SORRY, RICH LOWRY -- DANIEL PENNY WAS A VIGILANTE

Like nearly every other commentator on the right, Rich Lowry of National Review believes that Daniel Penny did a heroic thing when he fatally strangled Jordan Neely, a mentally ill homeless man, on a New York subway car earlier this month, and he's disgusted by those of us who find extra-judicial killing distasteful:

Pretty much everything you need to know about the Daniel Penny case you can learn from the Death Wish movies.

Or so you might conclude if you took seriously the Left’s analysis of the tragic incident in a New York City subway car earlier this month that has led to Penny, a former Marine, getting charged with second-degree manslaughter.

The upshot of this commentary is that conservatives favor “vigilantism” and support it, of course, because it’s a bulwark of white supremacy.

Lowry goes on to cite four published pieces that call Penny a vigilante, only one of which invokes white supremacy. But first Lowry must dismiss the charge of vigilantism altogether. He happens to have both Merriam and Webster right here...

There are many problems with this line of argumentation, beginning with the fact that Daniel Penny wasn’t a vigilante.

Merriam-Webster defines a vigilante as “a member of a volunteer committee organized to suppress and punish crime summarily (as when the processes of law are viewed as inadequate).”

Well, yes, that's the first Merriam-Webster definition of "vigilante." The second is:

broadly : a self-appointed doer of justice

Which is exactly what Penny was.

Lowry magnanimously refrains from arguing that in order to meet the strict definition of "vigilante," you must first join a committee. He writes:

There can be loner vigilantes, of course. If, say, someone Penny cared about was harmed by a mentally ill homeless man, and he started riding the subways looking for mentally ill homeless men to take vengeance on, that’d be vigilantism.

This is a version of the scenario that set the Charles Bronson character Paul Kersey on his path of blowing away New York City’s muggers and lowlifes.

Is he arguing that you can't be a solo vigilante unless you exactly mimic the plot of a Charles Bronson revenge film? It sure seems that way.

Lowry continues:

By contrast, conservatives are, as a general matter, viewing Penny as a defender of himself and, most importantly, those around him — not an avenging angel administering the justice that Alvin Bragg refuses to.

Really? Right-wingers don't see Penny as a substitute for a DA they regard as Soros-addled and crime-loving? You'd never know it from reading this summary of a podcast episode from popular right-wing brodcaster Liz Wheeler:

Liz ... talks about how the government neglected their duty of enforcing a civil society by allowing Jordan Neely, who had been convicted multiple times of criminal offenses, to roam freely. As a result of this negligence, Daniel Penny had to take matters into his own hands....

Or from the message posted to Penny's crowdfunding page by Kid Rock, who donated $5,000:

Mr. Penny is a hero. Alvin Bragg is a POS. Kid Rock.

And then there's this guy:

We must defeat the Soros-Funded DAs, stop the Left's pro-criminal agenda, and take back the streets for law abiding citizens. We stand with Good Samaritans like Daniel Penny. Let’s show this Marine... America’s got his back.
https://t.co/uQXZuT19Mo

— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantisFL) May 13, 2023

Lowry quotes the one piece he cites that overtly connects the killing of Jordan Neely to white supremacy, a Substack post by Aaron Rupar and Noah Berlatsky:

Conservatives are desperate to preserve the privilege of white violence, which is why the defenses of Penny sound so rabid and so unhinged. For conservatives, a world in which white men are held accountable for racist murder is a world without law, without order. It’s a world in which chaos (that is, equality) is let loose, and America’s essence (that is, white supremacy) is perverted.

Lowry responds, triumphantly:

Of course, if Penny had reacted the same way countering a perceived threat from a mentally ill white man, the tragic event would be a blip; it’s the catnip of a potential racial incident, and the opportunity to put Penny, with no justification, in the company of long-ago racists acting extra-legally to intimidate and kill blacks that makes the case irresistible for progressives.

You really believe that, Rich? Then why are we furious about Governor Greg Abbott's effort to secure a pardon for a man convicted of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester in Austin -- a white protester? Why are we angry about the lionization of Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two protesters and wounded a third, all of them white? People of color are prime targets for violent self-appointed guardians of the public order, but whites who don't know their place are also on the target list.

In this piece, Rich Lowry is wrong about everything -- as usual.

WHO CARES WHO WINS IOWA?

Ron DeSantis has been running for president for a couple of years already, but next week he'll finally make it official, according to news reports. Journalists and pundits who are desperate for a Republican horserace are telling us that we should expect DeSantis to run very strong in Iowa. Here's Marc Caputo of The Messenger:

Inside DeSantis’ Plan to Outwork Trump in Iowa

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis views Iowa as such a make-or-break state for his presidential bid that he’s considering a plan to campaign across all 99 of its counties, insiders familiar with his thinking tell The Messenger....

“DeSantis is in it to win it,” said Bob Vander Plaats, an Iowa evangelical leader who is neutral in the race so far.

In an example of DeSantis’s Iowa work ethic, Vander Plaats pointed out that the governor was in the state Saturday at two events across the state, but he added a third stop in Des Moines after Trump canceled a nearby rally in the city due to the threat of tornadoes....

“What you saw Saturday was the contrast he’s going to show in Iowa,” a DeSantis confidant who recently spoke to the governor told The Messenger.... “Ron is basically gonna move to Iowa. He’s a 44-year-old Navy vet and former [college Division 1] baseball player. He’s a machine. Trump is 76. And it shows. Iowans will see it with their own eyes when Ron is doing the ‘Full Grassley’ while Trump is playing golf like some retiree at a resort back home.”

Trump is supposed to be vulnerable in Iowa because, in an interview with Caputo a few days ago, he criticized the six-week abortion ban DeSantis recently signed. Here's Bob Vander Plaats (again):

The #IowaCaucuses are wide open. Stay tuned! https://t.co/ENba3ltSLk

— Bob Vander Plaats (@bobvanderplaats) May 15, 2023

New York magazine's Ed Kilgore notes that "the candidates endorsed by Vander Plaats won the caucuses in 2008, 2012, and 2016."

Yes, but all those candidates lost the nomination -- Mike Huckabee in 2008, Rick Santorum in 2012, and Ted Cruz in 2016. In fact, since 1972, the Iowa caucus has chosen the eventual GOP nominee in only two of seven contests in which an incumbent wasn't on the ballot: 1996 (Bob Dole) and 2000 (George W. Bush). Otherwise, Iowa picks GOP losers: George H.W. Bush beat Ronald Reagan in 1980 and Bob Dole trounced Poppy Bush in 1988.

Kilgore says that DeSantis "may see an opportunity to severely damage the 45th president in the very first contest of the 2024 GOP primary" -- but a Trump loss won't "severely damage" him, any more than it did in 2016. If Trump is at risk of losing Iowa, he'll just declare the caucuses rigged and corrupt and then concentrate on the next few contests.

And all of DeSantis's efforts might not matter. In multi-candidate polling, Trump has led all five of the Iowa polls conducted this year, according to FiveThirtyEight; Trump's average lead is 20.8 points. The notion that the evangelical-heavy Iowa GOP electorate will inevitably prefer the most anti-abortion candidate to Trump is belied by ... well, Trump's entire political career. White evangelicals have always been among his strongest supporters -- he vigorously proclaims that he hates the people white evangelicals hate and he does so in the style of the "prosperity gospel" preachers white evangelicals love.

DeSantis can keep up with Trump on the hate, but not the flashy-preacher style. So I think Trump will prevail in Iowa, but if he doesn't, it's no big deal.

IN THE JACKSONVILLE MAYOR'S RACE, THE DEMOCRAT WON. DeSANTIS AND TRUMP BOTH LOST.

Great news for Democrats:

Democrat Donna Deegan won the Jacksonville mayor’s race Tuesday night, a shocking upset that hands Florida Democrats a major shot of energy less than six months after they were trounced in the 2022 midterms and considered left for dead by the national party.

Deegan came into Election Day as the decided underdog against Republican Daniel Davis, who is the head of the city’s Chamber of Commerce and had a significant fundraising advantage. He was endorsed by Gov. Ron DeSantis....

With all of the city’s 186 precincts reporting, Deegan had a 52% to 48% advantage over Davis...

Deegan is a former TV anchor in the city with significant name recognition. After she left TV, she went on to found a nonprofit group that focuses on breast cancer research. She will be the city's first female mayor.

DeSantis endorsed Davis (although he didn't campaign with him), but Davis isn't the only prominent Republican who lost in Jacksonville yesterday. Florida Politics reports:

Davis tacked to the right ahead of the May 16 election, including holding a forum with Board of Education member Esther Byrd and School Board member April Carney in lieu of a final debate with Deegan. He also brooked controversy with a forum with partisan blogger Brendon Leslie, whose attendance at the January 6, 2021 insurrection in Washington, is controversial.

I told you about Esther Byrd last year, when Ron DeSantis appointed her to the Florida Board of Education. She's a big fan of Donald Trump and the movements surrounding him:

After the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots, Mrs. Byrd offered a defense of those “peacefully protesting” the certification of the 2020 Presidential Election while alluding to “coming civil wars.”

“ANTIFA and BLM can burn and loot buildings and violently attack police and citizens,” Byrd wrote on her personal Facebook page. “But when Trump supporters peacefully protest, suddenly ‘Law and Order’ is all they can talk about! I can’t even listen to these idiots bellyaching about solving our differences without violence.” ...

In October [2021], Mrs. Byrd offered an unsolicited defense of the Proud Boys....

“Why do you think Facebook is throwing people in FB Jail who share information about Proud Boys? (Side note: I must really have great friends cause a whole bunch have been locked up! 😂) I think it’s because they’ve seen a drastic spike in searches and they are worried that people are educating themselves rather than blindly believing what MSM narrative. Anyone have a better theory?”

Those statements came months after Byrd made comments supportive of QAnon after the couple was photographed on a boat flying a QAnon flag.

The comments in support of QAnon have been removed, but here are photos of Byrd on a boat flying Trump and QAnon flags:

Byrd’s wife @EstherByrd19 organized their first yacht club event on May 16 and their next one is on June 14. Mrs. Byrd posted photos of their friends’ boat they rode in for the first event. Notice the QAnon flag they’re flying.https://t.co/weHFRHYIaZhttps://t.co/dAUTSa31YI pic.twitter.com/QpaR0b9yBZ

— Phillip Perry (@phillipperry) June 7, 2020

April Carney is a DeSantis-loving member of the Duval County School Board who is believed to have been at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, largely because, after reading a Facebook post claiming that the J6 insurrectionists were members of Antifa, she responded, "WRONG. I was there."

Brendon Leslie, as noted above, was at the Capitol on January 6, and entered the bulding by his own admission. He went on to become the founder and CEO of Florida's Voice, one of the few non-Murdoch media outlets DeSantis will talk to, undoubtedly because of the fawning coverage he receives there. (Sample headline: "‘Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival’: DeSantis Launching Book to Detail ‘Battle-Tested’ Victory Plan for the U.S.")

These were the people Daniel Davis surrounded himself with in the run-up to this election -- and he lost.

A couple of thoughts: First, however much we want to divide Republicans into Trump and DeSantis camps, it's clear from all this that many Republicans have been fervent supporters of both. I think that's true even outside Florida, although Republicans are now faced with the need to choose sides.

But also note that Trumpism and DeSantisism -- really, right-wing radicalism in general -- might have been a bit toxic for some voters in Jacksonville. Obviously not massively toxic -- this was a close race -- but maybe just toxic enough.

How much of the country has had it with the present-day GOP? We'll find out in the next year and a half.

THE GOP WILL MAKE DEMOCRATS PAY IF DIANNE FEINSTEIN IS PRESSURED TO QUIT

It's not sexist to say that Dianne Feinstein should resign her Senate seat. But it's terrible politics when Republicans are in a state of total war against the Democratic Party and liberalism.

Feinstein is no longer capable of serving effectively. Slate's Jim Newell makes that clear:

When [a] fellow reporter asked [Feinstein] what the response from her colleagues had been like since her return [to the Senate after an extended absence], though, the conversation took an odd turn.

“No, I haven’t been gone,” she said.

OK.

“You should follow the—I haven’t been gone. I’ve been working.”

When asked whether she meant that she’d been working from home, she turned feisty.

“No, I’ve been here. I’ve been voting,” she said. “Please. You either know or don’t know.”

In a sane political system, I'd support putting pressure on Feinstein to resign. I'd feel exactly the same way if she were a man named Don Feinstein.

But as The New Republic's Walter Shapiro explained a month ago when Feinstein's time away from Washington stalled the approval of a number of judicial appointments, it probably wouldn't be possible to replace her on the Judiciary Committee (where Democrats have a one-vote majority) if she resigns, because Mitch McConnell is a sociopath:

The Democrats would need either unanimous consent or a filibuster-proof majority to appoint a senator to replace Feinstein on the Judiciary Committee in the middle of the term. Generally, during situations like this, the Senate operates under unanimous consent. But McConnell has defied Senate tradition before, especially with his refusal to even give Merrick Garland a hearing on his Supreme Court appointment in 2016. Jon Tester, Montana’s moderate Democratic senator, said recently that McConnell, who cares passionately about blocking liberal judges, would probably not relent even if Feinstein resigned. As Tester told Burgess Everett from Politico, “That’s what I’m hearing ... it won’t make any difference.”

I shouldn't make this about McConnell personally, because he couldn't do this without the enthusiastic support of his caucus. The entire Republican Party is sociopathic. This is not how the government should work in a developed country. But it's how our rotting, decaying government works.

If I thought there'd be Israel-size demonstrations in America in response to the filibuster of a Feinstein committee replacement, maybe I'd support pressuring Feinstein to quit. (Of course, the demonstrations in Israel have only forced a pause in Benjamin Netanyahu's judicial overhaul plans, which are still on the table.) In America, no one took to the streets when Senate Republicans refused to hold a hearing on Merrick Garland. So of course no one will protest in response to the filibuster of a Judiciary Committee replacement.

So please, let's not gin up a pressure campaign to compel Feinstein's resignation. Let her stay as long as she can, even if it's through the end of her term. This is war.

TO THE RIGHT, WE'RE NOT HUMAN

In his latest column, Jamelle Bouie writes about right-wing support for Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed two left-wing protesters in 2020, as well as for Daniel Perry, who may receive a pardon instigated by Governor Greg Abbott after being convicted of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020, and Daniel Penny, a newly minted right-wing hero who strangled an emotionally agitated but apparently nonviolent homeless man on a New York subway car earlier this month.

Bouie writes:

In listening to conservative fans of Rittenhouse, Perry and Penny, you would never know that there were actual people on the other side of these confrontations. You would never know that those people were, in life, entitled to the protection of the law and that they are, in death, entitled to a full account of the last moments of their lives, with legal responsibility for the men who killed them, if that’s what a jury decides.

What you would know is that some Americans are “heroes” and “law-abiding citizens,” and others are not. You would know that those Americans get the benefit of the doubt. And you would learn that to be seen as a problem by one of these law-abiding citizens is to be in jeopardy and even, potentially, to forfeit your claim to life.

The reason that, after listening to right-wingers, "you would never know that there were actual people on the other side of these confrontations" is that right-wingers don't think there actually were people on the other side of these confrontations. In two instances, there were left-wing demonstrators. In the third case, there was a Black man asking for money. To the right, these aren't people.

Michelle Goldberg, in her latest column, makes this clear:

[Ron DeSantis] is fluent in the language of the religious right, and strives to check all its policy boxes. “Put on the full armor of God. Stand firm against the left’s schemes,” he said at the Christian Hillsdale College last year, substituting the “left’s schemes” for the “devil’s schemes” of Ephesians 6:11.

There it is. DeSantis swaps in "the left" for "the devil" -- because the devil is what we are to the right. That's who mentally ill beggars and LGBTQ people and Black people who haven't embraced right-wing orthodoxy are: devils. I could list more of the right's enemies, but they all fall into the same category. All devils.

I have a theory that the contemporary popularity of zombie stories is a reaction to the cultural taboo against overt bigotry. Many people are still bigots, of course, but it's not polite to be an open bigot. As a result, it's generally not acceptable to turn a particular ethnic or religious group into the enemy in popular culture. But we still want stories that allow "good" people to feel virtuous when members of a group we don't consider human are killed. So instead of, say, Jews or Blacks or Muslims, we have zombies.

But the right has a long menu of enemies. Right-wingers still want leeway to deny they're bigots, so they demonize their enemies. We threaten Western civilization. We're causing societal breakdown. We want to destroy America, Christianity, the family.

We're effectively devils or zombies, so it's okay to kill us. We're not human.

TRUMP ISN'T THE ONLY MENACE

One reason I've been less angry about the CNN town hall than most other liberals is that I don't believe Donald Trump is uniquely dangerous. In his first campaign and in his presidency, Trump did harmful things to America that other Republicans and right-wing operatives hadn't dared to do -- but now Trump's techniques have been absorbed by the GOP and the right. Even at the peak of his power, Trump functioned as a cog in a Republican machine that had been corroding democracy and demonizing enemies for years.

Obviously, Trump made the machine work far more efficiently. But long before he started his first campaign, the Republican machine was doing Trumpian things, though with a bit more caution. Pre-Trump Republicans stopped the Florida recount in 2000 and finagled a corrupt Supreme Court decision that put George W. Bush in the White House; Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election results by force. Pre-Trump Republicans were racist in code; Trump dropped the code. Pre-Trump Republicans enacted restrictions on voting and persuaded millions of Americans that all-but-nonexistent "voter fraud" was widespread; Trump declared that any election he lost was rigged. Pre-Trump Republicans engineered a hostile takeover of the federal courts; Trump merely finished the job.

Republicans were dangerous before Trump. They would have been dangerous even if Trump had never entered politics. Now they're dangerous in Trumpish as well as non-Trumpish ways, and those dangers will still be there even if Trump drops dead tomorrow.

Which is why I wish more attention could be paid to Republicans other than Trump.

Today, The Washington Post reports that President Biden's reelection campaign intends to compete for North Carolina and possibly Florida. Pumping money into Florida seems like a waste of time, but Biden lost North Carolina by 1.3 points in 2020, and Barack Obama won it in 2008. The state has a Democratic governor now, and Democrats lost Senate races in 2020 and 2022 by 2 and 3 points, respectively.

In addition, the Republican candidate for governor in 2024 is almost certain to be a divisive hatemonger named Mark Robinson.

Robinson is the kind of Republican I wish would get more attention in the national media. He should be a household name, like Marjorie Taylor Greene. He's mentioned in the Post story, but only in the 20th and 21st paragraphs, although what readers are told is disturbing enough:

The Republican favorite for the job, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, supports an outright abortion ban and opposes same-sex marriage. He is known for controversial statements, such as calling homosexuality and transgenderism “filth” and calling student survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting “media prostit-tots.” He has boasted of owning a semiautomatic rifle in case the government gets “too big for its britches.”

“In Mark Robinson, you have a very powerful force that will turn out not only the Democratic base, but will sway a lot of independent voters because they’re not going to tolerate particularly a governor candidate who has an AR-15 and is ready to shoot government officials,” said [Governor Roy] Cooper, who is barred by law from seeking a third term in office.

I think the AR-15 line is much less toxic, by U.S. standards, than the other remarks -- and there are so many more beyond what the Post is reporting. A few examples:

In strongly worded Facebook posts, he decried a “globalist” conspiracy to “destroy” former President Donald Trump and took aim at Black Panther, the Marvel film whose titular protagonist, as Robinson put it, was “created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by [a] satanic marxist.” He went on to allege, using a Yiddish slur, that the movie “was only created to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets.”

... Raleigh’s News & Observer unearthed an interview in which Robinson spoke with a fringe pastor, Sean Moon, who claimed that the modern incarnation of the four horsemen of the apocalypse includes China, the CIA, Islam and the Rothschild family of “international bankers that rule every single national or federal reserve-type style of central bank in every single country.”

Rather than objecting to the blatantly antisemitic conspiracy theory, Robinson grunted along in agreement. “That’s exactly right,” he said.

Robinson, who is Black, seems to despise Black people:

In various posts over the years he referred to Black people as “muddle headed negroes,” “apes,” and “a monkey.”

“February is Black History Month. I guess the shortest month of the year is all we need to learn about the separate but equal history of a people who have achieved so little,” Robinson wrote in 2014.

... In a 2014 post, he shared a picture of a controversial t-shirt attacking the NAACP civil rights organization that had been sold by a North Carolina Republican politician. The image showed a white man holding a Confederate flag and urinating on the letters “NAACP.”

“I think the shirt was completely unnecessary,” Robinson wrote. “The NAACP has done a fine job of pissing on itself and its legacy for many years now.”

Robinson is also a conspiracy kook:

In 2016, as he watched the summer Olympics, along with being outraged about the Muslim fencer, Robinson was disturbed by the start of the games.

“AND NOW IT’S TIME TO PLAY…………..How many occult symbols can you spot in the Olympic Games Opening Ceremonies!!!!!!!” he wrote.

... Robinson also saw conspiracies behind organizations that provide abortions.

“Planned Parenthood; Doing the devils work, with liberals support, for the New World Order.

#takedownplannedparenthood,” he wrote in 2015.

... Even reality television was evidence of spreading darkness for Robinson.

“I know this may sound paranoid and crazy, but I truly believe that the ‘judgement’ format of these ‘reality’ competition shows ( i.e. American Idol, DWTS, Chopped, etc. ) is sign of things to come in the REALITY of the New World Order,” wrote Robinson in 2015, before adding an ominous hashtag, “#timewilltell”

This man is the lieutenant governor of a swing state. He's leading in primary polling for governor by 34 points, and he's slightly ahead of the likely Democratic candidate in one poll. And here's the key point: Robinson, who's 54 years old, will be like this long after Trump is out of politics. Maybe Trump persuaded Republicans that a person like Robinson could be politically viable, but decades of ugly speech on the Internet, Fox News, and talk radio are what made people like Trump and Robinson viable. Those forces will exist long after Trump is gone.

And then there's Mike Flynn. The Hill reports that Trump hopes to give Flynn a job in his administration if he's elected again.

“I will say, General Flynn, he’s some general. He’s some man. He took abuse like nobody could have handled, and he came out bigger, better, stronger than ever before,” Trump said via phone to the “ReAwaken America” rally at Trump National Doral Miami, according to a Rolling Stone report.

The Hill story gives us a brief rundown on Flynn career since 2017:

Flynn, whom Trump fired early in his administration, pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI about speaking with the Russian ambassador, though he later withdrew the plea.

He’s been surrounded by other controversies related to the 2020 transfer of power and prior dealings with foreign entities, and has been tied to QAnon and backed Trump’s claims of widespread election fraud. He was pardoned by Trump as the former president left office.

When Flynn is described this way, the idea that he might return to power seems only moderately unsettling. But Flynn isn't just a guy who has embraced QAnon, called for a military coup to return Trump to the White House, or argued that America should be a Christian theocracy:

“If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion,” he said. “One nation under God and one religion under God, right? All of us, working together.”

He's also a co-founder of the ReAwaken America tour, a traveling roadshow that peddles raw sewage from feature speakers like these guys:

Charlie Ward, an antisemite who has shared posts praising Adolf Hitler for supposedly “warning us” about Judaism; claiming that “VIRUSES are Man (JEW) made”; and calling 9/11 a Jewish plot. He’s also promoted a book which claims “that the official narrative of the Holocaust cannot be sustained” and shared a video attacking the alleged Jewish media for supposedly lying about the Holocaust.

Ward, who is a QAnon supporter, has also promoted fringe conspiracy theories claiming the Earth is flat, the moon landing was faked, and prominent people including President Joe Biden ... are actually “reptilian humanoid hybrids.”

... Scott McKay ... has claimed that Jewish people are fakes and have perpetrated 9/11; set up banking systems “in exchange for the child blood sacrifices”; and engineered presidential assassinations, among many other crimes. McKay has also praised Hitler and said he was trying to create “a banking system for the people and the free world.”

Keep in mind that Flynn is doing this independent of Trump. Trump's son Eric frequently appears on the tour, and Donald Trump, as noted above, phoned in to a Florida ReAwaken rally, but the tour doesn't depend on Donald Trump for support, and would undoubtedly continue if he died tomorrow. Flynn is only 64, more than a decade younger than Trump. This is a second career for him, and he won't give it up soon. If he runs for president in 2028, and polls reasonably well, I won't be surprised.

The menace of modern conservatism doesn't begin and end with Trump. It may seem hard to believe now, but when Trump is gone from the scene, it's likely that there'll barely be a decrease on the toxicity of our politics.

SO I GUESS IT'S OKAY TO MAKE WHITE PEOPLE IN FLORIDA FEEL BAD ABOUT DISCRIMINATION AGAINST A GROUP REPUBLICANS THINK MIGHT VOTE FOR THEM

I approve of this, but if I didn't understand it, I'd be surprised at the Republican hypocrisy:

As part of a broad education curriculum bill signed this week by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, educators in the state will be required to teach Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) history.

Florida joins Illinois and New Jersey among states that include AAPI history as part of their curriculum....

An analysis of the bill says the lessons "must include the history of Japanese internment camps and the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II; the immigration, citizenship, civil rights, identity, and culture of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders; and the contributions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders to American society."

Before reaching DeSantis' desk, the bill got strong bipartisan support, getting unanimous 40-0 approval in the Senate before getting approval in the House by a 112-3 margin.

It's not surprising that Democrats would vote for this. Democrats believe in the honest teaching of history, including the history of legalized discrimination in America. But DeSantis and other Republicans proudly support Florida's Stop WOKE Act, which requires teachers to avoid the possibility of inculcating "guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions ... committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex, or national origin." How do you teach about Japanese internment without running that risk?

I guess you teach the kids that the internment camps were all the fault of Democrat Franklin Roosevelt, the evil Democrat hero of Democrat Party members everywhere. (Did I mention that FDR was a Democrat?) Or maybe it's okay to blame white people in this case, because unlike Black people, Asian Americans seem as if they might start voting GOP in significant numbers under the right circumstances.

Republicans are very interested in a pair of cases currently before the Supreme Court in which the plaintiffs argue that college affirmative action programs (at Harvard and the University of North Carolina) discriminate against Asian American students. You know this is an important issue to the right when this top conservative thinker weighs in:

For a *very* long time, US media was racist against non-white people, now they’re racist against whites & Asians.

Same thing happened with elite colleges & high schools in America.

Maybe they can try not being racist.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 26, 2023

I'm sure the Florida bill is also intended to reassure Asian Americans that the relentless attacks on China by DeSantis and his ideological allies aren't a problem for them. DeSantis is just starting to ramp up his presidential campaign, so he'll be attacking China a lot, as will Donald Trump and most of the other GOP presidential candidates. The GOP's effort to blame China for every problem in America that isn't caused by wokeness -- surely there can't be any third culprit! -- is likely to have consequences.

It's good that AAPI history will be taught in Florida -- but GOP support for this bill is cynical and shameless.

GOP VOTERS WANT THEIR HEROES TO PUNCH LIBERALS IN PERSON, NOT BY PROXY

Well, this is just what you'd expect from Ron "Mr. Excitement" DeSantis -- he's about to take a step that will lead to another step that will lead, eventually, to a presidential campaign:

On Monday, the Florida governor’s political operation is set to move into its new base of operations, which will trigger disclosure requirements with federal officials....

That move will require the not-yet-filed campaign to spend more than $5,000 and, under Federal Election Commission guidelines, when someone running for federal office spends more than $5,000, they are required to register, file financial reports and designate a principal campaign committee.

Functionally, the office move will require DeSantis to file paperwork with federal election officials within 15 days, thus acknowledging publicly for the first time that he is running for president.

“The DeSantis team has been housed at the Florida GOP building since the re-elect,” said a veteran Republican consultant. “They are gearing up to move out soon. In moving, they would be spending funds and [it] most likely would force them to file a ‘Form 1‘ with the FEC, which would force an announcement sooner rather than later.”

A Form 1! Wowee! The excitement is almost too much to bear!

In The New York Times, Shane Goldmacher, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Swan try to explain "Why Ron DeSantis Is Limping to the Starting Line." (Yes, that's the embarrassing headline.) They blame DeSantis's refusal to announce until after the end of Florida's legislative session, as well as his donor-alienating positions on abortion and Ukraine, and also his lack of personal skills. But they only briefly touch on something that a Times opinion writer correctly identifies as a major DeSantis mistake -- one that Donald Trump isn't making:

... the most basic lesson to be drawn by Republican politicians from watching Trump’s [CNN] town hall is the importance, for any would-be Trumpian successor, of demonstrating that you too can engage with the mainstream press and come away a winner.

... it’s the opposite of the DeSantis method, which has been to stiff-arm the mainstream media (with a side of mockery from his friends and allies on Twitter). That’s fine for the governor of a rightward-trending state trying to get things done locally and build support with conservative activists. But it’s not what Republican voters actually seem to want from their national champions. They want the show, the battle, the drama. And you can’t really own the libs, in the end, if you won’t even take their questions.

That's from Ross Douthat. He's right. The rage monsters of the GOP electorate don't want their presidential nominee simply to declare from on high that the libs deserve to be abused. They want their nominee to do the abusing personally.

This doesn't just apply to reporters. Here's a Guardian story about the climate of fear in Florida classrooms:

Adam Tritt, a high school English teacher in Palm Bay, Florida, was shocked when his school’s librarian – eager to comply with Florida’s new law restricting “inappropriate” books in schools – removed one-third of the books on his classroom shelves, including a collection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry that was not on her list of approved books.

Vivian Taylor, a seventh-grade teacher in Miami, says she was told to hardly discuss Emmett Till ... in her civics classes because under Florida’s year-old “stop woke” law, “people say you’re not supposed to talk about that because it will make children uncomfortable”.

Carol Cleaver, a middle-school science teacher in Pensacola, says that when LGBTQ+ students who are feeling hopeless or depressed approach her to discuss their emotional troubles, she, different from before, often balks at telling them about a crisis support hotline for young LGBTQ+ people. She fears that if she mentions it, she will get in trouble under the Parental Rights in Education bill (known as the “don’t say gay” law)....

As the summer holidays approach, Florida teachers are feeling anxious, confused and beaten down....

DeSantis is a sick sadist for doing this to teachers -- but to Republican voters nationwide, he probably doesn't seem sadistic enough. I'm sure they'd like him to terrorize these teachers face-to-face.

Remember Chris Christie? No, not the pathetic loser who ran a futile presidential campaign in 2016 and might be planning another one in this cycle. I mean the early Chris Christie -- before Bridgegate and before the Obama hug, both of which made him a pariah in his own party. People forget, but Christie was the ur-Trump -- a thug who enjoyed attacking journalists, unionized teachers, and other people who dared question him almost as much as Fox News viewers nationwide enjoyed watching him do it. In 2012 it would have been difficult for Christie to beat the deep-pocketed Mitt Romney in the primaries and Barack Obama in the general election, but a lot of people wanted him to try. And you can understand why. Here were his poll numbers in March 2011:

The New Jersey governor scores the highest rating of any Republican in [a] Quinnipiac University survey, which asked how warmly respondents feel about various political figures and used the answers to calculate something of a hotness index. Christie’s hotter than any other Republican by this measure, at 57 degrees.

Among all political figures tested, Christie’s heat was only topped by First Lady Michelle Obama’s 60 degrees and former President Bill Clinton’s 59.2 degrees....

Mitt Romney fell lower on the list at 50.4 degrees.

What did the people who liked Christie respond to? This:



This is what Republican voters want. They wanted this a decade ago, long before Trump was a candidate, and they want it now. DeSantis is too averse to human contact -- even hostile human contact -- to give them the in-person brutality they crave.

IF YOU THINK CNN'S TRUMP TOWN HALL WAS A TURNING POINT, YOU'VE BEEN LIVING IN A BUBBLE

I respect Peggy Noonan's anger about CNN's Donald Trump town hall, but if you believe what she believes about the town hall's impact, you're part of the problem:

Well, that was a disaster, a politically historic one. It situated Donald Trump as the central figure of the 2024 presidential cycle.... It will have an impact on the campaign’s trajectory.

When it was over I thought, of CNN: Once again they’ve made Trump real.

Until Wednesday night, Donald Trump wasn't real? Maybe that's what you think if your social circle consists of aging journalists and former Reagan Cabinet officials, all of whom peaked in 1986. Until Wednesday night, maybe you could still imagine a universe in which "mainstream" Republicanism continues to have a large, passionate following and Nikki Haley or Asa Hutchinson could win the 2024 Republican nomination in a spirited battle of ideas. But that world hasn't existed for years and isn't coming back.

Politically, Donald Trump is real -- and he hasn't stopped being real since 2015, even after January 6.

On the subject of the town hall audience, which greeted Trump with a standing ovation and "chuckled when he talked about sexual assault," Noonan writes:

That wasn’t Gov. Chris Sununu’s broad GOP. It certainly wasn’t representative of New Hampshire in general or of New Hampshire on primary day, when undeclared voters can cast ballots for any presidential candidate in either party. The Republicans in the audience seemed more like supporters of the Trump-endorsed candidates who went down in flames last year.

In other words, the audience was the contemporary Republican electorate. Why do you think Governor Sununu chose not to run for Maggie Hassan's Senate seat last year? It was probably for the same reason Charlie Baker of Massachusetts -- also a moderate Republican governor with strong support from Democrats -- didn't run for reelection last year: he might not have survived his own party's primary.

That's the GOP right now. Voters want thuggish extremists. So of course Trump has never stopped being "real" to the Republican electorate.

Politico's Playbook also got this wrong:

CNN’s New Hampshire town hall with DONALD TRUMP last night may have done more to boost his chances of winning the GOP presidential nomination than anything that’s happened since the 2020 election.

Again, you can only believe something like this if you believe that the Republican electorate swore off nastiness and rage sometime after January 6 and has been patiently waiting for Mike Pence to lead a troop of Boy Scouts in the Pledge of Allegiance, with visuals by Frank Capra, after which he'd become the nominee by acclamation, but then Trump came roaring back on a motorcycle and reminded GOP voters how much fun bad boys are, something they'd completely forgotten.

Believing that the Republican electorate is full of fine, upstanding citizens who love civic virtue is willful blindness. Republican voters want someone to break stuff and have fun doing it. The only reason Ron DeSantis is struggling is that when he breaks stuff -- including people -- he doesn't really seem to being having fun. So of course Trump has been leading in the polls, DeSantis is second but trailing badly, and all the candidates who still maintain a surface politeness (while largely sharing the same political beliefs as DeSantis and Trump) are in single digits.

But these misreadings of Wednesday night reinforce my belief that the town hall wasn't a disaster for America. It's clear now that many people in the world of politics have been living in a civility bubble and had no idea what the Republican Party really is. Now I hope they know.

WAIT -- IS JOE MANCHIN PLANNING TO RUN AGAINST THE PRESIDENT AS A DEMOCRAT?

I'm confused by this story from Axios's Hans Nichols:

Scoop: Manchin flirts with Iowa voters

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) may not have announced that he's running as a third-party candidate for president. But he's acting like it.

... Manchin took time from his busy Senate schedule to tell a gathering of Iowa business and community leaders Wednesday in D.C. that he’s "fiscally responsible and socially compassionate" — another hint that he’s considering a potential third-party presidential bid.

... Manchin, perhaps his party's most endangered incumbent, didn’t explicitly tell the assembled Iowans he was leaving his party and running for president as an independent.

The group No Labels is raising money to build a presidential launchpad for a bipartisan ticket, with plans for their own nominating convention in Dallas in April 2024 and a strategy to get onto the ballot in all 50 states.

... No Labels has a close relationship with Manchin and frequently invites him onto their conference calls with donors to expound on the issues of the day. Last week, he sounded like a candidate on a No Labels call, according to Puck News, which obtained a recording of the conversation.

Manchin did not rule out joining a No Labels ticket on "Meet the Press" last month....

You know what has me confused about this? Iowa. I'm sure Manchin, who's being courted by No Labels and who has quite an exalted opinion of himself, is considering a presidential run. But what does being the No Labels candidate have to do with Iowa? As far as I know, No Labels isn't planning to conduct primaries or caucuses. Iowa is only relevant to a presidential campaign if you're running as a major-party candidate.

Right?

What am I missing? Did Manchin go to Iowa because Beltway reporters have a Pavlovian response to any politician visiting Iowa a year and a half before a presidential election, even if the pol isn't considering a major-party candidacy? (If so, I guess it worked -- Hans Nichols and his Axios editors drooled when Manchin rang the bell.) Or has Manchin concluded that if he runs on the No Labels ticket he probably won't win a single state, just like every other minor-party challenger in the past thirteen elections, but President Biden might be weak enough to be toppled in the primaries, or could at least be hobbled further, which will make it easier for Manchin's fat-cat fossil-fuel buddies to get four more years of the renewable-hating Donald Trump?

I can't tell. Maybe Manchin is just weighing a lot of options. But if his plan is to run on the No Labels ballot line, Iowa makes no sense.

IT'S TOO LATE TO UN-NORMALIZE TRUMP

I'm seeing a lot of complaints about CNN's Donald Trump town hall. I'm ambivalent about it.



I agree that CNN made a lot of choices that worked to Trump's advantage, the most obvious being the decision to give him airtime just as his civil trial was wrapping up, which meant he could use the appearance to knock the sexual assault and defamation case from the headlines. It was a mistake to let him have a town hall format heavy on audience questions, which were certain to be less hard-hitting than what a good journalist would ask. It was probably a mistake to assemble an audience of potential Republican primary voters (party members and undecideds) -- the crowd included many people who cheered when Trump bullied moderator Kaitlan Collins and called her "nasty," his go-to insult for women. (See the end of the video above.) Because of his height and weight, Trump will always be able to physically dominate any space in which he's interviewed by an average-size woman, and of course he'll take full advantage of that size difference if the woman challenges him, because he's a bully and a misogynist.

But the people who think this event shouldn't have happened apparently believe that Trump should never be given a forum in the mainstream media, from now until November 2024, I guess. Giving him this forum "normalized" him, they say.

But it's too late for that. Trump won the Electoral College in 2016 and nearly won it in 2020. He appears to be a slight favorite to win the popular vote in 2024, and he's all but certain to win the Republican presidential nomination. Two impeachments, an insurrection, a multi-count indictment, a civil verdict, and several ongoing investigations haven't made him a political pariah. Normalize Trump? He is normalized. It's too late to un-normalize him.

Instead of arguing that Trump shouldn't get airtime -- which gives his supporters the opportunity to say that we're afraid of him, and spreads his town hall message by applying the Streisand effect to it -- we need to use his lying and bullying to rally people who are disgusted by lying and bullying. (If those people don't constitute a majority of the electorate, then we're already doomed, and it's the electorate's fault, not Trump's.)

We need to highlight Trump's politically unpopular positions. Remind voters over and over again that Trump appointed the three Supreme Court justices who made the Dobbs decision possible, and also appointed the judge who banned the abortion pill -- and highlight the fact that last night he called Dobbs "a great victory" and refused to rule out signing an abortion ban. (If he'd been asked, I assume he would have said he's proud of Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Kacsmaryk, and that he'll appoint more people like them to the federal bench if he's elected again.)

Point out that Trump refused to take Ukraine's side in its war with Russia. I think Democrats should link this to Trump's "very fine people on both sides" remark about the deadly Charlottesville fascist rally in 2017. Message: How can we choose a president who can't tell the difference between right and wrong?

Remind voters -- especially female voters -- that Trump joked about the woman a jury said he sexually assaulted, while grossly distorting the facts:

"What kind of a woman meets somebody and brings them up and within minutes you're playing hanky panky in a dressing room? I don't know if she was married then or not. I feel sorry for you John Johnson," Trump said to a chorus of laughter.

We aren't going to silence him. We just have to use his words and deeds to beat him.

EITHER HOUSE GOP WITCH HUNTERS ARE COMPLETELY IN A BUBBLE OR THEY'RE REALLY BAD AT POLITICS

Yesterday, a jury declared that Donald Trump had sexually abused and defamed E. Jean Carroll, awarding her $5 million in damages. Also yesterday, it was reported that Congressman George Santos was about to be indicted on federal charges; this morning, he surrendered to authorities and was charged with 13 counts of money laundering, theft of public funds, and lying on federal disclosure forms.

Oh, and Trump will do a CNN town hall tonight, at which the Carroll verdict is likely to be discussed at length.

Under these circumstances, if you were a Republican and the head of the House Oversight Committee, and you'd been telling people for days that this morning you'd hold a press conference to discuss all sorts of skeezy things the Biden family has allegedly done, the sole purpose of which would be to embarrass the president, wouldn't you consider postponing that press conference to a time when it might get a little more public attention?

James Comer and his fellow Oversight Committee members just plowed ahead, and while their press conference is, naturally, the lead story on the Fox News and New Yok Post sites, no one else cares. Okay, CNN cares -- a little. Here's CNN's story:

House Oversight Chairman James Comer laid out new details to support allegations that members of Joe Biden’s family including his son Hunter received millions of dollars in payments from foreign entities in China and Romania including when Biden was vice president....

However:

... the committee does not suggest any illegality about the payments from foreign sources. The bank records by themselves also do not indicate the purpose of the payments that were made.

... Comer has suggested that Biden may have been improperly influenced by the financial dealings, particularly by his family’s foreign business partners, but the latest report does not show any payments made directly to Joe Biden, either as vice president or after leaving office.

Among the committee's allegations, according to Fox:

... the committee said it discovered that Hunter Biden, through his associate Rob Walker, received more than $1 million from a foreign company reportedly controlled by Gabriel Popoviciu, the subject of a criminal probe and prosecution for corruption in Romania.

But as The New York Times reported in 2019, Rudy Giuliani

participated in an effort that would have helped [Popoviciu], and was in fact recruited to do so by Louis J. Freeh, a former F.B.I. director who had been brought onto the matter by Hunter Biden.

A 2018 Times story was headlined "Giuliani Criticizes Crackdown on Corruption in Romania."

... Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, has waded into the debate on the side of the accused, sending a letter to Romania’s president, Klaus Iohannis, criticizing the country’s anticorruption efforts.

The letter, dated Aug. 22, expressed concern about the “continuing damage to the rule of law being done under the guise of effective law enforcement” in Romania — a position that seemed at odds with official United States policy.

Mr. Giuliani wrote that an amnesty should be given to those who had been convicted in the crackdown, citing the “excesses” of the country’s anticorruption agency.

Hunter Biden -- like Rudy Giuliani -- appears to be an influence peddler. But I don't see any evidence that Joe Biden pocketed any money or moved to alter any government policies on the basis of what his son said or did.

Today's press conference apparently didn't even mention the "Biden crime family finances global prostitution ring!!1!!!" allegations that have been sending tingles up right-wingers' legs recently. These allegations came up in yesterday's Times profile of Congresswoman Nancy Mace, which linked to this tweet:

Read several of those Suspicious Activity Reports at the Treasury just now.

The number of Biden family members involved (more than previously known), the amount of money involved (astronomical), the shell companies, the accusations of prostitution rings… wild... pic.twitter.com/hGORfBbhTF

— Nancy Mace (@NancyMace) April 17, 2023

Senator Ron Johnson has been worked up about this, too:

Sen. Johnson: “We have the evidence that Hunter Biden paid tens of thousands of dollars for prostitutes that were sex trafficked through an international sex trafficking ring…”

He went on to explain that Joe Biden was footing the bill 😳

Pretty hard hitting for Fox News 💥 pic.twitter.com/6oITcMKBOS

— TheStormHasArrived (@TheStormRedux) May 9, 2023

But no, Joe Biden isn't the head of a global prostitution operation. Even the New York Post, in a story published last year about Hunter's reported "dalliances with a Russia-linked escort ring," said that Joe Biden "inadvertently financed" the sexual encounters.

I'm sure I speak for many Democrats when I say that Hunter Biden has probably done quite a few unsavory and probably illegal things, but Joe Biden appears to have done nothing worse than support his son emotionally and financially, with some of the cash likely to have been spent in very dubious ways. If Hunter is indicted, it's probably for a good reason. It still won't prevent me from voting for Joe.

Today's House GOP press conference will be completely ignored by most Americans. Either Comer and his cronies don't understand that the rest of us aren't obsessed with Hunter Biden or they just want to preach to the right-wing choir. If they were interested only in reaching other people in their bubble, they probably succeeded. If they wanted to try getting the rest of us to care, they should have waited a few days.

TRUMP'S ABSURD LEGAL STRATEGY

I'll quote Tom again, and this time I have to acknowledge that he was right:

So apparently Trump's lawyers won't be presenting any witnesses in his defamation trial, I guess just relying on the spectacularly ineffective cross-examination of E. Jean Carroll to make their case. Maybe the plan is to get the verdict overturned on appeal, on the basis of incompetent counsel? I mean, there must be a plan, right?

I think there was a plan -- not a smart plan, but a plan dictated by Trump's personality and demons. I assume he thought he might win even without putting on a case, hoping that misogyny would prevail, along with a belief that he would seem to the jury like too mighty a figure to have done something like this (even though he knows he actually did it).

But I also assume he knew he might lose -- and he preferred to lose looking arrogant than risk losing while looking weak. To him, looking weak would be putting on a case, claiming innocence, offering a counternarrative -- and allowing that narrative to be challenged in open court. He thought it was better to lose with swagger (which is what he thinks he's done) than risk losing after being openly challenged. He preferred to increase the odds of losing if it meant not looking weak in the moment, and now he can tell his gullible fans that the whole thing was a farce and a fraud, so of course he didn't participate, and he holds his head high, even though a jury concluded that he's a sexual abuser and he's out five million dollars.

Trump is 76 years old. The father who terrorized him and thus made him fanatical about avoiding the appearance of weakness died more than 23 years ago. And he still can't relax.

SHOOTERS AND THEIR FANBOYS AREN'T THE ONLY ONES WHO "GAMIFY" MASS MURDER -- SO DO REPUBLICAN POLITICIANS

Yesterday The New York Times reported that Maurcio Garcia, the gunman who killed eight people on Saturday at a Texas shopping mall, regularly posted racist, misogynistic, and neo-Nazi material on the largely unmoderated Russian site OK.RU, according to investigators. Aric Toler of Bellingcat found Garcia's now-unavailable profile on the site. Toler described what he found in a Twitter thread (which is also available here).

In addition to photos of the mall, images of the shooter's swastika and SS-logo tattoos, and rants justifying violence as a reasonable reaction to sexual frustration, Toler found that Garcia, like quite a few other mass shooters (and many of their fans), regarded mass murder as a game. Garcia was impressed by the "kill score" in the recent Nashville school shooting.

Flashback to @IwriteOK's 2019 Bellingcat article on how mass shootings have been "gamified", with the Allen shooter talking about a "decent kill score" in Nashville.https://t.co/arQCcxRtt6 pic.twitter.com/0xDEcGsn9l

— Aric Toler (@AricToler) May 8, 2023

(In Garcia's post, "ER" is presumably Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in a misogynist spree in 2014 and has since become a hero to angry incels.)

In the 2019 article Toler cites, Bellingcat's Robert Evans explains what the "gamification" of mass murder is, citing previous mass-casualty incidents:

Ever since the Christchurch shooting spree, 8chan users have commented regularly on Brenton Tarrant’s high bodycount, and made references to their desire to “beat his high score”....

What we see here is evidence of the only real innovation 8chan has brought to global terrorism: the gamification of mass violence. We see this not just in the references to “high scores”, but in the very way the Christchurch shooting was carried out. Brenton Tarrant livestreamed his massacre from a helmet cam in a way that made the shooting look almost exactly like a First Person Shooter video game. This was a conscious choice, as was his decision to pick a sound-track for the spree that would entertain and inspire his viewers.

The Poway Synagogue shooter attempted to copy Tarrant in both these tactics, posting a musical playlist along with his shooting.

When you "gamify" violence, you make a choice to leave humanity and empathy at the door. Garcia wrote:

Every school shooting, to me, is the perfect time to be a completely horrible person and see this event like a sport or comedy.... the heart of the matter is: we all know it's just a fucking spectacle at this point, and the spectacle and the killer are far more interesting than the boring fucks who were killed.

But shooters and their admirers aren't the only people who "gamify" mass slaughter. So do Republican politicians.

When message-board sociopaths "gamify" death, the game is relatively simple: First-person shooter. One psycho against the world. You kill, you win. Republican politicians see mass death as a more complicated game, a game in which winning takes several steps.

Here's a summary of Republican gameplay:

* Republicans, nationally and in red states, keep guns as widely available as possible. They describe this as the preservation of constitutional freedom and of a right granted directly by God; even though they work for the government, they embrace the notion that guns are there, when necessary, to be turned against he government (just not when they run it).

* Then a mass shooters kills and injures a large number of people.

* They offer thoughts and prayers. They categorically reject gun control. They chastise anyone who would "politicize" the slaughter.

* Liberals express outrage.

* The Republican politicans channel and magnify that outrage. They encourage their voters to believe that any restriction on gun ownership will instantly lead to a liberal-fascist confiscation of all privately owned firearms.

* Gun sales soar. Loyalty to the GOP increases.

* Conveniently for plutocrats throughout America, the politicians who rally their voter base around the threat of gun confiscation are the same politicians who most reliably vote in favor of lowering rich people's taxes and reducing regulation on their businesses. So mass slaughter is not only good for the gun industry, it's good for GOP and the fat-cat class.

This is how Republican politicians run up a high "kill score." They get campaign money -- not just from the NRA, but from billionaires who understand the game -- and they reinforce a sense of sociocultural solidarity with their voters. Their kills are at the ballot box.

This is why I'm tired of being told that Republican politicians are "cowards" who are afraid to do anything about gun violence. They're not cowards. They just don't care about anything but their careers. They're as drained of empathy as Mauricio Garcia was. Mass death is a game to them, the way it was to him. And they've been winning for a long time.

IN THE E. JEAN CARROLL CASE, DON'T ASSUME THAT TRUMP IS CERTAIN TO LOSE

(I got this one wrong, I'm happy to say. And my apologies to Yas and Tom for confusing their work.)

I have great respect for Yastreblyansky's Tom's judgment (sorry, it was Tom's post; I have great respect for his judgment too), but I'm afraid I don't agree with what he wrote last week about Donald Trump's civil trial:

So apparently Trump's lawyers won't be presenting any witnesses in his defamation trial, I guess just relying on the spectacularly ineffective cross-examination of E. Jean Carroll to make their case. Maybe the plan is to get the verdict overturned on appeal, on the basis of incompetent counsel? I mean, there must be a plan, right?

The jury, Michelle Goldberg noted last week, is six men and three women. To me that's a bad sign. (I know men. That means the ratio of male speech to female speech in the jury room will be much more than two to one.)

It's possible that Yastreblyansky Tom is right and Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina is doing a terrible job, but part of his questioning of E. Jean Carroll, as described in a May 1 blog post at New York magazine, could be persuasive to any juror who thinks Carroll undertook this strictly for vengeance, or at least believes that's possible:

“As you sit here today, you know there’s a Law and Order episode from 2012 that featured a woman getting raped in the Bergdorf Goodman dressing room, correct?” [Tacopina] asked. Carroll replied, “I am aware, yes.” Carroll, for her part, said she didn’t see the episode, which involves a rape fantasy. Carroll liked Law and Order, but not Special Victims Unit, saying: “It’s too violent.”

Tacopina also asked questions about Carroll’s television and social media habits. He asked about The Apprentice.... Did Carroll admit that she enjoyed the show? “I had never seen such a witty competition on television,” Carroll said. “It was something that was worth watching.”

He then asked about the show’s conclusion — where Trump would tell hapless contestants “You’re fired!” before booting them. “I didn’t watch that,” Carroll said, “but I watched the competition.” Tacopina pressed on “You made a Facebook post, you were a ‘massive’ — all caps Apprentice fan.”

“Two friends were on The Apprentice,” Carroll said, “and I wanted to boost The Apprentice. This was a very good television show.”

Tacopina also asked about another Facebook post where Carroll wrote: “Would you have sex with Donald Trump for $17,000? (Even if you could A. Give the money to charity and B. close your eyes and he’s not allowed to speak.)”

“You joked about having sex with Donald Trump?”

“Yes,” Carroll replied.

In today's New York Times liveblog of the case, Kate Christobek writes this about the closing argument by E. Jean Carroll's lawyer, Michael Ferrara:

Ferrara says [the] defense wants jurors to envision “the perfect rape victim,” one who never goes back to where she was raped, burns whatever clothes she was wearing, never again has success in her career, never looks at her rapist again, never flirts and screams when being assaulted.

If you read this blog, I assume you're a feminist, and you're nodding your head in vigorous agreement with Ferrara. The problem is, it's likely that many of the jurors -- most of the men and quite possibly one or more of the women -- aren't feminists. They are expecting the perfect rape victim. Tacopina may have given them all the permission they think they need to let Trump off the hook.

Goldberg's column has more:

[Tacopina] took a similar tack with Jessica Leeds, one of the two supporting witnesses who also allege Trump assaulted them. Leeds testified that Trump groped her on a plane in the late 1970s, saying, “It’s like he had 40 zillion hands, and it was a tussling match between the two of us.” She said Trump called her the C-word when they ran into each other years later, a degrading little coda. In court, Tacopina questioned Leeds about her politics — “You just testified you are a registered Democrat?” — and her long silence about what she says Trump did to her. “You held it in for those 40 years until he was running for president?” he asked, his tone thick with incredulity.

Goldberg adds:

In the story Tacopina is constructing, all these women are acting out of spite. But the miserable process they’re enduring belies this narrative; it’s hard to imagine any of them, let alone all of them, agreeing to submit to public humiliation, and the attendant threats from Trump’s acolytes, just so they can perjure themselves in the vain hope of tarnishing the ex-president’s political career.

But too many people don't understand that. They imagine that a woman would subject herself to this amount of abuse and vilification just to punish an innocent man, because, y'know, a lot of women are sick and crazy. That was the message of Johnny Depp supporters all through his lawsuit against Amber Heard. And the jury agreed with the fans.

I hope Yastreblyansky Tom is right about this case, even if, as he concedes Yastreblyansky says, it's unlikely to have much impact on the public's view of Trump. But I fear most people still believe too many myths about sexual assault -- particularly the widespread myth that it's a response to sexual frustration, which means that anyone who has a lot of consensual sex couldn't possibly be a criminal sexual aggressor. Maybe the jurors will conclude that Trump is a monster the way juries have concluded that Harvey Weinstein is a monster. But the public never saw Weinstein with a loving wife or girlfriend on his arm. With Trump, they've seen that. So he might skate.

IF I'M KILLED AND DISFIGURED BY AN AR-15, PLEASE SHOW THE IMAGES

There was a mass shooting at a Texas mall on Saturday. What witnesses saw was horrible:

In an interview on Sunday, [Steven] Spainhauer, a former police officer, said he went to the scene of the shooting at the outlet mall in Allen after getting a call from his son.

"I found seven people shot in front of the store," he said.

Spainhauer recalled the horrific details of three victims, noting that one girl "had no face."

On Twitter, users have been posting a video clip of a pile of bodies at the mall. Twitter has removed the clip repeatedly, but it keeps returning; it's here now, at least for the moment. (The tweeter incorrectly refers to the massacre as a school shooting.) There's a pixilated version here.

Most decent people think Twitter should be censoring the video more rigorously.

I didn’t truly realize how bad Twitter has gotten until I accidentally stumbled across one of the videos from the most recent mall shooting and saw it had been up for OVER EIGHT HOURS? That shit would’ve been taken down within ten minutes before they fired the entire mod team.

— addy kaye (@adellephox) May 8, 2023

I disagree with the outrage. It's so much easier for the thoughts-and-prayers brigade to tell Americans that our massacres are merely regrettable rather than conscience-shocking when we don't see the reality of these shootings -- the literally visceral reality. In the video clip, you see a child's brain matter on the pavement. You get a sense of what assault weapons do to bodies. This needs to be seen by every American who can bear to look -- and by every Republican politician.

I live in New York City. We have crime, but it's usually not this kind of crime. Nevertheless, I've told my wife that if I'm killed and disfigured in this way, I want the images to go public. I think we should all make this pledge. We need to reject the taboo against showing these images. Too many people have an image of gun death derived from television and Hollywood. It's quick. It's clinical. It's only moderately bloody. That helps the Republicans maintain their stranglehold on gun policy in Washington and in much of the country.

A few months ago, after video showing the police murder of Tyre Nichols was released, I noticed that even some right-leaning news outlets felt compelled to acknowledge that the cops had gone too far -- because we saw that they did. I wrote:

... the right-wing media is ... generally describing the police violence as extreme and unjustified. A headline at the Daily Mail: "Tennessee sheriff suspends two deputies and orders new investigation after officers are seen FIST-BUMPING in sickening bodycam as Tyre Nichols lies on the ground in agony." At Fox News: "Reaction swift after Tyre Nichols police footage released; 'These men were street fighting,' former cop says."

We'll retreat to our corners soon enough, but the fact that some on the right acknowledge basic facts about these attacks suggests that there's some benefit in allowing the public to see the nature of the violence we argue about ideologically. The visual facts of these cases do not have a right-wing bias.

It was good that we saw that footage, and if rage monsters are going to keep destroying innocent bodies, it would be good to see those bodies, as Emmett Till's mother understood after racial terrorists killed her child:

When Mamie Till held an open-casket funeral for her murdered and disfigured son, Emmett, then allowed photos of his body to be published in Jet magazine, she did the right thing. I wonder whether we now need to see graphic images of mass shootings, or even ordinary firearm murders or suicides. There's widespread agreement in our culture that these images are taboo, but technology, from television to TikTok, has made us visual rather than verbal -- we may never grasp the horror of gun violence without seeing that horror unexpurgated. I think someday there'll be a gun-violence Mamie Till. That person will be vilified, but we'll realize after a while that we needed to see what was exposed.

We've known since the time of Rodney King that many of us don't understand brutality even when we see it. But some of us can grasp the truth when it's presented that way. So we need the images.

If I'm killed this way, I want the carnage to be seen. We might start the slow work of reversing America's gun absolutism if more people defy this taboo.

THANKS

Thank you, Tom and Yas, for great posts whil I was away (and apologies for the interruption). I'll have some thoughts about recent events soon.

Dude, Where's My Recession?

 

 

Rezoned development around a suburban transit hub. Image via New Jersey State League of Municipalities.

Happy beginning-of-the-month Freaky Friday, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases last month's job numbers and we sit down to play another round of Good News is Bad News:

I'm looking at this jolly message

Holy moly, we've got another one!

Payrolls grew a huuuuuge +253k in April, well above market expectations. There's no hint of any sort of labor market slowdown in these numbers. Other indicators had been hinting at a slowdown, but these are more reliable.

— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) May 5, 2023

and instead of smiling, I'm instantly telling myself ruh-roh, Fed's gonna keep pushing those interest rates up. Bad News! But wondering, can't you let it be Good News for a change, just the one time?

As young Wolfers actually appeared to be doing, in fact, in this series:

Lemme tell you why I love a hot labor market... It helps all of us find work, and it *particularly* helps traditionally disadvantaged groups.

Here's the Black unemployment rate, which just set a new record low of 4.7%. That's 0.3%-pts lower than *ever* recorded before. pic.twitter.com/mIIfXjb7DG

— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) May 5, 2023

And perhaps not without reason, because wage growth seems to be finally really ahead of inflation, with the Consumer Price Index down to around 4% (where Krugman was saying sometime last year it ought to be allowed to settle, instead of insisting on getting it down to the 2% target), and the workers at the lower end of the scale are really getting something out of this, while those at the upper end must be OK because they won't stop spending money, on restaurants and road trips and plane trips and 7% mortgages, which is what is driving all this peculiar prosperity.

Somebody, I don't remember who, offered a bit of an explanation: the higher interest rates aren't so much an end to inflation as a displacement of it: like inflation, they make things more expensive, but only the things you need credit to buy. Thus, the Fed's actions aren't changing the overall costs of growth, just shifting who has to pay for it, to the upper middle class if you like, which is doing well enough that they've decided they can afford it.

And that's the story: as some of us were saying a year ago, it's going to be OK. Looks like we won't be solving the affordable housing crisis any time soon, but that's not the Fed's fault—it's conservatives and too many NIMBY liberals who don't want to solve it (ironically, New York's progressive supermajority seems to have prevented not-so-progressive Governor Hochul from accomplishing the one truly progressive thing she wanted to do, a plan for financing 800,000 new homes across the state, because the suburbs were afraid of distasteful developments around the transit hubs).

And in general, the biggest threat to the recovering economy isn't the Fed but the Republican Party, and its attitude toward the debt ceiling, which is finally starting to get really frightening, because, as Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman said at the Washington Post, they think destroying the US economy for some unspecified period of years will help their election prospects:

a sizable swath of Republicans see default — or deep spending cuts, which would also damage the economy — as probably the best or only shot at ousting Biden. Yet if that’s the case, then why would anyone count on the right kind of pressure making Republicans cave?

After all, for some GOP members, particularly the radicals demanding confrontation, the theory seems to be that the Biden presidency is an emergency, so if damaging the economy would weaken his chances at reelection, it’s the “right” thing to do.

I think they're wrong about that, as usual (bringing the US to the brink of default in 2011 and achieving a downgrading of the nation's credit rating didn't win them any votes in 2012), but that's the thing. I appreciate Democrats' efforts to raise the debt ceiling through a discharge position (the rarely used procedure for introducing a bill past the objections of the Speaker and forcing a vote in which there could be enough of a handful of halfway sensible Republicans to pass it—no guarantees, but it could happen), but I really like the suggestion of John Stoehr's Editorial Board as to how Biden should act unilaterally, on the basis of the 14th Amendment's injunction against putting the validity of the public debt in question:

One thing everyone agrees on is failure to lift the debt ceiling is badbad for everyone for no good reasonreason. So Joe Biden should avoid waiting for permission from the House Republicans. He should pay the country’s debts, then say sorry for stopping a mass global panic.

Because he wouldn't need to apologize—

The irony is the House Republicans probably won’t ask for an apology. They’d have to admit to being responsible for forcing the issue. Imagine hearings in which Jim Jordan demands to know why Biden privileged billions of normal people over his dearly beloved Constitution.

—and if he did  ("Please excuse me for saving the country from financial disaster without any regard for Marjorie Taylor Greene's feelings") it would be worth it.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.