Tuesday, May 05, 2026

BUT DEMOCRATS ARE THE EXTREMISTS

Last month, comedian Ramy Youssef commemorated Arab American Heritage Month on Sesame Street by teaching Elmo the meanings of "salamu alaykum" and "habibi."



The right lost its shit, of course.



Fox's Raymond Arroyo was incensed:
“I wish Sesame Street would stick to teaching kids about letters and numbers and leave the Arabic immersion to someone else,” he said on The Ingraham Angle. “Next, Bert and Ernie will be praying five times a day on Sesame Street, facing east.”
Podcast host Chad Prather said, "Time to deport Elmo.... On this episode of Sesame Street, Elmo learns how to build an IED."

Fast forward to last Friday. Sesame Street commemorated Jewish American Heritage Month by posting a video featuring actress Kat Graham, in which she talked about matzoh ball soup with a Muppet named Abby Cadabby.



Again there were angry right-wing responses:



One was from an influencer and ex-Navy SEAL named Dan Bilzerian:



Bilzerian is well known in some circles. He
initially gained fame for his Instagram photos alongside bikini-clad women....

[He] has 30 million followers on Instagram and 2 million on X. He regularly tweets opinions like "Jewish supremacy is the greatest threat to the world today," questions the accuracy of the statistic that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, and reposts clips of avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes....

By 2024, the occasional surveys he took of his followers became pointedly focused on Jews. "Who causes the majority of the world's problems?" he asked, with users overwhelmingly voting for the multiple-choice option "16 million Jews."

In January 2025, Bilzerian asked his followers whether Hitler was a "good person," a "terrible person," or if they didn't know. A third of the 178,000 voters said Hitler was a "good person," and 23% said they didn't know.

Bilzerian laid out his views on Jewish people in a 2024 interview with conservative commentator Patrick Bet-David, during which he said Jews "knew about 9/11" and "had JFK assassinated." Later that year, conservative media personality Piers Morgan asked Bilzerian how many Jews he believed died in the Holocaust. "I don't know, but I would bet my entire net worth that it was under 6 million," Bilzerian said.
Bilzerian is now a Republican candidate for Congress. The incumbent in this race is Randy Fine, a notorious anti-Muslim bigot:
... he privately wrote “Go blow yourself up!” to a Florida Muslim after they challenged his social media posts, calling on an Islamophobic trope that Muslims are prone to violence or suicide bombings.

In December 2023, as Palestinians awaited much-needed humanitarian aid, Fine mocked them, posting on his X account, “Stop the trucks. Let them eat rockets. There are plenty of those. #BombsAway.”

... In May 2025, Fine suggested on national television that the United States should use nuclear weapons against Gaza, invoking the atomic bombings of Japan as a model for dealing with Palestinians. When asked to explain this genocidal rhetoric, he doubled down with a racist and dehumanizing response, claiming that half of Gaza’s population is “married to their cousins” and has “mental defects,” and that “you’ve got to have a mental defect to interpret the comment that way.”
Last winter, he responded to a snarky tweet from a Muslim activist about the prevalence of dog poop in New York City after a major snowstorm with this:



And a third candidate in that Republican primary, Aaron Baker, has been endorsed by James Fishback, a Republican gubernatorial candidate who has referred to the Black front-runner in the race, Byron Donalds, as "By’rone" and "posted a video of himself shooting a gun along with a demand that Donalds join him to prove that he is 'actually black.'" Fishback has "referred to the junk in school cafeterias as 'goyslop,' a far-right term for unhealthy food that Jews [allegedly] foist on non-Jews." And he's been endorsed in the governor's race by manosphere sex criminal Andrew Tate.

And yet we're forever being told that the Democratic Party is the party of extremism, and that Democrats need to silence party members whose beliefs are seen as radical.

The GOP should be widely recognized as the hatemonger party. But instead, we're likely to get a half-dozen more center-left "studies" reinforcing the notion that it's Democrats who have an extremism problem. The Republican Party is increasingly a party of unabashed haters, people who hate without resorting to codes or dog whistles. Maybe Democrats should make a habit of talking about that.
Posted by Steve M. at 9:22 AM 0 comments

Monday, May 04, 2026

JOHN FETTERMAN IS A PSYOP

Politico's Jonathan Martin thinks Senator John Fetterman might switch parties.
It’s a few days after the election this November, and the results have become clear: Democrats have netted the four seats they need to claim a Senate majority.

But then there’s a disturbance in the force: Senate Republicans and President Donald Trump persuade Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) to switch parties or at least become an independent to ensure Republicans retain power in the chamber.

It’s a scenario that’s becoming less fantastical by the day.
Fetterman says he won't:
“I’m not changing,” Fetterman told me in an interview Friday when I asked if he was ruling out both becoming a Republican or turning independent. “I’m a Democrat, and I’m staying one. “

Yet, at least in private, he’s not totally rejecting dropping his “D.”

When one senior Republican recently brought up the idea of becoming an independent to Fetterman, he absorbed the suggestion and didn’t embrace or reject the overture, according to a GOP official familiar with the conversation.

In our interview, Fetterman said bluntly: “I’d be a shitty Republican.” ...

“Committed conservatives like Cassidy and Tillis are getting pushed out of their seats,” he noted. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) voted to convict Trump on impeachment charges in 2021, and the president is now targeting him in his primary. And Tillis announced his retirement after clashing with Trump over the [One Big Beautiful Bill]....

If Republicans can’t tolerate even Tillis, Fetterman suggested, how would they accept somebody who supports abortion rights, gay rights, legalizing marijuana and is pro-labor? (He flies the pride flag outside his Senate office.)
Fetterman could decide to stop calling himself a Democrat, but my guess is that he won't. The reason has nothing to do with ideology. It's all because Fetterman is perceived as more useful to the right-wing media (and thus to the GOP) if he remains a nominal Democrat.

Fetterman is just the latest in a series of "Fox News Democrats" or "Fox News liberals" -- figures who are registered Democrats but regularly agree with right-wing talking points. Fox has been promoting such figures for a long time -- here's a piece about Fox News Democrats from 2012:
Fox News co-host and contributor Bob Beckel has called for the assassination of WikiLeaks spokesperson Julian Assange (“A dead man can’t leak stuff”—Follow the Money, 12/6/10), for furnishing guns to school children (“If you give your kid a gun, no bullying”—Five, 1/5/12) and for militant opposition to the “War on Christmas,” which is “completely out of hand” (Five, 12/9/11)....

But Beckel is presented as a left-leaning voice on Fox, a counterweight to the network’s army of right-leaning talkers. And he’s far from an atypical specimen there....

For years, Susan Estrich, former campaign manager for 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, was one of Fox’s leading tepid liberals. (Sean Hannity—Hannity & Colmes, 5/23/04—has called her “my favorite liberal.”) ... During the 2003 California gubernatorial campaign, Estrich defended candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger against charges he had physically assaulted numerous women ...; after he won, Estrich accepted a job working on his transition team....

Fox News contributor and former Clinton White House special counsel Lanny Davis (FoxNews.com, 10/6/11) wrote a paean to an arch-conservative political organizer, headlined “I’m a Democrat and I Respect Grover Norquist.” Davis recounted how the anti-tax crusader had set him straight on the Great Depression and Herbert Hoover’s liberal economic lunacy, and ended by praising Norquist’s love for his family: “But it’s not possible for anyone to be anything but a good person who has such love and devotion to his wife and his children.”
The piece lists other self-styled Democrats who regularly seconded right-wing arguments at the time: Zell Miller, Juan Williams, Doug Schoen, Alan Colmes.

Fake Democrats are such a regular feature on Fox that "Fox News liberal" shows up in online encyclopedias of TV tropes, such as Tropedia:
Also known as a conservative Democrat or a DINO (Democrat In Name Only), a Fox News Liberal is a character who allegedly provides political balance in the narrative.... They can be presented as the Only Sane Man in their party, and their criticisms of said party can also evoke from those in the prevailing party that "See? Even this die-hard ... liberal thinks that their party has gone way too far and become way too extreme. *sigh* If only the rest of their party could be as reasonable as they are, they wouldn't be in such bad shape". In particularly extreme versions of this trope, the character forsakes their own beliefs as a means of Character Development, claiming their party line has "gone too far".
TV Tropes adds:
It's also very common for them to admit the solutions proposed by people with (what their superiors consider to be) the 'correct' political views are basically good and desirable, but quibble about the details or minutiae of their 'correct' policies.
Fox News Democrats are meant to be a gateway drug for Democratic audience members. (According to Pew, 18% of Democrats and Democratic leaners say they regularly get news from Fox.) These audience members are expected to watch Fox News Dems and think, Wow, even members of my own party think Democratic officeholders and candidates are radical and weird. The goal is to get these viewers to switch parties, or at least vote GOP some of the time.

Fox and the GOP clearly think that the psyop is more effective if the on-screen critic of Democrats remains a registered Democrat, which is why these people claim to be Democrats long after it becomes obvious to more sophisticated viewers that they've switched teams. Alan Dershowitz, for instance, was a Fox News Democrat for more than a decade. Here's a clip from 2015 titled "Megyn Kelly, Alan Dershowitz Rip Liberal Fascism on Campuses: 'These Students Are Book Burners'":



Dershowitz kept up this "I'm a Democrat, but..." charade until last month, when he made his affiliation with the GOP official. (Dershowitz will turn 88 later this year. I guess he's aging out of this role.)

So Fetterman is perceived as a more useful Republican propagandist if he continues to call himself a Democrat. But what about the Senate? Won't the party want him to switch if it prevents Democrats from taking over?

I wonder if Republicans are weighing the publicity risk of a perceived betrayal of voters vs. Fetterman's usefulness as a saboteur. They might think Democrats voters will take to the streets in large numbers if it's clear they've voted for a Democratic Senate and Fetterman's party switch prevents that. There might be intense pressure on him to resign so he can be replaced by an actual Democrat.

By contrast, if he stays in the party, Democrats run the Senate -- and Fetterman, like Joe Manchin and Kysten Sinema before him, can make the party seem divided and radical. He can still vote for Trump's appointees and judicial nominees, and he will. Between that, the filibuster, and Trump's veto pen, Republicans can limit how much Democrats accomplish, while persuading low-information voters that the country's failing are owned, or at least co-owned, by "the Democrat-controlled Congress."

In any case, Democrats need 52 senators for anything resembling real control. That could happen, but it's a longshot.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:35 AM 0 comments

Sunday, May 03, 2026

TODD BLANCHE WILL TOTALLY PROVE AT TRIAL THAT JAMES COMEY IS TRAVIS BICKLE, SWEAR TO GOD

On Meet the Press today, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche reassured Kristen Welker that it's not a crime merely to use the phrase "86 47" -- even though, in his view, it constitutes a threat to kill Donald Trump -- and those of us who have used the number code, or bought or sold "86 47" merchandise, shouldn't worry about being brought up on federal charges just for the use of the numbers.

WELKER: On Amazon, there are dozens of "8647" products being sold and purchased right now. Should individuals selling or buying that merchandise be concerned they are going to prosecuted? BLANCHE: Of course not

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 3, 2026 at 10:28 AM

WELKER: The image -- excuse me -- is part of what led to this indictment.

BLANCHE: Yes.

WELKER: It is worth noting that on Amazon.com -- we looked this up -- there are dozens of products with the same terminology. We're showing it right here: "86 47" being sold and purchased right now. Should individuals selling or buying "86 47" merchandise be concerned that they're going to be prosecuted by the DOJ?

BLANCHE: This isn't -- this isn't about a single incident. Okay, this isn't -- I mean, of course not. That's posted constantly. That phrase is used constantly. There are constantly men and women who choose to make threatening statements against President Trump. Every one of those statements do not result in indictments, of course. There are facts, there are circumstances, there are investigations that have to take place....
So why is James Comey being indicted for posting an image of seashells in an "86 47" arrangement? Blanche says that's super-secret:
WELKER: Just to be very clear: You are suggesting the seashells themselves are not at the root of this indictment.

BLANCHE: I am suggesting that every single case depends on the investigation that's done. And of course the seashells are part of that case -- I mean, that's what the public sees. But without a doubt -- and it should be evident by the fact that it's been eleven months since the posting and the indictment -- there is an investigation that takes place, and that's the result. The result of that investigation is the indictment that was returned last week.
The headline for NBC's story about this is "Acting Attorney General Says Indictment Against James Comey Goes Beyond Seashell Photo."
“This is not just about a single Instagram post,” Blanche told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “This is about a body of evidence that [prosecutors] collected over the series of about 11 months. That evidence was presented to the grand jury.”

Blanche said he was not “permitted” to share the other evidence against Comey that was collected, but added: “At the trial — a public trial that will be open to the public — everybody in this country will know exactly what evidence the government has against Mr. Comey.”
And, in fact, that's what the indictment implies (emphasis added below):
COUNT ONE

On or about May 15, 2025, in the Eastern District of North Carolina, the defendant, JAMES BRIEN COMEY JR, did knowingly and willfully make a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, the President of the United States, in that he publicly posted a photograph on the internet social media site Instagram which depicted seashells arranged in a pattern making out "86 47", which a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.

In violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 871(a).

COUNT TWO

On or about May 15, 2025, in the Eastern District of North Carolina, the defendant, JAMES BRIEN COMEY JR, knowingly and willfully did transmit ininterstate and foreign commerce a communication that contained a threat to kill the President, Donald J. Trump, specifically, by publicly posting a photograph on theinternet social media site Instagram which depicted seashells arranged in a pattern making out "86 47", which a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to President Trump.

In violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 875(c).
This is a hilarious bluff. Blanche wants us to think that James Comey is secretly this guy, a person acquiring and planning to use multiple weapons to take out Trump while living in a 1970s cold-water flat and wearing his hair in a Mohawk:


Once a jury is "familiar with the circumstances" of Comey's seedy, violent existence, it will be plain as day that he had intent to kill.

Blanche will probably be nominated to replace Pam Biondi as a result of this bluff, but at trial we'll all see that he has nothing. I assume the DOJ will present other perfectly reasonable, non-violent negative statements Comey has made about Trump and suggest that they're evidence of a crime; DOJ lawyers will probably use the phrase "Trump Derangement Syndrome," as if anyone who's not in the MAGA/Fox News cult believes that's an actual thing that suggests violent mental instability.

The case will be thrown out of court. But the cult will believe that a "swamp" judge tossed it in order to suppress inconvenient facts about Comey's murderous intent. And Blanche will need to indict a few more innocent people if he wants to save his job.
Posted by Steve M. at 12:11 PM 0 comments

Saturday, May 02, 2026

DONALD TRUMP, THE ALL-CONTROLLING PUPPET

The New York Times Magazine has published Lulu Garcia-Navarro's long interview with Tucker Carlson. As you can imagine, the interview sanewashes Carlson -- his batshit crazy conspiracy theory about the Chabad Lubavitch movement's alleged role in pushing the United States into war with Iran doesn't come up, and Carlson's invocations of demons and Satan aren't mentioned.

Garcia-Navarro gets Carlson to explain some of his conspiracy thinking, but he's careful to make it sound rational and not too anti-Semitic. When asked why he believes President Trump agreed to go to war with Iran, he calculatedly provides a list of pro-war advisers that's a mix of Jews and non-Jews:
My strong impression, and I could be wrong because I don’t work there, is that no one in the [White House] was pushing for this, at least overtly. That all the pressure was coming from outside — constant calls from donors and people with influence over the president. Rupert Murdoch, Miriam Adelson, etc., and then a small constellation of, I guess they’d be called influencers, beginning with Mark Levin, but there were others, Sean Hannity, pushing the president to do this and telling him that you will be a figure out of history, you will save and redeem Israel or something.
I have to admit that this, in isolation, is fairly plausible. Later, Garcia-Navarro tries to pin Carlson down, and he sounds a bit more conspiratorial:
You said he’s a hostage just now. You told the BBC he’s a “slave” to foreign interests. Correct.

I just want you to be explicit. Trump is being held hostage by whom? By Benjamin Netanyahu and by his many advocates in the United States.
Saying that Netanyahu strongly influenced Trump's decision to go to war isn't conspiratorial, of course, but saying that Trump is a "slave" to Netanyahu is.

Carlson goes on to argue that we're stuck in Iran because of Netanyahu:
And we know that not simply because Trump started the war on Feb. 28, but because he couldn’t get out of it. He declares we’re having a cease-fire. He says, We’re having a cease-fire and we’re having these talks and they’re going great, and we are going to open the strait. And Iran says, Yeah, one of our conditions is Israel’s got to pull back from southern Lebanon. You can’t use the Iran war as a pretext for stealing more land from a sovereign country that’s not your country....

And within hours of Trump announcing this, Israel publicly, in a way that was designed to get the attention of everyone, including the Iranians, starts killing civilians in Lebanon. Now, what was the point of that? Not to secure the Israeli homeland. The point of it was to end any talk of a negotiated settlement, to keep this going until Iran was destroyed and chaotic, which is the Israeli goal.
Carlson is essentially saying that Trump is blameless in this matter -- he could have gotten us out of the war, but Israel trapped him. Carlson ignores Trump's own strategic ineptitude, and his own desire to keep fighting the glorious war that both Netanyahu and Fox News want him to fight until he achieves the glorious victory they tell him he can achieve.

We think Carlson has broken with Trump, but I think he's being careful not to burn the bridge between himself and Trump.

Carlson describes a conversation he had with Trump about Iran -- and puts an utterly implausible spin on it:
He felt he had no choice and he said to me, Everything’s going to be OK. Because I was getting overwrought. Don’t do this. The people pushing you to do this hate you. They’re your enemies. This will destroy you. This will gravely harm our country. We’ve got kids. I’m hoping for grandkids. Let’s not go there. And he said, It’s going to be all right, and he said, Do you know how I know that? And I said no, and he said, Because it always is. There’s a kind of Teddy Rooseveltian optimism there, but that’s not really what it was. This is my read. That was more a justification from a man who feels he has no choice.
No, it wasn't "a justification from a man who feels he has no choice." It was Trump being the Power of Positive Thinking simpleton he's always been, going back to his real estate days. And, well, you can't blame him -- he's run multiple businesses into the ground and destroyed the United States, but he always seems to emerge without a scratch.

Carlson doesn't talk about demons or Satan, but he manages to inject some "spiritual" mumbo-jumbo into the conversation:
... I never saw, nor did I hear about anybody who works for the Trump administration, who was enthusiastically pushing this war on Trump, being like: “You want to make this country great again? We need a regime-change effort in Iran.” Instead there were a lot of cowardly people, as there always are, and Trump engenders cowardice in the people around him through intimidation. And there is a kind of quality that he has that’s spellbinding. And I think it probably literally is a spell. And the effect is to weaken people around him and make them more compliant and more confused. And I’ve experienced this myself. You spend a day with Trump and you’re in this kind of dreamland. It’s like smoking hash or something. It’s interesting, very interesting. And there may be a supernatural component to it. I’m not a theologian, but it’s real, and anyone who’s been around him can tell you it’s true. But whatever the cause, no one around him was weighing in strongly, as far as I know, on either side, for or against. But people from the outside were strongly weighing in, calling him constantly.
Okay, let me get this straight: Trump is so spellbinding that his own aides are afraid to be forthright with him, but Trump somehow isn't spellbinding when talking to Netanyahu, Murdoch, Adelson, Hannity, and Levin. This spellbinder -- this theologically supernatural spellbinder -- apparently loses his theologically supernatural powers when talking to boldface names -- or maybe to bellicose Zionists. I can't quite pin down what Carlson is saying here.

I have an alternate theory.

Perhaps Trump is just an egomaniacal ignoramus desperately searching for legacy projects as the monthly injections in his hands remind him of his own mortality, and the boldface names just played him like a Stradivarius.

But Carlson prefers the narrative in which Trump is too powerful to get honest advice from his subordinates and also too powerless to rebuff Netanyahu and a couple of Fox News talking heads, not to mention the 95-year-old man who founded Fox. Either way, Carlson seems to be describing Trump as more sinned against than sinning, which tells me he could return to the Trump fold in the future.

Finally, I want to note another aspect of Carlson's method here. He uses the word "spellbinding," which invokes the religious realm for the yobs who subscribe to his podcast, but is also a term the Times might have used for a John F. Kennedy speech in 1962. He's trying to speak to more than one audience here, and I'd admire the code-switching skill if I weren't distracted by how willing Garcia-Navarro is to fall for it.
Posted by Steve M. at 12:02 PM 0 comments

Friday, May 01, 2026

CAN DEMOCRATS REALLY FIGHT THE REDISTRICTING WAR TO A DRAW?

The New Republic's Greg Sargent tells us that Democrats can compete with the GOP on redistricting, if they fight hard:
According to a new analysis by Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group, Democrats could redraw anywhere from 10 to 22 additional congressional seats for the party in time for the 2028 elections if they push hard with redistricting in seven blue and swing states.

... even if Democrats flip zero chambers, they can redraw up to 10 additional congressional districts for the party, the analysis finds, by maximizing gerrymanders in New York, Colorado, Oregon, and Maryland, where Democrats control governorships and state legislatures.

But even more strikingly, Democrats could redraw as many as 22 additional congressional districts for the party overall if they flip legislative chambers in other states and redraw aggressively in them, the analysis finds.
The analysis argues, for instance, that "three congressional seats are gettable in Wisconsin, three in Minnesota, and up to six in Pennsylvania" if Democrats establish complete legislative control by flipping both houses of the legislature in Wisconsin and one house each in Minnesota and Pennsylvania -- although the Minnesota state constitution appears to ban an immediate redistricting there.

I think Democrats will do very well in state legislative races this year, primarily because anger at Donald Trump will motivate millions of voters around the country to turn out in order to replace rubber-stamp Republicans in Congress. These voters are likely to vote Democratic downballot as well. All of the state legislative chambers mentioned above could flip.

But Democrats put a lot of political capital at risk when they redistrict, and they might struggle to sustain popular support for redistricting in states where they haven't done it. Notice that Abigail Spanberger won the 2025 Virginia governor's race by 15 points, 57.58% to 42.22%, but last month's redistricting referendum passed by roughly 3 points, 51.69% to 48.31% -- and Spanberger has a job approval rating of 47%, with 46% disapproving, according to a Washington Post poll conducted a month ago. Her support for redistricting is a major reason for this decline in support.

As I've often pointed out, both conservatives and moderates outnumber liberals in America. That's been true for many years, although the gap is narrowing:


Democrats are competitive nationally (and have won the popular vote in seven of the last nine presidential elections) because their voter base includes a greater percentage of self-styled moderates than the GOP base does. "Moderate" might be a meaningless term these days -- moderates these days are angry about many things that anger liberals -- but there's clearly a larger voting bloc that's loyal to the GOP, the party of conservatism, and that wants the opposition party to suffer whenever possible. Anger about the Republican gerrymandering that's taken place since 2010 doesn't seem to have cost any Republicans their seats, or even lowered their approval ratings. That's because Republicans hate Democrats. Republicans are trained to hate Democrats. The media voices they trust tell them every day that Democrats are evil. Even when non-MAGA Republicans witness offputting acts by the president, they tell themselves, "But Democrats are worse."

Democrats attempting to redistrict as aggressively as Republicans won't have as large a base of voters who hate Republicans. I think they'll succeed in many states by invoking Trump, but in states where they might be required to wait until 2030 -- when Trump will (presumably!) be out of office -- they might regret all the invocations of bipartisanship and working across the aisle that they're so fond of.

They'll also be fighting a party that's much better at rallying its voters than Democrats are.


GOP rhetoric of this kind can be effective against Democratic governors and state legislators. Republicans are good at demonizing Democrats. Democrats are good at demonizing ... Trump. They haven't built a sustained case against the Republican Party over the years, and they may struggle to win support for aggressive redistricting as a result.

Democrats might get this done, but I want to make clear that it won't happen automatically in states with full Democratic control, especially if the party's legislative majorities are small. Republicans will work hard to make Democrats pay a price for redistricting, something Democrats have never managed to do to Republican redistricters. Democrats need to be willing to pay that price, and to fight for their maps by discrediting the entire GOP, not just Trump.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:37 AM 0 comments

Thursday, April 30, 2026

DADDY, WHAT WAS DEMOCRACY?

The Supreme Court's decision in Louisiana v. Callais is extraordinarily damaging to American democracy, but while it's the worst blow democracy has suffered in America this month, it's not the only one.

I would have voted for the pro-Democratic gerrymander that passed in Virginia earlier this month, and I would have voted for the one in California before that. I'll support a pro-Democratic gerrymander in New York, if there is one. Our governor favors one:
On Wednesday, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York reiterated her support for drawing new maps.

“I’m working with the Legislature to change New York’s redistricting process so we can fight back against Washington’s attempts to rig our democracy,” Ms. Hochul, a Democrat, said in a statement.
But gerrymanders are bad -- and then Louisiana v. Callais is worse. I don't know how the idea of American democracy survives all this.

First, the Supreme Court decision, which garottes Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Elie Mystal writes:
Congress explicitly intended the VRA to include “disparate impact”—the idea that a law that results in racism is indeed racist whether or not the racists who wrote the law admit to their nefarious plans. Alito’s construction explicitly rejects this concept. Nobody elected Alito or the other Republicans on the court to make this decision for us, but they’ve decided that only Republicans on the Supreme Court know what racism truly is.
The Court's decision, written by Samuel Alito,
means that even if you can show that [a] gerrymander was obviously targeted to dilute the Black vote ... it doesn’t matter unless the white gerrymanderers say something like, “I drew this map because I hate Negroes” or some other similarly vile statement bold enough to get Alito excited. It means that the Voting Rights Act is effectively dead.
Florida was so certain of this outcome that it began gerrymandering its House map even before the decision came down. Louisiana plans to reschedule its May 16 primary in order to redraw its maps.

But the worst is yet to come. The New York Times tells us:
... some Democrats fear 2028 will become a worst-case scenario, with Republican-controlled states across the country redrawing their maps to maximum partisan advantage. An analysis by The New York Times last year found that all told, Democrats would be in danger of losing around a dozen majority-minority districts across the South if the court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act.
And this can happen because the Supreme Court set up this ruling making racial gerrymanders effectively legal by ruling seven years ago that partisan gerrymanders are effectively legal, at least under federal law:
... [a] state can defend their maps by claiming that they were merely engaging in partisan gerrymandering. This move is thanks to what the Supreme Court wrote in the 2019 Rucho case—that though partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, it is out of the Court’s realm to fix.

So when, say, Louisiana goes back and eliminates many black opportunity districts in its state, it can claim it is doing so to help Republicans, not whites. That’s an outrageous proposition given the considerable overlap between those two groups in Louisiana.
I don't want to downplay racism in this country, but I sincerely believe that the partisan impact of this is what the Federal Society Six care the most about. They might hate Black people, but what primarily motivates them is the desire to keep America a tax and regulatory paradise for right-wing billionaires, particularly fossil fuel billionaires. (I'm sure the surviving Koch brother feels his life's work is all but done.) If the partisan voting split among Blacks were 50-50, the Court's Republicans would have been much less likely to do what they've done.

In response:
... Democrats are gearing up for a battle. In Colorado and New York, they have begun to explore the process of changing state laws and redrawing their maps before the next House races in two years....

Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, also a Democrat, hinted at future action in his state during a news conference on Wednesday. “We have options,” he told reporters after the decision from the court had been handed down.

Elsewhere, Democratic strategists have pointed to Oregon and New Jersey as states that could draw new maps for partisan advantage, though they would have to undertake similar processes as Virginia and California and get permission from voters through referendums.
But what we have to look forward to is a future in which members of minority parties in both red and blue states are utterly disenfranchised. A country where most people never vote in a competitive legislative election isn't a democracy. It's a illiberal state of the kind Viktor Orban built temporarily. We appear to be building one permanently. Now that the Supreme Court has effectively made gerrymandering 100% legal, you can't vote out gerrymanderers at the state level because they can gerrymander the state legislatures (as Republicans have already done in states such as North Carolina and Wisconsin) so the pro-gerrymandering majority party stays in power forever.

And all this comes at a time when American democracy was already in a precarious state. We have free and fair elections for the presidency and for statewide offices, and for most legislative bodies, but voters seem fed up. They don't seem to think voting gets them the results they want (apart from MAGA voters who go to the polls hoping to see libs owned). So democracy seems futile even before the next wave of gerrymanders, and soon most states could have all-Republican or all-Democratic House delegations and permanent supermajority control of legislatures. If we can't stop the gerrymandering arms race, why will anyone bother to vote a generation from now?

Mystal writes:
... if Democrats take back the House and the Senate, kill the filibuster, and elect a Democratic president in 2028, Congress can pack the court and fill it with people who do not believe in a white’s-only theory of voting rights. Those new justices could overrule not just Callais, but all of the other voting rights cases the Roberts court has issued to try to destroy minority voting rights. Those new justices could overturn the court’s prior gerrymandering decisions.
I hope it can happen. The howling of Republicans -- and, probably, the mainstream media -- if Democrats attempt this will undoubtedly be audible from space. We'll be told that Democrats campaigned as normies and are now acting like "radical left extremists." But it's our only way out.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:30 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, April 29, 2026

IF YOU WANT A CODEWORD FOR "KILL," REPUBLICANS HAVE A COUPLE FOR YOU

Acting Attoney General Todd Blanche knows that this 2025 James Comey Instagram post was not code for "Kill Donald Trump":



In the restaurant and bar trade, "86" means "stop taking orders for this item, because we're out of it." It also means "throw the bum out." Comey, like millions of other Americans, wants Donald Trump removed from office. But Blanche knows that credulous Republican rubes -- including Trump himself -- will believe that Comey threatened the president with death.

Republican attacks on their critics are often projection, and this is no exception, because Republicans actually do have a couple of codewords for "kill" that they use regularly. The words are "treason" and "traitor."

Republicans have begun using these words more and more often because of the deliciously bloodthirsty implication: If you're a traitor, Our God Emperor Trump gets to kill you.

Yesterday, Media Matters posted this:
In the last month, right-wing media figures have labeled a wide range of people and entities they associate with the Democratic Party — from former President Barack Obama to mainstream media figures and critics of the Iran War — as “traitors,” in some cases explicitly demanding they be tried for treason and put to death....

* Fox host Will Cain said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) criticizing Trump’s “bungled mismanagement” of the Iran war “is nothing short of treasonous." Cain opened the segment by telling viewers, “As we’re in a high-stakes moment overseas, some Democrats sound like they’re not on team America.” He also called Murphy a “traitor” for making a sarcastic social media post about the war: “Chris Murphy responding to a post about Iran's shadow fleet running a blockade. He responded with one word: ‘awesome.’ That post triggered immediate backlash, as it should. Critics calling him, as they should, a traitor.” [Fox News, The Will Cain Show, 4/21/26]

* Newsmax’s Carl Higbie said Murphy “should be expelled from the Senate and charged with treason.” Higbie claimed that “in this case, like we have a U.S. senator ... rooting for the enemy of the country he's supposed to represent.” [Newsmax, Carl Higbie Frontline, 4/22/26]

* Newsmax guest Zuhdi Jasser called Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) a traitor and enemy of the state for opposing war in Iran. Jasser: “To see traitors like Ilhan Omar talk about our troops the way she does and Israel's moral force the way she does, these are enemies of the state. They’re part of the Marxist-jihadist global axis, if you will.” [Newsmax, Sunday Agenda, 3/1/26]
The post continues with nine more examples. Those accused of treason include Barack Obama, Tim Walz, and the news media.

Only one of the commentators mentions death as a punishment for traitors, but there's no need to make this explicit: the audience for this content knows that convicted traitors can be executed, and drools at the thought of Democrats being executed.

And sometimes Republicans, particularly the president, don't even bother to leave the death part implicit:


Literally every time a Republican says that a political opponent committed treason or is a traitor, the real message is this: It appears that the government ought to kill this opponent. In fact, the government might have have a moral obligation to kill this opponent. Every regular consumer of right-wing media knows this, and finds these messages delightful and uplifting. Keep this in mind whenever you hear a Republican using these words. It's a call for (state) violence.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:39 AM 0 comments
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