GUARDRAILS 2.0: THE DeSANTIS YEARS

The Bulwark's Jonathan Last doesn't have much respect for Ron DeSantis's latest moves on COVID:

... the COVID stuff? My God: More than a million Americans died from it. People still die from it every day. And DeSantis is playing games with this disease.

But Last also portrays it as mostly boob-bait for right-wing bubbas:

... none of these proposals will amount to anything. Which is perfectly in line with the DeSantis modus operandi: big, performative, shit-stirring uses of government power—that are quickly (and quietly) walked back, overturned, or abandoned.

Remember the Stop WOKE Act? It was DeSantis’s big anti-CRT-in-schools legislation.... It was stopped by the courts because it is flatly and obviously unconstitutional.

Remember when DeSantis punished Disney for opposing his Don’t Say Gay law by revoking the company’s Reedy Creek special tax district? Yeah, that’s going by the wayside because it wasn’t thought out and would wind up costing Florida taxpayers money....

And how about DeSantis’s mass “voter fraud” arrests, which managed to round up a bunch of people who don’t look like they live in the Villages on trumped-up voter-fraud charges? Yeah, those cases are falling apart in court because they had no basis in law.

Oh—and don’t forget the DeSantis promise to ship immigrants out of Florida after his stunt sending asylum seekers from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard blew up in his face.

This is what he does. And his anti-vaccine programs are no different.

No vaccine maker will be prosecuted in Florida.

There will be no peer-reviewed research showing that the risks of vaccine side effects were greater than the benefits.

A “Public Health Integrity Committee” will not interfere with the practice of medicine in Florida.

And that’s by design.

I don't like this framing. Last is certain that DeSantis knows his wingnut-pleasing assaults on decency will be stopped before they go too far. But if you were a Florida teacher who felt you could lose a job (or face death threats) for helping an LGBT student cope or for teaching accurate racial history, what you went through is real. If your life was turned upside down when you arrested for voting after being told that you had the right, your suffering was real. Maybe the courts will reverse or limit most of DeSantis's worst policies eventually -- but until that happens, real people suffer.

Last recognizes this:

The DeSantis stuff especially grinds my gears because he’s not shitposting on Twitter—he’s using the awesome power of the state to hurt real people. The alleged vote fraudsters? These were actual human beings with jobs and families. The asylum seekers from Venezuela he tricked into going to Martha’s Vineyard? They’re folks who braved unimaginable horrors to escape an ugly dictatorship.

But I'm afraid that the main thrust of Last's argument -- that, in the end, none of these bad policies stick, and that DeSantis doesn't really want them to, because he's just trying to win over right-wing voters and isn't really an extremist -- will become the conventional wisdom in the mainstream media. This would be part of the process whereby the media sells DeSantis as the mainstream, moderate, within-the-pale alternative to Donald Trump.

Also: After Donald Trump, do we really want to trust that President DeSantis would be constrained by guardrails? The current U.S. Supreme Court, in all likelihood, is further to the right than the Florida Supreme Court, and a Congress in which both houses are controlled by the GOP could easily be further to the right than the Florida legislature. Why should we feel certain that DeSantis's worst excesses as president would be curbed?

I don't believe DeSantis is playing eleven-dimensional chess in the way Last describes. I think DeSantis simply doesn't care what happens to people as a result of his actions, as long as the libs are owned and his poll numbers rise. I don't know whether Last is right or I am. But I hope those of us outside Florida never have to find out.

THE TRUMP REBOOT: NFTs AND ALSO ... A POLICY-ORIENTED LISTENING TOUR? SERIOUSLY?

Yes, Donald Trump embarrassed himself today by announcing that he's selling licensed collectible NFTs/trading cards depicting himself "as a superhero with laser eyes, an astronaut, a John Wayne-like cowboy and a golfer – along with, of course, a dark-suited Trump surrounded by gold bars" ... y'know, the way would-be Leaders of the Free World routinely do. But the Trump campaign has also given the Murdoch press an advance look at efforts to make him look serious. First, The Wall Street Journal reports on campaign strategy:

Rather than staging signature, large-scale rallies, the plan calls for Mr. Trump to tour key states and conduct smaller policy events, focusing on crime, border security, foreign policy, big tech and the economy, according to people involved in the preparation. Rallies would resume later in the year; advisers said it was never the plan to do such events early on.

The goal of the policy events, these people said, is to remind voters of the ideas Mr. Trump advanced during his time in office, which remain popular among Republicans even if his personal style isn’t.

So the plan to reverse Trump's polling tailspin is to have him sitting around big conference tables nodding during dull policy discussions as if he understand the details of what he's hearing? That's how he's going to beat Ron DeSantis?

And in the New York Post, we have this:

Former President Donald Trump vowed Thursday that he will ban the federal government from using the terms “misinformation” and “disinformation” to describe domestic speech if he retakes the White House.

The 76-year-old Trump made the pledge as part of a broader “free speech” platform announced in a video policy statement shared with The Post — vowing also to impose a seven-year ban on former FBI and CIA workers handling private-sector US consumer records....

“The censorship cartel must be dismantled and destroyed — and it must happen immediately,” Trump said in the video, which is expected to be the first in a series of policy announcements as part of his 2024 presidential campaign.

... Trump’s proposals [include] limiting Section 230 legal immunity for tech platforms unless they act with political neutrality....

“Within hours of my inauguration, I will sign an executive order banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organization, business, or person, to censor, limit, categorize, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens,” he said.

“I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as ‘mis-‘ or ‘dis-information’. And I will begin the process of identifying and firing every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship — directly or indirectly — whether they are the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the FBI, the DOJ, no matter who they are.”

That gets Trump a bit closer to the pleasure/rage centers in the brains of GOP base voters. But is it as viscerally appealing as calling Mexican immigrants "rapists"? For that matter, is it as viscerally appealing as flying immigrants to Martha's Vineyard, arresting alleged illegal voters, and terrorizing Disney, which is stuff Ron DeSantis has actually done recently (even if nearly all of it is facing pushback in the courts and elsewhere)?

Part of Trump's brand is that he's a culture warrior, but it's not that he's a wonky culture warrior. Trump isn't supposed to sound like a guy who understands the details and knows which subsections of the law to rewrite. He's supposed to just barge in and start throwing punches. This might be what Stephen Miller and other advisors want Trump to be, but it's not what Trump's fans want him to be.

The NFTs make Trump look like a guy who's retired from the fray and is just cashing in. The policy statements make him look like ... a guy who wants to be Blake Masters. This isn't going to win him the nomination.

I DON'T KNOW WHAT TRUMP PLANS TO ANNOUNCE, BUT I ASSUME IT WILL BE UNDERWHELMING (updated)

WTF?

Here's some speculation:

Trump won't be announcing a running mate. The video suggests that this announcement, like most things in his life, is all about him. He wouldn't depict himself as a superhero only to give someone else the spotlight. And if he somehow manages to win the nomination -- which polling suggests is becoming less and less likely -- he won't run with DeSantis because DeSantis is clearly too ambitious and would threaten Trump's alpha status. At this point, I don't believe DeSantis would run with Trump. Why should he saddle himself with that has-been when the most powerful man in America, Rupert Murdoch, could be on the verge of getting him elected president?

There's a name for people who announce a running mate before the nomination is decided: they're called losers. Ronald Reagan did it as a desperation move in 1976. Ted Cruz did it in 2016. It was a futile act in both cases.

Maybe Trump plans to announce that he's a candidate for Speaker of the House, although that's unlikely. He's expressed support for Kevin McCarthy. Also, he wouldn't win. The Constitution says he can do it, but why would he try?

A few possibilities, all of which would be underwhelming and embarrassing:

* He's returning to Twitter.

* He's filing some ridiculous new lawsuit to overturn the results of either the 2020 election or the Arizona gubernatorial election (though I don't know how he would have standing in the latter case).

* He's publishing a book of his correspondence. (We already know he's planning to do that, but maybe, out of desperation, he's planning to announce the book himself in the hope of getting one decent news cycle, not that anyone cares.)

* He's just going to rant about his usual grievances, but he plans to do it in a very QAnon way, with references to "the Storm" and so on, so believers will think he's a superhero who'll soon round up all the liberal cannibal pedophiles.

Or maybe Vladimir Putin likes him enough to let him get the credit for the release of Paul Whelan. That would be real news. But even the Russians don't seem to like Trump anymore.

Beyond that, I'm stumped. Any thoughts?

*****

UPDATE: Okay, maybe Trump really is running for Speaker. At Post, Seth Ambramson writes:

Went online to see Roger Stone writing about Trump running for Speaker of the House, Michael Flynn writing about Trump running for Speaker of the House, MAGA-world hangers-on Jovan Hutton Pulitzer and Forgiato Blow writing about Trump running for Speaker of the House, and Trump whisperer Maggie Haberman being suspiciously quiet on Twitter except for a single highly random “like” of a tweet about the Speaker of the House race and how Kevin McCarthy doesn’t have the votes to win it and has no path to get those votes....

It certainly is what Bill Kristol just tweeted he is certain Trump is going to do, and it would be consistent with Trump’s bizarre, obtuse, superhero-themed announcement from yesterday....

Trump running for Speaker of the House as a bizarre compromise pick between McCarthy and the House Freedom Caucus holdouts would also—and I can’t believe I’m saying this—make a lot of political sense for Trump in terms of keeping him in the spotlight, raising his profile during his presidential campaign, and putting him essentially in control over the narrative in Washington as well as the minute tactics of elected Republican officials there for the duration of the 2024 presidential election cycle.

But how would he win? We know that much of the GOP is fed up with Trump and blames him for the 2022 midterm results. We know that even House members who fear alienating Trump supporters can say that while the Constitution allows for a Speaker who isn't an elected member, picking someone outside the House is just a bad idea. And while there aren't many GOP moderates in the House, there are enough to deny Trump a majority. So how will he get 218 votes? And if he loses -- if he's a loser, the worst thing, in his view, that he can possibly be -- then what? He'll say the vote was rigged? In Congress? How?

Maybe he'll announce that he's ready if asked, on the assumption that he won't be asked. But won't he look like a loser if he's not asked? I just don't get it.

*****

UPDATE: The announcement was even more absurd than I expected:

NEVER FORGET: REPUBLICANS THINK OUR COVID STRATEGIES ARE FAKE AND WE SUPPORT THEM ONLY BECAUSE WE'RE TYRANTS

A journalist who works at the Southern Poverty Law Center is puzzled by Ron DeSantis's anti-public-health witch hunt:

In my line of work I see this nonsense all the time but — taking a step back — it’s a pretty crazy deep cut for the governor of the third most populous state pic.twitter.com/ERjUCCbciK

— jason wilson (@jason_a_w) December 14, 2022

But it's not crazy. Here's what you need to understand: The Republican base believes that all the established figures who mobilized to fight COVID are corrupt, and that liberals know this. Republicans think we've supported vaccine mandates, masking, and other COVID mitigation and prevention strategies only because we want to crush the public under our jackboot.

Here's a piece at Hot Air:

NYC recommends wearing masks outside

Wait -- does New York City want you to wear masks while strolling in the park? No, of course not.

Due to high levels of COVID-19, the flu and RSV, @NYCHealthCommr has issued a Health Advisory on mask wearing. New Yorkers are strongly urged to wear masks in public indoor settings and crowded outdoor settings.

Find a COVID-19 and flu vaccination site: https://t.co/G3OXTST9Ob pic.twitter.com/kBv1dDtWz6

— City of New York (@nycgov) December 12, 2022

The city is recommending -- but not requiring -- masks in indoor settings and crowded outdoor settings. It's New York. We have crowds. We have crowds that the average Hot Air reader living in an outer-ring exurb in Marjorie Taylor Greene's congressional district can't comprehend.

The author of the piece, David Strom, is livid:

At least it isn’t a mandate. At least not yet.

There won't be a mandate. There wasn't one last winter during the Omicron surge. I'm not sure Strom understands that. (Most right-wingers seem to believe that liberal America has been in a state of total lockdown for two and a half years.)

But will the madness never cease? Really? Have we really learned nothing?

Perhaps that is the wrong question.

No, it IS the wrong question, because none of the mandates and “suggestions” have had much to do with COVID anyway.

The mask mandates were never about protecting anybody’s health, but rather about forcing people to comply with absurdities.

This is what they believe: that we know better, and we do these things because we love tyranny.

The mandates got people used to both the idea of complying with ridiculous requirements imposed by bureaucrats and–this is important–directing a “2-minutes hate” at those who refused to be bullied into submission.

The Left needs us to be in a permanent state of near panic in order to push through their insane agenda.

But what agenda have we pushed through? The Supreme Court still has nine justices. Build Back Better needed to be drastically shrunk in order to pass. Student loan relief is on hold. Abortion is illegal in more than a dozen states. The national minimum wage still hasn't gone up since 2009. Just about any sociopath in America can still buy an AR-15.

The great thing about masks ... is that everybody knows you are compliant. They can literally see it on your face.

Social pressure can be maximized. The mask is a display of fealty, not a medical tool. Getting you to wear it is a victory for the Left....

It will be interesting to see how many New Yorkers will comply with this “recommendation.” I suspect it will be relatively few, even in deep Blue NYC.

So it's a "recommendation," in scare quotes, which means that Strom thinks it's really a mandate, and "social pressure can be maximized" -- and yet Strom thinks New Yorkers won't comply. If that's tyranny, we're not very good at it.

Here's what I don't get: If we see every public health problem as an excuse to deprive the citizenry of their freedom, why didn't we do this during SARS? Or Ebola in 2014? Or the rise in monkeypox earlier this year? Or any bad flu year? Right-wingers love quoting Rahm Emanuel's saying "Never let a crisis go to waste." We let all those crises go to waste! We're inept tyrants!

If I am correct it will be an obvious indicator of the limits that exist for the people pushing the more radical policies being pushed by the transnational Elites, such as converting from meat eaters to bug eaters.

If you don't lurk in right-wing spaces, you have no idea how obsessed they are with the notion that we want to force them to eat insects.

It may be...I hope it actually is...the case that the World Economic Forum/Davos agenda is running up against its limits.

World Economic Forum! Drink! Well, it's true that the WEF has recommended eating insects as a way to fight climate change. But no one's actually doing it.

The masking is a test of your willingness to accept absurd demands, nothing more. Don’t comply. They don’t work, and not doing so sends a message to the elite and to everybody who meekly follows their lead.

"Meekly" is the tell here. Right-wingers talk as if we're tyrants of a particularly brutal kind, but then they portray anyone who complies with our demands as meek little sheeple -- not like them. They're the brave resisters.

And that's the mindset that makes this Ron DeSantis crusade against the medical establishment politcally potent. DeSantis isn't playing a "deep cut" -- he's playing one of the right's favorite hits. It's evil, but it's smart politics.

RON DeSANTIS'S ASSAULT ON PUBLIC HEALTH IS BEING TREATED AS A HORSERACE STORY

The possible next president of the United States wants to launch an all-out assault on vaccine manufacturers -- but don't worry your silly little head about the public-health implications of that, because according to NBC's Marc Caputo, this is just a horserace story:

For about a year, Donald Trump’s confidants, advisers and boosters have worried that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was positioning himself to get to the right of the former president over the issue of Covid vaccines.

DeSantis, who is mulling whether to challenge Trump in the 2024 Republican primary for president, deepened those suspicions Tuesday.

At a roundtable he convened of Covid vaccine skeptics and opponents — including his own surgeon general — he formally called on the state Supreme Court to impanel a grand jury to investigate whether pharmaceutical companies criminally misled Floridians about the side effects of vaccines, a position at odds with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This could have a chilling effect on the development of future vaccines. It's frightening, though it's not as frightening as a DeSantis presidency could be, especially if it coincides with a new pandemic, or the spread of a really bad COVID strain. DeSantis is putting vaccine makers on notice that if he's the president, it's open season on them. But to Caputo, this is just a story about the 2024 election:

The decision by DeSantis to now investigate the vaccines was widely panned by those in Trump’s orbit.

“Prior to this, his position was identical to Trump’s, and he advocated the efficiency and safety of vaccines. That’s his record,” said Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to Trump and an outspoken critic of DeSantis.

“This is a shot across the bow. We know exactly what Ron is up to,” said another Trump adviser who spoke more bluntly, but on the condition of anonymity to be able to speak freely.

“The fact is, we’ve seen this coming for a year, ever since Ron started to get anti-vax,” the Republican said, explaining the governor's opposition to the vaccine. “Yes, there’s a portion of our base that is anti-vax and some people could walk away from Trump over it. That’s why Ron is doing it. It’s so transparent.”

Whether this is good or bad policy (it's terrible policy) is of no concern to Caputo. All he cares about is whether it's related to 2024. DeSantis's surrogates insist it isn't:

Those familiar with DeSantis’ thinking downplayed the political ramifications, pointing out that he was one of the first high-profile Republicans to challenge expert opinions and health care professionals when it came to the Covid response....

DeSantis was also an early public critic of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease specialist, during the pandemic who became anathema to conservatives in 2020, even as Trump resisted pressure to oust him (while still often criticizing him).

“This isn’t about 2024. This is about what DeSantis believes in,” said one Republican who was not authorized to speak publicly on his behalf.

There's a brief mention of public health -- one entire sentence!

DeSantis’ announcement came just hours after a study found the vaccines have saved 3.2 million American lives.

But then we're right back to the 2024 race. A new poll is cited (in which DeSantis is crushing Trump). The pollster is quoted describing DeSantis as someone whose "support spans many columns and crosstabs, and that includes Trump voters and lots of them are anti-vax." And we're reminded that Trump was once booed for saying he'd received a booster shot.

Inectious diseases can kill millions, but what's really important is who's up and who's down in electoral politics.

THE GOP: GULLING THE RUBES FOR SO LONG THAT NOW THE RUBES ARE IN CHARGE

When I started blogging twenty years ago, I believed that the right-wing propaganda machine was a cynical means to an end: The people who said that Democrats want to turn America into a communist dictatorship after stealing multiple elections through widespread voter fraud with the help of a monolithically left-wing media didn't actually believe what they were saying -- it was disinformation intended to stir up the rabble and keep them voting Republican. Now, as I read the Talking Points Memo series based on text exchanges after the 2020 election between then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and other coup plotters, I'm reminded that a large number of Republican officeholders are high on their own supply. They're part of the rabble that believes the nonsense their propaganda outlets peddle.

The TPM series is based on messages that were never intended to go public. Among themselves, the texters didn't have to sound like people who truly believed in the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. They could have just discussed the election as a contest in which they wanted to prevail by any means necessary. Some did discuss it that way. Then there was South Carolina congressman Ralph Norman, who sent this text to Meadows:

Mark, in seeing what’s happening so quickly, and reading about the Dominion law suits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation we are at a point of � no return � in saving our Republic !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!

And Texas congressman Brian Babin:

Mark, When we lose Trump we lose our Republic. Fight like hell and find a way. We’re with you down here in Texas and refuse to live under a corrupt Marxist dictatorship. Liberty! Babin

Here's Norman again:

Guys, if there was ever a time to stand with our leader who has strengthened our military, stood for life for the unborn, supported Israel, built the wall , appointed conservative judges ect. And we lay down and abandon him JUST BECAUSE THE BIASED MEDIA HAS CALL THE ELECTION?? ... I will go anywhere anytime to help our cause.

Did they sincerely believe their own election conspiracy theories? Pennsylvania congressman Scott Pery, who later became chairmain of the House Freedom Caucus, certainly seemed to believe:

On Nov. 8, 2020, the day after Biden was projected as the winner of the election, Perry texted Meadows and urged him to connect with Sidney Powell, the firebrand far-right attorney. Powell would go on to pin Trump’s defeat on a communist conspiracy masterminded by deceased Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. In messages with other contacts, Meadows, who entertained some conspiracy theories about the vote, indicated that Powell’s ideas were too far-fetched even for him. Perry seemingly had no such doubts and pressed Meadows, “please do not delay in speaking” with Powell.

... On the morning of Nov. 12, he sent a flurry of messages to Meadows and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH). Perry’s download to the pair began with a rambling 501-word, six-part strategy for challenging the vote in Pennsylvania that Perry said he was forwarding from a legislator in the state....

“People think Dominion software was hacked,” the lengthy text said, referencing a voting machine company that was central to many 2020 conspiracies....

Perry followed that message up by sending Meadows and Jordan what he described as a tip received “from an intel friend.”

“DNI needs to task NSA to immediately seize and begin looking for international comms related to Dominion – was china malware involved?” Perry wrote....

Perry appeared to be convinced there had been foreign interference. Per the texts, he was fixated on what later became known as “ItalyGate.” This conspiracy theory posited that Trump’s loss was really due to a hacking effort masterminded by an Italian defense contractor that used military-grade satellites to zap voting machines and steal the election for Biden.

And here was Congressman Ted Budd (who'll be a senator in the new Congress):

On the evening of Nov. 7, Rep. Ted Budd (R-NC) shared a message claiming there were links between Dominion Voting Systems and billionaire George Soros....

“Praying for your health! FYI Dominion Voting Systems is owned by State Street Capital, which are Carlyle (Rubenstein alums), Rubenstein is a longtime co-investor with Soros Capital,” wrote Budd.

Budd’s message seemed to be a misspelling of Staple Street management, a private equity firm that owns Dominion, coupled with a series of claims that there were some kind of ties between various other investors.

And Congressman Paul Gosar:

... shortly after 11 p.m. on Dec. 16, 2020, Gosar wrote in with his own completely inaccurate concerns about Dominion.

... China bought Dominion in October for $400 million. If that’s not interference, then should have a report with details and specifics that would validate that either way. And if they didn’t......

The claim made by Gosar reportedly originated with far right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ website, InfoWars. Gosar also included a link to an executive order signed by Trump in 2018 that called for the director of national intelligence to “conduct an assessment of any information indicating that a foreign government” attempted to interfere with the election within 45 days of ballots being cast. Gosar also sent Meadows a link to a fringe blog called “Some Bitch Told Me” and a since-deleted set of files that he said showed “Massive fraud coming out of AZ.”

I can't give you the exact cynic-to-conspiratorialist ratio in the GOP, but it's clear that the ranks of the latter have been increasing, and will continue to do so.

TRUMP MIGHT AS WELL ADD COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT TO HIS LIST OF LAW VIOLATIONS

CNN reports that Donald Trump plans to publish a new book next year:

Former President Donald Trump is planning to release a book next year showcasing his private correspondence with past and present celebrities and international icons, CNN has learned.

... His newest book will contain reproductions of letters written to, or by, Trump over the last few decades....

Trump’s correspondence with singer-songwriter Elton John, the late entertainer Michael Jackson and the late Diana, Princess of Wales, are expected to be included, sources said.

So this won't just be a book of letters written by Trump (or by Trump employees ghost-writing words on his behalf). It will include letters to Trump -- letters written by extremely famous people.

Do you think Trump realizes that he doesn't have the legal right to publish the contents of these letters just because he has them in his files?

You might assume that if you possess a letter -- a piece of paper sent to you by another person -- then you own not only the letter itself but the right to publish the contents of the letter. There was a time when authors and book publishers operated on that assumption as well. Then a man named Ian Hamilton set out to publish a biography of the reclusive author J.D. Salinger, relying in part on letters written by Salinger that were kept in university collections and made available to scholars. Salinger sued:

The letters were quoted extensively in a draft [of the biography] that went out to reviewers and that was planned for publication by Random House. When Salinger’s agent, Dorothy Olding, passed along an uncorrected proof to the author in late 1986, he formally registered his copyright in the letters and told his lawyer to object to the publication of the book until all contents from the unpublished letters had been removed. Hamilton acquiesced and revised many of the letter excerpts into close paraphrases.... they didn’t appease Salinger and he sued Random House for copyright violation, breach of contract (Hamilton had signed copyright forms at the archives in question), and unfair competition....

In 1986, the Court of Appeals ruled in Salinger’s favor and thus began a new era in U.S. copyright law. Not only were unpublished works on their way to becoming covered under the fair use constraints and privileges, but a bright line was also drawn around unpublished letters. In subsequent copyright case law, a distinction was made between the vehicle of a letter (the paper it’s written on or the virtual notepad of an email) and the expression of the words themselves.

So if Trump wants to publish letters that were sent to him, he needs the permission of the writers (or their estates).

Do you think he knows that? Do you think the fifth-rate legal talent he tends to hire these days knows that?

This wouldn't be a problem if Trump were working with a major publisher, even an established right-wing publisher like Regnery. Established book publishers employ lawyers who know all this. They wouldn't allow him to go forward until he'd obtained written permission to publish every letter he wanted to include.

But as CNN notes, Trump's book won't be put out by an established publisher:

Trump’s second book since leaving office is due to be published by Winning Team Publishing, an imprint launched by his eldest son Don Jr. and former campaign adviser Sergio Gor....

The same publishing house was behind “Our Journey Together,” the $75 hardcover collection of photographs that Trump released last December.

Maybe Junior and Gor understand copyright law as it applies to letters, or maybe someone who works for them does. But it's likely that no one in Trump World understands this, and Winning Team might have to scrap hundreds of thousands of books when some famous letter writer discovers letters published without permission and decides to sue.

It's conceivable that Team Trump will carefully follow the law, and the book will be published without incident.... Oh, who am I kidding? That won't happen, will it?

*****

UPDATE: Hey, whatever happened to this book?

NEW BOOK ALERT: CRIME OF THE CENTURY by President Donald J. Trump! More details coming soon at https://t.co/Lqe3uPvyQ5 🇺🇸

— Winning Team Publishing (@WinningTeamPub) May 16, 2022

Seven months later, there's no mention of the book on Winning Team's site. There's no Amazon page for the book. It's vaporware. And the book of letters might suffer the same fate.

ELON MUSK IS A POLITICAL ACTIVIST, BUT HE ISN'T A "FAR-RIGHT" ACTIVIST

I'm grateful to The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel for debunking the notion, advanced in a recent New York Times story by Jeremy Peters, that Elon Musk's political beliefs are difficult to comprehend. But I don't agree with the way Warzel characterizes Musk:

Elon Musk Is a Far-Right Activist

If there’s one tweet that will tell you everything you need to know about Elon Musk, it’s this one from early [yesterday] morning:

My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2022

In five words, Musk manages to mock transgender and nonbinary people, signal his disdain for public-health officials, and send up a flare to far-right shitposters and trolls.

I don't like Warzel's use of the term "far-right" here. Elon Musk isn't a far-right activist. He's a mainstream Republican activist.

You might argue that they're the same thing, and I'd find it hard to rebut you. But when mainstream journalists use the descriptor "far right" in contexts like these, they imply that the rhetoric and beliefs are common only on the fringes of conservatism, and suggest that a "normal" Republican Party exists in which the rhetoric and beliefs are considered abhorrent. But powerful Republican Party officials and officeholders agree with Musk, and no prominent Republican in good standing will condemn the call to criminalize Fauci or the contempt for trans and nonbinary people.

"Prosecute/Fauci"? Last year, the Republican Establishment's preferred 2024 presidential candidate sent a fundraising email with the headline "Fauci for Prison":

Yesterday, at least four sitting members of Congress quote-tweeted Musk approvingly, as did the GOP's 2022 candidate for secretary of state in Michigan:

Fauci’s resignation should not prevent a full-throated investigation into the origins of the pandemic. He must be required to testify under oath regarding any discussions he participated in concerning the Wuhan lab leak. His policies destroyed lives. https://t.co/DTYKc6nL8G

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) December 11, 2022

When the new Republican Congress is sworn in, Fauci WILL be under investigation. I PROMISE this!! https://t.co/DxaR8WkveA

— Ronny Jackson (@RonnyJacksonTX) December 11, 2022

We’ll be bringing him in soon. https://t.co/z6asMboqKu

— Rep Andy Biggs (@RepAndyBiggsAZ) December 11, 2022

Now these are pronouns I can approve of!

Long overdue. https://t.co/0B3EGLqhl9

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) December 11, 2022

And expose all the media entities that pushed his propaganda. https://t.co/7B2tgZdLNf

— Kristina Karamo (@KristinaKaramo) December 11, 2022

And is contempt for trans and non-binary people a "far-right" phenomenon? Here's Jim Jordan, who'll be one of the most powerful figures in the House starting next year, railing against Democrats because he thought they were "banning 'gendered' pronouns." Here's Jordan again, this time at CPAC, saying, "You see last week they tried to cancel Kermit the Frog and Mr. Potato Head? They backed off Mr. Potato Head. I think he told them his preferred pronouns are he/him/his, right?" Here's Senator Ted Cruz telling a conference that his pronoun is "kiss my ass." Here's Josh Hawley in a Senate Armed Services Committee saying, "I'm curious as heck how not using he/she can help with lethality." Here's Senator Marsha Blackburn at Kentanji Brown Jackson's Supreme Court confirmation hearing asking Judge Jackson to define what a woman is.

This is the mainstream right.

Warzel writes:

But even as a far-right shitposter, Musk is hapless.... Musk is still seen as a dilettante by the inveterate shitposters and bigots. Over on 4chan, the far-right message board, Musk’s Fauci tweet barely merited discussion. “Elon is just being controversial to drive traffic to his website,” one poster mused.

If Musk tweeted this to impress far-right shitposters, that would be a problem. But he didn't. He tweeted it to impress mainstream Republicans. And it worked.

MUSK : TRUMP :: TEA PARTY : BUSH?

Republicans don't do introspection.

Okay, sure, sometimes the official party admits that mistakes were made and commissions a study to try to determine why the previous election cycle or two didn't go as well as expected. But those studies are always ignored. Instead, Republicans just rebrand themselves and walk around beating their chests as if they've done nothing wrong. The lack of self-doubt makes ordinary Americans forget the party's recent failures. The mainstream media naively portrays the rebranded GOP as fresh and new. And the party recovers.

We know this is what happened after Democratic electoral victories in 2006 and 2008 -- Republicans who held "pizza summit" listening tours in 2009 were ignored, while the Tea Party became the hot new thing. Rank-and-file Republicans were thrilled, Fox News provided wall-to-wall coverage, and the mainstream media fell for the ruse that this Koch-funded uprising was grassroots and non-partisan.

It worked because even though Democrats had just taken Congress with significant majorities and had elected an appealing new president, those Democratic officeholders got bogged down trying to pass big bills, while the Tea Party seemed to have energy and popular appeal (assuming you believed that "popular" meant "popular with white people living far outside urban areas"). The reviled George W. Bush had barely left office, but his legacy as the leader of the Republican Party was instantly forgotten. The slate was wiped clean and the party was seen as reborn.

This seems to be happening again, although a bit awkwardly.

Republicans just had a bad electoral cycle, which they blame in large part on Donald Trump's handpicked candidates and his obsession with nonexistent election fraud in 2020. The party should be licking its wounds -- but Elon Musk just purchased Twitter and he's commissioned hack pseudo-journalists to write up the contents of cherry-picked internal company files so that they suggest a vast left-wing conspiracy to repress the right on social media. It's one nothingburger after another, but the worlds of media and politics can't look away -- and for good measure, here's Jeremy Peters in The New York Times arguing that you can't really tell whether Musk is a right-winger or not, the same reaction the mainstream press had to the Tea Party.

Fox is all over the story, amplifying it the way it amplified the Tea Party. And we know that both Musk and Rupert Murdoch are fans of Ron DeSantis, who regularly attacks Big Tech. So this is the rebranded GOP, right? Trump is as much an unperson as George W. Bush was in 2009, and Musk, Murdoch, and DeSantis are the new (or not so new) leaders?

But there's a complication: unlike Bush, Trump hasn't gone away, and most of what's showing up in the Musk reports on Twitter involves alleged mistreatment of him. Censorship of Hunter Biden's nudes prevented Trump from winning reelection! And then Twitter unfairly banned him just for demanding the overthrow of the government!

This complicates the rebranding, although Musk's use of Twitter as an instrument of revenge is certain to extend beyond Trump. (This morning Musk tweeted, "My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.") Beyond that, though, is this what voters care about? Obviously, it's what Republican voters care about. But the Tea Party could say it was focused on issues that matter to average Americans -- taxes, "big government." Do ordinary Americans really care about deplatforming and shadowbanning? Will they really want to relitigate the 2020 pandemic response in 2023?

Still, Musk has everyone looking. Republicans struggled in the midterms, but they're the party on offense, as usual.

CHOOSE YOUR CONSPIRACY

Grant Wahl, a 48-year-old soccer journalist, died suddenly while covering a World Cup match in Qatar. This happened a couple of weeks after he was detained for a short time at another World Cup match for wearing a pro-LGBTQ T-shirt. (Gay sex is illegal in Qatar.)

Wahl's brother thinks he was murdered.

Absolutely bone chilling stuff

Soccer journalist Grant Wahl who was kicked out of a stadium in QATAR for this shirt has reportedly collapsed and passed away during the Argentina game today

His brother says on Instagram that Grant was fully healthy & believes there’s foul play pic.twitter.com/t47C2XfuVl

— JACK SETTLEMAN (@jacksettleman) December 10, 2022

Quite a few people seem to agree with him.

And then, over in the Fox News comments, there's an alternate theory:

I agree this is not a natural death, the so called vaccine claims another next.

****

When the clot shot kicks in?

****

Apparently too many jabs got to him.

****

not natural causes..... may like a Jab ?

****

My guess is he got the jab.

****

If you’re a democrat pleasE keep getting all the Covid shots and boosters all you can!

****

Maybe it wasn't about culture but more about vax!

****

like they did for COVID, we need to start showing daily charts and graphs of those that are dropping dead that have been vaccinated. My guess is the vaccination rate amongst the dropped-dead is close to 99.999%

That last comment seems intentionally hyperbolic, but I've been lurking in right-wing comment threads and it's my impression that much of the right believes that literally every unexplained death that takes place these days is the result of COVID vaccination.

These people ignore the fact that COVID itself poses much more of a risk to the cardiovascular system than the vaccines. (Wahl reportedly had COVID in August.)

Before he died, Wahl told readers of his Substack that he'd been sick for a while, with a cough that was diagnosed as bronchitis. He said he didn't have COVID -- he was testing "regularly." The World Cup for him had been "Three weeks of little sleep, high stress and lots of work."

I don't enjoy bothsidesing, but I find these conspiracy theories equally implausible. Wahl was detained for the T-shirt before Thanksgiving -- why would he be targeted for murder now? And it upsets me that the mild risks associated with the vaccines are being grotesquely exaggerated, especially when we may be only two years away from the presidency of anti-vaxx conspiratorialist Ron DeSantis (who, I suspect, doesn't really believe what he says about the shots, though he's cynically and sociopathically willing to harm public health if it will win him the presidency, or at least the Republican nomination). I'm sure Wahl was vaccinated -- he was married to Dr. Céline Gounder, an infectious disease specialist who was on Joe Biden's COVID advisory committee during the presidential transition -- but even seemingly young and healthy people die suddenly for many reasons, including (but absolutely not limited to) COVID and conditions brought on or exacerbated by past COVID infections.

I'll add that many of those Fox commenters think that if Wahl was murdered by the government, he deserved it.

It's amazing that these SJWs think they can march into any country they like and start dictating policy. That's how you end up in prison...or dead. How you liking the USA now?

****

If you’re American you need to understand the risk of even traveling to another country. Much less countries like Russia or Qatar. I just cannot fathom how someone can be so entrenched in a social message they fail to understand they’re traveling outside the power of the constitution. And Qatar even happens to be a pretty safe place for travel compared to many other ME countries. That said, it isn’t safe if you test laws you have no business testing.

****

Sometimes when one pokes the bear, he bites.

So, yeah, there are problems on both sides, but the other side is worse.

SINEMA SAVES HER CAREER AND TRIES TO MAKE IT LOOK LIKE PRINCIPLE -- BUT WHY NOW?

Senator Kyrsten Sinema has announced that she's a registered independent now. In an Arizona Republic op-ed, she says she's "declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington," but it's clear why she really left the Democratic Party:

Switching parties allows Sinema to avoid a brutal primary challenge, or at least make one much more difficult to pull off. If another Democrat decided to jump into the race, they could risk splitting the vote in the general election and handing Republicans the seat in 2024.

She's not popular among Arizona Democrats, and would probably lose a primary to (in all likelihood) Congressman Ruben Gallego, who just won reelection by 54 points. But now Democrats will be motivated not to run a candidate against her, because they know Republican voters are likely to vote the party line, and they don't want a split the liberal/moderate vote and put Doug Ducey or Kari Lake in the Senate.

Sinema is forcing Democrats to stick with her even though they want to be rid of her. It's like (SPOILER ALERT) the end of Gone Girl.

But why now? She could have made the announcement anytime before the start of the 2024 campaign. A state "sore loser" law prevents her from running in the Democratic primary and then running as an independent in the general election, so she'd have to make the choice at the outset of the campaign. But she didn't need to make it now.

She insists that she won't be switching caucuses:

In a 45-minute interview, the first-term senator told POLITICO that she will not caucus with Republicans....

But will she caucus with Democrats? CNN says more or less, probably:

Democrats will have a narrow 51-49 majority that includes two independents who caucus with them: Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine.

While Sanders and King formally caucus with Democrats, Sinema declined to explicitly say that she would do the same. She did note, however, that she expects to keep her committee assignments – a signal that she doesn’t plan to upend the Senate composition, since Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer controls committee rosters for Democrats.

With a 51-49 majority, Democrats maintain control over Senate committees. They can appoint the majority of committee members and have control over subpoenas. Sinema now threatens that. She can take that power away from the Democrats at any time.

But she could have done that anyway. So this could be just a pure branding exercise -- or it could be a sign that she's going to vote more often with Republicans than she does now, which isn't as often as you think:

FiveThirtyEight calculates that she votes with President Joe Biden 93 percent of the time, more than [Joe] Manchin, Jon Tester of Montana, Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats. These percentages can be misleading, because not all votes carry equal weight. But consider judicial nominations, perhaps the most important thing for Democrats over the next two years. Sinema voted to confirm Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and as of February, she hadn’t voted against a single Biden bench nominee.

Her real value to the right -- particularly to her corporate-lobbyist pals -- has been her ability to prevent legislation from coming to the floor altogether, so maybe her voting record isn't a true measure of what she does as a senator. But I think this will liberate her to be more overtly right-wing. So I'm really sorry the Democrats couldn't manage 52 wins.

RON DeSANTIS WANTS VACCINE MANUFACTURERS TO BE THE NEXT DISNEY

Ron DeSantis -- soon to be touted by the mainstream media as a "return to normalcy" Republican presidential candidate -- hasn't issued a good, juicy corporate fatwa in a while. But the midterms are over and he needs a new enemy, so here goes:

Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) just openly declared war on the pharmaceutical industry.

DeSantis recently announced that his office intends to hold vaccine manufacturers accountable for making misleading and false statements about the vaccines....

“We are going to work to hold these manufacturers accountable for this mRNA. Because they said there was no side effects, and we know there have been. A lot,” said DeSantis.

“And so we did a study in Florida. You saw an 86% increase in cardiac-related activity from people 18-39 from mRNA shots.”

“And so, we’re going to be doing some stuff to bring accountability there... You know, we wouldn’t let them mandate on you in Florida. We said no, because Orange County wanted to fire firefighters. Gainesville wanted to fire people. Even the corporations like Disney wanted to fire.

“So we said “no” across the board. So everybody had the ability to opt-out of anything they were trying to impose on you. But there are other people around the country that got forced to take this, and then what? They’re not allowed to sue? Or get any kind of recourse when this is not something they wanted to do?

“So this something we’re going to lead on in Florida. And so we’re going to have some announcements over the next 3-4 weeks on that. We’ve always gotten ahead of these things, and we’re going to continue to do that going forward,” he added.

That's from Gateway Pundit, but it's an accurate account of what DeSantis says in the second half of this clip (in the first part, he expresses approval of Elon Musk's decision to allowed COVID misinformation to return to Twitter):

Gov Ron Desantis and Elon Musk declare war on mRNA jab manufacturers 👏👏@RonDeSantisFL @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/drCb4Yaz4m

— James Freeman (@JamesfWells) December 7, 2022

So he's planning to go after Pfizer and Moderna -- next month, because you don't want to roll out a publicity stunt like this at Christmas. You want to wait until the traditional beginning of the next presidential election cycle.

The study he's citing has been widely criticized by respectable scientists:

Health experts and federal officials are criticizing Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo's decision to advise men between 18 and 39 years old not to get COVID-19 vaccines....

His recommendation is based on an analysis the state health department published ... that said these men had a "modestly increased" risk of cardiac-related deaths within a month of getting a messenger RNA, or mRNA, vaccine. The analysis was not peer-reviewed....

The authors of this study, who are not named in the report and who Ladapo has since declined to reveal, acknowledge its many limitations.

They admit they couldn't determine what actually caused the deaths of the small group of 18- to 39-year-old men in Florida they looked at because they used death certificates to calculate how many were cardiac-related, not medical records.

Death certificates aren’t always accurate, explained Jason Salemi, an epidemiologist with the University of South Florida’s College of Public Health. He said given the small sample size of the study — less than 100 patients — researchers could have dug deeper.

“Why not review those medical records and make absolutely certain you know what caused these deaths and whether or not they were vaccine-related?” he said.

Salemi’s biggest concern was that the report failed to pay equal attention to examining the risks of COVID-19 infection and how well the vaccines performed at reducing the harmful effects of the virus.

Though they don’t present any research on the subject, the authors themselves say in their conclusion that health risks from getting COVID-19 are substantially higher than those associated with the vaccination.

If DeSantis plans to roll this witch hunt out in January, you can assume that Fox News -- otherwise known as the DeSantis for President press office -- will be on board. And with House Republicans clearly planning a show trial for Dr. Anthony Fauci, not long after the still-Democratic House passed a defense appropriation bill for 2023 that rescinds the COVID vaccine mandate, it's clearly open season on the the people who tried to save us from COVID.

And yet the media will tell us that DeSantis is a refreshing change from the extremism of Donald Trump if he wins the nomination, and we might be on the verge of a presidency run this way.

WHY NO INSURRECTION IN 2022?

Amanda Marcotte has a theory about why there's been no serious violence or unrest in response to the midterm results, even in Arizona, where Kari Lake coninues to insist that she was the rightful winner of the governor's race.

... I suspect the real reason the Big Lie is failing to incite fascist violence around midterm elections is that few, if any, Republicans actually believed the Big Lie in the first place. It was always a pretext for what its proponents really want, which is a movement to replace the process by which we choose American presidents with a dictatorship, ideally led by Donald Trump himself. Installing a bunch of mini-Trumps in state offices, even for the purpose of supposedly setting Trump up to steal the 2024 election, doesn't have the emotional power of an actual, no-BS, top-down fascist revolution.

... "Election deniers" implies that the conspiracy theory of stolen elections is the primary motivation of Trump's insurrectionist movement. But really, the conspiracy theory is just a paper-thin excuse, one which Trump and his minions barely even try to establish as a functioning narrative. Fascists, as John Ganz writes in his most recent newsletter, "believe things have gotten so bad that only a radical move to break the present regime can save the nation."

I don't buy this. I think much of the rank-and-file right genuinely believes that the 2020 election was rigged, as is any election in a red or purple state or district that's won by a Democrat.

And yes, we know that thought leaders on the right -- Nick Fuentes, Curtis Yarvin -- are fed up with democracy and would prefer a dictatorship. But do most rank-and-file right-wingers really think in these categories? It seems to me that they just want what they want: they'd like their side to win all the time. They seem to believe that they'd win every election if the electoral system changed: no early voting, no mail voting, no dropboxes, no (to them) suspiciously complex and time-consuming ballot counting in large cities and counties, no mainstream media and Big Tech rigging of elections (i.e., ordinary editorial judgment about what their publications and sites publish). I don't think they're against democracy, for the most part. They think democracy would work fine if it were rigged in their favor. (They'd say "unrigged.")

I can think of a few reasons why there's been no electoral violence this year:

* Donald Trump and his allies aren't leading the rebellion. Trump doesn't care that many of his endorsees lost -- even Lake, who was seen as a favorite of his and a possible 2024 running mate. Trump cares only about himself. He was never going to put any effort into statewide coups.

* The prosecution of January 6 insurrections is having an impact. Shockingly to them, January 6 is being prosecuted as a crime. That means any exercise of violence to overturn the results of an election could be treated the same way! No fair! No ordinary right-winger wants to get sent to what they call the "American Gulag."

* These days, they believe that any demonstration will lead to Deep State entrapment. The ones who don't think all the violence on January 6 was the work of disguised Antifa operatives think all the violence on January 6 was instigated by disguised FBI provocateurs. Now they think any announcement of a right-wing demonstration is a similar plot to entrap True Patriots.

* Once again, they're waiting for the scales to fall from America's eyes. When I go to Gateway Pundit, I see prominent headlines such as "BREAKING: Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer Colluded With Federal Agency, CISA, To Censor Election Critics" and "'We Are Going To Be Filing A Lawsuit THIS FRIDAY' – Kari Lake Guest Hosts America First With Sebastian Gorka (VIDEO)." The next lawsuit or documentary will be the one that finally makes the rest of America see the light!

* They're too busy terrorizing drag performers and school librarians. Marcotte notes that right-wing anger

has more recenlty been rerouted into more direct expressions of right-wing cultural resentments, which is why we're seeing attacks on Pride events and hysteria about "wokeness" or "critical race theory." Having a tantrum, or staging a riot, over Kari Lake losing her bid to be governor of Arizona simply doesn't have the same emotional resonance.

Marcotte thinks this is because they want nothing less than to topple democracy altogether -- but if so, why would they bother attacking some local drag show or library? I think she's right that they'd rather fight to overturn a presidential election than a gubernatorial election, and it's probably also the case that fighting for Daddy Trump is more satisfying than fighting for a woman. (Trump's unsuccessful male endorsees seem to have meekly accepted their defeats.) But I think this is less about having strong opinions regarding America's ideal system of government and more about wanting to fight so someone they regard as the most alpha of males can be restored to his rightful place in the most alpha of jobs. Meanwhile, anger about sex and race are primal, which is the evil genius of the ginned-up crusades against critical race theory and trans people, and the reason they've struck such a deep chord on the right.

I just don't think it's as simple as "they want fascism and will accept no substitute." It's complicated.

MATT BAI: WON'T SOMEONE THINK ABOUT THE POOR HATEMONGERS?

The Washington Post's Matt Bai has noticed that many of us are horrified by Kanye West's anti-Semitism. Bai think the problem is ... us.

There was a time not so long ago when if you wanted to hear the world’s dumbest sentiments on race or ethnicity, you had to at least put on a coat and go down to the neighborhood bar.

What we did not do back then, by the way, was storm into those bars, haul out the loudest blowhards and publicly shame them at the top of every homepage and cable show in America.

That’s pretty much where we are now, when displays of basic idiocy dominate the headlines, mostly because denouncing them makes the rest of us feel more virtuous, or maybe because they seem to validate our sense that the culture is unraveling.

Exhibit A involves Ye, who used to be a big-time rapper named Kanye West but is now the society’s best-known Hitler admirer.

Okay, stop right there. No virtue-signaling liberal dragged poor Kanye West out of obscurity and forced America to pay attention to him even though he was barely known to the public. Kanye West is one of the most popular musical performers of the past twenty years, with nine platinum albums and 73 platinum songs. Until recently, he was a billionaire, with lucrative businesses and endorsement deals. And right-wing influencers, including the House Judiciary Committee and the most popular host on cable news, have tried to make him the face of a new, multi-racial Republican Party. In his status as a public figure, he couldn't be less like a random non-famous guy spouting bigotry at a bar.

Bai writes:

Ye (do I really have to call him that?) is pretty clearly struggling with mental illness, as his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, has been telling us for years.

Everyone knows West has bipolar disorder. He mentioned it on an album cover, for crissake. Do your homework, Matt. Moreover, millions of people have the same disorder or other mental illnesses and aren't raving bigots.

Is the moral thing here really to give Ye more of a platform to debase himself than he already has? Just because Donald Trump takes Ye seriously doesn’t mean the rest of us have to.

Do we book guests on the Alex Jones podcast? Did we give West his 32 million Twitter followers back (temporarily)? The recent platforming of West came from people who weren't liberals. And if liberals' decision to talk about West offends Bai, is he saying that we should allow this extremely famous and highly influential person to spout the vilest bigotry with no pushback? Apparently that's exactly what Bai wants us to do.

Bai is also peeved because a story from Britain was briefly in the news here:

Then we have the international flare-up over the British Baroness Susan Hussey ... who turns out to be the all-too-real kind of White person who thinks that non-White people must be from somewhere else....

Lady Hussey is 83, born in the waning days of the British Empire. Show of hands: How many of you have grandparents who would say something racially insensitive without being cognizant of why?

My grandmother said a few insensitive things during her life. But she didn't have a highly sensitive position working for the British royal family, one that requires decorum and diplomacy, in a country where the press is unrestrained and eager to pounce on any royal shortcoming. Being careful not to say the wrong thing was Lady Hussey's job, or at least part of it. I can't say the same about my grandmother.

Oh, and Bai thinks we're all way too upset about rampant hatemongering on Twitter.

As for the growing alarm over Twitter, let’s just grasp for a modicum of context. According to the Times, slurs against Black Americans have lately risen from 1,282 a day to more like 3,876. Insults of gay men are up to a daily average of almost 4,000.

Thousands of slurs are thousands too many, but consider that Twitter has something like 41 million daily active users in the United States alone. We’re not talking about a remotely significant percentage of tweets....

Yes, think of all the Black and LGBT people who weren't called "n****r" or "groomer"!

Bigotry ought to be condemned even if it’s not especially pervasive — we should all be able to agree on that.

We have no problem agreeing on that. It's you who seem to have a problem with it.

But the total lack of perspective in the conversation about hate speech — this impression that somehow these controversies are the most important things happening in the universe right now — can lead us down a couple of perilous paths.

Anyone who thinks this is troubling at all is blowing it up into the top story in the world, Bai says, offering no evidence that this is true.

First, it lends credence and momentum to those on the left who would jettison the concept of free speech entirely. There’s a popular — and very misguided — argument among leftists, particularly younger ones, that free expression is a weapon wielded by the capitalist and colonialist elite, and that no one should enjoy the right to make others uncomfortable because of their race or identity. They would turn the entire country into a college campus.

Yeah, you knew Bai would start punching hippies sooner or later.

Real liberals know that the freedom of speech includes the right to be stupid, hurtful and wrong. In fact, that’s generally when it matters most. We’re a stronger and more admired country not when we protect the ideas everybody loves, but when we tolerate the ones that make us sick.

The real intolerance is criticizing people who say "n*****r" or "groomer."

Second, all this mindless amplification of run-of-the-mill bigotry adds to the perception that history is moving in the wrong direction when it comes to inclusivity and tolerance. That’s just not true.

... Ugly strains of hatred have become louder and more visible since the onset of the Trump era, but that doesn’t mean we’re going backward. In fact, by any obvious measure of progress, we are a vastly more enlightened society than we were 50 years ago, or even 25 years ago.

How does that prove we're not going backward? Do we have to give up all the ground we've gained in a half century before we're allowed to say, "Oops, I think we have a bigotry problem"? There were double-digit increases in hate crimes in major cities in 2020 and 2021, and they're still going up in 2022. Hate group activity surged in the Trump years. The right-wing establishment has apparently declared open season on trans people. But if you express concern about any of this, you're the problem, according to Bai.

If you want to worry about the state of civil society, then worry about Trump’s call this week to suspend the Constitution so he can be enshrined in power — and the deafening Republican silence that followed it. Or worry about the case that just reached the Supreme Court, in which a Colorado website designer says she shouldn’t have to make wedding pages for gay couples.

It seems odd that Bai is disimissive of personal bigotry yet worried about that Supreme Court case. But I think I understand his worldview. He's spent so much time hanging out with the big names in politics that he doesn't believe anything of importance is done by people without political power, even extremely wealthy influencers like Kanye West and Elon Musk.

But guys who let our society's atmosphere of hate collect in their craniums until they decide to shoot up synagogues or gay bars don't run their plans through congressional committees. Matt Bai doesn't care, though. If it doesn't happen in his world, it doesn't matter, and you're an idiot for being concerned.

IN A SANE AMERICA, THE GEORGIA SENATE RACE WOULD HAVE BEEN A ROUT

I'm happy about the outcome in the Georgia Senate race, but it shouldn't have been close. I keep hearing that Herschel Walker was a terrible candidate, but he won 48.5% of the vote in November and 48.6% in the runoff despite all that terribleness. Let's compare him to another terrible candidate: In 2014, after he said that a "legitimate rape" is unlikely to lead to pregnancy, Republican Todd Akin lost his Senate race to incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill by a 55% to 39% margin, despite the fact that Missouri was transforming itself from a purple to a red state.

By any objective measure, Walker was a much worse candidate than Akin -- the abortion hypocrisy, the unacknowledged children, the allegation of abuse, the campaign-trail babble about vampires and werewolves, the near-disappearance in the home stretch of the runoff. But this inept, morally flawed man, or at least the organization around him, motivated large numbers of voters to turn out a second time for him, even though the Senate was no longer up for grabs. It took a great campaign by Raphael Warnock and the Democrats to beat him.

If I understand the conventional wisdom correctly, this outcome proves that Donald Trump is a loser and that Brian Kemp is a winner. Here's Politico:

Trump keeps losing

Of all the candidates Trump elevated in this year’s midterms, few resembled Trump as closely as Walker — a scandal-plagued, celebrity-turned-politician and early adopter of Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was rigged.

... it was Trump who hand-picked Walker for the Georgia Senate run, just as he had chosen GOP nominees in other high-profile contests this year, and the result was one more blemish on Trump’s record — and a fitting coda to his demoralizing fall from power....

Brian Kemp is the real winner in Georgia

There’s a reason Gov. Brian Kemp’s name is being floated as a potential presidential contender. He may be one of the savviest Republican politicians in the country.

First, Kemp survived Trump’s wrath for his resistance to Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, easily winning re-election. Then he went all in for Walker, a win-win for Kemp. Had Walker won, Kemp would have gotten all the credit — as former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie joked — for being “the first human being who ever dragged Herschel Walker over the goal line.”

But no one was blaming Kemp for Walker’s defeat.

I don't get it. Kemp kept his distance from Walker during the general election and Walker got 48.5% of the vote. He campaigned for Walker in the runoff and Walker got 48.6%. Maybe he had no impact? And sure, Trump gave his endorsement to this morally dubious, incurious, inarticulate, and unqualified candidate -- but Walker did about as well as another Trump endorsee, Adam Laxalt in Nevada, who had all the right qualifications.

And I know that Kemp won the general election easily, as did Secretary of State Brad Raffensprger, which suggests that a generic Republican would have won this race. But Kemp and Raffensperger were incumbents. Walker was running against an incumbent. We don't know how a different Republican candidate would have fared.

The national campaign for Walker helped keep him in the race. Mitch McConnell spent millions and a lot of nationally prominent Republicans appeared with Walker, in person and on Fox News. Beyond that, the scandals and mockery seemed to motivate many Republican voters -- if Herschel Walker was being attacked by the evil libs because he paid for abortions (allegedly, they'd say) or flashed a fake police badge in a debate, then he must be worth voting for. The scandals cost him more votes than they won him, but it was close.

Grievances still motivate Republican voters. That's why Walker kept it close. Imagine this race plus a GOP that didn't disdain early voting. Imagine this race plus a Walker endorsement from Saint Ron DeSantis. He could have won. A round of applause for the Warnock campaign, because beating Walker wasn't easy.

NO, REPUBLICANS AREN'T PURSUING HUNTER BIDEN BECAUSE THEY THINK IT TAKES THE HEAT OFF TRUMP

The New Republic's Alex Shephard thinks he knows why Republicans are determined to pursue the Hunter Biden story:

For the right, the fixation on Hunter Biden boils down to a few things. The first and biggest is that it’s become a kind of grotesque simulacrum of Trump’s two big Russia scandals: interference (and collusion) during the 2016 election and the attempt to extort Ukraine into providing dirt on the Bidens in 2019. The idea here is that the Biden family is just as corrupt as the Trump family and that Biden ascended to the White House after numerous media and tech entities essentially cheated on his behalf....

The histrionics over election interference also neatly mirror popular concerns about the Trump administration and should be familiar to anyone who followed the Trump-Russia scandal. Republicans are well nigh convinced, in the same way that Democrats were during the course of several formal investigations into Trump’s dealings, that the Hunter Biden laptop story would really blow up if only the media would be willing to relentlessly turn the screws.

The Bulwark's Mona Charen -- formerly a Republican in good standing, now a Never Trumper -- has a similar theory:

The right has a deep psychological need for the Hunter Biden story. They desperately want Joe Biden to be corrupt and for the whole family to be, in [Representative Elise] Stefanik’s words, “a crime family” because they have provided succor and support to someone who has encouraged political violence since his early rallies in 2015, has stoked hatred of minorities through lies, has used his office for personal gain in the most flagrant fashion, has surrounded himself with criminals and con men, has committed human rights violations against would-be immigrants by separating children from their parents, has pardoned war criminals, has cost the lives of tens of thousands of COVID patients by discounting the virus and peddling quack cures, has revived racism in public discourse, and attempted a violent coup d’etat.

They know it. It gnaws at them. That’s why the Hunter Biden story is their heart’s desire.

Charen believes that the Hunter Biden narrative, now revived by Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi, "has been suspended for some time," and is being eagerly embraced by Republicans at this moment because Trump has been unusually embarrassing in the past few weeks. Clearly she's unaware of the hard-sell campaign for the preposterous "docu"drama My Son Hunter, which was released on September 7. For a while, you couldn't click on Breitbart without seeing a big ad for the movie; Fox News first promoted it in November 2021. I've posted the batshit-crazy trailer before, but here it is again.



Republicans' Hunter narrative might be partly whataboutism, but they'd be doing what they're doing now even if Joe Biden had beaten Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio in 2020. Republicans tirelessly pursue every negative story against a powerful Democrat, whether genuine or concocted -- Hillary's emails, Obama's birth certificate, Monicagate, Whitewater. (In real time, Charen was morally outraged by the Clinton presidency, even Whitewater.) The core precept of the Republican Party is that Democrats and liberals are evil.

If this is resurfacing now, it's for two reasons: because Republicans just won the House and because Elon Musk (who's regarded as endlessly fascinating) just took over Twitter and promoted it. If Democrats hadn't held the House in 2020, we would have had this moment two years ago.

Alex Shephard says this about the Hunter Biden story:

... it doesn’t have the thing that makes other pseudoscandals tick: It doesn’t reinforce an already popular notion about the Bidens as some uniquely corrupt family.... The Hunter Biden story doesn’t work ... because it’s not actually a quintessential story about Joe Biden. It’s actually a Trump story, and the kind of corruption and malfeasance that defined the last president.

But Republicans believe that all Democrats are amoral globalist corruptocrats. Sure, many don't literally believe that all Democrats sexually abuse children and drain their bodies for adrenochrome, but the QAnon narrative is just an amped-up version of the mainstream GOP narrative, which assumes control of all national and global institutions by slick, depraved liberal overlords. Watch the trailer above. The real, shambolic Joe Biden is replaced by just that kind of degenerate slickster.

And on the right, they think the Trumps aren't a uniquely corrupt family. To right-wingers, the Trumps are salt-of-the-earth folks (Trump Sr. doesn't have a posh accent! When he eats, he likes steaks and burgers! Don Jr. likes to hunt!) who just happen to be rich. They see Trump as a rich, comfortable man who selflessly gave up his life of ease so he could work hard to save the country. They really believe all this -- the Trumps are humble members of the Volk who were granted great wealth by God while Joe Biden is a greedy international criminal mastermind. So they've been pursuing the Hunter Biden story nonstop since it first emerged, and they're pushing it into the headlines now simply because they can.

HOW THAT GOP BREAKUP WITH CAPITALISM GOING THESE DAYS?

We've all read commentary like this:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ ... public vendetta against Disney over its opposition to Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, dubbed by critics the “Don’t Say Gay” law, sends a clear message to boardrooms across the country: Stay the heck out of politics.

... But the DeSantis versus Disney imbroglio is a mere preview of a much larger collision underfoot within the GOP between the MAGA-inspired cultural warriors who now control the party and the traditional low tax and deregulation conservatives. It’s a clash that is finally breaking the decades-long alliance between Big Business and the GOP.

... The cultural zealots that have hijacked much of the GOP are pushing America to the precipice of the biggest political realignment in nearly 100 years.

DeSantis hates Disney! DeSantis hates Big Tech! DeSantis thinks capitalists are "woke"!

But Politico reports this today:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s inauguration celebration is expected to be spread out over two days — and will give up close access to donors willing to contribute between $50,000 and $1 million, according to a breakdown of sponsorship packages.

Five donors who give $1 million to the Republican Party of Florida will be recognized as “inaugural chair” sponsors who will receive tickets to a candlelight dinner the night before the inauguration, VIP seating at the inauguration ceremony held on the steps of the Old Capitol as well tickets to the inaugural ball and a “Toast to One Million Mamas,” the campaign group put together by first lady Casey DeSantis, and a photo opportunity with the governor.

I'm pretty sure this access won't be going to any janitors or pipefitters or other representatives of what I keep hearing is the new blue-collar GOP.

DeSantis isn't an anti-capitalist. He's a Putinist. He's running Florida in a Putinist way, and he wants to run America in a Putinist way.

You know, like this, but without the brutality (so far):

In the summer of 2000, 21 of the richest men in Russia exited their bulletproof limousines and entered the Kremlin for a historic meeting.... Through shady deals, outright corruption, and even murder, these rapacious "oligarchs" — as Russians had come to derisively call them — had seized control of much of Russia's economy, and, increasingly, its fledgling democracy. But now, their nation's newly elected president, Vladimir Putin, wanted to tell them, face to face, who was really in charge....

Putin offered the oligarchs a deal: bend to my authority, stay out of my way, and you can keep your mansions, superyachts, private jets, and multibillion-dollar corporations.... In the coming years, the oligarchs who reneged on this deal and undermined Putin would be thrown into a Siberian prison or be forced into exile or die in suspicious circumstances. The loyalists who remained — and the new ones who got filthy rich during Putin's long reign — became like ATM machines for the president and his allies.

DeSantis's style is lite Putinism, but the priniciple is the same: Line my pockets and don't cross me politically, or you'll regret it.

DeSantis needs an enemy every time he hasn't been on Fox News for a few weeks, and corporations are satisfying targets. But rich businesspeople and heirs to business fortunes have funded his past and future campaigns -- here's a partial list -- and they'll fund his inaugural. Ron DeSantis is not a working class hero.