IMMIGRANT TRAFFICKING ISN'T ABOUT IMMIGRATION AND THAT SUPREME COURT PRAYER CASE WASN'T ABOUT PRAYER

I told you on Thursday that the immigrants who are being shipped to "liberal enclaves" by Republican governors aren't the real targets of the governors' actions -- the immigrants are being used and abused, but the governors' actual targets are white liberals, who, the governors hope, are howling in anguish at the sight of brown people on their lawns. (They aren't, but the right-wing media says they are, so that's what every rank-and-file right-winger believes.) Here's another story that isn't about its ostensible subject:

When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that Bremerton assistant football coach Joseph Kennedy had the right to pray on the field, it wasn’t widely understood then that the court had also ordered the school district to give him his job back....

“As soon as the school district says ‘Hey, come back,’ I am there, first flight,” [Kennedy] said.

So the school district has been flummoxed about what’s happened since.

... as the Bremerton Knights were prepping for the season in August, Kennedy was up in Alaska, meeting with former Vice President Mike Pence and evangelist Franklin Graham. On the eve of the first game, which the Knights won, Kennedy was in Milwaukee being presented with an engraved .22-caliber rifle at an American Legion convention.

The weekend of the second game, which the Knights also won, Kennedy appeared with former President Donald Trump at the Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey. He saw Trump get a religious award from a group called the American Cornerstone Institute.

Coming up this month, Kennedy’s scheduled to give a talk as part of a lectureship series at a Christian university in Arkansas.

“Place a PR/Publicity Request,” invites his personal website, where he’s known as Coach Joe.

Former U.S. solicitor general Paul Clements, who argued Kennedy's case at the Supreme Court, repeatedly asserted at the Court that Kennedy had been fired. Justice Samuel Alito also said repeatedly that Kenney had been fired. This wasn't true.

In 2015, he was put on paid leave near the end of the season after holding a series of prayer sessions on the field with students and state legislators. He still got paid for his full assistant coach contract, about $5,000. High school assistants often work on yearly deals, and Kennedy, at odds with the head coach and aggrieved by what had happened, never reapplied to work the 2016 season.

“He was not terminated,” Bevers said. The head coach at the time had moved on, as did most of the coaching staff.

The case didn't end with a humble football coach returning to ply his humble trade and humbly praying on the 50-yard line surrounded by players, some of whom felt coerced to pray. We were told that Kennedy felt called by God to spread the Word that way -- but somehow God doesn't want him to do that anymore, apparently. Why did God abandon His flock on the high-school gridirons of Washington State?

Because this wasn't about spreading the Word to those kids. It was about beating the libs. It's always about beating the libs.

We're the enemy. We're the devil. Defeating us is the point, more than any ostensible goal. Kennedy and his lawyers beat us, so mission accomplished. Always remember this.

REPUBLICANS WON'T DEVELOP HUMAN DECENCY, BUT THEY MIGHT GET BORED

In a post about GOP governors' stunt shipments of immigrants, titled "What Happens When a Party Rejects Humanity?," New York magazine's Sarah Jones writes:

The conservative movement’s deep history of racial prejudice suggests that the GOP’s turn toward inhumanity is inevitable and irreversible. Once crossed, some lines cannot be uncrossed. Republicans take their marching orders not from elder statesmen like Mitt Romney but from racist demagogues like Tucker Carlson, who said on Thursday’s broadcast of his show that Martha’s Vineyard would need “shantytowns” to house its new residents. Carlson isn’t going away, and neither is the racism that animates the Republican Party. Anyone still seeking a reasonable governmental partner in the GOP is setting themselves up for personal disappointment and political failure.

I share Jones's outrage, as well as her sense that the GOP and the conservative movement are irredeemable. But I'm having trouble with her headline.

As far as I'm concerned, it was clear that the right had rejected humanity a long time ago -- sixty years ago, obviously (though the segregationist hatemongers were mostly Democrats then), and certainly two decades ago, when the public learned about the Bush administration's embrace of torture. If you lurked at right-wing sites back then, and for many years afterward, you know that the rank-and-file right loved the idea of torturing Muslims.

WATERBOARDING : Baptism For Terrorists! #NoIslam #NoShariaLaw #StopMuslimImmigration pic.twitter.com/j5lxHM3bMC

— Sgt. Rock's Scowl (@CaterW) April 28, 2013

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to bring back "a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding," to the delight of his voters. But it never happened. Trump became much more focused on cruelty to immigrants. With the passage of time -- and because Trump himself expressed disdain for the Bush administration's wars -- Muslim-bashing became somewhat less popular on the right. Rank-and-file Republicans didn't hate Muslims any less, but they were distracted by their hatred for Mexicans and Central Americans.

So while the particular form of inhumanity we're seeing now from Ron DeSantis and other Republican governors won't disappear anytime soon -- there'll be much more trafficking of immigrants, especially between now and Election Day -- we'll eventually see fewer of these events. It won't be because right-wingers have suddenly developed a conscience. It'll happen because they'll get bored with the current cruelties and decide to turn to new ones, or maybe old ones they haven't tried in a while. The soullessness is constant, but the specifics will change someday.

MAYBE IT'S NOT SUCH A GOOD IDEA TO RUN A GENERAL-ELECTION CAMPAIGN EXCLUSIVELY IN THE RIGHT-WING BUBBLE

A few days ago, The Bulwark's Jonathan Last told us that he's worried about Doug Mastriano's gubernatorial campaign in Pennsylvania. Last noted that Mastriano -- "the most extreme, openly Christian nationalist candidate in living memory" -- was, as of September 8, trailing Democrat Josh Shapiro by only 6.9 points, according to the FiveThirtyEight polling average, despite doing nothing to reach out to non-conservative voters in a purple state. Last quoted a CNN account of Mastriano's campaign approach (it's by Chris Cillizza, but it sticks to the facts):

Mastriano ... doesn’t appear to have any interest in hedging any of his positions or doing any sort of outreach to groups beyond his hardcore base of supporters. Quite the opposite, in fact.

A recent article from the Philadelphia Inquirer makes plain just how different the campaign that Mastriano is running really is. Here’s the key bit:

“As he tours the Commonwealth, Mastriano has essentially walled himself off from the general public, traveling within a bubble of security guards and jittery aides who aim to not only keep him safe, but ensure he only comes into contact with true believers” ...

Mastriano also rarely engages with any media that is not overtly friendly to him. He conducts Facebook Live events and does interviews in places like the One America News Network but simply refuses to talk to any more mainstream outlets....

Mastriano is also being drastically outspent on television ads by his Democratic opponent, state Attorney General Josh Shapiro. According to Axios, Mastriano has yet to spend any—yes you read that right—money on TV ads for the general election campaign....

Last frets:

... how confident are you that polls are adequately capturing Mastriano’s support? After all, his entire campaign is based on the idea that he is going to reach a bunch of people who exist outside the current political dynamic and bring them out with his shofar army.

Speaking only for myself, I am not confident at all.

We all felt burned by the presidential polls in 2016. The polls in 2020 weren't much better. So Last worries that Mastriano is about to pull off a Trump 2016 upset.

I'm not so worried. According to a new Monmouth poll, Josh Shapiro just jumped out to an 18-point lead.

More than half of potential voters say they will either definitely (33%) or probably (21%) vote for Shapiro in November. Just over one-third currently feel they will definitely (21%) or probably (15%) vote for Mastriano. Significantly more Pennsylvania voters say they definitely will not vote for Mastriano (45%) than the number who completely rule out Shapiro (28%). Among voters who identify as Democrats, 66% say they are definitely prepared to support Shapiro now and just 2% have definitely ruled him out. Among Republicans, 47% say they are definitely prepared to support Mastriano now while 13% have definitely ruled him out....

Shapiro has a decidedly positive personal rating of 55% favorable to 33% unfavorable, while Mastriano holds a net negative rating of 36% favorable to 48% unfavorable.

This is the fourth poll this month in which Shapiro has a double-digit lead: Shapiro leads by 11 according to CBS, by 19 according to Echelon Insights, and by 21 according to Center Street PAC. Will the race be a blowout? Probably not, but I feel pretty good about this one.

I mention this because Ron DeSantis appears to have started the 2024 presidential campaign with his stunt immigration flight. Right-wingers are over the moon -- in the next polls of the race for the 2024 Republican nomination, I'm sure DeSantis will significantly close the gap between himself and Donald Trump, or possibly take the lead. But does this stunt have any appeal to the moderate voters DeSantis will presumably need to win the general election in 2024? Does DeSantis ever do anything to appeal to them?

Obviously, DeSantis is not trailing in his current race -- he leads by a comfortable margin. But as governor of Florida, he's an incumbent. He won't be an incumbent when he runs for president.

Unlike Mastriano, DeSantis will do mainstream advertising when he runs -- he's amassing a nine-figure war chest for a reason. But he does avoid talking to the non-right-wing media. He does treat everyone to his left as the enemy. And unlike Trump, he's not compelling on TV, and he's never a happy warrior. So he might be the nominee and then go down to defeat following a base-only strategy.

FOR ONCE, I DON'T THINK THE CRUELTY IS THE POINT

In a Bulwark post about Ron DeSantis's immigration stunt, Jonathan Last invokes Adam Serwer:

One of the early truths we learned about Trumpism was that the cruelty was the point.

In previous eras, when a political actor pursued a policy that was useful but cruel, he would make excuses. He would pretend that actually the policy was okay. That no one would really get hurt. Or that, if someone was going to get the short end, that tough choices had to be made because there was no alternative. So sorry.

(I think Last is talking about torture in the George W. Bush presidency. This is a good summary of that administration's completely unconvincing statements in its own defense.)

One of Trump’s political innovations was to realize that his followers wanted cruelty. They didn’t care about abstract ideas, like the free market or liberalism. They had various subsets of Americans whom they hated. What they wanted was a strongman who would target these othered peoples and hurt them. They wanted cruelty; policy TBD.

That lesson has been absorbed by Trump’s children, DeSantis first among them.

The Donald Trump/Stephen Miller policy of deliberate family separation absolutely was cruelty for its own sake. But I think this is different.

DeSantis, and Greg Abbott before him, haven't been separating parents from children. They haven't been shooting or beating or caging the immigrants. (They aren't legally allowed to, obviously, but I'm not sure they're allowed to do what they're doing, either.) They haven't sent them to parts of the country that are full of armed white supremacists who might terrorize them and kill them.

I'm not saying that DeSantis and Abbott are nice people. They're terrible people. But while forcibly relocating the immigrants is cruel, it's not maximally cruel. And they're being sent to places where they're greeted with compassion and provided with some social services.

Why aren't DeSantis and Abbott being maximally cruel to these immigrants? Because to them, and to their national audience of right-wing rage monsters, thid isn't about the immigrants.

It's about us.

Every time DeSantis, Abbott, and their rooting section talk about these stunt shipment of human beings, what makes them slaver is not the idea that the immigrants will suffer, but that we will suffer, in our posh liberal enclaves. They exult every time a mayor or governor expresses resentment or declares a state of emergency. We're the ones DeSantis and Abbott want to treat with cruelty. We're the ones they want to hear howl.

This means, obviously that the immigrants themselves are reduced to weapons used against us. DeSantis and Abbott care no more about them than a rock thrower cares about the feelings of a rock. This is sociopathic indifference to the humanity of the immigrants. But we're the enemy they really want to hurt right now.

HUMAN TRAFFICKERS DeSANTIS AND ABBOTT PASS THE GOODS AROUND

Two flights filled with undocumented immigrants left the South and landed on Martha's Vineyard yesterday. Republicans nationwide are dancing in the streets as if their team just won the Super Bowl, and Ron DeSantis, through a spokesperson, is beating his chest as if he threw the winning touchdown (except he presumably won't be going to Disney World):

"Yes, Florida can confirm the two planes with illegal immigrants that arrived in Martha’s Vineyard today were part of the state’s relocation program to transport illegal immigrants to sanctuary destinations," the governor’s communications director, Taryn Fenske, told Fox News Digital.

Here's a curious detail, per The New York Times:

As the migrants received Covid-19 tests, food and clothing, there was confusion on the ground about who had sent them to Martha’s Vineyard, a popular getaway for the moneyed and powerful. Migrants said they had started the day in San Antonio, but it was the Florida governor’s office that took responsibility.

The link in the Times report is to a story from Boston's WCVB, which tells us what happened:

Online flight records show at least two private planes that began the day in San Antonio, Texas, also made stops in Florida's panhandle, before later arriving on the island.

It was not immediately clear who paid for the private charter flights to the island; however, the statement from the governor's spokesperson said the Florida Legislature appropriated $12 million to implement a program to facilitate the transport of undocumented immigrants from the state.

Texas governor Greg Abbott has been busing immigrants to New York and Chicago as part of his reelection campaign. DeSantis, who's also running for reelection (while simultaneously running for president), is clearly frustrated that his state doesn't share a border with Mexico -- he proposed sending Cuban immigrants to Joe Biden's Delaware, then backed down in response to bipartisan outrage in his state.

So Abbott, like a human trafficker generously sharing some of his ill-gotten human goods with a fellow criminal, generously offered DeSantis a couple of planeloads of humans. Or maybe DeSantis paid Abbott for the right to have the human cargo flown to Florida, using Floridians' tax dollars.

A $12 million human trafficking slush fund could cover a lot more charter flights between now and Election Day, though you also have to take into account the cost of non-monetary payments to DeSantis's chief publicist:

A video provided to Fox News Digital shows the migrants deboarding the planes at Martha’s Vineyard Airport in Massachusetts.

Fox got the exclusive video! Amazing how that always happens with DeSantis!

If we've decided that this is an acceptable way to treat human beings in America, maybe blue-state mayors and governors should turn these planes and buses around and send them straight to Lachlan Murdoch's Bel Air mansion.

SPEAK ENGLISH OR DIE* (*SOME EXCEPTIONS APPLY)

Ben Shapiro thinks assimilation is very important.

Taking refugees is a fine notion. Settling them is great, too, unless those refugees have no plan to assimilate to your values.

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) September 3, 2015

@benpolitico @Goldberg3000 Israeli ad campaign points out a fundamental truth: American Jews assimilate. And I'm married to an Israeli.

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) December 2, 2011

Shapiro is pro-assimilation, except at times when defending the refusal to assimilate enables him to accuse his enemies of bigotry. Then lack of assimilation is just fine:

The media's new war on Hasidic Jewry is merely a metastasized version of the old culture war against evangelical Christians: anyone who rejects the predations of Left-wing pseudo-morality must be targeted. That theme undergirds the NYT investigation.

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) September 13, 2022

"The media's new war on Hasidic Jewry" is one story in The New York Times -- a long, thorough, and well-reported story on the failings of ultra-Orthodox private schools in New York State, which receive a substantial amount of public funding and mostly fail to provide the education in basic subjects that the funding is supposed to guarantee. There isn't a word in the story about "Left-wing pseudo-morality," unless Shapiro considers it "woke" or "politically correct" to want students in American schools to know English, math, and science.

From the story:

The leaders of New York’s Hasidic community have built scores of private schools to educate children in Jewish law, prayer and tradition — and to wall them off from the secular world. Offering little English and math, and virtually no science or history, they drill students relentlessly, sometimes brutally, during hours of religious lessons conducted in Yiddish.

The result, a New York Times investigation has found, is that generations of children have been systematically denied a basic education, trapping many of them in a cycle of joblessness and dependency....

The schools appear to be operating in violation of state laws that guarantee children an adequate education. Even so, The Times found, the Hasidic boys’ schools have found ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money, collecting more than $1 billion in the past four years alone....

The students in the boys' schools are not simply falling behind. They are suffering from levels of educational deprivation not seen anywhere else in New York, The Times found. Only nine schools in the state had less than 1 percent of students testing at grade level in 2019, the last year for which full data was available. All of them were Hasidic boys’ schools.

Girls receive more secular education because they study fewer religious texts. But they, too, are struggling: About 80 percent of the girls who took standardized tests last year failed.

The boys’ schools cram in secular studies only after a full day of religious lessons. Most offer reading and math just four days a week, often for 90 minutes a day, and only for children between the ages of 8 and 12. Some discourage further secular study at home. “No English books whatsoever,” one school’s rule book warns.

This is what Shapiro and every other right-wing demagogue will tell you is taking place in communities of Hispanics and Muslims: a rejection of assimilation, a refusal to abandon ancestral languages for English, the construction of a culture that isn't American in the midst of America. But accusing his enemies of religious bigotry is Shapiro's go-to move, so Shapiro thinks this rejection of assimilation is just fine.

Many of the students emerge unable to function in English, and therefore unable to hold jobs.

Chaim Fishman, 24, who attended Yeshiva Kehilath Yakov in Williamsburg, said that when he asked English teachers the meaning of words, they often said they did not know them....

Like others in the community, Mr. Fishman tried to learn English on his own, in part by secretly listening to the radio. After managing to leave his yeshiva, he enrolled in public school and was embarrassed at how little he knew.

“I’m the third generation born and raised in New York City,” he said, “and, still, when I was 15, I could barely speak English.”

... Soon after turning 17 in Kiryas Joel, in Orange County, [Joseph] Kraus decided to run away....

Over the next 18 months, he enrolled in remote public school classes but was barely able to use a computer or understand his teachers....

For much of this year, he shared a subsidized room with another homeless man in a Knights Inn on the edge of Liberty, a Catskills town dotted with boarded-up storefronts just an hour from his childhood home.

He spent his days walking the 30 minutes to and from the local library, where he searched for jobs without much success. He said he was recently fired from a diner because he could not write down orders. He lives off food stamps but skips many meals....

Mendy Pape said he left a Hasidic neighborhood in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, for Montreal in 2010. He got a job at a bagel factory, but, unable to afford an apartment, he slept on park benches. Despairing, he tried to take his own life.

After six months in a psychiatric hospital, Mr. Pape said he recovered enough to find work and an apartment. A neighbor started to teach him English in her spare time, he said, and gave him his first secular book: “Green Eggs and Ham” by Dr. Seuss. He was 28.

Now a nursing school graduate, Mr. Pape said he believes his Hasidic education was designed to keep him from leaving the community.

“I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have a bank account, I didn’t have references. I didn’t have any of that because I didn’t even know what any of that was,” he said. “I had no knowledge really of how to speak to people. I thought I was all on my own. That’s the idea I was given in school.”

If these were madrassahs, Ben Shapiro would make it his life's work to denounce them. But defining his enemies as hatemongers is Shapiro's happy place. So reporting on these schools -- whose victims are Jews, and whose enablers include liberals like former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio -- is, in Shapiro's eyes, the real crime.

THE STUPIDEST GOTCHA OF THE 2022 CAMPAIGN (SO FAR)

Oh boy, this Daily Mail story is going to blow the Pennsylvania Senate race wide open!

Actually, it's more than $100,000 -- the eight properties are worth $108,800! That averages more than $13,000 per property!

No, they're serious about this:

A watchdog group is filing a complaint asking the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate why Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman did not disclose eight real estate assets on his most recent personal financial disclosure.

The total value of the properties he left off his disclosure form was $108,800. All eight of the properties were in Braddock, Pa.- Fetterman's hometown where he served as mayor. His name is listed as owner on all of them on the Allegheny County website. Many of the properties appeared to be empty lots worth between $10,000 and $20,000 that are surrounding Fetterman's home. One was a building structure worth over $40,000.

Fetterman did not list a single real estate asset on his most recent July 29 disclosure, but his team says he did not have to because they did not produce income and weren't classified as investments.

If his team is wrong, clearly this is a capital crime. Hang him for not reporting vacant lots!

According to FACT, at least seven of the eight properties Fetterman did not disclose were valued over $1,000- though the precise fair market value is not known, their assessed values are $41,500, $22,100, $14,100, $10,500, $9,600, $9,300, $1,000 and $700.

And this is coming up because...

Pennsylvania's lieutenant governor is locked in a highly competitive race with Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz to replace retiring GOP Sen. Pat Toomey....

Recently Fetterman knocked Oz for saying he owns two houses, despite having investments in 18 properties. The Democrat frequently paints Oz as being disconnected with the state and accuses him of spending more time at his New Jersey residence.

In August Oz was captured on video at a campaign event saying: 'Well I, legitimately, I own two houses. But, uh, one of them we're building on; the other ones I rent.'

The Daily Beast later reported he owns 10 houses, including a 18,559-square-foot estate in Palm Beach, Fla., that has been valued at more than $36 million.

So what's the deal with FACT, the group that discovered this massive scandal?

Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT), formerly the Free Market American Educational Foundation, ... is a Washington,DC-based conservative nonprofit organization specializing in advocacy regarding legal and ethical issues related to politics. Until 2017, it was run by the former Acting United States Attorney General Matthew Whitaker.

You remember Matthew Whitaker, right?

... before ascending to his current role, Matthew Whitaker was ... a cartoonish, grifting dope who shilled for a company that hawked time-travel cryptocurrencies, Bigfoot dolls, and toilets specially designed for men with big dicks—and that was shut down for good and paid a $26 million fine to the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year for its alleged wrongdoing.

In 2014, according to Mother Jones, Whitaker became a board member of an outfit called World Patent Marketing, which cajoled investors into backing an array of patent-pending products that some might charitably describe as "questionable." ...

The WPM press release introducing the novelty bathroom fixture, dubbed the "MASCULINE TOILET"—all caps in original, of course—explains the problem the invention purports to solve in vivid, hilarious fashion:

The narrower curvature at the front of the toilet creates limited space for male genitalia when a man sits on the toilet seat. This limited space can cause contact from male genitalia with portions of the toilet, which is undesirable as those portions may be contaminated from human waste.

The distance between the rim and the water surface needs to be long enough to ensure there is no risk of contact. The average male genitalia is between 5" and 6". However, this invention is designed for those of us who measure longer than that. I estimate that a 12" distance is adequate enough for most well-endowed men, though I would not be surprised if there are cases who need a greater distance. Nevertheless, for the time being, this is a good starting point. An "extra long" [XL] version can always be created if needed.

In 2017, after he'd become acting attorney general, The Washington Post reported on his time with FACT:

In its application to the IRS for status as a tax-exempt organization, the organizers reported that the group would study the impact of environmental regulations on businesses, records show. In that incarnation, the group took no action and “only existed on paper,” one man named in IRS filings as a board member told The Washington Post. Another named in a state filing as a board member said he never agreed to be on the board.

Whitaker’s 2017 pay from the charity [was] more than $500,000 for the first nine months, or half the charity’s receipts for the year, according to tax filings....

In the 2014 filing, FACT reported that it had no employees and that it paid Whitaker $63,000 for three months of work, 30 hours a week, as president and director. It received $600,000 in donations, the document shows.

The Post determined from other tax filings that the money came from DonorsTrust, a large nonprofit organization that wealthy contributors have used to anonymously give millions to conservative nonprofits in recent years.

The group nabbed tax-exempt status, then changed its name (several times), its address, and its management. Then it began targeting Democrats almost exclusively, a focus it has continued under its current head, Kendra Arnold.

By the way, here's one of the properties Fetterman failed to disclose:

Now, here's just one of Dr. Oz's lesser-known properties:

🚨 PROPERTY #7 + #8 + #9 🚨

Did you think that Doc Hollywood only owned homes in the US?

Doc Hollywood is also Doc Worldwide 🌎

Check out this truly beautiful estate in Ireland his family owns☘️

He also owns 2 additional homes in Turkey too☝️ For a total of 3 int'l properties pic.twitter.com/cy5vbp3KxG

— John Fetterman (@JohnFetterman) August 17, 2022

BOTH SIDES!

THE AMERICAN FATWA THAT WASN'T

Graeme Wood's moment in the sun came in 2015, when The Atlantic published his article "What ISIS Really Wants." It chided then-president Barack Obama and other Western liberals for what Wood regarded as a naive approach to the Islamic State. Members of the exterminate-the-brutes right -- whose cynical transformation into cheerleaders for Trumpian isolationism would come a year or two later -- made use of the article in their ongoing campaign to portray Obama as a morally relativistic hater of Western civilization and a pro-jihad fifth columnist. They overlooked (or probably never read) the part of Wood's piece where he warned against an American invasion to overthrow ISIS and instead recommended "continuing to slowly bleed it, through air strikes and proxy warfare." Obama essentially agreed with, and successfully pursued, the "slow bleed" strategy; the right mostly dropped the subject (Hillary Clinton's emails were a far more tempting target), and the ISIS book Wood published just after the 2016 election was decidedly not a bestseller.

Wood, unsurprisingly, is now trying to rebrand himself as a critic of Western "cancel culture." Because it's 2022 and takes have to be truly spicy to cut through the clutter, he argues that there's essentially no difference between cancel culture here and the ongoing fatwa that nearly cost Salman Rushdie his life a month ago. It's inconvenient for Wood that the cultural establishment in the West supports Rushdie, but he plows ahead anyway in a recent Atlantic piece:

No one is saying, as Jimmy Carter did in 1989, that Rushdie had committed a great evil by offending Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. But that is because they still have a sense of shame, and the near-murder has silenced them. Rushdie’s sin is decades old. A fresh evil, unaccompanied by bloodshed, would attract a freshly craven response, dinging the author for the offense caused and if possible banishing his novel to the great reject pile in the basement of Random House.

Let's overlook the fact that Wood mischaracterizes the New York Times op-ed Jimmy Carter wrote about The Satanic Verses in 1989. (Carter's concern was that the book offended Muslims, not the ayatollah. He's been criticized for the op-ed ever since.) And let's also overlook the fact that Random House has kept The Satanic Verses in print since 2008, and continues to do so. (Random House, it should be noted, was the publisher of Wood's unsuccessful book.)

Now, take a look at the phrase "great reject pile" in the above quote. Each word has a link, intended to inform the reader of the chilling climate in American culture today.

The first link goes to a story about how cultural sensitivity complaints and social media eruptions have led to the cancellation of several young-adult books that were on the verge of publication. I agree with Wood that this is not a good trend. Censoriousness in children's publishing seems excessive to me.

The third link goes to a story about Woody Allen's memoir. Yes, Grand Central, a part of the Hachette media empire, canceled the book in 2020. But it was then picked up and immediately published by Arcade, an imprint of Skyhorse, which also quite successfully publishes Alan Dershowitz, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and other best-selling reprobates. Simon & Schuster is Skyhorse's distributor. The Woody Allen memoir was widely available and made the New York Times bestseller list.

And then there's the middle link -- an NBC story from April 2021 about protests at Simon & Schuster after the company signed Mike Pence's memoir. I bring this up because Axios today is helping to begin the publicity blitz for Pence's book, more than two months before its publication date. Wood portrays the Pence protests as cancel culture, but the book wasn't canceled. Simon & Schuster rejected employees' critiques of Pence and scheduled publication just before Thanksgiving and Christmas, when book sales are highest. The book is getting the treatment a publisher provides when it expects a major bestseller.

The book won't sell like an Obama memoir, but there'll be plenty of legitimate buyers. And whatever happens to it in the marketplace, please note that it will be in the marketplace. Pence hasn't been silenced. Yet Graeme Wood thinks there's a fatwa against Pence, simply because people protested his book deal. To Wood, that's the equivalent of a death sentence.

WHY IS THE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE FOR GOVERNOR OF ARIZONA HANDING THE ELECTION TO A TRUMPIST LUNATIC?

This is politcal malpractice:

Democrat Katie Hobbs’ campaign announced Sunday that she would not debate Republican Kari Lake as the two battle for the Arizona governor’s office....

The decision came after more than a week of efforts by Hobbs, currently secretary of state, to change the debate into separate half-hour interviews with the moderator. The Citizens Clean Elections Commission, which has held debates for two decades featuring candidates for statewide and legislative offices, flatly rejected that proposal on Thursday.

Hobbs's campaign spokesman said Hobbs -- who also refused to debate during the Democratic primary campaign -- simply thinks it's pointless to debate Lake.

“Unfortunately, debating a conspiracy theorist like Kari Lake – whose entire campaign platform is to cause enormous chaos and make Arizona the subject of national ridicule – would only lead to constant interruptions, pointless distractions, and childish name-calling,” Hobbs’ campaign manager Nicole DeMont said.

Lake is a crackpot, but she's a polished crackpot -- she was a local TV news anchor for 22 years. I'm sure his would give her a natural advantage in a debate -- and I'm sure she'd Gish-gallop her way through it, making so many wild, unfounded claims that Hobbs would struggle to keep up.

But you have to make the effort. Voters expect it. And Hobbs can't win unless at least half of Arizona voters find batshit-crazy Trumpism and conspiratorialism at least somewhat off-putting. So let Lake rant -- and be the public champion of everyone offended by her ideas, rather than ceding the airwaves to her. (Lake will now get to turn the debate into her own town hall.)

Here's a taste of what Lake is like, from Wikipedia (the link numbers have been deleted):

In August 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Lake led anti-mask rallies, calling on Arizona State University students to go against the university's mask mandates. Lake said that as governor she would not tolerate mask and vaccine mandates of the COVID-19 pandemic. In November 2021, Lake told a group of Republican retirees that she was taking hydroxychloroquine to prevent COVID-19 infection. She stated that, as governor, she would work to have hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin produced in the state to "make it easier for us to get these lifesaving drugs." Lake questioned the science behind COVID-19 vaccines and said that she had not been vaccinated....

Lake ... described herself in 2022 as a "Trump candidate." ... She accused President Joe Biden and Democrats of harboring a "demonic agenda." ...

Lake said in 2022 that she considers abortion to be "the ultimate sin" and praised the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.... She expressed support for banning both surgical abortions and medication abortions in Arizona....

Lake has opposed legislation to create non-discrimination protections for people based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and opposing restrooms accommodating transgender people.

... in a tweet ... Lake said that if elected governor, she would not "recognize" federal gun laws....

Lake falsely claimed President Joe Biden did not receive 81 million votes and that Arizona (which was won by Biden in the 2020 presidential election) was actually won by Trump. After the 2021 Maricopa County presidential ballot audit found no evidence of election fraud, she demanded the election be "decertified" ... She endorsed a false assertion by Trump spokeswoman Liz Harrington that Democrats use mail-in ballots to rig elections. Lake tweeted quotes made by Sidney Powell on Lou Dobbs Tonight falsely asserting there was a sweeping election fraud conspiracy. She has advocated imprisoning Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (who is running for governor in 2022 as a Democrat) on baseless and unspecified allegations of criminality related to the 2020 election. Lake also called for imprisoning journalists.

If you're the opposing candidate, you have to stand up and confront a demagogue like Lake -- especially when she's said you should be imprisoned. You have to do what Hillary Clinon and Joe Biden did when they debated a TV star turned fascist demagogue in 2016 and 2020.

It can be savvy to duck debates when you have a large lead, but FiveThirtyEight says Hobbs is leading in the polls by less than a point.

Lake will be one of the worst governors in America if she's elected. It will be impossible for the Democratic ticket to win the state's electoral votes in 2024 if she's governor, no matter how the state's citizens vote. Hobbs is making a bad mistake. This is the kind of blunder that could decide the election.

SO THEY'RE USING MAGGIE HABERMAN TO TRY TO KEEP TRUMP OUT OF PRISON?

CNN reports:

Former President Donald Trump repeatedly told aides in the days following his 2020 election loss that he would remain in the White House rather than let incoming President Joe Biden take over, according to reporting provided to CNN from a forthcoming book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.

"I'm just not going to leave," Trump told one aide, according to Haberman.

"We're never leaving," Trump told another. "How can you leave when you won an election?" ...

Haberman writes that in the immediate aftermath of the November 3 elections, Trump seemed to recognize he had lost to Biden. He asked advisers to tell him what had gone wrong. He comforted one adviser, saying, "We did our best." Trump told junior press aides, "I thought we had it," seemingly almost embarrassed by the outcome, according to Haberman
.
But at some point, Trump's mood changed, Haberman writes, and he abruptly informed aides he had no intention of departing the White House in late January 2021 for Biden to move in.

He was even overheard asking the chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, "Why should I leave if they stole it from me?"

Is this what really happened? It's possible. Or it's possible that this is just what Trumpworld wanted Haberman to write, because her reporting becomes conventional wisdom, and Trump's circle wants the public -- including potential jurors in any Trump trial -- to think Trump really believed he'd won the election.

For some of the possible charges against Trump related to the post-election period, it will be necessary to prove corrupt intent in order to convict. (Or at least that's what high-minded legal analysts say. I think what's necessary is finding twelve jurors who never watch Fox News. If even one is a regular viewer, the government can present days and days of smoking-gun evidence and Trump will still avoid conviction.)

The "corrupt intent" standard makes me furious. It appears that even if a reasonable person should have known that Joe Biden won the election, and a reasonable person who is a prominent government official, in fact the most prominent government official, really should have known that Joe Biden won the election, Trump can still get away with claiming lack of corrupt intent if he says that he didn't know, even if he once knew and then stopped knowing, under the influence of Sidney Powell, the My Pillow guy, the Overstock.com guy, and other fine legal minds.

This comes at a time when, as I recently noted, it appears that ordinary people who have voted illegally get much harsher sentences if they didn't know they were breaking the law than if they did know and tell the authorities that, hell yeah, they cheated (on behalf of the Republicans) because they were sure the evil Antichrists of the Democrat Party were already cheating. In that case, corrupt intent seems to get you a reduced sentence, or maybe I'm confusing that with white skin.

In any case, I haven't read Haberman's book, which goes on sale October 4, so maybe this is not what she's telling us. But for now it seems that her sources fed her the line that Trump's intent wasn't corrupt, and she's dutifully retransmitting it.

DEAR REPUBLICANS: DUMP TRUMP AND MAYBE THE PUBLIC WILL CARE ABOUT HUNTER BIDEN

The Washington Examiner has published a lengthy review of the new right-wing attack film My Son Hunter. The piece, which is 2500 words long and seems longer, is by Dominic Green, a Very Serious conservative pundit -- he's written for The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist, among other publications. Green dislikes the movie but largely accepts the right-wing Hunter Biden narrative it's based on; he laments that the narrative will never be widely accepted in America, blaming a conspiracy of silence:

Hunter Biden’s business activities are a powder trail, yet most American media are unwilling to strike a match. Perhaps it might shed an unflattering light on their partisan efforts to suppress the story before the 2020 elections. Perhaps an unexpected detonation might damage a Democratic president who is floundering in the polls. Perhaps it would help former President Donald Trump, who threatens to run in 2024, or the Republicans, who promise to step up their inquiries if they recover Congress in the November midterm elections.

Hunter Biden is untouchable. Where once Dr. Faustus, busy with his pipes and decoctions in his home lab, cut a deal with Mephistopheles, Hunter, the Faust of Generation X, has done one better. He may have mortgaged his soul, but he enjoys near-unique privileges where it really matters, down here on the ground. This crackhead and whoremonger amassed millions as an influence-peddler. Hunter peddled as hard as he partied, and he peddled to pro-Putin oligarchs in Ukraine and party-adjacent squidillionaires in China. He was under the influence of a shopping list of illegal substances and a raging sex addiction, too, but his connection to his father was strong enough for his clients to believe that when they put Hunter on the board and the payroll, they were buying access and influence to Joe Biden.

Outside the right-wing bubble, no one cares. Perhaps the rest of America will care if Republicans take the House and/or Senate, because they'll start the first committee hearing on the president's son about ten minutes after they're sworn in next January, and hearings will still be taking place when the polls open in November 2024. But I think even this saturation coverage of the story won't matter.

That's for many reasons, but one of them is obvious: the existence of the Trump family. Many politically engaged Democratic voters can, in great detail, expound on the many corrupt acts the Trumps have engaged in. But even voters who haven't paid much attention can see the obvious: Donald Trump lives surrounded by the spoils of wealth. He owns gaudy estates. He sits on gold-plated toilets. Joe Biden's life in Delaware seems ... simple. Here he is taking a bike ride! Here he is hanging out with a German shepherd! Biden's day-to-day habits seems the opposite of corrupt, while Trump and his family seem to be telling us: We may or may not be amoral serial felons surrounded by ill-gotten gains, but we sure want it to look as if we are.

The life of Hunter Biden has been decadent, but all his escapades seem to head in the same direction: straight toward the gutter. Maybe he had ill-gotten gains, but they weren't gotten for very long. As soon as Hunter acquired them, they appear to have departed, either up his nose or in a prostitute's cleavage. By contrast, even when Donald Trump was nearly a billion dollars in debt thirty years ago, his message was: I've still got it all, and nobody can take it away from me!

I despise Ron DeSantis with every fiber of my being, but there are no pictures of him like this:

Republicans should dump Trump if they want to have any chance of persuading Americans outside their base that Hunter Biden got away with something.

THE PREDICTABLE REPUBLICAN FREAKOUT IF DEMOCRATS EXCEED EXPECTATIONS IN NOVEMBER

Tom Bonier is the CEO of TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm. He's been telling people that voter registration since the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision has heavily favored Democrats. Last week he wrote this in a New York Times op-ed:

In my 28 years of analyzing elections, I had never seen anything like what’s happened in the past two months in American politics: Women are registering to vote in numbers I never witnessed before. I’ve run out of superlatives to describe how different this moment is, especially in light of the cycles of tragedy and eventual resignation of recent years. This is a moment to throw old political assumptions out the window and to consider that Democrats could buck historic trends this cycle....

Election prognostication relies heavily on precedent. Yet there is no precedent for an election centered on the removal of a constitutional right affirmed a half-century before. Every poll we consume over the closing weeks of this election will rely on a likely voter model for which we have no benchmark.

Then on Thursday there was this in the Houston Chronicle:

A new analysis from political data and polling firm TargetSmart found that while Texas’ new voter registrants are evenly split between men and women, they are younger and more Democratic than before the June ruling.

“It’s not that we’re not seeing a surge from women but that in Texas, we’re somewhat uniquely also seeing a surge from men, particularly younger, more progressive men, who are matching the surge from women,” said the firm’s CEO Tom Bonier....

According to TargetSmart, Democrats now have a 10-percentage point advantage among new registrants since Dobbs, making up 42 percent to Republicans’ 32 percent. Prior to Dobbs, Republicans had a five-point advantage.

The state’s young voters — defined as those under age 25 — are also leaning more blue, the analysis found. Democrats now make up 47 percent of young Texas voters, up from 34 percent. The Republican share has remained the same at just under 30 percent.

That’s in line with what TargetSmart is seeing in 25 states that report party registration.

I don't know if what Bonier is saying is accurate, and if so, I don't know if it's enough to overcome the usual GOP voter enthusiasm and other advantages that regularly lead to Republican victories in states like Florida, Texas, Georgia, and Arizona.

But what if Bonier is right? What if the polls we're seeing are based on likely-voter models that don't take this surge of pro-Democratic enthusiasm and anger into account? What if Democrats beat expectations in November and win not only the races where they're seen as competitive, but a few where they aren't?

That would be awesome. It would also make Republicans' heads explode.

In 2016 and 2020, the polls underestimated Republican turnout. Regardless of what the GOP will tell you, Democrats never questioned that those votes were real. In 2016 we complained about leaks, disinformation, and psychologically manipulative ads microtargeted to voters based on corruptly obtained Facebook user data. We blamed the Russians. We blamed James Comey for his last-minute announcement that the Hillary Clinton investigation was being reopened. But we never doubted that the votes were real. We acknowledged that Trump won the Electoral College in 2016, and nearly won it in 2020, because, to a greater extent than we'd anticipated, eligible voters had cast lawful ballots for Donald Trump (and, in 2020, for candidates we'd expected to lose, such as Susan Collins).

Republicans won't react that way this year if polls are underestimating Democratic strength. They'll cry fraud. And where they control the electoral process, they'll say that the difference between the polls and the election results is all the evidence they need to show that fraud happened.

After the votes were counted in 2016, Democrats beat themselves up: How did we underestimate this right-wing anger? Were we unable to perceive it because we live in an elite bubble? The media sources we relied on churned out endless pieces, most of them written in diners, that tried to identify the voters we'd overlooked and explain how they thought.

Nothing like that will happen if Democrats overperform in November. I worry that the same mainstream media will take Republicans' claims of fraud seriously, because the Republicans making the allegations will be seasoned pros like Ron DeSantis and Brian Kemp, not amateurs and clowns like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.

In my last post, I predicted widespread cheating by Republicans in the midterms. I think it's likely that many Republicans will try to cheat, but honest election officials -- the ones who haven't been driven to retire -- could still prevent serious fraud from taking place. But then these same honest officials might be accused of dishonesty for counting real Democratic votes. It might get ugly.

REPUBLICAN ELECTORAL FRAUD WILL BE RAMPANT THIS YEAR, WON'T IT?

Greg Sargent flags a CNN story about poll-worker training in Michigan:

The evening before Michigan's state primary, Wayne County GOP leaders held a Zoom training session for poll workers and partisan observers -- warning them about "bad stuff happening" during the election and encouraging them to ignore local election rules barring cell phones and pens from polling places and vote-counting centers.

"None of the constraints that they're putting on this are legal," former state senator Patrick Colbeck told trainees on the August 1 call.

As far as cell phones, "I would say maybe just hide it or something, and maybe hide a small pad and a small pen or something like that because you need to take accurate notes," Cheryl Costantino, the GOP county chairwoman and host of the call, told participants.

Some participants raised concerns about being tossed out if they broke the rules. "That's why you got to do it secretly," Costantino replied.

Sargent writes:

These Republicans aren’t just urging rule-breaking at the polls. They’re also justifying it by claiming in advance that Democrats are the real cheaters, per CNN, thus pre-fabricating a phony rationale for their own chicanery.

This self-justifying ruse — Democrats will inevitably cheat, so pretty much anything goes to set things right — is absolutely foundational to right-wing efforts to corrupt democracy across the board, including laying the groundwork to steal future elections.

Also see this detail from a recent New York Times story about the wide range of punishments meted out in recent cases of voter fraud (generally speaking, if you're middle-class and cheated deliberately, you get a slap on the wrist, but if you're poor and genuinely believed you were entitled to vote, you get the book thrown at you):

An Iowa woman, Terri Lynn Rote, said she cast two ballots for Mr. Trump in 2016 because she believed her first vote would be switched to favor Hillary Clinton. “I wasn’t planning on doing it twice — it was spur of the moment,” she later told The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier. “The polls are rigged.”

A judge fined her $750 and sentenced her to two years’ probation.

This comes at a time when the new hotness on the right is the argument that Democrats want to criminalize being a Republican (or being a Trumpist, which to most Republicans is the same thing). Last week, right-wing commentator Matt Taibbi told readers of his Substack that President Biden, in his Philadelphia speech, "sure sounded like a man preparing to criminalize Trumpism." Today, FrontPage Magazine's Daniel Greenfield warns of "The Coming Outlawing of the Republican Party":

Republicans want to hold the majority and co-exist with Democrats, while Democrats, under the influence of the Left, want to eliminate Republicans.

This fundamental difference between the two sides was on display during Biden’s fascist rant in Philadelphia where he denounced half the country as a threat to democracy.

Greenfield's evidence is a court ruling affecting precisely one (1) Republican officeholder, a New Mexico county commissioner and convicted January 6 insurrectionist who has now been removed from office under a provision of the Fourteenth Amendment prescribing that penalty for those who have "engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States government. Prior to his removal, the commissioner, Couy Griffin, showed his respect for democracy by refusing to certify the results of the county's primary election this year, even under a court order, citing no reason to doubt their accuracy except "my gut feeling and my own intuition."

The message being sent to Republicans is that they'll all be put in camps soon by the fascist supervillain Joe Biden (who apparently is no longer an addle-pated dementia sufferer). So how scrupulous do you think they're likely to be about following election laws? I assume that they'll regard double-voting, harassment of Democrats at the polls, and probably all the chicanery they claim Democrats engaged in two years ago -- voting-machine manipulation, dropbox-stuffing, boxes of fake ballots -- as necessary to save America and freedom.

I see that Virginia, under that nice Governor Fleecevest, is starting a copycat version of Ron DeSantis's "election integrity" unit.

BREAKING: Va.'s GOP Attorney General Jason Miyares announces he will create an "Election Integrity Unit" that will prosecute alleged election law violations. Will have 20+ attorneys. Va. has not seen significant issues with voter fraud.

— justin jouvenal (@jjouvenal) September 9, 2022

Maybe it's time for some Democratic governors and attorneys general to do the same thing. They might actually find quite a bit of fraud, from the Republican side, especially this year.

QUEEN ELIZABETH IS DEAD, AND RIGHT-WING CRAZIES ARE HAVING A NORMAL ONE

Queen Elizabeth has died, and the reaction at some right-wing comments sections is a bit unhinged.

At TheDonald (aka patriots.win):

She's fucking 97 years old...

****

A fucking 97 year old can still die from the Clot Shot.

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Guarantee you she didn't get the shot.

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Elites got Harmless Saline Solution for the cameras. Think about it .... The secret service protects Potatus even if there is a on in a million chance something will happen to him. You think they are gonna put a real shot of experimental gene therapy treatment into him? the truth is so obvious it hurts

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I think the globalists never told her it was poison. She definitely got the shot. They want to abolish the monarchy so what better way.

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I don't think any lizard got the shot.

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It is hilarious that we pretend the clot shot only kills healthy people under 50 because anyone else gets another excuse attached nearly every time.

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As long as she is queen, Charles is not a king. Charles is a globalist puppet. For all her faults, the Queen is not.

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I have never heard this. Can you give an example of when she has stood up against the globalist agenda? Not saying you're wrong just surprised to hear this.

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its more that she didn't push any of the globalist wank

when you are in a position such as that and you realise the globalist wank is all around you there is little you can do without fear of repercussions (an accident down the stairs ending her reign a few years early for example)

charles has been pushing the globalist wank with gusto in recent years

with the queen dead this is the beginning of the end of the monarchy as far as i am concerned

So to sum up: The queen either died from receiving the coronavirus vaccine ("the clot shot") or she was given a fake shot to fool the rubes. She wasn't really a globalist but Charles is, so goodbye monarchy. Got it?

(By the way, she was 96, not 97.)

What's up at Gateway Pundit? Let's take a look....

Good riddance to the jab pusher who murdered tens of thousands by saying the jab was harmless.

Doesnt matter whether she knew or was stupid. She was too influential to make such a statement without knowing for sure.

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You mean what she did in the shadows with Jimmy Seville to her country.

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And ted heath, lord Mountbatten, Rolf Harris and the school kids that disappeared on a picnic with her in Indonesia in the 70's.

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And the native Canadian orphans who disappeared with her and Philip on a picnic.
Anyone with a brain knows she and her reptilian relatives are/were E V I L.

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The numbers are massive . A death cult leader gone today ! Woot!

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I don't doubt that adrenochrome helped keep that old bag alive.

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This monarchy will die with her! Charles or Willian do not have the strength, character, faith, or integrity to withstand the woke mob and the WEF!

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withstand? They are PART of the woke mob!

So are the surviving members of the royal family pawns of the World Economic Forum? Are they "lizard people"? Were they and the queen personally responsible for Jimmy Savile's pedophilia at the BBC? Apparently so!

A Free Republic thread directs us to this Substack post by Jordan Shachtel, which I believe represents the consensus right-wing opinion regarding Charles (I expect to hear many of these points on Fox in the next few days):

[Queen Elizabeth's] successor ... can best be understood as the WEF (World Economic Forum) king. King Charles is truly a king for our times, in the worst possible way imaginable. He is a perfect representation of the western ruling class and its pernicious agenda.

Charles, to put it bluntly, is an anti-human reprobate, who has lived a life of disgrace, hypocrisy, and corruption. But his lifestyle is the least of the issues at hand. Charles is a king who has embraced and promoted the most destructive causes of our times.

Most notably, Charles is both a climate catastrophist and an advocate for the depopulation agenda. Last year, he demanded a “war-like footing,” in calling for the sabotage of reliable energy resources to tackle the so-called climate crisis. Charles’s initiatives, and his promotion of the destructive Paris Climate Accords and the U.N.’s Climate Change Conference objectives, has helped position the U.K. on the precipice of energy disaster....

The newly minted king is also an avowed proponent of depopulation, having on multiple occasions called for population control of broader civilization....

At the onset of COVID Mania, Charles sat down with World Economic Forum leader Klaus Schwab, in which the pair excitedly championed a “Great Reset” to “solve the climate crisis and restore the natural world.” In a podcast with Schwab, Charles advocated “carbon pricing” of goods and a “net zero” agenda, which, of course, would result in mass human suffering....

Charles doesn’t actually care about the environment. It serves as window dressing for his true aims. His advocacy for the “green” agenda, through Davos talking points, is part of a campaign to usurp more power for the “elite” circles that he travels within. Charles has spent the last several years dedicating lots of time and energy to promoting the ESG agenda, which acts to cartelize industry and create financial monopolies in the name of the environment.

Finally, I can get a sense of what it feels like to be a Patriot in the time of the American Revolution. Charles is a king worthy of our disdain. He has embraced the evil ideologies of our times. He represents a series of radical movements that seek to impose ruin upon the masses, to the benefit of the ruling class. Charles is no king of the people. He is the WEF king.

So that's how the right is mourning Queen Elizabeth. You can't help but admire their quiet dignity and tact.

A SPOILED BRAT IS NOT A NIHILIST

At The Atlantic, Tom Nichols writes about President Biden's recent Philadelphia speech and accuses the MAGA movement of nihilism:

... Biden got one big thing right, and that one thing explains why Donald Trump and the MAGA World apologists are reacting with such fury. The president outed them as anti-American nihilists:

... MAGA Republicans have made their choice. They embrace anger. They thrive on chaos. They live not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies.

This, as Biden pointed out, is what makes the MAGA movement so dangerous. It has no functional compass and no set of actual preferences beyond a generalized resentment, a basket of gripes and grudges against others who the Trumpists think are looking down upon them or living better lives than they are....

These citizens do not want a discussion or a compromise. They don’t even want to “win,” in any traditional political sense of that word. They want to vent anger over their lives—their personal problems, their haunted sense of inferiority, and their fears about social status—on other Americans, as vehemently as possible, even to the point of violence....

The MAGA movement isn’t interested in politics, or policies, or compromises. It is interested in destruction and seeing others made as miserable as its followers are. MAGA is a movement of people who seem to be, in so many ways, deeply and profoundly unhappy, and suffering from an emptiness and anger deep in their spirit.

But MAGA does have a "functional compass" and a "set of actual preferences": We get what we want and people who don't like us are owned. Elsewhere in the piece, Nichols says precisely this:

How do any of us, and especially the president, engage with such a movement, when every discussion includes the belief that the only legitimate outcomes are ones in which the MAGA choice wins?

Say what you will about "We should win 100% of the time," but it's a belief system. It's not nihilism -- it's infantilism. It's the belief system of a child in the back seat of a car throwing a temper tantrum.

A child throwing a temper tantrum wants what he wants now, and doesn't care about any other possible consequences -- you should pull the car over and attend to his needs right away. This is how spoiled children see the world. It's also how billionaires see the world, which is why MAGA and mainstream Republicanism work so well together. Billionaires don't care whether endless tax cuts for their class and increasing inequality and the dismantling of the regulatory state make the country unable to function for the rest of us -- they want what they want, and they assume their money will shield them from any negative societal consequences. The MAGAs think nothing bad will ever happen to their kind if they remake the world to their specifications -- they won't get slaughtered in a mass shooting, they won't get long COVID, they won't have a gay or trans child who's persecuted, they won't have an ectopic pregnancy the state considers suspicious.

And in the worst case, they prepare for doomsday. MAGA is full of doomsday preppers, but their prepping isn't nihilism or the result of being "deeply and profoundly unhappy." Whether they admit it to themselves or not, they want the apocalypse. They think they'll thrive in it -- and we won't. They want an America in which they're dominant and we're submissive, and they're convinced that a Mad Max world in which they have bunkers and we don't would be the ultimate in lib-owning.

And as Douglas Rushkoff recently wrote, billionaires are engaging in doomsday prep too, although their bunkers are much more luxe. You can say that their desire to drive the planet to an irreversible catastrophe is nihilism, but I see them as a class of spoiled brats who focus on nothing except always getting their way. And that's a belief system.

REPUBLICANS REALLY MIGHT LOSE THE SENATE BECAUSE THEY'RE ASSHOLES

John Fetterman, still recovering from a stroke, has told Politico that he intends to debate his opponent in the Pensylvania Senate race, but not until October:

“We’re absolutely going to debate Dr. Oz, and that was really always our intent to do that,” Fetterman told POLITICO in an exclusive interview. “It was just simply only ever been about addressing some of the lingering issues of the stroke, the auditory processing, and we’re going to be able to work that out.”

Fetterman declined to specify which debate he will attend or provide an exact date for it, though he said it will “be sometime in the middle to end of October” on a “major television station” in the state.

Fetterman has been limiting his campaign appearances, and seems somewhat halting in his speech in recent clips. Republicans, of course, want to take advantage of his infirmity in order to win the election. The outgoing Republican senator, Pat Toomey, has a conventional approach to the situation: He's insinuating that Fetterman can't serve while disguising the message as concern:

“I’ve worked with senators in both parties, sadly, who have seriously diminished intellectual or communication capabilities, and I can tell you, that’s a very different thing,” said Toomey. “It’s really hard to be an effective voice for your constituents if you cannot engage in that way.”

But the message from Dr. Oz's campaign is pure assholery:

Asked for comment on Fetterman’s debate commitment, Oz spokesperson Barney Keller said, “Is it possible to quote somebody laughing?”

This follows another campaign spokesperson's statement: “If John Fetterman had ever eaten a vegetable in his life, then maybe he wouldn’t have had a major stroke and wouldn’t be in the position of having to lie about it constantly.”

These aren't slip-ups. These are calculated moments of assholism. It's standard behavior for Republicans in this campaign. Oz isn't the only GOP Senate candidate in a winnable race who's (a) acting this way and (b) trailing in the polls. Here's Ron Johnson, who's up for re-election, attacking the media for asking him questions and attacking his fellow Wisconsin senator, Tammy Baldwin, who was the first openly gay person elected to the Senate:

Wow.

Johnson takes a swipe at fellow WI Senator Tammy Baldwin for... trying to pass marriage equality legislation? https://t.co/KzZHGtusEg

— Tim Hogan (@timjhogan) September 7, 2022

And here's Blake Masters attacking his opponent in the Arizona Senate race for ... being an ex-astronaut (but not, apparently, the really cool kind of astronaut):

Blake Masters implies Mark Kelly’s NASA career isn’t a big deal because he only went to “International Space Station space, not even like space.”

Masters: “He was an astronaut. That’s fine. That’s cool. That works one time.” pic.twitter.com/HnDYlhdIPF

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) September 5, 2022

Republicans are struggling to retake the Senate because women are furious about the end of Roe v. Wade, because Donald Trump can't be silenced, and because the party's extremism is rampant all over the country. But they would be in a much better position to win seats if so many of them hadn't decided that being an asshole is what voters really want. I realize that it's what Republican voters really want, but this just might be the year when Democrats and independents vote in sufficent numbers to defeat Republicans who lean into assholism.

I'm not sure Republicans will be able to abandon assholism even if they struggle in the midterms -- their two top presidential contenders, after all, are two of the proudest assholes in America. But it looks as if they'll pay a price for rampant assholism this year.

IT'S THE LIBERALISM, STUPID

Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report is baffled by the apparent contradiction between President Biden's poll numbers and the Democrats' numbers for the midterms:

In [a recent] Pew survey, 37 percent of voters said they either strongly or somewhat approved of the job Biden was doing in office. Not surprisingly 93 percent of those who strongly approve and 86 percent who somewhat approve say they are voting Democratic this fall. Among the 43 percent of voters who give Biden "very unfavorable" marks, 82 percent of those voters say they are supporting a Republican for Congress.

But, among the 17 percent of voters who say they "somewhat disapprove" of Biden, 43 percent say they are planning to vote Democratic this fall, compared to 29 percent who say they'll vote Republican.

In other words, those who are "meh" about Biden are voting for Democrats. This is not something that we've seen before.

At Politico, Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini expresses skepticism about the possibility that Democrats can do well in the midterms, because the party in the White House nearly always loses seats in Congress:

The Democratic argument, I guess, would be that this is something of an election almost like ’98 or ’02, where you had kind of a historical event happen that disrupts that midterm pattern. I think that the burden of proof is maybe a little bit higher on Democrats here, because that doesn’t happen very often. The counter-examples are small, right? The ’98 midterm with the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the ’02 midterm after 9/11. Is there a possibility that overturning Roe v. Wade was kind of a historical event or a disruption on the level of those things? Yeah, it’s possible. But Biden is not necessarily sitting at a 60 percent plus approval rating as we’re having this conversation.

Ruffini's point is that, yes, Democrats did well in the 1998 midterms, but Bill Clinton was a very popular president. George W. Bush was very popular in 2002 in the aftermath of 9/11. Joe Biden's numbers are going up, but he's not popular.

The simple explanation: It's the Dobbs decision. But Democrats' numbers were better than Biden's even before Dobbs. On May 1, the day before the draft Dobbs decision leaked, Democrats were only 2.4 points behind Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, according to FiveThirtyEight. Biden's approval number at the time was 10.3 points below his disapproval number.

It's the liberalism, stupid. Many voters want what they thought a Biden presidency promised: relief on health care and college costs, efforts to curb gun violence, policies to reduce climate change, tax increases for the rich, seriousness on COVID. But some voters who now say they disapprove of Biden think he hasn't delivered.

When they were in office, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush were seen as doing what they set out to do -- if you didn't like them, it was because you didn't like their policies. With Biden, it's different -- some people don't like his policies, but others think see him as struggling to get the country where he wants it to go. They see a Republican Supreme Court and corporatist pseudo-Democrats blocking his agenda. They see Donald Trump walking free. They see radical Republicans at the state and local level terrorizing teachers and librarians. But Biden hasn't seemed like the solution to those problems.

Amy Walter writes:

There's plenty of reason to think that a good chunk of these "somewhat disapprovers" are Democrats. [A] pollster who shared [a] non-profit survey with me said their survey showed these voters to be overwhelming Democratic and 'skew young.'

That was certainly true when Biden's numbers were at their worst in midsummer.

For 30-44 year olds, he is -28.

For 45-64 year olds, he is -33.

For 65+ year olds, he's -11.

But for the youngest, most liberal, most Democratic group of voters: -50.

— Will Stancil (@whstancil) July 11, 2022

The liberal agenda isn't everyone's agenda. We're still more or less a 50-50 nation. But we're a 50-50 nation with a 40-60 skew on the president. That's because of how Biden's competence has been perceived. But he's not on the ballot this year.

YOU DON'T HAVE TO LET THEM LIE

NPR's David Folkenflik has a fairly good story on the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News. The breaking news is that a Fox producer, who's not named, sent an email warning that one Fox host's claims of fraud after the 2020 presidential election were toxic:

The November 2020 email from an anguished Fox News news producer to colleagues sent up a flare amid a fusillade of false claims.

The producer warned: Fox cannot let host Jeanine Pirro back on the air. She is pulling conspiracy theories from dark corners of the Web to justify then-President Donald Trump's lies that the election had been stolen from him. The existence of the email, confirmed by two people with direct knowledge of it, is first publicly disclosed by NPR in this story.

The NPR story provides some examples of Pirro's on-air commentary:

On Nov. 14, 2020, for example, the day that Biden clinched his victory, Pirro questioned why vote counts shifted against Trump over the course of Election Night in such states as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. (Some counties were counted later than others; ballots cast the same day were often tallied before those cast by mail.) "The Dominion Software System has been tagged as one allegedly capable of flipping votes," Pirro told viewers, as she promoted Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell's "findings" on Dominion. (A federal judge in Michigan later officially sanctioned Powell for her actions in court on Trump's behalf after the elections, while the Texas state law bar is seeking to have her formally punished.)

Folkenflik reached out to Fox for its side of the story. Here's what Fox said:

"Freedom of the press is foundational to our democracy and must be protected," a senior spokeswoman for Fox News said in a statement to NPR. She called the damages claims "outrageous, unsupported and not rooted in sound financial analysis, serving as nothing more than a flagrant attempt to deter our journalists from doing their jobs."

"All you're reporting to the public is that somebody - in this case, the president of the United States - has made the allegation of voter fraud by Dominion," Dan Webb, Fox News' outside attorney on the case, tells NPR. "I don't know how anything could be more newsworthy than the president of the United States making the allegation, and his lawyers making the allegations in court, because that's so fundamental."

Does Folkenflik explain that that's not "all" Fox was "reporting to the public"? Does he point out that there was far more in the disputed broadcasts than just a recounting of what President Trump was saying about the election?

No. And while you might say it's obvious that the Fox statement is at odds with the facts, Folkenkflik should have said so explicitly. I get it: The mainstream press believes that the subject of a negative story has a right to respond. But the right to respond is not a right to inject an unchallenged lie into the discussion.

As Dominion's complaint against Fox makes clear, Pirro, Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs, and other Fox hosts repeatedly hosted such conspiratorialists as Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani -- Powell was a regular guest on Fox well after the Trump White House cut ties with her. The Fox hosts reported their outlandish claims even after state and federal government bodies rejected them. This wasn't neutral reporting. Fox went out of its way to put conspiratorialists on the air. So why let the Fox spokesman lie about this now?

Folkenflik does tell us:

In conducting the first interview of Trump after the election, Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo told Trump and her viewers, "This is disgusting, and we cannot allow America's election to be corrupted." In mid-December, Bartiromo announced that "an intel source" told her that Trump had won the election. She never followed up with any further material to substantiate that reporting.

And:

In December 2020, while still a Fox Business host, [Lou] Dobbs said opponents of President Trump throughout the government had committed "treason," and later suggested that any Republican who upheld President-elect Joe Biden's victory in the Electoral College may be "criminal."

That implicitly rebuts the Fox statement -- but readers sould still be told that the statement is false.

There's also this in the story:

Asked by NPR whether Fox still considers Bartiromo a news anchor, and thus part of Fox's news and reporting division, rather than its opinion side, a network spokeswoman declined to comment. It is the first known time Fox has not identified Bartiromo as a news-side journalist.

This is nonsense framing that Fox has been getting away with for years. Fox backs critics down by claiming that it's a first-rate news outlet that also happens to broadcast a few hours of opinion a week. The implication is that you can't blame the "real" Fox -- the news side -- for what a few peripheral opinion hotheads say in prime time. Even if we were to ignore the fact that those opinion-mongers make Fox most of its money, what difference does it make whether a false and defamatory statement is made by an opinion-side host or a news-side host? If Tucker Carlson or Jeanine Pirro falsely described you on the air as a child molester, would you be any less defamed than if Bill Hemmer said the same thing?

Let's watch how this case unfolds. I'm not expecting much, but maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised.