Roy Edroso breaks it down — and everything he says is right on: Back when I did a regular “rightbloggers” column for the Village Voice, I covered a few of the loonier rightwing conspiracy theories those folks promulgated. I didn’t make a habit of running them down, though. I thought the bloggers’ and web propagandists’ ridiculous interpretations of major events were loony enough themselves, and also more germane to way conservatives were polluting our political discourse and indeed our politics, than the occasion crackpot cock-and-bull story about, for example, Barack Obama’s secret gay life. Back then, despite what Tommy Lee Jones said in Men In Black, what one might read in the supermarket tabloids or their web equivalents was not considered the best investigative reporting on the planet.
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I think DeSantis and the gang see this as a feature not a bug. But it isn’t. There comes a point at which turning your state into an antediluvian hellscape starts costing real money: With the start of the 2023-24 academic year only six weeks away, senior officials at New College of Florida (NCF) made a startling announcement in mid-July: 36 of the small honors college’s approximately 100 full-time teaching positions were vacant. The provost, Bradley Thiessen, described the number of faculty openings as “ridiculously high”, and the disclosure was the latest evidence of a brain drain afflicting colleges and universities throughout the Sunshine state. Governor Ron DeSantis opened 2023 with the appointment of six political allies to the college’s 13-member board of trustees who vowed to drastically alter the supposedly “woke”-friendly learning environment on its Sarasota campus. At its first meeting in late January, the revamped panel voted to fire the college president, Patricia Okker, without cause and appoint a former Republican state legislator and education commissioner in her place.
Update: The NY Times had this quote explaining why they love Donald Trump: “He might say mean things and make all the men cry because all the men are wearing your wife’s underpants and you can’t be a man anymore,” David Green, 69, a retail manager in Somersworth, N.H., said of Mr. Trump. “You got to be a little sissy and cry about everything. But at the end of the day, you want results. Donald Trump’s my guy. He’s proved it on a national level.” There is nobody, NOBODY, who is a bigger whiner and cryer that Donald J. Trump. Not even the world’s most spoiled five year old princes snivel as much as he. But they just want to feel good about saying things like “make all the men cry because all the men are wearing your wife’s underpants and you can’t be a man anymore” and Trump gives them permission. And, by the way, what results????
Why cultists are so loud and proud Lies and conspiracy theories are related, finds Marcel Danesi, a professor of semiotics and linguistic anthropology at the University of Toronto. In a pattern that “goes back to antiquity,” populist leaders such as former President Donald Trump, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Russia’s Vladimir Putin “use language to develop a cult-like following.” Danesi offers a scientific explanation at Politico. Such leaders deploy “dehumanizing metaphors to instill and propagate hatred of others.” Here is an example of the result, live and in color, from the Trump rally Saturday in Erie Pennsylvania: Whoops. Danesi explains: The first step to manipulating the minds of the public, or really the precondition, is that listeners need to be in the right emotional state. In order to hack into the minds of the public, people need to feel fear or uncertainty.That could be caused by economic instability or pre-existing cultural prejudices, but the emotional basis is fear.
Classy guy indeed… And he’s having a normal one today.
You cannot make this stuff up: Former president Donald Trump called on congressional Republicans to withhold military support for Ukraine until the Biden administration cooperates with their investigations into the president and his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings. The demand, delivered at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, echoed Trump’s conduct at issue during his first impeachment, when Trump withheld aid from Ukraine while pressuring the country’s president to announce an investigation of Biden. “Congress should refuse to authorize a single additional shipment of our depleted weapons stockpiles … to Ukraine until the FBI, DOJ and IRS hand over every scrap of evidence they have on the Biden Crime Family’s corrupt business dealings,” Trump said at the rally. He added that any Republican lawmakers who didn’t join the effort should face primary challenges, a tactic he used last year to unseat Republicans who voted to impeach him for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
Floridians prefer Trump: The warning signs were there even before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis stepped onto the stageat a luxury hotel near Miami. Ticket sales for the local Republican Party’s biggest annual fundraiser were down by two-thirds. One group of reliable supporters skipped the event entirely. The ballroom at the JW Marriott Turnberry Resort & Spa was far too big for the 380 people who showed up. Staff hustled to arrange paneled “air walls” around the room to make the space look smaller. When DeSantis arrived at the gathering in early July, he gave what two people who attended described as a familiar and lackluster speech. “It kind of came off like a bar mitzvah speech,” said a party member who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from Miami-Dade GOP leaders. “The only time people really applauded was when he was introduced, and when he was done.
As if Pensacola News Journal: In a recently published research letter regarding emerging infectious diseases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that Florida is witnessing an increase in leprosy cases lacking traditional risk factors and recommending that travel to Florida be considered when conducting leprosy contact tracing in any state. […] The number of reported leprosy cases across the country has doubled over the past decade, according to the CDC. Citing data from the National Hansen’s Disease Program, the CDC says there were 159 new cases reported in the U.S. in 2020. Nearly 70% of these new cases were reported in Florida, California, Louisiana, Hawaii, New York and Texas. Florida stands out in the report for two reasons: Central Florida alone accounted for nearly 20% of the total number of cases reported nationally and several new-case patients in central Florida demonstrated no clear evidence of zoonotic exposure or traditionally known risk factors. Not to panic. DeSantis is more of a threat. But not treatable with antibiotics.
Arkansas is going after booksellers too: Arkansas is temporarily blocked from enforcing a law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors, a federal judge ruled Saturday. U.S. District Judge Timothy L. Brooks issued a preliminary injunction against the law, which also would have created a new process to challenge library materials and request that they be relocated to areas not accessible by kids. The measure, signed by Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders earlier this year, was set to take effect Aug. 1. A coalition that included the Central Arkansas Library System in Little Rock had challenged the law, saying fear of prosecution under the measure could prompt libraries and booksellers to no longer carry titles that could be challenged. The judge also rejected a motion by the defendants, which include prosecuting attorneys for the state, seeking to dismiss the case. The ACLU of Arkansas, which represents some of the plaintiffs, applauded the court’s ruling, saying that the absence of a preliminary injunction would have jeopardized First Amendment rights.
Maureen Dowd wrote a typically snotty column excoriating Joe and Jill Biden for failing to acknowledge their granddaughter, Hunter’s child by a woman with whom he’d had a brief affair four years earlier. It gave the right wingers fodder to proclaim that despite Joe’s reputation as a family man, the Biden Crime Family is cruel to little children and other living things. It seemed obvious that there was more to the story than what we knew which was already complicated. The first family put out this statement: President Joe Biden has offered his first statement on 4-year-old grandchild Navy Joan Roberts, the daughter of Hunter Biden and Lunden Roberts, an Arkansas woman who filed a paternity suit against the president’s son in May 2019. “Our son Hunter and Navy’s mother, Lunden, are working together to foster a relationship that is in the best interests of their daughter, preserving her privacy as much as possible going forward,” President Biden said in a statement provided exclusively to PEOPLE.