoise. Liberals choose hare.”

The rewriting begins with erasing (ProPublica):

On Jan. 10, the U.S. Department of Justice released a 123-page report on the 1921 racial massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which claimed several hundred lives and left the thriving Black neighborhood of Greenwood in smoldering ruins. The department’s investigation determined that the attack was “so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence.” While it conceded that “no avenue of prosecution now exists for these crimes,” the department hailed the findings as the “federal government’s first thorough reckoning with this devastating event,” which “officially acknowledges, illuminates, and preserves for history the horrible ordeals of the massacre’s victims.”

“Until this day, the Justice Department has not spoken publicly about the race massacre or officially accounted for the horrific events that transpired in Tulsa,” said Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, in announcing the report. “This report breaks that silence through a rigorous examination and a full accounting of one of the darkest episodes of our nation’s past. This report reflects our commitment to the pursuit of justice and truth, even in the face of insurmountable obstacles.”

Only two weeks later, the department took a strikingly different action regarding the historical record of a violent riot: It removed from its website the searchable database of all cases stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol that were prosecuted by the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

[…]

The removal of the database happened more quietly, but it is worthy of notice in its own right. It signals the Trump administration’s intention to not only spare the president’s supporters any further consequences for their role in the riot, but to erase the event from the record — to cast it into the fog of confusion and forgetting in which the Greenwood massacre had existed for so long.

Look for the monuments to the Confederacy that the UDC erected across the nation over decades. Look again at the Dixie Republic up top. It’s not the only such establishment peddling white grievance and nostalgia for the days of ‘massa’ and docile ‘darkies’. For years in Columbia, SC, Maurice Bessinger’s BBQ joints had little nooks where he sold alternate Civil War histories and related odes to the mythic days of Tara.

Soon enough there will be January 6th roadside shops and websites selling MAGA “alternative facts” as truthy history. Buy fan fiction about principled Jan. 6 patriots, righteous defenders of the MAGA cause whose only crime was loving their king. Read how these peaceful protesters were violently attacked on Jan. 6 by jackbooted thugs of the Deep State.

Do not laugh off these people. One of their own sits in the Oval Office.

And it’s not good

I’ve posted a few pieces by Gil Duran at the New Republic over the past year or so exposing the Silicon Valley overlords and their philosophy led by a creepy guy named Curtis Yarvin. The NY Times actually interviewed Yarvin recently, headlined, “Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.” (gift link.)

But if you want a brief overview of what’s these freaks, now exemplified by Elon Musk, are up to, this video by Duran is very helpful. They have a plan and they have a lot of money. I’m not sure they have the slightest idea of how normal people think or how they will react to all this, but it’s important to know what they have in mind in order to oppose it effectively.

Zack Beauchamp at Vox has a great piece today that I would suggest you read in its entirety if you’re feeling as overwhelmed as I am. He recaps the atrocities. You know what they are and they are legion. But he has some perspective that I think is worthwhile:

[T]here are ways to fight back — to do more than is already being done. An effective strategy would revolve around three key points:

1. First, Trump is weak. He has deputized Musk to grab power illegally because he doesn’t have the votes to win it through legislation. The illegality of Trump’s agenda means that there are lots of levers his opponents can pull to stop him. The most significant of these are lawsuits, many of which have already yielded injunctions against unlawful Trump-Musk orders.
2. Second, delay means victory. The problem with the courts is that they are slow and reactive; Trump can do damage before they intervene that may prove impossible to repair. So democracy’s defenders need to think of their jobs as buying time for the courts — blocking and delaying everything to prevent him from doing irrevocable harm to the constitutional order before he can be ordered to stop.
3. Third, delaying strategies help prepare America for the worst. Trump might defy a court order, sparking a constitutional crisis. In that event, the only levers remaining are extra-legal popular resistance — mass protests, strikes, and the like. The more ordinary citizens work to delay his policies now, the better prepared they will be to escalate in the event of an even deeper crisis.

He points out that one of the main strategies of this attempted takeover is to create new “facts on the ground” — to change things “so rapidly and irreversibly that even a court order can’t restore the status quo. ” But Beauchamp points out that a truly strong president would be able to get this program through congress and confer legitimacy.

[H]e wouldn’t need to unlawfully dismantle USAID; he would get Congress to pass a law abolishing it. He wouldn’t need to assert impoundment power; he could get Congress to pass a budget that reflects his priorities.

Thanks to the Republicans’ exceedingly narrow House and Senate majorities, he doesn’t have those options. To wield the degree of power he wants, he needs to depend on flagrant lawbreaking — on getting Musk and the DOGE crew to change the facts on the ground so dramatically that no one can unwind it.

The weak link here is the need for speed. To execute a “change everything before the courts get involved” strategy, you need to make the most of the time you have. But if Musk and Trump can be slowed, the entire thing could fall apart.

Beauchamp has been studying other countries’ experience with similar attempted autocratic takeovers and has advice on how to thwart this one. First he suggests that Democratic officials in Washington have a bad hand to play and that nobody should expect them to lead. He writes:

Minority opposition parties do not have a great track record in spearheading movements against democratic backsliding. They tend to place too much faith in the system and trust that the normal rules constraining power will constrain a would-be authoritarian even as the authoritarian busts through them.

“What happens is that the demagogue’s popularity drops as the corruption mounts, and the opposition parties say, ‘Oh my god, he’s at 40 percent, there’s no way we can lose, there’s no way he can steal it.’ Then what do you know — he steals it. And they never fully planned for the day after,” the anonymous democracy expert explains.

If that sounds a little like the Democratic Party’s institutional attitude in the past few years — well, you’re not wrong. And it underscores that waiting for Democrats to set the tone, or focusing on demanding more from them, is a tactical mistake.

He says we need protests:

Instead of looking to Democrats, Americans outside of government can take action on their own — directly protesting or otherwise frustrating Trump administration actions and, in doing so, setting an aggressive tone that Democrats can amplify and support from the inside. Indeed, the best international evidence suggests that only a combination of citizen and institutional pressure can halt democratic erosion once it’s begun.

And “the groups” need to come together quickly to establish a united front. Time is of the essence.

Federal workers are key:

Collectively, citizens and civil society have tremendous power. But few Americans are in better positions individually to help delay Trump than the civil servants being asked to implement his power grabs.

When asked to implement unlawful or antidemocratic orders, these workers can either openly refuse or feign incompetence to throw sand in the gears. They can look for bureaucratic chokepoints and man them. If Trump is going to treat them like the deep state, they can be the deep state.

This doesn’t depend on everyone in the federal government acting in unison immediately. Just a handful of defiant civil servants can spark something bigger.

In a recent piece for Jacobin magazine, Rutgers professor Eric Blanc argues that a series of 2018 strikes by teachers in West Virginia, Arizona, and Oklahoma — which successfully won concrete victories like higher pay — show how individual American government employees can spark broader movements of non-compliance.

Specifically, he argues that a handful of determined federal employees speaking out, paired with relatively easy actions designed to encourage others to join in, can create momentum that can translate into real disruption.

Delay tactics will only work to allow the courts time to hold the line. At this point that are the last institution standing. And if they don’t? Or if Trump goes with the “let him enforce it” strategy after all? Then we have no choice:

a massive, society-wide mobilization. Millions-strong protests, government officials refusing to work en masse, threats of general strikes: these are the kinds of radical actions that become necessary when an executive declares that the law simply doesn’t apply to it.

He suggests that contingency planning for such a mass mobilization should start right away. We just don’t know how this is going to go.

He offers all kinds of evidence from other attempted power grabs like this one to bolster his assertion that defeating this is possible. We are a unique country in a million ways but we aren’t the first, by any means, to face an authoritarian threat from within. We have strong democratic traditions and the president is weak politically and very stupid and vain. It can be done.

David Weigel wrote a piece today for Semafor called “the Resistance is working” pointing out that the Democrats are actually doing what they said they would do to push back — a well-coordinated legal strategy, which happens to be the most potentially rewarding — but that people aren’t seeing it because they are focused on the weakest link, the Democrats in Congress who have little real power and aren’t very good at resistance anyway.

Maybe it’s time to refocus ourselves as citizens on protests to support democracy?

It’s asymmetric warfare

Our friend Anat Shenker-Osorio once wrote, “Democrats rely on polling to take the temperature; Republicans use polling to change it.” Democrats are reactive, Republicans proactive. If ever there was a time for Democrats to get proactive and go on offense, it’s now.

“If the Democrats’ claim that they were fighting for democracy in 2024 seemed too abstract for many voters before Jan. 20, it is terrifyingly concrete now,” writes E.J. Dionne. He reminds we who don’t need reminding of the recent unlawful predations of the Musk-Trump cabal. But getting to the meat of it, he sounds a lot like ASO:

Democrats have a bad habit of pulling back from thorny matters by saying: “Oh, voters don’t really care about this issue.” What Republicans understand is that voters often notice an issue only if a party is persistent enough in forcing it into the public conversation. The trans debate and Hunter Biden’s problems were hardly front of mind for most voters. Republicans worked hard to put them there.

Citizens in large numbers will only start noticing how truly radical Trump’s designs are when Democrats find dramatic ways of standing up to them …

Yes, Democrats need to be for something. But Dionne suggests that FDR and Reagan first won support based on what they ran against. “In both cases, the power of negative thinking created paths to sweeping affirmative agendas.”

Where Dionne goes wrong is in heeding “party strategist” James Carville who hasn’t been right since the 1990s. Carville believes Democrats can restore their brand ahead of 2026 midterms by hammering Trump’s failure to fulfill his “No. 1 promise” to bring down “the price of everything.”

Midterms? That’s a mite presumptuous at this point.

I’ve suggested that Democrats don’t have a messaging problem so much as a “tree falls in the forest” problem. It doesn’t matter what Democrats say if no one hears it, whether it’s about the price of eggs or the collapse of the post-WWII international order. Republicans have the bigger megaphone. It’s asymmetric messaging warfare.

In this attention-driven political economy, and facing spotlight hogs like Musk and Trump, if Democrats have any chance of slamming the office doors on the Muskovites’ greasy fingers, they need to find creative, dramatic ways of upstaging them. Democrats have to get nuts, get attention, and make Americans care more about losing their country and their freedoms than the freakin’ price of eggs. As ASO put it, “to make popular what we need said.” Anything less is nation-state suicide. Never mind 2026.

But they’ll need help, Dionne suggests. The “resistance” worked the last time around:

Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist who studied the anti-Trump movement, noted recently in the New Republic that what worked the last time were the “persistent, community-based efforts by 2,000 to 3,000 grassroots Resistance groups in every town, city, and suburb across virtually all congressional districts.” The events of the past three weeks summon Americans again to diners, churches, libraries, union halls and taverns to organize, to pressure their elected officials (especially the 15 House Republicans who won last year by five percentage points or less), and to reach out to their friends and neighbors to warn them about what Trump is doing to their democracy.

“Move fast and break things” is the tech slogan inspiring what Trump and Musk are doing to our government and our constitutional arrangements. Those who want to stop their wrecking ball need to act with the same urgency.

Do Democrats have what it takes?

Harwood sums it up

John Harwood assesses the GOP’s “descent into nihilism” at Zeteo. It is by now so taken for granted as to go unnoticed. Not in Kiev, of course.

I don’t have a Zeteo subscription just yet, but the teaser sums up the situation nicely. Or not so nicely, if you’re still a member of what once was the party of Lincoln that now is a pathology:

The Republican Congress is dominated by sycophants, extremists, performance artists, and opportunists. Those who know better bow down out of fear, not only for their careers but also for physical safety from attack by their own constituents.

That’s because the Republican voting base is shot through with anger.

And utterly faithless for all their Jesusing and proud-to-be-an-Americaning.

“Europe’s American century is over.” That’s a lot of graves to turn over in (above).

 

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They shipped him to Gitmo

This is a horrible story and one which I believe is probably just the tip of the iceberg:

Luis Alberto Castillo, a father of one from Venezuela, entered the United States on Jan. 19, one day before Donald Trump became president for a second term — swept into office on a promise to treat undocumented migrants with a heavy hand.

By Feb. 4, Mr. Castillo was on a plane to a U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, best known for a detention center that has long held terrorism suspects accused of launching the deadliest attack on American soil.

That day, the Department of Homeland Security declared that those who had been transferred to the island represented “the worst of the worst” and were all members of a Venezuelan criminal group, the Tren de Aragua.

But in an interview from her home in Colombia, Mr. Castillo’s sister Yajaira Castillo said her brother was not a gang member to be feared, but rather an everyday Venezuelan who had fled his country because of its economic crisis.

He was targeted because he had a Michael Jordan Tattoo on his back which is apparently something that some gang members have — as well as many non-gang members in Venezuela because basketball is very popular there and Michael Jordan is an icon. I’m not kidding.

The NY Times checked and this man has no criminal record in Venezuela. He didn’t sneak across the border but presented himself and obtained an appointment as the law allowed. He is now in a concentration camp being treated like a terrorist.

The only way the sister found out about it was by happening to see a picture of his shared by Kristi Noem on social media. He’s the one in the lower right above.

Speaking of Noem, get a load of the nasty piece of work they’ve hired as the spokeswoman for DHS:

“This administration abides by the rule of law,” said the spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin. “During further assessment, intelligence officers could not definitively determine whether the individual is or is not a confirmed member of TDA,” or Tren de Aragua. “He may very well be a member of this vicious gang. He may not be.”

In a follow-up message, Ms. McLaughlin said that the department had received new information that Mr. Castillo was a member of the gang. She did not provide evidence.

“TDA is a pathetic gang for human trafficking, drug trafficking and kidnap for ransom among other heinous crimes,” Ms. McLaughlin said. “The New York Times is more interested in writing sob stories about its disgusting members than justice for its victims.”

I’m sure they’re passing this story around the White House today, and high fiving each other over it.

Trump used to say on the campaign trail that the markets were going up and inflation was coming down in anticipation of his arrival to save the country. Guess what?

Inflation heated up more than expected in January, as prices for groceries, housing and energy all picked up for Americans in early 2025, potentially complicating President Donald Trump’s agenda.

A key gauge of inflation — the consumer price index — showed Wednesday morning that prices rose by 3.0 percent in January from a year earlier, according to the Labor Department. That’s hotter than the 2.9 percent annual gain reported in December, underscoring economic concerns of Americans who voted out incumbents in federal elections last fall…

Wednesday’s data showed that consumer prices rose 0.5 percent on a monthly basis from December, the biggest increase since August 2023. Shelter costs, which grew 0.4 percent, accounted for nearly 30 percent of the monthly gain.

I’m going to guess that all this talk of tariffs has prices going up in anticipation of whatever daft declaration he’s going to make next. Certainly, calling for 25% tariffs on Canadian lumber and instigating a campaign of terror on the workers who make up most of the housing construction force in the country hasn’t helped either.

Oh heck.

Stocks on Wall Street slumped at the start of trading on Wednesday, dragged lower by data that showed consumer prices rose more than expected in January, leaving the Federal Reserve little cause to lower interest rates again soon.

The S&P 500 fell roughly 1 percent as trading got underway. The Nasdaq Composite index, which is chock-full of tech stocks that have come under pressure recently from rising global competition to develop the chips that will power the development of artificial intelligence, also fell around 1 percent.

Oops:

Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, said President Donald Trump’s latest tariffs on Mexico and Canada could deal a serious blow to his company and the auto industry. Farley, who was speaking at a conference organized by Wolfe Research in New York on Tuesday, said that while Trump has talked about making the “US auto industry stronger,” the president’s trade policies would hit Ford hard. “So far, what we are seeing is a lot of cost and a lot of chaos,” Farley told conference attendees.

Aaaaand cut:

President Trump promised voters that, if elected, he would enact policies that would bring prices down on “Day 1” in office.

But three weeks into his term, Mr. Trump and White House officials have become more measured in how they discuss their efforts to tame inflation. They have begun downplaying the likelihood that consumer costs like groceries will decline anytime soon, reflecting the limited power that presidents have to control prices. Those are largely determined by global economic forces.

It’s all going very well. Eat those omelettes, folks. Nothing to see here.

He’s giving Ukraine to Vlad as we knew he would. Here’s Hegseth (after he got booed by middle schoolers) today:

I think we all expected this but watching the cable newsers like Dana Bash excitedly announce this as a “historic” moment that will change the world, as if that’s a good thing. But then I suppose they said the same thing when Neville Chamberlain declared “peace in our time” too…

Let me count the ways

First, put up or shut up. (Musk will do neither.)

The hypocrisy dials at the West Wing propaganda office are turned up to 11. Donald Trump, our first convicted-felon president, and his Muskovite DOGEes mean to screw Americans while promising to root out corruption and improve “efficiency” they have yet to properly define or document. Look Elon Musk and Trump in the eyes. Have you ever seen men more trustworthy?

What was it Michael Douglas said in Black Rain (1989)? “I usually get kissed before I get fucked.”

Here’s just some of what Musk-Trump’s torching government agencies will cost you without kissing you first.

Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum could cost consumers “an extra $8 billion per year.” That’s just for warm-ups.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that Musk-Trump means to close returned to consumers over $21 billion in corporate rip-offs, junk fees, overdraft fees, and credit card late fees over its dozen-year history. It’s a net money-maker for taxpayers, returning far more than it costs. Trump is killing it off to satisfy his billionaire pals.

“Wall Street and now Big Tech don’t hate the CFPB because it’s an ineffective waste of money. They hate it because this relatively small agency punches way above its weight,” Helaine Olen writes, having “proven time and time again the government can be effective on behalf of the welfare of the people. No wonder oligarchs hate it.”

Trump’s shutting down USAID not only weakens U.S. influence worldwide. American farmers who supply food aid are out $2.1 billion in food aid the government purchases from them for the program. Thousands of American jobs will be lost, over 11,000 tracked so far, impacting over 40 states.

And the Muskovites are coming for programs millions of Americans rely on: Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. “Trump claims Elon Musk’s DOGE ‘geniuses’ have found ‘very fraudulent stuff’” declares Forbes. Anything Musk tells Trump, the con-man-in-chief believes:

Speaking en route to the Super Bowl, Trump explained: “The whole country looks like it’s a fraud. It’s fraud, waste, abuse. What Elon and his group of geniuses have found is unbelievable—and that’s just in USAID.

[…]

“Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlements payments to individuals with no [Social Security number] or even a temporary ID number,” Musk posted on Saturday.

“If accurate, this is extremely suspicious,” Musk added, “if accurate” covering a multitude of fuck-ups by people who don’t really know what they’re looking at. With not “even a temporary ID number” sounding suspiciously like the effort by North Carolina Republicans to throw out 60,000+ votes based on data entry errors in the voter registration file.

This may turn into an ongoing series.

American carnage wasn’t a description. It was a vengeful promise.

Even Republicans are trying to tell their representatives something. (Have some pride and dignity fergawdsakes)

Yes, it’s true that members of that 40% may threaten to kill you if you cross Dear Leader but again, have some pride and dignity…

I read yesterday that Hakeem Jeffries and others in the leadership are angry at “the Groups” for rallying their members to call Congress.

“People are pissed,” a senior House Democrat who was at the meeting said of lawmakers’ reaction to the calls. The Democrat said Jeffries himself is “very frustrated” at the groups, who are trying to stir up a more confrontational opposition to Trump.

A Jeffries spokesperson disputed that characterization and noted to Axios that their office regularly engages with dozens of stakeholder groups, including MoveOn and Indivisible, including as recently as Monday

“There were a lot of people who were like, ‘We’ve got to stop the groups from doing this.’ … People are concerned that they’re saying we’re not doing enough, but we’re not in the majority,” said one member. “I reject and resent the implication that congressional Democrats are simply standing by passively,” said Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.).

Yeah, no. They should be thrilled that the people are engaging and have their backs when they confront the Republicans over this Constitutional crisis.

My criticism of “The Groups” is that they don’t see always see the bigger picture. When they are mad *because they are observing a constitutional crisis* you have to hand it to them because they are right.

— Joel (@exadyto.bsky.social) 2025-02-12T01:54:12.678Z