Matt Yglesias writes: Sophisticates knno that the Trump Crime Wave has been reversed, but the 2024 data (so far, it’s early yet) is actually better than that and suggests we’re on pace for the lowest murder rate year since *2014* fully reversing the post-Ferguson rise in lethal violence. And yet a majority of Americans are convinced that we are in the midst of an unprecedented crime wave. Why? Because Donald Trump and the Republicans are pathological liars and the mainstream media is apparently incapable of effectively countering their lies. We know this because large numbers of non-MAGA voters who don’t watch Fox believe this. Some of it is the hangover from the pandemic crime spike and it takes a while for people to absorb changes. But they would be aware of it if the media would be more assertive in challenging the lies. Instead, much of the time they frame it as a matter of opinion.
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We’ve all heard about the resurgence of the far right in Europe (although the extent of it was very overstated at first) but the UKisn’t among them: Sunak surprised many in his own party by announcing an early election on May 22, against widespread expectations that he would wait until later in the year to allow more time for living standards to recover after the highest inflation in 40 years. Market research company Savanta found 46% support for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, up 2 points on the previous poll five days earlier, while support for the Conservatives dropped 4 points to 21%. The poll was conducted from June 12 to June 14 for the Sunday Telegraph, opens new tab. Advertisement · Scroll to continueReport this ad Labour’s 25-point lead was the largest since the premiership of Sunak’s predecessor, Liz Truss, whose tax cut plans prompted investors to dump British government bonds, pushing up interest rates and forcing a Bank of England intervention.
Another one bites the dust: The pastor of one of the country’s largest churches—and who Donald Trump once named as a spiritual adviser—has admitted to “inappropriate sexual behavior” with a woman who says he sexually abused her when she was just 12 years old. On Friday, Cindy Clemishire told The Wartburg Watch, a religious watchdog blog, that Robert Morris, the pastor of Texas’ Gateway Church, asked her to come into his room when he stayed with her family for Christmas in 1982. She was 12 and he was 20 at the time. She said Morris molested her and then ordered her not to say anything about his behavior “because it will ruin everything.” The abuse continued for years before Clemishire confided in a close friend, prompting Morris’ wife to find out and Morris to step down from the ministry, according to the report. He eventually returned to the church and founded Gateway Church in 2000, turning it into one of the country’s largest megachurches with an estimated weekly attendance of 100,000, according to the church.
It’s still the Independents, stupid Six in 10 key state voters turn out sporadically or are not firmly committed, Post-Schar poll finds. Let’s dig in: In a nation where many voters have made up their minds, Denning [26] and Etter [age 48] are among the voters whose decisions about the presidential race are neither firmly fixed nor whose participation is wholly predictable. As a group, these voters do not exactly fit the description of being undecided. Some lean toward a specific candidate. Some even say they will definitely vote for that candidate. But age or voting history or both leave open the question of how they will vote in November — if they vote at all. The Washington Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University surveyed 3,513 registered voters in the six key battleground states. The survey was completed in April and May, before a New York jury found Trump guilty on 34 counts in the hush money trial involving an adult-film actress.
Ashes, ashes “Motivated ignorance,” writes Peter Wehner in The Atlantic, refers to willfully blinding oneself to facts. It’s choosing not to know. In many cases, for many people, knowing the truth is simply too costly, too psychologically painful, too threatening to their core identity. Nescience is therefore incentivized; people actively decide to remain in a state of ignorance. If they are presented with strong arguments against a position they hold, or compelling evidence that disproves the narrative they embrace, they will reject them. Doing so fends off the psychological distress of the realization that they’ve been lying to themselves and to others. This is why, as cognitive scientist George Lakoff suggests, the truth (facts) will not set them free. Or as his former student, Anat Shenker-Osorio, quips, truth for some people is more an “I’ll see it when I believe it” proposition and not the other way around. Motivated cognition, she told Lawrence O’Donnell, “is a helluva drug.” Motivated ignorance is a widespread phenomenon; most people, to one degree or another, employ it.
Over the weekend Donald Trump committed one of the worst verbal “glitches” of the campaign so far. After delivering his standard line about how Joe Biden should be forced to take a cognitive test and rambling on about how he had “aced” his, Trump then said: “Doc Ronny Johnson, does everyone know Doc Ronny Johnson from Texas? He was the White House doctor and he said that I was the healthiest, he feels, president in history so I liked him very much.” Trump was very close with this former admiral (busted down to captain for his inappropriate behavior, drinking and drug use) doctor, now congressman. I wrote about their relationship some years back: Brig. Gen. Dr. Richard Tubb, said in a letter that the doctor had been attached like “Velcro” to Trump since Inauguration Day. Tubb explained that [the] office is “one of only a very few in the White House Residence proper,” located directly across the hall from the president’s private elevator.
There are Democrats out there who say the Biden campaign shouldn’t run ads like this. They say nothing matters but voters’ perceptions of the economy. I don’t think that’s true. (It certainly isn’t true of the MAGA people who are all about cult worship and culture wars.) And I don’t think it’s a good idea to push disinformation even if it’s in service of assuaging people’s concerns. The truth is the best way to go. And the truth is that some people are economically insecure. Millions of them. And Biden has done as much as any president in my lifetime to address that. Nonetheless, it perennially exists in our country and you can’t sugar coat it. Some people need help. At the same time, the economy really is in a comparatively good place with lots of jobs, inflation coming down sharply and roaring markets which should be celebrated, not downplayed. Democrats do themselves no favors by being the Debbie Downer party while Trump is out there selling himself as having the greatest economy the world has ever seen.
Trump is running on an explicitly transactional platform planning to enact draconian tariffs on virtually everything because he thinks he can strong arm other countries into doing his bidding — which would crash the world economy and provoke hostility among friends and foes alike. I don’t think that’s what most of the country means when they say we should engage with the world. Here’s what German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said about Biden over the weekend: “I think that Joe Biden is someone who is very clear, who knows exactly what he is doing and who is one of the most experienced politicians in the world, especially when it comes to international politics. In a difficult situation like this, where a war is taking place right here in Europe, after Russia invaded Ukraine, where many, many other conflicts are raging around the world, this is an asset, a good thing, and therefore I can only say that this is a man who knows exactly what he is doing.” Or we can have an ignorant, malevolent, pathological liar in charge. That’s the choice.
This tactic is used by many rich people but very few have used it as liberally as Donald Trump: The IRS plans to end a major tax loophole for wealthy taxpayers that could raise more than $50 billion in revenue over the next decade, the U.S. Treasury Department says. The proposed rule and guidance announced Monday includes plans to essentially stop “partnership basis shifting” — a process by which a business or person can move assets among a series of related parties to avoid paying taxes. Biden administration officials said after evaluating the practice that there are no economic grounds for these transactions, with Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo calling it “really just a shell game.” The officials said the additional IRS funding provided through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act had enabled increased oversight and greater awareness of the practice. “These tax shelters allow wealthy taxpayers to avoid paying what they owe,” IRS commissioner Danny Werfel said.
The biggest mistake the Dems ever made was letting the right own Epstein theories. pic.twitter.com/Z6TCcJAKTs — Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 17, 2024 This should be on tik-tok. (It may be for all I know but I do hope so…) There are a lot of young women who need to see it as well as plenty of decent young men who might be skeeved out by grandpa Trump macking on young women like this. It’s very creepy and he’s still doing it. This video (referenced briefly in that series above) is recent: You know what is creepy? Adjudicated Rapist Donald Trump sexually harassing a young woman at Turning Point pic.twitter.com/skEE0F6kQG — Barbara Sobel (BarbaraJ.Sobel on Threads) (@Momof4Cats4) June 15, 2024 With the way the Trump campaign and Rupert Murdoch are pushing doctored videos of Biden every day, I think it’s only fair to spread real videos of Donald Trump’s grotesque behavior. People may have accepted it to some degree but they certainly don’t want to be reminded of it. They should be. They have to be.