This long article about Jack Texeira, the Air Force airman who shared classified material to an online group friends is just chilling. (I have included a gift link for those who don’t have the Washington Post sub. so you can read it.) This guy was far more than just an innocent little Christian boy who liked to chat online. He fits the profile of most mass shooters with white supremacist views. Here’s the opener: Jack Teixeira, dressed in camouflage fatigues, his finger wrapped around the trigger of a semiautomatic rifle, faced the camera and spoke as though reciting an oath. “Jews scam, n—–s rape, and I mag dump.” Teixeira raised his weapon, aimed at an unseen target and fired 10 times in rapid succession, emptying the magazine of bullets. The six-second video, taken at a gun range near Teixeira’s home in Massachusetts, affords a brief but illuminating glimpse into the offline world of the 21-year-old National Guard member, who stands accused of leaking a trove of classified military intelligence on the group-chat platform Discord.
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It’s not pretty Most congressional Republicans seem to have shrugged off Donald Trump’s wildly irresponsible suggestion, at Wednesday night’s CNN town hall, that a U.S. debt default would be an acceptable (if not desirable) outcome of the fraught negotiations underway between Kevin McCarthy and the White House. But that doesn’t mean Trump’s comments won’t have an impact. House GOP leaders continue to pretend that it’s Biden and his Democrats who are risking a default and the baleful economic consequences… But congressional Republicans varied in how annoyed they sounded in brushing off Trump’s “political advice” (as his close Senate ally J.D. Vance chose to put it). Even some House Freedom Caucus members were clearly irritated, according to Axios: Here’s the problem: With McCarthy white-knuckling it over his narrow control of the House (his own debt-limit/spending-cut proposal only passed by two votes), it wouldn’t take much of a rebellion by hard-core HFC types to blow up his negotiating position and/or to threaten his slippery grip on the Speaker’s gavel.
“Merely rearranging their prejudices” Day-laborers like Joey on the construction site were not an educated bunch. But they had opinions. Lots of them. When Joey began a sentence with, “Now, I’ll tell you what’s the truth …”, it was time to buckle up. Here it comes. Brian Klass does not invoke truthiness in writing this morning about knowingness, but the two are cousins. An essay by Jonathan Malesic at Aeon provoked Klass to explore the latter. “We know there is something wrong with the way we know,” Malesic explains: Knowingness, as the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear defines it in Open Minded (1998), is a posture of always ‘already knowing’, of purporting to know the answers even before the question arises. When new facts come to light, the knowing person is unperturbed. You may be shocked, but they knew all along. In 21st-century culture, knowingness is rampant. You see it in the conspiracy theorist who dismisses contrary evidence as a ‘false flag’ and in the podcaster for whom ‘late capitalism’ explains all social woes.
I think everyone knew that CNN’s very special episode of The Trump Show on Wednesday night was going to be a fiasco. How could it not be? Donald Trump lies as easily as he breathes and he was going to be given a live platform to do that. We’ve seen him do these events for years now and there was no reason to believe this one would be any different. If there was anything startling about it was the friendly audience that cheered and jeered as if they were at a Trump rally. But we should have expected that too. CNN said the town hall was for Republican primary and “undeclared” voters and there’s no mystery about what kind of people show up for campaign events with Donald Trump. All that was missing were the red hats and the awkward line dancing to “YMCA.” I won’t go into the full litany of rhetorical atrocities. You can read more about them in these pieces by Amanda Marcotte [need link], Brian Karem and Igor Derysh. Suffice to say that he was as obnoxious and crude as always reminding anyone who’s forgotten, just how unfit he is for the office of president of the United States.
If he can’t even hold Florida… Amidst massive legal battles involving former U.S. President Donald Trump and jockeying for control of the GOP that puts Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the public light, 69 percent of registered Republican voters in Florida still say they support Trump as the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, while another 18 percent say they “somewhat support” him, according to a recent poll conducted by Florida Atlantic University, in collaboration with Mainstreet Research. According to the poll, Trump would win over DeSantis by a significant margin if the primary were held when the poll was completed between April 13-14. When the same group of voters was asked about their choice for the upcoming Republican presidential primary, approximately 6 out of 10 (59 percent) chose Trump, while about 3 out of 10 (31 percent) chose DeSantis. That’s just plain pathetic.
The worst story you will hear today It’s a fact that serial killers almost always start off torturing and killing animals for fun. Elon Musk has been giving kids the idea: Graphic videos of animal abuse have circulated widely on Twitter in recent weeks, generating outrage and renewed concern over the platform’s moderation practices. One such video, in which a kitten appears to be placed inside a blender and then killed, has become so notorious that reactions to it have become their own genre of internet content. Laura Clemens, 46, said her 11-year-old son came home from his school in London two weeks ago and asked if she had seen the video. “There’s something about a cat in a blender,” Clemens remembered her son saying. Clemens said she went on Twitter and searched for “cat,” and the search box suggested searching for “cat in a blender.” Clemens said that she clicked on the suggested search term and a gruesome video of what appeared to be a kitten being killed inside of a blender appeared instantly. For users who have not manually turned off autoplay, the video will begin rolling instantly.
Kaitlin Collins:You once said that using the debt ceiling as a negotiating wedge just could not happen. You said that when you were in the oval office. Donald Trump: That’s when I was president Collins: So why is it different now, when you’re out of office? Trump: Because now I’m not president Raucous laughter and applause from the cult. I’ll just leave that there for you to ponder. This is what passes for serious political discourse on the right. Here;s a member of Trump’s braintrust pretty much saying the same thing: Former Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow says, “I just don't buy these horrific scenarios” about the debt ceiling. “If, you know, if an interest rate payment was 10 days late, and the price of that would be a major, major spending reduction, it probably would be a good idea.” This is drastically different from where Kudlow was back when he was in government, and told Fox News Radio in 2019: “We can’t have a default, Brian [Kilmeade].
Not exactly Philip Bump take a look at that question because of Anderson Cooper’s assertion last night on his show that it’s important the CNN audience reckon with the fact that half the country supports Trump: In recent YouGov polling conducted for the Economist, about 45 percent of respondents said they viewed Trump strongly or somewhat favorably, getting us near that half-of-Americans mark. But that “somewhat” is hazy. When Quinnipiac asked the same question in March, without the “somewhat” option, only about a third of respondents said they viewed Trump favorably — more than YouGov’s “strongly favorable” but less than the combined “strongly/somewhat.” It was the same percentage as said they considered themselves supporters of the “Make America Great Again” movement. Of course, we’re only talking about American adults here, not younger people among whom, it’s safe to assume, Trump is generally even less popular.
That’s sweet. My cats turn into Tasmanian Devils in the car, screaming non-stop and bouncing around like Mexican jumping beans in their carriers. And what a pretty kitty. And then there’s this story about a very big pretty kitty: Before P-22 died in December, I’ll admit I was only vaguely aware that there was a mountain lion living in Griffith Park. I had heard the name and was familiar with some of the many perils that pumas in the Los Angeles area were facing — shrinking territory and an attendant lack of genetic diversity, speeding freeway traffic and exposure to rat poison — but I didn’t know much about what made P-22 singular. Then, late last year, P-22, who had made an unlikely home in Los Angeles’s biggest municipal park for more than a decade, started behaving more aggressively. Wildlife officials took it as a sign that after a long, difficult life, his health had deteriorated and that he should be euthanized. After his death, he became inescapable. There was his feline face on a giant yellow mural at a fitness studio where I sometimes take classes.
Sometimes with legislation. Sometimes with guns. Pundits and news sites are still analyzing fallout from CNN’s Trump “town hall” spectacle. We learned nothing about the former president we did not already know. The fiasco changed no minds. James Fallows invoked “shocking but not surprising” to summarize the show. “Don’t say you haven’t been warned” sits atop Susan Glasser’s review. The jeers and laughter from the Trump mob, she writes, “was the tell, the most revealing part of the whole exercise.” Without “the approval of the mob, his mob,” Trump “would be just another angry old American man” shouting at his TV instead of being on TV. It is the audience for his shtick that gives it power, and us pause. The relationship is symbiotic, but Trump is not telling them anything they don’t want to hear. Trump has his grievances, but he validates theirs, gives them permission to wear “Fuck Your Feelings” tee shirts in public. He reads the room. He sees them and makes them feel seen in all their dark seething. He is their retribution.