He’s mad because of the windmills. It’s as petty as it gets. But it’s also clear that he intends to make transgender people a major target of his campaign and it’s just sick. These are some of the most vulnerable people in the world, especially the kids, and these pigs are going to bully them on a national basis and try to literally ban them from American life. It’s heartbreaking. But Trump always has his finger on the pulse of right wing media culture war obsessions and this is one. He’s not going to let DeSantis and the rest of them get to his right.
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It just sounds insulting. We don’t know why. Matt Lewis at the Daily Beast has some thoughts: For Donald Trump, the first step is always to label his victim. Indeed, assigning a good bad nickname appears to be a sine qua non in the Trump playbook. Once he gets that part right, the job is half-done. For example, “Crazy Joe” (which gave way to the superior “Sleepy Joe”) never resonated the way “Crooked Hillary” (or Lyin’ Ted, “Low Energy Jeb,” and Lil’ Marco) did. And now that “Meatball Ron” has become his leading moniker for Ron DeSantis, Trump might have landed on another keeper. Back in 2016, when Trump first started gaining traction, a few outlets dug into why his nicknames were working. Some people saw it primarily as a symptom of the coarsening of discourse and dirty political fighting he reveled in; but others spotted an evil genius at work.
Fat chance of it becoming law Two Democratic senators called on Congress to adopt a proposal that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made in 2011 to address a standoff over raising the debt ceiling, which would grant the president the authority to raise the limit on their own. Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said in an op-ed in The Washington Post on Wednesday that McConnell’s plan is simple and took the “weaponization of the debt ceiling off the table” during a battle over raising the debt limit more than a decade ago. The plan was included in the Budget Control Act of 2011, which ended an impasse between a Republican-led House with a Democratic-led Senate and then-President Obama. “While the broader Budget Control Act had numerous flaws, the McConnell plan itself was a good solution then, and it remains a good solution today,” Merkley and Kaine said. They said McConnell’s plan allowed Obama to raise the debt ceiling on his own while allowing Congress to pass a joint resolution to override that action if two-thirds of lawmakers wished to.
It’s not paranoia A majority of the Republican Party is self-avowed (white) Christian nationalists. They admit it: More than half of Republicans support Christian nationalism and believe the United States should be a strictly Christian nation — that’s according to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution. Christian nationalism is an extreme and divisive worldview rooted in the belief that the U.S. is an inherently Christian nation and that the country’s laws should be rooted in Christian values. The view has been prominent in white evangelical spaces for decades, but it gained significant national attention following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and throughout the Trump presidency. Now, according to researchers — who surveyed more than 6,000 Americans — the public’s view on Christian nationalism is divided mostly along political party lines. The survey found that most Republicans surveyed view themselves as either Christian nationalist sympathizers (33%) or adherents (21%).
Self-described Christian reactionary Nick Fuentes built his youthful following by claiming the title of “The Most Canceled Man in America.” Now, he’s consciously weaponizing it to undermine the America First movement. In part one of this three part investigative series, we sort the fact from fiction in Fuentes’ tale of persecution. Read part two of The Grayzone’s investigation into Nick Fuentes here. Read part three of The Grayzone’s investigation into Nick Fuentes here. Far-right agitator livestreamer Nick Fuentes has urged […]
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Republican senators pummel Biden nominee to FCC “You’ve said, quote, ‘Republicans know that the only way they can win an election is to suppress the vote’,” said Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) on Tuesday in challenging Gigi Sohn, President Joe Biden’s nominee for a seat on the Federal Communications Commission. Sullivan is shocked, shocked, that anyone would think Republicans want to suppress the vote. Senate Commerce Committee Republicans find Sohn’s tweets a stumbling block in a way that the former president’s were not. “Maybe next election, Republicans will stop beating up on gays and women,” Sohn also wrote somewhere. Sohn is openly gay. “Do you understand just how ridiculously infuriating these statements are?” Sullivan went on. “You are saying Republicans want to suppress the vote.” We haven’t seen such mock Republican outrage since … since … since the State of the Union Address last week after President Joe Biden looked into the camera and told Americans that some Republicans want to sunset Social Security and Medicare.
Russian occupiers found a world different from theirs, so they smashed it War in general is an atrocity. But zoom in from 30,000 feet and it gets personal. Nobody comes out untainted by reducing enemies and civilians to bone and ash. The Iraq invasion and the atrocities at Abu Ghraib set me on the path that led me here. Treat tales of atrocities with a degee of skepticism, propaganda always being a feature of war. So much arrives as anecdotes. Somewhere I heard that when Red Army troops occupied Berlin in WWII, they sent in uneducated troops from Central Asia among the occupiers to humiliate the master race. They’d gather wristwatches and wear several. They couldn’t tell time, the story went. They just liked the sound of the ticking. (Take with a grain of salt.) If only that was the least of it. So today arrive more tales of Russian Army actions better documented than that anecdote (CNN): The Russian government is operating an expansive network of dozens of camps where it has held thousands of Ukrainian children since the start of the war against Ukraine last year, according to a new report released Tuesday.
Trump’s campaign strategy comes into focus When Donald Trump took office in 2017 he was determined to best Barack Obama in every way and, as absurd as it was, he was especially determined that he should win the Nobel Peace Prize as Obama had done in his first year in office. Trump even went so far as to ask then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to nominate him (which he dutifully did). At times he also went around saying that because a couple of right-wing European randos had also nominated him, he’d actually won it, claiming that he was bringing world peace and so deserved it. This ruse played into Trump’s cultivated image as some sort of peacenik, despite the fact that he is one of the most bloody-minded public figures in American history. Sure, he managed to avoid getting into a major war during his term but that was mostly a combination of luck and adversaries who knew a sucker when they saw one. But it was always clear from his history and his rhetoric that Donald Trump had a very violent imagination.
A smart political promise People made fun of Biden for putting so-called Junk Fees on his agenda but it turns out to be a very smart move. People hate them: Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on many things but paying less for concert tickets or to switch cable TV providers is one of them. During his Feb. 7 State of the Union speech, President Joe Biden called on Congress to pass the Junk Fees Prevention Act, which would limit extra fees or surcharges across the travel and entertainment industries, including early termination fees from cable TV or internet providers and service fees often attached to tickets for concerts and sporting events. Biden previously called out companies like Live Nation Entertainment Inc.’s Ticketmaster to lower the “huge” service fees it places on many events and to be more transparent with consumers about a ticket’s full costs. The ticketing platform has been under Congressional scrutiny since November for its disastrous handling of presales for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, which renewed accusations that the company is monopolizing the live event industry.
I’m really excited to share this new resource from the Office of Digital Learning. We’ve created a public resource so that anyone can now sample a handful of online courses that ODL has designed for OU Online programs via a public URL. Our instructional designers reached out to a number of our online instructors, and I am […]