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Republicans are fighting a cold civil war “The doomsday prepper of the past has become a mainstay of rightwing culture,” Jeff Sharlet (The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War) said recently of scattered rural militiamen. Elected Republicans in control of state legislatures don’t need AR-15s to fight their cold civil war. They are manipulating democracy to undo democracy in full view of state capitol and national press. The Republican majority voted to expel three Democrats from the Tennessee state House last week for what they insisted were breaches of decorum in loudly calling for action against gun violence. They kept the white woman, Rep. Gloria Johnson (barely), and expelled two young Black men. The Nashville Metropolitan Council voted 36-0 Monday to reinstate Justin Jones to the position Republicans revoked last week. Justin Pearson of Memphis is expected to be reinstated when the Shelby County Board of Commissioners meets on Wednesday. Pardon the cliche, but if you haven’t noticed that MAGA Republicans have declared war on representative democracy, you haven’t been paying attention.

The weapons are similar too Teens and college students across the country protested the war in Vietnam not just because of disagreements over U.S. foreign policy. Their lives were on the line. Or their brothers’ or their friends’ or their husbands’. Hundreds of students, parents and teachers protested against gun violence inside the Tennessee state House on April 6 for the same reason. Lives are on the line. Theirs and friends’ and their kids’. We watched Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear in a Monday press conference hold back tears after friends were shot and one killed in a mass shooting at a bank in Louisville. How long will these daily shootings go on unchecked before each of us is personally affected the same way, if not shot ourselves? Hope for our democracy and for an end to the daily slaughter may lie with the young. This is their Vietnam. Ironically, the weapon of choice in many of these shootings is a variant of those the Pentagon sent in bulk to Southeast Asia 60 years ago.

AI is here and it will change everything! OMG the sky is falling! Programmers are now obsolete. No, they are needed more than ever before. Large language models will destroy journalism, democracy, society. No, they will free us from drudgery and we will all be happier. Cancer will be solved because of AI. AI’s hallucinations […]

(Some thoughts on the efforts to regulate children’s use of social media) Have you noticed how many people ages 65+ watch television every day? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, almost 90% of those in this age bracket watch TV Every.Single.Day!!!! ::gasp:: And that data was collected before the pandemic! By <hand-waving logics of a […]

I can’t recall such utter hopelessness in UK politics, with every political party in the grip of a self-serving cabal of the political class interested purely in personal interest. The Labour Party is entirely taken over by the Wes Streeting tendency. Its method is to find the most right wing racist in Hartlepool who ever […]

The post So Now Who Do We Vote For? appeared first on Craig Murray.

Is DeSantis already spent? Those of you who read this blog regularly know that I’ve been saying the smart move for DeSantis would have been to wait until 2028. Trump is still dominant and there’s just no way for anyone to get around it. It looks like some of his fans are starting to come to that realization as well: Among the 15-20 Republican mega-donors who control the purse strings in G.O.P. politics, there’s growing concern that Ron DeSantis, the great white knight from Tallahassee, might not be the one, or at least not yet.

Trump is facing multiple legal challenges and this is how he chooses who to represent him? Seated far to the left of the defendant, former President Donald J. Trump, in a Manhattan criminal courtroom on Tuesday was a lawyer who has never tried a case in court, whose phone was seized by federal agents executing a warrant last year, and who once hosted syndicated news segments bombastically defending the Trump White House. Seated to Mr. Trump’s far right was Todd Blanche, a newly hired criminal defense lawyer who also represents the lawyer at the far-left end of the table, Boris Epshteyn. In between them was Joe Tacopina, a combative presence on cable television who recently represented Mr. Trump’s future daughter-in-law, Kimberly Guilfoyle, before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The tableau, rounded out by another lawyer, Susan R. Necheles, from Mr. Trump’s arraignment on felony charges of falsifying business records, revealed more about the client than about the case at hand.

They’ll have Trumpism without so much Trump in it The persistent Mr. Frank Luntz delights us with yet another look into the minds and desires of Trump voters. He finds them, curiously, outside rural diners. He doesn’t specify how he selects his focus groups — more than two dozen! — and gets them to sit still for him. Some things haven’t changed. Like their sense of victimization (New York Times): Many felt ignored and forgotten by the professional political class before Mr. Trump, and victimized and ridiculed for liking him now. Like Republican primary voters nationwide, the focus group participants still respect him, most still believe in him, a majority think the 2020 election was stolen, and half still want him to run again in 2024. Others want Trump without so much Trumpiness in a 2024 presidential candidate. They want “a candidate who champions Mr. Trump’s agenda but with decency, civility and a commitment to personal responsibility and accountability.” Um, no, they don’t. That’s the difference between Luntz reporting what Trump voters say they want and considering what their choices actually reflect.

Tiffany Dover is ready to exit the shadows The conspiracy caucus’ legacy may linger long enough to bite us the next time a nasty virus appears. Brandy Zadrozny interviews Tiffany Dover, a Tennessee nurse unwillingly placed by anti-vaxxers at the center of their conspiracy theories (NBC News): I’d been following Tiffany since that day, Dec. 17, 2020. Like thousands of others, I first saw her on a livestream during the national rollout of Covid vaccines to front-line workers, where Tiffany became one of the first people in the U.S. to get a shot. I was also watching when she fainted immediately after, launching a wave of misinformation and conspiracy theories that would eventually unravel her life.  The modern anti-vaccine movement was powered by unverified stories of the dead and damaged. Tiffany wasn’t the first person to be swallowed up in an anti-vaccine propaganda campaign, and she wouldn’t be the last.  The unsettling thing about it — to me and the more well-meaning conspiracy theorists who took up an interest in Tiffany’s case — was that she seemed to just disappear. Imaginations ran wild.