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To all who celebrate

Bankruptcy, fistfights and leather couches Rachel Maddow’s staff noticed a sprawling story that while not exactly headline news ought to be. (I’d missed it until her show Monday night.) Multiple state Republican parties are at or near bankruptcy. The headline for Jim Geraghty’s National Review column last week dubbed it a “quiet collapse” in four key states. Political donations follow power. Especially in the states. Especially in non-general election years. So it is not surprising that in four states with Democratic governors that state Republicans are not seeing their coffers as full as when the GOP holds the governor’s mansion. What Geraghty sees in that less is something more. In Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, and Minnesota Republicans are “going broke and devolving into infighting little fiefdoms.” Arizona Republicans are down to their last $23,000 in their federal account while their failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake barnstorms the country as “real” governor in exile. She could be raising money to help her fellow Arizona Republicans, but no.

The LA Times’ Jonah Goldberg discusses the idea that Republicans are hooked on victimization, believing that they are under siege by powerful forces that are destroying their way of life: Among his core supporters, about 37% of the party according to a breakdown of the poll by the New York Times’ Nate Cohn, literally nobody thinks he committed any crimes and 94% think the party needs to rally around him against these presumably bogus charges. […]  If the Republican establishment forces were as powerful as Trump and his voters think, they’d be able to do something about it. If the Deep State were half as formidable as they think, Trump would never have been president in the first place. But large segments of the GOP suffer from the delusion that they are victims of the ruling classes and that the woke left is running everything — or will — if Trump doesn’t stop them. Even in states with Republican governors and legislative supermajorities, like Tennessee, a certain paranoia that the left could take over at any moment dominates politics.

All things Cold War are new again An old joke from the Cold War comes to mind this morning. At the risk of telling it badly, here goes: American: We have freedom of speech in my country. I’m free to criticize my president as much as I want. Russian: But is true in Soviet Union! I too am free to criticize your president as much as I want. Now let’s back up to another Cold War tale I recalled at the very beginning of the Donald Trump administration (1/26/2017). Programmers and scientists across the country were rushing to back up climatic data in fear that the new administration would delete it and other research that conflicted with the administration’s chosen view of reality. They hoped to head off a MAGA Dark Age. Oh, right. My other Cold War story (see update below): Hedrick Smith in “The Russians” (1984) recounted a visit to Moscow’s Lenin Library. (Memory must serve, as I cannot locate the text online.) Smith, the New York Times’ Moscow Bureau Chief from 1971–74, had gone to one of the world’s great libraries to do some research. He needed a back copy of Time(?) magazine.

If they vote Democrat, stop them! The outrage meter here in The Cesspool of Sin is pegging this morning. Brad Friedman‘s X-post-factoid Sunday was pretty eye-catching. Ohio Republicans really, really don’t want the majority of state voters to cast ballots in the Aug. 8 special election. Their ultimate goal is to prevent a popular constitutional amendment securing abortion rights from passing in November. Ohio Capitol Journal: Early voting is ongoing for the upcoming Aug. 8 special election on Issue 1 that asks voters to make it harder to amend the Ohio Constitution by raising the threshold to 60%. To get to the ballot box, voters need to keep in mind changes made to voter ID laws last year, in a late-night legislative move approved by Gov. Mike DeWine at the beginning of 2023. Those changes, made through House Bill 458, mean different identification allowed at the polls, and limits to the absentee ballot dates. While a driver’s license with a different address is still allowed (as long as it’s not expired), voters must be registered with the Ohio Secretary of State at the correct address before voting.

God knows why… Donald Trump stepped on to the stage in Des Moines Iowa on Friday night to the ubiquitous GOP rally song called “Only in America” just as the lines, “one could end up going to prison, one just might be president” were blaring over the loudspeakers. Everyone in that room has probably heard the song a thousand times, Trump included, but never have the words been more relevant. If they were mad at Gov. Reynolds they shouldn’t have been. The song was played for every candidate who spoke. It’s just that those particular lyrics only apply to one of them. The crowd cheered lustily for the former president and current front runner for the Republican nomination anyway ,as they always do. It’s doubtful any of them even heard those lyrics, and if they did they no doubt saw it as more evidence of the massive conspiracy against Donald Trump. We know this because earlier in the evening one lone Republican candidate tried to tell them the truth: Reporters inside the room said the booing was much louder and more energetic than what appears on the video.

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.

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.