WHAT IF TRUMP DOESN'T DOMINATE THE GOP OR FADE AWAY?

A couple of recent stories suggest that Donald Trump no longer dominates the Republican Party the way he'd like to. First, there's this:

At the Western Conservative Summit this weekend, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis beat former president Donald Trump in a presidential preference straw poll.

DeSantis just edged out Trump in the poll, conducted by the Centennial Institute at their event. The approval poll asks participants to select each potential candidate they would approve of for president in 2024.

... each participant [could] choose multiple answers....

DeSantis beats Trump, which seems to validate the common belief that Trump won't sustain his popularity within the party. But DeSantis doesn't beat Trump by much, which means that the post-Trump moment hasn't arrived yet. (And it's not clear whether DeSantis could beat Trump in an election in which voters get only one vote each. In a late April poll of New Hampshire Republicans done for John Bolton's PAC, DeSantis got 20% of the vote in a large primary field that included Trump -- but Trump got 52%.)

Then there's this, from Politico:

Donald Trump has endorsed conservative Rep. Ted Budd in North Carolina’s critical Senate race, the former president's first foray into an open primary in a battleground. That state's retiring Republican senator has other ideas.

Sen. Richard Burr praised North Carolina's former GOP governor, Pat McCrory, as “the only one in the race that can win the general election" for the seat Burr is vacating. “Pat McCrory has a commanding advantage," Burr added.

... Budd’s internal poll released after the former president’s endorsement showed him lagging badly behind McCrory. Trump has lost his Twitter megaphone and the round-the-clock news coverage he had as president, potentially hamstringing the effectiveness of his seal of approval.

Budd released the poll to make the point that, yes, the better-known McCrory beat him badly (45%-19%) in the initial round of questioning -- but when respondents were told about Trump's endorsement, Budd shot to a 46%-27% lead. So Trump's blessing still matters a lot to the party's voters -- although the fact that respondents didn't know about this endorsement suggests that Trump doesn't know how to get his message heard anyomre.

There seem to be two schools of thought regarding Trump's future. Some believe that his dominance of the party is unchallenged and will continue as long as he stays active; others think he can be taken down -- if not immediately, then certainly by 2022 or 2024.

But he might be only somewhat damaged goods by then, in the estimation of his party's voters. That could be good for Democrats.

A thoroughly discredited Trump could mean a primary that seems conventional, with the likes of DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and Mike Pompeo dominating. (I think DeSantis would win easily.) That's risky for Democrats because while the Republicans will be extreme and Trumpy, with a lot of talk about election theft and imminent Marxism, the mainstream press will sell the party as respectable again, and casual non-Republican voters won't see the urgency in turning out. On the other hand, if Trump is dominant and unchallenged within the party, he'll effectively become the nominee by acclamation, and while he'll motivate quite a few disgusted casual voters to pull the lever for the Democrats, he'll also turn out casual voters in his own party. That wasn't enough to give himn a win against Joe Biden in 2020, but it might be enough if Biden is four years older and seems it, or if Kamala Harris is the nominee and is painted as unlikable.

I like the idea of Trump in the middle: still too much of a MAGA hero to be effectively challenged in a primary, but offputting to a few more GOP voters than he was last November. Maybe major figures will be persuaded (probably by the mainstream press) that they can run against him in a primary and win -- and maybe he'll ask Trumpist state parties to simply cancel a number of the primaries to spare himself the shame of not winning 99%-1%. Maybe he'll alienate voters he needs.

He might not be sufficiently damaged to lose the primaries -- but he might be damaged enough to win only after a bloody and bruising fight. I hope so.

SURELY YOU'RE NOT SUGGESTING THAT JOE BIDEN IS INNATELY A GOOD FATHER!

I'm back. Thank you, Tom and Yas, for stoking the fire while I was away.

I see that Catholic bishops in America appear to be plotting to deny Communion to President Biden. (I assume they'll drag out the debate, then stage the great snub a few months before the midterms, possibly live on Fox & Friends.) Shortly after this story broke, Dan McLaughlin, a Catholic and a writer for National Review, posted this on Twitter, in response to the death of the president's older and less impulsive dog:

Champ Biden dies, Major lives on. The Biden family tragedy in miniature.

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) June 19, 2021

At NR, McLaughlin published a version of this tweet that's longer and less flippant but nearly as offensive.

It was announced Saturday that Joe Biden’s dog Champ has died at age 13. By all accounts, the family German Shepherd was – as we would say – a good boy.... That leaves the family with another German Shepherd: Major, who was kicked out of the White House for a month after reportedly biting a Secret Service agent and a National Park Service employee.

On the eve of Father’s Day, the contrast between the two dogs – one uncomplicatedly beloved, the other a constant source of trouble – put me in mind of the Shakespearean tragedy at the heart of the Biden family: Joe’s sons Beau and Hunter.

McLaughlin gives us a nasty thumbnail version of Joe Biden's life -- his "boundless ambition and self-regard" (in a politician? heaven forfend!), his election to the Senate as a young man, the loss of his first wife and very young daughter in a car accident, the unsuccessful presidential runs, the ascension to the vice presidency. ("He hadn’t made it" to the White House, McLaughlin writes, condescendingly, "but gosh, he was close.")

In McLaughlin's telling, Biden had a "good son" and a not-so-good son, and maybe the not-so-good son was not so good because Biden was a shitty father. Or maybe not!

Beau was the textbook “good son,” doing all the right things. He won statewide office. He served in Iraq. He had a wife and two kids. He was obviously being groomed to take his dad’s Senate seat before long, maybe after being governor of Delaware. Maybe he would make it that one last rung on the ladder that dad never quite reached.

Hunter, though, was another story: a drug addict, a repeat peddler of influence on his dad’s good name, a guy who used the N word. It is natural for a father, busy with his career, to be indulgent of sons who have lost the rest of the family as toddlers. It is not hard to picture Joe, seeing that the family was in good hands with Beau, being all the more indulgent of Hunter. Or maybe that’s all armchair hogwash; we have all known wise and upright parents who did everything right, and one or more of their kids just got away from them. Sometimes, there’s nothing you can do.

McLaughlin finesses this, but you know he doesn't believe that those last two sentences really apply to Biden. Biden is a personally distasteful to McLaughlin, so he got the bad son he deserved in addition to the good son he didn't. (Though let's take a moment to imagine how brutal the right would be toward Beau Biden if he were alive now and on track to a possible presidency.)

In McLaughlin's telling, Joe Biden may have indulged Hunter because he had another son who was good. Then, McLaughlin tells us, Joe Biden lost the good son -- and indulged the bad son because he didn't have the good son anymore. And also ran for president only because Beau was gone, apparently.

With no “good son” to inherit the Biden legacy, the black sheep of the family assumed unexpected prominence that nobody had planned or wanted. Joe, unable to just step back and bask in the glow of Beau’s rise the way George H.W. Bush did after 1992, decided to run again himself in 2020, visibly well past his prime. Hunter embarrassed him at every possible turn, but Joe would never turn on the only remaining son, the last remnant of the family he brought with him in 1972, no matter what ethical compromises it demanded, no matter how many people warned him about what Hunter was doing.

What never occurs to our Catholic commentator is that, for Biden, being a man of faith means trying to be a good man -- he's forgiving his bad son not seven times, but seventy times seven. He was that way when Beau was alive and he's that way now because his love is unconditional.

McLaughlin ends with a sympathetic pat on the back, which would seem like the work of a decent person if it didn't follow a punch in the mouth:

We can blame Joe Biden for all the risks he is willing to run and things he is willing to overlook in order to let his son (and his brother, Jim) cash in with shady foreigners, and for an approach to nepotism that makes a mockery of Democratic crocodile tears about the Trumps. But that is all political fair game, as it always is. We can’t blame Joe Biden for an unshakeable devotion to his last remaining son, or for the independent misbehavior of a “kid” who is now 51 years old. The tragedy of Joe Biden, in the years when he ought to be enjoying his retirement, is that being a dad means the family doesn’t always work out the way you planned it, sometimes you can’t retire when you wanted to, and the things you would do for your kids sometimes go beyond the things you might ever have done just for yourself.

To McLaughlin, hiring the children of aides for White House jobs is a hanging offense, but giving West Wing offices to Jared and Ivanka is no big deal. And being a decent father to a prodigal son is something Joe Biden wouldn't have done if the tragedies in his life had never happened. Happy Father's Day, National Review readers!

Ben Shapiro Is Wrong

Notably, nobody said crime https://t.co/9ihSrJwWy6

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) June 18, 2021

Conservatives are nodding sagely at Ben's seemingly damning indictment of the NY mayoral candidates, but I don't think they've really thought it through. I mean, do we really want to ban crime?

Take murder, for example. Banning murder won't actually make murder go away; it'll just take murder away from law-abiding citizens while leaving it in the hands of criminals. In the violent post-apocalyptic hellscape our Democrat cities have become, how are decent people supposed to defend themselves without murdering anybody? And beyond self-defense, murder is an essential tool for maintaining public order (thus preventing your own city from becoming an apocalyptic hellscape).

What Ben Shapiro forgets, and the rest of us should always keep in mind, is this: if crime is outlawed, only outlaws will commit crimes.

Attacking the Republican Brand

Steve has written often about the need to attack the Republican brand on a national level--to demonize their most repellant figures, and tie them to the party as a whole. I would love to see Democrats run a national ad campaign attacking the GOP, and for various reasons I think now is the time to do it.

Below is a rough sketch of the kind of ad I'd like to see.

Narrator: On January 6, a Trump rally in Washington DC turned into a violent mob that stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn our democratic elections.
[Captioned footage of Trump telling people to go to the Capitol, seguing into footage of insurrectionists attacking cops]

Narrator: The mob was radicalized by lies about the election spread by Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz and Representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
[As each one is named, their photo appears, captioned with name/title. A half-second later the word "Republican" in vivid red appears under each name. This is done throughout the ad, as each person is mentioned.]

Narrator: Representatives Mo Brooks, Paul Gosar, and Andy Biggs helped organize the rally.

Narrator: Senator Josh Hawley cheered the mob on.
[Hawley fist-raised photo]

Narrator: As attackers inside the Capitol were searching for Speaker Pelosi to kidnap or kill her, Rep. Lauren Boebert gave them her location.
[Image of Boebert tweet]

Narrator: And when it was all over, 140 Republican House members voted to give the violent mob exactly what they wanted.
[Scroll list of names, with "Republican" in red next to each name, under the heading "Voted to Overturn the Election"]

Narrator: All of these Republican politicians are accomplices in the greatest attack on democracy in 150 years. And not one of them has been held accountable in any way by Republican leadership.
[Photos of Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy...Republicans.]

Narrator: This is the GOP.

Ham-handed? Sure. Effective? Maybe. I'm sure someone who actually knows what they're doing could put together something much better. The point is, we need something like this. And now is the time to do it.

It's Big, It's Bad, and It's a Wolf

  

De Golyer Library, Southern Methodist University, via Texas State Historical Association.

Happy Juneteenth! And if anybody tells you that's not a real thing, please inform them that it's been a paid state holiday in Texas since 1980, and celebrated there much longer than that, ever since the very first anniversary in 1866 of the day Major General Gordon Granger arrived with the Union army in Galveston, 19 June 1865, to tell the state's population and most particularly its 250,000 enslaved persons, in the words of General Order no. 3,

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freed are advised to remain at their present homes, and work for wages.

Because they hadn't officially been informed earlier, though all the enslaved persons in Confederate-held territory had in fact been freed in the Emancipation Proclamation of September 1862; it couldn't be implemented, obviously, until the Union had won the war. (And slavery remained legal in Maryland, and parts of Virginia and Louisiana that the Union already held in 1862, because the Proclamation was in principle a military move against the rebels, intended to encourage their slaves to throw off their chains and hurt the Confederate war effort, not an attempt at abolition.)

A fixture everywhere in the African American community in the South by the end of the 19th century, and going northward with the Great Migration in the 20th, it has become an observed holiday in all sorts of states and municipalities (can't give an exhaustive list and I'm finding some contradictory or flat-out wrong assertions at Wikipedia, I'm sorry to say), and recognized by Congress in a bipartisan bill of 1997, and by presidents beginning with the Bush administration with a proclamation in 2002—of course Trump chose to celebrate it in 2020 with a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, site of the 1921 race massacre that destroyed the city's "Black Wall Street" district. It was a very good idea to make it a national holiday at last.

Juneteenth 1900, in Austin. Texas State Historical Association.

On the subject of Critical Race Theory, my old lady came up with an interesting alternative thought: that while a lot of individual Republicans are no doubt as dumb and ignorant as Nebraska governor Pete Rickett, the party as an institution knows very clearly, if not in much detail, what CRT is, and that's why they're so committed to denouncing it so loudly and consistently, because it serves their purposes very well.

Namely, they understand 

He'd Kill Us if He Had the Chance

[The Conversation spoilers below]

The whole Critical Race Theory panic is laughable on so many levels (they have no idea what it is, it isn't even taught at the K-12 level, and the "concerned parents" turn out to be GOP activists), but it also has a deeply scary side. As we've all known for a long time, with conservatives everything is 100% projection. So when we read something like this:

Several people emailing me, in good faith, believe that white Americans are in the position German Jews were in the 1930s. They think that CRT is an exterminationist ideology that has taken over institutions and white Americans are in literal deadly peril. They are afraid.

— Jason Stanley (@jasonintrator) June 17, 2021

...we have cause to be concerned.

And when Charles Murray is speculating about a race war on Tucker Carlson's show:

The situation is this, you have 13 percent of the population, that's the proportion of Blacks in the U.S. population, who are accusing 60 percent of the population, which is the proportion of non-Latino whites, of being bad, evil people. That's kind of a self-defeating strategy, and what I'm scared of is that whites are going to start adopting identity politics themselves....[U]ntil recently, I was very skeptical of comparisons with the 1850's. You know, you hear them occasionally. “This is like the run-up to the Civil War,” and I said “Nah, it's nothing like that”....And I am less inclined to say that these comparisons with the 1850s are far-fetched. I think that the possibilities for an undeclared civil war are greater than they used to be, and here's where the scenarios can get very -- unlikely, but possible.

...it's cause to be very afraid.

Eventually they're going to put liberals in camps because they think we want to put them in camps. https://t.co/AXmAnmtS9e

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) June 17, 2021

When Harry Caul catches the guy saying "he'd kill us if he had the chance", he thinks it means the couple are in danger from his client. Instead, the line is their rationalization for killing him first. This is where conservatives are going. Their fear is our danger.

COMPANY'S COMING

I have a houseguest on the way -- remember those? -- so I won't be blogging for the next couple of days. However, one or two members of my fine relief crew are likely to be here3, so stop by. I should be back on Sunday.

REPUBLICANS ♥ IGNORANCE

Kyle Whitmire, a columnist for the Alabama Media Group, impressed a lot of liberals this week with a column in which he described his efforts to determine what a state legislator who's a vocal opponent of critical race theory actually thinks critical race theory is. (Spoiler alert: The legislator, Chris Pringle, doesn't have a well-informed understanding of critical race theory and struggles to name specific authors or works that offend him.)

And then there's this, from Kevin Kruse, the historian:

I’m not sure why the governor is proudly sharing an article which shows he doesn’t actually understand what Critical Race Theory is, but he’s *very* proud that he’s against it, whatever it might be. https://t.co/x6AicmByjp

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) June 16, 2021

I wrote a tweet in response to Kruse:

Please disabuse yourself of the notion that "They don't even know what critical race theory is!" is a potent argument. Right-wingers draw nourishment from being told they're ignorant. They loved Reagan, Trump, and first-term Dubya in large part because we said they were ignorant. https://t.co/cELRe8soPL

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) June 16, 2021

The tweet wasn't well received (see below), but I stand by it. While it's true that the right's politically successful attacks on critical race theory are based on ignorance, right-wing politicans often relish being called ignorant, especially when they have, or appear to have, a large portion of the public on their side -- Har har har you think we're so dumb but we're beating you, you four-eyed liberal elitist! This was the message from the camps of Donals Trump (until he lost) and George W. Bush (until Katrina). This was said about Reagan (and even, to some extent, about Eisenhower).

My tweet didn't go over well:

Take your point but so what? If they're committed to their ignorance, they can take the lash of scorn that goes with it.

Seriously. What's the alternative? Triangulation? Listening tours? That shit just keeps on not working. Might's well try the truth.

— Roy Edroso (@edroso) June 16, 2021

But Republican politicians love the lash of scorn. The scorn is a badge of honor. They use it to bond with their voters. (They say I'm ignorant, but they're really attacking you!)

Edroso has my argument all wrong. I'm no Joe Manchin -- I don't want to do outreach to these bastards. I just don't want to fuel their persecution complexes, which they routinely weaponize.

So, sure, tell the rest of the public what critical race theory really is. Tell them that it isn't actually taught in primary and secondary schools. Make the point that this appears to be an effort to prevent any teaching at all about the mistreatment of non-whites throughout our history.

But if you try to show Republicans up by asserting that you're better informed or more literate, they'll just say you have contempt for plain, commonsensical "real Americans" who didn't go to fancy-schmancy schools. Don't give them that opening.

LISA MURKOWSKI COULD LOSE TO A DEMOCRAT -- OR TO A REPUBLICAN WHO THINKS TWILIGHT IS DEMONIC

In The Washington Post, Henry Olsen tells us that ranked-choice voting could give Democrats a Senate seat in Alaska.

Alaska's 2022 general election for the Senate seat will feature the top four vote-getters from a non-partisan primary. The Trump-skeptical incumbent, Lisa Murkowski, will probably be one of those candidates, as will Kelly Tshibaka, a Trumpist Republican who led the race in a recent poll, with Murkowski a distant third.

The second-place candidate in this poll is Dr. Al Gross, who hasn't said he'll run but has expressed interest; he lost a Senate race last year, but raised a lot of money and has high name recognition (in part because he once killed a bear in self-defense).

Olsen writes that the ranked choice voting system

opens the way for Gross, or another strong Democrat, to win even if Tshibaka gets a plurality on the first count. Both the 2016 election results and polling show that Murkowski’s support overlaps with voters who would normally vote Democratic. As a result, Tshibaka’s attacks on Murkowski could backfire; it could push the incumbent into third place but might anger Murkowski’s backers so much that they either support a Democrat or don’t rank Tshibaka at all on the second or third rounds of counting. That could be enough to give Democrats a majority of the vote.

However, that poll shows Tshibaka, the Trumpist, currently winning the instant runoff:

POLL OF LIKELY VOTERS IN ALASKA (5/22-25):

After the ranked choice process, Al Gross picks up a substantial share of Murkowski’s second choice voters.

Gross moves from 28% of the decided vote initially to 46% and ends up trailing Tshibaka by only single digits (54%-46%) #AKSen pic.twitter.com/YTCPUGuvmg

— Change Research (@ChangePolls) June 8, 2021

Olsen calls Tshibaka "an almost postcard-perfect candidate for Alaska conservatives," in part because she "is a devout Christian who, with her husband, Niki, founded a church in Alexandria, Va., and has worked extensively in faith-based activities."

But here's what Olsen doesn't mention:

Kelly Tshibaka ... once wrote in support of an "ex-gay" Christian organization that promoted discredited "conversion therapy" and said that homosexuality was caused by "sexual molestation during childhood."

In an article unearthed by CNN's KFile, Tshibaka wrote that gay people can "work through the process of coming out of homosexuality" through Christianity and urged gay people to "not be controlled by the 'once-gay-always-gay' rhetoric used to advance political agendas" in a 2001 Harvard Law School student newspaper article.

In other blog posts found by KFile that have since been scrubbed from the internet, Tshibaka said that the "Twilight" book and movie series "is evil and we should not read or watch it" because "entertaining and participating in these kinds of activities leaves us spiritually vulnerable. It also leaves us open to the enemy's attacks."

The essay on homosexuality is a nasty piece of work:

"Today is National Coming Out of Homosexuality Day, a day dedicated to helping homosexuals overcome their sexual tendencies and move towards a healthy lifestyle. Compassionate people nationwide recognize this day, rather than the more publicized 'National Coming Out Day,' because they want people to live and enjoy their lives to the fullest," she wrote.

Tshibaka urged gay people to "not be controlled by the 'once-gay-always-gay-rhetoric' used to advance political agendas" and said that gay people can instead "come out of homosexuality" with the help of Jesus Christ.

She repeatedly cited the work of Exodus International, a Christian nonprofit "ex gay" organization that maintained gay men and lesbians could change their sexual orientation through prayer and psychotherapy, an idea that has been debunked and discredited by major medical associations in the US.

In one passage, she included their bogus claim that "the most common cause of homosexuality is sexual molestation during childhood." In another, she supported Exodus' recommendations that gay people participate in "pastoral counseling, accountability groups, personal prayer and Bible studies.

Exodus International later renounced "conversion therapy" in 2012 and its leader apologized for the pain caused by their programs. The organization dissolved in 2013 after its leaders concluded they could not change a person's sexual orientation through psychotherapy.

Eight years later, Tshibaka's blogging on Twilight wasn't much better.

She called it "evil and we should not read or watch it."

"Some say this book is harmless, that it promotes Christian values, and that it does not promote anything wicked at all. But Satan does not usually look repulsive, horrific, and evil on the outside," she wrote in an October 2009 blog post.

"Make no mistake: 'Twilight' is a perfect example of how the enemy twists, perverts, and ridicules the things of God. This is his m.o. This is how he works," Tshibaka added.

That post is available via the Internet Archive. In another post, she also attacks the Harry Potter books (without having read them).

To preface this, I have not read any of the Harry Potter books, although I did see two of the movies. But here is my opinion, based on my experience and some study I’ve done....

I believe all fantasy books involving magic are potentially spiritually dangerous, especially to the vulnerable, i.e. children and anyone who is not well-grounded spiritually and are on guard against the wiles of the devil – our very clever enemy. This includes books written by C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. However, I do believe that the Narnia books and the Ring series are delightful, wonderful literature that should be read and enjoyed, with one caveat – the parents need to be involved....

... I got into magic/witchcraft through reading the Fellowship of the Ring.

... [It] was only a couple of months after reading the Fellowship that I started practicing....

I was “discovered” by another witch in my sophomore year of high school when she felt me using magic on her. And so I became involved in her group and got deeper and deeper, as one always does. Witchcraft is like drugs – anyone who says they can use it and say they are not addicted is a liar. It draws you in, entangling you more and more until you are completely trapped and there is no out (aside from God, that is). I was increasingly tormented by the demons I sought to control, until I heard there voices taunting me constantly. And no, I was not mentally ill, I knew these creatures well, as I had called them to me through my magic, although at first I did not recognize them as demons. Later on, I did recognize them for what they were and still called them, seeking to control them as they did in the books I read.

I eventually left my group and tried to stop practicing to get them to stop, but by then it was too late, I had sold myself to them for a little power... (And yes, God did show up and save me, buying me back with His blood). All this because the enemy used the Fellowship of the Ring, a good book with a great moral, to draw me into an area God wants to keep us away from, to protect us.

I say all this to illustrate what can happen when one indulges in a little “innocent” childhood reading....

Is she really a good fit for Alaska? Alaska is one of the least religious states in the union, and the least religious red state.

But she says that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against Trump, so she'll win, unless Murkowski or a Democrat can beat her.

NOW WE KNOW WHY TRUMP WAS JUST TALKING ABOUT THE MEMOIR HE INSISTS HE'S WRITING

On Friday, Donald Trump posted this on his website:

I turned down two book deals, from the most unlikely of publishers, in that I do not want to do such a deal right now. I’m writing like crazy anyway, however, and when the time comes, you’ll see the book of all books. Actually, I’ve been working on a much more important project right now!

What inspired that? Now we know:

Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former president Donald Trump and a senior adviser in his administration, has secured a book deal to recount Trump’s presidency.

Broadside Books, a conservative imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, announced that Kushner’s book will come out in early 2022. Kushner has begun working on the memoir, currently untitled, and is expected to write about everything from the Middle East to criminal justice reform to the pandemic. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Trump knew that Jared was about to announce a book deal, so he had to tell us that publishers want his book too, you know.

(It's possible that "I turned down two book deals" actually means "I discussed my book with two publishers, who either turned me down or made me an offer I would have been embarrassed to accept.")

I'm not sure why publishers aren't interested in a Trump book. There are millions of Americans who worship Trump as a god and would buy gold-plated turds if he were selling them. He wouldn't need bulk buys from the GOP or conservative interest groups -- in a country where there are entire stores devoted to selling Trump merchandise, I'm certain that his book would legitimately sell.

We've been told since late last year that publishers are reluctant to sign Trump up because they fear (for obvious reasons) that he won't be truthful. A New York Times story from November said that some executives in the book world

noted that publishers would face credibility issues if they released a book by a public figure known for spreading falsehoods and misinformation. Publishers, who typically rely on authors for fact-checking and accuracy, would likely need to take additional steps to verify that Mr. Trump’s account was factual and that he would be willing to undergo that kind of review. And if the factual and legal vetting did not eventually satisfy the publisher, would they be able to claw back whatever portion of the advance had already been paid?

“I’d have to be satisfied that he met Simon & Schuster’s overall standards for publishing a book, which is that book be honest, fair and balanced,” Ms. Canedy said. “We’d want to know that he would be willing to be edited and submit to a rigorous fact-checking process.”

A Politico story published on Monday said the same thing.

Their reluctance is driven by several factors, though the underlying fear is that whatever Trump would write wouldn’t be truthful.

“[I]t would be too hard to get a book that was factually accurate, actually,” said one major figure in the book publishing industry, explaining their reluctance to publish Trump. “That would be the problem. If he can’t even admit that he lost the election, then how do you publish that?”

But beyond what's necessary to avoid libel suits, most book publishers generally don't fact-check:

In general, fact-checking is not a standard part of the workflow in book publishing, even in nonfiction book publishing. What usually happens is this: Authors submit their manuscripts, the manuscripts go to editors who help to refine them and shape them, and from there the book goes into production and copy editing.

The copy editor will look for grammatical errors, and sometimes the publisher’s lawyer will check the book to make sure there’s nothing libelous in there, but fact-checking is not part of the standard publisher’s process. [...]

So how do publishers generally handle it if factual errors creep into a book? Basically, the same way they handle plagiarism: They make it the author’s problem.

One of the standard parts of any book contract is the warranty and indemnity clause. By signing on to that clause, an author is guaranteeing that their book is their own, original project, not plagiarism, that it doesn’t infringe on anyone else’s rights, and — if the book is nonfiction — that its facts are accurate. And if it turns out that any of these claims are untrue, the liability is all on the author. They’re the ones who pay up if someone decides to sue.

Some authors hire their own fact-checkers, but

we’re left with an industry in which a lot of nonfiction books don’t get looked over by a professional fact-checker.

Of course Trump's book would be dishonest. But over the years, mainstream publishing houses have published many books by the likes of Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Ben Shapiro, and Candace Owens. They're about to publish this Jared Kushner book and books by Mike Pence and Kellyanne Conway. These books will be vetted for libel. But how truthful will they be?

Obviously, Trump lies more brazenly than other people -- even Kellyanne Conway. Obviously, he won't want to be told to excise the most actionable lies (although I bet he'd do it if his publisher threatened to withhold a portion of the advance). But is this enough to explain why no publisher wants his book, which would be a huge seller?

I'm intrigued by something in the Politico story that, regrettably, goes unexplained:

“I’m skeptical,” added another publishing insider when asked if they believed Trump’s statement that he had gotten two offers. “He’s screwed over so many publishers that before he ran for president none of the big 5 would work with [him] anymore.”

What did he do? Did he take large advances for books he and his ghostwriters never delivered? Did he try to intimidate publishers by suing them, or threatening to sue, possibly when they tried to get advance money back for vaporware manuscripts?

In addition to the inevitable massive dishonesty of Trump's book, I think what publishers find offputting is his approach to business (treat everyone badly, cheat whoever you can, sue if they don't like it), plus the likelihood of outrage on the part of staffers, readers, and authors (the Simon & Schuster staff protest against Mike Pence's book deal hasn't worked, but protests against Trump would be much greater, and might be joined by the reading public, and by superstar authors).

What I find baffling is the decision to sign up a Jared Kushner book. Does anyone like him? Liberals and progressive don't. Old-line Republicans don't. Trumpers are wary of him. Right-wing groups wouldn't even bulk-buy it.

But some people in the publishing world probably regard Kushner, wrongly, as a future figure of influence, in politics or in business. Maybe it's New York tunnel vision. (Prior to his time in D.C., Kushner operated out of the New York metro area, and locals tend to think anyone who's even a vaguely big deal here is a big deal nationwide.) Maybe his publishers believe that right-wing Jews, as well as evangelical Christians who regard themselves as great friends of the Jews, will buy Kushner's book. Or maybe Kushner is planning to dish some embarrassing dirt on his father-in-law. (It was reported earlier this year that Jared and Ivanka want to make a "clean break" from her father, though I don't believe that.)

Meanwhile, Donald Trump could easily self-publish a ghostwritten book and sell millions of copies. But he won't, for the same reason he won't start a social networking site to rival Twitter and Facebook, or simply join an exisiting right-wing site, which would then become a conservative communications hub: He wants to be welcomed into The Club, and he can't bear the thought that he's been rejected. So he'll probably continue to insist that his book is imminent and will be published by a major house, but there'll never be a book.

THE HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA IS KILLING CHILDREN'S TELEVISION!* *(No, it isn't.)

Here's a story from Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire that your right-wing relatives are probably sharing on Facebook right now:

Nickelodeon Ratings Crash Amid LGBTQ Push

There’s growing evidence that Nickelodeon’s hard push to promote the LGBTQ agenda to children is having a negative impact on the network’s ratings.

In the last two weeks, both Nickelodeon and its preschool-targeted network, Nick Jr., have released videos championing “trans,” “queer,” and “pansexual” inclusion....

These latest videos come after the network began overtly celebrating “Pride” month several years ago and implied in 2020 that its most popular character, SpongeBob SquarePants, is gay....

Pirates and Princesses, a popular entertainment site specializing in Disney-related news, ... says [Nickelodeon] has seen a major decline in viewers since it began overtly pushing the LGBTQ agenda to its young viewers:

Since July of 2017, Nickelodeon’s viewership has dropped from 1.3 million average viewers per week to a June of 2021 average of only 372,000. In only four years, Nickelodeon has dropped more than two thirds of its audience. That is catastrophically bad for the cable channel....

There are signs that Viacom has not learned any lessons and is retrofitting these old shows with the same principles that have resulted in Nickelodeon’s huge loss in ratings. Even with a show about infants, much of the headlines have been about a retconned, now-lesbian character; whatever your thoughts on that issue, it’s hard to see how a children’s show about infants is best served in advertising when the news is all about sexuality.

But as a December 2020 story from Variety VIP noted, most cable and broadcast channels have seen large declines in viewership in recent years -- not primarily because of wokeness or LGBTQ-friendliness, but because more people are watching streaming channels.. For instance, TNT lost 51.8% of its viewers between 2014 and 2020. Adult Swim lost 61.5%.

The Disney Channel, which is a rival to Nickelodeon and isn't singled out in the Daily Wire story, lost 81.8% of its viewers between 2014 and 2020. (Disney's Disney+ streaming service launched in November 2019.)

And maybe the problem at Nickelodeon has to do with corporate parent ViacomCBS -- its channels seem to be doing badly across the board:

The CW, which ViacomCBS co-owns with WarnerMedia, has seen audiences decline by more than half (-51%; -844k). Other ViacomCBS networks seeing more than half of their viewers evaporate since 2014 are MTV2 (-131k; -70.4%), Nick at Nite (-902k; -67.1%), Nicktoons (-173k; -66.5%), VH1 (-370k; -52.3%), and Comedy Central (-362k; -51.5%).

... BET has lost 317,000 primetime viewers over the last six years, representing a decline of -45.5%. MTV is down by 367k, a loss of -45.5%, and Paramount Network - the rebranded Spike - is down by 329,000 (or -41.6%).

This reminds me of another recent Daily Wire assertion: that California lockdowns were the reason for 100% of the state's restaurant closures last year. (In fact, there were high numbers of restaurant closures last year even in states that never locked down, for the obvious reason that many people avoided restaurants altogether; also, restaurant closures are common even in good years.)

The Daily Wire has ragebait down to a formula. Don't confuse these stories with the truth.

MANY GATEWAY PUNDIT READERS CHEER THE MURDER OF A STORE EMPLOYEE BY AN ANTI-MASK CUSTOMER

In Marjorie Taylor Greene's home state, her anti-mask ideology kills:

A cashier at a DeKalb County supermarket was fatally shot Monday when she argued with a shopper about wearing his face mask, officials said.

The shopper, identified as Victor Lee Tucker Jr., 30, of Palmetto, left the Big Bear supermarket after the argument but came back with a gun, according to the GBI. The volatile incident also resulted in injury to an off-duty sheriff’s deputy working as a security guard, who tried to intervene and was shot during an exchange of gunfire.

You might think cold-blooded murder would give readers of right-wing websites pause. But while a (slight) majority of the commenters at Gateway Pundit agree that shooting a store clerk is bad, others believe she got what she deserved.

Now there is one less karen

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And Karens nationwide notice the random downside of trying to control others.

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She did what the store owner told her to do. Deprive them of business, but don't take it out on the employees.

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Anyone who is "just following orders" is a collaborator. And complicit.

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Same goes with cops who enforce asinine unconstitutional face diaper mandates,distancing crap..

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I vote for public flogging.

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Some people get off on being given the extra power. And when did stores change the policy that the customer is always RIGHT?

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... At some point ... you have to draw the line. Where is yours? Vaccine passports? Vaccines required for employment? Forced vaccination at gunpoint? FEMA camps for unvaccinated? Gas chambers? Mandatory annual boosters for new variants forever? Not allowed to eat unless vaccinated? Those same "Karens" out of fear and hysteria who are asking you to wear a mask and virtue signalling their second shot and even having vaccinated their children will push you into the gas chamber or at least let it happen.

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All the facts are not known as exactly how she treated this man. She may have been less then kind in how she was enforcing the stores mask tyranny. I suspect that she probably was rather nasty and insulting about the whole thing.

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You Really think that person died? No blood on the walls nothing, landed softly on her backpack while an item was placed into her hand which she grabbed. It’s all part of the show wake up.

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Whites would be a lot better off if we were more easily provoked to violence, as our conquering Indo-European ancestors were.

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Let's hope other Karens take note and opt to STFU. If your boss tells you to enforce mask policies tell them NO because you value your life.

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I still think a good knock upside the head would have been better

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No it was not worth her life. However, my educated guess is that it is not the first time she has done that sort of thing.

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It's a clear case of provocation and at most voluntary manslaughter. I'm not saying what he did was right: throwing a punch would have been more proportionate than a bullet.

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Maybe slap her instead but kill her? No way

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One less democrat

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...unfortunately, the left has completely degraded the value of life. And BLM literally getting away with murder over the last 18 months has raised the temperature in the room...it’s gonna lead to more incidents like this. (Not saying it makes it right, but typically the same people who bark at others to wear masks are the same people praising and normalizing the violence, destruction and murder committed by BLM....and I guess it’s bound to blow up in your face at some point).

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This is what the left/DS want - to turn everyone against everyone else. No societal adhesion. Divide and conquer.

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Maybe don't make asinine rules that will only instigate and provoke negative encounters with the customers that in no way benefit anyone and in the worst case scenario end in deadly encounters. I knew this was going to happen eventually.

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Killing someone over an egregious Human Rights Violation? Sounds like he did the right thing to me. He did proper Nuremburg all at once.

... And we're back to masks = Hitler. Marjorie Taylor Greene may have concluded that it's in her best interest to abandon that talking point, but the talking point took root on the right quite a while ago, and it's not going away. Killing store clerks who ask customers to wear masks is manyv right-wingers' idea of antifascism.

SO WHY DIDN'T THE FEVER BREAK WHEN GEORGE W. BUSH LEFT OFFICE IN DISGRACE?

In an opinion piece adapted from her forthcoming book, Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court, Jackie Calmes, the White House editor for the Los Angeles Times, writes:

The radicalization of the Republican Party has been the biggest story of my career. I’ve been watching it from the start, from the time I arrived in then-Democratic Texas just out of college in 1978 to my years as a reporter in Washington through four revolutions — Ronald Reagan’s, Newt Gingrich’s, the tea party’s and Donald Trump’s — each of which took the party farther right.

Here's how she describes that third revolution:

After the near-collapse of the financial system and its bailout by the Bush administration, in 2008, Barack Obama became the first Black American elected president. Almost immediately, the third Republican revolution took shape, this one a headless movement from the bottom up: the tea party.

Republican Party leaders sought to unite with tea party activists against their common enemy — Obama. In the midterm elections of Obama’s two terms, Republicans regained control of the House in 2010 and then the Senate in 2014.

I wouldn't describe the Tea Party as "a headless movement from the bottom up" -- the Koch brothers had heads -- but she's right about the sequence of events.

George W. Bush left office with a 34% job approval rating, according to Gallup -- at times in 2008, it had been in the twenties. He left in disgrace, responsible for two wars that had become quagmires and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. His party suffered massive losses in the 2006 and 2008 elections.

In other words, he'd sunk as low as we hope Donald Trump sinks if civil, criminal, and congressional investigations eventually reveal the full scope of his criminality.

I'm in favor of getting to the truth about Trump. I hope he dies in prison, although I assume he'll never spend a night there.

But why do we think a disgraced Donald Trump would mean a damaged GOP? It didn't happen after 2008 -- the party just rebranded itself and became even more dangerous.

The party is ready to rebrand itself right now if necessary. It's obsessed with critical race theory and cancel culture. It rails against vaccine passports and "open borders." Its fixation on "election integrity" references Trump's defeat in 2020 but could easily continue even if Trump were in federal custody, because it's an extension of a strategy Republicans have pursued since before Trump entered politics.

Maybe you'd say that the Tea Party happened because we had a Black president. But that Black president had just won his election by the largest popular and electoral vote margin in twenty years. Do we think there wouldn't have been a Tea Party if the 2008 winner had been Hillary Clinton?

There's a level of rage on the American right that apparently results from only one thing: profound resentment at having to share power with people who don't think (or look) the way they do. Accountability for Donald Trump, if it ever happens, won't change that. If we want to do something about the right's power to damage America, we have to take on the Republican Party directly, in real time. Investigations of January 6 or Donald Trump's taxes won't get the job done, and probably won't weaken the post-Trump GOP at all.

WE KNOW THAT A 55-VOTE FILIBUSTER WOULD JUST MOVE THE STONE WALL, RIGHT?

Ross Douthat believes that the filbuster is a good thing right now because Democrats don't have a mandate for truly progressive change.

... in reality the Democrats have a relatively thin majority, opposed by a very large minority. The national presidential vote in 2020 was roughly 51 percent to 47 percent; the national vote for the House of Representatives was about 51 to 48 percent. These are clear victories, but not the margins of a transformative majority.

Trump and George W. Bush gave us massive tax cuts for the rich after losing the popular vote. Bush gave us the Iraq War in his "countermajoritarian" first term, and Trump gave us three far-right Supreme Court justices in his term. Perhaps it's inappropriate for parties to govern as if they have a massive mandate from the voters unless they actually do, but that rule should apply to Republicans as well as Democrats, right, Ross? And if it doesn't apply to Republicans, why should it aply to Democrats?

But Douthat believes the Democrats could pass some legislation even with a filibuster:

... there is a half measure available that [Senator Joe] Manchin should consider as an alternative to abolition: weakening the filibuster by taking its threshold to 55 votes instead of 60.

As a practical matter a 55-vote threshold puts a lot of things that the West Virginia senator favors more in play — from the gun-control measure he hashed out with Pat Toomey in the Obama years to infrastructure spending and the Jan. 6 commission in this presidency — while still throwing up a strong impediment to ideological legislating.... It adapts the filibuster in a reasonable way to our age of heightened polarization, maintaining protections for the minority, while making some deals that used to be possible available again.

The Manchin-Toomey gun bill requiring background checks on all commercial gun sales got 54 votes in the Senate in 2013. The January 6 commission also got 54 Senate votes last month. It's almost as if Senate Republicans are consistently sending a message not only that they'll block legislation supported by the majority, but that they would block it even if the filibuster threshold were cut to 55.

And really, it doesn't matter what the cutoff is, as long as it's higher than 50. Mitch McConnell will limit the number of people in his caucus who are granted leeway to cross the aisle, in order to ensure that nothing important passes over Republican objections (with the exception of simple-majority bills passed under reconciliation).

A change in the cutoff would be a slight improvement, as would a return to talking filibusters (which is what Manchin's predecessor Robert Byrd wanted, as Yastreblyansky reminded us a few days ago). But genuine bipartisanship would mean Republicans occasionally voting for Democratic bills in large enough numbers to give Democrats victories, not just making empty gestures by voting with the Dems on bills they know will never reach the filibuster threshold. There's no reason to believe that even the few Republicans who like to be seen as aisle-crossers will ever allow a series of Democratic victories to happen, or that McConnell will grant them permission to do so. The last Republican senator to defy the party that way was John McCain on Obamacare repeal, and he was dying. A 55-vote threshold won't make votes like that any more frequent.

ACCOUNTABILITY ISN'T WHAT WE NEED RIGHT NOW

My last post was titled "No, Trump's Spygate Isn't a Game Changer." My point was that the public, apart from people who already loathe Trump, won't care that his Justice Department spied on members of Congress and on family members and others associated with them. They'll see that classified information was leaked and accept the argument that surveillance was warranted. They don't really care what happens to members of Congress anyway -- most Americans don't like Congress.

On Twitter, there was this response:

Here’s an instructive exercise: name a revelation that *would* change the game.

(I can’t.)

— blue meme (@TheBlueMeme) June 12, 2021

I can't either. And it's not just this story.

I'm pleased that there are investigations into Trump's finances here in New York, but again, apart from Trump-haters, I don't believe anyone will be appalled to learn that rich guys cook the books. It would be good for America if we had a 9/11-style commission to investigate the January 6 assault on Congress, but Americans, apart from self-deluding right-wingers who blame Antifa, largely understand what happened that day and recognize that Trump motivated the mob. No one's mind will be changed by a blue-ribbon commission. No minds are being changed by the arrests of the perpetrators.

We need to be talking more about the future threat of Republican rule. Large portions of America believe -- still -- that the GOP is a sober, responsible mainstream party and that Democrats are radical and extremist. Focusing on Trump's crimes or on January 6 doesn't change minds because the conventional wisdom is that Trump and Trumpism are invading forces that have perverted the Republican Party, rather than decades of Republicanism taken to their logical extreme. Focusing on Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene in isolation doesn't work either -- they're still seen as wacky outliers, nothing like the wise, thoughtful GOP elders who talk in measured tones on Sunday talk shows and distract Americans from the radicalism of their party.

We need to remind Americans that we can't raise the minimum wage, fight climate change, pass sensible gun laws, increase taxes on the super-rich, or protect reproductive freedom because a solid bloc of Republicans won't allow us to. We need to hammer home the fact that Republicans back or at least tolerate COVID denialism and vaccine skepticism, that they want to restrict voting rights and probably overturn the results of future elections, that they want to scapegoat trans youth everywhere in America, that they believe it's okay to run over peaceful protesters in your car, that they want to return to the days of the Wall and family separations at the border.

Trump could go to prison tomorrow and all this would still be true. It's all true even though January 6 rioters are in prison and up on charges now.

Accountability is fine, but it won't save us. Talking about the ongoing threat posed by ordinary Republicanism might.

NO, TRUMP'S SPYGATE ISN'T A GAME CHANGER

People I respect are discussing this story as if it has the potential to Change Everything. I don't see it. I think most of America will just yawn:

As the Justice Department investigated who was behind leaks of classified information early in the Trump administration, it took a highly unusual step: Prosecutors subpoenaed Apple for data from the accounts of at least two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, aides and family members. One was a minor.

All told, the records of at least a dozen people tied to the committee were seized in 2017 and early 2018, including those of Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, then the panel’s top Democrat and now its chairman, according to committee officials and two other people briefed on the inquiry. Representative Eric Swalwell of California said in an interview Thursday night that he had also been notified that his data had been subpoenaed....

The zeal in the Trump administration’s efforts to hunt leakers led to the extraordinary step of subpoenaing communications metadata from members of Congress — a nearly unheard-of move outside of corruption investigations. While Justice Department leak investigations are routine, current and former congressional officials familiar with the inquiry said they could not recall an instance in which the records of lawmakers had been seized as part of one.

To politically engaged Trump critics, this is a big deal, of course. But to everyone else? Most of the public tuned out the Russia investigation a long time ago, and paid little attention to the Ukraine story. (Over the course of the latter story and the resulting impeachment, Trump's poll numbers actually rose somewhat.) The spying was in response to stories that were embarrassing to Trump, but the stories did involve leaks of classified information. To many Americans, it undoubtedly makes sense that Trump's Justice Department would want to investigate such leaks vigorously. And the people spied on are primarily members of Congress, at a time when 58% of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing (although that's down from 73% just before Election Day).

This won't cause the scales to fall from anyone's eyes. To many Americans, pursuing it will seem like a distraction from the government's real work. And the pursuit -- by Democrats who lack the GOP's personal viciousness and thirst for vengeance -- probably won't draw blood in any case.

As usual, I hope I'm wrong. But I'm convinced that this will mean nothing to most of America.

A FOX NEWS GOVERNOR IN MICHIGAN?

It's a GOP poll, so take it with a grain of salt, but...

If the election were held today, former Detroit Police Chief James E. Craig would defeat Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer – 45 percent to 38 percent – according [to] polling data ... released Wednesday by the Michigan Republican Party.

In that same poll, Detroit businessman John James trails Whitmer in a hypothetical match up -- 50 percent to 45 percent.

The poll [was] commissioned by the Michigan GOP and conducted by Competitive Edge Research and Communication Inc. ...

I'm sure this poll has a partisan skew, but even if James Craig isn't solidly ahead of Whitmer, it's striking that he does much better against her than John James, another Black Republican, who came within two points of beating incumbent Democrat Gary Peters for a U.S. Senate seat last year, and came within six points of beating Michigan's other senator, Democrat Debbie Stabenow, in 2018.

But John James isn't a Fox News regular. James Craig is.

Craig knows all the buzzwords, as he demonstrated in September:

His latest pop-in to "Fox & Friends" was to react to videos currently inflaming right-side media, of a mid-size U-Haul truck in Louisville unloading signs and "riot gear" to anti-police protesters in yesterday's reaction to the Breonna Taylor grand jury action.

Conservatives have siezed on the clips as evidence that organized forces are behind BLM and other protests in American cities.

Craig was on hand to agree, and called the scene evidence of outsiders stirring up trouble and a "Marxist ideology" at work.

On Fox & Friends, the Detroit police chief claims video of one U-Haul truck in Louisville is proof that nationwide violence "is coordinated, it's planned ... it's financed" by a "Marxist ideology" trying "to undermine our government as we know it." pic.twitter.com/lIobpm2VKg

— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) September 24, 2020

This Fox News hit occurred a day after a widely shared Facebook post appeared claiming that the U-Haul was distributing weapons, and was paid for by an activist paid by George Soros's Open Society Foundations. PolitiFact quickly debunked those claims. Craig never mentioned Soros on Fox. However, he did say of the protest, "But it's coordinated. It's planned. And, not to mention, it's financed. The question is, who's financing it?"

Donald Trump is a Craig fan, as he told a Michigan interviewer in September:

“You have a great police chief,” Trump said. “I watch him. I really like him a lot. Say hello to him. I think he’s terrific. I think he’s just an incredible representative; he speaks so well about a very important subject, which is crime, and rioting, and all the things you see in certain cities.”

Can this get Craig elected? I don't know, but it's a problem for 2024 if Whitmer loses. Michigan's legislature is under GOP control. If a Democrat wins the popular vote in Michigan in 2024, it's an open question whether an all-Republican state government will award the state's electors to that Democrat.

RUBBING OUR FACES IN IT

We know that Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch has made clear that he won't rein in Tucker Carlson's racist talk. Last night, Carlson rubbed our faces in the fact that he can be an on-air racist with impunity by bringing on an old-school racist from Fox's past:

Glenn Beck has ramped up attacks on former president Barack Obama in recent days, capping the whole thing off by retracting an apology he once made for calling Obama “racist.”

During a Wednesday night appearance on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Beck said, “I take my apology back. I was exactly right and I even stated it right. You are a racist if you believe in critical race theory. If you think that what Dr. Martin Luther King said — that he envisions a country that is seeing people for the content of their character and not their color — if you think that’s wrong, then yes, you are a racist.”

In July 2009, Beck called Obama a racist and said he had "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture." Companies that removed their ads from Beck's show included ConAgra, Geico, Procter & Gamble, and Progressive insurance. Beck was defended by Rupert Murdoch, and he remained on Fox for two more years. But this was seen at the time as an embarrassment for Fox, and while Beck's show remained on the air he was never again quite as blatant in his race-baiting of Obama. In 2016, The New Yorker's Nicholas Schmidle interviewed Beck and wrote:

[Beck] once ... accused Obama of being a racist with a “deep-seated hatred for white people.”

That was the old Beck, he insists: “I did a lot of freaking out about Barack Obama.” But, he said, “Obama made me a better man.” He regrets calling the President a racist and counts himself a Black Lives Matter supporter. “There are things unique to the African-American experience that I cannot relate to,” he said. “I had to listen to them.”

So much for that.

The Murdochs know that we liberal elitist scum believe that the 2009 Beck pronouncement was possibly the most offensive moment in Fox history -- so Beck has now been brought back to reprise it. That's a big fuck-you to all of us. In 2009, for all its denials, Fox might have cared what we thought. Fox doesn't care anymore. The Murdochs and Carlson don't believe they have any reason to care, and they want to make sure we know that.

STOKING THE STAR-MAKER MACHINERY, GOP STYLE

To hear right-wingers tell it, the Black Republican lieutenant governor of North Carolina just had a breakout moment. RedState reports:

North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson Gave a Must-Hear Speech That Will Set Your American Soul on Fire

Americans are a country of people that should be proud of who they are and what they’ve accomplished and despite what the left may say about you or this country, it’s one that not only needs defending, it deserves defending.

That was the message from North Carolina’s Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson during the North Carolina Republican Party State Convention. It was a speech that went overlooked due to the appearance of former President Donald Trump and his speech, but it’s one that deserves to be seen and heard by any Republican, and indeed any American who has pride in their country.

So what did Robinson say?

“The greatest example that I saw, and witnessed it firsthand on television, was during 9/11. People running away from those burning buildings, running away in horror. We saw a policeman and fireman running to those buildings, basically running to their deaths to go help others because they saw trouble and they knew that they would need it.,” said Robinson.

“That’s got to be us this day right here,” he continued. “And what is the trouble? The trouble is the Biden administration that is seeking the turn this country into a socialist hellhole. The trouble is Antifa, who wants to roam the streets and beat you into submission. The trouble is Black Lives Matter that claims to care about the lives of black people but it’s turned a blind eye while violence in black communities are taking lives at a genocidalal of rate. They turn a blind eye!”

“That’s where the trouble is and that’s where we’ve got to run to,” he added....

“At Bunker Hill that was Americans. And at Fredericksburg and Gettysburg that was Americans. And at Iwo Jima, raising that flag on Suribachi, it was Americans. And at Pork Chop Hill, that was Americans. Khe Sanh, that was Americans. And on 9/11 there was America who ran towards those burning buildings,” he continued.

“That is who you share your heritage with. You do not share your heritage with a weak and ineffective people who cower at the sign of trouble!” he added.

Robinson went on to say:

It's time to put on our packs. It's time to fix those bayonets. It's time to get ready. We got a fight on our hands.

When I put all of that together, it sounds as if he's talking about using bayonets against the Biden administration, which would seem to be a ... problematic thing to say. But he doesn't appear to be in any trouble for saying it. Instead, he's being lavished with praise -- from Dinesh D'Souza, Dan Bongino, and Gateway Pundit, among others.

This tweet seems to have generated much of the excitement:

I encourage you all to take a minute to listen to this fiery speech by Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina Mark Robinson.

It's worth every second. pic.twitter.com/oJ6ubGyoFJ

— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) June 8, 2021

The tweeter is a GOP operative who's not the first person you'd expect to be praising a Black man.

Caleb Hull, a digital communications strategist popular with pro-Trump Republicans, made racist and inflammatory comments, including the use of the n-word, on a Twitter account he used as a video gamer in 2014....

Hull worked as director of content at Targeted Victory, an influential Republican marketing and advertising firm. According to FEC filings, Targeted Victory’s clients include campaigns for high-ranking Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado, and powerful Republican entities like the National Republican Senatorial Committee....

In 2014, Hull made anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and anti-LGBTQ remarks on a Twitter account ... with the handle @FlwTV...

Hull casually deployed the n-word on his @FlwTV Twitter account on several occasions and shared jokes in which the slur was the punchline. In one instance, he remarked that he was banned from a streamer’s chat room after he “spammed” the n-word “17 times.” Hull promoted racist tropes about Black people, specifically those involving watermelon and fried chicken, Black children without fathers, and slaves picking cotton....

Hull shared an image multiple times that depicts a piece of fried chicken hanging from a noose....

Other targets of Hull’s mockery included Muslims, special needs children, and Latinos.

On the other hand, Hull and Mark Robinson seem, in some ways, like brothers from different mothers.

On his Facebook page ... Robinson has lashed out at others and posted various insults; his posts disparaging transgender people, Muslims, former President Barack Obama, and African-Americans who support Democrats, among others, have drawn criticism.

Robinson accused people "who support this mass delusion called transgenderism" of seeking "to glorify Satan"; claimed that the movie Black Panther was "created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic Marxist" that was "only created to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets" (using a Yiddish slur for Black); called former President Obama a "a worthless, anti-American atheist" and posted "birther" memes; accused American Muslims of being "INVADERS" who “refuse to assimilate to our ways while demanding respect they have not earned.”; called Michelle Obama a man; and disparaged Joy Behar and Maxine Waters in crude terms. After the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, Robinson wrote that "Homosexuality is STILL an abominable sin and I WILL NOT join in 'celebrating gay pride.'" In 2020, Robinson asserted that the coronavirus was a "globalist" conspiracy to defeat Donald Trump, and dismissed the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic, writing, "The looming pandemic I’m most worried about is SOCIALISM."

And yet Hull's commenters think Robinson has a very bright future. The only thing they can't agree on is how bright:

DeSantis Robinson 2024

— Justin W. Partlow (@partlowjustin) June 8, 2021

I think Mr Robinson just announced his candidacy for the Presidency.

— Andrew (@Chewbaccasbeard) June 8, 2021

Even I'm not pessimistic enough to believe that a guy like this can win national office. Then again, who knows?

I WISH I BELIEVED

I'm generally in agreement with Yastreblyansky, but I don't share his optimism about the next few election cycles, or what comes after that.

Yas has high hopes for 2022, citing, among other things,

the end of Covid and, if it works out, the extraordinary job market and visible physical progress of the Biden double infrastructure program, which voters are going to be really aware of early on as it affects life in every community in the country, at least if Democrats manage to get the news out.

Republicans, of course, are portraying the current economic comeback as both tepid and problematic. Workers won't work for the wages offered because they'd rather sit on their asses and collect unemployment! Small business owners are struggling to fill jobs! Inflation is imminent! All of this framing is retransmitted by the mainstream media, which is as offended as the right by the notion that labor might win a few victories at capital's expense.

As for infrastructure, I've seen how bureaucratic permitting struggles can delay the start of big projects. I also saw how Republicans successfully attacked President Obama when signs were posted at infrastructure projects linking them to his stimulus plan.

Maybe the economy will be going at full speed by 2022 -- but Democrats could well agree to far less infrastructure than they want, and will probably be terrible at selling themselves as the party responsible for prosperity and jobs, while Republicans will do their usual first-rate job of creating clouds of suspicion around everything Democrats do.

This ought to be a midterm like 1934 (Democratic gains of 9 Senate and 9 House seats)! I'm really not kidding.

I've also seen others make comparisons to 2002, when Republicans gained seats in Congress. But both 1934 and 2002 were years when a crisis being managed by the party in the White House was ongoing. Voters rewarded FDR's party in 1934 because they thought he was dealing well with the ongoing Depression. In 2002, we still seemed to be under attack from terrorists, and voters thought George W. Bush's GOP was handling that crisis well. If by 2022 the pandemic appears to be well in the past, I think President Biden will get less political benefit than, say, the governors who seemed to be successfully managing the crisis in 2020. (Trump got no benefit in 2020 because few people thought he was managing COVID well.)

The places where they'll have passed the grotesque anti-voting legislation are going to be places that would inevitably have gone Republican anyway.

Um ... Georgia? We're hoping for a Stacey Abrams governorship and the reelection of Senator Raphael Warnock. Can all that happen under the new law?

And here's Yas's most provocative assertion:

... the Republican party that staged a failed coup attempt in 2021 is a dinosaur that has been dying since 1876.... Their 40% national approval isn't getting any bigger, and hasn't over the past four years. Democrats are growing, and ought to be growing more....

The fact that [Republicans] chose Trump as their representative in 2016—dumber than Reagan, less involved than Bush—was a sign of how far they've fallen. I understand that doesn't make them harmless, zombies are dead but they're still a problem. They can do a lot of damage on their way out, but they can't win. They don't have ideas and they don't have people.

Is "They don't have ideas" meant to be a conscious echo of Lionel Trilling? Seven decades ago, he wrote:

... the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.

Those "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas" were enough to give us Reagan, Limbaugh, Gingrich, Grover Norquist, Fox News, George W. Bush, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, the Roberts Court ... in short, a movement that's had a stranglehold on American politics for forty years. Simple-mindedness is a feature, not a bug -- it was for Reagan, it was for first-term George W., and it got Donald Trump 74 million votes.

(And yes, I know that Joe Biden got 81 million. I just wish I could believe that another Democrat would have done as well -- say, Kamala Harris, who could well be the 2024 nominee, and who is becoming the latest in a long series of Democrats said to be widely disliked, the kind of conventional wisdom that feeds on itself, as it did for Mike Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton.)

Maybe I'm wrong about all this. Maybe Biden's popularity will sustain itself and spread to the rest of his party. Maybe heartland America will finally see the Republican Party as conspiratorial, maniacal, and extreme.

I just think it's unlikely. We're going to have to fight for every win in 2022 and 2024, and it will be a much tougher fight than 2020. But I hope I'm wrong and Yas is right.