JORDAN PETERSON IS CAITLIN FLANAGAN'S Q

At The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan has elevated Jordan Peterson to demigod status, portraying him as the man whose words will destroy "identity politics" and the left as a whole.



Flanagan isn't on the right-wing media circuit, but her piece reads like something you'd find at Townhall or the American Thinker. It portrays the left as all-powerful -- able to ban Peterson from all morning chat shows in the U.S. and to destroy the careers of editors engaged in wrongthink -- but also extremely fragile and destined to collapse any minute now, like the paper tigers they are. This is reminiscent of the way the right talks about Democratic politicians -- they're both impotent (Barack Obama can't utter a coherent sentence without a Teleprompter!) and all-powerful (Obama fundamentally transformed America into a socialist pro-Muslim hellhole!). Peterson is the man who's crushing the omnipotent but decaying left -- it's not much of an exaggeration to say he's Flanagan's Q, subverting the dominant paradigm with his sub rosa, samizdat utterances.

Flanagan describes the effect Peterson had on her teenage son and his friends after they discovered his YouTube videos:

The boys graduated from high school and went off to colleges where they were exposed to the kind of policed discourse that dominates American campuses. They did not make waves; they did not confront the students who were raging about cultural appropriation and violent speech; in fact, they forged close friendships with many of them. They studied and wrote essays and—in their dorm rooms, on the bus to away games, while they were working out—began listening to more and more podcasts and lectures by this man, Jordan Peterson.

The young men voted for Hillary, they called home in shock when Trump won, they talked about flipping the House, and they followed Peterson to other podcasts—to Sam Harris and Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan. What they were getting from these lectures and discussions, often lengthy and often on arcane subjects, was perhaps the only sustained argument against identity politics they had heard in their lives.

That might seem like a small thing, but it’s not. With identity politics off the table, it was possible to talk about all kinds of things—religion, philosophy, history, myth—in a different way. They could have a direct experience with ideas, not one mediated by ideology. All of these young people, without quite realizing it, were joining a huge group of American college students who were pursuing a parallel curriculum, right under the noses of the people who were delivering their official educations.

And this is big and hugely subversive because the left needs only a nudge before it collapses utterly, according to Flanagan:

... there is no coherent reason for the left’s obliterating and irrational hatred of Jordan Peterson. What, then, accounts for it?

It is because the left, while it currently seems ascendant in our houses of culture and art, has in fact entered its decadent late phase, and it is deeply vulnerable.... When the poetry editors of The Nation virtuously publish an amateurish but super-woke poem, only to discover that the poem stumbled across several trip wires of political correctness; when these editors (one of them a full professor in the Harvard English department) then jointly write a letter oozing bathos and career anxiety and begging forgiveness from their critics; when the poet himself publishes a statement of his own—a missive falling somewhere between an apology, a Hail Mary pass, and a suicide note; and when all of this is accepted in the houses of the holy as one of the regrettable but minor incidents that take place along the path toward greater justice, something is dying.

... When even Barack Obama, the poet laureate of identity politics, is moved to issue a message to the faithful, hinting that that they could be tipping their hand on all of this—saying during a speech he delivered in South Africa that a culture is at a dead end when it decides someone has no “standing to speak” if he is a white man—and when even this mayday is ignored, the doomsday clock ticks ever closer to the end.

Flanagan's a better and smarter writer than the folks at C-list right-wing sites, but I don't see how there's much difference between her fantasy of of the end of leftism and the "Imagine No Liberals" worldview at those sites.

Because of Peterson and his allies, Flanagan says, leftism is on the run -- a few YouTube videos here, a few Joe Rogan podcasts there, and the left has been overwhelmed.

Whatever was happening, it was happening on a scale and with a rapidity that was beyond the ability of the traditional culture keepers to grasp. When the left finally realized what was happening, all it could do was try to bail out the Pacific Ocean with a spoon.

As I said, Peterson is Flanagan's Q.

Late entry for song of the summer: the QAnon rap https://t.co/WHKMmWdC0t

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) August 9, 2018

LAURA INGRAHAM LOVES HER COUNTRY -- JUST NOT OURS

In the past 24 hours, you may have come to the conclusion that Laura Ingraham hates America. Twitter suggests that's the case:

Laura Ingraham: "The America we know and love doesn't exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don't like ... this is related to both illegal and legal immigration" pic.twitter.com/s5G2qIY4W0

— Dinesh D’Souza is a convicted felon (@ndrew_lawrence) August 9, 2018

So does the lede of this story from The Hill:

Laura Ingraham: America as we know it doesn’t exist anymore due to ‘demographic changes’

Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Wednesday lamented that the “American we know and love doesn’t exist anymore” because of demographic changes in the country that she blamed on illegal and legal immigration....

The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf writes:

Laura Ingraham Doesn’t Love Her Country Anymore

... What I love about America is its animating idea: “That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

What Ingraham loved about America was apparently its former demographic profile. Now that Hispanic and Asian immigrants have triggered “massive demographic changes,” the America she loves “doesn’t exist anymore.” Sad!

But Ingraham still loves her America -- she just doesn't love ours. She may be a racist and a white nationalist, but she's also a Republican shill. Note the phrase at the beginning of this excerpt from her remarks, and note where she draws her lines (emphasis added):

“Because in some parts of the country, it does seem like the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people and they’re changes that none of us ever voted for and most of us don’t like. From Virginia to California, we see stark examples of how radically in some ways the country has changed. Now, much of this is related to both illegal and in some cases legal immigration that of course progressives love.”

Ingraham doesn't hate America -- she hates Democratic America. She names two Democratic states. She strongly implies that the rest of America -- presumably including the fine, patriotic exurbs and rural areas where her viewers live -- is just fine, at least for now, because Republican values prevail, although it's all under siege because of Democratic policies. If you watch the full version of her monologue (posted below), you'll see that she thinks the old centrist Democrats were okay -- they respected borders -- but now Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is singlehandedly taking over the Democratic Party (or so Ingraham implies, even though she also mocks Ocasio-Cortez for backing unsuccessful candidates in Tuesday's primaries), therefore we may soon need to bid farewell to our borders, and thus America as we know it.

Ingraham says:

Now, this is a sure way, over time, to remake and reshape America. This is exactly what socialists like Ocasio-Cortez want, eventually diluting and overwhelming your vote with the votes of others who aren't, let's face it, too big on Adam Smith and the Federalist Papers.

We members of the Ocasio-Cortezocrat Party haven't destroyed America yet. Ingraham insists that even minivan-driving suburban moms will surely vote Republican in response to horror stories about crimes reportedly committed by undocumented immigrants, including several she describes in the monologue in blood-curdling detail. (In Ingraham's telling, it seems that no native-born American has ever molested a child or killed someone in a motor vehicle crash.)

Ultimately, Ingraham suggests that America can be saved the same way Fox commentators always say it can be saved -- by means of more Republican votes.

THE NUNES TAPES SEEM LIKE A NOTHINGBURGER TO ME

Last night on her show, Rachel Maddow played tapes of Congressman Devin Nunes that were secretly recorded at a fundraiser for a House Republican colleague, Cathy McMorris Rodgers. I know the tapes were intended to make my pulse race, but I don't see what the big deal is.

The New Republic's Jeet Heer says it's because Nunes contradicted the president on the subject of collusion:

During private fundraiser, Devin Nunes admits collusion can be a crime. ... In the audio, Nunes makes some notable remarks about the ongoing Russia investigation. As NBC reports, “Nunes also appeared to say that if a campaign received and released stolen emails from a foreign government — he used a hypothetical example of McMorris Rodgers getting secret information from Portugal, where his ancestors are from — there would be a criminal element to that.” These comments go against the thrust of a frequent claim made by President Donald Trump, that “collusion is not a crime.” As Nunes concedes, collusion could rise to the level of being a conspiracy with a foreign power, which is criminal.

This is interesting, but it's not as if it can be used in a court of law -- Devin Nunes talking at a fundraiser isn't legal precedent. It could be brought up in impeachment hearings in the House or an impeachment trial in the Senate, but will any reluctant Republican say, "Well, I was planning to vote with the president, but Nunes's words convinced me Trump is guilty"? It's a nice gotcha, but it's nothing more.

The Washington Post's Aaron Blake seems agog at the partisanship:

First off, here’s [a] full quote, in context:

So therein lies what’s like your classic Catch-22 situation where we’re at a -- it puts us in such a tough spot. If Sessions won’t un-recuse and Mueller won’t clear the president, we’re the only ones, which is really the danger. That’s why I keep -- and thank you for saying it by the way -- I mean, we have to keep all these seats. We have to keep the majority. If we do not keep the majority, all of this goes away."

We don’t know quite what Nunes was responding to, regrettably. But what first strikes you is how quickly he pivots from talking about Trump’s fate in the Russia investigation to the GOP’s electoral fortunes -- as if the purpose of keeping Republicans in power is to shut the whole thing down.

Well, duh. The GOP myth right now -- it's almost QAnonish, even in respectable circles -- is that Trump will solve all of America's problems if he can only shake off the shackles placed on him by the Deep State, and that Republicans serve in Congress only in order to allow Trump to be unleashed.

Blake goes on to write:

... removing Trump from office would require a majority vote to impeach in the House and a two-thirds vote to remove in the Senate (which means plenty of Republicans going along). Nunes is leading the crowd to believe that this would happen. Perhaps that’s just overheated partisan rhetoric -- the kind of thing you say to fire up the base -- but the fact that the guy running the House intel committee’s Russia probe suggests it’s actually possible Trump could be removed from office based upon Mueller’s Russia probe seems significant.

It's not clear whether Nunes thinks the Deep State would get to more than a dozen of his GOP colleagues in the Senate or whether he just wants the donors to believe that. But the belief that their enemies are all-powerful is team-building for the GOP.

And there's this:

Hard-line conservative Republicans in the House recently hit a roadblock in their effort to impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein when Speaker Paul Ryan opposed the move. But one of those conservatives, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., gave a different explanation to donors recently when asked why the impeachment effort had stalled.

He said it's because an impeachment would delay the Senate's confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court....

"So if we actually vote to impeach, OK, what that does is that triggers the Senate then has to take it up," he said on the recording. "Well, and you have to decide what you want right now because the Senate only has so much time.”

He continued: "Do you want them to drop everything and not confirm the Supreme Court justice, the new Supreme Court justice?"

Does this mean they'll try to impeach after the election, assuming Kavanaugh's confirmation process is over? Sure -- is that a surprise? I can easily imagine them trying again in the lame-duck session even if they lose the House, just the way an earlier generation of House Republican ultras impeached Bill Clinton right after midterms in which Republicans were punished for anti-Clinton zealotry. It's not clear that an impeachment vote against Rosenstein would ever happen, or that it would succeed. In a Senate trial, there'll never be 67 votes to convict Rosenstein. So it's just an attempt to throw up a big stumbling block.

Or maybe it's just phony toughness on Nunes's part. The donors are probably rich guys who watch a lot of Fox News and are angry that the "witch hunt" hasn't been shut down. Nunes is apologizing to them for not getting the job done. But is it surprising that he (and the donors) still want to do this? Hardly. So nothing on the tapes strikes me as particularly significant.

TWO REPUBLICAN FOXES OVERSEEING TWO ELECTORAL HENHOUSES

Yeah, this seems legit:

No law requires Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to recuse himself from a recount in the governor’s race....

Republican legislative leaders said Wednesday morning that a recount is almost certain and could possibly take weeks....

Kobach, the state’s top election official, narrowly led Gov. Jeff Colyer in the Republican primary by a mere 191 votes Wednesday morning after each of the state’s 105 counties had posted election returns....

“There’s nothing in the statute that says the secretary has to recuse himself,” said Mark Johnson, a partner at the Kansas City law firm Dentons who has experience in election law. “But I would have to believe that in a situation like this, the secretary would be well advised to remove any appearance of impropriety.”

Somehow I don't think that recusal will happen. And Kobach will also get to oversee the general election if he advances to it. Maybe there ought to be a law against that -- or, given that this is a state issue, fifty laws.

Kobach, of course, pushed phony claims of voter fraud as the driving force behind the Trump administration's election integrity commission. Also, according to The Kansas City Star, Kobach earned big bucks recommending that small towns pass a draconian anti-immigrant initiative while offering himself as a legal defender of the initiative, which was regularly rejected in court. Kobach made money; towns went broke. That guy is going to oversee a recount and then a general election involving himself?

But he's not the only democracy-averse Republican secretary of state who might get to rule on a gubernatorial election in which he's the candidate. There's also Brian Kemp in Georgia, who's in a tight race with Democrat Stacey Abrams. Democracy doesn't always go well in Georgia, as we learned this week:

It appeared, according to the Georgia Secretary of State’s website, that Habersham County’s Mud Creek precinct in northeastern Georgia had 276 registered voters ahead of the state’s primary elections in May.

Some 670 ballots were cast, according to the Georgia secretary of state’s office, indicating a 243 percent turnout.

But on Tuesday at 10 a.m., the number of registered voters on the secretary of state’s website was changed for Mud Creek to 3,704 registered voters, reflecting a more likely turnout of about 18 percent.

The odd turnout figures last Friday were filed as part of a federal lawsuit against the state by election security activists that included a number of sworn statements and exhibits from activists and voters who experienced a series of bizarre and confusing issues at the state’s polling places....

In one sworn statement, a voter explains that she and her husband, who were registered to vote at the same address, were assigned different polling places and different city council districts. In another, a voting machine froze on Election Day.

In several instances, voters showed up at their polling places as listed on the secretary of state’s website, only to be told they were supposed to vote elsewhere.

An Atlanta Democrat’s voting machine provided him a ballot including the 5th Congressional District, for which longtime Rep. John Lewis ran unopposed, instead of his 6th Congressional District ballot, which featured a competitive Democratic race.

But wait, there's more This happened in 2016:

... a security researcher in Georgia named Logan Lamb discovered a serious security vulnerability in an election server in his state. The vulnerability allowed him to download the state’s entire database of 6.7 million registered voters and would have allowed him or any other intruder to alter versions of the database distributed to counties prior to the election. Lamb also found PDFs with instructions and passwords for election workers to sign in to a central server on Election Day as well as software files for the state’s ExpressPoll pollbooks—the electronic devices used by poll workers to verify voters’ eligibility to vote before allowing them to cast a ballot.

The unpatched and misconfigured server had been vulnerable since 2014 and was managed by the Center for Election Systems, a small training and testing center that until recently occupied a former two-story house on the Kennesaw State University campus. Until last year, the Ccnter was responsible for programming every voting machine across the state, raising concerns that if the Russians or other adversaries had been able to penetrate the center’s servers as Lamb had done, they might have been able to find a way to subvert software distributed by the center to voting machines across the state.

But Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who was the only state election official to refuse security assistance from the Department of Homeland Security prior to the election, has insisted for more than a year that his state’s voting systems were never at risk in the 2016 election, because DHS told him the Russians had not targeted Georgia.

This changed [in July of this year], however, when the Justice Department unsealed the indictment against 12 Russian intelligence officers who oversaw an operation that, the department says, included targeting county websites in Georgia.

And, of course,

Georgia uses a single model of touchscreen voting machine statewide that security researchers have shown to be vulnerable to hacking. The machines do not have a paper trail and therefore provide no means of conducting an audit of their election results—an ideal scenario for anyone who wants to subvert an election.

And did I mention the 2015 data breach?

Two Georgia women have filed a class action lawsuit alleging a massive data breach by Secretary of State Brian Kemp involving the Social Security numbers and other private information of more than six million voters statewide.

The suit, filed Tuesday in Fulton County Superior Court, alleges Kemp’s office released the information including personal identifying information to the media, political parties and other paying subscribers who legally buy voter information from the state.

In response, Kemp’s office blamed a “clerical error” and said Wednesday afternoon that they did not consider it to be a breach of its system. It said 12 organizations, including statewide political parties, news media organizations and Georgia GunOwner Magazine, received the file.

But surely Kemp has some concerns about the proper conduct of elections -- doesn't he? Well, yes, as this 2017 story makes clear:

Secretary of State Brian Kemp has continuously blasted Democrat Stacey Abrams since both entered the governor’s race, even as his office oversaw a complicated fraud investigation into a voter registration group founded by Abrams.

The Republican has said he’s fulfilling his constitutional duty by directing his office’s probe of the New Georgia Project, which last week led to a decision by the State Elections Board to refer 53 allegedly forged voter applications out of roughly 86,000 forms to the state Attorney General’s office for possible prosecution.

But his critics say he should recuse himself from the probe to avoid a conflict of interest, citing his frequent attacks against Abrams as evidence he can’t be seen as a neutral arbiter of the voting complaints.

The probe's lead investigator said that he'd found no wrongdoing by Abrams or her group (the people referred for prosecution were independent contractors) -- but now Kemp gets to oversee an election in which he's running against someone he targeted for investigation. That's modern democracy in America.

****

UPDATE: Oops, forgot this from last year (hat tip ZenLoon in comments):

A computer server crucial to a lawsuit against Georgia election officials was quietly wiped clean by its custodians just after the suit was filed, The Associated Press has learned.

The server’s data was destroyed July 7 by technicians at the Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University, which runs the state’s election system. The data wipe was revealed in an email sent last week from an assistant state attorney general to plaintiffs in the case that was later obtained by the AP. More emails obtained in a public records request confirmed the wipe.

The lawsuit, filed July 3 by a diverse group of election reform advocates, aims to force Georgia to retire its antiquated and heavily criticized election technology.

WHY I'M NOT ANGRY AT THE GREENS

Despite what you may have heard, Republican Troy Balderson's lead over Democrat Danny O'Connor in the OH-12 special House election is now greater than the number of votes won by Green Party candidate Joe Manchik:



Balderson's lead is 1754 votes. Manchik won 1127. So far, it's not true that the Greens cost the Democrats this one.

Once provisional ballots are counted, that could change. But even if the margin narrows to a smaller number than Manchik's total vote, I still won't be as angry as I was in November 2016 or November 2000.

Winning this one would have been great (and it's still theoretically possible). But this wasn't a critical victory. It's nothing like a presidential election. All by itself, it was never going to flip party control of the House. And even though they may have won, it's still a gut punch to Republicans.

Do you know what percentage of the vote the Democrat got in this district in the 2016 House race? It was 29.8%. Granted, the Republican was an incumbent, Patrick Tiberi. But still -- 29.8%. This is nearly a 20-point gain for Democrats in the district. If Democrats overperform that way (or even half as much) across the country in November, they've got the House.

And there'll be a rematch between these two guys in the same district in November (no, I don't know why Ohio bothered with a special election three months before a scheduled general election). By November, if Balderson is declared the winner in this election, he may represent a party that's shut down the government. Democrats could win this seat then.

In 2016, the Green candidate (it was Manchik then, too) got 3.6% of the vote; this year, he got only 0.6%. I wish the decline had been even greater -- but I feel better about the Democrats' chances in November than I did a week ago, and this election is why.

WINGNUTS REALLY THINK THEY'RE ALL GOING TO BE THROWN IN GULAGS ANY MINUTE NOW

Roy Edroso tweets:

Fascinated by all these free-market conservatives telling us why a private company can't choose who to keep or kick off their own website -- on behalf of ALEX JONES.

— Roy Edroso (@edroso) August 7, 2018

I mean they weren't even this excited about forcing businesses to accommodate wingnuts back when James Damore was their free-speech cover boy. It's like the worse the wingnut, the more passionate their defense of him.

— Roy Edroso (@edroso) August 7, 2018

I begin to suspect the reason the worst wingnuts excite their defenses the most is because they secretly believe the loathsome things those guys say -- and know they could never say such things themselves. So they *must* have an Alex Jones out there to say it *for* them.

— Roy Edroso (@edroso) August 7, 2018

I suspect that many "respectable" conservatives sincerely believe liberals are as evil as Jones says we are, and wish they could say the things Jones says about us without losing what credibility they have in the world outside their bubble. But I don't think that's the real reason they're so excited about the Jones situation.

I think they're worked up because they sincerely believe liberal fascism has come to America -- yes, even though they control all three branches of government and the majority of state governments. They think all of them will be silenced soon, if not jailed.

Glenn Reynolds, who a decade ago was exulting in the downfall of the Dixie Chicks ("Learning the difference between capitalism and censorship," he snarked) and the end of Dan Rather's career at CBS, now laments "the unpersoning of Alex Jones" and warns,

This is absolutely the first stage in a coordinated plan to deplatform everyone on the right. It’s not really about Alex Jones at all.

Elsewhere he writes, "REMEMBER, THE LEFT’S GAME PLAN IS ALWAYS TO SILENCE ITS OPPONENTS, NOT TO OUT-ARGUE THEM," and links to this Twitter thread from John Hayward:

Blogs shattered the Old Media monopoly during the 2004 election. Social media became an instrument to restore the power of the guild. As websites grew dependent on a few big social platforms for clicks, a leash that could tame the seemingly uncontrollable blogs was forged.

Some on the Left wanted to do this with crude government censorship, but that always runs into 1st Amendment problems, and it's a power they could lose in elections. Guild power is immune to elections. It is above the will of the people. It tells the people what they think....

Unelected guilds and mob actions give the Left control over speech without fear of losing elections or running into the 1st Amendment. They also confer the power to define terms, which is how government power can be bent to the Left even when it loses elections....

Left-wing activists are not afraid of establishing non-governmental guild controls that would effectively ban "fake news," "hate speech," "dangerous ideas," etc. because they are confident they will define those terms. The sword of New Censorship is not double edged....

How do you squash the blog revolution of 2004? By making it very difficult for anyone outside the guild and its approved politics to attract a huge audience, and very easy for insiders to do so. You make the little outsider afraid to even TRY. And here we are.

Reynolds's PJMedia colleague Roger Simon tells us we're literally in Hitler territory:

Fascist is a big word not to be bandied about (though it too often is these days)....

Nevertheless, the group censorship of Mr. Jones ... is one of the scarier developments of our time, if not potentially the scariest.

What we seem to be on the brink of, if not over the brink, is a kind of techno fascism replete with the deepest kind of enforced conformity through the fusion of social media and the hardware produced by these companies. It's already beyond what Orwell and Huxley conceived.

I can still go to Facebook and see Gateway Pundit and Breitbart and Mike Cernovich and World Net Daily and the Federalist. They're all on YouTube and Twitter. They still have their own sites. In other words, they continue to have platforms. They're not even in a virtual gulag, much less a real one.

Their president is still the president. The Supreme Court of their dreams will outlive me and many of them. Alas for them, they don't own Silicon Valley -- neither does liberalism -- and it's making them crazy. They're supposed to control all the levers of power.

We got angry a decade ago when Rather and the Dixie Chicks and Phil Donahue and Eason Jordan were forced to the sidelines by star-spangled pro-Bush triumphalists. But most of us didn't think what we were living through was worse than 1984. Get a grip, righties.

PAUL RYAN IS NOT A VICTIM

The problem with Mark Leibovich's New York Times Magazine feature on Paul Ryan is that it focuses almost exclusively on Ryan as a victim of a force beyond his control -- Donald Trump -- and downplays Ryan's own agency.

“He put out a tweet last night that was really good,” Ryan told me after he and the president hung up. The speaker’s words carried the vaguely patronizing tone of a parent affirming a potty-training milestone." This Is the Way Paul Ryan’s Speakership Ends https://t.co/98Swo6pbQD

— Mark Leibovich (@MarkLeibovich) August 7, 2018

For instance, Leibovich writes:

Far from any unified governing philosophy, the animating objective for much of today’s Republican Party has been reduced to whatever Trump does or wants. The main goal of many elected Republicans is to curry the approval of the president, avoid provoking him (or, worse, a tweet) and thus not inflame the “base.” Being deemed an infidel inside the Church of the Base can be lethal for even the most ensconced incumbent....

Ryan made a determination after Trump’s election that to defy the president too forcefully would invite a counterreaction. He tends to speak of the commander in chief as if he were sharing a coping strategy on dealing with a Ritalin-deprived child. “It boomerangs,” Ryan says of being too critical of Trump. “He goes in the other direction, so that’s not effective.” He added, “The pissing match doesn’t work.”

And Ryan himself wants to blame our problems on the political climate, which is an easy way of blaming no one at all, while shifting blame away from himself:

I caught up again with Ryan on a soupy Thursday morning in the Capitol. “You’re going to ask me about Donald Trump 16 times, right?” he asked me as we buckled ourselves into the back of his armored Suburban. He has this practiced-exasperation shtick down pretty well at this point. He was headed to do an onstage interview with Jonah Goldberg on the subject of political leadership in “an age of tribalism and identity politics,” a topic that Ryan says he has given a great deal of thought to. To Ryan’s mind, tribalism and identity politics are twin scourges that contributed to the environment that exists today. “Donald Trump didn’t give us all this,” Ryan told me. “Donald Trump is showing us what it looks like.”

In this profile, Ryan evades responsibility for his own actions, which don't seem to interest the author. I recommend that you skip the profile and read Richard North Patterson's brutal Ryan takedown in The Boston Globe instead:

... the stark truth is that Trump is a political mutation spawned by Paul Ryan’s big ideas.

Those ideas – promoting free trade, slashing entitlements, and shredding the social safety net – offered nothing to a base beset by economic insecurity and racial anxiety. To win their votes, Ryan and his party offered diversionary scapegoats – feckless bureaucrats, lazy welfare recipients, secular elites, job-stealing immigrants, and venal minorities practicing “identity politics.”

... Abruptly, the party became Trump’s hostage; Ryan, his court eunuch. Ryan stood mute as Trump vilified Muslims, shafted Dreamers, and separated refugees from their kids. He supported Devin Nunes in reducing the House Intelligence Committee to rabid pit bulls bent on killing the Russia investigation to protect Trump from impeachment. Cruelest of all, Trump signed a version of Ryan’s donor-driven fiscal fakery into tax law. Reality, indeed, bites.

Thus ended Paul Ryan’s fatal deception. He becomes in history what he always was in fact — the avatar of a fiscally-ruinous wealth transfer to America’s 1 percent.

Read the whole thing, which would have made a much better sendoff for Ryan in the Paper of Record.


(Patterson op-ed via Downpuppy.)

WALK OF FAME STARS ARE DEFENDED AS IF THEY'RE CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS

Conuld Donald Trump's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame be permanently removed?

... Donald Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is facing a political assault.

West Hollywood’s city council unanimously voted Monday to seek the removal of Donald Trump's Hollywood star, according to Mayor John Duran.

But it's highly unlikely that this will happen:

... the resolution is nothing more than a glorified request, as control of the stars rests with the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which has never removed stars in the past—not even the one belonging to Bill Cosby, who’s been found guilty on three felony counts of aggravated indecent assault, or the musician Spade Cooley, who was convicted of murdering his wife in 1961....

“The Hollywood Walk of Fame is a registered historic landmark. Once a star has been added to the Walk, it is considered a part of the historic fabric of the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Because of this, we have never removed a star from the Walk,” said Leron Gubler, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce president and CEO.

This is nonsense. If you can change a "registered historic landmark" by adding to it, why can't you change it by removing something from it, as long as the essential nature of the landmark is unchanged? The Walk of Fame is a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Landmark, designated in 1978. So is Grauman's Chinese Theatre, designated in 1968. In 2013, Grauman's underwent a renovation that turned it into an IMAX theater. It's also changed its name (not for the first time since it achieved landmark status) -- it's now the TCL Chinese Theatre. It's still a landmark. (The famous facade remains.)

The Hollywood Reporter and IMDb have lists of controversial honorees on the Walk of Fame, among them Kevin Spacey and Bill Cosby. The Chamber of Commerce has specifically said it won't remove Cosby's star, which has been defaced by vandals.

Walk Of Fame Says Bill Cosby's Star Isn't Going Anywherehttp://t.co/12KUer3lrX pic.twitter.com/mW3HGOlx0d

— LAist (@LAist) July 9, 2015

Curiously absent from those lists is D.W. Griffith, whose Birth of a Nation inspired a revival of the Ku Klux Klan.

On the one hand, the Chamber of Commerce seems to be defending every star the way Southern states defend Confederate monuments. On the other hand, a project of reassessment could get complicated. I'd like to see Cosby go, but Louis B. Mayer was awful, too, and he's clearly not the only sexual predator from the past who has a star. (Alfred Hitchcock, also not a nice guy, has two stars.) It would be a big project just to purge the Walk of Fame of real evildoers.

For now, though, it's clear that's not going to happen. So expect a lot more vandalism -- of the Trump and Cosby stars, at least.

IT'S ALL FUN AND GAMES UNTIL SOMEONE DUPED BY YOUR PRANK GRABS AN AR-15

BuzzFeed floats the theory that QAnon is actually a left-wing prank:

While it's almost impossible to prove who started QAnon, there is some evidence that it was meant to be a prank all along. And more importantly, it's looking more and more likely that QAnon is actually a prank by leftists or anarchists to make the far-right look deranged.

Last month, an Italian leftist activist collective called the Wu Ming Foundation pointed to a book they published in the ’90s that is shockingly similar to QAnon.

In 1999, Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, Federico Guglielmi, and Luca Di Meo, writing under the name "Luther Blissett," published an Italian novel called Q....

The plot of their novel Q is pretty similar in structure to the basics of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

It follows the journey of an unnamed Anabaptist religious radical across Europe during the 16th century. He joins various movements that emerge following the Protestant Reformation. The whole time he's being pursued by a spy for the Roman Catholic Church named Q....

They also pointed to the fact that the Q from the QAnon community is described almost exactly like Luther Blissett used to be described, "an entity of about 10 people that have high security clearance."

There's also this:

In early 1995 the Italian media was gripped by the disappearance of a British artist. harry Kipper had been cycling round the north of the country, his route tracing out the word 'ART'. Weekly TV show Chi l'ha visto? ("Has Anybody Seen Them?") departed from its usual diet of missing children, fugitive spouses and draft dodgers to follow Kipper's case. On the eve of broadcast, the programme-makers found they'd been duped - but not before newspapers had been alerted to the hoax. Kipper was the creation of anonymous, Bologna-based art-anarchists who explained their motivation thus: "Chi l'ha visto? is a Nazi-pop expression of the need for control". The statement was signed 'Luther Blissett'.

... Following a five-year plan, the group known as 'Luther Blissett' pulled off a number or stunts. They conned the Italian mass media with stories of art made by chimpanzees. They were behind rumours implicating a respected priest in a child sex ring....

"Child sex ring"? Okay, now I can believe that QAnon was the brainchild of one or more people who at least know about these guys, although that doesn't necessarily mean the perpetrators are lefties or left-leaning anarchists.

But if they are lefties, QAnon was a stupid and dangerous prank for them to pull.

As the BuzzFeed story notes, it already seems to have led to a couple of acts of vigilantism:

An Arizona veteran’s charity called Veterans on Patrol ... came across a homeless camp in Tucson in May and decided it was a child-sex camp. The group organized under the #OperationBackyardBrawl hashtag. Members spent several days streaming at the site and eventually forced local authorities to investigate, and a cadaver dog was even brought in. Of course, nothing was found.

Things got even more intense a week after the Tucson incident, when Matthew P. Wright ... was arrested after he drove an armored vehicle onto a bridge spanning the Hoover Dam and blocked traffic to demand the government "release the OIG report," a call spouted by QAnon believers. Wright's standoff with the police lasted 90 minutes. He was eventually taken into custody without incident, authorities said, but a rifle and a handgun were found inside the truck.

We know that the earlier Pizzagate conspiracy almost got people killed when a gunman showed up at the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in D.C.

Generally speaking, I like an arty prank as much as the next overeducated elitist. But whoever cooked QAnon up -- assuming the perpetrators were people whose worldview is similar to that of the Italians -- didn't take into account that the likely believers in QAnon are heavily armed, or that the rumors being circulated reinforce the messaging of the dominant political party in America, which is extremely reactionary and dangerous.

QAnon seems to be withering under exposure. Good. If it was a prank, I hope the people responsible had a good laugh -- and we're lucky nobody got killed.

OF COURSE CHARLOTTESVILLE WASN'T A TURNING POINT FOR TRUMP

Under the headline "The Real Lesson Trump Learned from Charlottesville, Politco's Annie Karni asserts that President Trump was emboldened a year ago by the fact that he got away with failing to fully condemn violent white nationalists:

That moment temporarily left Trump on an island, abandoned by Republicans on the Hill and corporate executives who had previously played nice with the president on his business councils, and was a low-water mark of his presidency...

[But] a year out from Charlottesville tells a different story and is less clear cut....

“The big picture is the fizzle,” said Bill Kristol, editor-at-large of the Weekly Standard and a prominent Never Trump conservative. “He’s not in good shape politically, but he’s not in worse shape. Charlottesville didn’t change his numbers. Everything has just become more the way it was.”

Indeed, the Republicans in Congress who distanced themselves from Trump during the height of the controversy last summer have since embraced the president on tax reform and his Supreme Court selection, Brett Kavanaugh. Many of the executives who walked away from Trump’s business councils have simply taken their hobnobbing behind closed doors: Now they quietly dine with the president at the White House, or with his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner at their Kalorama mansion.

Trump’s poll numbers, while still hitting a ceiling below 50 percent, in the year since Charlottesville have climbed up to a high of 44 percent, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Trump is in high demand as a campaign surrogate among Republican candidates. His supportive gang of Fox News hosts have become more ethno-nationalist in their rhetoric than they were a year ago.

Meanwhile, Trump himself is less constrained than he was after Charlottesville.... the president has continued to inflame racial tensions....

But he didn't learn anything from the outrage "fizzle" that he didn't already know. What happened when the Access Hollywood tape was released? He got away with it -- just about every Republican who denounced him returned to the fold shortly afterward. What happened when he attacked John McCain? Or Judge Curiel? Or Megyn Kelly? Or Alicia Machado? Or Khizr and Ghazala Khan? Or Serge Kovaleski? He escaped serious consequences every time.

He didn't learn from Charlottesville that he could do or say anything and not lose his voter base or the elected officials in his party -- he'd already learned a long time ago that they won't leave him over hate speech or crude slanders.

Charlottesville didn't embolden him -- if he's unbound now, it's because he learned how to avoid being restrained by aides, especially those who aren't as politically extreme as he is. My guess is that he doesn't even register the Charlottesville moment as particularly significant. For him it was barely a speed bump. If he did register it, it was as a moment that confirmed what was already obvious to him.

TRUMP DOG-WHISTLES TO THE GLENN GREENWALD LEFT?

This morning, Donald Trump tweeted this:

The Fake News hates me saying that they are the Enemy of the People only because they know it’s TRUE. I am providing a great service by explaining this to the American People. They purposely cause great division & distrust. They can also cause War! They are very dangerous & sick!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 5, 2018

I responded:

Am I paranoid if I suspect that "They can also cause War!" was suggested by an aide who knows it'll appeal to Glenn Greenwald and other anti-anti-Trump lefties? https://t.co/pmI2sJ97pt

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) August 5, 2018

And as if on cue, Glenn Greenwald tweeted:

We're going to spend the morning pretending that the US media didn't play a vital role in spreading the lies that led to the worst political crime of this generation: the invasion & destruction of Iraq? Or the worst crime of the prior generation: Vietnam? Or multiple other wars?

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 5, 2018

Read Greenwald's entire thread. (Hat tip: Tom Hilton.) He makes some valid points, although I primarily blame the Bush administration for lying us into the Iraq War (with, to be sure, a great deal of assistance from the media).

In any event, I now strongly suspect that that sentence in the tweet was intended as a dog whistle to the useful idiots of the liberal-hating left. I don't believe Trump knows enough about them to have added the sentence on his own. But someone on his team understands, and the phrase connected as intended.

HANG JIM JORDAN AROUND EVERY REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE'S NECK

If Republicans hold the House in November, sexual abuse enabler Jim Jordan's campaign to be the next Speaker of the House is looking more and more credible. Jordan seems to be the MAGA people's choice:

There were a number of moments in President Donald Trump’s freewheeling speech, in a suffocatingly hot high school gymnasium on Saturday night, that broke the humid haze over the crowd, sending them into uproarious cheers....

But the one that seemed to send the crowd into a euphoric tailspin was Trump inviting Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) onstage.

"Jim Jordan, how great is he?" Trump said. "What a great defender he's been, what courage. He's a brave, tough cookie."

Chants of “Speaker of the House,” erupted from the bleachers as the conservative lawmaker came to the podium.

He's vigorously backed by the Koch-founded, Tea Party-linked group FreedomWorks.

HUGE NEWS! 📰 Rep. @Jim_Jordan has OFFICIALLY announced he is RUNNING for Speaker of the House! TAKE ACTION! Send these representatives a message on Twitter. Tell them to support Jim Jordan for Speaker of the House: https://t.co/Jw1n593c4e - #SpeakerJordan #ampFW pic.twitter.com/s9n01qrYhG

— FreedomWorks (@FreedomWorks) July 26, 2018

Ted Cruz backs his bid for Speaker. So does Jordan's House colleague Ron DeSantis, the Trump-endorsed front-runner in the race for Florida's Republican gubernatorial nomination.

It appears that no matter how many former Ohio State wrestlers come forward to charge Jordan with turning a blind eye to sexual assault in the school's wrestling program, he's going to evade responsibility -- and he really could be Speaker by this time next year.

So this shouldn't be limited to Ohio races:

Democrats are borrowing from the Republican playbook in a new ad ahead of Tuesday's Ohio special election to tie the GOP candidate to the embattled Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan.

A new, five-figure, digital spot released by American Bridge admonishes Republican Troy Balderson over not releasing a stance on Jordan's bid for House speaker....

"Seven former student athletes say Jim Jordan turned a blind eye to sexual abuse at Ohio State," the ad's narrator says. Does Troy Balderson stand with the victims or with Jim Jordan?"

They try to tie every Democrat to the (non-scandal-plagued) Nancy Pelosi, so we should put them all on record, all over the country. We should ask every Republican House candidate, and every member of the House who's running for another office: Where do you stand on abuse enabler Jim Jordan's campaign for Speaker?

THE OLD REPUBLICAN BAIT-AND-SWITCH

I'm not impressed by this:

First lady Melania Trump voiced support for LeBron James on Saturday after President Trump went after the NBA star on Twitter, questioning his intelligence....

“It looks like LeBron James is working to do good things on behalf of our next generation and just as she always has, the First Lady encourages everyone to have an open dialogue about issues facing children today," first lady spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said in a statement obtained by The Hill.

Her comment came hours after the president jabbed James on Twitter and questioned his intelligence, prompting pushback and statements of support on the player's behalf.

Following CNN host Don Lemon's interview with James this week about his newly opened school, Trump tweeted: “Lebron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon. He made Lebron look smart, which isn’t easy to do."

When I read about something like this, or about Ivanka Trump criticizing her father's family separation policy, I'm reminded of this GOP bait-and-switch from 2004:

In a political season marked by Republican efforts to outlaw gay marriage, Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday offered a defense of the rights of gay Americans, declaring that "freedom means freedom for everyone" to enter "into any kind of relationship they want to."

... In contrast, President Bush has argued that a federal constitutional amendment banning gay marriage is essential....

In unusually personal remarks on the issue, delivered at a campaign forum in Davenport, Iowa, the vice president referred to his daughter, Mary, who is a lesbian, saying that he and his wife "have a gay daughter, so it's an issue our family is very familiar with." ...

He spoke on the same day that a draft version of the Republican platform was distributed to convention delegates that declared, "We strongly support President Bush's call for a constitutional amendment that fully protects marriage." The draft platform added, "Attempts to redefine marriage in a single city or state could have serious consequences throughout the country, and anything less than a constitutional amendment, passed by Congress and ratified by the states, is vulnerable to being overturned by activist judges."

Cheney made those remarks on August 24, 2004. The Republican convention convened six days later. The platform ratified at the conventionincluded the language quoted above.

And then there were the referenda:

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Nov. 3 - Proposed state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage increased the turnout of socially conservative voters in many of the 11 states where the measures appeared on the ballot on Tuesday, political analysts say, providing crucial assistance to Republican candidates including President Bush in Ohio....

The amendments, which define marriage as between only a man and a woman, passed overwhelmingly in all 11 states....

But the ballot measures also appear to have acted like magnets for thousands of socially conservative voters in rural and suburban communities who might not otherwise have voted, even in this heated campaign, political analysts said. And in tight races, those voters -- who historically have leaned heavily Republican -- may have tipped the balance.

Red-meat policies for the true believers, accompanied by a toothless dissent from someone close to the president in order to fool more moderate voters. It worked in '04. No one should fall for it again.

ON BLUE-COLLAR EMPLOYMENT, TRUMP GETS THE SPIN HE WANTS

It must be a Trump recovery for blue-collar workers, because The New York Times effectively says so:

Workers Hardest Hit by Recession Are Joining in Recovery

The least educated American workers, who took the hardest hit in the Great Recession, were also among the slowest to harvest the gains of the recovery. Now they are a striking symbol of a strong economy.

The unemployment rate for those without a high school diploma fell to 5.1 percent in July, the Labor Department reported Friday, the lowest since the government began collecting data on such workers in 1992. At the economy’s nadir in the summer of 2009, the unemployment rate for high school dropouts hit 15.6 percent, more than three times the peak unemployment rate for college graduates.

... Other indicators suggest the recovery is finally extending its reach. The Labor Department’s broadest measure of unemployment, which includes workers forced to take part-time jobs because full-time positions are unavailable, fell to 7.5 percent in July, the lowest since 2001.

All this has translated into better economic opportunities for workers without a college degree, who account for a majority of the work force. It is a contingent that was championed by Mr. Trump during his presidential campaign....

But if you look at a chart that appears in the same Times article, you don't see a sudden improvement in blue-collar workers' job prospects -- you see a years-long trend that started under Obama and continues at the same pace:

Even the White House isn't trying to conceal the origin of the recovery, although it also credits Trump:

The American economy is continuing its longest monthly streak of job growth in history, with 3.9 million jobs added since President Trump was elected.

Read more ⬇️ https://t.co/H5mop38ygO

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 3, 2018

(The chart is the ratio of employment to population. It's also posted at whitehouse.gov.)

I understand that, with regard to hiring of the less educated, we appear to have hit "critical mass" or a "tipping point" or whichever cliché you want to use. That's good. But it's a continuation of existing trends. The Times doesn't conceal that fact, but the emphasis is on the seeming breakthrough rather than the long approach to that breakthrough. That's pro-Trump spin.

It's likely that we would have seen very similar numbers under President Hillary Clinton -- and I suspect that the spin wouldn't have been the same. It's not just that regular Fox commentator Donald Trump would have been among the many right-wing pundits denouncing the data as fake news and assuring us that hiring was actually very weak. It's also that elected Republicans would have been saying the same thing, and probably being heeded by the mainstream press. At best, President Clinton would get a grudging acknowledgment that she'd sustained the recovery, but we'd be told that it was all Obama's doing. She'd get no credit for a blue-collar breakthrough.

IT WOULDN'T BE SURPRISING IF TRUMP IS NOW LYING JUST FOR THE SAKE OF LYING

Susan Glasser writes this for The New Yorker, under the headline "It’s True: Trump Is Lying More, and He’s Doing It on Purpose":

On Thursday, the Washington Post published a remarkable story on its front page revealing a recent spike in the number of “false and misleading claims” made by President Trump. In his first year as President, Trump made 2,140 false claims, according to the Post. In just the last six months, he has nearly doubled that total to 4,229....

History books will likely declare the last few months a turning point in the Trump Presidency.... The upsurge provides empirical evidence that Trump, in recent months, has felt more confident running his White House as he pleases, keeping his own counsel, and saying and doing what he wants when he wants to.

I think it's more than that. The specific content of most of Trump lies makes him seem, to his base, as if he's even more of a demigod (and a martyr) than they thought he was -- but there's also value for him in lying just for the sake of lying. When he lies, mainstream media fact checkers call him out for it. That alone is a plus for him. He's admired even more by his fan base every time he's called out by "the fake news." So he has incentive to lie just so he'll be criticized for it. He might as well lie about things he has no reason to lie about, because every lie invites a fact check, and every fact check can be denounced as an attack by media evildoers. It's a wonder he doesn't lie about everything -- his name, the day of the week -- just so he can run up his untruth score in the Post and elsewhere. It's all upside for him when he lies, so of course he's doing it more.

MUCH OF THE RIGHT WANTS TO LOSE THE FIGHT OVER SARAH JEONG

After it was announced that tech writer Sarah Jeong was joining the editorial board of The New York Times, right-wingers began circulating critical, snarky tweets she'd written about white people.



The Times defended Jeong, saying that she'd been under attack and was responding in kind, something she won't do in the future. Jeong provided examples:



The right was outraged -- but many conservatives don't want her fired. David French:

The Times is standing by its hire. Good. It’s time to end termination-by-Twitter and debate bad ideas head-on. (As for whether the Times and other elite outlets will display the same fortitude when a conservative is the target of online outrage, I’ll believe it when I see it.)

Ben Shapiro:

Should she have been fired? Nope. We’re living in an age of social media mobbing, and it’s got to stop if we’re ever going to have any semblance of a social fabric left – or if we’re ever going to engage in conversation like normal people without fear of firing every minute.... The New York Times knew what it was getting when it hired Jeong, and firing her would only encourage the kind of behavior we saw with regard to Kevin Williamson and James Gunn, among others.

Kevin Williamson:

If ... the Times is more or less satisfied with Jeong, then it should resist the social-media mob campaign to have her dismissed. It is up to institutions to hold the line against mass hysteria and the mob mentality of social media.... the New York Times [has] the resources and the standing to stand up to this kind of social-media scalp collecting: All [it needs] is the guts. I hope the Times has enough.

This comes off as high-minded. But there are other, less well-positioned right-wingers who also want Jeong to stay on, claiming a different reason:

A missing piece of the analysis of faux outrage around Sarah Jeong being hired by the Times is that the goal of the outrage is not to get her fired; it's to use it as a wedge to polarize people into distrusting the media more.

4chan /pol/ calls this process "redpilling normies" pic.twitter.com/HVh0rCYEUy

— Jay Cassano (@jcassano) August 3, 2018

Posts on /pol/ saying things like Sarah Jeong is "the best thing to happen in years" and she is "the answer" because in their view it highlights media hypocrisy around "racism" toward white people. pic.twitter.com/xFRJnjAsnL

— Jay Cassano (@jcassano) August 3, 2018

Some of Cassano's examples:





I don't think the beliefs of French, Shapiro, Williamson, et al., are as different from these as they want you to believe. These folks also want to expand the playing field of acceptable discourse -- because expansion lets in many of the ugly things that the "respectable" right wants to say. If we were to open up the discourse enough, Ben Shapiro could go fully mainstream even after expressing opinions like this:

Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue. #settlementsrock

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) September 27, 2010

What the 4chan racists want is not exactly what French, Shapiro, Williamson, and like-minded others want. But there are more similarities than the latter want you to believe.

CONSERVATIVES ARE STILL FAILING TO ATTAIN THEIR ULTIMATE GOAL

At The Washington Post, a poli sci professor named Paul Musgrave writes:

Conspiracy theories are for losers. QAnon is no exception.

In the 2014 book “American Conspiracy Theories,” political scientists Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent said that conspiracy theories appealed to the powerless as a way to explain their defeats. In a democracy that regularly gave losers a chance to gain power, however, the winning side would abandon conspiracy beliefs when they gained power. In short, Uscinski and Parent wrote: “Conspiracy theories are for losers.”

How to explain, then, why so many Trump supporters — who are backing the winning team — have embraced this type of thinking?

... The popularity and prominence of the Q phenomenon doesn’t seem to fit with the conspiracies-are-for-losers argument. As Washington Post reporter David Weigel tweeted, “Can anyone recall another time when there was more conspiracy-mongering by supporters of the party in power than the party out of power?”

... QAnon’s appeal derives from the mix of online communities’ proclivity for extremism, political polarization, real-world child-abuse scandals and the inability of the Trump administration to enact the policies it promised its most extreme supporters.

... The final ingredient is that, despite his bombast, Trump has often failed to deliver for his most zealous supporters. Trade wars are neither good nor easy to win. There is no wall, and Mexico isn’t paying for it. Obamacare hasn’t been repealed.

Yes, but Trump support believe that things are going very well in America. According to the latest Economist/YouGov poll, 76% of Republicans and 80% of Trump voters think the country is on the right track. They're happy. They don't think Trump has failed to deliver.

If they feel a sense of failure, it's for one reason: We still exist. They genuinely believe that Trump is an extraordinarily capable and successful president, but they feel besieged because America, despite being Great Again, still hasn't been purged of its left-leaning vermin.

Even before Trump, this was a common sentiment on the right:





They want us banished, even from parts of America they'll never visit. That has happened yet, so they still feel they're losing.

They've long believed that we control the media and education and popular culture. Now they believe we control the FBI and the CIA. They can't bear to coexist with us -- they can't listen to country music while we listen to rap, or watch Fox while we watch CNN or MSNBC -- because they want all traces of us eliminated. Trump is great, but he still isn't great enough to have accomplished that -- unless Q is right and he actually will accomplish that very, very soon.

That's why they need a conspiracy theory -- because sharing a country with us is intolerable.

ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHERS

Obama ordered Dijon on his hamburger. Bush fumbled in the grocery aisle. And Trump says you need an ID to buy groceries. [corrected typo] https://t.co/7O7ZI64XcV

— NYT Politics (@nytpolitics) August 2, 2018

It's the Times bothsidesing again:

Just when it seemed like Tuesday’s “Make America Great Again” rally in Florida would end with the typical punch list — Democrats, journalists, immigrants — President Trump added new spice to his usual extemporaneous potpourri by asserting that supermarket shoppers need to show valid identification in the checkout aisle.

“You know,” Mr. Trump knowingly told the approving crowd, “if you go out and you want to buy groceries, you need a picture on a card. You need ID.”

So the reaction to Trump's regular demonization of enemies in campaign rallies is essentially "Oh, that's just Uncle Don being Uncle Don again" -- we're just so bored, aren't we? Then he tosses in a new line of attack and Times reporter Katie Rogers perks up a bit. Does she at least acknowledge that Trump is wrong about the need for ID at grocery stores?

Yes -- but here comes the bothsiding:

... with this particular offhand and baldly inaccurate comment, the president landed himself in the company of other presidents and presidential hopefuls who have fumbled while trying to showcase their everyman appeal....

President George Bush was teased for not knowing how to work a grocery store scanner — in his defense he was actually marveling over the newfangled technology — during his failed campaign for re-election in 1992. President Barack Obama was once heckled by Sean Hannity, Mr. Trump’s favorite human megaphone, for ordering Dijon mustard (too fancy!) on a cheeseburger.

The attack on Obama wasn't limited to Hannity, of course. Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, and Mark Steyn also weighed in. The right-wing blog Legal Insurrection spoke of "Dijongate" in a post that was updated nine times and in multiple follow-up posts.

But, of course, Obama didn't get anything wrong about consumer purchasing. Bush was baffled by increasingly common supermarket technology. Trump said something completely incorrect. Obama merely ordered a burger in a way that allowed conservatives acting in bad faith to claim he was being elitist. (In fact, mustard is the fifth most popular burger topping, according to the Weber Grill Watch Survey, well behind ketchup but ahead of pickles, bacon, and barbecue sauce.)

Also note this: Bush and Obama were engaging in benign political behavior -- here's the president doing something ordinary and human. Trump was talking about ID at grocery stores in order to defend the GOP's years-long campaign to suppress the Democratic vote using voter ID legislation. That's not funny.

Rogers conducted a few interviews to flesh out this story, one of them with a Trump crony who owns a supermarket chain. Surely he gets the facts correct, right? No, he doesn't:

John A. Catsimatidis, the owner of Gristedes Foods, a chain of small grocery stores in Manhattan and Brooklyn, said in an interview that he has known the president for 40 years, but cannot recall a time when Mr. Trump entered one of his stores.

“I wouldn’t know,” Mr. Catsimatidis said. “I don’t have any pictures with him in Gristedes.”

... Presumably an expert in all things regarding the checkout lane, Mr. Catsimatidis, the owner of Gristedes, did not see why critics were seizing on the president’s assertion that an ID was needed to buy groceries.

“You need a photo ID to buy groceries if you’re using a credit card or if you want to use a check,” Mr. Catsimatidis said. “Doesn’t that sound logical?”

You don't need a photo ID when you're using a credit card to buy groceries. I do it all the time and I've never been asked for ID. Catsimatidis owns more than thirty supermarkets in and around New York City. How does he not know this? He has a personal net worth of $3.4 billion -- are all billionaires this oblivious to the real world?

THE RISE OF QANON IS A SIGN THAT TRUMPISM MIGHT NOT BE PRIMARILY ABOUT TRUMP AT ALL

At a Trump rally last night in Florida, a nutball agglomeration of conspiracy theories appeared to go mainstream:

Believers in “QAnon,” as the conspiracy theory is known, were front and center at the Florida State Fairgrounds Expo Hall, where Trump came to stump for Republican candidates. As the president spoke, a sign rose from the audience. “We are Q,” it read. Another poster displayed text arranged in a “Q” pattern: “Where we go one we go all.”

The symbol appeared on clothing, too.....

In the black hole of conspiracy in which “Q” has plunged its followers, Trump only feigned collusion to create a pretense for the hiring of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who is actually working as a “white hat,” or hero, to expose the Democrats. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and George Soros are planning a coup — and traffic children in their spare time....

In the world in which QAnon believers live, Trump’s detractors, such as Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, wear ankle monitors that track their whereabouts. Press reports are dismissed as “Operation Mockingbird,” the name given to the alleged midcentury infiltration of the American media by the CIA. The Illuminati looms large in QAnon, as do the Rothschilds, a wealthy Jewish family vilified by the conspiracy theorists as the leaders of a satanic cult. Among the world leaders wise to satanic influences, the theory holds, is Russian President Vladimir Putin.

QAnon flirts with eschatology, fascist philosophy and the filmmaking of Francis Ford Coppola. Adherents believe a “Great Awakening” will precede the final storm foretold by Trump. Once they make sense of the information drip-fed to them by “Q,” they will usher in a Christian revival presaging total victory.

More, from the Daily Beast's Will Sommer:

... the general story, outlined in a pro-QAnon video ..., is that every president before Trump was a “criminal president” in league with all the nefarious groups of conspiracy theories past: the global banking elite, death squads operating on orders from Hillary Clinton, deep-state intelligence operatives, and Pizzagate-style pedophile rings. In an effort to break this cabal’s grip, according to Q, the military convinced Trump to run for president.

Now Trump and his allies in the military are poised to arrest all these wrongdoers, shipping many of them off to Guantanamo Bay. That coming purge has been dubbed “The Storm” by QAnon fans, who claim Trump referenced it when he referenced “the calm before the storm” in October.

I don't know why QAnon's visibility suddenly increased last night. It may be that interest in the nutball worldview has grown organically and the Q folks simply decided to be out and proud about their beliefs. Or perhaps they're being pushed into the limelight by whoever is spearheading the con. Sommer, who's been following QAnon since its inception, tells Chris Cillizza that he has no idea who's putting up the "Q" posts that drive the movement:

There are a lot of theories about who Q is. QAnon people believe in fanciful ideas like, maybe it's Trump or Dan Scavino or Michael Flynn....

I think Q is just some random person or group of people who started a troll that has gotten way out of hand. Or maybe, as with so many things these days, it's a Russian psy-op!

If it's a psy-op -- on the part of Russia or one or more pro-Trump Americans -- this certainly seems like an appropriate time for it to go mainstream. Mueller may issue a report on possible obstruction of justice this month. Paul Manafort's trial is under way. Mariya Butina has been arrested and twelve Russians have been indicted. The Trump faithful want to believe in an evil so vast it dwarfs what the rest of us are talking about (and is a funhouse-mirror version of what we're talking about).

But I keep thinking about something The Washington Post's Philip Bump just wrote:

President Trump’s campaign rallies are meant to center on one thing and one thing only: Trump. He holds the rallies, years before he’s on the ballot again, because it gives him two things that he greatly enjoys, a microphone and an adoring audience.

The coverage of those rallies and their popularity with his base, though, means that non-Trump issues seep into the public consciousness. Slogans, random individuals, people promoting causes. Trump is the main attraction, but sideshows can draw the spotlight.

One did on Tuesday. A number of people at Trump’s rally in Florida held signs or wore shirts referring to “QAnon”...

But why this? Why now? Why is this something that has managed to take root among supporters of Trump?

I don't think QAnon-style thinking is just a sideshow. I think it's the point of conservatism now. Not every pro-Trump conservative believes the specific QAnon theories, but they all believe that their enemies -- who now include not just all Democrats but every Republican who won't genuflect to Trump -- are unspeakably evil. You can give this an anodyne name like "negative partisanship," but it's far beyond that. Conservatives don't just believe the rest of us have bad ideas. They don't just think we're dangerously wrongheaded. They think we're the epitome of pure, satanic, civilization-threatening evil. They may not believe that we're all pedophiles, but they think we're all as evil as pedophiles. They may not think we're all directly tied to an elitist conspiracy intended to enchain and impoverish everyone on the planet who isn't part of the plot, but they think we're evil enough to do anything, including that and more.

So I'm not sure that Trumpism requires Trump at all. Trump is the center of a personality cult because he's the first politician at his level who seems to regard us as the unholy monsters that rank-and-file conservatives believe we are. Moreover, he seems to relish the idea of a holy war against us.

But if Trump were out of the picture, or if he seemed to waver in the fight, they'd still think that we're pure evil. Trump isn't the point -- the fight against us is the point. Trump is just, in their belief, the greatest fighter they've had.

So Q shirts at a Trump rally make perfect sense. They love Trump, but what they really want is the fight, and the fight is Q.

****

Here's the video referenced above by Will Sommer. It's worth watching, just so you know how far around the bend your right-wing neighbors have become.

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME A BOB WOODWARD BOOK REALLY DAMAGED A PRESIDENT?

Here's a headline at Talking Points Memo:

White House Dreads ‘Killer’ Woodward Book After ‘Everyone’ Talked To Him

The story tells us:

Though the Trump administration, unlike administrations past, withheld formal access to legendary reporter Bob Woodward for his insider exposé, White House officials are bracing for a “killer” account filled with unauthorized stories from “everyone,” according to a Tuesday Politico account.

“He hooked somebody, and that put the fear of God in everyone else,” a former official told Politico.

So should we expect serious damage to the Trump administration when the book is published on September 11, less than two months before the midterms?

I'm not expecting much. There'll probably be one or two juicy stories, but nothing that will put Trump's presidency at risk. Woodward has written many books since Watergate about sitting presidents and their administrations -- one each during the Reagan and Poppy Bush years, two during Clinton's presidency, four in the George W. Bush years, and two more when Obama was president -- and nothing stuck. The last big controversy he stirred up was more than twenty years ago, in the summer of 1996:

First lady Hillary Rodham Clinton held imaginary conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt and Mahatma Gandhi as a therapeutic release, according to a new book written by Bob Woodward....

The first lady declined a personal adviser's suggestion that she address Jesus Christ, however, because it would be "too personal," according to Woodward's book, "The Choice."

Hillary was accused of conducted "séances," even though the practice -- saying out loud what one would like to say to a person who isn't in the room -- is fairly common in psychotherapy. There was an uproar, but it didn't last, and Bill Clinton was easily reelected a few months later. Shortly after that, it became clear that Woodward had missed a much bigger story: the president's affair with Monica Lewinsky.

(The "séance" story seemed to have been totally forgotten during the 2016 campaign, even as other past attacks on Hillary were revived. Much of the country is now as New Agey as Hillary appeared to be at the time. I don't think any Oprah fan would find what she did at all unusual these days.)

Before that, the biggest post-Watergate splash a Woodward book made was in the waning days of the Reagan administration:

In [1987, Woodward] published “Veil: The Secret Wars of the C.I.A., 1981-1987,” which contained his famous account of a deathbed conversation with William Casey, the former C.I.A. director. Casey, according to Woodward’s telling, admitted that he knew about the illegal diversion of monies from Iranian arms sales to the Nicaraguan Contras. “His head jerked up hard,” Woodward wrote. “He stared, and finally nodded yes.” “Why?” Woodward asked. Casey whispered, “I believed.” Did it happen like that? Even today, it’s a matter of dispute. In 2010, a former C.I.A. employee, who was part of Casey’s security detail, claimed Woodward “fabricated” the story after being turned away from Casey’s room at Georgetown University Hospital.

At the time of publication, Casey's widow strenuously denied the story. In the long run, it didn't matter: Ronald Reagan became the most revered president among conversatives (although he's probably slipping to #2 these days). Reagan's vice president was elected to succeed him a year after the book appeared.

So no, I don't expect this book to have much impact. Of course, anything that stings will be dismissed by Trump and his cult as "fake news." But beyond that, Woodward isn't likely to uncover much of consequence -- and it's quite possible that he'll miss a big story.