ANTI-LIBERALISM IS THE NEW UNIFICATION CHURCH

The Washington Post's story about questionable details in the biography of newly elected Republican congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna isn't nearly as enjoyable as the ongoing George Santos saga. (The latest on Santos is that bad checks written on his account were passed to Amish dog breeders in exchange for puppies, which were then advertised as rescue dogs; when Santos spoke to prosecutors about the checks, he claimed to work for the Securities and Exchange Commission and the charges against him were dropped.) Nevertheless, Luna's story involves quite a bit of reinvention, if not quite a Santos-level personal reboot:

Twelve years before she was elected as the first Mexican American woman to represent Florida in Congress, Anna Paulina Luna was serving at Whiteman Air Force Base in Warrensburg, Mo., where friends said she described herself as alternately Middle Eastern, Jewish or Eastern European. Known then by her given last name of Mayerhofer, Luna sported designer clothing and expressed support for then-President Barack Obama.

By the time she ran for Congress as a Republican, she had changed her last name to Luna in what she said was an homage to her mother’s family. A staunch advocate for gun rights, she cited on the campaign trail a harrowing childhood that left her “battle hardened.” She said she and her mother had little extended family as she grew up in “low-income” neighborhoods in Southern California with a father in and out of incarceration. She said she experienced a traumatizing “home invasion” when she was serving in the Air Force in Missouri.

Luna’s sharp turn to the right, her account of an isolated and impoverished childhood, and her embrace of her Hispanic heritage have come as a surprise to some friends and family who knew her before her ascent to the U.S. House this year. A cousin who grew up with Luna said she was regularly included in family gatherings. Her roommate in Missouri had no recollection of the “home invasion” Luna detailed, describing instead a break-in at their shared apartment when they were not home, an incident confirmed by police records. And three years before her first congressional bid as a conservative, Luna registered to vote as a Democrat in Washington state, voting records show.

The onetime Democrat and Obama fan had turned into this by the time of her first congressional campaign, as a Florida Republican, in 2020:

This kind of thing seems to be happening a lot these days: a person who's had greater-than-average difficulties in establishing a self, and whose personal reinventions are accompanied by dishonesty or psychologically unhealthy behavior, ultimately finds mental peace and societal validation as an enemy of liberalism. In the past, people like this ended up in cult religions. Now they show up on Fox News.

Consider Tara Reade, who struggled through a series of career changes and left a trail of acquaintances feeling burned by her Santos-like dishonesty, then ultimately found fame as a (Putin-adjacent) alleged victim of sexual harassment (or was it assault?) by Joe Biden. Her story kept changing, and was rejected by dozens of former Biden staffers, but she found support among Democrat-haters on the right and the left.

Or consider Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was leading an ordinary suburban life until her marriage began to fall apart and she discovered (in approximately this order) extreme fitness, QAnon, right-wing media self-promotion, and the cult of Donald Trump. There's now a non-zero chance that she'll be president of the United States or Speaker of the House someday.

Or consider Candace Owens, who ran a liberal-ish blog that was critical of Donald Trump and other Republicans, then ran a site intended to doxx online bullies, at which point she was doxxed herself; she blamed progressives, then began to win the favor of Gamergaters and the rest of the online right. Soon she announced a conversion to Trumpist conservatism and now she's a right-wing superstar.

We could even go back to the George W. Bush years, when a professional gay escort born James Dale Guckert became Jeff Gannon, a member of the White House press corps and fawning Bush fan.

There's a place for all these people because (a) America is full of liberal-hating rage junkies and (b) there is a well-financed instrastructure that supports anyone, however emotionally unstable, with even a modest talent at sticking it to the libs.

Expect there to be more Santoses, Greenes, and Lunas in the future. The demand for them may be limitless.

Y KANT PAMELA PAUL READ?

In a column titled "What Liberals Can Learn from Ron DeSantis," Pamela Paul chastises Democrats for their response to the rise of Florida's governor -- but for the life of me, I can't figure out what she thinks we're doing wrong.

Paul writes:

Is there anything liberals can do about Ron DeSantis other than quietly seethe, loudly condemn him every time he makes headlines and hope that his political flaws — his distaste for glad-handing, his less-than-inspiring public speaking style, his conspicuous unlikability — will take him down before he gets anywhere close to the presidency? It would be tempting to write off DeSantis, the bombastic Republican governor of Florida, as another unelectable right-wing lunatic unfit for national office.

We’ve made that mistake before.

It’s reliably depressing to revisit 2016 and the misbegotten liberal conviction that America couldn’t possibly elevate Donald Trump to the presidency. We’ve already cataloged the mistakes in media coverage and dissected what we missed that somehow made Trump a viable, let alone a desirable, candidate to occupy the Oval Office. But here we go again. As the Democratic political strategist Lis Smith has remarked, the left’s reaction to DeSantis looks just like its reaction to Trump: “He’s picking these fights. He’s saying and doing abhorrent things. And all the same characters — whether in the media, Democratic politics, the punditry class, whatever it is — have the same freakout.”

Let’s pay closer attention this time.

... we shouldn’t underestimate DeSantis.

Is Paul criticizing us for writing DeSantis off as unelectable -- or for freaking out because we fear he is electable? I'm pretty sure we can't be doing both simultaneously. Nevertheless, Paul seems to be making both accusations at once.

The Lis Smith quotes comes from the transcript of an October 2022 podcast. Paul seems to be using the Smith quote to accuse Democrats of underestimating Trump before the 2016 election, but Smith was talking about the mood among Democrats after the 2016 election, which is when she first met Pete Buttigieg, for whom she later worked.

Smith said:

When I first met [Buttigieg], it was over the phone in December 2016. He was thinking about running for DNC chair.... December 2016 is when the Democratic Party, sort of rightly so, was in full freakout mode, because no one could believe that we had lost to Donald Trump. And the media was in full freakout mode too because so few people had predicted this. All the polls were wrong. And Donald Trump seemed to fly in the face of everything that we thought America is and was. Yet he was able to prevail. So, Democrats sort of over-corrected—overreacted I think—at that moment. In the weeks afterwards, certainly in the years afterwards, you had Democrats going out there and saying, “To beat Trump, we have to be like Trump, and we gotta yell, we gotta scream. When they go low, we go lower. We kick them in the teeth.”

In the passage quoted by Paul, Smith wasn't talking about Democrats contemptuously dismissing Trump -- she was talking about Democrats trying to reverse-engineer Trumpism, which is pretty much the opposite. Smith said that Buttigieg

understood that it’s important not to play Trump's game—which is to say something outrageous, watch people's heads explode, dominate the news cycle for days, and then rinse and repeat. I'm sort of seeing the same thing happening with Ron DeSantis. He's picking these fights, he's saying and doing abhorrent things. And all the same characters—whether in the media, Democratic politics, the punditry class, whatever it is—have the same freak out. Then everything revolves around Ron. He's setting the debate....

Smith's point wasn't that above-it-all elitist Democrats are dismissing DeSantis the way they dismissed Trump. It's that Democratic attempts to out-Trump Trump were doomed to failure. Buttigieg, in her opinion, knew that the right way to deal with Trump was to be the opposite of him.

Pete understood that the best counterprogramming to Trump was to be the antidote to him in terms of style presentation, how he talked—but also in terms of policy.

You may not agree with Smith that the person who's solved the problem of how to counter Trump is Pete Buttigieg -- I certainly don't. But it's exactly the opposite of what Paul believes about DeSantis, which is: You gotta admit the guy has some good ideas.

The jury is still out on whether DeSantis’s unorthodox response to Covid-19 was a colossal error or an unexpected success or, more likely, something in between, but the fact that he took an aggressive approach to avoid the pains of lockdown on small businesses and families wasn’t lost on Florida voters. While other politicians prevaricated and dithered, DeSantis spoke with conviction and seemed to be doing something, and to many working families in Florida, that mattered.

... We can decry his stunt in shipping migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, but we should also be attending to the real concerns of people living in areas of heavy immigration.

... A law like the Stop WOKE Act of 2021 ... may come with an incendiary name and some egregious efforts to curtail free speech. But it’s important to recognize that aspects of it appeal to Floridians tired of racial and ethnic divisiveness and the overt politicization of what’s taught in the classroom.

As many liberals will quietly acknowledge, the Parental Rights in Education Act, which DeSantis signed last year and which opponents nicknamed the “Don’t Say Gay” law, has reasonable and legitimate attractions for a broad range of parents who worry about the focus, efficacy and age appropriateness of what their kids are learning in primary and secondary school.

Lis Smith says: Don't try to counter Republican bellicosity with Democratic bellicosity. It's bad strategy. Pamela Paul says: Hey, Democrats, maybe those people punching you in the face have a point. Maybe you should try punching yourself in the face. I don't think the former editor of The New York Times Book Review even realizes that those messages are different.

DEAR REPUBLICANS: IF YOU WANT TRUMP TO GO AWAY, MAYBE YOU SHOULD STFU ABOUT TWITTER AND HUNTER BIDEN

Politico tells us today that the Republican Party is scheming to prevent Donald Trump from winning the 2024 nomination. Big organizations such as the Club for Growth and the Koch network's Americans for Prosperity plan to spend money to defeat Trump. Donors are telling presidential aspirants that they shouldn't stay in the race if they're struggling to win primaries and are splitting the anti-Trump vote. A top GOP fundraiser says of Trump:

“He is a metastasizing cancer who if he is not stopped is going to destroy the party. Donald Trump is a loser. He is the first president since Hoover to lose the House, the Senate and the presidency in a single term. Because of him Chuck Schumer is the Leader Schumer, and the progressive agenda is threatening to take over the country. And he is probably the only Republican in the country, if not the only person in the country, who can’t beat Joe Biden.”

But at the same time, House Republicans and Fox News are pushing the notion that, actually, Donald Trump is right when he says the 2020 election was rigged -- a message that reinforces Trump's case for being renominated.

Here's Congressman Pat Fallon, a member of the House Oversight Committee, on Fox this morning talking about Twitter's response to the New York Post's reports on the Hunter Biden laptop:

Fallon says:

They kept using a dodge by saying, "Well, we're trying to fight foreign interference in the election cycle" when, ironically, they were the ones that were interfering with the election cycle. I mean, the Hunter Biden laptop story and the evidence that was in there, the Media Research Center ran a poll and said 17 percent of Democrats -- of Democrats! -- in key swing states would have changed their vote. President Trump needed a hundred thousand people, a hundred-thousand-vote swing. That's a potential 3.2-million-person swing! And they-- Twitter changed and altered the 2020 election.

(As Philip Bump noted in December, the wording of that Media Research Center poll question was absurdly inflammatory: “At the time you cast your vote for president, were you aware that evidence exists, including bank transactions the FBI is currently investigating, that directly links Joe Biden and his family to a corrupt financial arrangement between a Chinese company with connections to the Chinese Communist Party that was secretly intended to provide the Biden family with tens of millions of dollars in profits?” So I don't trust the poll results.)

And here's Congressman Clay Higgins:

BREAKING: @RepClayHiggins warns former Twitter executives this is just the investigation part “later comes the arrest part, your attorneys are familiar with that.. I’d like to spend five hours with these ladies and gentlemen doing depositions surely yet to come”

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/FREASWOpgt

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 8, 2023

Here's a fuller version of the key quote, from a Fox News story:

"You, ladies and gentlemen, interfered with the United States of America 2020 presidential election, knowingly and willingly," Higgins said. "That’s the bad news, it’s gonna get worse because this is the investigation part. Later comes the arrest part. Your attorneys are familiar with that."

And here's Sean Hannity on Fox:

As a reminder, there was ample evidence of collusion in the 2020 election, but not between Trump and Russia. Instead, Twitter, Facebook, Google, other big tech companies were coordinating, collaborating with not only the DNC, the Biden campaign, but the upper echelon of your FBI all united In one effort, they wanted to defeat Donald J. Trump and help elect Joe Biden. Now, the first example of this involves a very true Hunter Biden laptop story from hell.... Twitter, other big tech, they eagerly censored The New York Post, America's oldest newspaper because of their blind rage against Donald Trump....

What Twitter did in the fall of 2020 for Joe Biden was the in-kind donation of in-kind donations so big that you could actually never measure the amount of dollars it would have cost somebody to buy that kind of information suppression. They censored a scandal that could have turned the entire election.

We all know that Rupert Murdoch wants Ron DeSantis to be the 2024 GOP nominee, not Donald Trump. But Fox News is promoting the message that the election was rigged. This the genteel version of the Big Lie -- it doesn't involve phony Chinese bamboo ballots or satellites beaming fake votes in from Italy. But this is essentially Trump's message, and Murdoch's flagship news operation is repeatedly promoting it.

And big GOP donors are presumably still giving money to Republicans who won't stop talking about 2020 and election rigging. If the donors are convinced that Trump is a sure loser, maybe they should turn off the money spigot.

But they won't, and Murdoch won't stop giving these attacks wall-to-wall coverage. Sucks for them that the result could be that they're stuck with Trump again.

IT'S NOT GROOMING IF A REPUBLICAN HETEROSEXUAL DOES IT!

When I first read about Donald Trump's new line of attack on Ron DeSantis, I thought it was sleazy but likely to be effective. The more I think about it, though, the more I'm certain that it won't work:

Donald Trump ... reposted images of a young Ron DeSantis allegedly partying with high school teens....

One of them, who has her arm around the now-Florida governor, is smiling and appears to be holding a brown glass bottle....

The image ... appears to come from a 2021 blogpost by HILLREPORTER.com. The post cites a 'whistleblower' who said the girls pictured 'are believed to have graduated in 2002, making them seniors at the time.'

DeSantis, 44, taught history and government at the Darlington School in Rome, Georgia, during the 2001-2002 year.

He was fresh out of Yale at the time....

The New York Times made reference to the blog post in its own article about DeSantis' time at the school....

'Two former students, both women, remembered him attending at least two parties where alcohol was served, but they said that the parties took place after graduation and that they were not bothered by his presence at the time, although they question it now....'

It was DeSantis's press secretary, Christina Pushaw, who mainstreamed the use of "groomer" as a slur, so DeSantis deserves this attack. But it will fail.

Matt Gaetz had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old that was under investigation by the feds. Republican voters don't care. Donald Trump is the subject of multiple sex allegations. Republicans don't care. Andrew Tate, recently arrested in Romania and now being charged with human trafficking, literally boasts about grooming and imprisoning women, and also about having sex with teenagers as an adult. He continues to have many right-wing admirers. Ted Nugent once released a song called "Jailbait" about having sex with a 13-year-old, and he adopted a 17-year-old so he could have sex with her. Republicans love him.

To a Republican, it's simply not grooming if the groomer is male, heterosexual, and right-wing. So it doesn't matter what DeSantis did, as long as it involved girls. GOP voters will say it's fine.

JOE BIDEN HECKLES BACK, SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS RECYCLES

Last night, President Biden wasn't quite at the level of Ariel Elias, the stand-up comic who drank a beer thrown at her by a heckler...



But Biden pushed back. Unlike previous Democratic presidents in this era of GOP demonization, he didn't try to remain high-minded and above the fray. He's the first Democrat in the office who seems to know he's in an alley fight, and who's done something other retreat in response to this kind of attack.



Back in the 1980s, I did stand-up for a while. I was terrible, but I learned to respect the craft. You want to tell great jokes, but hecklers make it impossible for you to do the work you're trying to do -- until you learn how to handle them. You can't expect the heckling to stop on its own -- the fever won't break. You will be heckled. You need to be ready.

Biden took on the bullies. That's good. In the manistream media, I'm sure there'll be a great deal of sighing about lost dignity. But it needed to be done.

****

Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders delivered the Republican rebuttal to Biden's speech. One passage in particular puzzled some viewers:

She said:

A trip I will never forget was on December 25, 2018. My husband Bryan and I had just cleaned up wrapping paper that had been shoved into every corner of our house thanks to our three kids, when I had to walk out on my own family’s Christmas, unable to tell them where I was going, because the place I’d be traveling to was so dangerous they didn’t want anybody to know that the President was going to be on the ground for even a few hours.

We boarded Air Force One in total darkness—there were no lights on the plane, no lights on the runway, our phones and computers shut down and turned in. We were going completely off the grid. Nearly twelve hours later in the pitch-black of the night, we landed in the war-torn part of western Iraq. It was again a similar scene—no lights on the plane, no lights on the runway. The only light you could see was coming from about a mile away in a dining hall where hundreds of troops—who were in the fight against ISIS— had gathered, expecting to celebrate Christmas with senior military leadership from around the region.

They had absolutely no idea that the President and First Lady were about to walk into that room. And when they did—it was a sight, and a scene, and a sound I hope I never forget. The room erupted. Men and women from every race, religion, and region, every political party, every demographic you can imagine started chanting in perfect unison over and over and over again, ‘USA, USA, USA.’ It was a perfect picture of what makes our country great.

One of the young soldiers yelled from the back, ‘Mr. President, I reenlisted in the military because of you.’ The President said, ‘and son, I am here because of you.’ Shortly after, that young soldier came up to me and said, ‘Sarah, you have a tough job.’ I told him ‘What I do is nothing. You take bombs and bullets. That’s a tough job.’ And in a moment that I know I’ll cherish for the rest of my life, that soldier reached up, and pulled the Brave Rifles Patch he wore on his shoulder and placed it into my hand, a sign of ultimate respect, and said, ‘Sarah, we are in this together.’ Overwhelmed with emotion and speechless, I just hugged him, with tears in my eyes and a grateful heart for our heroes who keep us free.

This is recycled material. It's a slightly rewritten version of the first minute of Sanders's campaign announcement video:

I'm in —> https://t.co/8bmfl3ZPgp

Watch ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/khDPEk0orU

— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) January 25, 2021

It's chilling now to see the date on that video -- January 25, 2021. Less than three weeks after the Trumpist insurrection at the Capitol, Sanders, in her first campaign video, chose to praise Donald Trump before she talked about herself. But politically it was the right decision: her red state loved Trump, and it was smart politics to say, in effect, I touched the hem of his garment -- vote for me. (Sanders got 83% of the vote in the gubernatorial primary and 63% of the vote in the general election.)

But repeating this now is ... weird. Sanders was supposed to be rebutting the State of the Union address, but here she was buttering up Trump in the hope that he'll pick her as his vice president. Clearly she didn't have the courage to drop the Trump part and go straight to the bit about the soldier, because that would be reported as a Trump snub.

I guess it never occurred to her to skip the anecdote altogether, since it had no relevance whatsoever to Biden or the State of the Union address. But she's only 40 years old. She has a career to build. That's what mattered to her. Alas for her, she probably would have done better for herself if she'd flattered Ron DeSantis.

SURPRISE! THE ISLAMOPHOBIC INSURRECTION DEFENDER AT THE NEW YORK TIMES IS ALSO A PUTIN APOLOGIST

In the opinion section of The New York Times, Christopher Caldwell writes:

The United States’ recent promise to ship advanced M1 Abrams battle tanks to Ukraine was a swift response to a serious problem. The problem is that Ukraine is losing the war.

That's odd, because straight-news reporting in the Times says that Russia is still struggling in Ukraine:

Britain’s defense intelligence agency said on Tuesday that Russia had been trying to launch “major offensive operations” since early last month, with the aim of capturing the rest of the Donetsk region, which includes Bakhmut. But it had “only managed to gain several hundred meters of territory per week,” because of a lack of munitions and maneuver units, the agency said in its latest daily assessment of the war.

“It remains unlikely that Russia can build up the forces needed to substantially affect the outcome of the war within the coming weeks,” the agency concluded.

Many paragraphs into his opinion piece, it becomes clear that Caldwell doesn't just believe the Russians are winning -- he believes they should win. He sings a sob story about Russia and Putin that could have come from Tulsi Gabbard doing a guest appearance on Tucker's show:

The largest country by area on the planet has no reliable exit into the world. The most reliable route runs through the Black Sea, where it crosses the trade routes that link the civilizations of Asia to the civilizations of Europe....

Russians say the war is about preventing the installation of an enemy military stronghold on the Black Sea, strong enough to close off what has for centuries been Russia’s main access to the outside world. Without Ukraine, Russia can be turned into a vassal state. That NATO intends to bring about the subjugation, breakup or even extinction of Russia may be true or false — but it will not sound implausible to a Russian.

Many Americans cannot resist describing Mr. Putin as a “barbarian” and his invasion of Ukraine as a “war of aggression.” For their part Russians say this is a war in which Russia is fighting for its survival and against the United States in an unfair global order in which the United States enjoys unearned privileges.

Caldwell doesn't want to say it in so many words -- that might risk his status as a pundit who is welcome in polite circles -- but it's clear which country he regards as the villain:

... the Biden strategy has a bad name: escalation. Beyond a certain point, the United States is no longer “helping” or “advising” or “supplying” the Ukrainians, the way it did, say, the Afghan mujahedeen during the Cold War. It is replacing Ukraine as Russia’s main battlefield adversary. It is hard to say when that point will be reached or whether it has been already. With whom is Russia at war — Ukraine or the United States? Russia started the war between Russia and Ukraine. Who started the war between Russia and the United States?

Caldwell, a Putin apologist now, not long ago was a January 6 apologist. In a Times op-ed last July, he insisted that the insurrection was no big deal:

Were we really that close to a coup? ...

The stability of the republic never truly seemed at risk. As Michael Wolff writes of Mr. Trump in his new book, “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency,” “Beyond his immediate desires and pronouncements, there was no ability — or structure, or chain of command, or procedures, or expertise, or actual person to call — to make anything happen.”

And it was perfectly reasonable for these fine folks to show up with weapons and bear spray:

Contesting the fairness of an election, rightly or wrongly, is not absurd grounds for a public assembly. For a newly defeated president to call an election a “steal” is certainly irresponsible. But for a group of citizens to use the term was merely hyperbolic, perhaps no more so than calling suboptimal employment and health laws a “war on women.”

And hey, you gotta admit they had a point:

Republicans had — and still have — legitimate grievances about how the last election was run. Pandemic conditions produced an electoral system more favorable to Democrats. Without the Covid-era advantage of expanded mail-in voting, Democrats might well have lost more elections at every level, including the presidential.

Because, of course, we forced Republicans at gunpoint not to take advantage of the mail-in voting option themselves.

And in October, he described the work of the January 6 committee as McCarthyism:

Certainly there were constitutional crimes that day. But the committee members have been too inclined to look at the Republican Party as a nest of subversives, much as certain anti-Communists did the Democrats at some of the colder points in the Cold War.

This is the same Christopher Caldwell whose 2009 book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, applied the Great Replacement Theory to Muslims settling in Europe. A laudatory Times review summarized its message:

Through decades of mass immigration to Europe's hospitable cities and because of a strong disinclination to assimilate, Muslims are changing the face of Europe, perhaps decisively. These Muslim immigrants are not so much enhancing European culture as they are supplanting it. The products of an adversarial culture, these immigrants and their religion, Islam, are "patiently conquering Europe's cities, street by street."

Caldwell is loathsome in so many different ways. It's appalling that he's writing for the Times and not RT or the American Thinker, where he belongs.

IT'S ALL FUN AND GAMES UNTIL HITLER SEEMS RESPECTABLE

This story is being taken seriously:

Two people, including a known neo-Nazi leader, were arrested last week after the FBI interrupted their plot to attack the Baltimore power grid, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland announced Monday morning.

The FBI views the two people, identified as Sara Clendaniel and Brandon Russell, as "racially or ethnically motivated" extremists.

NBC News reports that Russell is a known neo-Nazi and founder of the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group bent on "ushering in the collapse of civilization," according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The group admires Charles Manson and supports "the idea of lone wolf violence," according to the Anti-Defamation League.

It's good that these two were caught before they could carry out an attack. As a story at Insider notes, there was a 72% increase in attacks on the U.S. power grid between 2021 and 2022. The fencing around many power substations is in disrepair. The security cameras (if there are any) often don't work. Local police can be slow to respond. So the facilities are soft targets for the extreme right.

... four extremism researchers who spoke with Insider all agreed that the far-right had become the dominant player in targeting the grid. A study released last year by George Washington University's Program on Extremism found that as Salafi-jihadist plots from Islamic State supporters began to wane in about 2017, neo-Nazi attempts on infrastructure grew.

"We saw a huge spike in white supremacist cases starting targeting critical infrastructure between 2020 and 2022," Ilana Krill, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism who was one of the study's authors, told Insider. "A disproportionate amount of these cases focused on the energy sector and substations."

*****

We care about attacks on the power grid. But here's a story about anti-Semitism from Media Matters that doesn't suggest an obvious imminent threat, and that features a clownish protagonist, so it didn't get much traction. However, the anti-Semitic clown is well known in some circles, and is only two degrees separated from a former (and possible future) president of the United States:

Eric Trump has been touring with antisemitic conspiracy theorist Scott McKay, who claims that many Jewish people are working “under the cover of this religion called Judaism” to carry out a massive and evil conspiracy. In McKay’s telling, these fraudulent Jewish people have perpetrated 9/11; set up banking systems “in exchange for the child blood sacrifices”; and engineered presidential assassinations, among many other crimes....

McKay, who is also a QAnon conspiracy theorist, has begun to gain more prominence because of his featured speaking role on the ReAwaken America tour....

The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer recently reported that Trump’s Miami hotel is scheduled to host the ReAwaken tour in May....

* McKay has claimed that Jewish people “built Hitler. ... He was created by them” because they needed a catalyst to profit from a military conflict. He also praised Hitler for supposedly attempting to spurn his Jewish creators by trying to break “free of the Rothschilds’ corrupt money-magic fiat system” and create “a banking system for the people and the free world.”

* McKay claimed that 9/11 was perpetrated by “the same group of people that has done a very good job at hiding under the religion of Judaism."

* McKay claimed that Jewish people were responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing and the assassinations of Presidents Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and William McKinley....

* McKay claimed that Jewish people practice “satanism, child sacrifice, bleeding them out, torturing them, consuming them, eating their heart.”

I'll admit that McKay, who's also known as Patriot Streetfighter, can be hard to take seriously. Here he is claiming (among other things) that Nazis have colonized Mars:

This is Scott McKay. He speaks at “ReAwaken America” events with Eric Trump. Scott believes the Nazis won World War 2 and are currently living on Mars. Great job, @EricTrump! pic.twitter.com/8gIvNjZVCA

— The Good Liars (@TheGoodLiars) February 7, 2023

But if he's talking about Jews this way in public appearances with a former president's son, and he might be in the lineup of speakers at a property owned by the former president, and that former president might become president again, I think that's more alarming than anything that's been credibly alleged against Hunter Biden. (Or Ilhan Omar.)

*****

Finally, there's this:



This was posted at Reddit's r/Teachers; it's been taken down, and from the moderator's comment, it's easy to see why:

Here are some theories about what the teacher posted, from the comments:

This isn't new. I remember Nazi jokes in my 1970s adolescence -- we grew up on Hogan's Heroes, The Producers, and "Mr. Hilter" in Monty Python's "North Minehead By-Election" sketch, and all that was an influence. The jokes I remember can't be justified, but I don't think anyone ever expressed real admiration for Hitler, even half-seriously. We didn't know adults or authority figures who felt that way; we weren't that far removed from World War II. (My father and two uncles fought in that war.)

Laughing at Hitler diminishes the horror of the Nazi era, but it also diminishes Hitler. O But if edgelord media figures are making Hitler seem semi-respectable, that's going to have consequences sooner or later.

REPUBLICANS -- AND PORTIONS OF THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA -- ARE HELPING CHINA SAVE FACE AFTER THE BALLOON SHOOTDOWN

It might be hard to persuade most Americans of this, but the spy balloon incident has not been a triumph for China. On Saturday, after Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed his trip to Beijing in response to the incident, Lily Kuo of The Washington Post wrote:

Blinken had been expected to meet Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the trip, and while few expected concrete results, officials on both sides hoped it would start the process of capping tensions over issues such as Taiwan, U.S. sanctions targeting Chinese tech companies, human rights and China’s friendship with Russia....

The delay to Blinken’s trip comes after weeks of efforts by Chinese officials to slow the downward spiral of U.S.-China ties, as Beijing tries to rehabilitate its global image and revive its economy after almost three years of paralyzing anti-covid policies and strident “wolf warrior” diplomacy.

“From the perspective of China’s top leadership, they wouldn’t have wanted to disrupt the process of easing relations with the United States because this year is a very important year for China to revive the economy,” said Zhao Minghao, professor at the Institute of International Studies at Shanghai’s Fudan University. “There is no point in China sabotaging the process.”

In The New York Times today, David Pierson writes:

The Chinese balloon that bumbled its way across the United States has launched a thousand questions about its real intent.

But it is also focusing the world’s attention on the prospect that the communications and control within Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s government and his vaunted security apparatus may be less coherent — or even less functional — than the image he so confidently projects....

“What has been particularly damaging for China, both internationally and domestically, are the questions this raises about competence and how they’re reinforcing doubts about Xi Jinping’s leadership,” said Susan Shirk, a former deputy assistant secretary of state during the Clinton administration and author of a recent book, “Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise.” ...

With Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken canceling his trip to Beijing, Mr. Xi missed an opportunity to push back against the mounting pressure Washington is applying on China through security ties with partners across Asia and restrictions on semiconductor technology. That would have allowed Mr. Xi to devote more attention to pressing domestic matters such as reviving China’s weakened economy.

The balloon incident follows other apparent miscalculations, including the haphazard unwinding of his, at times, suffocating “zero Covid” measures following widespread protests....

“It’s really quite a paradox if you think about it, because it’s the beginning of his third term,” Ms. Shirk added. “He should be at the high point. And yet we see all of this negative feedback.”

Republicans want you to believe they hate China, but their #1 enemy is, as always, the Democratic Party. So they're helping China save face, even after Biden's shootdown of the spy balloon. The Republican reaction to the incident is summarized in the headline of a Mike Pompeo opinion piece at FoxNews.com:

China spy balloon fiasco exposed Biden's astonishing weakness and Xi will drive a truck through it

And much of the mainstream media agrees that President Biden is the leader who looks weak. Here's Pierson's New York Times colleague David Sanger:

It may be months before American intelligence agencies can compare the audacious flight of a Chinese surveillance balloon across the country to other intrusions on America’s national security systems, to determine how it ranks.

(Pierson said the balloon "bumbled its way across the United States," but to Sanger, the flight was "audacious.")

... for pure gall, there was something different about the balloon....

“We don’t know what the intelligence yield was for the Chinese,” said Evan Medeiros, a Georgetown professor who advised President Barack Obama on China and Asia with the National Security Council. “But there is no doubt it was a gross violation of sovereignty,” something the Chinese object to vociferously when the United States flies over and sails through the islands China has built from sandbars in the South China Sea.

“And this made visceral the China challenge,” Mr. Medeiros said, “to look up when you are out walking your dog, and you see a Chinese spy balloon in the sky.”

It's an appalling violation of sovereignty, even though it's just like what America does routinely to China. It's different ... why? Because you can see it happening while walking your dog.

And at Politico's Playbook, it's clear what really matters in all this:

China deflates Biden’s SOTU swagger

... When Biden ascends the House rostrum tomorrow to deliver his State of the Union address, the buzz will hover tens of thousands of feet higher, where a Chinese surveillance balloon floated until it was shot down Saturday off the South Carolina coast.

It’s a distraction Democrats aren’t exactly thrilled about.

... Republicans have spent days casting Biden as weak on China and suggesting he was too slow to confront foreign spying on American soil. As of last night, House GOP leaders were still entertaining holding a vote before the speech chiding the administration’s response.

This was not a good week for China. A major component of its global espionage program was publicly exposed. The balloon itself was shot down. The world now sees that the seemingly all-powerful Xi Jinping might not have full control of his own government's foreign policy apparatus.

But Republicans and much of the press want to assure you that Biden is the screwup here. And for now, that's the dominant narrative.

SPY BALLOONS WEREN'T SHOT DOWN WHEN TRUMP WAS PRESIDENT? BLAME LIBERALISM FOR THAT, TOO! (updated)

The initial Republican responses to news of the Chinese spy balloon was what you'd expect:

That balloon would never have made it over US soil if Trump was President.

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) February 3, 2023

Then we learned that there were similar incidents in the Trump years:

U.S. officials said Saturday that similar Chinese balloons transited the continental United States briefly at least three times during the Trump administration and once that they know about earlier in the Biden administration.

The Trumpist response: Yeah, okay, we had spy balloons, too. But they weren't bad spy balloons!

“One top national security official from the administration of former President Donald Trump said none of the Chinese spy balloons were near sensitive sites or had payloads as large as this one appears to carry,” Bloomberg [reported].

Not near sensitive sites? That's unclear:

Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told AP that Chinese surveillance balloons were sighted several times in the past five years. Some of them have been spotted near U.S. military bases in Hawaii, he said, though he did not specify when.

But if we ever learn more details about spy balloons during the Trump years and it becomes clear that equally provocative incidents happened then, Republicans have a fallback scapegoat:

Wokeness.

What you'll hear is that Trump wanted to be tough, but he was prevented from doing so because we have a "woke military" that's "more concerned with pronouns than winning wars." The right keeps a reservoir of go-to enemies, and the "woke military" is one of their favorites, useful whenever a liberal asks why America struggled to achieve military triumphs under Republican presidents.

The groundwork is already being laid:

#WokeMilitary #Woke #Military #ChineseSpyBalloon #meetthepress @60minutes @RealDeanCain @CHueyBurns @MalcolmNance @pnjaban https://t.co/Joyzt9eeJH

— Vinnie Luciano (@SiennaLove1994) February 5, 2023

US Military run by the Woke pic.twitter.com/KgkWCnbO9J

— Raised Right (@RightMsmagnolia) February 4, 2023

The military went woke, kicked all the competent men out because they support Trump, and now it can’t even pop a balloon

— Will Tanner (@Will_Tanner_1) February 4, 2023

When Blake Masters, in a Senate campaign ad, said, "No active-duty American general has ever won a war," he was expressing a common opinion on the right: that the rot goes back many years, which means that True Patriots in the Republican Party have been sabotaged by traitors for a long time.

Our top generals have turned into woke corporate bozos, and our troops deserve better. pic.twitter.com/kC4fgSeEZR

— Blake Masters (@bgmasters) November 16, 2021

Conservatism can't fail. It can only be failed. If the parties held responsible are institutions the right used to revere, like the FBI and the U.S. military, well, that's the necessary cost of shielding the Republican Party from blame.

*****

UPDATE: Told ya.

THEY GET YOU COMING AND GOING (updated)

Dana Milbank tells us that Republicans are complaining about IRS customer service, even though they don't really want it to get better:

Last month, in its first legislative action, the new House majority voted to rescind more than $70 billion in funding for the IRS, much of it intended to improve customer service at the agency.

This week, many of those same Republican lawmakers went to the House floor with a new grievance: They are angry about — wait for it — poor customer service at the IRS.

“The American people have suffered” while waiting “for months for their tax refunds,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, declared on the House floor....

Republicans, some of whom are still scaring Americans with the bogus claim that 87,000 armed IRS agents will be breaking down their doors, now have a new conspiracy theory: The IRS’s backlogs are caused by teleworking. (It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the IRS had its budget slashed by 15 percent since 2010, while the number of returns jumped by nearly 10 million annually.)

Therefore, the new majority passed a bill this week ordering IRS employees and all federal workers to return to teleworking levels that existed in 2019 — before the pandemic forever changed the way people work.

Many private businesses -- including the one I worked for until very recently -- did fine with remote work. Some are still doing fine. Of course, this accomplished that by investing in appropriate technology. Successful firms kept their tech up to date even before the pandemic, because it was good for business.

The IRS, by contrast, has very dated technology. The increased IRS funding in the Inflation Reduction Act won't just allow the IRS to hire more customer service reps -- it will also modernize the tech. (Note, for example, that IRS employees have to manually enter data from tax forms into agency computers -- optical character recognition technology isn't used yet.) So if you want better customer service rom the IRS, don't fight the extra funding.

Of course, the anger about remote work is also a backhanded attempt to argue that the pandemic isn't a concern, even for workers who might be older or in groups that are at high risk for serious COVID consequences. We know two things about right-wingers' attitudes toward the COVID virus: (1) they think it's no worse than the flu and (2) they think it's a deadly bioweapon designed to cause mass death and hand global power to China.

And so we also have this:

House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) casually suggested to Fox News on Friday that the suspected Chinese spy balloon floating over the United States could contain “bioweapons” from “Wuhan” ...

After saying the balloon “never should have been allowed” to cross over into the U.S., the Kentucky lawmaker then fear-mongered that the craft could be loaded down with weaponized viruses. “My concern is that the federal government doesn't know what's in that balloon,” he asserted. “Is that bioweapons in that balloon? Did that balloon take off from Wuhan?”

Republican continue to allude to the COVID-as-bioweapon theory even as they argue that COVID vaccines are far more dangerous than the virus itself. Milbank writes:

The new House majority passed a bill this week aimed at striking down the “tyrannical” requirement that many health-care workers get vaccinated. It came armed with vials of disinformation.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) announced that it has “been proven false” that the vaccine “stops the spread” and that government agencies “have conceded” this. The original vaccine is “for a virus that no longer exists,” he claimed, and the vaccine “can cause myocarditis, blood clots, strokes and even death.”

... The vaccines do have rare side effects — but the risk of death from the virus itself is much greater.

... Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.), a doctor, spoke of people shunning the vaccine “based upon fears about fertility” — without mentioning that there is no basis for such fears.

You're thinking, They can't have it both ways -- but in their bubble, they can.

The talk about bioweapons is preposterous. If the COVID virus was a Chinese bioweapon, why was it allowed to spread in China -- and not initially among, say, the Uyghurs, for whom the Chinese government clearly has contempt, but among the residents of central cities and towns? And if we're talking about a bioweapon on the spy balloon, why would you drop it from 60,000 feet, where it might not even reach a human being, rather than spread it in a more targeted way? And how does China benefit if a country to which it sells trillions of dollars of goods each year is devastated by a plague?

But none of this has to make sense. It just has to hit the primitive fear and rage centers in the brains of right-wing voters, even if it's all contradictory.

****

UPDATE: The U.S. has downed the balloon, sadly for Republicans. They really thought "The balloon is carrying bioweapons!!! OMG!!! OMG!!!" was a winner.

Watters: The next balloon might be filled with another virus. Pop, droplets all over, we are all on ventilators again. How do we know the next balloon isn’t loaded with Bioweapons pic.twitter.com/1L4ko5P1FA

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 4, 2023

MAYBE TRUMP AND DeSANTIS WON'T VICIOUSLY ATTACK EACH OTHER. MAYBE THEY'LL JUST TAKE TURNS VICIOUSLY ATTACKING AMERICANS.

Last May, I wrote:

I think it will be illegal to be trans, at any age, in many states by the end of the decade.

Now it seems possible that Republicans will cut to the chase and pass a ban at the national level. Dave Weigel writes:

You’d be forgiven if you missed Donald Trump’s new plan to stop “left-wing gender insanity.” ...

But to both LGBT advocates and social conservatives, Trump’s policy rollout was a watershed moment, one that signaled a hard right turn from debates focused on transitioning youth to a broader attack on the very concept of transgender identity itself.

Trump had already supported efforts by red states to ban gender-affirming care for minors, discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools, and transgender student athletes. Now, Trump was promising a gag order on federal promotion of gender transition “at any age” and a law “establishing that the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female, and they are assigned at birth.”

“The biggest thing here is the pivot away from transgender youth to all transgender people,” said Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director at the National Center for Transgender Equality. “This year is the first time we’ve seen actions, in states, going after adults. That is brand new for Trump.”

Here's Trump's speech on the subject. It's horrifying. It's primarily focused on an absolute ban on gender-affiriming care for young people, but adults aren't spared.



Erin Reed writes:

Here are the healthcare policies [Trump] outlined:

* Gender affirming care being seen as child abuse.
* The revocation of all gender affirming care protections in the federal government.
* Ending all programs promoting sex and gender transition “at any age.”
* Ending all taxpayer dollars being used on gender affirming care.
* Banning gender affirming care for trans youth nationwide.
* Declaring hospitals and healthcare providers that treat trans youth no longer be Medicaid and Medicare eligible.
* Liability lawsuits for doctors providing gender affirming care for trans youth.
* Investigations of hospitals and manufacturers of gender affirming care medication.

He also listed a series of education policies:

* Investigating affirming teachers for “civil rights violations” and giving them “severe consequences.”
* Eliminating federal funding for affirming schools.
* Credentialing teachers only if they promote “positive education about the nuclear family.”
* Defining “male and female” as biological sex assigned at birth nationally, erasing trans people from the law.
* A nationwide ban on trans people in sports.
* Forced outing for trans youth.

This is pu re cynicism. On the issue of LGBTQ rights, Weigel writes, Trump

was best known in 2016 for publicly moderating the party’s faith-infused stance on LGBT issues, including opposing North Carolina’s “bathroom bill” and inviting Caitlyn Jenner to use whichever facilities she preferred when on Trump properties. After the Pulse nightclub shooting, he promised to “fight for” the LGBT community better than Hillary Clinton by keeping out Muslim immigrants who harbored anti-gay beliefs.

Trump doesn’t talk like that anymore. As Semafor’s Shelby Talcott has reported, he’s focused more on this topic because he’s seen how much it revs up conservative voters.

Remember this, from October 2016?

But maybe this is how the 2024 campaign will go: Trump will find a base-gladdening way to punch down at vulnerable people, ideally positioning himself to DeSantis's right, and then DeSantis will come back with an equally loathsome attack on an easily targeted groiup Republican voters hate. Rinse and repeat until one of them has the nomination.

The trash talk Trump directs at his fellow presidential aspirants isn't very frightening these days, but maybe I've been wrong to interpret that as a sign that he's lost his touch. George Wallace, after running for governor of Alabama as a moderate in 1958 and losing to a candidate supported by the Klan, vowed that "no other son-of-a-bitch will ever out-n****r me again," then began running -- and winning -- as an overt racist. Trump seems determined not to allow DeSantis to out-culture-war him. If that's the case, this will be a race to the bottom, and the cruelty will be the point.

BORIS JOHNSON ASKS THE WRONG QUESTION

Boris Johnson weighed in on American politcs yesterday:

During an event Wednesday at the Atlantic Council about the war in Ukraine, Johnson called out [Tucker] Carlson specifically for both his position on the invasion — and for his grip on the American right.

“I’ve been amazed and horrified by how many people are frightened of a guy called Tucker Carlson. Has anybody heard of somebody called — has anybody heard of Tucker Carlson?” Johnson joked in response to a question about responding to Russian aggression. “What is it with this guy? All these wonderful Republicans seem somehow intimidated by his — by his perspective.”

“I haven’t watched anything that he’s said,” Johnson continued. “But I’m struck by how often this comes up. Some bad ideas are getting into — starting to infect some of the thinking around the world about what Putin stands for, what he believes in. It’s a disaster. He stands for war, aggression, systematic murder, rape and destruction. That’s what he stands for.”

I'm not a Boris Johnson fan, but I share his contempt for Tucker Carlson (and Vladimir Putin). However, I think Johnson misunderstands Carlson's role in all this.

The Republicans who are prepared to abandon Ukraine aren't afraid of Tucker Carlson. They want to be in sync with Carlson's viewers, or in many cases they sincerely agree with Carlson that Putin is a better defender of traditional values (petroleum, hating gay people) than "globalists" like Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Western political leaders who back him.

"Why are they afraid of Tucker Carlson?" is the wrong question. The right question is "Why aren't they afraid of the danger to global stability if Vladimir Putin conquers Ukraine?" But Republicans are often heedless of the consequences of their own recklessness, because they don't think anything bad will ever happen to them as a result.

Republicans have never worried about what could happen to America as a result of their pro-gun absolutism -- they assume they won't die of gun violence. In the 1990s, they didn't worry about party members with ties to anti-government militias; they don't seem to worry now about party members with ties to the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. They seem to assume that nothing these groups might do to the country, even overthrowing a legitimately elected government, would disturb their lives. (January 6 might have been bad for the country, but if it had succeeded, a Republican would be in the White House. So it's all good!)

They don't worry about the possible consequences to the planet if we never make the transition away from fossil fuels. They don't worry about the harm to America from Gilded Age levels of inequality. They don't worry about the harm that comes to America from the near-absolute immunity the police have when they've committed acts of brutality. They don't worry about turning gay and trans people into nationwide objects of hate. If the worst happens, they assume they'll be fine.

This is just how Republicans are: If they don't believe it will affect them, it's nothing to worry about. They want whatever the base wants, or their donors want. The country can burn as far as they're concerned, as long as they're sure they'll never be singed.

JUST RUN, YOU COWARDS (updated)

So today we have overlapping stories about the 2024 Republican presidential field from a New York Times team led by Maggie Haberman ("Eager to Challenge Trump, Republicans Aren’t So Eager to Be the First") and from former Timesman Jonathan Martin at Politico ("The Cold Calculus Behind the Shrinking GOP Presidential Field"). From Martin we learn that there are people in the GOP, and particularly in its money wing, who are capable of grasping the obvious: that a field with too many candidates could help Donald Trump, and that it's already a two-man race:

“They don’t have a Trump problem, they have a DeSantis problem,” explains Scott Jennings, a GOP strategist, of the potential field. “It’s going to be hard fighting for the other 60 to 70 percent of the vote [not going to Trump] when another guy could get 90 percent of it.”

... That DeSantis has already burned in the conservative psyche was on display this week in Mississippi, where far-right State Sen. Chris McDaniel — whose proto-Trump 2014 primary nearly toppled then-Sen. Thad Cochran — opened a campaign for lieutenant governor by asking Republican voters: “Do you want a Trump or DeSantis, or do you want a Mitt Romney or a Liz Cheney?”

... Among the party’s top contributors ... there’s simply no appetite for a prolonged, fractured primary that could pave the way for another Trump nomination-by-plurality.

... the bundler bed-wetting about whether a larger field will merely open a path for Trump puts the onus on most every non-Trump candidate to demonstrate why they won’t just siphon votes from a single alternative.

“The mega donors are going to keep their checkbooks in the desk for a while because they saw what happened in ’16,” said Dave Carney, a longtime GOP consultant.

But Martin still dreams about a wide-open field and all the insipid stories that will allow him to write:

However, the history most on the minds of the Republicans considering the race, who are not named Trump or DeSantis, is what happens when there’s a bloody battle between top contenders. Spoiler: It augurs well for a third candidate.

This is what’s giving hope to the other Republicans most likely to run.

What "history" is Martin talking about? Did the Clinton-Sanders battle in 2016 give Martin O'Malley the nomination? Did Clinton and Obama beat each other up so badly in 2008 that John Edwards stole the crown? Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller were polling decently on the eve of the 1976 Republican contest. Why didn't they get in the race, knowing that Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan were about to start roughing each other up?

History actually shows that when there’s a bloody battle between two dominant contenders, one of them wins -- as you'd expect. Some of the candidates who haven't declared, or who've announced that they won't run, seem to realize that -- or their potential donors do.

But this isn't the only reason that the field is limited to Trump so far. Martin writes:

... a number of would-be Republican candidates this time see the party still in the former president’s grip, cast an eye at his preemptive attacks on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and say: who needs it, I’ll check back in 2028 when, one way or another, Trump is out of the picture.

Haberman et al. make the wannabes seem even more cowardly:

Contenders have so far been unwilling to officially jump into the race, wary of becoming a sacrificial lamb on Mr. Trump’s altar of devastating nicknames and eternal fury.

"Devastating nicknames"? Seriously? Like "Ron DeSanctimonious"? Would-be candidates are afraid of that?

It's clear that Trump no longer has the energy or the focus to be an effective playground bully. Against DeSantis, he barely seems to be trying, and against Nikki Haley, who's about to anounce her candidacy, he's not making an effort at all, as Haberman and her team note.

He revealed to reporters over the weekend that she had reached out to him to let him know that she might run — and instead of sounding angry, he sounded almost delighted at the prospect of having a direct target, and a more crowded field.

Or maybe they both know he's planning to pick her as his running mate if he wins.*

But Trump can't even summon the energy to hit one of his favorite punching bags, Chris Christie. Here was Christie a couple of days ago:

Former Pres. Trump “can’t win a general election,” especially after election denying candidates lost in the 2022 midterms, @GovChristie says.

“We could go through the entire list—loser, loser, loser, loser—and I think Republicans are recognizing that.” https://t.co/dNhW1EkeOU pic.twitter.com/zFNelRk96u

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) January 29, 2023

Christie has said he's considering a presidential run. The old Trump would have lashed out at Christie almost immediately. The Trump of 2023 can't rouse himself to say anything.

Get in the race, you cowards. Trump is a paper tiger now. He can't hurt you. He can't hurt anybody. Remember how he turned Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio into laughingstocks in 2016? When was the last time he did that to anyone?

Stay out of the race if you think you can't beat DeSantis. Don't stay out of the race because you're afraid Trump will be mean to you. He's too weak to fight.


*UPDATE: I spoke too soon:

Trump on Wednesday shared a video on his social media platform, Truth Social, of Haley saying she wouldn't challenge Trump for the 2024 nomination if he were to run. He raised the video again during his Hewitt interview.

"Nikki suffers from something that's a very tough thing to suffer from," he said. "She's overly ambitious."

But as insults go, this is nothing. I've been hit harder in pillow fights. He's extremely beatable if this is the best he's got.

WAS A LEAK AFTER THE RAID ON JAMES GORDON MEEK'S HOUSE MEANT TO FALSELY DIRECT OUTRAGE AT PRESIDENT BIDEN?

The Department of Justice is charging a well-known reporter with child pornography offenses:

In a statement, the DOJ said that it was charging James Gordon Meek, a former foreign correspondent for ABC News, with the alleged transportation of images depicting the sexual abuse of children.

The DOJ said that an online username associated with Meek "received and distributed child sexual abuse materials," and devices owned by Meek allegedly contained images depicting children engaged in sexually explicit conduct.

Wednesday's arrest came after months of speculation around the circumstances of a federal investigation into Meek. Last April, the FBI raided Meek's Arlington, Va. home, a move that the DOJ clarified at the time was unrelated to his work as a journalist. Meek abruptly resigned from ABC following the raid without giving any clear explanation to network bosses.

After the April raid, Meek disappeared from public view. In October, a leak to Rolling Stone suggested that the raid was in search of classified material on Meek's computer, at a time when he was about to publish a book about the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan:

Meek has been charged with no crime. But independent observers believe the raid is among the first — and quite possibly, the first — to be carried out on a journalist by the Biden administration. A federal magistrate judge in the Virginia Eastern District Court signed off on the search warrant the day before the raid. If the raid was for Meek’s records, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco would have had to give her blessing; a new policy enacted last year prohibits federal prosecutors from seizing journalists’ documents. Any exception requires the deputy AG’s approval....

Sources familiar with the matter say federal agents allegedly found classified information on Meek’s laptop during their raid.

The "sources familiar with the matter" said this even though a professional colleague of Meek's found it implausible.

One investigative journalist who worked with Meek says it would be highly unusual for a reporter or producer to keep any classified information on a computer.

And did this all happen because Meek was about to embarrass the Biden administration? The Rolling Stone story implied that it did.

Even stranger, in the months before he vanished, Meek was finishing up work on a book for Simon & Schuster titled Operation Pineapple Express: The Incredible Story of a Group of Americans Who Undertook One Last Mission and Honored a Promise in Afghanistan, which he co-authored with Lt. Col. Scott Mann, a retired Green Beret.... But post-April 27, the book-jacket photo disappeared from his bio, and Simon & Schuster has scrubbed his name from all press materials.

(The raid didn't suppress the book, which was published on August 30, with Mann listed as the sole author. It became a New York Times bestseller.)

When the Rolling Stone story appeared, right-wingers flipped out, of course. A RedState post was titled "The FBI Raid and Disappearance of Journalist James Gordon Meek Should Chill You to the Bone."

This is chilling. The Department of Justice has truly become Joe Biden’s enforcement arm. From parents who are vocal about the immorality occurring in their local school boards being targeted as domestic terrorists to waging vendettas against former President Donald Trump, to raiding the homes of investigative journalist James O’Keefe and other Project Veritas journalists over presidential daughter Ashley Biden’s journal. We have moved far past the covert targeting of Sharyl Atkisson and James Rosen to overt action to quell free speech and silence anyone seeking, documenting, and publishing the truth.

Glenn Beck called it "the year's biggest story," telling his listeners:

... do we live now in Russia? The FBI is completely and totally out of control. A Emmy award winning journalist ... is whisked away into, we don't know if it's the FBI, into black vans where no one is wearing identification on their flack jacket.... Why? And where is this guy? And why isn't, why isn't the world of ABC on fire. Where are the journalists? If Donald Trump had anyone in a gray sedan ... and an old lady got out and said hey, I'm with the Trump administration and I just like to ask you about an article, they would have been screaming to high heaven. Now we have a FBI that is completely out of control. And they pick up a journalist in April. We're just hearing it about it now?

This is not good. The fear and the madness has got to stop. The fear and the madness has got to stop. We must end it November 8.... I don't know what warnings you're getting elsewhere, but if you're not hearing an urgent warning on the loss of your country, our Bill of Rights, your freedom, and your economic freedom, you're listening to the wrong people.

And now we have truly repellent details about material allegedly found on Meek's laptop. I won't share them with you, but you can read the affidavit details here. They may make you physically ill.

Was Rolling Stone misled by sources who had been given incorrect information and repeated it in good faith? Did the sources provide a fake scoop out of simple dishonesty?

Or was this an effort to make the Biden Justice Department look like jackbooted thugs, less than a month before Election Day? (That's what Glenn Beck meant when he said, "We must end it November 8.")

Maybe you believe that the child porn was planted on the computer of a reporter whose work made President Biden look bad. If so, it's odd that this happened and no effort was made to halt publication of the reporter's book. Someone misled Rolling Stone, and there was a significant freakout on the right, shortly before the midterms. Was that by design?

DeSANTIS CAN DO A LONG MARCH THROUGH THE INSTITUTIONS IF THE INSTITUTIONS DON'T FIGHT BACK

The College Board surrenders to Ron DeSantis without a fight:

After heavy criticism from Gov. Ron DeSantis, the College Board released on Wednesday an official curriculum for its new Advanced Placement course in African American Studies — stripped of much of the subject matter that had angered the governor and other conservatives.

The College Board purged the names of many Black writers and scholars associated with critical race theory, the queer experience and Black feminism. It ushered out some politically fraught topics, like Black Lives Matter, from the formal curriculum.

And it added something new: “Black conservatism” is now offered as an idea for a research project.

I wonder why this happened....

Acceptance for the new curriculum is important to the College Board, a nonprofit, because A.P. courses are a major source of revenue. The Board took in more than $1 billion in program service revenue in 2019, of which more than $490 million came from “AP and Instruction,” according to its tax-exempt filing.

Erik Loomis puts this a bit more bluntly:

The Advanced Placement system is corrupt to the core. It’s part of the privatization of public education, a “non-profit” that exists to create huge profits for itself by getting parents or school districts to pony up for expensive tests that many students are not prepared to take. Then, the AP grading system ensures that a certain percentage of these students will get college credit for these exams no matter how unprepared, based on the important principle of making sure next year’s parents will see it worth their while to pony up even more cash for a largely valueless educational experience.

Whether you agree with this or not, there's revenue in these tests. DeSantis posed a threat to the College Board's cashflow, just as he threatened the profits of Disney last year. And so the College Board folded just the way Disney folded after expressing mild disapproval of DeSantis's anti-LGBTQ jihad.

DeSantis's ally and ideological soul mate Chris Rufo tosses around the leftist phrase "the long march through the institutions" as if he's talking about an extended process of conquest. But some of the institutions give up without firing a shot. DeSantis surely knows that. This is one reason he's likely to run up a fairly high body count before he's stopped.