LET'S KEEP PRETENDING THAT THE INMATES AREN'T RUNNING THE ASYLUM

Eric Boehlert reports on Chris Christie's spectacular failure.

It’s hard to recall a former politician who was showered with more free media attention than Chris Christie this month as he peddled his new book, “Republican Rescue.” ... CNN even dedicated an entire primetime hour to him....

Consumers aren’t buying it.

A senior publishing source with access to the industry’s BookScan tabulations tells me that “Republican Rescue” sold just 2,289 copies during its first week in stores, which constitutes a colossal publishing flop....

In comparison to Christie’s 2,000 copies debacle, Jonathan Karl’s new book “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show,” sold 24,000 hardcover copies the same week as the Christie failure. How Christie was able to sell so few books after lining up so much national media attention during his marketing roll-out — “This Week” and “The View,” “Fox & Friends,” along with Fox News, Fox Business, the Daily Show, HBO twice, and CNBC — represents an extraordinary disconnect.

It confirms that the deeply unpopular former New Jersey governor remains, first and foremost, a media creation.

After that embarrassing misread of public sentiment, has the mainstream media gotten the point about the nature of the contemporary GOP? Nope. Today we get Peter Nicholas writing this for The Atlantic:

Pence 2024?

If Donald Trump officially enters the next presidential race, that doesn’t mean his former vice president will stay out of the contest.

... Pence is eyeing a presidential run of his own, even though his old boss hasn’t ruled out a 2024 campaign. Pence wouldn’t necessarily stay out of the race even if Trump jumps in.

“If you know the Pences, you know they’ll always try to discern where they’re being called to serve,” Marc Short, Pence’s former chief of staff, told me.

To his credit, Nicholas is skeptical:

A 2024 Pence campaign looks futile no matter the scenario. If Trump runs, he’ll rally the same MAGA zealots who refuse to believe he lost the last election. And if Trump opts out, Pence isn’t his natural successor; he may have spoiled any hope of inheriting the Republican base when he defied Trump on January 6.

Nicholas thinks Pence is a longshor, but ... he believes Pence may have spoiled hopes of inheriting the party's base? Really? Ya think?

Nicholas tells us that "GOP operatives [are] asking a version of the same question: What in the world is Mike Pence thinking?" I'll tell you what Pence is thinking and why he's thinking it: He's thinking that his party is going to come to its senses and rally around a pre-MAGA style of candidate, probably because the mainstream media keeps saying that could really happen. The fawning over Christie is one example. So is punditry like this:

A cold-eyed political calculus suggests that 2024 would be Pence’s best and maybe last real shot. He’ll be 65 by the next inauguration, and fresher faces are emerging in Republican politics, notably Glenn Youngkin, the incoming Virginia governor who won a state that Biden had captured a year ago by 10 points. “Someone like Glenn Youngkin is the future,” Sarah Chamberlain, the president of the Republican Main Street Partnership, a group that promotes centrist policies, told me. “He would be a wonderful presidential candidate.”

Youngkin would be a credible GOP presidential candidate if his party's voters didn't demand supersized portions of red meat whenever it's available; they accepted the leaner cuisine of his run in Virginia because it's what party strategists thought was necessary for a win (and he still race-baited his way to victory). GOP voters won't accept Demagoguery Lite in the 2024 primaries -- not if Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump Jr., Ted Cruz, Mike Flynn, or Mike Lindell decides to run in the absence of Trump Sr.

Even as Nicholas casts doubt on Pence's chances, he makes clear that he really doesn't get it:

Whatever Trump’s future, for Pence to be competitive in a Republican presidential primary race, he’d need to assemble a coalition of fellow evangelical Christians, cultural conservatives, and a chunk of mainstream Republicans who appreciate that he upheld Biden’s victory.

"A chunk of mainstream Republicans who appreciate that [Pence] upheld Biden’s victory"? Dude, there are no such Republicans -- not in the electorate. There are professional Never Trump Republicans, but there are no non-professional Never Trump Republicans.

Nicholas quotes something Pence said recently on his podcast about the aftermath of 9/11:

“I will tell you, on that day and in the weeks and months that followed, there were no Republicans in Washington, D.C.,” Pence tells his listeners. “There were no Democrats in Washington, D.C. It was just Americans...."

But Republican voters simply don't believe Democrats can be Americans. If Pence is still talking this way, and he's really running, he's setting himself up for a worse ass-kicking than Jeb Bush got in 2016.

MIND-READING AT THE WASHINGTON POST

Here's a Washington Post headline:

How did reporters Annie Linskey and Fenit Nirappil determine that the public has little appetite for new pandemic restrictions? They spoke to the following people:

* "Ezekiel Emanuel, a physician and bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania who was on President Biden’s covid advisory team during the transition" (and who is Rahm Emanuel's brother)

* "Joe Kanter, Louisiana’s top public health official"

* "Robert Wachter, who chairs the Department of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco"

They quoted President Biden, White House press secretary Jen Psaki, White House COVID response coordinator Jeff Zients, British prime minister Boris Johnson, Trump-backed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, Trump-backing congressman and former White House physician Ronny Jackson, and Democratic governors Ned Lamont of Connecticut and Phil Murphy of New Jersey.

In other words they determined that the public won't tolerate new COVID restrictions without talking to any members of the general public, or to anyone who's surveyed public opinion on the subject. So when they write, "But after nearly 21 months of covid-19 restrictions, there is little appetite in the country for the kinds of school closures, indoor-gathering bans and restaurant restrictions that defined the early days of the pandemic," it's "according to health officials, who say the political will to push for unpopular — but effective — mitigation measures is waning." Never mind the fact that the only people who actually say this are Dr. Emanuel, who left full-time government work a decade ago and is primarily a professor, and Dr. Wachter, who's also a professor.

No ordinary citizen is quoted. No pollster is quoted. We just have to take the word of "experts" that, as Dr. Emanuel says, “The American public is rightfully exhausted," and that, as Dr. Wachter says, “The threshold to shut things down is going to be much higher than it was."

It's obvious what's happening here: Republicans are vehemently opposed to any COVID mitigation measures and Democrats are afraid of Republicans, so we won't do what we need to do, and what other countries are already doing, to minimize the suffering caused by the omicron variant because we allow the GOP to have a veto over nearly every area of public policy, whether Republicans represent the majority or not. (On so many issues -- guns, abortion, taxation of the rich, climate change, and now COVID, they don't.) The press hears the loudest voices -- angry rural white Republicans with guns, along with the politicians who encourage their outrage -- and assumes they represent consensus opinion.

They don't. The public has been strongly supportive of mask mandates, vaccine requirements, and other mitigation strategies, but we defer to the right because the right is noisy and intimidating. And these Post writers don't even understand that that's what's happening.

'CAUSE YOU KNOW SOMETIMES WORDS HAVE TWO MEANINGS

I saw this Twitter thread a little while ago:

A guest at the bar tonight asked, "so how long have you been in this lockdown" and confused I was like "what lockdown?" to which she responded "you know, the masks [gesturing that I was wearing a mask]" and something really clicked for me in that moment

— Hemry, Local Bartender (@BartenderHemry) November 29, 2021

It seems obvious now in retrospect but it really is just purely binary to these people; taking the barest minimum precautions (e.g. an "indoor mask mandate" where guests can remove their masks to eat and drink") is tantamount to unfettered totalitarianism in their minds

— Hemry, Local Bartender (@BartenderHemry) November 29, 2021

I was immediately reminded of this:

The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think "critical race theory." We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 15, 2021

Rufo's plan, near the outset of the moral panic over teaching about racism in schools, asserted that he and his fellow culture warriors had "decodified" the term "critical race theory" and would "recodify" it to mean "anything about race in school curricula that right-wingers don't like." Rufo and friends have been quite successful at this.

But clearly this isn't the only time right-wingers have changed the perceived meaning of a word or phrase. As @BartenderHemry says, "lockdown," for many people, now means "any annoying pandemic-related inconvenience." So now things that are a minor nuisance feel like totalitarianism to these folks, in part because their brains are conditioned to think "lockdown," which really does sound like a totalitarian restriction on freedom of movement. So right-wingers can move around freely in a mask, but they feel as if you can't. Word recodified; rage successfully induced.

"Critical race theory" doesn't seem like an inherently sinister phrase, but Rufo always saw its potential, as he explained to The New Yorker's Benjamin Wallace-Wells:

"...‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain,” Rufo wrote.

... “Its connotations are all negative to most middle-class Americans, including racial minorities, who see the world as ‘creative’ rather than ‘critical,’ ‘individual’ rather than ‘racial,’ ‘practical’ rather than ‘theoretical.’ Strung together, the phrase ‘critical race theory’ connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American.”

Rufo and his pals have made "critical race theory" a pejorative, and now it's applied to even plain statements of fact about race that make their way into school curricula, as a mark of shame.

But the right has been identifying scare words and broadening their meanings as a tactic of rhetorical warfare for a long time. The classic right-wing scare words are "socialism" and "communism," which mean "anything right-wingers don't like." Marjorie Taylor Greene is particularly fond of using "communism" this way:

These are the 13 “Republicans” who handed over their voting cards to Nancy Pelosi to pass Joe Biden’s Communist takeover of America via so-called infrastructure:

Katko
Bacon
Van Drew
Young
Upton
Kinzinger
Gonzalez (OH)
Reed
Smith
Gabarino
Malliotakis
Fitzpatrick
McKinley

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) November 6, 2021

Vaccine mandates causing Americans to be fired is communism in America today.

Republicans should vote NO to the CR Dec 3 to fund the government.

I won’t vote to fund communism.

I won’t vote to fund climate scams or socialist programs.

Shut down the government.#ShutItDown

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) November 9, 2021

2. Steve Bannon is a Patriot and informs Americans daily about the communist revolution in America.

Commies always go after the strongest first.

The J6 committee is a fake committee full of liars, traitors, and communist.

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) November 12, 2021

I suppose the right would argue that our side has done something similar with the word "racist," but we can make a reasonable case for nearly all uses of the term, whereas Greene just uses "communism" to refer to anything that annoys her and Rufo boasts of cynically misapplying the term "critical race theory" as a tactic of war. I don't know how you beat the right at this, but calling the tactic out might be a start.

WHY DOES DONALD TRUMP HATE JESUS?

Spotted on Twitter:

Would you pay $20,000 to attend this? pic.twitter.com/8n0bvZqQOH

— chris evans (@chris_notcapn) November 28, 2021

Notice what word isn't anywhere in the copy? Christmas.

It's not here, either:

Richard Johnson of the New York Daily News told us about the event in October:

Donald Trump will celebrate Christmas early by posing for photos with fans who are paying $10,000 a head.

The former president is headlining a Dec. 3 fundraiser in an airport hangar in Naples, Fla., where 100 Christmas trees will re-create Melania’s Yuletide decoration of the White House....

Trump ... is set to pose for 90 photos with guests who can use the shots on their Christmas cards. The total number of guests could be 250 with spouses and offspring.

“Trump does get a piece of the pie, but the lion’s share will go to charity,” said Brad Keltner, the event’s organizer.

Keltner scoffed at rumors the event will feature an ice rink, Russian ballerinas and Clydesdale horses, but confirmed that there will be snow.

“This is not a political fundraiser,” Keltner said. “The president is doing this to benefit several local causes in a community that strongly supports him.”

I hope we find out whether any of this money was actually donated to charities. But whether the event is intended to help the needy or line Trump's pockets, it's Christmas-themed and it features Christmas trees, but there's no "Christmas" in the publicity images for the event.

Isn't Trump the guy who said this many times?

You know, we're getting near that beautiful Christmas season that people don't talk about anymore. They don't use the word "Christmas" because it's not politically correct. You go to department stores and they'll say "Happy New Year," or they'll say other things, and it'll be red, they'll have it painted, but they don't say -- Well, guess what? We're saying "Merry Christmas" again.

But as I told you in December 2016, Trump's properties regularly avoid the "C" word.

Why does Trump hate Jesus?

REPUBLICANS HAVE A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY TO DO THINGS THEY'RE NOT REMOTELY INTERESTED IN DOING

Ross Douthat has just published a not-bad column with this headline:

Republicans Have a Golden Opportunity. They Will Probably Blow It.

But as you read the column, you realize that if what Douthat is saying is correct, Republicans are likely to squander an opportunity to do things Douthat wishes they'd do, not things they want to do.

He writes:

Republicans have a lot to be thankful for. In the years since George W. Bush their party has staggered around without a governing ideology, veering from one style of fantasy politics to another, and twice nominated a ridiculously unfit reality-television star for the presidency. Yet through it all the party has never collapsed, never fallen more than a little distance out of power and almost always retained a certain capacity to block the Democrats, which is the only thing its constituencies can agree on.

It's nice that he thinks this is a bad thing. I question the bit about "veering from one style of fantasy politics to another." Does he mean veering from the 1776 cosplay fantasy of the Tea Party to the ... rhetorically indistinguishable fantasies of MAGA? The Trump crowd wears fewer tricorn hats, but I don't see much difference between the MAGAs and the teabaggers otherwise.

Douthat thinks Republicans will win back the House, although not with a large majority, "even if Biden’s poll numbers bounce back." (So do I.) That doesn't please him:

But in a way, that advantage is also the core Republican weakness, and the party’s good fortune in avoiding profound punishment for all its follies is the reason those follies will probably continue.

He thinks a GOP that followed the Glenn Youngkin path -- a little bit of populism, a little bit of Trump, a little bit of Romney, as Douthat sees it -- could become America's favorite party.

Youngkin has a Romney-esque persona — the corporate suit and genial family man — but where the man from Bain Capital ended up captive to party dogma on taxes and entitlement cuts, the former Carlyle Group executive promised higher education spending and tax cuts that benefit the lower-middle class, playing against the corporate-Republican and supply-side stereotypes.

Meanwhile, Youngkin imitated Trump not just in his relatively populist promises but also in his willingness to pick cultural fights — in this case, on critical race theory in schools — that other moderate Republicans might shy away from. But then in most other ways he was an anti-Trump: decent rather than bullying, reasonable rather than paranoid, keeping conspiracism at a distance, reassuringly competent rather than apocalyptic.

So that’s all the G.O.P. needs nationally to fully exploit its post-Covid opportunities — a more populist economic agenda, a willingness to take the fight to the progressive left (but with a smile) and an end to Trumpian conspiracism.

I'm not sure how all that jibes with what Youngkin said in a speech yesterday:

Criticizing COVID-19 lockdowns and shutdowns’ impact on businesses, Youngkin said he was concerned that Virginia’s right-to-work status “would go away” after hearing of automotive companies locating plants in neighboring states....

“I do not believe that people should be told that they must get the vaccine,” Youngkin said....

Youngkin said he opposed businesses firing workers for not getting vaccinated and promised to revoke mandates for state employees to get vaccinated and wear masks. He also promised to appoint a new state health commissioner and rescind state mandates for K-12 students to wear masks to school.

(According to an October poll, 71% of Virginians support mask mandates in schools Another October poll shows that Virginians support business vaccine mandates 55%-41%.)

But whether or not Youngkin is really the model New Republican, as Douthat believes, the party is unlikely to follow his lead. Douthat is on firmer ground when he writes:

But do enough actors in the party really want that combination? At the elite level there is a clutch of politicians and candidates who keep groping for a more populist agenda and a group of nationalist intellectuals who think they’re on the cusp of imposing one upon the party. But there is still a larger group of lawmakers, strategist and donors who are very comfortable having no agenda whatsoever, or falling back on the familiarity of upper-bracket tax cuts and pretend budget cuts as soon as they’re restored to power.

I'm pretty sure all that plus lib-owning is what every Republican wants, apart fraom Douthat and a few other brainy-ish types.

Douthat acknowledges that:

Among the party’s voters, activists and media personalities, meanwhile, there remains a clear appetite ... for Donald Trump in full — nourished by the plausible belief that populists and social conservatives can’t entirely trust more-corporate Republicans, the implausible belief that Trump’s nastiness helped him more than it hurt him, the false belief that he actually won the 2020 election, plus the very America-in-2021 desire for politics to be high-stakes TV entertainment rather than boring attempts to cobble together governing majorities.

I don't think Republican voters really care about Trump's made-for-TV style -- sure, they enjoy it, but they also seem ready to rally around Ron DeSantis, an untelegenic sourpuss, because he seems so good at owning libs, and appears to be as monomaniacal about the pursuit of lib-ownage as the voters themselves are.

I don't think Republican populists and social conservatives mistrust "more-corporate" Republicans in any ideological way -- they just have strong doubts about the corporatists' commitment to lib-ownage. Some of them actually voted for the Biden infrastructure bill! How dare they cooperate with Democrats on anything! (I question whether any Republicans are more corporate than others -- a few talk about helping the working classes, but they all want to shovel money in the direction of the rich. So when I refer to "more-corporate Republicans," I mean the ones for who put corporatism rather than lib-owning in the foreground.)

And I don't think the belief that "Trump’s nastiness helped him more than it hurt him" is implausible exactly. In 2020, he drove Republican and Democratic turnout. He lost, but he came extremely close to eking out an Electoral College victory. He seems like the all-time greatest lib-owner, so he'll drive GOP turnout again, and Democrats have to hope he'll drive Democratic turnout as well.

But whatever happens, Douthat sees a potential renewal of the GOP slipping away:

And if there’s anything we’ve learned over the past 15 years, it’s that the chance to enjoy a little bit of power without any real responsibility is impossible for Republicans to resist.

"Responsibility"? Republicans don't want that. They just want power, permanently.

By chance, a couple of hours ago I happened to read the following quote in a People magazine story about the callow Trumpist congressman Madison Cawthorn:

As Cawthorn told PEOPLE last year, not long after his election win: "I think it's just a lot more fun to be a conservative ... my generation is really probably the most pro-freedom generation since the founding fathers."

Republicans "have the right values, they just don't know how to convey them in a way that makes sense," Cawthorn said.

"We just enjoy life more," he said then. "We're less concerned about what other people are doing and we're more concerned about our own success."

"We're less concerned about what other people are doing and we're more concerned about our own success," says Cawthorn. Remember, helping people through legisaltion is his job. But he doesn't care. He thinks what's important is to win and not give a shit about anyone else. These, he believes, are "the right values." And nearly every Republican appears to agree. Power without responsibility? Yup, that's the goal -- forever, if possible.

THE RIGHT-WING MEDIA THINKS COVID IS REAL NOW, BUT THE FANS STILL THINK IT'S A HOAX

Hi, I'm back -- thank you, Yas and Tom, for some terrific work while I was away.

While I was gone, global health officials announced the emergence of a frightening new COVID variant, now named Omicron, that might cause reinfections and evade vaccines (though a great deal is still unknown). Surprisingly, most of the right-wing press has decided that this variant is genuinely bad (but I guess it's because saying so makes President Biden look bad). So Gateway Pundit reports the variant under the headline "New COVID Virus Variant Identified in Africa Is 'Highly Transmissible and Vaccine-Resistant.'" In fact, we don't know how vaccine-resistant it is, and won't know for several weeks, but GP is treating it as a real and dangerous virus.

The commenters? Not so much:

Endless Jabs......Boosters........The Reset Is Here.

****

It 'could be' a new variant OR nothing at all. It may, and most likely is (given the "the Great Reset" every westernized nation is trying to institute) just a red herring to try and get everyone to lock down again and make the final push to collapse the economy. People have been fighting back all over the globe and so they NEED a "new variant" that sounds even deadlier to try and scare everyone into submission.... But IF it is an actual variant, it's less deadly (even if it 'transmits easier' than the original strain) to anyone with NATURAL IMMUNITY as every virus gets WEAKER as it mutates. Now, for anyone with the vaccine....each new variant will be more deadly thanks to the spike factories they injected into themselves, not because the variant is stronger (It's NOT). They signed their death warrants by taking the vaccines & boosters. Let's hope people the world over are not going to fall for the "new variant" ruse this time. All they want to do is take our FREEDOM. Period. All one needs to prove this is look at Australia. That's all this COVID nonsense has been about from the beginning, when the CCP & Fauci released this on the world. Side note: Africa has had the LOWEST COVID CASES IN THE WORLD!! They have been regularly taking HCQ & IVERMECTIN against malaria and other parasites. These drugs also happen to be the only known CURES for COVID! So now the media & elites are trying to make Africa look like a COVID hotbed to trick people into their nefarious plans.

That's a pretty good one-paragraph compendium of nearly every popular COVID conspiracy theory on the right. In case you didn't know, "The Great Reset" was the theme of the 2020 Davos conference, and it's now become shorthand on the conspiratorialist right for the belief, as one summary of the belief put it, that "the global elite’s plan" is "to instate a communist world order by abolishing private property while using COVID-19 to solve overpopulation and enslaving what remains of humanity with vaccines."

More from the GP comments:

COVID and all its supposed variations are Satan's way of trying to kill off the world's population in these Last Days.

Satan has many slaves in BigPharma and politics who sold him their souls for big bucks.

Matthew 24:7For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.

****

Correct me if I'm wrong, But Didn't I just Read an Article about the Low cases in Africa. Germ Warfare since?

****

I have an ample supply of Ivermectin on hand to treat my whole family. The Progressives will never be able to understand how the gene therapies falsely called 'vaccines' actually CAUSE other variants to evolve, while simultaneously severely weakening the bodies Immune Response. These Gene Therapies are a death spiral.

And because some scientists believe that the new variant might have developed in an immunocompromised, HIV-positive person, we get this:

"The variant may have come from someone with AIDS".

Hmmm. Who is a driving force behind the COVID debacle and the AIDS debacle?

Why it's "Dr." Anthony Fauci, of course! How interesting!

****

It may be a stretch to include Dr. Judy Mitowitz’s claim that most vaccines are already infected with the HIV virus in the labs, but we know for sure this variant is. Something sinister will come from the fact that an active HIV/AIDS patient was the first person detected with the new variant. How do we know that HIV/AIDS isn’t the cause of the mutation?

(I'm aware of Judy Mitkovits, one of the most dangerous -- and successful -- anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists out there. If she has the crackpot belief that HIV is in most vaccines, it's news to me, but I wouldn't be surprised.)

Predictable. The people are weary of this scam. They needed a new threat to continue control and for an excuse as to why the Jab is not working. If this were a movie, you'd walk out due to lack of believability. When they start off by yelling 'cases' as opposed to hospitalizations and deaths, and statistics, you have cause for doubt.

****

The vaccine destroys your immune system. Every booster will make you die sooner.

****

Must be keeping the Smallpox in reserve??

****

Covid was created for the vaccine. The vaccine was created for the passport. The passport is to give total control of everyone to NWO.

****

There is NO variant.. only scare tactics to get more injected. A bio-engineered spike protein, (Dr. Francis Boyle) cannot change into a virus. In any case. according to WHO Jan 2021, the PCR test is meaningless, as it only confirms the presence of a strand of Flu or He.p.DNA, so how do they know somebody is infected? Greg Hunter USAWatchdog dot com. Dr. Elisabeth Eads, “Video: Covid-19 Injections Will Cause Massive Deaths”, where Dr. Eads not only points out that the PCR tests false positives are an estimated 97%, but also lays bare the real death count related to the Covid vaxxes.

****

That brings up a good question: How do you flush out the spike proteins if you have a bad reaction to the shot? What is the antidote to the COVID shot?

****

I heard Pine Needle Tea. U can buy it on-line.

****

Death.

And in response to a tweet from right-wing talk radio host Buck Sexton, someone with a Pepe the Frog avatar posts this:

And there's this, as you'd expect:

I suppose most people on the right will manage the doublethink (Biden is president and the pandemic is getting worse, even though the pandemic is a hoax), but it might get harder. I think Stephen Miller is preaching to the wrong crowd:

Miller: If President Trump was still in office, we’d already have modified vaccines to deal with the new variants pic.twitter.com/4WxhjACWFI

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 27, 2021

He's claiming that a reelected Trump would already have a vaccines ready to deploy now for a variant that wasn't publicly identified until this week, but the Fox audience doesn't believe that COVID is terribly dangerous (at least to rock-ribbed Real Americans with rootin'-tootin' immune systems) and does believe that the vaccines are dangerous. Old conspiratorial habits of mind die hard.

Gratitude

William S.L. Jewett "The First Thanksgiving Dinner" wood engraving for Harper's Weekly, 1868, via The Clark Museum. The first federal Thanksgiving, that is, proclaimed by President Lincoln in fall 1863 to express the Union's gratitude for the victory at Gettysburg, which is perhaps what Father is focused on while the children tuck in.

Happy 400th Thanksgiving! Though I guess it's understood that the first one wasn't, technically, a thanksgiving. That is, they must have held one after that 1621 harvest, but in church, praying all day, not feasting, and not inviting the heathen savages in, and that's not what we're historically informed about. The feast, actually three days of feasting, undoubtedly took place too, as Edward Winslow wrote in a letter to a London connection, George Morton (sent with the ship that brought their first harvest of "Indian corn" and barley for sale on the English market, because they'd done much better, with Squanto's help, than just being able to feed themselves), 

Our harvest being collected our governor sent four men fowling together so we might rejoice together in a more special way after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. In just one day the hunters killed as much fowl as if their hunting party had been larger. The fowl fed the company almost a week at which time, among other recreations, we drilled with our fire arms. Many of the Indians joined us including Massasoit, the greatest king, and some ninety of his men. We all entertained and feasted together for three days. The Indians went out and killed five deer which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, the captain, and others. And although it is not always as plentiful as it was at that time, yet by the goodness of God we are so far from want that we often wish you could partake of our plenty.

There's a connection between thankfulness ceremonies, I think, and Puritan predestinationism, the religion of those Plymouth brethren who arrived in Massachusetts on the Mayflower in 1620, the idea that our lives and afterlives are chosen for us before we're even born, through the randomly apportioned Grace of God, so that if some of us are rewarded with eternal life in Heaven in the choir invisible and others doomed to eternal punishment below, it's not because of a choice we've made but a choice that has been made for us. And it's the the same for any prosperity we may enjoy in this life, prosperity being the "outward sign of inward Grace"; you can't really say you "earned" it, though you can say you deserve it—after all, the decision was God's, you're one of the Elect.

So when we go through a Christian thanksgiving ceremony, as so many of us did at the table yesterday, making the ritual statement of what we're particularly thankful for in our current lives, family and health and so on, I feel we're sneakily saying that we really are better than the less fortunate, not because we've worked so hard actually, but because God picked us (we are better than others, in fact, but that's because God decided we would be in advance). Which effectively says we do deserve our good fortune after all, which makes me a little bit mad. Which makes it disturbing for me to say I'm thankful—I'm so grateful my kids aren't in jail or single parents and I'm so grateful I'm going to get to retire some day, as these things are going to be denied to other people, because God decided they shouldn't have them. Really?

War! What Is It Good For?

I must have dropped off the Soros mailing list, because I didn't realize until today that there's a war on Thanksgiving. The twist this time is that it isn't being ginned up by Fox News to fire up the rubes. This one is from Matt Lewis, an anti-Trump conservative who rarely criticizes Republicans without throwing comparable blame at Democrats. Thanksgiving, it turns out, is getting it from Both Sides (via Hot Air, because the original is behind a paywall):

The culture war doesn’t take Thanksgiving week off, and its two main participants aren’t big on giving thanks, anyway.

The illiberal left wants to radically transform an inherently evil America that was founded on slavery and colonialism. The post-liberal right wants to forfeit the idea of liberal democracy, contending that modern America is weak, secular, and decadent....

MSNBC recently invited writer Gyasi Ross to talk about the “mythology” of Thanksgiving. “Instead of bringing stuffing and biscuits, those settlers brought genocide and violence,” he said. “That genocide and violence is still on the menu as state-sponsored violence against Native and Black Americans is commonplace. And violent private white supremacy is celebrated and subsidized.” [emphasis added]

The left wants a more equitable and democratic America in which we confront and improve upon the truly shameful parts of our history. The right wants to end the democratic experiment. Both sides, amirite?

Jazz Shaw, a hack even by Hot Air standards, apparently took this as a challenge to his own bothsides cred, and came up with this gem:

Yes, in the course of settlers' westward expansion into land that was already occupied, some of the people who were being ethnically cleansed off of their land committed atrocities against the people who were doing the ethnic cleansing, so really, both sides. I suppose we could be thankful that Fox hasn't tried to turn the War on Thanksgiving into something on the level of their War on Christmas, but then I'm supposed to be at war with Thanksgiving, which means I shouldn't be thankful for anything, so instead I guess I'll just be pissed off at useless fucks like Matt Lewis who know how toxic the Republicans are but reflexively undermine anyone who poses a credible alternative.

ETA: Matt Lewis and Jazz Shaw both make a point of arguing that our genocide isn't anything exceptional, providing historical examples to show that not just Both Sides but all sides did it. But they're skipping the part where conservatives inist on American exceptionalism. No, in the larger scheme, extermination of the native population wasn't anything exceptional. And I don't think anyone is arguing that it was. The point here is the disconnect between the claim that America is exceptional and our entirely unexceptional genocide. Either we're exceptional or we aren't, and if we are we need to be held to exceptional standards, and if we aren't we shouldn't pretend to be.

Class Interests

 

The Branko Milanovic–Christoph Lakner "Elephant Chart" showing global growth rates from 1988 to 2008 arranged by income percentiles, with its four major highlights: mediocre growth in red for the poorest people, or most people in the poorest countries, extraordinary growth in green for most people in the emerging economies of Asia, especially China, serious stagnation in blue for the pretty rich people of western Europe and North America in particular, and fabulous growth in purple for the global super-rich (not as fabulous as China, but keep in mind that the 1% are starting with a lot more money, ending up by 2020 with 43% of all the wealth in the world).

This post from Nathan Newman ("Education Polarization in Elections: People Are Voting Their Class Interests"), giving me at long last a way of thinking about that "White Working Class" that makes some sense, has been sitting in an open tab on my computer for almost a month. He's looking at the same voting pattern as everybody else, but he's seeing it in the historical context of how it effectively happened that the outsourcing economy of the last 40-odd years primarily affected white workers in relatively rural areas; because that's how the distinction between workers in the growing service industries and and those in the shrinking manufacturing industries had sorted itself out in the US, where the former remained as traditional multiracial and urban, the latter came to be concentrated in

towns built around a single company factory [now] in steep decline. These communities were often created in an earlier generation of outsourcing, when companies fled unionized cities, deindustrializing heavily black urban areas as scholars like William Julius Wilson detailed.

Some of the firms that left succeeded in escaping their unions while in others, workers managed to maintain them - but the racist politics of suburbanization meant most of those factories ended up in far more homogeneously white communities in smaller towns and exurbs than the racially diverse urban centers they left behind. So when the globally-induced deindustrialization of more recent decades came, the communities experiencing those losses and the culture of those trade-induced grievances were more homogeneously white as well.

Capitalism sucked them out of their natural habitat and planted them there in the middle of nowhere, where they were sitting ducks. I say this with some personal knowledge of what happened to all the women in the Chinese garment factories in Brooklyn and Manhattan in the 1990s: nothing, actually. As their work was taken away by companies in China and Bangladesh and Vietnam, they fairly quickly found new work that paid better. Pretty sure that's even truer in L.A., and Newman speaks for factory workers in Europe:

A destructive aspect of the fragmentation of American manufacturing into exurbs and small towns is that it was unable to respond effectively when emerging economies added new competition. Vibrant industrial districts in places like Germany and Italy, where industry clustered together in historic urban regions, were able to retool their approaches and kept roughly 20% of their working population in manufacturing jobs.

Out in the sticks in Missouri and Ohio and Indiana, on the other hand, those white guys were just entirely abandoned, other than by the opiate pharmacists and gun sellers marketing the means of relatively easy death, and eventually the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, workers in services were getting the squeeze too, in that first joint of the elephant's trunk, but in different ways—they weren't losing work, but they were getting more and more corporatized and wages held down, even in the knowledge industries—as I was arguing in early 2016, practically everybody is a proletarian now, if not a member of the gig economy precariat. though some of us have much more comfortable lives than others, house yobs vs. field yobs if you know what I mean. Newman agrees:

Mixed Messages

From Fox News:

Sure, that sounds plaus...

...okay, never mind.

I guess his mother probably has her own agenda--convincing the world that her son isn't a monster--but it's at cross purposes to the broader right-wing message, which is that a monster is exactly what we need to own the libs. ("Own" can have a lot of synonyms here, including "exterminate".)

Brandon

Hi all, relief crew here! Happy Thanksgiving!

Makeup by Kevin Kirkpatrick, via Vulture, January 2012.

Posted this in comments at Roy's SubStack, on the "Let's Go Brandon" phenomenon, in response to a comment by SundayStyle wondering "are we supposed to believe that the Fuck Your Feelings crowd have suddenly decided to revert to dainty euphemisms?" and thought it was something I'd want to remember:

It's middle school boys pretending to clear their throats--"A-whore! A-whore!" The immaturity is kind of the point. It's pretending Biden is your mom or your teacher, baffled and unable to respond, whereas if you just said "fuck" they could just yell at you and not let you go to the dance.

This is what Trump is particularly a master of, not just saying the quiet part out loud but claiming deniability as he does it. "You know, they have a word. It sort of became old-fashioned. It’s called a nationalist. And I say, really, we’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, OK? I’m a nationalist." Why is he not supposed to use the word? Because he's telling you he's a Nazi.

But whether you embarrass yourself by calling him out for it, or by not calling him out, you're the one who gets embarrassed, and all the cool boys in the class can't get over how funny it is.

 Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

BACK IN A FEW

I'm going to be celebrating Thanksgiving like a semi-normal person, so I'll be away from here for a few days. I think there'll be posts here while I'm away, so stop by. Have a great holiday, try not to rise to your right-wing relatives' bait, and I'll see you on Saturday.

ALEX JONES WANTS TO DO TO CONGRESSIONAL DEMOCRATS WHAT HE DID TO PIERS MORGAN

I just saw this at Gateway Pundit:

EPIC! Alex Jones to the Liz Cheney Jan. 6 Committee: I Will Only Testify If It Is Aired on CSPAN Where They Can’t Twist my Words

On Monday the sham January 6 Committee issued a new batch of subpoenas to five of President Trump’s allies.

The Marxist committee subpoenaed longtime political operative Roger Stone and Infowars host Alex Jones....

On Tuesday Alex Jones released a video on Infowars. Jones told his supporters there is no way he will testify behind closed doors in front of the demons on the committee. Alex does not intend on spending the rest of his life in prison because of Adam Schiff’s lies. Alex added that he will plead the fifth.

Alex insists the only way he will testify is if they air the entire struggle session on CSPAN where they cannot lie about his words.

Which means he wants a repeat of this CNN appearance from 2013:



Piers Morgan, a CNN host at the time, had been advocating gun control legislation in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre. In response, Jones had posted a petition on the White House website calling for Morgan to be deported; the petition received more than 100,000 signatures.

How bad was this interview? Here's a transcript of the first question, followed by Jones's answer:

MORGAN: Why do you want to deport me?

JONES: Well, we did it as a way to bring attention to the fact that we have all of these foreigners and the Russian government, the official Chinese government, [Mao] said political power goes out the barrel of a gun. [He] killed about 80 million people because he's the only guy that [had] the guns. So we did it to point out that this is globalism, and the mega banks that control the planet and brag that they've taken over in Bloomberg, AP, Reuters, you name it, brag that they're going to get our guns as well.

They've taken everybody's guns but the Swiss and the American people. And when they get our guns, they can have their world tyranny while the government buys 1.6 billion bullets, armored vehicles, tanks, helicopters, predator drones, armed now in U.S. skies, being used to arrest people in North Dakota.

The Second Amendment isn't there for duck hunting. It's there to protect us from tyrannical government and street thugs. Take the women in India. Your piece earlier on CNN I was watching during Anderson Cooper's show. Didn't tell you that the women of India have signed giant petitions to get firearms because the police can't and won't protect them. The answer is --

(CROSSTALK)

Wait a minute. I have FBI crime statistics that come out a year late, 2011, 20-plus percent crime drop in the last nine years. Real violent crime because more guns means less crime. Britain took the guns 15, 16 years ago. Tripling of your overall violent crime. True we have a higher gun violence level, but overall, muggings, stabbings, deaths, you -- those men raped that woman in India to death with an iron rod four feet long.

You can't ban the iron rods. The guns -- the iron rods, Piers, didn't do it, the tyrants did it. Hitler took the guns, Stalin took the guns, Mao took the guns. Fidel Castro took the guns.

MORGAN: OK. How many --

JONES: Hugo Chavez took the guns, and I'm here to tell you, 1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms. It doesn't matter how many lemmings you get out there on the street begging for them to have their guns taken. We will not relinquish them. Do you understand?

That['s] why you're going to fail and the establishment knows no matter how much propaganda, the republic will rise again when you attempt to take our gun[s]. My family in the Texas revolution [against] Santa Ana. My family was at the core on both sides starting [that], because Santa Ana came to take the guns at Gonzalez, Texas.

Piers, don't try what your ancestors did before. Why don't you come to America, I'll take you out shooting. You can become an American and join the republic.

MORGAN: Are you finished?

JONES: Yes, I am finished. You will not take my right. You go through background checks to get guns. How about Prozac? You know the -- that's a big sponsor, isn't it? That whole class of drugs.

MORGAN: Let me ask you a question.

JONES: No, whoa, got to cut that off, don't you? Don't want to talk about -- the U.S. number one cause of death is suicide now because they give people suicide mass murder pills.

MORGAN: Calm down. Calm down.

JONES: Your answers give more money to the psychiatrists and psychologists to put more crazy people on drugs so they could kill people, Piers.

MORGAN: Let's try and have a debate here.

JONES: Yes.

MORGAN: Answer me this question.

JONES: I'm sick of the same old script here, bud.

This is a classic Gish gallop -- "hurling as many different half-truths and no-truths into a very short space of time so that [the] opponent cannot hope to combat each point in real time." And much of it is at a vein-popping level of aggressive hysteria. Jones is frighteningly aggressive. Morgan never regained control of this discussion.

Would he do this in Congress? Sure. Why wouldn't he?

I'm not looking forward to it.

DARRELL BROOKS POSTED A FACEBOOK MESSAGE ABOUT RUNNING PEOPLE OVER. IT WAS WRITTEN BY A COP.

Andy Ngo, the right-wing provocateur/journalist -- many of you would say I should put "journalist" in scare quotes -- has several posts on Twitter about Darrell Brooks, the man accused of running people over at the Waukesha holiday parade on Sunday. Many of Ngo's posts are attempts to smear Black Lives Matter because Brooks posted favorable messages about BLM.

#Waukesha, Wis. Christmas parade massacre suspect Darrell Edward Brooks posted repeatedly in support of #BLM. His social media accounts were deactivated following his arrest. pic.twitter.com/36nLAm1l7e

— Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) November 23, 2021

Brooks was also upset by the death of George Floyd, and was angry at the police, in ways many other people are angry. Here are a few posts collected by another Twitter user:

If posts like these make someone a dangerous radical -- which is how Ngo and other right-wingers are trying to portray him -- then there are a lot of dangerous radicals in America. I guess I'm one of them.

But this is my favorite Ngo gotcha:

Darrell Edward Brooks, the man who was taken into custody by police over the #Waukesha Christmas parade mass casualty event, had posted a quote in 2016 on a now-deactivated Facebook account: "Run them over. Keep traffic flowing & don't slow down for any of these idiots..." #BLM pic.twitter.com/d8bYZPv8bd

— Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) November 22, 2021

Yes, it appears that Brooks posted this:

But Ngo doesn't tell you is that this was written by a cop. The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported this in 2016:

A St. Paul police sergeant resigned Wednesday after he apologized last month for posting on Facebook “Run them over” in advance of a Black Lives Matter St. Paul march.

An internal affairs investigation into Sgt. Jeffrey Rothecker was completed, but his resignation stopped the process, said Steve Linders, a St. Paul police spokesman....

... The Rothecker case began after someone with the screen name “JM Roth” made a comment about protesters on Facebook under a Pioneer Press article before a Jan. 18 unpermitted protest. The post referred to protesters as “idiots” and detailed what drivers could do to avoid being charged with a crime if their vehicles struck someone during the march.

I'm not saying Brooks was a good person. He has a long criminal record and was out on bail after an incident in which he reportedly ran over the mother of a child of his. But he posted this because he was angry that a cop was recommending running demonstrators over, not because he thought it was a swell idea.

Ngo is trying to bamboozle his fans into believing that this was a post in favor of using a car as a weapon. It wasn't.

FOR THE THOUSANDTH TIME: THE TRUMP GOP IS THE PRE-TRUMP GOP

Brian Klaas, a professor at University College London, has written a Washington Post op-ed that has bad news for pro-democracy Americans:

For the past decade, I’ve studied the rise of authoritarianism and the breakdown of democracy around the world. Traveling from Madagascar to Thailand and Belarus to Zambia, I’ve tried to understand how despotic politicians and authoritarian political parties systematically destroy democracy. And based on that research, I have some bad news: The party of Reagan and Romney is long dead. The party of Trump is here to stay.

Klaas is right to say that GOP authoritarianism won't be reversed under pressure from the party's voters, or because a charismatic party member charts a pro-democracy course.

Republicans could conceivably abandon such practices if their leaders were being pressed by their own supporters to be more democratic. Instead, we’re seeing the opposite.... These voters are now using those lies as a litmus test — to separate the true believers from alleged “RINOs” who believe in democracy more than they believe in Donald Trump....

The Republican Party could also be driven away from authoritarianism by a charismatic rival to Trump who believes in democracy.....

[But] when a Republican tries to investigate the Jan. 6 rioters to hold them accountable, he or she becomes a pariah, too. (Just ask Rep. Liz Cheney.) Meanwhile, the rising stars in the party are extremist zealots who are sympathetic to the insurrectionists such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

And what about the possibility of change being forced on the GOP?

Authoritarian parties can be reformed when they suffer a crushing electoral defeat. If Republicans were wiped out at the polls in 2022, there would be a decent chance the GOP would move back to a more normal center-right party. That outcome is unlikely, however, precisely because the party’s anti-democratic tactics are insulating Republican politicians from voter backlash. Already, Republican lawmakers have drawn gerrymandered maps that rig future elections in their favor. In Wisconsin, for example — a state Joe Biden narrowly won — the new maps will likely give Republicans 75 percent of the state’s seats in the House of Representatives. Even if Democrats get more votes, Republicans would win more seats.

But that's not a new development brought about by "the party of Trump." Remember the last pro-GOP gerrymander of Wisconsin:

At a statewide level, Wisconsin is a quintessential battleground where races are often decided by only a few percentage points. Contrast that to the state assembly map the Republicans drew: In 2012, they won 60 of the 99 seats in the Wisconsin Assembly despite winning only 48.6% of the two-party state-wide vote; in 2014, they won 63 seats with only 52% of the state-wide vote.

No rank-and-file Republican had a problem with that, or had a problem with voter ID laws, huge purges of voter rolls, and other techniques Republicans used to win elections before 2020. No Republican had a problem with the destruction of ACORN a decade and a half ago.

I say this over and over again. The simple fact is that the Trump GOP is the pre-Trump GOP. But I guess you can't get an op-ed on this subject placed in a major American newspaper unless you fail to grasp this.

KYLE RITTENHOUSE IS LAYING THE GROUNDWORK FOR HIS LAWSUIT AGAINST JOE BIDEN

This doesn't really surprise me.

Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who was acquitted of murder last week after shooting and killing two people in Kenosha, Wis., during civil unrest there last year, said he supports the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.

"I’m not a racist person. I support the BLM movement," Rittenhouse said during an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a portion of which is slated to air on Carlson's program on Monday evening.

On Friday, I told you that many people in right-wing comment threads are hoping Kyle Rittenhouse will sue President Biden. I think this will actually happen. I think Rittenhouse's pro-Black Lives Matter statement is intended to set up the forthcoming lawsuit.

Will this be some crazy Sidney Powell-level nonsense suit? You decide. In all likelihood, it will be based on this 2020 Biden campaign ad, in which then-president Trump is (properly) attacked for encouraging white supremacists. Rittenhouse appears at 0:13.

There’s no other way to put it: the President of the United States refused to disavow white supremacists on the debate stage last night. pic.twitter.com/Q3VZTW1vUV

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) September 30, 2020

The voiceover is Fox's Chris Wallace at a presidential debate asking Trump whether he'll condemn "white supremacists and militia groups," with a specific mention of Kenosha. I'm not a lawyer, but I think if the ad included that soundbite accompanying a photo or clip of a random right-wing demonstrator who didn't participate in violence, the demonstrator would have a libel case. But public figures need to demonstrate "actual malice" in order to win libel cases, and Rittenhouse in 2020 seems to have been a "limited-purpose public figure," someone who (as noted here) "voluntarily injects himself or herself into a public controversy." However, a judge might not agree.

I assume Rittenhouse is now under the wing of professional Republican agitators who'll want him to sue, or at least threaten a lawsuit, ideally at a time when it will have maximum electoral impact. I'm guessing that would be just before the 2022 midterms, because a party can win a midterm election if it has the more motivated voter base, and this will help rally the base around their shared hatred of The Enemy (us).

I assume the suit (or the tease) will coincide with the publication of Rittenhouse's inevitable book -- look for that sometime next year.

REPUBLICANS ARE BECOMING POST-TRUMP! NO, WAIT -- THEY'RE TRUMPIER THAN EVER!

I saw these two items back to back at the aggregation site Memeorandum:

So which is it? Is Trumpism fading away, or is it rampant?

The Peter Nicholas article in The Atlantic is the usual mainstream-media wishful thinking:

If Donald Trump tries to run for president again, one of his former campaign advisers has a plan to dissuade him. Anticipating that Trump may not know who Adlai Stevenson was or that he lost two straight presidential elections in the 1950s, this ex-adviser figures he or someone else might need to explain the man’s unhappy fate. They’ll remind Trump that if he were beaten in 2024, he would join Stevenson as one of history’s serial losers. “I think that would resonate,” said this person, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity to talk more freely. “Trump hates losers.”

Oh, please. It won't resonate, for one simple reason: Trump really doesn't believe he lost in 2020. There are cynical spreaders of the Big Lie (most of the stars of Fox News), and then there are true believers. Trump is a true believer. Remember, he has no idea how things work. He has no idea that the vast 2020 election conspiracies he believes in couldn't possibly have happened. Remember also that Trump has been a believer in Norman Vincent Peale's Power of Positive Thinking for most of his life. Even if he has doubts that he actually won in 2020, he also believes that if he consistently asserts that he won, then it will be true that he did win. It's the way he felt about COVID -- if he kept saying it would disappear, it would. (And if he loses in 2024, he'll believe he won again.)

Nicholas cites the usual very short list of signs that Trump might be fading:

Glenn Youngkin’s recent victory in the Virginia governor’s race demonstrated that a Republican candidate could win in a battleground state without yoking himself to Trump.

(Yes, though Youngkin won after securing Trump's endorsement and appearing at an "election integrity" rally at Liberty University, and after a Trump Lite campaign of racial demagoguery.)

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, now making the rounds to promote a new book that counters Trump’s claim that he won the 2020 election, signaled that he might run for the 2024 GOP nomination whether or not Trump enters the race.

(Republican voters don't like Christie any more than Democrats or independents do -- he got 1% of the vote in a 2024 primary poll conducted in October. However, Christie and the mainstream media should really get a room.)

A poll last month offered encouraging news for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in New Hampshire, the state that traditionally holds the first primary contest of the presidential-election season. Though Trump was the first choice among likely Republican voters, DeSantis’s favorability rating had climbed to 62 percent, eight points higher than Trump’s.

(Notice that Nicholas won't tell you the numbers in the poll of the race. That's because Trump shellacs DeSantis, 43% to 18%. No one else is in double digits. And that's New Hampshire, the most moderate state among the early contests.)

On the other hand, there's something odd about the Washington Post story that claims MAGA loyalists are gaining in influence: They're fans of Trump, but their influence seems to be increasing without reference to Trump.

The show of force from Donald Trump’s staunchest congressional allies began almost immediately after 13 House Republicans voted this month in favor of a massive infrastructure bill that handed President Biden one of the biggest victories of his tenure.

“Traitor Republicans,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) declared in a series of tweets where she posted their office phone numbers after vowing that all those in her party who “hand over their voting card to Nancy Pelosi to pass Biden’s Communist takeover of America will feel the anger of the GOP voter.”

Others chimed in. Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) promised to “primary the hell” out of any Republican who voted for the measure.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) tweeted it was “Time to name names and hold these fake republicans accountable.” And, this past week, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) told a pro-Trump podcast that there was never a situation during the infrastructure debate in which Republicans should work with Democrats: “They were going to win it all, or we were going to win it all.”

The continuing turmoil in the House GOP conference over how and whether to punish members who back anything supported by Democrats shows how an emboldened group of far-right House members is gaining influence over the Republican Party in Congress. These representatives are positioning themselves to further purify the House GOP conference as a branch of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.

Is that really what's going on? Is this really about the MAGA movement? These folks don't seem to be talking about Trump at all. They're just taking the usual GOP message -- Democrats are evil and cooperating with them is treason -- to its logical extreme. This and their defense of Paul Gosar for posting his kill-AOC anime video are certainly Trump-compatible -- Trump agrees on both counts -- but these members f Congress are really building on both Trumpism and non-Trump-specific right-wing extremism. They'll be the Republican vanguard if Trump runs in 2024 or if he doesn't.

So to sum up:

* Trump is probably running.

* Even if he doesn't run, Trump fans are exerting their influence in Congress, but their extremism doesn't require Trump (although he's all in favor of it).

* Chris Christie will flo0p in the GOP primaries unless the Morning Joe greenroom gets to hold one.

STOP TALKING ABOUT TRUMP AND 2024 -- REPUBLICANS ARE KILLING AMERICAN DEMOCRACY NOW

Worried that democracy might die in America? As Ari Berman of Mother Jones notes, it's already dying in Galveston, Texas:

For 22 years, Stephen Holmes has been the lone Black and minority county commissioner in Galveston County, Texas, a coastal area south of Houston. But under new redistricting maps adopted by the GOP-controlled commission on November 12, over the vocal objections of Democrats and African-Americans who attended the only public hearing on the matter, every commission seat will likely be held by white Republicans as part of a bid by the local GOP to “Keep Galveston County Red.” This will deprive communities of color of any political representation at the highest levels of local government in a county that is 45 percent non-white.

... under the new maps approved by three white, male GOP county commissioners, voters of color would make up just 26 percent of eligible voters in Holmes’ new district, reducing the minority vote by a staggering 28 points and likely dooming his re-election chances in 2024.

Such a move would have been unthinkable and illegal before the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013....

At the state level in Texas, 95 percent of demographic change over the past decade has come from communities of color but this fall Republicans passed maps for the state legislature and US House that increase the number of districts where whites make up a majority of eligible voters and decrease the number of district where communities of color make up a majority of eligible voters.

And it's not just Texas:

In North Carolina, Republicans adopted new redistricting maps that could eliminate the seats of one-third of Black state senators, one-fifth of Black state representatives, and one of two Black members of Congress from the state.

In Georgia, 100 percent of the state’s population growth came from communities of color, but white Republicans will likely remain in the majority for the next decade under new redistricting maps and voters of color will have less representation than before....

And in Wisconsin, as Reid Epstein reports in The New York Times, Republicans are threatening to bring criminal charges against members of a bipartisan state election board:

The Republican anger at the Wisconsin Elections Commission, a body of three Democrats and three Republicans that G.O.P. lawmakers ... comes nearly 20 months after commissioners issued guidance to local election clerks on how to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

Republicans have seized in particular on a March 2020 commission vote lifting a rule that required special voting deputies ... to visit nursing homes twice before issuing absentee ballots to residents. The special voting deputies, like most other visitors, were barred from entering nursing homes early in the pandemic, and the commission reasoned that there was not enough time before the April primary election to require them to be turned away before mailing absentee ballots.

The vote was relatively uncontroversial at the time: No lawsuits from Republicans or anyone else challenged the guidance. The procedure remained in place for the general election in November.

But it's controversial now, after Joe Biden won the presidential vote in Wisconsin by a small margin. So let's arrest the commission members!

... the Trump-aligned sheriff of Racine County, the state’s fifth most populous county, recommended felony charges against five of the six members of the election commission for guidance they had given to municipal clerks early in the pandemic. The Republican majority leader of the State Senate later seemed to give a green light to that proposal, saying that “prosecutors around the state” should determine whether to bring charges.

If this happens, Wisconsin is a banana republic.

And last week, Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican, said that G.O.P. state lawmakers should unilaterally assert control of federal elections, claiming that they had the authority to do so even if Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, stood in their way — an extraordinary legal argument debunked by a 1932 Supreme Court decision and a 1964 ruling from the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Ryan Cooper of The Week explains:

The basic idea here — handing out electoral votes through the legislature rather than after a vote — arguably wouldn't even be "illegal," since the Electoral College clauses in the Constitution stipulate that electors are chosen "in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct."

But courts have sensibly held that since legislative actions need gubernatorial approval (or are subject to a governor's veto power), and since they're also subject to judicial review, the Constitution can't be interpreted to mean that legislatures can unilaterally choose presidential electors however they please.

But we may be moving in that direction, in Wisconsin and possibly other states. And this could happen whether or not Donald Trump runs. Trump's election complaints might have inspired this new round of assaults on democracy, but they could be applied on behalf of any Republican. And if we're not vigilant, they will be.