“any reasonable method to promote peace” “The first militia church I went to I thought was a fluke,” Jeff Sharlet (The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War) told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Tuesday evening. “And then I started to realize that churches were arming up with the expectation of civil war.” “The doomsday prepper of the past has become a mainstay of rightwing culture,” Sharlet found in his research travels. Sharlet writes about Ashli Babbitt, shot and killed by Capitol security as she tried to climb through broken glass into the Speaker’s Lobby on Jan. 6. I did not know law enforcement had found a weapon on her body inside the ambulance. Babbitt’s knife appears on the cover of Sharlet’s new book. It’s one of those details that the MAGA right does not want or need to know. It detracts from the near-virginal image MAGA Republicans have built up around her since the insurrection. “They were aging Ashli back” within days, Sharlet says, making her “smaller, younger, as if whiter.” A young white girl.
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Here’s an interesting leftist perspective on the current crisis: A number of American friends have been asking about my thoughts on Israel so I figured I’d just do a thread. This isn’t some academic analysis or anything, just some things I’ve noticed as someone who follows the news closely and has been to probably a dozen protests. Here we go: 1. The threat was real. American Left is (rightfully) wary of anyone that leans on unelected Supreme Court, but in this case they were final line of defense before dictatorship. Israel has no other checks or balances. No constitution, no separation between exec. and legislature 2.Bibi’s extremist coalition was trying to push reforms that would turn supreme court into rubber stamp. First to suffer would be Palestinians, LGBT and unions. Imagine Trump (who couldn’t even cancel Obamacare) with no obstacles, no challengers. What would he do? 3. If the reforms would have passed, many of the Palestinians with Israeli citizenship would have been disenfranchised because they have become the crucial piece in any non-Netanyahu coalition. As a result, Bibi would never lose an election ever again. Game Over. 4.
That book is banned, comrade MAGA Floridians fear ideas they find mildly threatening. Heads are not rolling yet, but it’s open season on books. At the slightest objection — outrage-addicted MAGAs are drunk on the power of it — Florida is removing books from its schools. A new measure in the Florida legislature would allow any person raising any objection to any book to disappear it as quickly as an East German neighbor turned over to Stasi. Greg Sargent writes that while the bill seems to have support from Republican presidential hopeful Gov. Ron DeSantis, passage could backfire: “If Florida passes this bill, it may be the first state in the country to institute in every public school a rule requiring the immediate removal of materials following an objection,” Jeffrey Sachs, a political scientist who closely tracks these proposals, told me.
Fox is NOT a journalistic entity, it’s a political operation.A person working for a PAC wouldn’t get congressional press credentials, but Fox does.It’s time to revoke the congressional press credentials for anybody from #Fox. I’m happy Marcy started the conversation. I want to move it forward. I think that de-credentialing should be one result following the resolution of the Dominion case in favor of Dominion. Why Bother To Revoke Fox’s Credentials? Press credentials have VALUE to Fox. It allows them, as a political operation, to masquerade as a news organization. I’m making the case that Fox is like the RNC or a Political Action Committee and not a journalistic entity, therefore they are not entitled to the benefits and protections we offer journalistic entities in America. Having Congressional Press credentials is a sign of legitimacy. Not having them wouldn’t mean they couldn’t still do stories about congress, but NOT having them, and the REASON they don’t have them sends a message to everyone. I’m already hearing all the defeatist responses from the left about trying to do this.
It’s looking dicey for the latest Great Whitebread Hope Nobody has ever absorbed the right-wing politics of grievance as eagerly as Donald Trump. In anticipation of his possible run for president in 2016, one of Trump’s smartest moves was to deploy aide Sam Nunberg to listen to talk radio for him and give him a rundown on all the talking points floating around in the right-wing fever swamp. He was a CNN guy but he knew that whatever Fox News and Rush Limbaugh were talking about was what the base of the Republican Party was interested in and that’s where he would aim his candidacy. As it happened, Trump found that he and they were very much on the same wavelength. He didn’t even attempt to please the political establishment or cater to their needs. Trump runs almost entirely on instinct. He’s bragged openly that he doesn’t need to learn anymore because he already knows everything he needs to know. In business, he refused to look at marketing data and analyses because he trusted his personal vibes over a bunch of pointy headed numbers crunchers. He hired people because they genuflected to him, not because they had any expertise.
Last week, as I was losing my voice, I had a really fascinating conversation with Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times, moderated by Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation, about the state of American democracy. You can watch it here. It was a wide-ranging discussion: we talked about whether fascism is a good model for understanding the contemporary American right, the helps and hindrances of the Constitution, the virtues and vices of returning to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for insights into current events, and more. Bouie is one of those rare political writers who really knows his history; it’s almost never that I read one of his Times columns without learning something I didn’t know about the American […]
(Again?) I’m unclear about the unique national security risk Washington believes Tik Tok to be. The questioning from members of congress last week showed they are clueless about social media so I’m not convinced. (Emptywheel has some thoughts on that question.) Be that as it may, I am very sure of the political risk that banning tik-tok will bring to the Democratic Party and I don’t know if these people are savvy enough to realize it. This article spells it out: For Chris Mowrey, a TikTok creator who posts popular videos focused on politics, the app represents more than just a platform: It provides a sense of community for his generation, connecting like-minded users and motivating them to take action. TikTok had a “massive influence on young people getting out to vote” in the 2022 midterm elections, Mowrey argued to me in an interview, particularly for those Democratic-leaning voters who may have felt isolated in a red state or area.
I don’t know exactly what this guy is grooming kids for but it’s obviously not something we would normally associate with religious right family values. And yet: Some people might say that’s just a tad homoerotic. Not that there’s anything wrong with that… In case you were wondering, Turning Point USA is adamantly opposed to LGBTQ rights: Turning Point UK too:
Only 21% of Republicans don’t want Trump to be president again I don’t know why so many Republicans still refuse to believe that their voters actually like this guy. More proof from the Maris Poll: A majority of Americans (56%) think the investigations into former President Donald Trump are fair. 41%, though, consider the probes to be a “witch hunt.” Perceptions align closely with partisanship with 87% of Democrats and 51% of independents reporting the investigations are above board. Nearly one in five Republicans (18%) agree. Most Republicans (80%), though, think the investigations are a “witch hunt.” Most Americans perceive Trump has engaged in improper behavior. A plurality of Americans (46%) think the former president has done something illegal, and an additional 29% consider Trump to have done something unethical but not illegal. Only 23% of Americans say Trump has done nothing wrong. Most Democrats (78%) consider Trump’s actions to be illegal. While majorities of Republicans and independents perceive wrongdoing by Trump, there is less consensus about the criminality of his actions.
This piece by David Lauter makes a point I hadn’t heard before. Trump’s been famous for a very long time and his “approval” rating has been pretty much the same. Since the 80s. There’s a fact about Donald Trump that both devotees and detractors often ignore, and it’s key to understanding what likely will happen politically — and what won’t — if any of the several criminal investigations of him lead to an indictment: Few people have ever been known so widely for so long. How widely? In 1999, 16 years before he launched his campaign for president, almost 9 in 10 Americans already knew enough about Trump to have an opinion of him, Gallup found. That year, Trump was as widely known as Al Gore, the sitting vice president, who was about to launch his fourth national campaign. Slightly more people had an opinion about Trump than about George W. Bush —the governor of Texas and son of a former president — who would defeat Gore in 2000. By contrast, only about a third of Americans that year had an opinion of John McCain, who was already in his third term as a U.S.